The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  So Shamus grew in knowledge of the ultimate things, and he grew in confidence that someday soon, maybe even today, he'd have the ultimate answers.

  “Well, the Institute has picked up the sound of the first shoe dropping,” Anima Rubicunda Mannerly, the third wife of Shamus Eagnach, said, “and it certainly is a thumping cobble of folk mythology. By the way, Shamus, there are sizeable checks being received from the ‘Turpentine Groves Rapid Transit Tramways’ for the use of our right-of-ways, but we show no leasing arrangement with any such company. Well, as I always say, ‘Checks are checks however much tainted’.” “And what about that first shoe, Anima Rubicunda?”

  “I just told you, they've dropped it. You weren't listening.”

  Yes, Shamus Eagnach was now married to Anima Rubicunda Mannerly. She was of that Jungian archetype known as the Reeking Red Soul, also known as the Strawberry Blonde, which Jung himself considered to be frightful beyond compare but which many people like to look at and have around the house. The death of the second wife of Shamus, Pandora Riviera, had had a poignant touch to it as well as an amusing touch, and Shamus was sure that Pandora (she had been dead for nearly two days now) often smiled about it as she bode with the blessed.

  “What must I do to convince you that you should put ‘Override Push Buttons’ on all the controls that are designated ‘Positively No Override’?” Pandora had asked him once, and she had asked him a thousand times. And after Pandora's mangling death while trying to push an Override Push Button that wasn't there Shamus did put the Override Push Buttons in all the tram-cars that used the ‘Positively No Override’ controls. Shamus had liked Pandora a lot, but he didn't especially miss her two days later. Anima Rubicunda was so much like Pandora that the transition had been almost automatic.

  “What did the first shoe consist of, modified light of my life?” Shamus asked Anima Rubicunda now.

  “Oh, the folkloric sort of information that the answers to your ultimate questions do exist, that they are written out boldly in a book that anybody may order, that one may read the answers to the questions and understand them and be delighted with them. And then one dies immediately in the fullness of that delight. This detail has bugged some people away from reading the answers in the book, but it seems fair enough to me. Since the only ones who will learn of the books and find the answers are those who have devoted their lives to searching for those answers, it is only just that their lives should end when their life's purpose has been fulfilled.”

  “Well, let's get the book then, Anima,” Shamus said.

  “I've got it. Here it is. It cost me fifty thousand dollars, and you can pay me back now if you wish. I have read it. I understand it and am delighted. Do thou likewise.”

  Anima Rubicunda didn't look dead. Shamus took a fifty thousand dollar bill from his billfold and paid her. Then he examined the book.

  “It's written in Ladino or Sephardic,” he said.

  “My husband, I'd always assumed that you were educated,” Anima Ruby said. “If not, then it's all over with us. Don't you know Sephardic? Can't you read it?”

  “I don't know. I never tried it. I know Old Spanish, of course, and I know Hebrew. I'll just go and take a half-hour lesson in Sephardic from a Sephardic expert I know. Then I'll come back and read the book.”

  “I'll not wait for you. I'll go ahead and get things ready for the trip. Oh Shamus, what if your first wife Cinderella was right? What if we are only token people? Will we have only a token God then?”

  “I'm not sure. Maybe the real God is ‘Father of Gods and Men and Computers, and of Token People also.’ Where are we going?”

  “Oh, you may come to understand that after you read the book.”

  “What's that thing on the sofa there? It looks rather like a manikin made to resemble you.”

  “Yes, something like that. I'll see you in the tram.”

  Shamus went and took a half-hour lesson in Sephardic, a language that is Old Spanish written in Hebrew characters and used yet by some of the Jews of Istanbul, a city that is the ‘Los Angeles of the Near East’ when it comes to quackery. Then he came back and read the book. He found all the ultimate answers in it, plainly written out. He understood the answers and was delighted with them. And he didn't feel at all dead. The name of the book that gave the answers and the delight was ‘The Terebinth Groves of Mamre’. ‘Terebinto’ was the word in Sephardic as it is in Spanish.

  “Oh, that's wonderful!” Shamus cried out. “The Terebinth tree is only the Turpentine Bush, a runty little tree at best; and the reputation of turpentine as a cure-all for diseases is much diminished in modern times. And yet I believe, as did our ancestors, as I know now with my new illumination, that turpentine is the smell of life itself. ‘In the Turpentine Trees’ was one of the places where the ‘Father of Gods and Men and Computers and Maybe of Token People Also’ made pleasant and open promises which he would keep. It's one of the places, like ‘A Lodge in a Garden of Cucumbers’, or ‘A Habitation of Dragons and a Court of Owls’ that sing out of the old Bible and are a delight even to imagine. Ah, there's a manikin intended to represent me, sitting on the floor beside the sofa on which reposes the manikin of my wife Anima Ruby. And my dummy holds the hand of Anima's dummy in its own. Anima must have arranged them so before she left, that beloved comic. Oh, I feel wonderful. I have never been so far from death in my life. And now for a trip, in a tramway, I believe.”

  Shamus descended from his five-level penthouse into the ‘Happy Hot Dog World-Wide Rapid Transit System Tower’ below it. “It will be given me at this moment to know which tram to take,” he said, and then he knew that he had spotted the right one. It had the most amazing device on it, the device that would permit it to go in two opposite directions at the same time. Shamus himself had worked unsuccessfully on this device for twelve years, but somebody had worked it out perfectly. “How has this been done on a tram-car and I have not done it?” he asked himself.

  The classification card on the tram-car read ‘Fourth Class Cargo — Seven Day Wonders’. This card was placed askew and the previous card could still be read: ‘Third Class Cargo – Turpentine’. Shamus entered the special tram-car.

  I will not serve.

  —Lucifer

  If we be not people yet

  When will the people come?

  And every morning falls the dew

  In seven years it's gone.

  —Nero

  There was an incredible number of persons in the tram-car, and yet it was not crowded.

  “How can this be?” Shamus Eagnach asked, neither to himself nor yet out loud, for the distinctions between such sorts of utterances had now disappeared. “How can there be such a number of persons here, and it now crowded? It has to be crowded, and it isn't. Bodies take up room. Ah, that's it. We are not here in our bodies. My own body was left beside that of my third wife Anima Ruby in our penthouse and I thought that they were manikins. Well, I'll say this, I feel more alive in death that I ever felt in my life. And there are three persons I know both wisely and well. I am fortunate in my wives. Ah there, Anima Ruby, how many of the sizeable checks were received from the ‘Turpentine Groves Rapid Transit Tramways’?”

  “About three million of them, Shamus, and that was just for half a day. I believe they must have used some sort of preternatural cars to transport the dead people, or made them walk, before our cars became sophisticated enough for them to use. This makes us the richest people in the world, with what we already had. Well, it's something to be the richest people in the world even if we're no longer in it. The piped-in harp music must have gotten their business for us.”

  The three wives of Shamus were sitting at a club-car table with a deck of Glory Cards before them. “Come take a hand and pass an aeon with us,” the first wife of Shamus, Cinderella, spoke, and she winked. And Shamus sat with them.

  “Tell me one thing,” he began, “if you know it—”

  “Certainly we know it, whatever it is,” the wife Pandora R
iviera said with that lilt that was her vocal signature. “This is the particular judgment going on right now, and at the particular judgment people are given all knowledge of particulars. If we are only token people, as Cinderella here thinks might be the case, then this is the token particular judgment and we are given such knowledge of particulars as applies to token persons. Oh, you with your tram-way mind are wondering who worked out the device to permit this car to go in two opposite directions at the same time, the device on which you worked unsuccessfully for twelve years. We told God about it, that you had worked on it for twelve years. ‘I bet I can work it out in twelve minutes,’ he said. He did, but just barely.”

  “When did he work it out in just twelve minutes?” Shamus asked.

  “It was either seven thousand or seven billion years ago,” said Anima Ruby the third wife. “Your clay is not quite cold yet, Shamus, so the full illumination is a bit tardy coming to you. But you'll have it all soon. We are now in the state of re-entrant time and re-entrant space, and re-entrant size, and re-entrant persons, and re-entrant cause-and-effect, the state that makes becoming a God possible. When re-entrant size prevails, a brain that is normally no more than 2000 ccs in bulk may well be many light years across, especially when it has become an immaterial brain. When re-entrant time prevails, there are aeons upon aeons available. When re-entrant personhood prevails, everybody becomes potentially divine. In this vale of tears and chuckles here below, ulp, there below, most of us were truly only token or mustard-seed persons with only token or mustard-seed minds: but each mustard-seed mind may expand to a billion powers of a billion and become a spacious tree full of birds. Where re-entrant creation prevails, creation can happen both before anything else has happened and after everything else has happened. I see that it is coming to you now, Shamus, and wave after wave of illumination is washing over you.”

  Shamus and his three wives played a four-handed game with the Glory Cards. There are six hundred and sixty-six cards in a pack of Glory Cards. All are unnumbered face cards, and each has its special powers. Only illuminated persons are brainy enough to play with such cards.

  Strange feelings did come to Shamus then in the crowding waves of illumination. There were headaches whose radii had to be measured in billions of parsecs. There were responsibilities hard enough to rend a million skies. Talk about mind-stretching! There was a mind being stretched clear around the universes hundreds of times every second. There was a cosmic juggling act going on that required the juggler to be all-knowing and all-powerful and all-just and all-present and all-loving. Did you ever try to be all-loving and all-just at the same time even for an instant? There was a mind, and it impinged on every mind in the tram-car, and perhaps in the whole universe, that had to mark the fall of every sparrow, that had to check out the health of every mite on every sparrow, and the tonic health of every microbe on every mite, and this on many billions of worlds, not just on one. There was a mind that had to know and nourish every subatomic particle everywhere, and there were many orders of such particles much smaller than are generally known about. Well, every mind is as much the center of the cognitional universe as every other mind, and in the quirks of time and person and development one of them may outgrow (may already have outgrown) all the others. This most stretched of minds may be your own, and you just have not noticed it yet.

  “It's fun though, for everybody except the work-horse,” Shamus said. “What, what, are there some persons in this tram-car who don't find it fun? Why not, why not? Oh, oh, it's my amazing device that permits the tram to go in two opposite directions at the same time, my own amazing device that I'd have invented if God hadn't beaten me to it. We are not all going in the same direction on this tram, I see, and we are not all going in delight. Some of us are already in Heaven and some of us already in Hell, to use the old vulgar names of the places, and yet we're all riding in the same tram-car until the harvest. But this is the harvest. I can hear the whetted scythes cutting the wheat and the tares, the sheep and the goats together. And how will they separate them after they're mown? I'd better pay attention and see.

  “What is it that those glum and angry ‘other sorts of persons’ are saying, what is it that the undelighted persons among us are muttering? ‘We will not serve, we will not serve,’ they mutter over and over again. I hope it does not come to me either, but I'd be afraid to say out loud that I reject it. Some of those undelighted ones must be the cream of the crop to have it offered to them. Ah, I see now that not every person could make it as God, but perhaps one in every billion could, and there are a handful of billions in this tram-car. What, have all refused it?”

  That was an interval of either five aeons or five seconds. When time is re-entrant, those intervals are about the same. And still there hasn't been a traffic in the highest position of all. Those who lack the scope for it are not asked, and those spacious ones who might possibly do it have all refused it in gloom and anger and fear.

  And what is it that several wrathy persons who may perhaps be outside of the tram-car are grumbling?

  “Well, dammit,” the wrathy persons are grumbling, “get with it! On with the continuity and go easy on the side-jabber. If you know it, tell it! What is the answer? How did God get to be God?”

  Oh, he got to be God by default. And now he has to be God until either seven or seven billion years have passed, or until he can find another person who will still want to be God after he has become illuminated and informed about the whole situation.

  He hasn't found him yet.

  Bird-Master

  ‘There was a Cheyenne sub-chief named Whistling Elk. There was also an animal, or a ghost-animal, in the mythology of several tribes, the Cheyennes, the Sioux, the Osages, and the Comanches. There is something spooky about this Whistling Elk in the legends, for real elks do not whistle. The Whistling Elk is aan apparition, a ghost, a messenger of death. He is also the one who gives the birds the signal to migrate. They would not know when to mill and fly away, and they would perish of the cold and hunger, if the Elk didn't give them the signal. The Whistling Elk is sometimes associated with the Bird-Master, who is variously known as the ‘shape-changer’ and the ‘cloud-shaper’.

  ‘The Whistling Elk is also a death omen. When he whistles, the temperature immediately drops thirty degrees: this is the ‘blue norther’, but it is really the coldness of death. Many human persons die in the night after the Elk whistles. The birds devour the souls of the persons who die on this night, and the food helps to sustain the birds on their migration.’

  Legends of the Country Between the Cross-Timbers and the Shining-Mountains, Harry Fire-Island.

  ‘The Bird-Master has two sets of bones, his winter bones and his summer bones. When he has left one set of bones, then he can fly like a bird, or like the boneless spirit that he had become. It is by this trick that he migrates with the birds, leaving his summer bones in North America and winging off to inhabit his winter bones in Brazil. The Bird-Master can manufacture illusions (illusions because they deceive the eye, and yet are material), configurations that are made up of insects and birds in their thousands and even millions, the Shaggy Giant, the Ravening Bear, the Dead-but-Walking King, all of them mountain high.

  ‘The Bird-Master believes that he makes and manipulates the whole world and everything that is in it out of the configurations of birds and bugs. Alternately he believes that he dreams the whole world. ‘The Mummers’ are the enemies of the Bird-Master. He is not sure whether he makes them or not, whether he dreams them or not, or whether they are independent of him. Like Wathigthoncici Kika, the Osage Solomon, the Bird-Master understands bird-talk.

  ‘The usual appearance of the shape-changing Bird-Master is that of a human boy about ten years old. Sometimes he sits on the edge of a cloud with a fishing pole, and he dangles his line and hook down to lower clouds. If somebody asks him what he is doing he says that he is fishing. And he does catch very many fish.’

  Further Legends of the Country Between the Cro
ss-Timbers and the Shining Mountains, Harry Fire-Island

  ‘It was Oliver Hampton who brought tatters of Guy Fawkes Day from England to the middle-plains Indians of North America. He established the Bloody Red Mummers with both Indian and White Man lodges. Every November Fifth a lodge would hang, draw, and then burn like a torch either a real man or an effigy man. If it was a real man, they ate the entrails they drew from him and called it ‘eating the soul’. If it was an effigy man, they chewed the straw and the corn-husks that they drew from the body. In later decades, the Mummers say that they never heard of Guy Fawkes Day and that November Fifth is Bird Migration Day. This is the big day of the year that they celebrate.’

  British Explorers in Midland North America, George Saffron

  ‘It was the loudest and most fearful shout that I ever heard in my life. It shook the ground and rattled the trees and set me to trembling. I am somewhat given to uneasiness and apprehensions anyhow.

  ‘I am constantly surrounded by human persons; and humans are cold, calculating, nerveless, unflappable, easy in their minds, and they hardly know the meaning of apprehension. But I am a machine, so I am nervous and apprehensive and worrisome and often despondent. For one thing, I have recently received a very weak signal, the detecting of which was one of the things for which I was manufactured. For another thing, I am very much worried about my good friend the Bird-Master. The Bird-Master was a rather slow-witted and likeable young man generally believed to be of the human species. But a change has taken place in him within the last two days. I can feel powers and cross-powers all around him, and he speaks of ‘marshaling my nations’. And then this huge shout comes like raw salt rubbed into my worries (that is a human proverb).