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

by R. A. Lafferty

  ‘Valery Mok and myself (I am Epiktistes the Ktistec Machine) were walking in the weed-patch to the north of the Institute for Impure Science in the very early morning when the Shaggy Giant made his first appearance in our immediate neighborhood. He made it to the accompaniment of brilliant but unconvincing lightning and thunder.

  ‘ “That is the phoniest lightning I ever saw,” Valery declared, “and the fellow himself reeks of pigeons. Moreover, he's unsubstantial. And yet he's impressive. I wonder why he is?”

  ‘The reason for the giant being impressive to me is partly embodied in certain words contained in one of those books that were inserted into my memory-bank when I was manufactured. It is the old Modern Library edition of Gargantua and Pantagruel, and the introduction, by Donald Douglas, contains the words and image: “No doubt you are inclined to feel at home in a fiction where men exchange the small mean gossip of the common day and no giant ever darkens the length of Main Street with the shadow of his big toe.”

  ‘But in the present case, the shadow of the Giant's big toe (the giant was barefooted; all authentic giants are always barefooted) did darken our own place in the weed-patch in the early morning light. The big toe was a hundred feet above us and was about the size of six elephants. The Shaggy Giant had his left foot raised as if he would stamp us to death. He was impressive because he was big and he was threatening. And yet he had a furlong-long comic grin on his face high above us, and he was of an unsubstantial and unreal appearance, and he really did reek of pigeons and of other birds. The morning light was tricky, and the jagged lightning was—

  ‘But suddenly a big hand (only God has a hand that big; it must have been his) came out of the higher sky and caught the Shaggy Giant up by the nape of his neck and shook him.

  ‘ “Lemme go, lemme go!” the giant called out in a very un-giant-like voice. The thunder had gone out of the voice, and it was the voice of someone we knew. Then the dangling giant himself turned into somebody we knew, the Bird-Master. “Lemme go, Aloysius, lemme go!” he begged.

  ‘Then Aloysius Shiplap, Member of the Institute, came from the ridge into the wide area of the weed-patches. He was lugging by the nape of his neck the no-more-than-life-sized Bird-Master in his most usual appearance of a boy about ten years old. The Bird-Master in the sky seemed to grow flimsier, and the Bird-Master in the hand of Aloysius seemed to grow more substantial.

  ‘ “Scatter it, Bird-Master, scatter the image,” Aloysius Shiplap ordered with iron in his voice.

  ‘ “No, no, Aloysius, lemme go! I was having fun. I was scaring Valery and Epikt with a giant.”

  ‘ “Scatter it,” Aloysius ordered again, and the image in the sky (erstwhile the Shaggy Giant and later the Bird-Master) scattered. It broke up into clouds of birds and insects and bugs, and then into smaller and smaller clouds. Then, with a final sigh of large and small wings beating in the receding distance, the material illusion was gone.

  ‘ “Is there always a preponderance of pigeons?” Aloysius asked.

  ‘ “No. Only when I make a Shaggy Giant,” the Bird-Master said. “When I do the Ravening Bear I use mostly ducks and geese. When I do the Ghost of the Dead Leader I use a lot of shrikes and sea-terns. When I will do the Valery Mok mock-up that I am planning I will use mostly larks mixed with saber-billed butcher birds.”

  ‘Aloysius Shiplap let the Bird-Master go then, and all four of us had a good laugh about it.

  ‘The Bird-Master is a good friend of mine, probably because neither of us is entirely human. Well, the Bird-Master looked human much of the time; and several of my own mobile extensions are as human-looking as artifice can make them. But I am a Ktistec Machine. And many persons have doubts about the Bird-Master's humanity.

  ‘ “There is something wrong with that boy they call the Bird-Master,” our Institute Director Gregory Smirnov said just the other day. “He's been a boy around here for more than a hundred years (for more than three hundred years if we're to believe the happy-tongued Pawnee Indians). He should have grown into a man in that much time. It's unnatural for him to remain a boy so long.”

  ‘ “There's something wrong with that boy they call the Bird-Master,” said Glasser of the Institute. “Anyone who maintains two sets of bones, one of them in a cave in that hill yonder, and the other set in Brazil, goes beyond being merely odd. Yes, I know that he explains that he chews a lot of slippery elm and this makes his bones easier to slip out of, but that explanation won't stand up at all.”

  ‘ “There is something wrong with that boy they call the Bird-Master,” said Cogsworth of the Institute. “Not only can he understand bird-talk, but (though he's no more than a middle-grade moron) he can understand every sort of talk. He talks Armenian with Bob Askandanian and Arabic with George Bozarth. He talks Cantonese with Mary ‘China Doll’ Ming, and he talks Mexican with the Mexicans and Osage with the old Osages. But in every case the people say that the Bird-Master talks a very low-class version of their language. There is something wrong with that boy. And why does he remain only ten years old no matter how many years go by?” I can answer that last part myself. He remains only ten years old because nobody older than ten can understand bird-talk. But that gives an idea of the objections that some people bring against the Bird-Master, and all of these people are his friends.

  ‘ “There is something wrong with that boy they call the Bird-Master,” Aloysius Shiplap of the Institute added to the indictment. “He draws pictures in a drawing tablet. He works with many erasures until he gets pretty much what he wants. Then he postures a bit and comes to look like what he has drawn. And then he whistles a tune or chants some gibberish, and the thing he has drawn in the tablet, the thing he has come to look like himself, appears in the sky made out of clouds that are made out of marshaled birds and insects and even buggier bugs. The things he makes in the sky seem to be alive and vocal, and yet they show all the defects of his drawings.”

  ‘Oh sure, knowledgeable people and machines, such as ourselves at the Institute, recognize that his apparitions are made out of birds and insects; but where do the birds and insects get their intelligence to assemble in such astonishing order. The Bird-Master is a sculptor of clouds and of convincing pseudo-persons and pseudo-animals-of-mechanisms (he can do a two-toned Ford Imperial Runaround perfectly, and set it to bumping over convincing bumps in the sky). But all these things are made up of living pieces, birds, bats, insects, and non-insectuous bugs. And all of them, in their thousands and millions, are regimented together to make a convincing image from whatever angle it is seen.

  ‘When the Bird-Master does the Ghost of Gaetano Balbo (the Bird-Master calls it The Ghost of the Dead Leader) he does it complete with monocle. And seven mansard-locusts must combine their diaphanous wings to make the glass for that monocle. How does he discipline things as flighty (there is a sort of pun there, though Gregory says it is unseemly for machines to make puns), how does he discipline things as flighty as are mansard-locusts?

  ‘And Gregory says that we can only understand the Bird-Master by studying both his short-term and his long-term cycles: and he says that I haven't been around long enough to study any except the B-M's very short-term cycles. (I'm only a kid by either human or machine standards; I have not yet completed the second year of my life.)

  ‘Yesterday I sat with the Bird-Master on a cloud-bank and we fished together in a cloud below us. Several of my own mobile extensions can be airborne, and I had selected the Old Time Brave Aviator in Goggles and Boots. And the Bird-Master seems to get up into the air pretty much whenever he wants to. To me the Bird-Master has always been Huck Finn, one of the ninety-nine personalized human archetypes that were set into my classification system at my beginning. He is freckled, his hair is between tow-colored and red, he grins, and he snaps his blue eyes back and forth. He looks like a scarecrow that is indwelt by a cornfield-sprite. He is the freckled color of straw and corn-husks, and his eyes are like blue corn-flowers bobbling on short stems. He is almost always barefooted, but
yesterday he was wearing a pair of bird-feather shoes. A man saw him wearing a pair of such shoes once and wanted to know whether Bird-Master could have many such pairs of shoes manufactured if the price was right. Bird-Master took the matter up with the birds, and they told him that they would not make shoes for anybody except himself. They were gift shoes for him to wear on the nine chilly days that come before the bird-migration, they said.

  ‘It was while we were hooking and pulling speckled carp out of a pond in a hollow in a cloud that the Bird-Master told me that he had a fear of falling, and that all the birds had it too. “Heck, Epikt,” he said, “that's the way that most birds die, by losing their nerve and crashing to the earth. It takes a lot of nerve to fly. Airy-dynamics and stuff like that don't do it; nerve is what does it. Birds live dangerously, and so do I. That's what I like about chumming with the birds. Say, Epikt, I'm going away with the birds late tomorrow, I think. Look in at my summer bones now and then while I'm gone. They'll be in the same place they were last year.”

  ‘ “I have seen your summer bones after you've slipped them off,” I said, “but I still don't believe in them. There's something wrong with the whole business.”

  ‘ “You're the guy whose main brain fills more than twenty big rooms in the Institute building,” Huck Finn Bird-Master grinned the words at me, “and whenever you go out for an hour you ask yourself ‘How many brains had I better put into this extension of myself for this little jaunt?’, and you find something wrong with as slippery a kid as I am slipping out of his bones for a little while, or for half a year? Where is your sense of proportion, Epikt?”

  ‘ “Bird-Master,” I said to him, “you have told me that the Whistling Elk gives the signal for the birds to fly south. But there are no elks in Brazil. Who gives them the signal to fly north again in the springtime?”

  ‘ “The Whistling Tapir,” he grins. Nobody can throw a fast answer at you with a slower drawl than can the Bird-Master.

  ‘Last winter (the first winter of my life) I found the Bird-Master's summer bones in a little cave in a nearby hill. They were guarded by a badger named Anthony, and they were sometimes savaged by a wolverine named Gulo. The Wolverine Gulo was also the Devil Gulo who sometimes came out of the animal body and prowled around the neighborhood seeking whom he might seduce. There were terrible animal fights between the badger and the wolverine, and people came and watched them fight and bet money on them. But nobody except myself found the Bird-Master's bones in that little cave. Nobody else could have gone in there, and I had to make a very slim mobile extension of myself to do it.

  ‘Crows brought sticks of wood up to us as we sat there on the cloud-bank. And the Bird-Master laid them to build a fire. Then a Thieving Magpie (Pica nuttali) brought us a cigarette lighter that he had stolen and kept in his nest. So we lit a fire. The Bird-Master pulled out a frying pan that he kept in a fold in the cloud there, and we had a fish fry.

  ‘The Elk appeared on the moors below, right on the edge of our weed-patch. He looked like a painted elk. An elk painted by a good artist is as noble an animal as there is in the world, but a run-of-the-moors elk is unkempt and blear-eyed and grubby, and a loud-mouth. But this elk was noble, and there was something puzzling about his size down below there. He stood up taller than the tall trees around him, but I had the feeling that if he were in a growth of toadstools he would stand up only about as high proportionally above them as he stood above the trees. The Elk made noises.

  ‘ “Is that the Elk whistling?” I asked the Bird-Master.

  ‘ “No. He is only blaring now. He will test all the sixteen winds, and then he will test them again. And then, in a couple of hours or days, when he is satisfied with the conditions, he will give the whistle. And the night after he gives the whistle, several persons in the neighborhood will die; and the birds will eat the souls of the persons who have died to gain strength for the migration. And sometime on the following day (probably tomorrow) the birds will rise and begin to turn in mills and turmoils, the geese and ducks flying the highest in the mills, then the swifts and swallows just below them, then the crows and hawks and eagles, then the shrikes and larks, and all the other birds lower than these. Then they will all peel off from the rotating mills and fly south in their formations according to their species. And I will fly with them.”

  ‘ “How will you fly with the birds, Bird-Master? You got all out of breath just flying up to these clouds.”

  ‘ “Heck, Epikt, when I slip out of my bones I can fly with the swiftest birds and never get out of breath.”

  ‘Then, late in the afternoon yesterday, the Elk did whistle. And during the night that followed (last night) several people died in the neighborhood.’

  Notae Diurnae, November 5, Of The Second Year Of My Life, Epiktistes the Ktistec Machine

  ‘Cautio de Notis Diurnis of Epikt. Dammit, Mechanismus, you were programmed to be a speculating machine among other things. You were made to be very strong on the ‘what if?’ imagination caper. But you must keep a grasp on reality. You have written notes into the Institution Journal about things that did not really happen, things like sitting on a cloud-bank and fishing with the Bird-Master. Cool it, kid, cool it.’

  Gregory Smirnov, Director of the Institute for Impure Science

  O du Kindermund, O du Kindermund,

  Unbewuszter Weisheit froh,

  Vogelsprachekund, Vogelsprachekund

  Wie Salamo!

  Oh you childhood-mouth, oh you childhood-words,

  What a lore unknown you spun,

  Understanding birds, understanding birds

  Like Solomon!

  Aus der Jugendheit, Friedrich Rukert

  But after the age of ten, the Vogelsprachekund is lost.

  ‘There are four stages of living things, cells, individuals, bodies, and corporations; and these four things are really only about two. A bird may be an individual most of the time, but at migration time it becomes only one cell in a Corporation of Birds. A cell has its intelligence all through it; a body or an individual has its intelligence in a specific part of it, the brain; a corporation has to have corporation intelligence, but it is sometimes a puzzle where that intelligence resides. With a Corporation of Birds, the directing intelligence may be an alien particle, possibly a bird-brained human (a human or a quasi-human who has peculiar rapport with birds). Murderous hatred may sometimes be raised against such a quasi-human, but something seems always to save the bird-brains from the wrath.’

  Fugue in Straw and Red, Robert Ritzrot

  ‘I am now putting a few notes of my own into the Journal of the Institute, before things come to their bloody or flaming climax. We may likely see the end of the phenomenon known as the Bird-Master today. There is barely time now, before he is gone, to answer the question whether he ever was here at all. And indeed he has never had a very strong texture of reality.

  ‘I am Valery, the only person around here entitled to spell 'I' with a capital I, member of the Institute and outgoing person. I knew this morning that something wrong had happened when the Bird-Master tried to distract us with the largest of his apparitions, the Shaggy Giant. Besides countless insects, there were hundreds of thousands, and maybe millions (including all too many pigeons) of birds involved in the Giant, and there was a fearful expenditure of bird-energy. But the birds are getting ready to migrate anyhow, and they are very prodigal of their energy at such times.

  ‘I tried to interview the Bird-Master after the Shaggy Giant Manifestation (which was broken up by Aloysius Shiplap) and before the Ghost-of-Gaetano-Balbo Construction.

  ‘Myself: It is said that you are more than a hundred years old, Bird-Master. Do you know how old you are or when you were born?

  ‘B-M: I am less than one day old. I was born again today, or maybe it was yesterday. A new spirit has entered into me and taken control of me. It's an evil spirit, Valery. Rotten, real rotten.

  ‘Myself: What is the spirit's name?

  ‘B-M: Gulo. Yes, it is the Dev
il who has been prowling around the Institute for a long while, and it is also the Devil who has been living in the wolverine who is now named Gulo also. This inhabiting Devil has a bad effect on that animal. I always say there is nothing wrong with a wolverine except bad manners and bad breath when it is not inhabited by a devil. But when it is inhabited by a devil, which is most of the time, it is a mighty rotten actor. And now I've become Gulo himself. I hate myself when I'm completely rotten.

  ‘Myself: Seven persons is the neighborhood died last night, Bird-Master. Five of them died in their beds, apparently from natural causes. But out on the moors last night, an eight-year-old boy was smashed to death by a body blow, and folks say that the legendary Whistling Elk did it. And a four-year-old girl was torn to pieces, and folks say that the wolverine did it.

  ‘B-M: No, you have it exactly backwards. The boy was smashed by an automobile which several young drunken gentlemen were driving around on the moor in that dark. And the girl was killed by house-dogs of the neighborhood that run loose at night. But the five persons who died of apparent natural causes in their beds, they really died of unnatural causes, Miss Valery. And then the birds ate their souls to gain strength from them for their migration. They couldn't migrate otherwise. It's the law of nature, but I wish it wasn't.