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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “On what slight a basis does genius depend? On what does wisdom? Would it not be possible to go into a brain, emulsify it a bit in small areas, and then roll and mould its substance into the forms of wrinkles and promontories identical to those of a brain that housed true genius and true wisdom? Not only do I believe that this is possible, but I believe that it has already been done.”

  —Audifax O'Hanlon.

  The Effigy Histories had appeared like a shower of September meteors. They were bright and sudden, and one had barely time to cry “Money, Money, Money!” or “Magic, Magic, Magic!” while each shooting star of them flamed and burned. But they did not go out. They accumulated. And now there are three dozen of them. The best way to have first sight of one of them is over the left shoulder.

  Few works of History generate such an atmosphere of luck and pleasant surprise and sheer delight. The people took to them instantly. But the Effigy Histories, in spite of their hectic reception, aren't very historical. It is much harder to say what they are than what they are not.

  They are not conventional histories at all. They are art-forms, or they are life-forms, that resemble histories somewhat in their shapes and movements and effects. But they are not accurate in any of their particulars.

  The facts and happenings in them differ from the facts and happenings in corresponding reality: but in overall impression they are quite similar. They are in fact a little bit more apparitional, a little bit more colorful, a little bit tonier than the corresponding realities.

  As happy fictions, as ingenious inventions, they are fine. But they are like imposing bottles that have been emptied of all the liquor of fact and refilled with something else. Only a very few persons in the Cosmo Club realize that some sort of switch has been made: nobody in the rest of the world realizes it. As the creator of these ‘Histories’, Karl Effigy is also a happy fiction.

  In the case of the Effigy History of Music and its author, there is a correspondence and mutual clarification between creation and creator that is not to be found in the Effigy History of Mountains, for instance. With almost any musical instrument, Karl Effigy can play out the clarifications of the statements in his History of Music.

  But Karl Effigy can not, to the same extent, clarify the obscurities of his History of Oceans or his History of Continental Upthrusts. And yet he illuminates those subjects very powerfully also, going back and giving one the feel of adolescent oceans and of swampier continents.

  In all reason, Karl Effigy is too young a man to be even the fictional master of so many subjects. He is pleasant, he is loud, he is large. He is full of vigor, and he has all the candor of a perfect con-man. He always seems to have just arrived from somewhere very distant. His talk, if analyzed, has the mechanical element of a recording. But, left unanalyzed, it has the liveliness and humor of humanity at its best.

  2

  Karl Effigy was quite a good talker. He was clear and convincing. There were only a very few listeners (among them the fine-boned Robert Straitroad and Redman Newbreeze) who came to realize that Effigy's words were mostly nonsense. But these few listeners knew that it didn't matter much. Somehow he did communicate with a strange clarity and luminosity. “Remember the boy with the rubber muscles,” Robert Straitroad said.

  “Remember the dolphin who invented Underwater Algebra,” Redman Newbreeze said.

  Robert Straitroad and Redman Newbreeze were determined to find by whose strings Karl Effigy was dangled. And, in that same small scientific community, most of the wrong-go strings were manipulated by Clement Stringtown and Crowley Headcooper. Let's look at those two manipulators, but be careful. They don't like to be looked at too closely.

  Clement Stringtown was an absolutely corrupt idealist. His ideal was the golden apple that would leave two of itself behind for every one that he stole. But, until that ideal golden apple arrived, Clement stole a lot of ordinary apples wherever he could find them. He also (his enemies said) stole pennies from dead mens' eyes. “I'll bring the change back to you,” he'd always say to excuse himself to those dead men, but he never brought any change back.

  Clement was the last of the simple-minded, single-souled inventors. He had a lust to violate the laws of mechanical compensation when they got in the way of his inventions. He did violate these laws, and he got away with it to effect a dozen really remarkable inventions. He forced compensation to get out of his way a dozen times. But now the adapted compensations waited to waylay him in a dozen ambushes to get even.

  Crowley Headcooper was sort of a partner of Clement Stringtown. Headcooper could build anything that Stringtown could think about. Crowley Headcooper was a fine design engineer in both animate and inanimate materials, and he was one of the finest micro-machinists in the world.

  Ah, about the Boy With The Rubber Muscles: it goes like this: Clement Stringtown and Crowley Headcooper had been doing work on the counterpoint relationship between brain corrugations and body form. If they could change the shape of the runnels and wrinkles of a brain, they believed, they could also change the shape of the body to conform to the new conditions. They conquered obesity in several cases. They duplicated the wrinkles of typical thin-people brains and so compelled fat people to become thin people. Then they decided on a showboat antic to advertise themselves. They selected a smooth-bodied boy or young man and entered him as a candidate in the Mr. Universe Body Beautiful Contest.

  They had the preserved cadaver and brain of the Mr. Universe Body Beautiful of fifty years before that (the greatest of all Mr. Universe Body Beautifuls). It was no trick to identify the brain-wrinkle area that corresponded to body-form in the cadaver. They forced the corresponding brain-wrinkle area of the smooth-bodied youth into the same configurations. And the body of the boy hurried to conform.

  The boy began to eat junk food in gigantic quantities and to grow one of the most beautiful sets of massive muscle ever seen. He shoveled in a thousand pounds of goop, and he put on a hundred pounds of new and exquisite musculature. He won the contest, and he was named Mr. Universe Body Beautiful.

  But there was a waspish lady reporter who wouldn't let it go at that. She said that he was a fake, and she challenged him to Indian-Wrestle. He refused. She handed him a hundred-kilo dumbbell, and he dropped it with the spraining of both his wrists. The lady reporter lodged the charge of fraud.

  Well, the contest was based on appearance and beauty of musculature, not on strength. And judgment was upheld on that basis, unless fakery could be proved. Fakery was charged, and the marvelous muscles were investigated. They proved to be real in that they were a living part of the boy. And they proved to be false in that they were made out of cheap-shot, hurry-up material and not out of honest flesh. The brain had ordered the body to conform to a pattern, and the body had conformed too quickly and with inferior material.

  The prize money was put into escrow, and it's still there. The protest has never been decided, but the damage was done. Whenever those intrepid inventors, Clement Stringtown and Crowley Headcooper, came up with something really new and spooky, people always warned “Remember the Boy with the Rubber Muscles.”

  But this made the inventors even more resolute. They became the world's foremost experts at brain-cobbling. Clement was designing meaningful adaptations of the human, and other, brains; and Headcooper was putting them into effect. They experimented with forcing lightly-wrinkled brains into such convolutions as represented massive knowledge. If a person possessed all the knowledge in the world, he would have brain corrugations like these. If he had brain corrugations like these, he would possess all the knowledge in the world.

  Clement and Crowley really had something here: and when they really had something they couldn't be topped.

  Ah, about that dolphin who invented Underwater Algebra, it goes like this: The inventors Clement and Crowley had been doing work on the relationships between the brain corrugations of dolphins and similar corrugations of humans. They forced the wrinkles of a small area of the brain of a very intelligen
t dolphin into patterns identical to those of that single-minded man and great algebra-master Masaad ad-Turk. And the dolphin's brain took the new corrugations easily.

  For recording, a high-frequency pencil was sound-coupled to the pitch-speech of the dolphin. The pencil etched its message onto thin laminations of slate that were set into the water. The result, finally recorded on one hundred and eighteen sheets of slate, was a coherent system of mathematics that was popularly called Underwater Algebra. This new system was dazzling with promise. It was much more than an algebra. It contained Third Calculus, and it propounded new and emulsified rotating vectors.

  There had never been an underwater mathematics before. There had never been an alien mathematics before. There was quite an excitement about the thing. There was speculation that humans were a thousand years behind dolphins in the field of impure mathematics, and that only a crash program backed by huge governmental and world financing could close the gap. But several of the genius-mathematicians of the world took exception to the direction and crunch of the toy steamroller of the dolphin devotees.

  “Underwater Algebra is all wet,” Professor Rodney Muldoon spoke with incredible crassness. And Professor Plato Platorhinus spoke of it even more sharply at an International Seminar:

  “Drain all the water out of all the equations,” he barked. “Then see what you have left.”

  “How will we drain equations, Professor Platorhinus?” the Marshal of the Seminar asked in confusion.

  “Aw Dromedary drek! What do they make Seminar Marshals out of nowadays?” Professor Plato cried in anguish. “Rotate all the vector values ninety degrees clockwise and let the water run out of them.”

  It was done. And what they had left was simple dry-land mathematics such as toddlers study in high schools and colleges.

  Almost the whole mathematical community had been had. And it resolved to get back at somebody. It would get back at inventors Clement Stringtown and Crowley Headcooper whenever it could.

  Ah, about the most recent endeavor of Stringtown and Headcooper, it goes like this: “We can now sufficiently duplicate any bump or wrinkle from any human brain into any other human brain,” Clement Stringtown said. “And the two of us are the foremost brain-bump geographers in the world. We know what brain-wrinkles correspond to what knowledge and accomplishments, and we have here in the local medical museum an array of some of the most knowledgeable brains that have ever lived. Why could we not take a large and fresh brain and make it the active repository of all the wisdom and talent ever?”

  “Let's try it,” Crowley Headcooper said.

  “We could cram a big young and mostly blank brain with the Mathematical Knowledge of Louis Lobachevski, with the Philosophy of Terrence Muldoon, with the Morphic Zoology of Zielinski, with the Earth-Science of Popper, with the Phenomenal Theology of Holdfaster Gander, with the Mind-as-Rhapsody Accomplishments of Maurice Aichinger, with the Musical Mastery of Gordon Whitecrow, with the Political Sagacity of Richard Hornwhanger, with the Historical Encyclopediasm of Garfield Rialto, with the Art-as-Soul Charisma of Johnny Konduly, with the Cosmological Scope of Velikov Vonk (he is not dead, but in his case it will not matter), with the Golden Calligraphy of Tachigraphic Ted (his brains are in the Carnival Museum rather than in the Medical Museum).”

  “Let's do it,” Crowley Headcooper said.

  This latter-named person of the grandees, Tacky Ted as he was called in the carnivals, had indeed been a rather shabby person in spite of his one golden talent. He had the most beautiful and the most rapid handwriting in the world. In his carnival act he could write his beautiful hand at more than a hundred and twenty words a minute. This talent would be handy for the Histories.

  “We will select a wide and deep field with its sod still unbusted,” Clement Stringtown glowed. “We will take a young man of full vigor and openness, and of the highest degree of blankness we are able to find. By your sophisticated pantographic duplications, we will effect in him all the finer bumps and channels of Roland Ambergris, all the wonderful wrinkles of Kurt Wedekind, and the whole scenic assemblage of fine gutters and worm-windings in the pickled brains of Hildebrand Oakley.”

  “Man, man, let's do it!” Crowley Headcooper cried.

  They found a virile and blank appearing young man on the other side of a fence at a minimum security place. The young man was dissatisfied with his occupation there. He said that he could come along with Stringtown and Headcooper.

  It was done. And the avid inventors and creators went quickly into the duplicating business. They laid out those pickled brains to scan them, and Velikov Vonk put his live head on the line with the rest of them. They selected the best areas of each of the master brains, and they duplicated them in the young man. When they were finished, they had a pleasant and exuberant man (a lot of the personality of Johnny Konduly went into him) who knew everything, and who knew how to communicate it all also in the fastest and most beautiful handwriting in the world (it would have reminded an old-timer of the Tachigraphy of Tachigraphic Ted who used to be in the carnivals).

  That brings it just about up to date.

  Robert Straitroad and Redman Newbreeze, each for a dishonorable reason of his own, took a hostile step against the new prodigy, the meteoric phenomenon, who was named Karl Effigy. Robert Straitroad called Senator James ‘Grim Jim’ Jimson and asked him to have the Effigy Histories banned as being dangerous euphoric drugs, and he asked him to have the author of Histories destroyed.

  Redman Newbreeze captured the fingerprints of young Karl Effigy from a highball glass and sent them across town to be identified.

  And at the same time, two prominent persons who shall be nameless brought suit under the charter of the Cosmo Club (to which almost everybody mentioned in these chronicles belonged) for a total examination of the person and processes of young Karl Effigy, the phenomenon who walked like a shuffling kid.

  But, while these machinations gathered themselves to pounce, Karl Effigy and his meteoric masterworks continued to zoom and soar. Among others, there now appeared the Effigy History of Edged Instruments, the Effigy History of Convivialities, the Effigy History of Wheeled Vehicles and Persons, the Effigy History of Wines, Brandies, and Sugar-Rums, the Effigy History of the Sexes. So many of them, so great, so startling!

  3

  Was it true that Karl Effigy talked nonsense when he elucidated and clarified his dazzling and pleasant Histories? Yes, in the manner of having words correspond to things and ideas, he did talk nonsense. But, in a larger way, his talking and writing were composed of the rarest sensibilities, even if not of precise sense. His expressions had the inner coherence of great paintings, of grand and unframed natural scenes, or of resounding and sustained pieces of music. And his discourse was all a series of great pieces of music. Only the instruments were invented to protect the guilty. His flowing Histories themselves were nonsense, to the limited view: but to the Big View, they were galas in which sense was only one of the many condiments to be sniffed and enjoyed. And still the magnificent Histories rolled on. The Effigy History of Country Music From Fiddle to Git-Fiddle, the Effigy History of Motor Scooters as Youth Experience, the Effigy History of International Relations as Continuing Nostalgic Experience.

  One thing about the Histories, most of them were projected to some distance in the future without losing any of their essential validity.

  One thing about the historian Karl Effigy, he projected himself in all directions including the future. He was a new-context man. And the answer to him surely had to be in the future, since it wasn't in the present.

  Karl Effigy really did know everything, for he had the various shapes and attitudes of brain of a person who knows everything. Those shapes and attitudes are intuitive, and they are always to be recognized. And they cannot be faked.

  And Karl Effigy did not know everything, because all his pleasant Histories were nonsense, and so were his pleasant explanations of them.

  There came an evening when the Head Usher of the C
osmo Club had to make a choice between these two exclusive cases of the pleasant Karl Effigy.

  “Remember the Boy with the Rubber Congruencies,” that Head Usher warned, and he banged his gavel for order. This was on the second evening of the hearings against Karl Effigy.

  “But we have never had a Boy with Rubber Congruencies,” the Sergeant-at-Arms said.

  “We have now,” the Head Usher announced. “We have found Club Member Karl Effigy deficient in Process. He has the shape and feel and effect of Great Wisdom, and that effect isn't made out of empty material either. It is made out of alien material, however. It all adds up correctly, but all the individual members are wrong. It conforms to the shape and it satisfies the appetite, and it subsumes all the pleasures of wisdom and achievement. But it will not stand cross-sectioning.

  “The knowledge possessed and promulgated by Karl Effigy (he acquired it by brain-tampering, according to rumor) is sound and correct in general, but not in particular. It is right and conforming shape made out of wrong material. It fails. And member Karl Effigy fails. He now ceases to be a member of the Cosmo Club.

  “Take him to the Field of Extinction, Sergeant-at-Arms. The Cosmo Club does not permit itself the luxury of living ex-members.”

  “Just a minute!” cried a bailiff breaking into the room with a solid dozen federal marshals. “The person of Karl Effigy becomes our prisoner and not yours. The power of a Congressional Committee is higher than the power of a private club. He is wanted for sentencing, or at least for examination, on the charge or suspicion of purveying euphoric drugs, his so-called Histories. We will take him now. Flowers may be sent to Potters Field about an hour hence, or friends may send contributions to the charity of their choice.”