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

by R. A. Lafferty

  There were stone houses, there were wooden houses, there were grass houses. Really the only shelter needed was roof from the rain (it rained torrentially but infrequently in most of San Simeon), and rock-hewn granaries for the beans and the maize to keep them from the rats.

  San Simeon was the nesting ground for the giant bird named ‘huracan’ or ‘hurricane’. The birds (some said that there was only one of them that flies again and again; some say that there are a half-dozen of them hatched new every year) came out of certain limestone crags of central San Simeon where they nested, and flew over the Ocean of Mexico spreading destruction.

  San Simeon had been a much larger country once. Pieces of it, large and small, are taken up by the hurricane bird every time it flies and are dropped into that water or onto other land by the storm bird in its twisting flight. At least thirteen islands of the Antilles are made out of these pieces of San Simeon that were dropped out of the twisting sky.

  San Simeon was the richest country per capita in the world. Its wealth didn't lie in its maize or its beans or its grass-weaving industry, nor in its fowling or fishing, nor in its henequen or chicle growing; not in its mahogany or dye-wood, not in its vanilla or rubber or sugar cane (all three of these were inferior), and not in its limestone quarries. Its wealth was in gold coins and in uncoined masses of gold. It was not in gold mining (there is none of that there, though all the neighboring countries have some gold mining), but only in the gold itself. The wealth isn't in the production but only in the possession.

  There is only one gold coin in San Simeon. It is the San Simeon duro or fifty dollar gold piece. Once the world was flooded, for a very brief while, by these fifty dollar gold pieces. Now most of them are found only in San Simeon itself; and every man, woman, and child there has hundreds of them. A few more of them are stamped every year, at the Mad King's mint, and given to whatever people need them, mostly to infants born within the year just past. No one knows where the gold itself originally came from. If asked, the people of San Simeon wink and say ‘de la estrellas’, ‘from the stars’. This is a sort of joke-legend, but the existence of a great amount of gold is a fact.

  The intersection of the two diagonals of the imperfect square whose four corners are New Orleans, Havana, Tegucigalpa, and Mexico City will come to a point right off the North shore of San Simeon. But, as the country is so small, this is a rough means of locating the country itself. San Simeon was also called Babylon. Nobody remembered the reason for this its ancient name.

  San Simeon was ruled by a dynasty of Mad Kings, the Balbos. This line shines with clusters of geniuses, nor do the persons lose their genius when they lose their balance; they simply become mad geniuses. A prince of the line will grow up with his madness held in subjection, like a wild and powerful horse controlled by a strong hand. When the prince is nineteen years old, his father will become Mad King, and the prince will fare into the world to cut a swath there. He will immediately marry a princess of one of the seven acceptable families, and they will have a son.

  The wife of the acceptable family will always die in childbirth, and the prince will not remarry. For that reason, there has never been a Queen in San Simeon.

  With the aid of San Simeon gold duros, the prince will win high position in the intellectual world and in the glittering international community. He will set up foundations for the support of scientific and artistic activities and programs. He will be one of the dozen persons in the world to give it tone and style for two decades. Then the madness will take him over.

  He will return to San Simeon to become the new Mad King. His father will become the Mad King Emeritus. His grandfather, who had been the Mad King Emeritus, will die. And his son the new prince will fare into the world to cut a great swath there.

  So it had been with the Mad Kings Gaetano I, II, III, IV, V, VI. So it apparently would not be with him who had been born to become Mad King Gaetano VII. Instead of going mad when he reached the age of thirty-nine, the current Gaetano had become a high churchman (which some considered an act of another sort of madness), and he did not come home.

  His father fretted at being forced to remain on as Mad King after his term should have run out, and his grandfather fretted at not being allowed to die until he could be relieved by another Mad King Emeritus.

  San Simeon was surrounded by larger and more powerful neighboring countries, Campeche, Peten, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, and Yucatan Antigua. San Simeon survived as an independent country by paying gold tribute to these five powerful neighbors.

  The poorest part of San Simeon was its North Coast. It was dry and scorched and stony land. Off North from the dry stony land were salt water swamps, and these merged with shoal water still further north. There was intermittent shoal water all the way from the North Coast of San Simeon to what are called the Campeche Banks — more than one hundred kilometers. There was an inconsistency about these shoal waters in that much of their shoaling was from ghost shoals. There might be clear water many fathoms deep for league after league and day after day. And then those clear deep waters would turn into churning, shallow shoals.

  With the rock shores and the salt swamps and the shoal waters, there were many desolate places in those northern regions that could hardly be reached at all by land or sea or air.

  The governor of the northern province received a signed order from Mad King Gaetano VI forbidding, under pain of death for all concerned, any bells to be rung along that north shore.

  “That is easily complied with,” the governor said. “No bell has ever rung here. There has been no bell to ring.”

  Then he heard a bell off north between the salt water swamps and the ghost shoals, in one of those places that would be very hard to come to from any direction and by any means.

  “I had forgot about that bell, or rather I didn't believe in it,” the governor said, “but the tone is just how my grandmother used to describe it. It is named the ‘Sea-Bell’. I will get soldiers and go and extinguish it: I'll be extinguished myself if I don't do so.”

  Both police and soldiers were sent with orders to stop the ringing and destroy the ringers. But these armed legal men could not, for a while, come up to the bell either by land or by sea. It was in a rough waste place. Shoal water appeared where it had never shoaled before. The coast guard cutters could not go through such shallows. Strong men went in rowboats that could float on even a thin dew, but fogs came and deceived both the eyes and the ears. It seemed that the bells were behind them, and then that they were in front. That first bell, the Sea Bell, was on a ship, and the ship was harried out of there for a while. It went through clear deep water, and there was always shoal water before and behind it. And it shoaled in the clear deep water as soon as the ship had passed through.

  Two days after it had begun to sound, the first bell, the ‘Sea Bell’, was joined by another clanging, booming bell (called the ‘Martyr-Bell’). Two weeks later it was joined by a third bell (called the ‘Peter-Bell’).

  In spite of all their efforts, the police and soldiers were never able to silence all three of these bells at one time. The bells were summoning bells, they were summoning certain persons to assemble. If everything went right with the bells, if everything went wrong with the police and soldiers, the assembly would be brought to be before the bells were silenced. One of the bells, or two of them, and much of the time all three of them, continued to clang and boom for a full three years. And every few months, another person would join the hidden assembly.

  3

  The third unusual thing that happened that day was the declaration of the termination, extinguishing, and dismantling of an institution that had lasted for about two thousand years. This institution was now called simply the ‘Crowd’ (Ekklesia, an Assembly, a Crowd), and it might no longer exist. The Last Conclave was being held in Babylonia Bagascia, a town that had once been mistress of the world under another name. It had been a holy-unholy town that was almost without equal in its contrasts. Now the unholy element was in po
wer, backed by a massive unholiness from outside. Whatever had been holy about the town was now either in hiding or in flight.

  But sometimes there is a verve and variety in unholiness, and there were many sparkling people in town at the time of the Conclave. The Princes of the Crowd were popularly known as ‘Gates’ (Cardines, Hinges, Swingers) or ‘Stones’; they were assembling to disorganize and dismantle themselves for the last time. They had the votes to do it, but votes were an anachronism now. They had the power to do it, and power was still in contemporary use.

  The mood of the Big Stones was a truculent one.

  “Animosity?” said Efram Gate Gratz. “You're damned right we have animosity, total animosity. We've come to bury Peter, not to praise him. We will kill him and we will ritually defecate on his grave, and we will be certain that nothing like this ever happens again.”

  “Certainly we intended the building to fall when we removed the cap-stone,” Howard Stone Ostwald said. (Some of the Princes used the ‘Gate’ and some used the ‘Stone’ in their names, but after today neither would be used as patents of nobility. But the titles and crests would still be used by some of them when working with their bands or doing their Talk Shows.) “We intend to remove every sort of cap-stone, and we intend for every building to fall down. Buildings divide people, and we have had enough of division.”

  Every effort had been made to save the Ekklesia, the Assembly, the Crowd, even to changing the name many times, but the weight of history was all against it. It had built-in structure, and the true crowd must be unstructured. After the nations were gone, it was felt that the Crowd still might be saved, as a sort of museum piece, if only it could be given a broad enough base. New Princes, Gates, Stones were created to represent various broad bases. There were Gates and Stones of Labor and of the Media. There were Gates of the various rites of Freemasonry and Jewry. There were Gates of the Pentecostals and Roarers and Teilhardians, of the Gays and the Hot Brains and the Levelers. There were Gates of the various instrumentalists: Hornmen and Drummers had special Gates to represent them, and the electric guitarists had five Gates of their own. There were special Stones for the Trippers and the Dippers, for the Mushroomers and Hash-Bashers, for the old time Drunkards and for the Fundamentalist Drunkards. There were thirteen Stones for the Media groups, and sixteen for the Labor people. The Zero Growth lobby was represented. Everything was represented. It hadn't worked. The Crowd, the Assembly was finished, but it wouldn't die with dignity. Well, maybe it would die if it had its head cut off.

  The decapitating had happened the day before the opening of the conclave. Conclaves have never been called for any reason other than to treat of the condition of headlessness, to erect a new Cap-Stone for one that has fallen, or (as in this case) to declare a Cap-Stone suppressed.

  The Cap-Stone himself (He was Paul the Eleventh in the listing of the Cap-Stones) had been decapitated the day before. Then his head had been put up on a pike at the Spanish Stairs where people could see it as they came and went. The head was not dead for quite a while. It could talk and answer questions, though in a tortured tone. Several times it cried in a miserable and snuffling sort of way. People came and stood on the little ladder there and pulled all the hair out of the head in bloody gouts.

  Several ladies asked their bravos to bring them pieces from the head for souvenirs. The bravos broke out the teeth and gouged out the eyes for their lady friends. But still the head was able to talk, and even to get a little the best of its tormentors in argument and discussion.

  One of the Stones climbed the little ladder there and cut out the Cap-Stone's tongue. He took it into a little caffe there to have it grilled for eating. The head wept in a grotesque gurgling way after its tongue was cut out. Then a fire-tongue came down, and the Cap-Stone talked for a while in his own voice with the fire-tongue. He fell silent only when several of the Gates came and broke open his skull and scraped his brains out. They took these and fried them with onions to eat. The Cap-Stone was silent after that, and perhaps he was dead.

  All that was a sort of prodigy, but prodigies were quite common in Babylonia Bagascia that week. It was believed that the Ekklesia was ended with the destruction of the head of that last Cap-Stone. The Conclave would only confirm the end of it.

  Well, the Conclave, the declared last one of them, would be very broad-based. All the Gates and Stones in the world were present there except for a stubborn thirteen of them. These thirteen were darkness men who refused to face the light and the reason of an open conclave. But everything else in town was compounded of light and reason. The week's entertainment preceding the Conclave was as light and as reasonable as it was possible to make it, and as authentic. Dancing girls, dancing men, dancing whatevers. Laced wine, and stratified noise building up like layered rock over the city. There was a special freedom-and-looseness festival every day of the week, and the Voltaire Festival was on the final day and night before the Conclave. It was named for the Father of Reason and was to commemorate his three hundredth birthday as well as the final realization of everything that he had stood for, save for a few unfulfilled trifles here and there. This father of reason had once expressed the desire that he might see the last king strangled with the guts of the last priest. What more apt than to enact this thing!

  “How do we think of these things!” cried the marshal of the festival. “We're amazing.”

  So they woke up Voltaire and set him in a chair to watch it on the last evening of the festivals. Dead? No, the man hadn't been dead. Death wouldn't have him. Death had curled a fleshless lip in scorn and turned away. Death is pickish. So the man had gone into a senility stasis and had been nearly forgotten in his person in the very centuries that his works were fruiting so magnificently. Oh, it would be a charming strangulation that would be presented for him and for everyone!

  The last king was Hiram III of the small kingdom of St. Kobarid in the Julian Alps, and Hiram was in Babylonia Bagascia that very week. And he was a man surrounded by all the consensus hatreds. He had defied the order of the World Consensus General to abolish his nation, and so he still ruled over the only unabolished nation left in the world. Nor could the nation be abolished till late springtime when the snow plows would be able to enter it and break a road for the armed dismantlers and terminators.

  And Hiram had otherwise disgraced himself. For one thing, he had gotten into a fist fight with a ‘Highly Honored’ Television prince. The public shock at one of the ‘Highly Honored’ category being struck by such a ruffian as Hiram was overwhelming, and sky-writers were impelled to build scarlet cloud signs asking ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’. It seemed that nothing was to Hiram III.

  An even more shocking thing happened. At the Colossal Noisearama Itself, Hiram had begun to yodel very loudly (he had captured a central section of the amplification system with several of his sheriffs) at one of the most solemn and intense moments of a Rock Movement. Oh, he broke it! He was marked for death from that moment.

  And Hiram III had quipped back at Otto Glotglutz the sick night-club comedian. The suddenness and unlikelihood of this had sent Glotzie (as he was known to the sick world over) into tears. The thunderstruck observers could only call “Shame! Shame!”

  And Hiram had refused to contribute to a cash benefice to World Labor Czar Poot Plambert on Poot's being voted the World's Most Beloved Man of the Year. “Not to me he's not the most beloved,” Hiram had said crudely. So the life of Hiram III wasn't worth a lead lire around Babylonia Bagascia anyhow.

  The last priest in the world had, hopefully, been Paul the Eleventh (who was the last Cap-Stone or Top-Peter also); Paul's head was still on a pike by the Spanish Steps, and his guts were still warm and pliable. So the great thing was presented to the Voltaire Festival at prime time that night. It was (this was the judgment of all knowledgeable observers) more fun than catching a greased pig.

  And it was somewhat similar. For, of course, the entrails of Paul the Eleventh were well-greased for the spectacle. They were long, and t
hey were slick! A picked team of fifty senior youths from the Senior Youth World Congress was to perform the exquisite garroting.

  They had been having a hard time waking Voltaire up and keeping him awake. But, once he understood that it was one of his highest desires really being presented for him, he was able to stay awake pretty well; and he cackled and carried on like a person a hundred and fifty years younger than himself.

  But it takes a long time to strangle a man with entrails as slick as those were. Fourteen choruses of Grave-Stone Rock were done while it was going on, and one of those choruses can't be done in less than ten minutes. Even with a good loop around the last royal neck in the world, and with twenty-five select senior youths tugging and lugging on each entrail length, it was hard to do a quick job with such a greasy hawser. But, really, a quick job hadn't been what was desired. It was slow, and the face of Hiram III turned every rainbow color during the presentation.

  It was an entertaining two-and-a-half or three hours. But Hiram III was finally dead and his body was given over to the dismemberers and souvenir seekers. And the Father of Reason was permitted to go back to sleep again. And then, since the Pauline entrails were now just well warmed up, and all possible fun had already been had out of Hiram III, it was decided to act out another drama in a nearby basilica or holy place, the largest of them. The theme of this new presentation was an old saying about Wild Beasts Devouring Entrails in the Holy Places. For this, the winning team of fifty persons from the Consenting Adults' World Congress (this team had just eaten the world's longest hot dog, fifty meters long, in three minutes, and was ready for anything) was assembled and instructed. And they began the devouring.

  But they had almost bit off more than they could chew in this case. The entrails were tough and they were rubbery. They were slick and they were uncleansed. It was something of a circus to watch it all, the look on the faces of the chewers when they could not get a good bite. The even more contorted look on their faces when they could. Paul the Eleventh had been a tough old man, and the uncleansed entrails of tough old men have a very gamey taste to them. But the Consenting Adults were used to doing just about anything, and finally they were able to do this. Finished them off, they did, and hardly a scrap left of them. Who would ever forget the bright week of the Festivals, and especially that final bright day and night of the Voltaire Festival! Novelty piled upon novelty, and all was novelty!