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

by R. A. Lafferty

  Directional infra-red cookers were good, though perhaps a little bit overdone in several ways. One could put a directional nozzle on any such restaurant or home cooker and make it zero in on any organ of any man. It would cook the liver or heart of the victim where he stood, and leave no outer mark. It would cook his brains or his kidneys. There were many variations of this.

  And there were the biodegradable murders. Biodegradables can be bought in any store, to turn noisome trash and accumulation back to basic earth. Lave it on a thing or spray it on, dust it as a powder or pour it as a liquid, the biodegradable stuff will disintegrate anything, and certainly it will rot a victim into good moist earth in hardly no time at all. Oh, only a little bit of it in a man's coffee or his wine, and he will begin to degrade from the inside out. He will provide good entertainment during the ten minutes it is going on, and then he will be stenchless and friable, slightly moist but not sopping, easily disposed of, and utilitarian.

  Wonderful new inventions were made in the almost forgotten fields of floggings and crucifixions. These had already experienced a renaissance, and the second phase of a renaissance is the flowering of new art out of the new-turned soil. There were flaying machines such as our father never knew, and St. Andrew's and St. Peter's Crosses that spun like pinwheels and threw off messages in letters of fire. These were the ‘Strange Fruit Trees’ foretold again and again, and now made real.

  Timed shrinking fabrics were good. They could be set for an hour or a day or a season. And inducing a person to wear them was no trick at all. A little flattery, a little salesmanship, and a person would be into a wonderful new outfit. Now these new fabrics were tough. The timing element had really been left optional by the makers, so that the dealer could cause the garment to disappear at whatever interval the market would stand. The shrinking element had been put in so that any of the clothes could be made to fit anybody. But both of these adjustments could be tampered with. It was fun to see a man being throttled by his own shirt collar, and there no way he could get out of it. It was fun to see a man cut in two by his own belt, or to see the hands of a lady severed off by the timed shrinking of her own cuffs, or to see a head crushed like a melon by its own hat.

  But the real shrinking achievements were done by the infusions that would unsize both living and unliving stuff. This trick was at first ruled out as impractical by the Murder Contest judges, but a terrible howl went up at the exclusion. It was pointed out that the AAA International Material Handlers already had such shrink-powder and used it regularly. They used it for shipping bulk baled goods, reducing them to a very small size, and then enlarging them to original bulk at destination. And AAA had already shipped some people by this method, but it was very tricky and most of them had died. But, since the technology was already in existence, the judges had to allow it.

  The commoner form of the suggestions was to have the victim shrunk to small size where he could be done in by many different methods and could be subjected to indignities while he was being done in. But a more sophisticated way was to have the murderer shrink himself and so obtain strange entry and launch crunching internal attack.

  Embulking pellets are good. Intrude one into the victim's food and he will grow exponentially till he explodes. All the modern techniques are fruitful, and all the old procedures can be refined. Implements are updated, and there are more imaginative sorts of debowelings suggested every day.

  Killing with words was given a bloody literalness. This was a real triumph. Everyone was very pleased with the context. “It shows that the people are still thinking,” one magistrate said.

  John Mogul, the chief of ‘Track and Total’, held up his two hands with five digits extended on each of them to indicate that only ten of his primary targets were left alive and that three of them were dead. And round the world, song-singers and rope-jumpers gave his newest crowing and prediction, each in his own tongue:

  “Ten little starvelings pale and thin

  From empty pot to dine

  Flay the tenth and show his skin,

  Then there are nine.”

  This verse indicated that Cardinal Ti was dead and that the next in line was Cardinal Artemis of Santa Cruz, and that he would be flayed alive.

  And after this, the killings would go much more quickly.

  7

  Persons in the same trade should know each other. The more specialized the trade is, the more restricted it is, so much the more the members of it be acquainted. When a trade is of an absolutely specialized nature, and the members of that trade are very small in number, their acquaintance is well-advised. Count Finnegan and Herman Hercules both followed the trade of being doubles to Princes of the Ekklesia in Flight, a very specialized trade and one restricted to thirteen members. These two met by an arranged accident, and both of them were tracked and bugged wherever they went.

  “I am an ugly little bugger, Finnegan,” Herman said. “I do not mind this. There are many persons who like me and who even like my ugliness. My primary, Cardinal Erculo, is a beautiful little bugger, however. And yet we do look exactly alike. How can this be? It is not a question of a more beautiful soul shining out of him and making him beautiful. Finn, I don't know about my Cardinal but I do know about myself. I'm a good guy all the way through and I have a beautiful soul; I know this. And I do look beautiful when I'm playing the role of the Cardinal, and he does look ugly when he's playing the role of me. Roles will do a lot for one.”

  “Roles and settings,” Count Finnegan said. “It reminds me of a great arrangement that was once presented to a highly select council for judgment. A group of artists of pure instinct had put this arrangement together. The question had been asked whether there was such a thing as beauty in arrangement and proportion, or whether the whole idea was a mere accommodation. The group of artists said that there was such a thing, and that they would be able to make a convincing approach to it, even if they could not absolutely effect the thing itself. One anti-artist who was there said that there was no such thing as beauty in arrangement or proportion, or in anything else. So the artistic arrangement was made. It consisted mostly of objects, some of them brightly colored abstractions, some of them facsimiles, straight or offset, of real things. They were all well done. Lighting effects constituted other elements of the display, as did a faint dripping of music. Odors, nostalgic as well as symbolic, were other elements in the arrangement. It was excellent. The persons of the select council pronounced it to be something between a convincing approach to beauty in form and the absolute effecting of that beauty.

  “ ‘Wait just one color-corrected minute!’ said the anti-artist. He picked up one of the thousand or so objects in the display and let the persons of the council view the thing with one piece missing. Then he put the piece back exactly as it had been. It was no use. The near approach to beauty had been shattered by that removal, and it could not be reconstructed by the replacement of the piece. It would be like trying to reassemble a soap-bubble that had burst.”

  “And there will always be at least one anti-artist present,” said Herman Hercules. “That was good, Finnegan. That serves them right for bugging us. The bug will have recorded Count Finnegan the Artist talking like an artist, lest there be any doubt who you really are. But will any bug ever record Herman Hercules making a really convincing approach to beauty? I was a wrestler, Finnegan, in my youth and well into my middle age, and my ugliness was one of my attractions.”

  “I know it. I saw you wrestle in New Orleans at the old Decatur Street Arena. I saw you once in a ‘Nine Man Free-Style Midget Wrestler Melee’.”

  “Yes, that was before I was champion. For many years I was the ninety-nine pound champion of the world. As you know, one must be under five feet tall and under one hundred pounds to be a midget wrestler. I was just under in both respects. So is my primary, Cardinal Erculo. So was Saul whom I knew in old times.

  “I always followed such jobs as would keep me near the things I loved and in the ambients I required for li
fe, just as a fish will always take jobs that will keep him in contact with water. Oh, the things that I have always loved, they are stadiums, they are hippodromes, they are coliseums, they are arenas, they are grandstands, they are opera houses, they are circuses, they are fairs, they are carnivals, they are amusement parks, they are racetracks, they are music halls, they are even museums; they are forums, they are red-light districts (and I am virtuous), they are all-night restaurants and newsrooms, and penny arcades. They are six-day bicycle races; I love them. Aye, and they are army camps on battle eves. And they are prisons. They are any of these things when they are inhabited. Oh, Finn I like even all-night movies. Almost all of us long-timers have to be among crowds. I know that you are acquainted with many long-timers, Melchisedech, Gregorio, others. There are far more of us than you would guess, perhaps as many as one out of a hundred. In a city of five million persons, there will be fifty thousand of us, and our combined ages will probably be fifty million years. All of us, for reasons you would have to delve deep to uncover, like to be with crowds. We have the fear of being along. We have the fear of places closing up some hours out of the twenty-four. We are lonely in crowds, but that is better than being lonely alone. I remember Rome in the Empire Centuries, I remember Tarshish, I remember Babylon. Those were all raunchy towns, but they did have spectacles and crowds. To be with and before those crowds, I have been a tumbler and an acrobat and a tightrope walker. I've been a jockey of racing mules. I've been a candy butcher and concession boy, I've been a ‘get your hamburger, get your hot-dog, get your Coney Island sandwich’ peddler at every sort of ball game. And a side-show barker. I've been a dicer and a card-sharp, just so I could stay on top of the games and be with bunches of people when everyone else had gone home. There are private sorts of people who have no need of crowds. I'm not one of them. Our Lord Himself was only partly one of them. He made His own crowds, but he needed something else. It was for this reason that he spent so little time in Judaea which was loaded with private kinds of people. He liked the mixed-blood country to the north better, the Dekapolis region where there were always spectacles going on. He liked horse races especially. I am a town boy myself. I never liked the green country except when I toured it with carnivals or horse-fairs. But I was more myself as a monkey-faced midget wrestler than as anything else.

  “Now the Cardinal Erculo, of who I am the exact double, he is a lot like me in his love of spectacles. So was Saul. He was called a tent maker, but how many know that he was a maker of circus tents? But the Cardinal has a love for himself being too central to the spectacles. How he does love his Cardinal's box in his native Milano at La Scala, that holy mother of all opera houses! Ah, that old arena on Decatur Street in New Orleans where I used to wrestle, they tore it down, didn't they?”

  “I think so, Herman. I have been in abeyance for a few decades until just lately so I've lost track. I've heard that they've even revived the old canard that there isn't any Decatur Street in New Orleans. Herman, you muscular little mutt, you'd be a good man in the high rigging of a ship that I know about. We're going on a voyage on that soon, I believe. It's a ship that I remember in a disjointed way. It's piloted by a man in a golden mask. I feel very strongly that I should know him, but he'll not be tricked out from behind that mask.”

  “Ah, you know him, Finn. You knew him for many years. And you may have sailed that ship even more than he has. I sailed with him recently. I didn't know him at first either, behind that mask. He says that it is for the vanity of the ‘All of Us’, the ‘Ekklesia’, that we must now be served by such outré instruments as himself, as thou, as I.”

  “He mentioned the two of us specifically as outré instruments?”

  “He did. Then I knew him by the broaching of the wine and the baking of the beans. Yes, we go on that voyage soon. We sail with him within one hour. We do, if the ‘Track and Total’ agents do not kill us first.”

  “My own double, the Cardinal Hedayat, who is pontiff in petto of God, tried to explain to someone recently the importance of the thing that we maintain, the thing that the world has set itself the task of stamping out. He said that it was a special dimension. He said that it was a necessary element in everything and that the world would not be the same world without it. He said that any mathematics that disregarded it as a function would be a false mathematics, and any physics or philosophy that failed to include it would be false and incomplete. It is a real intrusion into time and space, and it has changed time and space irreparably. I say that it is the source that enlivens, the spark that unites, the only live growing thing on which all other things are parasites. It is the covenant that has changed the form of everything.”

  “But not everybody agrees which is the Covenant.”

  “All the killers agree that this is the Covenant that they must kill. It is, among a hundred other things, a biological mutation. But biological mutations are chancy for quite a few centuries and subject to being wiped out by regressions. If we break this covenant, then we regress. By the covenant, we are already supermen. But if we refuse it we cannot go back to being natural men, we can only go back to nothing. We cannot now be natural men, if we ever could, which I doubt. We must be supernatural men (which is supermen), or we must be unnatural men or monsters. And monsters are never anything else than creatures on their way to extinction. I'd better go back to my room for an instant, if we are to sail within one hour.”

  “No, Finn, you're dead if you go back to your room. They wait for you there.”

  “Then I will just take a midnight stroll through Bally Alley for one more time. Come with me, Herman, mutt Hercules.”

  “No. They're in Bally Alley too. We will go to the harbor by the ‘harbor express’. We've a half-chance of living through it if we go that way. We've no chance at all if we go any other way.”

  The ‘harbor express’ was a crawl-way through and under the cellars of buildings and through the tunnels that connected them, through storm-sewers and through ceramic tiles that carried electrical feeders, through heat ducts and thieves' catacombs. And the ‘harbor express’ came out under wharfs somewhere. But the midget Hercules could go anywhere and Count Finnegan could go almost anywhere.

  Had there somehow been a slight slip in the conversation of Herman Hercules? Had someone not learned that role quite well enough? How else, but for some slip, could Count Finnegan have known that this was Martino Cardinal Erculo of Milan hiding in the disguise of his own double, Herman Hercules, and that it was not Herman Hercules himself?

  Or perhaps those weren't the exact cases either. Perhaps it wasn't given to anyone to know the exact identity of these two double or triple masqueraders.

  8

  The killings had been coming along almost as well as could have been desired. Less than fifty of the Abdicated Princes were left, but they didn't really amount to anything, anyhow. Only four of the Princes In Hiding were left alive and they did amount to something, but they were going fast. All thirteen of the doubles were still, as far as anyone knew, alive; but they didn't amount to much either. They were a minor puzzle though. “The doubles or shadows have all disappeared when their primaries disappear,” John Mogul said, “but they haven't been accounted for. I believe that it's simply the case that dead men don't cast shadows.”

  A little horn-pipe music please. Then!

  This is the ship that has rocked and rolled

  And sailed in the scorchy zones.

  This is the pilot who's thousands years old

  (Skull for his face, and a mask of gold!),

  And his hands are nothing but bones.

  Finnegan, Gilbert, and Hercules

  Ride in the troughs and rolls,

  Under a spread of yard-arm trees,

  Into the Santo Simeon Seas,

  Into the Sea of Shoals.

  Certainly dead men cast shadows. That's what history is about. John Mogul was wrong about the doubles or shadows ceasing to exist when their primaries were put under ground. All thirteen of the prima
ries had been buried now, under stones that read:

  For Hedayat, “Upon this Peter I will build my church.”

  For Brokenbolt, “The Lord walking by the Sea of Galilee saw two brothers.”

  For Ti, “My chalice indeed you shall drink.”

  For Merry, “So I will have him remain until I come, what is that to thee?”

  For Leviathan, “So long a time have I been with you and have you not known me?”

  For Artemis, “This is the Israelite in whom there is no guile.”

  For Lloyd-Spencer, “And, leaving all things, he rose up, and followed him.”

  For Salvatore, “Lord, thou hast proved me and known me.”

  For Gregorio, “These seeing it shall be troubled with terrible fear, and shall be amazed at the suddenness of their unexpected salvation.”

  For Runosake, “—but others, save them, snatching them from the fire.”

  For Doki, “Their sound went forth into all the earth; and their words to the ends of the world.”

  For Gabrailovitch, “One of these must be made a witness with us of his resurrection.”

  For Erculo, “Thou art a vessel of election.”

  The last of the thirteen to die had been the prince of them all, the primary of Count Finnegan, Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of Antioch. His death (he was impaled upside down) was reported in the press as “Last Gate Swings”.

  But the ‘Track and Total’ people hadn't caught or killed any of the shadows yet, and now they didn't care very much. They didn't even put the murders out to sub-contract. But they did put prices on the heads of the thirteen shadows. And the shadow-men were converging on a part of the world where there were sharp bounty hunters on land and still sharper ones on the ocean. Private enterprise had not yet died out in some of those chopped-up little oceans. A man there would murder you for four dollars, but that was surely better than having him draw four dollars from some commonalty for doing no work at all. Count Finnegan and Gilberto Levine-and-O'Brien and Herman Hercules, three double-men or shadow-men who had lost their primaries were sailing on a ringing bell-way in the ancestral ship named the Argo. The bell-ways were resonating channels in the ocean that led one straight to the one hundred booming bells around the mooring stone north of San Simeon. There had been, when the bells first began to summon and ring there, a premonition or prescience of great things to happen in an assembly there. But now all the great persons who had figured in the premonition were dead and buried, the only part of any of them still above ground being the flayed skin of Cardinal Artemis. But the shadows of the great and hinge men were going to keep a rendezvous in the place of them. And there was a lot of shadow-play going on concerning their voyages. There was the pilot and captain of the Argo who had something very shadeful about him.