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

by R. A. Lafferty

  This captain and pilot wore a golden mask, a golden scarf around his neck, and golden gauntlets on his hands and wrists. These golden garments were made from combings of the Great Golden Fleece of Colchis Itself. All three of the doubles who had taken passage on the Argo knew this mysterious pilot; and one of them, Count Finnegan, had known him very well for many years. But an impediment was in-between. The pilot was swathed in gold fabric because the flesh was all gone off him and what was left was mostly bones. The pilot could not speak because of his throat condition (he had no flesh at all to his throat; he had, in fact, no throat; he had neck bones and nothing else in that region), but he could communicate. And he was always in good spirits. (His flesh had been reduced to ashes and now reposed in a cigar canister that had once belonged to the King of Spain, but his spirit and his bones were intact. He was, as everyone will guess soon or late, Melchisedech himself, the father of all magic men.)

  The Argo sailed continuously against the wind and the currents, and it was not by ordinary standards a very sea-worthy ship. The monkey-faced midget wrestler, Herman Hercules, was constantly cobbling things together in the high rigging, and Count Finnegan was often following the keel-haul around under the ship to make emergency repairs. But, of course, the Argo could never sink, not forever.

  “Let me see thy skin, Gilberto,” Count Finnegan said to his friend the Levine-O'Brien when they were half seas over. “You made certain marks on thy skin so you would know it if you ever saw it again.” “Oh, no, no, no,” Gilberto said, and he seemed a little bit frightened about it all. “Something has gone wrong with those marks so that I am not absolutely certain whether they are the same marks I made or not. It is a frightening thing to wake up on a morning and find oneself in somebody else's skin. It is equally frightening to be not really certain whether this has happened or not. The marks that are on the skin I am wearing now, they are very like the marks that I made on my own skin, and yet there is something about them that shouts ‘Forgery! Forgery!’.”

  “Let me see them, Gilberto,” said Count Finnegan. “I watched you make the marks on your skin, and I have my fine artist's memory and sense of style for these things. I can spot forgery.”

  “I'd rather not, Finnegan,” Gilberto said. “Let's leave it in doubt.”

  The primary of Gilberto, Cardinal Artemis of Santa Cruz, had been flayed by one of those arranged accidents that had become common in the world. The Cardinal had gone to bless a new cork-cutting machine in Portugal, though knowing the danger of assassination. And when the blessing was finished, the machine was somehow joggled to run. It reached out its arms and took the Cardinal in its grasp. It flayed his skin off completely in one piece. The Cardinal died almost immediately afterwards. But the skin, the skin, which skin was it, and which man was wearing it at the time? Sometimes doubles will identify so completely with their primaries that there's no telling them apart.

  There was something else here. Finnegan had painted, using a radiation imprinting technique, a masterwork at least as great as ‘The Resurrection of Count Finnegan’, on the endoderm, the inside of the skin of Cardinal Artemis. He had done it when the Cardinal was hale and living, but the Cardinal hadn't known that he did it. Finnegan knew how to reproduce this inside-imprinted masterwork now. But was it on the inside of the trophy skin of the Cardinal that was now cherished by John Mogul? Or was it on the inside of the skin of this Gilberto Levine-and-O'Brien who was beside Finnegan now? If John Mogul had seen the masterwork and if he had it beside him at all times, the exploding and kinetic beauty of the work may have accounted for the strange behavior of John Mogul at his end.

  A Saucerite from the Big Triangle region joined them on the Argo when they were short days from the mooring-stone. He was a pleasant person. “You four here are the only gentlemen I have met on World,” he noted. “All others stare at me in that unseemly way that humans have. Then they poke at me with their fingers and ask me if I am one of the ‘Big Brothers’ sent to supervise their civilization. Do I look like a Big Brother?”

  “You do, little owl-eyes, you do,” said Herman Hercules. Herman and the Saucerite were about the same size.

  “I am an eleven-year-old student,” the Saucerite said. “And, taking advantage of a misunderstanding, I am enrolled in classes with eleven-year-old humans. But I cut a sort of path among those kids. In the evenings, in my saucer, I sweep back to my under-sea nest in the Triangle, and I often take several of my classmates with me. This makes me seem to be an important person to my classmates, and I love it.”

  “What school do you attend?” Gilberto asked him.

  “Gaetano Polytech in Balbo City. Next season I will go to the University of Miami if I can get a chess scholarship.”

  “I want to poke you with my fingers myself, rude or not,” Gilberto said. “Well, are you real? Tell me, and I won't have to poke you to find out.”

  “Does ‘Reality’ have to be that consensus grubbiness that calls itself ‘real’ on so many worlds? Oh, I'm real. But poke me, and your fingers will go right through me. Your world's like all the others.”

  “You're a poor student, Sauce, not to know that our world is unique,” the fleshless Melchisedech, pilot and captain, said. “We are not like other worlds. You must realize that.”

  “Oh, your world is of special interest, of course, since it is the ‘World of the Covenant’,” the young Saucerite said. “But it isn't a world of special accomplishment or attainment. That some of you are really the first super-people is likely, and that you carry super-seed is almost certain. But the results aren't overwhelming. There's unevenness in you, and the super-tang is rare. It's because of your special category and dimension that we send more students here than to many other places. It's because of your unevenness and barren areas that so many of us students return as empty-minded as we were when we left home.

  “But some few of you are die-hards, and this interests us. Most of us, most of the people everywhere, are die-easies; you are different. I'll be covering the Conclave at Mooring-Stone for a little press network of which you likely haven't heard.”

  Three others of the double-men or shadow-men, Cecil Octavian of England who was the double to the dead Cardinal Brokenbolt of Australia, Niku Kazuko of Honolulu who was double to the dead Cardinal Runosake of Kobe, Daniel Jean Boulle who was the double of the dead Cardinal Salvatore of New Orleans, were coming up from along the Mexican coast in a tramp steamer. They had been impersonating archeologists for the purpose of deceiving assassins and bounty hunters, and it was in their archeological activity that they had acquired the presence of a person who was about as archeo as one can be.

  “It isn't a bad life,” this very odd person gave the stony communication. “We were the High Lords once and we had everything our way. We had the jaguar by the tail, as they say, and the Jaguar in the Sky was our own constellation. We were the Lords of the Square Hills which you now call the pyramids of Quintana Roo. The Holy Hills had grace then. They didn't seem so square-tapered and flat-headed as they are now, not before the spirit went out of them. And we had bells then, gold bells. Did any of you ever hear the rich clanging of solid gold bells?

  “We understood prophecy. We knew that there would be a Pact and a Lineage. We were pretty sure that the Pact would be with us. Should it be with the monkeys of the trees, or the humans of the river shores, or the alligators of the swamps, or the whales of the ocean, when we were there? We were the Pyramid Lords. We were the Rulers of the World. We had a touch of the divine fire; we could feel it in us. We still have it. We maintained order in the world. The monkeys and humans and alligators and whales were our cattle.

  “We set our golden bells to booming to call God to come down. I believe now that we were too early by a few thousand years. The bells set up a golden roaring with words; ‘We have pen and ink here,’ they called, ‘Come down with the Pact and we will sign it and then You can countersign it.’ ‘Be quiet,’ God said. ‘It isn't even morning yet.’ ‘Come down with the Pact,’
we set our bells to speaking, ‘and bring the morning with you when you come. We are ready now.’ ‘Be quiet,’ God said again. We rang the bells still louder. He came down then. And He turned all of us to stone. ‘Now you will be quiet,’ He said.

  “So we have been stone-stiff and buried inside our pyramids since then, except that one of us is allowed to move about every few centuries, as I do now, and bring news to his fellows. ‘But I will not forget you,’ God had said on that day when He turned us to stone. ‘I will always treat kindly with you. And I have wonderful things in mind for you, after a few thousand years. Until then, be quiet.’ So He made a Pact with the humans instead, a puzzling choice, and He made it with an unlikely variety of them. And then He renewed the Pact, with the most uncouth humans ever. So be it.

  “But now we have heard the bells ringing again, not gold bells as we once had, but bells nevertheless. I've come to report on the event, for an underground press of which you have not heard. It is the Pyramid Roots publication, and it is circulated entirely underground, from the roots of one pyramid to those of another. Why do we not have fresh lamb on this voyage? On the Argo, Melchisedech gives them fresh lamb.”

  This rock-headed person was something of a clown, but it is distinction aplenty for a person made entirely of stone even to walk and talk. And Rocky was a pleasant companion, and he knew the passages through the shoals. He himself had laid these passages out originally, he said.

  Three others of the double-men or shadow-men, Bolo Manolo, Douglas McAfee, Lloyd Cardigan-Pembroke the pig butcher of Tywyn in Wales, came down from Bimini on a luxury yacht, and they looked to be the richest and sportiest fishermen ever. They didn't talk with any Saucerites or Pyramid Lords. But there was one ancestral dolphin who followed along with them and spoke to them when they dangled a coded communication apparatus overboard.

  Yes, the dolphin knew about the Testament, the Pact, the Covenant also. What creature does not know about it? He knew about the line which is the life-line of the world. He had expected, as they all had, that the Pact would be made with the dolphins as the most intelligent and most obedient creatures in the world. It wasn't. The Pact was made with humans, and it contained the sad clause that other humans would try to nullify it until the end of time. But the dolphins accepted their being passed over for the lesser folk. They had a bell of their own, the dolphin said, and it was the largest bell in the world. A number of the dolphin's fellows were towing it, and were already quite near to the Mooring-Stone.

  “Should we set it to ringing again in the great underwater?” he asked.

  “Do so,” said the shadow-man Lloyd Cardigan-Pembroke the pig butcher from Wales, the double of the dead Cardinal Ti. “We can't have too many bells.”

  “Are any of you double-men familiar with the grass of the very long roots and the red tinge in its green that used to grow on Vatican Hill and nowhere else in the world?” the Dolphin asked conversationally. “It was named ‘Blood-of-Martyrs Grass’. ”

  “We are all familiar with it,” Bolo Manolo said. “It grew in only that one place in the world and now it grows there no more. It is finished.”

  “Not so,” said the Dolphin. “It is growing here now, up from these waters, and it has covered the mooring-stone with its thin carpet of red-flecked green. And the temperature of the water is rising, and the land itself is rising. Rejoice, for the martyr grass has come back.”

  The Dolphin left them then to see about setting the big Dolphin Bell. In about an hour the men felt the underwater clanging from the biggest bell in the world, and it raised up their spirits like ocean waves.

  The yacht went into the mooring-stone, as had the Argo, as had the tramp steamer from along the Mexican coast. Then the bounty-men who had the place encircled said that the bag was full enough, and they decided to pull the draw-string on it. But, somehow, they couldn't quite do it.

  The bounty-men had nine priced men and three craft inside their bag, at Mooring-Stone, and now they would kill them and collect their price. The bounty-men knew those shoal-waters, and they knew how to close in on prey. But things had gone wrong for them. The shoal-waters were changing by the minute, by the second, and the bounty-men were being dashed to their deaths. Strange killer-shoals were appearing everywhere.

  But four other double-men or shadow-men came through anyhow, after the bounty-men had thought they had slammed the shoaly gates. Arnoldo Rugutini of New York City, the double of Cardinal Gregorio of Messina, came in on an army copter. It landed him, and it whirled off again. Arnoldo had connections for things like that.

  Mihail Majic, the double of Cardinal Gabrailovitch of Zagreb, swam in, a fifty mile swim in the open ocean. He was a World Class Swimmer.

  Emmet Collins of Boston, Massachusetts, the double of Cardinal Merry of Cork, talked his way in. He came in a little boat that you wouldn't believe. He stopped at a nest of bounty-men and talked to them. He told them that he was a follow-up man for ‘Track and Total’ and that he was checking up on the job to see that nothing went wrong. He would signal to them from Mooring-Stone, he said, when it was time for them to go in for the kill. And they let him go in. And only when he was out of their immediate reach did they howl at themselves and wonder who had stolen their wits. It was the silliest story anybody had ever made up, and how had they been taken in by it? Oh, if you hadn't heard that Emmet Collins talk, do not ask how anybody could have been taken in by him. Since the world began, no man had ever talked as he talked.

  The thirteenth of the double-men was John Giwa from Anecho in Africa. He was the double of dead Cardinal Doki of Douala. John Giwa had flown from Anecho to Marseille in France by commercial flight. He broke in on John Mogul there. He cut the twelve digits from Mogul's hands and wrapped them in butcher's paper to take with him. He put a skewer through Mogul's tongue when that man became too loud. He took a waiting charter flight to Miami. He took a barn-stormer down over Mooring-Rock, and he came down on the rock with a scarlet parachute. Then he went down into the underground cave or room that had been named ‘The Room of the Conclave’ when it was hewn out of the rock four hundred years before. (This popular name for the room had always been a mystery.) He found the other twelve double-men or shadow-men already there.

  John Giwa banged his hands together loudly. “Holy men, let us get started!” he cried.

  9

  One other man then came into this strange room in the middle of the rock. This was Monsignor X of the ill-famed Roman-Babylonian Conclave which was supposed to end all conclaves. “The Conclave must have a Servitor,” X said. How did he get there anyhow? He brought the Triple Crown with him, or at least a double of it. Where did he get it? How did he get it there?

  “Is that volcanic activity I feel or is it an effusion of special grace?” John Giwa asked himself and all of them. “We know from our inner revelation,” he went on, “that all thirteen of us are not double-men or shadow-men. One or more of us is a primary man, a true Cardinal. Only one is required. One lone Cardinal left in the world could hold his own private conclave and nominate himself Pope. And the Holy Ghost would confirm that nomination.”

  The violent-and-holy-man John Giwa then dumped out twelve curled and blood-caked things. They were the twelve severed fingers and thumbs of John Mogul the contract murderer. John Giwa dumped them as if they were snakes. They did move themselves and writhe. Then, coming into a pattern, they reared themselves furiously and extended themselves upward in trembling anger as if swearing vengeance.

  Yes, there was both volcanic activity going on and an effusion of very special grace. In ten minutes, a sea-soaked country of ten thousand square kilometers rose above the level of the sea. And the Mooring-Rock, three square kilometers of it, rose a hundred meters above its countryside.

  “Mooring-Stone,” John Giwa spoke the blessing to the new land above his head which he could sense but could not see. “Your old name of Babylonia Oceania now becomes Babylonia Sancta.” It was now changed from Oceanic Babylon to Holy Babylon.


  Each of the thirteen members of the conclave gave a short talk. Then X asked the golden-masked Melchisedech to give a talk also.

  “But I am a dead man,” Melchisedech explained.

  “Dead man, speak us live words,” John Giwa said. And he did so.

  “Then X called their names for the vote. One of them, Count Finnegan, said “abstineo”, “I abstain.” The other twelve all voted for the same person. Then X placed the triple crown on the head of John Finnegan Solli. John Giwa said “Reign in grace, Pope Finnegan the First.”

  Was that the sound of mule-laughter ringing around the world? Many, many people loved Finnegan, but everybody found it the wildest joke ever that he should also be crowned Pope. Mule laughter, yes, and bleaker laughter also, and naked fury rising to the skies. “My god, my god! (pardon the phrase, Ungodly Oaf), but it's the case of volcanic activity riding to the rescue like the old U.S. Cavalry,” the Angry League people shrieked. “The ultimate in lack of style, and corn, corn, forever corn!”