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

by R. A. Lafferty

  I recently had, and am still having, an odd but valid mystical-mathematical vision of a cosmic change detected and noted in a classroom. This may be yesterday or today or tomorrow, but it is immediate, before the ending of the seven days times seven. The great mathematician is scratching in chalk before a group of graduate students, and he figures the implications of new values and functions. The great mathematician is a true portrayal, cubistically, for he is a simultaneous montage of the three most famous mathematicians in the world.

  “It is a different universe now,” the mathematician says, and he demonstrates that it is. And the graduate students gasp as they catch the implications. One had but to look at the spooky equations set out there to see that the world was changed, the buildings were changed, the bodies of all the students were changed. The change was not in size nor in general appearance. Only persons trained in post-secular mathematics would be able to follow the implications. The average half-educated person would not notice anything different in the world, even though every electron and neutrino in every atom of the world had been changed. The seventh line that the mathematician put on the board there — Oh my God, that seventh line! A cosmos could be swallowed up in the implications of that line and never seen again.

  “Aye, it's a whole, new, and different universe that we have now,” the mathematician was saying. “Such a complete alteration we have had no more than a score of times before; no more than five or six times since the appearance of man. It is the nature of the universe to change completely at intervals, but it is inherently conservative and will not fulfill this nature without grave reason. But the appearance of a chicken-hearted devil will not only rotate every vector value in the universe one hundred and twenty degrees in the counter-clockwise direction, but will also (as you can see by the ninth line) introduce a—”

  It isn't the vision that always fades out at that point; it is myself that fades out. The disturbing vision will not go away. It happens more validly and more clearly all the time. I suspect that all the people will have to go away and the vision will remain.

  Casey Szymansky is a spellbinder. That is one of the least known facts about him, and some persons have been acquainted with him for years and have not known this about him. He does not spellbind persons; he spellbinds crowds. But he addresses crowds very seldom because of this. He doesn't love his spellbinding talent; mostly he tries to hide it away; but he has it.

  On a bet, he once walked uninvited onto a stage where that turgid drama Goat Boy, with Adrian Abdo in the title role, was playing at the Castle Theatre. Casey carried a Greater Chicago phone directory with him. He opened it at random and began to read names in a passionate and ecstatic voice. And suddenly it was pandemonium in the old Castle. Girls shrieked and squealed, matrons moaned like Carolina doves, boys howled, and men stood and shouted.

  Casey read only seven names, and then he stopped. There were absolutely unceilinged ovations! But, later, no one could remember the reason for such carrying on.

  Anyhow, Casey won the bet, whatever it was. He always represented a danger ready to go out of control. It only takes one spark, if it be a special sort of spark, to ignite and burn down a universe. And Casey could conceivably be a spark of almost any sort.

  For his last month, and right up to the strange ending of him, he was surrounded by sudden crowds of insane people. Nobody had ever seen anything like them.

  Casey died then, after a month of extreme pressure from his followers. He really died, I believe, to get away from his mad followers who were a little too much for him. Casey had always been fastidious.

  Now they have stolen his body away. Beside his open grave they set a plaque — ‘Non est hic; surrexit enim’, which is to say ‘He is not here; he is risen’. How corny can you get?”

  From all evil of this day,

  Libera nos, Domine!

  FROM THE COMMENTARY OF COUNT FINNEGAN

  It's an odd process to try to reconstruct a man out of little pieces of paper, when possibly that man isn't dead yet.

  People, for a few decades, thought that I was dead; and maybe I was dead and maybe I wasn't. And whatever I am reconstructed out of now, it may be less substantial than little pieces of paper.

  I'd give more than paper to reconstruct Casey though; I'd give an arm or a leg or an eye; but not a head, and not a soul. A piece of paper is almost too easy an offering.

  One thing about Casey that no one else seems to have noticed; he's lost his mind. He's as nutty as a Lever Brothers Coconut plantation. He's fishy as the Grand Banks themselves. He always did attract weak-fish and weak-fish opinions; but his compassion has been genuine. He is sometimes taken by transports of it. He cries easily but privately over the case of helpless things. The shape of a conch can mist him over, or the dulling of a Lesser Cat's eye that he picked up on yesterday's beach. Between Morotai and Soemsoem Islands where we were long ago, the Molucca wind used to set up a sort of double ripple on the near glassy green water, and the pattern of it shook him every time he saw it. He had a Buddhist regard for small bugs and beasts, and he would take great care not to harm any small thing. Now he has lost his framework and is committed to helping a large thing that is far from helpless. He is insane, gently but dangerously insane. Ah, now comes the silly question from someone on the fringe: “With Casey who would know the difference?”

  I would know the difference.

  Simple insanity is like heresy in one way. It loses, or it throws out, only one thing of many, and it keeps the rest. It allows the original structure (whether of mind or of institution) to stand, with only one big gaping hole in it. Sometimes the structure will collapse quickly then (if the gaping hole is at the heart of it); but sometimes it will stand for a very long time with the wind whistling through that hole. If the wind does not happen to blow from the wrong direction, one might not even notice the insanity, or the heresy.

  He had last compassion for every last least thing, and all the rest of it is noise. His excessive commitment to the Monsterousness is all noise, done as he goes over the edge.

  God, have mercy on that man! I do not ask it lightly.

  Make me not such leader be

  Let this cup depart from me.

  Of former lives, of former aspects, of former roles, I believe that Melchisedech Duffy implanted all of them in us as educational devices. I believe that it was the doing of his damned talismans. Oh certainly, I remember all the old episodes; but did they happen? Or were pieces of old Greek mythology and of other sorts of myth implanted in us?

  Who gave Duffy such power as he once had in such things?

  He does not know.

  Who gave me such real but crooked powers as I now begin to evince?

  I do not know.

  What am I anyhow? I'm an old wineskin full of new wine.

  Then I will burst it, and both wine and wineskin will be lost.

  No, no! I protest against it! I do not want to be filled with such new wine. I asked for it, yes, but I didn't want it.

  I remember the Spanish hero Cid Campeador, dead and tied upright in his saddle on his horse, and leading his army to a great victory with his wild riding, such wild riding as nobody had ever seen before. But what had a dead man to lose in taking the hurdles that way? I remember the skull of the great law-giver Justinian, set on a rough hewn council table in those dim centuries when the Empire had all but disappeared into the Gothic fog. There was a snake coiled within the great law-giver's skull. Questions were asked of the skull and of its snake. If the answer was ‘yes’, the snake slithered its head and half length out of the right eye-socket of the skull. If the answer was ‘no’, the snake slithered its head and half length out of the left eye-socket. So the judgment was given to chieftains on great matters, and it was accepted.

  I see myself as leading an insane army of overturners intent on destroying this world, and the next one, and the one after that. But am I responsible for what my body does after I'm dead? (I suppose that I'm dead; that seems to be the mo
st reasonable explanation for certain phenomena.)

  I will disassociate myself from what comes after me. I say ‘It is not myself who gives these judgements. It is the snake in my skull.’

  FROM THE COMMENTARY OF BASCOM BAGBY

  “That fish, Prince Casimir (Casey Szymansky) has always been hard both to like and to dislike. He is here now. He is not in Hell. That is a false report that he has gone to Hell and is making arrangements for his second coming. The arrogance and kinkiness has mostly gone out of him. He is very sick though, and he has a long road to recovery.

  “He has great concern for the goat caravans that arrive here every day. There has long been the cultus of praying for us Poor Souls in Purgatory; but the effect has not been so much the taking up of the burdens of the Souls here as the sending to us of further burdens to bear. People phrase their prayers for us very strangely. They pray mostly for themselves, that they be rid of their burdens. And they mention our names. And those burdens arrive here every day on caravans of laden scapegoats. Casey works with the beat-up and burden-weary goats pretty well. He is a good animal man, and he patches them up as well as can be done.

  “Casey is here. So he is not elsewhere, so the predicted prodigies of him will not take place. —unless this is a pseudo or effigy Casey who is here. That is possible, though barely.”

  FROM THE COMMENTARY OF DEMETRIO GLAUCH

  “Casey's body is stolen. This casts a new darkness on the matter. Believe it, it was not stolen by strangers. It was stolen by his own supporters or associates. I am reminded of an advertisement that appeared in the last but one issue of the ‘Crock’, when the insane followers were driving Casey out of his wits and to his death.

  “ ‘Genuine emptied temples (still covered by consecration guarantee), dead bodies sent postpaid by certified grave robbers. Use them for fun or experiment, or for special rites. Prodigies sometimes occur during their use’. A box number was given to order bodies from, and requests for specific bodies were solicited. The price was not given in the ad, but somewhere else in the ‘Crock’ was a note that the bodies ran from fifty dollars each to two thousand dollars each.

  “But Casey's body, if it is held by the same grave robbers, would probably cost a Prince's ransom, or a Devil's ransom.

  “As to the Promontory Prodigies, some of them are happening, but likely they do not mean what Casey thought they might mean.”

  Hanged folks swinging from a tree.

  Hanging people, pray for me!

  Episodes Of The Argo

  Sine Patre, neque Finem,

  Tu Melchisedech ordinum

  Panem Proferens et vinum

  Without Father, without Ending

  Thou of the order of Melchisedech,

  Setting out Bread and Wine.

  —Bascom Bagby, Letters After I Am Dead

  He, whoever he was, stirred out of a fitful sleep into a frozen and apprehensive fear of falling. He supposed that he was a man of the human sort, as he usually was when he woke up in such a turmoil.

  His stirring had caused him to slip another notch and to dislodge something more of whatever was holding him up. And whatever had woke him up was the whistling of a frozen substance falling, through the frozen air, to a very great distance down. He felt insecure, and he realized that most of what he had been lying on had now vanished into space.

  He was in a shallow notch of the very high reaches of an ice-coated cliff, and that cliff was slick. There was a gale blowing, and the ice was falling in glops of many tons, falling and falling for a mile or more. He seemed to be in a sleeping-bag that threatened to spill him out upside down. His ice support was eroding and breaking away under him, and the bottom of the cliff was out of sight in the darkness. Whenever he shifted to get into a more safe position, he dislodged more of his support.

  “Kaloosh!” came the noise when the largest portion of the dislodged snow-ice finally hit below. He had changed position three times while it fell. It was a thousand meters or more straight down. His head was out over the abyss and he gawked down into the white darkness. White darkness? Yes, such frosty surroundings do provide a white darkness at night.

  “If I am a man, I can reason,” he spoke, and his voice dislodged still more of his icy support. Now he was tilting downward on the disappearing ice ledge at an angle of more than sixty degrees. “If I am a man I can reason,” he repeated, but soundlessly this time, careful not to make more disturbance with the vibrations of his voice. “If I can reason, I need not be afraid. If I am afraid of such a little thing as death by falling, then it will not matter whether I fall: what falls will be worthless. (Who is singing that damned song?) If I were afraid, it would not be my own heroic self that fell. Somewhere there is a voice that says to me that I can tell bodily death ‘I will go with you, only not yet.’ But this is a nervous situation. And somebody is still singing that damned song.”

  “I'm stuck in peril most extreme— HI HO!

  Oh morning danger is the theme— HI HO!

  My enemies will soon prevail.

  Oh where's the bailiff with my bail?

  The wind is blowing quite a gale.

  My fall will leave me plain un-hale.

  I'll bust my head and bust my tail.

  HI HO! The gollie wol.”

  Aw, it was himself singing that stuff. It was the gale wind that gave it its strident tone. So he went with another bit:

  “Oh, it's great to be young and in danger,

  HI HO!

  It's great to be young and in danger.”

  Then he saw that he was not in a sleeping-bag at all, but was wrapped only in half a dozen very long and very warm threads. He recognized them as a few combings from the Original Great Fleece of Colchis. So then, wrapped in no matter how few threads of the great Fleece, he could not freeze, and he could not fall, and he could not die. Aye, he had been hung on the cliff in an impossible position by an almost fatal fall. And he had been left there until the next section of his adventure should begin. This was a sky-high adventure serial drama he was in, and it was at the same time as real as Ragnarok.

  He slipped completely then, and slipped clear off the precarious ledge. Then he was dangling by one single golden thread out over the abyss, and he knew that he was perfectly safe. He turned a fragment of the Fleece outward to show its glint, and this quickly brought an answering glint from the still unrisen sun, the Fleece and the sun being brothers. Now the sun arose, a little bit early, being wakened by the greeting.

  Then the man saw his ship very far below, frozen solid in blue ice, and three monkey-like creatures were romping on the tall and ice-sheeted rigging and rejoicing in the dawn. There were solidly frozen birds hanging motionless in the high-air, spread-winged and asleep. People, it was cold!

  The man flung gold threads of the great Fleece upward, and climbed up them towards the top of the ice cliffs. Oh, there hadn't been anything wrong at all. It was just that Argonauts, from the hectic life that they lead, do often wake up scrambled and with lost bearings. The man whistled sharply, and the three monkey-like creatures came off the rigging of the ship and boiled up the slick and frozen cliffs like inverted cascades. They were wraiths, or at least of a lighter flesh, and they could climb like ascending lightning. They brought ice-axes with them, and were cheerful and ready for any assignment.

  Reaching the top of the cliff, the man took a work order from the breast of his chlamys and read it. He looked around for what should be there. The three monkey-like seamen had already discovered it and were attacking it with their ice-axes. It was a woman frozen in a solid pillar of ice.

  “No job too big, no job too small,” the man laughed. “Oh, this is in the nature of a vacation, to be allowed to spend a night on the high cliffs that I love and to carry over the rescue into the bright morning. We appreciate these little leisures when they come to us.”

  The woman was ivory-fair, and her veins as shown through her flesh and the ice were sky-blue. The lids of her closed eyes were also of this gentle
and ghostly blue, as was the web-like flesh between her toes. The man attacked the enclosing pillar of ice, as the monkey creatures were also doing. They hacked and split great hunks out of the pillar and quickly sculpted it down almost to the woman.

  She woke up, and her blue eyes darted here and there, following the bladed axes. She grinned with her eyes at the Magus (the man had already remembered that he was a Magus, and he was quite near to remembering his own name). And the woman grinned with her eyes at the monkey-like creatures, and they echoed the grin back at her. She cringed with mock horror when the axes came too near to her. The woman was probably beautiful and was wrapped in the blonde pelt of a female cave-bear.

  “How did you know where I was?” she talked out of a crack in the ice. She spoke with human sound but not yet with usual words. It was the vocalized thought-speaking that primordial persons use so easily and understand so universally. She was nice looking, but behind her face she was toothed more massively than most of the people you know.

  “I had a work order to come and wake you up,” the man said. “What a way to run a hotel! Someone leaves an order with the desk clerk (as it were) to be wakened in forty thousand years, and it might not be even the same desk clerk on duty when the time rolls around. Why couldn't you use an alarm clock like anybody else?”

  “Oh poor you!” the woman communicated, and a lot of her was already out of the ice. She used words at random, but her messages were clear enough. “I almost feel sorry for you,” she was saying. “but I know you can't really be cold with those golden combings on you. We knew about them, but we never could find them. Oh poor monkey-faces too! But you don't mind having to come and get me, not when we are such good friends as we already are.”