Aurelia

by R. A. Lafferty

  “How does it feel on the last day of your life?” was the thing they asked her the most often and with the most solicitude.

  “I have not agreed that this is the last day of my life,” Aurelia still held out. “Why should it be? What could happen to me? This is one of the ‘spooking worlds.’ Did you know that? I remember now that it is in the planet catalogs as a ‘spooking world.’ You people here are trying to spook me into believing that I will die tonight, and you do kill people by spooking. Now I know that all of you are good people, but ‘spooking’ is an evil habit.”

  Well, it did make one a little nervous for everyone to assume and say that she was on the last day of her life. Who would kill her? The worm with the pistol? But that could happen only if Aurelia cooperated with the extraordinary worm.

  “If anyone else says ‘Poor Lamb’ to me and pats me on the head, I’ll pop!” Aurelia groused. “I’m not done in yet.”

  “It is a cheap response, yes,” said Marshal-Julio who was with her, “and I suspect that you find it a little bit cloying. But persons are able to speak easy words only for the false emotions, not for the true. We all have true grief for your going. We have had you for such a short time, and we hate so much to lose you. It just seems as if we should have responded in some fuller way to your visit to our world.”

  Marshal-Julio seemed to be trying to say other words that would not come.

  “Poor lamb,” he finally said, and he patted Aurelia on the head.

  Blaise Genet came to see Aurelia on that morning also.

  “This is the last time I will ever see you in life,” he intoned sorrowfully. “I didn’t appreciate you. I was preoccupied with other things. Now it will be finished.”

  “Don’t you join that damned funeral march, Blaise,” Aurelia said. “I don’t admit any of it at all. I’m not going to die today.”

  “Maybe not, but I am,” Blaise said. Then he fell down and died, apparently in pain.

  “I was wrong,” Aurelia said as people began to gather around Blaise, thinking he might not be dead yet, though he was. “It wasn’t particularly the spirit trying to get in. It wasn’t anything trying to get out. It was just his steep blood-pressure that made him hear knocking. But a good governor wouldn’t have let it kill him.”

  The great philosopher Aldous Spencer-Trencher brought Aurelia a bowl of Slowpoke Snails and talked to her.

  “You die of a sickness, fair-haired Aurelia,” he said. “It is the same sickness that a roebuck dies of when the lion breaks its neck and severs its throat. This might not be thought of as a sickness, but it is. It is the destructive response of the environment to the person. It is the sickness of the roebuck being who he is and the lion being who he is. Yours is a type of ‘seven-day sickness.’ For you, it might be called a ‘world sickness,’ for you really do not belong to this world and you cannot live here more than seven days, the period of the infection. This world is that very large microbe, the lion, that slays you. You always insist that you belong to the ‘broad human race,’ yes. But the mechanical and medical cause of your death here will be the local or narrow human race. An allergy is set up between you and this local or narrow human race. It rejects you out of its blood stream. Either you must die of the contact, or the local race must. It is simpler for you, having fewer moving parts than the aggregate of the local race, to die. Yes, and it is medically neater. The reverse of the process is called ‘catastrophic epidemic’ or ‘deadly plague.’ There is a strong feeling against this reversal whenever it happens.”

  “Thank you for the Slowpoke Snails,” Aurelia said. It was a very large bowl of them, and Aurelia was one of those persons who eat Slowpoke Snails slowly and sparingly. She went around to other persons, giving them some of the snails on her spoon, and reducing as she at first believed, the quantity of snails in the bowl.

  A dowdy woman of all too familiar aspect came to Aurelia.

  “This is your last day to make peace with the yin-yang principle,” this woman said. “It is the celestial compensation by which the universe runs. If you stand against it, you will be destroyed. I have here a symbol of it. It is the life-death symbol. It can give you either life or death at the end of this day, depending on your disposition.

  “I am not at all disposed to deal with a yo-yo,” Aurelia said. “Begone with that damned thing, woman! I tell you that it is out of balance.” It was the meanest-looking yo-yo that Aurelia had ever seen. A person could get hurt badly with a thing like that.

  “And I say it is in perfect balance,” the woman said. “And it isn’t a yo-yo.”

  Aurelia stopped the woman’s mouth with a spoonful of Slowpoke Snails. Then she blew cock-crew on her Prince-of-Nysa horn, and she heard Cousin Clootie around the bend blowing his own. All the people sat down for early Ientaculum-breakfast.

  There were a lot of Slowpoke Snails still in the bowl. Aurelia went around through the sitting crowds and gave big spoonfuls to each person. “Good,” they said. “Very good,” others said. “Where did you get them?” some of them asked her. “You just can’t get Slowpoke Snails anymore.” Aurelia ladled them out to all five thousand persons of her regular entourage and to many irregulars. And the bowl was still half full.

  “I will tell the world this,” she said. “The tenth helping of Slowpoke Snails is not nearly as good as the first. I have had enough of them, and I believe that the people have.” She went and dumped them in the river, and the fish rose to them gratefully. But by then the breakfast was over with, and it was time to be moving again. Aurelia gave the break-up signal, and she gave her final cock-crow homily:

  We have an intrinsic claim to light. We have an intrinsic claim to component peace. We have an intrinsic claim to happiness. We have these claims and rights because we are human creatures. We belong to the privileged and magic species, and that gives us right and title to these good things. We can forfeit these rights and titles only by becoming something less than human creatures.

  These are not the things that a governor should talk about, I have been told. “A governor should talk about governing.” Aw great goitrous goats! No such thing. Who wants to hear talk about governing. The mechanics of governorship are now performed be mechanism-computers. But the ghostly components of governorship will still be called out by such as myself.

  Humans are magic creatures, with something very much the matter with them. All nature cries out with apprehension “There is something the matter with the People.” It is true. There is a crippling that had already taken place before any of us came here. This old destruction of part of us does not belong to our original human nature, but now it is part of our second human nature. This makes it harder, but we were not told that it would be easy. We will be able to follow the bright and rational road with the uncrippled part of us that remains. We have the guarantee that there is road enough for our feet and ship enough for any voyage. We are defective, but our defect is not such as will prevent our making our good way to the end.

  Ah, I had another analogy rigged up, but it came apart when I was trying to shape it a little better. I will not use it this time, but perhaps another time. I’d better hurry though. According to what everybody tells me of myself, I have only three times left after this one, only three corners of the day left.

  There is an obstreperous house in the middle of our road, whether it is a sea-road or a land-road. The name of that house is the “Mystery of Iniquity.” Who groaned, dammit, who groaned? Do not make that “oh-what’s-eating-that-kid-anyhow” gesture so loudly at me! Oh really, it is not my fault that I have to hang a stilted name on the house. It is the fault of yourselves and the languages of your world that have nothing but stilted words.

  We can pass by that house named the “Mystery of. Iniquity” and leave it on the road behind us. And then we will see it once more in the road ahead of us, and this will happen again and again. But there is not a multiplication of the mysterious house. There is only one of them. Sometimes we forget what is in the house, and we
open the door and look in. We are blasted then, and we are set back on the board a thousand kilometres and a thousand days to a place called “Swampy Junction.” And coming out of “Swampy Junction,” the road is always twice as hard as it was before.

  People are always making excuses for people, which is good. And they over-do it, which is bad. They say that a lot of the stumbling that people do is accidental. Fat-Tailed Fish it is! None of it is accidental. Some of it is done by the people themselves, and some of it is caused by obscene contraptions. There are grubby little machines that scurry around and pass out cards “Accidental Stumbling Arranged Cheap.” They will provide it too. And even the mighty will stumble and break their noses, but it will not be accidental.

  This is the end of my cock-crow oration for this day. Short minutes ago I heard the cock crow, after a little urging. And now both friends and enemies tell me that it is the last time I will ever hear it crow.

  Do I believe that? Do you?

  THIRD PRANDIUM

  “I have half a kilo of athanatos bark,” Herr Boch the dealer in antiques and oddities and ancient artefacts told Aurelia. “And it works.”

  “How do you know, Herr Boch? Have you tried it?” Aurelia asked him.

  “I have not tried it on myself,” he confessed, “but that is only because I’m afraid of it. I have it to sell, not to use. But others have tried it, and it works for them.”

  “Who has tried it?”

  “The Prince of Nysa here, for a conspicuous case. He’s been using it for many centuries, and he does not age further or die.”

  “He looks aged to me,” Aurelia said. “No offense, Prince, but you looked aged just these last seven days. Did Uncle Silas use it?”

  “Uncle Silas? The spaced-out boy? Yes, he started to use it a few decades ago, but he was already pretty well gone when it started. It did keep him from dying normally, but there was an abnormal circumstance.”

  “Would you recommend it, Prince?” Aurelia asked.

  “Not unreservedly, no,” the Prince said. “It’s just a question of how much tedium you can take. The world is too much with me now-a-days. There was one time when I had a great capacity for tedium, but now I can tolerate it less and less.”

  “I haven’t much tolerance for tedium myself,” Aurelia said. “Is it expensive?”

  “Very expensive, Aurelia,” Herr Boch told her, “but you are the ward of a group of very rich men. They’ll give you anything you want.”

  “But what are the contradictions?” she wanted to know. “What if it is my time to die, and I take some of your bark?”

  “If you take it, you will not die. But there would be contradictions, yes. Very painful contradictions. You might wish, after you had taken it, that there was some way out where you could un-take the bark.”

  “It is all a joke about it being an athanatos bark, a no-dying bark, isn’t it, Herr Boch?”

  “No. ‘Athanatos’ is the correct botanical name for the bush.”

  “But it’s still a joke, isn’t it?”

  “Would you call the thirty thousand dollars an ounce that I get for it a joke?”

  “Yes, a grand joke, Herr Boch. If you weren’t an antlered man, you wouldn’t get half that much for it. You wouldn’t even know about it.”

  Uncle Silas, as a matter of fact, was there right now, standing dimly and smiling vacantly. He had his head on, but he also had a red line running around his neck where it had once parted from him.

  “Uncle Silas, would you recommend Herr Boch’s athanatos bark?” Aurelia asked.

  “No,” he said dimly. “I don’t believe that I ever used more than an ounce of it anyhow. Or maybe he let me smell the burlap sack that it had been in, not much more. No, it didn’t give me life. I had already gone past that.”

  And yet Uncle Silas was a strong testimonial for the bark. It had kept this last fragment of him from dying, even after his head had been cut off. Uncle Silas was now very vague of outline. Aurelia picked up pebbles and threw them through him. He howled mildly when he saw one pass through him, but he made no noise when he didn’t notice them.

  “Who killed you, Uncle Silas?” Aurelia asked.

  “Nobody. I died, ah, unnaturally, spaced out, and a little bit at a time. But I’m not clear dead yet, so no one killed me.”

  “Who cut your head off?”

  “Oh, Cousin Clootie did that. He understood the case with me, that I was already gone except for just this last shadow. He knew that I was really quite old. I told you the truth that I had been in old wars and engagements. Do you not have, on ‘Shining World,’ a number of ‘World’s oldest teen-agers’ as we have? I had been spaced out for a long time when Clootie met me. You have heard of people being half dead. I was probably ninety percent dead and decayed. In some cultures somewhere, the cutting-off-of-the-head had something to do with dispatching the ‘walking dead’ and giving them release. That was the case in the world where Cousin Clootie came from. He believes it is part of his governing to do things that are too distasteful for other persons to do, cutting off the heads of such unfortunates, for instance. He thought he could release me by cutting off my head, and he did release a lot of me. There’s less of me here than there was before he did it, and more of me in the pleasant place on the other side. I’m almost all on the other side now. I wonder how I’m doing over there.” He dimmed out.

  “I notice that you have been seeing and talking to an apparition,” the Prince of Nysa said. “Young girls see and hear vividly on the last day of their lives. They sometimes see and hear things that aren’t there.”

  “Oh, is that all it is?” Aurelia asked. “I thought that something was the matter with me.”

  Crowds of useless people were playing with those damnable yin-yang yo-yo’s.

  “Oh, stop playing with those cursed things,” Aurelia snapped with a mouth full of spite.

  “We’ll not stop,” they said. “And we’re not playing. We mean every bit of it.”

  It’s a wonder they didn’t get hurt with those things. They were dangerous.

  The day was beginning to fragment. Aurelia was into rather sharp discussions with people. They had begun to doubt her. They had stony ears that she talked to in vain.

  “Of course I can work magic,” she was saying. “I can throw my staff down on the ground and it will turn into a serpent. Or I can strike a rock with it and water will gush forth.”

  “You don’t have any staff,” the people jeered at her.

  “Oh, I forgot that I didn’t have one,” she admitted, “but now I have.” She had a fine staff in her hand then. If the people had been a little bit better humoured they would have accepted that as a pretty good trick in itself, but they didn’t. They still jeered. “Do it, do it, work magic!”

  “Why haven’t I already done some of those things?” Aurelia asked the hazardous surroundings. “Is this some sort of penny ante world that would be impressed by little tricks like that? Oh, you people grow small in my estimation!”

  “Do it!” they called out. “You can’t do it. Strike that rock with your staff and make the water gush out. And then throw your staff on the ground and make it turn into a serpent.”

  “You really don’t believe that I can do these little kid tricks?” Aurelia asked.

  “No, no. Prove it.”

  “Oh all right,” Aurelia said. She struck the rock with her staff and the staff broke in two. “Oh damn,” she said. “It must have been cracked already.”

  In disgust she threw the two pieces of her broken staff on the ground and they turned into two serpents. Then the two serpents began to gush great streams of water out of their mouths.

  “Oh damn, damn,” Aurelia wailed. “This is one of those days when everything goes wrong.” The people jeered at her ‘You got it backwards. You got it all mixed up. We knew you couldn’t do it.”

  Yes, the day had begun to fragmentize. Aurelia realized that Aldous Spencer-Trencher had been correct. She was dying of this-world sickness,
whatever the final fever and climax of that sickness should be. She was dying of ‘strange world sickness.’ That is what the approximately one out of every seven of the young students taking the world government course died of. And those sicknesses did have very strange climaxes, some of them.

  She blew the horn for Prandium. And what would the star dish be?

  “Not Slowpoke Snails again!” she cried. “Oh, not again!”

  “Hearing how much you liked them, and this being the last day of your life, a group of concerned persons has flown in a thousand kilos of them,” a sort of spokesman said. “This is half of the Slowpoke Snail harvest in the world every day.”

  “It was nice of them,” Aurelia said. And a little bit later, she gave her prandium homily for what was perhaps the last noontime she would ever see:

  Our behavior is influenced at least as much by our future as by our past. A man with a certificate of surety in hand will behave in a different manner from a man who has it not. I have a certificate of surely in my hand even though I die in a strange place. This future ploy is a little bit like throwing a sky-rope upward and beginning to climb it with the assurance that it will not fall back. The process seems unworkable, and yet it works. It is a trick that all sky-climbers use. To select a goal is to receive power and direction from that goal.

  Institutions are better than the people who inhabit them. That is why all “enemies of the people” attack institutions first. Crowds are worse than the people who make them up. The things that you commonly say to each other on this are quite opposite, and wrong. People try to hide in crowds, and the worse the people are the more they try to hide. They call hiding in the crowds “community”; they call it “consensus”; they call it “group-involvement.” But most often it is only the cowardice of crowds. Really to go forward, you must go alone, or in loose array. To regress you must seek the homogeneity of a crowd.