Serpent’s Egg

by R. A. Lafferty

  Serpent's Egg

  R. A. Lafferty

  www.sfgateway.com

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Contents

  1 The Three Corners of the World

  2 The Blue-Eyed Apes

  3 When Rare Computers Walk and Mime

  4 The Happening of People

  5 Alley Oop

  6 End of Summer

  7 Structo Lane

  8 The Kangaroo Who Rules the World

  9 On the Ship Annabella Saint Ledger

  10 The Whales Are Building Something

  11 The House on Tom Dooley's Island

  12 Sleepwalkers’ Serenade

  13 The Night of the Short Knives

  14 Ocean-Bottom Overture

  Epilog by a Sea Louse

  Website

  Also by R. A. Lafferty

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE THREE CORNERS OF THE WORLD

  Therefore think of him as a serpent's egg…

  And kill him in the shell.

  —Julius Caesar. Shakespeare.

  “The computers have taken up Astrology on their own,” Lord Randal's father had said one morning at breakfast. “Even the Kangaroo is into Astrology now.”

  “How odd,” Lord Randal's mother had answered. “That could be quite dangerous. Computers do not distinguish between a prediction and an instruction. They will try to make every one of their predictions come true, even if they know it is silly. Do not you yourself have doubts sometimes of our ‘Floating World’?”

  “Those who have doubts of such things, Iris, may have the Kangaroo to deal with. If they are important enough. But we are border-line, not quite mega persons.”

  Well, why should this little scrap of breakfast conversation by Lord Randal's parents have frozen the Lord with fear? He surely wasn't a fearful boy. And why when he was frozen with fear, should the same numbing fear have seized on his two close associates? The other two had not even heard the scrap of conversation; but the other two always shared any emotion that one of them shared.

  These three had been raised together from their beginnings until now when all three of them were between nine and ten years old. The three were Lord Randal and Inneall and Axel. They were so close, and they generated so much power from their closeness, that Axel had once proposed that they adopt two lines from Swinburne for their motto:

  ‘Where three men stand together

  Are kingdoms less by three.’

  “Oh, that won't work at all,” Inneall had uttered. “We are no men at all. We are one girl and two boys.”

  “What I am worried about is what the Kings of those Kingdoms will do when they feel themselves threatened,” Axel worried. “And some king or kings have felt themselves threatened already by us. Remember the ‘Serpent's Egg’ anxiety or premonition.”

  That had been another scrap of breakfast conversation by George Lynn-Randal and Iris Lynn-Randal the parents of Lord Randal.

  “We are suspected of harboring a Serpent's Egg,” George had said.

  “Which one? Oh, which one of them?” Iris had questioned him. “I'll miss any of my children that is killed, but I'm afraid that I'll miss Lord Randal more than either of the other two. That is very unfair of me, isn't it? When?”

  “If it comes, it always comes just before the tenth birthday. A Dolophonos has already been put on standby for our case. I see him lurking around the ‘jungle’. But that is done in the case of almost any experiment that can go wrong. But the one who is the Serpent's Egg always has a premonition of it somehow. But it doesn't happen often, only about one in a million of the general population is ever adjudged to be a Serpent's Egg.”

  “I've heard that it is as high as one in a thousand in some of the special experiments, but we don't know whether ours is that special or not. I do wish we had some idea of what the experiment is to indicate.”

  “This experiment of which we are the ‘parents’ is to explore ‘New ways of looking at the world, but not too cockeyed new’ is the only leak I've been able to get hold of.”

  It had been Axel who had overheard that scrap of breakfast conversation, but all three of them had begun to shake and shiver at the same time, and their spirits have not stopped shaking yet. They did not completely understand it, but it scared them all the way through. And it puzzled them. They knew that all the venomous and dangerous serpents are viviparous, live-born, and have no eggs in the popular sense of eggs. They knew that only the harmless and benevolent snakes lay eggs, and who would want to kill such pleasant creatures in the shell that they do not have?

  “There is a fury behind all this,” Inneall said, “and fury does not have to be rational.”

  Lord Randal was a human boy though conceived in a glass tube. Inneall was an Ambulatory Mime-Human Computer, entirely mechanical except for a light-minded polter who dwelt in her part of the time, a tenant that the ‘parents’ of the experiment didn't know about. Her grammatical gender was male. By all rational rules she was sexless. And yet she insisted that she was a girl, and her insisting made it so. Axel was a simian of the species called Axel's Ape, sometimes called the Smithy Apes, for in their wild state they possessed the talents for working metals. They were sometimes called the Golden Apes for their color was such, and they were sometimes called the Blue-Eyed Apes.

  These three were raised together from birth as part of an ongoing experiment. For their own area they had two hectares or about five acres of contrived feral land. That was really a large allotment for land was not as easily come by as it had been in former times. The area was shared however with other experiments: experimental plants, insects, experimental mammals and marsupials, fat sloths and tapirs and bandicoots and hogs that fed on rotten wood and mold and mulch and fissured rocks. There were experimental worms that weighed more than a ton each and were edible, though as yet they had rather sickening after-effects. There were experimental fish growing large and fat on the nutrient-mud that formed in the streams and pools faster than they could devour it. There were fat fowl that could fly ‘thus far and no farther’, for the two hectare plot had a transparent cover over it. There were experimental bread-bushes and honey-cane, and fat-berry vines. It was a picturesque small area with three leaping water-falls, with cliffs and clefts, with an almost natural interlocking support system.

  But The Three realized very early that it was not completely natural (they seemed to have innate ideas of what was natural and what was not). Those water-falls had an element in addition to their natural state (should it therefore be called supernatural?): there were transparent tubes, hardly to be seen, in the middle of the tumbling water-falls, by which the water was conveyed up to the top of the falls again. These were the only water-falls that The Three had ever seen, but they knew that the tubes didn't belong in the natural order of things.

  And the vines by which they swung from the alpha cliff to the beta cliff above the water, they were live vines with green leaves growing on them. And yet they had something non-live twined in with them, metallic wire, so that these particular vines could never break even though other vines of apparently the same sort could be cut and broken. This strengthening wire was not in the natural order of things, and The Three knew it. It was of the mechanical order, the order of things that Inneall was made out of. And the cover over their area, there was something questionable about that. It was Axel who proposed a challenge to that transparent cover when they were all six years old.

  Lord Randal had invented the bow-and-arrow. But Axel could shoot the arrows farther and faster. And higher. And when he was six years old, Axel did what many persons have dreamed of doing: he made his mark on the sky. He dipped the heads of his arrows in mud, and he shot them u
p with uncanny accuracy and made mud marks on that transparent sky-cover which was twenty meters above them. He made about a hundred mud marks that conveyed a message in the written form of ‘code Chaldee’ that the three had independently reinvented. The message was “If there is anybody up above that sky, let him give us a sign.” And the sign came at once, quick lightning and a water shower on the top side of the sky. The Three were pleased to see that their message was not washed away by the rain shower. There was someone else out there, someone more important than the overly-silent care-takers who sometimes came into the area to make major or minor adjustments, trying to look invisible when they came.

  The Three had lived in the lightly-covered area since they were a week old. What? A machine might live there when no more than a week old. An Axel's Ape, for all that we know different, might have survived. But how could a human boy have lived in such circumstances? What would he eat?

  Oh, he would eat experimental truffles for one thing. They grew right under the surface of the ground, and some of them burst through the surface. They had an odor that was stronger and more enticing than fresh milk. And they could be sucked in as easily as milk. Then there was experimental taro root, and experimental yams that could be eaten almost as soon, by the age of three months anyhow. And then Lord Randal was not an ordinary boy. He was a boy bred and vitro-ed to have an I.Q. clear off the scale. With all three of them, the scanners had chirped early and often the warning “Mega, Mega, Mega!” to signify that they were exceptional persons or mega persons. And these warnings were recorded and pondered in the proper places.

  When they were all one year old, a door was opened for them from their area to the back door of the Lynn-Randal house. And The Three wandered in to explore. As they explored everything they could enter, they here began the second aspect of their lives.

  All three of them could walk well in their own manner by this time. All of them could talk in their several codes and tongues. They had no trouble in understanding the talk of George Lynn-Randal and Iris Lynn-Randal. The Three were very intuitive in these things. Within a week they already knew what these two grown persons would say before they opened their mouths. And yet the things in the Lynn-Randal house were quite interesting.

  There was the music, an unparalleled encounter. The Three instinctively found their way to what they wanted in a collection of a hundred thousand tapes. Well, the tapes they played nearly drove the two adult Lynn-Randals crazy even though these tapes were of these adults’ own collecting. There was a difference when they were listened to by other-way ears. The music came on a little bit too strong when melded with the minds of the three young entities. These listening minds gave entirely different contexts to the music.

  There were pictures in the Lynn-Randal house. The Three had seen their whole world for their whole lives as kaleidoscopes of unframed pictures. There was nothing else in the world except pictures. But these pictures in the house (there were about thirty thousand of them on the one hundred dial-a-picture arrangements, and they were changed every month) had a special character.

  There were smells in the Lynn-Randal house, and the Lynn-Randal adults themselves seemed insufficiently aware of some of them. These also had their special character. There were no smells quite like them in the whole outdoors. Though they had a rather cloying element, yet they had the attractions of novelty. And it is well to have smelled every smell possible at least a few times.

  And there were the animated talking books in the Lynn-Randal house. Well ‘books’, in that world that had entered its post-literary age, were the ‘third tracks’ of ‘two-track prowls’, and only a few of the ‘prowls’ were issued with this third track. But the Lynn-Randals believed in the three-track system, and they got three-trackers whenever they were available.

  The first track was the sound, and the second track was the visual, both of them always a little bit sketchy to save money and to stimulate the imagination. High winds and thunder were usually in the background of the sound, along with the screaming of frightened alligators and the rutting cries of giraffes. These things were always ‘good noise’ even for sedate indoor scenes. The voices usually had the ‘all-people throatiness’ that had become the consensus voice of the media, now that it had been admitted that everyone was an ethnic and that there were no regular people left. Well, the last of the old supreme people had all been murdered on the charge (false) that they were unfeeling.

  The pictures on the visual track were sketchy, sometimes film shots of real things, but mostly they were cartoons. Even the cartoon characters were fully drawn in only one frame out of every one hundred, and they were more perceived in subliminal than in clear conscious vision. This also was a great stimulus to the imagination. But every character in a prowl (sometimes the things were called ‘antics’ or ‘romps’ or ‘trips’ or ‘experiences’ or ‘jaunts’ as well as ‘prowls’) had its own bright and shining color, carried through from the drawn cartoon figures to the ninety-nine frames of rapidly-moving geometric forms. There was a lot of movement in those forms, and a lot of fragmented geometry.

  In experiencing these prowls, The Three quickly discovered their own signature colors and geometries. Axel's was the golden pentagon with five arms at his five angles. Lord Randal was an orange square. And Inneall was a lavender-purple triangle. Whenever these colors and shapes turned up in the prowls, The Three could always identify themselves with the characters of those colors and shapes. And their identifications were always apt. The colored geometries taking the places of pictures of persons, besides saving money in the cartooning, were also a sort of abstracting or psychologing of the characters, of finding their hidden essences.

  The third track, whenever it was present in a prowl, was the printed word. At first meeting, each of The Three made an exciting and bizarre interpretation of the printing, but it was not the correct interpretation in any of the cases. Then they were told that it was not guesswork or whimsey as to what the printing meant. There were regular rules for interpreting it, and it was known as reading.

  Axel was the first of The Three to learn to read. The week after they had all learned to understand human talk, Iris Lynn-Randal (the mother of Lord Randal) had read some of the printed prowls to each of them while following the text with her finger with the child gazing at it. Axel caught on immediately, and the other two did not. So she carried it through with Axel first. And in one week, Axel could read the printed prowls easily. It took the other two a month to master it.

  “How odd,” Iris said, “that the Ape should be the most intelligent of our three children. It is really impossible that he should have learned so quickly and well, and yet he has done so.”

  “We cannot say that one of our—ah—‘children’ as you call them—‘experimental entities’ is the right name for them—is more intelligent than the others,” George Lynn-Randal stated, “since all three of them are designed to be so intelligent that they are clear off the scale. Above all, we must not forget that they are experimental entities. To become emotionally involved or sentimentally attached with them might destroy the validity of the experiment. In any case, it would be unwise for you. Twice before, you have suffered attacks of sentiment, and with disastrous results.”

  “Oh, George, I really believe that the results of my sentimentalities were more comic than disastrous,” Iris spoke with that irritating grin of hers.

  “Remember, Iris, that the majority of experiments will fail in the nature of things,” George argued. “Be always ready to brush the ashes of this experiment off your hands if it fails.”

  “Nay, I'll pour the ashes of it over my head, and I'll wail and make mourn if it fails,” Iris smirked. Oh, that Iris did have an irritating grin on her!

  “Just who are we three?” Inneall the little-girl computer asked Iris one day.

  “You are The Three, always capitalized, to yourselves. The rest of the world will call you whatever it wishes.”

  “And will we always be just The Three?” In
neall pursued it.

  “Probably you will combine with the children of other experiments when you are older. That's the way it was done when it was done that other disastrous time. Probably then you will become The Nine or The Twelve.”

  “Oh, that's all right then. That will show progress.”

  The bookish prowls were stylized and not really very good. They were supposed to be all sound and color and action, according to their advertising. But the real action, like the detailed drawings, happened in only about one frame out of a hundred. But there was never anything to take the place of the non-existent action. Some of the prowls were worse than others, and at the bottom of them all were the products of the ‘Jackdaw Two-and-Three Track Press’. Jackdaw produced the ‘Bongo and his Beepers’ series, the ‘Cut-Throats of Coke-Town’ series, and the ‘Fast-Action Eadie and Eddie’ series. All of these had shovelings of noise and motion and color. All of them produced gnawing and garish blue moods, the same thing that tedium produces. All of these were for small children, for teenagers, and for adults alike. These were sometimes criticized, but mostly by persons of standards derived from an earlier age, from the pre-postliterate age. But the new ears of the new people could not recognize such things as satire or irony or rime. But, as the great contemporary philosopher Jasper Junkins (a pseudonym) said: “We are all sub-teenagers now.”

  It was all very limited in the house. The instruments for the music did not go beyond the git-fiddle, whango, and ivory-mouth; all instruments beyond these were vanity. The smells in the house were ‘least-common-denominator’ smells, those which never went beyond the scope of the unlearned human nose. The music was devoid of melody except for those few tapes which The Three uncovered and which so irritated the adults of the house. Melody was like rime in that the new people could neither hear it nor recognize it. The formal pictures in the house were good, but they were not as good as the unframed pictures that made up the outdoor world. And the prowls or books never rose very high above the bottom or the Jackdaw level.