Serpent’s Egg

by R. A. Lafferty

  Oh sure, The Three knew that all this was completely deficient (well, they knew it by the time they were four years old). But they also knew that they must feed their minds to gluttony on the raw color and noise and movement and even the tedium of all this. They needed this roughage.

  But the back door of the Lynn-Randal house wasn't the only door out of the somewhat contrived outdoor Eden in which the Intrepid Three had been raised. What the adults of the house didn't know was that The Three had also discovered doors into ‘Structo Lane’ that funny short block in which the more maverick of the Ambulatory Computers hung out; and into ‘Ape Lane’ or ‘Ape Alley’ or ‘Ape Caverns’, that confused, underground, gas-lit enclave of the gone-feral Axel's Apes, and of those ‘new barbarians’, the blue-eyed towheaded white trash who had decided, for private reasons, to pass themselves off as Axel's Apes.

  The worlds through these two other doors weren't very extensive. Each of them was a single lane only a short block in length. But Oh the extravagance of detail to be found in these short lanes! A fair minority of the people knew about the ‘Structo Lane’ of the maverick Ambulatory Computers; but not one person in a hundred knew about ‘Ape Lane’.

  Several years went by, and The Three waxed in Wisdom and Strength and Beauty. They were really a striking trio, the blue-eyed ape, the blue-eyed and ruddy-featured boy, the blue-eyed machine in her contrived ambulatory form of a winsome little girl. They found and read real books of the older pre-postliterate age. And they discovered small numbers of people who also harked back to the old literatures and musics and arts and dramas.

  By these contacts, perhaps, the Experiment of The Three was contaminated.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE BLUE-EYED APES

  The blue-eyed apes

  Have stole the grapes

  And bushed themselves on wine-o.

  Axel Albert Grindstone, a fair-haired, blue-eyed, small-boned person, was born in Terre Haute Indiana on the first day of Spring of the year 1990. He was of the ‘old species’, a non-ethnic, with English, Norwegian, German, and Dutch blood.

  “That boy will have only one idea in that thin-skulled head of his,” said Ansel Abraham Grindstone as he thumped the thin head of his blue-eyed baby son with a heavy index finger. “He will realize that idea, and then he will die. He'll do it all before he is thirty-five years old. I'll outlive this last and most frail of my sons. Well, he has three older brothers who are husky and substantial and not given to monomania. I can afford one cuckoo out of my nest. I even suspect that I'll get to like him. There is something else I want to say to him or about him, but I haven't the words.”

  Ansel Grindstone never did find those other words to say to his frail and sometimes flaming son Axel, but perhaps it didn't matter. And Axel would not be weak although he would always be frail-seeming. He was of great moment and effect from the beginning. His mother had died in giving birth to the four-pound Axel, though she had had easy births with his three older brothers who each had weighed ten pounds at birth.

  Though Axel's father hadn't found the special words to speak to him, yet Axel would hear special words from a variety of voices, ghostly, angelic, demonic, spirit-of-aeons past, spirit-of-times-to-come voices. And each of the voices in its own words would tell him essentially: “Go out and find them!”

  Axel was a throw-back to some of his plowed-under blood, for there were few fair-haired and blue-eyed persons to be found in the world after we had all become ethnics and the regular people had disappeared from us. And the voices that talked to Axel were from pasts and futures.

  Like young Champollion, young Axel Grindstone prepared for his mission in life by studying oriental languages, but in his case they were Old Chaldee, Arabic, Swahili, Amharic, and Ghees. And his mission in life, well, it was to find the Other Eden, wherever it was, in Near Asia, or in Africa of the Horn. The Other Eden? Oh yes, there had to be another Eden, for the voices told Axel that there was. For one thing, there was the ancient cliff mural at Al-Waghe in which God is shown holding a two-stringed bow. And God, so the voices told Axel, always had two strings to his bow. So why should he not have been ready with the Second Eden, the second string of his bow?

  Axel Grindstone, the blue-eyed idealist, came to believe that in the hilly fastness beyond Guna in Ethiopia there was this second Eden of ‘The People Who Had Not Fallen’, the Ace Card that God held back.

  Axel held whole bales of beliefs that were deemed awkward in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He was a creationist; he believed that mankind was only nine thousand years old, and that this Second Mankind was only about thirty years younger. He believed that some persons who had lived within the first century of mankind were still living in the world. He believed that the world itself was not more than twice the age of men, and that the whale was the oldest of all creatures. He also believed that at least one whale from the second generation of whaledom was still alive in the ocean of the world.

  He believed that Abraham's Bosom was the name of a valley not too far from the Second Eden, and that the Kings David and Solomon were there yet, asleep but alive. So was Prester John there asleep. So was the Cid of Spain and Arthur of England and other champions of Christendom. He also believed that persons older than Abraham even (Melchisedech and others) were sleeping undead in this same valley named the Bosom of Abraham.

  Now all these strange beliefs happened to be true, but all of them were deemed awkward in Axel's lifetime. And Axel had decided just where the Second Eden should be, and he went on a journey to it. Axel had decided on this place, a far corner of Ethiopia, the crag-laced wooded hills of Gamu Gofa, by sifting considerable historical evidence. He put together a composite picture and idea of the Unfallen People from what his voices told him, from his encyclopedic reading, from his talking to thousands of persons learned and unlearned in his travels about the world. He weighed myths and legends, and he weighed probable facts and striking theories. He learned to see through other eyes and to hear with other ears and appraise with other minds as he tried to arrive at the truth from the influence it had had on various peoples during the centuries. There was an amazing amount of evidence, but none of it taken alone was undisputable.

  Well, the King-and-Emperor of the Unfallen People was Prester John who had been created exactly thirty years after Adam had been made. Prester John would not die. He would live on earth forever until the last day, or until God called him. He was the sleepiest King-and-Emperor ever, for he only woke and gave decisions for fifteen minutes out of every twenty-four hours, but they were always wise decisions. Others of the Unfallen People who might live on earth till its end were Melchisedech and Magog. A Giant of the same name has given Magog a bad reputation, but the original Magog was one of the Unfallen Patriarchs.

  None of the Unfallen People would die natural deaths, for disease and ageing were not known to them. They could die by accident, but they were generally guarded against accidents. They could die by lightning bolts, and this was the case of God taking them to himself. And they could die of being murdered. But they could not be murdered by other Unfallen People, for Unfallen People would not be capable of the act of murder. The Unfallen People could only be murdered by the fallen people of First Eden.

  The Unfallen People sometimes came out of their Eden, to help the fallen mankind, to do little kindnesses for them, and to instruct them in odd details. When they came out, they usually crossed over from the Horn of Africa to Arabia. When the Red Sea was still a lake, or perhaps a series of lakes, there was a land-bridge or bridges where it is all water now. The particular bridge by which the Unfallen People used to cross over to Arabia was named the Ape Bridge. Axel Grindstone believed that the real name of it was the Angel Bridge, and that some superstition caused people to call it the Ape Bridge, since ‘Angel’ was one of the words considered by some of the ancients as too holy to utter.

  Even after the Red Sea had become a sea indeed, the Ape Bridge sometimes made its reappearance, now at one
place, now at another. It may have been this Ape Bridge that Moses used to part the waters and lead his people across. But the original location of the Ape Bridge had been further East and South, from present Assab in Eritrea to Mocha in Arabian Yemen.

  There were two clusters of legends that attached to the Unfallen People, though Axel Grindstone was mightily puzzled to know how they were attached. The Unfallen People were called the Smithy Apes and also the Stone-Master Apes by such people in Ethiopia and Arabia as had been slightly acquainted with them through the centuries. Why this use of the reverse euphemism ‘Ape’ again?

  One cluster of legends stated that the Unfallen People had built the Cathedrals of Europe, in the twelfth and thirteenth and into the fourteenth century. And it was said that, in proof of this, the Unfallens had left signs that they had been there, one of the signs being the mysterious Gargoyles carved on the high parapets of the Cathedrals. How could the grotesque Gargoyles be a sign that the Unfallen People had been there? A weaker version of the Cathedral Legend was that the Unfallen People had not gone to Europe at all; but that nine stone-masters from Europe, from Italy and France and the Germanies and the Lowlands and England and Moravia, had been admitted into the Second Eden for one year and had been taught advanced stone-work by the Unfallen Masters.

  The other cluster of legends concerns the Romany or Gypsy people and states that, on their coming out of Indo-Asia when their homeland had been mysteriously requisitioned by others, they had crossed the Ape Bridge on one of its reappearances and had traveled in Africa to the doors of Second Eden. There is dispute as to whether the Gypsies entered there, or whether some of the Unfallen People came out to them. But the Unfallens did teach them black-smithery and cutlery and the tinker trades so that they would have honest avocations to live by in their wanderings. But there is no doubt that when the Gypsy bands entered Egypt and Turkey and then Europe, each band of them had a golden ape, walking to the fore, leading the way. The usual explanation for this is that the Golden Apes were Orangutans from the Asian Indies, for these were the only blond or golden or red apes known. There is again the puzzle as to how the Ape had become a sort of code name or totem for the Unfallen People.

  Later pictures of the Gypsies show the Apes with chains around their necks, so apparently at a later time the Romanies were bringing the Apes along and were not led by them. This ties in with an obscure detail of the early legends that the Unfallen People, in addition to being excellent smiths and stone-masons, were also adept in the operation of circuses and carnivals. What a strange notion! Of what could it have been the memory?

  In still later reports and pictures of the Gypsies as they went further west in Europe, the collared-and-chained bear takes the place of the collared-and-chained ape. But why did Axel Grindstone believe that the Romany Legends had some connection with the Unfallen People? He believed it because the voices told him that there was a connection.

  In the last year of his short life, Axel Grindstone knew that he was near Second Eden. He was beyond Arba Mench in Gamu Gofa Province of Ethiopia. It was from Arba Mench that the resident doctor sent a telegram to Ansel Grindstone the father of Axel:

  “Axel G is in a feverish and near hysterical condition. His expectations are too high, and the shock of what he finds may kill him. I do not see how either his mind or his body can survive what he will discover. It isn't really so bad. I love and admire the Unfallen Ones myself, but the disappointment of Axel on meeting them may well be mortal. Perhaps your arrival may somehow save his life and sanity. If you have the means, come at once.”

  This telegram was sent from Arba Mench, a provincial capital, to Indianapolis, Indiana, another provincial capital. Ansel Grindstone had moved from Terre Haute to Indianapolis three years before this.

  But his son Axel was already rollicking down the rocky road past Gandula and to the cliffs and hills and lakes beyond. He was as happy as he had ever been in his life, and he was in the company of half a dozen merry African persons who had already met some of the Unfallen Ones and done business with them and enjoyed their company.

  Axel now learned for sure, from these people who knew them, that the Unfallen Ones were experts in every sort of smithery, that they were iron-workers and bronze-workers who could make any sort of machine that one might request.

  “How rum, how odd, how wonderful!” Axel had cried. “They will take away the implicit vulgarity from machinery. They will make it another of the living and blessed things. They will sanctify it with their hands and with the hands of those they have taught. Nothing can ever be thought of as common or vulgar if the Unfallen Ones have wrought it.”

  Axel learned for sure that the Unfallen Ones were masters of stone work. He learned, in fact, that the Unfallen Ones had built this very stone bridge on which Axel and his companions were now crossing a torrent. The bridge was as graceful as an arrow fletched with Bird-of-Paradise feathers and in full flight upwind. It was like music the way it shot itself over the torrent. It was built of stones of five different colors, and it was key-locked together by the cunning cut of its stones which were set together without mortar.

  Axel was told that the Unfallen Ones did not speak very much in either Swahilli or Arabic or Amharic or Ghees, but that they understood all the tongues and could speak them if they wanted to. And when they did speak, it was slowly and measuredly. The Unfallen Ones always weighed their words well, and they did not ever use dishonest words. Many words are etymologically dishonest with built-in falsifiers. But the Unfallen Ones never used such false words.

  Axel was told that the Unfallen Ones were Master Mathematicians; and that great mathematicians came from Alexandria and Damascus and Tokyo and Heidelberg and Dublin and sat at the feet of the Unfallen Ones to learn high mathematics. And also local school-children came to the Unfallen Ones (for the Unfallens thought as much of the children as of the great scholars) for help in their lessons. In fact, the present Prime Minister of Ethiopia had come from the Province of Gamu Gofa (which is as deep in the boondocks as it is possible to go on this world) and had come to the Unfallen Ones for instruction in mathematics and many other subjects. And it was because of this that he had scored incredibly high on the National Examinations and received his start on the road by which he had arrived at Prime Minister.

  And at sundown one day, Axel Grindstone and his merry African companions came to the top of a crest of cliffs and saw the green trees of the Second Eden in the valley below them.

  “Where are the great stone buildings of these master builders?” Axel asked.

  “They have them not, they need them not,” one of the companions said. “They build only for others. They themselves live in green grass huts. Though in these hills the heat is terrible in the summer time and the cold is killing in the winter, though the whole year is plagued with tempests and torrents and droughts and floods, yet in this one valley which is Second Eden the climate is always of the essence of perfection. And it rains only when they command it to rain. We will stay here on the top of these cliffs tonight, Duke Grindstone, for the cliffs themselves are outside of Second Eden. So accidents-in-the-dark are not forbidden to these cliffs. We will climb down them by morning light.”

  Then, after suffering a night of icy winds on the cliffs, Axel Grindstone saw some of the Unfallen Folks at a medium distance in the green valley below him. They were like glowing gold. Their statures, and their bodily carriages, and their very mien were full of grace and dignity and nobility. They were the wonders of the world.

  After the careful climb down the cliffs, Axel Grindstone went towards the Unfallen Folks at a run. How noble, how angelic they were! He could almost see their faces as he came nearer to them. He could almost see their faces! He could see their faces! Aye, and their condition.

  Oh God, he could see their faces!

  Axel Grindstone fell down in a sort of impassioned fit. He frothed. He was in sudden delirium. His companions made a litter and carried him back to the Provincial Capital Arba Mench. They go
t there the following morning, twenty-four hours later. And Ansel Grindstone, the oldish father of Axel, got there about the same time.

  “My son, it isn't that they were drunk on morning wine that shocked you, is it? They are able to do this only four times a year, so I am told. The peoples of this country traffic unfairly with them, and the Unfallen Ones perform hundreds of hours of stone work and smithery for a few pounds of grapes for their morning wine. And they were not so drunk as they appeared to you to be. The drunken look is a human convention, and it is not quite the same with them. The faces of the Unfallen always look drunk to humans. It's the slackness of them. Or is it their faces themselves that shocked you! My son, God thought that those faces were beautiful! He thought that they were the most beautiful faces that he had ever made. What if you should see the face of an Archangel with the crook or bridge of his nose a hundred yards deep? And with its jaw magnificently slack beyond anything seen in the jaws of humans? This towering strangeness is part of their towering holiness. What if you should see such an Archangel face with its eyeball a half mile across and the bloodshot marks in the eyeballs as red ditches wider than a man could leap across? All these things are described by the Jewish historian Josephus. If the Archangels have such faces, should you not accept the small oddities in the faces of the Unfallen People?”

  “Oh no, Oh no, Oh no!” Axel moaned. “They are not people. They are the ugliest apes this side of hell.”

  The faces of the Unfallen People, of course, were the faces that they had carved on the high parapets of the Cathedrals all over Europe, and especially in France, so that everyone would know that it was they who had built those wonderful things. The Unfallen People, of course, were the Gargoyles, and they had Gargoyle faces.