Serpent’s Egg

by R. A. Lafferty

  “We will not break it up. It is a good group,” Lutin said.

  The Dolophonos backed out of Lutin's tent in mixed fear and frustration and sorrow and anger. “I am going back to our nests to get the python-gun,” he said. “This is intolerable.”

  An ordinary weapon would not kill a prophesying Python, but a Python-Gun would.

  But the best act of the circus was not intended to be an act at all. It sprung up in the interval between the circus performances. It was an otherworldly sort of wrestling between Carcajou in his metamorphosized man-form and Luas the Angel. Some of the spectators at first believed (when the display had begun suddenly) that this wrestling was a sort of pyrotechnic display and that the ‘wrestlers’ were only moving figures drawn like hellish cartoons in the fire of a fire-works gala. There was the smell of black-powder and of gun-powder such as pyrotechnics does produce. And there was the smell of real brimstone over the whole area, strong, frightful. There was an animal howling, and a wolverene stench that complemented the brimstone. There was fire running over the limbs of both of the wrestlers. The eyes of the beholders were deceived and they did not know what they saw.

  And there was indeed a dazzle on the two that confused the apperception. At first it seemed as if they were two boys wrestling. What else could it seem like? They were both just short of ten years old. Then it seemed as if they were two men wrestling, mighty and rampant men. And again it seemed as if they were two Titans wrestling, slightly fish-faced as are all Titans, somewhat bigger than giants, earth-shaking in their struggle.

  “Then a man who was more than a man wrestled with him until it was after noon. He tried to escape from this wrestler so that he himself could become less than a man again, but he could not. And neither of them could prevail.

  “The man who was more than a man touched the thigh of the other; and thereafter that other one could never change form again, nor go down on four legs like an animal again.

  “‘Have you done a good thing for me in revealing that this must be my true form?’ asked he whose thigh had been touched.

  “‘Yes, I have done a good thing for you,’ said the wrestler who was more than a man. ‘I have cast it out of you, and now you are free from it. Perhaps I hear a call and must leave you now.’

  “‘You may not leave me till you bless me,’ said he who could no longer go down like an animal.

  “‘No, it is you who must bless me,’ said the man who was more than a man. He was an angel. And they wrestled no more. But strange persons who nested in the cliffs went to set their hands to weapons to try to kill both of them who had wrestled.”

  —The Book of Jasher

  The others of the Eleven were amazed to find that the real form of Carcajou was that of a human and not that of a wolverene. So were the scanners of the neighborhood amazed. “Undocumented Human!” they gave their howl to their superior scanner, wherever it was. “Undocumented Human has appeared in inexplicable manner. Undocumented Mega Human!”

  “I am going back to our nests to get an angel-gun,” one of the Dolophonoi-Assassins said to another. “Neither short knife nor ordinary weapon will kill one of them. Only the angel-gun will kill that one, and it also kills the one who shoots it. But I was never told that this job would be free from danger.”

  “I am going back to our nest to get a wolverene-were gun.” said the other Dolophonoi-Assassin. “With any other sort of gun, the person when shot can turn from one form to another and so escape. But the wolverene-were gun will kill him in both forms if they both bide in him. It will also kill werewolves and every sort of shape-changer. But again it kills the one who shoots it, so it will kill me in all my forms and disguises and manifestations. But neither was I ever told that this job would be free from danger.”

  Then those two Dolophonoi-Assassins also went back towards their nests in the cliffs to get the more deadly weapons.

  Then the Mother Elephant Riesin, at the urging of her unborn daughter Gajah, began to crowd a fourth Dolophonoi who seemed to be newly assigned to the region and to the Children of the Experiments.

  “You must leave this place,” Riesin said. “You must leave this shore entirely. You are the one who owns the elephant gun. You will not confine yourself to monitoring the children. You mean to kill. I mean that you must leave this place entirely.”

  Riesin threatened to trample the Dolophonos, yes, but she always gave him a chance to escape as she drove him further and further away from what had once been Heart's Desire Cove.

  “I will go back to our nests now and get the elephant-gun,” this Dolophonoi-Assassin said. “This is intolerable. I will get the Elephant-Gun, and then I will kill you and yours, Dame Elephant.”

  The three monster-hunters, Iris Lynn-Randal, Shadrack Saleh, and Gregor McGregor, armed with the Python-gun, the Angel-gun, the Wolverene-were-gun, and the Elephant-gun, waited in ambush near the cliffs for the four Dolophonoi to return. They were resolved to kill those monsters. But they were fearful about the whole matter as the time came nearer. They had never killed, and it became more and more doubtful whether they could do it now.

  The three of them began to tremble as they saw that they had been scented by the Assassins who now turned from the path leading to their cliff-nests, and came instead straight for the ambush.

  “Shoot them now, shoot them now,” Iris urged herself and her companions. But most of the persons who could kill had been eliminated from all ranks of the population below that of Mega Person, and none of these three was a Mega. Even before the leveling, the majority of the people were not able to kill.

  Iris trembled. She sickened, and she tasted her own blood in her mouth. She moaned and prayed. And then she threw down the Python-Gun that she held. She wailed over her weakness.

  Shadrack Saleh trembled and threw down the two guns that he held, the Angel-Gun and the Wolverene-were-Gun. He had doubly armed himself, and he was too weak to use the weapons.

  Gregor McGregor trembled and tried to throw down the Elephant-Gun, but it stuck to his hands and he could not rid himself of it. He cried out with the pain of his hands that were cramped around the gun.

  “No!” cried one of the Dolophonoi who broke roughly in the ambush now. “You cannot throw down the Elephant-Gun because you will be compelled to use it now. Your hands are like iron on it till you do use it. You have compelled us to advance the time, and the Mother Elephant has also compelled it. No, no, you will not shoot me with the Elephant-Gun. You point it in vain. And now you find that you are compelled to point it away from me. You will shoot the Mother Elephant Riesin, and you will shoot her unborn daughter Gajah in her belly. And you will kill them both. Riesin stands clearly in the open now. You have a good shot from here. The Elephant-Gun is directed by the will, and it cannot miss if the one who shoots it wills that it shall hit.

  “No!” Gregor cried. “I do not will that I shoot, and I do not will that I hit.”

  “Something is churning in your will though,” the Dolophonos said. “It would be wonderful for me to kill the Elephants and you could not stop me from it. But it is more wonderful that I compel you to do it, that I compel you to will to do it. Aim and fire!”

  “No!” Gregor cried out. “Gajah is my adopted daughter and Riesin is her mother. Riesin is an Empress Elephant, and Gaja is a ‘Wonder of the World’ Elephant.”

  “We know that,” the Dolophonos spoke impatiently. ‘We are not in the business of killing ordinary Elephants. Aim and shoot!”

  “I will shoot myself first.”

  “You may not do that,” the Assassin said. “You're doomed to hang rather. You are under a compulsion. You can shoot the two-in-one Elephants but no other thing. You've no choice. Aim and fire!”

  Under the strange compulsion, Gregor McGregor willed to kill the Elephants. He aimed and fired with a horrible, roaring, echoing, beastly noise. Riesin the Mother Elephant staggered, but she did not go down. Nevertheless, Gregor knew for certain that he had killed the unborn daughter Gajah, a ‘Wonde
r of the World’ Elephant.

  He threw down the Elephant-Gun then. The compulsion was finished. He broke out of the ambush and ran back into the wastelands on the north shore of Inneall's Ocean. Then, in his running and raving mad state, Gregor came to a carob tree and hung himself on it till he was dead. The carob is that pretty Mediterranean evergreen that is sometimes called the ‘Judas Tree’, one of the ornamental trees that had been used to beautify the old strip pits there.

  The other two hunters were wandering in the waste-lands also, broken in mind and spirit.

  And back at the circus, the steam calliope was still playing, horribly loud, horribly beautiful.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ON THE SHIP ANNABELLA SAINT LEDGER

  Oh vengeful balls-of-fire and hail!

  The Kangaroo in motion!

  The Land is red in tooth-and-nail;

  We'll hide upon the Ocean.

  —Annabella Saint Ledger, Pirate Chantey

  Riesin was an Empress Elephant. In earlier days in India, Empress Elephants used to serve as mayors of villages and towns and even of very large cities. They were very good mayors, being honest, intelligent, diligent, compassionate, fair, foresightful, and of outgoing and magnetic personalities. Moreover they were stable and not given to flightiness.

  When travelers would come to a town, if they saw that it was well-kept and beautiful and busy and of happy-and-singing inhabitants, they would say “This town has an Empress Elephant for Mayor.” But if they saw that the town was unkempt and weed-choked and with the roads and streets broken, and that the inhabitants were ill-disposed, they would say “This town has a Human Mayor. There are just not enough Empress Elephants for every town to have one; and an ordinary Elephant does not make any better mayor than a human would.”

  But when the Moguls came to India as conquerors and despoilers, the Empress Elephants tried to get their towns to stand fast against the fierce invaders. They failed, and the Moguls slew all the Empress Elephants. And the custom of having Empress Elephants for mayors was never renewed.

  But Empress Elephants, even if hurt unto death, will always know what they must do. The Empress Elephant Riesin walked north, painfully and as if she were drunken, through the hill-lands and tangled waste-lands north of Inneall's Ocean, and she knew exactly where she was going.

  Satrap Saint Ledger had set up a double scanner in the big clubroom that he shared with Livius Secundus and Felix Culebra y Columba in Structo Lane. The Ten Children of the Experiment (both Axel and Gajah were lost from the original Twelve now, and Luas himself was saying that he himself must go very soon)—the Ten Children had come to Satrap there for they were bewildered and without a leader. They watched on the double scanner.

  One side of the scanner showed Riesin trudging in great apparent pain northward through that wasteland above Inneall's Ocean. The other side of the scanner showed a rocky road traversing high foothills that stood before very high mountains.

  “As you see,” Satrap told the Ten, “Riesin the mother of the unborn Gajah has started northward to the Graveyard of the Elephants in India, to bury (they bury under piles of brush and not in the ground) the dead one she is carrying, and to die herself.”

  “But this isn't India,” Inneall-Annabella protested.

  “There is a jog in the road,” answered Satrap who had a touch of the mystic in him, “and by that jog an Elephant may pass from a road in midland America to a road in India. The Graveyard of the Elephants is in the small realm of Mustang just north of India in the high foothills of the higher mountains. You can see a bit of the road leading to it, and you can see a part of the Elephant Graveyard on the second side of the scanner-scope. I have a man there. I'll get him on the voxo, and he'll go to the spot we are watching. He'll tell us when Riesin is coming to it, when she accomplishes the jog in the road. Then we can witness her last sad acts.”

  “The real name of these last days and years is ‘The Fulfillment of the World’,” Livius Secundus the Ambulatory Computer whose passion was history told them. “The ‘Fulfillment of the World’ isn't easy. There are persons and beings and contrivances who would block the fulfillment of the world. One of them is coming now. But all these things of the latter days, the Computer Machines that are made in the image of Man as Man is made in the image of God, the readying of ‘Second Humanity’ for possible awakening, the rising of geniused animals with their trans-animal talents for speech and abstract thought and role-playing, all these things are part of the ‘Fulfillment and Enlargement of the World’. But, as I say, the enemies of the fulfillment and enlargement are upon us everywhere, and one of them is even now at the door.”

  One of them came through the door. He had the aura and odor of a Dolophonos-Assassin, but he had a more powerful presence than any of the others had had. He came and stood just behind the young man Carcajou, he who that morning had still seemed to be a young wolverene. Well, the wolverene-devil has been cast out of him now. It was Carcajou of whom the scanners of the neighborhood had howled “Undocumented Human! Undocumented Mega Human!” a few hours before. Well, this was a Mega Dolophonos who had been sent to dispose of Carcajou somehow. The Mega Dolophonos sneered and smiled, touched Carcajou on the shoulder so that livid white sparks of fire jumped between them, and Carcajou groaned and slumped forward in pain. The Mega Dolophonos laughed a chilling laugh and went out again for a while.

  An Asiatic of the strong-nosed Aryan type appeared on the second side of the scanner-scope. He waved to Satrap Saint Ledger and to all of them. “She is coming up the rocky road now,” said the man in Hindi; and all of them, having intelligences clear off the scale and accomplishments to match, understood him. “She is dying on her feet, but she will accomplish her mission. You can hear her labored breathing and groaning now.”

  And they could hear it. And in a very short while they saw the Empress Elephant Riesin herself on the scope. She was blood-covered, and she breathed out bloody foam. She found a clean spot and quickly brought forth the dead Gajah. Then she pulled small bushes with her trunk, and all the watchers knew without being told (except for their odor that came from the scanner-scope) that they were Himalaya Incense Bushes. Riesin covered Gajah up with the incense bushes and fronds. Then three flames came down from the middle air and hovered over Gajah. “They will burn over her for thirty days,” Satrap Saint Ledger said. “I will burn over her much longer than that. She was indeed a ‘Wonder of the World’ Elephant.”

  Riesin staggered a score of steps up the path beyond Gajah. Then she lay down and died with a great sigh. The Asiatic of the strong-nosed Aryan type, he who was in the employ of Satrap Saint Ledger, took up a double-bladed axe and began to cut boughs from the Mountain Yew Trees and to cover Riesin with them.

  The trick of bi-location or trans-location, used by the India Elephants to cover hundreds and thousands of miles when they are dying and are impelled to find the Elephant Graveyard, is not unknown in other contexts. Hubbard, in his ‘Big Book of Strange Happenings’ lists eleven cases of this happening to humans. There was the case of a man walking up a street in the Intramuros District of Manila deep in daydreaming. Then, when he came to himself, he was walking up a street in the Embarcadero District of San Francisco. He knew the neighborhoods in both cities well. He had close friends in both places. And it was verified by them that he had been in Manila at such a time and in San Francisco at such a time fifteen minutes later. And the other cases cited in the ‘Big Book of Strange Happenings’ were very like this first case. The common elements were that the person had to know both places, either for their fame or for his own acquaintance of them, and that he had to be completely raptured in a daydream when it happened. Then a jog in the undermind will correspond with a jog in the road, and the trans-location will be effected.

  Migrating birds sometimes do this also. A bird may be winging south on his migration (especially such a bird as a Swift or a Swallow) over the plains of Nebraska, deep in a daydream (birds are notoriously deep day-dreamers), and th
en the bird will be winging south over the thick forests of Honduras. But it isn't a really common happening with any species, or it wasn't up till the Second Day of Summerset of that particular year.

  “Satrap, my surrogate grandfather,” Inneall-Annabella said. “We want you to buy that brass cannon and all seven of its cannon-balls that are in the antique shop up the Lane.”

  “And please mount it on the ship Annabella Saint Ledger immediately,” Henryetta ordered in her preemptory way. “We are going to make that ship our headquarters, so we want the best weapon that your money can buy for our protection.”

  “That old brass cannon is not the best weapon that my money can buy,” Satrap said. “For defense it is useless.”

  “My researches tell me otherwise,” Inneall contradicted.

  “It's an enchanted cannon, you see,” Henryetta explained. “The cannon-balls are really annihilation shells. And, while the charges of the cannon would ordinarily be too weak to lob the cannon-balls more than two or three miles, yet they will really go as far as they are ordered to go, even around the curve of the Earth. And they will hit whatever they are ordered to hit. In addition to that, the cannon-balls are self-perpetuating. No matter how many of them are shot off, there will still be the original seven of them left. This is the special ninety-ninth cannon that was on the Golden Hind, the most feared pirate ship of them all. The other ninety-eight cannons were for appearance only, but this enchanted ninety-ninth cannon did all the damage. If we have it mounted, we can whip anything on the Ocean.”

  “You two come at me so sharply with your demands that I might as well have both of you for surrogate granddaughters,” Satrap mused. “I'll adopt you too, Henryetta, in the same irregular fashion that I adopted Inneall.”

  “No, I'll not be adopted even irregularly. I was born an orphan and I'll die an orphan.”