Serpent’s Egg

by R. A. Lafferty

  The Dolphins and the Porpoises were seldom able to come so deep down in the water. But sometimes one of them, more restless of mind than his fellows, would learn the ‘State of Oceanic Metastasis’ from other creatures; and he’d come sleep-swimming into these mild depths.

  Then there were all the intermediate and small fishes and shellies, the colorful array. All the fishes give the impression of being in clown suits or in party masquerade; and there is an almost feverish gaiety about their appearances and movements. Fishes, fishes, you don't really look like that!

  Some of the Nine Children of the Experiments went up to the Ocean Surface five or six times during the long afternoon. They exchanged their little oxygen canisters at the Ship; for they were mere novices at the ‘Dream-State of Oceanic Metastasis’. And yet they were asleep by top-side standards.

  The afternoon wore out. It became pitch-dark in the depths while the slanted sun was still in the evening sky above the ocean. All the depth-creatures who had lights turned them on then.

  And when finally the sun did set, all of the nine (and possibly, just possibly Invisible Alfred also) rose up out of the Ocean and climbed on board of that noble Ship Annabella Saint Ledger.

  The Pirate Seaman Quentillius Quern the Fifth met Henryetta as she climbed over the gunnels to come on board.

  “Here is your sharp, short-bladed knife,” he said. “It is very special. Use it wisely. Always strike upward with it.”

  “You killed another Dolophonos to get it?” she asked.

  “Yes. I killed another Dolophonos,” he said, “and he killed me.” (Yes, it was plain that Quentillius was dying.) “I wanted you for my girl,” he told Henryetta. “Faint heart never won foxy lady, you know. But for the sake of propriety I decided to wait until you were ten years old. And you won't be ten till tomorrow.”

  “Tonight at midnight,” Henryetta said. “Oh, there will be both vengeance and prevention this night! Oh, a drop of your own spurting blood is on your eyelash! It is like a red star there. Die easy, Quentillius.”

  “You're asleep, aren't you, Henryetta.”

  “Yes I am, Quentillius. How did you know that?”

  The Sun was already down, and the Second Day of Summerset was over with. The Third and Last Night of Summerset had begun. It would be called ‘The Night of the Short Knives’.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE NIGHT OF THE SHORT KNIVES

  And somewhere yet the birds do sing

  And somewhere children shout;

  And some may live by bladed thing,

  And some may die without.

  —Ode for Third Night of Summerset

  “Is the Annabella Saint Ledger a Ship of Fools that represents all Mankind?” Inneall asked the rest of the Nine, and the Pirate Crewman Lanternjaw Lunnigan too, “or does it represent only all Cockeyed Mankind? Is the world that we see the true world; and is the prosaic Floating World only a collection of symbols and covering conventions? Or is the Floating World the real world, and is our world only a collection of allegories and metaphors and symbols and conventions? The only instruction we've had was to see the world with new eyes, but not too cockeyed new. So maybe we have stumbled in this and are indeed Serpent's Eggs. Well, what is our Rationale of Life? We are forbidden to have a Theology of Life (have you noticed how forbidding the Floating World has become?), but may we not at least have a Rationale of Life?”

  “I don't think so, Inneall,” Lutin the Pythoness said. “The most we can hope for is a Mystique of Life.”

  “Are you still sick, Snake?” Inneall asked.

  “Yes. And with the happiest sickness that anybody ever had. I feel as if I had the whole world inside of me. I'm overflowing with the world. I never enjoyed anything so much in my life.”

  “We are all asleep,” Inneall said. “I believe that our Ocean Sleep (would it be an acceptable pun if I called it our ‘Deep Sleep’?) may be an inoculation against our catching the Deep Sleep of the Ape Caverns. We had already practiced doing things while we were asleep, walking, talking (if necessary), using weapons if there was the opportunity, carrying out loosely preconceived plans. And today we learned the Ocean Sleep which is more active than ordinary wakefulness.

  “This is the night when, according to the mythology which some of us accept and some of us do not, the Axel's Golden Apes will wake up and take their places as the Second Humanity; and there is nothing we more need than help in the humanity department. And the Waker will be Axel, our friend and brother and sworn companion. He will wake from his Deep Sleep at midnight tonight (there is a variant to the mythology that says he will wake at cockcrow, but I assume that there will be a Midnight Crowing Cock) and then he will wake the other Golden Apes in the cavern. And these awakened ones by their upsurging awareness and shining mentality will trigger the wakening action of all the other Axel's Golden Apes in the World. Yes, at midnight when most of us will come to age (all of us will come to age twixt then and morning-light) and on coming to age will be subject to the judgement of the Kangaroo, and subject to being murdered as being Serpent's Eggs if our fate so falls. And Axel is also subject to being murdered when he wakens.

  “Well, it will be a busy midnight moment, and maybe somebody will try to cheat by a minute or two. Perhaps we will whittle down the ranks of the Dolophonoi during the hours before midnight. This is a Council of War, and only we Nine, and Lantern-jaw Lunnigan as spokesman for our pirate allies, will be in on it. If anyone else should hear the details we are about to discuss, we might be betrayed to our deaths and destruction.”

  “Where can we go to be sure that we are alone and not overheard?” Dubu the Bear asked.

  “Up in the crows-nest,” Henryetta said. “It's on the top of the tall foremast, and we'll all fit in there somehow as we're rather small. From there we can see anybody coming anywhere near us from any direction. Surely nobody would have anticipated us and bugged the high nest. No matter: half of us always carry bug-scramblers or bug-locators. Bugs can't hide from us. Up we go!”

  It sure did come close to being crowded up in the crows-nest. Nine of the Royal Kids, and Lanternjaw Lunnigan (but he wasn't nearly as thick as he was long)—“Ten of us,” Ruddy Lord Randal said, “but it's almost as crowded as if there were eleven of us. Inneall, we can see from here that there's a lot wrong with your ocean. A new ocean will always raise almost as many problems as it solves, and you haven't been solving any of them. And many of the scientists still rate your ocean as unstable. It won't last, they say.”

  “I know, Lord Randal,” Inneall said. “One of them told me that my Ocean won't last a thousand years. ‘Meet me here in a thousand years and we'll see about that,’ I said. ‘I'm a machine who will last a thousand years, and you're a human who won't. I will be here in a thousand years, and so will my ocean be.’ ‘No, little-girl machine, no,’ that mad scientist said. ‘My information is that you will be dead and dismantled within three days, little serpent's egg machine. Your ending within three days is as certain as anything can be in this world.’ That's what he told me, two days ago. Well, if there are no bugs up here, let's hold our Council of War.”

  “Something smells funny up here,” Lutin said. “It is almost the smell of treachery. But I am sure of all ten of us. There can't be a speck or spot of treachery in any one of us.

  “Know you then that Axel cannot be killed while he is in the Deep Sleep. None of the Golden Apes in the Cenaculum can be killed while they're in the Sleep.”

  “How do you know this?” Dubu asked.

  “May you all know that there is a Prophet at Heart's Desire Cove, a Prophetic Python, Myself! I know what I know. Axel can only be killed after he wakens. They will attempt his murder in the swift second between his wakening and his awakening the others. If Axel is killed then, well, Second Humanity will continue to sleep forever, or possibly only for another thousand years. The wakening moment will be midnight. Inneall is correct in her assumption that there will be a ‘Midnight Cock’: it will crow for the awakenin
g. The ‘Midnight Cock’ also appears in Medieval Aeneas Legends, but that is only a comment in passing. We will be able to handle the sleep-walking Dolophonoi. They have been practicing sleep-walking murder for hours and hours but 'twill not work for them. Their self-hyped-up sleep-walking will not be an inoculation against the Deep Sleep of the upper cavern and the cenaculum. But our Ocean Sleep will be an inoculation against it. We will be there to forestall anything going wrong. We will not let anything go wrong. Second Humanity will wake up, and the World will be the better for it.

  “We ourselves will be in peril then, any of us who may possibly have received the stigma of being a Serpent's Egg. But let us not be selfish. If we die, we die. We are subject (the special ones of us) to assassination as soon as we leave the cenaculum, the upper room of the Sleepers. And we must leave it as soon as the wakening is effected.”

  “But how will we get into the Ape Caverns, and especially into that special part of it which is the Cenaculum of the Sleepers?” Dubu asked. “There are all sorts of guards of several species ringing the place.”

  “I don't know how we'll get in.” Lutin confessed, “but Inneall knows the secret of getting in. She is sitting on that secret, and she isn't good at sitting on secrets. There is a squealing of secret delight all through her mechanism. Tell us, Inneall, how will we get in?”

  “By the Executive Passage,” Inneall said, and she did indeed squeak a bit with her secret delight. “It leads from the clubroom of our favorite condominium in Structo Lane, down in the underground for a hundred meters and to one foot from the Cenaculum of the Sleepers in Apes Caverns. We will have our nine-way birthday party in just an hour in that spacious clubroom of Satrap Saint Ledger and Livius Secundus and Felix C-and-C. We will have a banquet such as no Royal Kids approaching their tenth birthday have ever had before. In that Clubroom Banquet-Hall there will be a new tapestry, a masterwork of pop art, new-woven only this afternoon, hanging on the wall. The tapestry is ‘The Midas Satrap Saint Ledger As An Obscene Sea Monster’. It will be Satrap himself in his beautiful oceanic-ugliness-monsterness as we saw him and loved him today.

  “So we will hold banquet before such a striking piece of art that nobody would think to look behind it. And at exactly three minutes till midnight, we will all rise quietly but swiftly from the banquet table and slip behind that magnificent tapestry and into the Executive Passage that is behind it. Traversing the passage swiftly, we'll come to solid limestone at the end of it, with a brass door set into that limestone wall. There will be a large key in that door. One of us will turn the key in that door which will set off the last blast and demolish the final foot of solid rock. We'll step though the newly blasted hole then and we'll be in the Cenaculum of the Sleepers, the only part of Ape Caverns that is above the new ocean level. We'll be in there with about five seconds to spare before cockcrow. Should we be there earlier than that, perhaps the Kangaroo would have time to take some counter-action against us. It is better to be neither late nor early, but rather to arrive at the last possible minute. So we will be able to throw our cloak of protection around Axel at the Midnight Cockcrow and the critical moment just after it. And when Axel wakes the others, then our work will be done.

  “Whatever intuitive evasive actions will be necessary for us to take then, we will take. My only hope is that not too many of us will be crushed as Serpent's Eggs.

  “Well, that is the end of our Council of War. Oh, it will work. Of course it will. There is no way that we could be betrayed. Oh, what was that? Something brushed past me. It must have been a bird.”

  “More likely a bat,” said Carcajou.

  “How odd!” Lutin the Pythoness mused then. “That funny smell, that smell of treason, it's just disappeared from our midst. How wonderful is the smell of the ocean air without it.”

  “You will stay here in the crows-nest, Lanternjaw,” Henryetta said. “It may be that you will spend most of your time here in the crows-nest of this invisible ship for the next hundred years or so.”

  “I’d feel better if you had a trusted pirate with you,” Lantern-jaw said.

  “We'll take Sebastian Lazar,” Lord Randal decided. “With you up here and Quentillius Quern the Fifth dead, Sebastian is the only really superior pirate left.”

  The Noble Nine came down from the crows-nest.

  At the Birthday Banquet, some time between the walnuts and the wine, a furtive person slipped in and went to Ruddy Lord Randal. “For thirty ounces of gold I will give you the name of the person who is the Supreme Head of the Kangaroo at present,” the furtive person said. “I have it written here on a kangaroo knuckle-bone. True information from the Kangaroo is always written on a kangaroo knuckle-bone. That guarantees its authenticity. For only thirty ounces of gold I give you the name of the person who is the Supreme Head of your enemy the Kangaroo. This is not knowledge that everybody has.”

  “Where did you get the knuckle-bone?” Lord Randal asked.

  “I stole it, and it's cheap for the price. It is only because I have no love for the Kangaroo myself that I do this.”

  “I will pay him the gold, Lord Randal,” Satrap Saint Ledger said. “Take the kangaroo knuckle-bone, Lord Randal.”

  Lord Randal took the knuckle-bone from the furtive person and put it unexamined into his breast pocket.

  “Why, how perverse you are, Lord Randal!” Henryetta cried. “You didn't even read the name on it.”

  “I don't want to know the name. Our plans are made, and the name of the person who is presently the Supreme Head of the Kangaroo does not matter. He is likely a prominent man of whom I've heard. That being so, I would come to think bad of a man that I had been thinking well of. I don't want that.”

  “But some of us want to know, Lord Randal,” Henryetta said. “Lord Randal, slyly or openly, I am going to get that kangaroo knuckle-bone out of your breast pocket.”

  “Oh! Henryetta, Oh!” Lutin cried as if in sudden pain. “Some nights I wish that I weren't a prophetess. Yes, you will take it out of his pocket. I see you taking it out of Lord Randal's breast pocket, after he is dead tonight.”

  Well, except for that shock it was a good birthday party. Several of them wouldn't really be ten years old for minutes or hours after midnight, but they had decided to have the party for all of them together. They sang coming-of-age songs such as:

  “Oh, think of us as saint and sage,

  And writ on golden pages!

  Look out for when we come of age;

  We will amaze the Ages!”

  (Authentic mega persons are legally of age when they are ten years of age; lesser persons are legally of age when they are eighteen years old.)

  “We must all be sure that we do not abuse such powers as we have,” said that wise young Bear Dubu. “We must be sure that we do not give cause to be adjudged as Serpent's Eggs. Henryetta, there have been horrifying fires in the last few hours in four different towns (that are now towns-no-more) within a hundred miles of here. What's your range, dear?”

  “Much further than that. But nobody can prove that I did those fires. There are several other pyro-mega-maniacs active in this part of the world. Besides, I'm not fair prey till twenty-four minutes after cock-crow midnight. I can take a lot of evasive action with twenty-four minutes warning.”

  “Inneall, are you still determined that your ocean shall cover the entire world?” Dubu asked. “Are you still determined that it shall obliterate all the land?”

  “Yes, unless you can show me some way that it will cover the entire world without obliterating all the land,” Inneall said (that little-girl machine had a mean grin on her sometimes). “Whatever one makes, one should make the best possible. And the best possible ocean will cover the entire world.”

  Oh, they did have some interesting conversations and light-hearted banter. Satrap was at table with them. And Livius and Felix. And the pirate Sebastian Lazar. Sebastian gave the impression of being brilliantly thoughtful. He didn't say anything, but still he gave the impression of b
eing a deep and brilliant man. It was mostly the ironic way that he crooked and arched his eye-brows.

  At exactly three minutes till midnight, the Nine Royal Kids and the pirate Sebastian Lazar rose quietly but swiftly from the banquet table and slipped behind that tapestry titled ‘The Midas Satrap Saint Ledger As Obscene Sea Monster’ that hung on the wall; then they were into the Executive Passage that was behind it. Traversing the hundred-yard-long passage swiftly, they came near the limestone wall with the brass door set in it. Ruddy Lord Randal went ahead of the rest of them to turn the big key in the door. But when he was still five steps away from it, the key turned in the door of itself. The limestone wall exploded. Then there was a ragged and lime-dusty opening into the Cenaculum of the Sleepers, and the ten persons stepped into that room. They were puzzled that the key had turned in that door by itself, but they were into the room of the Sleepers with five seconds to spare before midnight.

  The way was clear. Three Dolophonoi in the room were unconscious on the limestone floor. Their induced sleep-walking sleep had not been protection against the pervading Deep Sleep of the room.

  And immediately the Midnight Cock crowed.