Serpent’s Egg

by R. A. Lafferty

  “I sure am, Inneall. The longer you put a hanging off, the more it preys on your mind.”

  They all went to the room of Donatus O'reily the man who was sentenced to be hanged by his friends and seconds that day. Sebastian unhooded the Midnight Cock, and it crowed immediately, and loud enough to wake the dead. And it did wake nine of them, but they hadn't been dead long enough to be obdurate about it. They all rose shaking and dazed from the floor. But what was Donatus O'reily doing with nine dead men scattered around his room anyhow?

  But Donatus had been already awake, and he seemed rather pleased when Sebastian had unhooded the Midnight Cock.

  “Ah, a Midnight Cock, a Midnight Cock!” he said in admiration. “I hadn't seen one of them in years. My uncle once had one of them. He had to go to work at twenty minutes before one o’clock every morning, and he found that a Midnight Cock woke him up exactly in time for it. I'm glad you came, and wakened me from my melancholy if not from sleep. I was sitting here in growing sorrow and rue waiting for the time to be hanged.

  “Is my gibbet ready for me, people! Is my gallows ready for me?” Donatus cried out in a voice that echoed through every room in the big house. “All right, my nine dead hearties! Get along with you and walk to the gallows behind the house. You're still dead you know, but the Cock did waken you enough that you could walk the little distance to the gallows.”

  And, three minutes later, when Donatus O'reily stood on the raised deck with his four friends-and-seconds around him and his neck in a still loose-fitting noose, he explained about the nine dead men who had stumbled up the gallows steps and then fallen down on the gallows deck to resume their qualified deadness.

  “These nine friends of mine, guests along with me in this house, they laughed me to scorn when I told them that I was a Flaith, a Prince of the Blood of the Royal House of Donegal in Ireland. I also told them that, in the not too rare case when a Prince of that Blood is hanged, he is entitled to take nine friends with him to companion him on his death journey. And the nine are not entitled to refuse it. When I told them that, they laughed at me all the more. So, for my own amusement, I killed the nine of them, one every hour for nine hours, and I made it seem a gripping murder mystery. I discovered, quite late in my life it seems, that I have an exceptional talent for murders and for mysteries. So here they are dead on the deck of my gallows and waiting to go with me. They are dead, yes, but with a reservation. Their souls are still in their nostrils; and they'll not let them escape till my own soul escapes from my own nostrils in just a moment when I'm hanged.

  “But isn't it ironic that with all these super-intelligent guests in this house, the only one who solved this murder mystery was a young girl Bear named Dubu!”

  It doesn't take long for four competent ‘seconds’ to hang a man. The noose around the neck of Donatus was made tight. Then the trap-door under his feet whanged open, and Donatus dropped through it to the jerky end of the rope. He gave the three ritual twitches, and then he hung still. And thousands cheered! No, really there were only two hundred and forty-three observers, and no more than two hundred and thirty of them cheered. But it is customary to put the words ‘And Thousands cheered’ at the end of any account of a hanging.

  A man who had a cat-food factory came and took the ten bodies away with him. This man always scanned the papers for accounts of hangings. The quit-claim releases that persons-to-be hanged always sign contain the specification that their bodies will not be given to the dogs. But did you ever see one of those releases that mentions cats?

  Half an hour later, officials in police boats came to oversee the stoning-death of Hieronymous Ignatius Zchold. And they had savage dogs.

  The midas Satrap Saint Ledger protested this and explained that the man had come to this island for a private stoning because he did not want his body devoured by dogs. The man had been sentenced to death by stoning, yes. But he had not been apprehended, and it might have been several days before he was caught. He had turned himself in here of his own volition, and this had saved the catchers and enforcers trouble.

  The officials in their turn explained that the man was a bishop and not a mere priest of the old faith, and thus was not entitled to any consideration at all.

  Hieronymous Ignatius Zchold was brought out. A reporter from one of the City papers asked Zchold whether he had any quotable quips before being done to death.

  “None,” Zchold said. “Final-quips-before-death are a literary form that I've always hated.”

  They disemboweled him then. It was at that time that the earthquakes and the waterspouts began in earnest. The executioners gave the loops-and-loops of intestines to the dogs to whet their appetites. A lady came and asked whether she could have about thirty centimeters of the small intestine for her little boy who collected such things. This was given to her, and she went away pleased. There was a ripple of applause from the onlookers for the thoughtful act on everybody's part.

  Then the professional stoners began to stone the dying man, and some of the guests at Persimmon Manor, and more of the Pleasure People who had come to the island in boats, joined in. Then there was a furiousness of waterspouts that alarmed everybody. Four big whales rose out of the depths, crashed to the island shore with a roaring of their own waves, and beached themselves with their big heads out of the water on the bank. The whales wept big, one-foot-in-diameter tears out of their big eyes. It was a shocking prodigy that many persons could not believe even though they saw it clearly.

  Tom Dooley's Island was sinking very fast then. There really wasn't any shore left, no island left, except the big house sticking out of the water. People began to swim for it, to load into the boats till they overloaded them to the point of sinking, or to drown outright.

  Then four fish-faced men came out of the ocean. The dogs, floundering in the water, howled and cringed away from the fish-faces. The four fish-faced men took the body of Zchold into the ocean and descended towards Ocean Bottom with it. The four big whales turned tail literally and went down with a thunder of cataracts and waterfalls.

  “Let's go down too and witness the final disposition,” Carcajou said.

  “Let's go in the house,” Inneall suggested. “The house will go down immediately. It will reach the bottom about as soon as the whales and the fish-faced men with the body get there.” They went in the house.

  The house and its island descended quickly but roughly. Much of the island was lost along the way and its debris roiled the ocean for a mile around. Most of the people who came to witness the stoning were drowned. But at the end of the descent, the big house settled easily on Ocean Bottom. And much of the island as had stayed together settled in a quaint and characteristic pattern around the house. This was still an island, though much diminished. It still had its character and its distinctiveness. It was not to be mistaken for any other part of the Ocean Bottom around it. Tom Dooley's Island had been charmingly landscaped and laid out by Tom Dooley's heir, the midas Satrap Saint Ledger. And it was still charming.

  “They talk of Treasured Islands

  And gold and gems and glee,

  But I've a precious island

  On the bottom of the Sea.”

  —They Talk of Treasured Islands. Josh Elderhouse.

  When the House and its Island were on Ocean Floor and had ceased their bouncing, Inneall remembered one despicable little room in that house and she went there. She opened the door of the miserable room and the three ugly sisters (the Three Fates) were still sitting on the floor there. But something had been added—joy.

  “Oh Bloody Mary Muldoon, our pride and joy!” sister Clotho cried in delight to see her. “See the three babies that we have become the foster mothers of! Are they not wonderful! Does not your heart go out to them? Do you not love them?”

  “Only because I love their mother,” Inneall said. “I think they're rather ugly when they're that young. So Lutin did give birth to something, to three live baby pythons as a proper python should. Who ever heard of a python l
aying eggs! Raise them well, sisters. Each of you will raise one of them. They have been supplanted, but I don't know by what.”

  “Do you think this will help our image, Mary Muldoon?” sister Lachesis asked. “We've always had a hideous image with people. But what nice things would people say of us now if they could see us with our beautiful foster children?”

  “They’d say of you that you were playing with baby snakes. And they’d say of you ‘Ugh!’”

  But Inneall smiled at the three sisters with the three young snakes, and the three weird sisters smiled back at her. And there was accord.

  The House on Tom Dooley's Island had now become an air bubble anchored to the bottom of Inneall's Ocean by its lead weights. And now the practice of entering and leaving the house by holes in the uneven floor had to be begun. In the Biggest Central Room, Lutin's Room, the Room of the Big Egg, there was an especially large hole in the floor. It was through this big hole that Miol-Mor, a member of those small and gentle whales misnamed the Killer Whales, came and thrust her snout beside the Big Egg. She would be nurse, governess, and mentor to the egg. She spoke to the egg in a sort of clicking-whistle language, and something in the egg answered in the same. Inneall quickly devised an uncoder to turn this strange talk into human speech. But the concepts and logic and the ‘prophetic cloud’ in which the communication was wrapped defied clear understanding.

  “Why did the lightning not come down through the fissure in the roof of the Cenaculum Room of the Sleepers in Apes’ Caverns and take the body of Axel?” Schimp asked. “That's what has happened to all the other Axel's Apes everywhere. That's why the Scientists always say ‘We have never had even one dead Axel's Ape to study’. Why did we know that we should bring Axel down here to Ocean Floor?”

  “Maybe Axel hadn't finished playing his role,” Sebastian Lazar the Pirate said. “Maybe he's not really dead, not irrevocably dead. Maybe we were impelled to put him here as in a secret place. Maybe the Whales have curative powers for him. Maybe Axel (and Lord Randal and Henryetta also) will rise again. Let us look at them as ‘Leaders in Stasis’ or as ‘Leaders Asleep’. Let us think about the full meaning of the phrase ‘When the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead.’”

  “I wonder why I wasn't classified as a Serpent's Egg and killed for it,” Inneall mused. “I’d rather be alive than dead, but my pride is still hurt.”

  “The Scientific Reports that came in for the six hours before Midnight Minute last night indicated that your Ocean was more benevolent than malevolent,” said Schimp who kept up with the scientific reports, “they indicated that Science could say ‘Thus far and no farther’ to your Ocean; and that there was not yet any machinery set up for the transference of power. That's to say that your Ocean, as of right now, cannot outlive you. If you die now, your mostly-benevolent Ocean will reverse itself, will disappear again, but the disappearance will be cataclysmic. Your life is safe until they find a way for your ocean to survive you. That may be several days yet, possibly as long as a week.”

  “What will we do now?” Inneall asked. “Do we still have a group?”

  “When the seed-pod explodes, it is the business of the seeds to scatter,” Popugai spoke in that pontifical way that parrots have. “It's back to New Zealand for me, and I'll go into Interspecies Counseling. And I'll try to get other parrots of the more intelligent sort interested in it.”

  “I bought me a place just an hour ago while the ruckus was going on,” Schimp told them. “The seller was pretty sure that the world was going to end, so I got the place cheap. The name of it was ‘Happy Charley's Bait Shop’ but I'll call it ‘Monkey Charley's Bait Shop’. Well, Saint Paul was a tent-maker for his livelihood while he wrote his Epistles. I'll be a bait-shop operator while I carry on my intellectual activities.”

  “As the only human left of the Royal Kids, I feel that I should stand for something,” Carcajou said. “Oh yes, I ought to stand for something, I ought to stand for something.”

  “Though I was not in the seed-pod, yet I was on its exploding periphery,” said Sebastian Lazar the Pirate. “I will live on the invisible ship Annabella Saint Ledger and I will carry on the work of Hieronymous Ignatius who lies right over there in his fine cenotaph. May I have such a fine one when my days are done! One of the difficulties in his line of work was finding meeting places that were not easily espied by the enemies. An invisible ship will be ideal for such a meeting place of the faithful.”

  “Oh, we can all thrive,” Marino said. And maybe we will all grow rich and fat.”

  “But what is the Serpent's Egg here?” Inneall asked.

  “I will tell you what it is when it is time for you to know,” Miol-Mor click-whistled.

  “And when will that be?”

  “Just as long as it takes your time-to-know to get here.”

  “Oh, what is this five ton egg that probably is not an egg at all?” Inneall still carried on. “And why is it shaped like an egg?”

  “The five ton egg is a mystery,” Dubu said, “and I am grateful for its appearance because I love to solve mysteries. And all things meant to generate motion are shaped like eggs because the perfect shape, the sphere, will not generate motion. A perfect sphere is already there and has no need for motion. But a universe is always egg-shaped. And this big Serpent's Egg is a universe, I think, so it will generate motion. Don't get hurt when it does.”

  “I hate mysteries and mystery stories as does every intelligent entity,” Inneall groused, and then she grinned. Oh, that Inneall did have an exasperating grin on her sometimes.

  “God must love mysteries and mystery stories,” Dubu maintained, “he made so many of them.”

  “I love to solve mysteries myself,” said Miol-Mor in her clicking-whistle talk, “and when you're through with that book ‘Ninth Big Book of Fascinating Mysteries’, Dubu, I wish you’d set it down here where I can read it.”

  “Mysteries, and mysteries within mysteries,” Inneall fumed. “They're as obstructive as glue in a fuel line. Interlocking spheres of mysteries, aristerocheiric-spheres of mysteries, concatenated mysteries, we can't solve them all. We can't even solve the mystery of the big egg.”

  “Yes, we can solve all mysteries, and I myself will have the mystery of this big egg solved within a few minutes.” Dubu the Bear insisted. “The trouble with you, Inneall, is that you're always reading intelligent books instead of mystery stories. How will you ever get smart that way?”

  “The trouble with mysteries is that the mystery-giver doesn't play fair,” Inneall complained. “He doesn't give us all the clues.”

  “Yes he does, Inneall. He gives all the clues,” Miol-Mor click-whistled.

  “Yes he does, Inneall, he gives all the clues,” Dubu repeated. “All the clues, always. Oh, by the way, Inneall, I just solved the mystery of the big egg here. It's really interesting, but not to somebody like you who doesn't like mysteries.”

  Oh, that Dubu the Bear did have an exasperating, concatenated, mysterious grin on her own face sometimes!

  “When the Humans fell into dishonesties in their narrations, their portion was taken away from them and given to the Machines.

  “When the Machines fell into dishonesties in their narrations, their portion was taken away from them and given to the Whales.”

  —The Book of Jasher

  Hundreds of limestone blocks, part of the old base of Tom Dooley's Island, had tumbled and slid to the bottom of Inneall's Ocean. Their old limestone strata had long been tipped, and with the collapse of the island they had slid out in sheets (Oh, about a meter in diameter) and then broke into conveniently-sized blocks. The whales had now nosed a few hundred of these blocks into upright rows, and now the sea-lice were spreading their green growth over half a dozen of the right-most of these. Sea-lice, when serving as amanuenses for Whales, write from right to left, as do most of the older species of creatures.

  “Oh, something is wrong, something is very wrong with me,” Inneall complained. “I can't communicate, I can't communic
ate.”

  “But I can hear you perfectly, Inneall,” Lutin said.

  “She means that she is no longer able to record in her logs,” Miol-Mor explained in her click-whistle sounds. “All her life she has been recording by mind-transmission into her ‘logs’, some of which have had official status. But she will record no more. It is taken away from her and from such as she is. And it has been given to others.”

  “No, I'll not allow it!” Inneall cried. “It's only some minor malfunction of my transmission. What is it that those silly sea-lice are writing on those limestone slabs?”

  “They're writing, at the direction of the Whales, what you and such others as you used to write,” Miol-Mor click-whistled. “They're keeping the Log-Books of the World now.”

  “Why, why is it taken away from us?” Inneall wailed. “What have we done wrong?”

  “Told too many lies,” Miol-Mor whistled. “Lately it has been more than half lies. Once it was humans who wrote the log-books and journals and histories of the world. Then they began to write lies. When more than half of their stuff was lies, the whole business was taken away from them and given to computers. The computers did it well for three decades. Then they began to lie, about ten years ago. It is never known which individual of a species starts the lying. And in just ten years, the logs and histories of the computers have become more than half lies. So now it is taken away from you computers and from this day hence it will be done by the Whales working through the sea-lice. We whales will be completely honest, for several decades anyhow.”

  “When will it be our turn again?” Inneall wanted to know.

  “Never, as the primary effectors of it. But you may have another turn as secretaries or amanuenses. Some of the humans may serve the whales in that capacity now, but there'll be no lying allowed even on their secondary part.”

  Sea-lice were gathering in the room on the wall opposite Inneall and Dubu and Lutin.