NOT TO MENTION CAMELS
R. A. Lafferty
www.sfgateway.com
Enter the SF Gateway …
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
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Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Website
Also by R. A. Lafferty
About the Author
Copyright
There are certain clap-bookers and clap-trappers who are making artificial men, or introducing artificial elements into real men. And these artificial contrivances are then able to stride about on their own movement like godlings.
Tractatus, Lament of the Times
1
With mortal coil in death uncurled
And body ripe to dump or doff it,
We stand like dummies on a world
Or be like sharpies jumping off it.
“World-Jumper’s Ballad”
Pilger Tisman lay in the article of death. He was attended by three outstanding doctors: Funk, Austin, and Ravel; by their numerous aides; by a coroner; and by a brigadier of police. Their care was not to save Pilger’s life (there was no chance for that, and no reason for it), but to weigh his death. This business of weighing a death was something new in that place, even though it was said to be common elsewhere. For this weighing, the men used both highly sophisticated and wildly ingenious equipment.
Pilger Tisman was being executed for his shockingly murderous and irresponsible deeds and behaviors. Public opinion had cried out for his death, and his few supporters were in hiding. He had been sentenced “to die with discomfort.” His punishment was quite cruel, but it was not unusual. He was breathing the old ritual gas named Yperite or Mustard, and he had been in absolutely ghastly discomfort before losing consciousness.
“Well, he endured the pain well,” Doctor Jude Ravel admitted. “Like a man, as they used to say. Or like a stoic wise-in-death animal. My father used to say that animals had a clear death-accepting ritual; and that if, after accepting the fact of death, the animal should be released from that circumstance, it would go ahead and die anyhow.”
“Oh, certainly, certainly,” said Doctor Wilcove Funk. “That’s known about animals, but Tisman wasn’t a wise-in-death animal. He’s a frustrated-in-death man. He’s a betrayed-in-death cult figure. A cult figure owes the world a showy death, and Tisman didn’t deliver it. He had it planned, I believe, and somehow the pain and the shock jolted it all out of his mind. If that girl had been with him, she could have reminded him of it. She was responsible for many of the showy elements of his career. He went under trying desperately to recall his planned words and gestures, and he’s still trying to remember them in his death delirium. If we had equipment just a bit more sophisticated, as we are told that they have in some of the other enclaves, we could still lift those clouded-over words and acts from his flickering mind. As it is, we’re denied his heroics. We are cheated.”
Another article of Tisman’s sentence was that he “should take nothing with him.” Most persons, in dying, do not take anything with them. But there are a very few tricky individuals who do. The number of those who took something with them when they died had now risen to one in a hundred of the known cases, and possibly as many of the unknown. With cult figures it was much higher: two out of three at least who took something with them, and who left something behind them that hadn’t been there until their going. Cult figures were always tricky. This man Tisman had been tricky in very many ways, and possibly he was tricky in this. It wasn’t like him to die blankly.
A difficulty for the death-monitors or death-weighers was that each dying person who took something with him when he went used an individual or peculiar trick to do it. Nothing was standardized. No two persons, apparently, had ever used the same device. The tracing technique was quite new in this place, but already the catalogue of tricks numbered more than a hundred. This made the carrying-forward of material or weighable substance difficult to prevent.
The thing that most dying persons took forward with them—this was no more than an instrumental guess—was probably memory. Or it was identity. Or it was consciousness (or the capacity for consciousness, for it was mostly unconscious persons who made the leap). Were these three things the same? At least all of them were weighable.
Did one who took something forward with him always leave something extra behind also? Probably. It couldn’t always be detected immediately—perhaps it wasn’t always weighable; but the departing ones who took something with them did seem always to leave a new and compensating thing in its place. Cult figures particularly did often leave a fast-spreading residue (can a newly appearing thing be called a residue?) in place of what they took with them. The thing taken and the thing left may have been two halves of a unity, and it threatened to crush a world like a shell between the riven halves. The world was hard shelled, though, and very seldom was it actually crushed by such a circumstance.
In earlier times, those who carried such minimum personal baggage (memory, identity, consciousness) forward with them from the death drama did often have after-appearances that were nothing worse than harmless ghosts. But in these recent decades, and as the cults had evolved into a new natural force, the tricky departing ones seemed able to erect horrendous ghost worlds or counterworlds that impinged, sometimes physically, upon the real world. The encounters with these intrusive worlds were dislocating, disturbing, eroding, and fright-inducing in their effects. And they were not harmless.
“As a hulk I don’t like him,” Doctor Jon Austin said. “I don’t really see how anyone could like him as a hulk, or as a man, as well as I had known him. But cult figures are loved. They have devoted followings. They have magnetic effects. Do you understand how this Tisman could have been loved by anyone?”
“I half u
nderstand it,” said Doctor Wilcove Funk.
“It may be that I understand the other half of it,” said Doctor Jude Ravel. “We two would never understand the same half of anything.”
“We have paralyzed all his centers,” Doctor Wilcove Funk said to the room at large, “even some of the involved centers whose purpose we do not understand. We have muted but not quite silenced his call-tone or person-tone. We have dimmed his corona spectrum, but we sure have not been able to put it out. That is really all we can do. The next move is up to him.
“It would seem that his numbed areas could not translate their data to any point beyond. And yet we know of cases where absolutely dead areas have done so. We will see. We’ve been tricked before, and by persons of lesser reputation than this man. We learn, with every person who slips by us, to guard a little better against this sort of encounter. We still don’t know what death is, but we do know that nothing ever winds all the way down without winding something else up.”
Doctor Funk was a man with a huge head, with heavy orbital ridges; with a protruding muzzle on him that made a true chin unnecessary and impossible; with a large back-brain; and with a great good humor. He was a tremendous man with a steep amount of animal in him, and with a sharp apperception of things in between.
But the dying Pilger Tisman had an even larger back-brain. How was there room for it? It was almost a case of the inside of his skull being bigger than the outside. And as to the humor of Tisman—well, those who had known him extensively had testified that he had a large, craggy, towering humor, outrageous, noisy, overflowing, and fearsome. But it was not always a good humor. Those assisting at his death were all secretly afraid that he would give them a stroke of his strong humor even out of his death delirium.
“It is inconsiderate for any man to take so long a time to die,” the brigadier of police said testily. “Are you sure we’re more likely to muff it if we hurry it along? Or have some of you the compassionate sickness?”
“Yes, I have the compassionate sickness,” Doctor Funk said. “And we’re not sure which way we’re most likely to muff it. We’re keeping records, as you know, and we will try to determine that as we determine other things.”
Doctor Funk regarded the dying Tisman with sympathy and kindred feeling, even though he agreed that Tisman was unnecessarily slow about giving up the ghost. Funk’s giant hands were compassionate as he monitored the guttering brain and body of Tisman. It was the centralized memory prints that he worried about, that area of abridgments and handy essences that nearly duplicated, in highly compressed form, the gangling memory that ran all through the brain itself. This was the cerebral juglans, that small nodule whose purpose and content had but lately been discovered. Funk marred the juglans, the “remembering acorn,” but what would be the effect of his marring it? The juglans was a fat composite of chemical fixes and electrical charges that inhabited the patterned wrinkles and grooves of that small nodule; and it was the containing nodule itself, that which seemed always on the nervous edge of explosion. But it was the patterns, even the empty patterns, that held the power. Content and detail were not important on this level. Patterns could always create their own new detail. Taking the patterns away might seem like stealing holes or tunnels: not to be done. But it was often done nowadays.
“There was never such a call-tone or person-tone as this man has,” Doctor Jude Ravel said admiringly. “It hardly needs amplifying. I believe that a person of exceptionally acute hearing would be able to pick it up with his bare ears. It is too rough and rambunctious to be a musical tone, and yet it has almost infinite depth and texture to it. It is a whole orchestra full of randy harmonics, and a mighty randy orchestra it is. In some cases, the person-tone or the call-tone will make a very good résumé of a man. Not here. Tisman can’t be expressed by one sense, but this tone is a sort of signature of this man. No other person, thank the god of ears, could ever sound that sound.”
Doctor Ravel was talking about Tisman’s call-tone, a nonchromatic aspect of the body corona translated into audio and then greatly amplified.
“And yet, remarkable man that Tisman was, incandescent cult figure that he was, he leaves behind him only one powerful friend and one powerful enemy,” Doctor Jon Austin said. “And of his cult, it is believed that only two members remain faithful to him. If so, where are they?”
“I want to hear that tone of the man Tisman extinguished,” the brigadier of police said solidly. “I want to hear it extinguished at exactly the same time that I see the man himself extinguished, that I see his life go out. I hate these after-sounds from a dead man. They mean that an execution has been bungled, and I’ll not accept a bungle in this one. Do not fool with the amplification! And do not try to fool me. I want all of him to expire, evenly, quickly, and forever. I do not want an echo, or any afterglow or after-sound.”
It had been said that this brigadier of police was firmly under the finger of the one powerful enemy of Tisman. But the brigadier seemed to be finding the hatred of Tisman in his own person.
“If the man is able to evade our nets and to leap forward, the tone of the man will also make the jump—last of all,” Doctor Ravel said. “It’s the sign that a man has been extinguished, or has escaped being extinguished. If he does leap forward, the tone will be heard again, an instant after the body’s death. If the man has succeeded, the tone will be heard triumphant, and from a location outside of the body. And it will not need amplification. And sometimes that tone will seem to mock.”
“That man-tone had better not be heard from some location outside the body,” the brigadier of police stated with that menace of voice that all brigadiers of police develop. “I said that I wanted to hear that tone extinguished at the same time that I see that man and his life extinguished. It had better not sound again. And it had better not mock.”
“Here is something new in light,” Doctor Jon Austin said with pleasant interest, “and something new in color. Though each person’s aura is unique, some are crankily more unique than others; and Tisman’s is uniqueness itself. Since we first learned to translate the electrical shell that is called aura into light and color, there hasn’t been a personal spectrum like this. There must be a hundred nonchromatic colors in it. Ah, those grays, those silvers, those brasses, that pulsating pallidness! And some of those shinings and shimmers are cut loose from any color at all. Even the blackness writhes and shines. There are areas of light that cannot be fractured at all, that will not break down into any components. I tell you that this man is a dazzle!
“Of course, pyrotechnics themselves are easy. It is almost to take cheap advantage of the world to use them at all. But pyrotechnic flesh is a little different case; it is the case of Pilger Tisman and of many of the cult figures. I wonder if pyrotechnic flesh is all that is really required of a cult figure. There may be a bit more than that to be found in this man.”
“Why doesn’t he die?” the brigadier of police asked with a peevishness that was almost a pout. “His lungs have to be entirely burned up. His brain is cooked. His heart ruptured three minutes ago. A few aspects of him have already tried to climb over the wall to get out, and we’ve knocked each of them back into the flame. Don’t let anything climb over the wall when it comes to the end! I want Tisman dead! I want him all dead at the same time, with no pieces hanging over the edges of him. And that time is now.”
“It never happens that way, Salvatore,” the coroner told the brigadier. “Dying is always a series of reactions and backlashes. Nobody ever died all at once. Ah, there’s his last throe, I’ll wager. He can’t regain consciousness, of course, but there’s a stirring and coherence in the cellar of his mind, though it’s in the occipital region of his brain. His brain is now emitting impulses in the delta pattern (this isn’t common for one who is unconscious, and it certainly isn’t common for a world-jumper; it’s a trick, a personal trick): a pattern of about three counts a second. Tisman is sending, he’s probing, he’s getting ready for a leap. He’s gauging the foo
tholds and handholds on the other side before he makes the grand jump out over the chasm.”
“Stomp on his damned fingers!” the brigadier of police crackled. “Don’t give him a handhold. Don’t give him any hold at all. We want him dead and done for.”
“He’s dead,” Doctor Wilcove Funk said tightly. “We can’t know yet, maybe ever, whether he succeeded in his leap or not. The canniest of jumpers sometimes do not leap straight across. Some of them leap upstream for the cliff-faces there. Some of them jump for the downstream bluffs. Some of them wade through shoal water, and some of them climb immeasurable heights in their attempt to get across and away. There were never such mountain-climbers or abyss-leapers as these outlaw world-jumpers in the moments of their gateway deaths.”
“You seem to know a lot about the topology of the other side,” Doctor Ravel chided.
“The topology of the other sides,” Doctor Funk said. “They are legion.”
Pilger Tisman was dead. His heart and breath and heat were gone. His voltage was gone. The tumultuous vinegar of his chemistry was dried and dead. His brain waves were in what has humorously been called the omega pattern—zero per second. His tone was extinguished. His colorful aura went out. His memory center, the abridgments and essences that filled up that small cerebral juglans, was still fat and full, fossilized and frozen—and unescaped. Tisman was dead. This was an “end of pyrotechnics.”
For about three seconds.
Then that centralized memory deposit collapsed as its fat content was removed in electrical charge and chemical fix and pattern. This was an absolute physical theft from the body, one that could be clearly recorded. Someone had stolen the meat from that acorn.
The aura dazzled and shimmered again, but not in the neighborhood of the body. It was at some distance in that medical amphitheater, and then it flicked out through the walls, out of the region, out of the world. The person-tone of the dead man sounded again, clear, without any translation or amplification, and it also was located outside of the vessel of the body. The tone sounded triumphant in its resurrection, and it did mock with a biting mockery. Then it was gone; not gone out, but gone away from there in a swoop.
Not To Mention Camels Page 1
