by Roger Elwood
“I cannot bear it! I see the machines—”
“But by the beginning of the next century,” Felix said persuasively, putting a tentative hand upon Mottel’s prayer shawl, and bringing him to a halt, “by the beginning of the next century, my friend, you will be an old man if you survive at all and I will most certainly be dead; your son will be your age and almost all of your friends old or dead as well. What does the next century have to do with you or me or any of them standing behind? They do not know, as we do not know, if we will live to see tomorrow. The government and disease are everywhere; so is uncertainty, it is enough to live for the moment—”
“Yes,” Mottel said, collapsing upon his limbs and sitting unmoving in the roadway, “we are all dogs, living for the moment, that is what our tradition and our government has taught us, but by living for the moment we are standing in watch for the greater peril and I cannot move. I can no longer move, I am very weak. Will you help me? Will you assist me to my feet?”
“You cannot get to the capital,” Felix said, squatting beside him, “the capital is a month’s journey even by cart and you will never get there.” He held Mottel’s hands, felt the softness and withering of the flesh, the beat of the demon inside. “You cannot deliver the message,” he said, “and if you did, no one would listen.” “Then you, Rabbi,” Mottel said, and with a demon’s strength, gathered himself to seize and press the old man’s hands, “you deliver the message. Take it there, take it on the road: tell them what I see. If you are a Rabbi, a man of wisdom, even the authorities will listen to you. They will hear what you have to say before they turn their armies upon you.”
“I will not live into the next century,” Felix said quietly, and remembering dimly certain ancient rites and rituals, pressed his mouth against Mottel’s ear and whispered the Third Oath of Release, calling the demon toward him. “What do I care of the next, century when I do not know if I will survive this night?”
“You must, Rabbi,” Mottel said, “you must think of the next century, our people have never thought of the next moment, that is their tragedy, but I tell you—” and at that moment, responding to the Oath in a way which it never could have understood had it been given breath, the demon sprang from Mottel’s soul and with a knifing twist, deep into that of Felix who, in the saying of the Oath, had left himself open as he had never done that time long ago in Belgrade. Felix screamed once and then fell before Mottel in the dirt, gasping.
“The engines,” he moaned, “the engines, oh my God, the engineering of it,” but he could say no more, he was a much older and less vigorous man than Mottel (who the demon had almost destroyed), and with no other sound he fell over to the earth like a carving, lying still at Mottel’s feet.
Behind him, Mottel could hear his relatives shouting as they, having witnessed the scene, ran toward him; ahead of him, Mottel, in his weakness and released delirium, thought that he could see the capital itself hanging heavily in the sky like overripe fruit, but what he thought and saw most of all lay before him in the dying old man, and even as he leaned forward to try, one last time, to get the sense of it, it dwindled and perished before him, leaving Mottel alone then, waiting for all of them to come upon him and the moment went on forever.
And Mad Undancing Bears
R. A. Lafferty
Distinctly Lafferty in style, this story of group madness
may turn off some; but others will find it unforgettable.
I
Recurring group madness as a world problem could be easily solved if only there were some standard to determine which are the madmen and which are the keepers.
Inmate Number 444075864, Platt Institute
for the Criminally Insane
Though fight them yet with ding and din
And sanity of noise,
The mad things come like silent sin
With dress and pace and poise.
Peach Orchard Ballads
They had been wandering forty years in the desert, so most of them had been born there. There were probably two hundred small groups of them, and they came now for bloodless conquest of the dark and dismal cities of the plains and valleys. They could hear the din of the cities from many miles away, they could see the smoke above them like clouds during the day, and the dancing lights at night.
The desert that the small groups came from were the badlands, the silent salt plains, the alabaster hills and the potato hills, the gopher gulches and the bear brackens of middlewestern North America. And other continents had other deserts where perhaps similar movements were taking place. The silent things were coming to the towns.
“The deserts are always the same,” Polycarp was saying softly. “If there are devils in the desert (and there are) they are always the same primordial devils. If there is madness in the deserts (and we know that there is) yet it is always the same madness. The deserts do not change, and we who come out of these waste places do not change except in our generations and our cycles. We have a cleansing, a sandblasting effect on the cities.
“But the cities change; and their madness (though always of the same virus) takes different form at each appearance.”
They were sandaled in soft leather against the hot earth. They were enfolded against the sun in dressed bearskins and deerskins and wolfskins. They were hooded with the head skins of bears, and the bears’ ears were like horns on them.
They talked happily and liltingly, but they did not sing. Song was banned to them for this while because its name had been stolen by a different and dirty thing. They walked thirty kilometers a day with a springiness and swing, but they did not dance. Dance was barred to them for the days of their dynasty because its name had been burgled by a shoddier and more dismal thing. But the birds that followed them thick as clouds sang, and the whitetailed deer and blackfoot ferrets danced about them.
“The Third Muggers and the Fifth Choppers are coming to kill us,” Scholastica said lightly. “I know that it is a glorious thing to die, but we come for the bloodless conquest of the cities and our effect is lost if we die too easily. We are rapt, but we are told that it is not we who are mad. Yet we really have no instructions. We have no statement other than that it will be given to us in that hour what to do. Have we even any leaders?” These people were neat, they were clean, they were combed and trimmed; and the men of them were unbearded. It gave a youthfulness to all of them that was seldom seen elsewhere. They had an easy grace for all the uneasiness of their situation.
“We do have leaders,” said Vitus, “and they also will be revealed to us in that hour. As to the muggers, mind them not. In older days they ambushed and murdered; but now, and to us, they are a sick joke of themselves. They come with blaring noise boxes to their ears. In the din of the cities their tactics might still succeed, but here in the quiet desert how is a noisy ambush to take us? And they are slower afoot than ourselves.
“The choppers, however, are something else. They have the speed of their machines, and they can search out and signal and combine murderously.”
“’Tis a chopper comes now with a great roar,” Margaret said. “He has left his followers many kilometers behind and comes like a giant alone. I see his face as in a childhood dream. Dream animals, particularly those dreamed by very young children, are often accurate depictments of extinct animals; did you know that? But he is not quite an animal, and I am not quite a young child. And he isn’t extinct.”
“There are also dream people and quasi-people,” Fabian said. “They are dreamed by adults, sometimes dreamed waking by adults, and perhaps they are real. What about the ’typhonian’ features of dreamed people? Did all people once have typhonian features?”
“This one has,” Perpetua said. “Underneath his hairiness he has them clearly. This one is a Typhonian.”
“He is an Angel,” said Dadacus. “He is an angel unrevealed even to himself. That is what a typhonian is. One of us here must reveal him. Then he will be worth many of the others. We receive the best of them in compen
sation for our losses.”
The whine of the approaching chopper-cycle had become a scream. The dust of it was a pillar in the air. It came into sight as a howling dot at the bottom of the pillar, and it grew. Riding it was the chopper whom several of them had seen while he was still far below the horizon. He was a huge, bearded, slavering man, the whites of whose eyes were as big as apples, and the black pupils of them were like insane black holes.
His name, lettered in crazy print on his cycle, was Whole-Hog McCloud. He was hairy and naked and obese, a mad and frothing giant. But did he really look like that?
Only at first glance. In reality he had the plastic smooth, primordial, unfinished look of a typhonian. He could still be molded into anything. But the noise of him and of his apparatus!
He had amplifiers on his exhaust; he had amplifiers all over his machine and all over himself. He screamed to a skidding halt, throwing sand and rocks and gravel a hundred meters.
He was bloodied in his hairy nakedness from his skidding fall, and he had intended it so. He arose and arose again, appearing more giantlike than was possible.
“We fight to the death,” the big chopper roared through his amplifiers. “I fight and kill you all at once.” And he came at them swinging a length of chain in one of his huge hands.
“No, we wrestle to life,” Celsus said. Celsus was the biggest man of this group of desert people. “And you strive with myself only, not with all at once. I’m a mightier wrestler than you’d believe, and my help is from otherwhere.”
But part of Celsus’ help was from those present. Domitilla spread out her hands, and there was silence. The fallen chopper-cycle coughed and its engine died.
The electronic noise boxes that were hung on the machine all conked out with their amplifiers. There was left only quiet and little puffs of black smoke. The throat amplifier of the giant Whole-Hog McCloud likewise went silent with a bigger puff of blacker smoke.
The giant tried to roar again, but his only noise was a weak, hoarse croaking.
“My noise, my noise, I need my noise,” he croaked. “My strength is in my noise.”
Did someone laugh at him? It may have been the desert itself, or the whitetailed deer or the ferrets; or those birds named bullbats that are unmannered birds. The people of the desert group smiled at him with quiet compassion, though Domitilla still spread out her quieting hands.
It was tall, dusty noon, and the battle joined. Whole-Hog came at Celsus swinging his chain, and he caught him a solid bloody blow with it. But the strong wrestler, though staggered, had hold of the chain in the middle now. He held two links of it in his wrestler’s hands; he broke the chain. (He really had strength or help from otherwhere.) He held one half of the chain loosely in his hand now and left Whole-Hog with the other.
Then the wrestler Celsus smiled and threw his own length of chain away; but Whole-Hog kept his. They closed, they grappled, and the pinioned Whole-Hog was more hampered than aided by his chain weapon. Whole-Hog seemed less huge when the two of them were twined together, only a little larger than Celsus. They wrestled for a great long while: the naked hairy typhonian and the big youngish man in the bearskin cloak.
Jacob once wrestled with a Presence for a great part of the night and until dawn. This was at a place named Phanuel near a stream called Jaboc.
Whole-Hog McCloud wrestled with Celsus from tall noon till near dark qt a place that was very like Phanuel and was near a stream called Coyote Creek.
Cecilia, with her quick lilting voice, told the old and ever-new account of the erstwhile giant while he wrestled. It was all new to his ears that had been stunned for so many years and were freed only in recent hours. But he heard it and he changed. His eyes changed as he wrestled, and his whole form. Cecilia talked on and on (though it was necessarily a very compressed account that she gave) and Domitilla still held her quieting hands spread out.
Just as the sun touched down the two big men stopped their wrestling.
“Your name is no longer Whole-Hog,” Celsus said. “It is Whole-Man now.”
“Here is water,” said Whole-Man McCloud. “What is to prevent you taking me ritually into it7”
They did so. And when they came out of the water, Domitilla wrapped Whole-Man in a bearskin robe. By this he became, like the rest of them, a berserker.
They moved on in the early night There had been ten persons in this group; now there were eleven.
The people of the cities didn’t understand how the desert epidemic grew. It grew by such accretions as this.
2
The shock so stopped the world that one
Could hardly hear the flack.
There reeled the psychedelic sun.
Rabidity was back!
Peach Orchard Ballads
One of the nineteen persons comprising the secret society named Glomerule that ruled much of the world was a bear and not a man. His name was Boris Medved.
Actually, only ten of the high members were men, the other eight being women; and it’s an open question whether women or bears are the stranger species.
Boris looked like a man. He was neither more nor less hairy than the men of the society, neither more nor less unhandsome. But there are certain differences between even the most manlike bear and a man (so Doctor Rockter said); and by these differences, Boris was-a bear. He was determined, however, not to let this influence him either way in his judgments of the mad bear clan which was reappearing here and there out of the deserts. Boris was a most fair-minded individual. (And let us not forget the great contributions he had made to Rat-Track Rock.)
“But there is no doubt that the madness has reappeared,” Boris shouted to his colleagues Doctor Rockter and Beryl My-Thing. “There were a dozen reports yesterday, a hundred today; tomorrow there may be thousands.”
“We had our century of sanity,” Beryl cried out. “They can never take that away from us. I had hoped that it would last forever, though; or at least for my own time.”
“And it will and it must last!” Doctor Rockter trumpeted. “What are even a thousand cases of this new insanity among, the billions of us? We will isolate it. We will solve it. We will not let ourselves be driven mad by the reappearing madness. We’ll dog it down. We’ll blast it out. The madness is in the berserker form this time. Does that put you in an embarrassing position, Boris?”
“It does not!” Boris roared. “They say (that is, you say it as doctor) that I’m a bear, medically and phyletically, so I suppose that I am. But these mad berserkers are apparently humans of a bear clan who dress in bearskins. They should put the rest of you in an embarrassing position more than myself. It is nearly always in the human species that these madness epidemics appear. But I have nothing but hatred and contempt for these berserkers. Yes, and fear, for the infection does spread.”
They didn’t really have to shout, cry, trumpet or roar out their words like that It was ingrained, almost innate habit. They could all read mouth; and they weren’t able to hear each others’ words above the din in any case.
“Doctor Rockter, how is the madness caught? How is it infectious?” Beryl screeched. “And where does it abide in the centuries between?”
“We don’t know,” Rockter howled. “Several cycles back, in the old world, mad people of the fish clan or catfish clan lived underground in what were called catacombs. We believe that the mad people of the bear clan live underground in what are called barrows, though this guess may be based on a false etymology. And we don’t know what triggers their coming up from underground, of how the madness infection is passed on. One explanation (which in itself seems mad to me) is that they pass it on by some spermotopheric spasm at the moment of their deaths, so that one dead berserker makes as many as ten live ones. I’ll not believe it. I would guess that themselves made up that tale so that we’d be fearful of killing them.”
“But we are not!” Boris thundered. “The Third Muggers and the Fifth Choppers are in the field now killing them as fast as they find them. Unfortuna
tely, that doesn’t seem to be fast enough.”
Harry Stonefoot, Gaster Blaster, and Helga Navel (three other high members of Glomerule) entered the meeting room. (Everybody remembers Helen and her Umbilical Chords, the greatest, or at least the loudest, string band ever. They’d done so much for Pock Rock a decade ago.)
“These mad folk come from the badlands,” Helen twanged like vibrating mountains. (One could actually hear her. She’d always had a voice that could cut through the howling ululation of the strings and chords.) “They come from those deserts of nonsound, from the silent salt plains, from the alabaster hills and the potato hills, from the gopher gulches and the bear brackens. The horrible silence has driven them mad, clear mad. They wear cloaks of bearskin; that is the truth. They refuse obeisance to the Fundamental Rock. They refuse all conjuncture. They’ll not meet the beat, or mesh the flesh, or sing the thing, or grass or hash. They’ll not touch the raper-caper, or the placid acid, or the ranchy dance. They’ll not bollix Moloch with the rid-kids; they disdain the itch-twitch. There is no bottom to their madness. They’re mad beasts in human form. They are coming in groups of a dozen or more and each group is bringing a cloud of silence with it. The secret of their madness is in that no-noise cloud.”
“We kill them and dissect them,” Harry Stonefoot clattered so powerfully that the cords of his throat stood out purple. “They are humans in all but mind, and even there the brain capacity is of sufficient physical size. But they dress in bearskins while keeping themselves cropped and depilated. Why should they want to be taken for animals? What is it they are called?”
