After a while a bunch of them were off in that little tavern on the road between Cleveland and Osage. It was only half a mile away. If the valley had run in the other direction, it would have been only six feet away.
“It is a psychic nexus in the form of an elongated dome,” said the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk. “It is maintained subconsciously by the concatenation of at least two minds, the stronger of them belonging to a man dead for many years. It has apparently existed for a little less than a hundred years, and in another hundred years it will be considerably weakened. We know from our checking out folk tales of Europe as well as Cambodia that these ensorcelled areas seldom survive for more than two hundred and fifty years. The person who first set such a thing in being will usually lose interest in it, and in all worldly things, within a hundred years of his own death. This is a simple thanato-psychic limitation. As a short-term device, the thing has been used several times as a military tactic.
“This psychic nexus, as long as it maintains itself, causes group illusion, but it is really a simple thing. It doesn’t fool birds or rabbits or cattle, or cameras, only humans. There is nothing meteorological about it. It is strictly psychological. I’m glad I was able to give a scientific explanation to it or it would have worried me.”
“It is continental fault coinciding with a noospheric fault,” said the eminent scientist Arpad Arkabaranan. “The valley really is half a mile wide, and at the same time it really is only five feet wide. If we measured correctly, we would get these dual measurements. Of course it is meteorological! Everything including dreams is meteorological. It is the animals and cameras which are fooled, as lacking a true dimension; it is only humans who see the true duality. The phenomenon should be common along the whole continental fault where the earth gains or loses half a mile that has to go somewhere. Likely it extends through the whole sweep of the Cross Timbers. Many of those trees appear twice, and many do not appear at all. A man in the proper state of mind could farm that land or raise cattle on it, but it doesn’t really exist. There is a clear parallel in the Luftspiegelungthal sector in the Black Forest of Germany which exists, or does not exist, according to the circumstances and to the attitude of the beholder. Then we have the case of Mad Mountain in Morgan County, Tennessee, which isn’t there all the time; and also the Little Lobo Mirage south of Presidio, Texas, from which twenty thousand barrels of water were pumped in one two-and-a-half-year period before the mirage reverted to mirage status. I’m glad I was able to give a scientific explanation to this or it would have worried me.”
“I just don’t understand how he worked it,” said the eminent scientist Willy McGilly. “Cedar bark, jack-oak leaves, and the world ‘Petahauerat.’ The thing’s impossible! When I was a boy and we wanted to make a hide-out, we used bark from the skunk-spruce tree, the leaves of a box-elder, and the word was ‘Boadicea.’ All three elements are wrong here. I cannot find a scientific explanation for it, and it does worry me.”
They went back to Narrow Valley. Robert Rampart was still chanting dully: “I want my land. I want my children. I want my wife.”
Nina Rampart came chugging up out of the narrow ditch in the camper and emerged through that little gate a few yards down the fence row.
“Supper’s ready and we’re tired of waiting for you, Robert,” she said. “A fine homesteader you are! Afraid to come onto your own land! Come along now; I’m tired of waiting for you.”
“I want my land! I want my children! I want my wife!” Robert Rampart still chanted. “Oh, there you are, Nina. You stay here this time. I want my land! I want my children! I want an answer to this terrible thing.”
“It is time we decided who wears the pants in this family,” Nina said stoutly. She picked up her husband, slung him over her shoulder, carried him to the camper and dumped him in, slammed (as it seemed) a dozen doors at once, and drove furiously down into the Narrow Valley, which already seemed wider.
Why, that place was getting normaler and normaler by the minute! Pretty soon it looked almost as wide as it was supposed to be. The psychic nexus in the form of an elongated dome had collapsed. The continental fault that coincided with the noospheric fault had faced facts and decided to conform. The Ramparts were in effective possession of their homestead, and Narrow Valley was as normal as any place anywhere.
“I have lost my land,” Clarence Little-Saddle moaned. “It was the land of my father, Clarence Big-Saddle, and I meant it to be the land of my son, Clarence Bare-Back. It looked so narrow that people did not notice how wide it was, and people did not try to enter it. Now I have lost it.”
Clarence Little-Saddle and the eminent scientist Willy McGilly were standing on the edge of Narrow Valley, which now appeared its true half-mile extent. The moon was just rising, so big that it filled a third of the sky. Who would have imagined that it would take a hundred and eighty of such monstrous things to reach from the horizon to a point overhead, and yet you could sight it with sighters and figure it so.
“I had a little bear-cat by the tail and I let go,” Clarence groaned. “I had a fine valley for free, and I have lost it. I am like that hard-luck guy in the funny-paper or Job in the Bible. Destitution is my lot.”
Willy McGilly looked around furtively. They were alone on the edge of the half-mile-wide valley.
“Let’s give it a booster shot,” Willy McGilly said.
Hey, those two got with it! They started a snapping fire and began to throw the stuff onto it. Bark from the dog-elm tree—how do you know it won’t work?
It was working! Already the other side of the valley seemed a hundred yards closer, and there were alarmed noises coming up from the people in the valley.
Leaves from a black locust tree—and the valley narrowed still more! There was, moreover, terrified screaming of both children and big people from the depths of Narrow Valley, and the happy voice of Mary Mabel Rampart chanting, “Earthquake! Earthquake!”
“That my valley be always wide and flourish and such stuff, and green with money and grass!” Clarence Little-Saddle orated in Pawnee chant style, “but that it be narrow if intruders come, smash them like bugs!”
People, that valley wasn’t over a hundred feet wide now, and the screaming of the people in the bottom of the valley had been joined by the hysterical coughing of the camper car starting up.
Willy and Clarence threw everything that was left on the fire. But the word? The word? Who remembers the word?
“Corsicanatexas!” Clarence Little-Saddle howled out with confidence he hoped would fool the fates.
He was answered not only by a dazzling sheet of summer lightning, but also by thunder and raindrops.
“Chahiksi!” Clarence Little-Saddle swore. “It worked. I didn’t think it would. It will be all right now. I can use the rain.”
The valley was again a ditch only five feet wide.
The camper car struggled out of Narrow Valley through the little gate. It was smashed flat as a sheet of paper, and the screaming kids and people in it had only one dimension.
“It’s closing in! It’s closing in!” Robert Rampart roared, and he was no thicker than if he had been made out of cardboard.
“We’re smashed like bugs,” the Rampart boys intoned. “We’re thin like paper.”
“Mort, ruine, ecrasement!” spoke-acted Cecilia Rampart like the great tragedienne she was.
“Help! Help!” Nina Rampart croaked, but she winked at Willy and Clarence as they rolled by. “This homesteading jag always did leave me a little flat.”
“Don’t throw those paper dolls away. They might be the Ramparts,” Mary Mabel called.
The camper car coughed again and bumped along on level ground. This couldn’t last forever. The car was widening out as it bumped along.
“Did we overdo it, Clarence?” Willy McGilly asked. “What did one flat-lander say to the other?”
“Dimension of us never got around,” Clarence said. “No, I don’t think we overdid it, Willy. That car must be eighteen
inches wide already, and they all ought to be normal by the time they reach the main road. The next time I do it, I think I’ll throw wood-grain plastic on the fire to see who’s kidding who.”
Nor Limestone Islands
Introduction by Michael Bishop
Lafferty strikes the reader as sui generis, a literary creator like no other. But he also comes across as uniquely himself, a writer so potently fizzy and tipsy-making that one could say his prose Laffervesces.
See the first paragraph of “Nor Limestone Islands,” a tale arising from Lafferty’s interest in geology, mineralogy, rockhounding, story-mining and architectural and literary lapidaries. (Disarmingly, he had the ability to appear to be an expert in every -ology imaginable.)
That paragraph reads: “A lapidary is one who cuts, polishes, engraves, and sets small stones. He is also a scrivener who sets in little stones or pieces here and there and attempts to make a mosaic out of them.”
With that dubious hook, our Oklahoman leprechaun not only defines a term that may not feel wholly familiar, but also compares the intricately fitted jigsaw-puzzle of an architectural mosaic to the mix-and-match literary method by which he has structured “Nor Limestone Islands.”
Listen to this tale’s limestone salesman make a pitch to a roomful of city officials: “We … want everybody to come and visit us, but hardly anybody wants to. Right now, my country [Sky-High Stutzamutza] is about three miles from here” [my emphasis].
This spiel evokes part three, “A Voyage to Laputa,” of my most admired book in the world, Gulliver’s Travels. Laputa’s lodestone-directed flying islands first boggled my starving preteen mind in Tulsa, Oklahoma, circa 1958.
Thus, in 1984, I chose “Nor Limestone Islands” to represent R. A. Lafferty in an anthology titled Light Years and Dark: Science Fiction and Fantasy Of and For Our Time. And here is how I introduced it:
“How does a 105-pound girl assemble a thirty-million-ton Pink Pagoda in six hours? R. A. Lafferty will tell you in this charming ‘article’ about floating limestone islands and the intrepid Miss Phosphor McCabe, whose breathtaking photographs of Sky-High Stutzamutza (see plates I to XXII) are unfortunately not included in the text.
“Lafferty, you see, is famous—perhaps notorious is the better word—for the inveterate unorthodoxy of his story concepts and narrative strategies. His work is immediately recognizable as his in a way that the work of other writers is not always identifiable as theirs and nobody else’s.
“This distinctiveness would seem to leave Lafferty wide open to parody, but he writes with such droll originality that any attempt to burlesque him turns instead into a pale pastiche of his methods and hence into a kind of homage.
“New Wave? Old Wave? Who cares? Lafferty is surfing the crest of a comber whose quirky break only he knows how to ride.”
That remains pretty much the case today. Indeed, those who manage to create better than passable parodies-cum-hommages to Lafferty (like Neil Gaiman) usually come away from the experience understanding both how hard such stories are to write and why no one else tries to build a career emulating our sui generis Raphael Aloysius Lafferty.
Nor Limestone Islands
A lapidary is one who cuts, polishes, engraves, and sets small stones. He is also a scrivener with a choppy style who sets in little stones or pieces here and there and attempts to make a mosaic out of them.
But what do you call one who cuts and sets very large stones?
* * *
Take a small lapillus or stone for instance:
The origin of painting as an art in Greece is connected with definite historical personages; but that of sculpture is lost in the mists of legend. Its authentic history does not begin until about the year 600 B.C. It was regarded as an art imparted to men by the gods; for such is the thought expressed in the assertion that the earliest statues fell from heaven.
“Statuaria Ars; Sculpture,” Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities.
We set that little stone in one corner, even though it contains a misunderstanding of what fell from heaven: it wasn’t finished statues.
Then we set another small stone:
(We haven’t the exact citation of this. It’s from Charles Fort or from one of his imitators.) It’s of a scientist who refused to believe that several pieces of limestone had fallen from the sky, even though two farmers had seen them fall. They could not have fallen from the sky, the scientist said, because there is no limestone in the sky. (What would that scientist have done if he had been confronted with the question of Whales in the Sky?)
We set that little stone of wisdom into one corner. And we look around for other stones to set.
* * *
The limestone salesman was making his pitch to the city commissioners. He had been making a poor pitch and he was a poor salesman. All he had was price (much less than one tenth that of the other bidders) and superior quality. But the limestone salesman did not make a good appearance. He was bare-chested (and colossally deep-chested). He had only a little shoulder jacket above, and a folded drape below. On his feet he had the crepida or Hermes-sandals, made of buckskin apparently: a silly affectation. He was darkly burned in skin and hair, but the roots of his hair and of his skin indicated that he was blond in both. He was golden-bearded, but the beard (and in fact the whole man) was covered with chalk-dust or rock-dust. The man was sweaty, and he smelled. His was a composite smell of limestone and edged bronze and goats and clover and honey and ozone and lentils and sour milk and dung and strong cheese.
“No, I don’t believe that we want to deal with you at all,” the mayor of the city was saying. “The other firms are all reputable and long established.”
“Our firm is long established,” the limestone salesman said. “It has been doing business from the same—ah—cart for nine thousand years.”
“Balderdash,” the streets and sewers commissioner swore. “You won’t even give us the address of your firm, and you haven’t put in a formal bid.”
“The address is Stutzamutza,” the limestone salesman said. “That’s all the address I can give you. There isn’t any other address. And I will put in a formal bid if you will show me how to do it. I offer you three hundred tons of the finest marble-limestone, cut exactly to specification, and set in place, guaranteed to take care of your project, guaranteed to be without flaw, in either pure white or variegated; I offer this delivered and set within one hour, all for the price of three hundred dollars or three hundred bushels of cracked corn.”
“Oh take it, take it!” a Miss Phosphor McCabe cried out. “We elect you gentlemen to do our business for us at bargain prices. Do not pass up this fine bargain, I beg you.” Phosphor McCabe was a lady photographer who had nine fingers in every pie.
“You be quiet, young lady, or we will have you put out of the hearing room,” said the parks and playgrounds commissioner. “You will wait your turn, and you will not interfere in other cases. I shudder to think what your own petition will be today. Was ever a group so put upon by cranks as ourselves?”
“You have a very bad reputation, man,” the finance commissioner said to the limestone salesman, “insofar as anyone has heard of you before. There is some mumble that your limestone or marble is not substantial, that it will melt away like hailstones. There is even a rumor that you had something to do with the terrible hailstorm of the night before last.”
“Ah, we just had a little party at our place that night,” the limestone salesman said. “We had a few dozen bottles of Tontitown wine from some stone that we set over in Arkansas, and we drank it up. We didn’t hurt anybody or anything with those hailstones. Hey, some of them were as big as basketballs, weren’t they! But we were careful where we let them fall. How often do you see a hailstorm as wild as that that doesn’t do any damage at all to anything?”
“We can’t afford to look silly,” the schools and activities commissioner said. “We have been made to look silly in quite a few cases lately, not all of them our own
fault. We can’t afford to buy limestone for a project like this from someone like you.”
“I wonder if you could get me about a hundred and twenty tons of good quality pink granite?” asked a smiling pinkish man in the hearing room.
“No, that’s another island entirely,” the limestone salesman said. “I’ll tell them if I see them.”
“Mr. Chalupa, I don’t know what your business is here today,” the mayor said severely to the smiling pinkish man, “but you will wait your turn, and you will not mix into this case. Lately it seems that our open hearings are just one nut after another.”
“How can you lose?” the limestone salesman asked the commissioners. “I will supply and cut and set the stones. If you are not satisfied, I will leave the stones at no cost, or I will remove them again. And not until you are completely satisfied do you pay me the three hundred dollars or the three hundred bushels of cracked corn.”
“I want to go to your country with you,” Miss Phosphor McCabe burst out. “I am fascinated by what I have heard of it. I want to do a photographic article about it for the Heritage Geographical Magazine. How far away is your country now?”
“All right,” the limestone salesman said. “I’ll wait for you. We’ll go just as soon as I have transacted my business and you have transacted yours. We like everybody and we want everybody to come and visit us, but hardly anybody wants to. Right now, my country is about three miles from here. Last chance, gentlemen: I offer you the best bargain in quality marble-limestone that you’ll ever find if you live two hundred years. And I hope you do all live to be two hundred. We like everybody and we’d like to see everybody live two hundred years at least.”
“Absolutely not,” said the mayor of the city. “We’d be the laughing-stock of the whole state if we did business with someone like you. What kind of a country of yours are you talking about that’s only three miles from here? Absolutely not. You are wasting your time and ours, man.”
The Best of R. A. Lafferty Page 4
