The Best of R. A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  “No, there is not one word of the text changed,” Gregory grumbled. “History followed its same course. How did our experiment fail? We tried, by a device that seems a little cloudy now, to shorten the gestation period for the new birth. It would not be shortened.”

  “The town is in no way changed,” said Aloysius Shiplap. “It is still a fine large town with two dozen imposing towers of varicolored limestone and midland marble. It is a vital metropolis, and we all love it, but it is now as it was before.”

  “There are still two dozen good shows in town that I haven’t seen,” Valery said happily as she examined the billings. “I was afraid that something might have happened to them.”

  “There is no change at all in the Beautiful Arts as reflected in the reviews here that we have taken as basic texts,” said Audifax O’Hanlon. “You can say what you want to, but the arts have never been in finer shape.”

  “It’s a link of sausage,” said the machine Chresmoeidy.

  “‘Nor know the road who never ran it thrice,’” said the machine Proaisth. “That’s from an old verse; I forget the author; I have it filed in my main mind in England if you’re interested.”

  “Oh yes, it’s the three-cornered tale that ends where it begins,” said the machine Epiktistes. “But it is good sausage, and we should enjoy it; many ages have not even this much.”

  “What are you fellows babbling about?” Audifax asked without really wanting to know. “The art of painting is still almost incandescent in its bloom. The schools are like clustered galaxies, and half the people are doing some of this work for pleasure. Scandinavian and Maori sculpture are hard put to maintain their dominance in the field where almost everything is extraordinary. The impassioned-comic has released music from most of its bonds. Since speculative mathematics and psychology have joined the popular performing arts, there is considerably more sheer fun in life.

  “There’s a piece here on Pete Teilhard putting him into context as a talented science fiction writer with a talent for outré burlesque. The Brainworld Motif was overworked when he tackled it, but what a shaggy comic extravaganza he did make of it! And there’s Muldoom, Zielinski, Popper, Gander, Aichinger, Whitecrow, Hornwhanger—we owe so much to the juice of the cultists! In the main line there are whole congeries and continents of great novels and novelists.

  “An ever popular art, graffiti on mingitorio walls, maintains its excellence. Travel Unlimited offers a ninety-nine-day art tour of the world keyed to the viewing of the exquisite and hilarious miniatures on the walls of its own restrooms. Ah, what a copious world we live in!”

  “It’s more grass than we can graze,” said Willy McGilly. “The very bulk of achievement is stupefying. Ah, I wonder if there is subtle revenge in my choice of words. The experiment, of course, was a failure, and I’m glad. I like a full world.”

  “We will not call the experiment a failure since we have covered only a third of it,” said Gregory. “Tomorrow we will make our second attempt on the past. And, if there is a present left to us after that, we will make a third attempt the following day.”

  “Shove it, good people, shove it,” the machine Epiktistes said. “We will meet here again tomorrow. Now you to your pleasures, and we to ours.”

  * * *

  The people talked that evening away from the machines where they could make foolish conjectures without being laughed at.

  “Let’s pull a random card out of the pack and go with it,” said Louis Lobachevski. “Let’s take a purely intellectual crux of a little later date and see if the changing of it will change the world.”

  “I suggest Ockham,” said Johnny Konduly.

  “Why?” Valery demanded. “He was the last and least of the medieval schoolmen. How could anything he did or did not do affect anything?”

  “Oh no, he held the razor to the jugular,” Gregory said. “He’d have severed the vein if the razor hadn’t been snatched from his hand. There is something amiss here, though. It is as though I remembered when things were not so stark with Ockham, as though, in some variant, Ockham’s Terminalism did not mean what we know that it did mean.”

  “Sure, let’s cut the jugular,” said Willy. “Let’s find out the logical termination of Terminalism and see just how deep Ockham’s razor can cut.”

  “We’ll do it,” said Gregory. “Our world has become something of a fat slob; it cloys; it has bothered me all evening. We will find whether purely intellectual attitudes are of actual effect. We’ll leave the details to Epikt, but I believe the turning point was in the year 1323 when John Lutterell came from Oxford to Avignon where the Holy See was then situated. He brought with him fifty-six propositions taken from Ockham’s Commentary on the Sentences, and he proposed their condemnation. They were not condemned outright, but Ockham was whipped soundly in that first assault, and he never recovered. Lutterell proved that Ockham’s nihilism was a bunch of nothing. And the Ockham thing did die away, echoing dimly through the little German courts where Ockham traveled peddling his wares, but he no longer peddled them in the main markets. Yet his viewpoint could have sunk the world if, indeed, intellectual attitudes are of actual effect.”

  “We wouldn’t have liked Lutterell,” said Aloysius. “He was humorless and he had no fire in him, and he was always right. And we would have liked Ockham. He was charming, and he was wrong, and perhaps we will destroy the world yet. There’s a chance that we will get our reaction if we allow Ockham free hand. China was frozen for thousands of years by an intellectual attitude, one not nearly so unsettling as Ockham’s. India is hypnotized into a queer stasis which calls itself revolutionary and which does not move—hypnotized by an intellectual attitude. But there was never such an attitude as Ockham’s.”

  So they decided that the former chancellor of Oxford, John Lutterell, who was always a sick man, should suffer one more sickness on the road to Avignon in France, and that he should not arrive there to lance the Ockham thing before it infected the world.

  * * *

  “Let’s get on with it, good people,” Epikt rumbled the next day. “Me, I’m to stop a man getting from Oxford to Avignon in the year 1323. Well, come, come, take your places, and let’s get the thing started.” And Epiktistes’s great sea-serpent head glowed every color as he puffed on a seven-branched pooka-dooka and filled the room with wonderful smoke.

  “Everybody ready to have his throat cut?” Gregory asked cheerfully.

  “Cut them,” said Diogenes Pontifex, “but I haven’t much hope for it. If our yesterday’s essay had no effect, I cannot see how one English schoolman chasing another to challenge him in an Italian court in France, in bad Latin, nearly seven hundred years ago, on fifty-six points of unscientific abstract reasoning, can have effect.”

  “We have perfect test conditions here,” said the machine Epikt. “We set out a basic text from Cobblestone’s History of Philosophy. If our test is effective, then the text will change before our eyes. So will every other text, and the world.

  “We have assembled here the finest minds and judgments in the world,” the machine Epiktistes said, “ten humans and three machines. Remember that there are thirteen of us. It might be important.”

  “Regard the world,” said Aloysius Shiplap. “I said that yesterday, but it is required that I say it again. We have the world in our eyes and in our memories. If it changes in any way, we will know it.”

  “Push the button, Epikt,” said Gregory Smirnov.

  From his depths, Epiktistes the Ktistec machine sent out an Avatar, partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction. And along about sundown on the road from Mende to Avignon in the old Languedoc district of France, in the year 1323, John Lutterell was stricken with one more sickness. He was taken to a little inn in the mountain country, and perhaps he died there. He did not, at any rate, arrive at Avignon.

  * * *

  “Did it work, Epikt? Is it done?” Aloysius asked.

  “Let’s look at the evidence,” said Gregory.

 
The four of them, the three humans and the ghost Epikt who was a kachenko mask with a speaking tube, turned to the evidence with mounting disappointment.

  “There is still the stick and the five notches in it,” said Gregory. “It was our test stick. Nothing in the world is changed.”

  “The arts remain as they were,” said Aloysius. “Our picture here on the stone on which we have worked for so many seasons is the same as it was. We have painted the bears black, the buffalos red, and the people blue. When we find a way to make another color, we can represent birds also. I had hoped that our experiment might give us that other color. I had even dreamed that birds might appear in the picture on the rock before our very eyes.”

  “There’s still rump of skunk to eat and nothing else,” said Valery. “I had hoped that our experiment would have changed it to haunch of deer.”

  “All is not lost,” said Aloysius. “We still have the hickory nuts. That was my last prayer before we began our experiment. ‘Don’t let them take the hickory nuts away,’ I prayed.”

  They sat around the conference table that was a large flat natural rock, and cracked hickory nuts with stone fisthammers. They were nude in the crude, and the world was as it had always been. They had hoped by magic to change it.

  “Epikt has failed us,” said Gregory. “We made his frame out of the best sticks, and we plaited his face out of the finest weeds and grasses. We chanted him full of magic and placed all our special treasures in his cheek pouches. So, what can the magic mask do for us now?”

  “Ask it, ask it,” said Valery. They were the four finest minds in the world—the three humans, Gregory, Aloysius, and Valery (the only humans in the world unless you count those in the other valleys), and the ghost Epikt, a kachenko mask with a speaking tube.

  “What do we do now, Epikt?” Gregory asked. Then he went around behind Epikt to the speaking tube.

  “I remember a woman with a sausage stuck to her nose,” said Epikt in the voice of Gregory. “Is that any help?”

  “It may be some help,” Gregory said after he had once more taken his place at the flat-rock conference table. “It is from an old (What’s old about it? I made it up myself this morning) folk tale about the three wishes.”

  “Let Epikt tell it,” said Valery. “He does it so much better than you do.” Valery went behind Epikt to the speaking tube and blew smoke through it from the huge loose black-leaf uncured stogie that she was smoking.

  “The wife wastes one wish for a sausage,” said Epikt in the voice of Valery. “A sausage is a piece of deer-meat tied in a piece of a deer’s stomach. The husband is angry that the wife has wasted a wish, since she could have wished for a whole deer and had many sausages. He gets so angry that he wishes the sausage might stick to her nose forever. It does, and the woman wails, and the man realized that he had used up the second wish. I forget the rest.”

  “You can’t forget it, Epikt!” Aloysius cried in alarm. “The future of the world may depend on your remembering. Here, let me reason with that damned magic mask!” And Aloysius went behind Epikt to the speaking tube.

  “Oh yes, now I remember,” Epikt said in the voice of Aloysius. “The man used the third wish to get the sausage off his wife’s nose. So things were the way they had been before.”

  “But we don’t want it the way it was before!” Valery howled. “That’s the way it is now, rump of skunk to eat, and me with nothing to wear but my ape cape. We want it better. We want deer skins and antelope skins.”

  “Take me as a mystic or don’t take me at all,” Epikt signed off.

  “Even though the world has always been so, yet we have intimations of other things,” Gregory said. “What folk hero was it who made the dart? And of what did he make it?”

  “Willy McGilly was the folk hero,” said Epikt in the voice of Valery, who had barely got to the speaking tube in time, “and he made it out of slippery elm wood.”

  “Could we make a dart like the folk hero Willy made?” Aloysius asked.

  “We gotta,” said Epikt.

  “Could we make a slinger and whip it out of our own context and into—”

  “Could we kill an Avatar with it before he killed somebody else?” Gregory asked excitedly.

  “We sure will try,” said the ghost Epikt who was nothing but a kachenko mask with a speaking tube. “I never did like those Avatars.”

  You think Epikt was nothing but a kachenko mask with a speaking tube! There was a lot more to him than that. He had red garnet rocks inside him and real sea salt. He had powder made from beaver eyes. He had rattlesnake rattles and armadillo shields. He was the first Ktistec machine.

  “Give me the word, Epikt,” Aloysius cried a few moments later as he fitted the dart to the slinger.

  “Fling it! Get that Avatar fink!” Epikt howled.

  * * *

  Along about sundown in an unnumbered year, on the Road from Nowhere to Eom, an Avatar fell dead with a slippery elm dart in his heart.

  “Did it work, Epikt? Is it done?” Charles Cogsworth asked in excitement. “It must have. I’m here. I wasn’t in the last one.”

  “Let’s look at the evidence,” Gregory suggested calmly.

  “Damn the evidence!” Willy McGilly cussed. “Remember where you heard it first.”

  “Is it started yet?” Glasser asked.

  “Is it finished?” Audifax O’Hanlon questioned.

  “Push the button, Epikt!” Diogenes barked. “I think I missed part of it. Let’s try it again.”

  “Oh, no, no!” Valery forbade. “Not again. That way is rump of skunk and madness.”

  In Our Block

  Introduction by Neil Gaiman

  This was not the first short story of Lafferty’s I read, nor even the first I fell in love with.

  It was, however, the first story I ever took apart, as best I could, to try and work out how he did it.

  I would have been about eleven. I didn’t know what an American city block actually was—it was an indeterminate word that meant simply a region, as far as I was concerned. I came from towns and cities with winding, random streets. But I loved the story. It was a shaggy dog story without a punch line, a tall tale without apparent conflict in which all that happened was that two friends walked around a block, and talked to people they found. A letter was dictated. It was about new people coming in, about immigrants, about people working hard and moving on. It was about taking the extraordinary for granted. And I loved the way the words worked.

  So I read it, and I reread it, and I read it aloud, and I tried to understand it. I would never know what a Dort Glide was (nor, I suspected, did Lafferty), but I felt that, if I could understand how this short story was built and constructed, I would understand how to write.

  I loved the way the people in the shanties spoke. I wanted to speak like the typist, or her sister in the bar. I hoped one day to be able to say, “See how foxy I turn all your questions,” but I never had an opportunity to. I only had one tongue, so to reply, “With my other tongue” was also right out.

  Coming back to it as an adult, and I have read it every year or so, I find that I love it as much as I ever did. It’s cockeyed and joyful, but it’s also a glorious, blue-collar, low-rent story about a block in Oklahoma where the people arriving just want to fit in. It’s about immigration, and about what people bring to the places they visit. It’s about revealing secrets.

  And it’s a writer’s story, too, about the places that ideas come from. I imagine Ray Lafferty walking past a tin shack he had not noticed before, on his way to a local bar, and having a story in his head by the time that he returned home that night.

  In Our Block

  There were a lot of funny people in that block.

  “You ever walk down that street?” Art Slick asked Jim Boomer, who had just come onto him there.

  “Not since I was a boy. After the overall factory burned down, there was a faith healer had his tent pitched there one summer. The street’s just one block long and it dead
-ends on the railroad embankment. Nothing but a bunch of shanties and weed-filled lots. The shanties looked different today, though, and there seem to be more of them. I thought they pulled them all down a few months ago.”

  “Jim, I’ve been watching that first little building for two hours. There was a tractor-truck there this morning with a forty-foot trailer, and it loaded out of that little shanty. Cartons about eight inches by eight inches by three feet came down that chute. They weighed about thirty-five pounds each from the way the men handled them. Jim, they filled that trailer up with them, and then pulled it off.”

  “What’s wrong with that, Art?”

  “Jim, I said they filled that trailer up. From the drag on it it had about a sixty-thousand-pound load when it pulled out. They loaded a carton every three and a half seconds for two hours; that’s two thousand cartons.”

  “Sure, lots of trailers run over the load limit nowadays; they don’t enforce it very well.”

  “Jim, that shack’s no more than a cracker box seven feet on a side. Half of it is taken up by a door, and inside a man in a chair behind a small table. You couldn’t get anything else in that half. The other half is taken up by whatever that chute comes out of. You could pack six of those little shacks on that trailer.”

  “Let’s measure it,” Jim Boomer said. “Maybe it’s bigger than it looks.” The shack had a sign on it: Make Sell Ship Anything Cut Price. Jim Boomer measured the building with an old steel tape. The shack was a seven-foot cube, and there were no hidden places. It was set up on a few piers of broken bricks, and you could see under it.

  “Sell you a new fifty-foot steel tape for a dollar,” said the man in the chair in the little shack. “Throw that old one away.” The man pulled a steel tape out of a drawer of his table-desk, though Art Slick was sure it had been a plain flat-top table with no place for a drawer.