Lobster, lobster, said Ceran to himself, the water has passed the danger point! And it hardly feels different. If you believe your senses in this, then you will be boiled alive in your credulity.
He knew now that the living dolls were real and that they were the living ancestors of the Proavitoi.
Many of the little creatures began to fall asleep again. Their waking moments were short, but their sleeps seemed to be likewise. Several of the living mummies woke a second time while Ceran was still in the room, woke refreshed from very short sleeps and were anxious to talk again.
“You are incredible!” Ceran cried out, and all the small and smaller and still smaller creatures smiled and laughed their assent. Of course they were. All good creatures everywhere are incredible, and were there ever so many assembled in one place? But Ceran was greedy. A roomful of miracles wasn’t enough.
“I have to take this back as far as it will go!” he cried avidly. “Where are the even older ones?”
“There are older ones and yet older and again older,” said the first grandmother, “and thrice-over older ones, but perhaps it would be wise not to seek to be too wise. You have seen enough. The old people are sleepy. Let us go up again.”
Go up again, out of this? Ceran would not. He saw passages and descending ramps, down into the heart of the great hill itself. There were whole worlds of rooms about him and under his feet. Ceran went on and down, and who was to stop him? Not dolls and creatures much smaller than dolls.
Manbreaker had once called himself an old pirate who revelled in the stream of his riches. But Ceran was the Young Alchemist who was about to find the Stone itself.
He walked down the ramps through centuries and millennia. The atmosphere he had noticed on the upper levels was a clear odor now—sleepy, half-remembered, smiling, sad, and quite strong. That is the way Time smells.
“Are there those here even older than you?” Ceran asked a small grandmother whom he held in the palm of his hand.
“So old and so small that I could hold in my hand,” said the grandmother in what Ceran knew from Nokoma to be the older uncompounded form of the Proavitus language.
Smaller and older the creatures had been getting as Ceran went through the rooms. He was boiled lobster now for sure. He had to believe it all: he saw and felt it. The wren-sized grandmother talked and laughed and nodded that there were those far older than herself, and in doing so she nodded herself back to sleep. Ceran returned her to her niche in the hive-like wall where there were thousands of others, miniaturized generations.
Of course he was not in the house of Nokoma now. He was in the heart of the hill that underlay all the houses of Proavitus, and these were the ancestors of everybody on the asteroid.
“Are there those here even older than you?” Ceran asked a small grandmother whom he held on the tip of his finger.
“Older and smaller,” she said, “but you come near the end.”
She was asleep, and he put her back in her place. The older they were, the more they slept.
He was down to solid rock under the roots of the hill. He was into the passages that were cut out of that solid rock, but they could not be many or deep. He had a sudden fear that the creatures would become so small that he could not see them or talk to them, and so he would miss the secret of the beginning.
But had not Nokoma said that all the old people knew the secret? Of course. But he wanted to hear it from the oldest of them. He would have it now, one way or the other.
“Who is the oldest? Is this the end of it? Is this the beginning? Wake up! Wake up!” he called when he was sure he was in the lowest and oldest room.
“Is it Ritual?” asked some who woke up. Smaller than mice they were, no bigger than bees, maybe older than both.
“It is a special Ritual,” Ceran told them. “Relate to me how it was in the beginning.”
What was that sound—too slight, too scattered to be a noise? It was like a billion microbes laughing. It was the hilarity of little things waking up to a high time.
“Who is the oldest of all?” Ceran demanded, for their laughter bothered him. “Who is the oldest and first?”
“I am the oldest, the ultimate grandmother,” one said gaily. “All the others are my children. Are you also of my children?”
“Of course,” said Ceran, and the small laughter of unbelief flittered out from the whole multitude of them.
“Then you must be the ultimate child, for you are like no other. If you be, then it is as funny at the end as it was in the beginning.”
“How was it in the beginning?” Ceran bleated. “You are the first. Do you know how you came to be?”
“Oh, yes, yes,” laughed the ultimate grandmother, and the hilarity of the small things became a real noise now.
“How did it begin?” demanded Ceran, and he was hopping and skipping about in his excitement.
“Oh, it was so funny a joke the way things began that you would not believe it,” chittered the grandmother. “A joke, a joke!”
“Tell me the joke, then. If a joke generated your species, then tell me that cosmic joke.”
“Tell yourself,” tinkled the grandmother. “You are a part of the joke if you are of my children. Oh, it is too funny to believe. How good to wake up and laugh and go to sleep again.”
Blazing green frustration! To be so close and to be balked by a giggling bee!
“Don’t go to sleep again! Tell me at once how it began!” Ceran shrilled, and he had the ultimate grandmother between thumb and finger.
“This is not Ritual,” the grandmother protested. “Ritual is that you guess what it was for three days, and we laugh and say, ‘No, no, no, it was something nine times as wild as that. Guess some more.’”
“I will not guess for three days! Tell me at once or I will crush you,” Ceran threatened in a quivering voice.
“I look at you, you look at me, I wonder if you will do it,” the ultimate grandmother said calmly.
Any of the tough men of the Expedition would have done it—would have crushed her, and then another and another and another of the creatures till the secret was told. If Ceran had taken on a tough personality and a tough name he’d have done it. If he’d been Gutboy Barrelhouse he’d have done it without a qualm. But Ceran Swicegood couldn’t do it.
“Tell me,” he pleaded in agony. “All my life I’ve tried to find out how it began, how anything began. And you know!”
“We know. Oh, it was so funny how it began. So joke! So fool, so clown, so grotesque thing! Nobody could guess, nobody could believe.”
“Tell me! Tell me!” Ceran was ashen and hysterical.
“No, no, you are no child of mine,” chortled the ultimate grandmother. “Is too joke a joke to tell a stranger. We could not insult a stranger to tell so funny, so unbelieve. Strangers can die. Shall I have it on conscience that a stranger died laughing?”
“Tell me! Insult me! Let me die laughing!” But Ceran nearly died crying from the frustration that ate him up as a million bee-sized things laughed and hooted and giggled:
“Oh, it was so funny the way it began!”
And they laughed. And laughed. And went on laughing … until Ceran Swicegood wept and laughed together, and crept away, and returned to the ship still laughing. On his next voyage he changed his name to Blaze Bolt and ruled for ninety-seven days as king of a sweet sea island in M-81, but that is another and much more unpleasant story.
Afterword by Andy Duncan
I first encountered “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” in The Norton Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery with Karen Joy Fowler, an anthology that turned out to be important to my fiction-writing career. It was published in fall 1993, during my first year in the graduate creative-writing program at North Carolina State University. I don’t think I bought a copy immediately, but in January 1994 I had my first workshop with Nebula Award winner John Kessel, who peered at my manuscript and peered at me and peered at my manuscript again and
said, “There’s a long, rich history of this sort of thing, and you’re part of it whether you know it or not.”
From that point Kessel was my sensei, and on his recommendation I snapped up a copy of the Norton—a box of marvels that tells a novice SF writer, “You can do anything you want, as long as it’s strange.” When I flew to the Clarion West Writers Workshop that summer, also on Kessel’s recommendation, the Norton was one of the two inspirational hardcovers in my luggage. (The other was Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! for which I never will be asked to write an introduction.)
Of all the stories in the Norton that spoke directly to me, “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” may have spoken the loudest. In her Norton essay, Le Guin discusses science fiction’s tendency to literalize metaphors, and Lafferty’s story precisely literalizes one of the foundational metaphors of my upbringing in rural South Carolina, where I was taught to venerate a long chain of ancestors growing ever smaller as they receded into the distance. Their secrets were closely guarded, but as I stumbled through the late twentieth century, those generations were often audible in the background, like peepers in the spring; I was pretty sure they were laughing. Moreover, all my important ancestors, the conveyors of culture and especially language, seemed to be women. Lafferty’s unforgettable “living dolls” of the planet Proavitus (Latin for “ancestral,” I’m told) embody the famous Faulkner line from Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Rereading Lafferty’s story now, I wonder about the fate of the Proavitoi. What happens to them in the space between the story’s last two sentences? “With the pharmacopoeia that one could pick up here, a man need never die,” says Manbreaker Crag, who envisions his team becoming “the patent medicine kings of the universe.” Will these “slight people” survive Manbreaker’s unstranding of their organic chemistry? Consider that Lafferty was a lifelong resident of Oklahoma—a state wrested from the natives by any number of Manbreaker Crags—and many of his writings ponder the exploitation of the indigenous peoples of North America; along with language itself, it is the unavoidable theme of his great novel, Okla Hannali.
I believe Lafferty knows exactly what happens to the Proavitoi, but spares us at the end by diverting our attention to “another and much more unpleasant story.” As the ultimate grandmother might have said, was too joke a joke to tell a stranger, perhaps; Lafferty could not insult a stranger to tell so funny, so unbelieve.
Land of the Great Horses
Introduction by Harlan Ellison™
Look out your window. What do you see? The gang fight on the corner, with the teenie-boppers using churchkeys on each other’s faces; the scissors grinder with his multicolored cart and tinkling bells; a pudgy woman in a print dress too short for her fat legs, hoeing her lawn; a three-alarm fire with children trapped on the fifth story; a mad dog attached to the leg of a peddler of Seventh Day Adventist literature; an impending race riot with a representative of RAM on a sound truck. Any or all? It takes no special powers of observation to catalog the unclassifiable. But now look again. What do you see? What you usually see? An empty street. Now catalog:
Curbstones, without which cars would run up onto front lawns. Mailboxes, without which touch with the world would be diminished. Telephone poles and wires, without which communication would screech to a halt. Gutters, sewers, and manholes, without which you would be flooded when it rains. Blacktop, without which the car you own wouldn’t last a month on the crushed rock. The breeze, without which, well, a day is diminished. What are these things? They are the obvious. So obvious they become invisible. How many water hydrants and mailboxes did you pass today? None? Hardly. You passed dozens, but you did not see them. They are the incredibly valuable, absolutely necessary, totally ignored staples of a well-run community.
Speculative fiction is a small community. It has its obvious flashy residents. Knight, Sheckley, Sturgeon, Bradbury, Clarke, Vonnegut. We see them and take note of them, and know what they’re about. But the community would not run one thousandth as well as it does without the quiet writers, the ones who turn out story after story, not hack work but really excellent stories, time after time. The kind you settle back and think about, after finishing them, saying, “That was a good story.” And you promptly forget who wrote it. Perhaps later you recall the story. “Oh yeah, remember that one about…” and then you wrinkle down and say, “What the hell was the name of the guy who wrote it? He’s done a bunch of things, you know, pretty fair writer…”
The problem is a matter of cumulativeness. Each story is an excellence, standing alone. But somehow it never makes a totality, an image of a writer, a career in perspective. This is the sad but obvious thing about R. A. Lafferty’s place in speculative fiction.
He is a man of substantiality, whose writing is top-flight. Not merely competent fiction, but genuinely exemplary fiction. He has been writing for—how many years? More than six, but less than fifteen? Something like that. Yet he is seldom mentioned when fans gather to discuss The Writers. Even though he has been anthologized many times, been included in Judith Merril’s Year’s Best SF on several occasions, and the Carr-Wollheim World’s Best anthology twice, and appeared in almost all the science fiction magazines. He is the invisible man. It will be rectified here. Raphael Aloysius Lafferty will emerge, will speak, will declare himself, and then you will read another extra-brilliant story by him. And dammit, this time remember!
Lafferty speaking: “I am, not necessarily in this order, fifty-one years old, a bachelor, an electrical engineer, a fat man.
“Born in Iowa, came to Oklahoma when I was four years old, and except for four years in the army have been here all my life. Also, one year on a little civil service job in Washington, D.C. The only college I’ve ever attended was a couple of years in the University of Tulsa’s night school division long ago, mostly math and German. I’ve spent close to thirty years working for electrical jobbers, mostly as buyer and price-quotation man. During WWII I was stationed in Texas, North Carolina, Florida, California, Australia, New Guinea, Morotai (Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia), and the Philippines. I was a good staff sergeant, and at one time I could talk pretty fair pasar Malay and Tagalog (of the Philippines).
“What does a man say about himself? Never the important things. I was a heavy drinker for a few years and gave it up about six years ago. This left a gap: when you give up the company of the more interesting drinkers, you give up something of the colorful and fantastic. So I substituted writing science fiction. Something I read in one of the writers’ magazines gave me the silly idea that science fiction would be easy to write. It isn’t, for me. I wasn’t raised on the stuff like most of the writers in this form seem to have been.
“My hobby is language. Any language. I’ve got at least a thousand dollars in self-teach grammars and readers and dictionaries and Lingua-phone and Cortinaphone courses. I’ve picked up a rough reading knowledge of all the languages of the Latin, German, and Slavic families, as well as Irish and Greek; but actually Spanish, French, and German are the only ones I read freely with respectable speed. I’m a Catholic of the out-of-season or conservative variety. As to politics, I am the only member of the American Centrist Party, whose tenets I will one day set out in an ironic-Utopia story. I’m a compulsive walker; turn me loose in a strange town and I’ll explore every corner of it on foot inside a week. I don’t think of myself as a very interesting fellow.”
This is the editor again, for a final comment. Lafferty is about as uninteresting as his stories. Which is to say, not at all. As entered for the prosecution’s case against R. A.’s contention that he’s a neb, the following story, one of my particular favorites in this book.
Note: The introduction above is reproduced from its original appearance in Dangerous Visions and is © 1967 The Kilimanjaro Corporation with the kind permission of the author.
Land of the Great Horses
“They came and took our country away from us,” the people had always said. But nobody under
stood them.
* * *
Two Englishmen, Richard Rockwell and Seruno Smith, were rolling in a terrain buggy over the Thar Desert. It was bleak, red country, more rock than sand. It looked as though the top had been stripped off it and the naked underland left uncovered.
They heard thunder and it puzzled them. They looked at each other, the blond Rockwell and the dark Smith. It never thundered in the whole country between New Delhi and Bahawalpur. What would this rainless north India desert have to thunder with?
“Let’s ride the ridges here,” Rockwell told Smith, and he sent the vehicle into a climb. “It never rains here, but once before I was caught in a draw in a country where it never rained. I nearly drowned.”
It thundered again, heavy and rolling, as though to tell them that they were hearing right.
“This draw is named Kuti Tavdavi—Little River,” Smith said darkly. “I wonder why.”
Then he jerked back as though startled at himself.
“Rockwell, why did I say that? I never saw this draw before. How did a name like that pop into my mind? But it’s the low draw that would be a little river if it ever rained in this country. This land can’t have significant rain. There’s no high place to tip whatever moisture goes over.”
“I wonder about that every time I come,” said Rockwell, and raised his hand toward the shimmering heights—the Land of the Great Horses, the famous mirage. “If it were really there it would tip the moisture. It would make a lush savanna of all this.”
They were mineral explorers doing ground minutiae on promising portions of an aerial survey. The trouble with the Thar was that it had everything—lead, zinc, antimony, copper, tin, bauxite—in barely submarginal amounts. Nowhere would the Thar pay off, but everywhere it would almost pay.
Now it was lightning about the heights of the mirage, and they had never seen that before. It had clouded and lowered. It was thundering in rolling waves, and there was no mirage of sound.
The Best of R. A. Lafferty Page 12
