The Best of R. A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  “There is either a very large and very busy bird up there or this is rain,” Rockwell said.

  And it had begun to rain, softly but steadily. It was pleasant as they chukkered along in the vehicle through the afternoon. Rain in the desert is always like a bonus.

  Smith broke into a happy song in one of the northwest India tongues, a tune with a ribald swing to it, though Rockwell didn’t understand the words. It was full of double rhymes and vowel-packed words such as a child might make up.

  “How the devil do you know the tongues so well?” Rockwell asked. “I find them difficult, and I have a good linguistic background.”

  “I didn’t have to learn them,” Smith said, “I just had to remember them. They all cluster around the boro jib itself.”

  “Around the what? How many of the languages do you know?”

  “All of them. The Seven Sisters, they’re called: Punjabi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Marathi, Sindhi, Hindi.”

  “Your Seven Sisters only number six,” Rockwell jibed.

  “There’s a saying that the seventh sister ran off with a horse trader,” Smith said. “But that seventh lass is still encountered here and there around the world.”

  Often they stopped to survey on foot. The very color of the new rivulets was significant to the mineral men, and this was the first time they had ever seen water flow in that country. They continued on fitfully and slowly, and ate up a few muddy miles.

  Rockwell gasped once and nearly fell off the vehicle. He had seen a total stranger riding beside him, and it shook him.

  Then he saw that it was Smith as he had always been, and he was dumbfounded by the illusion. And, soon, by something else.

  “Something is very wrong here,” Rockwell said.

  “Something is very right here,” Smith answered him, and then broke into another song in an Indian tongue.

  “We’re lost,” Rockwell worried out loud. “We can’t see any distance for the rain, but there shouldn’t be rising ground here. It isn’t mapped.”

  “Of course it is,” Smith sang. “It’s the Jalo Char.”

  “The what? Where did you get a name like that? The map’s a blank here, and the country should be.”

  “Then the map is defective. Man, it’s the sweetest valley in the world! It will lead us all the way up. How could the map forget it? How could we all forget it for so long?”

  “Smith! What’s wrong? You’re pie-eyed.”

  “Everything’s right, I tell you. I was reborn just a minute ago. It’s a coming home.”

  “Smith! We’re riding through green grass.”

  “I love it. I could crop it like a horse.”

  “That cliff, Smith! It shouldn’t be that close! It’s part of the mir—”

  “Why, sir, that is Lolo Trusul.”

  “But it’s not real! It’s not on any topography map!”

  “Map, sir? I’m a poor kalo man who wouldn’t know about things like that.”

  “Smith! You’re a qualified cartographer!”

  “Does seem that I followed a trade with a name like that. But the cliff is real enough. I climbed it in my boyhood—in my other boyhood. And that yonder, sir, is Drapengoro Rez—the Grassy Mountain. And the high plateau ahead of us which we begin to climb is Diz Boro Grai—the Land of the Great Horses.”

  Rockwell stopped the terrain buggy and leaped off. Smith followed him in a happy daze.

  “Smith, you’re wide-eyed crazy!” Rockwell gasped. “And what am I? We’re terribly lost somehow. Smith, look at the log chart and the bearings recorder!”

  “Log chart, sir? I’m a poor kalo man who wouldn’t know—”

  “Damn you, Smith, you made these instruments. If they’re correct we’re seven hundred feet too high and have been climbing for ten miles into a highland that’s supposed to be part of a mirage. These cliffs can’t be here. We can’t be here. Smith!”

  But Seruno Smith had ambled off like a crazy man.

  “Smith, where are you trotting off to? Can’t you hear me?”

  “You call to me, sir?” asked Smith. “And by such a name?”

  “Are the two of us as crazy as the country?” Rockwell moaned. “I’ve worked with you for three years. Isn’t your name Smith?”

  “Why, yes, sir, I guess it might be englished as Horse-Smith or Black-Smith. But my name is Pettalangro and I’m going home.”

  And the man who had been Smith started on foot up to the Land of the Great Horses.

  “Smith, I’m getting on the buggy and I’m going back,” Rockwell shouted. “I’m scared liverless of this country that changes. When a mirage turns solid it’s time to quit. Come along now! We’ll be back in Bikaner by tomorrow morning. There’s a doctor there, and a whiskey bar. We need one of them.”

  “Thank you, sir, but I must go up to my home,” Smith sang out. “It was kind of you to give me a ride along the way.”

  “I’m leaving you, Smith. One crazy man is better than two.”

  “Ashava, Sarishan,” Smith called a parting.

  “Smith, unriddle me one last thing,” Rockwell called, trying to find a piece of sanity to hold to. “What is the name of the seventh sister?”

  “Deep Romany,” Smith sang, and he was gone up into the high plateau that had always been a mirage.

  * * *

  In an upper room on Olive Street in St. Louis, Missouri, a half-and-half couple were talking half-and-half.

  “The rez has riser’d,” the man said. “I can sung it like brishindo. Let’s jal.”

  “All right,” the wife said, “if you’re awa.”

  “Hell, I bet I can riker plenty bano on the beda we got here. I’ll have kakko come kinna it aro.”

  “With a little bachi we can be jal’d by areat,” said the wife.

  “Nashiva, woman, nashiva!”

  “All right,” the wife said, and she began to pack their suitcases.

  * * *

  In Camargo in the Chihuahua State of Mexico, a shade-tree mechanic sold his business for a hundred pesos and told his wife to pack up—they were leaving.

  “To leave now when business is so good?” she asked.

  “I only got one car to fix and I can’t fix that,” the man said.

  “But if you keep it long enough, he will pay you to put it together again even if it isn’t fixed. That’s what he did last time. And you’ve a horse to shoe.”

  “I’m afraid of that horse. It has come back, though. Let’s go.”

  “Are you sure we will be able to find it?”

  “Of course I’m not sure. We will go in our wagon and our sick horse will pull it.”

  “Why will we go in the wagon, when we have a car, of sorts?”

  “I don’t know why. But we will go in the wagon, and we will nail the old giant horseshoe up on the lintel board.”

  * * *

  A carny in Nebraska lifted his head and smelled the air.

  “It’s come back,” he said. “I always knew we’d know. Any other Romanies here?”

  “I got a little rart in me,” said one of his fellows. “This narvelengero dives is only a two-bit carnival anyhow. We’ll tell the boss to shove it up his chev and we’ll be gone.”

  * * *

  In Tulsa, a used-car dealer named Gypsy Red announced the hottest sale on the row:

  “Everything for nothing! I’m leaving. Pick up the papers and drive them off. Nine new heaps and thirty good ones. All free.”

  “You think we’re crazy?” the people asked. “There’s a catch.”

  Red put the papers for all the cars on the ground and put a brick on top of them. He got in the worst car on the lot and drove it off forever.

  “All free,” he sang out as he drove off. “Pick up the papers and drive the cars away.”

  They’re still there. You think people are crazy to fall for something like that that probably has a catch to it?

  * * *

  In Galveston a barmaid named Margaret was asking merchant seamen how best to get passage
to Karachi.

  “Why Karachi?” one of them asked her.

  “I thought it would be the nearest big port,” she said. “It’s come back, you know.”

  “I kind of felt this morning it had come back,” he said. “I’m a chal myself. Sure, we’ll find something going that way.”

  * * *

  In thousands of places fawney-men and dukkerin-women, kakki-baskros and hegedusies, clowns and commission men, Counts of Condom and Dukes of Little Egypt parvel’d in their chips and got ready to roll.

  Men and families made sudden decisions in every country. Athinganoi gathered in the hills above Salonika in Greece and were joined by brothers from Serbia and Albania and the Rhodope Hills of Bulgaria. Zingari of north Italy gathered around Pavia and began to roll toward Genoa to take ship. Boêmios of Portugal came down to Porto and Lisbon. Gitanos of Andalusia and all southern Spain came to Sanlúcar and Málaga. Zigeuner from Thuringia and Hanover thronged to Hamburg to find ocean passage. Gioboga and their mixed-blood Shelta cousins from every cnoc and coill of Ireland found boats at Dublin and Limerick and Bantry.

  From deeper Europe, Tsigani began to travel overland eastward. The people were going from two hundred ports of every continent and over a thousand highroads—many of them long forgotten.

  Balauros, Kalo, Manusch, Melelo, Tsigani, Moro, Romani, Flamenco, Sinto, Cicara, the many-named people was traveling in its thousands. The Romani Rai was moving.

  Two million Gypsies of the world were going home.

  * * *

  At the institute, Gregory Smirnov was talking to his friends and associates.

  “You remember the thesis I presented several years ago,” he said, “that, a little over a thousand years ago, Outer Visitors came down to Earth and took a sliver of our Earth away with them. All of you found the proposition comical, but I arrived at my conclusion by isostatic and eustatic analysis carried out minutely. There is no doubt that it happened.”

  “One of our slivers is missing,” said Aloysius Shiplap. “You guessed the sliver taken at about ten thousand square miles in area and no more than a mile thick at its greatest. You said you thought they wanted to run this sliver from our Earth through their laboratories as a sample. Do you have something new on our missing sliver?”

  “I’m closing the inquiry,” Gregory said. “They’ve brought it back.”

  It was simple really, jekvasteskero, Gypsy-simple. It is the gadjo, the non-Gypsies of the world, who give complicated answers to simple things.

  “They came and took our country away from us,” the Gypsies had always said, and that is what had happened.

  The Outer Visitors had run a slip under it, rocked it gently to rid it of nervous fauna, and then taken it away for study. For a marker, they left an immaterial simulacrum of that high country as we ourselves sometimes set name or picture tags to show where an object will be set later. This simulacrum was often seen by humans as a mirage.

  The Outer Visitors also set simulacra in the minds of the superior fauna that fled from the moving land. This would be a homing instinct, inhibiting permanent settlement anywhere until the time should come for the resettlement; entwined with this instinct were certain premonitions, fortune-showings, and understandings.

  Now the Visitors brought the slice of land back, and its old fauna homed in on it.

  “What will the—ah—patronizing smile on my part—Outer Visitors do now, Gregory?” Aloysius Shiplap asked back at the Institute.

  “Why, take another sliver of our Earth to study, I suppose, Aloysius,” Gregory Smirnov said.

  * * *

  Low-intensity earthquakes rocked the Los Angeles area for three days. The entire area was evacuated of people. Then there was a great whistle blast from the sky as if to say, “All ashore that’s going ashore.”

  Then the surface to some little depth and all its superstructure was taken away. It was gone. And then it was quickly forgotten.

  * * *

  From the Twenty-second Century Comprehensive Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, page 389:

  * * *

  ANGELENOS. (See also Automobile Gypsies and Prune Pickers.) A mixed ethnic group of unknown origin, much given to wandering in automobiles. It is predicted that they will be the last users of this vehicle, and several archaic chrome-burdened models are still produced for their market. These people are not beggars; many of them are of superior intelligence. They often set up in business, usually as real estate dealers, gamblers, confidence men, managers of mail-order diploma mills, and promoters of one sort or other. They seldom remain long in one location.

  Their pastimes are curious. They drive for hours and days on old and seldom-used cloverleafs and freeways. It has been said that a majority of the Angelenos are narcotics users, but Harold Freelove (who lived for some months as an Angeleno) has proved this false. What they inhale at their frolics (smog-crocks) is a black smoke of carbon and petroleum waste laced with monoxide. Its purpose is not clear.

  The religion of the Angelenos is a mixture of old cults with a very strong eschatological element. The Paradise Motif is represented by reference to a mystic “Sunset Boulevard.” The language of the Angelenos is a colorful and racy argot. Their account of their origin is vague:

  “They came and took our dizz away from us,” they say.

  Afterword by Gregory Frost

  In 1967 Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions was first published by Doubleday. I, in high school in Iowa and already devouring the likes of Fredric Brown, Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, Zelazny, and Dick, might as well have been the target Harlan put in the crosshairs. In retrospect we peer through many great annual Best of anthologies—edited by Gardner Dozois, David Hartwell, Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling, Kelly Link & Gavin Grant, Terry Carr, etc.—and we forget how monumental was Harlan’s lashing together of what he termed “Thirty-two Soothsayers.” I’m near Philadelphia now, and so I think of Harlan as the Albert Barnes of science fiction. Barnes’ collection of impressionists is an extraordinary thing; and to be fair there are a few disappointing works hanging among the Matisses, Van Goghs, Gaunguins, Picassos, and Renoirs—lesser paintings by artists who faded into obscurity, though obviously Barnes thought he saw something in them. Dangerous Visions really is the Barnes collection of science fiction. A few “what happened to…” pieces, but otherwise breathtaking.

  Dangerous Visions proved to be my gateway into the worlds of Raphael Aloysius Lafferty through the story Harlan selected, called “Land of the Great Horses.” I did not know at the time how extraordinary that would prove to be, just as I didn’t know that Lafferty himself was a fellow Iowan (born in the southwestern town of Neola, Iowa—if anyone from Neola is reading this, you need to put up at least a plaque for Heaven’s sake!)

  As Lafferty stories go, this one is short and seemingly simple, but oh, by the end it has shape-shifted on you more than once. It can be read, in a way, as a companion story to another tale of his called “Narrow Valley,” also concerned with unreliable topography.

  It is also exemplary of the way Lafferty entered stories sidewise, producing a text that dives straight into a situation already in motion and seems to be about one thing, yet turns out to be about something else. And then when you think you have its measure, the author adds a punch line you never saw coming.

  Here, we begin with a sort of dictum: “They came and took our country away from us,” the people had always said. But nobody understood them.

  What country and what people, we must read to discover. We are then introduced to two Englishmen, Richard Rockwell and Seruno Smith, driving across the Thar Desert, which is to say the Great Desert of India. They approach and behold a famous mirage called the Land of the Great Horses, or Diz Boro Grai. It’s what they’ve come to see. Things immediately start to go wrong. In this extremely barren desert, they hear the sound of thunder from an approaching storm, and then find their mirage shot with lightning. The improbable climatic event seems to transform Seruno Smith: he suddenly and inexplicably knows the na
mes of places (a draw called Kuti Tavdavi, Little River); he bursts into song in tongues he does not speak. When asked how by Rockwell, he explains that he has only to remember these tongues to sing, and that “They all cluster around the boro jib itself.” Smith seems to be leading this “great life” out of nowhere. He confesses to Rockwell that he speaks all languages in play—the so-called Seven Sisters, but Smith names only six. Rockwell notices and finally requests the name of the missing language: Deep Romany. Rockwell tries to head back, but Smith refuses, and calls him “Sarishan,” or “English,” as if they are suddenly foreign to each other, and then begins to scale the heights that until moments ago were part of the mirage.

  The story shifts then to various small scenes of people speaking various dialects of Romani, Punjabi, Hindi—in each it’s clear that someone with Romany blood is feeling the pull of Diz Boro Grai. Some are Romani Rai, gypsy gentlemen; some are dukkerin-women, that is, fortune-tellers; some perhaps Athinganoi, considered to be the ancestral tribe of the Roma. And so it goes as various people with some percentage of gypsy blood pull up stakes and head “home” because “the rez has riser’d,” and it tugs at them, smells like rain, cannot be ignored. Home is the Land of Great Horses, which became a mirage for thousands of years but now is no longer.

  To reveal more would be to spoil the story for the reader. Suffice it to say that once you understand what is going on, Lafferty still has a coda to deliver—one that plays on the “Diz” of “Diz Boro Grai” and “dizz” in a newly coined dialect that refers in all probability to Disneyland.

  In “Narrow Valley,” where, Michael Swanwick tells me, Lafferty is having his little joke with the Pawnee language, here he effortlessly tosses off terms and phrases in various Romany dialects … all of which leads to a final, signature jape that can only exist because of his skill with those dialects.