“Well then, to the text, or should I say the pictography? ‘You fear the earth, you fear rough ground and rocks, you fear moister earth and rotting flesh, you fear the flesh itself, all flesh is rotting flesh. If you love not rotting flesh, you love not at all. You believe the bridge hanging in the sky, the bridge hung by tendrils and woody vines that diminish as they go up and up till they are no thicker than hairs. There is no sky-bridge, you cannot go up on it. Did you believe that the roots of love grow upside down? They come out of deep earth that is old flesh and brains and hearts and entrails, that is old buffalo bowels and snakes’ pizzles, that is black blood and rot and moaning underground. This is old and worn-out and bloody Time, and the roots of love grow out of its gore.’”
“You seem to give remarkably detailed translations of the simple spiral pictures, Steinleser, but I begin to get in the mood of it,” Terrence said.
“Ah, perhaps I cheat a little,” said Steinleser.
“You lie a lot,” Magdalen challenged.
“No I do not. There is some basis for every phrase I’ve used. It goes on: ‘I own twenty-two trade rifles. I own ponies. I own Mexico silver, eight-bit pieces. I am rich in all ways. I give all to you. I cry out with big voice like a bear full of mad-weed, like a bullfrog in love, like a stallion rearing against a puma. It is the earth that calls you. I am the earth, woolier than wolves and rougher than rocks. I am the bog earth that sucks you in. You cannot give, you cannot like, you cannot love, you think there is something else, you think there is a sky-bridge you may loiter on without crashing down. I am bristled-boar earth, there is no other. You will come to me in the morning. You will come to me easy and with grace. Or you will come to me reluctant and you be shattered in every bone and member of you. You be broken by our encounter. You be shattered as by a lightning bolt striking up from the earth. I am the red calf which is in the writings. I am the rotting red earth. Live in the morning or die in the morning, but remember that love in death is better than no love at all.’”
“Oh brother! Nobody gets that stuff from such kid pictures, Steinleser,” Robert Derby moaned.
“Ah well, that’s the end of the spiral picture. And a Kiowa spiral pictograph ends with either an in-sweep or an out-sweep line. This ends with an out-sweep, which means—”
“‘Continued on next rock,’ that’s what it means,” Terrence cried roughly.
“You won’t find the next rocks,” Magdalen said. “They’re hidden, and most of the time they’re not there yet, but they will go on and on. But for all that, you’ll read it in the rocks tomorrow morning. I want it to be over with. Oh, I don’t know what I want!”
“I believe I know what you want tonight, Magdalen,” Robert Derby said.
But he didn’t.
The talk trailed off, the fire burned down, they went to their sleeping sacks.
Then it was long jagged night, and the morning of the fourth day. But wait! In Nahuat-Tanoan legend, the world ends on the fourth morning. All the lives we lived or thought we lived had been but dreams of third night. The loin cloth that the sun wore on the fourth day’s journey was not so valuable as one has made out. It was worn for no more than an hour or so.
And, in fact, there was something terminal about fourth morning. Anteros had disappeared. Magdalen had disappeared. The chimney rock looked greatly diminished in its bulk (something had gone out of it) and much crazier in its broken height. The sun had come up a garish gray-orange color through fog. The signature-glyph of the first stone dominated the ambient. It was as if something were coming down from the chimney, a horrifying smoke; but it was only noisome morning fog.
No it wasn’t. There was something else coming down from the chimney, or from the hidden sky: pebbles, stones, indescribable bits of foul oozings, the less fastidious pieces of sky; a light, nightmare rain had begun to fall there; the chimney was apparently beginning to crumble.
“It’s the damnedest thing I ever heard about,” Robert Derby growled. “Do you think that Magdalen really went off with Anteros?” Derby was bitter and fumatory this morning and his face was badly clawed.
“Who is Magdalen? Who is Anteros?” Ethyl Burdock risked.
* * *
Terrence Burdock was hooting from high on the mound. “All come up,” he called. “Here is a find that will make it all worthwhile. We’ll have to photo and sketch and measure and record and witness. It’s the finest basalt head I’ve ever seen, man-sized, and I suspect that there’s a man-sized body attached to it. We’ll soon clean it and clear it. Gah! What a weird fellow he was!” But Howard Steinleser was studying a brightly colored something that he held in his two hands.
“What is it, Howard? What are you doing?” Derby demanded.
“Ah, I believe this is the next stone in the sequence. The writing is alphabetical but deformed—there is an element missing. I believe it is in modern English, and I will solve the deformity and see it true in a minute. The text of it seems to be—”
Rocks and stones were coming down from the chimney, and fog, amnesic and wit-stealing fog.
“Steinleser, are you all right?” Robert Derby asked with compassion. “That isn’t a stone that you hold in your hand.”
“It isn’t a stone? I thought it was. What is it then?”
“It is the fruit of the Osage orange tree, an American moraceous. It isn’t a stone, Howard.” And the thing was a tough, woody, wrinkled mock-orange, as big as a small melon.
“You have to admit that the wrinkles look a little bit like writing, Robert.”
“Yes, they look a little like writing, Howard. Let us go up where Terrence is bawling for us. You’ve read too many stones. And it isn’t safe here.”
“Why go up, Robert? The other thing is coming down.”
It was the bristled-boar earth reaching up with a rumble. It was a lightning bolt struck upward out of the earth, and it got its prey. There was explosion and roar. The dark capping rock was jerked from the top of the chimney and slammed with terrible force to the earth, shattering with a great shock. And something else that had been on that capping rock. And the whole chimney collapsed about them.
She was broken by the encounter. She was shattered in every bone and member of her. And she was dead.
“Who—Who is she?” Howard Steinleser stuttered.
“Oh God! Magdalen, of course!” Robert Derby cried.
“I remember her a little bit. Didn’t understand her. She put out like an evoking moth but she wouldn’t be had. Near clawed the face off me the other night when I misunderstood the signals. She believed there was a sky-bridge. It’s in a lot of the mythologies. But there isn’t one, you know. Oh well.”
“The girl is dead! Damnation! What are you doing grubbing in those stones?”
“Maybe she isn’t dead in them yet, Robert. I’m going to read what’s here before something happens to them. This capping rock that fell and broke, it’s impossible, of course. It’s a stratum that hasn’t been laid down yet. I always did want to read the future and I may never get another chance.”
“You fool! The girl’s dead! Does nobody care? Terrence, stop bellowing about your find. Come down. The girl’s dead.”
“Come up, Robert and Howard,” Terrence insisted. “Leave that broken stuff down there. It’s worthless. But nobody ever saw anything like this.”
“Do come up, men,” Ethyl sang. “Oh, it’s a wonderful piece! I never saw anything like it in my life.”
* * *
“Ethyl, is the whole morning mad?” Robert Derby demanded as he came up to her. “She’s dead. Don’t you really remember her? Don’t you remember Magdalen?”
“I’m not sure. Is she the girl down there? Isn’t she the same girl who’s been hanging around here a couple of days? She shouldn’t have been playing on that high rock. I’m sorry she’s dead. But just look what we’re uncovering here!”
“Terrence. Don’t you remember Magdalen?”
“The girl down there? She’s a little bit like the girl that
clawed the hell out of me the other night. Next time someone goes to town they might mention to the sheriff that there’s a dead girl here. Robert, did you ever see a face like this one? And it digs away to reveal the shoulders. I believe there’s a whole man-sized figure here. Wonderful, wonderful!”
“Terrence, you’re off your head. Well, do you remember Anteros?”
“Certainly, the twin of Eros, but nobody ever made much of the symbol of unsuccessful love. Thunder! That’s the name for him! It fits him perfectly. We’ll call him Anteros.”
Well, it was Anteros, lifelike in basalt stone. His face was contorted. He was sobbing soundlessly and frozenly and his shoulders were hunched with emotion. The carving was fascinating in its miserable passion, his stony love unrequited. Perhaps he was more impressive now than he would be when he was cleaned. He was earth, he was earth itself. Whatever period the carving belonged to, it was outstanding in its power.
“The live Anteros, Terrence. Don’t you remember our digging man, Anteros Manypenny?”
“Sure. He didn’t show up for work this morning, did he? Tell him he’s fired.”
“Magdalen is dead! She was one of us! Dammit, she was the main one of us!” Robert Derby cried. Terrence and Ethyl Burdock were earless to his outburst. They were busy uncovering the rest of the carving.
And down below, Howard Steinleser was studying dark broken rocks before they would disappear, studying a stratum that hadn’t been laid down yet, reading a foggy future.
How I Wrote “Continued on Next Rock”
An Afterword by R. A. Lafferty
To ask how any story or tune or statue comes about is to ask “How is it done?”; “What does it take?” Have you heard of the Dutch boy in this country who was going to butcher school, whose schoolmates tried to mix him up? The heart, they told him, that is named the liver; the bladder is called the stomach; the tongue is the coccyx; the loin is known as the chuck; the brisket is the flank; the lungs are named the trotters; and so on. This Dutch kid was very smart, however; he figured out that they were having him, and he figured out the right names for everything, or for almost everything. And he passed his final examination with top grades both in meat-cutting and nomenclature. “How were you able to do it,” the instructor asked, “with so many things going against you?” “I’ve got it up there,” the Dutch kid said, and he tapped his head. “Kidneys.”
It isn’t exactly that one should use kidneys for brains, but the sense of grotesque juxtaposition does come in handy. You can’t be sure you are looking at something from the right angle till you have looked at it from every angle. How did I write “Continued on Next Rock” then? Upside down and backward, of course. I started with a simple, but I believe novel, idea that had to do with time. Then I involuted the idea of time (making all things contemporary or at least repeating), and I turned the systems of values backward, trying to make the repulsive things appear poetic (“the nobility of badgers, the serenity of toads”) and trying to set anti-love up as comparable to love (the flattest thing you can imagine has to have at least two sides; it can have many more). I let the characters that had been generated by this action work out their own way then. After this, I subtracted the original simple but novel idea from the story, and finished things up. (The original idea was a catalyst which could be recovered practically unchanged at the end of the reaction.)
The beginning idea, which I give to anyone who wants it, was simply to have archeologists digging upward through certain strata, for rather vague topographic reasons, come to deposits of the fairly recent past, or the very recent past, of the near future (a discarded license plate from fifteen years in the future, for instance), then the more distant future, then to realize that the strata still remaining above them had to contain the remnants of at least a hundred thousand years of unfaked future.
So much for the genesis of one particular short story. Each one is different but each one is anomalous; and there is a reason for that. No normal or reasonable or balanced or well-adjusted person is going to attempt the making of a story or a tune or a statue or a poem; he’ll have no need for such abnormal activity. A person has to be somehow deficient or lacking in person or personality or he will not attempt these things. He must be very deficient or lacking if he will succeed at all in them. Every expression in art or pseudo-art is a crutch that a crippled person makes and donates to the healthy world for its use (the healthy world having only the vaguest idea that it even needs crutches).
There are, I know, many apparent glaring exceptions to the rule that only persons who are deficient or lacking in person or personality will contribute any creative content. Believe me, these exceptions are only apparent. There is something badly unbalanced in every one of them.
Carry it one step further, though. One of the legends, unwritten from the beginning and maybe unwritten forever, is about a Quest for the Perfect Thing. But it is really the quest for the normal thing. Can you find, anywhere in the world, behind or before or present, even one person who is really normal and reasonable and balanced and well-adjusted? This is the Perfect Thing, if it or he or she is ever found, and if ever found there will be no further need of any art or attempted art, good or bad.
Enough of such stuff, end of article, if this is an article. I am both facetious and serious in every written word here.
Sky
Introduction by Gwenda Bond
Reading an R. A. Lafferty story is always a bit of a trippy experience—a journey into the odder parts of experience, his perceptively askew perspective a looking glass all its own. But “Sky” is about an actual trip (or a few of them), with all the inspired psychedelia and questionable reality we expect—and desire—from a Lafferty story. The title’s Sky isn’t the airy horizon above us. No, it’s the unusual substance sold by the furry-handed “Sky-Seller” who can’t survive in sunlight (or thinks he can’t anyway) to ostensible main character Welkin Alauda.
A 1972 Hugo nominee, “Sky” sits at the intersection of the absurd and the transcendental. There are deadpan assurances of fantastical dangers: “You will burn,” Welkin told him. “Nobody burns so as when sunning himself on a cloud.” There is the observational commentary of some unseen but nonetheless present narrator on both the characters and the grim world that surrounds them; of Welkin we’re told “it was said that her bones were hollow and filled with air.” The Sky-Diving friends of Welkin discuss time and the universe, existence and falls through it, in perfect rose-colored stoner parlance. We sense the end of a journey coming as we read, and we know it will be quite a crash. Welkin wanders through caverns filled with Amanita mushroom varieties, deadly and hallucinogenic, gathered by not just the Sky-Seller but moles.
The results that follow this final trip linger with the reader. So enjoy this delightful trance of a tale, but, always remember, Sky has its dangers.
Sky
The Sky-Seller was Mr. Furtive himself, fox-muzzled, ferret-eyed, slithering along like a snake, and living under the Rocks. The Rocks had not been a grand place for a long time. It had been built in the grand style on a mephitic plot of earth (to transform it), but the mephitic earth had won out. The apartments of the Rocks had lost their sparkle as they had been divided again and again, and now they were shoddy. The Rocks had weathered. Its once pastel hues were now dull grays and browns.
The five underground levels had been parking places for motor vehicles when those were still common, but now these depths were turned into warrens and hovels. The Sky-Seller lurked and lived in the lowest and smallest and meanest of them all.
He came out only at night. Daylight would have killed him; he knew that. He sold out of the darkest shadows of the night. He had only a few (though oddly select) clients, and nobody knew who his supplier was. He said that he had no supplier, that he gathered and made the stuff himself.
Welkin Alauda, a full-bodied but light-moving girl (it was said that her bones were hollow and filled with air), came to the Sky-Seller just before first light, just when he ha
d become highly nervous but had not yet bolted to his underground.
“A sack of Sky from the nervous mouse. Jump, or the sun will gobble your house!” Welkin sang-song, and she was already higher than most skies.
“Hurry, hurry!” the Sky-Seller begged, thrusting the sack to her while his black eyes trembled and glittered (if real light should ever reflect into them he’d go blind).
Welkin took the sack of Sky, and scrambled money notes into his hands which had furred palms. (Really? Yes, really.)
“World be flat and the Air be round, wherever the Sky grows underground,” Welkin intoned, taking the sack of Sky and soaring along with a light scamper of feet (she hadn’t much weight, her bones were hollow). And the Sky-Seller darted headfirst down a black well-shaft thing to his depths.
* * *
Four of them went Sky-Diving that morning, Welkin herself, Karl Vlieger, Icarus Riley, Joseph Alzarsi; and the pilot was—(no, not who you think, he had already threatened to turn them all in; they’d use that pilot no more)—the pilot was Ronald Kolibri in his little crop-dusting plane.
But a crop-duster will not go up to the frosty heights they liked to take off from. Yes it will—if everybody is on Sky. But it isn’t pressurized, and it doesn’t carry oxygen. That doesn’t matter, not if everybody is on Sky, not if the plane is on Sky too.
Welkin took Sky with Mountain Whizz, a carbonated drink. Karl stuffed it into his lip like snuff. Icarus Riley rolled it and smoked it. Joseph Alzarsi needled it, mixed with drinking alcohol, into his main vein. The pilot, Ronny, tongued and chewed it like sugar dust. The plane named Shrike took it through the manifold.
Fifty thousand feet—you can’t go that high in a crop-duster. Thirty below zero—ah, that isn’t cold! Air too thin to breathe at all—with Sky, who needs such included things as air?
The Best of R. A. Lafferty Page 23
