The Best of R. A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Well, I’ll imagine a few ways that the little buggers could have done it, and I’ll test it somehow. I’ll ask them how they did it. If the tittering little obscenities have any intelligence at all, I’ll find a way to ask them.”

  The “tittering little obscenities,” the Thieving Bears, were not much like bears. They were more like large flying squirrels, and they did glide on the winds, apparently for sport. They were more like pack rats (the Neotoma cinerea of Earth) both in appearance and in their thieving ways, but larger. It was old John Chancel who had named the species “Ursus furtificus, the Thieving Bears.” Oh, the explorers had their introduction to the thieving of the little animals within five minutes of planet-landing. The creatures came into the ship itself and got into places that should have been impossible to them. They stole Selma’s candy and Dixie’s snuff. They stole (by drinking it on the spot) George Mahoon’s “He-Man Scent—Cinnamon,” thirteen bottles of it, but they did not drink any of the other scents. They went wild over mustard, emptying whole containers of it and then wheezing in delicious agony from the effect. Elton Fad tried to drive them away with heavy sticks. They fastened onto the sticks while he swung them and ate them right up to his hands. They were funny, but they could become infuriating. They stole six of Dixie Late-Lark’s French horror story novels.

  That wouldn’t be fatal to her. She had lots of them.

  “They’re going to sample them,” Dixie said. (She herself looked a little bit like one of those Thieving Bears.) “They’ll be the test. If they do read them and appreciate them, it’ll prove that they’re intelligent creatures and have better reading tastes than my crewmates. That will be a start in analyzing them, something to put into the electronic notebooks.”

  Could the Thieving Bears talk? That was not determined for sure within the first ten or even twenty minutes.

  “Say ‘Good morning,’ fuzzy head,” Selma rattled at one of the creatures.

  “Say good morning, fuzzy head,” it bear-barked back at her. Well, it had the right number of syllables, and the right rhythm and stress. And the bear-barks did resemble Selma’s rattling words. And whenever the bears answered one of the persons, it answered in that person’s own timbre. The bears began to imitate the people quickly, and there was never any doubt as to which person was being imitated.

  The tittering that went with the imitations, though! Ooooh, that could become tiresome after a little while. “Tittering little obscenities,” yes.

  Could the Thieving Bears read? ’Twould be known in a bit, maybe. The bears had gotten into those big lockers that were full of comic books and had stolen big bunches of them. These comic books from the Trader Planets were now collector’s items on Old Earth, and they generated quite a profit. The wonderful things should be collector’s items everywhere.

  Some of the big Thieving Bears were “reading” those comic books to some of the little Thieving Bears, reading them in the Thieving Bears’ own barking talk. And some of the little bears would bark their excitement and incredulity at parts of the narration and would come and look at the pictures and the worded balloons themselves. And then there would be that damned tittering!

  It was clear that the big bears believed that they were reading, and that the little bears believed they were understanding. But the wording in the comic book balloons was in the Gno-Pidgin dialect of the Trader Planets, and people from the Traders had never been to Thieving Bear Planet. It was almost too much to believe that “Sangster’s Syndrome Intuitive Translation” was being practiced by animals below the level of conceptual thinking. Then some of the little bears were clearly acting out episodes from the comic books (very subtle episodes, according to Benedict Crix-Crannon, who had total knowledge of the content of all the comic books from the lockers). Well, there was no easy explanation for that.

  The explorers treated themselves to a bonus meal within an hour of their arrival, after things were pretty well settled down. On a new world, they did this only when they had complete confidence that everything was under control. It was a traditional Earth-hearty meal, though it was from a packet of such bonus meals that had been packaged on Trader Planet Number Four. There were ten-centimeter-thick Cape buffalo steaks, mountains of Midland mushrooms, Camiroi currants and Astrobe apples, Elton eels, Wrack World rye bread, “Galaxy” brand goat butter, Rain Mountain coffee, Rumboat cordials, and Ganymede cigars (“They have an aroma that outlasts the Everlasting Hills,” a testimonial said of those perfectos).

  “Logs of earlier explorers say that there is no real enjoyment in eating on Thieving Bear Planet because of the harassment of the bears,” Benny Crix-Crannon gloated. “Well, I’m enjoying this meal (another bumper of Rumboat cordial, Luke, please), and I’d like to see anybody take that enjoyment away from me.” And yet the enjoyment and savor of that grand meal began to disappear almost at that moment. How? Oh, it was just that all the items of their enjoyment were being mysteriously stolen away from them.

  “All the rest of Dixie’s snuff has been stolen by the bears now,” Gladys said. “That’s too bad. She loves it so much. If all her idiosyncrasies are stolen away, it’s as if she is stolen away too.”

  “And another thirty or so of Dixie’s French horror story novels have been stolen by the bears,” Elton Fad grumbled. “She’s bound to be frustrated by that. We should insist on fair play from the bears.”

  “Her gold snuffboxes have been stolen, too,” Selma Last-Rose lamented. “How mean of the bears! The snuffboxes were valuable, even for the gold.”

  “And her hookah pipe is gone,” Luke Fronsa complained. “What will the bears steal next?”

  “I don’t know,” George Mahoon wondered, “but Dixie Late-Lark has herself been stolen now, or at least she’s gone. She could not have gone out unrecorded, for the ship is on full security. And yet the ship itself registers that she is no longer on board. She was sitting between you and Selma, was she not, Gladys?”

  “She was, yes, just a moment ago, on the chair between the two of us. But there isn’t any chair between us now, and there couldn’t have been; there isn’t any room for one. She must have been sitting on something else. Oh, that damned tittering! I wonder how they stole her and what they did with her.”

  “Be rational, Gladys,” Luke said. “There’s no way the little bears could have stolen Dixie Late-Lark.”

  “Then where did she go? And how?”

  “I don’t know,” Mahoon admitted, “and I don’t believe that any of us know. All at once, it doesn’t seem very important. Ah, I’m queasy. Yes, and I’m hungry. After a perfect bonus meal, I shouldn’t be either. Fortunately, I had plugged myself into the ship’s monitor, because of early reports of anomalies on Thieving Bear Planet, reports of the well-feeling and the wits of the explorers being stolen away. All right, monitor, what has gone wrong with me?”

  The ship’s monitor spilled it all out. It was in coded chatter. “But we all understand the coded chatter just like our mother’s milk,” as Dixie had once said. All of them were completely tuned to the code of their own ship. And each of them put it into words automatically.

  “Essential food value suddenly stolen from your ingested food,” the monitor chattered. “Pepsin stolen from your stomach, thalmatite stolen from your thalamus, thyroxine stolen from your pharynx, Cape buffalo essence stolen from your esophagus and stomach, mushrooms and currants and apples stolen from your lower stomach and small intestine, rum alcohol stolen from your stomach and ileum and bloodstream, and normal blood alcohol and blood sugar stolen as part of the same theft. Slurry of rye bread and butter and coffee stolen from your paunch and antrum stomach. Essence of Elton eels stolen from some saltwater swamp of you. And at the same time, insulin and glucagon are stolen from your pancreas, hepatocytes and bile salts from your bile duct and duodenum; and words, ideas, and inklings have been swiped from several parts of your brain. No wonder you’re queasy and hungry at the same time.”

  “Thank you, ship’s monitor,” George Mahoon said. �
��Well, it seems that I’ve been infected by some microbe or germ or virus. I’ll take a few of the anti-anti pills to quell the infection.”

  “Forget the anti-anti pills, George!” Elton Fad cried angrily. “I think we should take a couple of steel bars and teach the Thieving Bears a lesson. There are microbes and germs and viruses infecting me too, but they are about half my own size and are known as the Thieving Bears. Damn those tittering little idiots! They’re beginning to intrude too intimately with their thefts and their eatings; but I don’t know how they’re doing these things so interiorly. Sometimes I wish I’d gone into the family business and never become an explorer at all.” Elton Fad’s family was in eels: they were big and rich people in eels.

  A little doll made out of wax and rags, with thorns and pins and needles sticking clear through it, and with its throat cut horribly, came sailing through the air and landed on the table where all the explorers had just finished their fine meal that had lost its power just after passing its climax. The tortured little doll had Dixie Late-Lark’s face on it. Its mouth was wide open and it was screaming silently and horribly.

  “At least we know that the bears can read and absorb world-French,” Gladys Marclair laughed. And they all laughed. “They couldn’t have learned about the poupées-fetiches, the fetish dolls, anywhere except from Dixie’s French horror stories. Why, it’s Stridente Mimi, Screaming Mimi herself. That’s really Dixie’s theme story. Oh, I wish that Dixie would come back so she could see this comical takeoff of herself. Shut your mouth, doll-Dixie!”

  Gladys pushed her forefinger against the mouth of the little fetish doll to close it, but the doll bit her finger suddenly, viciously, terribly, and set the blood gushing from it. When Gladys got her finger loose again, the doll opened its mouth wide once more and continued to scream silently and horribly from a now blood-dribbling mouth. It has long been noted that fetish dolls seem to have a life of their own.

  That little comic interlude cheered them all a bit, and they left the table in a happier state. And they went out from the ship.

  * * *

  Oh, the Thieving Bears wanted to play games, did they! Well, the explorers would beat them at their games, and they would solve all the mysteries about them at the same time. But the explorers had now come to regard the bears as more complex and as more nearly intelligent than they had previously seemed. They were still tittering little stinkers, though. The Thieving Bears were bigger than police dogs and a little bit smaller than Great Danes. They were toothless and clawless and apparently harmless. How can you worry about such tittering and giggling things?

  * * *

  “Quick! Come quick!” Selma Last-Rose was calling, in a queer voice on the edge of panic. “Come quick! I’ve found Dixie.”

  The Thieving Bears, however large they seemed, gave the impression of being nearly weightless. They had to be nearly weightless to glide on the wind the way they did. They seemed to be mostly—well, it wasn’t hair and it wasn’t feathers—they seemed to be mostly made out of a fluffy and deep-piled covering with not much body inside it.

  “Come, come, somebody come!” Selma was still calling in her rattling voice. “Dixie is dead.”

  The bears had to be ninety percent fluffy covering and no more than ten percent body. Otherwise, big as they seemed, they couldn’t have gotten through some of the holes that they did go through.

  “Horribly, horribly dead,” Selma was chanting in a little-girl singsong voice. “Horribly, horribly dead. Oh please, somebody come and help me look at her. I can hardly manage to look at her all by myself.”

  Dead Dixie Late-Lark was an exact life-sized replica of her own many times-transfixed fetish doll. Her throat was just as flamboyantly and terribly cut as the doll’s had been. The same thorns and pins and needles ran through her, but now they were meter-long thorns and two-meter-long needles. And her mouth was very wide open, as had been that of the doll; and Dixie was likewise screaming horribly and silently.

  And a tittering, a giggling in the Thieving Bears’ fashion, was coming from her silently screaming mouth and also from her laid-open throat. How ghastly!

  * * *

  The horror was broken a bit, or diverted into a wondering exasperation, by Benny Crix-Crannon’s voice booming, “Here’s another one of them. This one’s better done. It’s good!”

  Yes, it was another horribly dead Dixie Late-Lark, with her throat cut even more savagely, with her poor body transfixed with even longer thorns and needles, with the tittering and giggling from her wide-open and silently screaming mouth even more disconcerting.

  In all, they found seven life-sized versions of Dixie Late-Lark horribly and ritually murdered. Then all seven of them jumped up, turned into rather young Thieving Bears, and ran away tittering. And the very stones of that planet seemed to join in that tittering and giggling.

  But where was Dixie Late-Lark herself? Was that not a pertinent question? More pertinent questions may have been: why did all the explorers stop wondering what had happened to their colleague Dixie Late-Lark? And why did they now feel that her disappearance was unimportant?

  * * *

  “I have lost my judgment,” George Mahoon lamented. “I’ve still got most of the pieces of things in my mind, but I can no longer put them together. Putting things together is what judgment is. One of you others will have to take over the captaincy of this expedition.”

  “Oh, bother the captaincy!” Gladys Marclair rejected it. “Expeditions would be better without captains anyhow. And you can’t lose something that you never had, George. Let’s play ‘Ask the Question’ with this situation. And let’s wonder why no bunch, coming here, has played it before. This is an Earth-sized planet and remarkably monotonous. On its look-alike continents, there are hundreds and thousands of little low plains or meadows comparable to this Plain of the Old Spaceships. Why have all the expeditions to this world, from that of John Chancel to our own, landed here within one thousand meters of each other? Instructions for exploration landing sites have always been ‘Random selection, tempered with intelligence.’ And another instruction has been ‘Examine new ground wherever possible.’ For whose convenience have we all landed in this one place? Oh, your diminished judgment, George! Probably somebody has been eating the hippo out of your hippocampus (I’ve always believed that the ‘little hype’ is the center of the judgment as well as of the memory), so now you’re not as well hyped as you were. What if hardly any of the area of this planet has been checked out?”

  “Oh, we made sixteen scanning circuits of Thieving Bear Planet before we landed,” George Mahoon said. “Sixteen circuits will give a very good recorded sample. And some of the previous expeditions made the full sixty-four scanning circuits, and the full scan doesn’t miss much.”

  “Do we believe that the Thieving Bears are to be found in all parts of this planet, George?” Selma Last-Rose asked.

  “I don’t know. Do we believe it, Benny?”

  “Oh no. The Thieving Bears are strictly small-species and small-area creatures. Their crankinesses as well as their brilliancies indicate that they have far too small a gene-pool. They have to stay close together in a small area to ‘keep warm’ in the special (of a species) identity-survival sense.”

  “As to myself, I’ve lost more than my judgment,” Luke Fronsa mourned. “I’ve lost all my ideas, and all that I have left now are notions. Somebody is eating all my ideas right out of my head and leaving only the hulls of them. Did you know that notions are only the shells or hulls of ideas after the meat is eaten out of them?”

  * * *

  The bears were toothless, and they were playful. Sometimes they came gliding in on the air, and they might be practically invisible when the light was in their favor. They came gliding in or ambling in, and they tagged the people gently as a breath. But whenever they touched the people, however briefly or lightly, they left what seemed to be very small entering marks. And they also left a redness, like the stings of nettles. One of the explorers (n
o matter which one; they had begun to run together, even in their own regard) said that the Thieving Bears were really a species of giant insects, insects with strange appetites and always hungry.

  * * *

  Seven days and nights went by very rapidly. It was a giddy world in this respect, fast-spinning: for seven days and nights on Thieving Bear Planet were the equivalent of only about eighteen hours on Old Earth or sixteen hours on Astrobe. And the fast-spin did make a difference on Thieving Bear. It was because of the fast-spin that there were no large treelike plants, not even any very large bushes. There were small bushes, and there was the non-gramineous grass.

  2.

  People without an accompaniment of ghosts are a deprived people. They will descend to almost any depth of “oriental” cultishness or modish superstition or silliness or astrological depravity to hide the fact that they have lost their ghosts.

  Ghosts without an accompaniment or “neighborness” of people are similarly deprived, and they will cast themselves into the most bizarre roles or forms to try to create a company for themselves.

  Both of these conditions are unhealthy.

  —Terrance Taibhse, Introduction to Ghost Stories of Sector 24

  The storminess of Thieving Bear Planet wouldn’t have permitted any botanical constructs taller than small bushes. And the fast-spin of Thieving Bear compelled certain surface conditions for that world. On most worlds, the hills go up. On Thieving Bear Planet, the hills went down.

  The upper levels of all the continents of Thieving Bear were flat and lush, and sometimes they were swept by violent winds. And down from them, the hills ran to the sheltered plains or meadows or circle-valleys (such as was the Plain of the Old Spaceships), and on these lower levels the winds were less violent.