The Best of R. A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  Two of the seven short nights just past had been “electric nights,” and the ghosts walked on electric nights. The electric nights were highlighted (literally) by massive thunderstorms and plasmal displays. (The odds are that these storms are more violent than the storms where you come from.) The lightning piled up on the high places, roaring like lazaruslions. Then it rolled down the hills like waterfalls and formed hot and spitting pools on the lower plains and meadows.

  The ghosts were always there, but some of them were ordinarily like empty balloons. On the electric nights, they filled up with lightning and manifested themselves. But others of the ghosts were always low-key, living out their endless nights and days till they would finally fade away after a long era. One of the ghosts was that of John Chancel, one of the earlier visitors to Thieving Bear Planet, usually called the “discoverer” of Thieving Bear, but now he said that this wasn’t true. During the second of the electric nights, Chancel’s ghost sat in the cockpit room of the ship with the explorers and lovingly handled the eight hundred knobs, wheels, levers, push buttons, keyboards, and voice boxes that commanded the ship. The ships hadn’t been so sophisticated in his day.

  “I catch onto all the new and enjoyable advances in ship control quicker than ‘he’ would,” Chancel’s ghost spoke softly. “Oh, he has the physical brains with him, most of them; but I have the intuition. And he, we, were never very good on brains anyhow. We had the mystique and the personality, we had the intuition, we guessed a lot, and we faked a lot. But we were never a well-linked personality.”

  “Just how does one become a ghost?” Gladys Marclair asked. “Besides dying, I mean, is there any way to bring it about?”

  “It happens, in many cases, long before death. I was his ghost here for twenty years (Earth years) before Chancel died elsewhere. He left his (my) ghost here on his second landing. He came back here for me several times after that, but I wouldn’t rejoin him or go away with him. He had become quite cranky in his ways, and I in mine. There would have been everlasting conflict if we had joined. But it was also psychic disaster (more for him than for me) for us to be separated.

  “It’s not at all rare for a living person to be separated from his ghost. I see that two of you six have become separated from your own ghosts, and none of you can guess which two of you it is. On Thieving Bear, the conditions seem to be favorable for these split-ups. It leaves a great hunger (yes, a physical hunger) in the ghosts who are left behind. But each planet has its own ghostliness that is different from that of other places. Even Old Earth has remnants and tatters of ghostliness, and it isn’t a hungry world. As a prophet said, ‘Happy the world that has iron meadows and rich essences on which the spirits may feed, and then go to sleep.’ But we spirits are most often sleepless here.”

  “What happened to Dixie Late-Lark?” Gladys Marclair asked this pleasant ghost.

  “Oh, she’s a ghost of a different sort. There never was any Dixie Late-Lark as a person. There were only the six of you who arrived here. Dixie was your esprit de group, your group effigy, and also a manifestation of your ‘goofiness syndrome.’ But we made her visible to you for the first time. And you recognized her and accepted her in your unthinking way. This ‘unthinking way’ has become part of the environment of Thieving Bear Planet. She was the toothsome imaginative essence of all of you, the capriciousness or coltishness of you, and that made her very appetizing. We love essence. It’s so concentrated.”

  “Why did you make her visible?” Selma asked.

  “Because we like to see what we’re eating.”

  “Who or what are the Thieving Bears?” Luke Fronsa asked Chancel’s ghost.

  “Oh, they’re a sort of tumbleweed, a sort of nettle. Ghosts use them to get around in some of the time; so I myself am often a Thieving Bear. It is only on the electric nights that we can inflate ourselves with enough plasm to look like ourselves. We walk here a lot because we are always hungry and restless. Ghosts in places that are richer in organics and metals and minerals stay well fed by a sort of osmosis, so they walk and stir very little. They sleep their decades and centuries away. Notice it sometimes that active ghosts are only to be found in deprived regions. One of my counterparts has hardly stirred in a hundred years. I can feel my counterparts, but there’s not much of them to feel.”

  “Where do the little Thieving Bears come from?”

  “From a very early landing, perhaps the earliest, for they were here when I arrived. It was an ill-advised settlement expedition of men, women, and children. Then all died of starvation, not knowing how to turn the lush grass into food. They were the first of the hungry ghosts. It was their crying hunger that has drawn all the ships to land in this one place. ‘Come let us eat you’ is their cry, and it is still a most passionate cry.”

  “You spoke of your ‘counterparts’ a moment ago,” George Mahoon said. “Did John Chancel generate more ghosts than one? Is he himself restless and hungry?”

  “Oh, I myself (the central John Chancel) have gone to my glory. But all of us great ones leave multiple ghosts behind us. He (I) left at least two others besides myself. We have a sort of awareness of each other, a loose feeling. He had real greatness (unlikely as it seems), and I didn’t. And yet this is the paradox: he saw himself entirely from the outside, and he loved what he saw; I saw us from the inside, and I wasn’t impressed. And we were not the first man on as many planets as is claimed for us. We were not the first man here. There were already Thieving Bears here when we came, ghosts of earlier explorers. But John Chancel had the greatness; and the earlier explorers had it not. So Chancel was credited with many first landings.

  “Good luck to you, ladies and gentlemen, when you lift off in your capsule this electric morning. There are several entries that you must make in your log immediately after lift-off, or you will forget them and never make them at all. And you will have to make these entries in something other than ink.”

  “Why should we lift off in our capsule?” Elton Fad asked. “We use the capsule only when the ship is inoperative.”

  “It’s inoperative now and forever,” the ghost of John Chancel said. “Well, it’s a good ship and it eased the hunger of a lot of us. You’d better lift off in the capsule as soon as possible now. We try to play fair, but we’ll be feeding on it very soon if it’s still here.”

  That John Chancel was a nice fellow, even in his fading ghost form.

  * * *

  But a much more violent ghost (right at that electric dawn after the second electric night) was the ghost of Manbreaker Crag. After the second of the electric nights had ended, Manbreaker decided to remain apparent out of sheer stubbornness. They had all been feeling the powerful presence of this Manbreaker Crag for some time.

  “I’m the only one here of any moment or weight,” Manbreaker’s ghost spoke in a rough sort of roar. “I’m not a person to crawl into pieces of nettle or tumbleweed or any weeds except my own mortal weeds. I’m not one to take on the form of a cutie giggling bear or other toy. I am not a ghost, nor any part of a ghost story. Ghost stories are for children and cutie bears. I am a simple dead man who is restless and hungry on this mineral-poor world. On electric nights, I go get my own body where I keep it. I enter it and I inflate it with the crackling lightning and the electricity that has gathered here. I’m a hungry dead man with a dead man’s temper. Don’t mess with me!”

  “Don’t mess with us, fellow,” George Mahoon spoke sharply. “Our ship seems to be in a very weakened condition and we have to be getting out of here quickly. Stay out of the way, grave-rot oaf, and be quiet. Elton, go sharpen this, and then bring it back to me along with a heavy sledgehammer. I think I know how to deal with hungry dead men.”

  George Mahoon handed a thick and heavy hardwood dowel pin to Elton Fad. It was about the length and heft of a baseball bat.

  “The other ones, the real ghosts, which is to say the real unreal ones, have their little self-saving fables that they recite when they feed on people and the possessions
of people,” the hungry, long-dead man, Manbreaker Crag, roared. The only speaking voice he possessed was this sort of dogged roar. “They say, ‘We do not steal important things out of your minds. We steal only funny-shaped, trifling things. Serious people like you are better off without them. Our gain is your gain.’ That is what they are telling you, but they lie. What we eat out of your minds are the most serious things that your minds are capable of holding. What we steal and eat out of your bodies are the tastiest things in your bodies. We come to table on you, and we feast on you. What we eat out of your ships and your stores are the most nourishing and sophisticated things you have brought, wotto metal, data gelatin, electronic reta, codified memories and processes. We eat these things because we are hungry. And I eat them more ravenously than do any of the others. I eat the essence of minds and leave gibbering idiocy in its place. I eat the bodies of whole people where they stand.”

  “Is everything possible transferred from the ship to the capsule?” big George Mahoon asked his party.

  “It is,” several of them answered.

  “I will eat the essence of your capsule-boat just as all of us on Thieving Bear have eaten the essence of your ship,” dead Manbreaker Crag roared.

  “Is it sharpened?” Mahoon asked as he took the thick hardwood dowel from the returning Elton Fad.

  “It is sharpened,” Elton said, “but something has gone wrong with it. It loses weight as I stand here. They feed across short distances.”

  “Scrawny ship captain, I think I’ll eat you as you stand there,” dead Manbreaker roared at Captain Mahoon. “You’d make a big bite, but I’ll eat you.”

  Big George Mahoon felled bigger dead-man Manbreaker Crag with a powerful blow to his dead face. Then he put the point of the sharpened dowel pin (“Yes, Elton, I believe that he ate the heart out of it, but how could it have been prevented?” Mahoon asked) to the region of the heart of Manbreaker and struck the pin a heavy blow with the big sledgehammer. But the wooden pin or stake came apart into weak splinters and pieces of worm-eaten (or zombie-eaten) wood.

  “Ah well, we’ll have to leave him as he is,” Mahoon said. “I don’t know any other way to kill a man who’s already dead.”

  * * *

  The six explorers got into the capsule-boat then and lifted off. They looked down on the ship they had left behind them then, and it crumbled down and became a part of its own outline and schematic. It became one more of the token spaceships that formed that part-circle that gave the name Plain of the Old Spaceships to that curious site. Those drawn outlines of the old spaceships, they were the old spaceships. There must have been a lot of good eating in each of them, though.

  “To the log!” George Mahoon howled. “I feel it all slipping out of my memory so fast! Each one of us take a long log page and write as rapidly as possible. Get it down, before we lose it as earlier explorers lost it.”

  “No use lamenting that there is no ‘ink’ in any stylus or pen or log pencil laid out or still boxed,” Selma Last-Rose rattled. “No use lamenting that even the electronic ink is eaten out of every recorder and that the remembering jelly is eaten out of every memory pot. The hungers of the Thieving Bears are unaccountable. All the earlier logs had a few words written in something other than ink. If we all write as fast as we can, we may get more than a few words down. We may even get the explanation down onto the log sheets before it fades completely from our minds.”

  They all opened their veins and wrote on the long log sheets in their own blood. It was sticky going. So many free-flowing things had been eaten out of their blood that it was now viscous and thick. But they made it do. They got the explanation all down, even though (when it was shown to them later) they hardly remembered writing it.

  * * *

  A simple explanation had been needed for the conditions on Thieving Bear Planet. It was needed because, as the great Reginald Hot had once phrased it, “Anomalies are messy.”

  And that simple explanation is herewith given, more or less as it was written in thick blood in the log book.

  Days of Grass, Days of Straw

  Introduction by Gary K. Wolfe

  “Days of Grass, Days of Straw” first appeared in New Dimensions 3, the third in a series of rather adventurous anthologies edited by Robert Silverberg throughout the 1970s. Coming close on the heels of science fiction’s controversial New Wave, Silverberg’s series was clearly out to recognize new voices and new literary approaches to science fiction and fantasy, and Lafferty had stories in each of the first four volumes. The volume with “Days of Grass, Days of Straw” also included two stories which would become widely reprinted, Hugo Award–winning classics, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (Tiptree was of course later revealed to be a pseudonym of Alice Sheldon). Each of those would be reprinted dozens of times in the coming decades, but Lafferty’s story—despite now being regarded as one of his best and most strikingly visionary by aficionados—was reprinted only in a few of his own collections. It did, however, get translated into Dutch and inspired the 2004 song Dagen van gras, dagen van stro (a literal translation of the title) by the performer Spinvis (Erik de Jong). Spinvis’s lyrics have only an elliptical connection with Lafferty’s story, but the point is that Lafferty’s best stories, even when not widely familiar, manage to find their way into unexpected corners of the culture and leave traces there.

  The story itself is one that some readers find challenging—within the first two lines, a city street morphs into a road, then a trail, then a mere path, and our protagonist Christopher finds himself in a pre-urban, pre-industrial landscape with features resembling Native American legends and Oklahoma tall tales. Even his own name doesn’t ring true, and half-recognized people and places never quite coalesce into a more traditionally realized fantasy landscape. Yet he feels revived and invigorated, as though the world had been “pumped full of new juice.” “Things were mighty odd here,” he notices in an observation that may well sound familiar to anyone reading a Lafferty story for the first time. “There was just a little bit of something wrong about things.”

  We eventually learn that Christopher hasn’t crossed into a fantasy world at all, but rather to a different kind of time—a “day of grass,” one of the “overflowing and special days apart from the regular days,” which are called days of straw. Although these special days are “Days out of Count” in terms of history and the calendar, they are earned at great cost by prophets and “prayer-men,” who wrestle with God to gain them. Called by different names in different cultures, these “rich days, full of joy and death, bubbling with ecstasy and blood” may include entire seasons, and although “nobody has direct memory of being in them or living in them,” we give them pallid names like Indian Summer. Lafferty’s stunning vision of a more vital and perhaps more dangerous world just beyond the one we know, but somehow folded into it, is one of his most haunting recurrent themes.

  Days of Grass, Days of Straw

  1.

  Fog in the corner and fog in his head:

  Gray day broken and bleeding red.

  —Henry Drumhead, Ballads

  Christopher Foxx was walking down a city street. No, it was a city road. It was really a city trail or path. He was walking in a fog, but the fog wasn’t in the air or the ambient: it was in his head. Things were mighty odd here. There was just a little bit of something wrong about things.

  Oceans of grass for one instance. Should a large and busy city (and this was clearly that) have blue-green grass belly-high in its main street? Things hardly remembered: echoes and shadows, or were they the strong sounds and things themselves? Christopher felt as though his eyeballs had been cleaned with a magic cleaner, as though he were blessed with new sensing in ears and nose, as though he went with a restored body and was breathing a new sort of air. It was very pleasant, but it was puzzling. How had the world been pumped full of new juice?

  Christopher couldn’t recall
what day it was; he certainly didn’t know what hour it was. It was a gray day, but there was no dullness in that gray. It was shimmering pearl-gray, of a color bounced back by shimmering water and shimmering air. It was a crimson-edged day, like a gray squirrel shot and bleeding redly from the inside and around the edges. Yes, there was the pleasant touch of death on things, gushing death and gushing life.

  Christopher’s own name didn’t sound right to him. He didn’t know what town he was in. Indeed he’d never before seen a town with all the storefronts flapping in the wind like that. Ah, they’d curl and bend, but they wouldn’t break. A town made of painted buckskin, and yet it was more real than towns made of stone and concrete.

  He saw persons he almost knew. He started to speak and only sputtered. Well, he’d get a newspaper then; they sometimes gave information. He reached in his pocket for a coin, and discovered that he didn’t have regular pockets. He found a little leather pouch stuck in his belt. What’s this? What else was stuck in his belt? It was a breechclout with the ends fore and aft passing under his belt. Instead of pants he had a pair of leggings and a breechclout, three-piece pants. Oh, oh, what else?

  Oh, he wore a shirt that seemed to be leather of some sort. He wore soft shoes that were softer than slippers. He was hatless, and his hair came forward over his shoulders in two tight long braids. He had dressed casually before, but he didn’t remember ever dressing like this. How were the rest of the people dressed? No two alike, really, no two alike.

  But he did bring a coin out of that leather pouch that was stuck in his belt. A strange coin. It wasn’t metal: it was made of stone, and made roughly. On the face of it was the head and forequarters of a buffalo. On the reverse side was the rump of a buffalo. The words on the obverse of it read WORTH ONE BUFFALO, and on the reverse they read MAYBE A LITTLE BIT LESS.