Space Chantey

by R. A. Lafferty

  SPACE CHANTEY

  R. A. Lafferty

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Website

  Also by R. A. Lafferty

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Lay of Road-Storm from the ancient Chronicles

  We give you here, Good Spheres and Cool-Boy Conicals,

  And perils pinnacled and parts impossible

  And every word of it the sworn-on Gosipel.

  Lend ear while things incredible we bring about

  And Spacemen dead and deathless yet we sing about:—

  And some were weak and wan, and some were strong enough,

  And some got home, but damn it took them long enough!

  NEW SPACE CHANTEYS,

  Living Tapes, Sykestown, A.A. 301

  WILL THERE BE a mythology in the future, they used to ask, after all has become science? Will high deeds be told in epic, or only in computer code?

  And after the questing spirit had gone into overdrive during the early Space Decades, after the great Captains had appeared, there did grow up a mythos through which to view the deeds. This myth filter was necessary. The ship logs could not tell it rightly nor could any flatfooted prose. And the deeds were too bright to be viewed direct. They could only be sung by a bard gone blind from viewing suns that were suns.

  Here trumpets blare. Here the high kerigma of heralds rises in silvery gibberish. Here it begins.

  The war was finished. It had lasted ten equivalent years and taken ten million lives. Thus it was neither of long duration nor of serious attrition. It hadn’t any great significance; it was not intended to have. It did not prove a point, since all points had long ago been proved. What it did, perhaps, was to emphasize an aspect, sharpen a concept, underline a trend.

  On the whole it was a successful operation. Economically and ecologically it was of healthy effect, and who should grumble?

  And, after wars, men go home. No, no, men start for home. It’s not the same.

  There were six of them there, Captains of hornets, those small craft that could go anywhere, six of them mustered out with their crews and with travel orders optional. And there wasn’t an ordinary man among them. They were six full crews of the saltiest, most sulfurous men who could be combed out of the skies.

  Roadstrum, one of the Captains, was as plain a man as ever lived, and now he spoke out plainly:

  “I would say let us go directly home. We were boys when this began, and we are not boys now. We should go home, but I could be talked into something else.

  “Dammit, I said I could be talked into something else!”

  “A day or two on Lotophage might be worth it,” said Captain Puckett. “We’ll never be this close to it again and there must be something behind all those stories of the soft life there. They say it is Fiddler’s Green and Theleme rolled together. They say that it may be Maybe Jones City itself. If we don’t like it we can leave at any time.”

  “The Captains Roadstrum and Puckett are from World, are you not?” Captain Dempster asked. “In that case it is not at all in your direction home.”

  “We are from World,” said Roadstrum, “and we know the direction home.”

  “Lotophage is supposed to be a bums’ world,” said Dempster, “and if you stay there long enough you turn into a bum.”

  “If you’re afraid of it we’ll mark you off,” said Captain Silkey, “and perhaps you have less a way to go to be a bum than we others. But I see that you are afraid.”

  Silkey knew how to put the needle into Dempster. The only thing that Dempster was afraid of was being called afraid.

  “Look at it this way,” said Captain Kitterman. “We can’t get flight clearance to World or to anything in that Arm for three days, but we can go to Lotophage immediately. We can spend an equivalent day there, we can spend two, and still be home without loss of time. I suggest that we do it.”

  “For myself,” said the sixth Captain, “it is imperative that I get home. There may have been changes there. My wife is faithful within limits, but I do not know whether ten years transcends those limits. My children should have reached an interesting age. Besides, nobody ever stops on Lotophage for only a day or two.”

  “What think you, Crewmen?” Roadstrum asked loudly of the splendid array. These men were the salt of the skies, the one out of ten who had determinedly stayed alive through the whole war, very often hurt, absolutely refusing to be killed. Never had there been so many great fine men assembled. They were the tall ones.

  “I’d give the very ears off my head to go to Lotophage and enjoy it,” said Crewman Birdsong, “but the ears on my head and other shapeless things about me will be the obstruction. They have a regulation on Lotophage, you know; only beautiful persons are allowed the enjoyments.”

  “They bend the regulation,” said Captain Silkey. “They use the wide idea of beauty. All the fine surging things they count beautiful, even though they be a little rough in texture. They don’t bar one man in a thousand.”

  “I’m the man in a thousand in that,” said Birdsong, “but I’ll go; I’ll try it. There’s no world I’d visit so gladly.”

  They put it to the vote of their crews. Most of the men were for the side trip to Lotophage, the pleasure planet. Only enough men for one hornet crew wanted to go home directly. The sixth Captain (he shall be nameless, he shall be nameless forever) assembled the cravens and they went to their ready barracks to wait for flight clearance home.

  The other five crews tumbled into their hornets to go to Lotophage.

  “I have shucked a skin like a yearly snake,” said Captain Roadstrum. “I’m an onion and an outer layer is sluffed off me, that of Young Soldier the First Time. But I be bigger and ranker for losing the layer. All who go home in the wrong direction, we fly!”

  Where fidd
lers scree’d and Rabelaisians loped, it was,

  And Maybe Jones had walked the streets and hoped it was.

  So glad a land, you’d never find a grouser there.

  They said a man could really throw a rouser there!

  Ah well, ’twas good enough for Lotophagians,

  But how about the horny hopping shaggy uns?

  How turned the bright-eyed crew to sleepy gooney guys?

  How have a high old night with afternooney guys?

  Lotophage was beautiful at planet-fall, subdued gold, afternoon color. Roadstrum, who captained the lead hornet, intended to take the planet from morning side as he always did, but somehow he failed. He came down in an afternoon world. Then remembered that it was always afternoon on Lotophage.

  You could have shipped home whole boat-loads of sugar from the sweetness of their welcome. These people really made you feel wanted. They were even kind with Crewmen Birdsong and Fairfeather when they took them into custody.

  “It is that only beautiful people are allowed at large here,” the Lotophagians told these unfortunates. “We bend a point, we break a point, but you two are beyond the point entirely. It’s into the dungeons below the light that the two of you go.”

  “But look at Captain Roadstrum with that broken nose on him,” Crewman Birdsong protested angrily.

  “We bend a point there,” said a Lotophagian. “What’s a broken nose? He’s a beautiful man withall.”

  “Look at Captain Puckett with a muzzle on him like a coon,” howled Crewman Fairfeather with much heat.

  “We break a point there,” said the Lotophagian. “Take him from the rear, or in no more than one-eighth profile. Is he not beautiful? But we cannot in heart say the same thing about you. It’s the dungeon for you two.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until you die. Or until we need the room for two more uglier than yourselves, which is not likely. You two just fill it up.”

  “Sorry, boys,” said Captain Roadstrum. “Sorry, boys,” said Captain Puckett and Dempster and Silkey and Kitterman. And the Captains and the crewmen went about the business of enjoying Lotophage.

  As with all low-gravity planets there was a lassitude about everything. The indolence was reflected even in the subtropical flora. And no other life but the lazy one would have been possible there, due to the thin atmosphere. It was because of this that one could get high there so quickly. The air was almost entirely oxygen with no nitrogen filler, but it was still very thin. But for those who love the lazy life, it was automatically induced.

  Most flopped down where they were without even going to the nearest building. Why go further? Everything was available everywhere. They fell center-first into the slothful life. They slept hugely. It was hours later before any of them came to awareness again. Then they reclined Roman-fashion on the grass, and the sod rose and formed into contours to accommodate them.

  “We used to lie on the roof at home when I was a boy and dream of this,” said Cowper, one of Dempster’s crewmen. “We’d dream how we would live on an island or planet, and the bananas would fall off the trees beside us. The coconuts would drop with a hole already in them for drinking; and after they were drained they would fall apart for eating. There would be a waterfall that turned a paddle-wheel that worked a music box, and you had only to whistle the key notes and it would take up any tune you wanted to hear. There would be cigarette vines dangling just above you, and you could snap one off and it would be already lit when you snapped it.

  “It was big turtles, as I remember the daydream, who were taught to walk by with varieties of food on their backs. It was monkeys who were taught to prepare these foods.”

  “Ah well,” said Captain Roadstrum, “when we travel we find how greatly our boyhood dreams are outstripped by reality.”

  Roadstrum had a four-foot-long pseudo-banyan fruit, actually a giant banana. He had been eating on it for many hours. He had a jug of rum-mix which he sucked with an attachment. The mix was under slight pressure so that he didn’t have to suck very hard. At his side was a control panel of great selectivity. The invisible speaker, heard only by himself, would give him music or song, news or comment, drama and weird humor tales, gem-like repartee, or dirty stories.

  He could squeeze a bulb in his hand and he would be flopped over into the warm water of the ocean pool where he could roll and float and dive. He could squeeze the bulb again and he would be transported back onto the grass by an ingenious lift. It was handy, and it was easy on the body.

  In only one case did the panel fail him in information. That was when he asked it, “What day is this?”

  “That answer we cannot give,” the panel said. “It is ruled that, if you will not rise and see, it really does not matter to you. Besides, here there are not days. Here it is always afternoon.”

  The only clock available to Roadstrum without rising was the whisker clock. He felt by his beard that many days had gone by. He did not want too many days to have gone by. “Can you shave me?” he asked the panel. “Oh, sure,” and the panel did it that quick. And this set the clock back to the beginning.

  It was an easy life on Lotophage, and there was a whisper about the houris. The houris were among the things supposed to make the time pass so quickly on Lotophage. In particular Roadstrum had heard the whisper of an houri named Margaret, and now he rose to find her.

  He stopped only to inquire of the health of crewman Sorrel. Sorrel, one of Puckett’s crewmen, had thus far been their only casualty. He had put his jaw out of place while yawning. He seemed all right now but he would take it easy for a while.

  Generally an houri would come on signal, even a thought signal, and swoop a man up in her arms and carry him off to pleasure. Roadstrum, however, being unaccountably energetic, was already on his feet when Margaret came to his unvoiced signal. He suggested that they go to the Sleepy Sailor a full hundred feet across the lawn.

  Margaret offered to carry him on her twinkling shoulders, but Roadstrum was a bundle of energy even on this soft world and he walked on his own two feet.

  In the barroom of the Sleepy Sailor there were many patrons sleeping or lounging on couches. But there were others of more hardy breed who sat bolt upright (“What’s that mean, anyhow?” asked Margaret; “It means downright upright,” said Roadstrum), and even some who stood with toe on rail. Some of the patrons were familiar to Roadstrum. There was Maybe Jones himself.

  “Is this the place, Maybe?” Roadstrum asked him.

  “No it is not,” said Maybe, “though it fools me for a while every time I come. I’ll stay here a while till I get a tip on a likelier place. This is very like the Place Itself as it is in the early afternoon, when things are beginning to rustle and make starting noises. But it never blossoms out as does the place; it never really gets into it. ‘Things will start hopping along about sundown,’ I always say, but here there isn’t any sundown.”

  “I have heard about a place,” said Roadstrum, “if you have ten thousand Chancels d’or for the tip.”

  “Always, always,” said Maybe Jones, who always paid well for tips that might lead him to the Place Itself. “Here it is. Now if you will mark down the rough coordinates here and whisper me a brief description of it I will be off to see.” And Roadstrum gave it to him.

  “I know a place that might be the place, Maybe,” Margaret the houri said.

  “Margaret, Margaret,” said Maybe Jones, “you have given me ten thousand wrong leads, and yet I believe you could give me the right lead if you wished.” And Maybe Jones was gone. He traveled forever looking for the lost pleasure place, and spacemen had begun to call it Maybe Jones City.

  “Everybody loves it here,” said Margaret the houri. “On Lotophage the law does not restrict. Elsewhere many things are illegal, as are we ourselves. We are forbidden to live anywhere else, and the penalty for disobeying that law is death. Where does that leave you if you happen to be immortal?”

  “I have heard about you houris,” said Roadstrum, “but
the stories are confusing. It is said that you are older than people and that you will live forever.”

  “I sure hope so. I wouldn’t want it any other way. But we change. I remember when I used to call myself Dolores and wore a rose in my hair and carried on like that. I remember when I was Debra and had a lot of style. I remember once when I was a Frenchie. Boy, it sure is fun being a Frenchie! But I don’t remember very far back, only a couple of years. It seems like I always did have a lot of boyfriends.”

  “They say that you are timeless, which I do not understand,” said Roadstrum.

  “ ‘He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri’s knees,’ as the poet says. I don’t understand it either, Roadstrum, but you use a timeless device on your own ships when you make the big instant jumps. Who needs ships?”

  Roadstrum sat on the timeless houri’s knees and found it pleasant.

  “The report is that you are completely immoral,” he said.

  “Shouldn’t wonder if I am,” Margaret answered.

  “That you are not born, do not generate, and never die.”

  “No, I don’t remember ever doing any of those things.”

  “In Earth legend, it is said that you are older than Eve.”

  “You don’t understand women, Roadstrum. Never tell one that she is older than Eve. No, no, she was twenty-one years old when she was born; and I’m not one to whisper such things, but it wasn’t a normal birth. I’m eternally nineteen. Sure, I remember her. She was the first of those fat house-cats.”

  “You have always had a bad name among good people,” said Roadstrum.

  “It’s those fat house-cats who give us a bad name. I don’t care for them either.”

  “It is even said that you do not live at all, that you are only a tall story that wandering men tell.”

  “There are worse places to live than in tall stories,” said Margaret. “But you are in them yourself, Roadstrum, in all the jokes and stories of the shaggy-people cycles.”