Space Chantey

by R. A. Lafferty

  A boy? He must have been a meter taller than big Roadstrum.

  “Somebody stop that young fool!” Roadstrum called, still beating the air in the grasp of Bjorn. “If he meddles with the craft we’re stuck here forever. Kill him or something, but stop him anyhow!”

  “He who kills before breakfast will have bad luck all the forenoon,” Bjorn gave them the proverb. “I would take it unfavorably if anyone killed him. He is my little boy and you will let him do what he wants. I am sure he will fix your boats. Nobody can chip stone or dress leather so finely as my boy; nobody can fit a balk or a beam so well. He is the best mechanic anywhere. And call him not a fool! You think we have no feelings just because we are slobs? Here comes the cars. Now we will go to eat the big breakfast. Try to play the men at the bord whether or not you will be able to play it in the field.”

  Here come the cars, Bjorn had said. Cars? What were those things sliding in through the low sky, skimming in not ten meters above the land, silently and flatly and raggedly? Wait a minute now. It is camouflage of some sort. They cannot be big flat slabs of stone sliding about in the air with giant Trolls standing on them! But they sure did look like big slabs of stone, some of them twenty meters in diameter, some of them only a tenth as wide. There were ten-man and five-man and one-man slabs sliding along flatly above the ground. And when they came down they still looked like stone slabs, and they were.

  Well, how do stone slabs as heavy as these (and the smallest of them were so heavy that twelve men could not budge them at all on the ground) cruise about above the land with no mechanism whatsoever.

  “Crewman Bramble, how is that possible?” Captain Roadstrum asked.

  “It isn’t. Our wits are scrambled, our eyes fail us; it is not possible at all.”

  “I see that you have never encountered a science as advanced as ours,” the boy Hondstarfer said as he came out of one of the hornets to enlighten them. “This is so far beyond you that I am not sure I can explain it to you. You yourselves are caught in the electromagnetic dead-end, so you are hardly able to imagine a thing like this and you doubt your eyes. We are fortunate. We have no surface metal on our world, or perhaps we would have been caught in the same dead-end. Is this not much neater? Our cars operate naturally on the static-repulsion principle.”

  “How can that be?” asked Crewman Bramble, who knew the theory of everything. “The static-repulsion principle can move nothing heavier than feathers.”

  “What do you use for feathers on World?” the boy Hondstarfer asked in amazement. “Here it will move stone slabs of a pretty good size, and it would move mountains if they weren’t rooted so deeply into the land. This is a dry world and one without metals in its surface. It is mostly of pure flint. So we take slabs of chert or impure flint from the mountains, and there is sufficient static-repulsion between the slabs and the surface flint to enable the slabs to glide and fly.”

  “It is impossible,” said Crewman Bramble.

  “Shall I tell you the supreme scientific law of the universes?” Hondstarfer asked. “Hold onto your ears or they may fall off at the magnitude of the disclosure. It is all scientific laws crushed into one. Like charges repel. Think about it.”

  “Where do the slabs get their charges, Hondstarfer?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t all the slabs fly about all the time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why do they fly so lightly in the air and then sink so heavily to the ground?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will it work for anything besides flint and chert?”

  “I don’t know. There isn’t anything else on our world.”

  “Well, how do you steer the things?”

  “It’s all in the way you rub your feet on them. But you will have to put felt boots over those metaled things you’re wearing. Here, the women come with small children’s boots for you to slip on. Anything else would burden you so that you couldn’t move.”

  Women? Dame elephants rather. They were very large, though not so large as their men-folks, and broad and almost shapeless. They were smiling and mysterious and ineffably wild, unbeautiful, ogresses, giantesses. But Crewmen Fairfeather and Birdsong and others went for them. Being somewhat grosser in their choices than the other crewmen, they were completely taken by these great creatures.

  “I have never been so humiliated in my life” said Margaret the houri. “The giants all say, ‘Go away, little girl, go away to your mother. Eat the big breakfast and someday you will grow up to be a real woman.’ Real woman! Fellows, if there was ever tenth-rate competition, this is it. And I can’t compete.”

  “You go now with my father and the others,” the boy Hondstarfer said, “to eat the big breakfast and then to die the big death. And I go to get a bigger stone hammer and still a bigger one. It is fun to work on your flying boats. There are so many things in them that I will have to change or throw out completely. It is no wonder that they break down, they are so primitive.”

  “Come, come, little boy-men,” big Bjorn called. “Mount on the two stone slabs set aside for you there and come to the breakfast hall. Follow us. Oh, you must all put on the little felt boots over your metaled ones. Were you not told? We go now. You follow.”

  “How do you get these blimy things off the ground?” stone-slab Captains Roadstrum and Puckett called out to the giants after they had assembled their men on the slabs.

  “Rub your feet, little boy-men, rub your feet!” laughed Bjorn and Hross and Hjortun and Fjall and Kubbur and all those shaggy giants. “Were there ever such dolts? How do you get your own flying boats off the ground? Rub your feet, little things, rub your feet.”

  The Captains and crewmen rubbed their feet on the big chert slabs, drew hot sparks; and then the slabs jolted and rose from the ground and glided crazily along. They learned the tricks of steering and gaining height quickly. These were really easy vehicles to operate.

  And now they had the impression of great height when they were no more than five hundred meters in the air, an impression that they never had in the hornets. It was all sheer down-drop in the windy air, and these things had no side rails of any sort on them, and they tipped and swerved.

  “The magic carpet!” said Crewman Bramble. “We have evidence now that the medieval Arabs of Earth really used such. They worked only over the very dry rock deserts, flint and chert deserts; and they were not carpets only, but thin slabs of stone covered with carpeting. Antiquarians have assured us that the evidence is overwhelming that such things were really used. I didn’t believe it. I don’t know how they could have worked. I don’t know how these can work.”

  They came to the face of a sheer mountain. They hovered in the air in front of a black hole in the face of that rock.

  “Come in to the breakfast,” Bjorn called. The ogres drifted into the black interior on their stone slabs, and the men followed them in. And came down hard. The static-repulsion principle seemed to fail when they were in the heart of the stone here.

  “Clumsy!” taunted Bjorn. “Clumsy!” taunted Blath and Hrekkur and the other ogres.

  “You are the new guests here,” said Bjorn in the cave darkness. “Tell the sun to come in, little Roadstrum.”

  “I’d as well tell the wind to lie down and the waves to be quiet,” said Roadstrum. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You are a boy-brained blockhead,” said Bjorn. “What words do you use to order the sun when you are on World? Here it is simple to recite the words. You say, ‘The sun, come you in,’ and the sun comes in.

  “The sun, come you in,” Roadstrum said valiantly, wondering at himself. And the sun came in.

  It was not, of course, the big sun of Lamos, but the little sun, the little boy of the big sun. It came in through the doorway of the cave, a hot yellow ball three meters in diameter, and it rose up to the roof of the cave and shone there. It was bright and hot, and the cave had been very cold. Water began to run down the walls, and globs of i
ce to fall.

  “What is it?” asked Roadstrum of Crewman Bramble.

  “It is the little sun, the little boy of the big sun,” Bjorn interrupted. “Does not the sun of World have little boys also?

  “What is it really?” Roadstrum asked Bramble.

  “Some type of ball lightning,” said the crewman. “But no, I see that it is a glowing stone. It must be a very small asteroid captured in the queer ambient of this nonmetallic world. It will glide around as the other rocks, and it should burn up if it is the proper texture. I don’t know by what means it obeys voice commands. It burns but it does not burn up. I haven’t worked out a theory on it yet. I suppose that Bjorn’s hypothesis is the best one; it is the little boy of the big sun.”

  “We have roast bull first,” said Bjorn, as a big bull was driven to them from some inner space of the cave. “Roadstrum, you are the high guest; skin the bull.”

  “I would need first a long steel knife to kill it,” great Roadstrum said. “And then skinning knives and tongs and an A-frame and a block and tackle to handle it. Give us the equipment, Bjorn, and myself and five or six of my men will have it killed and skinned within the hour.”

  “You are really the great Road-storm?” Bjorn asked in wonder. “Little boy-men, you don’t know how to skin a bull. Fjall, skin the bull.”

  Fjall broke the horns off the bull and threw them away. Then he put his fingers in the horn holes and broke a girdle out of the skull. He peeled all the skin off the skull. He broke the front hooves off the animal and peeled the skin up the legs; then he did the same thing with the back quarters. With his great thumbnail he then slit the skin up the belly. He rolled the hide back over the hump and shoulders. Then, going around behind the unhappy animal, he caught the bull by the tail and jerked the entire skin off in one piece, leaving the bull bawling and bare.

  “See how easy it is when you know how,” Bjorn said. “Now, Roadstrum, spear the bull on that pike and raise it up to the sun in the roof and roast it. At least you can do that.”

  “I cannot raise the bull on that pike,” said Roadstrum. “I cannot even raise that pike.”

  “Oh helvede! Spear the bull and raise it up, Hrekkur,” Bjorn said, and Hrekkur did it. That little boy of the sun roasted it thoroughly and quickly with a great dripping of burning wonderful grease and a powerful aroma. They ran other bulls through then, skinned them like gloves, and roasted them whole on spits held high in the small sun.

  “Let us not get ahead of the count,” said Bjorn. “I doubt me a little whether the boy-men can eat a bull each. We will see. Why do you hesitate, Roadstrum? That first bull is yours. Take it, take it in both hands if need be, and eat it up valiantly.”

  But Bjorn was right. The boy-men from the hornet crafts could not eat a whole bull each. It took three, and sometimes four of them, to devour a whole bull. And they ate pretty heavily too.

  Hey, they brought oat-cakes bigger in diameter than a man is high. They brought onions as big as the head of Burpy, and he had the biggest head of all the crewmen. They brought in honey-mead in casks large enough to make houses out of. And the breakfast beer! They knocked a bung out of the cave wall itself and the beer flowed, black and strong as Irish porter, in a great stream. It was a mountainful of beer they had there.

  You think that was all? They had pork pies with a full-grown boar in each of them.

  “Roadstrum, Roadstrum,” Bjorn chided. “Do not throw away the tusks. One eats them too. They will make a man of you. It is the same with the teeth and the hooves of the stallions that we come to in the next course.”

  “And the antlers of the stag too, big Bjorn?” Roadstrum asked, for he would not let the huge fellow out-talk him in any case.

  “Oh certainly, little Roadstrum. The accepted way is to swallow them without crumpling them or abridging them, but I see that you have neither the mouth nor the gullet for that.”

  Well, the boy-men from the hornet crafts acquitted themselves pretty well after they had gotten into it. They were slow starters is all. The mightier of them ordered another round of bulls and ate them with only two men to a bull. They ate those little baked whole foxes as though they were peanuts, and the baked rams as though they were cashews. They devoured the beavers, as was the custom, pelts and all. They developed a taste for whole roast wolf and nearly ran the Laestrygonians out of that commodity. And they found eagle stuffed with meadow mice to be a really different tidbit.

  They found also that there is this about honey-mead: the second gallon that one drinks is better than the first, and the third is better and more intoxicating than the second. They got as high as orn-eagles, and as stuffed as pigs on acorns.

  “Tell me in truth, little Roadstrum, was it not a great breakfast?” Bjorn asked.

  “It was a great breakfast, Bjorn,” Roadstrum said in all honesty. “In all my life I have never eaten a more filling one.”

  “And now, Roadstrum and all your small things, we fight,” Bjorn announced. “We fight the great fight to the great death. You’ll like this part of it, for I begin to see that you are really good fellows and men after all.”

  “With what do we fight, and for how long?” Captain Puckett asked.

  “We fight with the stone-tipped spears and pikes and with stone battle-axes,” Bjorn said. “We have little boy-sized ones that you will be able to lift if you wish to use them. Or, if you have weapons of your own, you may use those; and we fight till everybody is dead. How else is a fight?”

  “Can we use our hand blasters?” Captain Roadstrum asked.

  “We do not know what are hand blasters,” said Bjorn, “but if they are weapons, you may use them, of course. Now, Roadstrum, dismiss the sun and we will go out. Say only, ‘The sun, go you out.’ ”

  “The sun, go you out,” said Roadstrum, and the little sun unhooked itself from the ceiling of the cave and glanced brilliantly out of the gaping door.

  They all mounted their stone slabs, rubbed their feet, and zoomed out of the cave entrance into the sunlight, that of the father sun, not of the little-boy sun who had been in the cave. They landed in a great meadow. Captain Puckett sent Crewman Birdsong back to the hornet crafts to get a hand blaster for each man.

  “Do you want one, Deep John?” Captain Roadstrum asked the vagabond.

  “No, I always use a piece of coal-car coal swung in a bandanna,” said the hobo.

  “We do not know what is coal-car coal or bandanna,” said Bjorn, “but use them if they are weapons.”

  “A good solid rock will do for the piece of coal,” said Deep John, “and a little sling I have here to swing it in. And I believe a little stone slab I have my eye on could be used both for vehicle and weapon.”

  “You are sure you want to use those little things, boys?” Bjorn asked when the hand blasters were brought to the crewmen and passed around. “They are so short and light, how will you kill one of us with one of them? Better take the stone-tipped spears and then we will have real sport. You boy-men are small but you seem to be fast. With the stone spears you will kill some of us, at least, and we will have sport.”

  “No, we will use our blasters,” Roadstrum said. “And I will tell you, Bjorn, that it will be strictly no fight. I do not understand your custom in this, but we do not intend to fight till all of us are dead. We desire very much that none of us be dead. And we will fight till all of you are dead only if it is absolutely necessary.”

  “Spoilsports!” called Hross and Kubbur, the big giants. “Dog-warriors,” Fjall jibed. “Little-girl men,” Hrekkur derided, “you are not men for a fight. You are not men at all.”

  “We are men,” said Roadstrum, “and we are masters of men. Bjorn, bring a pig or a sheep and I will show you how easily and at what a distance one of these blasters can kill.”

  “Do you not insult us!” Bjorn cried angrily. “Pig-soldiers! Sheep-soldiers! Let us see you kill one of our men with one of your blasters. Then we will know whether they are weapons for men.”

  “No, no
, I could not kill a living man or—ah—ogre for demonstration,” Roadstrum said.

  “I could,” said Crewman Fairfeather. Fairfeather had always been something of a blow-top, but there was something different about him now. He had a grin on him that was almost like the grins of the Laestrygonians. He seemed to grow larger. He looked like—well, he had always been the ugliest of the crewmen, now he was nearly as ugly as the Laestrygonians themselves—he looked like one of the giants, that same happy insane look in the eyes.

  Fairfeather shot big Hrekkur with his blaster. He tore a big hole in the giant and killed him.

  “Now you’ve torn it!” said Roadstrum angrily. “We’ll probably have to kill them all. Watch for their moves.”

  But all the giant Laestrygonians were whooping with laughter.

  “Killed him! Killed him!” they whooped and roared. “Man, he did look funny when you killed him so easily.”

  “Look at his face, the side of it that’s left. He still doesn’t believe it.”

  “Hey, the boy-men got a real weapon going.”

  “Show us again.”

  “Kill me.”

  “Kill me. Hey, little fellows, kill me with one.”

  “Easy fellows,” big Bjorn said. “We can’t use all our fun up in one moment. You’ll all get killed this day. We don’t want to have our sport over too early; and remember, we have to kill the boy-men also. Are we ready? Onto your stone slabs all and into the air for battle!”

  “Must we fight on those things in the air?” Roadstrum asked.

  “There are no rules. We do whatever seems the most fun,” Bjorn said. “Fight where you will. We like to come zooming at each other on the stone slabs and transfix each other with our spears as we crash together. Fight on the ground if you wish, but we will zoom down and spear you on the ground.”

  “We will try it both ways,” said Roadstrum.

  Both men and ogres got on their stone slabs and, rubbing their feet on them, lurched up into the air. They fought with two or three men or ogres on a slab, or with only one on a slab. The men could not steer or maneuver as well as the ogres could, but they learned rapidly since their lives depended on it. And it is very hard to kill with a blaster when riding one of those stone broncos in the sky and shooting at a fluttering evasive target.