Space Chantey

by R. A. Lafferty

  She did, she did. But now the murder howl had gone over the space-ways, and they were all outlaws to be hunted. And decent people would no more give them haven.

  She sought with song to make the towsle toys of them,

  She hadn’t recked the ruddy reckless boys of them.

  She sold her reputation for a song she did,

  And paid a reparation for the wrong she did.

  The “Songstress Murder” made the space-ways gape to hear,

  The stunning scandal, murder, wreck, and rape to hear.

  A killer clan! The avid law is chilled for it,

  And deems that they be hunted down and killed for it.

  And Roadstrum cast a youngish pelt aside of him,

  And came down near the tough essential hide of him.

  Ibid

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The cream of Horneteers, the high elite of them!

  And sky-wolves snapping at the bloody feet of them!

  In Guimbarde town, it rude! it raw! ramshackle it!

  They sought the crushing, crashing way to tackle it.

  For noble lies and every royal whopper there

  They’d kill the kerl who couldn’t tell a topper there.

  Inside the Club itself, the most exclusive yet,

  Came snuffling death:—and they be more elusive yet!

  From flying hoosegow, sudden-swift, the ratter ran

  Who cut all trails and read the Gypsy patteran.

  He blew the blast! And they be hustled well and gone.

  And after that they went a while to Hell and gone.

  Ibid

  IT WAS the most exclusive club in the world, in all the worlds, and this is a mighty pale statement to make about it. Let us emphasize that it was hard to get into.

  It was a hundred and thirteen stories up by one count, a hundred and nineteen by another, and nobody was sure how close either might be. Naturally the Club did not have a room or suite number, no more than did any other thing in those buildings.

  It was in one of those weird, wooden buildings of Guimbarde Town, and the buildings of Guimbarde Town have neither elevators nor zoom-rooms. How could they have? There is no corridor nor shaft in any of them straight enough for such contrived transportation.

  It was in one of those thousand-odd steep wooden buildings that crown Blind-Raven hill, tall shanties, most of them over a hundred stories (there is no exact count in any of these buildings) that the Club is found. These buildings lean together and prop each other up; and when one of them topples and falls (and it happens quite often) several others will usually fall with it.

  The building no longer had a name, or at least no name that applied to all of it: there were local names that applied to various parts of it. Long ago it had been the Ramshackle Hotel, but the lower nine stories of it had sunk into the mud (they used no foundations in Guimbarde Town) and various tribes and peoples still lived subterraneously there. At a little later time, a dozen upper stories had fallen from the building onto the Greenglanders Building and had been incorporated into that; and very many of the middle stories had burned. But to make up for what it had lost, in simple justice it had received thirteen stories fallen from the old Potters’ Steeple, dropping from the sky, as it were. These were conjoined crookedly to the old basic (these segments never do fall straight), and all the higher stories later added to the building were crooked.

  Well, how do you get up even a hundred and thirteen or a hundred and nineteen stories to arrive at the Club? You go up those old outside stairways, and they sure are dangerous! There will sometimes be five or nine stories missing from the stairway, and there you must scramble. There are places where you must pay toll or fight your way through. There are cliff-dweller Indians in the mid-sixties who drink out of the skulls of those who thought it a safe thing to go up that stairway.

  All this, you must know, is the finest section of Guimbarde Town, not the meanest; and Guimbarde Town is the finest city on Yellow Dog. Yellow Dog itself has lost its world license, is now a proscribed world, and is inhabited mostly by shiftless and shifty persons.

  So it is seen that the Club is not an easy place to get into. Why not come down to it from above, you say, in gracious copter or in sky car? They don’t use them there. The skies over Guimbarde Town, and indeed over the whole of Yellow Dog, are infested by Megagaster birds that can take all but the largest craft in a single gobble. And yet Roadstrum and his brave outlaws did come down into the Club from above.

  “How can we land? How can we land?” Roadstrum had fretted at the top of his voice.

  “Leave it to Bramble,” said Captain Puckett. “He’ll think of something.”

  “Leave it to me,” said Bramble. “I’ll think of something. Hey, you know those nineteen cases of Mumuckey mustard that we have carried for so long a time? Often we’ve had little room for food or water, and have been forced to sleep three deep. Some of you have howled that we should throw the mustard out so there would be room for ourselves. ‘Let us keep them,’ I said every time; ‘we will find something they are good for.’ Now we have found it. We will foil the Megagaster birds with our mustard, and we will land on this planet.”

  Willing crewmen got out and, working dangerously, coated the entire hornet craft half a meter thick with Mumuckey mustard. Then they came into the dangerous sky of Yellow Dog.

  What happened to them? What happens to every craft that enters that dangerous sky? They were gobbled up in one bite by a Megagaster bird.

  One account is that they went right through that bird like yellow flame. Another is that it bounced them around nine times in its maw and then spat them out with a cry of disgust and horror. They crashed down through the top dozen flimsy floors of a building and came to rest in the Club. They got out of the hornet craft and looked around.

  It was dark there. The more exclusive a club is, the darker it always is. There was no light there at all except the luminescent eyes of some of the creatures present. This, however, was light enough, once they got accustomed to it.

  “This is the Improbable Club,” said the President-Emeritus in a heavy muffled voice, “and you things have made an improbable entry. Many unqualified persons have attempted to crash this Club, but you have done it literally. Whether you will be able to qualify for our high membership is another thing. It will not matter. We accept, for a brief moment at least, all who come here as members. We will quickly measure you one way or another. We have no living ex-members. Sit you down, all, and unwind your ears. Remember, each topper must be topped.”

  “If not?” Roadstrum asked boldly, not understanding this jabber at all.

  “The stopper,” said the President-Emeritus. This worthy seemed hardly human, but he was a genial person, in a hard-eyed sort of way.

  “What’s the fellow talking about?” Roadstrum asked Crewman Bramble. “What is this Improbable Club that we have fallen into?”

  “I’m not sure, Captain Roadstrum,” said Bramble. “The name is, perhaps, a euphemism. There is a crest on the old weapons-rack in the corner, and it reads ‘Club Menitros.’ Is this the Club Itself whose very location is unknown, the club for membership in which Emperors might give their right galactic segment, the club so exclusive that for a full century it had no members at all? Is this the High Liars Club itself?”

  Roadstrum and all the crewmen bowed their heads. “If it be so, we will all try to be worthy of it,” they murmured.

  The half-dozen members were drinking loopers, the green-lightning drink, and now a liveried waiter brought them to the crewmen also.

  Margaret the houri, who had been larking around in other parts of the building, came in to them now.

  “I met a fast-talking fellow and I’m going to World with him,” she said. “I’d go with you, but the word is that you’re not going there.”

  “But yes, we will go in our hornet as soon as we are sure we have given the slip to the sky-police,” Roadstrum said.

  “Three families have already moved into
your hornet,” Margaret said. “You couldn’t get them evicted in a month. Besides, the word is out that you’re not going anywhere in that hornet, ever. I guess I’ll just go to World with this fast-talking fellow.”

  “Our fellowship begins to break up,” said Roadstrum sadly. “Goodbye, Margaret, you’ll miss us.”

  Deep John the Vagabond, who had likewise been making connections, came back.

  “I’m going to hook a night freight to World, fellows,” he said. “I’d go with you, but the word is out that you’re not going to World. And where you are going, I don’t want to go.”

  “The word is not out until we put it out,” Roadstrum said. “I myself intend to go to World very soon.”

  But Deep John had left them.

  “One of the members there reminds me of someone,” Roadstrum whispered to Puckett. “The fellow with the green scarf.”

  “He looks familiar to me also, Roadstrum,” said Puckett. “I’m on the verge of thinking whom he reminds me of.”

  And there was another fellow there who seemed to be, like the hornet-men, on trial membership. He was a curious creature with a knot in the middle of his forehead, with one red eye, and with the other eye covered by a patch.

  “You may begin, Probationary,” the President-Emeritus said. “Be not nervous. In a very little while you will either be a member, or you will not be.”

  But the red-eye began nervously for all that.

  “I come from a very poor planet. We have no exports except our own citizens, going to better ourselves in other places. We have no talent, can perform few tasks, and have no trade on alien worlds except one. We work as traffic lights.”

  “As traffic lights?” Roadstrum asked, though he was not sure that a probationary member should be asking questions. “How as traffic lights?”

  “All on our world are born with one red eye and one green eye,” the creature said. “Our eyes shine brightly, as you see that my red eye shines brightly here now. We offer our services, we stand on corners in fair weather and foul, and we blink first one eye and then the other. The pay is everywhere miserable, the conditions are hard, but it is a livelihood.”

  The President-Emeritus motioned to three ushers, and they approached grimly.

  “Why is the one eye bandaged, and what is the knot in the middle of your forehead?”

  “If one wished to work on a good corner anywhere, and have a little better conditions, he had to have an amber eye also,” the creature said, very nervously. “The amber eye is not natural to us, so I have had an implant but it is not yet completely formed. It will grow, and it will break open, I believe, by springtime. In the meanwhile my green eye is inflamed. It’s the messages I have to flash on it that have done it in. The ‘walks’ and the ‘don’t walks’ I can manage easily enough. It’s the special things, the ‘No left turns except on Sunday or before eight A.M.,’ things like that have inflamed it. It isn’t easy to flash a variety of messages.”

  “Enough of that,” said the President-Emeritus. “I believe you hardly qualify, and if you continue with your jabber it will get worse. Why can folks not understand that this Club is not for amateurs?”

  The ushers slit the fellow’s throat, opened a trapdoor in the floor, and dropped him through. He fell three hundred and fifty meters, the building having a lean there and this part of the story being out over empty air.

  “I understand what he meant,” Roadstrum whispered to Puckett, “when he said, ‘In a very little while you will either be a member, or you will not be.’ I am not sure that all our men will be able to qualify. They are good ordinary liars, but the extraordinary is expected here.”

  “That fellow with the green scarf bothers me more and more,” Puckett whispered. “He reminds me very much of someone we have met in our travels, something about the brow, something about his grin.”

  And it was to the fellow with the green scarf that the President-Emeritus turned now. “Give us one of yours, Horace,” the P-E said, “anything to get the taste of the late ineptitude out of our ears.”

  “Sammy the Snake!” Roadstrum said suddenly and loudly. “Pardon me, sir, but are you any kindred of Sammy the Snake, the gambler on Roulettenwelt?”

  “My cousin,” said the fellow with the green scarf. “I am Horace the Snake. Fellows, these travelers know Sammy.”

  All the crewmen could see the resemblance now. It was something about the brow, of course, and something about the grin. It was also the flickering forked tongue and the thirty-meter long torso. Cousins! They could almost have been brothers!

  “Ah, I’ll tell you about the time I used to be a baseball player,” Horace began. “I had natural disabilities for this sport, for it had been originally a human game not designed for snakes. And, after humans, it was the giant frogs who played it best, especially at my chosen position, shortstop. Those fellows could really get the hop on a ball. And I, a poor earth-crawler, had to make my way by diligence and persistency.

  “In my apprentice years I had a mighty sore mouth from catching that ball, and I never could throw it at all. But I could reach it. With my tail anchored around second base, I could flop my head all the way to third, or first, instantly. In my ninety years on the diamond (we snakes are long-lived) I had fifty thousand double plays and ten thousand triple plays, all unassisted. This, I believe, is a record.”

  “How would you bat, Horace?” Roadstrum asked, entranced, for he had never heard Horace’s stories before.

  “Couldn’t very well, Roadstrum. Had to take the bat crossways in my mouth and bunt. I’m telling you I really had a sore snout in my apprentice years. But I stayed with it and I learned. You’ve heard pitchers say they’ll jam a ball down a fellow’s throat. They did to me. I’ve swallowed more baseballs than any ball player who ever lived. The worst thing is, they passed a special ruling that I was out whenever I swallowed a pitched ball. I never did believe they should have charged me more than a strike for it.”

  “Still, if you could lay down a bunt, any sort of bunt—” Roadstrum saw the possibilities.

  “I could and I did, Roadstrum. I got where I could lay them down, and they didn’t have to be very good. I could stretch my length and have my head on first base before anyone could blink. And once I was on first, I was as good as around. I hold every base-stealing record in baseball. When the bases are ninety feet apart, and a fellow is a hundred and five feet long, how are you going to tag him out?”

  “I believe I know a way to stop that stealing.” Crewman Trochanter grinned evilly.

  “I think I know what you mean, Trochanter.” Horace the Snake smiled. “Horse-Hoof Harry tried it once when he was playing first base for the All-Star All Stars. Weighed nine tons, that fellow, and what hooves he did have on him! I still wake up screaming when I remember how he tromped on my tail just as I went into my stretch.”

  Crewman Trochanter chortled.

  “But it was the last tail he ever tromped on, Trochanter,” said Horace the Snake. “It was just about the last thing of any sort he ever did. I felt kind of sorry when his widow came around to see me that evening; but, as she said, it’s all in the game.”

  Another person, perhaps human, had come into the Club. He was talking in a low voice with the President-Emeritus and with others. There was cursing, and the phrase “bird-killers” was heard.

  “We had a bat-boy named Bennie,” Horace the Snake continued. “He was a bat-boy literally, too small to handle the bats, but he flitted around merrily in the air.”

  “And how he could catch flies!” said Crewman Bramble.

  “I hate a guy who’s heard them all,” said Horace the Snake.

  One of the Club members, a florid colonel type, who dressed in the human style, was telling a steep tale of witty warfare and cunning conquest. The high hero of this was a great leader named Alley-Sally. It was a racy tale, and it excited Roadstrum.

  “Puckett, Puckett,” he whispered avidly, “just listen to this great stuff. Listen how it goes. What I would
not give to be in on a campaign like that one! What I would not give to meet such a leader.”

  “Roadstrum, Roadstrum,” Puckett chided. “It is yourself and ourselves he talks about; our own epic. Alley-Sally is yourself, Road-Storm. You remember that bit he’s telling now, the six-day war in Wamtangle? Sure, that was a passing smart trick you devised there, Roadstrum. It’s part of our own story he tells.”

  “Oh, I know that, Puckett. But he tells it so much better than it happened! Listen how they did it, Puckett! Listen to how smart their leader was! Oh, if I could only have been there!”

  There was a lot of boy still left in Captain Roadstrum.

  “One of the hornet-men will now tell a tale,” said the President-Emeritus. “A slander against the hornet-men has been brought into this Club within the last several minutes. I do not believe this slander, but I say it is time the horneteers were tested. If they fail the test, then they be not members of the Club, and it will not matter if the slander is true. We will make it quick. Let one horneteer tell a colossal lie, and all be judged by it.”

  “Let me,” said Captain Puckett. “A raconting man you are not, Roadstrum.”

  And this is the high tale that Captain Puckett told:

  “When I was quite a young man and filled with the spirit of adventure and space-faring, I went out to the Daedalian Chersonese and visited a world known as Demetrio Four. Being an undisciplined youth (I speak of that time now in sorrow, having become a moral man in my maturity) I fell into a liaison with a local girl, one Miseremos. She was the light of my life and I was completely impassioned by her. Our affair went along charmingly, until one day her four brothers came and seized me. They examined me very carefully, and in a way that I could not understand. They said that, things being the way they were, Miseremos and myself must marry. I was not adverse to this, loving the girl mightily, though I resented somewhat the manner and compulsion of it.

  “And marry we did, though I was quite puzzled by some of the accompanying rites. Then followed the weeks of deep enjoyment, though I was more and more puzzled. I felt strange and uncertain, and my wife, apparently, did not. ‘Your brothers spoke of Things being the way they are, Miseremos,’ I told her one day. ‘And I look at you and wonder. How are things, Miseremos?’