“Why are we special?” Jane Chantal Ardri asked her husband Hilary. “Seven of our magic Group of Twelve have received gunshot wounds (none of them fatal) within the last hour. What was that sound, dear? The seven who were shot all believe that they were shot by their shadows. Oh, we are not spared, are we? You are shot, are you not? Hilary, the shot came from the window. Whyever do we have such an anachronistic thing as a window in our house? Oh, because we love it, of course, I remember. Well, the none of them fatal phrase still holds. But it looks as though it might be painful. Did it break your shoulder bone?”
“I don’t believe that it did, Jane Chantal. I can still raise my arm, but I’m not going to do it again, it hurts so hellishly. Perhaps I should get a doctor. Oh, I forgot, you are a doctor. That is one of the arts in which you are an artist.”
“Yes, Hilary. It is so lucky that you have me in moments like this.”
Perhaps the greatest of the forgeries of Denis Lollardy was his Laughing Christ of Creophylus which he had done only short months ago. The original Laughing Christ had disappeared from a villa North-by-East of Rome in the year of the Lord 453. And this one had been dug out of the storied Italian marl-and-loam very near to that place. Was this indeed the original Laughing Christ? people asked.
This was better than the original. Howin was it better? It worked miracles, and there was no tradition of the original statue working them.
What miracles did it work? It cured the melancholy of people who gazed on it. But miracles of that sort are only subjective miracles. It changed the horrible nose of a Roman lady and made it a thing of joy instead of a thing of horror. But really, it had changed the configuration less than a millimeter. And it happened that such was enough to make it into a good-natured and pleasant member instead of a horrible member. It was still not a beautiful nose, but the lady accepted it with pleasure and glee.
Thunderation! The statue did work genuine miracles. And it terrified one man. Denis Lollardy had never been a pious man. He had only been a borderline believing man. But he knew miracles when he saw them, and he was terrified (Oh, but there was joy mixed with the terror also) by the miracles worked by the Laughing Christ that he himself had carved.
“I don’t know how to get into communication with Mary Brandy Manx,” Jane Chantal Ardri said. “She is strolling on the sea of her silly island somewhere, I suppose. She is on an island of her own in more ways than one. But we do want the Group of Twelve to be together this evening on a private video-world-conference at least. We have got to find out what has gone wrong with the world, why it has become so vague and unsubstantial, why (by all one-hundred-and-one of the tests for it) we are all dreaming and in doubt of there being anything else beyond our dream. Oh dammit, Mary Brandy, hear me and answer me!”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Mary Brandy Manx answered in her brandy voice. She had gotten her middle name because of her brandy voice. She wasn’t a drinking woman. She had got that mellow and slightly strained voice from shouting at the gulls, terns, loons, and other sea-and-shore birds on her own island shore. Those birds will not answer you, you know, unless you shout at them.
We come to Mary Brandy now.
12. MARY BRANDY MANX. She lived on the Isle of Man. She here is numbered twelfth in the Group of Twelve. The Isle of Man on which she lives is twenty-nine miles from Ireland, thirty-one miles from England, and twenty-one miles from Scotland. But the miles to Scotland are very long miles because of the treacherous currents and the howling winds. What the winds howl, and they howl in the Manx language, is Why would anybody want to go to Scotland? So, in sympathetic miles, the Isle of Man is nearest to Ireland.
Books will tell you that the Isle of Man had its own language, Manx, which is still understood by one person in three on the Island. And the books will tell you that it is related to Irish and Scotch-Gaelic. As a matter of fact the Manx language is identical to the Irish language. It is only Irish spoken in a brandy voice.
“The ocean itself speaks in a brandy voice,” Mary Brandy said once, and it’s true. Listen to it sometime. Oh, listen to it! It is the mellow and slightly strained voice that the ocean got from shouting at the birds, the flying and leaping fish, and whales. None of them will pay attention to you unless you shout.
“What time, Jane Chantal, what time?” Mary Brandy asked now. “Oh, I’m talking to you by the old-fashioned voxo that I hung on your wall the last time I visited you. What time?”
“Eveningish, Mary Brandy. Eveningish by Oklahoma Time, this evening. Have you been shot today, Mary Brandy?”
“Oh, of course I’ve been shot today! Does that pertain to my being a member of the Group of Twelve? I thought that possibly it was some local political malcontent who had shot me, but all of them say that if they’d shot me I wouldn’t be walking around and asking about it. No, it isn’t bad at all. Some of the local gulls who are personal friends of mine have regurgitated a dram-and-a-half of gull-oil for me, and that will heal anything. Yes, I will join all of you this evening on a private video-world-conference; and then I will meet all of you anywhere in the world you choose after that. I suspect that the video-conference will not be enough, and you will decide on an In-the-Flesh-World-Conference after that. Why are your eyes red, Jane Chantal? Why have you been crying? Oh, you’ve been shot too, have you? Through the window, was it? Oh, I love windows! I’m so glad that you insisted on one in your house. Ninety percent of the people in the world now live in houses without windows and I’m so sorry for them! Goodbye now.”
Mary Brandy Manx was Mayor of the town-city of Port Saint Mary on the southern part of the Island known as Spanish Head. Mayor, hell, she was Meara of the town! And there were political malcontents in Port Saint Mary, persons who sometimes became wrathy against that she-outcast on the hill. Of course Mary Brandy Manx was an outcast. How else could she guarantee that at least one town in this world shall be well-run and well-administered. Mary Brandy was the oldest member of the Group of Twelve (Gorgonius Pantera, though he had lived in three centuries, was still quite a young man by every test); she was on the sunny side of sixty by only two years. But sometimes, in two special cases, she was only sixteen years old. And in both of the cases, at least at the start of her antic, she wore her ‘balloon dress’.
She wore it when she went up in her balloon. (Of course she had a balloon. Doesn’t the mayor of your town have a balloon?), and she wore it when she went swimming. Seven yards of linen and of wool cloth went into it. Yes, she grew her own flax, and she raised her own sheep. And she did look like a balloon when she swam in that dress. It was only when she had swum seven miles out and was over the Spanish Depths that she submerged, hung that dress on a rock hob five fathoms down, and became a sea goddess as she reveled in the further depths. And all sea goddesses, of whatever seas anywhere in the world, are exactly sixteen years old, never a day older.
And whenever Mary Brandy went higher than a mile in her balloon, she took off her balloon dress, put it in the bottom of the wicker gondola, and put five sand-bag ballasts on it (less than five wouldn’t do it, for it loved to fill itself with air and sail independently of Mary Brandy), and thus Mary Brandy would become a low-sky goddess, and they also are always exactly sixteen years old.
But at whatever age she might be at the moment, Mary Brandy Manx was a handsome woman with brandy-colored hair and eyes the color of those of a Manx cat.
“Jane Chantal, I want Hieronymous Talking-Crow to attend the meeting of the Group of Twelve tonight, whether it is a video-world-conference or an In-The-Flesh-World-Conference,” Leo Parisi said.
“But you are Hieronymous Talking-Crow, Leo,” Jane Chantal Ardri argued with him. “Everybody knows that is only a pen-name of yours. It’s the pen-name under which you write your better things.”
“Wrong, Jane Chantal, wrong. We are different persons, and we have met only once. But he belongs with the Group of Twelve.”
“Nobody except the Group of Twelve belongs with the Group of Twelve,” Jane argued. “Howe
ver we were selected, we were well selected. As with the Prototypical Group of Twelve, there may not be a thirteenth.”
“But with the Prototypical Group of Twelve, there was a second twelfth, to replace Judas, remember, who dropped from the twelve.”
“Oh, will we have a Judas, do you suppose, Leo my little lad?”
“I believe it nearly certain. Symmetry or floating justice or ultimate compensation or something almost requires that we should have a Judas in our group.”
“Does Hieronymous Talking-Crow have a shadow?”
“Yes, he does, Jane Chantal. He worried about it till I told him that every member of the Group of Twelve has one.”
“Well, Boy Wonder, did it or something shoot him today?”
“Yes it did, but not fatally. I don’t yet understand the shootings. Does symmetry or floating justice or ultimate compensation require these shootings, do you suppose?”
“I don’t know. Why should it require bad shooting? Where does this Hieronymous Talking-Crow live?”
“Oh, right there in your United States. Do the individual states have names? He knows about communications. He will be able to communicate with us if we accept him. And, as you know, acceptance is the first requirement for acceptance.”
“We are all equal in the Twelve; and we don’t have anything so vulgar as officers or officials or votes. If he is accepted, then he will be accepted. If he is not accepted, then he will go out and hang himself on a carob tree and burst asunder.”
“That bear is going to eat itself to death, Leo,” Perpetua Parisi said. “He has gobbled up thirty-six large salmon that he slapped out of the river. And now he has eaten more than a hundred of those giant eels. I don’t know how he catches them. They seem to rise right out of the water and look him right in the eye. He whistles to them, and they come up in answer to his whistle. Is that possible?”
“He is wheezing out of his bursting belly,” Leo said, “and the eels do come up in answer to the sound, yes. What he has jammed into his maw has surely doubled his weight, and of course he’ll die.”
“I bet he’d be good roasted whole,” Perpetua drooled, “and the several hundred pounds of trout and eels roasted inside him just as they are! Oh, I think I’ll rig up a long spit and a couple of stanchions and haul in a couple of wagon-loads of hard wood for the fire.”
What? Are there wild bears walking around in middle Italy? Are there giant trout in the rivers, and big eels by the hundreds?
Yes, in one place all three of them can be found. Near the town of Sora, in the Liri River, in the foothills of the Apennine Mountains. Those big bears are good and strong and flavorsome when they stuff themselves full of acorns and one of them is roasted whole. Think how much better one would be when stuffed full of trout and eels!
“Leonardo the Great has been wounded, Hilary,” Jane Chantal said. “No, he hasn’t been shot. He’s been terribly bitten and mauled. It was a sneak attack by that other panther, the black one. Oh, what a day for assaults this has been! All of the ‘Group of Twelve’ have been assaulted, and several of their associates.”
“There’s a mind behind this,” said Hilary, “and not a dreaming mind. That’s reassuring.”
“Would it be reassuring if the mind-behind-it got us all killed tomorrow, Hilary?”
“Sure it would. That would mean that we had been alive to be killed, a thing presently in doubt.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Monday at Sora
The group hook-up was held as a private video-world-conference that evening (evening for Hilary and Jane Chantal Ardri on their lakeside in Oklahoma). One of the objections made by some people to private video-world-conferences was that they were easily tapped. Anybody in the world might look in and listen in on these Poor-Man-Conferences. But the objection did not apply to the Group of Twelve, the group to which the Ardris belonged. All of their groups (which would now be reduced to a single group) were Open Covenant Groups. They didn’t care who might listen to them or watch them. In fact, there were several thousand persons around the world who habitually dropped everything for a listen-in and look-at on the Group of Twelve. What droll subjects that group did take up!
This conference generated thrills and it generated panic. When the one-hundred-and-one tests of Atrox Fabulinus to determine whether one was dreaming were discussed, thousands of the observers put the easiest of them to the test. And the pop conclusion “We’re dreaming, we’re dreaming, and we can’t wake up” ran like wildfire through the crowing crowds. “We can’t wake up because there is nothing to wake up to” was the further chilling conclusion, and the thousands of observers turned into the tens of millions as the word went around and all rushed to get in on the panic. “We are only a dream and the world is only a dream: there isn’t any real world” became the voice of the panic.
But it wasn’t the Universal Voice of Panic. Strangely enough there were those in the audience for whom the Tests of Atrox showed that they were not dreaming, not by any of the tests, that they were wide-awake in a wide-awake world. That boy-genius and Prince of Gadgetry, Leo Parisi was able to run an instant monitor on any audience tuned in on his group. And the Solomon Izzersted/John Barkley Towntower person could do it also. Strangely, strangely, the wide-awakes amounted to eighty percent of the audience. They did not panic, they were not impressed, they lost interest and left the conference. But quality sampling showed that the wide-awakers were those of inferior minds. “They are the canaille, they are the lumpenproletariat,” said Jane Chantal Ardri. “But try to get along without them,” said Mary Brandy Manx the Mayor of Port Saint Mary. “They are the solid ones. We rarified ones are those filled with air.”
“Really, they almost spoil the panic,” said Hilary Ardri, “but I never respected the opinion of crowds.”
Ah those low ones, those majority ones, how would they know? How would they be affected even by death? How could there be any difference between dreaming and waking to such as they?
But the panic prevailed as it selected its audience. And the official monitory authorities would be forced to scrub this private world conference off the airways.
“Group of Twelve, Group of Twelve, we’re going to be jammed off the air instantly by the Panic Marshals,” came the calm brandy voice of Mary Brandy Manx. “Let us close the conference now and meet in the flesh somewhere tomorrow. Mine is a good place.”
“No. Meet here,” Perpetua Parisi cut in. “Can all of you be here in sixty minutes? I have a big bear full of trout and eels being roasted whole, and it will be done in sixty minutes. And in sixty minutes it will be tomorrow here. Everybody be here.”
“Yes,” came the jovial voice of Hilary Ardri. “Bad as it is, modern transportation can get anybody in the world to any place in the world within sixty minutes and with a lot to spare. Shall I program some good Oklahoma-lake fish to be there?”
“Oh, maybe a ton of them, Hilary,” Perpetua said. “They are so good. And some of the people may not like whole roasted bear filled with trout and eels. It hasn’t been tried yet. And possibly some of the needy rich will drop by and we’ll have to feed them.”
So the conference popped like a bubble and went off the air, leaving the tens of millions of observers howling “Where is here, where is here, where are you going? We want to go too. We can be anywhere in sixty minutes if only we know where that anywhere is. We want some of that big bear roasted whole full of trout and eels.”
But the place of Leo and Perpetua Parisi near Sora in Italy was a place that had purposely been made hard to find.
“Here, whenever we eat or drink, we also set a plate and a cup for Atrox Fabulinus,” Leo Parisi said. “And the food on the plate is always eaten, and the drink in the cup is always drunk. Perpetua accuses me of the eating and drinking in moments when she is not watching closely, and I accuse her. Notice how wonderfully full-bodied she’s become. I love it on her, but I believe it’s evidence that she’s cheating. We really do believe though that the giant Atrox (be he ali
ve or be he dead) is in the neighborhood. We believe that he has a scriptorium in one of the caves nearby, or even in some obscure room of our own house. One of our house ghosts (we have three house ghosts) assures us that Atrox is not a ghost, or not one of their sort of ghosts at least. ‘That sloppy giant,’ she says, ‘that damnable camel’s nose, no, he’s not one of our party. He is not of our party at all’.”
Midnight had struck while the first of the Group of Twelve or the Group of Twelve Slightly Expanded were arriving at the well-hidden plush home of Leo and Perpetua Parisi. So now it was Monday at Sora. Perpetua had set all thirteen of her player pianos to playing Monday at Sora, and they would play it for twenty-four hours. No, they would play it for much longer than that. It was a piece of Perpetua’s own composition. Had she had the unapparent age of her father and the experience (had she lived in three different centuries and carried on an affair with the piano in all three of them as he had) she might have been as great a composer as he was. And the talents of such a genuine seventh daughter as Perpetua are always to be honored. The enchanting Monday at Sora was really a bit slight, and yet it was perfect for thirteen pianos. But it would not have sustained three hundred and five pianos as her father’s Seventh Woman Suite, and it surely would not have sustained near seven hundred pianos as did her father’s Giant Suite.
The bear? Oh, the bear had probably weighed five hundred pounds (fur and head and feet and bones and all), and the trout and eels in his distended stomach had probably weighed another five hundred pounds (no wonder the feast had killed him); and Leo had added two hundred pounds of chestnuts for flavor. But weights and measures all had an unreal quality about them at this middle of the night feast.
A lady of the neighborhood came to them. “The Atrocious Giant will no longer be satisfied with a little drinking cup like that,” the old lady said. “He has already come to consider you as stingy and miserly people and he repents that he has made you. He likes to drink out of a cup that is a cup.”
East of Laughter Page 5