East of Laughter

by R. A. Lafferty

  “But many parts of the spherical world have been intersected by the lens world as the compilation drifts and changes through the centuries. The unreal regions and the presently unreal people in them sometimes have legends and memories of the time when we were real.”

  “When was this that you sailed to the very edge of the lens-shaped or real world, Saint Brandon?” Hilary Ardri asked. Hilary had been doing some powerful thinking.

  “It was in the Year of Restored Salvation Five Hundred and Fifty-Three,” Saint Brandon said.

  “Are we persons real who are here?”

  “Some of you are, Hilary, and some of you aren’t. I won’t go any further than that. We don’t want to hurt any feelings. Being in the real lens-shaped world doesn’t automatically confer personal reality. That Giant, Atrox Fabulinus, he who is called the Roman Rabelais, has devised one-hundred-and-one tests for a person to determine whether he is dreaming or not, whether he is real or not.”

  “Oh, damn Atrox and his idiot tests!” Hilary howled. “He’s murdered my wife Jane Chantal and I intend to murder him.”

  “That won’t bring your wife back, Hilary. But if you persuade Atrox to un-murder Jane Chantal, that will bring her back.”

  “Well, dammit Saint Brandon, will she be real after he, ah, unmurders her?”

  “If she was real before, then she will be real again. If she was not real before, then she will not be real afterwards. But, even so, you will have her back, if you and Atrox can come into some kind of accord. Reality-Unreality is only one of the eleven aspects of things, and we should not give more than one-eleventh importance to it. Did any of you people take the one-hundred-and-one tests of Atrox to determine whether you and your world are real?”

  “Yes, old salt-water Saint, we did,” Hilary Ardri admitted, “and by all the tests we are unreal. And by my own tests, that rotten and usually invisible giant is unreal. Saint Brandon, is it possible for an unreal person to become real?”

  “On this we have no revelation. I would guess that it is possible but not common.”

  “There is a giant shadow or giant person skulking at the little foot-bridge that crosses the floating moat,” said Denis Lollardy who returned from rambling about. “I have the feeling that it is our disreputable Giant Atrox Fabulinus.”

  “Yes, it is he,” said the Countess Maude Grogley. “He is terrified of crossing running water. He has to have a girl or woman bring him across it. Most giants have strange phobias. But I’ll leave him there for a while. Everybody is angry at Atrox for his killing people and for his other sillinesses. It would be a breach of etiquette to leave a Tuesday’s Guest out there past noon on Tuesday, but we’ll leave him there for a while yet. Or maybe one of you ladies should get him now. After all, he is my guest. Bring him across the little foot-bridge over the flowing moat. He’s afraid to cross by himself.”

  “I’ll go get Atrox,” Perpetua Parisi said. “What does one do, simply lead him over the bridge by the hand?”

  “Nothing so simple as that. No, the lady carries him across the bridge on her back, and he weighs a hundred stone or more. I usually do it, but right now I’m a little bit broken from playing Unbreakable Dolls at a rowdy Castle party yesterday.”

  “I could not do it,” said Perpetua. “Not a hundred stone.”

  “I will go and get Atrox,” Drusilla Evenrood said. “It will be the fulfillment of a legend for me. In my own shire of Sussex we have the legend of the little girl who used to carry the giant on her back every morning. And every morning the giant would pay her a sixpence for the ride. The mother of the little girl found out about it and went to give the giant a ride for sixpence. But the giant was too heavy for the mother and he broke her back. Three other women, greedy for gain, found out about it and went out to give the giant a ride for sixpence. And the giant was too heavy for each of them, and each of them got her back broken. The little girl was the only one who could carry the giant on her back without having her back broken, for carrying giants is the opposite of what one might expect. And when the little girl grew bigger and was afraid that the giant’s weight would break her back, she got her smaller sister to take her place and give the giant a ride every morning.

  “When I was six years old, I wanted to be that little girl, and I went out every morning to look for the giant and offer him a ride. I never met him, though I did give rides to several of the gentlemen of the neighborhood. When I was seven years old, I knew that I was too big for it, so I turned it over to my four year old sister. And, would you believe it?, the very first morning she went out and found the giant and gave him a ride. At least she said that she did. My little sister told lots of lies when she was four.

  “I am not a little girl now, but I am the smallest of all the ladies here except the Countess so I should be able to do it. Will Atrox give me a sixpence for the ride, Countess Grogley?”

  “I believe that he will pay you a Roman silver sestertius, Drusilla.”

  The Ogre-Siog, a very intelligent person, began to give them his own views on the reality of the world. “There are two sides to the world, the inside and the outside,” he said. “The inside is real and the outside is less than real. Mostly we Sioga live on the inside or real side of the world. We only come onto the outside of the world to steal apples or, in my case, to visit with the Countess Maude Grogley whom I love. Usually when we come up on the outside of the world, we come to what Saint Brandon calls the lens-shaped world, but sometimes we come up onto what he calls the spherical world in places out of correspondence with the lens-world. Yes, there is a slight difference in them, but not as much as he makes out. The apples are better on the surface of the lens-world, and the Countess lives on the surface of the lens-world. I have lived for twenty-two lifetimes, and this is the wisdom I have learned in those twenty-two lifetimes.”

  Drusilla Evenrood came back into the room with the giant Atrox Fabulinus. She was flipping a Roman silver sestertius coin in the air. That’s worth a hundred times more than a sixpence. Atrox was clearly visible now, a huge and lumpish giant. He had a large bundle, nine feet long. That alone must have weighed three hundred pounds.

  “Another time, Drusilla?” Atrox asked.

  “Perhaps, Atrox, perhaps. Yes, I believe so. It’s the only one of my little girl dreams that ever came true.”

  “Atrox, I want my wife Jane Chantal back!” Hilary cried angrily.

  “I will try to bring her back, Hilary, but I honestly don’t remember killing her. I remember reaching down to her in the room and finding that she was already dead. However, my memory has become a little bit sketchy in these last several centuries. Maybe I did it and maybe I didn’t. I will try to animate her again. I will try to remember the words I used to animate her the first time, or words very like them. I will put my mind to it right now, and soon I will be able to put quill to parchment to see what I am able to do.”

  “The Ogre-Siog is correct that there is not very much difference between the real and the unreal, between the inside and the outside of the world,” the Morning Angel said. The Morning Angel, who never slept, was about at all hours, but he was somewhat brighter in the morning, and now it had slipped into afternoon. “And Saint Brandon is right that the real-unreal question is only one of eleven aspects of things and of no more than one-eleventh importance. And myself am of the opinion that the life-death opposition is entirely overblown. Death is but a minor episode in life. I surely wouldn’t count it among the ten great turning-points of my life. And there are very many items which we account as natural or universal which are no such thing. Many of them are only accidents or illnesses and should be subject to easy cures.”

  “How’d you ever get to be a Morning Angel anyhow?” Hilary Ardri asked sourly. He had been in a bad temper ever since the murder of his wife Jane Chantal the evening before.

  “I just don’t know, Hilary. I just don’t remember. Nor do you remember how you got to be Hilary Ardri. I’d be tempted to regard myself as the randomized product of a
randomized universe except that my Faith constrains me to believe that everything in the created universe has a purpose, and that includes me. I’m called the Morning Angel because I’m bright in the morning and I dim out after the morning is gone. And now it is afternoon, possibly verging onto evening. But I am trying to say that such widespread things as gravity, for instance, may be only contagious illnesses. And they may pass away.”

  The Scribbling Giant Atrox Fabulinus was also in a sour mood. He sat at a huge table with a huge roll of parchment before him. All the rolls of Atrox were huge. And he scribbled with a nine-foot-long quill pen. All of the Group of Twelve had shuddered when Atrox had unsheathed that murderously-long pen, for it was one of the long feathers such as had speared Jane Chantal and perhaps others to their deaths.

  Several times, transparent figures in the shape of Jane Chantal had appeared near where Atrox was working. But then the bumbling giant would mutter “Not right, just not right” and he would jab his big pen angrily into the parchment, and each transparent Jane Chantal would collapse in turn like a punctured balloon. And the hope of Hilary Ardri went up and down. The observers noticed, however, that each successive Jane-figure had been a little bit more Jane-like. And a little more solid. So the hours went by, and it was night.

  And when night came, they all dined on gored ox and Castle cheese.

  “You all glare at me today as if I were a malefactor,” Atrox complained, “but perhaps I am not the only malefactor in this group. Denis Lollardy, besides you being a common forger, you are an uncommon thief. You stole from me the thing I most prized in my life, the thing that has authorized my strange continued life. That was the statue or figure of eidolon The Laughing Christ. Well, it has been mistaken for a statue or an eidolon, but I believe that it is the Christ himself in the train of his second sepulture. I buried him, as he had instructed me to do, in the ground of Italy. And after three quinque-centums of years he was to rise out of that ground again and renew the world. But you, you thief and forger, you came and dug him out of the ground betimes, and then you represented him as one of your own forgeries.”

  “No, Atrox, you are wrong,” Denis Lollardy said firmly. “You did not bury him in the ground, you buried him in your mind. And I found him there, for all of us can raid into your mind as you can raid into ours. And then I carved him out of fine travertine marble. He was one of my greatest forgeries, forgeries for which there was no physical original. Then I buried my magnificent statue in the ground to age it, and afterwards I dug it up again.

  “Atrox, we will be at my own place one of the latter days of this week, I believe. Then we will ask the Laughing Christ just what he is and how many authors he had. I believe that you yourself were Creophylus, and that you only imagined you had carved the statue.”

  “No. I am no Creophylus, no sculptor,” Atrox said. “The Christ was alive when I buried him, at his request.”

  “Yes, I am convinced that gravity is a mere contagion,” the Morning Angel was saying. (No, he wasn’t still on that subject: he had come back to that subject.) “Some of you here of limited experience and limited travel may believe that gravity and its effects are everywhere, but this is not so. Once it was of a very limited extent, a slight sickness, like a cold in the cosmic head, that afflicted only a very narrow corner of the universe. But then it spread, it spread, it was one of those quick contagions. It was like the three-day flu. And it was everywhere; in one slightly less narrow corner of the universe it was everywhere. But I believe that it has peaked and that it is now perhaps declining. I feel that it will decline rapidly and then disappear. So then, in all likelihood, it will prove to be much less than a three-day influenza. It may prove to have been a mere one day cold.”

  Atrox made an impatient sound and stabbed his parchment with his big quill pen. And the Morning Angel fell asleep in his chair. What, was the Morning Angel no more than another figure from the long quill of Atrox?

  “Perhaps you could write better on my word-processor, Atrox,” said the Countess Maude Grogley. “You will have to make a change to something one of these centuries. When the last bird with nine-foot-long distal wing-feathers is dead, what will you do? There’s only nine of them left in the world, you know.”

  “Mother,” Laughter-Lynn Casement said. “I’ve wondered about your word-processor over there. There’s no way it can work.”

  “But it does work. I write all my thank-you notes on it.”

  “But, mother, you still do not have electricity in this cranky old Castle. What do you use instead of electricity to run your word-processor?”

  “Candles,” said Countess Maude Grogley.

  “I believe that we should continue on our Quest,” said Solomon Izzersted. “We have made some progress here, but I believe that we have nearly exhausted this source for now.”

  “I will not leave,” Hilary Ardri stated stubbornly. “I will haunt Atrox here until he gives my beloved Jane Chantal back to me.”

  “Fear not, little flock,” Atrox said. “Wherever you are, I am of necessity quite near by.”

  “It is an hour till midnight,” Mary Brandy Manx said. “I wish you would all come to my place for a day at Port Saint Mary.”

  “It is already midnight some places,” Laughter-Lynn Casement said. “I wish you would all come to my place at Oosterend for a day.”

  “We wish that all of you would come and spend a day or a forever with us at our wonderful Klavierschloss,” said Gorgonius Pantera.

  “Oh, we both wish it,” his wonderful wife Monika said.

  “Who will decide where we should go next?” the Strange Cargoes’ man Caesar Oceano asked. “Who will decide?”

  With his big quill pen, Atrox Fabulinus the Roman Rabelais wrote one word ‘Oosterend’ on his parchment.

  And immediately all the loose membership of the Group of Twelve was on its way to Oosterend.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Wednesday at Oosterend

  Oh, they came down as soft as the breast of a goose! It was nothing like their landing of the previous midnight. Those Irish morning games are so rough! But this was gentle.

  “Gentle, but something is backwards,” Laughter-Lynn Casement said in a puzzled voice. “My modern world terminal should be on the other side of my house where I left it, where it’s always been. And other things are awry. Preternatural persons shouldn’t meddle unless they have perfect memories for such details. Maybe preternatural persons should not meddle at all. And yet our reality, what we have of it, may derive from such as them.”

  “We come to the third morning of our quest for reality,” Perpetua Parisi said. “Oh, we are gaining on it, aren’t we? Or are we gaining on it at all? Who has been here before us this morning? It seems as if we are running in sand and making hardly any progress at all. What is that strange creature running up the beach to us? It’s somebody who should be of our party, and yet isn’t even a person yet.”

  “I believe it is only gulls,” Caesar Oceano said. “Gulls become very grumpy when they must work at night, but when the fish are running at night, what choice do they have? And it’s plain that the fish have been running all night. This is a bountiful shore, Laughter-Lynn. No, one thing moving there is taller than a gull and more graceful.”

  “I haven’t any Castle as my mother has,” said Laughter-Lynn, “but I have a commodious house. I have a woman servant and a man servant and a child servant. I’ll just go up the hill to my fine house and wake all three of them and set them to rustling a big Dutch-Friesian breakfast for all of us. There’s a saying around here, you know ‘Eat a banging-big Dutch breakfast early in the morning, and be soggy all day.’ Oh, Hilary, it could almost be Jane Chantal. It could almost be. I’ll have them set a plate for her too in any case. Does everybody want beer for breakfast?”

  Yes, the strange creature running up the beach to them was taller than a gull and less harshly voiced. It was more girlish than even a girl gull. It was at the same time curiously graceful and yet moving with a comical
clumsiness often shown by newly-hatched shore-birds. The starlight and sea-shine were glimmering through it, and yet it was not transparent, only very slightly translucent.

  “Who am I? Who am I?” it was singing in a voice that needed practice.

  “Who am I? Who am I?” it was indeed saying when it came still closer to them. “That’s the game we are playing now,” it sang. “We are playing ‘Who am I?’ I ask ‘Who am I’ and one of you says ‘Give me a clue’.”

  Hilary Ardri was shaking as though he would unjoint himself, and his face was ashen in the starlight and sea-shine. There was joy and horror and wonder mixed in his expression, and he had begun to cry. But he spoke in a soft, clear voice “Give me a clue, Jane Chantal.” She wasn’t woman-sized. She was nine-year-old girl-sized.

  “Oh, you got my name half-right,” the creature said. It now seemed to be more of a land-creature than a sea-creature. “My name is Jane Galatea. I love ‘Who am I?’ for a morning game. I loved those Irish morning games yesterday morning too, and I could only hear them and not see them, and the games couldn’t hear me or see me either. He says that he always writes the ears first, that something has to be first, and that there is a magic about new-made ears that he understands better than any of the other giants do. So I could hear all sorts of things before I could see them or move in them. I felt out of it when I couldn’t take part in all that Irish morning visiting, but maybe I can go back there some other time. Funny man, say ‘Give me another clue, Jane Galatea.’”

  “Give me another clue, Jane Chantal my wife,” Hilary Ardri said.

  “How could I be your wife yet? Part of the ‘Who am I?’ game is that I get to choose whose wife I want to be. Ask me a question, funny man.”

  “How old are you, Jane Chantal?” Hilary Ardri asked. He was still ashen-faced and he was still shaking, but now he was shaking more with delight than with horror.