East of Laughter

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Denis Lollardy, you must deed me eleven acres of your estate, right here where the rock-slide has come down on your Irish Gardens. Oh, it will be beautiful when ten thousand flowered green creepers cover-over the rocks again. I’ll set up a little modern world terminal right here, and I can come here without leaving my Castle, and eat my breakfast here some mornings.”

  “All right,” Denis Lollardy said, “I’ll deed you my Irish Gardens and the rock-slide that’s intruded on them.”

  The estate-engineer of Denis Lollardy said that there were fifty thousand tons of rocks there and that it would take several years to clear them.

  “I don’t want them cleared if you don’t, Perpetua,” the Countess said.

  “No, I don’t want them cleared either,” Perpetua Parisi said listlessly. “I suppose it’s best to leave them. Leo wasn’t meant to grow up. Now he can be a Boy Genius forever. And so can the faun, I suppose.”

  The priest of the estate said a brief grave-top mass for the three dead. And then he talked a while with the Nine and with the Countess Maude.

  “The faun was not really Saint Faunus,” he said. “The canonization a few hundred years ago was no more than a folk-joke canonization. No, he was never a human, only a faun. And his death leaves only three genuine fauns in all Italy. Since the moment of Christ’s birth, not even one female goat has given birth to a faun, but only to kid goats. So all the fauns left are quite old, though they all keep a boyish appearance. And they are the last of the manifestations from the old pagan days. As a priest I say that it will probably be better when they’re finally gone. As an antiquarian, I’ll miss them”

  “The stones, if they shift but a little, will cover forever the hole where the Laughing Christ has been buried and unburied,” Denis Lollardy said. “I’d better have the wonderful thing up above ground again. We will take him to your Alpine Castle, Gorgonius. Your mountains deserve to know him, if only for a day.”

  Denis brought the statue up by the rope-pull. The flickering torch-light made it seem as if it were a live man laughing. And all ten of them (the priest had gone) were again stunned by the sheer beauty and joy and friendliness of the masterwork.

  “Maybe some other cheerful spirit will come and live in him,” Mary Brandy said.

  Monika Pantera had a pair of dingy lamps with her.

  “Denis conveniently forgot to have them sent to our Castle today,” she said. “I knew he would. But I will not be denied these two dingy lamps.”

  Jane Chantal High-Queen blew her hunting-horn loudly with the exuberant breeziness of her own breast. That burst of high horn-music sent the tune Saturday at Lecco for Seven Flutes scampering over the hills for a while. But as soon as Jane and her hunting-horn and her friends had gone, the Saturday at Lecco tune would come back again. It was the official tune of the place almost forever.

  “Everybody stand very close,” Jane Chantal called them. “We are in a haunted murder-world and all who stray from the group will be picked off and killed one by one.”

  The nine members of the Group of Twelve, Jane Chantal High-Queen, Perpetua Parisi, Gorgonius and Monika Pantera, Solomon Izzersted, Denis Lollardy, Caesar Oceano, Drusilla Evenrood, Mary Brandy Manx, along with the Countess Maude Grogley and the transcendent marble statue named The Laughing Christ of Creophylus, stood very close together. Then they were in the great hall of Klavierschloss, the Piano Castle of Gorgonius and Monika Pantera in the high German Alps. It was very early Sunday Morning, only a little bit after midnight, of June Twenty-First or Midsummer Night, of one of the very final years of the twentieth century.

  There were garments of a sort there. There was a disreputable urn there. And none of them was so gauche as to have to ask what the things were for. They all put on the sack-cloth, and they poured the ashes over their heads. There was even a garment of sack-cloth trimmed to the small size of Solomon Izzersted. Solomon at least would wear these penance weeds for the rest of his very long life. And one of those present put a sack-cloth garment around the statue of the Laughing Christ and poured ashes over the Laughing Head.

  And when, three hours later, the priest of the Castle came to say the Mass Before Dawn it was not the designated Mass of Sunday of the Twelfth Week of Ordinary Time but was instead the Mass for the World Mortally Sick and Perhaps Dying.

  But after that they breakfasted well as the hundreds of pianos in the Castle began to play Lift Up Your Eyes and Mountains in the Morning. The Gorgonius art had cut and programmed these with a new blend of songs of the general name Sunday at Klavierschloss for Three-Hundred-and-Ninety-Nine Player Pianos. One who knew him would never have considered Gorgonius Pantera to be a selfish man, but in this one thing he was selfish. This great blended group of songs, by far the best he had ever done, he had kept for himself. And from now until the end of the world (less five or six days perhaps) they would memorialize his own place. They were better than the songs with which he had memorialized Sora and Gaire Castle and Oosterend Sea-House, and Evenrood Manor in East Sussex and the Mayoral Residence at Port Saint Mary and the great Estate House at Lecco. They were the very best of the songs that he had hoarded in his mind and his genius for parts of the three centuries in which he had lived.

  In the state of rapture that his best work had put him into, Gorgonius was not too surprised when a strange man (a strange man whom he had known for many decades) came to him with a half-strange message.

  “What is it, Otto?” Gorgonius asked that man who lived still higher up on the mountain than himself. “What is the message?”

  “The Alpenriese, the Alpine Giant, whom I serve, says that he is weary and wishes to die, as Atrox has died, as the Hsiang Giant has died, as the Illacrove Giant has died, as the El-Khatar Giant has died in the night just past.”

  “What, Otto? Is the Alpine Giant, he who lives in the strange cave on the top of this very mountain, one of the Scribbling Giants who write the world? Well, no Giant is a hero on his own Mountain, but I wouldn’t have suspected it of him.”

  “Yes, Prince Gorgonius, he is one of the Giants who write the world. And he wishes to die as soon as he can find a replacement. He said to ask whether you would be his replacement?”

  “I can hardly refuse it, Otto. I’ll take the position mainly to keep out the incompetents. The phenomenon of the Sussex Wraiths, that bunch who reached for giantism and hadn’t the ability for it, must not happen again. But I’d really rather be the replacement for Atrox, except that I wasn’t asked.”

  “No, the replacement for Atrox will be a greater person than yourself, one who will nominate himself and will not be denied either on earth or above. You will be the replacement of the Alpenriese. You will still be one of the Seven Giants who write the world, but you will not be the replacement for the First Giant, for the Atrox.”

  “All right. I’ll do it, Otto. Tell the Alpenriese that he can die immediately if he wishes it. The replacement for Atrox will be a greater person than myself, you say? I don’t know of any talent or gift, except holy modesty, in which I might be outdone, but so be it! How strange! How unexpected! I wonder who he could possibly be?”

  Monika Pantera was trying to clean one of the two old and dingy lamps which she had compelled Denis Lollardy to give to her.

  “Monika, Monika, do you know what you are doing?” her daughter Perpetua Parisi asked her. “Do you realize just how corny a thing you are walking into?”

  “I half realize it, daughter, I suppose. But how would a person of my sensibilities walk into something corny? I just believe that there may be a bit of beauty under the dinginess and commonness of this old lamp. I’ll use this brass-polish and rub as hard as I can, and I may uncover something.”

  “Yes, rub very hard, mama. He won’t come unless you rub very hard. Oh corny, corny!”

  “Oh, I’ll clean it a while,” Monika smiled, and she rubbed it still harder. “Lamps are like people. You never know just what brightness is hidden in them until you search for it. Oh, who is this large and stran
ge man standing here!” Monika looked a little bit startled, and it wasn’t one of her regular looks. There was indeed a large and strange man standing there. “Who are you?” Monika asked.

  “Oh, corny, corny!” Perpetua and Jane Chantal and all of them railed.

  “I am an Ifrit from the Jinns of our Lord Solomon the King,” the big creature said. “You have called me up by rubbing the ancient talismanic lamp. Now I will grant you anything that you want, anything at all in the world. Wish, and be gratified.”

  Then the laughing Solomon Izzersted (he had become a laughing person quite recently, since his liberation) quoted a Chestertonian talismanic verse:

  “Multiplex of wing and eye

  Whose strong obedience broke the sky

  When Solomon was King.”

  Well yes, the large and strange man was indeed multiplex of wing and eye, but you’d hardly have noticed it of him if Izzersted hadn’t called attention to the fact.

  “What is your greatest wish, Princess Monika?” the strange Ifrit asked. “What is your greatest need?”

  “Oh, I don’t need anything at all, not one thing in the world,” Monika said. “No, no, I simply don’t need anything at all.”

  “But there must be something you need or desire!” the Ifrit of the Jinns cried. “There has to be something you need, or I have lived in vain. I have crossed ten thousand years and a hundred million miles to serve you. And you don’t want anything! Why are all those lesser persons laughing and giggling?”

  “Oh, just because they are lesser persons. They’re just giddy. Sometimes I wish they weren’t.”

  “Then that’s a wish. I’ll destroy them. I’ll smash the giddiness out of them. I’ll smash everything out of them. I’ll obliterate them!”

  “No, no, harm them not. I wouldn’t have even one of their giddy heads smashed. I love them all.”

  “But I must give you something!” the Ifrit cried. “I can’t go back to the vasty deeps full-handed.”

  “Do not be cruel, mother,” Perpetua giggled. “Let him grant you some one wish.”

  “Oh very well. I’ll let you grant me one wish, Ifrit. I wish that you would bide with us for a while here and tell us all about Ifrits and Jinns and Genii and other principalities and powers.”

  “Oh yes, yes, we love to talk about ourselves,” the Ifrit said.

  “It bounces back to you, Denis Lollardy,” Solomon Izzersted giggled. “You are the King of Corn now, for having the lamps, and Monika has acquitted herself well. How could you do anything so corny as to own Aladdin’s Original Lamp, and even make a forgery to accompany it?”

  “It’s the boy in me,” Denis said.

  “Whose original lamp?” the Ifrit asked. “Oh yes, Aladdin. Yes, he was one of the ten thousand owners through whose hands the storied lamp has passed. And now if I am to bide with you for a while and tell you about myself and my various peoples, may I have set a mid-morning banquet for you all, with all the wonderful foods we eat back home?”

  “Go ahead, Ifrit,” Monika agreed. “But take it easy with the almonds.”

  “I believe there’s a friend who’d like to be in on this,” Jane Chantal High-Queen said: “Abra dabra ookie ort / Come and visit, Charley Fort.”

  And of course the strange Charles Fort was immediately among them. “Ifrits, Jinns, Genies, denizens of the Ancient Arabian Empire of the low skies, sea stallions, flying horses, birds that can gulp down elephants in a single gulp, diamonds falling by the ton out of a sunlit sky, talking fish rising from the deeps, persons turned into stone by enchantment, Genies imprisoned in bottles for thousands of years, animals of unknown species howling in the streets, old sail-ships sailing in the sky with their sails billowing in the wind, fish-faced people, donkey-faced people, my kind of people!” Yes, Charles Fort was among them.

  “Sit down with us, Charles,” Monika said. “This genuine Ifrit is going to tell us all about the Arabian Things.”

  “Arabian Oceans in the low sky, unknown fish larger than whales falling out of the sky onto earth, a man seen walking on clouds overhead and trembling when the clouds begin to break up under his feet, then he disappears in clear air. Completely blue people, speaking the ancient Amharic language, appearing suddenly in the streets of one hundred cities of the earth. Scorpions the size of horses. Ah, I love them. My kind of people, my kind of people!” Thus Charles Fort spoke, and then he sat down quietly with the rest of them. “Ah, Ifrit, could I have Rupperts beer at the mid-morning banquet.”

  “Certainly. Rupperts is a favorite of mine also. Yours is a hard act to follow, Fort,” the Ifrit said. “Ifrits are bound to admire humans for their glibness. Usually we have a thousand years or so to think about what we’re going to say, and then we usually bust it. And you talk right off the tops of your heads, and you come out with all sorts of perfect colloquies.

  “Humans, when they speak of us at all, will usually refer to us as ancient. But we are ancient only in a very limited way. We are just one hour older than human people, and yet we were present to see some things that human people have never seen. But the monkeys and apes, bears, elephants, camels, whales and dolphins (those are the only intelligent animal species there are) are an hour older than are we ourselves, and two hours older than humans are. These animals have seen things that even we Jinns have not seen. But to some degree we Jinns know what all these animals think, and also what you humans think. Let me explain how we know these things.

  “We have the most acute hearing of any species. We can hear everything spoken or whispered anywhere on earth or in the heavens or in any of the four limbos or the seven hells. We cannot hear pure thoughts, but most thoughts are slightly sounded, especially those of bears and camels and monkeys and apes, and whales and people also. If they sound their thoughts at all, we can hear them.

  “The Darwinians have for a long time been searching for missing links between monkey-apes and humans, which they believe will prove their notions true. We Ifrits are the real ‘missing links’ between monkey-apes and humans, and we prove the strange notions false. We are not perceived as missing links because we are almost always invisible to humans. And when we are seen by humans we are usually seen in low resolution, in brief moments, and clothed in flowing robes. No human has ever seen the true shape of our ankles, for instance.”

  “But what about your fossil bones?” Solomon Izzersted asked. Solomon had been bouncing up and down like the baseball he resembled, bouncing up to human eye-level as he often did when he was avidly interested in what was being said. “Every creature that has ever lived has left fossil bones somewhere. Why have yours not been identified?”

  “You are wrong, Solomon,” the Ifrit said. “And it always hurts me to say that about a human, if you are a human. Ah, if you are a human! No, not every creature who ever lived has left fossil bones behind him. Only some of the creatures who have died have left bones. None of us has ever died, neither has any one of us ever been born. We were created in the same numbers that we now number. None of us has died of sickness, though we do sometimes suffer sickness. None of us has died of violence. Nor did any of us drown in the flood, for we breathe water as readily as we breathe air or fire. Only in shape and design do we appear to be missing-links between monkeys-apes and humans. But we are not such links because we do not generate.

  “Our purpose is to think certain sets of thoughts which creatures of other species either do not think at all or think badly. That, I believe, is also the purpose of the intelligent animals. We Ifrits have at least a brushing acquaintance with the thoughts of bears (what a mess of truly central speculations they do manipulate!), and of camels (who would suspect that such ungainly creatures have such elegant thoughts?), of apes (what inexorable logic ungoverned by common sense!), of whales (massive, oceanic, but lacking in crispness), and elephants (Oh the questions they ask, and the answers they fail to comprehend!).

  “The thoughts that we ourselves are supposed to think are such things as ‘How did God get to be God?�
��, ‘How did matter happen to be?’ ‘Is being easier than non-being?’ – and apparently it is, ‘Why should there be anything at all?’, and ‘Who would know it if there was nothing?’ We are supposed to meditate such things as ‘Are those last nine billion galaxy groups really essential to the punch-line of the anecdote of existence?’, ‘Is such a large universe really necessary?’, ‘Are you sure that there is not any duplication anywhere in the universe?’, ‘Is the smallness of the atoms necessary, or is their smallness an illusion?’”

  “The panoramic and rich smallness of the atoms is not an illusion,” Solomon Izzersted said as he bounced up and down. “If it is not necessary, then it is a bonus at least, a revel, a triumphant pageant.” Solomon had become a strong partisan of atoms.

  “We wonder also whether God was perfect in his beginning, or in his un-beginning,” the Ifrit continued to speculate. “We wonder how he passed his time before he created time. We wonder whether there were awkwardness in his first fashioning of creatures, and whether he found it politic to extinguish certain species who might have remembered the awkwardnesses. We wonder whether a person who is at the same time everywhere-present, all-wise, all-powerful, all-good, and without either a beginning or an end might not have rigged some of those concepts? And we wonder what the odds were against all those once-in-infinity excellences all happening to one person.

  “We wonder also about the inevitability of certain geometrical forms and consensus categories. And we wonder about the narrowness of numbers. Would there not be advantage in leaving all numbers of less than a million uncreated and incapable-of-being-thought-of, as non-existent? Then we could live in a universe of really meaningful and spacious numbers. But what if that has really happened? What if all numbers under a million are already excluded, and one is really a-million-and-one? But if we were really spacious, then such small-concept things as triangles simply would not exist. There would be no squares, and probably no circles.”

  “Do Jinns think a lot about such subjects during the thousands of years they’re pent up in bottles?” Jane Chantal asked.