But some of the things they exchanged as gifts instead of smashing them—glass birds and horses, fortune-telling globes that showed changing people and scenes within, tuned chiming balls that rang like bells, glass cats that sparked when stroked, wolves and bears, witches that flew.
The Eretzi found some of these things that the Children discarded. They studied them and imitated them.
And again, in the interludes of their other games, the Children came back to Hobble's shops where he sometimes worked with looms. They made costumes of wool and linen and silk. They made trains and cloaks and mantles, all the things for their grand masquerades. They fabricated tapestries and rugs and wove in all sorts of scenes: vistas of Home and of Eretz, people and peacocks, fish and cranes, dingles and dromedaries, larks and lovers. They set their creations in the strange ragged scenery of Eretz and in the rich contrived gardens of Home. A spark went from the Children to their weaving so that none could tell where they left off and their creations began.
Then they left poor Hobble and went on to their more vital games.
There were seven of them (six, not counting the backward Hobble), but they seemed a thousand. They built themselves castles in Spain and Gardes in Languedoc. The girls played always at Intrigue, for the high pleasure of it, and to give a cause for the wars. And the wars were the things that the boys seldom tired of. It is fun to play at armies with live warriors; and the Eretzi were live… in a sense.
The Eretzi had had wars and armies and sieges long before this, but they had been aimless things. Oh, this was one field where the Eretzi needed the Children. Consider the battles that the Children engineered that afternoon:
Gallipoli — how they managed the ships in that one! The Fathers could not have maneuvered more intricately in their four-dimension chess at Home.
Adrianople, Kunovitza, Dibra, Varna, Hexamilion! It's fun just to call out the bloody names of battles.
Constantinople! That was the one where they first used the big cannon. But who cast the big cannon for the Turks there? In their histories the Eretzi say that it was a man named Orban or Urban, and that he was Dacian, or he was Hungarian, or he was Danish. How many places did you tell them that you came from, Michael Goodgrind?
Belgrad, Trebizond, Morat, Blackheath, Napoli, Dornach!
Cupua and Taranto — Ralpha's armies beat Michael's at both of those.
Carignola — Lonnie foxed both Michael and Ralpha there, and nearly foxed himself. (You didn't intend it all that way, Lonnie. It was seven-cornered luck and you know it!)
Garigliano where the sea was red with blood and the ships were like broken twigs on the water!
Brescia! Ravenna! Who would have believed that such things could be done with a device known as Spanish infantry?
Villalar, Milan, Pavia! Best of all, the sack of Rome! There were a dozen different games blended into that one. The Eretzi discovered new emotions in themselves there — a deeper depravity and a higher heroism.
Siege of Florence! That one called out the Children's every trick. A wonderfully well-played game!
Turin, San Quentin, Moncontour, Mookerhide!
Lepanto! The great sea-siege where the castled ships broke asunder and the tall Turk Ochiali Pasha perished with all his fleet and was drowned forever. But it wasn't so forever as you might suppose, for he was Michael Goodgrind who had more bodies than one. The fish still remember Lepanto. Never had there been such feastings.
Alcazar-Quivar! That was the last of the excellent ones — the end of the litany. The Children left off the game. They remembered (but conveniently, and after they had worn out the fun of it) that they were forbidden to play Warfare with live soldiers. The Eretzi, left to themselves again, once more conducted their battles as dull and uninspired affairs.
You can put it to a test, now, tonight. Study the conflicts of the earlier times, of this high period, and of the time that followed. You will see the difference. For a short two or three centuries you will find really well-contrived battles. And before and after there is only ineptitude.
Often the Children played at Jealousies and raised up all the black passions in themselves. They played at Immoralities, for there is an abiding evil in all children. Masking and water-carnivals and balls, and forever the emotional intrigue!
Ralpha walked down a valley, playing a lute and wearing the body of someone else. He luted the birds out of the trees and worked a charm on the whole countryside.
An old crone followed him and called, “Love me when I'm old.”
“Sempremai, tuttavia,” sang Ralpha in Eretzi or Earthian. “For Ever, For Always.”
A small girl followed and called, “Love me when I'm young.”
“Forever, for always,” sang Ralpha.
The weirdest witch in the world followed him and called, “Love me when I'm ugly.”
“For always, forever,” sang Ralpha, and pulled her down on the grass. He knew that all the creatures had been Laurie playing Bodies.
But a peculiar thing happened: the prelude became more important than the play. Ralpha fell in love with his own song, and forgot Laurie who had inspired it. He made all manner of music and poem — aubade, madrigal, chanson; and he topped it off with one hundred sonnets. He made them in Eretzi words, Italian words, Languedoc words, and they were excellent. And the Eretzi still copy them.
Ralpha discovered there that poetry and song are Passion Deferred. But Laurie would rather have deferred the song. She was long gone away and taking up with others before Ralpha had finished singing his love for her, but he never noticed that she had left him. After Hobble, Ralpha was the most peculiar of them all.
In the meanwhile, Michael Goodgrind invented another game of Bodies. He made them of marble — an Eretzi limestone that cuts easily without faulting. And he painted them on canvas. He made the People of Home, and the Eretzi. He said that he would make angels. “But you cannot make angels,” said Joan.
“We know that,” said Michael, “but do the Eretzi know that I cannot? I will make angels for the Eretzi.”
He made them grotesque, like chicken men, like bird men, with an impossible duplication of humeral function. And the Children laughed at the carven jokes.
But Michael had sudden inspiration. He touched his creations up and added an element of nobility. So an icon was born.
All the Children did it then, and they carried it into other mediums. They made the Eretzi, and they made themselves. You can still see their deep features on some of those statues, that family look that was on them no matter what faces they wore or copied.
Bronze is fun! Bronze horses are the best. Big bronze doors can be an orgy of delight, or bronze bells whose shape is their tone.
The Children went to larger things. They played at Realms and Constitutions, and Banks and Ships and Provinces. Then they came down to smaller things again and played at Books, for Hobble had just invented the printing thing.
Of them all, Hobble had the least imagination. He didn't range wide like the others. He didn't outrage the Eretzi. He spent all his time with his sick toys as though he were a child of much younger years.
The only new body he acquired was another one just like his own. Even this he didn't acquire as did the other Children theirs. He made it laboriously in his shop, and Hobble and the Hobble Creature worked together thereafter, and you could not tell them apart. One was as dull and laboring as the other.
The Eretzi had no effect whatsoever on the Children, but the Children had great effect on the Eretzi. The Children had the faculty of making whatever little things they needed or wanted, and the Eretzi began to copy them. In this manner the Eretzi came onto many tools, processes, devices and arts that they had never known before. Out of ten thousand, there were these: The Astrolabe, Equatorium, Quadrant, Lathes and Traversing Tools, Ball-Bearings, Gudgeons, Gig Mills, Barometers, Range-Finders, Cantilever Construction, Machine Saws, Screw Jacks, Hammer Forges and Drop Forges, Printing, Steel that was more than puddled Iron, Logarithms, Hydrau
lic Rams, Screw Dies, Spanner Wrenches, Flux Solder, Telescopes, Microscopes, Mortising Machines, Wire-Drawing, Stanches (Navigation Locks), Gear Trains, Paper-Making, Magnetic Compass and Wind-Rhumb, Portulan Charts and Projection Maps, Pinnule-Sights, Spirit-Levels, Fine Micrometers, Porcelain, Firelock Guns, Music Notation and Music Printing, Complex Pulleys and Snatch-Blocks, the Seed-Drill, Playing Cards (the Children's masquerade faces may still be seen on them), Tobacco, the Violin, Whiskey, the Mechanical Clock.
They were forbidden, of course, to display any second-aspect powers or machines, as these would disrupt things. But they disrupted accidentally in building, in tooling, in armies and navies, in harbors and canals, in towns and bridges, in ways of thinking and recording. They started a thing that couldn't be reversed. It was only the One Afternoon they were here, only two or three Eretzi Centuries, but they set a trend. They overwhelmed by the very number of their new devices, and it could never be simple on Eretz again.
There were many thousands of Eretz days and nights in that Long Afternoon. The Children had begun to tire of it, and the hour was growing late. For the last time they wandered off, this time all Seven of them together. In the bodies of Kings and their Ladies, they strode down a High Road in the Levant. They were wondering what last thing they could contrive, when they found their way blocked by a Pilgrim with a staff.
“Let's tumble the hairy Eretzi,” shouted Ralpha. “Let him not stand in the way of Kings!” For Ralpha was King of Bulgaria that day.
But they did not tumble the Pilgrim. That man knew how to handle his staff, and he laid the bunch of them low. It was nothing to him that they were the high people of the World who ordered Nations. He flogged them flat.
“Bleak Children!” that Pilgrim cried out as he beat them into the ground. “Unfledged little oafs! Is it so that you waste your Afternoon on Earth? I'll give you what your Fathers forgot.”
Seven-colored thunder, how he could use that staff! He smashed the gaudy bodies of the Children and broke many of their damnable bones. Did he know that it didn't matter? Did he understand that the bodies they wore were only for an antic?
“Lay off, old Father!” begged Michael Goodgrind, bleeding and half beaten into the earth. “Stay your bloody bludgeon. You do not know who we are.”
“I know you,” maintained the Pilgrim mountainously. “You are ignorant Children who have abused the Afternoon given you on Earth. You have marred and ruined and warped everything you have touched.”
“No, no,” Ralpha protested— as he set in new bones for his old damaged ones—“You do not understand. We have advanced you a thousand of your years in one of our afternoons. Consider the Centuries we have saved you! It's as though we had increased your life by that thousand years.”
“We have all the time there is,” said the Pilgrim solidly. “We were well and seriously along our road, and it was not so crooked as the one you have brought us over. You have broken our sequence with your meddling. You've set us back more ways than you've advanced us. You've shattered our Unity.”
“Pigs have unity!” Joan shouted. “We've brought you diversity. Think deep. Consider all the machines we have showed you, the building and the technique. I can name you a thousand things we've given you. You will never be the same again.”
“True. We will never be the same,” said the Pilgrim. “You may not be an unmixed curse. I'm a plain man and I don't know. Surety is one of the things you've lost us. But you befouled us. You played the game of Immoralities and taught it to us Earthlings.”
“You had it already,” Laurie insisted. “We only brought elegance instead of piggishness to its practice.” Immoralities was Laurie's own game, and she didn't like to hear it slighted.
“You have killed many thousands of us in your battles,” said the Pilgrim. “You're a bitter fruit — sweet at the first taste only.”
“You would yourselves have killed the same numbers in battles, and the battles wouldn't have been so good,” said Michael. “Do you not realize that we are the higher race? We have roots of great antiquity.”
“We have roots older than antiquity,” averred the Pilgrim. “You are wicked Children without compassion.”
“Compassion? For the Eretzi?” shouted Lonnie in disbelief.
“Do you have compassion for mice?” demanded Ralpha.
“Yes. I have compassion for mice,” the Pilgrim said softly.
“I make a guess,” Ralpha shot in shrewdly after they had all repaired their damaged bodies. “You travel as a Pilgrim, and Pilgrims sometimes come from very far away. You are not Eretzi. You are one of the Fathers from Home going in the guise of an Eretzi Pilgrim. You have this routine so that sometimes one of you comes to this world—and to every world—to see how it goes. You may have come to investigate an event said to have happened on Eretz a day ago.”
Ralpha did not mean an Eretzi day ago, but a day ago at Home. The High Road they were on was in Coele-Syria, not far from where the Event was thought to have happened, and Ralpha pursued his point:
“You are no Eretzi, or you would not dare to confront us, knowing what we are.”
“You guess wrong in this and in everything,” said the Pilgrim. “I am of this Earth, earthy. And I will not be intimidated by a gangle of children of whatever species! You're a weaker flesh than ourselves. You hide in other bodies, and you get Earthlings to do your slaughter. And you cannot stand up to my staff!”
“Go home, you witless weanlings!” and he raised his terrible staff again.
“Our time is nearly up. We will be gone soon,” said Joan softly.
The last game they played? They played Saints—for the Evil they had done in playing Bodies wrongly, and in playing Warfare with live soldiers. But they repented of the things only after they had enjoyed them for the Long Afternoon. They played Saints in hairshirt and ashes, and revived that affair among the Eretzi. And finally they all assembled and took off from the high hill between Prato and Firenze in Italy. The rocks flowed like water where they left, and now there would be a double scarp formation.
They were gone, and that was the end of them here.
There is a theory, however, that one of the Hobbles remained and is with us yet. Hobble and his creature could not be told apart and could not finally tell themselves apart. They flipped an Eretzi coin, Emperors or Shields, to see which one would go and which one would stay. One went and one stayed. One is still here.
But, after all, Hobble was only concerned with the sick toys, the mechanical things, the material inventions. Would it have been better if Ralpha or Joan stayed with us? They'd have burned us crisp by now! They were damnable and irresponsible children.
This short Historical Monograph was not assembled for a distraction or an amusement. We consider the evidence that Children have spent their short vacations here more than once and in both hemispheres. We set out the theses in ordered parallels and we discover that we have begun to tremble unaccountably. When last came such visitors here? What thing has beset us during the last long Eretzi lifetime?
We consider a new period—and it impinges on the Present—with aspects so different from anything that went before that we can only gasp aghast and gasp in sick wonder:
“Is it ourselves who behave so?
“Is it beings of another sort, or have we become those beings?”
“Are we ourselves? Are these our deeds?”
There are great deep faces looking over our shoulder, there are cold voices of ancient Children jeering “Compassion? For Earthlings?” there is frozen vasty laughter that does not belong to our species.
Name Of The Snake
When Pio Quindecimo — Confiteantur Domino Misercordia ejus — had proclaimed it, it was received, even by the faithful, with a measure of ennui. Contingent, speculative, rhetorical — it was not thought of as touching on practicality. Pio was not one of the outstanding Popes The century. The encyclical was titled modestly “Euntes Ergo Docete Omnes”: “Going Therefore Teach Ye All.” Its substance was t
hat this was a literal command of the Lord, and that the time had come to implement that command in its extreme meaning; that when the Lord had said “Go into all lands,” He had not meant to go into lands of one narrow earth only; that when the Lord had said “Teach Ye All,” it was not meant to teach all men only… within the narrow framework in which we have considered the term “men.”
Should the command be taken literally, its implementation would cause far-reaching activity. It was in the implementation of the command that Padreco Barnaby was now on that remote planet, Analos.
Could one call the Analoi humans? Had their skeletal remains been discovered on old Earth, they would unhesitatingly have been classed as human. The oddly formed ears — not really as large as they seemed — somewhat Gothic in their steepled upsweep, their slight caudal appendage, their remarkable facial mobility and chameleon-like complexions, these could not have been read from their bone remains. But how are we to say that their ears were more grotesque than our own? When did you last look at your own ears objectively? Are they not odd things to be sticking on the sides of a person's head?
“They are gargoyles,” said an early visitor from Earth. Of course they were. The gargoyles had been copied by a still earlier visitor to Analos from Earth. But they were a lively and interesting bunch of gargoyles: mechanically civilized, ethically weird, artistically exciting. They were polished and polyglot, and in many ways more human than the humans.
On Analos, the Padreco was at first a guest of Landmaster, a leading citizen. Here the priest, speaking of his mission, first came up against the Wall.
“I can see what this might lead to, little priest,” Landmaster told him when they discussed the situation. “It might even become bothersome to us — if we ever let anything bother us — if we had not passed beyond the stage where annoyance was possible. So long as you confined your activity to resident Earthlings and humans or that recension, there was no problem. Fortunately we do not fall within those categories. That being so, I do not see how your present aspirations can have any point of contact with us.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 45