The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  Then he walked all over Aranea with the dog Cyon. That whole world was covered with golden cobwebs; and it brought out the song in Scarble. Man afoot! Here was a whole echoing world to sing in! The full voice is also the normal complement of the male animal, and Scarble had a voice (a bad one) that would fill a world.

  “The Spaceman frolicked with his girl

  Though all his friends could not abide her.

  She was a pippin and a pearl,

  She was a comely twelve-legged spider.”

  Scarble added dozens of verses, most of them obscene, while the spider audience in its millions chirped and murmured appreciation. He sang them to the tune of ‘Ganymede Saturday Night.’ He sang all his ballads to that tune. It was the only tune he knew.

  Marin had been wrong; it was a picnic after all. Scarble sat on the edge of one of the silken ringed spider ponds and communed with the mother-loving spiders. The cycle of them, he knew, was this:

  The little biped fingerlings were born in a sort of caul. Most often the caul is only wrapped about them, and the young ones fight their way out of it and become aware. Sometimes they look as if they arrived wearing space helmets. Often the young are truly live-born, with only scraps on them of the egg they should have arrived in. The spiders had been surprised in their era of transition.

  The newborn bipeds refuse the care of the adult spiders, and run wild at this stage of their being. They destroy everything of the spider nettings and handicrafts that they are able to, and the adult spiders regard them patiently with that abiding mother-love.

  And sometime later, when it is time for the change, the adults drug these young, bind them, weave a silk shell around them, and then put a cap on it. Into the cap (it is the hood of the cocoon) is placed one of the small four-legged scutters, freshly killed and made putrescent in some manner. This is the whole purpose in life of the scutters, to feed the pupa form of the spiders.

  The pupa spider is somnolent for a long time. Then it begins to eat of the putrescence in the hood, and to change. Four little notches grow out of each of its sides. With these it saws away the cocoon and emerges as a new being. Soon the notches wilt grow to full members, and the creature then takes its place as a full adult of the Nation of Spiders.

  The Spiders were master engineers, and the pattern of the spider ponds built by them covered the whole world of Aranea. They controlled the waters of that world with their silken dams, weirs, levees, and hurdles. The spiders were littoral creatures and had to maintain a controllable water level. The lakes and ponds were divided by silken barriers into small plots, some of them so completely covered by blue-green vegetation as to have the appearance of lush meadows, others adjacent to them being clear of all growth. The spiders seeded and they harvested. At some of their major dams there were anchoring cables as much as an inch in diameter. Scarble estimated that there might be as many as seven billion individual spider silks making up such a cable.

  Scarble sat on the silken edge of one of the pools while the spiders in their myriads twittered about him. Then an expert crew of them performed certain rites at that pool, sweeping it, making it clearer, inviting him to drink.

  “Thank you,” said Scarble. He leaned into it and drank deeply. Then he stretched out to rest on the silken shore. He went to sleep.

  He dreamed that it was snowing, but in a new and pleasant manner. It was not like Earth snow, and not at all like the biting snow of Priestly Planet or the blue horror that is the lethal snow on Arestor: This was warm snow, light and full of sun, snowflakes with beards on them like mote-sized comets. Scarble was being covered over by a warm snow that was half sunshine.

  He awoke lazily and discovered that it was true. The spiders had been covering him with gossamer and silk, as children on a beach will cover one another with sand. They shot the silks out over him like millions of streamers of serpentine. It was a party, a ball given for him; and the spider song had now reached a point of excitement and jubilation.

  Scarble tried to raise his head and found that he could not. He gave it up and lay back, deliciously lazy. This was something new in ease. Whether he was sleeping or waking it was all the same. A picnic after all, to be so pleasantly drugged —

  To be what? An ugly thought came into Scarble's mind and he chased it away. It came again and sat like a little black animal on the edge of his golden dream.

  Why hadn't he been able to raise his head?

  He cleared his mind of the beginnings of panic.

  “Here, here!” he called out. “You're covering me too deep with that damned sand. Fun's fun, but that's enough.”

  But it was more cohesive than sand. This might be only a noonday dream that would slide away. Well, it wasn't. It was stark afternoon reality. The spiders had him pegged down to the ground with their billion-stranded silk bonds and he could hardly move a muscle.

  And the mother-loving little abominations had drugged him by whatever they had put into the inviting drinking pool. The taste in his mouth reminded him of the knock-out drops they used to pass out free as water on New Shanghai.

  The spider song became more complex. There were elements of great change in it, the motifs of one world falling away and another one being born. The golden daylight of Aranea was coming to an end. Scarble had enjoyed his luxurious drugged sleep for more hours than he had believed. Completely weary of his struggle with his bonds, he dropped to sleep again; and the spiders continued to work through the night. The first thing that Scarble saw in the morning — out of the corner of one eye fixed in his unmoving head — was the spiders maneuvering a large golden ball towards him. They tipped it with lines from the tops of gin poles. They rolled it over and over, reset their rigging, and rolled it again.

  It was the dog Cyon, dead, and cocooned in a sack of silk. The stench of it was unbearable. The dog was not only dead but decayed, almost liquid in its putrefaction, and with the high hair still on it.

  Scarble was sickened by this, but he understood the nature of the happening. He was a naturalist, and he knew that anger was an unnaturalist response, and that murder and putrefaction are natural workings. But Cyon wasn't merely a dog. He was also a personal friend of Scarble.

  Scarble could not turn to see what was behind his own head, but he knew that spiders had been working on something there all night. He realized now what it was: a snood, a capuchin like a friar's, the hood to be his own cocoon. He knew with horror what thing they were rolling into that hood now, and how the hood would be joined onto his own cocoon. It happened quickly.

  Scarble's screams were drowned in the near liquid mass; they had a drumlike sound even to his own ears as though they were coming from under water. They merged easily with the spider music which had just the place for that screaming motif.

  Then overpowering sickness sent Scarble into merciful unconsciousness after the dead and rotting dog was rolled into his face and closed in with him as their cocoons became one.

  How long does it take a man to die in such circumstances? Scarble set his mind to do it as quickly as possible, but he was too tough for his own good. By second night he still could not arrive at death, but he welcomed the dark. The dog's carcass had become higher and more pungent, and the agony of Scarble took on new refinements. He was thirsty to the point of madness, and so hungry that he could eat anything — almost anything.

  It frightened him that he could now understand the spider mind so clearly. The spiders worked by analogy. They believed Scarble to be an unfinished two-legged strider, come to them with his quadruped that was born for one purpose — to feed him when he went into pupa form before being metamorphosed into a giant Emperor Spider. Aye, they believed Scarble to be the Emperor Spider promised to them from the beginning of time.

  The spider song was a dirge now, the passing of the old life, the death and decay fugue. But in the complex of the dirge there were introductory passages of something much higher: the Anastasis, the Resurrection Song.

  “You mother-loving spiders!” Scarble
called out in fury. “You think I'm going to eat Cyon and then turn into a spider. You're wrong, I tell you! The biology of the thing is impossible, but how do you explain biology to spiders?”

  To be dying of thirst and there no liquid to mouth except that! To be starving and there no food available but this soft putridity pressed into his face!

  There was a change in the tempo of the spider song. It rose in the crescendo of transition and made Scarble angry.

  “You presumptive little twelve-legged crawlers, you're getting ahead of me! Don't tell me what to do! Don't act as though I had already done it.”

  But the hours had taken their price, and Scarble had already passed through madness and into the world on the other side. He didn't know when it began, but the spiders knew of the change about third dawn. The spiders' soaring incantation rose to new heights, and Scarble was able to follow it. He was hearing tones above the range of the human ear.

  Scarble began to eat of the putrefied mass — and to change. The Hallelujah Chorus of the Spider Song rose in a vast symphony.

  In the Spaceman's Survival Handbook there is one instruction which some have believed to be written in humor: ‘Never die till you have considered every alternative to a situation.’ Well, how does a man get out of a situation like this?

  He doesn't.

  Well then, how does a spider get out of a situation like this?

  He grows eight more short little notches of legs, and he shuffles and saws his way out of the cocoon with them.

  “It's worth a try,” Scarble said. “I'll see if I've turned into a spider.”

  He had. He did it. It worked.

  They disabilitied Scarble from the active service. He could give no intelligent account of his lone stay on Aranea. He gave out with nothing but sick quips like: “Cyon was a good dog, but only after he had become very bad,” and “The Spiders tied me up and made me eat the dog, and then they turned me into a spider.” Scarble was plainly insane, but pleasantly so. And there was nothing left of the dog except curiously softened bones.

  They sent Scarble back to Earth and kept him under observation. Such men were handled with sympathy. They called him the Spider Man around the wards. But after a while that sympathy ran a little thin. Earth was having her own troubles with spiders.

  “I've never seen anything like them,” an earthside doctor told Scarble in examining him one day, as he brushed some of that floating stuff out of his eyes. “The growths are not malignant, but they will be mighty unhandy. Since they are not malignant, I cannot remove them without your permission, Scarble. They're getting larger, you know.” “Certainly they're getting larger,” Scarble maintained. “I'm quite pleased with the way they're coming along. They get to be as big as the spiders' other legs. And don't remove them! I'd as soon lose one of my other limbs as one of them. They saved my life. I couldn't have gotten out of my cocoon without them.”

  “You're going to have to get off this spider jag, Scarble. Have you been reading the crank reports about the spiders and have they upset you?”

  “Why should they upset me, Doctor? Everything is going as smooth as—ah—spidersilk. Naturally I have my own intelligence setup on these matters. And the fact that you refer to them as ‘crank reports’ likewise pleases me. I'm on the top of the heap, Doctor. Who else has a hundred billion soldiers ready to strike? We live in exciting times, do we not?”

  “As to that sickness of yours, Scarble, I'll gladly leave it to your other doctor, your psycho doctor; and now it is time for you to go and see him. But I wish you'd let me remove those growths before they become larger. They're almost like other limbs.”

  “Quite like,” said Scarble. He left the room majestically in the flowing robes which he now affected and went down the corridor to see his other doctor. The robes served a purpose. They did cover Scarble's afflictions, the four strange growths on each side of his body. And also:

  “An Emperor always wears flowing robes,” Scarble said. “You can't expect him to go dressed like a commoner.”

  Doctor Mosca, Scarble's other doctor, was a quiet and patient man. He was also a dull fellow who had to have simple things explained to him over and over again. “What are you today, Scarble?” Doctor Mosca asked again as he brushed some of the floating stuff away.

  “Why, I'm the Emperor of the Dodecapod Spiders of Aranea,” Scarble said pleasantly. “I explain that to you every day, doctor, but you don't seem to remember. I am also Prefect Extraordinary to the Aranea Spiders of the Dispersal. And I am Proconsul to the Spiders of Earth.”

  “Scarble, I'll be plain with you. Your planet probe experience (whatever it was) has unhitched your mind. And you have somehow connected whatever happened on Aranea to the recent spider incidents on Earth. I will admit that some of these incidents are peculiar and almost insane—”

  “No, no, Doctor, not insane. They are absolutely reasonable—according to the Higher Reason. They are organized and directed and strictly on schedule. To call the incidents insane would be almost like calling me insane.”

  “Mr. Scarble, we don't keep you here for your pool-shooting ability, though you're good at that. We keep you here because you're very sick — mentally. Now listen to me carefully: You are a man, and not a spider.”

  “I'm glad you think so, doctor. Our high council decided that it would be better if I retained the basic man-appearance until our present military operation is completed. It should be completed today.”

  “Scarble, you've got to get hold of yourself!” Doctor Mosca insisted. He brushed heaps of the accumulated silkstuff off his desk. “You are a man, and an intelligent man. We have to get you off this insane spider jag of yours. And it's not my department, but somebody had better get the world off its jag, too. Every year has its own peculiar sort of nuttiness, but the Spider Incidents have become downright silly. Do you know that, with the recent astronomical increases of the spiders—”

  “That may be an unconscious pun,” Scarble interrupted.

  “—that it is estimated there are now a hundred billion spiders in this country alone.”

  “Multiply that figure by a thousand if you wish,” Scarble said. “Last night was the Night of the Great Hatching, and the young ones grow to effective size in hours, all stages of them quickly now. The time is at hand. I give the word now!”

  “Great thumping thunder!” Doctor Mosca howled. “I'm bitten badly! Another spider bite.”

  “Not just another bite,” Scarble said. “That was the critical bite. I'm sincerely sorry for the pain: but, with so many people to impregnate, I could not equip all my creatures with painless probes. It eases off now, though, doesn't it? The injection contains a narcotic and a soporific.”

  It did. Doctor Mosca drowsed. He half-dreamed that it was snowing, but in a new and pleasant manner. It was warm snow, light and full of sun, flakes with beards on them like mote-sized comets.

  The suddenly appearing spiders were covering Doctor Mosca with gossamer and silk, as children will cover each other with sand on a beach. And they were covering many millions of others, all stung and sunk into pleasant lethargy and drowsiness, with billions of streamers of serpentine silk.

  It was deliciously lazy for Doctor Mosca to lie back in the chair and hear that demented Scarble drone on that he was no longer a man—(Doctor Mosca found that he could no longer move his head: there was something odd about that)—that Scarble was no longer a man, whatever his appearance, that he was really the Emperor of the Dodecapod Spiders of Aranea, and of all Spiders everywhere.

  In Our Block

  There were a lot of funny people in that block. “You ever walk down that street?” Art Slick asked Jim Boomer, who had just come onto him there.

  “Not since I was a boy. After the overall factory burned down, there was a faith healer had his tent pitched there one summer. The street's just one block long and it dead-ends on the railroad embankment. Nothing but a bunch of shanties and weed-filled lots. The shanties looked different today, though, and there
seem to be more of them. I thought they pulled them all down a few months ago.”

  “Jim, I've been watching that first little building for two hours. There was a tractor-truck there this morning with a forty-foot trailer, and it loaded out of that little shanty. Cartons about eight inches by eight inches by three feet came down that chute. They weighed about thirty-five pounds each from the way the men handled them. Jim, they filled that trailer up with them, and then pulled it off.”

  “What's wrong with that, Art?”

  “Jim, I said they filled that trailer up. From the drag on it it had about a sixty-thousand-pound load when it pulled out. They loaded a carton every three and a half seconds for two hours; that's two thousand cartons.”

  “Sure, lots of trailers run over the load limit nowadays; they don't enforce it very well.”

  “Jim, that shack's no more than a cracker box seven feet on a side. Half of it is taken up by a door, and inside a man in a chair behind a small table. You couldn't get anything else in that half. The other half is taken up by whatever that chute comes out of. You could pack six of those little shacks on that trailer.”

  “Let's measure it,” Jim Boomer said. “Maybe it's bigger than it looks.” The shack had a sign on it: Make Sell Ship Anything Cut Price. Jim Boomer measured the building with an old steel tape. The shack was a seven-foot cube, and there were no hidden places. It was set up on a few piers of broken bricks, and you could see under it.

  “Sell you a new fifty-foot steel tape for a dollar,” said the man in the chair in the little shack. “Throw that old one away.” The man pulled a steel tape out of a drawer of his table-desk, though Art Slick was sure it had been a plain flat-top table with no place for a drawer.

  “Fully retractable, rhodium-plated, Dort glide, Ramsey swivel, and it forms its own carrying case. One dollar,” the man said.