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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Let's go back and not do it again,” Bodicea Crag said. “Let's not do it again till we find out what went wrong with our Chute. This is deplorable.”

  The firm land “island” that they were on was hardly big enough for the five of them to stand on even with extreme crowding; and the snouts and serrate mouths that broke the surface of the quicksand were murderous. The whole thing was a churning soup-bowl of death-dealing monsters.

  “The best place to attack a problem is where it is,” Jingo stated firmly. “It may be that we have been handed, quite by accident, entrée into the underlying mystery and puzzle of Paleder. Hey, this is a puzzle that can really get its teeth into you! That was a new boot too! Let's attack the puzzle where it sprawls about us here. I do not believe that the Chute malfunctioned at all, but some phrase of our instructions to it may have led it to give us this unusual opportunity. Let's use it, let's use it! How real is this, Questor? There will never be a better time to test the latest of the latest, the new portable instrument. What does the gadget say?”

  Questor Shannon had the small reference instrument out and in the palm of his hand. It read “fact and depth and intensity of illusion.” But immediately, a sleek head on a long neck came out of the quicksand, gobbled the reference instrument, took three of Questor's fingers and a part of the palm of his hand with it, and withdrew into the quagmire again. It had a neat and precise operation for something so large, for that head could have taken Questor himself entire in one gulp. And Shannon sniffled and whimpered and shook with the pain of it.

  “Ah, reality, along with the reality discerner, has been swallowed by a swamp dragon,” Jingo Blood said. “So now, reality is to be found in the dragons and not in ourselves. We can use your lost fingers for a reality meter now though, Questor. If you find that your fingers are back on your hand, after a bit, that will mean that the present scene is a little less than real. But, if the fingers stay gone, that means that points are scored against all of us.”

  Jingo Blood seemed to be enjoying the situation a bit more than the other four were, but she was surely not leaping with joy about it. They couldn't move from there without being done to death by the huge and slashing creatures. And they couldn't stay there very long, as their “island” was beginning to crumble under them.

  “At the present moment, there is no sun in the sky over Paleder World,” George Blood remarked in what was supposed to be an even-toned conversational voice. “And yet it was at Paleder City noon that we shot the Chute and came down. The sky should now be full of the Sun Proxima (the Grian Sun) which is also the sun of Kentauron-Mikron, Camiroi, and Astrobe. Why, by the way, have the people of those three worlds not sufficiently explored Paleder, or Dahae as some of them call it? Why have not the inhabitants of the planets of Sun Alpha and Sun Beta explored it? A mystery. There is no sun in the sky over us, and yet there is sufficient shocking gray and orange, lurid and garish light. No sun, and no real cloud-cover either. Dull daytime stars are above us; but instead of clouds there are globs of gloop drifting in the very low air. And one of them is coming upon us now at an unnatural speed.”

  The glob came upon them and swallowed them in its fetid breath. It was sharp with teeth in it, and these were quickly identified as belonging to aerial snakes. The glob brought with it a saturating mental and emotional depression, stark consternation, an unbearable fearfulness and unpleasantness. It brought dread. It brought hallucination and contradiction, fear of falling, and fear of ultimate fire. It brought ravening ghosts and ghost-animals. It brought flying foxes that fastened onto throats with hollow and life-draining teeth. It brought violent small creatures who sometimes seemed to be human children and sometimes tearing monsters.

  But a voice came from one of the small and possibly human monsters. It was a boy's voice speaking in Demotic or Low Galactic:

  “Hang in there, Gaea guys! Some of us are on your side. Don't let this whip you. It's only a little psychic storm.”

  What sort of stuff was that?

  And then came the abomination of total despair. This corroding despair entered into the organs and entrails of all the Quiz Ship people. It entered the streets and alleys of their brains and the avenues of their notochords. It entered all the bags and vessels of their bodies. It suffused their glands and seeped into the marrow interiors of their hollow bones. This was complete despair.

  “If this is not the ultimate damnation, then I'd gladly choose the ultimate damnation in place of it,” Bodicea Crag gave a sharp-voiced value judgment. “Whatever we are in, it cannot get any worse than this.”

  It got worse suddenly. The “island” they were crowded onto, the island in the midst of the endless quicksand-quagmire, erupted and cast them all into the noisome and poisonous morass.

  They were struck and gobbled and slashed. They were torn apart by tides and concussions. They were drowning in hot, searing, vividly inhabited and attacking mud; and they had limbs lopped off by swamp dragons. They screamed, and their screams were choked off in mouths full of mud.

  “I'm not a cowardly man,” the huge and pompous Manbreaker Crag sounded then, managing to get his mouth, but nothing else, above the surface of the erupting and devouring mud, “but we have to make our peril known to somebody, somewhere. Loudness is called for, and my own loudest voice is rather unpleasant and piercing.”

  It was indeed. But everything else that remained in that world was likewise unpleasant and piercing. All of the persons of this expedition had, under test conditions, endured as much as fourteen megapangs of pain. They could not have qualified for the expedition elsewise. But here, in the ravening bog, there was multitudinous pain dozens of times more intense, and there was no way they could endure it.

  But how does one not endure things that are at the same time beyond endurance and beyond escape? The five screamed, screamed with their mouths and their eyes full of blood and mud and offal. They were being eviscerated by dragons, and they were being boiled alive like lobsters. Things were literally eating the brains in their heads and the organs in their bodies. Things had already devoured their minds and their souls.

  The five of them screamed, underwater and under mud, mindlessly and soullessly, on and on.

  “Oh, stop that exasperating shrilling,” adult voices were saying to them in High Galactic. “And stand up! And stop fouling yourselves in the mud! Are all the people where you come from as frivolous and silly as you are?”

  The five persons from Quiz Ship stood up. There was something about the silliness of their situation that was almost more horrible than the pain they had thought they were suffering.

  They were standing somewhat less than ankle-deep in little puddles of tacky mud. They stepped out of it and tried to cleanse themselves of flecks and spotches of mire. There really wasn't too much of it on them. They were smeared somewhat, but they weren't mortally dirty.

  “We were in a horrible quagmire-jungle,” Questor Shannon was saying. He felt they owed some sort explanation to someone. “We were overwhelmed with despondency, and we were being killed by swamp-dragons and fire snakes and frenzied foxes. We were in the abomination of total despair.”

  But it was plain that these people didn't believe him at all.

  “You were where you are now,” one of those Paleder adults said. “We are sorry if we fail your expectations, but we do not have any swamp-dragons or frenzied foxes on our world. You landed in this little spot where you are now. This was less than a minute ago. Then you began to scream and carry on.”

  “What? What is — what was this place?” Jingo Blood was asking. “What a double-dealing monstrosity of a place it was! And where has it gone?”

  “It was, and is, as even you should be able to see, a very small amusement park for very small children,” one of those adults said. “As you can see, it is no more than twenty meters across, and nowhere is the growth, the ‘jungle’ as you call it, more than one meter high.”

  That was true. The fearful flora did not now come to the waists o
f any of the Quiz Ship people; but, just a moment ago, it had seemed to reach all the way to the sunless sky, sunless no more.

  For the Grian Sun was strong in the noontime sky now. What, it had been less than a minute since the Quiz Ship people had landed? All that confusion had taken place in less than a minute?

  “The snakes, the dragons, the sea-serpents, the air-serpents, the flying devil foxes—” Bodicea Crag was pleading as though for justification.

  “Oh, you mean the little rubber creatures,” one of the Paleder adults said. “The small children like to make them and to play with them. And they make jangles of noises when they play here, but not so discordant noises as you yourselves make. Do you like to play with the little rubber animals also? Perhaps you will be allowed to make some of them. The small children have dragon-making contests, but these are the failed constructions that you find here. The children. Ugh, the children! They are tedious when they are uncontrolled. Where are the adults of your own party?”

  “We are the adults. We are all the party there is,” Manbreaker Crag affirmed, with a touch of sad arrogance.

  “You-are-the-adults?” the Paleder people asked in apparent disbelief. “The way you were carrying on, we thought that you were simply incredibly loutish children. Now we see that you are, yes, that you are incredibly loutish adults. We will have to take you into custody and to inquire into your awkward arrival here. Yes, and into your grotesque behavior. We are not sure that you are genuine humans or Proto-humans at all. You may be what are called ‘fiasco humans’. It is likely that you are from Gaea or one of the other very backward worlds.”

  “It's only one-upmanship,” Jingo Blood tried to rationalize it to her companions as the five of them were led away (by moral force, not physical), apparently to some sort of confinement. “The people of Paleder seem to be very good at one-upmanship. But I do not quite understand—” “We haven't made a very impressive beginning here,” Manbreaker Crag said dismally, and they silently all agreed with him. But how had they seemed to be drowning and dying? How had they been doing it in little patches of mud that were no more than five centimeters deep? How had it seemed that they were being broken apart and eaten alive by ravening animals that now turned out to be no bigger than their thumbs, and that moreover were made out of rubber?

  “How are your fingers, Questor?” Jingo Blood asked him.

  “They hurt terribly,” he said, and he showed them.

  “Ah, but you still have them,” Jingo chortled. “That means that the little scene we just experienced was not real and that it didn't happen.”

  “Those fingers, they are bad,” George Blood said. “They're highly infected already. I suspect that they will have to come off. And if you do lose them, that might mean that the little scene we just experienced was real to some extent, and it did happen, a little bit anyhow.”

  “Loss of nerve, and loss of our sense of proportion, that's what has been responsible for our fiasco,” Manbreaker Crag was rationalizing to his fellow Quiz Ship people. “We let them get the jump on us, and make fools of us.”

  “Being made a fool of shouldn't matter a lot to an explorer,” Jingo Blood told them. “The job of an explorer is to solve problems and to get information. The explorer must be willing to serve as bait if there is no other way to coax the information to strike. Special information is like lightning, and it must be tempted. So, we have been bait. Yeah, live bait.”

  “It hadn't seemed like a loss of proportion to me,” George Blood said. “Maybe it is a finding of a lost sense of proportion on this problem. We lost our sense of proportion as to Paleder World one hundred years ago, when John Chancel first set down here. And no one from our world has been able to see this world in proper proportion from that day till this. Why have we been confused? This isn't an alien planet. This is a world of human or proto-human persons. It is a civilized world where they speak Galactic.

  “But there are so many enormities to be solved here! There are so many towering questions to be answered, and none of our people has even had the wit to ask them yet. Why is Paleder permitted to hide its light? That is the question.”

  “How have the people of Paleder become such master illusionists? That is the main question,” Manbreaker Crag stated pompously.

  “No, that is not the question at all,” Jingo contradicted. “I don't believe that the head of the creature even knows that there are illusions going on. Those things are part of the snap of its tail. But what is the creature itself like if its tail has such a snap to it? That is more like the question. The things to notice aren't the little diversions such as the tiny park that seemed to us to be enormous. What are we being diverted from? That is the question. There must have been many people diverted away from raiding the wonderful technology of Paleder. The people of Paleder seem to set up the illusion that their technology is not worth bothering with. How have they managed that illusion? That is much more important than the little tail-flick illusion of the quagmire and its dragons.”

  They were in a pleasant enough room, large and probably comfortable. They hadn't explored it thoroughly yet, but they had learned one objectionable thing about it: they couldn't get out of it. They couldn't open the doors. They couldn't even find the doors.

  “If we are not to mind being fools, then let's take the fools way of getting some action here!” Manbreaker shouted. “Let's make a noise about it.”

  “You make a noise about it, Manbreaker,” Bodicea said. “You have a peculiar talent for that.”

  Manbreaker Crag made howling, roaring, gibbering noises of fearful volume. Possibly he did it for no longer than a quarter of a minute, but it seemed like hours to his four companions. What did it seem like to the Paleder people?

  “Simpletons from Gaea, stop that childish racket!” Paleder voices sounded the command to them from outside the room.

  “We want out of here!” Manbreaker roared. “Out, out, out!”

  “Come out then,” said the voices with perhaps a touch of taunting. “The doors aren't locked.”

  “We don't even know what are doors and what aren't,” George Blood howled.

  “Intelligent persons would know doors,” the voices outside remarked. “The doors can be found by persons with eyes in their heads. They are not locked. They are only intelligence coded. Persons of adequate intelligence can open them easily. Persons with inadequate intelligence better remain where they are for a while. We will possibly have to locate your keepers and have them come and get you.”

  “Oh, there's no problem about getting out,” Jingo Blood told her companions after a moment. “You can get us out of here, Manbreaker. You can get us out of here by another very peculiar talent that you have. But let us first take the blinders off our eyes, now that they are loosened. Let us consider why the Paleder affair has not been properly pursued.

  “Why have we people of Gaea not pursued it? Paleder is a gleaming ‘goldmine in the sky’ with its technology that is beyond any other. But this is only our third acknowledged attempt at it, the other two being one hundred years ago for one of them, and fifty years ago for the other. No, our own is not an acknowledged attempt either, so there have been only two of them. But there may have been several Sneaky Pete attempts like our own. And why have the people of the nearer worlds, Camiroi, Astrobe, Kentauron-Mikron, not pursued it? Probably they have, but somehow they were shaken from it or diverted from it.

  “Does Paleder really have the most advanced and most sophisticated technology of all the worlds? Likely it has. Then why hasn't that technology been appropriated? Or why haven't there been attempts, with or without force, to appropriate it? Is it the case of ‘Yes, it is the most sophisticated technology to be found anywhere; only—’ Well, only what? What is it that turns people away from the acquisition, from the follow-up? Is there something phony about this ‘most advanced technology anywhere’? Is there something undesirable about it? That is what we have to find out. Now let us get out of here and find it out. Lead us out of here,
Manbreaker.”

  “How?” the ponderous Manbreaker asked.

  “By one of the small number of talents that you have. No, not by roaring, by your other main talent.”

  “Oh, that one!” Manbreaker barked. He was a large and powerful man.

  “You can tell the doors, Manbreaker,” Bodicea said. “They will be the easiest parts to break open.”

  Manbreaker Crag broke out of that room, presumably through a door where it should have been the easiest. And the other Quiz Ship people followed him out.

  “How novel,” said a Paleder person with the only touch of amusement ever noticed in any of those high-brained ones. “We ourselves would never have thought of that solution. And yet it conforms to the requirements, as being an alternate intelligent solution, a solving of the egress problem by using a more spacious interpretation of the framework of the problem. We might be tempted to incorporate such a procedure into our own thinking, were we not beyond the stage of incorporating any new material.”

  “Certainly we allow visitors to Paleder World,” a Paleder person was saying in answer to a question. “Being the most open of all worlds, by our own claim and covenant, we could hardly bar visitors. No, we do not encourage them to come. Why should we? Visitors are always something of a nuisance. Yes, there have been many parties here from various worlds. No, you are not the third party to arrive here from Gaea. You are more like the thirtieth. Oh, we suppose it's true that the parties who come here on ‘unacknowledged’ attempts, those who do not file ‘Paleder’ as their flight destination, do not often return from Paleder, or do not return in good case. Often they have bad luck in leaving. Those who come without filing flight patterns usually have a bit of theft in their hearts, and they must expect retribution. We find that you yourselves have not filed ‘Paleder’ as your destination. That was thoughtless of you.”