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

by R. A. Lafferty

  Drill shook a bit of sharkskin pepper onto the back of his hand, and he licked it off with his long and perhaps prehensile tongue. There is no real pepper on Rapa Nui; but grated sharkskin looks like pepper, and it is much cheaper if one grates it himself.

  “What is the one thing?” I asked, as was expected of me.

  “The furrows and crests of the frozen or motionless waves, they have a design; perhaps it is the original of all designs,” Drill said. “As the spot is the shadow of the thumb of God, so these undulative configurations are the shadows of the whorls and loops of God's own thumbprint. Those designs have all been recorded, and they are in the old archives and chants. You can see the value of this.”

  “No. What is the value?” I asked.

  “Why, we have positive identification,” Drill said. “If ever a false God should come over our earth, we would know the difference.”

  “The spot is moving over our land now,” said Chui, who was Drill's sweep-out boy. There was something about Chui that was too clean, too ordered, too sleek, too suave, too cruel, too efficient. His abilities were plainly beyond those of an ordinary sweep-out boy. “And the land becomes furrowed as the spot moves over it. The harrowing of the land takes the same patterns as that which the motionless waves had shown. And something else is revealed by the furrowing, is literally uncovered by the furrowing — it is the resurrection of the implicit stones.”

  “What stones are these?” I asked Chui.

  “The basalt stones that were implicit in the Earth from the beginning,” Chui said. “The stones that will become the idols of the new masters when they are hewed and carried and set up in place by the terrifying, soul-wringing labor of someone, not of ourselves.”

  How would there be basalt stones on Rapa Nui? How would a sweep-out boy on Rapa Nui use words like “implicit?”

  There was the sound of some sort of scuffle outside of Drill's Marine Bar. There were the — now somewhat troubled — two sets of footfalls in the outer corridor: those of a splayfooted person in soft buckskin boots and also the blurred double footfalls of a barefoot person. And I heard the angry voice of Hamadryad: “You will wait, beast! You will not take over one instant before the time!” Hamadryad howled. There was a chilling animal chortle — it was insane, and it echoed the terrible, ordered mindset of the insane. There was a thudding, ripping blow. And there was a quavering scream — Hamadryad's. I felt with an awful sinking that Hamadryad was dead. But presently he came into the Marine Bar. He was somewhat bloodied about the left shoulder and arm, but he was almost serene.

  “It is a mistake to treat slaves with too light a hand,” he howled softly, “but it is likewise a mistake not to recognize the day when it arrives. I'll not intrude my own troubles on others though, especially since the turn-over will be pretty general. Ah, a Final Catastrophe, Mr. Drill, and the usual for lunch.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Hamadryad,” Drill said, and he began to assemble the Final Catastrophe. A Final Catastrophe is green, still-fermenting palm wine served in a large wooden bowl. It is sprinkled with sharkskin pepper and it has hull-bore worms in it to give it liveliness. It always contains a cormorant egg smashed in its shell and afloat in the liquid. The Final Catastrophe is a specialty of Drill's Marine Bar and is found almost nowhere else in the world.

  “We overdramatize ourselves and our affairs,” Hamadryad howled easily as the sweep-out boy Chui, a little later, was cauterizing his bleeding arm and shoulder with boiling hot ships' tar, using a big brush. Chui had a new glitter and avidity for this task. He sniffed blood; he sniffed pain. One was tempted to believe that there was a touch of cruelty involved, tempted to suspect that the tar didn't really have to be that hot.

  “Actually, a final catastrophe is not as final as all that,” Hamadryad added. “We eschatological persons are accused of turning all our tales into end-of-the-world tales. Really they are not. They are merely end-of-the-era tales, or end-of-the-episode tales.”

  Was it in mere sympathy with Hamadryad that my own left shoulder began to ache and stir and heave? A great pain there had roots running down into my heart and lungs and liver and up into my head. Something was very wrong about this new pain in my shoulder, this new weirdness, this new desolation. A shoulder should not go to the roots of being like that. And there was something very wrong with the behavior of our island. It gave a great bump and jolt so as to produce sudden seasickness and disorientation. The island must have moved fifteen feet further into that blind spot that is the shadow of God's thumb.

  Hamadryad shook kunai-grass seeds into the Final Catastrophe as soon as that drink was set in front of him. Kunai seeds are very like Aladdin's Sesame, very like broomcorn spikes. Hamadryad paid for the drink with a nui d'argile, a local clay coin of which five hundred are required to equal one Chilean peso. It was really not enough for the drink, but Drill was some sort of Kindred of Hamadryad — and one always enters a great turnover broke and in debt.

  “Our remnant island, our vestigial home comes under the shade almost at once,” Hamadryad said. “All the islands of the world — all the mains also — are only pieces broken off and drifting away from the paradise. Yet this our own island was once special among the bright ones.”

  Chui the sweep-out boy had begun to tear my shirt off me in strips and rippings. This wasn't ordinary behavior even in Drill's Marine Bar, but I was now in too much pain to object. It was as if a sword were going out of my shoulder, and that hurt much more going out than going in. Then, with great delight, Chui was applying boiling hot tar to my disturbed area.

  “They love it,” this Chui reveled. “It's a joyful malediction to them on their going out to take control. The tar brush is symbol of all such things.”

  “All what such things?” I asked with irritation. My shoulder was on fire, but there was something involved with my shoulder that was enjoying the fire.

  The island gave another lurch. Still more of it had come under the somber shadow.

  “The scatter-heads, those incontinent dreamers who believe that there is an Astrology, say that the world has been in the age of Pisces,” Hamadryad stated, “and that now it will, or has already, entered into the age of Aquarius. What bubble-headed fools they are! They know neither the constellations in heaven nor the constellations on earth! The world has been, for the last long era, in the glorious age of the Monkey; and now it will — Oh, why must such things be! — enter the tyrannical and meticulous age of the Cat.” Hamadryad snuffled, and a tear ran down his long nose.

  Drill brought Hamadryad's lunch, the stomach of suckling pig distended with its first milk. Hamadryad sprinkled it with sharkskin pepper and also with kunai seed, spilling much of both from his shaking hand. Then he dined. “— my last meal as a free person,” he yowled softly.

  Myself, I had that disturbed and bottomless feeling that sometimes accompanies typhoid fever, the feeling that there were two of me — one standing just a little apart from the other. But how should I suddenly have the typhoid? Or was the typhoid itself a mere fragmented premonition of something to come? (Ah, the island gave another jolt and slid still more into the shadow; soon it would be darkness at mid-morning.) Was the typhoid — it might be a collective name for many phenomena — a premonition of a thing that might be in the process of arriving at this very moment?

  “All of your theories are cataclysmic, as are the happenings and appearances of this day in this place,” I said, “but how are they relevant to the more substantial world in its more reasonable daylight?”

  “Is it not shockingly relevant that the Monkeys are out and the Cats are in?” Hamadryad asked sorrowfully. “You will now have over all the world the careful, stalking cruelty and the tufted-eared deceit.”

  “Is that worse than what we have had?” I asked him. He had now become very nervous.

  “Abysmally worse,” he croaked. Hamadryad hadn't a good appetite for his last meal as a free person. Painfully, agonizingly, he was moving little flecks of sharkskin pepper and kunai seed a
bout on the table, moving them with mental anguish but not touching them except with his mind. “Oh, I'll never be able to do it,” Hamadryad whimpered. “How then will I be able to move things a billion billion times heavier? Oh, it will be an agony of the spirit to perform such labor, and the doom is for such a long aeon!”

  I myself was feeling as torn-up as ever I had in my life. The spooky duality was still on me. I was suffering a sundering identity crisis. There was one me located approximately in my proper body. There was another me situated somewhere behind my left shoulder. Which one was valid was unsettled. Everything in my minds was unsettled for a puzzling while. And the island on which we were staying had now developed the nervous, choppy movements of a small boat caught in a rip tide.

  “What is it that those in the ascendant have and that the slaves usually lack?” Hamadryad asked in a tired, analytical howl. “It is presence,” he stated.

  “Presence?” I asked. “I thought that presence was the one thing that the poorest and most abject slave shared with the rich and mighty. Everyone is present somewhere.”

  “No, they are not,” Hamadryad maintained. “Many species and races seldom show real presence. Your own shoulder-slaves do not. My own slave in the corridor—” Hamadryad shuddered a bit here “—does not. Presence is an attribute of a complete being. Many have not been complete. Now we enter a region and an era when perhaps many of us will regress to incomplete beings. It's frustrating to be incomplete.”

  “And invisible?” I asked.

  “And invisible,” he said. “It's a sad state. Many who have not experienced it do not realize that to be invisible is to be in total darkness both objectively and subjectively. In our new, sad state, we will be seen only in our work, in the hewing and transporting and setting, in the homage and ransom.”

  “What will we hew and transport and set?” I asked Hamadryad. “And to whom will we pay homage and ransom?”

  “The great cool cats and the huge idols of them,” he said fearfully. “We will be compelled — awl, awl, rawl, rawl, howl!” and Hamadryad was seized by terrible pain and transformation.

  A presence came into the room. And an absence gathered itself whimpering together. Mr. Caracal was the presence that arrived in the room. He was no longer an invisible slave in the corridor; he was a person present — felix and feline — a person of whom great idols would be raised out of the implicit stones. And Mr. Hamadryad was the gathering absence. And I felt that I also had gathered myself into a weak absence and that that absence was slinking out of my body to skulk and slave invisibly somewhere — and I wasn't much good at moving heavy objects by mental anguish. Oh, the torture that might be ahead! But at the same time I had become a person of great strength and vitality, and I was about to take over and infuse a body that I found tottering there, an old body of my own.

  Hamadryad was now no more than a long-nosed shadow in boots that were not part of him. Then he moved out of his fancy boots, and he had baboon feet. He had stopped out of an old sign of his freedom. He was now a freebooter no longer, but a slave slipping into invisibility.

  Odd that I had not noticed before that Hamadryad was a baboon. But he was a baboon, a drill, a man-drill — and a vanishing one. Odd that I had not before noticed that the long-faced statues here on Easter Island were baboon-faced. And that thousands of great-faced carvings elsewhere in the world were baboon-faced. But the baboon is much more manlike in face than are the other monkeys, and the monkeys much more so than any other creatures. And, while the monkey era had still obtained, men and monkeys were pretty much interchangeable.

  Something of myself had gone out of my body and now whimpered invisible at my shoulder. But something of a more real me had come in with great strength and poise. Mr. Caracal winked at me. Mr. Chui winked at me, and he was much more than a sweep-out boy now. But Drill had disappeared to be an invisible slave for a long era.

  Now I am clear and clean, and cool and cruel. I am in command of myself and of my own sector of the world. I am a cool cat with no more of the monkey resemblance. The statues to be raised by slaves from the implicit stones will resemble me. We have high-handed hatred for our right now. We have so many of such spacious things for our right now.

  Have you noticed how much calmer the world is now that we have instituted certain measures of discipline? Have you noticed how much cleaner the world is now that we have made “cruelty” no longer a dirty word? Surely I and mine had once been scatter-brained, petty, inefficient and human. Is there not something intolerably monkeylike in the word human? That is all past. Now I am divinely mad, but cool and cruel in my disposition; no longer scatterbrained; all my brains now are neatly in one brain-pan.

  Once I traveled in coconuts. In the old way of it, that was to be a monkey traveling in monkey-nuts. The coconut complex — was it not Adam Smith who wrote it so? — had been the last refuge of free enterprise in the world.

  Fortunately we have broken up that refuge. We have organized coconuts, the last of the monkey-business. We have organized coconuts into the World-Wide New Era Great Cat Coconut Cartel.

  Holy cats, we have organized it all!

  Or Little Ducks Each Day

  1

  “Against no word is there such strong prejudice as against the word ‘Prejudice’.”

  —Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

  Jim Snapjudge was unhappy without apparent reason. It couldn't be anything preying on his mind. His was a mind that preyed: not one to be preyed upon. He had not been brooding: he did not brood: he thought and moved by swift intuition. No derelictions or wolves of the past were snapping at his heels. His business was all with the future, intelligent prediction. Once the past had been assimilated, he did not turn back to it. And anything following him would have to feed many a cake to the heads of the dog-devil that guarded that time road before overtaking Jim Snapjudge. He was secure.

  He felt no guilt for the suicide of Cletus Dogwood. He wasn't responsible for it. He hadn't caused it. He couldn't have stopped it. He had merely judged, correctly, that it would happen. It had been a little disquieting when Cletus insisted that there must be some mistake in the prediction, and Snapjudge had assured him that a mistake was impossible. But as for guilt for anything, why what did Snapjudge owe for? Guilt means owing payment or gelt or yield. Word-meanings were important to Snapjudge, for his whole profession and life's direction and fortune depended on the meaning of one word.

  And should he feel remorse for the late-life criminality that broke out in Angelo Woodstock? It's true that he was the only Prejudicial Analyst who had predicted it accurately, but he had gathered more data than the others had. But remorse, which is to say biting again or back-biting, no, he didn't feel remorse for such things as that. Yet something was presently biting him in an inaccessible spot. Not biting him again, but biting him newly and mysteriously.

  Anyhow, he couldn't afford second thoughts about such things. Second thoughts are always duplication, an inefficiency that a Prejudicial Analyst cannot allow himself.

  A young man, pleasant and impudent of face, was approaching Snapjudge from the front as he walked through Actuaries Concourse. The man seemed about to speak to Snapjudge, but instead of that he cocked an eye at him, grinned a crooked grin, and passed on. And perhaps he was gone forever. No he wasn't. There was a handle on the young man; Snapjudge would encounter him again. That was predictable. For even such a quick passing was sufficient to permit a good Prejudicial Analyst like Jim Snapjudge to give a rapid and basically exact reading.

  ‘Twenty-four years and five or six months old. Born in the autumn, that's sure. Name is approximately Godfrey Halskragen (if the surname had been Englished to Tippet, as had been considered by the father of the man, it would have left a stronger indication; but Halskragen it had remained), from Gallipolis, Ohio, so what was he doing downstream here in Kronstadt? Oh, that could be answered, if it mattered. Not quite sure where in Gallipolis the man had lived, but probably on one of those tree-named
streets that slope down towards that river. There was some indication that he had lived in two different houses not too far apart. Mostly of German-Irish blood. A lapsed Lutheran or Catholic. No, no, his German ears were halsstarrig (stubborn), but not that stubborn. A man with such graceful tragi to his ears could hardly be a Lutheran. Wife may be named Irene (Iris rejected after short consideration), and he may never see her again in life. This man (Godfrey tentative) has the opportunity to transfer to this town with his old firm (P & G Rotary Valve Company) at an increase in pay. And he is here to look the town over and decide. He believes, wrongly, that his ever-new resolutions (he is a boozer) will stand up better in a new town. But he will be drawn down into the Rhineland part of town tonight, into the Rangle-Tangles and Bierstuben and Schnapps-Shacks. And he will die there, drowned in the fools' cup as they used to say.’

  Snapjudge did not verbalize all this judgment to himself, but he did record it all in his mind in an annotation that was faster than words. There is a gyroscopic principle in the Analysis: high speed accompanying accuracy and balance. A slower judgment would wobble and be less accurate. This was the quick first impression, the only allowable impression for a Prejudicial Analyst. And Snapjudge's impressions, based as they always were on tens of thousands of previous impressions, were uncannily right.

  But then Snapjudge did a thing that he did very seldom. He looked back. And the young man who had passed him also looked back at the same instant, and their looks met. Their thoughts crossed like two rapiers made out of swift sunlight.

  “Could I not be different from my template?” the thought of the young man laughed back at Snapjudge. “Have I to die tonight just because my pattern says ‘die’? May I not escape?” And the young man winked crookedly. Snapjudge catalogued it as an amoebic wink, but he was puzzled at his own attaching such a name to it.