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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “But the people!” Salvation Sally cried. Sally had always liked people. “Can the deaths of millions of people be so easily forgotten?”

  “No people died in the catastrophe,” Hugh said. “None at all.”

  “How is that possible?” a man of the city asked. “There were millions of people living on the shores of the Black Sea. Consider just those who were on ships there when the sea disappeared. In fact, the first reports said that more than a million persons had died. Now the newspeople estimate that the figure will be nearer to a thousand, but that's still a lot of people.”

  “And this evening they may say that possibly a hundred persons died there,” Hugh filled in. “But nobody really died at the Black Sea. It would have been impossible for anyone to have died there.”

  “Well, drop a tear for the slaughter of the fish, then,” Mary Virginia chirruped almost in laughter. Why should she laugh? Great natural catastrophes are serious events. “Consider that the famous Black Sea sturgeon are no more.”

  “I consider that the famous Black Sea sturgeon never saw the Black Sea,” Hugh said. “It was a good trade name to peddle sturgeon under (‘Black Sea’ brand was a little bit like ‘Golden Mountain’ brand or some such), but most of those sturgeon came from the Mukmuk Sea in high Turkestan. Perhaps Cyrus Roundhead here, who is an expert on the Black Sea legend, would like to say a few words on this disappearance that is in the news. In any case, my time is up, and his time begins.”

  “Ah, yes,” Roundhead agreed, clicking a second and third lens into his monocle to give him enough distance vision to see across the room. “Ah, yes, the Saga of the Sea That Never Was, the legend that took on a life of its own. Isostasy analysis had determined years ago that there had to be a fairly high land rather than a low sea there. The world would have known the difference otherwise, by the difference of weight. But the theorists went there—where the sea scientifically could not have been, where it was documented as having been for so many centuries—and they thought they found it there. They were puzzled. Illusion will deceive, if it were possible, even the elect. But we Inner Royal Pops have always known there was no Black Sea in the common meaning.”

  “There has to have been a Black Sea!” one of the neo-Pops exploded. He was wearing one of those “Time Is Short. Are You Noetic Enough?” badges.

  “So it was once thought that it had to be,” Roundhead conceded, “though it's now been decided that there's no longer any psychological need for a Black Sea. For several thousand years, the Black Sea legend was allowed to grow undisturbed. Then it was deemed ripe. So, the night past or very early this morning, it was removed surgically and quickly. It was the legend that was removed, of course, not the sea. There never was any sea there, only a small swamp where several rivers disgorged, and then the flow was passed through the Bosporus Strait.

  “The Adriatic Sea was the only sea of Europe ever named the Black Sea. It is still called that, for adris or hadris meant ‘black’ in the early Latin and in the Etruscan. There is always a human requirement to believe in ‘Lands Beyond’ or ‘Seas Beyond.’ Some of the credited places are harmless and even inspiring: the Isles of the Blessed, the Hesperides, Antilla, Cibola. But the Black Sea legend was baleful. When we came to the present updating of legends, it had to go. The dislocation will not really be severe. Several million persons who believed they had villas on the Black Sea will only know that their comforting belief is gone; they will not remember what it was. Well, that's history.”

  “Are there any other legend places that have to be destroyed?” a fearful lady asked.

  “No, not at this time,” Roundhead answered cautiously. “There are three that I myself would like to have destroyed, and I've voted for their destruction. But it's believed that they're not ripe for it yet. They remain too strong and too entrenched.”

  “What are their names?” the fearful lady asked.

  “Oh, Rome, Athens, Jerusalem,” Roundhead said.

  “Roundhead, you shrivel me in all my ancientries,” Margaret Stone hollered out in her beautiful and gaunt voice.

  “You are saying that Rome and Athens and Jerusalem do not exist?” gasped a man who wore the badge “Ride It Out. They've Got to Keep Some of Us.” “I'm aghast.”

  “Yes. It's because of the aghast crowd that we don't do away with them forthwith.” Roundhead smiled. “Well, let's say that those three cities or syndromes were slightly in history, and they do have some technical connections with their own legends—as a flea will sometimes have the same surname as its dog. And we will admit that there is presently to be found a sort of carnival, tourist-oriented settlement on each of those sites. But that's about all.

  “It served the mordant humor of the Etruscans to bandy about the name ‘Roman.’ It applied to a destitute neighborhood of hillbillies who scratched out (literally) an existence in the hound-dog hills above the Tiber swamps. The Etruscans were an excellent, ardent, archaic, talented, and vastly cultivated people. If they addressed one another in such manner as ‘Hey, Brain Rot,’ ‘Hey, Nosebleed,’ ‘Hey, Okie,’ ‘Hey, Rumdum,’ ‘Hey, Roman’—well, that was their humor. Even their enemies took to calling them the ‘Romans’ for fun. That's where the thing should have stopped, in fun. There were never any real Romans except that small settlement of shiftless hillbillies.”

  “Whence do you have this information?” a scholarly man asked.

  “Oh, from the rocks of the region,” Roundhead said. “The patinas lifted from them give us a pretty detailed view of things there. And from other sources.”

  “But what about the City itself? The Capital City of the World? Rome?” Margaret Stone called in her hot Italian voice. (She had several voices.)

  “Ah, Miss Margaret, the seven leading Etruscan Cities shared and made up the common Capital City of Etruria, and of the Italic Peninsula, and of the World. They were sometimes referred to as the Seven Eminences, and one meaning of eminence is ‘hill.’ And they were sometimes given the name (in fun, and also in fraternal lodge hocus-pocus) of the Seven Hillbilly Hills. The ‘Capital’ was officially called ‘The City of the Seven Eminences.’ ‘City’ was here used in its original meaning of ‘league.’ ”

  “But what of the famous-name Roman emperors?” a man with the nose like the knobbiest Roman of them all asked. “They must have existed. They are too well known to be made up.”

  “Some of them were the names of vaudeville and music hall performers,” Roundhead said. “The Etruscans excelled in vaudeville and variety presentations. And some of them were the names of mascots of their army regiments. Some were nothing at all. The simple fact is this: Rome, with its supposed culture and art and law and might, began as no more than a joke. The joke became old, but even an unfunny joke is sometimes accorded privileged status in its old age. But there is no reality at all in the main Roman legend. Ah, I believe some of us wish to go on a little safari in a few moments.”

  “What about Athens?” This was asked by John the Greek himself, the owner and proprietor of John the Greek's Famous French Restaurant. “I come from there. I lived there till I was thirteen years old. I'll not be easily convinced that there isn't such a place.”

  “I'll not easily be convinced that there is,” Roundhead said. “I journeyed there once to find it, and I didn't find much. I obtained a map of the city, but it was defective. Only about one street in five that appeared on the map was to be found in reality. The comment on the back of the map said there were seventeen different streetcar routes in the city, but there was only one. The directory showed there were fifty-five cinemas in the city. There were only two, and both of them were showing American cowboy films.

  “There was a hill there with an old-new building on it. Half of it consisted of some broken old limestone pillars; the other half was a combination of milk bar, old hickory barbecue house, hotel, honky-tonk, estiatorio, and fried chicken emporium. I would ask someone how to get to the Panathenaic Stadium, or the Olympieum, or the Dionysus Theater, or the Odeon,
or the Parthenon. In each case, the person would point to the old end of that half-and-half building. It was whatever building one wanted it to be.

  “I would ask how to get to Churchill Street or Constitution Square or Sophocles Street or Concordia Square or University Boulevard. ‘Behold, your feet are upon it,’ someone would say. They had one street, and it was whatever street they wanted it to be. But I was at a disadvantage in my journey to Athens. I looked at it all with clear and open eyes.”

  “You joke,” an olive-colored lady challenged.

  “He jokes only a little bit, Helen Petrides,” John the Greek admitted. “I had forgotten it, but when I was a boy there, it was very much like that. But for it to be even like that, it has to be. Tell me again why you say there is no Athens, man.”

  “Oh, I said there was a contrived, tourist-oriented settlement on each of the sites,” Roundhead reasoned with John. “How it was anciently, I will come to in a moment. I see that some of our own young people and also some of the young and middling people of the town are seeking an end of words and a beginning of action, or at least they wish to mix a little action with the words. You ladies from the Pelican Press, I will promise you a safari after large and medium game in just a few minutes. You were not with us on the first little safari we took through the town last night.

  “There was a man, a laborer in the SF vineyard, who used always to suggest that the company might as well be chasing fire lizards on Venus while they talked. So they chased the lizards: They determined that they were identical to the fire drakes of Earth. But the quality of their dialogue always suffered from the dilution and division of attention.

  “Well, we will now go out and assault strategic parts of the city and the world with thunder axes, and we will carry out our talk at the same time. And we will not let the quality of our dialogue suffer, no matter what else we are doing.”

  Then they left the buildings of the Duffey establishment. They took to the roofs and the balconies and the iron ladders of the town. The young people of the Royal Pop Historians were very agile, but the townspeople kept up with them. The townsfolk found the thunder ax an easy weapon to master. They quickly learned the trick of hacking fraudulent persons and structures to death.

  “Now to answer the question that Mr. John the Greek has asked,” Cyrus Roundhead stated conversationally as he flung three bodies from a high building and then swung onto an iron ladder to go even higher.

  “This is illusion,” Mary Virginia said to Margaret Stone and Salvation Sally. “Just keep saying to yourself ‘This is illusion.’ ” If it hadn't been illusion, none of them would have been able to climb so wildly.

  “Ancient Greece was made up of a blasted inner core named Hellas and five concentric rings around it named Aetolia, Thessaly, Epirus, Macedonia, and Thrace. The southern sectors of these concentric rings had disappeared into the sea, or anyhow disappeared, in prehistoric times,” Roundhead was saying. He was extinguishing several elderly female persons with a thunder ax, but they did not seem to be valid persons. “This may also have been the case of the inner core called Hellas, for we can find no later sound evidence to locate it in actual geography. But, as in the case of the planet Saturn, all of the action was to be found in the rings anyhow.

  “The most important of these outer rings, Macedonia, was made up of strong and warlike men who, in consequence of their being strong and warlike, also became rich. Then, being not quite complete in their capabilities, they took one step backward and became nouveau riche. Ah, we're finished with clearing this building of its nothings, are we not?”

  “Child-hero and myself cleaned out the third floor,” Salvation Sally announced. “The rest should already have been taken care of.”

  “Then we remove it by deflation,” Roundhead said. “We let the air out of the building and we deflate it down to nothing. Do not be surprised, you who are on your first safari of this sort. There wasn't really any building here; there was only the illusion of a building. There wasn't real iron in it, you know. And there wasn't real stone.”

  The building was quickly deflated down to absolute trash, old cardboards and old papers. Then the wind blew the papers away, and it blew away all memory of the building with them. By and by, in a couple of hours, a park would begin to grow here.

  “Such is the origin of every city park in the world,” Roundhead said. “Well, the newly rich Macedonians decided to give themselves a culture, a portfolio of growth arts, and a history. They had to make a past for themselves, and they had nothing to use but imagination. So these prideful Macedonians created the legend of an old and heroic Greece.

  “At the arts, those Macedonians were strong and eager, but impatient, men. One of them would be hammering away at freeing a statue of its marble. He would have a good thing going and he would become too eager. Crunch, he knocks an arm off of his statue. Whang, there is a foot broken loose. Crack, there is a nose shattered completely. Then there is no way out of it except to create a fiction that the statue had been carved by old, heroic Greeks long ages before, that the broken-off members had been broken by the hammers of time and of the burying earth.”

  Breaking up the faces and bodies of the pseudopersons in the buildings was a queasy business. A little blood usually came out of them, but always more trash and fragments of plaster than blood. Some of the quasi-persons wore those new “Are You Splendid Enough?” badges. No, they weren't, or they wouldn't have been in line to be obliterated.

  “Those Macedonians created a number of fiction forms,” Roundhead was saying. “They created an Art Fiction, a Culture Fiction, a Commonwealth or Political Fiction, a Science Fiction, and a History Fiction. All of these fictions were rough-wrought things, but they were done so energetically and enthusiastically that even today they are sometimes mistaken for facts instead of fictions.

  “The most unlikely and perhaps the most excellent of their fiction forms was the Athenian Romance or the Athenian Novel. Though the work of a hundred diverse hands, it was one of the most convincing creations of all literature. It was written barely on the pulp level, yet it had authenticity and power. There are millions of people today who believe that this old and heroic Athens of the novels and romances really existed, and that it was the epitome of an old and heroic Greece.”

  “What about Plato and Aristotle?” the olive-colored lady asked. “Was it not in Athens that they flourished?”

  “No, no,” Roundhead denied her. “Aristotle was the tutor of the son of the king of Macedonia where he flourished. And Plato was a character in several of Aristotle's Athenian Novels. The Athenian Legend has been, so far, harmless. But if it ever festers or becomes infected (and there are some slight signs that it is on its way to doing just that), then we will have to remove it surgically.”

  “Some of them don't want to go,” Mary Virginia cried from a crumbling building where she was deflating false people. “Some of them protest, and they fight. Yes, and they bite like hell. If they never existed at all, where do they get the will to protest so violently when we put an end to their fictions?”

  “You must insist that they go,” said Roundhead, “or we will insist that you go in their places. It's fair that the person having the least reality should go.”

  Yes, some few of the persons and creatures and effects that were being obliterated by the thunder axes and other weapons did not accept their obliteration willingly. They fought, though they had little to fight with. They hissed their hatred. From looking like people, they came to looking like cur dogs and evil spirits. They were being dislocated from their places and forms. “It's you who are destroying our houses and bodies,” some of these uncreations spat at Mary Virginia, and she could not tell whether they were cur dogs or snakes or persons.

  “How about Jerusalem?” asked an unsatisfied customer to Roundhead.

  “Oh, it actually dates only from the present century,” Roundhead stated. “It was built as promotional venture by the Turks on or near the site of various ruined cities: the
Jewish city Jebus; the Greek city Solyma; the Idumaean city Hiero-Solyma or Holy Solyma; the Roman city Aelia Capitolina; the Syrian city Uris Lem; the Arabian city al-Quds. An Assyrian name, Ur Salim, comes nearest to the modern form, but it doesn't come very near to the modern location. It was down the dusty road to the Idumaean city Hiero-Solyma in the rocky southern wilderness that Christ went to be killed. His prototype, Samson, had gone down most of the same dusty road to the nearby city of Gaza in the same rocky southern wilderness to be killed.

  “But Christ was out of bright and flourishing Galilee (The Land of the Gaels), out of that civilization so startling and vivid that it could have happened only once. Ah, the grand cities of Galilee, the Seven Stars; Capernaum, known for its goldsmithery and for its great paintings; Tabigha, known for its tambour music, for its singing, and for its astronomy; Tiberias, known for its fish and its shellfish, and for its comic drama; Magdala, known for its great cuisine, for its wealth, and for its storytellers guild; Cana, known for its wine and for its country music; Nazareth, known for its wooden carriages and chariots, for its wooden statuary, and for its woodworkers guild; Sepphoris, known for its stone sculpture and for its dazzling night life. To be a Galilean was to be civilized and cultured to a degree that has not been known since that time.”

  “But where were the Jews?” the doubly unsatisfied customer still pursued. “Were the Jews not in the Jerusalem which you say didn't exist?”