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

by R. A. Lafferty

  Ten porkers killed. Two to go. And the shaken but talented Tom Halfshell was on muleback again and leading a new charge.

  There was great friendship among these four boys, and they risked their lives and limbs for each other again and again. Their coursing area was only the hog-run behind a small slaughterhouse, and there were surely easier and safer ways to slaughter the exciting and embattled hogs. But hogs should be slaughtered splendidly. All things concerning hogs, those totem animals, should be done as splendidly as possible.

  Now there was a furious and fleet-footed sow among the porkers left, and she was super-dangerous. There were elements of hate and intuition among sows. Swine were man's best friend, but that didn't apply to the disappearing sows of the species. The sows felt somehow (for they could not really know, since the thing was never mentioned in their presence) that even the remnant of them would soon be replaced by clone-boars.

  This first sow was all the more deadly for being short-tusked and close-coupled. She was murder, challenging and charging murder.

  “Thank all things that there is no analogy to men to these fierce, carry-over animals,” Coliath called. “We'd all be better dead than have such savage things within our own species. Watch it, Lion! Watch it, Tom!” The boys would rather find their eleventh and twelfth kills among the uncomplicated porkers, but this shrilling and squealing sow forced the kill upon them. She threw the mules of Cob Coliath and Duke Charles with charges so swift that those canny-footed animals could not cope with them at all.

  But then it was the bloodied Tom on his own lamed mule who killed her with such trickery and curious desire. The other three of them did not like to be involved with the remnant sows at all: but Tom Halfshell liked it particularly. He had her in an exciting and bristly kill. His lance had a large gout of flesh on it when he was finished, and Tom for a moment had the notion of having a pet pig from it.

  And then the ridiculousness of that idea struck him. It was only from bits of boars' flesh that pigs were ever cloned. Besides, Tom already had one little pet pig. He would wait till it was too big to be a pet before he requisitioned another one.

  Then Tom Brightfoot killed the anticlimactic twelfth porker.

  Oh, it was all simply hard and hot and bloody work that the boys had to do: but they would not have been boys of the species if they hadn't been able to infuse it with glory. They dragged the dead porkers to the tripods at mule-tail, and they had the first of them hoisted up quickly. They began to skin them to the time of their own hog-skinning songs. Youth, youth, and the danger and death that it loves to bring even the easiest task! This was fullness. This was completeness!

  Except for Tom Halfshell. And they always joked that he was in some way incomplete. But there was something unusually important coming up this day.

  “We are lucky that we will all take part in the ‘Last Man Festival’ tonight,” Lion Brightfoot shouted as he worked the skinning knives and tongs with strong hands. “There have been ‘Last Man Festivals’ before, but this is the last of them all. This ‘Last Man Who Remembers’ is a hundred and forty years old, and that doesn't even count the twelve ‘given’ years. My father says that we will invent other festivals, that we will never run out of festivals; but nothing like this one can ever be held again. It's the end of an era, he says. We will all play tonight in the bands, but only Tom will be with the twelve trumpeters. Will you play the brass trumpet, Tom?”

  “No, I think I'll play the conch-shell trumpet,” Tom said. “Anyone can play the brass trumpet.”

  “And no one can play the conch-shell like you,” Duke Charles cut in. “You'll drive us clear over the hills with that conch-shell tune of yours, Tom. The way you play the conch-shell, it's demanding an answer.”

  “It is, yes,” Tom said, “and sometimes I think that I can hear that answer from over the hills. Mine is one tune that's supposed to have an answer. I had a Butterfly Moon Shell once and tried to play it, but I could get no real music out of it at all. And the Butterfly Moon Shell is listed by the musicology museum as ‘deceptive and non-musical’. But I bet someone could play it. I bet someone could play the answer to my time on it. Maybe, to some people somewhere, the conch-shell trumpet is ‘deceptive and nonmusical.’ No, I can't tell you in words what I mean. But I could tell you on the conch-shell what I mean, if you would only listen and understand it. I bet the ‘Last Man Who Remembers’ understands it. I saw him yesterday, and he had a mighty deep look to him.”

  “The Last Man won't understand anything after tonight,” Cob Coliath said, as he did fine and strong work with a butcher's saw. “He will die tonight, and he says that he's ready for it. His official title is ‘The Last Man Who Remembers,’ you know.”

  “Who remembers what?” asked Tom who was not quite as intelligent as the others.

  “Oh, if anyone else remembered what it was, then he wouldn't be the last man to remember it,” Lion Brightfoot said reasonably. “And when he is finally dead, then no one at all will know what the old secret was. It was a crumby thing anyhow, they say. And my father maintains that nobody now left would understand it even if it were explained to him.”

  These four boys had arrived on simultaneous requisitions just about two years before this. They were boys as good as any you will ever find. And the fact was that men and boys, like everything else, were getting better all the time. Men now had a thorough understanding of what they were doing when they put in their requisitions for sons. They were more scientific about it than ever before. They understood the goal, and they got the results.

  “The reason for the world is the enjoyment of the world,” was a sound current ethical-scientific statement, “and the reason for men and boys is the fulfillment and pleasure of those same men and boys.”

  The men and boys did fulfill, and they did please themselves. They lorded it over the universe and they brought it into accord and resonance with themselves.

  2.

  These four boys who had come from the potting sheds at the same time were doing quick and hard pork work (the most meaningful and totemistic of all work). And after they had worked, they must go to their instructions. It would be that way all their lives: in the mornings, work; all the afternoons, instructions; in the evenings, enjoyments. Intellectuality and friendship and art and pleasure were the things that life was built upon, and not one of them must be slighted. These boys usually took their basic courses together; and then they took their majors and minors and corollaries with others who followed the same specialties. But even in the specialty subjects, there were ‘cross-currents,’ meetings between the basic friends. And the instructions must be carried out as splendidly as the pig-killings and other things.

  Boys came to their instruction years with explosive momentum: and the acquisition of knowledge and skill and understanding was supposed to continue at an explosive pace all their lives. The perfect balance, the passion, and the (yes) the serenity, can only come at high speed, as a rapidly spinning top will have balance and surety and serenity. But when it slows down, then it wobbles, and sometimes it falls.

  When the boys had been in the potting sheds (the fleshpots and the mindpots) they had developed great bodily and psychic mental intensity, but they had not been conscious in any of those areas. They had been in the large, unconscious, amitotic environment of intense activity kept well below the surface. It was there that the requisitions for sons were fulfilled; it was there that the selections were made as to what things should rise above the surface, what things might be kept in harmless somnolence below the surface forever, and what things must be destroyed while they were still below the surface to prevent them from making trouble later.

  So it was that the boys broke up through the surface of that environment with bright memories in some areas, and with gappy holes in their memories on other sections. Into the holes in their memories, other sorts of things might be flowed during the instructions, things of unrelated substance. But all the boys broke through that old surface with great po
wer, like porpoises leaping, like rockets riding on controlled explosions, like shouting stones hurled by spring-released catapults. And when the boys surfaced they became conscious, and they were all registered as having the ‘given’ age of twelve years. (They might have been in the amitotic environment anywhere from six weeks to six months: but not twelve years.)

  Tom Halfshell went at noon to his instructions in his major of Trumpet Playing and related subjects. Horns were paramount in the musical part of the instructions. All boys arrived with the memory of blowing a sort of Triton's horn in the depths of a sea. Drums and gongs and bells and clanging iron were important in their music also, and the rattling and singing woods, and even strings and keyboards. But it was the horns, and their cousins the pipes, that were the royal instruments. Tom Halfshell played the brass trumpet as formal instrument, and the conch-shell trumpet as informal instrument. And he was good, much better than any of his fellows, on brass or wood or shell or bone horns, or pig-tooth whistles or penny whistles, or even on that most royal of all instruments, the squealing, pig-stomach, Bag-Pipe. And yet he was not at ease with the pig-pipe, nor it with him.

  “You are much better than the other boys, Tom,” the instructor told him, “but they are complete, and you are not. There is something amiss with your blowing. There may even be outlawed OTHAFA elements in your tune. Your tune keeps looking for a missing piece and calling out for it. But, by the character of the world that we live in, there is no such missing piece. Do you understand that?”

  “I understand it as a statement, but sometimes I feel otherwise as a feeling,” Tom Halfshell said.

  “You are not allowed to feel too otherwise,” the instructor told him. “I am recommending that you change your major from the trumpet to the pig-stomach bagpipes. Your father is a piper and not a trumpeter, and his requisition for you was for a piper.”

  “No, I must stay with the trumpet and the conch-shell trumpet,” Tom said. “My tunes will not talk right on anything else.”

  “You seem to have an endless repertoire of tunes,” the instructor said. “You seem to have them, but you haven't. All the tunes that you play are variations of the same tune. Leave that time, Tom. You play it well, but incompletely. Play other tunes, even if you play them badly for a while.”

  “No, I can't,” Tom said, “It's the only tune that I can play.”

  “But it has OTHAFA elements in it.”

  “I don't know what those elements are, and you can't or won't tell me.”

  “Ah, I always hate to see a boy chopped down before he ever becomes a man,” the instructor said sadly. “Your blood be upon yourself!”

  3.

  In his minor, Nostalgic Folklore, Tom Halfshell also had his difficulties, to go along with his splendid experiences. Nostalgic Folklore was full of holes. That's the best that can be said about it. There had been changes made. Once it had not been all Swine-Myth and Solar-Myth. Once, perhaps, there had been Moon-Myth in it, and other things. But you could sure get yourself demerited if you asked why there were no moon-myths now. There were quite a few areas that you had to avoid.

  And the name of the course was the trickiest thing about it. Yes, it was very evocative of nostalgia: but there were so many sections of forbidden nostalgia. There were blood memories whose expression had been erased. And there was foolish stuff of poor quality that had been put in to fill the holes where something had been torn out by the roots. In particular was the land or plateau of OTHAFA blocked out, and yet there was evidence that any tricky boy could see that the land had once been central to folklore.

  Monster-Morph was a powerful course. It converged on man as its center. Man himself was the golden monster to whom all the roads and designs ran. And the primordial morphs of men were all interesting, trolls and boogermen, bears and apes and swine, lions — aye — and eagles, giants and ogres, cyclops, and one-eyed pirates. The last was quite revealing, for men seemed to be returning to the powerful single-eyed vision that had once been his. Modern man was particularly accident prone to the blinding of one (but not both) eyes. One man in three now wore a black patch over the blinded left (or sinister) eye, and it was a patch of honor. And Tom had learned that, as a thing quite recent, men were requisitioning cyclopean or one-eyed sons. And they were getting them too, now, for the first time, in this very season. There is much to be said for the power of the single vision. The power of monsters was assumed into man, and what man or boy would not glory in such an accretion? But Tom Halfshell was bothered by a devious monstrosity omitted. There had to be complementary shapes to the power-monsters, and there weren't. There had to be complementary colors and after-images to the golden Solar-Swine who was man. But something had happened to the ability to see after-images.

  Over the hills was a land named OTHAFA, but it wasn't on the maps of Musicology, Nostalgic Folklore, or Monster-Morph. That is why Tom had selected Hard Geography as his sustaining corollary when his father had advised him to take an additional instruction. Tom wanted to learn some Hard Geography about one particular place.

  And there was some semi-hard geography about the particular place, but not really hard. There was even the statement that OTHAFA was a generic term and that there might be a dozen or so of such regions (one of them very big) in the world. There was also the statement that OTHAFA might be regarded as the archipelago of many hard-surmounted islands, showing the same (non-geographic) characteristics in every instance.

  “There is something in the OTHAFA Archipelago that has cut us off as sheerly as we have cut it off,” was one statement. But was it a statement of Hard Geography? As geographical information, it was very frustrating.

  There was only shadow information about the place in Musicology and Nostalgic Folklore and Monster-Morph and Hard Geography. There were only fossil memories. And Tom found that he would not be able to go to the place himself.

  “You have already broken it by asking,” the instructor of Hard Geography said. “A well-raised boy would not have the trickery to ask. No, permits to go there are not given to anyone now, nor have they been for many years. It is a sign of criminality even to ask.

  “Ah, Tom, I always hate to see a boy chopped down before he ever becomes a man. Your blood be upon yourself!”

  And yet there was a coherent fantasy about the OTHAFA Archipelago. Part of it was Tom's private fantasy. Part of it was the private fantasies of several other boys. These fantasies had elements in common, and those elements were handed down from somewhere. Besides, remnants of kite-nets were found (they might float on the air for long distances). And animals were sometimes taken that had that old three-point wound marks as though somebody had botched killing them with a trident. There was an almost documented fantasy if the things were put together.

  The folks of the Archipelago were creatures of the moon-snail totem. From a distance, they looked a little bit like men. But on closer view — well, they weren't men. They sure weren't men.

  They were night hunters. They were net people. They used fowling nets (the kite-nets of which pieces were sometimes found), hunting nets, and fishing nets to capture their winged, legged, or finned prey. And they used tridents or daggers to kill their netted game.

  They also used a light and swift net in style between the hunting and fishing net that swept their totem moon-snails up from the wet grass. And they used another light and swift net in a style between the fowling and hunting net that could take a bemused doe-deer where it stood with raised head, and extinguish its breath with its strangling, running draw-loop before the ritual trident was even brought into play.

  The folk of the Archipelago were moonlight hunters, and they signaled with Moon-Snail trumpets.

  Sometimes Tom Halfshell, thinking of these things, rose late at night and went to the high Festival Meadow to blow powerfully on his conch-shell trumpet. He would blow, and then he would listen for an answer. He would blow, and then listen again. But the answering music-call (Tom had a fantasy that it would come from an unplayable she
ll-trumpet of the Butterfly Moon Snail) never came from the inland islands beyond the hills. Then, on the last night of them all for him, the answer did come briefly, in a briefness of only seven notes. But it came just a little bit too late for Tom to hear it.

  4.

  That was on the night of the ‘Last Man Who Remembers’ Festival. Tom Halfshell had been selected as one of the twelve high Horn-Boys for that festival. Really, he wasn't that good. He was better than any of his fellows in the immediate instruction classes, but the dozen high Horn-Boys for this festival were selected out of hundreds of instruction classes. There may have been a hidden reason for Tom being selected to so high an honor. There were a lot of cryptic remarks bouncing off of him that final evening. Even Tom's father, as several of the instructors had said in the same stilted words, “Your blood be upon yourself!”

  “Let it be in myself and on myself then,” Tom said cheerfully. “My blood sings in me tonight.”

  “The Only Song That You Can Play, is that what it sings to you?” the father asked.

  “Yes, it does sing that, and maybe some additional trumpetings also. Father, that is a requisition for a son that you are filling out there. And that is a cloning vial of your flesh and blood that you are packaging with it. That is not a legal thing for you to do. You already have a son, myself.”

  “It will be legal,” Tom's father told him. “I am dating it tomorrow, and I won't mail it until after midnight.”

  The ‘Last Man Who Remembered’ was a crowing, cackling little monster of a fellow. He was a hundred and forty years old, and that didn't even count the twelve ‘given’ years. “Heh, heh, they weren't ‘given’ to me,” he cackled to an audience of a million men and boys. “I came before that. I'm the only one left who came before.”

  There were about a million men and boys there. The people liked to invent festivals every week or so and flock to them. There was an eighty acre festival ground between the city below and the hills beyond. The people watched one half of a football game. Then they had band music and speaking and short snatches from the Last Man Who Remembered.