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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Not bad for starters,” Emily Vortex said. “Give them to me. I'll work them over and see if something really good can't be made out of them.”

  2.

  When he came to his fifteenth birthday and was officially of age, Karl Riproar did a number of quick things. He funded and founded the “Karl Riproar and Emily Vortex Simultaneous Arts Institution and Perpetual Memorial”. He ordered construction to begin on it that very day.

  He declared himself to be “Ultra-Departmental Director” of the city, using a little-known emergency provision by which he put the previous ultra-departmental director under citizen's arrest and replaced him.

  He founded the “Karl Riproar and Emily Vortex Sky's the Limit Speculation and Enjoyment Enterprises,” which survives even to this day.

  He married Emily Vortex.

  Let us not have an inaccuracy creep into this account. He didn't marry her that day. It was the following day that they got married. Emily was one day younger than Karl and did not come of age till the following day. But their marrying was part of the number of quick things that they effected as soon as they could.

  Karl legally changed his name to ‘Lord Torpedo Lord Gyroscope’. But on a practical basis he would still go by the name of Karl Riproar.

  He founded the “Imperial Compressed Music Company”.

  He bought the land for the “Pleasant Meadows Home Development Project”. He had construction on the homes begin at once, and also on his own manor house and gardens which would occupy the central portion of that area.

  He gathered in funds from a number of annuities that he had set up to mature when he was fifteen years old. He shuffled those funds. He increased them amazingly. The money for their increase had to come from somewhere. Really it was a toll levied on all the money markets of the country. But it was one of those tricks that are done only once.

  Anything else?

  No, those were the main projects of Karl Riproar and Emily Vortex. They were set up then, and all working pieces were working. They could play endless and trick variations with these projects, but the basics were there from this first establishment.

  So Karl Riproar waxed in years and size and strength and mentality and activity and angular velocity and momentum.

  To describe the simultaneous developments and achievements and pleasures of Karl Riproar and Emily Vortex would require a talent for simultaneity equal to their own. So we will describe the course of Karl mostly. Their courses ran roughly parallel, but we understand Karl's better. Besides, we're scared of Emily. She's weird. Karl Riproar, the boy and man who was so much in a hurry that he had to do as many as a dozen things at once, he now entered a timeless realm and regime in which there was no pressure at all but in which more things happened in more momentous and more massive fashion than ever before.

  “This is like Heaven,” Karl said one day.

  “Not quite,” said the usually more accurate Emily. “I calculate that the number of contacts in Heaven is two and a half times what we're experiencing, that the angular-momentum there is almost three times what we've achieved, and that the quantity of life there is nearly four times what we've reached here. But we're closing the gap, Karl, we're closing it.”

  The quantity of life, that was it. If you hear people talk too much about the “quality of life” do not pay attention to them. The quality is always predicated on the quantity. The more life there is the better it is. The abundance of it is the whole thing. It cannot be rich and detailed if it isn't abundant.

  Rich and detailed and abundant, that was a good description of their “Imperial Compressed Music Company.” Music solidifies at very high speed. You didn't know that? Three-hour-long works of limpid melody can be turned to ultra-high speed and then compressed and solidified into mere micro-seconds, into depth-moments of total enjoyment and no duration at all. These compressions can be enjoyed, one or ten or ten thousand of them, exquisite morsels for the sensually-educated elite. This was strictly high fidelity stuff as Karl and Emily processed it. The morsels were complete and unabridged, every note and shading of the originals there, all of it for instantaneous enjoyment. Karl and Emily enjoyed such music, more than one could hear in a hundred lifetimes ordinarily, and they also marketed it at a high profit to the very wealthy.

  And the “Pleasant Meadows Home Development Project” was an abundant success. This project provided three thousand homes on beautiful rolling foothills, for persons of the intellectual and aesthetic elites. This became a super-intellectual community such as has not been seen since Florence, since Tara, since Athens. There was cross-fertilizing vigor and power there; there was the high stimulus of art and drama and literature and all the winged sciences. And the financial arrangements were so favorable to the people that those selected simply could not afford to pass the project up. “To those who have much, much will be given” was the slogan of the project, and it worked.

  Most of the three thousand homes were filled with the very young and the very promising elements of the cream of the cream. Many of them moved on after a year or two or three, and their places were always taken by others even more promising and more select. Some of the people sickened and died, but the genius people have always had a proclivity towards early deaths. No matter, there were always fresh faces and fresh minds and really sparkling people arriving every day. And Karl and Emily lived in the middle of them, in the manor house on the top of Torpedo Mountain to which all the surrounding country was foothills.

  Karl and Emily had a good thing going in the “Pleasant Meadows Home Development Project”. If you are as canny as they were, and you develop and sell three thousand homes, then you make fortunes out of them, even if you give not-to-be-refused deals. And if, for some reason, there is a high turnover in home ownership there, and you keep surety strings on the properties, then you can make those fortunes over and over again every two or three or four years.

  And all the while there is the pleasure of the stimulating company of that large and talented neighboring group. And that brilliant neighborhood group had the pleasure of the acquaintance of what was, perhaps, the most gyroscopic couple in the world.

  As to themselves, Karl and Emily were so well attuned that the disagreements between them were few and small. One of those disagreements (a disagreement over no more than ten seconds time) had to do with their own intimate congresses. Karl thought that twenty seconds each time was long enough for such event. “That is, after all, one hundred and thirty billion times as long as it took for the ‘big bang’ that produced the universe,” Karl said reasonably, “and we do it eight times a night, and twelve times on Wednesdays and Saturdays. And we do only a very few other things while we are doing it. Really, can we reasonably give more than twenty seconds to it each time?” Emily thought that they should take at least thirty seconds to it, but she had to admit that there was almost total pleasure and realization in those twenty-second encounters of theirs. They would wake or half-wake from the multi-level, rich, and detailed dreams that such gyroscopic people have (each of them could dream from eight to twelve dreams at the same time); they would hold their magic congress (doing only a very few other things while they were enjoying the twenty seconds of it); and then they would plunge back into their high-frequency and variegated sleep again.

  Their usual night congresses followed (according to Karl's dream regime; we don't know Emily's) these dream cycles, which would take their names from the dominant dream motif of each group:

  1. The Alpha-Orlando Dream sequence.

  2. The nightly episode of the Green Ocean Dream Serial.

  3. The First Genovese Dream Experience.

  4. The “Aemilia of the Ten Thousand Eyes” dream encounter.

  5. The apprehensive “Don't Push That Button, Dammit, That Button Blows Up the World” nightmare.

  6. The Second Genovese Dream Experience.

  7. Karl's Signature Dream, the “Falling Through Rotting Space” nightmare.

  8. The “Hofstadter Passi
on” dream sequence.

  So you can see that their happy carnal encounters, following this evenly spaced schedule of dream, would be pretty well strewn out through the night.

  “I wonder if poor people ever dream?” Emily speculated once.

  But, for them, every night and day, every hour and every minute (by quintessential third-powering they could have as many as 216,000 minutes in every hour) was crammed and overflowing with pleasure and fulfillment.

  And it went on that way for many happy years.

  “Wrangler Hoxie, back at the progressive institution, used to wonder about the astonishing consumption of angular momentum in our vicinity,” Karl Riproar the Lord Torpedo and Lord Gyroscope said one day. “He said that all that angular momentum had to come from somewhere.” “Whatever made you think of that?” Emily asked with her smiles (she could smile as many as twelve different smiles at one time). “It wasn't the Chairman of the Environmental Quality Board who is puffing up the incline to our front door?”

  “Yes,” Lord Karl said. “He is wondering about the same old questions. Have we been shearing our sheep too closely, do you suppose?”

  “Oh yes, we have. There should have been enough of them to keep both of us. But, Karl, we have increased our consumption of everything so very much as the years go by.”

  The Chairman of the Environmental Quality Board came in and talked to them for ten minutes. For ten minutes! Why that was almost the equivalent of ten days experience the way they usually compressed it. And they had to slow down to voice speed to carry on the talk with him. “The attainment levels of the three thousand genius families in the ‘Pleasant Meadows Home Development Project’ aren't as high as they should be,” the Chairman of the Environmental Board said in a guarded voice.

  “They are higher than for any other group of equal numbers in the world,” Emily told him. “Best in the world isn't bad.” Emily was luxuriating her bare feet on the floor before her. She was receiving through the soles of her feet. There were elite soles-of-the-feet broadcast and reception programs for persons of extraordinarily fine sensibilities. There were two such programs, and Emily was enjoying one with each foot.

  “Yes, the attainment levels of the people in the Pleasant Meadows Project are higher than any group anywhere else,” the board chairman agreed. “And yes, it is higher than we could logically expect it to be. But—”

  “But is it as high above what you might logically expect it to be?” Emily asked. “Is that your question?”

  “Yes. Considering your own unique elevating influence, that is my question,” the board chairman said challengingly.

  “A thing that big is hard to hide forever,” said Karl Riproar the Lord of Torpedo and Gyroscope.

  Then the three of them looked at each other for a while.

  “Where does all that personal and psychic energy, all that angular momentum come from?” the board chairman asked. “You consume colossal amounts of it.” “Oh, it comes from the sheep,” Karl said, “from the pleasant genius sheep of Pleasant Meadows. We shear them but we do not butcher them. Why were you not afraid to come here alone?”

  “I'm not alone. I have backup,” the board chairman said. “But I'm not afraid because when you do kill (and I suppose that it is accidental when you do it) you kill very slowly. It takes about three years for it to happen. But I intend to settle you two in about three minutes. I have only to blow this whistle that I wear around my neck. There is no way you can prevent me blowing it. And it is tuned—”

  “I know what it is tuned to,” Karl Riproar said, “and I know that we can't prevent it blowing, since it will blow of itself.” Then the whistle did begin to blow, apparently by itself. It did not blow an alarm though. It blew a pleasant little tune that went out over the æther. Why should the pleasant little tune, or the whistle blowing by itself, have frightened the board chairman? Oh, because he didn't expect anything like that, and he didn't know what was going on.

  The board chairman held the whistle in his hands now, and still it blew by itself. The board chairman turned white, and he pulled the whistle from around his neck and flung it across the room. “My you are nervous!” Emily smiled to the board chairman. The whistle still blew of itself on the floor across the room. And the burden of its message was “All clear. No difficulty. You can go now.” That was the message that the whistle sent out over the æther. And backup vehicles fifty meters away were seen and heard to leave.

  “How?” the board chairman croaked.

  “Simple ventriloquism,” Karl said. “Were you never young and tricky? A childhood hobby of mine. I could make pianos and violins seem to play by themselves, seem to play quite well too. And, as ‘Ultra-Departmental Director’ of the region for life, I am the one who has set up all codes and signals.”

  “You are vampires,” the board chairman said. “The energy consumed by your dazzling simultaneities comes from the blood of others.”

  “Not from blood, from ichor,” Karl Riproar said.

  “And ‘vampire’ is a crass word used only by crass people,” Emily smiled. And they both were doing many other things at the same time and not paying very much attention to that board chairman or his investigation of them.

  “You suck blood, or you suck ichor-energy,” the board chairman said bitterly. “You are judged and condemned.”

  “You cannot judge us. We are special cases,” Emily said, and she took a dozen compressed music morsels and went dreamy-eyed on them.

  “So all the vampires have always said, that they were special cases,” the chairman remarked. “And are you both of old vampire families?”

  “I don't know. I don't think there's any such thing,” Karl said. “Both my parents were torpedo-manufacturers.” And Karl was doing a piece of hot-stone sculpture, holding the anode in his left hand, and speed-reading a mathematics text that he held in his right hand.

  “How do you think a creature feels to have the juice and the very life of him sucked out?” the board chairman asked belligerently.

  “Like you feel,” Karl said.

  “As you feel now,” Emily smiled. “As you begin to feel now.”

  “I begin to feel giddy,” the board chairman said. “But it won't be—all at one time?”

  “There are some that we can't draw just a little bit of juice from and leave,” Emily said, “because a little bit is all that they have in them. Oh yes, I code-dialed a doctor for you, but he will be too late. A strange case, so we will have to report it; that you were irrational when you came here, and that you just weakened and died.”

  Karl and Emily did a number of pleasant things (ten or twelve of them at the same time) as they waited for the doctor's lorry to pick up the Chairman of the Environmental Quality Board. Lord Karl put a plug in his left nostril and tuned its direction and amplification to pick up the wonderful aroma of sweet clover in Pleasant Meadows. He inhaled and enjoyed, and by doing so he consumed all the energy and pleasure potential that was in the board chairman, who thereupon expired.

  Slippery

  “Roy, I got a super-glycerine mist with species-juice added that's the slickest thing in the world,” Austro said. “How slick, Austro?” Roy Mega asked him.

  “You remember traction, Roy? You remember friction? You'd better remember them because they might not be around much longer. Roy, this stuff is slick!”

  Austro had just invented slippery-gip, a mist that would cling to anything it was targeted for and make that thing absolutely slippery. Austro's inventions hadn't been very good lately, but slippery-gip was good.

  “I wish I'd thought of that,” Roy complained with sour humor as he stood carefully in his shoes and held onto secure pieces of furniture.

  “You haven't thought of it yet,” Austro chortled. “You can't half see it even now. Mine is the only mind that's slippery enough to come up with slippery-gip.”

  Austro cast a small cloud of the mist at Roy's feet, and Roy turned three complete cartwheels and went down resoundingly as his ow
n patented no-slip shoes flew out from under him.

  “Damn your monkey-face, Austro!” he howled as he hit.

  Roy Mega was a young electronic genius of the species sapiens.

  Austro was a young general-purpose genius of the species australopithecus. Despite their being of different species they were friends.

  “There's nothing for you to patent though, Austro,” Roy said. “You can't patent a chemical formula.”

  “You're guessing. Slippery-gip may not even have a formula. It sure is slippery, isn't it? You can't get up, can you?”

  No, there was no way that Roy Mega could get up from the slippery floor even though it was covered with thick-piled carpet that you wouldn't ordinarily think of as slippery. Possibly one could sit on the floor, if he were very careful, if he had an exquisite sense of balance, and if he didn't try to move. But Roy thrashed around, and he ended up supine on the floor.

  “Why doesn't it affect you, Austro? Because you're barefooted?”

  “No. You're barefooted too now, Roy. Didn't you notice that your no-slip shoes had slipped clear off your feet, and your socks too? But I am the master of the slipperies, and they will leave me alone. You can get up now, Roy.”

  “I can? Yeah, I can, can't I?” He got up. “How did you turn it off, Austro?”

  “By being master of the slipperies. Roy, you have a bunch of friends who are jokers. I bet they sure could have fun with slippery-gip for a while. They could get it talked about.”

  “What will you finally do with your slick ideas, Austro?”

  “I can organize the ‘Super-Slick Industries’ and sell stock and get rich that way. Or I can blackmail the whole world with the slippery menace. In moral dilemmas like this I always ask myself what Monkey-Face Muldoon would do. And the answer is ‘He'd blackmail the world every time.’ ”