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

by R. A. Lafferty

  They hadn't respectable minds. Mentality wasn't their strength. They were fuzzy. There really weren't any other things to compare them to. Even the older people had very skimpy memories of any snakes other than these, but there was always the feeling that these were snakes of a special sort.

  Nobody knew how many of the snakes there were. Five is the most that had ever been seen together, but there were at least a dozen different appearances of them. It is possible that individual snakes changed their appearances at will.

  And it had been said jokingly that nobody knew how many Phelan girls there were. Six is the most that had ever been seen together, but a couple of them had a variety of appearances, Antoinette especially. Only three of the girls, Antoinette, Mary, and Teresa, still dwelt in the Phelan Girls Room. Irene was married to Konrad Katz. Margaret was married to Joseph Constantino. Patricia was only one year old and still lived in the suite of her parents, Quincy and Europa Phelan.

  The only one of Robinsonnade who really hated the snakes was Hugo Katz, the Ship-and-Colony Commander, and he hated them for ideological reasons. But the basis he gave for hating the snakes seemed almost irrational.

  “We did not bring either snakes or snake-seed with us from Earth,” he would say as if laying out a complex argument, “and therefore there cannot be any snakes on Robinsonnade. Snakes cannot make their way through deep space. They cannot even fly in the air. And there was no native fauna here. These cannot be real snakes.”

  “Why do you worry about them then, Hugo?” Quincy Phelan would ask every time the subject came up. “If they are imaginary, then there can be only imaginary objections to them. And unreal things can do no harm.”

  “Unreal things are capable of almost total harm,” Hugo would maintain. “They must be destroyed. They are things that have gone completely wrong. They are hysterical sicknesses. They are vile superstitions. Imagination is licit only when its images are schematically reasonable. Moreover, these are impossible snakes of non-existent species. They are biologically impossible. Snakes simply are not made like that or articulated like that. They do not move like that.”

  “But they are harmless, Hugo,” Quincy Phelan always said. “There is no possible way they could hurt you.”

  “Snakes are the crowning superstition and the progenitors of superstition,” Hugo shouted often. “They may not be allowed here or anywhere. The whole purpose of these settlements on the forty-seven planets of Selkirk is the filtering out of remnant superstitions from human specimens. Our charter says that we must root them out here even if it takes twenty years. It has taken us twenty years here on Robinsonnade, and still the symbols of superstition remain. Other planets here have sent four or five or even ten groups through to further colonization since we have been here. We may now be declared a rogue planet, and only the clean persons of us may be allowed to go further. And the rest of you, and your rotten seed with you, will be marooned here forever.”

  “It would serve them right, of course,” Quincy Phelan said. “But is there really any superstition here except in your own mind and mouth?”

  “Snakes are here, in your own house, Phelan. And we also believe that a person of your own family is a source of infection. The snakes are a mystery and an evil, and they are always of alien origin. But they come to consort only with persons who are open to superstition. The snakes of Earth did not originate there. They are an alien enigma. It was a dark angel who assumed the masquerade of a snake in an early test of strength: but that opened the door to the snakes there. What has opened the door to them here, what vile superstition?”

  “I don't know, Hugo.”

  “All belief in unworldly things, in ‘Things Beyond’, is evil superstition, Quincy. And are you yourself avid enough in stamping it out?”

  “We are ourselves in an unworldly place, in a Place Beyond, Hugo,” Quincy said, “for we were not born on the world we live on now.”

  “Do not juggle metaphors with me, Quincy. You are a poor hunter with a poor nose for these things. Or else there is something lacking in your will. You and your whole tribe may well be left behind here.”

  “We don't know what he is talking about,” Mary Phelan said dishonestly of Hugo Katz's tirades. “We don't know what kind of things he sees, but none of us has ever seen anything like that.” “We don't even know what snakes are,” Teresa Phelan lied out of her nine-year-old mouth. “And maybe they aren't bad anyhow. It wasn't a snake the first time. It was someone else in a snake-suit.”

  “We haven't any living things at all except the sheep and the rabbits and the bees and the earthworms,” Antoinette Phelan represented. “We sure don't know anything about things called snakes.”

  “I suspect that this is all a filament of your imagination, Hugo,” Quincy Phelan said with pleasant falsehood.

  And then one of the snakes seemed to grow to four times its regular size. It fastened onto Hugo Katz's hand with murderous and unsnakelike teeth. Barnabas Phelan, the middle-sized son of the family, had to rebuke the snake loudly to make it let go. And Hugo very nearly lost his hand in that attack.

  And yet it could be plainly demonstrated that the snakes were completely, or nearly, toothless. Who was imagining what? It was Hugo Katz who seemed to suffer an hysterical sickness at this time, imagining that he had been bitten by a snake, imagining that it was much more serious than it was, swelling up and turning black in his whole hand and arm over what was only a scratch. This was impossible. He must have received his injury in some other manner.

  “They only bite people they don't like,” Teresa Phelan said reasonably enough.

  Well, suppose that the snakes were of non-existent species and were biologically impossible, what then? How much snake-biology are girls sixteen and thirteen and nine years old supposed to know, when they have lived all their lives on a world where there are no snakes? How much snake-biology do you know yourself?

  But the snakes were of an existent species. They were of the species Culebra Caleidoscopia, from Earth, though very rare there. And how had they really got to Robinsonnade? Someone, for perverse reasons, must have smuggled the very small eggs of this species, since it would have been impossible to smuggle live snakes.

  But the Commandant Hugo Katz continued to be unreasonable about snakes, and now he was on another rampage on the subject, swearing that they must be gotten rid of before the arrival of Earth Night. He demanded that the snakes and all other lying superstitions should go.

  “Well, how had the snakes got to Robinsonnade?

  “An enemy has done this,” Hugo Katz said.

  2.

  The superior fauna of Robinsonnade was divided into four groups or families: the Katzs, the Constantinos, the Hucklebys, and the Phelans. The Katzs were sturdy and straw-haired, and they insisted that they should be the straw-bosses on every project. Under their father-patriarch Hugo Katz, the Ship-and-Colony Commandant, it was insured that they would be the bosses. All the Katzs were narrow-minded, or, they had tightly focused and beamed minds, as it was then said. They at least stood free of all superstition. The mother of the tribe was Monika Katz. The sons were Konrad (who was somewhat compromised by being married to Irene Phelan), Frederik, and Max. The daughters were Rita, Olive, and Veronika. The grandchildren were William and Lily. This was an award-winning family with numerous citations and prizes to show for it.

  The Constantinos were bronzed and curled people, full of spacious fire; but theirs was a wide focus, and their fire was not really hot. Bruno Constantino, the father of the flock, was the largest person on the Island-Planet of Robinsonnade. His wife Davida (Vida) Constantino was the next largest. The daughters of the family (yes, with the Constantinos, the daughters were the more important and the more overpowering) were Regina, Cecilia, Angela, and Barbara. The sons were Joseph, Anthony, Edward, and Cristofer. The grandchildren were Gabriel and Catherine.

  The Constantinos were the best plant-and-animal growers on Robinsonnade. It is said of such champions that they have one green t
humb and one red thumb. They were the best builders and maintainers, the best biologists and the best electronic people, the best para-animate chemists. They were also (tread lightly in this area though) the best in all the arts and musics. But it is the arts and musics that are the hardest to keep pure. They are the fields that are the softest to the entry of superstition.

  The Hucklebys believed themselves to be the central people of Robinsonnade, and in many ways they were. Well, the other three families (even the Katzs) liked them, and that is a considerable distinction. They were good at everything. And they were pleasant and uninflated in their persons. King Huckleby was the father of the clan. Audrey Huckleby was the mother. The tall sons were Esmond, Graves, Steven, Paul, and Bernard. The buxom daughters were Elviry, Joyce, and Emily. The grandchildren were Jane and Charles.

  The Phelans were a red and ruddy people. (Soft ground here, crumbling meadows, sinkholes: beware of them all.) The Phelans made all of the numerous discoveries that were made on Robinsonnade; but in each case it was an accident, and members of some of the other families could just as well have made them. The father of the family was Quincy, and the mother was Europa, both of them dangerously light-minded at unpredictable times. The daughters were Irene, Margaret, Antoinette (it is very treacherous around Antoinette), Mary, and Teresa. The sons were James, Barnabas (it is very, very treacherous around Barnabas), Blaise, and Damian. The grandchildren were Vincent and Patricia.

  These were the forty-seven persons of the superior fauna or the human species on Robinsonnade. Eight of them had come there twenty earth-years earlier and had landed in a satellite ship from a mother ship that had gone away again. The other thirty-nine persons of them had been born on Robinsonnade.

  It was a sharply-focused colony that they made. The only animal things that they brought with them were cattle (one cow that was gravid with twins, a male and a female, of which it had been ascertained that the latter was not a freemartin), sheep (one ewe likewise full for a twin yeaning), two hives of bees in deep sleep, three kilograms of earthworms likewise tightly sleeping, a clutch of arrested duck eggs, a few capsules full of fish roe, three pregnant doe rabbits, a quantity of pond algae, seeds of sweet clover (we slip over to plant things here), peanuts, Johnson grass, midland bermuda, kaw wheat, golden bantam corn, apples, grapes, olives, peaches. Chemicals and breeder chemicals. Food and water for a quarter of a year (it would happen that plain water was the most difficult of all commodities to manufacture in their case). Tools, of course (the satellite ship was a tool-shed and a shop-truck itself). Tapes and printed matter. That's about all.

  And everything that they brought showed a fine increase. And what they had not brought should not make an appearance at all, much less show an increase. And yet there were unauthorized appearances, most but not all of them intangibles. No mental thing should have appeared that was not to be found in the minds of the eight founders. And those minds had been completely monitored. So had their gene-trains been.

  The First Person in the hierarchy of Robinsonnade was Hugo Katz the Ship-and-Colony Commander. And the Forty-Seventh Person was possibly Antoinette Phelan. But most likely it was Barnabas Phelan. Barnabas was likely the forty-seventh island.

  Why? Antoinette as sixteen years old. Barnabas was fifteen. And there were children on Robinsonnade scarcely one year old. Never mind, the extremes were in other things than age.

  Who really ran the island-asteroid-planet of Robinsonnade?

  Hugo Katz believed that he did.

  The Antoinette-Barnabas Phelan axis believed that they did. (Hugo Katz didn't even know the names of the individual Phelan children.) But Antoinette and Barnabas had a youngish network set up and it twanged like harp strings. Harp music was among those susceptible to superstition.

  Antoinette and Barnabas believed that they ran that world, or that they would do so very soon. They believed that they were about to pull a startling coup to take over the world and at the same time to remodel it nearer to their own desire.

  3.

  Earth Night came. This was the night when all forty-seven of the island-asteroid-planets could be seen from the settlement on one of them, Robinsonnade. On Earth Night, which actually ran from noon one day till noon the next, they could see twelve of the planets as afternoon and evening stars, thirteen of them as morning stars, and twenty-one of them above and around and ahead and behind, either in the daylight or the dark. On Earth Night, none of the planets was directly behind Selkirk the sun, nor so close to Selkirk as not to be seen without light filter. And of course they could always see the forty-seventh planet, Robinsonnade, for they were standing on it. Earth Night, which marked the interval of an Earth year, was every three-hundred-and-sixty-first Robinsonnade night. The Robinsonnade year was longer, three hundred and eighty Robinsonnade days. The time coincidence reminded people of their ties to Earth, even though most of them had never seen it. It was a special time. The landing on Robinsonnade had been right at first noon of an Earth Night.

  There were forty-seven Earth-type planets in a narrow belt around Selkirk Sun. The largest of them had a mass about three times that of the smallest of them. Their diameters were between 8,300 and 12,000 kilometers. They were known as the “Asteroid Islands of Selkirk.”

  The Robinsonnade landing had coincided with landings on forty others of the asteroid islands, with satellite ships from a large mother ship that then went away again.

  The mother ship had returned to the Selkirk system several times after that, as many as eight or ten times. But it had never returned to Robinsonnade Island. The people of Robinsonnade were somehow classed as tainted or insufficiently purged. They had not received a pure enough and a sharp enough focus to go on to further and greater colonizations. So the party remained there, making haste too slowly, under its commandant Hugo Katz. Materially they had achieved an acceptable narrow subsistence stasis.

  This Earth Night marked the first time that Earth Night had returned to the same point in the Robinsonnade Calendar as on the original Earth Night landing. Hugo Katz proposed that such a period of twenty Earth Nights should be named the Hugo Katz period, and the proposal was adopted with no open opposition.

  Very well then, it was Earth Night; and, more important, it was Hugo Katz Night. The parabolic ‘clear clouds’ had gathered about Robinsonnade. There were forbidden superstitions that had attached themselves to these clear clouds or disclenses. And the hours of Earth Night were always a time of superstition hunting and eradication. There could well be a collision.

  The parabolic clear clouds were not obscuring clouds; otherwise, one would not have been able to see all forty-seven planets. The clouds were like clear crystal through which one might see with perfect clarity and also, perhaps, with magnification. But a sort of double vision was produced. For all that one could see through the clouds perfectly, they also (to another level of vision) acted like mirrors. The series of them acted like a tunnel made of mirrors. By means of the curious and parabolic clouds, one could see all the way around the planet of Robinsonnade, so it was believed. It was believed that one could see forever, around the planet a hundred and a thousand times.

  To those who had come onto Robinsonnade in the beginning, twenty years ago, those silvery, imperfectly-domed clouds had made Robinsonnade look like a scaled dragon.

  Now, on this anniversary day-night, the mutating transparence of the clouds made the other forty-six planets look like Japanese lanterns hanging for a garden party.

  “If you look into the clear-cloud between Dog Robber World and Truman World, you may see the face of the one you are to marry,” Frederik Katz said to Antoinette Phelan as he came up behind her. Frederik was breathing hard as he said this, as he always was when he talked to Antoinette. And yet he was a healthy and chesty young man, and there was no reason for him to be so winded after speaking a mere twenty-six words.

  “But that is superstition, Frederik,” Antoinette said, “and you know how your family hates superstition. Your father is livid
against it, as all good persons should be. But this is a peculiar superstition, an optical superstition. I really can see the face of the person I am to marry in that cloud. I see it now, though it is very superstitious of me to see it.”

  “You see it now, Antoinette? Whose, whose face is it?”

  “Really, I see several faces there. I see the faces of Stephen Huckleby, of Graves Huckleby, of Paul Huckleby, of Anthony Constantino, of Edward Constantino, of Max Katz (a little unlikely, he, though!), of Bernard Huckleby, of Cristofer Constantino (those latter two are pretty young, but maybe I can raise one of them the way I want him). Eight faces there. One of them has to be the face of the one I'll marry. There's no one else on Robinsonnade for me to marry.”

  “Maybe there's another face in the clear cloud, Antoinette,” Frederik suggested. “Is there not another face there?”

  “No. Whose could a ninth face possibly be?”

  “Mine. It could be mine.”

  “No. Oh, no, no, your face isn't there.”

  “Look again, Antoinette. Isn't there one face that stands taller than the group, one that looks over the heads of the others from the left? Look in the high left corner of the clear cloud. Do you not see a face there?”

  “No. It isn't a face, it's only a big smudge.”

  “Keep looking.”

  “Oh yes, it's the face of something. It's a pig's face.”

  There was a strangling sort of sob, and Frederik Katz bolted away and left Antoinette. She laughed, and then she grinned her most evil grin. She was a bit uneasy though. Frederik Katz always made her uneasy, and her own orneriness made her uneasy sometimes. Frederik was the favorite son of Hugo Katz the commander of the planet. At seventeen he already stood as tall as anyone else on that world. It was said that he had a fine mind. How do you tell if someone has a fine mind? Take it out and put it to some test? There was a sort of smudged brilliance about Frederik. The only thing wrong with him was that he was impossible.