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

by R. A. Lafferty

  Then Charley Singletree ascended, as it were, and left them. Well really he just walked out the front door of the Noonery, but he was on a plane different from that of Jonquil and Jim Hickory.

  These two also left the Roast-Beef Noonery after a moment and went out into the streets. There was a new and ragged look to the streets in recent days. Things (it would be an unverified guess to call them ‘creatures’), things that had always been suppressed by the consensus of consciousness were no longer suppressed. The things were in full but queer visibility. The consensus of consciousness had become too weak and rarified to do much public suppressing.

  “Jonquil, I've wondered about your surname Eerie,” Jim Hickory said. “Whence have you it?”

  “Oh, it's Low Scotch, and it really means ‘lonely’, as in the old song ‘Each lassie sits eerie / lamenting her dearie / the birds of the forest have all flown away’. Well, I am lonely, Jim. So many of our friends have gone over the line and become less than persons! And I cared for them. Isn't this horrible, Jim? And important, and unique, the loss of consciousness by humans? I used to believe that all animals had had it once and that most of them had lost it. But now the people are losing it.”

  “Yes, it's the case that only a few of us are still awake in the world, and that we're being shamefully outperformed by the sleep-walkers in every respect. They really have performed wonders in every field in a short time, but they don't know that they've done it,” Jim said with a sort of whisper of fright. “Oh damn, a buzzer! Is it on me or on you?”

  “It's on me,” Jonquil sighed. “I thought it was a hornet in my hair at first, but it's a buzzer over me.”

  “We can't be sure that this loss or change is unique, or that it will be accounted as important,” Jim Hickory said. “In a week, nobody will even remember what ‘consciousness’ was. If they still have the word, it will mean some weaker and different thing. And other things may have been disappearing along the way and taking their memory with them as they go. We will all forget this thing. But, Oh, Oh, Oh, unlike others I must still remember it for a moment! What a brave, bright, splendid, unique adventure Consciousness was while it lasted, for the short millennia that it lasted!

  “Goodbye, entity. There were other words or whatever, but they're all stolen from me now.”

  The pupils disappeared from Jim Hickory's eyes; and he ascended, as it were, and left Jonquil Eerie there. Really he ascended by walking away and down a little hill.

  Then a couple of unconscious guards, answering the buzzer, came and struck Jonquil down. They didn't know what they were doing, of course, and they failed to kill her; there was something sparky in her that refused to be extinguished too easily.

  The feral dogs came to tear her apart and eat her body then. But she was stubbornly conscious right to the very end of it. Aye, in every torn-apart piece she was conscious until the pieces were completely eaten.

  According to one report, something named ‘consciousness’ was lost to human persons. But what could it matter if something so trivial was lost? Some believe that ‘consciousness’ meant something rather brighter and more important until quite recently. But if the old ‘what it meant’ defies definition, then it couldn't have been very important either.

  Great Tom Fool

  or

  The Conundrum of the Calais Customhouse Coffers

  How hard it is to judge the second best. Who is the second-best scientist in the history of the world? First place goes to Isaac Newton, of course, but who is second best? There'll never be a solution; only endless quarreling over twenty-five candidates at least.

  And who is the second-best writer in the history of the world? First place goes to William Shakespeare, of course—

  Of course.

  It is odd that so little is known about Shakespeare and that so many people believe so passionately that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare but that someone else wrote the plays and poems attributed to the man. But if you want the Great Shakespearean Controversy raised to new pitches of madness, read this mad story.

  “Project ‘Shake the Spheres,’ is it?” Dude asked in his reptilian and bumptious voice. He was sensitive to the stigma of being an American-made machine, and he often reacted arrogantly. “I always liked ‘Shake the Cubes’ better. Well, a lot can be done if the corners of the cubes are a bit rounded, and as I am project director…” “You're droll, Dude,” said Shepherd O'Shire, the Proctor of Happy Braindom Ltd., “but you'll not be put in charge of any project, not ever again. We've learned better than that. You will be a working computer on this project, no more than that. And you will see to it that your two friends, the British and the French machines, will put their tomfoolery aside and work with you with quiet dedication on this job.”

  “I smell money connected with this case,” Dude uttered.

  “No, there will not be any money at all connected with it,” Shepherd countered. “There is no appropriation at all.”

  “A preemptive séance is the only way to get the information out of the dead people,” Lavender Brodie interrupted. (Her name, Brodie, signifies a “precipice”; did you know that?) “Dead people are at a disadvantage anyhow. Put pressure on them, I say. Have them by the ears!”

  “I have evidence, in my storage brain downstairs, that there is money connected with this case,” Dude insisted, “and I'm not talking about anything as petty as an appropriation.”

  Dude, a clown to his last compensating planetary gear, was present in his “giant giant” mobile form. In this mobile he didn't carry a lot of brains around with him, but he did have quick access to his storage brain.

  “And, Lavender,” the machine Dude went on, “a ‘séance’ is only a sitting down, and I have whipped that problem. I can do it now, in this my favorite extension. The giant dragon tail will snap off to let me sit down. I love myself when I solve insoluble problems like that.”

  Dude was the only nonhuman member of that learned society, Happy Braindom Ltd., but he had many nonhuman guests at its sessions.

  “And yet he's a bit too human for comfort,” Arsene Gopherwood often stated it, “especially when he's in that damned ‘laughing giant-dragon’ costume.”

  The human membership of Happy Braindom Ltd. was Shepherd O'Shire, Lavender Brodie, Emery Briton, Byron Verre, and Arsene Gopherwood.

  “This is a serious project, Dude,” Shepherd said nervously. “I repeat that there must be no tomfoolery.”

  “And yet ‘Tom Fool’ is the contingent name of the person we are investigating.” Dude smiled his meter-long smile. “ ‘Tom Fool and his Polylogues’ will be the title of the investigation.”

  “I prefer ‘The Conundrum of the Calais Customhouse Coffers’ for a title,” uttered the French machine Dingo. He had just arrived in his extension of a French Navvy in a striped sweater and a small artist's mustache and beret. “Yes, didn't I get here quickly though! We French are always so prompt. I can aid you all immeasurably on this project. And remember that by ‘Coded Information Storage Time’ I am only three minutes from my backup brain in France.”

  “Where's Toff?” Lavender asked. “He always gives a project class. You other two machines only give it performance. I always like class best.”

  “He's somewhere near,” Dude uttered. “He's trying to calculate just how late would be properly late in this case. He may be tapping his storage brain in London for some good entry lines.”

  “ ‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,’ ” Toff intoned as he entered with a jaunty actor's step—

  This happy breed of men, this little world,

  This precious stone set in the silver sea,

  This Shakespeare, this great Toft yet, “hardy” both,

  This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

  Then Toff fell flat on his face, a planned maneuver. Did you know that the English have their own humor, very subtle? Toff had arrived in his Noël Coward extension. He was Noël to the death, just as he is today. You know that Noël di
dn't stop wrinkling when he died.

  “We work very fast here, kids,” Lavender said. “I am sure that the best format for this will be the séance, and I believe that we had better get the first séance started.” “Gracious lady, there is no such thing as a workable séance,” the English machine Toff said with clipped finality.

  “Listen, you limey junkie, I've been to plenty of séances that worked.”

  “There is, however, the ‘deep psychic scan’ which comes through as a ghostly sort of apparition, very like a séance figure in appearance,” Toff admitted. “We are experts on these things. We go to our storage brains for them, and the storage brains produce the ‘scans’ from their bottomless accumulations of data. The psychic scans appear like threads of smoke. They hover, they thicken, they coalesce. And then they speak like séance evocations.”

  “Let us not be too pompous about this,” the Proctor of Happy Braindom Ltd., Shepherd O'Shire, instructed them. “A quick-hitting sortie will do us better than a ponderous siege of the problem. All we intend to do is answer all the unanswered questions about old Shakespeare, to clear up all the clouds that have obscured his identity and authorship, to define his significance and depth, and to duplicate his effect if that is possible. Let us go into the lounge and be at our ease now, and we will lay out whatever data we have to consider.”

  “Yes, yes, at once.” Dude gawked out of his wide, green-leather dragon mouth. “And these thirteen gentlemen and nine ladies here will also be present for our discussions. In a real way it is they who are motivating the discussions.”

  “What? Why? Who are these people?” Shepherd demanded. “Whence did they spring? From under what rocks?”

  “I know most of these thirteen gentlemen and nine ladies,” Arsene Gopherwood said, “and I'd recognize them as a type even if I didn't know them individually. They are what is known as publishers' representatives or pub-reps, and they all walk with a canted list because of the weight of the checkbooks they carry.”

  “But this is all wrong,” spoke Emery Briton. “Somebody has gulled these bright-eyed people into coming here under a misunderstanding. Don't they know that Computer Romances are about on a par with Nurse Romances? Such things turned out by machines are steady, perhaps, but they are not earth shakers, and they are not in short supply.”

  “Gentlemen, ladies, members of Happy Braindom Ltd., do come in and be seated,” Dude uttered in honeyed tones. And then he spoke in a lower tone to the Happy Braindom people only: “Play along with us, fellows. There really is big money connected with this. Look impressed when we refer to the ‘Treasure Chest’ that has already been found and exploited so rewardingly for these four centuries. Look triply impressed when we refer to ‘the other treasure chest,’ three times as large as the first, ten times as heavily laden, a hundred times as wonderful.”

  “Sure, we'll play along with you three contraptions,” Proctor Shepherd said. “For about ten minutes we'll play along with you. Now how about letting us see the ‘deep psychic scan’ of Shakespeare himself, the projected data that will look like an attending ghost. We'll put William on the stand, as it were, and question him in depth. If he balks, then we'll turn Lavender loose on him. If he can't answer the questions about himself, then who can answer them?”

  They were all seated in the lounge now. This was in the Old Drapers Guild Hall in East Lodestone, which is quite close to London, to Calais, to the Azores, and also to the Americas. Dude, after snapping off his dragon tail, was the last of them to sit down.

  “The difficulty, of course, is that Shakespeare is not Shakespeare,” that British machine Toff uttered. “That is to say that the plays and most of the poems were written at least eighty years before they were discovered in an old trunk by the historical Shakespeare.”

  “Why do you say this?” the pub-rep Agnes Wankowitz asked.

  “The plays nowhere mention America, tobacco, coffee, or tea, things that were having rather conspicuous and exciting reigns during the time of the historical Shakespeare,” Dude said. “But, eighty years earlier, the latter three had not been known at all, and the first of them, the New World, was still referred to as That Spanish Hoax by the English-speaking world. Potatoes likewise are not mentioned in the plays nor known in their time, but eighty years later everybody was eating that exciting new food, potatoes.”

  “And the pronunciation is the real giveaway,” the machine Toff said. “Historical pronunciations can be deduced by the rhymes of the times. In the plays we find hither rhyming with weather, eats rhyming with gets, eat rhyming with great, ear rhyming with hair, have rhyming with grave, love rhyming with prove and with move and with Jove (all were likely pronounced as we pronounce Jove today). We find propose rhyming with lose, gone rhyming with stone and also with moan, swear rhyming with were, tongue rhyming with wrong, gone rhyming with alone, granting rhyming with wanting. Ah, that's all the instances that I have with me right now.”

  “Do you have other instances somewhere else?” asked a pub-rep named Donald Dranker, a top negotiator.

  “Yes, I have about five hundred other instances in my storage-brain in London,” Toff uttered. “But the point is that none of these rhymes rang true at the time when the historical Shakespeare burst upon the scene like a funky comet; and all of them would have rhymed true eighty or a hundred years earlier. Leaving the Shakespearean corpus aside, the documented sound changes of the English language in the sixteenth century are clear enough. It is only the displaced Shakespearean evidence that ever confused the history. And one play, Henry the Eighth, has to be pulled out. It isn't a part of the original Shakespearean corpus. It really did appear as a new thing eighty years after the others. Oh, it's long been known that there was something very fishy about the accepted time setting of the plays.”

  “I am almost convinced,” said the pub-rep named Stanley Klumpstone.

  “Let's have the first apparition!” cried Lavender Brodie of the Happy Braindom bunch. “Put him in the witness box and put the screws to him!”

  Crackling lightning and obscure thunder! The iron hinges of time groaning as they swing open! Three callow young machines appraising what effect their devices were having on the people! And then a personable and intelligent looking, though somewhat harried, man was in their midst there in the Happy Braindom Lounge.

  Yes, he was the historical Shakespeare, though his nose was more bumpy and his face more of a mug than is shown in the accepted portraits. Whether he was a deep psychic scan or a called-up ghost was a matter of definition.

  “Though I have admired you within reason, yet I've always wanted to put you under the power of my hands and tongue to see whether you couldn't be shaped into something better,” Lavender declared to the apparition. “Now I will just follow my own peculiar line of questioning and see whether—”

  “ 'Twill do you no good, Dame Lavender,” the apparition spoke. “I am not here consciously.” (But a twinkle in its eye showed that it lied a little.) “I am not such a thing as could be conscious. I am—what is it that those droll machines that extracted me call me?—I am a deep psychic scan of all existing and extrapolative data of one William Shakespeare. Now let me say my say and do not interrupt me.”

  Oh, they'd interrupt him, of course, all of them. “I smell concatenated trickery here,” Lavender sputtered, and other people sensed other irregularities. But here are the words of the apparition as he followed his preemptive data while at the same time rolling with and responding to the interruptions.

  “I am William the son of John the glovemaker of Stratford in Warwickshire. But at the same time I am Tom. I am, I believe, the second focus of the ellipse that is the Tom Manifestation, for it was I who obtained the masterworks of that manifestation (or something between one fifth and one sixth of them) and made them public. I have been called Tom Rymer, Tom the Piper's Son (my father John did play the pipes better than any other man in Stratford), and Tom Fool. And indeed I have been all of these. I believe there were about eighty years betwe
en the two foci, between Giant Tom and my corporeal self.

  “Do I call myself an upstart? Somebody asks me the question. Aye, I do. I was more than an upstart. I was an upsurge, an upswarm. I knew my own limits (they were not low), but I let no one else know them.

  “Who was Tom Fool, you ask, and how did I come to possess one of his treasure chests? I believe that Tom Fool was not one but several men, that he was really Tom Foule or Tom Crowd. Several powerful and talented men, contemporaries and acquaintances, but too different to be friends or allies, were somehow joined in an amazing tomfoolery.

  “The only trait or talent that these several powerful men had in common was an unusually masterful way of writing in the Latin and the English languages. But their collaborations in the tomfoolery were likely involuntary and posthumous. The semisecret, small-audience masterworks of all these were somehow collected by a man of comprehensive taste (he may even have been the last surviving of those powerful Toms) and hidden away, from reaching English hands, in the customhouse at Calais. They were deposited there in a greater and a lesser chest. It was the lesser chest that I was able to obtain.

  “But get this straight: Those Masterworks were not always the worse for passing through my hands. I knew how ‘To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,… To… add another hue unto the rainbow,’ as 'tis writ in lines of my own that I added to one of the masterworks, lines that are somehow misquoted in your day, so I'm told.