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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Poor George!” the unwreckable Mary Deare said. “But look at it this way. Your wonderful teeth are in good hands now, which is to say in good mouth now, mine. Now my name is teeth, and the line won't be broken. Your son, of whom I am gravid now, will have the finest buck teeth ever in the history of the world.”

  “The fact is, George,” said a muffled voice that had been one of George's own “voices” a month before, “we needed good paired receptors combined with brains, with opportunistic brains, to use for our deployments. You had the good paired receptors. Mary Deare had the fine opportunistic brains. So we made a deal.”

  “And now, honey, we will be rich beyond your fondest expectations,” Mary Deare told George.

  “I no longer have any fond expectations,” George Dander said sadly, and he went away again.

  But Mary Deare Dander thrived. Those first couple of million dollars had been only peanuts. Now, with the aid of the “voices” she became fabulously rich, and in exchange for it she had only to become a sort of famous role model.

  “Some of them laughed at me for a while, at the way I looked,” she said. “But they laughed at me to their peril. Laughing people, do you ever know who really owns the company from which you have your living? It is dangerous to laugh at the richest woman in the world.” For, by the time that Mary Deare Dander gave birth to George Dander the one-hundred-and-first (Oh, the buck teeth on that newborn baby!) she really was the richest woman in the world, and in three more days she would be the richest person in the world.

  There is nothing so unpredictable as the changes in fads and fashions, especially the fads and fashions of beautiful women. And one of the strangest fashions ever to be taken up was the Dente Sporgente Look (pronounce it Dentay Sporgentay). Who would believe that the Dente Sporgente Look would be equated with having chic, with having elegance, with having total charm? Indeed, Marcel Buffon, the greatest beauty expert in the world, writing in the French fashion magazine Lendemain Elegant, wrote “The new Dente Sporgente Look is like nothing ever seen before. It is something new in beauty, it is something new in excitement, it is something new in bla.” It is true that this was the last thing Marcus Buffon ever wrote, for immediately after writing he opened his veins and died. He had always been a puzzling man.

  But the Dente Sporgente Look (the English translation of that wonderful and untranslatable name would be the “Protruding Teeth Look”) was in. No, you wouldn't have guessed in a hundred guesses that the great new worldwide fashion of that year would be the stylish and beautiful women of the world, millions and millions of them, all having their six upper front teeth pulled out and replaced by a huge pair of buck teeth, implanted in the bone and growing there (they wouldn't be good receptors unless they were growing from the bone because good receptors require the complete bone skeleton to serve as an antenna). And you wouldn't have guessed in a hundred-and-one guesses that these women would universally be regarded as ravishingly beautiful after the toothy change had been made in them. Whoever effected such a change anyhow, and by what means? (Ah, the Dente Sporgente was almost something new in newness.)

  It isn't certain who effected it, but the person who turned the greatest profit from it was that richest woman in the world, that metamorphic creature, Mary Deare Dander. Of the three thousand companies and corporations that she now owned, three hundred of them were part of the Buck Tooth Cartel.

  One day, a gnarled and knobby space-traveler who happened to be on World for a short stopover, saw Mary Deare Dander herself, and he reeled back aghast. “It is one of the natives of Synnephon-Ennea on Cloud-Nine Planet,” he groaned, “the most repulsive creatures in the Universe. If they have already begun to arrive here, then World would be better off to die the death.”

  “But Cloud-Nine Planet is usually deemed to be a legendary place,” said the travel agent who was expediting the space-traveler, “and it's also said that it is impossible to go to it or leave it.”

  “Cloud-Nine Planet is approximately as real as this planet here under my feet, and it is about as easy to get to or leave. Of course, one must always arrive at Cloud-Nine from the future because it's in a time-reversal eddy. But it's real, and one can go to and from it with a little trickery. Ugh, isn't she ugly!”

  “She is accounted the most beautiful woman on World,” the travel-agent said.

  “I see now that she is not quite a Cloud-Nine person yet,” the space-traveler mused. “But she is a metamorphic, and she is turning into a Cloud-Nine person. If one isn't already a Cloud-Nine person, one will become such after a bit of trafficking with the Cloud-Niners. The Cloud-Niners are real, but they destroy the reality of every world they infest.”

  And then the old space-traveler seemed to be literally pulled apart. His four limbs and his head were all separated from his torso by giant and invisible hands, so it seemed. Old space-travelers often talk too much and they suffer the consequences of talking too much. The travel-agent, being a fastidious man, disassociated himself from the scattered remains of the old space-traveler and walked stiffly away.

  The “voices” from Cloud-Nine Planet now had about fifty million good paired receptors that they could use on World, and that was about all they needed for right now. Beaver teeth, wild stallion teeth, moose and elk most of all! How could there have been enough of them to satisfy the demand? If the price is set high enough, there will always be enough, either genuine or counterfeit.

  The only still living giant Irish elk in the world had its two front teeth torn out of its mouth in the Dublin zoo one night. “Shame, Shame, Shame,” read the headlines of all the Irish papers, but that pair of giant elk buck teeth was known to bring a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on the black market.

  Behemoth teeth were the best of all, matched pairs of behemoth front teeth.

  But the behemoth is a fabulous creature.

  So are the prices for its buck teeth fabulous.

  You say that the behemoth front teeth are really plastic and cost only thirty-five cents a pair to produce? Well, with a base price of thirty-five cents, and approximately a hundred thousand dollars a sale going into advertising and hype, a million dollars a throw for them still yields a tidy profit for somebody, somebody named Mary Deare Dander.

  Somewhere in distant Space and Time

  Is wetter water, slimier slime.

  And there (we trust) there swimmeth one

  Who swam ere rivers were begun.

  Immense, of fishy form and mind,

  Squamous, omnipotent, and kind.

  —Rupert Brooke

  Mary Deare Dander now had large and glittering thousand-facet insect-type eyes. They would have appeared very ugly to anybody who was born before yesterday, but there were now no such persons. Now everybody was wearing a button that read “I was born anew this morning.” Such persons will soon come to accept and even love thousand-faceted, ugly, insect-type eyes. At least a dozen of the facets of the strange eyes were meaningful, for with them Mary could focus in on scenes on a dozen different worlds including Cloud-Nine Planet. This might be an advantage some time. The enlarged eyes were too big to remain in Mary's head, so now they were two throbbing, living, baseball-sized, bloodshot-in-seven-colors eyes on the front of Mary Deare's face.

  These new eyes would be the next fashion for the beautiful women of the world, the Augen-Laugen or Lye-in-the-Eye look. Already such orbs were being installed in leading ladies at a million dollars a throw, and both the numbers of them and the price would pick up. Oh yes, objectively they were very ugly, but who was still objective nowadays? Their introduction was part of the upgrading of the sense of beauty for the people of World, the upgrading that would have to be completed before the Cloud-Nine people themselves could appear.

  George Dander, when he left home that second time, believed that he would never laugh again. And he did not laugh again until a year and a day after his wedding. Then one aspect of the happenings struck him as very, very droll. (Hippopotamus front teeth, they were still going wel
l now. They hadn't much shape or style, but they were mouth-fillingly big. They were second class, but there was always a strong market for the second class. And the most important dealer in the world in hippopotamus front teeth was the metamorphic Mary Deare Dander.)

  “I wonder what the ‘voices’ really look like!” George Dander chortled in glee when the droll mood hit him one day. (Try to chortle some time without any front teeth.) “If they have to effect ‘upgradings’ of this world's ideas of beauty, like these present capers of theirs, before they can appear at all, boy-o-boy-o-boy! what must they really look like!”

  “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast,” the great Congreve wrote three hundred years ago, and the music that charmed the savage breasts of the worldlings in that season was a series of very strange tunes and songs. One of them had the strange name “Five Footfalls; glooch, klownk, geeze, klupple, bonk,” and the name was far from the strangest thing about that song. Well, it was a real recording of the footsteps of the people of Cloud-Nine Planet. The five-legged persons of Cloud-Nine Planet had their five feet and legs all different, and those were the sounds of their footfalls when they walked. And wordlings would have to get used to the sound and the fact of the Cloud-Niners walking before the Cloud-Niners arrived. World persons could not help listening to such strange pieces of music as this. Some people found those sounds delightful and enchanting. And some people quivered with fear at the sound of the murderously stalking, fearsome, five-footed Cloud-Niners. Mary Deare Dander now practiced an hour a day at walking on five different sorts of stilts at the same time. Mary Deare had become a prototype and a role-leader at many things.

  The metamorphosis of Mary Deare was coming along nicely, and all the substance of it came to her over the ivory grapevine and through the dozen special facets of her thousand-faceted eyes.

  She was the richest and most beautiful person in the world, and the most enchantingly strange.

  Oh noble teeth and noble eyes

  Beyond all reasoned uses!

  None other like her shall arise

  In land of Golden Gooses.

  —Buck Tooth Boogie

  And how was the visit of the Cloud-Nine people when they finally came?

  It was cryptic: that is the only word for it. But it did fulfill the Niners' old crab-tree Latin motto: “Eveneunt, Eridiunt, Exiviunt” which is rendered “They arrived, they laughed, they departed again.”

  The Cloud-Niners had specified only a medium-sized meeting hall and, adjoining it, a spacious withdrawing room with padded floor and walls.

  Only one hundred world people saw them at all, and that for only a few moments. The Cloud-Nine people were clad in a neutral sort of space vestiture and were normal of teeth and eyes and feet. Well yes, the only way you could describe them was as “Squamous, omnipotent, and kind.”

  The one hundred VIP worldlings were splendid with hippopotamus teeth and thousand-faceted giant insect eyes. And they were wobbly on five-stilted asymmetric contraptions.

  Mary Deare Dander, of course, was the spokesperson for the worldlings.

  “Our meeting is of the highest historical importance—” she began, and each of the Cloud-Niners pointed a finger at one of the Worldlings. The sign probably meant “Prodigious Welcome” or something like that.

  “Let history stand still and be humbled,” Mary Deare was saying. “This is the first moment of a new era.”

  The Cloud-Niners were absolutely twinkling and gurgling with some sort of delight or anticipation. They pointed their fingers at the worldlings again, and several of them seemed on the verge of speaking. But then all of them rushed into the padded withdrawing room, and you wouldn't believe what happened there!

  They leapt and tumbled and beat their heads on the padded floor and walls. They laughed and laughed and laughed with a whooping rowdiness which is a little bit beyond the capacity of humans. What an orchestration of laughter! It was like ten million of those old milk cans banging down ten million steps of a celestial stairway. It was like a million donkeys laughing at one of the seven outrageous donkey jokes.

  Twice the Nine-Clouders controlled themselves a little bit and came back into the hall with the worldlings.

  “This is First Encounter,” Mary Deare Dander spoke around her hippopotamus teeth. “This is—”

  But the Cloud-Niners each pointed a finger at a worldling, and then rushed into the padded withdrawing room again overcome with a high hilarity about something.

  And then, after an especially loud hurricane of merriment, the Cloud-Niners all went up through the ceiling in that droll way of theirs, and entered into hover-cars that they had whistled down from the low sky. Then they were gone, and their laughter fell like hunks of happy thunder down onto the earth.

  Yes, the visit of the Cloud-Niners would have to be called “cryptic.” That's the only word for it.

  Of course the laughter of the Cloud-Niners had all been recorded. And of course an attempt at decoding it was made. There would surely be treasures of information to be got from it when it was properly interpreted. And of course Mary Deare Dander was in charge of the great project. Well, who would you put in charge of it? Who else had sufficient prestige to head such a worldwide project? But as yet the “Project Decode Laugh” has not borne significant fruit.

  The “Niners” were pleasant and squamous and stout,

  But what in the hell were they laughing about?

  —Buck Tooth Boogie

  How Many Miles To Babylon?

  Finnegan seeks death and does not find it. That is the main point of his puzzling quest. His own fleece is named thanato and not mallion. Finnegan did not die in the ward in the hospital in the Philippines. But somebody died there in his name; and an army doctor friend of mine wrote me that Finnegan did die there in his presence, which letter I received the same day that Finnegan arrived in St. Louis. This amazed me, but it didn't seem to amaze Finnegan when I showed him the letter. ‘Finnegan did not, apparently, die on the landing at Naxos, though X swears that there were not seven but eight bodies in that lantern-lit square on the cobbles, and that one of the bodies was Finnegan's. But X himself spent the latter part of that same week in Finnegan's company. A thing like that would not bother X, but it bothers me.

  ‘Finnegan did not die in that very early encounter in the cabin of Brunhilde, but someone died there at the hands of Papadiabolous. Finnegan did not die at Tangiers with Don Lewis, though Marie Courtois believed that she had killed them both and left them together in the bottom of the tell.

  (“All I can say, Stein, is that I seem to remember these things differently,” he told me in explanation the last time I saw him. “I don't remember getting killed any of those times, except for a very hazy impression of Papadiabolous bending down to kill me in the cabin of the Brunhilde. But that was before I came on to the Brunhilde that first time.”)

  ‘Finnegan did not die at the hand of Saxon X Seaworthy on Galveston Island, though Doll Delancy found (on West Beach) a body which she swears was Finnegan's; and Miss Delancy knew Finnegan. And possibly Finnegan did not die on the Marianao Coast near Havana. I believe, in spite of all reports, that he is still alive. I also believe I have run athwart several tall-story artists, not the least of whom are that army doctor friend of mine, Doll Delancy, and Finnegan himself. But the death quest has always been there.

  ‘Finnegan is a double phougaro or funnel, the link between several different worlds. Yet there are characters (X, Biloxi Brannigan, Doll Delancy, and others) who have verifiable existence in at least two of those worlds. Finnegan himself believed that he was subject to topographical inversion; he believed that one of the worlds was always interior to him and another one exterior, and that they sometimes changed their places. But where does that leave us who live in either of the worlds? Are we not sometimes reduced to being no more than items in the mind of Finnegan?

  ‘Is the Brunhilde the first ship? Or the third? Is it the original Argo? Or is it a latter and unsanctified appearance of
that ship, following the Barque in time? We have also the question of superimposed levels of experience in the Cruise of the Brunhilde. X says that not all the events of this voyage happened to Finnegan in the first decade of the interbellum period: he says that a strong substratum of them happened to Giulio Solli (the monster forgotten, the father of Finnegan) in the decade before World War One, and that Finnegan has filial memory of them. The atmosphere of that period does sometimes break in strongly on the voyage. But so much of our information depends on X who is not to be depended on.

  ‘Carr states that the characters of the Brunhilde are not true archetypes. Why, then they are false archetypes, and these also have their being. Kidd believes that X himself is in the process of becoming the Third Evil to fill the void left by the insufficiency of Papadiabolous and Seaworthy in the roles of devils. But Kidd is Joycean. To complicate matters, Lafferty swears that Finnegan is in no way Joycean, that he is nine hundred years earlier, out of the Yellow Book of Lecan (the Táin bó Cúailnge), a character out of the Tá. This presupposes that Finnegan is identical with Finn McCool as well as with the more derivative Fingal, and also with Cú Chulainn. Well, Finnegan is capable of being all. To those interested in this line I recommend Thurneysen's Die Irische Helden- und Königsage.

  ‘I myself was present at several episodes (whether in the flesh or out of the flesh I do not know, God knows): I was present at one meeting of Don Lewis and Manuel of which Finnegan knew nothing, so this could not have come from his mind. I was present and watched them dine in death-like glitter on the Grand Canary, but I was unable to cross the room to them. John Schultz also experienced a rapport with one of the Brunhilde incidents.

  ‘We are all of us in legend, of course. It is absolutely impossible that anyone should be in life who has not first been in legend. But no one of us understands his own legend. Mary Schaeffer says that I am the Wandering Jew, particularly in my writing style.