Aurelia

by R. A. Lafferty

  “What were you pointing at, Sheila-be-Damned?” the bucko asked. “I don’t see anything special there. What did you mean when you pointed and said ‘Look there, look there!’ ”

  “I did not point. I did not say ‘Look there, look there!’ ” Sheila-be-Damned said.

  “Sheila-be-Damned, you did,” the bucko said. “Roxie was right. You shouldn’t have more than one stick every half hour.”

  But Roxie-Aurelia was off through the ‘Kill Aurelia Now League’ encampment. It was growing darker, and most of the mobsters were organizing dens, caves, and campfires. April second or third (whichever this evening was) was not really cold yet, but it is always cosy and conspiratorial to den into caves and to have fires snapping in the evening and night. And the foothills of these stunted mountains were full of caves. The luxury cabin of the tycoon faced directly onto these small mountains.

  How does the coon feel when he sits down with a mute of hounds to discuss doing the coon to death? He feels pretty frisky if he has conned the dogs into thinking that he is a dog. Such a coon is top-dog for such time as he can keep the dogs conned. And Aurelia as Roxie was top-dog for as long as she could keep this coven of mobsters fooled. And, as a coon, Aurelia was a showboat. All coons are.

  “What would we do with Aurelia if we had her now?” she asked, and she could hear the squeak of her own smirk.

  “That is difficult to say,” said one of the man-mobsters, struggling to find words. They were putting sycamore branches, from trees on a near creek-side, on the fire. “We should find some gadget for dispatching her so good that it would unjade us, but maybe she herself would be enough to do it. We love her, of course. She’s magic. But we have to complete the love-hate dialectic.”

  “Why do we have to complete the dialectic?” Aurelia asked. “Why do we have to be on both sides of everything? Why do we have to do anything at all?”

  “Because we have broken all the major compulsions,” the man said, worrying his words a little bit, “so we must be chained to the minor compulsions. We cannot be free completely, or we would violate the freedom-slavery dialectic; and we can progress only by dialectics. We have freed ourselves from the slavery of fact, so now we must bind ourselves to the slavery of fetish. There’s no other way.”

  “And yet we love Aurelia,” a girl said. “That is why it will be so difficult for us to kill her, but we do not grow by easy tasks. We love her. She is the ‘Shining Person,’ the ‘Bright Thing’ from our mythology and our songs. She is the analogy of the ‘Great Speckled Bird.’ ”

  “But, as you will remember, the ‘Death of the Great Speckled Bird’ was a hit ten times as great as the original ‘Great Speckled Bird’ song itself.”

  “Isn’t it all completely childish the way we carry on about this though?” Aurelia asked. “Do we have to be completely childish? Is there a premium on being silly?”

  “No, it is not completely childish,” one of them said. “It is part of the child-adult dialectic that we strive to fulfil. And it isn’t completely silly. It is part of the dialectic of the silly—”

  “Oh brother the dialectic!” Aurelia cried.

  “Roxie, what are you saying?” several of them shrilled aghast. “You are attacking the dialectic itself, the only thing that matters.”

  “We love Aurelia,” another of them said, “but when we force ourselves to love-hate her, we find it is not hard at all. Consider only her cruel treatment of Uncle Gifford Redwing, the scandal of the day. To tie the infamous Instrument Knot on him was shocking and unusually cruel, but we are not really opposed to such an agonizing and torturous thing as that. We enjoy the idea of it. But the fact is that she rejected his approaches, and so she has broken all the rules. No human should ever reject the approaches of any other human. We wonder if she knows what she has missed. The grosser the encounter the more powerful the experience, that’s what we always say. With the flesh, it does not matter whether the experience is joyful or whether it is revolting. The main thing is that it should be powerful. Power and movement takes precedence over joy and pleasure. Powerful experience can be a joyless pleasure, really the best kind. It is pleasure for its own sake, and not for the sake of joy.”

  “We love Aurelia for being shiningly perfect,” another of them said. (These people in the fire-lit cave all seemed alike now, and there was no good trying to find a difference between them; there wasn’t any.) “And she achieves balance. Lest she be thought of as too perfect, we have the sublime and horrible discordancies of the horns of her ship that sounded when she came in. Oh, may they sound forever! Discord, discord, discord! So she fulfils the perfect-imperfect dialectic. And we would protect her with our lives. That is to say that we would not want anyone else to kill her; we want to kill her ourselves.”

  “But the crux is this,” said another of them. “For two weeks now we have been entrapped into “Kill-Little-Name-Now’ effects, and they have not been satisfying. We have procured those two deaths, and they have been like ashes in our mouths and our spleens, like nothing at all. They have not satisfied us, and they have not left us hungry either. They have done nothing. There just is not enough satisfaction in hunting little-name persons to their deaths.

  “And here is the rest of the trouble; there are hardly any big-name people left anywhere, and what there are left are unassailable. We have to have big-name people to kill, or we perish. Our pegs are tuned too tight on that and we can never back off from it.

  “But the only new big name, absolutely the only new big name in the world, is Aurelia the ‘Shining Person’ from ‘Shining World.’ Her flame and fame have gone from the east even unto the west. We have to kill her. We need that joy.”

  “We hope that she will understand that we have nothing personal against her,” another of the persons said. “But what offends us most of all is this whole idea of governorship. It is true that we have only third-hand reports of it, but we still reject the idea. Now here is the complication. We do want to be governed. We do not want to be patronized or pampered or favoured. We do not want apologetic persons to lick the dust before us. Of what use to us is licked dust? So we have at least an acceptance-rejection attitude towards governorship. And iron-handed and hobbed-booted governorship over us would be accepted easily enough. It is this gentle and implied governorship that gags us. It implies that somewhere there are persons superior to us; and they would oversee us, to some slight extent at least, without any thought of profit from us. We say ‘Death to all Lord and Lady Bountifuls.’ We have dined on meat too strong to be happy with such pastry. There are numenistic elements in such ‘guidance’ even if it is carried on by a single young person in the quietest manner possible.”

  The mobsters had returned to the caves in more ways than one. They no longer looked at the world itself. All they looked at were a few flickering shadows on one of the interior walls of the world. Then the talk of the mobsters grew long hair on it.

  They described, in their very hairy terms, the various deaths they would inflict on Aurelia, and it made her a little bit sick. Oh, by the red fire that crackled and popped in that cave, it did make her sick! There is much to be said against such explicit details. They threw all the mobsters into shaking and climaxing passion though. This was a powerful and moving thing to them.

  Aurelia quietly went out of there and into another cave. In this other cave there was a sort of music brewing. It was music of the euphony-cacophony dialectic. The music was very, very loud. That was the whole essence of it. If it had been less loud, it would have deflated and disappeared. It would have shrunk to less than one howling quantum and it would have been heard no more. And the talk was very soft, slurred mumbles and voiceless whispers. Yet it could be heard well enough, coming through tunnels in the mountainous noise.

  They motioned Aurelia-Roxie to drums. And she played them badly, but not badly enough. She felt that she was letting them down.

  “We have solid, freeway music now,” one of the cave musicians said, his soft words run
ning out of the mountain of noise like a spring that trickles out of a gravely mountain. “For centuries, music was trammelled by its own attributes. But now we have freed it of them, one by one, from the latest to the earliest. First we got rid of tunes. Really, a tune in an episode intruded into music where it never did belong. Tunes came very late, and they never were world-wide. The Orientals never had tunes, and the occidentals didn’t have them in their classical centuries.

  “When we were freed of tunes, that false facade that had been built over the face of music, then we were able to see what other things we would be able to throw away. Very many other things, once thought necessary, were really not so. We got rid of melody then; we got rid of harmony, of pitch, of concord, of timbre, of rhythm, of consonance, of counterpoint, of polyphony.

  “We insist on distortion. We have no use for the music of the spheres. Our is the music of the prolate ellipsoidals.”

  They gave Aurelia-Roxie a lap-clavichord to play. She played it badly enough to get by, and yet they were disappointed in her. She should have been worse than that.

  “Our monolithic and whanging music has influenced all the other arts,” the soft-voiced cave-musician was saying. “While we have sheer masses of noise, the new painting has sheer and shouting extents of colour or of monotone. Sometimes the monotone will be piled up on the canvas a centimetre deep. As we have dispensed with almost everything in music, so the modern painters have dispensed with almost everything in painting.”

  “ ‘Modern’ doesn’t mean anything, you know,” Aurelia said. “How can a person say ‘modern’ and someone else not ask ‘modern what?’ Modern means ‘in the mode of—,’ but it has to be in the mode of something.”

  “No, it does not,” the soft-talker said. “The whole point of ‘modern’ is that it has a dangling designation. Well, we have spread to the inter-arts also. When the Rock Island City Dump won first prize in the National Conglomerate Sculpture Competition, we knew that we were getting somewhere. But if one of the ‘Beautify Our City Dump’ committees had been to work there, and it had still won the Conglomerate Sculpture Competition, we would really know that we were getting somewhere. You know, Aurelia, that, though you came here to govern, the arts must remain completely ungoverned.”

  By what slip of the tongue had this person addressed Aurelia-Roxie as Aurelia?

  “What is it that you, ah, that we actually seek in the arts?” Aurelia asked, still playing the lap-clavichord.

  “Apathy,” the soft-talker said. “Dynamic and power-mad apathy.”

  Why had that man called her Aurelia? Because it had come to him that she was Aurelia, and it was beginning to come to the others in the cave also.

  “Do you hear footsteps, Aurelia?” soft-voice asked her through the din.

  “Those coming to kill me, you mean? Yes, I hear them. But, curiously, I don’t believe they’ll arrive here tonight.”

  They gave Aurelia a French Horn to play. She played it as if it were seven horns, the seven howling and discordant horns of her space-ship, the horns that she had tuned herself. And the hackles began to rise on the necks of all of them then.

  “She is Aurelia!” they called and howled. “No one except Aurelia could play the horn with such absolute dissonance. She is Aurelia disguised as Roxie.” And they grabbed up burning torches from the deeper part of the cave and pursued her out into the night. This was murder set into motion.

  “After her!” they cried to alert the whole apartment. “She is Aurelia disguised as Roxie. Catch her! Kill her!”

  If you can’t fight it, join it.

  “After her, she is Aurelia disguised as Roxie,” Aurelia-no-longer-disguised-as-Roxie called out. “After her! There! There!” It was Aurelia-disguised-as-Gabriella who was crying them along the false trail.

  So Aurelia was out of that jam, but it had been close.

  And then a sordid thing happened. The monsters caught Roxie, plain Roxie, Roxie undisguised as anybody else. And they killed her there. They killed her in very hairy style. They did it in many of the ways that had made Aurelia a little bit sick just to hear them described a little while before.

  Aurelia slipped, in an Aunt Caladium disguise, back into the luxury cabin, and then she left off the disguise and was herself. But she was discouraged. People on this world were acting bestial, and Aurelia had at least a slight and temporary governorship of this world.

  Meanwhile, in another part of the luxury cabin, the tycoon Rex Golightly was in a heated discussion with the best bodyguard in the world, the man who was travelling under the name of Marshal Straightstreet.

  “I care as much for this Aurelia as I do for any of my own daughters,” Rex was saying. “She is important to the world, and she is even more important to me. I will not have anything wrong happen to her at all. I will say to time itself ‘Stand still and be searched till you convince me that you carry no harm to Aurelia.’ How did she get out of the cabin?”

  “I am investigating that now,” the bodyguard said. “Also, where she is now, and whether she is in any deeper danger.”

  “It is mad country out there,” Rex muttered. “There are half a million mad killers out there, all dedicated to her death. And they have acquired world-wide support. They have received a million letters and a million telegrams all affirming solidarity with their murderous position. And she is out there in that mad maelstrom. She must be saved at once.”

  “Be sensible, Rex,” the bodyguard said. “There are not half a million mad killers out there. There are not one thousandth of that number. And they have not received a million letters and a million telegrams of support. Use your ears and eyes and brains, Rex. There are between two hundred and three hundred rather listless persons in that mob. And most of them have come out of curiosity. They have received nine letters and telegrams of support, all written in the same words. We have verified this. This is the truth; all the rest is media.

  “They do not kill one death-marked person a week. A similarly-named group did kill one person about four years ago. And this group has killed one girl ten minutes ago, but she was not Aurelia. The murder was ghastly, of course, but the victim was not Aurelia, though somehow the mobsters thought that she was. We are to guard Aurelia only, not everyone in the world. Aurelia is in grave danger of her life, yes, but I believe the danger is not from these mobsters.

  “But we are not even certain that she has left the house. I have concluded that she is a mimic (Aye, and she knows that I am one), and she many still be in the house in mimic-form-and-face disguises of any of the other young people. Neither of use knows all the young people in this house. I am not even sure whether it is better or worse if she has left the house. Her life-danger is at least as likely to be in this house as outside it.

  “But yes, I recognize something now. She did go out of the house. I pitched what I thought was a female invader out of the house, pitched her out like a sack. There was something wrong with it then that I only realize now. The sack was too light for a normal young person. But Aurelia has very little weight. Her flesh and her bones are full of air. I threw her out of the house myself in my ignorance. What are you staring at, Rex Golightly? Oh, I see! I’ve been expecting him. It is the counterfeit.”

  What was standing there and gazing at them with balky anger was the duplicate of Marshal Straightstreet the best bodyguard in the world. There was no doubt that the two men were identical in every particular of appearance and bearing and dress.

  “Is it the counterfeit, it is the counterfeit,” said the first Marshal of the new arrival. “There are many marks by which a counterfeit may be known.”

  “No. The new arrival is the genuine one,” Rex Golightly said. “Yes, there are many marks by which a counterfeit may be known, and I have been marking them on you, man. But I have been blind and did not really see what I saw. We will deal with you now, false man. That one, I have known his since college. You I have never seen till two days ago.”

  “You would have said that the last on
e was the genuine one in either case, Rex,” the first Marshal Straightstreet said. “Actually, he does me a little better than I do myself. That is the one test of a counterfeit. He glosses over some of my flaws. What, can you not tell the difference between a primary and its cosmeticized shadow? I will play the shell game with that shadow, and you will not know which one is under which shell, Rex.”

  “You’ll play no game, impostor,” the second Marshal Straightstreet said. “I am here. You are finished. Now I’ll thrash you within an inch of your life.”

  “—to coin a phrase,” the first Marshal jeered. Then the second Marshal had him by the collar of his tunic and seemed indeed about to thrash him within an inch of his life. They went around and around. They were of equal strength, and each one countered with the other at every turn. Then they stood apart, facing each other, and glowering.

  “One of you was right,” Rex Golightly said then. “One of you said that he would play the shell game, and then I would not know which of you was which. Well, the game worked. I don’t know which of you is which. I fooled myself when I thought that I could see the difference in you two.”

  “This damnable impostor is not that much like myself,” the two Marshals said absolutely together. “Cannot you really tell the difference between us, Rex?” they asked absolutely simultaneously.

  “There is the ordeal of the narrow room,” Rex Golightly said. “It is a bloody and murderous ordeal, but I can think of no other. This room off here is a blind study. There is this one door to it, and this one only. There is no other door or window in it. There is no flue and no vent and no access in it. You two go into it now and settle this. In five minutes I want one of you to come out, and the other one not to be able to come out. The true Marshal Straight-street, the Marshal I have known since college, will be the one who comes out. No man will overpower him or overtrick him. Go in now, the two of you, without a word. What happens will be taken care of without outside reference. If there is a dead body left over, well, this cabin has facilities to take care of that also.”