Aurelia

by R. A. Lafferty

  The two Marshal Straightstreets went into the blind study room. Rex closed and locked the door after them with a big key. A bolt was heard to slide inside to lock the door from that side. Then a second bolt was heard to slide inside, doubly locking the door within. The second bolt was slid by a second hand. There was a subtle difference in the movement and power of the two hands. Then there was silence within.

  Ten seconds of silence, and then there was pandemonium within. Shots were fired. Screams and oaths were uttered. Bodies and furniture crashed and shattered. There was moaning. There was screaming. There was a tearing of panelling strips from the wall and the banging of them as weapons. There was smoke and fire within surely. It was almost as if there was the booming of small cannon. And then there was silence in the room again, a silence that seemed to go on forever and which did go on for the final four and half minutes of the given five minutes. Then Rex Golightly unlocked the door from the outside.

  One bar was heard to slide back on the inside. Then the other one. And Marshal Straightstreet walked out.

  “Ah, it is yourself,” Rex Golightly said in hearty greeting. “I’d have known you anywhere. How could I have doubted you for a minute? How could I have let the impostor confuse me at all? Let me see the other one. Is he dead?”

  “What other one? What are you talking about, Rex?” asked the one and the only Marshal Straightstreet.

  “The counterfeit bodyguard. The battered hulk, or the dead body.”

  “There is no such thing, Rex. You are having fantasies.”

  “Let me see,” Rex said, and he went into the blind study. He examined it thoroughly for several minutes. There was no battered hulk there, and no dead body. The boards that he had heard being ripped out of the panelling had not been ripped out. There was no sign of furniture crashed or shattered. There wasn’t a scratch or smudge on anything. There was no indication that there had been smoke or fire in there, no mark of shots having been fired. And it was almost certain that a small cannon had not been shot in there.

  “What did you do with him, Marshal?” Rex Golightly asked. “And if you ask ‘Do with who?’ I will break your blooming neck.”

  “I made away with him, Rex,” the best bodyguard in the world said. “Did you hear me? I said that I had made away with him. One of the Marshal Straightstreet’s had the power to do this. The other one did not. I am the one who had that power. As to which was the true and which was the false Marshal Straightstreet, that question now melts of what would be a counterfeit if there were only one of it?”

  “You had me almost convinced, Marshal,” Rex said, “and now I might almost become unconvinced.”

  “He had me convinced completely,” Aurelia said, “and now I am doubly convinced. It is always nice when one can have a complete and unflawed explanation of a thing.”

  “Aurelia, where were you?” Rex Golightly asked. “I was worried sick.”

  “I went for a walk,” Aurelia said.

  There was a spate of books about Aurelia for her third morning on this world. Some of them were hasty jobs thrown together. Some of them were highly subjective and went to soft facts. But there were a dozen or so with solid stuff in them, thoughtful and insightful. And there was something else; a review of ten of them in the ‘Morning Review’ by the redoubtable Albert Derby.

  1. Aurelia is From Iowa—The Waterloo Revelations, by Hawk-Eye the Reporter.

  2. Is Aurelia Saint Cecelia? by the Board of Presidents of the ‘Bad Music League.’

  3. Aurelia as Little Eva and Goldilocks—A Study of the Golden Doll Archetype, by Adrian Alte-Jung.

  4. How Well Does She Govern?—The Crux of the Matter, by Charles Sinkman.

  5. Machiavelli and the Aurelian Ethos, by Kirol Grabman.

  6. The Mathematics of the Aurelian Curve, by Arthur Airim.

  7. All That Glitters Is Not Gold—The Underworld and Floating-World Connections of Aurelia, by Jimmy Candor.

  8. How Human is Aurelia—Bird Bones and Basal Metabolism, by ‘Cipher.’

  9. Will It Ever Be Fun Again? The Aurelian Revival, by the Board of Governors of Romp Publications.

  10. How Square Must We Be? The Implications of Acceptance and Humility, by the ‘Free Spirit Daily.’

  1

  Aurelia is From Iowa—The Waterloo Revelations, by Hawk-Eye the Reporter.

  ‘Hawk-Eye The Reporter’ is possibly a pseudonym, and there is very much that seems pseudonymous about this work. This is not to say that the evidence presented here by Hawk-Eye is false. The evidence, when checked out, will prove to be absolutely true and substantial, pressed down and running over, and of excessive measure. A cultured pearl may not be called a false pearl, and cultured evidence may not be called false evidence. This is cultured and cultivated evidence. It is real enough. It is the nature of reality itself that is challenged in things like these.

  The irritation, the grain of sand introduced into the topo-oyster, may consist of a kind of personal animus, and it may be started as a premonitory or intuitive hunch. I suspect that the mechanism of it is obscure even to users of the device. A person is going to hate someone or something when that someone or something comes along. He will draw a bead on the phenomenon before it arrives, and he will blast it as soon as it shows its head. There is something unnatural and eldritch about all this, but it does happen. It is defamation, pre-empted and preordained. It is the tag ‘Fake’ posted proudly before it is known what the tag will be hooked to.

  Hawk-Eye hints and then says out loud that killing would be almost too good for Aurelia if she should indeed prove to be an impostor. And then Hawk-Eye the Reporter does indeed ‘prove’ her to be just that. Oh, there is nothing wrong with the proof, except that it is cultivated before the fact. Must sets of facts be mutually exclusive?

  In one way or another, each of these ten books contributes a fitted piece to the jig-saw puzzle titled The Murder of Aurelia. The pieces fit so closely, though each of them individually is jagged and uneven, that a knife-blade could not be inserted anywhere between any of them. And this is accidental—really it is. It is odd that ‘The Murder of Aurelia’ should already be a working title for this clutch of books, since Aurelia is a good and harmless girl. The piece contributed by ‘Hawk-Eye the Reporter’ is one of the largest.

  ‘Hawk-Eye’ shows or ‘proves’ that Aurelia is not from ‘Shining World,’ that she is not from off-world at all. She was born sixteen years ago in Waterloo, Iowa. Yes, and there are the pictures of her growing up right to the present time, and these were taken in Waterloo, Iowa in the years they were said to be taken. Aurelia is one of the coming events that cast their shadow before her; part of her shade is her ‘cultivated’ shadow from Iowa. There are even her finger-prints in the Waterloo Registry Office, and they do check with the finger-prints of Aurelia taken by the Alien Entry Board two days ago. There are the several scars on an Iowa doctor’s chart, there are the dental records, and they will check with those of Aurelia, depend on that. Everything, in fact, will check too well. It is proved without a shadow of a doubt that Aurelia comes from Waterloo, Iowa (she even played the French Horn, badly, in a junior-high-school band there), and consequently she does not come from ‘Shining World.’ Nevertheless, we believe that this over-documented thesis is false. The Iowa girl is an unconscious stand-in, and she cannot now be produced because she is supposed to be Aurelia, and there cannot be two of them. It is a case of artificial and unconscious ‘doubling before the fact.’ I feel that ‘Hawk-Eye’ himself is a double mind about this. He has written about ‘Automatic Writing’ before. Here he writes partly in Automatic Writing and Unconscious Writing. Now I believe that he has proof absolute that all this is true. And he had knowledge absolute that all this is false.

  As to the fingerprints that do check, Aurelia had a curious statement before the fact, before anyone mentioned fingerprints or a double:

  “On ‘Shining World,’ there are many persons who, by taking thought, can change their height and weight an
d appearance, can even change their fingerprints to any set of prints that happens to come into their minds. Yes, I am such a person.”

  It is very possible that Aurelia did change her fingerprints to a set that had just come into her mind when she was printed by the Alien Entry Board. It was only a touch of humour on her part. But how did the prints of the unconsciously and artificially planted Iowa double come into her mind? We don’t know. ‘Hawk-Eye the Reporter’ is part of, or all of, a murderous conspiracy, but he may not be conscious of his involvement.

  2

  Is Aurelia Saint Cecelia? by the Board of Presidents of the ‘Bad Music League.’

  The Bad Music League is not a tongue-in-cheek- group. It is a genuine tongue-in-the-bugle-mouthpiece organization, a high decibel confraternity of horners mostly, but also of string and keyboard and drum people. And we are not sure that it is entirely pseudo-scholarship that they put out.

  Bad Music is a world of its own. This has been known for a long time. It had only a nodding acquaintance with other worlds. Above a certain intensity of sound, above a certain level of marshalling and heaping non-linear statements in either instrumentality or prose, above the plateau of multi-media meretricious mass, there is a world-area where there is no longer a distinction between the pseudo and the ortho. It cuts across worlds. And Aurelia of ‘Shining World’ belongs to it also, despite her statements of her own incompetence in music. The Board of Presidents of the Bad Music League belong to this cross-cut world and operate entirely in this world-area where all outer things are completely vindicated.

  Unlike ‘Hawk-Eye the Reporter’ the author of the Waterloo Revelations, the authors of this book have no animus or hatred, unconscious or otherwise. Probably they love Aurelia, if there is any room for love in the high-decibel area above the meretricious mass of sound and sensation. They like her surely. The Bad Music League people wish to identify everyone with everyone else, to have it that all souls and personalities merge and are one whenever things reach sufficient altitude. So it is nothing for them to identify Aurelia with Saint Cecelia, with the Archangel Gabriel (a higher horner if ever there was one!), with the black trombone player, now dead, known as ‘Snow Goose,’ with the Pied Piper of Hamlin.

  They are on sound ground when they show that Saint Cecelia of the Trastevere Quarter (an inner-city girl) was not a string-player as formerly believed, but was a horn-lady all the way. And they are on sounding ground when they attempt to show that all horn players are one, just as all harpers are one, and all brass-beaters, all bell-ringers, all bellows-organists, all keyboarders, and all lutists are one. Thus there are only seven persons or souls in creation. Unmusical, especially un-bad-musical people, are not persons and do not have souls.

  The people of the Bad Music League are transformed and almost transfixed by the discovery that ‘Aurelia from the Stars’ is a consummate bad-music artist right down their alley, the only alley in the world for them.

  The Presidents of the League make a plausible case for Aurelia, and they make a plausible case for bad music. Bad Music is loud and strong music with too many dimensions to fit it into the conventionality of things, they say. They deny the name of bad music to weak music that has no dimension at all. That is nothing! Let it drop out of the bottom of the world. But really bad music is transcendent. It is dimension-exploding.

  More than anybody do the bad music people appreciate and welcome Aurelia. She is the Star who horned down from the sky. She is the Girl Next Door blown inside-out by the power of trumpets. She is transport! She is mountain-top! She is rhapsody!

  But the Authors, the Board of Presidents, also state plainly that they would stretch her skin over a drum-head, or take the larynx from her throat and install it in the living throat of a bagpipe if that would bring stronger and more-dimensioned music. They have mutilated and killed and adapted, and they will do it again. They come on too strong for most of us. Bad Music is amoral.

  3

  Aurelia as Little Eva and Goldilocks—A Study of the Golden Doll Archetype, by Adrian Alte-Jung. Alte-Jung is a literary psychologist of distinction, but his area of distinction is always just a little bit over the edge. He has never been able to present a completely closed-circular theory of anything, but only sectors of theories. He has given us thirty and forty-five and sixty degree sectors of dangling-carrot themes, but never a complete and satisfying theory itself. He has been obsessed with archetypes, but all his archetypes are pieces-of-pie slices without full shape. He does not know this about himself.

  Now he examines the Little Eva or Goldilocks Archetype which he himself believes to be flawed. He says that there is something the matter with the shape of it. Well, is he considering it complete, or is he considering only a pie-segment of it? He says that ninety percent of the people hate this archetype secretly, more than any other archetype.

  He considers Aurelia to be a recent appearance of this archetype. He says that she, like others of this type, comes on too fast without real growth, so she and the type will always be excessive.

  Well, why does curly-locks come on to so many people as a cloying discord? Because she is pushed, Alte-Jung says. Then she is rejected, and she falls into discord. And then she is pushed again. Why then, if she is an old player, does she not establish herself by persistence? Old players are almost always able to establish themselves if they have any quality at all. Ah, but she hadn’t any quality, so says Alte-Jung who doesn’t like her.

  Who then is pushing her, if she is misfitted and without quality? Who is it who likes her, if the ninety percent of the people do not? God likes her, her type and her archetype. Chocolate-boxy, yes, and cutie-cute, yes. But He likes her. And what does that say about the taste of God? It says that God is without real taste; that is the conclusion of the psychologist Alte-Jung.

  But Aurelia is not really like that. She has no curly-locks. She doesn’t look much like either Little Eva or Goldilocks. Yes, she does. With your eyes closed she does. Her hair, though golden or probably brassy, is fine. But it is long and lank. There is no curl to it at all. Nor has she a simper, though Alte-Jung says that the archetype has a built-in simper. And Aurelia is not excessively saccharine.

  She is with your eyes closed, Alte-Jung says.

  Never mind that. Alte-Jung is correct in essentials. Aurelia does come on excessively sweet. And she is hasty. She will not be here long enough for the ambient to adjust to her. Alte-Jung says too little too stridently, but from the narrow sector that he gives us we can estimate the size and power of the rounding circle. We ourselves feel a slight excess in Aurelia, but we do not feel the angry rejection. And many persons do feel it as strongly as Alte-Jung does. They reject Aurelia to the point of murderous death. What healthy bully-boy has not wished to dash the golden doll to pieces.

  With such inexplicable feelings against her, she will not live long upon this world. And, to put it in the form of one of her own impish questions “What world is this anyhow?”

  4

  How Well Does She Govern—The Crux of the Matter, by Charles Sinkman.

  Sinkman is the only one of the authors who asks the question how we knew that Aurelia had arrived and how we knew that she was to ‘govern’ the world for a while. She was, after all, only a tow-haired, slight-bodied fourteen-year-old girl who came in (who knows from where?) with all horns blowing. She did not announce who she was, where she was from, or what she was supposed to do here. She immediately disappeared into a confusing group of people, and she was plucked out by a compromised tycoon. But there has not been given any information yet that she is anyone alien or special. She might well be, as one author has said, only a slightly-confused runaway girl from Iowa. No, she might not be any such thing, Sinkman says.

  Sinkman believes that the knowledge of her, instantly, from the east unto the west, throughout the whole world, is a sort of credential of her right to govern. “People everywhere in the world have heard of her, but without ears; and read of her, but without print,” Sinkman says. And he
discusses how never-before-seen notables are recognized, and how they were even more often recognized in the past. He believes that there is such recognition on all the worlds. On ours, particularly in the pre-literate age, and now again as we enter the post-literate age, ‘name people’ are always recognized by the commoners who have seen no pictures of them and heard no description of them. Enough of Sinkman’s point here, but Aurelia has been recognized everywhere in the world in these several days, and has been more readily recognized by the poor and ignorant than by the rich and sophisticated.

  As to the performance of Aurelia as ‘Governor of the World,’ Sinkman builds scales and tables and diagrams to show the points of good government, and he considers more than a thousand instances of government on our own world. The highest rating that he gives to any of the governments is seventeen points out of a possible one hundred. To the governorship of Aurelia he gives thirteen points out of a possible one hundred. And yet thirteen points is better than the average (‘An average that everyone in the world should be ashamed of,’ Sinkman says), which average is only eight points out of a possible one hundred.

  And Sinkman is of the opinion that Aurelia’s governorship could work well if it had seven months in which to work instead of seven days. (How is Sinkman sure that Aurelia has only seven days in which to govern?)

  He ascribes things to Aurelia’s intent-of-governorship that are not apparent to everyone (not apparent to us the reviewer anyhow), though they may be apparent to the poor and ignorant. And he gives a resumé of what he says are Aurelia’s aphorisms and governmental beliefs. These are in Sinkman’s words and not in Aurelia’s. He says that they are in the words that Aurelia would use if she lived a few weeks longer:

  Happiness is the goal of mankind. This may be phrased in a higher way of divine service or dedication, but ‘happiness’ as a goal is always part of the stick, even if it is the smaller end. Understand that mankind may have a false goal as well as a true. But true happiness is the true goal of mankind.