Aurelia

by R. A. Lafferty

  “We are cheap-shotters. We are cowards. We know these things. But we will not be ultimate cowards unless we let them take that little wall down, the wall that (in final straits) we stand with our backs to. We are mockers. We are mutilators. And we will, in this case, be murderers. We go from temporal to eternal humiliation, but there must be the possibility of a moment in between when we can avail ourselves of free refusal.

  “In the further day, we will be able to say “Yes, we knew Aurelia, and we refused her. She was here, she is here, we still have her brittle bones in our earth. And we will be able to dig up and show those bones.”

  How Square Must We Be? shows that, whatever else has gone out of the world, truculence has not gone.

  These ten books together comprise a representative sample of the current thinking on the Aurelian Manifestation. They are worth an hour’s reading.

  Albert Derby, Reviewer

  The greatest bodyguard and detective in the world, who was either or both Julio Cordovan and Marshal Straightstreet, began to seize and interrogate the suspects of the kidnapping and murder of Aurelia. No, the account does not get ahead of itself. There hadn’t been any such kidnapping or murder yet.

  “The best time to investigate a murder is before it happens,” the famous bodyguard insisted. “After it has taken place, it is in most ways too late to do anything about it.” The bodyguard seized most of the suspects by force or by at least a slight show of force. He had almost all the force he would need.

  “I have placed a small army at your disposal, Marshal,” Rex Golightly the tycoon said, “and I could increase it to a large army if that would do any good. But hurry with your interviews and questioning, or else be ready to conduct them after we are on the move. Aurelia wants to begin her peripateticus now. So we’re about to take the house down.”

  “It would be easier to guard her if she remained here and the house remained here.”

  “I’m not sure that it would be, Marshal. There’s dark corners in this house that can never be lighted. We’ll take it apart today and pack it away, dark corners and all. And we’ll assemble it again tonight, and the dark corners will be there again. There’s every opportunity for murder in the dark corners of my house. And there are certain unfolding safety-factors on the open road. Do as well as you can, Marshal. Guard her life. That’s the thing. And do not interfere with her freedom. That’s the other part of the thing.”

  The first, and almost the last person that the famous bodyguard attempted to interrogate was Cousin Clootie, the grubby teenager who was usually in that hundred room luxury cabin of Rex Golightly the tycoon. The bodyguard said that he would have some answers out of Cousin Clootie, and Cousin Clootie said that he would answer or refuse to answer as he felt like it.

  The bodyguard laid his strong hand on Cousin Clootie’s shoulder, and then he was struck by lightning. He was felled, he suffered a bolt of electrifying agony, and the hair on his head was set on fire and the soles of his shoes smoked.

  “Oh, that’s the way it is,” the bodyguard said. “You are more than I thought.”

  “That’s the way it is,” Cousin Clootie said. “Yes, I am more than you thought.” But he was still a grubby teenager of apparent bad manners. He popped his teeth at the bodyguard, or perhaps that was a sort of smile. “I will probably answer anything you have the wit to ask,” he said. “You want to protect Aurelia, and of course I want to protect her also. Besides myself, I am more concerned for her than for anyone on this world. And I intend to protect her, subject to other things that I intend more to do. Bodyguard, you do not know what is going on, and I do.”

  “Clootie,” said the bodyguard rising from the floor and finding himself blistered and burned in many places. “You followed Aurelia here, I know that. How far did you follow her?”

  “Not far at all. A few parsecs.”

  “Oh, then you are the ‘Dark Counterpart.’ ”

  “It’s an inaccurate name, but there isn’t any accurate one that you’d understand.”

  “Why did you follow her here?”

  “To govern here. We do the meaningful governing. We slip in under the bright distraction of the ‘Shining People’ and do the work that they think they are doing.”

  “Then, for every child who goes out to govern from ‘Shining World’ there is one of you—ah—children from what I might call ‘Counterpoint World.’ ”

  “Not quite. One of us for every two or three of them sometimes. When one of them seems most in need of help, we go to give them help. We do the work while the helpless one provides us a bright cover to work under.”

  “Why do you come? Why do you govern?”

  “Oh, duty, things like that.”

  “You don’t give the impression of caring for either compassion or duty or any other good thing.”

  “No, I suppose that I don’t. I did badly in ‘Impressions’ in school. I’m supposed to be unobtrusive. And we have to design, each one of us, our own unobtrusiveness. I make myself to be distasteful and beneath notice, and so I do my work. The children from ‘Shining World’ are rejected because the people find themselves liking them too much. We are rejected because the people don’t like us at all. But we work on them while they ignore us.”

  “Did you kill young Uncle Silas?”

  “No. Or maybe yes. Is ‘kill’ the word for it? I think that he had already been dead for a long while when I first noticed him. You can use the theory that Uncle Silas was killed because he was mistaken for me by the ‘hit man’ who had some such instructions as ‘The weirdest teenager in the house,’ he will be the one. Kill him! Nobody would suspect that there might be two such weird teenagers as myself and Uncle Silas in the same house. You can use this theory. It may help to keep you occupied. And for all you will know it might be a true theory.”

  “No, people wouldn’t suspect that there were two such extreme ones as you.”

  “And nobody would suspect that both of us were persons on very important assignments, though disguised as persons of no importance at all.”

  “Uncle Silas was a person on an important assignment? Incredible. But then he might have been killed for himself.”

  “No. Hold to the first theory that he was killed for me. His importance wasn’t guessed.”

  “You are being very devious about something, Cousin Clootie. What is it?”

  “I want you to protect me also. I don’t want to die.”

  “And the one who wanted to kill you is still in the house? And he still may kill you? Or he may kill Aurelia?”

  “All these things are possible. If you will worry about them, then I will cease doing it. I hate duplication.”

  “I will worry about them,” the bodyguard said. “It is my job to worry about them. Are you also going on a peripateticus, as Rex calls it, when Aurelia goes?”

  “Yes. Today. And that is all the questions that I will answer, Mr. Bodyguard.”

  “But I would like to know—”

  “Black lightning of which you felt only a sample, man! Black lightning to burn you to a cinder!” Cousin Clootie the Dark Counterpart said. And then Cousin Clootie walked away with his awkward shamble.

  The bodyguard was almost convinced for a moment there, for a most narrow moment. And then the absurdity of it all overwhelmed him. That grubby teenager never came from space. He could not govern. He could not do anything at all. He was a moron. He was a revolting caricature of even a very dirty teenager. He was less than nothing.

  And yet he had talked persuasively for a moment there, considering that he was an oaf who could hardly talk at all.

  The bodyguard went to the River Boat. He sat down there with Karl Talion, Blaise Genet, and Helen Staircase. There were face-down cards on the table in front of them, but they were not playing. The blind man Michael Strogoff also sat at their table, playing by himself with blank cards and with one Golden-Aurelia value-card.

  “Hello Julio,” big Karl Talion said with a strong lack of cordiality.

&n
bsp; “He isn’t Julio Cordovan,” Helen Staircase said positively of the bodyguard. “Julio could do a lot of faces well, and his own perfectly. This man can’t.”

  “What do any of you know about the death of Aurelia?” the bodyguard asked.

  There was a short pause then.

  “Not a flicker, Julio,” Karl Talion mocked. “Not even a flicker from nervous Blaise. You’re a bungler, Julio. It hasn’t happened, of course. Those who are attuned to the fates say that it won’t happen for three days yet.”

  “Whatever intentions any of you have about Aurelia, forget them,” the bodyguard said. Herr Boch and the Prince of Nysa sat at a nearby table. It was the middle of the night.

  “We are here to watch Aurelia, and we will continue to watch her, Julio.” Blaise Genet said. “Will you interdict our watching?”

  “Yes, I will,” the bodyguard said. “I will interdict anything that could possibly harm her. One of you may have a Basilisk Eye or an otherwise baleful eye that could harm. You are vultures here. Vultures, be gone!”

  “No, I’ll not be gone,” Karl Talion said. “If you are not Julio, what did you do with him? What happened to Julio Cordovan?”

  “Oh, I swallowed him,” the bodyguard said. “Yes, he’s all in me. In as much as there ever was a Julio Cordovan I am still that person.”

  “No. You’re someone else,” Helen Staircase said.

  “I was always someone else,” the bodyguard maintained, “but I’m also the only Julio there ever was. You three, Karl and Blaise and Helen, are representatives of three different powers on three different continents. Each of you wants to kidnap Aurelia for your realm and put her through the juicer for your own country. You’d press all the information and value out of her. It won’t happen.”

  “We four, you Julio, and Karl and Helen and myself, are representatives of four different countries on four different continents,” Blaise Genet said. “Three of us do not want to use Aurelia and do not want anyone else to use her either. We want to maintain the balance, though she may not be weighty enough to tip it at all. The fourth of us, you Julio, are the least trusted of us. We don’t know what you want to do. Your thousand faces won’t disguise the fact that you’ve always been a two-faced sneak. You have Aurelia, or your two-hands-in-one-glove partner tycoon Rex Golightly has her. But we will not allow you to use her or to have her any longer. It comes too steep for you now, Julio.”

  “He isn’t Julio,” Helen Staircase said again.

  “Ah, I’ll shuffle them, and then we’ll play death-banter brag,” the bodyguard said. “Does everybody have plenty of blood? We play ‘brag’ and ‘bluff’ as surrogates for our countries, for it is dangerous for countries to play these games.”

  “We’ll not play with you,” Karl Talion said. “Touch one card and you lose a hand. Blaise and Helen and I will draw cards from our down-piles as soon as you leave.”

  “What will you draw for?” the bodyguard asked.

  “To see which one of us will dispatch you, Julio,” Blaise Genet said.

  “Except that he isn’t Julio,” Helen Staircase put in again. “But there is no harm in dispatching him anyhow.”

  “Someone is knocking at your door, Blaise,” the bodyguard said, “but he can’t get in and you can’t get out. You’ve waited too long.”

  The bodyguard left the three of them and blind Strogoff. He went and sat with Herr Boch and the Prince of Nysa at their table.

  “Does either of you know anything about the death of Aurelia?” he asked them.

  “That it has not happened, but that it will happen, unless someone prevents it,” Herr Boch said.

  “Unless someone more competent than yourself prevents it, bodyguard,” the Prince said.

  “Why are you two interested in Aurelia?” the bodyguard asked gruffly.

  “We aren’t,” the bodyguard answered. “We sit here, and we mind our own business. We have not shown any interest in her at all. We have not asked anyone any questions about her.”

  “You are interested in her,” the bodyguard said. “One of you came here from the Germanies, and the other of you from Little Asia. You were here waiting, a half mile from where she was to land, when no one could have known that she would land on this world.”

  “So were you,” Herr Boch said. “No one could have known that she would land here, and she knew it least of all. And yet everyone of moment knew all about it in advance. Myself, I want artefacts from ‘Shining World.’ I am an art dealer and I deal high. My Antikenladen, my exquisite shop and emporium, is the most exclusive and the most expensive in the world. I want artefacts in line with my style, breath-taking articles for which I can ask millions.”

  “And I want to seduce her,” the Prince of Nysa said.

  “Not really you don’t,” the bodyguard countered. “You are past that for many years, old prince. And you must know that she’s alien.”

  “Consider some of them that I’ve had,” the Prince said. “They were really alien. Ariadne was already dead before I first had her. It was a good, but creepy, relationship that we had. Carya, she was always turning into a walnut tree, and indeed she had a walnut tree in her lineage. Talk about a woman with wooden responses! Erigone belonged to the ‘Lesser Dog Star Clan,’ and she came from one of the planets of the Lesser Dog Star. And Leucippe turned into a screech-owl.

  “But I know about the peripateticus, bodyguard, and it is there that I intend to serve Aurelia. I’m an expert in the field. I know about parades and pageants, where the principal goes humble and barefoot and the princely retainers follow with every luxury that she needs. It will form just before dawn, with trumpets and bugles yet! I know about such retinues. I myself had some that were the talk of the world.”

  “There must not be any harm come to Aurelia,” the bodyguard said.

  “None,” the Prince of Nysa agreed, “except her death, and that will not be till three days hence. It is fated and cannot be prevented.”

  “I’ll prevent it,” the bodyguard maintained. “Your horns are coming back, Herr Boch. And what is that blue powder around the base of them?”

  At the near table, Helen Staircase had drawn low card from her down-pile. She would be the one to dispatch the bodyguard, to have him opened up first to see whether Julio Cordovan was in him in any form, and then to kill what was left of the guard.

  “It’s Blue Caustic,” said Herr Boch. “It is used on cattle after they are dehorned. It prevents new growth of core-matter. I used it on myself for years, but I will not use it during the peripateticus. I’ll let the horns grow then, and my horns can grow a lot in three days. In future times, when this is all retold and portrayed, I as well as the Prince of Nysa will become an attribute of Aurelia. Yes, I too know about retinues, and about pilgrimages, and the coursings of people.”

  “Statistically, Aurelia is already dead,” the Prince of Nysa said. “She was the weakest member of a seven-flight from ‘Shining World,’ and the ‘Shining Worlders’ expect to lose an average of one on every flight. This is the weeding out of their weak ones that keeps them strong and shining.”

  The bodyguard left them and left the River Boat. He went and talked to the two horse-wranglers who had intended to be on their way to the next rodeo long since and who were now caught in the Aurelia-net that was upon the neighbourhood.

  The guard talked to the two tow-truck operators who now had Aurelia’s space ship in their keeping. He talked to the multi-media ‘with-it’ people. He talked to the sectaries of the millennial sort. He talked to the leaders of the ‘Kill Aurelia Now League.’ He talked with power and threat to all these groups. They all knew that Aurelia was not dead. They all knew that she would die one way or another in three days’ time, and that her death was inevitable. The guard disputed this with them.

  Meanwhile, it was beginning to dawn.

  Back at the luxury cabin of the tycoon Rex Golightly, Aurelia came out and stood on the parapet of the highest tower of the whole cabin. The golden dawn caught her
and made her into a shining wonder.

  “Leaps are the best!” one of the ‘Kill Aurelia Now’ buckos had said to her the other night. “There is something electric about the long moment the leaper is in the air. And then the smashing, the smashing!”

  “Oh luck, luck! If only we could have it happen!” the disguised and devious Aurelia had said then. “And perhaps we can. I will implant the idea myself, and we may have just such luck.”

  They had both been standing and looking up at the highest turret of Golightly’s cabin and marvelling how wonderful it would be if someone would leap off it to death. Now Aurelia was posed up on that same turret, standing and teetering on the parapet of it. It was an electric moment indeed, and people gathered breathing electric breaths and hoping to see the leap.

  “Jump, jump, jump!” they called, and others took up the cadence ‘Jump, jump, jump!” People came from the hills and the lake and from all the luxury cabins around there. The ‘with-it’ people came, and the sectarians, and all of the ‘Kill Aurelia Now League.’ Even the strong partisans of Aurelia were caught up in the moment and cried “Jump, jump, jump!”

  Aurelia jumped.

  She leapt out into the golden air, and she plummeted the thirty meters to the ground, a modified plummet, for she had her own style. And would she have her own style in death also? There is something electric about the long moment when the leaper is in the air. In the case of Aurelia, there was something doubly electric about it, and something triply long. It wasn’t that time stood still. It was that Aurelia fell slower than other persons would.