Aurelia

by R. A. Lafferty

  “These Star-Dust Twins, these Seven-Day Wonders (What? Have they still two more days to go?), these also will pass away with no more effect than a light breeze passing over the face of the earth. But we may have had many such breezes from several points of the compass, and who is to say that they have no effect at all? They may have caused subtle changes in the faint lines of our corporate faces and our corporate brains. And the changes may have been on the better side.”

  By the by the second Prandium meal was finished.

  “Everybody up!” Aurelia cried loudly, and she blasted on her Prince-of-Nysa horn. “Make ready to resume the journey while I give the second-corner-of-the-day homily:

  You don’t speak plainly on this world, and I want that failing corrected. It’s difficult to govern a verbally-crippled and thought-crippled bunch. Please understand the difference between pleasure and happiness. There can be good pleasure and evil pleasure; but there can be only good happiness. Good pleasure is not less exuberant than evil pleasure. It can be much more exuberant. It can be rowdydow. It can be words that you don’t have at all. It need not be quiet. And bad pleasure can be of a deadly quiet sort. Please get rid of the word-trammels and thought-trammels that bind you.

  There is nothing worse than the tedious drudgery of disordered pleasure, but your imprecision of thought leads you to believe that deadly tedium may crop up almost anywhere. It may not. It is confined to a small area. If you will only understand where that evil tedium is you can avoid it. Please see the difference between things that sound alike, between “ordered” and “organized,” between “freedom” and “liberty,” between “authority” and “rule.” (“Rule” of itself cannot author anything. “Authority” can.) Oh, why don’t you have intuitive words and statements in the languages of your world?

  In other things, your imprecision with words worries me. A defined “criminally rich man” may now have wealth and income below the “poverty level.” And a “certified pauper” may be in the upper five percent of the wealthiest men. The first one will be denied all aid, and the latter one will receive all aid. It has something to do with the “grandfather clause,” but it has more to do with your stubborn imprecision of words and thoughts.

  The most rational road will always traverse the richest and most discovery-prone country. There will be bonus and bounty at every league of it. The air hums with activity all along the rational road. There is energy released at every step. It is the common magic of every day. Why do you keep falling off of the wonderful road? What’s the matter with all of you anyhow?

  It is because I can’t make you understand your present position and composite that I can’t make you understand your choices, though it seems so easy to choose the excellent over the execrable. A living and bodied person is a sort of arc of a circle, or perhaps of a parabola. If we continue the lines of that arc out beyond the body and the person, we come to a puzzle. The lines cannot be completed in the person’s own world or context. They go over the edge. Part of the enclosed, extended person will be either ultra-natural or infra-natural—anyhow it will be in another world, beyond the bounds of its supposed nature. We are sometimes told to become whole persons, and so we must do. But our own life and world are too small to contain our whole personhood.

  Well, is there any way that the circle or parabola of our persons can be completed? Of course there is. That is what I talk to you about four times a day. The reason that we are all so funny-looking, the reason that our institutions and our worlds are so funny-looking, is that this isn’t all of any of them. There is more of each of us somewhere else. There is more of everything of ours somewhere else.

  SECOND MERENDA

  News-person Susan Pischcale had been murdered while travelling with the slowly-moving Cousin Clootie Cavalcade. “I believe that it is a case of unmistaken identity,” said bodyguard Marshal-Julio.

  “Were you involved in making her identity unmistakeable?” Aurelia asked.

  “Possibly, possibly,” the premier bodyguard said. “One never knows what plant may be watered by one’s news leaks. It was surely known that you were using her appearance for a disguise. But then there was a lot of enmity against Susan. She did not have a sweet disposition. Since it will be well for you to use each disguise only once, we can discard a used disguise with a free conscience. Naturally you were spotted while wearing the Susan disguise, but naturally you were not spotted quickly enough for you to be done in while wearing it yesterday. Certainly they knew that you were not using that same disguise today, and certainly they (or perhaps he) pretended to think that you might be.”

  “I may use it again to spook him, but only momentarily. If Susan herself could be shot so easily, then I could be also,” Aurelia half worried.

  “Not at all, girl. Where are your brains? Your space ship above your head is your shield, but it is programmed to shield only you. You must have put in the shield and programmer—did you not?”

  “I suppose so. But I copied a lot of things from my classmates, and they helped me in still more things. I remember it, but I remember that it has a very limited range. It would not cover me here. Not enough power for it. Too far from my own Cavalcade.”

  Aurelia and the bodyguard, both in face disguise, were back in Cousin Clootie’s parade the second afternoon of the trek. They were about five-eighths of a mile from Aurelia’s own Cavalcade.

  “Look overhead,” the bodyguard said. “It follows you, not your Cavalcade.”

  And of course the little space ship was above Aurelia’s head in the Clootie Cavalcade.

  “But that’s a tip-off, isn’t it?” Aurelia asked. “Mine enemies will know that I am here with this group, no matter how I am disguised.”

  “So you are tipped off then, but you are not dead. We have to keep the shield over you. You are, generally speaking and with quite a few exceptions, impervious to death attack. Let us keep you so. Yes, they know when you are in your own group, and they know when you have left your group. But, in the ordinary course, you are safe wherever you are.”

  “How about poison? I’ve heard that poison is sometimes used on primitive worlds.”

  “You still don’t remember what it is with your space ship, Aurelia? That thing can smell out any poison, except very slow-working cumulative poisons, at a thousand meters, and it can seek and destroy them within that distance. It can destroy both poison and poisoner. The poisoner will have a trace on him.”

  “There are holes in it though. There are holes in my armour,” Aurelia said. “There was one person who could be killed by a lateral shot in the left elbow. There was another who could be killed by a small dart shot into the tragus of his right ear. And there was one who was unprotected in his heel. From what sort of shot am I unprotected?”

  “The monkey from the ship has advised me that there is such a shot, and to be on the guard for it. But it must originate from so low a level that only a worm could shoot it. And you must cooperate with that worm also, to shield it from the protection of the space ship with your own body. That means that you would have to bend low over the worm. Aurelia, if you see a worm in the grass who is armed with a pistol, do not lower your breast to within twenty millimetres of that worm-brandished pistol. And even if you do that, do not pre-empt the angle that will blot out your space ship entirely.”

  “I will try to remember it,” Aurelia said. “Do my enemies know my weak spot?”

  “No. There is no way that they could know. You are safe from everything, except a change in the rules. But why must we come to listen to Cousin Clootie today?”

  “Ah, because I like to listen to him. Besides myself, he is the only one with true authority on this world. The investigations that I have made tell me that all of the world-leaders of every realm have defective authority for some reason.”

  Karl Talion, Blaise Genet, Helen Staircase, several others, had left the Aurelian Migration and joined that of Cousin Clootie. How odd of them! Aurelia felt that it was a sort of treason. It was as if they
had felt that Cousin Clootie was more interesting than she was. And she’d started with an advantage. She’d had them first.

  But these international ‘brag’ players have the advantage now: they knew the two spies.

  “Poor Julio,” Helen Staircase said. “He has a thousand faces, and we’d know him in any of them. And we’d always know Aurelia. The sunshine of her sparkles through every chink. You weren’t very good at playing ‘mimes’ when you were at school, were you, Aurelia?”

  “How should you know that I played ‘mimes?’ ” Aurelia asked. “Now I am jealous of you fabulous ones. I had you and I lost you. Why have you left me?”

  Karl and Blaise were matching coins with stark intensity, with their eyes on everything else at the same time. Blaise, as always, seemed to have a terrible headache that he had half reached an accord with.

  “Come in!” Blaise called harshly once. “The door’s open.”

  “No, it is not really open,” Aurelia said, “or it is not wide open enough. Why have you left me for Clootie, people? Why?”

  “But you are Aurelia from ‘Shining World’ where everything goes right,” Helen said. “Cousin Clootie is from ‘Dark Companion SHOK-994’ where everything goes wrong. And we also belong to an everything-goes-wrong people. Like the fellow said ‘I never cared for pretty girls. I always liked the funny-looking ones. They just seem more like my kind of people.’ We do care for you, pretty girl, but grubby Cousin Clootie is more our kind of people. We’re full of shadows. And he is also. And you’re not.”

  “We shop for salvation, Aurelia,” Karl Talion said, “for ourselves and for our realms. Oh no, Blaise! Another match where neither of us wins! I hate it when one coin comes up ‘bust’ and the other comes up ‘neither of the above.’ We shop for salvation. And Banko Benko, the odds-makers’ odds-maker, has posted odds as high as eight hundred to one against my finding it. He’s even posted three hundred to one against Helen. With such odds against us, we’d be better disposed to believe with the commonality that ‘salvation’ is only a made-up word with no meaning.”

  “Why don’t you then?” Aurelia asked them.

  “We’re smarter than the other people,” Karl said. “We know what’s out there. And we are to be held more to account than other people. We are accountable for our realms also. And we heard the words ‘Go and see.’ That’s really why we were here and waiting when you and Cousin Clootie arrived. We have been listening to you, and now we will listen to Cousin Clootie. Your way is a little too easy. We’d rather come to salvation over mountains and obstructions and through walls of fire. We always liked hard wagers. We’ll find one hard enough yet.”

  A man, oh, he was that blind man Michael Strogoff (he’s been at the same table with the gamblers on the River Boat) handed Aurelia a bank newspaper. “There is a piece here about you and your dark companion, in The Afternoon Endeavor,” he said. And he pointed it out to Aurelia.

  Aurelia had learned to finger-read in third grade, and she read the piece:

  “We regard Aurelia and Clootie as two baleful and possibly contagious bolides that have struck our world,” the newspaper piece said. “They are meteors, and that is all that they are. Yes, they are animate, but as many as two percent of all meteors are animate by true definition. They are space animals, and they are hurtling rocks at the same time. They have not been quarantined, so they must be treated as any other meteors that were not immediately quarantined at the time of impact. They must be deactivated, even though ‘deactivated’ has a special meaning when applied to animate meteors or space animals. The two deactivated hulks (their bodies) may possibly be studied when they are safe to handle, but first they must be rendered safe. We will give the authorities only a short time to do this. Then our volunteer ‘Bolide Deactivation Brigade’ will act. This constitutes a public notice.”

  “I’m a bolide,” Aurelia announced when she had read the piece.

  “I’m from a cometary family myself,” Helen Staircase said, “but we have to forget the old days. Cousin Clootie is going to say a few words right now. What if, when she hears them, Aurelia should permanently leave the Aurelia Camp and join that of Cousin Clootie?”

  “I do join it, but only for a short while,” Aurelia said.

  “I have been asked to remove the mystery about myself,” Cousin Clootie was speaking, “but there is no special mystery about me. There is only the mystery on me that is on all of you, the mystery of being human.

  “On my world, we are an unoriginal and imitative people. In particular we imitate the talented people of what Aurelia calls ‘Shining World.’ But on their part they deny that we exist. We imitate their school curriculum as well as we are able to, since it has proved so successful with them. Actually we imitate it without its ‘Shining World’ errors, so it proves even more successful with us. We imitate it in one way by sending young students out on the ‘World Government Course.’ We try to match the ‘Shining World’ children one for one, and we quickly found that our governorship served a more important function than did theirs. We gave government exactly in those dark areas where the people of ‘Shining World’ were blind to the need of it. In the present sense, matching Aurelia one for one was difficult because Aurelia had no idea where she was going. But navigation and tailing were my strong points.

  “We find now that we complement more than we imitate. The people of ‘Shining World’ are superficial. They are ‘surface people’ only, bright surface though they have. We are somewhat deeper. So, though of shabbier quality, is this present world one of deep and layered arrangement. We possess something of all the ninety-nine depth layers that are always below the bright surface layer. From those depth-layers, with clumsy hands and minds, we try to bring out dark riches to bright day. It may be that we know more about resurrections than do those who have never trafficked with the dead. All that Aurelia preaches and talks about is correct, but there are other flocks and swine-herds that she knows not of.

  “Aurelia is herself a poem, but she misunderstands the necessity of poetry. So do I misunderstand it. For when it is necessary, then it is already defeated. And yet it is a necessity always. It must be a luxurious and unneeded outpouring, and yet it is more important than many of the crying necessities of the world. Even blank or incomplete, even though it is inartistic or unstrung, poetry is a triumph over the flat daytime. And however it is come by, it must be given out freely.

  “And Aurelia does not tell you very much about the tangle of flesh that is such a power-house. That is because she is only fourteen and I am fifteen. The things to remember about the tangle of flesh are that it is creatively powerful and that it is magic. And the important sub-thing to remember about it is that at least half of the time it is black magic—yeah, I mean reeky, black magic.

  “But many who are the most voluble and vocal about the flesh tangle have the weakest hands at the helm of it, and they are the flabbiest at directing it or sailing it. They are like the man who had a beautiful and savage horse, and the horse chased and herded the man and drove him through broken ground and horrendous cactus. The man was not able to master the horse, and he even said that horses are not meant to be mastered. But they are.

  “On this world we still hear the arguments that nuclear power should be outlawed because it is highly explosive, because it is often contaminating and polluting, and because it can never be completely safe. All these things can be said of the flesh-tangle power-house also. And yet it must not be outlawed in the main, and it must not be regulated by the ICC either. It must be handled rationally. As to how it may be handled rationally, I have a number of phrases handy that cover most of the ground; but I have experienced that I am hooted and derided whenever I use these phrases. Your hearts, I suspect, are blacker than I had at first imagined.

  “Why do I feel such a close kindred to you of this world? It is because I come from a ‘dark companion’ planet, and this is a ‘dark companion’ planet also. Of course I am sure of this! There used to be, I am told, so
me crackpot discussions here as to whether your world had a ‘dark companion.’ Most of the thoughtful persons put the idea down as nonsense. And those thoughtful persons were correct, but only in a technical sense. This world does not have a ‘dark companion’ because this world is a ‘dark companion.’ You are standing on an anti-earth and denying that there is an anti-earth. That is folly for you.

  “Your world does have a ‘bright primary,’ and you people on this world are so dim-eyed that you will not allow yourselves either to see or to believe in that bright, primary planet.

  “Yes, the planet under our feet here is a ‘dark companion.’ It is the donkey-counterpart world of a horse world, it is the goat world to a sheep world, it is a left-handed world to a right-handed world. Oh, it is! Well, people of the contrary donkey-brotherhood, I wish that you didn’t belong to it, and I wish that I didn’t belong to it either. We are a ‘dark-underside’ fraternity.

  “A paradox and a problem though. Why are dark undersides always coloured white? And why are bright top-sides always coloured black? Is someone, other than ourselves confused about these things? Oh, I will talk to you further on these and other matters, but my ship wants to speak to me now.”

  Yes, Cousin Clootie had his own ship hovering over his head, but it had much poorer visibility than Aurelia’s ship. While Aurelia’s ship was sharp and dark against the bright sky, the underside of Cousin Clootie’s ship was blue-white against the blue-white afternoon firmament, and you could lose it just while you were looking at it. And Cousin Clootie had a black tarsier-like mechanism with bright eyes that went up to his ship and back on errands. It didn’t fool around and it didn’t pull monkey-shines.

  There was another slight difference between the Aurelia and the Clootie Cases. The daytime constellations could be seen in the sky over Aurelia’s Cavalcade, but they could not be seen over Cousin Clootie’s, and this although the two aggregations were now only half a mile apart.