Aurelia

by R. A. Lafferty

  There was a very poor-looking man with a push-cart. He was vending sack-cloth and ashes. It was for the penitents, so he shouted half-heartedly, should there be any. Karl Talion, Blaise Genet, Helen Staircase, Michael Strogoff all began to haggle and buy their sack-cloth and ashes, and they talked about the quality of it.

  “Oh come on,” Aurelia protested. “I am still with you. This is the time for joy-songs and for aromatic oil and nard to smear on your heads. Sure I say ‘Repent!’ But I say ‘Repent and Rejoice!’ We should get an ‘oil-of-gladness’ vendor pushing a happy cart. I will get one for my own camp.”

  “We mourn partly for your own death, Aurelia,” Helen Staircase said, “and we repent because we have more need of it than do these other good people.”

  Aurelia left them in exasperation and went back to her own caravan. And she blew the horn for merenda though it was a little bit early for that meal. Then, after a short bit, giving the people hardly time to finish (they always ate more than was good for them anyhow) she blew the horn again and proclaimed:

  “All up! Ready for the journey while I give you a Fat-Tom-Insight-of-the-Third-Corner-of-the-day:

  Each one of us must become extraordinary, unless we are one of the rare ones who are extraordinary from birth. There will be a great change in us, but it will not be a change without preparation and splendid will. One day(this day for some of you) you will be walking down the ordinary life road, and you will be transformed. You will in a moment cease to be ordinary people and will become extraordinary people. Or else you will cease to be ordinary people and become veritable swine. The choice will be an easy one, so please do not stumble over it. You can have it whichever way you wish. And when the change takes place, you will no longer be walking down an ordinary life road. You will be walking down an extraordinary road, or you will be stumbling down a swine-trough. But if some of us fail in the transmutation, or go swinish, then the rest of us of the kindred cannot become as extraordinary as we would wish. Please keep this in mind.

  Things will always go well when everybody has become extraordinary. It is those who have not become so who slow the rest of us down and keep our surroundings grubby. I am telling you grubby people, stop dragging your feet!

  It’s said that the rule by which we play the game is “the world of things as they are.” Well, that’s a rule that can be bent then, for we can change that world. The world changes every day by natural decay and ultra-natural renewal. We, the all of us together, make a peculiar picture. It is peculiar because we are able to enlarge or diminish the frame of it while we are part of the picture.

  There are not virtues. There is only virtue. We cannot have some of the particular virtues without having them all. To lack even one of the six particular virtues is like having a geometrical cube lacking one of its six sides. Without one of its sides, it wouldn’t be a cube at all.

  What did you say, man? You say that seven particular virtues are commonly counted on this world? Aw blacksnake blood! How am I going to come up with a regular seven-sided figure to use for analogy?

  You ask me for an account of the technology of “Shining World” as though that might have something to do with my credentials. I will not give any such account to you. It isn’t important enough to give. It is not that I am completely ignorant of our technology, but technology is a mere trifle, a barrel of trifles. It is always good enough, whatever it is. Technology is accomplished in several different ways, sometimes by “modern” (in one of the modes) research and development by public push, sometimes by private-sector brain-busting, sometimes by fetish-application and counterpoint (the latter method is often called magic.) These methods work about equally well. There are fetish-magic technologies that are superior to our own technology on “Shining World.” But some of the lands or worlds with the better technologies are not always better-governed or more readily governable.

  Tell me (and I don’t mean to skip around in my talk) why do you have so few three-storied and five-storied and seven-storied words on this world? Why, for instance, have you forgotten the great depths of “wind.” Wind is an animation for the anemos the wind is also the anima the spirit. Why have you forgotten that the gust is the same word as ghost? They are the same word and thing. Why have you forgotten that the spirit is the breath, and that we respire and inspire when we breathe? And that the Holy Spirit is the Holy Breath?

  Why can I not make you see that the spirit blows new every day? Why can I not make you see that he’s knocking at every door and window of you. Oh, that’s what’s bugging Blaise Genet! He has more acute hearing than some others. He hears the spirit knocking to come in. Then why doesn’t he let it come in?

  There is a new wind blowing this day and every day. It is your skins and your noses that are stale, so you do not recognize it. It is your eyes that are bleary and do not see the fruited wake of the wind.

  You there, dammit, if you go to sleep while I am talking, I will break every bone in your body and throw you in the garbage can!

  SECOND CENA

  Rex Golightly was standing on the edge of the river in the early morning. A river now? Yes, but it was the little river between the upper and lower lakes. Tomorrow they would be on a lake-shore again. The River Boat was on the River now. It had come down from the upper lake by locks that not every boat knew about. Already its night lights and night music were twinkling. In the deeper water it was dark now, but there was still light in the shallow. It was at the depth between the deep and the shallow that Rex was addressing his ears.

  “Rex, Rex, my delightful friend,” said the Magus Balthasar Doppiocroce as he came up to the tycoon. “Either your inventions have surpassed themselves, or your wits have lost their edge. That fish isn’t really talking to you.”

  “Did I say that a fish was talking to me, Balt?”

  “No. But you were listening to that fish talk.”

  “How do you know what I was listening to, or whether I was listening to anything? You say that I was listening to a fish talk. And you say that it was not talking. Whose wits have the softest edge anyhow, thine or mine? But join me and hear him. He has some really hydracious ideas.”

  “Aquaceous is the word,” the fish said.

  “Fish, you told me yesterday morning that my ward Aurelia would live forever, or for three days, whichever came first,” Rex said to the fish. The fish loomed large and deep in the water. It may have been an ego-fragment, but it seemed quite solid. “I intend to hold you to that prophecy.”

  “So hold me to it then,” the fish said. “The ‘three days’ come before the ‘forever’ comes, and Aurelia will die tomorrow night in fulfilment of the prophecy.”

  “No, you’re wrong,” Rex said. “Listen to this, fish, and know that I now have a magus as witness to your words. Forever comes before three days, since forever goes back to the beginnings of things. Then I will hold you to it that Aurelia lives forever, since forever comes first.”

  “I will see what I can do,” the fish said.

  “At one time in my youth, by long practice, I was able to project and make visible an ego fragment of my own,” Balthasar the Magus said. “I made it in the form of a female butterfly, a pleasantly-voiced psyche. Talking to such a projection of one has much more style than talking to one directly; it is much more creative. I mean that the thoughts can bounce back from such a projection shattered and then reformed, and they may be strong with aspects that are only implicit in the thoughts at first. At that time, butterfly-projection was quite new. I’m not sure but that I originated it. It’s common now, and the Swiss School of Fragment Projection teaches it to tyros. But it wasn’t so then.

  “But I had to give up my butterfly ego-fragment. A high servant saw me pull the fragment in again after a conversation with it. He thought that I had eaten it, and he reported to the king that I had eaten one of the royal butterflies. For that, I was fined one hundred thousand ducats.”

  “Did you pay it?” the fish asked from deep water.

  “
Not exactly,” the magus answered. “Rather I paid it to myself. The next morning I was the king. My father, the old king, had died in the night. So I pardoned myself of the debt, as it were. You remember my father the old king, Rex.”

  “Ah well, this isn’t a king’s fish,” Rex remarked.

  “Yes. Yes, I am a king’s fish,” the fish contradicted.

  “Certainly you are. You are Rex’s fish, and Rex is a nomad king,” Balthasar said. “But, Rex, do you believe that by conversing with one of your own fragments you can compel fate?”

  “There is no fate, Balt,” Rex Golightly said. “There is only El-Allah—God. An esoteric passage that I read lately maintains that God has a secret love for riddles and catch-phrases. Well, I have caught him by a verbalism, by a riddle, by a catch-phrase. If he enjoys it, he may let her live forever.”

  “On the other side, she will live forever, Rex,” Balthasar said piously.

  “No. On this side!” Rex insisted. “I still have a sceptical man’s distrust for the other side.”

  “Butterflies are fairly easy psychic projections,” Balthasar said. “One begins with them. They are showy and easy. It’s like young music students playing ‘Humoresque’ or ‘Chop-Sticks.’ But your fish maintains its own depth in the water. It has considerable weight, and it speaks with resonance in its own voice. That cannot be easy. I remember when we were at the ‘School for Princes’ together; you were the best illusionist of us all. But I didn’t know that you had become this good.

  “King’s fish, what effect will Aurelia really have on this globe?” Balthasar asked, talking to the fish now. “Will her name even be remembered in a week, or will it be that her name was written on water?”

  “As to that, I’ll tell you what I did see written on the water in my days a-swimming in the various waters around this world,” the fish said. “I saw these words written:

  She was my love and my life. Water, do not let her be forgot.

  Preserve her name. Her name is Mary Jane.

  These world were written on the water, and they did not become obliterated. I have seen them twice, thirty years apart, and they do not fade at all.”

  “Fish!” Rex Golightly commanded in a strange voice. “Write this on the water! Preserve he name. Her name is Aurelia. Write those words! Write them now!”

  The fish wrote the words on the water. And the words did not fade.

  “Rex, Rex, Fish-Rex and Man-Rex,” the Magus Balthasar laughed, and he placed a royal hand on Rex’s shoulder. “You are an eternal delight to me. Really, there was never such an illusionist or such a humorist as yourself. And, Rex, there has always been something fishy about your humour. It’s fun being with you. Fun!”

  But the tycoon Rex Golightly was crying deeply as he looked at the water and its words—Preserve her name. Her name is Aurelia.

  A leading member of the ‘Kill Aurelia Now League’ came to her and said that he had defected, that he had now joined the ‘Kill Cousin Clootie Now Group.’

  “It was really a choice of satisfactions,” he said. “We have to focus on the most intense satisfaction. It would be fun to kill you, but—”

  “No, it would not be fun to kill me,” Aurelia interrupted. “It would be another thing entirely, not fun. It would be an evil pleasure to kill me.

  “It would be a bang to kill you,” the person said. “But some of the more knowledgeable of us have decided that it will be more of a bang to kill Cousin Clootie. We must focus on a single target for the most intense bang. We can always kill you later.

  “Well, what have the less knowledgeable of you decided about it?” Aurelia asked.

  “What?”

  “Why do you have to kill either of us?”

  “It’s an imperative,” the person said. “It is a pleasure-pain-paradox imperative. Girl, you just do not understand people. You don’t understand what makes them go. Killing is really the only fun.”

  “No, it isn’t fun,” she insisted wearily. “It’s something else.” She made a sign, and Marshal-Julio and a couple of his assistants seized the person.

  “Oh, what a dirty trick!” the person wailed. “We might have expected something better from someone like you. It’s a breach of faith for you to retaliate.”

  “We’ll take him and shake some answers out of him,” Marshal-Julio said.

  “No you won’t,” Aurelia smiled. “Only reasonable people have answers.”

  Aurelia’s after-cena talk that night was a little bit on the discouraged side:

  I have asked all of you to report to me any cases of unhappiness that are to be found on this world that I am governing. And the only reports that I have received are joker reports. Why is this? I am plainly amazed at it. I know that there are cases of unhappiness on this world, for being spotted with unhappiness is one of the properties of all inhabited worlds. Did you think that I was kidding? I wasn’t. Do you believe that I cannot do anything about unhappiness? Oh, but I can! In most cases, I can cure it. In almost all cases I can ameliorate it.

  Well then, let us talk about cheap-shotting, the besetting offense of this world. It is cheap-shotting that sets up most of the steps to unhappiness. It is cheap-shotting that turns people into sleazy frauds. Cheap-shotting is a main part of the “always-a-bad-word-for-everybody” syndrome. It is a main part of the “hatred-is-fun” life-statement. Fun? No, no, these sarcophagus assaults can have no real contact with fun itself.

  “Hatred is the hottest commodity there is,” is the hottest private slogan of those who live off the public and pander to it, political persons and media persons and entertainers, directors of aggregations, hucksters of opinions, moulders of styles. “Give the people something they can really hate, and they will follow you forever, though they are shoeless and starving,” a politician told me this very day. “Give them something to hate and they will give you the house-money and the food-money and the babies’-milk-money. Give them something to tear down and they are yours to the last ditch.” Now this is the way it is, here and there, yes. But this is not the way it is so universally as the hatred-is-a-way-of-life faction wants it to be. That’s the way it is on the surface, and to varying depths and uneven extent. And that is the way it will have to stop being! As governor of this world, I say that it will have to stop right now.

  To the worst of you slanderers and defamers and hate-em-alls, I say “Cut it out!” I say “Cut out your tongues and cut off your ears, and do it right now, for they give offense.” I have a big barrel right here. It will hold five hundred kilos of tongues and ears. I’m what? Why should I be kidding?

  And for the bad but not quite the worst of you I say “You’re not having any fun that way! Get rid of that stuff and start to have fun!”

  To those who say that neither the rotten messing-up nor the funful happiness are any business of the governor, I say “It is the governor who defines what is the governor’s business. This governor defines these things as very much the governor’s business.

  There was about a hundred kilo-weight of cut-off ears and tongues deposited in the big barrel after Aurelia’s talk. They filled the barrel only about one-fifth full. Many of the worst of the people were unwilling to take extreme means for their own cure. Even in that one-fifth quantity, there were many cow and pig tongues and ears. The people who put them there seemed to be deriding the whole business.

  Further Magi erected great houses that night and made them available. But, first and meanwhile, everybody of both the Aurelia and the Clootie camps had a hootenanny after the cena-meal. And the people on the shore were joined in voice and sound and spirit by the people of the River Boat and a number of private boats.

  Overhead, Aurelia’s ship blew all its horns, and with more orderly sound than usual. And Cousin Clootie’s ship resounded with the music of the Aeolian Zither (actually a space zither). It was a very good concert and multi-group sing-along and fun-fest there by the river. Very good, but not perfect. Other things crept into it. The words of some of the lyrics were
raunchy, and those were only the ones that could be understood. The hatred-is-a-way-of-life faction was out in force. The hate-em-alls were there. A lot of bootleg hatred and partisanship was smuggled in. The people still have a long way to go on the road to happiness.

  THIRD IENTACULUM

  “A side-light on the Aurelia and Cousin Clootie foofaraw is the little known fact that there really is a person in the world with the rightful title of ‘Governor of the World,’ ” a piece in The Morning Sickness—The Dissident Newspaper That is Different said on the third morning of the journey. “This person is an ideal governor in two ways: His name cannot be publicly known, and he had a very limited field of activity. What he actually does is set the prime rate of interest for all the lands of the world every day, and then that rate sweeps around the world from the date line back to the date line again. This ‘Governor of the World’ is actually an attendant to a computer that figures the interest rate from thousands of items of input. But the ‘Governor’ does have some power. There are several over-ride buttons that he can push that will make wilful though only fractional adjustments in the interest rate.

  “Are there any over-ride buttons that either Aurelia or Cousin Clootie could push to make any wilful fractional adjustments in the affairs of the world? We believe not. There is no possible way that either of them could take any effective governing action, not even the most fractional one. They will not leave even a memory behind them.”

  “What, will you not leave any foot-prints behind you, Aurelia?” asked Rex Golightly who read the piece in the Morning Sickness over Aurelia’s shoulder.

  “No, tycoon, no,” Aurelia said, “no foot-prints, no handprints, no ear-marks even.”

  People began to be very kind to Aurelia that morning. The wife and the morganatic wife of Rex came around to pay their respects, as did fifty of the other kindred. And there came the families of all the other Magi also, and people of lesser royalty. There even came thousands of commoners from both campments and from the countryside as well as the towns and cities. They talked to her and patted her.