Aurelia

by R. A. Lafferty

  You think that I am wandering in my words? Maybe, yes. But really I am only speaking without crowd words and without the crutch of crowd-comments. When you say “Everybody is doing it” you mean “Everybody is doing it wrong.” You are using a crutch comment. If you cannot talk outside of the stereotyped dishonesties of the crowd consensus, then do not talk at all. There aren’t nearly enough silent people in the world. But will not talking at all leave an empty place where that talk might have been? Indeed it will. Grow onions in that empty place then, but do not fill it with crowd chatter. People go to their damnation in crowds or in endless files, holding onto their neighbours’ tails. They do not go down that wrong road alone. They go in peer groups driven by peer pressure.

  Be high eagles then, even as your father was a high eagle. But may not even the eagles congregate? They may, yes, in the cool of the evening sometimes, after the day’s flight is finished with. I know of several high ledges that are real Edens of Joy on the stark cliffs.

  “Aurelia is talking in a fog today,” Karl Talion remarked, for they had come to Aurelia’s crowd from Cousin Clootie’s Cavalcade, both to pay their respects to the body of Blaise Genet and to hear Aurelia again; and then to hear her twice later in the day before she should be extinguished.

  “She’s not in a fog,” Helen Staircase said. “She’s in a ‘Shining Mist’ of the alchemists. She is talking from another viewpoint. I believe that she can fly literally. She does have bird bones, you know, hollow. And she has aerated flesh. Shall we really accept her as human?”

  “We will accept her,” Karl Talion said, “or we will be robbed of one of our richest fortunes if we do not. Either we accept it that we belong to the ‘broad human race,’ or we become intolerably narrow ourselves. It is our acceptance, not hers, that is in question.”

  Aurelia called: Be quiet over there, friends of mine. There will be time enough for you to talk after I am dead. Listen to me now, and the sense of what I say may come to you later.

  I will talk for a very little while longer about things in the shade. And then, for the final two corners of this day, I will talk again of things in the sunlight.

  I came and tried to touch you. But I have electric skin, and you have skins of another sort, and we couldn’t touch. I tried to talk to you, but I used words one way and you use them another, and we cannot understand each other very well. But I came here because I was sent. You also must go when you are sent, and don’t quibble about it.

  Did you ever notice how the shadows are when it’s exactly noontime? They’re panoramic. And the air is in abeyance. The ears of you people are like this, but your eyes are open, and I think that you see.

  Oh, Aurelia was still clear enough, but it was a scanning and dancing sort of clearness that she had. It didn’t touch all the keys.

  THIRD MERENDA

  They had passed from the river to the lower lake now. All the boats had made it down. They had watched the River Boat and found the locks that weren’t generally known.

  “Aurelia, if things had been a little bit different, then might we not possibly have—” young Marco Rixthaler tried to ask something.

  “Possibly, Marco, possibly,” Aurelia said. “If you hadn’t been so bashful, something might have come from our meeting. About the possible chromosome differences, I was joking. About the other objections, I was joking too. But you aren’t ready for me, and I didn’t meet anyone else.

  “I really wanted to leave a child of mine on this world. That would prove that I was more than an erratic bolide. As late as last night it could still have been done. We could have lit it last night, and it would have been far enough along by tonight. Then I could have arranged for someone to take it from my body and put it in the body of another girl. It would have been born on this world then, which would make me a real partaker of this world. But it’s too late now. It needs a few hours after it is lit before it can be found, and there aren’t that many hours left to me. The next time you meet a star-girl, don’t be so bashful. Say what you want to say. Of course it probably wouldn’t have worked anyhow.”

  Aurelia and Marco had gone onto the River Boat in a slack time that afternoon. Aurelia had wondered about the international personages. They were always in the gambling room on the River Boat, and yet they were often other places as well. And they were in the gambling room now, Karl Talion, Julio Cordovan, Blaise Genet, Helen Staircase, Michael Strogoff, and Aurelia herself. And they were playing ‘brag,’ except Michael who was playing solitaire with blank cards and with one Aurelia-value card.

  Well, they were wax figures, wax over some sort of jointed armatures, and they moved very mechanically. That Blaise Genet himself was dead did not seem to matter to his wax image. That Julio Cordovan was now the Marshal-Julio the bodyguard didn’t seem to matter. Nor did Aurelia-present-in-the-flesh seem to matter to the wax Aurelia.

  Aurelia scraped a little wax off the hand of Karl Talion, and he shuddered at the pain of it and bled blood-like fluid.

  “Do not injure the wax figures,” an attendant said. “It is believed that if you injure them, their primaries will receive the same injury. Oh, it is Aurelia! We are honoured. We have made your image as well as we could, but it doesn’t do justice to you.”

  There was a memory that these persons, on first encounter, had looked waxy and smelled waxy. Well, had they been wax figures when they had played ‘brag’ for blood, and when they had drunk blood?”

  “How do you tell whether they are themselves or their replicas?” Aurelia asked.

  “There is no sure way,” the attendant said. “Sometimes they are mixed. At present, I believe that one of them is real and the other five are replicas. I had believed that, the very first night of your landing, it was a wax figure of yourself who was here playing with us. Was it?”

  “I don’t know,” Aurelia said. “I thought it was myself. But now I remember that I smelled waxy then and didn’t seem to be quite myself.”

  Aurelia and Marco left the River boat and came onto shore again.

  “Aurelia, is something wrong?” Marco asked. “Do you feel bad?”

  “No. I feel all right, but I’m terminal. My fever is rising dangerously, but it’s all outside of my body. See! A lot of my fever is in those groups over there. Do you see their horns?”

  “No.”

  Time and events would be telescoped now. The horned people, whenever they appear, are very disruptive of time and events. Disruptive of time especially; but the day had already begun to disintegrate when the horned people appeared.

  The people hadn’t visible horns, except corner-of-the-eye visible when you weren’t quite looking at them. They were the ordinary people of the Cavalcade, people from the countryside and the towns and cities. They were the ordinary people gone ornery as they had gone when they had howled “Jump, Jump!” when Aurelia had been on the high tower and they wanted her to jump to her death, not knowing that she had bird bones and that a height like that was nothing to her.

  Rams’ horns, goats’ horns, bulls’ horns, buffalo horns’, and all of them were unnaturally sharp. But were they unnatural? What is the nature of horns anyhow, and what is their function?

  Their function is to kill.

  “Why have you written such an account,” the wife of the forensic reporter George Clavicle asked him. “No such thing has happened. She hasn’t gone from us.”

  “She will be gone soon, Lola, just as I have written it here. There’s no harm in writing up a piece ahead of time, if it doesn’t contradict the facts. And I just can’t face up to watching it.”

  “How did you know about the double dart, George?”

  “A hunch, one strong enough to go with. A hunch that may be correct in very bloody detail.”

  The forensic reporter filed the story before the events happened, but he would be the first one out with it in the night edition.

  “Aurelia has been trying to give us a speak-out on the pursuit of happiness,” Karl Talion said, “but we’re not get
ting it. Can it be that we have uncircumcised ears? I’ve already informed my country that there’s nothing in it for us in Aurelia. ‘A light breeze, a smell of sunshine, no more,’ is the report I made.”

  “Why is there confusion about where Aurelia came from, and where she is now?” Helen Staircase asked. “Well porcupines! (One of her phrases.) This is where she is now. What is the matter with things?”

  “It raised an identity question that we didn’t want raised,” Karl said. “Blaise Genet believed that Aurelia had travelled only a very short distance, three hundred million to three hundred and sixty million kilometres. He believed that she travelled only from ‘bright companion’ to ‘dark companion’ on opposite sides of the same sun. Blaise may possibly know for sure whether this is true now, since another thing that he believed in (and I half believe in it also) is that we receive particular knowledge immediately after death.”

  “Where would that leave Cousin Clootie then?” Helen wanted to know.

  “It would leave him landing on the same world he took off from, and not knowing it. It would make him a fit counterpart for Aurelia, as far as navigational proficiency goes.”

  “Well, do you believe that?”

  “No. It’s nonsense. In my country, we’ve had a fix on ‘Shining World’ and identified it without any doubt. It isn’t distant at all, but it’s about one hundred and sixty-five thousand times as distant as Blaise believed it was. It was all that knocking in his head that gave Blaise those funny ideas.”

  Aurelia blew her horn for merenda-meal very early, while there was still quite a bit of afternoon left. “I don’t want to be rushed at the end of it,” she said. “There are some things that simply should not be rushed.” And then she blew her on-the-way-again notes and gave her penultimate homily before the folks had hardly had time to eat. It was a ragged homily that she gave, but it was all real Aurelia material:

  Persons have been choosy about the laws they will accept. They may reject a civil law and accept a physical law (a law of motion, or of gas pressure.) The only explanation for this is that the civil law might have been badly thought out and badly composed. The thing then is to think them better and compose them better. How are laws made and amended on this world anyhow? I’ve neglected to find out.

  The one sort of laws should be inexorable and at the same time as reasonable as the other. To protest against one sort of law should be as foolish as to protest against another. There is a unified theory covering all sorts of laws, for all true laws are interlinked. We should never ask of a law of any sort whether it is good or bad. We should ask whether it is true or false. And the breaking of a physical law or a civil law should have comparable consequences, probably some sort of collision.

  There aren’t any things that are beyond or above the law, not any things that are too casual or too flitting to be included under the law. Can you name a thing that obeys as many laws as does a sunbeam? And yet a beam is thought of as somehow random. A waterfall obeys a most complex network of laws, all sorts of resolutions of forces, and potentials and momentums and angular velocities, and vapour point and dew point, and multi-surface tension, and the whole catalog of Properties-of-liquids and resonance. If it breaks even one corollary of one law, not only does it come apart, but the whole world comes apart a little bit also. So is it with any broken law.

  Physical and moral and civil laws are all mere aspects of the universal Law of Happiness. There was one law given at the physical beginning of the universe, at the “big-bang” moment—the Law “Be Happy!” And the universe has been following that law ever since then, with a few local exceptions. Pure matter obeys this law. Atoms and galaxies obey this law. Pure spirits obey this law. Then why doesn’t the local cantankerous mixtures of pure matter and pure spirit obey the law just as unwaveringly? Why don’t people obey it always? What’s the matter with people anyhow?

  You are not driven into a corner by this law. You are driven out of corner after corner by it. And when there are no more corners for you to hide in, then you must obey the happiness law. But will you do it even then?

  There is no way that I myself can be hurt. I am beyond that. I can be killed, but I cannot be hurt. I have a “Home Free” certificate. And how does one get such a thing? One reaches out the hand, and it is given. If you don’t have such a “Home Free” entitlement, it is only because you didn’t hold out your hand for it. There is an old saying “Obey the Law and Do as You Please.” There is another old saying “The Law is the Lantern to Light People Home.” Notice sometime what kind of people they are who contradict these old sayings. Oh notice them! And help them if you can.

  People of my governorship, if I were to give you hard sayings you would try to figure them out and perhaps fulfil them. Because I give you easy sayings, which happen at the same time to be true, you say “There is something wrong with that. It cannot be that easy. Give us something hard.”

  People, see that scarp of all-sized rocks there that have tumbled down that cliff. Select rocks there and bite on them if you want something hard. But take my sayings because they are true and they are easy.

  What, is there a charnel house somewhere along this lower lake? Or is it only the spirit of a charnel house that salutes us here?

  THIRD CENA

  The people who occupied themselves in manipulating those damnable, double-dart yin-yang, yo-yo’s had now painted pictures on each of them with the ‘worm with the pistol.’ This might have been consonant with the rumour and incipient legend that Aurelia could only be killed by a worm with a pistol. If that is what it took, then they’d do it that way.

  Those double-dart yo-yo’s could be sailed with a flick of the hand, and they would go straight to a selected target-tree and embed themselves in it to a ten centimetre depth. They could go into a steel target to half that depth. Then, on the whistled commands of the manipulators, they would spin back out of the targets and would sail over a distance (up to a hundred meters) back to the manipulators’ hands. They never missed a selected target, though how they homed in on targets and then back to the hands of the manipulators is a secret known only to the members of the yin-yang lodges. And why were those darts double-spiked? So, they would go back and kill the thrower if he had any reservations about the yin-yang philosophy. There were many mysteries about these murderous toys.

  How do ‘horned people’ kill? The actual killing is never seen by outsiders, but the ‘surge to kill’ is seen and remembered. The ‘horned people’ of a coven or cornutus encircle a victim and then they close in. There are horrid screams. Then the ‘horned people’ draw back again, and the victim is dead in the middle of their old stamped and trampled circle. The weapon is not to be found, and all the ‘horned people’ are like one single stony-faced person in their refusal to explain. Such, at least, is the way they did it in the movie ‘Vengeance of the Horned People’ which had been showing in the little movie room on the River Boat. There was some masterful camera-work in this movie, and some far-out suggestion-technique. The ‘horned people’ were never actually shown as wearing horns, and yet there was no doubt in the mind of any viewer that they were horned indeed.

  How do people of the twin terrorist societies, the ‘Kill Aurelia Now League’ and the ‘Kill Cousin Clootie Now Group’ kill? Oh, they have a whole bloody repertoire.

  How do persons of the ‘Citizens’ Execution League’ kill? Horribly, clumsily revoltingly. Such avid amateurs have no business at all in the murder field.

  How do persons of the ‘Media Extinction Arm’ kill? By slow poison mostly. A poisoned dish they may have employed recently is ‘Slowpoke Snails.’ These have been used especially by persons of the Jimmy Candor Cell of the Extinction Arn.

  Who will finally do it? The open outrage stands defiant and simmering. Any of the groups might do it. And so the suspense builds.

  “No, no, no,” Aurelia contradicts this. “Suspense is one thing that we don’t want. Not in my death we don’t. There is something so cheesy about suspense.�
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  Why was all this animosity with its urge to kill building up?

  “It’s their last chance,” Aurelia said, “before the inexorable law ‘Be Happy’ finally takes over and puts an end to their vagrancies.”

  The Magi had begun to pitch their tents early tonight, before full dark had come on, before the cena-supper had been eaten. One of the new, hundred-room, seven-story tents erected by one of the newly-arrived Magi was named the ‘House of Iniquity.’ That name was in bad taste, and so was the Magus. A corruption had come onto everything.

  Aurelia had gone to Cousin Clootie’s camp for the next to last time, to take farewell from him; she had the intuition that they would not have many words on their final meeting. And after that, Cousin Clootie talked informally, in his difficult way, to anyone who would listen to him.

  “The beautiful, sinful, rational road is not all that easy, not for everyone. The easiness presupposes clarity and sparkling intelligence, and clarity is often in short supply with fallen humanity. We must look for clarity. We must cry ‘Turn up the Lights!’ For clarity won’t be found in the dark. And it is darker here than even I am used to.

  “I do not have a certificate that says ‘Home Free.’ I have an unsigned certificate that says ‘Home, maybe, against long odds, and through a thousand perils.’ I am the governor of hard cases. I am an advocate of the fear-and-trembling people. But I will govern, even with a broken rudder, for as long as I am set to govern here. I will open my eyes, though they be glued shut. You have misunderstood about the governorship here of myself and my fair skip-blood cousin. It isn’t a political governorship. The old word ‘to steer a ship’ is the same as the old word ‘to govern.’ But the best steering of a ship isn’t political steering, and neither is the best governing in a world.