Aurelia
Page 21
“Sometimes my cousin misses things that are trampled in the mud. It isn’t that she is fastidious or prideful; it is just that she doesn’t see low or dark things. I pull them out of the mud. There is a division of mission between us. Maybe I cannot see as high as she can. Maybe she cannot see as low as I can. She does things easy. I do them hard. Now she goes out of the door unafraid, and I go out of it afraid. But we both go out of it.
“How does one say to a world that one has enjoyed its companionship, even though the goodbye is rather abrupt?”
Aurelia kissed Cousin Clootie. Then she kissed Jimmy Candor, the fulgurating reporter. Wait a minute! There was something tricky about that one. Aurelia wore the face of dead Susan Pishcala at the moment of that kiss, and Jimmy Candor reeled back in fear even though he knew that Susan was safely dead and by his own hand. And then Aurelia sluffed the Susan disguise again.
She kissed the dowdy woman who was an advocate of yin-yang. She kissed the Chairman of the Board of Governors of Romp Publications, and more than a hundred other people some of them morally malodorous.
“They were all weaving a garment for me,” she said. She went back to her own encampment, the last time she would go there. She blew the horn for the cena-supper, the fourth corner of the day.
“It’s a natural reaction,” she said to somebody about her terminal fever outside her body. “The world can’t swallow me. It gags me up. I am not killed, you see, however it appears that the thing goes. I die of incommodation sickness, but I’m not killed.”
She blew the horn again, but the day-schedule was coming apart. She would talk now, that there was no hurry for the people to finish their meal.
If we are well enough disposed, the passage from life through death to fuller life would be no more noteworthy than the passage from one day to another. This isn’t to say that it isn’t noteworthy at all; for the passage from one day to another should always be the walking from one delightful mansion to another, a sparkling experience. But in our passing from a smaller room to a larger we commonly pay too much attention to the doorway we are passing through. True, death should have all the excitement of the beginning of a stupendous journey, but our passage point is not a main part of it.
The “Nocastian Nights” Stories, beloved by children and adults forever, are loaded with jewelled magic and multicoloured wonders, with the excitement of strangeness and the allurement of species. Whales that talk, horses that fly if you turn the peg behind the ear, fish that rise from the ocean with gems in their mouths, cities of brass that can be transported from one place to another by the mere saying of a correct rhyme, the prize “happiness forever” won by no more than a little determined swashbuckling, giants that come at the bidding to serve and to sustain, the door in the wall that opens onto an incredibly fair land when one has the right key, palaces under the sea, and the great under-sea City of Domdaniel, castles built of drifting clouds of jacinths and chrysolites, flying carpets that will transport one anywhere, persons of incomparable beauty and pleasantness, companionship where each one takes the heart from his breast and exchanges it for the other, music that makes the mountains break open like doors, the enchantment of sanctified flesh, and the ship that sails on the river named “Forever.”
By the way, what do you call the “Nocastian Nights” Stories on this world? I know they have them here. Do you have a local name?
Can these things be? Yes, they can. Where and when? Right here and right now. These are the things that happen and exist every day in the real world. And here and now we are at least in the ante-room of the real world. The right key that opens the door in the wall is called on one side of it “Grace” and on the other side of it “Love a-burning.” It opens the door even if you use it upside down.
In one hour I will go from one room of this incredibly fair land to a larger room of it.
The best thing about this curious encounter is that we may be able to learn something from it,” Doctor Thorgrimsson spoke the next morning in the publication Wide Awake, the Morning Medical Journal. “We will have other visitors in time to come, and indeed there is the belief that we have previously entertained several visitors unaware. For this reason, it is important that we examine why these two young creatures have died from their encounter with our world. The deaths were accidental, of course, as are all deaths by chronic allergy. And yet there was multiple purposive death waiting for them if the accidents did not happen.
“This world responded to the children by classifying them anaphylaxically as intruders’ and by secreting a murderous toxin against them as ‘intruders.’ The response is so complex as almost to go beyond the province of the medical. This is at the same time a physical, a chemical, a medical, a sociological, and cosmological response-problem. The question is whether a mucous membrane is responsible for its reaction against an alien pollen or irritant.
Yes, as a matter of fact, it should be held responsible. The behaviouristic approach to allergies does make a membrane ashamed of any violent or excessive reaction to an intrusive stimulus, and it is proved that the membrane is able to modify its reaction by membranous resolve and will. And we do have cases of the ‘rag weed’ being shamed out of attacking people with the dreaded ‘hay fever.’
“Considering our world and its dominant human fauna as a responding mucous membrane, it may be possible to teach it to modify its responses to para-human intrusive contact. We must convey this idea, on conscious or unconscious or membranous level, that the murder-response is entirely out of order and will not be tolerated.
“This may be quite a simple adjustment that we have to make. Let us hope that we are able to make it before we are next visited from the sky.”
But Doctor Thorgrimsson’s comments were printed the following morning. Now it is still tonight. Yes, that is an indication of the way the sequence was disintegrating and becoming irrational.
The two cavalcades of Aurelia and Cousin Clootie had merged, and then their mass had shattered into specialized groups making islands among frightened spectators. The violence factor rose exponentially. There were fanged wolves and horned killers bawling and howling and shuffling around, though they were still in human guise. Everyone knew that Cousin Clootie’s death would come first, and yet there was no way that anyone could know anything at all about the matter.
Aurelia blew her Prince-of-Nysa horn, and Cousin Clootie answered with his. But then noisome clouds of creatures and prodigies poured out of both of the horns and near blinded the blowers. These clouds of delirious content would remain through the whole action, giving a surrealist counterpart to all of it. Aurelia and Cousin Clootie were not more than thirty meters apart, and they couldn’t come closer for the crowds. Uncle Silas, in very vague and weightless form, was standing with Cousin Clootie and regarding him with friendship. Cousin Clootie had tried to give Uncle Silas release, not knowing how spaced-out he was or how much of him was then on each side of the barrier.
Nervous bull-frogs were bellowing on the splashy shore of the lower lake, and manipulators of those yin-yang yo-yos were flying them at targets in simulated murder, and then whistling them back again.
“Play with those things somewhere else,” Aurelia said crossly. “They’re atrocious, and they have an evil philosophy behind them.”
“No we won’t,” a player said. “This is the world tournament for manipulating them, and we’re having it here.”
“People shouldn’t be allowed to kill those two little children” a woman said.
“It’s all right,” her husband told her. “It’s what they call an ‘Inexorable Chthonic Movement.’ There’s no way of stopping it. It’s a little bit like killing snakes.”
“I don’t think it’s anything at all like killing snakes.”
“Besides, the children will die by accident. No one will kill them. There are some experts here to observe. They are studying Chthonic-Movement accidents. And most of the things that those kids said are against everything that we stand for.”
The mult
i-media ‘with-it’ people were making ballads. Aurelia knew that she was in them, but she couldn’t catch the words. One of her mentors came to her.
“I have a little bit of something to tell you before you die,” he said.
“Oh leave it off, leave it off,” she protested. “I haven’t agreed to any of this business about my dying. I’m as healthy as a colt.”
“Yes, I know,” the mentor said. “Several days ago I told you what world this was, a crystal ball had whispered it to you also.”
“And I hardly believed it,” Aurelia said. “I don’t believe it yet. It just can’t be.”
“No it can’t. I was joking or something worse. So was the crystal ball. Dark jokes they were. But I can’t have you die under a misconception. This isn’t really———world. This is———world.”
“What? Oh, that un-explains a lot,” Aurelia brightened. “But still it’s as unlikely as before. It gives me a funny feeling to die on a world where nobody ever did take me seriously.”
A lady brought some ailanthus seeds to Aurelia.
“If you set them now, some of them will grow out of your mouth after you are dead and decomposed, and there will be a large ailanthus tree to show where you are,” she said.
“But doesn’t the ailanthus tree smell funny?” Aurelia asked.
“Yes it does. But it’s pretty. It’s the tree that most reminds me of you.”
Aurelia ate the ailanthus seeds.
“I’m going to catch one of those things and kill it,” Aurelia threatened the offensive yo-yos.
“You make one of them mad and it’s likely to kill you,” a boy said.
The newly-formed society ‘Kill Cousin Clootie Now and Aurelia in Just a Minute’ was getting ugly. They crowded around Cousin Clootie and harassed him. One of them tore his arm off with a swinging grapple. One of them drilled him right through the chest with a red-hot pike. One of them split his skull with an old-fashioned axe. And they jeered at him and he fell dead at their feet with multiple murder wounds.
Only it didn’t happen quite that way.
Cousin Clootie’s little space ship had a good shielding system, and it was programmed to shield Cousin Clootie in moments of stress. It smashed the swinging grapple before it could touch Cousin Clootie. It sent down a protective shaft and diverted and bent the red-hot pike. And it sent another protective shaft that intercepted the swinging axe and vaporized it. There was no way that it would permit assault on Cousin Clootie.
The newly-formed society withdrew in anger and added words to their slogan-flag ‘And Kill That Damned Space-Ship First.’ And they went to get a small cannon that one of them knew about to shoot it up.
Then the horned people came to the assault. There was a sizeable coven or cornutus of them and they encircled Cousin Clootie. Their horns were invisible to the eyes, but they were sensed by every other sense. The hornies encircled Cousin Clootie and closed in. There were horrid screams that went on for quite a while and then subsided to what sounded like dying gurgles. The ‘horned people’ drew back again then, and the victim Cousin Clootie lay dead in the middle of their old circle. The weapon would not be found, and all the ‘horned people’ would be like one single stony-faced person in their refusal to explain. It was a scene from the movie ‘Vengeance of the Horned People’ all over again.
Only it didn’t happen quite that way either.
Cousin Clootie was still on his feet in the middle of their old circle. He was gurgling in incoherent anger, but it wasn’t a dying gurgle. The ‘horned people’ had cut the hair from one side of his head only. They had pulled one sleeve off his tunic, and the opposite leg off his trousers. They had smeared him with black and scarlet paint, and they were laughing at him with derisive laughter. But they hadn’t killed him. The ‘horned people’ knew about shielding devices, and they knew what liberties they would be permitted to take and what they would not. And they knew that Clootie was really killed already by the spirit they had engendered.
Herr Boch brought his antlers to Aurelia. They had fallen off, so now he would not be an antlered man after all. They were still quite small, about the length of the end joint of a little finger. Aurelia, not knowing how else to keep them, swallowed them.
Then the persons of the ‘Citizens’ Execution League’ moved in on Cousin Clootie. They were the horrible and clumsy amateurs, the revolting creatures. Each of them made a twiddly little speech, and then each of them struck a death blow.
“Sick-Simper Tyrant, Die!” the final one of them cried, and he shot Cousin Clootie with a .45 hand gun and killed him. Then the members of the League all shouted slogans. Oh, those damned slogans!’
Only it didn’t happen quite that way either.
Cousin Clootie’s space ship shielded him as it had done before. It sent down those protective shafts to intercept every blow of every sort. So Cousin Clootie did not fall from any of those assaults, not even from the point-blank shot of the .45 hand gun.
No. He fell five seconds later.
The accident, as well as can be reconstructed, happened like this. One of those zinging yin-yang yo-yos struck the bottom of one of those protective shafts as it was being retracted into Cousin Clootie’s space ship again. And it was deflected downward, and it skewered itself into Cousin Clootie’s chest.
“Oh, this is ridiculous,” Aurelia said. “It is grotesque.” And she ran to Cousin Clootie. The yin-yang yo-yos had all been safety-approved, of course, “—so that they might not be damagingly deflected by any earthly material to do damage to any earthly person.” Yes, but that protective shaft that the yo-yo had hit was not of any earthly material, and Cousin Clootie was not an earthly person.
“How bad is it, Cousin Clootie?” Aurelia asked as she bent over him. She shivered as she saw the painting on the double-dart, the worm with the gun. Somewhere there was a prophecy about herself and a worm with a gun. The skewering yo-yo dart was the worm with the gun.
“Don’t anybody whistle!” the stentorian voice of the bodyguard Marshal-Julio rang over the multitude. But it rang a moment too late. The manipulator of the fateful double-dart, seeing that it was involved in a controversy, whistled for it to withdraw from its accidental target and return to his hand. But Aurelia, bending low over Cousin Clootie, was in the way of its withdrawal, and in the way of the protective shafts from both the space ships. The dart tried to withdraw. And it skewered out of the chest of Cousin Clootie and into the breast of Aurelia. Then the yo-yo dart panicked or got mad, and killed them both.
“Oh this is silly!” Aurelia said in her last words.
“Clumsy,” Cousin Clootie said as he died. “Is there no sense of drama on this world? Bad show. Ridiculous.”
The ballad-makers of the multi-media ‘with-it’ group had been singing the new song ‘She was a Bolide,’ with horn accompaniment.
Helen Staircase came there and killed the bodyguard Marshal-Julio by splitting him open with a powerful knife. Three days before, she had drawn low card to kill him. She still didn’t believe that he was Julio Cordovan, but she was exploring inside him with strong hands to see whether she could find anything of Julio in there.
Now all the people seemed to wake up at the same time and they all said, “What strange daze have we been in anyhow? Well, no matter, we are not in it any longer. That little dead girl seems to have something to do with our daze, and that little dead boy also. Oh, it’s been a silly week!”
See! Hear! The ballad-makers were already making a song about it, “Silly week.” Listen to the way the horns come in on it, Oh clumsy, clumsy, cool, cool!
Cousin Clootie’s little space ship dipped down and picked him up and carried him off. But Aurelia had forgotten to program her ship for retrieval.
They buried her there without a grave-stone. Her only monument was certain unfading words on water Preserve her Name. Her Name is Aurelia. But hardly once a year would a fisherman in a row-boat come onto those words, and then he would wonder “How do they get an effect like that
? It must be a ‘Monumental Water Company’ product.”
After Aurelia had been dead for a year, an ailanthus tree did grow there. It did smell funny, but it was pretty. It was the tree that should have most reminded people of Aurelia, but there was no memory of her left to be revived. A set of branched antlers also grew out of the ground there, and people do stop to look at them.
On the morning after the fateful night, a couple of media persons had been talking. “Something new every week,” one of them said. “Something a little different every week. Well, what kind of pure nuttiness will this new week have?”
“Want to guess?” the other one asked. “We’re getting up a pot on it. Nearest guess wins it all.”
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Also by R. A. Lafferty
The Devil is Dead
Archipelago (1979)
The Devil is Dead (1971)
More than Melchisedech (1992)
Other Novels
Past Master (1968)
The Reefs of Earth (1968)
Space Chantey (1968)
Fourth Mansions (1969)
Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of Ktistec Machine (1971)
Not to Mention Camels (1976)
Aurelia (1982)
Annals of Klepsis (1983)
Serpent’s Egg (1987)
East of Laughter (1988)
How Many Miles to Babylon? (1989)
The Elliptical Grave (1989)
Dotty (1990)
The Flame is Green (1971)
Okla Hannali (1972)
Half a Sky (1984)
Collections
Nine Hundred Grandmothers (1970)