“Don’t worry, Mr. Zhelezovitch,” Oread said. “I’ll make it for you tonight.”
2.
The name Daktuloi (Fingers) is variously explained from their number being five or ten, or because they dwelt at the foot (en daktulois) of Mount Ida. The original number seems to have been three: i.e., Kelmis the smelter, Damnameneus the hammer, and Acmon the anvil. This number was afterward increased to five, then to ten … and finally to one hundred.
—Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities
In the forests of Phrygian Ida there lived cunning magicians called the Dactyls. Originally there were three of them. Celmis, Damnameneus, and the powerful Acmon who in the caves of the mountains was the first to practice the art of Hephaestus and who knew how to work blue iron, casting it into the burning furnace. Later their number increased. From Phrygia they went to Crete where they taught the inhabitants the use of iron and how to work metals. To them is also attributed the discovery of arithmetic and the letters of the alphabet.
—Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology
It is also said of the Dactyls (the Finger-Folk inside the hills) that they live very long lives and retain their youthful appearance for very many years.
—Groff Crocker, Mear-Daoine
Just after closing time that evening, Oread Funnyfingers went by City Museum to see Selim. Selim Elia worked as night watchman there to help pay his way through the University. There really wasn’t much to do on the job. He sat at a big administrator’s desk and studied all night. Studying all night every night is how he got to be a genius. Oread had brought some sandwiches with her.
“Peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches made out of iron,” Selim joked.
“No, they’re not of iron,” Oread said solemnly. “One would need iron teeth to eat an iron sandwich.”
“Surely a funnyfingers could manage iron teeth.”
“Oh, our third set comes in iron, but for me that should be many years yet.”
“Oread, I want to marry you.”
“Everyone calls you a cradle-robber.”
“I know they do. And yet we’re almost exactly the same age.”
“There’s so many people here,” Oread said. “Terra Cotta People, Marble People, Sandstone People, Basalt People, Raffia People, Wooden People, Wax People. I will have to find out from my uncles which ones are real. Some of them aren’t, you know; some of them never lived at all.”
“We have one of your friends or uncles here, Oread, in wax. Over here.”
“I know where. You have all three of my uncles here in wax,” Oread said. “You might not recognize them from the forms of their names on the plaques, though.
“Oh Kelmis, Oh Acmon, Oh Damnae all three,
Come out of your cases and play with me.
“I don’t think they’ll come out though, Selim, since they’re made out of wax instead of iron. Effigies should always be made out of iron.”
“What do their names mean, Oread?”
“Oh Smelter, Oh Anvil, Oh Hammer all three,
Come out of your cases and play with me.
“No, they won’t come out. I’d have to be a bee-brain to evoke anything out of wax.”
“Oread, I love you very much.”
“No, they won’t come out at all. I’ll have them come over here themselves some night and make iron effigies of themselves. Then you can get rid of those silly wax ones.”
“Little iron-ears, I said that I loved you very much.”
“Oh, I heard you. You won’t be alarmed when they come out some night to make the effigies? They’re kind of funny-looking.”
“So are you, Oread. No, I won’t be alarmed. Why should a Syrian be alarmed over fabulous people? We’re fabulous people ourselves. And if they’re your uncles they cannot be dangerous.”
“Sure they can. I am. You said yourself that I’d set the flaming ducks after you again. I go home now, Selim, to get my homework made, and also to make that concept-symbol system for Mr. Zhelezovitch the instructor. It’s important, isn’t it?”
“I’ll go with you, Oread. Yes, it’s important to Zhelly and to the class and the course. It’s true that he might as well end the class forever if he doesn’t find it. But it isn’t true that we might as well end the world if we don’t find it. It’s not quite that important.”
“Who will watch the museum if you leave? I want very much to make this correctly and understandably for Mr. Zhelezovitch. I am a Funnyfinger, and making things for people is the whole business and being of the funnyfingers.”
“Oh, tell Kelmis to watch the place for me. Will it take long for them and you to make the concept?”
“Oh watch it for Selim, and watch it real nice,
Oh Kelmis, from rotters and robbers and mice.
“Sure, he’ll watch it for you. Even a Waxman-Kelmis will be faithful in that. Oh no, they never take very long to make anything for anybody any more.” (Time had slipped by, though not much of it; Selim had a sporty car that he drove like a flaming rocket; and it wasn’t very far to the northwest side of town. They were out at the Funnyfingers’ place now, and into the back, back rooms that turned into tunnels.) “They never take very long to make things anymore,” Oread was continuing, “not since that time, you know, when God got a little bit testy with them on Sinai when there was a little delay. They first made the tablets out of iron entirely, and they wouldn’t do. They had to make them out of slate-stone with the iron letters inset in it, and the iron had to be that alloy known as command iron. Since then they are all pretty prompt with everyone, and they follow instructions exactly. You never know who it really is who places an order.
“Kelmis has the original all-iron set. I’ll get him to show them to you some time.”
“Where do you get your stories, Oread?”
“I tell my mother that I make them out of iron.”
“And where do you really get them?”
“I make them out of iron.”
* * *
Selim talked easily with the three uncles while they wrought and hammered the white-hot parts that Oread was to assemble into a symbol concept.
“How is it that you work inside a little hill in Oklahoma?” he asked them. “Shouldn’t you be in the forests or hills of Phrygian Ida? How did you come to leave the Old Country?”
“This is the Old Country, and we haven’t left it,” powerful Acmon said. “Everything underground anywhere is part of the Old Country. All hills and mountains of the world connect down in their roots, in their toes, and they make a single place. We are in Mount Ida, we are in Crete, we are in Oklahoma. It is all one.”
They made the pieces. And Oread, dipping the parts out of the white-hot iron as if it were water, put them together to make the thing. It was a new concept-symbol system, and it looked as if it would work.
* * *
And it looked much more as if it would work the next afternoon. Mr. Zhelezovitch the instructor was almost out of his mind with it. The graduate students and the regular students (for this was one of those advanced, mixed classes) crowded about it and went wild. The implications of the new thing would tumble in their minds for weeks; the class would be a marathon affair going on and on as the wonderful new things were put to work to uncover still more wonderful things. The stars were out when Oread and Selim left the class, and no one else would leave it at all that night. But these two had something between them, and it might take another new concept to solve it.
“Oread, give me your answer,” Selim was saying again. “I want to marry you.”
“Make a wish on a star then. On that one where I’m pointing.”
“Triple jointed funnyfingers, who can tell where you’re pointing?”
“On that male star there between the several eunuch stars.”
“Yes, I see the one you mean, Oread. I make a wish. Now, when will you answer me?”
“Within a half hour. I go to question two people first.”
Oread left there at
a run. She went home. She talked to her mother.
“Mama, why is my father so boyish? Is he really just a boy?”
“Yes he is, Oread. Just a boy.”
“After some years would he be a man, really, and not just a pleasant young kid?”
“I think so, Oread, yes.”
“Then after some years you two could have children of your own? Being a funnyfingers isn’t an obstacle?”
“I’ll never know that, Oread. When he is grown up I will be long dead.”
* * *
Oread ran out of there and ran to the convent that was behind the school she used to attend. She entered and went upstairs and down a hallway. She knew where she was going. One funnyfingers can always find another one. Besides, the eight years was up. She opened the door and found Sister Mary Dactyl playing solitaire with iron cards.
“How old?” Oread asked.
“Three hundred and fifty-eight years,” said Sister M.D. without looking up. “Were I not vowed, I would be coming to the family age now.”
Oread ran all the way back to where Selim was still waiting in the street under the stars. She was crying, she was bawling.
“The answer is no,” she blubbered. Selim, under the stars, was as white-faced as it is possible for a Syrian to be. But he must not give up.
“Oread, I love you more than you can know,” he said. “Maybe we can make a different answer out of iron,” he proposed in desperate jest.
“This is the iron answer,” she bawled, “and the answer is no.” She ran away too fast to follow.
Deep under the hills Oread was crying. She was weeping big hot tears. They weren’t, however, iron tears that she wept. That part is untrue.
The tears were actually of that aromatic flux of salt and rosin that wrought-iron workers employ in their process.
Thieving Bear Planet
Introduction by Jeff VanderMeer
“Anomalies are messy,” R. A. Lafferty writes at the beginning of “Thieving Bear Planet,” and the reader might be forgiven for thinking Lafferty was referring to his own career and body of work. But, in fact, he’s referring to the alien thieving bears of the title, which follow their own peculiar set of rules. Too often science fiction gives us humans in uncanny bear suits, so to speak, when it comes to aliens. But Lafferty in this story and several others manages to create deeply strange and original alien encounters that both unsettle the reader and send up traditional science fiction approaches.
As ever with Lafferty, too, he manages feats of compression that are beyond most writers. Take the deliberately blithe reference to a Directory and Delineation of Planets, which, in offering an entry on the Thieving Bear Planet, tries from the start to impose a cage of logic on the unknowable, with its catalog of the usual planetary attributes, even if it destabilizes its authority in the same instant by including irrational statements from a former explorer of the planet. Or take Lafferty’s riotous description of the current expedition’s gastronome’s delight of a meal—which proves to be a great set-up to the stealing of the thieving bears, who are not just robbing the explorers’ very stomachs of plain old pork-and-beans, but a sumptuous feast, that the reader may feel the loss quite viscerally. These are lovely stories within the main story, little whirlpools of magnificent narrative energy.
“Visceral” is a key word when thinking of Lafferty’s triumphs, alongside “weird.” In, again, a condensed tale-like form Lafferty accomplishes what some space operas take trilogies to get to. A space opera, in its finest form, is just a mimic: a commercial delivery system for some of the strangest moments and situations in science fiction. (See: early Alastair Reynolds, for example.) With Lafferty, the traditional tropes of SF—alien contact, alien invasion, the noble exploration of space—are jewels he likes to put beneath tattered overturned cups, daring the reader to bet on where in the world the true treasure lies. But beware—when you pin down the location of that treasure, it’ll likely change shape, grow legs, and hop off the table.
This applies even to the thieving bears of the title, who take on a marvelous initial form, able to fly not so much because of having lightweight bones but because they’re almost like drifting toupees in structure. The mimicry they are capable of seems cute at first and then horribly brutal as the explorers become caught up in events they cannot control. Yet even then, Lafferty isn’t content, restless. It would have been easy enough for him to take the initial set-up to a very satisfying conclusion, but instead he roughs up and destabilizes his own story with the second act, which makes the reader question … well, everything. Is all that occurs just a joke by the thieving bears? Is there some other animating impulse at work? How is it that this Jenga-like structure Lafferty creates doesn’t fall and crash to the ground?
Along with many other complexities, then, “Thieving Bear Planet” chronicles the impossibility of comprehension of the alien, the war between the logical and illogical in ourselves that spills out into the cosmos beyond—all in the context of the certain knowledge that human beings will never know everything about this world, let alone the next, or the universes we inhabit. And that there is something wonderful about that fact.
Not many writers could grapple with such ideas and create a story that’s both so creepy and so funny and in the moment, but as in Lafferty’s best work in general, the author manages to channel a narrative momentum and a kind of joy in the very act of outrageous and madcap invention that provides unity, depth, and, yes, even a kind of beautiful closure.
Thieving Bear Planet
“Deliver me from carks and cares,
Deliver me from Thieving Bears.”
—John Chancel, Logs and Epilogs of Sector 24
A simple explanation was needed for the conditions on Thieving Bear Planet. It was needed because, as the great Reginald Hot had phrased it, “Anomalies are messy.”
Every decade or so, somebody with a passion for regularity takes over the administration of the Directory and Delineation of Planets, that massive cataloging operation, and makes a new survey of the anomalies. And there was not any way that such a survey could miss Thieving Bear Planet.
“It offers no threat to human life or activity, no danger to bodily health, and only slight danger to mental health,” the great John Chancel had written about it a century before this. “It has almost uniformly ideal climate, though it is not a place to generate sudden wealth. It is serene in environment and in ecological balance, and it is absolutely caressing in its natural beauty. But it does have a strange effect on some of its visitors. It forces them to write things that are untrue, as it is forcing me to do at this moment.” That was an odd thing to write in a ship’s log.
And, as one later old hand put it, “There is nothing to conquer here. It is a poorly endowed and counterproductive world. And everything goes wrong here. I will say this for it: things go wrong here in the most pleasant way possible. But they do go wrong.”
Now another expedition consisting of six explorers—George Mahoon (he was wrestler-big, and with a groping, grappling, leverage-seeking wrestler-mind); Elton Fad (he was long on information and short on personal incandescence); Benedict Crix-Crannon (buff and charming, and he knew all the jobs of the expedition); Luke Fronsa (he was a “comer,” as they said in the department, but wasn’t he a little bit overage in grade as a “comer” now?); Selma Last-Rose (what can you say after you say that somebody has everything?); Gladys Marclair (pleasant, capable, but she wasn’t a genius, and genius was really required for an explorer); and Dixie Late-Lark (sheer Spirit, she!)—had set down on Thieving Bear Planet. These were not the most experienced explorers in the Service, but they were among the newest and freshest. And they had already demonstrated that they were top people at clearing up anomalies.
“It’s a pleasant place, but not good for much,” George Mahoon said before they had been there ten minutes. “Why didn’t the earlier explorers simply say that it was ‘Only marginally or submarginally productive, indicated by fast scans to be poor in bo
th radioactive and base metals and also in rare earths and fossil fuels, not recommended for development in the present century when so many better places are available,’ or some such thing as that? Why did they put so much stuttering gibberish in their reports? I’m going to like it here, though. It’s nice for a brief vacation.”
“Oh, I’m going to like it too,” Selma Last-Rose spoke in her curious rat-a-tat-tat voice. “There must be a puzzle here, and I like puzzles. And there’s a minor mystery in this ‘Plain of the Old Spaceships.’ I may as well solve that.”
They had landed in a clear place on the Plain of the Old Spaceships. Here there were remarkable full-scale drawings or schematics of old spaceships, twelve of them in two-thirds of a circle, from the earliest to the latest, going clockwise on the ground. What medium these schematics were done in was not certain, but the lush grass refrained from growing on the lines of them and so marked them off. The “drawings” showed the circle-spheres of the spaceships and their fore and aft bulges. They gave accurate indication of the interior bulkheads. This was really a life-sized museum of ships that lacked only substance and the dimension of height.
“I recall two passages in the log of the ship Sorcerer about this plain or meadow,” Elton Fad said. “The first of them stated, ‘Some of our party believe that the plain of the ships was actually done by the Thieving Bears in a historical marker sort of response, but I myself do not credit the little beasties with that much intelligence.’ And there was a later entry in another hand, ‘The Thieving Bears really did make those schematics-in-the-grass memorials of all the spaceships that had been here, but they didn’t do it in any way that we had imagined.’ But that latter log entry, like latter entries of several of the explorers, had been written in something other than ink.
The Best of R. A. Lafferty Page 34