Of Crystalline Labyrinths and the New Creation
There are multitudinous emanations, and sight
is but one of them which is given us here in the
childhood of the soul.
—R. A. Lafferty
1
Ossie Safire, character,
A digger diligent and lean,
Went out one day searching for
Just one thalassapithecine.
Boomer Flats Ballads
WALKING BESIDE AN ARROYO ON A GIN-CLEAR OKLAhoma day, Ossie Safire caught sight of something: a shimmer, a shifting, something. Forty feet ahead of him, a shuffle of air and wind had just unsparkled in the gulch’s clayey walls. By rockhound intuition Ossie knew that if he didn’t hop down into the arroyo, whatever it was that he hadn’t quite seen would disappear.
So down he hopped and strode up the arroyo talking to himself: “I’m looking for Osage pottery shards, the paleoliths of the enigmatic pre-people People, or the flipper bones and femurs of archaeo-okie thalassapithecines.” (These last were seagoing ape folk of an undated inland-sea era in whom nobody but Ossie Safire believed.) “I am not looking for unsparklings of ostentatious air.”
Rowdy Al LeFever had invited Ossie out to his ranch to look around. Rowdy Al, who hailed from Boomer Flats, claimed that a first-rate discovery lay in wait on his place for a dedicated rockhound. Ossie had met him earlier that day on the porch of his lopsided, yellow, many-gabled house.
“An unusual house, sir,” Ossie had said politely.
“A fella down the road once tried to build one just like it,” Rowdy Al told Ossie. “He said to me, ‘Mr. LeFever, there is nothing so original as a first-rate copy.’ The house he built fell over nine or ten times before he got one version to stand up. ‘Well, it ain’t an inimitable house you’ve got here,’ he said, ‘but I could’ve never built one anything like it without seeing yours first.’ Later he tore it down and built a house more like himself, but I didn’t think too ill of him.”
“I’ve come to look for rocks,” Ossie had said, trying to get back on topic. “Or fossils.”
“Well, nose around. Make you a find. I’ve heard of you, Ossie Safire, and I want you to be the first to run across this thing.” Rowdy Al had retired into his yellow house, leaving Ossie to his own devices.
And so, wishing for the serendipitous, Ossie stalked the thing he hadn’t quite seen and fumbled his handpick out of his rucksack. A stand of cottonwoods topped the ochre rise beyond the arroyo’s far bank. Ossie was admiring their long trunks and liquid leaves as all unexpectedly it happened, it being a collision.
“Ow!” he said. For he had bumped into an anomaly that would soon grow even more anomalous, and had scraped his nose. He thought he saw a not-sparkle—yes, a not-sparkle—interpose itself between his eyes and the cottonwoods. He lifted his handpick and tapped it on the motionless wind in the gulch, upon the airy hardness that his nose had bumped. The air blocked his handpick blow and shivered Ossie Safire’s wrist. This is dismaying, he thought, for if no digger at the Greater Tulsa Diggers’ Consortium can credit thalassapithecines, will any of that crew believe I’ve found a pocket of solidified air?
But Ossie, whom dismay seldom deterred, again tapped his discovery with his handpick. He tapped up and down and laterally. He tested the dimensions of the entire anomaly, which hung from unknown heights into the arroyo like a transparent stalactite. Stooping, Ossie walked under its rounded tip. It had a radius of four or five feet and kept not-sparkling and not-glinting, all of which negative coruscations he now ignored.
(What were these unsparklings and not-glints? Ossie regarded the gin-clear day as one protracted flashing of the Cosmic Orderer; he thought the negative coruscations from the unseen rock winks of ordinary daylight. If this explanation sounds complicated, think how hard it was for me to devise.)
Ossie rued that he could not measure the height of the invisible stalactite. He threw dust on it hoping that a coating of grime might enlighten him, but the dust would not stick. It flew away on the Oklahoma breeze.
After a while, Ossie sat down on the arroyo bank with a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and a flask of mineral water. He stared up at his discovery. Was this what Rowdy Al had wanted him to find? Apparently. And so it hurt that the huge, hanging rock would not be tricked into visibility. The Greater Tulsa Diggers’ Consortium would expel him as a crank and a mountebank.
Eighty or ninety feet overhead, a graceful hawk collided with something and tumbled beak over pin feathers toward the arroyo. Ossie jumped to his feet, but the hawk caught itself up and, flapping with clumsy flaps, avoided a crash landing only a few feet from Ossie’s picnic. Groggily, the bird flew away.
A moment later, the brightness above Ossie unsparkled. Even more unsettlingly, he felt the invisible crystal think something at him:
Almostal comptured of omniversilly mattessence om Aye, O resiever of m’eye enconquerumphing metamorphilology.
This isn’t fair, Ossie thought. I was hunting thalassapithecines, and this annoying weirdness isn’t fair—not at all, not at all.
2
An Indian, called Flashing Plains,
Found a diamond on the prairie:
Sammy, blessed with spunk and brains,
Became a lapidary.
Boomer Flats Ballads
A week later in downtown Tulsa, Ossie Safire sat with three of his pals in the Arrowhead Lounge of the Diggers’ Consortium: Ignatius Clayborne, whom everybody called Clay to avoid getting knuckled; Opalith Magmani, a beautiful beast of a woman to whom Ossie had proposed four times; and the richest Indian interested in archeology whom Ossie had ever met, Sammy Flashing Plains. All three wondered why Ossie had herded them together into this cramped Naugahyde booth.
“Which idiocy must we deal with today?” asked Ignatius Clayborne. “The pre-people People or your butterflying baboons?”
“Thalassapithecines,” Ossie corrected his friend, humbly.
When Sharla, the barmaid, came to their booth to take their drink orders, Sammy Flashing Plains said, “No wisecracks about firewater, you guys.”
Ossie ogled Opalith and said, “I’d like a dry Magmani.” He quickly emended this to “A dry martini,” his mouth chock full of the dust of chagrin.
They all ordered martinis. “Banish the vermouth,” Sammy Flashing Plains said. “There’s enough wormwood in the paneling.”
“Well,” said Ignatius Clayborne when Sharla left to fetch their drinks.
The frog in Ossie’s throat croaked. “I’ve hesitated to talk to you all,” he began, coughing a bit, “because of the esteem in which I hold all three of you: Clay, a geologist; Opalith, a stratigrapher, dendrochronologist, and reader of varved clays, not to mention the greatest beauty to come out of Tishomingo, Oklahoma; and Sammy, a—”
“Preservationist,” Sammy Flashing Plains said. “I lead palefaces like you away from our holy places to do your digging, and I thank the Great Spirit that none of you is a social anthropologist.” He sported a double-breasted blue suit and a headband of Osage design. Everyone else slouched there in work clothes.
“Okay,” Ossie said. “Anyhow, out of esteem, I’ve delayed mentioning my most recent discovery. Now, though, several well-documented recent events have made it possible to broach the subject.”
Their martinis arrived.
“What thubject?” Leaning forward in unstarched khakis, Opalith was a starching creature, alert and lissome.
Ossie turned his gaze upon his crystalline gin and recalled the matter at hand. “Have any of you all been reading the World or the Tribune, or watching the television newscasts?”
Except for Sammy Flashing Plains, who eschewed the media of the technocracy, they had indeed.
“Then,” Ossie continued, “you’ve no doubt heard of the appearance, in diverse parts of the world, of sudden geological outcroppings.”
“The invisible ones?” Opalith fingered her alluring tresses.
Ossie Safire nodded.
“It isn’t a hoax,” Ossie said. “I’ve found one myself, one hundred and thirteen miles from here.” He told his skeptical pals of the unsparkling on Rowdy Al LeFever’s ranch and of how he had bumped his nose. Not one whit did he embellish, but he did refrain from mentioning that the invisible rock had communicated telepathically with him. (Well, almost communicated.) By way of epilogue he said, “Now there’ve been reports of similar anomalies as far away as Jerez, Spain, and as close as Dubuque, Iowa. Nine in all, there’ve been.”
“I can add a tenth,” said Sammy Flashing Plains, “but the report will be the most recent and the sighting the most ancient.”
“Explain yourself, you indigent aborigine,” said Ignatius Clayborne.
“That’s indigenous,” Sammy Flashing Plains said. “Which, in conjunction with aborigine, is redundant.” He made his martini disappear. “Many years ago, when I was little more than what Clay would call a papoose, I saw just such an unsparkling as Ossie has described—a flicker on the sage-grown prairie. Little rib-ringed coyote that I was, I ran home shouting, ‘The plains are flashing, O my mother! The plains are flashing, O my father!’”
“Is this a retelling of the Chicken Little story?” Ignatius asked.
“No,” Sammy said. “Incidentally, the proper name of that story isn’t ‘Chicken Little,’ but ‘Chicken Licken,’ a fact having importance because of the incantatory nature of the poem’s rhymes. These reports of invisible outcroppings may spell for us the same sort of disaster that overtook the protagonist of the nursery fable.”
“We’ll all by eaten by a fox?” Opalith Magmani said.
“Of course not,” said Sammy, “but it’s astute of you to recall the ending. What I suggest is that the incantatory nature of these reports may dull us to another possibility. Expecting a political catastrophe, we may fall prey to a totally different disaster—just as Chicken Licken, fearing skyfall, winds up as a fox’s dinner. An important contrast does exist, however.”
“Do tell,” said Ignatius.
“Chicken Licken’s error lay in supposing a universal catastrophe when she and her friends succumbed to a personal one. Our error may lie in assuming the collapse of a few local governments when the impending disaster will destroy everything.”
“How fashionably gloomy,” said Opalith.
Ossie Safire said, “What about your finding as a child, Sammy?”
“My father tried to dose me with castor oil, but my mother stopped him. She said that I’d seen only a bit of mica or tin can. I explained that I’d seen the unsparkling above the ground instead of on it, but they wouldn’t listen. I went back to the prairie and found a jutting point of solidified air at waist height. I cupped my hands around it, but couldn’t budge it. Finally, I draped my blood-red headcloth over it as a marker.
“When I returned the next day, my headcloth had blown into the sagebrush. I picked it out and, this time, tied it around the flashing crystal outcropping. But the cloth split and fell away again, for the rock inside my tiny bundle had … grown. I kept trying to capture it with cloth, but at last the rock point cut through the blanket that I had taken from my parents’ bed. Then, friends, it spoke with an inside-out tongue of fire in my brain, saying Tittle Smindian, you mayan’t never trapture a manipphany of the Nu Cree Nayschun.”
“Come again,” said Opalith Magmani.
“That’s what it said, inside me. I remember because I never thought like that, and still don’t. My father spanked me for spoiling the blanket. The next day the outcropping vanished. Today I am a lapidary, a gemstone dealer, and an Indian even yet.”
“An interesting story,” said Ignatius. “Do you contend it has some bearing on what Ossie has told us about his own find?”
“Two plus two,” said Sammy Flashing Plains.
Ossie Safire, grateful that Sammy had corroborated his account, downed his drink. He was also grateful that Sammy had recited the unseen outcropping’s telepathic nonsense, for the recitation made him feel less crazy.
At least until Sammy said, “Twenty years ago, it wasn’t time for what is going to happen to happen. Now, my friends, it is.”
3
A bold quartet, they sallied out
Like buccaneers or reivers
To ask whose exegesis was most stout:
Why, Rowdy Al LeFever’s!
Boomer Flats Ballads
Back out to the Oklahoma prairie they went, to the arroyo where Ossie had made his find—Ossie, Ignatius, Opalith, and Sammy Flashing Plains. Into the early-morning, blast-furnace swelter, one week later, they boomed along in Miss Magmani’s jeepster. (Don’t blame me if you prefer Ms. for the ladies. The Miss was Opalith’s own idea, and she insisted upon it.) How that woman could wheel a vehicle. Her driving made poor Ossie wish for a headache powder or a fortifying tot of vodka.
If he hadn’t known before, Rowdy Al now knew of his ownership of an invisible anomaly. He had invited four members of the Greater Tulsa Diggers’ Consortium to visit his place to examine it. He would be waiting for them. And he was.
“Howdy!” Opalith hailed him, jouncing her friends up the drive to Rowdy Al’s lopsided yellow house.
Out to the arroyo the rancher led them on foot. “Still here,” he said as the five of them stared up at the big unflashing rock. He took off his Stetson, mopped his brow, and beheld the gin-clear Oklahoma sky. “A very quiet anomaly,” he said.
“They’re all over now,” Sammy Flashing Plains said. “From the Kirghis Steppe to the African Sahel to Ty Ty, Georgia, U.S.A.”
“Twelve sightings in all,” Ossie said. “Thanks for not publicizing this one.”
“Well,” said Rowdy Al, “it’s been behaving itself.”
“Any new developments?” asked Ignatius Clayborne.
Rowdy Al pointed. “I think there’s another one out in the middle of the pasture beyond those cottonwoods.”
“Why do you think that?” said Opalith.
“The cattle have been crawling on their knee joints to lick the salt licks out there, and they don’t usually do that. Also, it sort of winks.”
“Have two outcroppings been ‘seen’ this close together before?” asked Ignatius.
“I don’t think so,” said Sammy Flashing Plains. “To avert catastrophe, we must determine the composition of these invisible rocks.”
“Set up camp out here,” Rowdy Al said. “Stay as long as you like.” He pivoted on the arroyo bank and walked off toward his bric-a-brac-infested house. The whiteness of the day cloaked his dwindling bulk with a hieratic haze. O, did that man glow!
The others set up camp halfway between the hardness that Ossie had discovered and the one that Rowdy Al had hinted at. They soon verified that the second outcropping did indeed exist, a veritable floating mountain of invisibility, which they christened The-Anomaly-As-Big-As-The-Ritz. (Ossie’s discovery, by the way, they called the Hope-It’s-A-Diamond outcropping.) Its bottom hovered four feet from the ground, and it had the circumference of an oil-storage tank. Its height, no hawks having flown by, they could not even guess at.
Ignatius Clayborne set out stakes beneath the perimeter of The-Anomaly-As-Big-As-The-Ritz, strung the stakes together, and knotted orange rags to the string. He moved the offending salt blocks so that LeFever’s cattle would not crawl over his pickets to get their licks in. Meanwhile, Opalith took soil samples from the area inside the flags, and Sammy circled the unseen rock trying to chip a specimen or two from its sides. Shivered wrists were all he got for his pains.
Ossie Safire hopped down into the arroyo and discovered that the Hope-It’s-A-Diamond outcropping had grown. It had lengthened in parallel with the gully beneath it. If it kept growing, one day it would abut on the one where his friends labored. (The arroyo wound that way, you see.) Mazy walls of glass would divide the ranch as surely a
s barbed wire already did.
The moon jumped up, and they all retired to their stuffy tent. “Not a good start,” Ignatius said. “What do you think The Ritz and the Hope-It’s-A-Diamond are—invisible rocks, solidified air, or a flash-frozen liquid?”
“In this setting,” Opalith said, “I would call those equally accurate, or inaccurate, ways of saying the same thing. The anomalies—which we cannot see, hear, or taste—occupy space, they encroach, and they grow. What does it matter if we call them rocks, air, or water?”
“Well, I’m a geologist,” Ignatius said huffily.
“We can hear the anomalies,” Ossie put in. “They ping when you tap them.” He neglected to add that sometimes the rocks thought things at you.
“Still,” said Opalith, “it’s their space-occupying that frightens us. That, and their sudden popping into being, and their ability to grow.”
That night, Sammy Flashing Plains rocked over his knees like a trance-taken medicine man. When Opalith dialed down the gas lanterns, the glowing gargoyles on the green tent walls faded from view. Talk mumbled off into sleep, and the night flowed down like embalming lava.
The next day, the four diggers resolved to delimit the transparent stones in space. The rag-hung cordons beneath The-Anomaly-As-Big-As-The-Ritz did this job inexactly. The flags kept them from banging into it, and the cows from crawling, but did not go far toward clarifying dimensions. Because the eroded gulch under the Hope-It’s-A-Diamond made it hard to work there, the friends concentrated on The Ritz and discussed means and methods of plumbing its mysteries.
Ignatius said pontifically, “We must make this prairie-pent Gibraltar visible,” and sent Opalith—who would allow no one else to drive her jeepster—to the hardware store in Boomer Flats to buy 1) an extension ladder, 2) a gallon of paint, and 3) a plastic bottle with a spray attachment.
“I got green,” Opalith told Ignatius upon her return. “Your favorite.”
Fortunately, he had asked for only one gallon because, once Ignatius had climbed the ladder and begun to spray, the paint—like the dust that Ossie had hurled on his first morning in the arroyo—would not adhere. Emerald droplets struck The Ritz’s invisible surface and immediately slid or blew away. Ignatius, a many-freckled man, came down the ladder with a profane lack of grace.
Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories Page 26