Stories by R. A. Lafferty Vol 1 Part 29

Szild didn't know what he did with all his money. He paid little attention to it, and he suspected that he hadn't received nearly as much of it as had his nervous partners.

He spent it manfully. He threw it away. It gave him a dour pleasure to go from billionaire to b.u.m. Then Arpad Szild was down to his last San Simeon Duro.

He laughed. Something had been missing from his life. Now it might be back. His gold was gone. So what to do?

He went up for some more.

Up to Venenatus the poison asteroid that would radiate a man's flesh off?

Sure. Szild didn't believe a lot of that stuff.

Patrick T. K. was alone in his shop when there entered a hooded man with a small heavy package.

"I was beginning to think I would see you no more," said Patrick. "I was told that that traffic had ended. I should have known better. I believe you are the same man, my first supplier of it, though I cannot see your face."

"I have none," said the hooded man. "How much for this?"

"Oh, ten dollars."

"A pound?"

"No. The lot. I figure about eight cents a pound. That's as high as I can go on contaminated gold. Oh sure, I can clean it. It's only the smart men who say it can't be done. It will even leave a handy profit for myself, though not for you. Gold's about done for."

"That isn't much. I have more of the stuff, a fair small load."

"I can take about this much a week. Can you live on ten dollars a week?"

"Yes. I don't eat any longer -- no stomach. I don't sleep. I just keep moving. I can live on that."

"And when your fair small load is gone?"

"I go up for another."

"They say n.o.body goes there and returns."

"I do. But it isn't crowded there now."

"I've a feeling that comes to me rarely. I'd like to help you. Are you blind?"

"I believe so. I have pooled what is left of each of my senses, and somehow it serves. I need no help. I'm the only happy man in the world, the one who found the pot of gold. They can't take that from me. I'll go get it forever."

"After you're dead?"

"Oh, yes. I've known s.p.a.ce ghosts. Now I'll be one. It isn't any one line you cross. I live in delirium, of course. It doesn't blunt pain, but it does change the viewpoint. On my last trip down, after I knew that I was already dead, that both I and the gold were ghosts, it was easier. Oh, those are long nights in purgatory I tell you, but I'm not irrevocably d.a.m.ned.

There's still the gold, you see."

"You're a happier man than I am. So pa.s.s it over."

"Here it is."

But when Szild pa.s.sed the heavy small package to Patrick, he did it with a hand that was stark splintered hones with only a little black flesh around the heel of it.

Patrick T. K. raised an eyebrow at this, but he didn't raise it very high. A sly gold dealer meets all types.

AMONG THE HAIRY EARTHMEN

There is one period of our World History that has aspects so afferent from anything that went before and after that we can only gaze back on those several hundred years and ask: "Was that ourselves who behaved so?"

Well, no, as a matter of fact, it wasn't. It was beings of another sort who visited us briefly anid who acted so gloriously and abominably.

This is the way it was: The Children had a Long Afternoon free. They could go to any of a dozen wonderful places, but they were already in one.

Seven of them -- full to the craw of wonderful places -- decided to go to Eretz.

"Children are attracted to the oddest and most shambling things,"

said the Mothers. "Why should they want to go to Eretz?"

"Let them go," said the Fathers. "Let them see -- before they be gone -- one of the few simple peoples left. We ourselves have become a contrived and compromised people. Let the Children be children for half a day."

Eretz was the Planet of the Offense, and therefore it was to be (perhaps it recently had been) the Planet of the Rest.i.tution also. But in no other way was it distinguished. The Children had received the tradition of Eretz as children receive all traditions -- like lightning.

Hobble, Michael Goodgrind, Ralpha, Lonnie, Laurie, Bea and Joan they called themselves as they came down on Eretz -- for these were their idea of Eretzi names. But they could have as many names as they wished in their games.

An anomalous intrusion of great heat and force! The rocks ran like water where they came down, and there was formed a scarp-pebble enclave.

It was all shanty country and shanty towns on Eretz -- clumsy hills, badly done plains and piedmonts, ragged fields, uncleansed rivers, whole weedpatches of provinces -- not at all like Home. And the Towns! Firenze, Praha, Venezia, Londra, Colonia, Gant, Roma -- why, they were nothing but towns made out of stone and wood! And these were the greatest of the towns of Eretz, not the meanest.

The Children exploded into action. Like children of the less transcendent races running wild on an ocean beach for an afternoon, they ran wild over continents. They scattered. And they took whatever forms first came into their minds.

Hobble -- dark and smoldering like crippled Vulcan.

Michael Goodgrind -- a broken-nosed bull of a man. How they all howled when he invented that first form!

Ralpha -- like young Mercury.

And Lonnie -- a tall giant with a golden beard.

Laurie was fire, Bea was light, Joan was moon-darkness.

But in these, or in any other forms they took, you'd always know that they were cousins or brethren.

Lonnie went pure Gothic. He had come onto it at the tail end of the thing and he fell in love with it.

"I am the Emperorl" he told the people like giant thunder. He pushed the Emperor Wenceslas off the throne and became Emperor.

"I am the true son of Charles, and you had thought me dead," he told the people. "I am Sigismund." Sigismund was really dead, but Lonnie became Sigismund and reigned, taking the wife and all the castles of Wenceslas. He grabbed off gangling old forts and mountain-rooks and raised howling Eretzi armies to make war. He made new castles. He loved the tall sweeping things and raised them to a new height. Have you never wondered that the last of those castles -- in the late afternoon of the Gothic -- were the tallest and oddest? One day the deposed Wencesas came back, and he was possessed of a new power.

"Now we will see who is the real Emperor!" the new Wenceslas cried like a rising storm.

They crashed their tnvo forces and broke clown each other's bridges and towns and stole the high ladies from each other's strongholds. They wrestled like boys. But they wrestled with a continent.

Lonnie (who was Sigismund) learned that the Wenceslas he battled was Michael Goodgrind wearing a contrived Emperor body. So they fought harder.

There came a new man out of an old royal line.

"I am Jobst," the new man cried. "I will show you two princelings who is the real Emperor!"

He fought the two of them with overwhelming verve. He He raised fast-striking Eretzi armies, and used tricks that only a young Mercury would know. He was Ralpha, entering the game as the third Emperor. But the two combined against him and broke him at Constance.

They smashed Germany and France and Italy like a clutch of eggs.

Never had there been such spirited conflict. The Eretzi were amazed by it all, but they were swept into it; it was the Eretzi who made up the armies.

Even today the Eretzi or Earthers haven't the details of it right in their histories. When the King of Aragon, for an example, mixed into it, they treated him as a separate person. They did not know that Michael Goodgrind was often the King of Aragon, just as Lonnie was often the Duke of Flanders. But, played for itself, the Emperor game would be quite a limited one. Too limited for the children.

The girls played their own roles. Laurie claimed to be thirteen different queens. She was consort of all three Emperors in every one of their guises, and she also dabbled with the Eretzi, She was the wanton of the group.

Bea liked the Grande Dame part and the Lady Bountiful bit. She was very good on Great Renunciations. In her different characters, she beat paths from thrones to nunneries and back again; and she is now known as five different saints. Every time you turn to the Common of the Ma.s.s of Holy Women who are Neither Virgins nor Martyrs, you are likely to meet her.

And Joan was the dreamer who may have enjoyed the Afternoon more than any of them.

Laurie made up a meodrama -- Lucrezia Borgia and tne Poison Ring.

There is an advantage in doing these little melodramas on Eretz. You can have as many characters as you wish -- they come free. You can have them act as extravagantly as you desire -- who is there to object to it? Lucrezia was very well done, as children's burlesques go, and the bodies were strewn from Napoli to Vienne. The Eretzi play with great eagerness any convincing part offered them, and they go to their deaths quite willingly if the part calls for it.

Lonnie made one up called The p.a.w.n-Broker and th Pope. It was in the grand manner, all about the Medici family, and had some very funny episodes in the fourth as Lonnie, who was vain of his acting ability, played Medici parts in five succeeding generations. The drama left more corpses than did the Lucrezia piece, but the killings weren't sudden or showy; the girls had a better touch at the b.l.o.o.d.y stuff.

Ralpha did a Think Piece called One, Two, Three -- Infinity. In its presentation he put all the rest of the Children to roast grandly in h.e.l.l; he filled up Purgatory with Eretzi-type people -- the dullards; and for the Paradise he did burlesque of Home. The Eretzi use a cropped version Ralpha's piece and call it the Divine Comedy, leaving out a lot of fun.

Bea did a poetic one named the Witches' Bonfire. All Children spent many a happy evening with that one, and they burnt twenty thousand witches.

There was something satisfying about those Eretzi autumnal twilights with the scarlet and the frosty fields and the kine lowing in the meadows the evening smell of witches burning. Bea's was really a pastoral piece. All the Children ranged far except Hobble. Hobble (who was Vulcan) played with his sick toys. He play at Ateliers and Smithies, at Furnaces and Carousels. And often the Children came and watched his work, and joined in while.

They played with the gla.s.s from the furnaces. They goldtoned goblets, iridescent gla.s.s poems, figures spheres, goblin pitchers, gla.s.s music boxes, gargoyle heads, dragon chargers, princess salieras, figurines of lovers, So many things to make of gla.s.s! To make, and to smash when made!

But some of the things they exchanged as gifts instead of smashing them -- gla.s.s birds and horses, fortune-telling globes that swowed changing people and scenes within, tuned chiming b.a.l.l.s that rang like bells, gla.s.s cats that sparkled when stroked, wolves and bears, witches that flew.

The Eretzi found some of these things that the Children discared.

They studied them and imitated them.

And again, in the interludes of their other games, the Children came back to Hobble's shops where he sometimes worked with looms. They made costumes of wool and linen and silk. They made trains and cloaks and mantles, all the things for their grand masquerades. They fabricated tapestries and rugs and wove in all sorts of scenes: vistas of Home and of Eretz, people and peac.o.c.ks, fish and cranes, dingles and dromedaries, larks and lovers. They set their creations in the strange ragged scenery of Eretz and in the rich contrived gardens of Home. A spark went from the Children to their weaving so that none could tell where they left off and their creations began.

Then they left poor Hobble and went on to their more vital games.

There were seven of them (six, not counting the backward Hobble), but they seemed a thousand. They built themselves castles in Spain and Gardes in Languedoc. The girls played always at Intrigue, for the high pleasure of it, and to give a causus for the wars. And the wars were the things that the boys seldom tired of. It is fun to play at armies with live warriors; and the Etetzi were live... in a sense.

The Eretzi had had wars and armies and sieges long before this, but they had been aimless things. Oh, this was one field where the Eretzi needed the Children. Consider the battles that the Children engineered that afternoon: Gallipoli -- how they managed the ships in that one! The Fathers could not have maneuvered more intricately in their four-dimension chess at Home.

Adrianople, Kunovitza, Dibra, Varna, Hexamilion! It's fun just to call out the b.l.o.o.d.y names of battles.

Constantinople! That was the one where they first used the big cannon. But who cast the big cannon for the Turks there? In their histories the Eretzi say that it was a man named Orban or Urban, and that he wis Dacian, or he was Hungarian, or he was Danish. How many places did you tell them thalt you came from, Michael Goodgrind?

Belgrade, Trebizond, Morat, Blackheath, Napoli, Donach!

Capua and Taranto -- Ralpha's armies beat Michael's at both of those.

Carignola -- Lonnie foxed both Michael and Ralpha there, and nearly foxed himself. (You didn't intend it all that way, Lonnie. It was seven-cornered luck and you know it!) Garigliano where the sea was red with blood and the ships were like broken twigs on the water!

Brescia! Ravenna! Who would have believed that such things could be done with a device known as Spanish infantry?

Villalar, Milan, Pavia! Best of all, the sack of Rome! There were a dozen different games blended into that one. The Eretzi discovered new emotions in themselves there -- a deeper depravity and a higher heroism.

Siege of Florence! That one called out the Children's trick. Awonderfully well played game!

Turin, San Quentin, Moncontour, Mookerhide!

Lepanto! The great sea-siege where the castled ships broke asunder and the tall Turk Ochiali Pasha perished with all his fleet and was drowned forever. But it wasn't so forever as you might suppose, for he was Michael Goodgrind who had more bodies thin one. The fish still remember Lepanto. Ne there been such feastings.

Alcazar-Quivar! That was the last of the excellent ones -- the end of the litany. The Children left off the game. They remembered (but conveniently, and after they had worn out the fun of it) that they were forbidden to play Warfare with live soldiers. The Eretzi, left to themselves again, once more conducted their battles as dull and uninspired affairs.

You can put it to a test, now, tonight. Study the conflicts the earlier times, of this high period, and of the time that followed. You will see the difference. For a short two or three centuries you will find really well contrived battles. At before and after there is only inept.i.tude.

Often the Children played at Jealousies and raised up all the black pa.s.sions in themselves. They played at Immoralities, for there is an abiding evil in all children.

Maskingss and water-carnivals and b.a.l.l.s, and forever the emotional intrigue!

Ralpha walked downn a valley,, playing a lute and wearing the body of someone else. He luted the birds out of the trees and worked a charm on the whole countryside.

An old crone followed him ind called, "Love me when I'm old."

"Sempremai, tuttava," sang Ralpha in Eretzi or Earthian. "For Ever, For Always."

A small girl followed and called, "Love me when I'm young."

"Forever, for always," sang Ralpha.

The weirdest witch in the world followed him and called, "Love me when I'm ugly."

"For always, forever," sang Ralpha, and pulled her down on the gra.s.s. He knew that all the creatures had been Laurie playing Bodies.