Stories by R. A. Lafferty Vol 1 Part 36

And the child came tumbling out of the tall rocks of Doolen's Mountain, leaping down the flanks of the hill as though she was a waterfall. And both the men laughed "Your Ginny is the weirdest cacophony I can imagine, Dismas," Dr.

Minden said. "It scares me, and I love it. Your daughter is the most remarkable creature in the world.

"Talk to us, Ginny! I wish I could fix it that you would be four years old forever."

"Oh, I've fixed it myself, Dr. Minden," Ginny sang as she came to them with a movement that had something of the breathless grace of a gazelle and something of the scuttering of a little wild pig. "I use a trick like the hoodoo woman did. She ate water-puppy eggs. She never got any older, you know."

"What happened to her, Gin?" Dr. Minden asked Ginny Dismas.

"Oh, after a while she got gray-headed and wrinkled. And after another while her teeth and hair fell out, and then she died. But she never did get any older. She had everybody fooled. I got everybody fooled too."

"I know that you have, Ginny, in very many ways. Well, have you eaten water-puppy eggs to get no older?"

"No. I can't find out where they lay them, Dr. Minden. I've got my own trick that's even better."

"Do you know, Ginny, that when you really cut loose you are the loudest little girl in the world?"

"I know it. I won it yesterday. Susanna Shonk said that she was the loudest. We hollered for an hour. Susanna's home with a sore throat today, but there isn't anything the matter with me. Hey, has that house ever been there before?"

"That house? But it's our own house, Ginny," her father, Dr. Dismas,said softly. "You've lived in it all your life. You're in and out of it a thousand times a day."

"I never saw it before," Ginny said. "I better go see what it looks like on the inside." And Ginny hurtled into the house that she was in and out of a thousand times a day.

"I'll tell you a secret, Dismas," Dr. Minden said. "Your small daughter Ginny is not really beautiful."

"Everybody thinks that she is, Minden."

"I know. They all believe her the most beautiful child in the world.

So did I till a moment ago. So will I again in minute when I see her come out of the house. But her contemporary, my small son Krios, told me how to look at her; and I do so. For an instant, out of her incessant movement, I forced myself to see her as stopped cold, at rest. She is grotesque, Dismas.

If ever she pauses, she is grotesque."

"No, she is like ultimate matter. Existence and motion are the same thing for her, and there cannot be the one without the other. But I've never seen her stopped, even in sleep. She's the liveliest sleeper anyone ever watched -- a laughing and singing sleeper. Her mother calls her our beautiful goblin."

"Exactly, she's a goblin, a monkey, a kobald. She's even grown a little pot like one of them. Dismas, she has a monkey face and bandy legs and a goblin's own pot."

"No, she hasn't! There she goes! Out of the house and up into the rocks again, and she's so beautiful that it shakes me. Four years old -- and she can still look at the world and say, 'Funny I never saw you before!'

Yes, I've got a multidimensional daughter, Minden. Also a neighbor who is either deep or murky. You keep feeding me s.n.a.t.c.hes of that paper of yours so I suppose that you want to excite my curiosity about it. And the t.i.tle -- The Contingent Mutation. What is? Who is?"

"We are, Dismas. We are contingent, conditional, temporary, makeshift and improbable in our species. Mine is a paper badly conceived and badly put together, and I shiver at the reception that it will get. But it is about man, who is also badly conceived and bad]y put together. The proposition of my paper is that man is descended, recently and by incredible mutation, from the most impossible of ancestors, Xauenanthropus or Xauen Man. The answer of that descent scares me."

"Minden, are you out of your mind? Where is the descent? Where is the mutation? The Xauens were already men. No descent and no mutation was required. The finds are all fifteen years old. One look at Xauen, and everybody saw instantly that the Neanderthals and Grimaldi and Cro-Magnon were all close cousins of the same species -- ourselves. They were the template, the master key. They unriddled every riddle. We saw why the chin or lack of chin was only a racial characteristic. We saw it all. There is nothing to distinguish the Xauens from ourselves except that their adults were badly made ganglers, and probably unhealthy. The Xauens are modern men.

They are ourselves. There is nothing revolutionary about stuttering out fifteen-year-old certainties, Minden. I thought your paper was to be a giant stride. But it is only stepping off a two-inch curb."

"Yes, an abysmal step off a two-inch curb, Dismas, backward and around the world, and standing on one's head and turning into a howling monkey in the process. It isn't a simple step. If I am correct, Dismas, then our descent from the Xauens was by an incredible, sudden and single mutation; one that has been mieunderstood both as to effect and direction."

"I've never been quite satisfied with the Xauens myself. There is something misshapen about the whole business. Of course we know the Xauens only by the skeletons of ninety-six children, three adolescents, and two adults. We are bound to find more."

"If we do, we will find them in the same proportion. Oh, we will not recognize them at all. But does it not seem an odd proportion to you? How come there were so many kids? And how come -- think about this a long, longtime, will you? -- that eighty-six of those kids were of the some size and apparently of the same age? The Xauen skeletons came out of nine digs, close together both in location and age. And of the total of one hundred and one skeletons, eighty-six of them are of four-year-old kids, Sure the Xauens are modern man! Sure they are ourselves chin to chin. But eighty-six four-year-old kids out of a hundred and one people is not a modern proportion."

"You ex~ain it then, Minden. I suppose that your paper attempts to.

Oh, scatter-boned ancestors! Here come the religious nuts!"

Drs. Dismas and Minden had been sitting in the open parkland in campesino chairs, in their own fine neighborhood between Doolen's Mountain and the lower brushland. Dr. Dismas drew a hog-nosed pistol from under his arm at the sight of the nuts who had shuffled up that way several times before.

"Be off!" Dismas barked as the nuts crowded and shuffled up closer from the lower brushland. "There's nothing around here you want. You've been here a dozen times with your silly questions.

"No, only three times," the nut leader said. He was clean-shaven and short-haired in the old manner still affected by fanatics, and he had fool written in every line of him. "It's a simple thing we seek," the leader sniffled. "We only want to find the woman and kill her. I believe that you could help us find the woman."

"There is no woman here except my wife!" Dr. Dismas said angrily.

"You have said yourselves that she isn't the woman. Be gone now, and don't come back here again."

"But everything that we know tells us that the woman is somewhere near this place," the nut leader insisted. "She is the woman who will bear the weird seed."

"Oh, well, there are some who say that my daughter Ginny is a weird seed. Be off now."

"We know Ginny. She comes down sometimes to mock us. Ginny is not the seed, but there is something of it about her. Ginny is born and already four years old. The seed that we are seeking to kill is still in the womb.

Are you sure that your wife --"

"d.a.m.nit, do you want a public pregnancy test? No, my wife is not!"

Dr. Dismas shot a couple of times around the feet of the nut leader, and the whole gaggle of the nuts shuffled off again. "It is only a little thing we seek, to find and kill the woman," they snuffled as they went.

"They may be right, Dismas," Dr. Minden said. "I've been expecting the weird seed myself. I believe that it may already have appeared several times, and such nuts have killed it several times. The contingent mutation can come unhinged at any time. It always could. And when it does, the human world can well pa.s.s away. But this time they won't be able to find the woman to kill her."

"This is fishier than Edward's Ichthyology, as we used to say in school. I begin to understand why you're afraid of the reception that your paper might get. And you, as well as I, seem to have developed a little weird seed lately."

"Yes, my young and my older son are both acting most peculiar lately, particularly in their relation to the Dismas family. My son Dall has been jilted by your daughter Agar, or is it the other way around? Or have they both been jilted by your small daughter Ginny? As far as I can arrive at it, Ginny told them that that sort of stuff is out, no longer necessary, not even wanted on their parts. She is obsoleting them, she says.

"And my four-year-old son Krios is about out of his mind over your Ginny. He is so advanced in some ways and so r.e.t.a.r.ded in others. It seems as though he grew unevenly and then stopped growing. I worry about him."

"Yes. Ginny has acquired several more small boyfriends now. She says that you break the fort with a big ram and you break the ram at the same time and throw it away. And then you find better tools to take it over. Idon't know what she's talking about. But Krios is jealous as only a pa.s.sionate four-year-old can be."

"Krios says that Ginny is bad and she made him bad. He says that he doesn't know the words for the way they were bad, but that he will go to h.e.l.l for it."

"I had no idea that children were still taught about h.e.l.l."

"They aren't. But they have either intuitive knowledge of the place, or a continuing childhood folk legend of it. Oh, here comes bad Ginny and her mother, and they both have that stubborn look on them. You have two strong women in your house, at least. I wish that Agar were; for my son Dall isn't, and one of them should be."

Ginny and her mother Sally came hand in hand with the air of something needing to be settled.

"I want to be fair about this, Father," Ginny called solidly. "What I like about me is that I am always so fair."

"That's a1so what I like about you, Ginny," said Dr. Dismas, "and what is the argument?"

"All I asked of Mother is that she make me three thousand seven hundred and eighty peanut b.u.t.ter sandwiches. Isn't that a fair request?"

"I'm not sure that it is, Ginny," Dr. Dismas said. "It would take you a long time to eat that many."

"Of course it will, twelve hundred and sixty days. But that makes only three a day for the time I have to stay hidden in my nest up in the rocks. I figured that out by myself without paper. A lot of kids that have been to school already can't figure as well as I can."

"I know. A precocious daughter is a mixed blessing," her father said.

"Oh, Ginny, you're going to get a paddling," her mother said. "I made you three of them, and you said that you weren't even hungry for them."

"Father, who is this woman who talks to me so brusquely?" Ginny demanded.

"She is your mother, Ginny. You have been with her every day of your life and before. You have just come out of the house with her, and you still stand hand in hand with her."

"Funny I never saw her before," Ginny said. "I don't believe that this woman is my mother at all. Well, I will get my servants to make the sandwiches for me. Serpents kill you, woman! -- Oh, no, no, n.o.body touches me like that!"

Musical screaming! Wailing of a resonance too deep for so small an instrument, as Ginny was dragged off by her mother to get paddled. Howling to high Heaven, and the plainting of wild hogs and d.a.m.ned goblins!

"She is in good voice," Dr. Minden said. "When she speaks of her servants, she means your daughter Agar and my son Dall. It scares me, for I almost know what she means. It is eerie that two compatible young people say they will not marry because a four-year-old child forbids them to do it. It scares me still more when I begin to understand the mechanism at work."

"What is the mechanism, Minden?"

"The mutational inhibitions. It's quite a tangled affair. Do you remember the Screaming Monkeys of boondocks Rhodesia twenty years ago?"

"Vague1y. Bothersome little destructive monkeys that had to he hunted down and killed -- hunted down by a sort of religious crusade, as I remember it. Yes, a mutation I suppose. A sudden wildness appearing in a species. What is the connection?"

"Dismas, they were the first, the initial probe that fai1ed. Others are on the way, and one of them will no fail. The story is that the religious crusaders said that no human child could be born while the howling monkeys flourished, for the monkeys themselves were human children. Well, they were. Well, no they weren't children. And they weren't human. But, in a way, they had been both. Or at least --"

"Minden, do you know what you do mean?""I hardly do, Dismas. Here come the 'servants.'"

Dall Minden and Agar Dismas drove up in a little roustabout car and stopped.

"What is this nonsense I hear that you two are not going to get married?" Dr. Dismas demanded.

"Not unless Ginny changes her mind, Father," Agar said. "Oh, don't ask us to explain it. We don't understand it either."

"You are a pair of d.a.m.ned useless drones," Dismas growled.

"Don't say that, Dismas," Dr. Minden gasped. "Everything begins to scare me now. 'Drones' has a technical meaning in this case."

"Ginny has just suffered an ignominy past bearing," Agar grinned.

She was a nice pleasant girl. "Now she's sulking in her cave up in Doolen's Mountain and has sent word for us to come at once."

"How has she sent word?" Dr. Dismas demanded. "You two have just driven up."

"Oh, don't ask us to explain, Father. She sends us word when she wants us. We don't understand it either. Well go up on foot."

"Where is all this going to end?" Dr. Dismas asked when the two grinning young drones had left them and were ambling up the mountain.

"I don't know, Dismas," Minden told him. "But I believe it may as well begin with a verse: Salamanders do it, Tadpoles and newts do it.

Why can't me and you do it?

"It's a verse that the four-year-olds have been chanting, and you may not be tuned in on them. And the peculiar thing is that the salamanders and newts and tadpoles are doing it now, more than ever before. It's worldwide. See Higgleton's recent paper if you don't take my word for it."

"Oh, great blithering biologists! What are the squigglers doing more than ever before?"

"Engaging in neotic reproduction, of course. In many pocket areas, tadpoles have been reproducing as tadpoles for several years now, and the adult frog species is disappearing. There have always been cases of it, of course, but now it is becoming a pattern. The same is true of the newts and salamanders. And remember that all three are like man, contingent mutations.

But how do the four-year-old children know about it when it is still one of the best-kept secrets of the biologists?... Here comes my wife. Is it more family trouble, Clarinda?"

"Oh, Krios has locked himself in the bathroom, and he won't come out or answer. He's been acting abominable all morning. Have you that emergency key you made?"

"Here. Now get the boy out, whip him gently but painfully. then explain to him that we love him very much and that his troubles are our troubles. Then get dinner. This family here never eats, unless it is peanut b.u.t.ter sandwiches, and has not thought to ask me to dine with them. Get back next door and with it, Clarinda. and stop bubbling."

"There is something really bothering Krios," Clarinda Minden bubbled yet, but she got herself back next door, "Where shall we take it up, Dismas?" Doctor Minden asked. "With the howling monkeys of boondocks Rhodesia who may once have been human children?

But n.o.body believes that. With the neotic salamanders and newts and pollywogs? With the Xauens who were either our grandparents or our grandchildren? Or with ourselves?"

"Roost on the Xauens a while," Dr. Dismas said. "You didn't quite finish your screed on them."

"Humans descend from the Xauens. Australopithecus, no. Sinanthropus, no. They were creatures of another line. But Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, Grimaldi and ourselves are all of one species, and we descend from theXauens. It is not true, however, that we have only one hundred and one skeletons of the Xauens. We have more than twenty thousand of them, but most of them are called 0uezzane monkeys."

"Minden, you're crazy."

"I am talking about the three-foot-tall, big-headed running monkeys who were mature and full grown at four years of age and very old at fourteen. They threw a few sports, steers and freemartins, who pa.s.sed the p.u.b.erty age without effect and continued to grow. They were gangling drones, servants of the active species, and of course sterile. They were the one in one hundred occurrence and of no importance. And one day they bred, set up a mutational inhibition against the normal; and mankind -- the privileged mutation -- was born.

"The Onezzane monkeys, of whom the Xauens were the transitional state, were the same as the howling monkeys of boondocks Rhodesia -- going in the other direction. They had no speech, they had no fire, and they made no tools. Then one morning they were the Xauens, and the next morning they were humans. They pa.s.sed all the highly developed apes in an instant. They were the privileged mutation, which is not, I believe, permanent.

"Dismas, the one hundred and one recognized Xauen skeletons that we possess are not of ninety-six children (eighty-six of them apparent four-year-olds), three adolescents and two adults. They are of ten infants and children, eighty-six adults, two mutants and three filial-twos.

"Let's take it from the flank. A few years ago, a biologist amused himself by making a table of heartbeat life lengths. All the mammals but one, he found, live about the same number of heartbeats, the longer-living species having correspondingly slower heartbeats. But one species, man, lives four or five times as long as he should by this criterion. I forget whether the biologist implied that this makes man a contingent species living on borrowed time. I do imply it. In any case, since the biologist was also involved in science fiction, his implications were not taken seriously.

"From the other flank. Even before Freud there were studies made of false p.u.b.erty, the sudden hot interest and activity that appears about age four and then goes away for another ten years. It's been many times guessed that back in our ancestry our true p.u.b.erty was at such an early age."

"Minden, no species can change noticeably in less than fifty thousand years."

"Dismas, it can change in between three and nine months, depending on the direction traveled. Here they come back! Well, drones, did you settle Ginny down? Where are you going now?"

Agar Dismas and Dall Minden had sauntered down from Doolen's Mountain.

"We're going to get four hundred and seventy-three loaves of bread and four hundred and seventy-three jars of peanut b.u.t.ter," Agar said rather nervously.

"Yes, Ginny says to use Crispy-Crusty bread," Dall Minden detailed.

"She says it has sixteen slices to a loaf, so we can make eight sandwiches to a loaf and to a jar. There will be four sandwiches left over, and Ginny says we can have them for our work. She's going to stay in her cave for twelve hundred and sixty days. She says it will take that long to get her thing going good so n.o.body can bust it up. I think she's a numerologist at heart. This is going to take more than four hundred dol1ars. That's more than Agar and myself have saved up together. Ginny says to do it, though, even if we have to steal the money for it. And she says to be quick about it."