While loosely categorized as a science fiction writer, R. A. Lafferty was—to use the old phrase—sui generis. His stories, with their surrealist plots and breathless pace, revel in excess, parenthetical asides, and gonzo bizarreness of every sort. Lafferty fans seldom have any clear idea where his absurdist tall tales are going, but who cares? We’re here for the ride.

Think back to the first time you read a “Lafferty.” It might have been “Land of the Great Horses,” which explains the origin of the gypsies and was included in Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking Dangerous Visions. Perhaps you happened upon “Eurema’s Dam” in an anthology of Nebula Award winners. Or just maybe you unearthed an old issue of If in a run-down charity shop and discovered “Boomer Flats,” in which a trio of eminent scientists travel to a Texas backwater in search of the missing link and there encounter hairy giants, a gorgeous woman named Crayola Catfish, a race of near immortals, and a space traveler known as the Comet.

My own introduction to Lafferty came through Gene Wolfe, back in the early 1980s. I was interviewing Wolfe about the just completed Book of the New Sun and asked him what contemporary writers he admired. He immediately answered, “R. A. Lafferty,” so I sensibly went out and bought a copy of the Ace Science Fiction Special, Nine Hundred Grandmothers. For some reason—perhaps the title attracted me—the first story I turned to was “Slow Tuesday Night.” That was enough. I read it with the same delight I had experienced when, as a teenager, I opened Lord Dunsany’s Jorkens Remembers Africa or The Most of S. J. Perelman. You know that feeling: you just want to hug yourself with pleasure, while sometimes laughing quietly or murmuring, “This is soooo good.”

No précis can convey the sheer exuberance of “Slow Tuesday Night.” Lafferty mixes courtly diction and comic-strip names, sets up expectations and immediately undercuts them, and gradually reveals a world that now seems all too familiar. In 1965, when “Slow Tuesday Night” first appeared in Galaxy, Lafferty was obviously using the American obsession with speed to critique our idolization of wealth, status, and celebrity. Read today, the story uncannily foretells the viral culture of the internet.

In its opening scene a panhandler accosts a strolling couple: “‘Preserve us this night,’ he said as he touched his hat to them, ‘and could you good people advance me a thousand dollars to be about the recouping of my fortunes?’” The diction here recalls the arch formality of W. C. Fields or Popeye’s scrounging friend J. Wellington Wimpy (“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today”). Neither the panhandler nor the couple seem to think it unusual for a beggar to ask for a thousand dollars. We soon learn why: after removing the “Abebaios block” from our brains, people found that “things that had once taken months and years now took only minutes and hours. A person could have one or several pretty intricate careers within an eight-hour period.”

Soon everything—absolutely everything—goes much, much faster, which also means that nothing lasts for very long. That panhandler—his name is Basil Bagelbaker—“would be the richest man in the world within an hour and a half. He would make and lose four fortunes within eight hours; and these not the little fortunes that ordinary men acquire, but titanic things.”

In the course of a single evening, Ildefonsa Impala, the most beautiful woman in the city, marries again and again. Her honeymoon with newly rich inventor Freddy Fixico is utterly kitsch—“the reticulated water of the famous falls was tinted gold; the immediate rocks had been done by Rambles; and the hills had been contoured by Spall.” After a luxurious hour, Ildefonsa consults “a trend indicator” and realizes that Freddy’s invention would soon be outmoded and his wealth gone, so she immediately divorces him. “Whom shall I marry next?” Ildefonsa asks herself on this slow Tuesday night.

Meanwhile, Basil has been wheeling and dealing in the Money Market. “He caused to collapse certain industrial empires that had grown up within the last two hours, and made a good thing of recombining their wreckage.” Naturally enough, his wife, Judy, is chosen “one of the ten best-dressed women during the frou-frou fashion period about two o’clock.” In such a mayfly world, plays and films run no longer than six minutes and Stanley Skuldugger can be voted “the top Actor-Imago of the middle hours of the night.” Having decided to produce a philosophical masterpiece, Maxwell Mouser is willing to devote an entire seven minutes to the task. He turns to “the ideas index,” sets the “activator” for the amount of wordage needed, and, for that extra bit of sparkle, switches on a “striking analogy blender” calibrated to his particular “personality-signature.” The resulting monograph quickly goes viral—“This was truly one of the greatest works of philosophy to appear during the early and medium hours of the night”—but by dawn it will already be dismissed and forgotten.

In “Slow Tuesday Night” Lafferty—politically conservative and devoutly Catholic—depicts a society of meaningless flux and impermanence, where there is “no abiding city” nor any sense of the spiritual. People surrender to the passing moment, nothing seems to matter very much, no hearts are permanently broken. Yet all this meretricious shallowness is conveyed through a simple yet brilliant conceit: if you speed up the world enough, everything starts to resemble the frenetic climax of a Keystone Kops farce.

In “Seven-Day Terror” Lafferty mentions “an untidy suite that looked as though it belonged to a drunken sultan.” That’s a wonderful simile, but also a fair description of his own gorgeous, shambolic abundance. What we love about Lafferty’s stories is the joyfulness of their telling, the playful diction, the topsy-turvy plot surprises, the knowing winks. To expect from them any logic but that of Wonderland is to miss the party. After all, as the Rabelaisian hero of “One at a Time” says, if you insist on realism and perfect sense, “you put unnatural conditions on a tale.” I’m pretty sure his creator would agree.

A panhandler intercepted the young couple as they strolled down the night street.

“Preserve us this night,” he said as he touched his hat to them, “and could you good people advance me a thousand dollars to be about the recouping of my fortunes?”

“I gave you a thousand last Friday,” said the young man.

“Indeed you did,” the panhandler replied, “and I paid you back tenfold by messenger before midnight.”

“That’s right, George, he did,” said the young woman. “Give it to him, dear. I believe he’s a good sort.”

So the young man gave the panhandler a thousand dollars, and the panhandler touched his hat to them in thanks and went on to the recouping of his fortunes.

As he went into Money Market, the panhandler passed Ildefonsa Impala, the most beautiful woman in the city.

“Will you marry me this night, Ildy?” he asked cheerfully.

“Oh, I don’t believe so, Basil,” she said. “I marry you pretty often, but tonight I don’t seem to have any plans at all. You may make me a gift on your first or second, however. I always like that.”

But when they had parted she asked herself: “But whom will I marry tonight?”

The panhandler was Basil Bagelbaker, who would be the richest man in the world within an hour and a half. He would make and lose four fortunes within eight hours; and these not the little fortunes that ordinary men acquire, but titanic things.

When the Abebaios block had been removed from human minds, people began to make decisions faster, and often better. It had been the mental stutter. When it was understood what it was, and that it had no useful function, it was removed by simple childhood metasurgery.

Transportation and manufacturing had then become practically instantaneous. Things that had once taken months and years now took only minutes and hours. A person could have one or several pretty intricate careers within an eight-hour period.

Freddy Fixico had just invented a manus module. Freddy was a Nyctalops, and the modules were characteristic of these people. The people had then divided themselves—according to their natures and inclinations—into the Auroreans, the Hemerobians, and the Nyctalops—or the Dawners, who had their most active hours from four A.M. till noon; the Day-Flies, who obtained from noon to eight P.M.; and the Night-Seers, whose civilization thrived from eight P.M. to four A.M. The cultures, inventions, markets, and activities of these three folk were a little different. As a Nyctalops, Freddy had just begun his working day at eight P.M. on a slow Tuesday night.

Freddy rented an office and had it furnished. This took one minute, negotiation, selection, and installation being almost instantaneous. Then he invented the manus module; that took another minute. He then had it manufactured and marketed; in three minutes it was in the hands of key buyers.

It caught on. It was an attractive module. The flow of orders began within thirty seconds. By ten minutes after eight every important person had one of the new manus modules, and the trend had been set. The module began to sell in the millions. It was one of the most interesting fads of the night, or at least the early part of the night.

Manus modules had no practical function, no more than had Sameki verses. They were attractive, of a psychologically satisfying size and shape, and could be held in the hands, set on a table, or installed in a module niche of any wall.

Naturally, Freddy became very rich. Ildefonsa Impala, the most beautiful woman in the city, was always interested in newly rich men. She came to see Freddy about eight-thirty. People made up their minds fast, and Ildefonsa had hers made up when she came. Freddy made his own up quickly and divorced Judy Fixico in Small Claims Court. Freddy and Ildefonsa went honeymooning to Paraiso Dorado, a resort.

It was wonderful. All of Ildy’s marriages were. There was the wonderful floodlighted scenery. The recirculated water of the famous falls was tinted gold; the immediate rocks had been done by Rambles; and the hills had been contoured by Spall. The beach was a perfect copy of that at Merevale, and the popular drink that first part of the night was blue absinthe.

But scenery—whether seen for the first time or revisited after an interval—is stirring for the sudden intense view of it. It is not meant to be lingered over. Food, selected and prepared instantly, is eaten with swift enjoyment; and blue absinthe lasts no longer than its own novelty. Loving, for Ildefonsa and her paramours, was quick and consuming; and repetition would have been pointless to her. Besides, Ildefonsa and Freddy had taken only the one-hour luxury honeymoon.

Freddy wished to continue the relationship, but Ildefonsa glanced at a trend indicator. The manus module would hold its popularity for only the first third of the night. Already it had been discarded by people who mattered. And Freddy Fixico was not one of the regular successes. He enjoyed a full career only about one night a week.

They were back in the city and divorced in Small Claims Court by nine thirty-five. The stock of manus modules was remaindered, and the last of it would be disposed to bargain hunters among the Dawners, who will buy anything.

“Whom shall I marry next?” Ildefonsa asked herself. “It looks like a slow night.”

“Bagelbaker is buying,” ran the word through Money Market, but Bagelbaker was selling again before the word had made its rounds. Basil Bagelbaker enjoyed making money, and it was a pleasure to watch him work as he dominated the floor of the Market and assembled runners and a competent staff out of the corner of his mouth. Helpers stripped the panhandler rags off him and wrapped him in a tycoon toga. He sent one runner to pay back twentyfold the young couple who had advanced him a thousand dollars. He sent another with a more substantial gift to Ildefonsa Impala, for Basil cherished their relationship. Basil acquired title to the Trend Indication Complex and had certain falsifications set into it. He caused to collapse certain industrial empires that had grown up within the last two hours, and made a good thing of recombining their wreckage. He had been the richest man in the world for some minutes now. He became so money heavy that he could not maneuver with the agility he had shown an hour before. He became a great fat buck, and the pack of expert wolves circled him to bring him down.

Very soon he would lose that first fortune of the evening. The secret of Basil Bagelbaker is that he enjoyed losing money spectacularly after he was full of it to the bursting point.

A thoughtful man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions.

“I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,” said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy.

Maxwell Mouser sent the work out to publishers, and received it back each time in about three minutes. An analysis of it and reason for rejection was always given—mostly that the thing had been done before and better. Maxwell received it back ten times in thirty minutes, and was discouraged. Then there was a break.

Ladion’s work had become a hit within the last ten minutes, and it was now recognized that Mouser’s monograph was both an answer and a supplement to it. It was accepted and published in less than a minute after this break. The reviews of the first five minutes were cautious ones; then real enthusiasm was shown. This was truly one of the greatest works of philosophy to appear during the early and medium hours of the night. There were those who said it might be one of the enduring works and even have a holdover appeal to the Dawners the next morning.

Naturally, Maxwell became very rich, and naturally Ildefonsa came to see him about midnight. Being a revolutionary philosopher, Maxwell thought that he might make some free arrangement, but Ildefonsa insisted it must be marriage. So Maxwell divorced Judy Mouser in Small Claims Court and went off with Ildefonsa.

This Judy herself, though not so beautiful as Ildefonsa, was the fastest taker in the city. She only wanted the men of the moment for a moment, and she was always there before even Ildefonsa. Ildefonsa believed that she took the men away from Judy; Judy said that Ildy had her leavings and nothing else.

“I had him first,” Judy would always mock as she raced through Small Claims Court.

“Oh that damned urchin!” Ildefonsa would moan. “She wears my very hair before I do.”

Maxwell Mouser and Ildefonsa Impala went honeymooning to Musicbox Mountain, a resort. It was wonderful. The peaks were done with green snow by Dunbar and Fittle. (Back at Money Market Basil Bagelbaker was putting together his third and greatest fortune of the night, which might surpass in magnitude even his fourth fortune of the Thursday before.) The chalets were Switzier than the real Swiss and had live goats in every room. (And Stanley Skuldugger was emerging as the top Actor-Imago of the middle hours of the night.) The popular drink for that middle part of the night was Glotzenglubber, Eve Cheese, and Rhine wine over pink ice. (And back in the city the leading Nyctalops were taking their midnight break at the Toppers’ Club.)

Of course it was wonderful, as were all of Ildefonsa’s—but she had never been really up on philosophy so she had scheduled only the special thirty-five-minute honeymoon. She looked at the trend indicator to be sure. She found that her current husband had been obsoleted, and his opus was now referred to sneeringly as Mouser’s Mouse. They went back to the city and were divorced in Small Claims Court.

The membership of the Toppers’ Club varied. Success was the requisite of membership. Basil Bagelbaker might be accepted as a member, elevated to the presidency, and expelled from it as a dirty pauper from three to six times a night. But only important persons could belong to it, or those enjoying brief moments of importance.

“I believe I will sleep during the Dawner period in the morning,” Overcall said. “I may go up to this new place, Koimopolis, for an hour of it. They’re said to be good. Where will you sleep, Basil?”

“Flop house.”

“I believe I will sleep an hour by the Midian Method,” said Burnbanner. “They have a fine new clinic. And perhaps I’ll sleep an hour by the Prasenka Process, and an hour by the Dormidio.”

“Crackle has been sleeping an hour every period by the natural method,” said Overcall.

“I did that for half an hour not long since,” said Burnbanner. “I believe an hour is too long to give it. Have you tried the natural method, Basil?”

“Always. Natural method and a bottle of red-eye.”

Stanley Skuldugger had become the most meteoric Actor-Imago for a week. Naturally he became very rich, and Ildefonsa Impala went to see him about three A.M.

“I had him first!” rang the mocking voice of Judy Skuldugger as she skipped through her divorce in Small Claims Court. And Ildefonsa and Stanley-boy went off honeymooning. It is always fun to finish up a period with an Actor-Imago who is the hottest property in the business. There is something so adolescent and boorish about them.

Besides, there was the publicity, and Ildefonsa liked that. The rumor-mills ground. Would it last ten minutes? Thirty? An hour? Would it be one of those rare Nyctalops marriages that lasted through the rest of the night and into the daylight off-hours? Would it even last into the next night as some had been known to do?

Actually it lasted nearly forty minutes, which was almost to the end of the period.

It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had run their course on the market. There had been a score of dramatic hits, three-minute and five-minute capsule dramas, and several of the six-minute long-play affairs. Night Street Nine—a solidly sordid offering—seemed to be in as the drama of the night unless there should be a late hit.

Hundred-storied buildings had been erected, occupied, obsoleted, and demolished again to make room for more contemporary structures. Only the mediocre would use a building that had been left over from the Day Fliers or the Dawners, or even the Nyctalops of the night before. The city was rebuilt pretty completely at least three times during an eight-hour period.

The period drew near its end. Basil Bagelbaker, the richest man in the world, the reigning president of the Toppers’ Club, was enjoying himself with his cronies. His fourth fortune of the night was a paper pyramid that had risen to incredible heights; but Basil laughed to himself as he savored the manipulation it was founded on.

Three ushers of the Toppers’ Club came in with firm step.

“Get out of here, you dirty bum,” they told Basil savagely. They tore the tycoon’s toga off him and then tossed him his seedy panhandler’s rags with a three-man sneer.

“All gone?” Basil asked. “I gave it another five minutes.”

“All gone,” said a messenger from Money Market. “Nine billion gone in five minutes, and it really pulled some others down with it.”

“Pitch the busted bum out!” howled Overcall and Burnbanner and the other cronies.

“Wait, Basil,” said Overcall. “Turn in the President’s Crosier before we kick you downstairs. After all, you’ll have it several times again tomorrow night.”

The period was over. The Nyctalops drifted off to sleep clinics or leisure-hour hide-outs to pass their ebb time. The Auroreans, the Dawners, took over the vital stuff.

Now you would see some action! Those Dawners really made fast decisions. You wouldn’t catch them wasting a full minute setting up a business.

A sleepy panhandler met Ildefonsa Impala on the way.

“Preserve us this morning, Ildy,” he said, “and will you marry in the coming night?”

“Likely I will, Basil,” she told him. “Did you marry Judy during the night past?”

“I’m not sure. Could you let me have two dollars, Ildy?”

“Out of the question. I believe a Judy Bagelbaker was named one of the ten best-dressed women during the froufrou fashion period about two o’clock. Why do you need two dollars?”

“A dollar for a bed and a dollar for red-eye. After all, I sent you two million out of my second.”

“I keep my two sorts of accounts separate. Here’s a dollar, Basil. Now be off! I can’t be seen talking to a dirty panhandler.”

“Thank you, Ildy. I’ll get the red-eye and sleep in an alley. Preserve us this morning.”

Bagelbaker shuffled off whistling “Slow Tuesday Night.”

And already the Dawners had set Wednesday morning to jumping.

“Narrow Valley” is possibly Ray Lafferty’s single most approachable and humane tale. It fairly bulges with people you’d like to have for neighbors: Clarence Little-Saddle and his father, Clarence Big-Saddle, of course, but also the beefy man with the land office in his desk, the farmer Tom Dublin who enjoys firing his rifle at friends for a joke, the inexplicably ubiquitous Willy McGilly, and not one but two smart-mouthed little girls. (Their brothers are OK, too, but Lafferty had a particular gift for precocious little girls.) Admittedly, Robert Rampart père is a blowhard, but one out of a family of seven isn’t bad. I’ve lost track of how many people I’ve converted to Lafferty fans by thrusting forward a copy of Nine Hundred Grandmothers, with a thumb bookmarking “Narrow Valley,” and saying, “Here—read this!” It’s easy to like.

This is one of the stories responsible for the notion that Lafferty was principally influenced by American tall tales. It’s true that he accomplished a great deal of his effects using deadpan narration of wondrous events. Also that he pretty much ignored the internal psychology of his characters. Henry James he wasn’t. If a man’s possessions were taken away from him, Lafferty had him throw back his head and lament this fact in words. If a woman lost interest in an enterprise, he indicated it by having her say exactly that. So, yes, the assertion is, in part, valid.

But a lot of people have written modern-day tall tales and not one of them has come close to writing like the Bard of Tulsa. Consider such digressions as Clarence Little-Saddle’s riff on the significance of the war bonnet and the lecture on how much larger the moon appears at the horizon than overhead. Consider his beautiful use of dialect. Consider his lovely comic asides and delightful parodies of scientific argot. Tall tales are nothing if not straightforward. “Narrow Valley” is anything but. This is a sophisticated work, written by a sophisticated man.

You can tell a lot about a writer by what he chooses to celebrate. There is a grim backstory underlying this tale and Lafferty, who knew Oklahoma history inside and out, was well aware of it. In the early seventeenth century, there were sixty thousand Pawnee in possession of a great deal of land and by 1875 … well, you can read that for yourself in the opening sentence. But “Narrow Valley” is, almost paradoxically, one of Lafferty’s sunniest works, a comedy, and a paean to resilience and human decency.

It’s also, as I said, easy to like. You’ll see.

In the year 1893, land allotments in severalty were made to the remaining eight hundred and twenty-one Pawnee Indians. Each would receive one hundred and sixty acres of land and no more, and thereafter the Pawnees would be expected to pay taxes on their land, the same as the White-Eyes did.

“Kitkehahke!” Clarence Big-Saddle cussed. “You can’t kick a dog around proper on a hundred and sixty acres. And I sure am not hear before about this pay taxes on land.”

Clarence Big-Saddle selected a nice green valley for his allotment. It was one of the half dozen plots he had always regarded as his own. He sodded around the summer lodge that he had there and made it an all-season home. But he sure didn’t intend to pay taxes on it.

So he burned leaves and bark and made a speech:

“That my valley be always wide and flourish and green and such stuff as that!” he orated in Pawnee chant style. “But that it be narrow if an intruder come.”

He didn’t have any balsam bark to burn. He threw on a little cedar bark instead. He didn’t have any elder leaves. He used a handful of jack-oak leaves. And he forgot the word. How you going to work it if you forget the word?

“Petahauerat!” he howled out with the confidence he hoped would fool the fates.

“That’s the same long of a word,” he said in a low aside to himself. But he was doubtful. “What am I, a White Man, a burr-tailed jack, a new kind of nut to think it will work?” he asked. “I have to laugh at me. Oh well, we see.”

He threw the rest of the bark and the leaves on the fire, and he hollered the wrong word out again.

And he was answered by a dazzling sheet of summer lightning.

“Skidi!” Clarence Big-Saddle swore. “It worked. I didn’t think it would.”

Clarence Big-Saddle lived on his land for many years, and he paid no taxes. Intruders were unable to come down to his place. The land was sold for taxes three times, but nobody ever came down to claim it. Finally, it was carried as open land on the books. Homesteaders filed on it several times, but none of them fulfilled the qualification of living on the land.

Half a century went by. Clarence Big-Saddle called his son.

“I’ve had it, boy,” he said. “I think I’ll just go in the house and die.”

“OK, Dad,” the son Clarence Little-Saddle said. “I’m going in to town to shoot a few games of pool with the boys. I’ll bury you when I get back this evening.”

So the son Clarence Little-Saddle inherited. He also lived on the land for many years without paying taxes. There was a disturbance in the courthouse one day. The place seemed to be invaded in force, but actually there were but one man, one woman, and five children. “I’m Robert Rampart,” said the man, “and we want the Land Office.”

“I’m Robert Rampart Junior,” said a nine-year-old gangler, “and we want it pretty blamed quick.”

“I don’t think we have anything like that,” the girl at the desk said. “Isn’t that something they had a long time ago?”

“Ignorance is no excuse for inefficiency, my dear,” said Mary Mabel Rampart, an eight-year-old who could easily pass for eight and a half. “After I make my report, I wonder who will be sitting at your desk tomorrow.”

“You people are either in the wrong state or the wrong century,” the girl said.

“The Homestead Act still obtains,” Robert Rampart insisted. “There is one tract of land carried as open in this county. I want to file on it.”

Cecilia Rampart answered the knowing wink of a beefy man at the distant desk. “Hi,” she breathed as she slinked over. “I’m Cecilia Rampart, but my stage name is Cecilia San Juan. Do you think that seven is too young to play ingénue roles?”

“Not for you,” the man said. “Tell your folks to come over here.”

“Do you know where the Land Office is?” Cecilia asked.

“Sure. It’s the fourth left-hand drawer of my desk. The smallest office we got in the whole courthouse. We don’t use it much any more.”

The Ramparts gathered around. The beefy man started to make out the papers.

“This is the land description,” Robert Rampart began. “Why, you’ve got it down already. How did you know?”

“I’ve been around here a long time,” the man answered.

They did the paperwork, and Robert Rampart filed on the land.

“You won’t be able to come onto the land itself though,” the man said.

“Why won’t I?” Rampart demanded. “Isn’t the description accurate?”

“Oh, I suppose so. But nobody’s ever been able get to the land. It’s become a sort of joke.”

“Well, I intend to get to the bottom of that joke,” Rampart insisted. “I will occupy the land, or I will find out why not.”

“I’m not sure about that,” the beefy man said. “The last man to file on the land, about a dozen years ago, wasn’t able to occupy the land. And he wasn’t able to say why he couldn’t. It’s kind of interesting, the look on their faces after they try it for a day or two, and then give it up.”

The Ramparts left the courthouse, loaded into their camper, and drove out to find their land. They stopped it at the house of a cattle and wheat farmer named Charley Dublin. Dublin met them with a grin which indicated he had been tipped off.

“Come along if you want to, folks,” Dublin said. “The easiest way is on foot across my short pasture here. Your land’s directly west of mine.”

They walked the short distance to the border.

“My name is Tom Rampart, Mr. Dublin.” Six-year-old Tom made conversation as they walked. “But my name is really Ramires, and not Tom. I am the issue of an indiscretion of my mother in Mexico several years ago.”

“The boy is a kidder, Mr. Dublin,” said the mother Nina Rampart, defending herself. “I have never been in Mexico, but sometimes I have the urge to disappear there forever.”

“Ah yes, Mrs. Rampart. And what is the name of the youngest boy here?” Charley Dublin asked.

“Fatty,” said Fatty Rampart.

“But surely that is not your given name?”

“Audifax,” said five-year-old Fatty.

“Ah well, Audifax, Fatty, are you a kidder too?”

“He’s getting better at it, Mr. Dublin,” Mary Mabel said. “He was a twin till last week. His twin was named Skinny. Mama left Skinny unguarded while she was out tippling, and there were wild dogs in the neighborhood. When Mama got back, do you know what was left of Skinny? Two neck bones and an ankle bone. That was all.”

“Poor Skinny,” Dublin said. “Well, Rampart, this is the fence and the end of my land. Yours is just beyond.”

“Is that ditch on my land?” Rampart asked.

“That ditch is your land.”

“I’ll have it filled in. It’s a dangerous deep cut even if it is narrow. And the other fence looks like a good one, and I sure have a pretty plot of land beyond it.”

“No, Rampart, the land beyond the second fence belongs to Holister Hyde,” Charley Dublin said. “That second fence is the end of your land.”

“Now, just wait a minute, Dublin! There’s something wrong here. My land is one hundred and sixty acres, which would be a half mile on a side. Where’s my half-mile width?”

“Between the two fences.”

“That’s not eight feet.”

“Doesn’t look like it, does it, Rampart? Tell you what—there’s plenty of throwing-sized rocks around. Try to throw one across it.”

“I’m not interested in any such boys’ games,” Rampart exploded. “I want my land.”

But the Rampart children were interested in such games. They got with it with those throwing rocks. They winged them out over the little gully. The stones acted funny. They hung in the air, as it were, and diminished in size. And they were small as pebbles when they dropped down, down into the gully. None of them could throw a stone across that ditch, and they were throwing kids.

“You and your neighbor have conspired to fence open land for your own use,” Rampart charged.

“No such thing, Rampart,” Dublin said cheerfully. “My land checks perfectly. So does Hyde’s. So does yours, if we knew how to check it. It’s like one of those trick topological drawings. It really is half a mile from here to there, but the eye gets lost somewhere. It’s your land. Crawl through the fence and figure it out.”

Rampart crawled through the fence, and drew himself up to jump the gully. Then he hesitated. He got a glimpse of just how deep that gully was. Still, it wasn’t five feet across.

There was a heavy fence post on the ground, designed for use as a corner post. Rampart up-ended it with some effort. Then he shoved it to fall and bridge the gully. But it fell short, and it shouldn’t have. An eight-foot post should bridge a five-foot gully.

The post fell into the gully, and rolled and rolled and rolled. It spun as though it were rolling outward, but it made no progress except vertically. The post came to rest on a ledge of the gully, so close that Rampart could almost reach out and touch it, but it now appeared no bigger than a match stick.

“There is something wrong with that fence post, or with the world, or with my eyes,” Robert Rampart said. “I wish I felt dizzy so I could blame it on that.”

“There’s a little game that I sometimes play with my neighbor Hyde when we’re both out,” Dublin said. “I’ve a heavy rifle and I train it on the middle of his forehead as he stands on the other side of the ditch apparently eight feet away. I fire it off then (I’m a good shot) and I hear it whine across. It’d kill him dead if things were as they seem. But Hyde’s in no danger. The shot always bangs into that little scuff of rocks and boulders about thirty feet below him. I can see it kick up the rock dust there, and the sound of it rattling into those little boulders comes back to me in about two and a half seconds.”

A bull-bat (poor people call it the night-hawk) raveled around in the air and zoomed out over the narrow ditch, but it did not reach the other side. The bird dropped below ground level and could be seen against the background of the other side of the ditch. It grew smaller and hazier as though at a distance of three or four hundred yards. The white bars on its wings could no longer be discerned; then the bird itself could hardly be discerned; but it was far short of the other side of the five-foot ditch.

A man identified by Charley Dublin as the neighbor Hollister Hyde had appeared on the other side of the little ditch. Hyde grinned and waved. He shouted something, but could not be heard.

“Hyde and I both read mouths,” Dublin said, “so we can talk across the ditch easy enough. Which kid wants to play chicken? Hyde will barrel a good-sized rock right at your head, and if you duck or flinch you’re chicken.”

“Me! Me!” Audifax Rampart challenged. And Hyde, a big man with big hands, did barrel a fearsome jagged rock right at the head of the boy. It would have killed him if things had been as they appeared. But the rock diminished to nothing and disappeared into the ditch. Here was a phenomenon: things seemed real-sized on either side of the ditch, but they diminished coming out over the ditch either way.

“Everybody game for it?” Robert Rampart Junior asked.

“We won’t get down there by standing here,” Mary Mabel said.

“Nothing wenchered, nothing gained,” said Cecilia. “I got that from an ad for a sex comedy.”

Then the five Rampart kids ran down into the gully. Ran down is right. It was almost as if they ran down the vertical face of a cliff. They couldn’t do that. The gully was no wider than the stride of the biggest kids. But the gully diminished those children, it ate them alive. They were doll-sized. They were acorn-sized. They were running for minute after minute across a ditch that was only five feet across. They were going, deeper in it, and getting smaller. Robert Rampart was roaring his alarm, and his wife, Nina, was screaming. Then she stopped. “What am I carrying on so loud about?” she asked herself. “It looks like fun. I’ll do it too.”

She plunged into the gully, diminished in size as the children had done, and ran at a pace to carry her a hundred yards away across a gully only five feet wide.

That Robert Rampart stirred things up for a while then. He got the sheriff there, and the highway patrolmen. A ditch had stolen his wife and five children, he said, and maybe had killed them. And if anybody laughs, there may be another killing. He got the colonel of the State National Guard there, and a command post set up. He got a couple of airplane pilots. Robert Rampart had one quality: when he hollered, people came.

He got the newsmen out from T-Town, and the eminent scientists, Dr. Velikof Vonk, Arpad Arkabaranan, and Willy McGilly. That bunch turns up every time you get on a good one. They just happen to be in that part of the country where something interesting is going on.

They attacked the thing from all four sides and the top, and by inner and outer theory. If a thing measures half a mile on each side, and the sides are straight, there just has to be something in the middle of it. They took pictures from the air, and they turned out perfect. They proved that Robert Rampart had the prettiest hundred and sixty acres in the country, the larger part of it being a lush green valley, and all of it being half a mile on a side, and situated just where it should be. They took ground-level photos then, and it showed a beautiful half-mile stretch of land between the boundaries of Charley Dublin and Hollister Hyde. But a man isn’t a camera. None of them could see that beautiful spread with the eyes in their heads. Where was it?

Down in the valley itself everything was normal. It really was half a mile wide and no more than eighty feet deep with a very gentle slope. It was warm and sweet, and beautiful with grass and grain.

Nina and the kids loved it, and they rushed to see what squatter had built that little house on their land. A house, or a shack. It had never known paint, but paint would have spoiled it. It was built of split timbers dressed near smooth with axe and draw knife, chinked with white clay, and sodded up to about half its height. And there was an interloper standing by the little lodge.

“Here, here what are you doing on our land?” Robert Rampart Junior demanded of the man. “Now you just shamble off again wherever you came from. I’ll bet you’re a thief too, and those cattle are stolen.”

“Only the black-and-white calf,” Clarence Little-Saddle said. “I couldn’t resist him, but the rest are mine. I guess I’ll just stay around and see that you folks get settled all right.”

“Is there any wild Indians around here?” Fatty Rampart asked.

“No, not really. I go on a bender about every three months and get a little bit wild, and there’s a couple Osage boys from Gray Horse that get noisy sometimes, but that’s about all,” Clarence Little-Saddle said.

“You certainly don’t intend to palm yourself off on us as an Indian,” Mary Mabel challenged. “You’ll find us a little too knowledgeable for that.”

“Little girl, you might as well tell this cow there’s no room for her to be a cow since you’re so knowledgeable. She thinks she’s a short-horn cow named Sweet Virginia; I think I’m a Pawnee Indian named Clarence. Break it to us real gentle if we’re not.”

“If you’re an Indian where’s your war bonnet? There’s not a feather on you anywhere.”

“How you be sure? There’s a story that we got feathers instead of hair on—aw, I can’t tell a joke like that to a little girl! How come you’re not wearing the Iron Crown of Lombardy if you’re a white girl? How you expect me to believe you’re a little white girl and your folks came from Europe a couple hundred years ago if you don’t wear it? There are six hundred tribes, and only one of them, the Oglala Sioux, had the war bonnet, and only the big leaders, never more than two or three of them alive at one time, wore it.”

“Your analogy is a little strained,” Mary Mabel said. “Those Indians we saw in Florida and the ones at Atlantic City had war bonnets, and they couldn’t very well have been the kind of Sioux you said. And just last night on the TV in the motel, those Massachusetts Indians put a war bonnet on the President and called him the Great White Father. You mean to tell me that they were all phonies? Hey, who’s laughing at who here?”

“If you’re an Indian where’s your bow and arrow?” Tom Rampart interrupted. “I bet you can’t even shoot one.”

“You’re sure right there,” Clarence admitted. “I never shot one of those things but once in my life. They used to have an archery range in Boulder Park over in T-Town, and you could rent the things and shoot at targets tied to hay bales. Hey, I barked my whole forearm and nearly broke my thumb when the bow-string thwacked home. I couldn’t shoot that thing at all. I don’t see how anybody ever could shoot one of them.”

“OK, kids,” Nina Rampart called to her brood. “Let’s start pitching this junk out of the shack so we can move in. Is there any way we can drive our camper down here, Clarence?”

“Sure, there’s a pretty good dirt road, and it’s a lot wider than it looks from the top. I got a bunch of green bills in an old night charley in the shack. Let me get them, and then I’ll clear out for a while. The shack hasn’t been cleaned out for seven years, since the last time this happened. I’ll show you the road to the top, and you can bring your car down it.”

“Hey, you old Indian, you lied!” Cecilia Rampart shrilled from the doorway of the shack. “You do have a war bonnet. Can I have it?”

“I didn’t mean to lie, I forgot about that thing,” Clarence Little-Saddle said. “My son Clarence Bare-Back sent that to me from Japan for a joke a long time ago. Sure, you can have it.”

All the children were assigned tasks carrying the junk out of the shack and setting fire to it. Nina Rampart and Clarence Little-Saddle ambled up to the rim of the valley by the vehicle road that was wider than it looked from the top.

“Nina, you’re back! I thought you were gone forever,” Robert Rampart jittered at seeing her again. “What—where are the children?”

“Why, I left them down in the valley, Robert. That is, ah, down in that little ditch right there. Now you’ve got me worried again. I’m going to drive the camper down there and unload it. You’d better go on down and lend a hand too, Robert, and quit talking to all these funny-looking men here.”

And Nina went back to Dublin’s place for the camper.

“It would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for that intrepid woman to drive a car down into that narrow ditch,” the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk said.

“You know how that camel does it?” Clarence Little-Saddle offered, appearing of a sudden from nowhere. “He just closes one of his own eyes and flops back his ears and plunges right through. A camel is mighty narrow when he closes one eye and flops back his ears. Besides, they use a big-eyed needle in the act.”

“Where’d this crazy man come from?” Robert Rampart demanded, jumping three feet in the air. “Things are coming out of the ground now. I want my land! I want my children! I want my wife! Whoops, here she comes driving it. Nina, you can’t drive a loaded camper into a little ditch like that! You’ll be killed or collapsed!”

Nina Rampart drove the loaded camper into the little ditch at a pretty good rate of speed. The best of belief is that she just closed one eye and plunged right through. The car diminished and dropped, and it was smaller than a toy car. But it raised a pretty good cloud of dust as it bumped for several hundred yards across a ditch that was only five feet wide.

“Rampart, it’s akin to the phenomenon known as looming, only in reverse,” the eminent scientist Arpad Arkabaranan explained as he attempted to throw a rock across the narrow ditch. The rock rose very high in the air, seemed to hang at its apex while it diminished to the size of a grain of sand, and then fell into the ditch not six inches of the way across. There isn’t anybody going to throw across a half-mile valley even if it looks five feet. “Look at a rising moon sometimes, Rampart. It appears very large, as though covering a great sector of the horizon, but it only covers one-half of a degree. It is hard to believe that you could set seven hundred and twenty of such large moons side by side around the horizon, or that it would take one hundred and eighty of the big things to reach from the horizon to a point overhead. It is also hard to believe that your valley is twelve hundred times as wide as it appears, but it has been surveyed, and it is.”

“I want my land. I want my children. I want my wife,” Robert chanted dully. “Damn, I let her get away again.”

“I tell you, Rampy,” Clarence Little-Saddle squared on him, “a man that lets his wife get away twice doesn’t deserve to keep her. I give you till nightfall; then you forfeit. I’ve taken a liking to the brood. One of us is going to be down there tonight.”

After a while a bunch of them were off in that little tavern on the road between Cleveland and Osage. It was only half a mile away. If the valley had run in the other direction, it would have been only six feet away.

“It is a psychic nexus in the form of an elongated dome,” said the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk. “It is maintained subconsciously by the concatenation of at least two minds, the stronger of them belonging to a man dead for many years. It has apparently existed for a little less than a hundred years, and in another hundred years it will be considerably weakened. We know from our checking out folk tales of Europe as well as Cambodia that these ensorcelled areas seldom survive for more than two hundred and fifty years. The person who first set such a thing in being will usually lose interest in it, and in all worldly things, within a hundred years of his own death. This is a simple thanato-psychic limitation. As a short-term device, the thing has been used several times as a military tactic.

“This psychic nexus, as long as it maintains itself, causes group illusion, but it is really a simple thing. It doesn’t fool birds or rabbits or cattle, or cameras, only humans. There is nothing meteorological about it. It is strictly psychological. I’m glad I was able to give a scientific explanation to it or it would have worried me.”

“It is continental fault coinciding with a noospheric fault,” said the eminent scientist Arpad Arkabaranan. “The valley really is half a mile wide, and at the same time it really is only five feet wide. If we measured correctly, we would get these dual measurements. Of course it is meteorological! Everything including dreams is meteorological. It is the animals and cameras which are fooled, as lacking a true dimension; it is only humans who see the true duality. The phenomenon should be common along the whole continental fault where the earth gains or loses half a mile that has to go somewhere. Likely it extends through the whole sweep of the Cross Timbers. Many of those trees appear twice, and many do not appear at all. A man in the proper state of mind could farm that land or raise cattle on it, but it doesn’t really exist. There is a clear parallel in the Luftspiegelungthal sector in the Black Forest of Germany which exists, or does not exist, according to the circumstances and to the attitude of the beholder. Then we have the case of Mad Mountain in Morgan County, Tennessee, which isn’t there all the time; and also the Little Lobo Mirage south of Presidio, Texas, from which twenty thousand barrels of water were pumped in one two-and-a-half-year period before the mirage reverted to mirage status. I’m glad I was able to give a scientific explanation to this or it would have worried me.”

“I just don’t understand how he worked it,” said the eminent scientist Willy McGilly. “Cedar bark, jack-oak leaves, and the world ‘Petahauerat.’ The thing’s impossible! When I was a boy and we wanted to make a hide-out, we used bark from the skunk-spruce tree, the leaves of a box-elder, and the word was ‘Boadicea.’ All three elements are wrong here. I cannot find a scientific explanation for it, and it does worry me.”

They went back to Narrow Valley. Robert Rampart was still chanting dully: “I want my land. I want my children. I want my wife.”

Nina Rampart came chugging up out of the narrow ditch in the camper and emerged through that little gate a few yards down the fence row.

“Supper’s ready and we’re tired of waiting for you, Robert,” she said. “A fine homesteader you are! Afraid to come onto your own land! Come along now; I’m tired of waiting for you.”

“I want my land! I want my children! I want my wife!” Robert Rampart still chanted. “Oh, there you are, Nina. You stay here this time. I want my land! I want my children! I want an answer to this terrible thing.”

“It is time we decided who wears the pants in this family,” Nina said stoutly. She picked up her husband, slung him over her shoulder, carried him to the camper and dumped him in, slammed (as it seemed) a dozen doors at once, and drove furiously down into the Narrow Valley, which already seemed wider.

Why, that place was getting normaler and normaler by the minute! Pretty soon it looked almost as wide as it was supposed to be. The psychic nexus in the form of an elongated dome had collapsed. The continental fault that coincided with the noospheric fault had faced facts and decided to conform. The Ramparts were in effective possession of their homestead, and Narrow Valley was as normal as any place anywhere.

“I have lost my land,” Clarence Little-Saddle moaned. “It was the land of my father, Clarence Big-Saddle, and I meant it to be the land of my son, Clarence Bare-Back. It looked so narrow that people did not notice how wide it was, and people did not try to enter it. Now I have lost it.”

Clarence Little-Saddle and the eminent scientist Willy McGilly were standing on the edge of Narrow Valley, which now appeared its true half-mile extent. The moon was just rising, so big that it filled a third of the sky. Who would have imagined that it would take a hundred and eighty of such monstrous things to reach from the horizon to a point overhead, and yet you could sight it with sighters and figure it so.

“I had a little bear-cat by the tail and I let go,” Clarence groaned. “I had a fine valley for free, and I have lost it. I am like that hard-luck guy in the funny-paper or Job in the Bible. Destitution is my lot.”

Willy McGilly looked around furtively. They were alone on the edge of the half-mile-wide valley.

“Let’s give it a booster shot,” Willy McGilly said.

Hey, those two got with it! They started a snapping fire and began to throw the stuff onto it. Bark from the dog-elm tree—how do you know it won’t work?

It was working! Already the other side of the valley seemed a hundred yards closer, and there were alarmed noises coming up from the people in the valley.

Leaves from a black locust tree—and the valley narrowed still more! There was, moreover, terrified screaming of both children and big people from the depths of Narrow Valley, and the happy voice of Mary Mabel Rampart chanting, “Earthquake! Earthquake!”

“That my valley be always wide and flourish and such stuff, and green with money and grass!” Clarence Little-Saddle orated in Pawnee chant style, “but that it be narrow if intruders come, smash them like bugs!”

People, that valley wasn’t over a hundred feet wide now, and the screaming of the people in the bottom of the valley had been joined by the hysterical coughing of the camper car starting up.

Willy and Clarence threw everything that was left on the fire. But the word? The word? Who remembers the word?

“Corsicanatexas!” Clarence Little-Saddle howled out with confidence he hoped would fool the fates.

He was answered not only by a dazzling sheet of summer lightning, but also by thunder and raindrops.

“Chahiksi!” Clarence Little-Saddle swore. “It worked. I didn’t think it would. It will be all right now. I can use the rain.”

The valley was again a ditch only five feet wide.

The camper car struggled out of Narrow Valley through the little gate. It was smashed flat as a sheet of paper, and the screaming kids and people in it had only one dimension.

“It’s closing in! It’s closing in!” Robert Rampart roared, and he was no thicker than if he had been made out of cardboard.

“We’re smashed like bugs,” the Rampart boys intoned. “We’re thin like paper.”

“Mort, ruine, ecrasement!” spoke-acted Cecilia Rampart like the great tragedienne she was.

“Help! Help!” Nina Rampart croaked, but she winked at Willy and Clarence as they rolled by. “This homesteading jag always did leave me a little flat.”

“Don’t throw those paper dolls away. They might be the Ramparts,” Mary Mabel called.

The camper car coughed again and bumped along on level ground. This couldn’t last forever. The car was widening out as it bumped along.

“Did we overdo it, Clarence?” Willy McGilly asked. “What did one flat-lander say to the other?”

“Dimension of us never got around,” Clarence said. “No, I don’t think we overdid it, Willy. That car must be eighteen inches wide already, and they all ought to be normal by the time they reach the main road. The next time I do it, I think I’ll throw wood-grain plastic on the fire to see who’s kidding who.”

Lafferty strikes the reader as sui generis, a literary creator like no other. But he also comes across as uniquely himself, a writer so potently fizzy and tipsy-making that one could say his prose Laffervesces.

See the first paragraph of “Nor Limestone Islands,” a tale arising from Lafferty’s interest in geology, mineralogy, rockhounding, story-mining and architectural and literary lapidaries. (Disarmingly, he had the ability to appear to be an expert in every -ology imaginable.)

That paragraph reads: “A lapidary is one who cuts, polishes, engraves, and sets small stones. He is also a scrivener who sets in little stones or pieces here and there and attempts to make a mosaic out of them.”

With that dubious hook, our Oklahoman leprechaun not only defines a term that may not feel wholly familiar, but also compares the intricately fitted jigsaw-puzzle of an architectural mosaic to the mix-and-match literary method by which he has structured “Nor Limestone Islands.”

Listen to this tale’s limestone salesman make a pitch to a roomful of city officials: “We … want everybody to come and visit us, but hardly anybody wants to. Right now, my country [Sky-High Stutzamutza] is about three miles from here” [my emphasis].

This spiel evokes part three, “A Voyage to Laputa,” of my most admired book in the world, Gulliver’s Travels. Laputa’s lodestone-directed flying islands first boggled my starving preteen mind in Tulsa, Oklahoma, circa 1958.

Thus, in 1984, I chose “Nor Limestone Islands” to represent R. A. Lafferty in an anthology titled Light Years and Dark: Science Fiction and Fantasy Of and For Our Time. And here is how I introduced it:

“How does a 105-pound girl assemble a thirty-million-ton Pink Pagoda in six hours? R. A. Lafferty will tell you in this charming ‘article’ about floating limestone islands and the intrepid Miss Phosphor McCabe, whose breathtaking photographs of Sky-High Stutzamutza (see plates I to XXII) are unfortunately not included in the text.

“Lafferty, you see, is famous—perhaps notorious is the better word—for the inveterate unorthodoxy of his story concepts and narrative strategies. His work is immediately recognizable as his in a way that the work of other writers is not always identifiable as theirs and nobody else’s.

“This distinctiveness would seem to leave Lafferty wide open to parody, but he writes with such droll originality that any attempt to burlesque him turns instead into a pale pastiche of his methods and hence into a kind of homage.

“New Wave? Old Wave? Who cares? Lafferty is surfing the crest of a comber whose quirky break only he knows how to ride.”

That remains pretty much the case today. Indeed, those who manage to create better than passable parodies-cum-hommages to Lafferty (like Neil Gaiman) usually come away from the experience understanding both how hard such stories are to write and why no one else tries to build a career emulating our sui generis Raphael Aloysius Lafferty.

A lapidary is one who cuts, polishes, engraves, and sets small stones. He is also a scrivener with a choppy style who sets in little stones or pieces here and there and attempts to make a mosaic out of them.

But what do you call one who cuts and sets very large stones?

Although his Okla Hannali will surely someday take its proper place alongside Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick as one of the Great American Novels, Raphael Aloysius Lafferty is more known for his short stories than his novels. And not all that widely known.

For Lafferty is that most tender, wretched, and essential of creatures, the writers’ writer: celebrated by, beloved of, but mostly visible only (check the intros) to his own proud, primitive tribe.

And even in the cult we call SF, Lafferty is an outlier, a dark star, a visitor from the Oort Cloud of literature. Our poet. Not Romantic (how much more pallid, Bradbury!) but rather Elizabethan in the exuberant precision of his words; metaphysical in the playful contrariness of his ideas. Difficult but fun.

No, not the most Important Writer of SF’s post-Golden Age. How could such an original prevail? But how not persist! Once discovered, he is never let go. He is with us forever. His is a slant spell but once you fall under it you remain enchanted.

So here is “Interurban Queen.” Not his greatest story: it’s a middling Lafferty which places it in the top rank of short fiction worldwide. It’s an Alternate History, a form Lafferty (a conservative Midwestern engineer) often used as a lever to upend his familiar Oklahoma quotidian. It’s a Utopian Tale (another field in which Lafferty liked to romp) with a solid business engine and a sunny, murderous heart.

Come along.

You are on an outing with your great-granddaughter through the green and pleasant landscape of your dreams.

Rifles are handed out. 

“It was the year 1907 when I attained my majority and came into a considerable inheritance,” the old man said. “I was a very keen young man, keen enough to know that I didn’t know everything. I went to knowledgeable men and asked their advice as to how I might invest this inheritance.

“I talked with bankers and cattlemen and the new oilmen. These were not stodgy men. They had an edge on the future, and they were excited and exciting about the way that money might be made to grow. It was the year of statehood and there was an air of prosperity over the new state. I wished to integrate my patrimony into that new prosperity.

“Finally I narrowed my choice to two investments which then seemed about of equal prospect, though you will now smile to hear them equated. One of them was the stock-selling company of a certain Harvey Goodrich, a rubber company, and with the new automobile coming into wider use, it seemed that rubber might be a thing of the future. The other was a stock-selling transportation company that proposed to run an interurban railway between the small towns of Kiefer and Mounds. It also proposed (at a future time) to run branches to Glenpool, to Bixby, to Kellyville, to Slick, to Bristow, to Beggs, even to Okmulgee and Sapulpa. At that time it also seemed that these little interurban railways might be things of the future. An interurban already ran between Tulsa and Sand Springs, and one was building between Tulsa and Sapulpa. There were more than one thousand of these small trolley railroads operating in the nation, and thoughtful men believed that they would come to form a complete national network, might become the main system of transportation.”

But now the old man Charles Archer was still a young man. He was listening to Joe Elias, a banker in a small but growing town.

“It is a riddle you pose me, young man, and you set me thinking,” Elias said. “We have dabbled in both, thinking to have an egg under every hen. I begin to believe that we were wrong to do so. These two prospects are types of two futures, and only one of them will obtain. In this state with its new oil discoveries, it might seem that we should be partial to rubber which has a tie-in with the automobile which has a tie-in with petroleum fuel. This need not be. I believe that the main use of oil will be in powering the new factories, and I believe that rubber is already oversold as to industrial application. And yet there will be a new transportation. Between the horse and the main-line railways there is a great gap. I firmly believe that the horse will be eliminated as a main form of transportation. We are making no more loans to buggy or buckboard manufacturers nor to harness makers. I have no faith in the automobile. It destroys something in me. It is the interurbans that will go into the smallest localities, and will so cut into the main-line railroads as to leave no more than a half dozen of the long-distance major lines in America. Young man, I would invest in the interurban with complete confidence.”

Yes, it looks perfectly simple on the surface … Lafferty’s prose is short on adjectives and long on what would seem to be the voice of the American tall tale. His characters are ciphers, seemingly one-dimensional caricatures; and the tall voice is innocently jocular as it seems to invent its own convoluted syntax, explains historical incidents at length, punctuates events with impossibly over-the-top details, and tramples through philosophical swamplands like Paul Bunyan in a hurry to get to the end of the story.

We can’t help but notice that there is more going on than we can see; and although there are bits and pieces we don’t understand—words we don’t know, incidents and outré theories that may or may not be historically correct, ostensibly irrelevant sidebars—we can’t get off the runaway train until it … stops. As is widely acknowledged, Lafferty is a one-off. He can’t be imitated. He’s been compared to Gene Wolfe because of the influence and presence of Christianity in his work; and he’s been compared to Mark Twain, probably for the yarnish nature of his prose. But comparisons don’t really work with Lafferty. After all the comparisons are made, we are still left wondering what the hell just happened after we read a Lafferty story. And why do these stories stick in our minds like childhood memory, like fairy tales that scared the bejesus out of us…?

Perhaps it’s because they are just that: philosophical fairy tales for adults.

And so to “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne,” which for my money is one of his best short stories; it is quintessential Lafferty, and it works on all the levels, sure to leave you scratching your head as the parable(?) inserts itself firmly into your memory. The story is classic counterfactual fiction: it is an illustration of what happens when you change history to create alternate history; and it comes into being through the writer’s choice of a divergence point, which creates a new branch that confounds history as we (think we) know it. Lafferty will leave you to tangle with the possible consequences of the battle of Roncesvalles and William of Occam’s concept of terminalism. And if you’re as obsessive as I am, you’ll probably find yourself looking up some terms.

All that aside, consider as you read whether this is a science fiction story at all … or whether it might just be an anti–science fiction story.1 The author playfully uses the tropes of science fiction, of alternate history; but the science is pretty much just another version of magic, a trope in itself. And the history … we believe it because Lafferty sprinkles in such learned esoterica that it somehow feels right. And some of it is!

Suffice it to say the story you’re about to read is simple and confusing and makes absolute sense! Welcome to the antinomical Lafferty. Welcome to his happily constructed dystopia. As the critic and scholar Don Webb said, “Lafferty’s fiction creates the Unknown rather than the Known.”

Enjoy the peep show. 

“We’ve been on some tall ones,” said Gregory Smirnov of the Institute, “but we’ve never stood on the edge of a bigger one than this, nor viewed one with shakier expectations. Still, if the calculations of Epiktistes are correct, this will work.”

“People, it will work,” Epikt said.

This was Epiktistes the Ktistec machine? Who’d have believed it? The main bulk of Epikt was five floors below them, but he had run an extension of himself up to this little penthouse lounge. All it took was a cable, no more than a yard in diameter, and a functional head set on the end of it.

And what a head he chose! It was a sea-serpent head, a dragon head, five feet long and copied from an old carnival float. Epikt had also given himself human speech of a sort, a blend of Irish and Jewish and Dutch comedian patter from ancient vaudeville. Epikt was a comic to his last para-DNA relay when he rested his huge, boggle-eyed, crested head on the table there and smoked the biggest stogies ever born.

But he was serious about this project.

“We have perfect test conditions,” the machine Epikt said as though calling them to order. “We set out basic texts, and we take careful note of the world as it is. If the world changes, then the texts should change here before our eyes. For our test pilot, we have taken that portion of our own middle-sized city that can be viewed from this fine vantage point. If the world in its past-present continuity is changed by our meddling, then the face of our city will also change instantly as we watch it.

“We have assembled here the finest minds and judgments in the world: eight humans and one Ktistec machine, myself. Remember that there are nine of us. It might be important.”

The nine finest minds were: Epiktistes, the transcendent machine who put the “K” in Ktistec; Gregory Smirnov, the large-souled director of the Institute; Valery Mok, an incandescent lady scientist; her over-shadowed and over-intelligent husband, Charles Cogsworth; the humorless and inerrant Glasser; Aloysius Shiplap, the seminal genius; Willy McGilly, a man of unusual parts (the seeing third finger on his left hand he had picked up on one of the planets of Kapteyn’s Star) and no false modesty; Audifax O’Hanlon; and Diogenes Pontifex. The latter two men were not members of the Institute (on account of the Minimal Decency Rule), but when the finest minds in the world are assembled, these two cannot very well be left out.

“We are going to tamper with one small detail in past history and note its effect,” Gregory said. “This has never been done before openly. We go back to an era that has been called ‘A patch of light in the vast gloom,’ the time of Charlemagne. We consider why that light went out and did not kindle others. The world lost four hundred years by that flame expiring when the tinder was apparently ready for it. We go back to that false dawn of Europe and consider where it failed. The year was 778, and the region was Spain. Charlemagne had entered alliance with Marsilies, the Arab king of Saragossa, against the Caliph Abd ar-Rahmen of Córdova. Charlemagne took such towns as Pamplona, Huesca, and Gerona and cleared the way to Marsilies in Saragossa. The Caliph accepted the situation. Saragossa should be independent, a city open to both Moslems and Christians. The northern marches to the border of France should be permitted their Christianity, and there would be peace for everybody.

“This Marsilies had long treated Christians as equals in Saragossa, and now there would be an open road from Islam into the Frankish Empire. Marsilies gave Charlemagne thirty-three scholars (Moslem, Jewish, and Christian) and some Spanish mules to seal the bargain. And there could have been a cross-fertilization of cultures.

“But the road was closed at Roncesvalles where the rearguard of Charlemagne was ambushed and destroyed on its way back to France. The ambushers were more Basque than Moslems, but Charlemagne locked the door at the Pyrenees and swore that he would not let even a bird fly over that border thereafter. He kept the road closed, as did his son and his grandsons. But when he sealed off the Moslem world, he also sealed off his own culture.

“In his latter years he tried a revival of civilization with a ragtag of Irish half-scholars, Greek vagabonds, and Roman copyists who almost remembered an older Rome. These weren’t enough to revive civilization, and yet Charlemagne came close with them. Had the Islam door remained open, a real revival of learning might have taken place then rather than four hundred years later. We are going to arrange that the ambush at Roncesvalles did not happen and that the door between the two civilizations was not closed. Then we will see what happens to us.”

“‘Intrusion like a burglar bent,’” said Epikt.

“Who’s a burglar?” Glasser demanded.

“I am,” Epikt said. “We all are. It’s from an old verse. I forget the author; I have it filed in my main mind downstairs if you’re interested.”

“We set out a basic text of Hilarius,” Gregory continued. “We note it carefully, and we must remember it the way it is. Very soon, that may be the way it was. I believe that the words will change on the very page of this book as we watch them. Just as soon as we have done what we intend to do.”

The basic text marked in the open book read:

That was the text by Hilarius.

“When we, as it were, push the button (give the nod to Epiktistes), this will be changed,” Gregory said. “Epikt, by a complex of devices which he has assembled, will send an Avatar (partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction), and something will have happened to the traitor Gano along about sundown one night on the road to Roncesvalles.”

“I hope the Avatar isn’t expensive,” Willy McGilly said. “When I was a boy we got by with a dart whittled out of slippery elm wood.”

“This is no place for humor,” Glasser protested. “Who did you, as a boy, ever kill in time, Willy?”

“Lots of them. King Wu of the Manchu, Pope Adrian VII, President Hardy of our own country, King Marcel of Auvergne, the philosopher Gabriel Toeplitz. It’s a good thing we got them. They were a bad lot.”

“But I never heard of any of them, Willy,” Glasser insisted.

“Of course not. We killed them when they were kids.”

“Enough of your fooling, Willy,” Gregory cut it off.

“Willy’s not fooling,” the machine Epikt said. “Where do you think I got the idea?”

“Regard the world,” Aloysius said softly. “We see our own middle-sized town with half a dozen towers of pastel-colored brick. We will watch it as it grows or shrinks. It will change if the world changes.”

“There’s two shows in town I haven’t seen,” Valery said. “Don’t let them take them away! After all, there are only three shows in town.”

“We regard the Beautiful Arts as set out in the reviews here which we have also taken as basic texts,” Audifax O’Hanlon said. “You can say what you want to, but the arts have never been in meaner shape. Painting is of three schools only, all of them bad. Sculpture is the heaps-of-rusted-metal school and the obscene tinker-toy effects. The only popular art, graffiti on mingitorio walls, has become unimaginative, stylized, and ugly.

“The only thinkers to be thought of are the dead Teilhard de Chardin and the stillborn Sartre, Zielinski, Aichinger. Oh well, if you’re going to laugh there’s no use going on.”

“All of us here are experts on something,” Cogsworth said. “Most of us are experts on everything. We know the world as it is. Let us do what we are going to do and then look at the world.”

“Push the button, Epikt!” Gregory Smirnov ordered.

From his depths, Epiktistes the Ktistec machine sent out an Avatar, partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction. Along about sundown on the road from Pamplona to Roncesvalles, on August 14th of the year 778, the traitor Gano was taken up from the road and hanged on a carob tree, the only one in those groves of oak and beech. And all things thereafter were changed.

This was not the first short story of Lafferty’s I read, nor even the first I fell in love with.

It was, however, the first story I ever took apart, as best I could, to try and work out how he did it.

I would have been about eleven. I didn’t know what an American city block actually was—it was an indeterminate word that meant simply a region, as far as I was concerned. I came from towns and cities with winding, random streets. But I loved the story. It was a shaggy dog story without a punch line, a tall tale without apparent conflict in which all that happened was that two friends walked around a block, and talked to people they found. A letter was dictated. It was about new people coming in, about immigrants, about people working hard and moving on. It was about taking the extraordinary for granted. And I loved the way the words worked.

So I read it, and I reread it, and I read it aloud, and I tried to understand it. I would never know what a Dort Glide was (nor, I suspected, did Lafferty), but I felt that, if I could understand how this short story was built and constructed, I would understand how to write.

I loved the way the people in the shanties spoke. I wanted to speak like the typist, or her sister in the bar. I hoped one day to be able to say, “See how foxy I turn all your questions,” but I never had an opportunity to. I only had one tongue, so to reply, “With my other tongue” was also right out.

Coming back to it as an adult, and I have read it every year or so, I find that I love it as much as I ever did. It’s cockeyed and joyful, but it’s also a glorious, blue-collar, low-rent story about a block in Oklahoma where the people arriving just want to fit in. It’s about immigration, and about what people bring to the places they visit. It’s about revealing secrets.

And it’s a writer’s story, too, about the places that ideas come from. I imagine Ray Lafferty walking past a tin shack he had not noticed before, on his way to a local bar, and having a story in his head by the time that he returned home that night.

There were a lot of funny people in that block.

“You ever walk down that street?” Art Slick asked Jim Boomer, who had just come onto him there.

“Not since I was a boy. After the overall factory burned down, there was a faith healer had his tent pitched there one summer. The street’s just one block long and it dead-ends on the railroad embankment. Nothing but a bunch of shanties and weed-filled lots. The shanties looked different today, though, and there seem to be more of them. I thought they pulled them all down a few months ago.”

“Jim, I’ve been watching that first little building for two hours. There was a tractor-truck there this morning with a forty-foot trailer, and it loaded out of that little shanty. Cartons about eight inches by eight inches by three feet came down that chute. They weighed about thirty-five pounds each from the way the men handled them. Jim, they filled that trailer up with them, and then pulled it off.”

“What’s wrong with that, Art?”

“Jim, I said they filled that trailer up. From the drag on it it had about a sixty-thousand-pound load when it pulled out. They loaded a carton every three and a half seconds for two hours; that’s two thousand cartons.”

“Sure, lots of trailers run over the load limit nowadays; they don’t enforce it very well.”

“Jim, that shack’s no more than a cracker box seven feet on a side. Half of it is taken up by a door, and inside a man in a chair behind a small table. You couldn’t get anything else in that half. The other half is taken up by whatever that chute comes out of. You could pack six of those little shacks on that trailer.”

“Let’s measure it,” Jim Boomer said. “Maybe it’s bigger than it looks.” The shack had a sign on it: Make Sell Ship Anything Cut Price. Jim Boomer measured the building with an old steel tape. The shack was a seven-foot cube, and there were no hidden places. It was set up on a few piers of broken bricks, and you could see under it.

“Sell you a new fifty-foot steel tape for a dollar,” said the man in the chair in the little shack. “Throw that old one away.” The man pulled a steel tape out of a drawer of his table-desk, though Art Slick was sure it had been a plain flat-top table with no place for a drawer.

“Fully retractable, rhodium-plated, Dort glide, Ramsey swivel, and it forms its own carrying case. One dollar,” the man said.

Jim Boomer paid him a dollar for it. “How many of them you got?”

“I can have a hundred thousand ready to load out in ten minutes,” the man said. “Eighty-eight cents each in hundred thousand lots.”

“Was that a trailer-load of steel tapes you shipped out this morning?” Art asked the man.

“No, that must have been something else. This is the first steel tape I ever made. Just got the idea when I saw you measuring my shack with that old beat-up one.”

Art Slick and Jim Boomer went to the run-down building next door. It was smaller, about a six-foot cube, and the sign said Public Stenographer. The clatter of a typewriter was coming from it, but the noise stopped when they opened the door.

A dark pretty girl was sitting in a chair before a small table. There was nothing else in the room, and no typewriter.

“I thought I heard a typewriter in here,” Art said.

“Oh, that is me.” The girl smiled. “Sometimes I amuse myself make typewriter noises like a public stenographer is supposed to.”

“What would you do if someone came in to have some typing done?”

“What are you think? I do it of course.”

“Could you type a letter for me?”

“Sure is can, man friend, two bits a page, good work, carbon copy, envelope and stamp.”

“Ah, let’s see how you do it. I will dictate to you while you type.”

“You dictate first. Then I write. No sense mix up two things at one time.”

Art dictated a long and involved letter that he had been meaning to write for several days. He felt like a fool droning it to the girl as she filed her nails. “Why is public stenographer always sit filing her nails?” she asked as Art droned. “But I try to do it right, file them down, grow them out again, then file them down some more. Been doing it all morning. It seems silly.”

“Ah—that is all,” Art said when he had finished dictating.

“Not P.S. Love and Kisses?” the girl asked.

“Hardly. It’s a business letter to a person I barely know.”

“I always say P.S. Love and Kisses to persons I barely know,” the girl said. “Your letter will make three pages, six bits. Please you both step outside about ten seconds and I write it. Can’t do it when you watch.” She pushed them out and closed the door.

Then there was silence.

“What are you doing in there, girl?” Art called.

“Want I sell you a memory course too? You forget already? I type a letter,” the girl called.

“But I don’t hear a typewriter going.”

“What is? You want verisimilitude too? I should charge extra.” There was a giggle, and then the sound of very rapid typing for about five seconds.

The girl opened the door and handed Art the three-page letter. It was typed perfectly, of course.

“There is something a little odd about this,” Art said.

“Oh? The ungrammar of the letter is your own, sir. Should I have correct?”

“No. It is something else. Tell me the truth, girl: how does the man next door ship out trailer-loads of material from a building ten times too small to hold the stuff?”

“He cuts prices.”

“Well, what are you people? The man next door resembles you.”

“My brother-uncle. We tell everybody we are Innominee Indians.”

“There is no such tribe,” Jim Boomer said flatly.

“Is there not? Then we will have to tell people we are something else. You got to admit it sounds like Indian. What’s the best Indian to be?”

“Shawnee,” said Jim Boomer.

“OK then we be Shawnee Indians. See how easy it is.”

“We’re already taken,” Boomer said. “I’m a Shawnee and I know every Shawnee in town.”

“Hi cousin!” the girl cried, and winked. “That’s from a joke I learn, only the begin was different. See how foxy I turn all your questions.”

“I have two-bits coming out of my dollar,” Art said.

“I know,” the girl said. “I forgot for a minute what design is on the back of the two-bitser piece, so I stall while I remember it. Yes, the funny bird standing on the bundle of firewood. One moment till I finish it. Here.” She handed the quarter to Art Slick. “And you tell everybody there’s a smoothie public stenographer here who types letters good.”

“Without a typewriter,” said Art Slick. “Let’s go, Jim.”

“P.S. Love and Kisses,” the girl called after them.

The Cool Man Club was next door, a small and shabby beer bar. The bar girl could have been a sister of the public stenographer.

“We’d like a couple of Buds, but you don’t seem to have a stock of anything,” Art said.

“Who needs stock?” the girl asked. “Here is beers.” Art would have believed that she brought them out of her sleeves, but she had no sleeves. The beers were cold and good.

“Girl, do you know how the fellow on the corner can ship a whole trailer-load of material out of a space that wouldn’t hold a tenth of it?” Art asked the girl.

“Sure. He makes it and loads it out at the same time. That way it doesn’t take up space, like if he made it before time.”

“But he has to make it out of something,” Jim Boomer cut in.

“No, no,” the girl said. “I study your language. I know words. Out of something is to assemble, not to make. He makes.”

“This is funny.” Slick gaped. “Budweiser is misspelled on this bottle, the i before the e.”

“Oh, I goof,” the bar girl said. “I couldn’t remember which way it goes so I make it one way on one bottle and the other way on the other. Yesterday a man ordered a bottle of Progress beer, and I spelled it Progers on the bottle. Sometimes I get things wrong. Here, I fix yours.”

She ran her hand over the label, and then it was spelled correctly.

“But that thing is engraved and then reproduced,” Slick protested.

“Oh, sure, all fancy stuff like that,” the girl said. “I got to be more careful. One time I forget and make Jax-taste beer in a Schlitz bottle and the man didn’t like it. I had to swish swish change the taste while I pretended to give him a different bottle. One time I forgot and produced a green-bottle beer in a brown bottle, ‘It is the light in here, it just makes it look brown,’ I told the man. Hell, we don’t even have a light in here. I go swish fast and make the bottle green. It’s hard to keep from making mistake when you’re stupid.”

“No, you don’t have a light or a window in here, and it’s light,” Slick said. “You don’t have refrigeration. There are no power lines to any of the shanties in this block. How do you keep the beer cold?”

“Yes, is the beer not nice and cold? Notice how tricky I evade your question. Will you good men have two more beers?”

“Yes, we will. And I’m interested in seeing where you get them,” Slick said.

“Oh look, is snakes behind you!” the girl cried. “Oh how you startle and jump!” she laughed. “It’s all joke. Do you think I will have snakes in my nice bar?”

But she had produced two more beers, and the place was as bare as before.

“How long have you tumble-bugs been in this block?” Boomer asked.

“Who keep track?” the girl said. “People come and go.”

“You’re not from around here,” Slick said. “You’re not from anywhere I know. Where do you come from? Jupiter?”

“Who wants Jupiter?” the girl seemed indignant. “Do business with a bunch of insects there, is all! Freeze your tail too.”

“You wouldn’t be a kidder, would you, girl?” Slick asked.

“I sure do try hard. I learn a lot of jokes but I tell them all wrong yet. I get better, though. I try to be the witty bar girl so people will come back.”

“What’s in the shanty next door toward the tracks?”

“My cousin-sister,” said the girl. “She set up shop just today. She grow any color hair on bald-headed men. I tell her she’s crazy. No business. If they wanted hair they wouldn’t be bald-headed in the first place.”

“Well, can she grow hair on bald-headed men?” Slick asked.

“Oh sure. Can’t you?”

There were three or four more shanty shops in the block. It didn’t seem that there had been that many when the men went into the Cool Man Club.

“I don’t remember seeing this shack a few minutes ago,” Boomer said to the man standing in front of the last shanty on the line.

“Oh, I just made it,” the man said.

Weathered boards, rusty nails … and he had just made it.

“Why didn’t you—ah—make a decent building while you were at it?” Slick asked.

“This is more inconspicuous,” the man said. “Who notices when an old building appears suddenly? We’re new here and want to feel our way in before we attract attention. Now I’m trying to figure out what to make. Do you think there is a market for a luxury automobile to sell for a hundred dollars? I suspect I would have to respect the local religious feeling when I make them though.”

“What is that?” Slick asked.

“Ancestor worship. The old gas tank and fuel system still carried as vestiges after natural power is available. Oh well, I’ll put them in. I’ll have one done in about three minutes if you want to wait.”

“No. I’ve already got a car,” Slick said. “Let’s go, Jim.”

That was the last shanty in the block, so they turned back.

“I was just wondering what was down in this block where nobody ever goes,” Slick said. “There’s a lot of odd corners in our town if you look them out.”

“There are some queer guys in the shanties that were here before this bunch,” Boomer said. “Some of them used to come up to the Red Rooster to drink. One of them could gobble like a turkey. One of them could roll one eye in one direction and the other eye the other way. They shoveled hulls at the cottonseed oil float before it burned down.”

They went by the public stenographer shack again.

“No kidding, honey, how do you type without a typewriter?” Slick asked.

“Typewriter is too slow,” the girl said.

“I asked how, not why,” Slick said.

“I know. Is it not nifty the way I turn away a phrase? I think I will have a big oak tree growing in front of my shop tomorrow for shade. Either of you nice men have an acorn in your pocket?”

“Ah—no. How do you really do the typing, girl?”

“You promise you won’t tell anybody.”

“I promise.”

“I make the marks with my tongue,” the girl said.

They started slowly on up the block.

“Hey, how do you make the carbon copies?” Jim Boomer called back.

“With my other tongue,” the girl said.

There was another forty-foot trailer loading out of the first shanty in the block. It was bundles of half-inch plumbers pipe coming out of the chute—in twenty-foot lengths. Twenty-foot rigid pipe out of a seven-foot shed.

“I wonder how he can sell trailer-loads of such stuff out of a little shack like that,” Slick puzzled, still not satisfied.

“Like the girl says, he cuts prices,” Boomer said. “Let’s go over to the Red Rooster and see if there’s anything going on. There always were a lot of funny people in that block.” 

When I wrote to R. A. Lafferty as a very young man, I asked him about his favorite of his own short stories. He mentioned three stories that I had read and loved—“Ginny Wrapped in the Sun,” “Configuration of the North Shore,” and “Continued on Next Rock”—and one that I hadn’t. It was called “Ride a Tin Can.”

Shortly afterward, I bought a copy of Strange Doings, and read “Ride a Tin Can,” and was disappointed. It made me sad.

I think I wanted to be uplifted. I wanted the thing that Lafferty did where his apocalypses were joyful things one went into with delight. And here were the Shelni race going into an apocalypse with joyful delight, and I walked away from the story feeling that I might just have read the saddest story in the world. I felt manipulated, because it was an ending that called for tears, told in a way that did not allow for tears. I did not trust tears anyway. “Ride a Tin Can” left me disappointed in Humanity. It was a story I could admire, but I could not love, and which I did not look forward to rereading.

As an older reader, I can love it: I can love it for the shape of the story, the three tiny tales that hover at the end of understanding; I love it for the worldbuilding that is never fully described, for the relationship between the Shelni and the Skokie and the frogs and the trees. I love it for Holly Harkel, a human woman who is goblin enough to talk to goblins under their tree-root home, goblin enough to ride a tin can herself.

It’s a story nobody else could have written, pulled off in a way nobody else would have imagined, that describes a genocide that hurts, without a word wasted.

I think, “We are better than this. Surely we must be better than this?” And I think, “How do you write a story like that anyway? Write a story like that, and make it look easy?”

But he does. Somehow he does.

It’s OK if you cry.

These are my notes on the very sticky business. They are not in the form of a protest, which would be useless. Holly is gone, and the Shelni will all be gone in the next day or two, if indeed there are any of them left now. This is for the record only.

Holly Harkel and myself, Vincent Vanhoosier, received funds and permission to record the lore of the Shelni through the intercession of that old correlator John Holmberg. This was unexpected. All lorists have counted John as their worst enemy.

“After all, we have been at great expense to record the minutiae of pig grunts and the sound of earthworms,” Holmberg told me, “and we have records of squeakings of hundreds of species of orbital rodents. We have veritable libraries of the song and cackle of all birds and pseudo-ornins. Well, let us add the Shelni to our list. I do not believe that their thumping on tree roots or blowing into jug gourds is music. I do not believe that their singsong is speech any more than the squeaking of doors is speech. We have recorded, by the way, the sound of more than thirty thousand squeaking doors. And we have had worse. Let us have the Shelni, then, if your hearts are set on it. You’ll have to hurry. They’re about gone.

“And let me say in all compassion that anyone who looks like Miss Holly Harkel deserves her heart’s desire. That is no more than simple justice. Besides, the bill will be footed by the Singing Pig Breakfast Food Company. These companies are bitten by the small flea of remorse every now and then and they want to pitch a few coins into some fund for luck. It’s never many coins that they want to pitch; the remorse bug that bites them is never a very large one. You may be able to stretch it to cover your project though, Vanhoosier.”

So we had our appropriation and our travel, Miss Holly and myself.

Holly Harkel had often been in disrepute for her claims to understand the languages of various creatures. There was special outrage to her claim that she would be able to understand the Shelni. Now that was odd. No disrepute attached to Captain Charbonnett for his claim to understand the planetary simians, and if there was ever a phony claim it was this. No disrepute attached to Meyro-witz for his claim of finding esoteric meanings in the patterns of vole droppings. But there seemed something incredible in the claim of the goblin-faced Holly Harkel that not only would she be able to understand the Shelni instantly and completely but that they were not low scavenger beasts at all, that they were genuine goblin people who played goblin music and sang goblin songs.

Holly Harkel had a heart and soul too big for her dwarfish body, and a brain too big for her curious little head. That, I suppose, is what made her so lumpy everywhere. She was entirely compounded of love and concern and laughter, and much of it bulged out from her narrow form. Her ugliness was one of the unusual things and I believe that she enjoyed giving it to the worlds. She had loved snakes and toads, she had loved monkeys and misbegottens. She had come to look weirdly like them when we studied them. She was a snake when we studied them, she was a toad when they were our subject. She studied every creature from the inside of it. And here there was an uncommon similarity, even for her.

Holly loved the Shelni instantly. She became a Shelni, and she hadn’t far to go. She moved and scooted and climbed like a Shelni. She came down trees headfirst like a Shelni or a squirrel. She had always seemed to me to be a little other than human. And now she was avid to record the Shelni things “—before they be gone.”

As for the Shelni themselves, some scientists have called them humanoid, and then braced themselves for the blow and howl. If they were humanoid they were certainly the lowest and oddest humanoids ever. But we folklorists knew intuitively what they were. They were goblins pure and simple—I do not use the adjectives here as cliché. The tallest of them were less than three feet tall; the oldest of them were less than seven years old. They were, perhaps, the ugliest creatures in the universe, and yet of a pleasant ugliness. There was no evil in them at all. Scientists who have tested them have insisted that there was no intelligence in them at all. They were friendly and open. Too friendly, too open, as it happened, for they were fascinated by all human things, to their harm. But they were no more human than a fairy or an ogre is human. Less, less, less than a monkey.

“Here is a den of them,” Holly divined that first day (it was the day before yesterday). “There will be a whole coven of them down under here and the door is down through the roots of this tree. When I got my doctorate in primitive music I never imagined that I would be visiting Brownies down under tree roots. I should say that I never so much as hoped that I would be. There was so much that they didn’t teach us. There was even one period in my life when I ceased to believe in goblins.”

The latter I do not believe.

Suddenly Holly was into a hole in the ground headfirst, like a gopher, like a ground squirrel, like a Shelni. I followed her, letting myself down carefully, and not headfirst. I myself would have to study the Shelni from the outside. I myself would never be able to crawl inside their green goblin skins, never be able to croak or carol with their frog tongues, never feel what made their popeyes pop. I myself would not even have been able to sense out their dens.

And at the bottom of the hole, at the entrance to the den itself, was an encounter which I disbelieved at the time I was seeing and hearing it. There occurred a conversation which I heard with my own ears, they having become transcendent for the moment. It was in the frog-croak Shelni talk between Holly Harkel and the five-year-old Ancient who guarded the coven, and yet it was in a sort of English and I understood it:

“Knockle, knockle.” (This from Holly.)

“Crows in cockle.” (This from the guard.)

“Wogs and wollie.”

“Who you?”

“Holly.”

“What’s a dinning?”

“Coming inning.”

So they let us in. But if you think you can enter a Shelni coven without first riming with the five-year-old Ancient who guards it, then it’s plain that you’ve never been in one of the places. And though the philologists say that the “speech” of the Shelni is meaningless croaking, yet it was never meaningless to Holly, and in flashes it was not meaningless to me. The secret guess of Holly was so.

Holly had insisted that the Shelni spoke English within the limits of their vocal apparatus. And they told her at this very first session that they never had had any language of their own “because no one had ever made one for us”; so they used English as soon as they came to hear it. “We would pay you for the use of it if we had anything to pay you with,” they said. It is frog-croak English, but only the pure of ear can understand it.

I started the recorder and Holly started the Shelni. Quite soon she had them playing on those jug-shaped flutes of theirs. Frog music. Ineffably sad sionnach skirries. Rook, crow, and daw squabbling melody. They were pleasant, weird little pieces of music that sounded as though they were played underwater. It would be hard to imagine them not played under the ground at least.

The tunes were short just as all tunes of children are short. There was no real orchestration, though that should have been possible with the seven flutes differently jugged and tuned. Yet there was true melody in these: short, complete, closed melody, dwarfed perfection. They were underground fugues full of worms’ blood and cool as root cider. They were locust and chaffer and cricket din.

Then Holly got one of the most ancient of the Shelni to tell stories while the jug flutes chortled. Here are the two of them that we recorded that first day. Others who listen to them today say that there is nothing to them but croaking. But I heard them with Holly Harkel, she helped interpret them to me, so I can hear and understand them perfectly in frog-croak English.

Take them, Grisly Posterity! I am not sure that you deserve even this much of the Shelni. The Shelni Who Lost His Burial Tooth

It is told this way.

There was a Shelni who lost his burial tooth before he died. Every Shelni begins life with six teeth, and he loses one every year. Then, when he is very old and has only one tooth left, he dies. He must give the last tooth to the Skokie burial-person to pay for his burial. But this Shelni had either lost two teeth in one year or else he had lived to too great an age.

He died. And he had no tooth left to pay with.

“I will not bury you if you have no tooth left to pay me with,” said the Skokie burial-person. “Should I work for nothing?”

“Then I will bury myself,” said the dead Shelni.

“You don’t know how,” said the Skokie burial-person. “You don’t know the places that are left. You will find that all the places are full. I have agreement that everybody should tell everybody that all the places are full, so only the burial-person may bury. That is my job.”

Nevertheless, the dead Shelni went to find a place to bury himself. He dug a little hole in the meadow, but wherever he dug he found that it was already full of dead Shelnis or Skokies or Frogs. And they always made him put all the dirt back that he had dug.

He dug holes in the valley and it was the same thing. He dug holes on the hill, and they told him that the hill was full too. So he went away crying for he could find no place to lie down.

He asked the Eanlaith whether he could stay in their tree. And they said, no he could not. They would not let any dead folks live in their tree.

He asked the Eise if he could stay in their pond. And they said, no he could not.

They would not allow any dead folks in their pond.

He asked the Sionnach if he could sleep in their den. And they said, no he could not. They liked him when he was alive, but a dead person has hardly any friends at all.

So the poor dead Shelni wanders yet and can find no place to rest his head.

He will wander forever unless he can find another burial tooth to pay with.

They used to tell it so.

One comment on this burial story: the Shelni do have careful burial. But the burial crypts are plainly dug, not by the six-fingered Shelni, but by the seven-clawed Skokie. There must be substance to the Skokie burial-person. Moreover, the Skokie, though higher on the very low scale than the Shelni, do not bury their own. Furthermore, there are no Shelni remains going back more than about thirty equivalent years. There are no random lying or fossil Shelni at all, though such remains are common for every other species here.

This is how they tell it.

There was a woman who was neither Shelni nor Skokie nor Frog. She was Sky Woman. One day she came with her child and sat down under the Shelni tree. When she got up to go she left her own child who was asleep and picked up a Shelni child by mistake. Then the Shelni woman came to get her own child and she looked at it. She did not know what was wrong but it was a Sky People child.

“Oh, it has pink skin and flat eyes! How can that be?” the Shelni woman asked. But she took it home with her and it still lives with the Shelni and everyone has forgotten the difference.

Nobody knows what the Sky Woman thought when she got the Shelni child home and looked at it. Nevertheless she kept it, and it grew and was more handsome than any of them.

But when the second year came and the young Shelni was grown, it walked in the woods and said, “I do not feel like a Sky People. But if I am not a Sky People, then what am I? I am not a Duck. I am not a Frog. And if I am a Bird, what kind of Bird am I? There is nothing left. It must be that I am a Tree.” There was reason for this. We Shelni do look a little bit like trees and we feel a little bit like trees.

So the Shelni put down roots and grew bark and worked hard at being a tree. He underwent all the hardships that are the life of a tree. He was gnawed by goats and gobniu; he was rough-tongued by cattle and crom; he was infested by slugs and befouled by the nameless animal. Moreover, parts of him were cut away for firewood.

But he kept feeling the jug music creeping up all the way from his undertoes to his hair and he knew that this music was what he had always been looking for. It was the same jug and tine music that you hear even now.

Then a bird told the Shelni that he was not really a tree but that it was too late for him to leave off growing like a tree. He had brothers and sisters and kindred living in the hole down under his roots, the bird said, and they would have no home if he stopped being a tree.

This is the tree that is the roof of our den where we are even now. This tree is our brother who was lost and who forgot that he was a Shelni.

This is the way it has always been told.

And the oldest of the oldest grandmothers knows how the universe began. Or does she? And does she—or they—know how to live forever?

This is R. A. Lafferty dangling a simple, delicious carrot in front of his not-simple protagonist, a space plunderer named Ceran Swicegood. Of course, Ceran would like to think of himself as a “special aspects man,” a more refined breed than his compatriots who take brutish names like Manbreaker and Barrelhouse. These names, they feel, make it easier for them to pillage. A name like “Ceran Swicegood” is for someone who’s searching for more … esoteric and rarefied booty.

But it’s this rarefied, pretentious (and ultimately greedy) search that destroys poor Ceran quicker than the short-term, cash-money goals of his colleagues. Knowledge is power, but ultimate knowledge juuuuuuust out of reach is soul-poison.

Did I mention this story is also hilarious?

Ceran Swicegood was a promising young Special Aspects Man. But, like all Special Aspects, he had one irritating habit. He was forever asking the question: How Did it All Begin?

They all had tough names except Ceran. Manbreaker Crag, Heave Huckle, Blast Berg, George Blood, Move Manion (when Move says “Move,” you move), Trouble Trent. They were supposed to be tough, and they had taken tough names at the naming. Only Ceran kept his own—to the disgust of his commander, Manbreaker.

“Nobody can be a hero with a name like Ceran Swicegood!” Manbreaker would thunder. “Why don’t you take Storm Shannon? That’s good. Or Gutboy Barrelhouse or Slash Slagle or Nevel Knife? You barely glanced at the suggested list.”

“I’ll keep my own,” Ceran always said, and that is where he made his mistake. A new name will sometimes bring out a new personality. It had done so for George Blood. Though the hair on George’s chest was a graft job, yet that and his new name had turned him from a boy into a man. Had Ceran assumed the heroic name of Gutboy Barrelhouse he might have been capable of rousing endeavors and man-sized angers rather than his tittering indecisions and flouncy furies.

They were down on the big asteroid Proavitus—a sphere that almost tinkled with the potential profit that might be shaken out of it. And the tough men of the Expedition knew their business. They signed big contracts on the native velvet-like bark scrolls and on their own parallel tapes. They impressed, inveigled, and somewhat cowed the slight people of Proavitus. Here was a solid two-way market, enough to make them slaver. And there was a whole world of oddities that could lend themselves to the luxury trade.

“Everybody’s hit it big but you,” Manbreaker crackled in kindly thunder to Ceran after three days there. “But even Special Aspects is supposed to pay its way. Our charter compels us to carry one of your sort to give a cultural twist to the thing, but it needn’t be restricted to that. What we go out for every time, Ceran, is to cut a big fat hog in the rump—we make no secret of that. But if the hog’s tail can be shown to have a cultural twist to it, that will solve a requirement. And if that twist in the tail can turn us a profit, then we become mighty happy about the whole thing. Have you been able to find out anything about the living dolls, for instance? They might have both a cultural aspect and a market value.”

“The living dolls seem a part of something much deeper,” Ceran said. “There’s a whole complex of things to be un-raveled. The key may be the statement of the Proavitoi that they do not die.”

“I think they die pretty young, Ceran. All those out and about are young, and those I have met who do not leave their houses are only middling old.”

“Then where are their cemeteries?”

“Likely they cremate the old folks when they die.”

“Where are the crematories?”

“They might just toss the ashes out or vaporize the entire remains. Probably they have no reverence for ancestors.”

“Other evidence shows their entire culture to be based on an exaggerated reverence for ancestors.”

“You find out, Ceran. You’re Special Aspects Man.”

I first encountered “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” in The Norton Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery with Karen Joy Fowler, an anthology that turned out to be important to my fiction-writing career. It was published in fall 1993, during my first year in the graduate creative-writing program at North Carolina State University. I don’t think I bought a copy immediately, but in January 1994 I had my first workshop with Nebula Award winner John Kessel, who peered at my manuscript and peered at me and peered at my manuscript again and said, “There’s a long, rich history of this sort of thing, and you’re part of it whether you know it or not.”

From that point Kessel was my sensei, and on his recommendation I snapped up a copy of the Norton—a box of marvels that tells a novice SF writer, “You can do anything you want, as long as it’s strange.” When I flew to the Clarion West Writers Workshop that summer, also on Kessel’s recommendation, the Norton was one of the two inspirational hardcovers in my luggage. (The other was Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! for which I never will be asked to write an introduction.)

Of all the stories in the Norton that spoke directly to me, “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” may have spoken the loudest. In her Norton essay, Le Guin discusses science fiction’s tendency to literalize metaphors, and Lafferty’s story precisely literalizes one of the foundational metaphors of my upbringing in rural South Carolina, where I was taught to venerate a long chain of ancestors growing ever smaller as they receded into the distance. Their secrets were closely guarded, but as I stumbled through the late twentieth century, those generations were often audible in the background, like peepers in the spring; I was pretty sure they were laughing. Moreover, all my important ancestors, the conveyors of culture and especially language, seemed to be women. Lafferty’s unforgettable “living dolls” of the planet Proavitus (Latin for “ancestral,” I’m told) embody the famous Faulkner line from Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Rereading Lafferty’s story now, I wonder about the fate of the Proavitoi. What happens to them in the space between the story’s last two sentences? “With the pharmacopoeia that one could pick up here, a man need never die,” says Manbreaker Crag, who envisions his team becoming “the patent medicine kings of the universe.” Will these “slight people” survive Manbreaker’s unstranding of their organic chemistry? Consider that Lafferty was a lifelong resident of Oklahoma—a state wrested from the natives by any number of Manbreaker Crags—and many of his writings ponder the exploitation of the indigenous peoples of North America; along with language itself, it is the unavoidable theme of his great novel, Okla Hannali.

I believe Lafferty knows exactly what happens to the Proavitoi, but spares us at the end by diverting our attention to “another and much more unpleasant story.” As the ultimate grandmother might have said, was too joke a joke to tell a stranger, perhaps; Lafferty could not insult a stranger to tell so funny, so unbelieve.

Look out your window. What do you see? The gang fight on the corner, with the teenie-boppers using churchkeys on each other’s faces; the scissors grinder with his multicolored cart and tinkling bells; a pudgy woman in a print dress too short for her fat legs, hoeing her lawn; a three-alarm fire with children trapped on the fifth story; a mad dog attached to the leg of a peddler of Seventh Day Adventist literature; an impending race riot with a representative of RAM on a sound truck. Any or all? It takes no special powers of observation to catalog the unclassifiable. But now look again. What do you see? What you usually see? An empty street. Now catalog:

Curbstones, without which cars would run up onto front lawns. Mailboxes, without which touch with the world would be diminished. Telephone poles and wires, without which communication would screech to a halt. Gutters, sewers, and manholes, without which you would be flooded when it rains. Blacktop, without which the car you own wouldn’t last a month on the crushed rock. The breeze, without which, well, a day is diminished. What are these things? They are the obvious. So obvious they become invisible. How many water hydrants and mailboxes did you pass today? None? Hardly. You passed dozens, but you did not see them. They are the incredibly valuable, absolutely necessary, totally ignored staples of a well-run community.

Speculative fiction is a small community. It has its obvious flashy residents. Knight, Sheckley, Sturgeon, Bradbury, Clarke, Vonnegut. We see them and take note of them, and know what they’re about. But the community would not run one thousandth as well as it does without the quiet writers, the ones who turn out story after story, not hack work but really excellent stories, time after time. The kind you settle back and think about, after finishing them, saying, “That was a good story.” And you promptly forget who wrote it. Perhaps later you recall the story. “Oh yeah, remember that one about…” and then you wrinkle down and say, “What the hell was the name of the guy who wrote it? He’s done a bunch of things, you know, pretty fair writer…”

The problem is a matter of cumulativeness. Each story is an excellence, standing alone. But somehow it never makes a totality, an image of a writer, a career in perspective. This is the sad but obvious thing about R. A. Lafferty’s place in speculative fiction.

He is a man of substantiality, whose writing is top-flight. Not merely competent fiction, but genuinely exemplary fiction. He has been writing for—how many years? More than six, but less than fifteen? Something like that. Yet he is seldom mentioned when fans gather to discuss The Writers. Even though he has been anthologized many times, been included in Judith Merril’s Year’s Best SF on several occasions, and the Carr-Wollheim World’s Best anthology twice, and appeared in almost all the science fiction magazines. He is the invisible man. It will be rectified here. Raphael Aloysius Lafferty will emerge, will speak, will declare himself, and then you will read another extra-brilliant story by him. And dammit, this time remember!

Lafferty speaking: “I am, not necessarily in this order, fifty-one years old, a bachelor, an electrical engineer, a fat man.

“Born in Iowa, came to Oklahoma when I was four years old, and except for four years in the army have been here all my life. Also, one year on a little civil service job in Washington, D.C. The only college I’ve ever attended was a couple of years in the University of Tulsa’s night school division long ago, mostly math and German. I’ve spent close to thirty years working for electrical jobbers, mostly as buyer and price-quotation man. During WWII I was stationed in Texas, North Carolina, Florida, California, Australia, New Guinea, Morotai (Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia), and the Philippines. I was a good staff sergeant, and at one time I could talk pretty fair pasar Malay and Tagalog (of the Philippines).

“What does a man say about himself? Never the important things. I was a heavy drinker for a few years and gave it up about six years ago. This left a gap: when you give up the company of the more interesting drinkers, you give up something of the colorful and fantastic. So I substituted writing science fiction. Something I read in one of the writers’ magazines gave me the silly idea that science fiction would be easy to write. It isn’t, for me. I wasn’t raised on the stuff like most of the writers in this form seem to have been.

“My hobby is language. Any language. I’ve got at least a thousand dollars in self-teach grammars and readers and dictionaries and Lingua-phone and Cortinaphone courses. I’ve picked up a rough reading knowledge of all the languages of the Latin, German, and Slavic families, as well as Irish and Greek; but actually Spanish, French, and German are the only ones I read freely with respectable speed. I’m a Catholic of the out-of-season or conservative variety. As to politics, I am the only member of the American Centrist Party, whose tenets I will one day set out in an ironic-Utopia story. I’m a compulsive walker; turn me loose in a strange town and I’ll explore every corner of it on foot inside a week. I don’t think of myself as a very interesting fellow.”

This is the editor again, for a final comment. Lafferty is about as uninteresting as his stories. Which is to say, not at all. As entered for the prosecution’s case against R. A.’s contention that he’s a neb, the following story, one of my particular favorites in this book.

Two Englishmen, Richard Rockwell and Seruno Smith, were rolling in a terrain buggy over the Thar Desert. It was bleak, red country, more rock than sand. It looked as though the top had been stripped off it and the naked underland left uncovered.

They heard thunder and it puzzled them. They looked at each other, the blond Rockwell and the dark Smith. It never thundered in the whole country between New Delhi and Bahawalpur. What would this rainless north India desert have to thunder with?

“Let’s ride the ridges here,” Rockwell told Smith, and he sent the vehicle into a climb. “It never rains here, but once before I was caught in a draw in a country where it never rained. I nearly drowned.”

It thundered again, heavy and rolling, as though to tell them that they were hearing right.

“This draw is named Kuti Tavdavi—Little River,” Smith said darkly. “I wonder why.”

Then he jerked back as though startled at himself.

“Rockwell, why did I say that? I never saw this draw before. How did a name like that pop into my mind? But it’s the low draw that would be a little river if it ever rained in this country. This land can’t have significant rain. There’s no high place to tip whatever moisture goes over.”

“I wonder about that every time I come,” said Rockwell, and raised his hand toward the shimmering heights—the Land of the Great Horses, the famous mirage. “If it were really there it would tip the moisture. It would make a lush savanna of all this.”

They were mineral explorers doing ground minutiae on promising portions of an aerial survey. The trouble with the Thar was that it had everything—lead, zinc, antimony, copper, tin, bauxite—in barely submarginal amounts. Nowhere would the Thar pay off, but everywhere it would almost pay.

Now it was lightning about the heights of the mirage, and they had never seen that before. It had clouded and lowered. It was thundering in rolling waves, and there was no mirage of sound.

“There is either a very large and very busy bird up there or this is rain,” Rockwell said.

And it had begun to rain, softly but steadily. It was pleasant as they chukkered along in the vehicle through the afternoon. Rain in the desert is always like a bonus.

Smith broke into a happy song in one of the northwest India tongues, a tune with a ribald swing to it, though Rockwell didn’t understand the words. It was full of double rhymes and vowel-packed words such as a child might make up.

“How the devil do you know the tongues so well?” Rockwell asked. “I find them difficult, and I have a good linguistic background.”

“I didn’t have to learn them,” Smith said, “I just had to remember them. They all cluster around the boro jib itself.”

“Around the what? How many of the languages do you know?”

“All of them. The Seven Sisters, they’re called: Punjabi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Marathi, Sindhi, Hindi.”

“Your Seven Sisters only number six,” Rockwell jibed.

“There’s a saying that the seventh sister ran off with a horse trader,” Smith said. “But that seventh lass is still encountered here and there around the world.”

Often they stopped to survey on foot. The very color of the new rivulets was significant to the mineral men, and this was the first time they had ever seen water flow in that country. They continued on fitfully and slowly, and ate up a few muddy miles.

Rockwell gasped once and nearly fell off the vehicle. He had seen a total stranger riding beside him, and it shook him.

Then he saw that it was Smith as he had always been, and he was dumbfounded by the illusion. And, soon, by something else.

“Something is very wrong here,” Rockwell said.

“Something is very right here,” Smith answered him, and then broke into another song in an Indian tongue.

“We’re lost,” Rockwell worried out loud. “We can’t see any distance for the rain, but there shouldn’t be rising ground here. It isn’t mapped.”

“Of course it is,” Smith sang. “It’s the Jalo Char.”

“The what? Where did you get a name like that? The map’s a blank here, and the country should be.”

“Then the map is defective. Man, it’s the sweetest valley in the world! It will lead us all the way up. How could the map forget it? How could we all forget it for so long?”

“Smith! What’s wrong? You’re pie-eyed.”

“Everything’s right, I tell you. I was reborn just a minute ago. It’s a coming home.”

“Smith! We’re riding through green grass.”

“I love it. I could crop it like a horse.”

“That cliff, Smith! It shouldn’t be that close! It’s part of the mir—”

“Why, sir, that is Lolo Trusul.”

“But it’s not real! It’s not on any topography map!”

“Map, sir? I’m a poor kalo man who wouldn’t know about things like that.”

“Smith! You’re a qualified cartographer!”

“Does seem that I followed a trade with a name like that. But the cliff is real enough. I climbed it in my boyhood—in my other boyhood. And that yonder, sir, is Drapengoro Rez—the Grassy Mountain. And the high plateau ahead of us which we begin to climb is Diz Boro Grai—the Land of the Great Horses.”

Rockwell stopped the terrain buggy and leaped off. Smith followed him in a happy daze.

“Smith, you’re wide-eyed crazy!” Rockwell gasped. “And what am I? We’re terribly lost somehow. Smith, look at the log chart and the bearings recorder!”

“Log chart, sir? I’m a poor kalo man who wouldn’t know—”

“Damn you, Smith, you made these instruments. If they’re correct we’re seven hundred feet too high and have been climbing for ten miles into a highland that’s supposed to be part of a mirage. These cliffs can’t be here. We can’t be here. Smith!”

But Seruno Smith had ambled off like a crazy man.

“Smith, where are you trotting off to? Can’t you hear me?”

“You call to me, sir?” asked Smith. “And by such a name?”

“Are the two of us as crazy as the country?” Rockwell moaned. “I’ve worked with you for three years. Isn’t your name Smith?”

“Why, yes, sir, I guess it might be englished as Horse-Smith or Black-Smith. But my name is Pettalangro and I’m going home.”

And the man who had been Smith started on foot up to the Land of the Great Horses.

“Smith, I’m getting on the buggy and I’m going back,” Rockwell shouted. “I’m scared liverless of this country that changes. When a mirage turns solid it’s time to quit. Come along now! We’ll be back in Bikaner by tomorrow morning. There’s a doctor there, and a whiskey bar. We need one of them.”

“Thank you, sir, but I must go up to my home,” Smith sang out. “It was kind of you to give me a ride along the way.”

“I’m leaving you, Smith. One crazy man is better than two.”

“Ashava, Sarishan,” Smith called a parting.

“Smith, unriddle me one last thing,” Rockwell called, trying to find a piece of sanity to hold to. “What is the name of the seventh sister?”

“Deep Romany,” Smith sang, and he was gone up into the high plateau that had always been a mirage.

In 1967 Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions was first published by Doubleday. I, in high school in Iowa and already devouring the likes of Fredric Brown, Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, Zelazny, and Dick, might as well have been the target Harlan put in the crosshairs. In retrospect we peer through many great annual Best of anthologies—edited by Gardner Dozois, David Hartwell, Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling, Kelly Link & Gavin Grant, Terry Carr, etc.—and we forget how monumental was Harlan’s lashing together of what he termed “Thirty-two Soothsayers.” I’m near Philadelphia now, and so I think of Harlan as the Albert Barnes of science fiction. Barnes’ collection of impressionists is an extraordinary thing; and to be fair there are a few disappointing works hanging among the Matisses, Van Goghs, Gaunguins, Picassos, and Renoirs—lesser paintings by artists who faded into obscurity, though obviously Barnes thought he saw something in them. Dangerous Visions really is the Barnes collection of science fiction. A few “what happened to…” pieces, but otherwise breathtaking.

Dangerous Visions proved to be my gateway into the worlds of Raphael Aloysius Lafferty through the story Harlan selected, called “Land of the Great Horses.” I did not know at the time how extraordinary that would prove to be, just as I didn’t know that Lafferty himself was a fellow Iowan (born in the southwestern town of Neola, Iowa—if anyone from Neola is reading this, you need to put up at least a plaque for Heaven’s sake!)

As Lafferty stories go, this one is short and seemingly simple, but oh, by the end it has shape-shifted on you more than once. It can be read, in a way, as a companion story to another tale of his called “Narrow Valley,” also concerned with unreliable topography.

It is also exemplary of the way Lafferty entered stories sidewise, producing a text that dives straight into a situation already in motion and seems to be about one thing, yet turns out to be about something else. And then when you think you have its measure, the author adds a punch line you never saw coming.

Here, we begin with a sort of dictum: “They came and took our country away from us,” the people had always said. But nobody understood them.

What country and what people, we must read to discover. We are then introduced to two Englishmen, Richard Rockwell and Seruno Smith, driving across the Thar Desert, which is to say the Great Desert of India. They approach and behold a famous mirage called the Land of the Great Horses, or Diz Boro Grai. It’s what they’ve come to see. Things immediately start to go wrong. In this extremely barren desert, they hear the sound of thunder from an approaching storm, and then find their mirage shot with lightning. The improbable climatic event seems to transform Seruno Smith: he suddenly and inexplicably knows the names of places (a draw called Kuti Tavdavi, Little River); he bursts into song in tongues he does not speak. When asked how by Rockwell, he explains that he has only to remember these tongues to sing, and that “They all cluster around the boro jib itself.” Smith seems to be leading this “great life” out of nowhere. He confesses to Rockwell that he speaks all languages in play—the so-called Seven Sisters, but Smith names only six. Rockwell notices and finally requests the name of the missing language: Deep Romany. Rockwell tries to head back, but Smith refuses, and calls him “Sarishan,” or “English,” as if they are suddenly foreign to each other, and then begins to scale the heights that until moments ago were part of the mirage.

The story shifts then to various small scenes of people speaking various dialects of Romani, Punjabi, Hindi—in each it’s clear that someone with Romany blood is feeling the pull of Diz Boro Grai. Some are Romani Rai, gypsy gentlemen; some are dukkerin-women, that is, fortune-tellers; some perhaps Athinganoi, considered to be the ancestral tribe of the Roma. And so it goes as various people with some percentage of gypsy blood pull up stakes and head “home” because “the rez has riser’d,” and it tugs at them, smells like rain, cannot be ignored. Home is the Land of Great Horses, which became a mirage for thousands of years but now is no longer.

To reveal more would be to spoil the story for the reader. Suffice it to say that once you understand what is going on, Lafferty still has a coda to deliver—one that plays on the “Diz” of “Diz Boro Grai” and “dizz” in a newly coined dialect that refers in all probability to Disneyland.

In “Narrow Valley,” where, Michael Swanwick tells me, Lafferty is having his little joke with the Pawnee language, here he effortlessly tosses off terms and phrases in various Romany dialects … all of which leads to a final, signature jape that can only exist because of his skill with those dialects.

As so often happens in a story by R. A. Lafferty, you are turned and turned and turned again, but always within the framework of the remarkable story itself. As a reader, I’m agog. As a writer, I’m forever asking, “How does he do this?” 

This is a story about a schlemiel, to use a word probably not too often heard in Raphael Aloysius Lafferty’s hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The schlemiel story is a genre I always thought I’d avoid, if I were an editor, for it has seemed to me that stories about schlemiels, losers, twerps, dullards, or schnooks would be of interest only to an audience of schlemiels, losers, twerps, dullards, or schnooks, at best, and no such people would be reading anything I edited. Well, never mind all that. R. A. Lafferty was a cunning and tricky writer and—as can quickly be seen—the schlemiel he created for us here is of an extraordinary sort.

“Eurema’s Dam” won a Hugo in 1973 at Toronto. I am not all that awed by stories that win awards, nor all that scornful of those that don’t, but Lafferty’s feat of winning a Hugo for “Eurema’s Dam” deserves some commemoration. Virtually all Hugo-winning stories then were first published in science fiction magazines or in paperback anthologies easily available to a wide segment of the electorate, but my anthology New Dimensions II had appeared only in an expensive hardcover edition that had sold perhaps six thousand copies. How, given that handicap, Lafferty’s story had ever reached enough people to get the required number of votes, I have no idea. Yet it won, beating out, among other things, a story of mine. I will not pretend that I would not have preferred it the other way around, but I was undilutedly delighted that so fine and special a writer as Lafferty had carried off his first trophy with a story I had published.

He was about the last of them.

What? The last of the great individualists? The last of the true creative geniuses of the century? The last of the sheer precursors?

No. No. He was the last of the dolts.

Kids were being born smarter all the time when he came along, and they would be so forever more. He was about the last dumb kid ever born.

I live in the future.

In 1978, when “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies” was first published, I was ten years old. My family lived in the forest-fire-prone foothills of the Canadian Rockies, in the echo path of wolf howls and coyote yips. That close to the mountains, radio signals aren’t reliable. Aside from the telephone, our only connection to the outside world was the TV. And oh boy, did we love it.

We had one channel, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The CBC’s programming wasn’t particularly inspiring—mostly homegrown shows like The Beachcombers and Front Page Challenge, with a few American shows like M.A.S.H. scattered like jewels across prime time. We were always disappointed when the shows went into repeats because we had no alternative. But we were kids. We would watch anything. My brother earned the nickname pattern-watcher because when the channel got knocked off the air, he would literally stare at the static pattern.

I would too, from time to time. Occasionally, if I stared long enough, I’d see things in there.

“Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies” is an alternate history of television. The narrator is an unnamed historian (probably amateur) who describes the television shows produced by Aurelian Bentley in 1873. These selenium “slow light” dramas are transmitted to television receivers that will repeat anything they receive. Thrillingly, because of the quirks of slow light, the more the receivers repeat the dramas, the better they become. They evolve and grow. The picture becomes clearer. The once-silent productions begin to develop sound. They also develop metacommentary, breaking the fourth wall and letting us into the inner workings of The Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley.

What a thrilling science fictional concept. My brothers and sisters and I would have embraced this technology in 1978. We would have watched those “slow light” dramas until they became so real we could have walked into their world.

This is Lafferty at his most delightful, playing with words and images to build a multilayered story within a story (within a story) that seems real despite its stylized, melodramatic trappings. I try to forgive Lafferty the use of troubling racial epithets (should I?) even though they throw me out of the story (in 1978, no, there was no excuse), because he touches my world to his. Lafferty makes me remember my entertainment-starved youth, where we would have done anything for a TV show that changed and even got better in repeat. And he makes me appreciate anew the wonder of this future I live in, where I carry in my pocket a receiver that will bring me, at a moment’s notice, all the television anyone could ever want. 

Even today, the “invention” of television is usually ascribed to Paul Nipkow of Germany, and the year is given as 1884. Nipkow used the principle of the variation in the electrical conductivity of selenium when exposed to light, and he used scanning discs as mechanical effectors. What else was there for him to use before the development of the phototube and the current-amplifying electron tube? The resolution of Nipkow’s television was very poor due to the “slow light” characteristics of selenium response and the lack of amplification. There were, however, several men in the United States who transmitted a sort of television before Nipkow did so in Germany.

Resolution of the images of these even earlier experimenters in the field (Aurelian Bentley, Jessy Polk, Samuel J. Perry, Gifford Hudgeons) was even poorer than was the case with Nipkow. Indeed, none of these pre-Nipkow inventors in the television field is worthy of much attention, except Bentley. And the interest in Bentley is in the content of his transmissions and not in his technical ineptitude.

It is not our object to enter into the argument of who really did first “invent” television (it was not Paul Nipkow, and it probably was not Aurelian Bentley or Jessy Polk either); our object is to examine some of the earliest true television dramas in their own queer “slow light” context. And the first of those “slow light” or selenium (“moonshine”) dramas were put together by Aurelian Bentley in the year 1873.

The earliest art in a new field is always the freshest and is often the best. Homer composed the first and freshest, and probably the best, epic poetry. Whatever caveman did the first painting, it remains among the freshest as well as the best paintings ever done. Aeschylus composed the first and best tragic dramas, Euclid invented the first and best of the artful mathematics (we speak here of mathematics as an art without being concerned with its accuracy or practicality). And it may be that Aurelian Bentley produced the best of all television dramas in spite of their primitive aspect.

Bentley’s television enterprise was not very successful despite his fee of one thousand dollars per day for each subscriber. In his heyday (or his hey-month, November of 1873), Bentley had fifty-nine subscribers in New York City, seventeen in Boston, fourteen in Philadelphia, and one in Hoboken. This gave him an income of ninety-one thousand dollars a day (which would be the equivalent of about a million dollars a day in today’s terms), but Bentley was extravagant and prodigal, and he always insisted that he had expenses that the world wotted not of. In any case, Bentley was broke and out of business by the beginning of the year 1874. He was also dead by that time.

The only things surviving from The Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley are thirteen of the “slow light” dramas, the master projector, and nineteen of the old television receivers. There are probably others of the receivers around somewhere, and persons coming onto them might not know what they are for. They do not look much like the television sets of later years.

The one we use for playing the old dramas is a good kerosene-powered model which we found and bought for eighteen dollars two years ago. If the old sets are ever properly identified and become collectors’ items, the price on them may double or even triple. We told the owner of the antique that it was a chestnut roaster, and with a proper rack installed it could likely be made to serve as that.

We bought the master projector for twenty-six dollars. We told the owner of that monster that it was a chicken incubator. The thirteen dramas in their canisters we had for thirty-nine dollars total. We had to add formaldehyde to activate the dramas, however, and we had to add it to both the projector and the receiver; the formaldehyde itself came to fifty-two dollars. I discovered soon that the canisters with their dramas were not really needed, nor was the master projector. The receiver itself would repeat everything that it had ever received. Still and all, it was money well spent.

The kerosene burner activated a small dynamo that imposed an electrical grid on the selenium matrix and awakened the memories of the dramas.

There was, however, an oddity in all the playbacks. The film-fix of the receiver continued to receive impressions so that every time a “slow light” drama is presented it is different, because of the feedback. The resolution of the pictures improves with use and is now much clearer and more enjoyable than originally.

The librettos of the first twelve of the thirteen Bentley dramas are not good, not nearly as good as the librettos of the Jessy Polk and the Samuel J. Perry dramas later in the decade. Aurelian Bentley was not a literary man; he was not even a completely literate man. His genius had many gaping holes in it. But he was a passionately dramatic man, and these dramas which he himself devised and directed have a great sweep and action to them. And even the librettos from which he worked are valuable for one reason. They tell us, though sometimes rather ineptly and vaguely, what the dramas themselves are all about. Without these outlines, we would have no idea in the world of the meaning of the powerful dramas.

There was an unreality, a “ghostliness,” about all the dramas, as though they were made by sewer light underground; or as if they were made by poor quality moonlight. Remember that the element selenium (the metal that is not a metal), the chemical basis of the dramas, is named from Selene, the moon.

Bentley did not use “moving pictures” of quickly succeeding frames to capture and transmit his live presentation dramas. Although Muybridge was in fact working on the zoopraxiscope (the first “moving picture” device) at that very time, his still incomplete work was not known to Aurelian Bentley. Samuel J. Perry and Gifford Hudgeons did use “moving picture” techniques for their primitive television dramas later in the decade; but Bentley, fortunately perhaps, did not. Each of Bentley’s thirty-minute live dramas, however it appeared for the first time in the first television receiver, was recorded in one single matrix or frame: and, thereafter, that picture took on a life and growth of its own. It was to some extent independent of sequence (an effect that has been attempted and failed of in several of the other arts); and it had a free way with time and space generally. This is part of the “ghostliness” of the dramas, and it is a large part of their power and charm. Each drama was one evolving moment outside of time and space (though mostly the scenes were in New York City and the Barrens of New Jersey).

Of course there was no sound in these early Bentley dramas, but let us not go too far astray with that particular “of course.” “Slow sound” as well as “slow light” is a characteristic of selenium response, and we will soon see that sound did in fact creep into some of the dramas after much replaying. Whether their total effects were accidental or by design, these early television dramas were absolutely unique.

The thirteen “slow light” dramas produced by Aurelian Bentley in the year 1873 (the thirteenth of them, the mysterious Pettifoggers of Philadelphia, lacks Bentley’s “Seal of Production,” and indeed it was done after his death: and yet he appears as a major character in it) were these:

1. The Perils of Patience, a Damnable Chase. In this, Clarinda Calliope, who was possibly one of the greatest actresses of American or world drama, played the part of Patience Palmer in the title role. Leslie Whitemansion played the role of Simon Legree. Kirbac Fouet played the part of “the Whip,” a sinister character. X. Paul McCoffin played the role of “the Embalmer.” Jaime del Diablo played “the Jesuit,” one of the most menacing roles in all drama. Torres Malgre played “the Slaver,” who carried the forged certificate showing that Patience had a shadow of black blood and so might be returned to slavery on San Croix. Inspiro Spectralski played “the Panther” (Is he a Man? Is he a Ghost?), who is the embodiment of an evil that is perhaps from beyond the world. Hubert Saint Nicholas played the part of “the Guardian,” who is really a false guardian.

This Damnable Chase is really a galloping allegory. It is the allegory of good against evil, of light against darkness, of inventiveness against crude obtuseness, of life against death, of openness against intrigue, of love against hatred, of courage against hellish fear. For excitement and intensity, this drama has hardly an equal. Time and again, it seemed that the Embalmer, striking out of the dark, would stab Patience with his needle full of the dread embalming fluid and so trap her in the rigidity of living death. Time and again, it seemed that the Whip would cut the flesh of Patience Palmer with his long lash with viper poison on its iron tip that would bring instant death. At every eventuality, it seemed as though Simon Legree or the Slaver would enslave her body, or the Jesuit or the Panther would enslave her soul. And her mysterious Guardian seems always about to save her, but his every attempt to save her has such reverse and disastrous effects as to cast doubt on the honesty and sincerity of the Guardian.

A high point of the drama is the duel of the locomotives that takes place during a tempestuous night in the West Orange Switching Yards. Again and again, Patience Palmer is all but trapped on railroad trestles by thundering locomotives driven by her adversaries (the West Orange Switching Yards seem to consist almost entirely of very high railroad trestles). Patience finally gets control of a locomotive of her own on which to escape, but the locomotives of her enemies thunder at her from every direction so that she is able to switch out of their way only at the last brink of every moment.

The Embalmer attempts to stab her with his needleful of embalming fluid every time their locomotives pass each other with double thunder and only inches to spare. The Whip tries to lash her with his cruel lash with its poisoned tip; and the Slaver threatens her with the outreached forged certificate of color, and only by fantastic cringing can she cringe back far enough to keep from being touched by it as their locomotives roar past each other in opposite directions.

It seems impossible that the racing locomotives can come so close and not hit each other, with their dazzling switching from track to track. And then (Oh, God save us all!) the Panther (Is he a Man? Is he a Devil?) has leaped from his own locomotive to that of Patience Palmer: he is behind her on her own locomotive, and she does not see him. He comes closer—but the climax of The Perils of Patience is not there in the West Orange Switching Yards. It is at a secret town and castle in the Barrens of New Jersey, a castle of evil repute. In this place the enemies of Patience were assembling a gang of beaters (slack-faced fellows with their tongues cut out), and they were readying bloodhounds to hunt Patience down to her death. She somehow obtains a large wagon piled high with hay and pulled by six large high-spirited horses. With this, she boldly drives, on a stormy night, into the secret town of her enemies and down that jagged road (there was a lightning storm going on that made everything seem jagged) at the end of which was the castle itself. The bloodhounds leap high at her as she passes, but they cannot pull her from the wagon.

But the Panther (Is he a Man? Is he a Beast?) has leaped onto her hay wagon behind her, and she does not see him. He comes close behind her—but Patience Palmer is already making her move. Driving unswervingly, carrying out her own intrepid plan, at that very moment she raises a key in her hand very high into the air. This draws the lightning down with a stunning flash, and the hay wagon is set ablaze. Patience leaps clear of the flaming hay wagon at the last possible moment, and the blazing, hurtling inferno crashes into the tall and evil castle to set it and its outbuildings and its whole town ablaze.

This is the flaming climax to one of the greatest chase dramas ever.

This final scene of The Perils will be met with often later. Due to the character of the “slow light” or selenium scenes, this vivid scene leaks out of its own framework and is superimposed, sometimes faintly, sometimes powerfully, as a ghost scene on all twelve of the subsequent dramas.

2. Thirsty Daggers, a Murder Mystery. This is the second of the Aurelian Bentley television dramas of 1873. Clarinda Calliope, one of the most talented actresses of her time, played the part of Maud Trenchant, the Girl Detective. The actors Leslie Whitemansion, Kirbac Fouet, X. Paul McCoffin, Jaime del Diablo, Torres Malgre, Inspiro Spectralski, and Hubert Saint Nicholas played powerful and menacing roles, but their identities and purposes cannot be set exactly. One must enter into the bloody and thrilling spirit of the drama without knowing the details.

More even than The Perils of Patience does Thirsty Daggers seem to be freed from the bonds of time and sequence. It is all one unfolding moment, growing always in intensity and intricacy, but not following a straight line of action. And this, accompanied by a deficiency of the libretto, leads to confusion.

The libretto cannot be read. It is darkened and stained. Chemical analysis has revealed that it is stained with human blood. It is our belief that Bentley sent the librettos to his clients decorated with fresh human blood to set a mood. But time has spread the stains, and almost nothing can be read. This is, however, a highly interesting drama, the earliest murder ever done for television.

It is nearly certain that Maud Trenchant, the Girl Detective, overcomes all the menaces and solves all the crimes, but the finer details of this are lost forever.

3. The Great Bicycle Race, the third of the Bentley television dramas, has that versatile actress Clarinda Calliope playing the lead role of July Meadowbloom in this joyful and allegorical “journey into summertime.” It is in The Great Bicycle Race that sound makes its first appearance in the Bentley dramas. It is the sounds of all outdoors that are heard in this drama, faintly at first, and more and more as time goes on. These are country and village sounds; they are county fair sounds. Though the sounds seem to be an accidental intrusion (another ghostly side-play of the selenium response magic), yet their quality lends belief to the evidence that the full and original title of this drama was The Great Bicycle Race, a Pastoral.

But there are other sounds, sometimes angry, sometimes imploring, sometimes arrogant and menacing—more about them in a bit.

Sheep and cattle sounds are all through the play; goat and horse and swine sounds; the rattle of ducks and geese; all the wonderful noises of the countryside. There are birds and grasshoppers, windmills and wagons, people calling and singing. There are the sounds of carnival barkers and the chants of gamblers and shills. There are the shrieks and giggles of young people.

And then there are those intrusive sounds of another sort, the separate overlay. These seem to be mostly indoor sounds, but sometimes they are outdoor grandstand sounds also, bristling talk in the reserved shadows of crowd noise and roaring.

“No, no, no. I’ll not be had. What sort of a girl do you think I am?”

“All these things I will give you, Clarie. No one else would give you so much. No one else would ever care so much. But now is the time for it. Now is the summer of our lives. Now we cut hay.”

“Let’s just see the price of a good hay barn first, Aurie. Let’s just get some things down on paper right now. We are talking about a summertime check that is as big as all summer. And we are talking about a much larger settlement to back up the other seasons and years.”

“Don’t you trust me, Clarie?”

“Of course I trust you, Bentley baby. I trust that you will get that trust fund that we are talking about down on paper today. I am a very trusting woman. I believe that we should have a trust fund to cover every condition and circumstance.”

Odd talk that, to be mixed in with the sound of The Great Bicycle Race.

The race was in conjunction with the Tri-county Fair, which counties were Camden, Gloucester, and Atlantic. The bicycle racers rode their twenty-mile course every afternoon for five afternoons, and careful time was kept. There was betting on each day’s race, but there was bigger betting on the final winner with the lowest total time for the five days, and the kitty grew and grew. From the great fairground grandstand, one could see almost all of the twenty-mile course that the riders rode, or could follow it by the plumes of dust. The grandstand was on high ground and the whole countryside was spread out before it. Cattle and mules were paraded and judged in front of that grandstand, before and during and after that daily race; then the race (for the approximate hour that it took to run it) was the big thing. There were seven drivers in the race, and all of them were world famous:

1. Leslie Whitemansion drove on a Von Sauerbronn “Special” of fine German craftsmanship. This machine, popularly known then as the “whizzer,” would get you there and it would bring you back. It was very roadworthy and surprisingly fast.

2. Kirbac Fouet was on an Ernest Michaux Magicien, a splendid machine. It had a socket into which a small sail might be fitted to give greater speed on a favorable wind.

3. X. Paul McCoffin was on a British Royal Velocipede. There are two things that may be remarked about the British Royal: it had solid rubber tires (the first rubber-tired bicycle ever), and it had class. It had that cluttered austerity of line that only the best of British products have.

4. Jaime del Diablo was on a Pierre Lallement “Boneshaker” with its iron-tired wooden wheels, the front one much larger than the rear.

5. Torres Malgre was on an American-built Richard Warren Sears Roadrunner, the first all-iron machine. “The only wood is in the heads of its detractors” was an advertising slogan used for the Roadrunner.

6. Inspiro Spectralski (Is he a Man? Is he a Cannon Ball?) was riding a McCracken’s Comet. This Comet had won races at several other county fairs around the state.

7. Hubert Saint Nicholas had a machine such as no one in the state had ever seen before. It was a French bicyclette named the Supreme. The bicyclette had the pedals fixed to drive the back wheel by the ingenious use of a chain and sprocket wheel, and so was not, strictly speaking, a bicycle at all. The true bicycles of the other six racers had the pedals attached directly to the front wheels. There was one syndicate of bettors who said the bicyclette had a mechanical advantage, and that Hubert would win on it. But other persons made jokes about this rig whose back wheel would arrive before its front wheel and whose driver would not arrive before the next day.

R. A. Lafferty was a gadfly.

Paradoxically, he was never a writer I “liked”—and even today I think of him as someone I am always being asked to write about. Because he’s so smart, it’s always a compliment. (The first time, decades ago, Terry Carr asked me to blurb his novel Past Master, I felt that same way.) His works are wryly humorous—though I always realize, moments after the laughter, I am the butt of the joke.

I never met him—he was from Oklahoma and lived his life in Tulsa with his sister, while tales of his alcoholic excess at SF conventions filtered up through the SF community.

“The Primary Education of the Camiroi” is, among other things, a story about linguistic drift as human society spreads more and more widely over more and more diverse landscapes.

Among the surprises the story offers is a fictive revelation that the flowering of ancient Greek Civilization was an “incursion” (an invasion?) of the Camiroi centuries ago.

Camiroi children have to learn to read more and more slowly, rather than faster and faster. (Lafferty’s tale was written in the 1950s, when a nation-wide craze for “speed-reading” courses swept the Anglophone world, among the most popular, one from Evelyn Wood. I was a slow reader—I was someone who wondered if I would not profit by taking an Evelyn Wood course…) Every once in a while in their topsy-turvy world, a familiar idea swims by (“Can you imagine a person so sick that he would desire to hold high office for any great period of time?” One of the reasons I wanted to be a writer in the first place is so that I could observe the effects of politics without being directly responsible for them.) This is in a section of text on education that ends with our learning that the Camiroi children design and construct their own school buildings.

Lafferty had his enthusiasm—the Choctaw Indians of his local area, whom he championed in the mythic novel Okla Hannali (1972), published by University of Oklahoma Press—sadly, not a book I have read, though it comes with high praise from writers on the topic such as Dee Brown.

Diogenes the Cynic is the philosopher who suggested, during the time of Plato, that perhaps education would go better if the teachers were beaten when their students did poorly …

This is the tradition Lafferty’s tales emerge from. And one has a far better understanding of this after one has been a teacher and, perhaps, retired from the position, than before.

The last half dozen pages of the Camiroi’s “primary education” are a list of courses, decided up by year, which end with a comment on what this progression might accomplish if it were “constituted” on Earth. The comment contains three recommendations as to how to accomplish these ends. Since they include kidnapping, book burning, and the murdering (“judicious hanging”) of “certain malingering students,” the tale is both witty and troubling, in the tradition of Swift’s “Modest Proposal.”

And that is where a good bit of Lafferty’s satire originates.

One of my favorite Lafferty anecdotes (I only discovered it on Wikipedia minutes ago) comes from David Langford in the Magazine SFX (2002): “[Once a] French publisher nervously asked whether Lafferty minded being compared to G. K. Chesterton [a Catholic author whose ‘distributism’ got him compared favorably to Marx], and there was a terrifying silence that went on and on. Was the great man hideously offended? Eventually, very slowly, he said: ‘You’re on the right track, kid,’ and wandered away.”

Even while I still find the stories unsettling, Lafferty seems on the right track …

“Where,” we asked the Information Factor at Camiroi City Terminal, “is the office of the local PTA?”

“Isn’t any,” he said cheerfully.

“You mean that in Camiroi City, the metropolis of the planet, there is no PTA?” our chairman Paul Piper asked with disbelief.

“Isn’t any office of it. But you’re poor strangers, so you deserve an answer even if you can’t frame your questions properly. See that elderly man sitting on the bench and enjoying the sun? Go tell him you need a PTA. He’ll make you one.”

“Perhaps the initials convey a different meaning on Camiroi,” said Miss Munch the first surrogate chairman. “By them we mean—”

“Parent Teachers Apparatus, of course. Colloquial English is one of the six Earthian languages required here, you know. Don’t be abashed. He’s a fine person, and he enjoys doing things for strangers. He’ll be glad to make you a PTA.”

We were nonplussed, but we walked over to the man indicated.

“We are looking for the local PTA, sir,” said Miss Smice, our second surrogate chairman. “We were told that you might help us.”

“Oh, certainly,” said the elderly Camiroi gentleman. “One of you arrest that man walking there, and we’ll get started with it.”

“Do what?” asked our Mr. Piper.

“Arrest him. I have noticed that your own words sometimes do not convey a meaning to you. I often wonder how you do communicate among yourselves. Arrest, take into custody, seize by any force physical or moral, and bring him here.”

“Yes, sir,” cried Miss Hanks, our third surrogate chairman. She enjoyed things like this. She arrested the walking Camiroi man with force partly physical and partly moral and brought him to the group.

“It’s a PTA they want, Meander,” the elder Camiroi said to the one arrested. “Grab three more, and we’ll get started. Let the lady help. She’s good at it.”

Our Miss Hanks and the Camiroi man named Meander arrested three other Camiroi men and brought them to the group.

“Five. It’s enough,” said the elderly Camiroi. “We are hereby constituted a PTA and ordered into random action. Now, how can we accommodate you, good Earth people?”

“But are you legal? Are you five persons competent to be a PTA?” demanded our Mr. Piper.

“Any Camiroi citizen is competent to do any job on the planet of Camiroi,” said one of the Camiroi men (we learned later that his name was Talarium), “otherwise Camiroi would be in a sad shape.”

“It may be,” said our Miss Smice sourly. “It all seems very informal. What if one of you had to be World President?”

“The odds are that it won’t come to one man in ten,” said the elderly Camiroi (his name was Philoxenus). “I’m the only one of this group ever to serve as president of this planet, and it was a pleasant week I spent in the Office. Now to the point. How can we accommodate you?”

“We would like to see one of your schools in session,” said our Mr. Piper. “We would like to talk to the teachers and the students. We are here to compare the two systems of education.”

“There is no comparison,” said old Philoxenus, “—meaning no offense. Or no more than a little. On Camiroi, we practice Education. On Earth, they play a game, but they call it by the same name. That makes the confusion. Come. We’ll go to a school in session.”

“And to a public school,” said Miss Smice suspiciously. “Do not fob off any fancy private school on us as typical.”

“That would be difficult,” said Philoxenus. “There is no public school in Camiroi City and only two remaining on the planet. Only a small fraction of one percent of the students of Camiroi are in public schools. We maintain that there is no more reason for the majority of children to be educated in a public school than to be raised in a public orphanage. We realize, of course, that on Earth you have made a sacred buffalo of the public school.”

“Sacred cow,” said our Mr. Piper.

“Children and Earthlings should be corrected when they use words wrongly,” said Philoxenus. “How else will they learn the correct forms? The animal held sacred in your own near Orient was of the species bos bubalus rather than bos bos, a buffalo rather than a cow. Shall we go to a school?”

“If it cannot be a public school, at least let it be a typical school,” said Miss Smice.

“That again is impossible,” said Philoxenus. “Every school on Camiroi is in some respect atypical.”

We went to visit an atypical school. Incident:

Our first contact with the Camiroi students was a violent one. One of them, a lively little boy about eight years old, ran into Miss Munch, knocked her down, and broke her glasses. Then he jabbered something in an unknown tongue.

“Is that Camiroi?” asked Mr. Piper with interest. “From what I have heard, I supposed the language to have a harsher and fuller sound.”

“You mean you don’t recognize it?” asked Philoxenus with amusement. “What a droll admission from an educator. The boy is very young and very ignorant. Seeing that you were Earthians, he spoke in Hindi, which is the tongue used by more Earthians than any other. No, no, Xypete, they are of the minority who speak English. You can tell it by their colorless texture and the narrow heads on them.”

“I say you sure do have slow reaction, lady,” the little boy Xypete explained. “Even subhumans should react faster than that. You just stand there and gape and let me bowl you over. You want me analyze you and see why you react so slow?”

“No! No!”

“You seem unhurt in structure from the fall,” the little boy continued, “but if I hurt you I got to fix you. Just strip down to your shift, and I’ll go over you and make sure you’re all right.”

“No! No! No!”

“It’s all right,” said Philoxenus. “All Camiroi children learn primary medicine in the first grade, setting bones and healing contusions and such.”

“No! No! I’m all right. But he’s broken my glasses.”

“Come along Earthside lady, I’ll make you some others,” said the little boy. “With your slow reaction time you sure can’t afford the added handicap of defective vision. Shall I fit you with contacts?”

“No. I want glasses just like those which were broken. Oh heavens, what will I do?”

“You come, I do,” said the little boy. It was rather revealing to us that the little boy was able to test Miss Munch’s eyes, grind lenses, make frames and have her fixed up within three minutes. “I have made some improvements over those you wore before,” the boy said, “to help compensate for your slow reaction time.”

“Are all the Camiroi students so talented?” Mr. Piper asked. He was impressed.

“No. Xypete is unusual,” Philoxenus said. “Most students would not be able to make a pair of glasses so quickly or competently till they were at least nine.”

Random interviews:

“How rapidly do you read?” Miss Hanks asked a young girl.

“One hundred and twenty words a minute,” the girl said.

“On Earth some of the girl students your age have learned to read at the rate of five hundred words a minute,” Miss Hanks said proudly.

“When I began disciplined reading, I was reading at the rate of four thousands words a minute,” the girl said. “They had quite a time correcting me of it. I had to take remedial reading, and my parents were ashamed of me. Now I’ve learned to read almost slow enough.”

“I don’t understand,” said Miss Hanks.

Some stories you don’t forget.

I first read R. A. Lafferty’s “Continued on Next Rock” over forty years ago, in the autumn of 1975. I remember it exactly. I was in graduate school, taking a Master’s degree, and I’d signed up for a course in science fiction. The text was Speculations: An Introduction To Literature Through Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Thomas E. Sanders. It included poetry, three essays, and forty-one stories. I know the exact number because I still have the book. The stories ranged widely, including genre precursors by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Rudyard Kipling; 1940s stories by writers such as Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Murray Leinster, and Judith Merril; and a lot of newer stories by then-current stars like Robert Silverberg, Theodore Sturgeon, and Robert Sheckley.

I read the entire volume the first weekend after I purchased it.

Among the stories was “Continued on Next Rock.” I read it, puzzled a while, and read it again. This was different. This was way different. It was clearly a love story, but not like any I’d ever read. Magdalen and Anteros seemed very strange, if not downright crazy. Actually, they are crazy. Sexually obsessed, he chases her through time, leaving amorous poems in strata of ancient rock. She spurns him, in what may or may not be a courtship ritual. Or murder.

The writing was wonderful, the characters inventive, the tone perfectly balanced between wryness and passion, the kind of passion that annihilates. I could not get it out of my head.

A few years later, a different one of my graduate-school professors, who’d become a friend, told me how much he admired R. A. Lafferty. He gave me a bound, uncorrected page-proof copy of Iron Tears, the 1992 Lafferty collection from Edgewood Press (I still have this volume, too). I thanked him, but my main reaction was indignation that the fifteen stories in the volume didn’t include “Continued on Next Rock.”

My admiration for the story, which I just read yet again, has only grown. After all, Anteros’s love poems are, if nothing else, unique: “You are the freedom of wild pigs in the sour-grass, and the nobility of badgers. You are the brightness of serpents and the soaring of vultures. You are passion of mesquite bushes on fire with lightning. You are serenity of toads.”

As I said—unique courtship poetry. And how come no man has ever told me that I am the nobility of badgers, let alone the serenity of toads? Why not, I ask you?

Maybe if I could have done the things that Magdalen could …

Up in the Big Lime country there is an up-thrust, a chimney rock that is half fallen against a newer hill. It is formed of what is sometimes called Dawson sandstone and is interlaced with tough shale. It was formed during the glacial and recent ages in the bottom lands of Crow Creek and Green River when these streams (at least five times) were mighty rivers.

The chimney rock is only a little older than mankind, only a little younger than grass. Its formation had been up-thrust and then eroded away again, all but such harder parts as itself and other chimneys and blocks.

A party of five persons came to this place where the chimney rock had fallen against a still-newer hill. The people of the party did not care about the deep limestone below: they were not geologists. They did care about the newer hill (it was man-made) and they did care a little about the rock chimney; they were archeologists.

Here was time heaped up, bulging out in casing and accumulation, and not in line sequence. And here also was striated and banded time, grown tall, and then shattered and broken.

The five party members came to the site early in the afternoon, bringing the working trailer down a dry creek bed. They unloaded many things and made a camp there. It wasn’t really necessary to make a camp on the ground. There was a good motel two miles away on the highway; there was a road along the ridge above. They could have lived in comfort and made the trip to the site in five minutes every morning. Terrence Burdock, however, believed that one could not get the feel of a digging unless he lived on the ground with it day and night.

The five persons were Terrence Burdock, his wife Ethyl, Robert Derby, and Howard Steinleser: four beautiful and balanced people. And Magdalen Mobley who was neither beautiful nor balanced. But she was electric; she was special. They rouched around in the formations a little after they had made camp and while there was still light. All of them had seen the formations before and had guessed that there was promise in them.

“That peculiar fluting in the broken chimney is almost like a core sample,” Terrence said, “and it differs from the rest of it. It’s like a lightning bolt through the whole length. It’s already exposed for us. I believe we will remove the chimney entirely. It covers the perfect access for the slash in the mound, and it is the mound in which we are really interested. But we’ll study the chimney first. It is so available for study.”

“Oh, I can tell you everything that’s in the chimney,” Magdalen said crossly. “I can tell you everything that’s in the mound too.”

“I wonder why we take the trouble to dig if you already know what we will find,” Ethyl sounded archly.

“I wonder too,” Magdalen grumbled. “But we will need the evidence and the artifacts to show. You can’t get appropriations without evidence and artifacts. Robert, go kill that deer in the brush about forty yards northeast of the chimney. We may as well have deer meat if we’re living primitive.”

“This isn’t deer season,” Robert Derby objected. “And there isn’t any deer there. Or, if there is, it’s down in the draw where you couldn’t see it. And if there’s one there, it’s probably a doe.”

“No, Robert, it is a two-year-old buck and a very big one. Of course it’s in the draw where I can’t see it. Forty yards northeast of the chimney would have to be in the draw. If I could see it, the rest of you could see it too. Now go kill it! Are you a man or a mus microtus? Howard, cut poles and set up a tripod to string and dress the deer on.”

“You had better try the thing, Robert,” Ethyl Burdock said, “or we’ll have no peace this evening.”

To ask how any story or tune or statue comes about is to ask “How is it done?”; “What does it take?” Have you heard of the Dutch boy in this country who was going to butcher school, whose schoolmates tried to mix him up? The heart, they told him, that is named the liver; the bladder is called the stomach; the tongue is the coccyx; the loin is known as the chuck; the brisket is the flank; the lungs are named the trotters; and so on. This Dutch kid was very smart, however; he figured out that they were having him, and he figured out the right names for everything, or for almost everything. And he passed his final examination with top grades both in meat-cutting and nomenclature. “How were you able to do it,” the instructor asked, “with so many things going against you?” “I’ve got it up there,” the Dutch kid said, and he tapped his head. “Kidneys.”

It isn’t exactly that one should use kidneys for brains, but the sense of grotesque juxtaposition does come in handy. You can’t be sure you are looking at something from the right angle till you have looked at it from every angle. How did I write “Continued on Next Rock” then? Upside down and backward, of course. I started with a simple, but I believe novel, idea that had to do with time. Then I involuted the idea of time (making all things contemporary or at least repeating), and I turned the systems of values backward, trying to make the repulsive things appear poetic (“the nobility of badgers, the serenity of toads”) and trying to set anti-love up as comparable to love (the flattest thing you can imagine has to have at least two sides; it can have many more). I let the characters that had been generated by this action work out their own way then. After this, I subtracted the original simple but novel idea from the story, and finished things up. (The original idea was a catalyst which could be recovered practically unchanged at the end of the reaction.)

The beginning idea, which I give to anyone who wants it, was simply to have archeologists digging upward through certain strata, for rather vague topographic reasons, come to deposits of the fairly recent past, or the very recent past, of the near future (a discarded license plate from fifteen years in the future, for instance), then the more distant future, then to realize that the strata still remaining above them had to contain the remnants of at least a hundred thousand years of unfaked future.

So much for the genesis of one particular short story. Each one is different but each one is anomalous; and there is a reason for that. No normal or reasonable or balanced or well-adjusted person is going to attempt the making of a story or a tune or a statue or a poem; he’ll have no need for such abnormal activity. A person has to be somehow deficient or lacking in person or personality or he will not attempt these things. He must be very deficient or lacking if he will succeed at all in them. Every expression in art or pseudo-art is a crutch that a crippled person makes and donates to the healthy world for its use (the healthy world having only the vaguest idea that it even needs crutches).

There are, I know, many apparent glaring exceptions to the rule that only persons who are deficient or lacking in person or personality will contribute any creative content. Believe me, these exceptions are only apparent. There is something badly unbalanced in every one of them.

Carry it one step further, though. One of the legends, unwritten from the beginning and maybe unwritten forever, is about a Quest for the Perfect Thing. But it is really the quest for the normal thing. Can you find, anywhere in the world, behind or before or present, even one person who is really normal and reasonable and balanced and well-adjusted? This is the Perfect Thing, if it or he or she is ever found, and if ever found there will be no further need of any art or attempted art, good or bad.

Enough of such stuff, end of article, if this is an article. I am both facetious and serious in every written word here.

Reading an R. A. Lafferty story is always a bit of a trippy experience—a journey into the odder parts of experience, his perceptively askew perspective a looking glass all its own. But “Sky” is about an actual trip (or a few of them), with all the inspired psychedelia and questionable reality we expect—and desire—from a Lafferty story. The title’s Sky isn’t the airy horizon above us. No, it’s the unusual substance sold by the furry-handed “Sky-Seller” who can’t survive in sunlight (or thinks he can’t anyway) to ostensible main character Welkin Alauda.

A 1972 Hugo nominee, “Sky” sits at the intersection of the absurd and the transcendental. There are deadpan assurances of fantastical dangers: “You will burn,” Welkin told him. “Nobody burns so as when sunning himself on a cloud.” There is the observational commentary of some unseen but nonetheless present narrator on both the characters and the grim world that surrounds them; of Welkin we’re told “it was said that her bones were hollow and filled with air.” The Sky-Diving friends of Welkin discuss time and the universe, existence and falls through it, in perfect rose-colored stoner parlance. We sense the end of a journey coming as we read, and we know it will be quite a crash. Welkin wanders through caverns filled with Amanita mushroom varieties, deadly and hallucinogenic, gathered by not just the Sky-Seller but moles.

The results that follow this final trip linger with the reader. So enjoy this delightful trance of a tale, but, always remember, Sky has its dangers.

The Sky-Seller was Mr. Furtive himself, fox-muzzled, ferret-eyed, slithering along like a snake, and living under the Rocks. The Rocks had not been a grand place for a long time. It had been built in the grand style on a mephitic plot of earth (to transform it), but the mephitic earth had won out. The apartments of the Rocks had lost their sparkle as they had been divided again and again, and now they were shoddy. The Rocks had weathered. Its once pastel hues were now dull grays and browns.

The five underground levels had been parking places for motor vehicles when those were still common, but now these depths were turned into warrens and hovels. The Sky-Seller lurked and lived in the lowest and smallest and meanest of them all.

He came out only at night. Daylight would have killed him; he knew that. He sold out of the darkest shadows of the night. He had only a few (though oddly select) clients, and nobody knew who his supplier was. He said that he had no supplier, that he gathered and made the stuff himself.

Welkin Alauda, a full-bodied but light-moving girl (it was said that her bones were hollow and filled with air), came to the Sky-Seller just before first light, just when he had become highly nervous but had not yet bolted to his underground.

“A sack of Sky from the nervous mouse. Jump, or the sun will gobble your house!” Welkin sang-song, and she was already higher than most skies.

“Hurry, hurry!” the Sky-Seller begged, thrusting the sack to her while his black eyes trembled and glittered (if real light should ever reflect into them he’d go blind).

Welkin took the sack of Sky, and scrambled money notes into his hands which had furred palms. (Really? Yes, really.)

“World be flat and the Air be round, wherever the Sky grows underground,” Welkin intoned, taking the sack of Sky and soaring along with a light scamper of feet (she hadn’t much weight, her bones were hollow). And the Sky-Seller darted headfirst down a black well-shaft thing to his depths.

“Cliffs That Laughed” appeared in the March 1969 issue of Magazine of Horror, surely one of Lafferty’s less likely markets (it was edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes, who had published some of Lafferty’s earliest stories and who doubtless knew enough to ask for more). It was reprinted in Lafferty’s second collection, 1972’s Strange Doings, but has scarcely been seen since. It certainly cannot be called a horror story, although what Freud called “the horror of incest” definitely plays a role. But what kind of story is it?

It’s a tale told in a bar, at least in part—but interleaved with another tale, told decades earlier to the same narrator, by a Malay storyteller he met while stationed in Indonesia, who gained new inspiration when he gained access to American comic books. The storyteller’s tale, which begins with “flute notes ascending” and ends with “flute notes descending,” offers a pleasing sense of unity, but the other story, about three soldiers who disappeared on an Indonesian island in 1945, “keeps interposing itself” upon it. In the end, however, the two tales complete each other, forming a deeply bizarre saga that the narrator (his protestations notwithstanding) weaves into a third tale, the one we read.

The tale’s elements will be familiar for Lafferty fans: a bloodthirsty but colorful pirate; a willful young woman intent on withholding sexual favors; a fell scheme foiled by a clever trick. Neither will these readers be surprised by the rather idealized portrait of pirates, nor with what Andrew Ferguson calls Lafferty’s “lurid depictions of death and dismemberment.” What does startle us is that the trick turns on the incest taboo, something Lafferty never otherwise wrote about. The brutal but poetic Willy Jones finally wins over Margaret, daughter of a man he murdered, and succeeds in consummating his love, but when he disregards her warning not to resume pirating, she exacts a grotesque vengeance upon his return to their sinister island, which forever frustrates his desire to “board” his wife lest he unwittingly commit the abomination of incest. Since her trick requires both Margaret and her nubile—indeed indistinguishable—daughter (born and bred during Willy’s twenty-year absence) to be at once dead and alive, the grotesque family romance seethes with the Freudian unheimlich or uncanny, and leads in time to father, mother, and daughter banding perversely together to attract other men to the island and then slaughter them as they “frolicked” with the two beautiful women.

This tangle of rage and baffled lust—the impulse to incest deflected into murderous resolve—gets its sequel in the tale told in the bar, by an American soldier who alone escaped from Willy Jones Island in 1945 and now, after twenty years’ journeying home, wishes for nothing but to go back again. A Malay folk tale updated by Wonder Woman (complete with numerous elements common to incest myths, such as identical mother and daughter and a questing figure who was declared dead yet is still alive) turns into the evocation of a composite Belle Dame Sans Merci, who leaves the men she encounters wracked by sexual enthrallment and desolation. It is a strange short story even for Lafferty, and this is without mentioning the “golems” (who are clearly something else) or the uncanny intermediate condition that haunts the text, such as the “middle state” between life and death (which mother and daughter now inhabit) or the “middle land” that the soldier traverses beneath the earth.

And what does the title signify? There are no cliffs in the story. The soldier now returning to his death remembers the two women as being “like volcanoes” and declares that “we climbed them like mountains. Man, the uplift on them! The shoulders were cliffs that laughed. The swaying—”

It’s an odd image (it does not sound like shoulders that he is praising) and recalls a short story Lafferty published a year later, “The Cliff Climbers,” in which the eponymous cliff—which the narrator tells us at the outset is actually “a spire”—clearly (like the “up-thrust” or “rock chimney” in “Continued on Next Rock,” also published in 1970) stands as a synecdoche, too blatant for readers to overlook, for a centuries-long male desire, one that (as in “Continued on Next Rock”) proves destructive to both pursuer and pursued.

Lafferty’s use of “cliff” as an image of displaced sexuality remains finally mysterious, as do his reasons for offering a different version of the three soldiers’ disappearance in his 1971 novel The Devil is Dead. “There is only one story in the world,” the storyteller reminds us, and the version proffered in “Cliffs That Laughed” gives us myth, humor, and virtuosity. For utter clarity, you need look to another writer.

Between ten and ten-thirty of the morning of October 1, 1945, on an island that is sometimes called Pulau Petir and sometimes Willy Jones Island (neither of them its map name), three American soldiers disappeared and have not been seen since.

“I’m going back there, I tell you! It was worth it. The limbs that laughed! Let them kill me! I’ll get there! Oh, here, here, I’ve got to get hold of myself.

“The three soldiers were Sergeant Charles Santee of Orange, Texas; Corporal Robert Casper of Gobey, Tennessee; and PFC Timothy Lorrigan of Boston which is in one of the eastern states. I was one of those three soldiers.

“I’m going back there if it takes me another twenty years!”

“Seven-Day Terror” was not my first introduction to R. A. Lafferty—that was “Slow Tuesday Night”—but it instantly became my favorite Lafferty story and remains so to this day, in spite of intense competition from “The Hole on the Corner,” the aforementioned “Slow Tuesday Night,” and “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne.”

“Seven-Day Terror” is part of the proud tradition of science fiction stories like C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner’s “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” and Ray Bradbury’s “Zero Hour” which are about children and how they see the world entirely differently from adults, a way of seeing that grants them incomprehensible and sometimes dangerous powers. But Lafferty’s children stand alone in their audacity, precociousness, and ruthless common sense.

And wisdom: Clarissa’s absolutely right about the dangers of letting scientific discoveries like the disappearer fall into irresponsible hands, i.e., those of adults.

And even though this story is as lighthearted as Lafferty comes, his wry awareness of how the world works is still present. Officer Comstock, for instance, has a knack for “getting near the heart of dark matters. This is why he was walking a beat out in the boondocks instead of sitting in a chair downtown.”

But mostly Lafferty’s just having fun here, and so are we. The Willoughby kids, from Clarence down to three-year-old Cyril, are charmingly incorrigible, the dialogue’s hilarious, and we get to meet the “esteemed” scientist Willy McGilly and his pals (who pop up in several Lafferty stories). Plus, there are oatmeal boxes, gold watches, floods, fireplugs, cats, local officials, beer cans, and an ending you should have seen coming but didn’t. In other words, Lafferty at his best. So sit back and prepare to have a really good time.

“Is there anything you want to make disappear?” Clarence Willoughby asked his mother.

“A sink full of dishes is all I can think of. How will you do it?”

“I just built a disappearer. All you do is cut the other end out of a beer can. Then you take two pieces of red cardboard with peepholes in the middle and fit them in the ends. You look through the peepholes and blink. Whatever you look at will disappear.”

“Oh.”

“But I don’t know if I can make them come back. We’d better try it on something else. Dishes cost money.”

As always, Myra Willoughby had to admire the wisdom of her nine-year-old son. She would not have had such foresight herself. He always did. “You can try it on Blanche Manners’s cat outside there. Nobody will care if it disappears except Blanche Manners.”

“All right.”

He put the disappearer to his eye and blinked. The cat disappeared from the sidewalk outside.

His mother was interested. “I wonder how it works. Do you know how it works?”

“Yes. You take a beer can with both ends cut out and put in two pieces of cardboard. Then you blink.”

“Never mind. Take it outside and play with it. You hadn’t better make anything disappear in here till I think about this.”

But when he had gone his mother was oddly disturbed.

“I wonder if I have a precocious child. Why, there’s lots of grown people who wouldn’t know how to make a disappearer that would work. I wonder if Blanche Manners will miss her cat very much?”

Clarence went down to the Plugged Nickel, a pot house on the corner.

“Do you have anything you want to make disappear, Nokomis?”

“Only my paunch.”

“If I make it disappear it’ll leave a hole in you and you’ll bleed to death.”

“That’s right, I would. Why don’t you try it on the fireplug outside?”

This in a way was one of the happiest afternoons ever in the neighborhood. The children came from blocks around to play in the flooded streets and gutters, and if some of them drowned (and we don’t say that they did drown) in the flood (and brother! it was a flood), why, you have to expect things like that. The fire engines (whoever heard of calling fire engines to put out a flood?) were apparatus-deep in water. The policemen and ambulance men wandered around wet and bewildered.

“Resuscitator, resuscitator, anybody wanna resuscitator,” chanted Clarissa Willoughby.

“Oh, shut up,” said the ambulance attendants.

Nokomis, the bar man in the Plugged Nickel, called Clarence inside.

“I don’t believe, just for the moment, I’d tell anyone what happened to that fireplug.”

“I won’t tell if you won’t tell,” said Clarence.

Officer Comstock was suspicious. “There’s only seven possible explanations: one of the seven Willoughby kids did it. I dunno how. It’d take a bulldozer to do it, and then there’d be something left of the plug. But however they did it, one of them did it.”

Officer Comstock had a talent for getting near the truth of dark matters. This is why he was walking a beat out here in the boondocks instead of sitting in a chair downtown.

“Clarissa!” said Officer Comstock in a voice like thunder.

“Resuscitator, resuscitator, anybody wanna resuscitator?” chanted Clarissa.

“Do you know what happened to that fireplug?” asked Officer C.

“I have an uncanny suspicion. As yet it is no more than that. When I am better informed I will advise you.”

Clarissa was eight years old and much given to uncanny suspicions.

“Clementine, Harold, Corinne, Jimmy, Cyril,” he asked the five younger Willoughby children. “Do you know what happened to that fireplug?”

“There was a man around yesterday. I bet he took it,” said Clementine.

“I don’t even remember a fireplug there. I think you’re making a fuss about nothing,” said Harold.

“City hall’s going to hear about this,” said Corinne.

“Pretty dommed sure,” said Jimmy, “but I won’t tell.”

“Cyril!” cried Officer Comstock in a terrible voice. Not a terrifying voice, a terrible voice. He felt terrible now.

“Great green bananas,” said Cyril, “I’m only three years old. I don’t see how it’s even my responsibility.”

“Clarence,” said Officer Comstock.

Clarence gulped.

“Do you know where the fireplug went?”

Clarence brightened. “No, sir. I don’t know where it went.”

A bunch of smart alecs from the water department came out and shut off the water for a few blocks around and put some kind of cap on in place of the fireplug. “This sure is going to be a funny-sounding report,” said one of them.

Officer Comstock walked away discouraged. “Don’t bother me, Miss Manners,” he said. “I don’t know where to look for your cat. I don’t even know where to look for a fireplug.”

“I have an idea,” said Clarissa, “that when you find the cat you will find the fireplug in the same place. As yet it’s only an idea.”

Ozzie Murphy wore a little hat on top of his head. Clarence pointed his weapon and winked. The hat was no longer there, but a little trickle of blood was running down the pate.

“I don’t believe I’d play with that any more,” said Nokomis.

“Who’s playing?” said Clarence. “This is for real.”

This was the beginning of the seven-day terror in the heretofore obscure neighborhood. Trees disappeared from the parks; lamp posts were as though they had never been; Wally Waldorf drove home, got out, slammed the door of his car, and there was no car. As George Mullendorf came up the walk to his house his dog Pete ran to meet him and took a flying leap to his arms. The dog left the sidewalk but something happened; the dog was gone and only a bark lingered for a moment in the puzzled air.

But the worst were the fireplugs. The second plug was installed the morning after the disappearance of the first. In eight minutes it was gone and the flood waters returned. Another one was in by twelve o’clock. Within three minutes it had vanished. The next morning fireplug number four was installed.

The water commissioner was there, the city engineer was there, the chief of police was there with a riot squad, the president of the Parent-Teachers Association was there, the president of the university was there, the mayor was there, three gentlemen of the FBI, a newsreel photographer, eminent scientists, and a crowd of honest citizens.

“Let’s see it disappear now,” said the city engineer.

“Let’s see it disappear now,” said the police chief.

“Let’s see it disa—It did, didn’t it?” said one of the eminent scientists.

And it was gone and everybody was very wet.

“At least I have the picture sequence of the year,” said the photographer. But his camera and apparatus disappeared from the midst of them.

“Shut off the water and cap it,” said the commissioner. “And don’t put in another plug yet. That was the last plug in the warehouse.”

“This is too big for me,” said the mayor. “I wonder that Tass doesn’t have it yet.”

“Tass has it,” said a little round man. “I am Tass.”

“If all of you gentlemen will come into the Plugged Nickel,” said Nokomis, “and try one of our new Fire Hydrant Highballs you will all be happier. These are made of good corn whiskey, brown sugar, and hydrant water from this very gutter. You can be the first to drink them.”

Business was phenomenal at the Plugged Nickel, for it was in front of its very doors that the fireplugs disappeared in floods of gushing water.

“I know a way we can get rich,” said Clarissa several days later to her father, Tom Willoughby. “Everybody says they’re going to sell their houses for nothing and move out of the neighborhood. Go get a lot of money and buy them all. Then you can sell them again and get rich.”

“I wouldn’t buy them for a dollar each. Three of them have disappeared already, and all the families but us have their furniture moved out in their front yards. There might be nothing but vacant lots in the morning.”

“Good, then buy the vacant lots. And you can be ready when the houses come back.”

“Come back? Are the houses going to come back? Do you know anything about this, young lady?”

“I have a suspicion verging on a certainty. As of now I can say no more.”

In “Boomer Flats,” which originally appeared in If Magazine in 1971, Lafferty expands on the internal mythology of his work and returns to familiar themes. Evolution, and how humans fit into it through spontaneous evolutionary leaps, features in other stories such as “Ginny Wrapped in the Sun” and “In Deepest Glass.” Lafferty asserted that storytelling was a manifestation of ancestry and that storytellers belonged “to the old ‘red-bone people.’” The journey to Boomer Flats brings the reader to a strange town where those people walk daily.

To those who know who Ivan Sanderson is, the clue is there from the very first line: eminent scientists Arpad Arkabaranan, Willy McGilly, and Dr. Velikof Vonk, declaring themselves his spiritual offspring, are in search of Fortean phenomena, specifically the ABSM (Abominable Snowman). It’s a literal wild-goose chase, as McGilly notes, referring to the hundreds of mud geese in flight across the sky.

This sort of linguistic play, the metaphorical made real, ripples through the story, and even sometimes slides it over into poetry’s realm, such as the repeated reassurance Crayola Catfish gives the eminent scientists about their drinks, “They’re fixing them for you now. I’ll bring them after a while.”

Boomer Flats is a shadow town, an echo of the town of Boomer. “Something a little queer and primordial about the whole place!” Lafferty warns the reader, who already knows we’re wandering in strange territory.

The three eminent scientists know it too. Dr. Velikof Vonk’s eyes grin “out of deep folk memory,” as he begins to drink what Crayola has brought him: a clay cup that “smelled strongly of river, perhaps of interstadial river.” The drinks, the Green Snake Snorters, move the trio into a strange mythopoetic world in washes, like a television show’s set where each cut-away and back reveals odder and odder details changed and added. The prose becomes stranger and stranger at the same time, moving into deeper and deeper waters of wordplay. That shabby man playing dominoes is a bear. Pieces are falling off a man called the Comet. And then, the giants enter, standing around the edges of the room in their black hats. This is where the legends dwell, almost as though Boomer Flats is the secret heart of Lafferty’s cosmos.

The three eminent scientists are specifically identified as three Magi, but what they find is not an answer in the form of the Christ Child, but more and more questions about the world itself. Instead the ending turns back to story’s heart in a way that pulls the reader further in and farther out, so to speak. This is Lafferty at his luminiferous best, slipstream before the term was ever invented.

“In the tracks of our spiritual father Ivan Sanderson we may now have trailed a clutch of ABSMs to their lair,” the eminent scientist Arpad Arkabaranan was saying in his rattling voice. “And that lair may not be a mountain thicket or rain forest or swamp, but these scrimpy red clay flats. I would almost give my life for the success of this quest, but it seems that it should have a more magnificent setting.”

“It looks like a wild-goose chase,” the eminent scientist Willy McGilly commented. But no, Willy was not downgrading their quest. He was referring to the wild geese that rose about them from the edges of the flats with clatter and whistle and honk. This was a flight-way, a chase of theirs. There were hundreds of them if one had the fine eyes to pick them out from the background. “Mud geese,” Willy said. “We don’t see as many of them as when I was a boy.”

“I do not, and I am afraid that I will not, believe in the ABSMs,” said the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk, stroking his—(no he didn’t, he didn’t have one)—stroking his jaw, “and yet this is the thing that I also have most desired, to find this missing link finally, and to refute all believers in the other thing.”

“We can’t see the chain for the links,” said Willy McGilly. “I never believed that any of them was missing. There’s always been too many of them for the length of the chain: that’s the trouble.”

“I’ve traveled a million miles in search of them,” said Arpad. “I’ve pretty well probed all the meager ribs of the world in that travel. My fear has always been that I’d miss them by a trick, even that in some unaccountable way I wouldn’t know them when I found them. It would be ironic if we did find them in such a place as this: not a wild place, only a shabby and overlooked place.”

“My own fear has been that when I finally gazed on one I would wake with a start and find that I had been looking in a mirror,” said Velikof. “There must be some symbolism here that I don’t understand. What is your own anticipation of them, Willy?”

“Oh, coming back to people I’ve always liked. There used to be a bunch of them on the edge of my hometown,” Willy McGilly said. “Come to think of it, there used to be a bunch of them on the edge of every hometown. Now they’re more likely to be found right in the middle of every town. They’re the scrubs, you know, for the bottoming of the breed.”

“What are you talking about, Willy?” Arpad asked sharply.

What they were all talking about was ABSMs.

So, here’s a quick story of mine, relevant to this particular story.

My wife became pregnant when I was twenty-nine years old, and when she told me the news

a) I was ecstatic;

b) I suddenly begun waking up at three in the morning every night with the thought “dude, you’re totally gonna die one day” ricocheting through my brain.

You don’t need to be a genius of psychology to figure this one out. With the advent of our child, I was no longer the final generation on the family chain; a new link would be forged and I would be inevitably pulled into eternity’s maw. I would survive by passing along my genes, not by living forever, which, up to age twenty-nine apparently, was my unspoken assumption.

I got over it. My kid’s pretty great and I don’t mind shuffling off the mortal coil, because I helped make her, and also I wrote a few books people might still read after I’m gone. I’m doing OK.

But that jolt of awareness I got at twenty-nine pops up again every now and then, in a slightly different way. I don’t mind so much that I will die. But I’m sad that I will no longer exist. I enjoy existing. Existing is pretty neat. And while I’m pretty sure that when I no longer exist I won’t mind (I didn’t mind not existing before I was born, after all), right now I’m put out about it. I mean, I put a lot of effort into developing a sense of self, here, people. I don’t get to take it with me? That’s some bullshit right there, I tell you.

It’s selfish of me but I don’t mind that little bit of selfishness. It won’t help me in the end, but until then it gets me along.

As I said, this story is relevant to “Old Foot Forgot,” which is a story that makes me both happy and sad. Happy because clearly Lafferty got where I was coming from. Sad because, well. Oblivion awaits, doesn’t it?

Fine. Bring it on (eventually). Until then: hey, I’m here, man. And I like it.

“Dookh-Doctor, it is a sphairikos patient,” Lay Sister Moira P. T. de C. cried happily. “It is a genuine spherical alien patient. You’ve never had one before, not in good faith. I believe it is what you need to distract you from the—ah—happy news about yourself. It is good for a Dookh-Doctor to have a different patient sometimes.”

“Thank you, lay sister. Let it, him, her, fourth case, fifth case, or whatever come in. No, I’ve never had a sphairikos in good faith. I doubt if this one is, but I will enjoy the encounter.”

The sphairikos rolled or pushed itself in. It was a big one, either a blubbery kid or a full-grown one. It rolled itself along by extruding and withdrawing pseudopods. And it came to rest grinning, a large translucent rubbery ball of fleeting colors.

“Hello, Dookh-Doctor,” it said pleasantly. “First I wish to extend my own sympathy and that of my friends who do not know how to speak to you for the happy news about yourself. And secondly I have an illness of which you may cure me.”

“But the sphairikoi are never ill,” Dookh-Doctor Drague said dutifully.

How did he know that the round creature was grinning at him? By the colors, of course; by the fleeting colors of it. They were grinning colors.

“My illness is not of the body but of the head,” said the sphairikos.

“But the sphairikoi have no heads, my friend.”

“Then it is of another place and another name, Dookh-Doctor. There is a thing in me suffering. I come to you as a Dookh-Doctor. I have an illness in my Dookh.”

“That is unlikely in a sphairikos. You are all perfectly balanced, each a cosmos unto yourself. And you have a central solution that solves everything. What is your name?”

“Krug Sixteen, which is to say that I am the sixteenth son of Krug; the sixteen fifth case son, of course. Dookh-Doc, the pain is not in me entirely; it is in an old forgotten part of me.”

“But you sphairikoi have no parts, Krug Sixteen. You are total and indiscriminate entities. How would you have parts?”

“It is one of my pseudopods, extended and then withdrawn in much less than a second long ago when I was a little boy. It protests, it cries, it wants to come back. It has always bothered me, but now it bothers me intolerably. It screams and moans constantly now.”

“Do not the same ones ever come back?”

“No. Never. Never exactly the same ones. Will exactly the same water ever run past one point in a brook? No. We push them out and we draw them back. And we push them out again, millions of times. But the same one can never come back. There is no identity. But this one cries to come back, and now it becomes more urgent. Dookh-Doc, how can it be? There is not one same molecule in it as when I was a boy. There is nothing of that pseudopod that is left; but parts of it have come out as parts of other pseudopods, and now there can be no parts left. There is nothing remaining of that foot; it has all been absorbed a million times. But it cries out! And I have compassion on it.”

“Krug Sixteen, it may possibly be a physical or mechanical difficulty, a pseudopod imperfectly withdrawn, a sort of rupture whose effects you interpret wrongly. In that case it would be better if you went to your own doctors, or doctor: I understand that there is one.”

“That old fogey cannot help me, Dookh-Doc. And our pseudopods are always perfectly withdrawn. We are covered with the twinkling salve; it is one-third of our bulk. And if we need more of it we can make more of it ourselves; or we can beg some of it from a class four who makes it prodigiously. It is the solvent for everything. It eases every possible wound; it makes us round as balls; you should use it yourself, Dookh-Doc. But there is one small foot in me, dissolved long ago, that protests and protests. Oh, the shrieking! The horrible dreams!”

“But the sphairikoi do not sleep and do not dream.”

“Right enough, Dookh-Doc. But there’s an old dead foot of mine that sure does dream loud and wooly.”

The sphairikos was not grinning now. He rolled about softly in apprehension. How did the Dookh-Doctor know that it was apprehension? By the fleeting colors. They were apprehension colors now.

“Krug Sixteen, I will have to study your case,” said the Dookh-Doctor. “I will see if there are any references to it in the literature, though I don’t believe that there are. I will seek for analogy. I will probe every possibility. Can you come back at the same hour tomorrow?”

“I will come back, Dookh-Doc,” Krug Sixteen sighed. “I hate to feel that small vanished thing crying and trembling.”

It rolled or pushed itself out of the clinic by extruding and then withdrawing pseudopods. The little pushers came out of the goopy surface of the sphairikos and then were withdrawn into it completely. A raindrop falling in a pond makes a much more lasting mark than does the disappearing pseudopod of a sphairikos.

But long ago, in his boyhood, one of the pseudopods of Krug Sixteen had not disappeared completely in every respect.

Along with “The Primary Education of the Camiroi,” this was one of the first tales by Raphael Aloysius Lafferty (1914–2002) I read.

Where it appeared, however, I have no notion. Possibly that’s because today I know so much more about the intellectual context that informs his story than I did when I first read it, and it is easy to let the context overwhelm the tale. One suspects that is part of the story’s project. But in whose anthology—Judith Merril’s? Terry Carr’s?—I first read this piece, I have no notion at all.

I once taught a Clarion workshop at Tulane (where the students included George R. R. Martin), and I wondered if somehow Lafferty himself might be in evidence. He wasn’t. And the class was in some confusion because the young man who had set up the whole thing had also pulled out at the last minute. It’s interesting that even at that time Lafferty as a myth was so in evidence.

But what of the tale to hand?

William Morris (1834–1896) was intelligent, rich, and multitalented. He was a committed socialist, and the author of a number of fantasies, including News from Nowhere and The World Beyond the Wood. He supported a number of other artists, including Edward Burne-Jones, and he designed ornate wallpapers still used today; as well, he printed sumptuous illustrated editions of books such as the Kelmscott Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. He is one of the most written-about men of his times, and he is the avatar of the hero of Lafferty’s futuristic tale of a trip through the City of the World.

As much or more than any famous Victorian figure, it’s easy to see how the nature of Morris’s fame is entirely an accident of a social position.

Lafferty’s title riffs on the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s (1788–1860) two-volume philosophical treatise The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer is known for the extreme pessimism of his philosophy and the beauty of his writing.

Like a Wallace Shawn play, Lafferty’s tale takes place in a stressed future and moves from there to its distressing end.

The story begins from a seeming common-sense challenge to the classical description of a city, straight out of Jane Jacobs (“a concentration of persons that is not economically self-contained…”) and sets it at the limit of its growth: “The World City is economically self-contained.”

By the story’s end, Lafferty’s own pessimism is running neck and neck with Schopenhauer’s. Lafferty’s Catholicism was a topic often referred to by fans and critics: the other writer who sits in my mind as a (severely lapsed) Catholic is Thomas Disch. And I wonder to what extent that can be read as part of the cultural context that informs both writers.

Lafferty’s is a story of bookies and talkies and readies, where the World City is a tidy place because it tips and tilts with the tides it floats on, and Willy, whose “name game” is based on William Morris, goes to explore with Kandy Kalosh and later Fairhair Farquhar, the World City which is, of course, much too large for them to see more than a fraction of—though what of it that’s revealed, with each narrative move, is more and more distressing.

In all, “The World as Will and Wallpaper” offers a grim view of what a world as it approaches its end times requires to be self-sustaining.

Ask a few readers of Lafferty what they treasure him for, and you’ll get a lot of the same answers. He will make you laugh, uproariously. He will show you new possibilities inherent in language—not just in English, but many others as well. He will provide you a vantage point on this world (and other worlds, to boot) that flips you inside out, inverting everything you thought you knew about the workings of fiction.

What they won’t mention as often—partly because he doesn’t do it that much, and partly because it hurts so much when he does—is that he will break your heart wide open.

“Funnyfingers” is, at its most basic level, a tale of doomed love. It isn’t spoiling anything to say that in an introduction, either, because as he often does, Lafferty tells us what’s going to happen right from the start. Here it’s in an epigram alluding to Orpheus, something you don’t do unless a Eurydice is about to be lost. With admirable narrative economy, the main character immediately thereafter poses the central question that will lead to her romantic impasse—who, or what, am I?—and then the reader is given several valid answers: she is a somewhat exasperating and precocious little girl, and she is also a young Dactyl, a creature of myth, one of a number who gave humankind ironworking, arithmetic, and the alphabet and who (in their adult years) remain responsible for manufacturing letters and numbers and pieces for the entire world.

The story plays out from there, though the narrative beats and resolution are hardly formulaic. However, Lafferty is as usual concerned with much more than just the central relationship of his unhappy couple: he’s exploring humanity’s relationship with its stories, as well as his own particular relation as a channel for those myths. While Lafferty’s personal relationship experience was limited to what he could glean from others, he nonetheless understood that much of what we love about another is the stories we construct around them, myths that are deeply personal even as they partake of the universal. But when what you love is a story—or you yourself are a story—the deck is stacked against you from the start.

As the young lovers in “Funnyfingers” realize to their dismay, our stories will outlive us, and in particular they will outlive their own tellers. The result is a curious (if typically Laffertian) inversion of the Orpheus legend: it’s not the stories who must be left behind to the darkness, but us. When Oread Funnyfingers traipses through the mine, assembling iron dogs or iron boys or iron philosophies, it’s us she’s putting together. And when she disassembles them at the end of play, it’s us she puts back in the spare-part bins. And, in the end, though we too feel heartbreak at the conclusion of our all-too-brief parts, it is Oread and it is Pluto, the stories themselves, who will weep iron tears.

“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. 

“Days of Grass, Days of Straw” first appeared in New Dimensions 3, the third in a series of rather adventurous anthologies edited by Robert Silverberg throughout the 1970s. Coming close on the heels of science fiction’s controversial New Wave, Silverberg’s series was clearly out to recognize new voices and new literary approaches to science fiction and fantasy, and Lafferty had stories in each of the first four volumes. The volume with “Days of Grass, Days of Straw” also included two stories which would become widely reprinted, Hugo Award–winning classics, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (Tiptree was of course later revealed to be a pseudonym of Alice Sheldon). Each of those would be reprinted dozens of times in the coming decades, but Lafferty’s story—despite now being regarded as one of his best and most strikingly visionary by aficionados—was reprinted only in a few of his own collections. It did, however, get translated into Dutch and inspired the 2004 song Dagen van gras, dagen van stro (a literal translation of the title) by the performer Spinvis (Erik de Jong). Spinvis’s lyrics have only an elliptical connection with Lafferty’s story, but the point is that Lafferty’s best stories, even when not widely familiar, manage to find their way into unexpected corners of the culture and leave traces there.

The story itself is one that some readers find challenging—within the first two lines, a city street morphs into a road, then a trail, then a mere path, and our protagonist Christopher finds himself in a pre-urban, pre-industrial landscape with features resembling Native American legends and Oklahoma tall tales. Even his own name doesn’t ring true, and half-recognized people and places never quite coalesce into a more traditionally realized fantasy landscape. Yet he feels revived and invigorated, as though the world had been “pumped full of new juice.” “Things were mighty odd here,” he notices in an observation that may well sound familiar to anyone reading a Lafferty story for the first time. “There was just a little bit of something wrong about things.”

We eventually learn that Christopher hasn’t crossed into a fantasy world at all, but rather to a different kind of time—a “day of grass,” one of the “overflowing and special days apart from the regular days,” which are called days of straw. Although these special days are “Days out of Count” in terms of history and the calendar, they are earned at great cost by prophets and “prayer-men,” who wrestle with God to gain them. Called by different names in different cultures, these “rich days, full of joy and death, bubbling with ecstasy and blood” may include entire seasons, and although “nobody has direct memory of being in them or living in them,” we give them pallid names like Indian Summer. Lafferty’s stunning vision of a more vital and perhaps more dangerous world just beyond the one we know, but somehow folded into it, is one of his most haunting recurrent themes.