R.A. Lafferty - Aurelia
R.A. Lafferty - Aurelia
Lafferty, R. A.
Aurelia.
I. Title.
PS3562.A28A95 813'.54 82-5011
ISBN 0-89865-194-8 AACR2
They carried on and sang that evening before they took off:
They sang the ballad, but they weren't as b rave as all t hat.
They were scared.
Were they crows or were they people? They perched up on
the spheres like crows. They sang like scared crows, and
singing was supposed to be one of their accomplishments.
They were having kick-off night together and giving a rousing
send-off to their own adventures, but they were scared � f it
all. And yet, being scared wasn't a thing they could admit to
themselves or to each other.
They were not only j ittery but they were also a little bit
1
ridiculous (it was planned that they should be), perched like
big birds on the tops of their oblate spheres which in turn were
balanced atop launching needles that stabbed into the night
sky. What ungainly, roosting crows they were! It took all their
ingenuity to appear beautiful, and they b arely made it.
All of them were fourteen-year old children. In one hour,
after they had embarked, they would all be fourteen year old
men and women. This night marked a change in their lives. It
was the ready-or-not adventure, and they could never be
ready enough for it.
They had to trust to their schooling and to their
competence. They had almost completed their tenth form
courses. All that was left was the 'World Government' portion
(on which they would embark within a n hour) , and then the
composing of the tenth form thesis after they should return.
Usually though, not all of them would return from such a flight
and governing.
They were supposed t o spend the hours before kick- off in
prayer o n t heir solitary launching needles. And t hey did pray,
yes: but they used a free sort of corporate prayer. The
launching needles that seven of them had selected and on
which they had built t heir flight crafts were q uite close
together, within singing dist a nce; even within conversat ion
distance considering the expanded sort of operatic-conversevole
voices, very carrying, that they had developed. Close friends
should not be completely solitary on kick-off night. Other groups
had been modifying their kick-off night prayers for several years.
They had to proclaim themselves some way. Proclamation was
prayer too.
That was the arrogance that they all gave voice to. With the
'people themselves,' such things were always lawful arrogance.
Well, which of the lesser breeds could send their young people out
on such flights and governorships? Not one, not one, except
maybe the people of Delphinia, and they were very far away. And
yet, Lavender was mistaken in her boast. They were all of them
lacking in a hundred different ways. They had been deficient in
their pupal and larval stages, and in all their growing up. They
were deficient for any expectations that might be held for them.
Really, it seemed that the time-table that had been set for them
was too swift a one. And Aurelia was the most lacking and
deficient of the seven-group, or of many seven-groups.
Well, in her own way at least, she was also the object of the
most affection and the most loyalty. She had to be, or she'd never
have made it even this far. But now, tonight, they would be flying
off singly, and the loyalties and affections of the others would
accompany her only in the way that good wishes might accom-
4
pany one.
Had Aurelia even constructed an adequate ship? It was
frightening to have to ask a question like that. But Aurelia j ust
wasn't as smart as the res t of them. Her life would be sailing with
the ship that she had built, and no one else could aid her in its
design or operation. But would a faulty ship mean the end of her
life? For every sortie, there was usually the death of one or two of
the seven; and it would take some hard remembering to come up
with a farer as badly equipped as Aurelia. It would be hard to
come up with one with more friends too. But, sadly, Aurelia was
the most likely bet for destruction.
Whatever sort of deep-space ship she had constructed for
herself, it couldn't be very good. Aurelia had always been weak
on 'Space Ship Design.' And she had always been weak in
navigation, so what sort of world would she likely arrive at
anyhow? At her second or third choice world, maybe? For the
little bit that she knew about worlds, one would have to shudder
at what her second or third choice might be. None of the young
persons could actually ask one another for help. But one could ask
for information after the barn door was already burned, as the
proverb has it.
"How will they know when one of us has come to govern a
world?" Aurelia wailed in fluty frustration. "We are not allowed
to announce to anyone that one of us has come to govern. How
will they recognize one of us as having the power and right to rule
them? And what can one of us do if they do not recognize me? I'm
lost already, I'm lost."
"When a lion appears in the midst of a herd of hartebeasts, the
hartebeasts will recognize the fact," Pandolfo sang from a near
needle. "When a lighted candle is placed inside a hollowed-out
pumpkin, the pumpkin will know it. You will be that candle
wherever you go, Aurelia. You will be the light of that world. You
will illuminate it even from its east unto its west. A lot of things
you don't have, but you do have light, Aurelia."
"Want to bet?" Aurelia chanted sadly. "I couldn't illuminate
even the legendary Kolokynthekephale, Pumpkin-Head World
itself. If there is such a place, that's probably where I'll end up."
"Aurelia, don't you know what world you're going out to
govern?" Adrian sang in amazement. "Haven't you recorded the
navigation sets for your first and second and third choices?''
"Nah," Aurelia caroled. "It's all in that vile number code."
"Concatenated Calculi Modules, girl!" Patmo exploded in
rough song. "You're fourteen years old! Don't you u nderstand the
'Navigation and Selection Number Code?' "
5
"Not nearly as well as I'd like to," Aurelia voiced. "And my
ship doesn't understand the subject much better than I do. You
see, my ship isn't really very much smarter than I am, even
though I tried to make it smarter. What if the people on the world I
go to govern won't know that I am supposed to be superior? How
will I ever convince them that I am?"
"That is quite a problem, Aurelia," Audry sang sweetly.
"There has to be some way we can help you. We'll cheat, we'll lie,
we'll slip you answers. We will do something."
Kick-off Nights are always nights of good weather, even if
favorable weather must be borrowed from nights before and
after. This was a perfect night.
so the intrepid seven sang. Six of them were no longer nervous for
themselves. Now they were nervous only for Aurelia. This was a
good thing. It was bad when young persons were nervous for
themselves on kick-off, and six of them were saved from that
now.
"It isn't even fatal if you bear in on a world that is not one of
your proper targets, Aurelia," Patmo called to her. "Every ship is
programmed (you programmed your own ship to this, though you
may not remember doing it since your own programming over
rides your conscious thoughts and intentions) for seven alternate
worlds if it misses its first world by faulty navigation. And
it won't very much matter which one of them you come to. They
will all be types of the one that you first agreed to go to; they will
all need governing; and they will all fit the conditions of your
assignment sufficiently. Confidence! That is what you need, girl,
confidence!"
They all meditated and prayed. And they sang some more:
That is what they sang for their last vaunt verse, and then
things began to happen to them. Like the crows that they so
resembled in their perching on their high spheroids, they began to
wake, one by one, to the scent and sound of dawn somewhere.
They began to loosen their wings to take compulsive flight.
They were full of unbottled feelings, and they had better get
out of there fast. Indeed, their ships were programmed (by
6
themselves) to take flight when their exact traject ory-second
arrived. They went into their ships. They seemed to melt into
their oblate spheres, their space-craft that they had made
themselves. They took off smartly without unnecessary fire or
fume.
Audry took flight. Then Rex. Then Adrian (his ship was
heavily laden, for it would have an important and far flight. ) Then
Lavender and Patmo.
"Don't forget to set your Compensating Contingency Grid
just as you feel yourself going into the grasp of the flight,
Aurelia," Patmo called to her with his last song for that while.
"You do forget things, you know, if you're not reminded of them."
"Oh, I'll say so!" Aurelia confessed in shameful measures.
"But it wouldn't have mattered if I forgot to set my Compensating
Contingency Grid at the last moment. What does matter is that
I've forgotten even to make the grid. Oh, what a flight this is going
to be!"
Pandolfo flew, the last of the others.
Then only Aurelia was left. She was very tense about it, and
she shouldn't have been. This was only a tenth grade school
assignment such as every fourteen year old child must take. The
worst that could happen to her was that she might fail the
assignment. The commonest way of failing such an assignment
was getting killed or vaporized in flight or in governorship. That
caused one automatically to fail the course.
'World Government,' the going out to govern one of the minor
worlds for a few equivalent months, was an important course.
But all the courses were important.
Aurelia flew on sudden impulse. She had no way of knowing
whether she flew at her proper moment, at her 'exact trajectory
second or not. Another thing that she had forgotten to make was a
Monitoring Chronometer.
7
"There isn't any way to make a bad flight," one of the
instructors had said to them two days before their kick-off. "If
there were such a way, then Aurelia would do it. But she won't.
You have all constructed your flight ships on the basis of your
multi-level intelligences, and there is no way at all that any of you
could have really faulty intelligence. You belong to the 'Golden
People,' and the 'Golden People' cannot fail in routine things, nor
in special things. If it were possible for one of your to fail, Aurelia
would be the one. But she will not fail. Too many people like her
too much, and being liked provides one of the most powerful
intellectual feed-backs known.
"All of you will always have more things go right than will go
wrong, simply because you are the people you are. You will
always have more reason than unreason. You will always have
more logic than illogic. You will always have more luck than
unluck. That is because you are of the special people.
"All your inventions and constructions will be special, and
they will not fail. They will have built-in safeguards. Should one
of you be rendered unconscious during your flight, it would not
greatly matter. You will have constructed your ships so that they
8
will follow the instructions of your unconscious if you are
unconscious. And they will follow the instructions of your death
mind [one of the most improvising and inventive of all mind
stages] if you are dead. But it is unlikely that one of you should die
on your outward flight. If any of you would do it, it would be
Aurelia. But she won't.
"Of course all of you have made blunders and will make
them. But you will not have made enough blunders to frustrate
your design. If it were possible for one of you to make enough
blunders to fault your flight, Aurelia would have done it. But she
hasn't.
"And you will have completely forgotten some important
things. After all, you are only fourteen years old and on your first
world venturing. But you will not have forgotten any absolutely
necessary thing. For instance, you will not have forgotten to make
a 'Monitory Chronometer.' " [All but one of them laughed at the
absurdity of anyone forgetting to make a 'Monitory Chrono
meter.'] "If any of you could possibly have forgotten to make such
a thing, it would have been Aurelia. And she hasn't.''
Oh, but she had! She had forgotten, and she had absolutely
resolved to do it when she had heard the instructor mention it.
And [Oh, how could she have!) she had forgotten it again as soon
as that session was over with.
And now [it was two equivalent days after the instructor had
made that last speech to them] she was in strange skies without a
'Monitory Chronometer' of any sort. Such a Chronometer is an
absolute necessity for navigation, and what will happen to you if
you do not have it?
Aurelia had· forgotten to make a 'Compensating Contingency
Grid.' She had forgotten to make a 'Monitory Chronometer.' And
she had forgotten to make a third important thing whose very
nomenclature she had also forgotten.
Oh, lacking such a Chronometer, you might possibly still
reach a world of the type selected for you. But as to which of the
worlds of that type you would reach, it would be left up to random
chance. And when you got there, you would not even know what
world you had come down on. Oh, there are memorized ear-marks
by which one might know what world it was. But Aurelia had not
well memorized the ear-marks.
Aurelia might come down on Skokumchuck the Shelni
Planet, or on Kleptis which is one of the Trader planets, or on
Gaea which is called Telluris or the Earth by its natives. On
Yellow Dog, or Bandicoot, or Sireneca [though that's pretty
9
distant], or Hellpepper Planet, or Dobson's World, or Hokey
Planet, or Aphthonica (World Abounding ] , or Horner's Corner, or
Sad Dog Planet, or Lotophage, or Lamos, or Paravata, or Analos,
or Gelotopolia, or Beggars' Choice, or Ragsdale, or New Shensi, or
Groll's Planet, or any of fifty-five other deficient worlds that were
within the primary dimension-sphere and had been j udged in
need of even a bit of second-class or immature governing. Some of
these were popular names of worlds that Aurelia didn't even
know the chart name of. But she knew that there were seventy-six
planets of the type recommended to her, of the type for which she
had supposedly programmed her ship, of the type within primary
range. But, with no 'Monitory Chronometer' at all, it was
blindman's guess which one she should come down on.
And, in the meanwhile, she was on a very random flight, and
random flights are rough. She bled from the nose and mouth and
ears. She retched and reeled and swooned. 'Til be so woe-begone
that everything will be sorry for me," she hoped, "and someone
will take care of me. Yeah, the hydrogen atoms, and the nickel
iron meteorites, they will feel sorry for me, I bet!" There was
nothing else out there. Aurelia, Aurelia, you had better have more
luck than unluck now.
Three years before, when Aurelia had been eleven years old
and in the seventh grade, she had built a living steed as a school
assignment. She had built it a little bit like a patrushkoe-horse,
since she didn't have a lot of imagination. But she didn't make it
too much like a patrushkoe, since students were no t allowed to
mimic already existing species too closely with their creations.
She left one thing out when she built that steed, the electronic-bit
to guide it with. (Any eleven-year-old child is likely to forget one
thing in making a complex animal like that: think of the hundred
things that she remembered when she was making it!] But it was
a good steed and a tireless one, and Aurelia enjoyed riding it.
But she didn't know where it was going, no more than it knew
itself. Her contemporaries had made a lot of j okes about Aurelia
and her steed that couldn't be guided.
Now her little space-ship, well-built in most respects, was
another steed that couldn't be guided at all. But it was a tireless
steed. They were in regions of 'good skies.' And it was a great
thrill just to ride it. But it was a fearsome thrill.
"There is no fear of falling in space," and instructor has said.
By the Great Blue Jasper, there is a fear of falling in space if you
have forgotten the 'Gyroscopic Struts' and the 'Pseudo-Vertical
Stabilizers.' There is a horror-sickness of falling.
But there was no way that Aurelia could avoid coming down
10
on a world of her designated type. If everything else should go
wrong, such a land-fall was still assured by the very style of the
shining ship. The seventy-six planets of Aurelia's assigned type
formed, as far as the ship was concerned, and integrated space
net. The programmed attractions for them were very strong. She
could not fly out of that net without being captured by it and
brought back. It was a huge net, yes, but her speed also was huge
and transcending.
Lacking a 'Monitory Chronometer' to select the best world to
match up with the talents of Aurelia, the ship would have to take
one at random. All the net-planets would be liveable for Aurelia.
And every one of them could well do with a little judicious and
higher-type governing by one of the 'Shining People.' But other
wise than their all being liveable for her, they were not very much
alike.
There would be outright horror waiting on Hell-Pepper
Planet, and Aurelia was a person bothered by brazen horror.
There would be a wildness that is worse than horror on
Bandicoot. Any decent person will feel disgust for Hokey Planet.
On Groll's Planet or on Gaea there was said to be a grossness that
really amounted to an enormity of behavior. The dishonesty of
the inhabitants of Kleptis or New Shansi was well known. So
was the perversity of Yellow Dog. There was the juvenile
clownishness on Gelotopolia and Ragsdale, an impudent artiness
on Aphthonica, an insulting elegance on Dobson's World, an
intolerable raunchiness on Horners' Corner. And there was the
plain mystery of fifty or so worlds that had been analyzed only
from a distance and had never been visited by either explorers or
student governors. The only thing they all had in common was
that they were insufficiently governed and could use whatever
guidance they could get.
Aurelia had drawn her shoddy class of worlds because she
didn't know what she wanted; and because her fellow students,
knowing what they did want, pad selected all the better groups
while she hesitated. Even so, and considering her restricted list, it
was not anticipated that she would land on any of the mystery
worlds. Following type, though, none of them could be as
mysterious as all that. But likewise it wasn't anticipated that
Aurelia should have forgotten to make a 'Monitory Chronometer.'
13
There were horse-herders, two of them, in the countryside
keeping a night-watch over t heir horses that night. There were
half a hundred sectarians of millennia! sort in a summer camp
nearby. This was in a group of low mountains around a lake.
There was also a multi-media (music and hollering and
debauching) 'with-it' group in a community quite near that place.
There was the River Boat on the lake with all-night gaming and
music. There was a tycoon and his menage in a luxury cabin.
There was a whole colony of luxury cabins on a fishful part of the
mountain lakes.
There was, moreover, an escaped convict, probably danger
ous and certainly insane, who had been sighted in the vicinity.
And there were two young men with a "Joe's Tow Service" tow
truck who were wandering the tilty roads of the region of the false
report of booty. So they were typical groups, typical persons
inhabiting the land and water on a typical night.
They all heard the little space-ship, all horns blowing and all
lights flashing, come down like a shouting and howling star. It
crashed with an impact that was more noise than destruction (the
ships of the young 'Shining People' were all sturdily made, and so
14
were the young 'Shining People' themselves,) so many of the folks
of the vicinity came towards the crash site, each at his own pace.
It was night, and it was in the region of delightful small
mountains. The sound of Aurelia's arrival was like the blowing of
all the trumpets of Heaven. Yeah, like all those trumpets blowing
out of tune! One thing, seven things really, that Aurelia had
installed in her space-ship was horns.
"I want everyone to hear me coming," she had said. "I want them
all to be able to get out of my way."
That was ridiculous.
"Perhaps you might want to arrive secretly at first," the
instructor had said several days ago, "and survey the situation to
ascertain the easiest and quickest ways to secure domination
over that world. Almost all of the most successful governors of
worlds have arrived on them quietly and secretly."
"Quiet and secret after I bank down maybe I will be," Aurelia
had said, "but first I want things to get out of my way."
"Things, animate and otherwise, will get out of the ways of
any member of the 'Shining People,' always, and without even
knowing that they do it," the instructor had explained. "That is
the submission that nature and its flora and fauna and encumber
ances and petrologies owe to the 'Shining People'-to get out of
our way always."
"Well, I won't blow my horns till I'm scared," Aurelia had
said.
"It would be impossible for any of the 'Shining People' to be
what was that word-"'scared,'' the instructor had admonished. "It
would be impossible for any adult of the 'Shining People' even to
remember that there was such a word as 'scared.' And even a
fourteen-year-old member of the 'Shining People' could hardly be
scared of anything ever.''
That instructor had been wrong. Aurelia was scared when
she saw the mysterious planet, wrapped in craggy night, rushing
up at her and showing no signs of owing any submission at all.
She leaned heavily on all of those seven horns, the only
instruments on her ship that seemed to have a clear purpose at the
moment.
"People, catch those heavenly horns!" persons of the multi
media 'with-it' group cried and bawled to each other as they came
out of skittish sleep. "Catch those third and fifth and seventh
discords! People, we got to ride those discords wherever they are
going!" These 'with-it' people knew their discords.
The horns roared and howled and hollered. And Aurelia's
ship came down with something between an extreme jolt and a
15
mild annihilation. The ship was damaged but not completely
destroyed. The same went for Aurelia herself. But she came out of
the craft nervously but bravely. Oh, what sort of nameless world
would this be?
(At the same time, and probably not far from there, Aurelia's
counterpart and adversary came down like black lightning,
secretly and yet arrogantly. More, perhaps, of Aurelia's
counterpart and nemesis and adversary in a little while.)
There were acrid and acid clouds. This was a wooly sort of
world, but which wooly world was it?
There was someone or something lurking there when Aurelia
climbed out of her ship. It was a thing or person, dark and
shambling, that did not get out of Aurelia's way. It disputed her
way rather. It attempted to attack her in a bizarre manner. The
thoughts of that thing, as Aurelia was able to gather them, were
relentless and at the same time incoherent. It was probably
insane. Certainly it was so in appearance.
"Oh go wash yourself!" Aurelia said crossly. "You're filthy.
And I hear water running there. Go and do it."
"Nah," the things said. "Not dodge me no more, kid. Come
here."
"I do hope you're not typical of this world, though first
specimens usually are typical," Aurelia said. "Really, your mind
is so boggled that I could hardly call you rational."
"Nah," the thing said. "Get off the coy, kid. Come here."
And then the thing definitely assaulted Aurelia, a bad
beginning on this planet, whichever one it was. Aurelia, almost
automatically, took the counter-action that had been inculcated
in her. But she was dismayed by the results.
The thing or person was twice her size and musky strong, but
something was wrong with it. It was unable to take care of itself,
.
and Aurelia apparently damaged it. She may even have killed it.
And Aurelia was exasperated over the bad start.
How could people be put together so badly and be so ill
conditioned as to break or be damaged by a few counteraction
strokes such as every nine-year-old child of the 'Shining People'
uses?
Well, if t he people of this world were so easily handled,
Aureli:a would have no real trouble in that particular. But she
must be careful not to damage them unnecessarily.
16
Aurelia's ship after her encounter with the dangerous escaped
convict. The sectarians came from their cave even before the
multi-media 'with-it' people arrived from theirs.
"Hail Messianic Angel, bright Vision from Heaven, and
Governess of the World!" these non-shining sectarians greeted
Aurelia. "Come with us to our place and protect us in these latter
days, and let the rest of the world perish. You just destroyed a
murderous lion of the night who was out on a prison break. You
are invincible."
Now this was amazing. These odd people knew Aurelia.
They understood who she was. And they greeted her in one of the
6A45D languages. Well, so had the murderous lion used such a
language, Aurelia recalled. Why, that was fortunate for Aurelia.
That was one of the most simple types of language to be found
anywhere. The 6A45D was one of the dozen classes of languages
that she had learned fairly well, when she had failed to learn a
hundred more difficult types at all.
Why, she could come close enough to this particular variety
of the type to fake it. If there were big gaps in her understanding
or her expression, then her intuition would flow into those gaps
and fill them up. After all, she was a completely intuitive person.
She was one of the 'Shining People.' She would keep these
creatures talking, and the understanding of their tongue would
grow in her by the minute. Soon she would understand them
perfectly.
"You are a :;hining angel, aren't you?" those millennia! sec
tarians asked her.
"Oh yes, certainly. As you see, as you see," Aurelia agreed.
She was full of intuition in the special form of telepathy, and she
pitched onto easy communication with them very quickly. Well,
maybe she was twice as slow about it as would be any other
member of her old group. But twice as slow was still pretty quick
in this case.
"And the devil, what will·you do about the devil?" they asked
her. "He's landed too, you know. Will you confound him?"
"Confound him? Yes, I suppose so. I'll confound him," Aurelia
said. What the devil was this devil they were talking about,
assuming that she was understanding what these people were
saying? The devils didn't come among the 'Shining People' very
much, and Aurelia wasn't experienced with them.
"We are talking about the devil who landed about the same
time that you landed," they explained what she hadn't asked
them. "We mean the devil who came down in a flame of darkness
when you came down in a flame of light. He must be confounded.''
17
"Yes, we'll confound him then. We'll confound him," Aurelia
agreed.
18
And you being from off-earth, we can bill you as the Shining
Angel who has had experience with those great rodeos in the sky.
Being an angel would make you an added attraction."
"But I'm not an angel really," Aurelia explained. "I misunder
stood the word at first. They're a different species entirely.
They're bodiless, and, ah, they're a little bit tedious too. No, I
haven't done any rodeo announcing. I don't know quite what it is,
but I am not turning it down. Let me consider it for a couple of
days. I want to do as many different things as I can while I'm
here."
"The other one, the dark-star one who landed the same time
you did, do you think that he's ever done any rodeo announcing?
We could bill him as a devil who has wrangled the hottest horses
in hell. If we had both of you at the same time, we'd have a double
added attraction."
"No, I don't know for sure who he is, but I'm pretty sure he
isn't a devil," Aurelia said, "and I'm pretty sure that he hasn't done
any rodeo announcing. But I cannot give a firm commitment at
this moment. Wait a couple of days."
The two horse-herders were rodeo wranglers and hazers,
former performers and announcers who were now overtaken by
the beginnings of age, and they were traveling with cars and
horse-trailers from last night's rodeo to tonight's. And they had
stopped in this vicinity to allow their horses to loosen their legs in
this mountain meadow in the cool night. They were more pleasant
representatives of this world than some that Aurelia had made.
"Horse-wranglers," Aurelia said, "you look straight, so tell
me something straight. What world is this? Is this Sad-Dog
planet?"
"Sis, with a line of talk like that, you'd be good, good," they
said in admiration. "We just got to get you for a rodeo announcer."
"I have a contract here," said one of the females of the 'with-it'
people, "for the licensing and manufacture and marketing of
Aurelia dolls and designs and marionettes and animated car
toons, and for more than a hundred different Aurelia devices and
premiums and tie-ins. If you will sign this contract here, we will
all cover ourselves with immense wealth and prestige."
"But this isn't a contract that you have in your hand," Aurelia
explained to the 'with-it' female who seemed to be in a perpetual
fuzzy state. "This is a large pandanus leaf that you have here. And
the thing that you have given me to write on it with is not a pen or
a stylus. It is a skewer or shish for spearing things and turning
them over a fire to roast them."
19
"Oh, I thought that this was a contract and a pen for you to
sign it with," the fuzzy-brained 'with-it' person said. "If I can find
a real contract and a real pen, will you sign it then?"
"I don't think so," Aurelia said. "We will see, but I don't think
so.
..
"Can you hit high C?" another female of the 'with-it' people
asked.
Aurelia hit high C. She was really a very voicy girl-"and
j ust alien-enough-looking to make a go of it," one of the 'with-it'
males said.
"That's too clear," the female 'with-it' said. "Can you sing it
muddier?"
Aurelia sang it mudder. So liked to sing, and she would try to
do it in the local way.
"We may as well pull it in, Angel," said one of the young men
with the 'Joe's Tow Service' truck there. "We won't promise that it
can be fixed, but if anybody can fix it then 'Joe's Repair Service'
can fix it. It isn't the kind of space-ship that you see around here
every day, so it won't be safe to leave it here in the mountain
meadow. It'll be stripped by kids and vultures, and then you will
never get away from here in it. Let us take it in and get it under
cover. If we can't fix it, we will tell you so, and you won't owe us
for anything except the estimate. And if we can't fix it, we can
probably give you top price for the hull. 'Joe's Salvage Service'
pays top price for every sort of hull."
"Go ahead and take it in," Aurelia said, "and get them to work
on it. I won't want it today or tomorrow, but if things go wrong
here I may want it pretty quick after that. Price is no object, not to
me anyhow. That's not my department."
"We'd better tie onto it and put a claim flag on it," the tow
man said. "And we'll radio for another and heavier turck to come
and help us with the tow. I wonder what misguided genius
designed this thing anyhow?"
"You won't need to radio for a heavier truck," Aurelia said.
"See this string that I tie onto it. Just lead it by this string and it
will follow. Cluck your tongue at it if it holds back. Oh, I designed
it. There's a lot of things wrong with it, aren't there?"
22
-·-----
-----
28
with Karl's blood. They filled the four flasks almost exactly full.
The mask of Karl Talion ( and it was a mask) paled and went
ashen and haggard when the four quarts of blood were finally
drawn from him. Then it was done with.
"Can blood be had from a paper doll?" Aurelia asked. "I
wouldn't have believed it."
(A terrible knocking and clattering began of such intensity as
to shake the whole world, and Blaise was amazed at the self
control of all the other persons who did not allow themselves to be
disturbed by the racket. Even Aurelia, who did not know what
the noise was, had still been expecting it and was not at all
startled by it. She knew that it was an attribute of Blaise Genet.)
The first servitor took the slippery elm quid from his mouth
and rubbed it on the throat of Karl Talion to staunch the bleeding.
It did so, but that big man was tottering on the edge of death. The
slippery elm quid is the ptelea of the ancients, and it will staunch
any bleeding.
The terrible knocking grew louder and louder, and Blaise
rushed out of the gambling salon to get away from it. But it was
everywhere. Was it real? It was as real as anything else, and more
real than most of the things. There was a real basis for everything
that happened here.
But sometimes it seemed that the terrible knocking was a
private affliction of Blaise Genet. It was a loud knocking at the
door or at the window. It was a determined knocking that
wanted an answer. Somebody wanted to come in, or at least to
communicate.
This terrible knocking had come to Blaise's door and to his
window night after night, and there was never anyone visible
there. It was all around his workshop every day, and no one was
ever seen there either. Blaise fled from it regularly.
He went to hotels to stay, and the knocking was always at his
rooms there. He took a bus trip: the knocking was there, on the
outside of his bus window all night, and there was nothing
outside except darkness, and sometimes illuminated landscapes
and city-scapes. He took a train trip. It was the same. It was a
knocking at his window, day and night, loud to him, not heard or
barely heard by other people. He took a plane trip and it was the
same. Someone was knocking on the outside in the cold, thin air.
He spent an entire year's savings in taking a twelve-minute orbit
of the earth. It was the same. Someone was knocking on the
outside of the hull of the orbit ship and wanting to get in.
"Oh, sure," the assistant pilot had said to him. "It happens
29
sometimes, every eighth or tenth trip. It means that we have a
split-wit on board. The split-wit is you in this case. I will have to
put it in the log that we have a split-wit on this trip."
It was rea lly a knocking on the outside of Blaise's head and
his breast.
"Who's there? What do you want?" he would ask sometimes.
"I want to come in," the voice often said, and it was very like
Blaise's own voice. "You have a whole lodging to yourself. That is
not allowed. I will come in and share it with you. And, later,
others will come in also."
But the lodging that the voice was talking about, the lodging
that Blaise seemed to occupy by himself illegally, that was
Blaise's own body.
"Why don't you answer it, Blaise," Aurelia said now. "It is
either a person or an aspect trying to be born. Allow it to be."
"I try. I don't know how," Blaise said. Now he was full of a
sort of reckless generosity, full also of the fear of coming under
the further dominance of Karl Talion if he drank too much of his
blood. So he gave each of the other garners, Julio Cordovan,
Aurelia the Governess, Helen Staircase, one of the quarts of
blood.
"To go," said Julio Cordovan the man with a thousand faces.
''I'll take mine with me to drink on deck." And one of the servitors
capped the flask for him.
"To go," said Aurelia, and they capped a flask of blood for her.
"If you drink it, it will tarnish your wings, Aurelia," Helen
Staircase said.
"No, I don't have wings in a physical sense," Aurelia
answered. "But I have not met t his custom before. Which world is
this, Lamos, to have such a custom?"
"To go," Blaise Genet himself said, and they capped a quart of
blood for him.
"We used to play 'Poles.' We used to play 'Symbols,' " Aurelia
said thoughtfully.
"That's what we're playing now,'' Helen Staircase said. "Oh, I
think I'll drink mine here." And she took it uncapped.
"Brag isn't really 'brag' on this world," Aurelia said. "It can be
bought off. The four quarts of blood are a buy-off."
"How rough do you play on your world, Aurelia?" Helen
Staircase asked her. "Your antagonist boasts that he will drink
your blood. Do you know what is to be known about your dark
antagonist?"
"You made that up, Helen," Aurelia charged. "He didn't say
30
that. I will have to find out more about my dark antagonist. Or
perhaps I will try to find out less about him. I will shut out all
information about him. I will not allow him the run of a world that
I govern."
31
This was the blood of Karl Talion that they were treating this
way, drinking it off as if it were a commerical drink. Aurelia went
to the condiment bar and shook salt and sulphur into it from the
ornate shakers there. It wasn't a bad drink, strong and filling,
sharp and reminiscent of some heroic sequence, tasting like
iron-what was the word for the iron taste? Ironic, yes.
And Karl himself looked as if it were a case of life or death for
him. The mask he was wearing was completely broken up in
agony gashes and weariness lines. And yet it was genuinely a
mask, and one could see that it fitted his face imperfectly, leaving
gaps. Was there some new technology in this living mask, or was
it simply an illusion gotten out of hand?
"They play rough on this world I am to govern," Aurelia said.
"But why? Are these people no more than big-grown children
over-age in grade? Or are they archetypes of some torturous
passion set here at the beginning for my instruction? Or is there a
difference? How would one of our smart kids go about analyzing
this?
"Aphthonica is a world of passionate archetypes who are at
the same time big-grown children. I remember that much about
32
Aphthonica, but it isn't enough. Aphthonica and two other
worlds are so. Crewman, is Aphthonica the name of the world we
are on?"
"I have heard it called many things, lady, but I have not heard
it called that," the Crewman on the River Boat said.
Aurelia felt whole nations of strength singing in her blood.
This is the strength that always comes to the 'Shining People'
when they need it. "And sometimes it comes when they do not
need it or want it at all," Aurelia told herself impishly.
It was the cluster of strengths that could permit her to
dominate this world and govern it. It would allow her to impose
herself on it, to savage it if it needed doing.
"Somehow I don't want to impose on it right now," Aurelia
told her blood-singing self. "It's like a crooked story, it's like a
crooked song, it's like a crooked ever-blooming happening. I want
to watch it, I want to taste it, I want to hear it. Somehow I don't
want to dominate it, not right now."
Aurelia's dark antagonist, her nemesis, her counterpart was
there also. It or he looked as if it would speak. Aurelia felt as if she
herself should speak, intricately and perhaps resoundingly. But
these two ("-whoever he is, whoever I am," Aurelia said] did not
have any governorship over each other. Then the moment passed
and the antagonist shuffled off like shabby lightning.
"Come along then," said the tycoon. "At my place you can
govern. Here you can not. The international people wanted to
abduct you, each to his own land. Well, I want to abduct you to my
own, and my own land is wherever I happened to be. The
important people will all come to my house, and with them you
can deal. Come with me to my luxury cabin."
"All right," Aurelia said. "Your needle was the only one that
knew what it was talking about. I'll go with you."
38
It was morning when Aurelia arrived with the tycoon at the
luxury cabin, so there were the morning papers of all the great
cities of the world on a sideboard there.
"Now, I think we will-" the tycoon began.
Well, newspapers of whatever kind are a certain simplicity,
and Aurelia could assimilate great globs of them simultaneously
and easily. She assimilated this glob from the Kansas City Star:
"Just after midnight of April Fool's Day there appeared the
April Fool's story of the year. Well, it has always been a good
story, and it always appears on April Fools Day, every five or six
years. This is the one of the arrival of a governor (in this case a
governess] from a 'Shining World' to rule our Earth, secretly but
powerfully, for the period of a year. There is a refinement this
time, in that a 'Dark Counterpart' is also supposed to have arrived
at the same time. For people who believe in the Single Tax,
Astrology, Flying Stogies, the Democratic Party, Salt-Free Diets,
Cheiromancy, and Trade Unionism, there might be validity here.
For the less credulous, there is none. There must be many people
in on this hoax, for it has circumscribed the world in a few hours,
and it is well detailed. There is even agreement on the landing
39
place of the 'Shining Person.' There is something else; an escaped
convict, confused in his mind and needing hospitalization, has
been found, murdered at the 'landing site.' This part has been
verified. Is this not carrying an April Fool j oke too far? We ask for
a non-fooling-around investigation of the murder and the attempt
to cover it up with out-of-this-world blather.''
Then the New Shansi Old Journal gave the following:
"We must all be of better appearance and behavior, now that
Aurelia is among us. Do we believe in Aurelia? We believe in the
'Shining People Tangency' whether the principal of it is named
Aurelia or not. Something splendid has touched us! Let us reflect
a little bit of that splendor in our own conduct. We have been
cynics for too long. Let us not be j ealous of shining civilizations
that are perhaps better than our own. Let us be better than we are,
and worry not that someone may be better than ourselves. We
recommend that you read thoughtfully the news account on page
A-2 and the editorial on page E-1."
Well, Aurelia found her own name mentioned in all the
papers. It was not always headlined, but it was pinpointed in all
of them. She was known by them all; she was accepted by many
of them; she was even understood by a few.
But Aurelia had j ust arrived during the night barely past.
How was she known world-wide so quickly? Well, whatever
world this was, it was one of the rapid-media worlds. Aurelia
tried to remember which and how many of the worlds of her sort
and selection were rapid-media worlds, but that unremembered
information simply slipped away from her mind-grapplers.
The Prairie Dog Town Prolocutor, the largest circulation
daily in the world, had this to say:
"The irony is that it is a slightly retarded 'Child from the
Stars' who has reached us this time. Using very sophisticated
tele-scan, we have measured the abilities and intelligence of the
'Aurelia' entity. Yes, perhaps she belongs to the 'Shining People,'
in type more than in intensity, but she would not rank among the
'Shining People.' This is evidence that there is a clear over-lap
between 'Shining People' Intelligence [verified as to fact, though
still unlocated as to source) and 'Earth People' Intelligence. This
lets us go so far as to say that our latest 'sophisticated tele-scan'
device would compare favorably with 'Shining People' devices.
We have further evidence for our view; our tele-scan reveals that
the Aurelia Ship [we will have its location pin-pointed and we
will examine it physically today) is made of material presently
beyond our analysis. We do not have any substance so exellent.
But the scan also reveals that the design of the ship is curiously
40
flawed in a dozen respects. Our best designs are better than the
design of the Aurelia Ship.
"Yes, we believe in Aurelia. Our tele-scan reveals that that is
her name, or very close to her name. We believe that she is from
'Shining World.' And we do have hard evidence for the existence
of 'Shining World.' We even believe that she has been sent to
govern our world for a while, unobtrusively and benignantly. See
the tele-scan tele-photos on page B9."
One inexcusable thing about the newspapers, they gave the
small information but not the large information in their datelines
and placelines. They always say what town they are published in
and what country they are published in, but they do not say what
world they are published in. And this is what Aurelia par
ticularly wanted to know.
The Dobson City Telegraph was blunt about it:
"This Aurelia belongs to the 'Flying Stogie' myths. Consider
the sort of people who have been promoting her, or at least have
been in her company through much of last night. There is Karl
Talion the phoney, and Julio Cordovan the phonies' phoney.
There is Helen Staircase 'the biggest confidence woman in the
world.' There is the Prince of Nysa. There is the notorious Herr
Boch. These persons were all attending, on a River Boat near
notorious Mountain Lodge, what is unofficially called 'The
World's Convention of Sharpies, Promotional Princes, and Con
fidence Persons.' This is phoneydom itself. And the 'Shining
World Space-Ship' just happened to land where they were
holding their convention. Oh, look for some transparent ex
ploitation from this! Most of the conventioneers are notorious
foreign agents grinding nationalistic axes here."
The Citadel City Sentinel was very concerned however:
"Aurelia is in mortal danger. There have been several
attempts to murder her on our own world during the night just
passed. An 'escaped convict,' conveniently allowed to escape and
given the 'contract' on her life, assaulted her right at the landing
site. By an accident still not ex plained, the assassin lost his own
life instead. Then there is the mysterious 'Dark Antagonist' who
has been trailing Aurelia with murderous intent all the night.
There was also an attempt by three unidentified men to throw
Aurelia overboard from a River Boat into the churning water, and
this attempt was barely thwarted. We now have evidence that
Aurelia has been drugged by needle and commandeered by the
notorious tycoon Rex Golightly and brought to his luxury cabin
'Potlatch.' We do not believe that Golightly himself will murder
her [he has other designs). but we do believe that she is in danger
41
of being murdered at Golightly's place, as is the notorious
Golightly himself every day of his life. We say that she must be
rescued from there and given the best protection that our world
can afford. She is, after all, some sort of ambassador or minister
or governess from 'Shining World.' We are organizing the
'Committee to Free and Protect Aurelia.' and we hope the
committee will have fifty million members worldwide by noon
today.''
Aurelia (she was a bit slow only in comparison to the other
'Shining People') digested this information and that of fifty other
morning papers of the world instantly.
"Now I think that we will-install you here and make you
comfortable, and in a half-hour or so you will begin to meet the
people who really matter," the tycoon Rex Golightly finished the
sentence that he had begun an interval before. "Do enj oy yourself
here, Aurelia. You will love 'Potlatch,' and 'Potlatch' will love you.
You will see why I call it my luxury cabin.''
Aurelia knew about luxury, of course. In school she had
studied 'Luxury as a Fine Art,' 'The Implementation of Luxurious
Living.' 'Luxury as the Meaningful Alternative,' such courses as
that.
And she knew about opulence. Back home, every family of
the 'Shining People' lived in a state of opulence for one day every
month for the goad of their souls.
Aurelia even knew about Conspicuous Consumption. Al
most every family of the 'Shining People' had one small and
suspected, and second-rate, art work that had cost a month's
earnings. But that was only for token. On 'Shining World' there
were such mountains of things waiting to be galvanized into some
kind of use that the question was always "What can we
conspicuously consume today?"
Aurelia had been in the homes of many of the 'Shining
Princes' of her own world, so she felt the pleasant shock of
recognition and welcome and kinship for the tycoon and his
menage, and for the luxurious cabin that housed them all.
Here was luxury, here was opulence, here was conspicuous
consumption.
The cabin-house 'Potlatch' had what every good house
·
should have, one hundred rooms for comfort and utility, facil
ities for Spartan dining (the ancient Spartan dining halls would
sit three hundred persons in the plain elegance that the soldier
princes liked, and the ancient models were followed here ) , chapel,
library, art gallery, theatre, gymnasium, natatorium, dens, bars,
game-rooms, club-rooms, courts for racquet and non-racquet
42
events, in-cabin botanical gardens with their aerated glass walls
merging with the larger botanical gardens outside, arsenal, moat
(filled with carp), tarn (filled with crappie), trout stream (full of
trout, ) fountains (full of fountain fish) , game park (full of deer and
bison and black bears), fields of big blue-stem grass and their
cattle, stands of pecan trees, waving fields of peanuts and
strawberries, race-courses, English Gardens, Italian Gardens.
Oh well, no cabin can have everything. 'Potlatch' had a lot.
"It really does remind me of home," Aurelia said.
The guests in the cabin were mostly ambassadors of
different sorts, from cartels, from countries, from organized
intellectual movements, from urbane hatchet groups, from moss
back unions ("One hundred and fifty years of moss can't be
wrong!"), from slave-block and indenture-block organizations,
from the structured satanisms, from the privileged corn and porn
groups, from the scientific and psychological and mathematical
covenants, from the 'consensus creation' foundations. The lobbies
of the cabin were full of lobbyists. The cabin-home 'Potlatch' was
on the premium country-home circuit and it drew top guest. But
they were adult guests. One almost forgot that 'Potlatch' had been
there less than a week, and that it was really a tent.
Of the younger visitors, there were gilded youths, topaz
youths, pomade youths who were the cherished and impressive
companions of the in-family young people. About the young
people, Rex Golightly had just received an anoynymous note.
"There is an assassin among the gilded youths of your house.
Your own sons do not know him, but they will say that they do.
They do not know half of their guests, but they are impressed by
them all and they will swear that they can vouch for them all.
There will be distinguished and special blood of your cabin and
on the thatch of your cabin if you do not act incisively. The name
of your cabin will have to be changed from 'Potlatch' to 'Murder.' "
Well, what was the tycoon Rex Golightly going to do about
that?
And then in the cabin, there was the permanent menage, the
family itself. Say, they were something! There was something for
everyone in the extensible, related and unrelated family of that
pleasant tycoon Golightly.
This is the family that , for a while, adopted Aurelia that
'Shining Person,' governess of the world, the family that clasped
her to its breasts (the asp bites that she got from this were slight
ones) and thoraxes, to its bony rib-cages and its happy paunches,
to its many-cockled hearts.
43
There was Rex Golightly himself, a man of high talent and
taste that went well with the spacious vulgarity that he had first
adopted for notice and gain and later had adopted for itself alone.
There was his wife Redfire and his morganatic wife Burnt Umber.
There were the brothers and sisters of tycoon Rex and his two
wives, persons of talents more obscure and less useable. There
were all the children of Rex, and the cousins and removed
cousins. But Aurelia, who possibly was also kindred, for Rex
insisted that there was a blood relationship between the
Golightly's and the 'Shining People,' was most reminded of home
by some of the 'goofy uncles.' Simon Golightly was her favorite
among them.
"I am embarrassed to ask anyone else so I will ask you,''
Aurelia said to that Uncle Simon on the first morning. "What
world is this? Yes, I really want to know. Yes, everybody gives
me the 'Aw Haystacks, this is the end!' look whenever I ask, but
you already have that look permanently, so it won't matter.
Dammit, is this world Bandicoot?"
"Ah, Bandicoot, Bandicoot, dream planet of my youth,'' Uncle
Silas drooled. "I was a soldier on the second invasion of
Bandicoot. Those were the j oyful years, the peaceful years. I fear
that no years like them will ever come again."
"But if you were on the invasion force to Bandicoot,'' Aurelia
said, "then this is either Skukumchuck or Hokey Planet or Gaea
or Beggars' Choice or Sad-Dog Planet. Those are the only worlds
of my assignment and type that have invaded Bandicoot in the
present century. Oh tell me, Uncle Simon, what force were you
with?"
Uncle Simon was bearded like a pard, like a very young pard.
He had pin-whiskers like pin-feathers. Aurelia could not well
judge the age of persons of this world, but she believed that Uncle
Simon was not too many years older than herself. He was not an
old man at all. He was on some medication or trip-facient that
made him vague and bumbling. Nevertheless, Aurelia liked him
better than most of the kindred, even though adjustments might
have to be made on any thing he said. Sometimes he gave his
name as Uncle Simon, and sometimes as Uncle Silas, so he was
called by both.
"So, on a bright day of my youth we invaded Bandicoot,'' he
said.
"But what world was Bandicoot invaded from?" Aurelia
asked softly.
"From this one, of course,'' Uncle Silas said. "Would we
invade from some other world? Contrary to the old saying, you
44
can get there from here; but you can do it only if you start from
here."
"But what world is this that we're on?" Aurelia asked. "I
know that the question is silly, but I am willing to look silly for
asking it. There's no other way to ask, and I want to know. What
world is this?"
"Be quiet, little girl, and listen to my story," Uncle Simon or
Silas said. Someone passed by in the corridor and Aurelia got an
unclear whiff of whomever it was.
"It's odd that you two young people should have arrived the
same day, and you are so different," Uncle Silas remarked. "And
yet somehow you are linked together. Ah, our general when we
invaded Bandicoot, he as General Ratwell. He was bow-legged.
But he had one of his legs shot off the morning we got to
Bandicoot. 'Well, don't just stand there,' the general told an
orderly. 'Run to Supply and get a 'replacement.' The orderly ran to
get an artificial leg, but he brought a straight one and not a bowed
one. General Ratwell was more than furious when he saw this. 'It
will not match!' he howled. 'Go get an artifical bowed leg.' The
orderly went to Supply again, but the only artificial legs they had
were straight ones. 'What a way to run an army,' the general
roared. 'This is a scandal beyond believing.' "
"I think so too,'' Aurelia said. She kissed Uncle Silas and
sauntered away. Pin-whiskers and all, she was sure that Uncle
Silas was not very much older than herself.
Then there was Uncle Gifford Redwing who was a 'funny
uncle.' Gifford had the voice and delivery of a cheap-shot
comedian. People often laughed when he came to the punch line in
his patter. If they did not, then he would come to the same punch
lines again and again until they did laugh. Uncle Gifford was very
fond of Aurelia, and there was no way he could keep his hands off
her. He had the idea that the 'Shining World' that she had come
from was a very permissive place, and he wished to show that his
own world was equally permissive.
"I will do anything for you, anything at all, Aurelia,'' Uncle
Gifford would say. "You and I. Aurelia, are the only two really
advanced persons around here. We are not bound by the rules that
bind lesser persons. And, come to think of it, the lesser people are
not bound by any rules either. Do you not find clothing oppressive
in such warm weather?"
"Not at all," Aurelia said. "I have thermostatic skin, of course,
I do not feel the heat ever. I wear clothes for modesty and
ornament.'' Aurelia had never heard of thermostatic skin on
people. That was one of the things she made up.
45
"Be nice to me and I will give you anything, anything," Uncle
Gifford said.
"Well, bring me Cousin Clootie's head on a platter then," she
told him. Cousin Clootie was the one of whom she had caught the
unclear but remembered whiff in the corridor when she was
talking to Uncle Silas.
"Would you like to play nature games?'' Uncle Gifford asked.
"Would you like to skinny dip? Would you like to show me some
of the more advanced techniques from your 'Shining World?'
You would be surprised at the techniques that we have here.
Here, here, there is nothing secret or hidden about me. I am all
unencumbered, as you see. Do you know that everyone from this
huge and palatial cabin has gone off somewhere now, except
Cousin Clootie who is lurking somewhere in the corridor? Come,
my dear, we have so much to show each other. Oh, come, come,
this is the end of the charade. Now! I said now!"
This was a slippery situation for Aurelia. She had resolved
not to break or kill anyone else on this world. Everyone from the
huge palatial cabin had indeed gone off somewhere, except
possibly Cousin Clootie who had been whiffed unclearly but
disturbingly. And Uncle Gifford was intending to take things by
unctuous violence. What do I do? Aurelia had never tied the
Instrumental Knot. Did she remember how it was supposed to go?
Aurelia was alone on a world that she didn't even know the
name of, a young and weak girl defenseless and unarmed,
without friends anywhere near, and confronted by a sanctionless
and sloppy fiend. And the fiend had a hold of her, avid to force his
evil will on her, with his fetid breath rattling his whole body (that
was a good phrase; Aurelia had read it in a book once), and with
his instrument actually barking and howling in its passion.
Poor Aurelia. What could she do?
She tied an Instrumental Knot in it, that's what she did.
"Dear girl," said the knot expert who had been rushed in by
the Navy. "Do you know how to untie this knot?''
"Oh sure," Aurelia said, "but it can't be untied in a single day.
Maybe not in a single week."
46
"Dear girl," said the consulting doctor, the world's foremost
expert on every sort of constriction. "This knot has brought
things to a topographical impasse. There isn't any way to untie it.
The whole Universe would have to be pulled through the loop to
untie this knot, and that's impossible. Girl, there has never been
seen anything like this on this world before."
Oh, that Uncle Gifford was making a big and painful noise
about it all!
"Just what world is this anyhow?" Aurelia asked. "Really, I
want to know. You tell me what world this is and I might tell you
something about that knot."
"Is there a way to untie that knot, Aurelia? He might die of it,
you know."
"He might, yes, but he shouldn't have let himself get in such
bad condition. But no funny Uncles ever die of little things like
that. Yes, there is a way to untie it. Certainly the whole Universe
had to be pulled through the loop to untie it, but that's easier than
it sounds. Here, I'll write down how to do it. And you write down
the name of this world. Is it Ragsdale? Is it Paravata? Is it Yellow
Dog? Is it Gaea? Is it Aphthonica? Uncle Gifford sure is roaring
loudly, isn't he. I bet he's really hurting."
"Yes. A knot like that will inflict the worst pain known to
man," the doctor said. "Ah, how simply it is, now that you write it
down. I'll untie it in just a moment and have him out of his agony.
But this last twist, that will s till hold it, won't it, Aurelia?"
"Yes. That's the time twist. You still can't untie it till the time
runs out."
"And when will t hat be, Aurelia?" asked the doctor who was
the foremost constriction expert in the world.
"When I leave this world, that's when the time will be out on
it. Then you will be able to untie the knot if you follow those
instructions. By the way, what is this world? I will j ust read its
name that you have written here. -Ah, nothing. Say, does
invisible ink on every world use a banana-oil base? When will it
come clear? When will I be able to read it?"
"When you leave this world, Aurelia," the consulting doctor
said. "You have a special shine on you when you're playing tricks,
do you know that? When you have left this world, then you will
be able to read its name. You can't know where you are, but you
can know where you have been."
"A dirty ethnic trick you pulled, consulting doctor," Aurelia
said.
"A dirty e thnic trick you pulled, shining person Aurelia," the
doctor said.
47
And Uncle Gifford howled and roared.
"Aurelia," said the tycoon Rex Golightly, "if you will not
untie the knot, can you not at least shut Giff up some way?"
"Oh sure," Aurelia said. She chopped Uncle Gifford over the
esophagus. This blow is known on most of the worlds, but they
have brought it to the highest pitch on 'Shining World.' The voice
of Uncle Gifford was killed completely, for how long a time was
not known. But his suffering was now more and not less than it
had been before.
"I have received a note that you are in great danger here,
Aurelia," the tycoon Rex Golightly said that evening. "I am taking
silent precautions, but I wonder if you could tell me where the
danger is most likely to come from?"
"No. It could come from anywhere," Aurelia said. "I am in
great danger here, but I would be in danger of assassination
anywhere on this world. All who govern strange worlds are in
danger of death every minute of their governorship."
"I will defend Aurelia," young Uncle Silas said. "When she
retires tonight, I will sleep like a faithful dog across her doorway.
No one will be able to get in without wakening me. And if l wake I
will howl till the whole cabin hears."
"That isn't a bad idea, Silas," Rex Golightly said. "You aren't
good for anything else. Maybe you will be a good guard dog."
So that night, Uncle Silas, the muddled boy with the pin
whiskers and the doggy eyes, slept across Aurelia's doorway to
give her protection. And no one could go in there without
wakening or dispatching Uncle Silas first.
But did he provide safety enough?
There was, for one thing among many, a strange guest among
the young people of the luxury cabin. The young persons of the
family had been calling him Cousin Clootie that day, but they had
no idea what sort of cousin he was of theirs. Aurelia had caught
an unclear whiff of Cousin Clootie in the corridor. She had caught
a clear whiff of the Dark Antagonist on the River Boat. She knew
now that they were the same. This was the person who had
arrived onto this world only minutes after Aurelia herself had
arrived. She didn't know anything about him, and yet she
shivered over some of the implications.
Yes, the Dark Antagonist (under the name of Cousin Clootie)
was a guest at 'Potlatch.' The sons of the house did not really
know him, but they said that they knew him and that they could
vouch for him.
48
The next morning began badly. Young Uncle Silas, still lying
across Aurelia's doorway to protect her, was found to be
decapitated.
Oh come on! Do not take it so easily. Do not be urbane and
brave about this. Of course he was a befuddled youth who was
good for nothing. But Aurelia had liked him more than any of the
others. So had the tycoon Rex Golightly. Silas or Simon, had been
befuddled but good. The others of the kindred were brighter and
sharper, but not quite such good persons. But everybody in the
cabin was shocked and broken up by it.
Or were they?
Cousin Clootie came and gazed. He was the Dark Antagonist.
He came from elsewhere. The veins of his temples throbbed and
crawled as if black lightning were flickering about him, but he
showed no emotion. His was a fire-blackened iron face. And yet
there was nothing at all that anyone could say against him, and he
had given them no grounds for suspicion.
People came to dispose of Uncle Silas. They loaded his body
onto a bier and began to carry it away, but they left the head there.
"Oh, no, no," Aurelia cried, and she carried the head and ran
49
after them.
"They do not need the head, Aurelia," Rex Golightly ex
plained patiently. "Identification has already been made. He was
known. He really was a blood kindred of the family. The body
will fulfill all legal requirements. They'll not need the head. We
can throw it out anywhere. You're getting blood all over you. Yes,
the head is very fresh cut, possibly only a minute before you or
someone else rose to a noise. Silas may have been an obstacle. He
may not have closed his eyes all night until he closed them j ust a
moment before he was killed. And then it may have been too close
a call with the dawn for the assassin to kill you. I understand how
you fell, Aurelia since he may well have given his life to save
yours. But throw the head away anywhere."
"Oh, no, no," Aurelia cried. She ran after the bearers of the
bier and place Uncle Silas' head in his own arms. And yet there
was something incomplete about the act. On 'Shining World,' they
had wailers who were professionals and who knew how to wail a
dead person. On this world, whatever it was, they seemed to have
no such thing.
"There should be professionals,'' Aurelia said dully to Rex
Golightly, and she was all smeared and blurred with still fresh
blood.
"Yes, professionals, Aurelia. I did have several in the house,
and yet somehow I trusted to an amateur, poor Uncle Silas going
away there, for your ultimate protection. I should have known
better. Today I will have in a real professional the best body
guard in the nation."
Yes, that morning had begun badly.
53
and anti-Earth were exactly on opposite sides of our sun, and
therefore they would always be invisible to each other. It was
believed that they were identical in all ways, except one, and that
one way could hardly be defined without setting up conflict in the
entire universe. Well, it was thought that these two worlds were
completely similar and at the same time completely opposite. But,
when we began to nibble at space and go out of our own orbit, we
saw that there was not any anti-Earth. And so that story died.
"But when we nibbled at space a little deeper, we saw that
very many worlds did have anti-worlds exactly opposite them in
their orbit around their sun. This seemed to be the normal case.
And we found from persons who went into space that they could
never see the anti-worlds of their own world, though persons
from other worlds could see them. We even find that persons
from, 'Shining World,' and our best guess is that you come from
there, Aurelia, c annot see their own Dark Companion, though
people of other worlds can see it. Can you explain it?"
"Oh, I suppose so," Aurelia said, "but I will give you back
what you have given me. This world we are on (Oh, somebody tell
me what the name of this world is-is it Sad-Dog Planet? Is it
Gelotopolia? Is it Gaea? Is it Dombon's World?) This world that
we are on, it does have an anti-world. I saw it clearly as I came in.
I was afraid that I would come down there. It would not have been
of the class approved for me, even though it is identical to this
world that is. But anti-world is there. And you do not see it. But
persons from other worlds do see it. Tell me why you do not see
your own anti-world, and perhaps I can tell you why we do not
see our own. Other than the fact, of course, that we do not have
one, and you do have one."
"But you do have one, Aurelia," Cousin Clootie said. He was
the Dark Adversary and he was always interrupting, "I know you
have one. I come from there."
54
and indeed it seemed to be in some strange language. And it was.
But what phrase had Aurelia spoken to the little and the big
buggers to make them behave? Are there certain phrases known
only to the children of the various worlds? Yes, there are. And
this phrase translated out "I'll break your necks," and it carried a
modifier to show that Aurelia meant it. The little and big buggers
listened to her then, and they had a fruitful conversation. And
Aurelia finished with a demonstration, and then a rather start
ling and challenging explication of that demonstration.
"A drop of water covering a hole in a leaf is a natural lens
microscope by which things may be seen enlarged," she said. "I
have just made such a microscope, and then several of you have
made simple things, and all of you have looked at things
magnified through them. So we know that the 'natural
microscope' does exist.
"But do you know that there also exist, equally simple, the
natural radio, the natural telephone, the natural color camera, the
natural computer, the natural microphone, the natural electric
battery? You do not know what they are? Think, children, think.
Most of them are as simple as putting a drop of water over the
hole in a leaf. Build them now, or arrange them rather. Right here,
right now, from things in this room, from things in your school
desks. I give you five minutes."
Well, they did it in five minutes, but j ust barely. Some of the
solutions were not quite what Aurelia expected. There is more
than one way to make several of these things.
Then Aurelia looked out over a throng that was not there.
"Well, can you make the things, big people?" she asked. "Try
it. Make them right now, from things at hand. I give you ten
minutes, since you are slower than children in your wits. Make
them. Arrange them."
Well, the people in the invisible throng did make all the
things within ten minutes, but just barely.
56
"That intellectual giantism, that might have been called 'The
Mind of God' if it wanted itself to be called such, might have been
the sum as well as the counterpoint of all the energy in the
Universe. And then the whole process could have been back
edited, and raised to as many powers as wanted. Before limits
were invented, there were not limits. Exponentially expanded
chaos could have been as all-good and as all-powerful as it
wished.
"Why should not God control and indwell every particle of the
Universe? At the moment of the 'Big Bang,' He was every particle
of the Universe. On the other hand, consider that maybe the 'Big
Bang' was an explosive cancer by which the proto-order went out
of control. Consider that maybe ourselves and all of the worlds
are cancerous units of destruction."
"Mr. Greenpasture, you are treating this as a simple case of
bi-lateral compensation,'' Aurelia said. "You res tric t exponential
explosions when you imply that they might be no more than bi
lateral or point-to-point equal. When you speak of 'all the mass
there was and all that there would ever be' you are speaking out of
much too small a concept. It is not a bi-lateral equation. It is a
billion-lateral equation."
"But, Aurelia, isn't that simply to billionize the sums by
adding exponients? Why not keep the bi-lateral aspect, the
symmetry?"
"Maybe so,'' Aurelia said. "The period when we had that in
school, I wasn't paying much attention."
"Do you know that there are problem children in problem
classes on this world who carry these things out further than do
your children on 'Shining World?' " Mr. Greenpasture asked
proudly.
"I suppose so,'' Aurelia admitted again. "After all, if problem
children are not good at solving problems, then who will be good
at solving them? I believe in the Law of Planetary Constancy.
This is an expansion of the Law of Intellectual Constancy, a law
that is always very hard to take for such as believe themselves
intellectually superior. The Law of Planetary Constancy states
that all planets are approximately equal in their po tential, all of
them from 'Shining World' to Skokumchuck. It states that the
people on the grubby worlds are just as smart as those on the
bright worlds, though sometimes they have poor ways of
showing it. We on 'Shining World' are not [Oh really, believe it!],
not so much smarter than other people as all that. But, oh it is
painful to admit this!"
57
Tycoon Rex Golightly brought the highly professional body
guard, the best in the world, to talk with Aurelia that day.
58
"Aurelia, this is the illustrious Marshal Straightstreet," the
tycoon Rex Golightly said warmly. "I have known him since our
college days. He is the man of the most integrity that I have ever
known in my life."
"Then why don't you recognize him now?" Aurelia thought
but did not say. "Aw, haystacks, what's the matter with you
anyhow?"
"You are silent, Aurelia," Rex Golightly said, and Aurelia
was silent.
"Marshal is more than a boayguard," Rex said. "He has been
bodyguard for entire nations and leagues. He is probably the most
trusted and dependable man in the world. You do not say
anything, Aurelia?" Aurelia did not say anything.
Marshal Straightstreet broke a rule for men of outstanding
station or repute on this world, Aurelia noticed. It is a rule
observed on worlds with a certain primitive mentality streak in
them, though they may not be in all respects primitive worlds. It
is the rule that an eminent man [the rule does not apply to women)
should be somewhat larger and taller than his fellows. Aurelia
had already learned to gauge the supposed eminence of a man by
59
his height. Her own host, Rex Golightly, was quite an eminent
man. Real eminence seemed always to stand more than two
meters tall. But the illustrious Marshal Straightstreet, the best
bodyguard in the world, was considerably short of that height.
"I am charmed to meet you, Shining Visitor Aurelia,"
Marshal said. But Aurelia was silent.
He was lithe, and of a rapid and intense musculature
sheathed in what was the proper flesh for the occasion (was he
the man of a thousand fleshes then?) ; he was good-humored and
intelligent in body as well as mind; he had fire-grey eyes and
experienced histrionic eyebrows; he had now a cat-purr voice
that showed the insufferable conceit of a tiger (was he the man of
a thousand voices also?) ; but he was still shorter than true
eminence should be according to the Primitive-mentality trait.
"Marshal Straightstreet has prevented the assassination of
no less than seventeen heads of state," Rex Golightly said
proudly.
"For better or worse?" Aurelia asked in her mind but not out
loud.
"He was once the amateur middle-weight boxing champion
of the world," Rex said.
"If they met today, which of them would win?" Aurelia asked
silently in her mind.
"And he is an Ultimate-Mind-And-Body-Combat Grand
Master," Rex continued. "You do not say anything, Aurelia?"
Aurelia did not say anything.
"Really, Aurelia," Marshal Straightstreet said with an edge
to his cat-purr voice, "if I am to guard your life and well-being,
you must a least acknowledge my presence." But Aurelia did not.
"Do you not practice the amenities on 'Shining World,'
Aurelia?" Rex Golightly asked in displeased banter.
"Oh, we've met before,'' Aurelia said out loud then. "Aye, and
we've drunk blood together."
64
There is no flexibility and no openness if you use that cursed
number. There would be static recurrency only. The sequence
would return to the same place every time, which is the same
thing as not moving at all. The stasis would be more serious in the
mind than in the world, but it would produce a hobbled and
manacled world like-well, I'm afraid like this one. It is only the
regularity of chains. It is a sequence that cannot even break away
from itself for short-cuts or intuitions. There is no bounce to
people who use that number, no glow to them. There is no
transcending, no double-j ointing. There are no 'dimensions
beyond.' We were taught that someday we would meet strange
people who believed in and would try to intrude an extra number.
We were told that they were, perhaps, incurable in their folly.''
"But Aurelia," the numerologist insisted again. "There is
such a number. We use it all the time. We work problems with it.
We cannot do without it."
"Try," Aurelia suggested. "Maybe you can."
"This number, which is named-" the numerologist tried
again.
"Please! I am a lady!" Aurelia spoke sharply. "Do not name it
in my presence. I know what it is. It is the Hell number. Thrice
spoken (or spat], it is the Number of the Beast. But the 'Shining
People' do not use it at all.''
66
at a middle distance. But close up you are not solid, and no one
here will ever see you in a more clear form than j ust these points
of light and color. Yes, I know that we can all be atomized into
mere points, but we don't all look like it. There is a discontinuity
and incompleteness about you. You know that, don't you?"
"You don't sound quite like a Pan-Math or Science Boluxus,"
Aurelia said.
"Perhaps I am a Boluxus of Interior Science," Forcedmarch
suggested.
"Oh, you are an anatomist?"
"I am that, but I do not mean that. It is part of a Chinese Box
Puzzle. There is more than one sort of interior, and I'm not
speaking of the anatomical sort. Perhaps I am speaking about the
'Interior Landscape.' Tell me about the landscapes of 'Shining
World.' Are they well-defined, or are they pointillistic? Or better,
show me. Here are paints and canvasses. I alwasy carry this kit
with me. I say to people 'Show Me' and I open the kit so that they
can show me this way. Sometimes they do show me. Often it is
the least expected of them who show me directly what they
mean, with paint on canvas. Show me, Aurelia, the landscape
where there might not be a sharp line between the interior and
exterior scapes.''
"Oh, I am a botcher," Aurelia said. "My botches will not give
you a good idea of the landscape of 'Shining World.' You'd miss
most of the landscapes anyhow. Your sense of smell isn't sharp
enough to take them all in, and some of these aren't mineral paints
at all. They are synthetic paints without authentic odor."
Nevertheless, Aurelia began to paint.
"They all love you instinctively," Forcedmarch said. "But
many of them do not trust their instincts any more. They carry
'Kill Aurelia Now' signs because they believe that it is the
solidarity thing to do. They feel that their whole way of life is
threatened by you, and of course it is. Oh yes, they'll kill you,
unless you slip away from here quickly and secretly. But they'll
kill you from the feeling that it is their duty. They won't do it from
real conviction."
Aurelia had finished the exterior-interior landscape of 'Shin
ing World.'
"Oh, I see now," Forcedmarch said. "I see a lot of it. Yes, as it
stands now they'll have to kill you. I wonder if you can complete
the painting so that they won't have to?"
"No. I don't think so," Aurelia said. "And I still don't know
what world this is. Is it Paravata? Is it Skokumchuck? Is it Gaea?
Is it Bandicoot? It almost has to be one of the four. On one of them
68
they killed the Prophets. On one of them they killed Joan. On one
of them they will kill Beatrice. On the other-Oh I forget whom
they will kill on the other, but there are four similar patterns."
"You are the 'Beatrician Moment/ " Forcedmarch said in
admiration as Aurelia finished up her botched exterior-interior
landscape as well as she could finish it.
"Who is the Beatrice that you talk about here, I want to know
that?" she said.
"I thought it was the same one you mentioned, Aurelia."
"There are several of them. Tell me what world this one is
and I might tell you about the Beatrices of this world. Tell me
what world this is anyhow."
"It is a world with a wide and j agged psycho-gash between
its exterior and interior landscapes. They are not linked so closely
or purposively as are the landscapes in your beautiful botchery.
You must flee at once, Aurelia."
"No. I will not flee at all. I was sent to govern. Is there no hope
then? Will they tread me down?"
"Yes. It will be an unhungry generation that treads you
down."
69
Aurelia was not a girl of a thousand faces, but perhaps she
was a girl of a hundred or so. She had learned 'miming' at school,
and she had played at miming. She could look pretty much like
anyone she wished. And there was one incredible advantage as a
mimic here on this world. The people could not smell body
signatures or identities. So the hardest part of mimicry could be
happily forgotten.
Aurelia studied a variety of girls and women outside,
through a spy-glass, from the cabin of tycoon Rex Golightly. She
settled on a dozen who seemed easiest to imitate and who were
prominent in the milling and shrilling outside, either as vocal
persons in the 'Kill Aurelia Now League' or as partisans of
Aurelia.
Then, j ust as evening was coming on, she went out of the
cabin, though no one was supposed to go out without a thorough
examination. As a matter of fact she was bodily thrown out by
the best bodyguard in the world, played by the Man of a
Thousand Faces, Julio Cordovan.
"What, what?" Julio had cried in fury when he found her just
inside one of the bolted doors. "You, you you! How did you get
70
in? You've tried fifty different tricks to get in, you brat assassin. I
don't care how you got in. I know how you will go out!" And the
best bodyguard in the world threw her out.
Yes, Aurelia had been watching the brat assassin and her
a ttempts to get into the cabin. She had learned her looks and her
voice. So that was the first and easiest one of them to imitate. And
Aurelia was thrown out into the 'Kill Aurelia Now League' just at
gathering dusk. There was a weird texture to that mob. It was not
exactly unfriendly, but it was murderous; there's a difference.
"You, Sheila-be-Damned," cried one of the ready-combat
buckos when he saw her. "How did you get here? How did you get
in there to be thrown out? You were clear down at the other end a
minute ago."
"I told you I was fast. I told you I was tricky," Aurelia said in
the strident voice of Sheila-be-Damned. (Wasn't it lucky that she
had learned so easily the name that she would be traveling under
for the moment?] "I told you that I could get inside. They threw me
out, but I'll not stay out. I'll get in there again and again and again,
till finally I fling Aurelia out to you."
"It's dull on the line, always a little dull here," the bucko said.
"All we do is listen to our own talk, but yours is a little more
exciting than most. There's not much action on a kill-line. Even
the final action is done in a minute. But the center of it is the
communications, in that tent there. Do you know, Sheila-be
Damned, that we have got a million letters today, and nearly that
many telegrams? These are statements of solidarity with the 'Kill
Aurelia Now League,' and they are flooding in from all over the
world. I love the feel of solidarity. The Kill-Blank-Now-Leagues
have always got heavy solidarity-support from everywhere in
the world. It gives you a real feeling of achievement to be part of it,
even though we don't kill nearly enough people. And there aren't
any new and good ways of killing. I always want to go to the end
of the stick with them, and yet we repeat the same techniques
over and over."
"How's about suicides," Aurelia suggested happily. "They
are real end-of-the-stick things, aren't they?"
"Yes. They may be the best. When you can feel the frantic end
coming to you in waves, it makes it all worth while. I like a
smashing suicide. Leaps are the best. There is something electric
about the long moment the leaper is in the air, and then the
smashing, the smashing!"
"Oh luck, luck! If only we could have it happen!" Aurelia
cried. "And perhaps we can. I will implant the idea myself. We
may have just such luck."
71
"Sheila-be-Damned, there is something different about you,"
the bucko said, "Something that I like very much. It goes against
the grain but I like it. Do you-"
But Sheila-be-Damned herself was approaching.
"Look there, look there!" Aurelia cried and pointed. The
bucko looked. The real Sheila-be-Damned arrived with anger and
amazement in her eyes. And then these looks were replaced by
bewilderment. Aurelia had ceased to look like Sheila-be-Damned.
Now she looked like one of the other girls in the mob.
"Roxie!" Sheila-be-Damned said. "I thought that there was
someone standing here who looked exactly like me. And now I see
that it's you."
"I don't look anything like you," Aurelia-Roxie said. "Sheila
be-Damned, you shouldn't have more than one stick every half
hour. You know how you see things that aren't there otherwise."
"It doesn't matter," Sheila-be-Damned said. ''I'd j ust as soon
see things that aren't there."
"What were you pointing at, Sheila-be-Damned?" the bucko
asked. "I don't see anything special there. What did you mean
when you pointed and said 'Look there, look there!' "
"I did not point. I did not say 'Look there, look there!' " Sheila
be-Damned said.
"Sheila-be-Damned, you did," the bucko said. "Roxie was
right. You shouldn't have more than one stick every half hour,"
But Roxie-Aurelia was off through the 'Kill Aurelia Now
League' encampment. It was growing darker, and most of the
mobsters were organizing dens, caves, and campfires. April
second or third (whichever this evening was) was not really cold
yet, but it is always cozy and conspiratorial to den into caves and
to have fires snapping in the evening and night. And the foothills
of these stunted mountains were full of caves. The luxury cabin of
the tycoon faced directly onto these small mountains.
How does the coon feel when he sits down with a mute of
hounds to discuss doing the coon to death? He feels pretty frisky
if he has conned the dogs into thinking that he is a dog. Such a
coon is top-dog for such time as he can keep the dogs conned. And
Aurelia as Roxie was top-dog for as long as she could keep this
coven of mobsters fooled. And, as a coon, Aurelia was a show
boat. All coons are.
"What would we do with Aurelia if we had her now?" she
asked, and she could hear the squeak of her own smirk.
"'rhat is difficult to say," said one of the man-mobsters,
struggling to find words. They were putting sycamore branches,
from trees on a near creek-side, on the fire. "We should find some
72
gadget for dispatching her .so good that it would unjade us, but
maybe she herself would be enough to do it. We love her, of
course. She's magic. But we have to complete the love-hate
dialectic."
"Why do we have to complete the dialectic?" Aurelia asked.
"Why do we have to be on both sides of everything? Why do we
have to do anything at all?"
"Because we have broken all the maj or compulsions," the
man said, worrying his words a little bit, "so we must be chained
to the minor compulsions. We cannot be free completely, or we
would violate the freedom-slavery dialectic; and we can progress
only by dialectics. We have freed ourselves from the slavery of
fact, so now we must bind ourselves to the slavery of fetish.
There's no other way."
"And yet we love Aurelia," a girl said. "That is why it will be
so difficult for us to kill her, but we do not grow by easy tasks. We
love her. She is the 'Shining Person,' the 'Bright Thing' from our
mythology and our songs. She is the analogy of the 'Great
Speckled Bird.' "
"But, as you will remember, the 'Death of the Great Speckled
Bird' was a hit ten times as great as the original 'Great Speckled
Bird' song itself."
"Isn't it all completely childish the way we carry on about
this though?'' Aurelia asked. "Do we have to be completely
childish? Is there a premium on being silly?"
"No, it is not completely childish,'' one of them said. "It is part
of the child-adult dialectic that we strive to fulfill. And it isn't
completely silly. It is part of the dialectic of the silly-"
"Oh brother the dialectic!" Aurelia cried.
"Roxie, what are you saying?" several of them shrilled
aghast. "You are attacking the dialectic itself, the only thing that
matters."
"We love Aurelia,'' another of them said, "but when we force
ourselves to love-hate her, we find it is not hard at all. Consider
only her cruel treatment of Uncle Gifford Redwing, the scandal of
the day. To tie the infamous Instrument Knot on him was
shocking and unusually cruel, but we are not really opposed to
such an agonizing and torturous thing as that. We enjoy the idea
of it. But the fact is that she rejected his approaches, and so she
has broken all the rules. No human should ever reject the
approaches of any other human. We wonder if she knows what
she has missed. The grosser the encounter the more powerful the
experience, that's what we always say. With the flesh, it does not
matter whether the experience is j oyful or whether it is revolting.
73
The main thing is that it should be powerful. Power and
movement takes precedence over j oy and pleasure. Powerful
experience can be a j oyless pleasure, really the best kind. It is
pleasure for its own sake, and not for the sake of j oy."
"We love Aurelia for being shiningly perfect," another of
them said. (These people in the fire-lit cave all seemed alike now,
and there was no good trying to find a difference between them;
there wasn't any.) "And she achieves balance. Lest she be thought
of as too perfect, we have the sublime and horrible discordancies
of the horns of her ship that sounded when she came in. Oh, may
they sound forever! Discord, discord, discord! So she fulfills the
perfect-imperfect dialectic. And we would protect her with our
lives. That is to say that we would not want anyone else to kill
her; we want to kill her ourselves."
"But the crux is this," said another of them. "For two weeks
now we have been entrapped into "Kill-Little-Name-Now' effects,
and they have not been satisfying. We have procured those two
deaths, and they have been like ashes in our mouths and our
spleens, like nothing at all. They have not satisfied us, and they
have not left us hungry either. They have done nothing. There j ust
is not enough satisfaction in hunting little-name persons to their
deaths.
"And here is the rest of the trouble; there are hardly any big
name people left anywhere, and what there are left are
unassailable. We have to have big-name people to kill, or we
perish. Our pegs are tuned too tight on that and we can never back
off from it.
"But the only new big name, absolutely the only new big
name in the world, is Aurelia the 'Shining Person' from 'Shining
World.' Her flame and fame have gone from the east even unto the
west. We have to kill her. We need that joy."
"We hope that she will understand that we have nothing
personal against her," another of the persons said. "But what
offends us most of all is this whole idea of governorship. It is true
that we have only third-hand reports of it, but we still reject the
idea. Now here is the complication. We do want to be governed.
We do not want to be patronized or pampered or favored. We do
not want apologetic persons to lick the dust before us. Of what
use to us is licked dust? So we have at least an acceptance
rejection attitude towards governorship. And iron-handed and
hobbed-booted governorship over us would be accepted easily
enough. It is this gentle and implied governorship that gags us. It
implies that somewhere there are persons superior to us; and they
would oversee us, to some slight extent at least, without any
74
thought of profit from us. We say 'Death to all Lord and Lady
Bountifuls�· We have dined on meat t oo strong to be happy with
such pastry. There are numenistic elements in such 'guidance'
even if it is carried on by a single young person in the quietest
manner possible."
The mobsters had returned to the caves in more ways than
one. They no longer looked at the world itself. All they looked at
were a few flickering shadows on one of the interior walls of the
world. Then the talk of the mobsters grew long hair on it.
They described, in their very hairy terms, the various deaths
they would inflict on Aurelia, and it made her a little bit sick. Oh,
by the red fire that crackled and popped in that cave, it did make
her sick! There is much to be said against such explicit details.
They threw all the mobsters into shaking and climaxing passion
though. This was a powerful and moving thing to them.
Aurelia quietly went out of there and into another cave. In
this other cave there was a sort of music brewing. It was music of
the euphony-cacophony dialectic. The music was very, very loud.
That was the whole essence of it. If it had been less loud, it would
have deflated and disappeared. It would have shrunk to less than
one howling quantum and it would have been heard no more. And
the talk was very soft, slurred mumbles and voiceless whispers.
Yet it could be heard well enough, coming through tunnels in the
mountainous noise.
They motioned Aurelia-Roxie to drums. And she played
them badly, but not badly enough. She felt that she was letting
them down.
"We have solid, freeway music now," one of the cave
musicians said, his soft words running out of the mountain of
noise like a spring that trickles out of a gravely mountain. "For
centuries, music was trammeled by its own attributes. But now
we have freed it of them, one by one, from the latest to the earliest.
First we got rid of tunes. Really, a tune in an episode intruded into
music where it never did belong. Tunes came very late, and they
never were world-wide. The orientals never had tunes, and the
occidentals didn't have them in their classical centuries.
"When we were freed of tunes, that false facade that had been
built over the face of music, then we were able to see what other
things we would be able to throw away. Very many other things,
once thought necessary, were really not so. We got rid of melody
then; we got rid of harmony, of pitch, of concord, of timbre, of
rhythm, of consonance, of counterpoint, of polophony.
"We insist on distortion. We have no use for the music of the
spheres. Our is the music of the prolate ellypsoidals."
75
They gave Aurelia-Roxie a lap-clavicord to play. She played
it badly enough to get by, and yet they were disappointed in her.
She should have been worse than that.
"Our monolithic and whanging music has influenced all the
other arts," the soft-voiced cave-musician was saying. "While we
have sheer masses of noise, the new painting has sheer and
shouting extents of color or of monotone. Sometimes the
monotone will be piled up on the canvas a centimeter deep. As we
have dispensed with almost everything in music, so the modern
painters have dispensed with almost everything in painting."
" 'Modern' doesn't mean anything, you know," Aurelia said.
"How can a person say 'modern' and someone else not ask
'modern what?' Modern means 'in the mode of-,' but it has to be
in the mode of something."
"No, it does not,'' the soft-talker said. "The whole point of
'modern' is that it has a dangling designation. Well, we have
spread to the inter-arts also. When the Rock Island City Dump
won first prize in the National Conglometate Sculpture Competi
tion, we knew that we were getting somewhere. But if one of the
'Beautify Our City Dump' committees had been to work there, and
it had still won the Conglomerate Sculpture Competition, we
would really know that we were getting somewhere. You know,
Aurelia, that, though you came here to gove!'n, the arts must
remain completely ungoverned."
By what slip of the tongue had this person addressed
Aurelia-Roxie as Aurelia?
"What is it that you, ah, that we actually seek in the arts?"
Aurelia asked, still playing the lap-clavicord.
"Apathy,'' the soft-talker said. "Dynamic and power-mad
apathy."
Why had that man called her Aurelia? Because it had come
to him that she was Aurelia, and it was beginning to come to the
others in the cave also.
"Do you hear footsteps, Aurelia?" soft-voice asked her
through the din.
"Those coming to kill me, you mean? Yes, I hear them. But,
curiously, I don't believe they'll arrive here tonight."
They gave Aurelia a French Horn to play. She played it as if it
were seven horns, the seven howling and discordant horns of her
space-ship, the horns that she had tuned herself. And the hackles
began to rise on the necks of all of them then.
"She is Aurelia!" they called and howled. "No one except
Aurelia could play the horn with such absolute dissonance. She is
Aurelia disguised as Roxie." And they grabbed up burning
76
torches from the deeper part of the cave and pursued her out into
the night. This was murder set into motion.
"After her!" they cried to alert the whole apartment. "She is
Aurelia disguised as Roxie. Catch her! Kill her!"
If you can't fight it, j oin it.
"After her, she is Aurelia disguised as Roxie," Aurelia-no
longer-disguised-as-Roxie called out. "After her! There! There!" It
was Aurelia-disguised-as-Gabriella who was crying them along
the false trail.
So Aurelia was out of that j am, but it had been close.
And then a sordid thing happened. The mosters caught
Roxie, plain Roxie, Roxie undisguised as anybody else. And they
killed her there. They killed her in very hairy style. They did it in
many of the ways that had made Aurelia a little bit sick j ust to
hear them described a little while before.
Aurelia slipped, in an Aunt Caladium disguise, back into the
luxury cabin, and then she left off the disguise and was herself.
But she was discouraged. People on this world were acting
bestial, and Aurelia had at least a slight and temporary governor
ship of this world.
82
working title for this clutch of books, since Aurelia is a good and
harmless girl. The piece contributed by 'Hawk-Eye the Reporter'
is one of the largest.
'Hawk-Eye' shows or 'proves' that Aurelia is not from
'Shining World,' that she is not from off-world at all. She was
born sixteen years ago in Waterloo, Iowa. Yes, and there are the
pictures of her growing up right to the present time, and these
were taken in Waterloo, Iowa in the years they were said to be
taken. Aurelia is one of the coming events that cast their shadow
before her; part of her shade is her 'cultivated' shadow from Iowa.
There are even her finger-prints in the Waterloo Registry Office,
and they do check with the finger-prints of Aurelia taken by the
Alien Entry Board two days ago. There are the several scars on an
Iowa doctor's chart, there are the dental records, and they will
check with those of Aurelia, depend on that. Everything, in fact,
will check too well. It is proved without a shadow of a doubt that
Aurelia comes from Waterloo, Iowa (she even played the French
Horn, badly, in a junior-high-school band there), and
consequently she does not come from 'Shining World.'
Nevertheless, we believe that this over-documented thesis is
false. The Iowa girl is an unconscious stand-in, and she cannot
now be produced because she is supposed to be Aurelia, and
there cannot be two of them. I t is a case of artificial and
unconscious 'doubling before the fact.' I feel that 'Hawk-Eye'
himself is a double mind about this.He has written about
'Automatic Writing' before. Here he writes partly in Automatic
Writing and Unconscious Writing. Now I believe that he has
proof absolute that all this is true. And he had knowledge
absolute that all this is false.
As to the fingerprints that do check, Aurelia had a curious
statement before the fact, before anyone mentioned fingerprints
or a double:
"On 'Shining World,' there are many persons who, by t aking
thought, can change their height and weight and appearance, can
even change their fingerprints to any set of prints that happens to
come into their minds. Yes, I am such a person.''
It is very possible that Aurelia did change her fingerprints to
a set that had just come into her mind when she was printed by
the Alien Entry Board. It was only a touch of humor on her part.
But how did the prints of the unconsciously and artificially
planted Iowa double come into her mind? We don't know. 'Hawk
Eye the Reporter' is part of, or all of, a murderous conspiracy, but
he may not be conscious of his involvement.
83
2
86
supposed to do here. She immediately disappeared into a
confusing group of people, and she was plucked out by a
compromised tycoon. But there has not been given any
information yet that she is anyone alien or special. She might
well be, as one author has said, only a slightly-confused run
away girl from Iowa. No, she might not be any such thing,
Sinkman says.
Sinkman believes that the knowledge of her, instantly, from
the east unto the west, throughout the whole world, is a sort of
credential of her right to govern. "People everywhere in the world
have heard of her, but without ears; and read of her, but without
print," Sinkman says. And he discusses how never-before-seen
notables are recognized, and how they were even more often
recognized in the past. He believes that there is such recognition
on all the worlds. On ours, particularly in the pre-literate age, and
now again as we enter the post-literate age, 'name people' are
always recognized by the commoners who have seen no pictures
of them and heard no description of them. Enough of Sinkman's
point here, but Aurelia has been recognized everywhere in the
world in these several days, and has been more readily
recognized by the poor and ignorant than by the rich and
sophisticated.
As to the performance of Aurelia as 'Governor of the World,'
Sinkman builds scales and tables and diagrams to show the
points of good government, and he considers more than a
thousand instances of government on our own world. The
highest rating that he gives to any of the governments is
seventeen points out of a possible one hundred. To the
governorship of Aurelia he gives thirteen points out of a possible
one hundred. And yet thirteen points is better than the average
('An average that everyone in the world should be ashamed of,'
Sinkman says) , which average is only eight points out of a
possible one hundred.
And Sinkman is of the opinion that Aurelia's governorship
could work well if it had seven months in which to work instead
of seven days. (How is Sinkman sure that Aurelia has only seven
days in which to govern?)
He ascribes things to Aurelia's intent-of-governorship that
are not apparent to everyone ( not apparent to us the reviewer
anyhow), though they may be apparent to the poor and ignorant.
And he gives a resume of what he says are Aurelia's aphorisms
and governmental beliefs. These are in Sinkman's words and not
in Aurelia's. He says that they are in the words that Aurelia
would use if she lived a few weeks longer:
87
Happiness is the goal of mankind. This may be phrased
in a higher way of divine service or dedication, but
'happiness' as a goal is always part of the stick, even if it is
the smaller end. Understand that mankind may have a false
goal as well as a true. But true happiness is the true goal of
mankind.
Law is the Road-Map of Happiness.
Grace is the Gift of Happiness.
Justice is Happiness in society.
88
A government should be nomadic, but everything else
should remain in its ordained place. The longing of people to
ov erthrow governments applies only to s e s s ile
governments. There is no way and no inclination to
overthrow a moving government. Instead of saying "How
can we get rid of it?" the people will say "when will it be
coming around again?" The medieval kings and their courts
were usually migratory. (Were there medieval kings and
their courts on this world? What world is this anyhow?)
They followed the circuit-ride of governorship as it is
correct that they should. And they brought the news and the
impregnating interchanges to the people, things of very
delicate adjustment. This was on the principle of the fewest
number of moving parts making the most efficient machine.
But, in the present time and world, the media have
preempted the royal prerogative of carrying the news. This
makes for debasement of news and the entry of falsehood.
People move out of guilt, or in search of something. But let
them find what they search for and they will no longer
wander; for one place is very like another. Let the people
stay in their places, and the whole pageant of the world will
pass before them in orderly fashion.
The present "forms" of civilizations are generally the
correct ones. They need but to be poured full wherever their
level falls. Beware of those who propose new forms! Be wary
of communities in place of families, of urban-rural
conglomerates in place of towns, of peer-group pensions in
place of homes, or exurbinae in place of neighborhoods, of
alpha males in place of fathers. And do not multiply the
making of j ugs when so many fine old j ugs stand empty.
6
The Mathematics of the Aurelian Curve, by Arthur Airim.
Airim, charlatan or genius or both, opens and then closes the
curtains capriciously in this study that is by turns fascinating
and frustrating. Airim writes himself into some contradictions
here, and he escapes from them by some of the darkest obfusca
tions ever. His mathematics is as easy or as difficult as he wishes
to make it. It is with his mathematics that he opens and closes the
curtains.
But he defends himself from charges that his interpretations
and predictions are on the level with astrology and palmistry and
lost continentism and dynamic analysis and visiting astro
nautism. "Aurelia is a visiting astronaut, yes," he writes, "but
everything about her is on a higher level than visiting astro
nautism." But he does not really prove that he can read character
and predict fate and lives by his analytical mathematics.
Airim says that his 'hypo-psychic character interpretations'
are no more than analytical geometry applied to the real world
and the persons in it. As to the geometrical curve of the Aurelia
person, Airim believes that it has an invisible counterpart to
every segment of it. But j ust what is the invisible counterpart of a
geometric curve? Airim admits that he doesn't understand it, but
90
he is certain it is there.
Well, there are invisible depths to the mathematics here.
There are a few unexpected sea-serpents in those depths, but it's
mostly murk there. Airim says that Aurelia will work a light
trauma on the whole world. But a sharper thing that he says is
that "The Saliant and outstanding characteristic of the Aurelia
curve is that it terminates so suddenly." And he makes it sound
sinister the way he says it.
This is for students of the various new analytic geometries
and other analytics, but not for everyone.
94
The sad thing about this is that the people haven't had much
fun for fifty years now. But this week they are having fun again,
'New-Wine Fun.' It will be only disputed fun for seven days, the
prophets say, but it's more than we were having before.
This is all very mysterious, and the Board of Governors of
Romp Publications make the comment "What is more fun than a
good mystery?" Aurelia is a good mystery, and much else. Even
the new and pertinent saying of the prophets "The generation is
responsible for all the Blood of the Prophets spilled since the
beginning of the World" is funny, and it calls up a mental cartoon
of the Prophet Aurelia spilling a great crockful of blood on the
carpet and saying "They made me do it."
Even the coming death of Aurelia is fun in its way. There is a
spate of "Aurelia's Wake" stories going around that are really
funny.
The musical scores in this book are well done.
10
96
The greatest bodyguard and detective in the world, who was
either or bo th Julio Cordovan and Marshal Straightstreet, began
to seize and interrogate the suspects of the kidnapping and
murder of Aurelia. No, the account does not get ahead of itself.
There hadn't been any such kidnapping or murder yet.
"The best time to investigate a murder is before it happens,"
the famous bodyguard insisted. "After it has taken place, it is in
most ways too late to do anything about it." The bodyguard seized
most of the suspects by force or by at least a slight show of force.
He had almost all the force he would need.
"I have placed a small army at your disposal, Marshal," Rex
Golightly the tycoon said, "and I could increase it to a large army
if that would do any good. But hurry with your interviews and
questioning, or else be ready to conduct them after we are on the
move. Aurelia wants to begin her peripateticus now. So we're
about to take the house down."
"It would be easier to guard her if she remained here and the
house remained here."
''I'm not sure that it would be, Marshal. There's dark corners
in this house that can never be lighted. We'll take it apart today
97
and pack it away, dark corners and all. And we'll assemble it
again tonight, and the dark corners will be there again. There's
every opportunity for murder in the dark corners of my house.
And there are certain unfolding safety-factors on the open road.
Do as well as you can, Marshal. Guard her life. That's the thing.
And do not interfere with her freedom. That's the other part of the
thing."
The first, and almost the last person that the famous
bodyguard attempted to interrogate was Cousin Clootie, the
grubby teenager who was usually in that hundred room luxury
cabin of Rex Golightly the tycoon. The bodyguard said that he
would have some answers out of Cousin Clootie, and Cousin
Clootie said that he would answer or refuse to answer as he felt
like it.
The bodyguard laid his strong hand on Cousin Clootie's
shoulder, and then he was struck by lightning. He was felled, he
suffered a bolt of electrifying agony, and the hair on his head was
set on fire and the soles of his shoes smoked.
"Oh, that's the way it is," the bodyguard said. "You are more
than I thought."
"That's the way it is," Cousin Clootie said. "Yes, I am more
than you thought." But he was still a grubby teenager of apparent
bad manners. He popped his teeth at the bodyguard, or perhaps
that was a sort of smile. "I will probably answer anything you
have the wit to ask," he said. "You want to protect Aurelia, and of
course I want to protect her also. Besides myself, I am more
concerned for her than for anyone on this world. And I intend to
protect her, subject to other things that I intend more to do.
Bodyguard, you do not know what is going on, and I do."
"Clootie," said the bodyguard rising from the floor and
finding himself blistered and burned in many places. "You
followed Aurelia here, I know that. How far did you follow her?"
"Not far at all. A few parsecs."
"Oh, then you are the 'Dark Counterpart.' "
"It's an inaccurate name, but there isn't any accurate one that
you'd understand.''
"Why did you follow her here?''
"To govern here. We do the meaningful governing. We slip in
under the bright distraction of the 'Shining People' and do the
work that they think they are doing.''
"Then, for every child who goes out to govern from 'Shining
World' there is one of you-ah-children from what I might call
'Counterpoint World.' "
"Not quite. One of us for every two or three of them
98
sometimes. When one of them seems most in need of help, we go to
give them help. We do the work while the helpless one provides us
a bright cover to work under."
"Why do you come? Why do you govern?"
"Oh, duty, things like that."
"You don't give the impression of caring for either com
passion or duty or any other good thing."
"No, I suppose that I don't. I did badly in 'Impressions' in
school. I'm supposed to be unobtrusive. And we have to design,
each one of us, our own unobtrusiveness. I make myself to be
distasteful and beneath notice, and so I do my work. The children
from 'Shining World' are rejected because the people find
themselves liking them too much. We are rejected because the
people don't like us at all. But we work on them while they ignore
us."
"Did you kill young Uncle Silas?"
"No. Or maybe yes. Is 'kill' the word for it? I think that he had
already been dead for a long while when I first noticed him. You
can use the theory that Uncle Silas was killed because he was
mistaken for me by the 'hit man' who had some such instructions
as 'The weirdest teenager in the house,' he will be the one. Kill
him! Nobody would suspect that there might be two such weird
teenagers as myself and Uncle Silas in the same house. You can
use this theory. It may help to keep you occupied. And for all you
will know it might be a true theory."
"No, people wouldn't suspect that there were two such
extreme ones as you."
"And nobody would suspect that both of us were persons on
very important assignments, though disguised as persons of no
importance at all."
"Uncle Silas was a person on an important assignment?
Incredible. But then he might have been killed for himself."
"No. Hold to the first theory that he was killed for me. His
importance wasn't guessed."
"You are being very devious about something, Cousin
Clootie. What is it?"
"I want you to protect me also. I don't want to die."
"And the one who wanted to kill you is still in the house? And
he still may kill you? Or he may kill Aurelia?"
"All these things are possible. If you will worry about them,
then I will cease doing it. I hate duplication."
"I will worry about them," the bodyguard said. "It is my job to
worry about them. Are you also going on a peripateticus, as Rex
calls it, when Aurelia goes?"
99
"Yes. Today. And that is all the questions that I will answer,
Mr. Bodyguard."
"But I would like to know-"
"Black lightning of which you felt only a sample, man! Black
lightning to burn you to a cinder!" Cousin Clootie the Dark
Counterpart said. And then Cousin Clootie walked away with his
awkward shamble.
The bodyguard was almost convinced for a moment there,
for a most narrow moment. And then the absurdity of it all
overwhelmed him. That grubby teenager never came from space.
He could not govern. He could not do anything at all. He was a
moron. He was a revolting caricature of even a very dirty teen
ager. He was less than nothing.
And yet he had talked persuasively for a moment there,
considering that he was an oaf who could hardly talk at all.
1 04
pieces of it. When one works for a Nomad King, one must expect
to strike his tent many times in a season.
1 05
The moving pageant carried a many-leveled retinue along
with it. Aurelia's space ship, about thirty meters in the air and
with all its horns blowing, was led along by a rope by one of the
tow-truck men. Boys in balloons ascended to it and traveled along
with it, talking to it, and getting bantering recorded answers.
Birds, tookers, hawks, king birds, grackle, black birds, all
followed along in crowds as the cavalcade made its bright way
along the lake shore.
It was a parade. It doesn't take much to start a parade, but it
takes something. It doesn't take much to start a rain, but that
takes something too: silver-iodine crystals will do it sometimes;
temperature inversion will do it sometimes; clouds overrunning
hot standing air will often do it; anything to coalesce on. Well,
Aurelia was silver-iodine crystals, she was temperature in
version, she was clouds running over hot standing air, she was
something to coalesce on. She started a parade.
She started a walkabout, a march, a trek, a trudge, a schola, a
forum ambulatory, a walking chataquah, a circuit-court, an
ambling assize, a concourse, a migration, a pilgrimage, a fanfare,
a saunter, a j ourney, an ambulation. Gautama and Aristotle,
106
Brabant and Hedge-Row Michael all liked to give instructions of
the walkabout, and was Aurelia less than they? This was a
'government ambulatory,' the kind of governing that Aurelia
most liked.
People joined the cavalcade from the camps of the 'with-its,'
the millennians, even from the 'Kill Aurelia Now' Nation. People
came from all the little towns on the lake: Cut-Bait Cove, Black
Crook Town, Silky's Landing, White Water City, Dokey's Dock.
The lines were humming, and soon people would arrive from
Tahlequah and Pryor and Big Cabin and T-Town itself.
Even the fish followed along the shore of the lakes, after the
ground parties. And Rex Golightly, the tall tycoon who was also a
Nomad King, talked to them as he walked at the tails of his rolling
tent-carriers.
"I know you as old oasis fish," Rex said. "What are you doing
in this lake here?''
"We don't know you," said a fish spokesman. "Not in those
dude clothes we don't."
"Yes, you know me,'' Rex said. "We've met and talked on the
date-palm circuit at half of the water-holes of the world. I am a
nomad king as well as a tall tycoon. Now I am worried about a
ward of mine that I have in my care. You have always told me the
truth, even when the stars and the palms of my own hands lied to
me. This ward of mine, I will not have anything wrong happen to
her. I'd like her to live forever, or as near to that as we can come."
"Then she will live forever, or for three days, whichever
comes first," a second fish told tall Rex. "That's as near to it as we
can come."
Rex Golightly talked to fish. At one time, when his life had
depended on his getting correct information, he got all his
information from the fish of the oasis circuit. And it was sound
information. But it was held against his reputation that he talked
to fish.
One hour of walking, and then all members of the Journey
Judicial stopped and sat in a circle on the ground. And j ust how
many persons can sit in one circle and converse with each other
intimately? Seven, ten, twelve, eighteen? Oh, many more than
that.
Fifty, a hundred, three hundred? Oh, many more than that
also. More than that in an intimate circle? Yes, more than that.
Above five thousand. That's about right.
For more than five thousand persons you might have to form
two circles, to keep things intimate. But Aurelia's circle was j ust
at five thousand persons. That made a close group when they sat
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down on the grass four times a day by the side of the lake. Without
an attracting center, this would have been too many persons for
an intimate circle. But Aurelia ( nobody knows why) was a
successful and attracting center.
Well then, what do you feed that many people, barley-loaves
and fishes?
"That would be possible, of course," the Prince of Nysa said
(he was serving as commissary), "but, since we have more means,
we may as well have more variety." The means were provided by
Rex Golightly and others of the kingly crowd. The expertise in
these things was provided by Herr Bock and the Prince of Nysa.
They had had very much and very long experience in catering to
large professional crowds of devotees. Yes, and in being catered
to. The Prince was a recognized expert in ancient Greek and
Asian affairs. Herr Boch had been seneshal in charge of moving
royal courts of the middle ages. And Rex Golightly, who was both
a tycoon and a nomad king, was an expert on hospitality of every
sort. He had insisted that this ambling court of Aurelia should
bear the name of his rolling, hundred-room cabin Potlatch.
The stops of the large and intimate party by the lakeside
were not ordinary stops. They were ritual j oys with ancient earth
celebrations grafted onto a 'Shining World' Mystery Play. They
had old elements of the Agrionia, of the Dionysia, of the Lenaea or
new-wine feast, of the Anthesteria or flower festival. And at
nightfall would come something very like the Greater Dionysia.
There were grapes. You can't have too many grapes. Where
do you get so many grapes in April? Oh, they are provided by the
caterers. And there are the attributes, the nebris or panther-skin,
the fox skins, the she-bear skins. "You can't tell the notables
without a skin-card," someone said. There were masked persons,
Sabazius the horned serpent, Silenei with small brow-horns, and
there were fluvial characters in general.
The pertinent constellations were seen in the sky in the
bright daylight; the Hyades, the Waggoner, Virgo. Ivy, laurel,
grape vine, olive branches were strewn and carried. There were
ritual piles of horns of cattle and buffalo and rams, and there were
boar-tusk trumpets that counted for horns. Arrows and darts
(Aurelia herself was the personification of the arrow). There was
another retinue following them. And the bodyguard Julio
Marshal disliked this happening.
"The first stop of the day always has an irregular feel," said
the Prince of Nysa who had become a sort of master-of
ceremonies of the whole walking court. "Some persons will have
eaten very early before setting out. And others do not regularly
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eat breakfast. Nevertheless, it is time for lentaculum. Let the
cock crow!"
FIRST IENTACULUM
"But the cock has already crowed," the chicken lady said. "He
is stubborn, and he will not crow again till tomorrow."
"I know a way to make the cock crow," the Prince of Nysa
said, and he started towards it. He did not have to demonstrate.
The terrified cock crew for the early Ientaculum breakfast, and
five thousand persons ate it in a circle on the grass.
Many horned creatures had been traveling along with them,
and they stopped with the people there, Long-Horn Cattle from the
show-herd of the Randy Rex Ranch, Buffalo from the Big
Bluestem Ranch, Santa Gertrudis Cattle from the Cow-Town
Corrals. Goats and sheep too. This was breakfast time, but it was
also a 'judgment day morning' which was announced as such by
trumpets. So Aurelia, in her role and office of Governor of the
World, would hear cases while she and all of them ate.
There was salt-bread dipped in either wine or honey. Some
like it one way, some another. And some had never tried it before
and went by delicious guesswork. Dates, olives, goat-milk, eggs,
cheese. Grapes, roast duck, white wine, melon. Oat-cakes, roast
pork, walnuts. Ram roast, cider, frumenty, apples, barley-bread.
Wood-cock, morning bread, red wine. About the same as you
have for breakfast at home, but it tastes better in the open.
Herr Boch and the Prince of Nysa and other knowledgeable
persons went among the sitting crowd and told the people to
show their joy and wit and variety "-so that when Aurelia asks,
as she will ask, 'Which world is this anyhow?,' we can answer 'All
of them.' "
There is no way of remembering the law cases that Aurelia
heard (a sort of privacy and impediment was placed upon them,
though they were heard publicly), but there were very many of
the cases (impossibly many for the time alloted), and the
decisions were given with incomparable wisdom as well as with
joy and verve.
Oh, there were joker cases, of course, and one 'joker
execution' in which a man who had received a death sentence, but
in jest, had thought that he was dead indeed, and was rather
angry when it turned out that he was still alive and the object of
merriment. But all were not cases of litigation. Some were j ust
cases of persons coming to Aurelia with hard or tricky questions,
and some were persons who only wanted to touch her, and to find
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out what the 'electric feel' of her was. And sometimes there were
slip-ups and plain misunderstandings.
"Do you believe in the yin-yang principle," a surly young
woman asked Aurelia.
"No I don't," Aurelia answered plainly. "I have no use at all
for any of those asymetrical yo-yos, least of all for the yin-yang. I
don't think they should even be allowed in the same tournaments
with regular yo-yos. But the matter is of very small importance."
"The yin-yang principle takes death-vengeance on those who
believe it to be of very small importance," the surly woman said.
Well, Aurelia had been taught on 'Shining World' that there were
limits to this business of suffering fools gracefully.
1 10
this world," Aurelia insisted. "And we ourselves may not identify
'Shining World' with any of the popular names or chart names.
We have to throw all those nicknames back into the hat unread.
There is an inhibition placed on us in this respect."
"Possibly on us also," said George Clavicle.
"Wouldn't it be funny if I myself did come form
Shokumchuck or Gaea or Bandicoot or Yellow Dog?" Aurelia
mused. "Who would the joke be on then?"
The sun was shining brightly and things should be rolling.
"Everybody up!" Aurelia cried loudly. "Be ready to resume
the journey while I give a Cock-Crow Insight-of-the-Morning
from Fat Tom the Sage of the Middle Worlds:
Happiness is both the key and the goal. Every human
action must have a goal, or it will not be a human action. The
"Object of Desire" is always the Human Goal, but there are
false objects and false goals. The goal is not wealth or power
or pleasure or well-being or even knowledge. The goal is
happiness, which is the true object of desire, and this goal
can only be attained by ordered and deliberate will. We do
not go to the ticket office and say that we want a ticket to "It
doesn't-matter-where." We want a ticket to "It-does-matter
where."
There are both internal and external seducers to draw
us from the rational goal of happiness. We rightly treat these
two classes of seducers in the same way, by refusing to be
seduced by them. The "Final Happiness" is neither outside
nor inside, but outside-and-above. One name for this
"outside-and above" final happiness is "The Universal
Good." Do you know that your words on this world are like
sticks that break and will not bend, that are incredibly stiff?
Please try to correct this in your words. That we may see
this universal good now only through a glass darkly is not a
real objection. That is better than not seeing it at all. It is
infinitely better to have a sometimes difficult goal than not
to have any goal. And ther.e is a peculiar advantage about the
final happiness goal. Once gained, it can never be lost.
But it is said "It cannot be had by natural powers alone."
That does not matter since, for the asking, we can be given
"more-than-natural" powers. There really is a fair road that
can be followed out, and the name of it is "Present or
Imperfect Happiness." Oh porcupines! In your words, that
sounds like grammatical tenses! The means of reaching the
goal are simple, distinctive, and proper to every human
being. "They are a family heritage that can be claimed only
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on the grounds of human blood." Deliberate control is the
root of it, and the human ability to choose is essential.
"The Repulsiveness of lgnorance"-now that is a phrase
that is not a sentence for the reason that there can be no
predicate t o the "Repulsiveness of Ignorance." But it is an
obstacle to lesser people, and once we were blocked by it we
become lesser people.
Cock-Crow thoughts are the brightest of the day, but
their dazzle sometimes compels their continuance to a
shadier time. The cock-crow sun gets in the eyes. We will
continue this at the second corner of the day.
FIRST PRANDIUM
But people must be about and doing. Noontime does not last
forever.
"Everybody up!" Aurelia cried loudly. "Make ready to
resume the journey while I continue with the noontime portion of
the Insight-of-the-day:
First, to put it all into context, it is unnatural or
supernatural that we should exist at all. In all reason, we
should not be. The odds against it are terrifying. Nothing
should be. All the evidence for us being here contradicts
elementary reason. And everything that exists is such
115
evidence. Let u s never forget that existence itself i s the
longest shot that was ever booted home.
On the talk of the will and the intellect then. The will of
itself is blind but it has aptitudes and powers. The intellect
is powerless. The two of them together are able to give
orderly movement, which is human movement. To the
extent that we ever indulge in disorderly movement, we are
not human. But 'orderly' does not mean what some of you
think it means, and it surely is not the same thing as 'serious.'
We should not be always, or ever, serious. What a wobbly
word 'serious' is anyhow! B ut we must be ordered, whether
seriously or unseriously, in whatever we do.
TherP. are half-lies which deny either intellect or will to
men. There are total lies which deny them both. On many
worlds, today is the day of the total lie. There are many very
smart people who deny both will and intellect to themselves
and who swear that they get along better without them. But
they are not ordered people, and so they leave off being
human. To be human is to have both will and intellect. And
to have them is to be a component of the Reign of Law.
Most declared revolts against authority are really
revolts against authenticity. It is an error to believe that we
can revolt against morality by revolting against authority.
Morality is no more based on authority than it is based on
the color green. Morality is the directing of an act towards a
natural object. Immorality is misdirecting an act. Authority
is merely a device under which human affairs are more
workable, and it has no necessary connection with morality.
Dispute my authority at your peril though!
There is a double standard to morality, yes. Rational
acts correspond to a good standard. Irrational acts
correspond to a bad standard. It's that simple.
But if it is all that simple, then why is there weeping in
the night? I may tell you why there is. Perhaps this evening I
will tell you, or perhaps tomorrow. Or I may leave it to
Cousin Clootie to tell you.
116
FIRST MERENDA
There were prodigies all that afternoon. Not only were the
constellations to be seen in the very bright afternoon sky: not
only did the birds bark and hoot; but the fish talked to Rex
Golightly the tycoon.
It was only by private device that the fish talked to Rex and
he to them. Actually he was talking to the fluvial and oceanic
components of himself rather than to fish, but some of his
components exteriorized t hemselves rather starkly. Then how
did other people hear the fish talking to Rex if it was done by
private device? Oh, other people possess private devices also.
It was not only that there was horn music without visible
horns that afternoon. There was a primary musical invention
made there that afternoon: it had to do with horn music from both
visible and invisible horns, a new sort of syncopation; it was
something that had never been done before. But besides all these
prodigies there was the prodigy of t he monkey.
This was the monkey that ran up and down the dangling
ladder from Aurelia's space ship to herself, bringing her data and
assurances. But the hanging ladder used by the monkey was
invisible, though it was very rope-like as it blew in the wind and
117
buffeted the monkey. And there was something very wrong with
the monkey.
"You made him yourself, didn't you?" a handsome and
neatly-bearded young man asked Aurelia shyly. This young man
was riding on a speckled mule of unusual liveliness. ''I'm Marco
Rixthaler," the young man said. "I am the son of the eminent
Melchior Rixthaler."
"Yes, I made the monkey myself," Aurelia said. "And your
speckled mule, you didn 't make him yourself. You wanted to, but
you couldn't. But he thinks that you did."
"Yes, he's a brain-washed mule and he believes that I made
him. And he almost outdoes himself in obeying unusual
commands to prove that he is a high mechanism and not a low
organism. He made himself spotted on command, you see. I don't
know how he did it, but he sweats a lot of mule sweat over the
problem. I would give almost anything if I had an insight into the
high science of 'Shining World.' I long to make living animals as
you do, to make them to my own designs."
"Oh, I'll show you how," Aurelia said, "if only there is time. If
there is a fourth day to the j ourney, then I'll show you how, and
then you can make all sorts of things. And you can make them
better than I do. Do you know that I made a horse once, or at least
a steed, and I forgot to make a way to steer it?"
"Yes, that's one of the anecdotes in the 'New Aurelia Joke
Book,' " Marco said. 'Oh yes, I see. The monkey, yes. One could
make these things much better than you make them, if only he
knew how to make them at all. There's a lot wrong with this
monkey you made."
Well yes, Aurelia had made this monkey badly, but it would
serve well. It was really an instrument, a tool to shuttle things
down from the hovering space ship to Aurelia; and to carry
messages back to the ship. It was a mechano-organo. It was very
monkey-like in its appearance and movements. But, as Marco
said, there was a lot wrong with it.
Aurelia noticed of the assured young Marco that his hands
were trembling. He was bashful with her. She would know the
symptoms on any world.
''I'd give a kingdom to kiss you,'' said young Marco with that
nervousness often seen in young boys on the boondocks-type
worlds.
"Do you have a kingdom?" Aurelia asked him reasonably.
''I'm heir to a kingdom" Marco said. "But you are from
'Shining World' so you are too far above me.''
"Aw haystacks!" Aurelia said. "No such thing. See that little
1 18
side-show wagon there that's rolling along with the entourage?
See one of its many signs 'Buy a ticket for a dollar and kiss the girl
of your choice.' It means kiss the carnival girl of your choice, but it
doesn't say so. Now canter over there on your speckled mule and
buy a ticket. Then come back and kiss me. I never kissed a boy on
a speckled mule before.''
Marco Rixthaler cantered over and bought a hundred tickets
from the carnival wagon, for he was a rich boy. He was also a very
nice boy, not forward like so many on this world. What was this
world anyhow? Well, the crystal ball had whispered a name for it
to Aurelia, but she wasn't convinced. Marco Rixthaler used up
half of the tickets. Then Aurelia told him to wait till evening with
the rest of them.
Aurelia said that she would like for Marco to meet her
mother, but she didn't know how soon that could be done.
FIRST GENA
1 24
"Repent, Repent!" some of them said. "This Day Shall Thy Soul Be
Required of Thee," said others. And Cousin Clootie himself could
be heard, walking apart and talking to a small and select group of
his leading people.
"I know how to disguise it," Aurelia said, "but do you? You
weren't able to disguise it from me, bodyguard. Don't you know
enough to give every character you play a different odor
signature, a made-up one if there is no original one to imitate?"
"You can identify persons by their body-odor?" Marshal
Julio asked. "Can Cousin Clootie do it also?"
"Likely he can," Aurelia said. "I've never heard of a place,
until this one, where people are so smell-less. It's coming into a blind
world or a deaf world, only one doesn't notice so quickly that the
people are handicapped. Well, let's stay to the leeward of them at
least."
"Repent, repent!" Cousin Clootie was saying in a voice that
was frayed from much talking. "It looks as if I arrived at this
world at the very last possible time to call you to repentence. This
is one thing that a good governor must do continually, call his
people to repentence. I do not know which is the most urgent, that
you should repent of your fiscal outrages, or your aesthetic, or
your intellectual, or your practical, or your moral. I suppose that
your fiscal and monetary outrages are the most enormous. Evil
people, you have become ugly in your outrages!"
"He's right, of course," Aurelia said. "The teen-aged curmud
geon is right."
"But he's so rough about being right," the bodyguard com
mented. "The saying is that you can catch more flies with sugar
than with vinegar."
"Look at the difference in the caught-flies though," Aurelia
said. "The sugar-fed flies are always sickly, and what good are
they when you have caught them? But the vinegar-fed flies at
least give you something to work with. They seem strong and
hard. They have a gloss on them. They may come with resent
ment, but at least they come with something. We do need vinegar
always, and I had almost forgotten it."
"Don't you people know what money is for?" Cousin Clootie
was asking with emotion. "It is for the corporate communion of
all the people in the world. Let us not make it out to be either more
or less than it is. It is the most workable and universal mechanical
contrivance for effecting the communion of peoples. There is no
absolute or personal ownership of money, not ever. Money is like
office. It may be occupied and administered, but it may not be
owned. We may not say that one who controls more money is
125
worse than one who controls less, any more than one who
adminsters a high office is necessarily worse than one who
administers a lower one. Misuse of money is really the sin of
gluttony or obesity. Taking into oneself more money than one
needs is as bad as taking into oneself more food than one needs.
Corporations of persons demanding more money than they need
are corporations of persons demanding damnation for themselves
and deprivation for others.
"Each world is a corporation of people unto itself, open only
on the transcendental end. To break this corporation of people by
greed or by grub is to bring on a reign of loneliness and misery, for
they are the fruits of a broken corporation."
126
"Ah, my sunshine counterpart is present. I sense her but I
cannot see her. Ours are parallel governorships, but they do not
have to be contradictory."
Cousin Clootie had a throaty and difficult way of talking,
especially when he was very much in earnest. And he had other
awkward mannerisms. More persons have been hated and killed
for having awkward mannerisms than for any other thing.
128
and waiting or there would have been exploding bolides raining
down out of the gawky sky.
129
SECOND lENT ACULUM
"You are sure that they are not true horns, Aurelia?" Herr
Boch asked. "Then what sort of a 'boch' am I?"
"You are a 'boch' of the analogous deer or odocoileus family, I
suppose," Aurelia said. "Is not the deer your totem animal? But
you said that you had the growths in your youth and shed them
130
and that you have been without them for twenty-one years. Oh,
familiar, familiar! It's an authentic pattern.
"But only those who prowl through the forests of curious
information will grow them at all. Well then, I will q uestion you
out of your forest of curious information."
Herr Boch did indeed have the beginnings of small, velvety,
branching antlers. They had sprouted out of their nubs only since
Herr Boch had known Aurelia, and only since he had stopped
using the blue caustic powder to inhibit them.
"My question," Aurelia said, "and I wouldn't know how to
ask it of anyone else, is what age of the present world are we in
here? I assumed that we were in the sixth and final age, but are
we? Has the Compensation been made yet or not?"
"This is the World of the Compensation, Aurelia," Herr Boch
said. "It is the only such world. Yes, the Compensation has been
made."
"But there are five or six other worlds that also claim to be the
World of the Compensation," Aurelia said, "and only one of them
can be."
"The others, they lie in their beards and they lie in their
bowels if they say that they are," Herr Boch growled in the grand
old phrase. "This is the only world of the Compensation."
"And we are subsequent to it here too?" Aurelia said. "How
far after it? On this world, has Rome fallen yet?"
"It has, Aurelia, too millennia ago. And in one more millen
nium it will rise again. Rome has fallen on almost every world.
Aurelia, you preach the doctrine of final happiness, and there are
many symbols of this. For me there has always been only one
such symbol, one goal in life. That would be a true artifact from
'Shining World.' I would give anything for such an artifact. I do
not want it for wealth, for I already am the richest antique dealer
in the world. I want it for myself and for what it symbolizes. Yes, I
would give anything for it.''
"Oh, give the monkey a kind word and tell him what you
want," Aurelia said. "He'll be glad to shinny up to the ship and
bring an artifact of some kind down to you.''
Herr Boch went to talk to the monkey that Aurelia had made,
and the Prince of Nysa carne to talk to Aurelia.
"It is near cock-crow time, Aurelia," he said, "and I will give
you a horn to blow the cock-crow tune on. I heard you t alking to
Herr Boch about antlers and horns. You believe that horns are
more predilected to evil than antlers are, and that is the truth of it.
You also believe, from what you said yesterday, that strong and
horned men are a rarity on this world. You are mistaken there.
131
There are whole legions of them; they are dedicated to evil and
destruction; and they will destroy you. But I left their company
several millennia ago, and it was then that I had myself polled or
dehorned. I have saved my two horns though. The evil has gone
out of them by now, and they have a strong and carrying tone. I
have j ust given one of them to that strange manifestation who is
named 'Cousin Clootie.' Now I give the other one to you. Blow the
cock-crow blast on it so that the day will know it is time to begin."
The Cavalcade had started a little while before dawn. Now,
at prime dawn, they would stop for Ientaculum-breakfast.
Aurelia took the horn (it was a very large, fluted goat-horn] from
the Prince of Nysa. She blew a powerful cock-crow blast on it,
and the cock j oined in. And all the people sat in their large circle
for Ientaculum.
But there were things tumbling out of the horn as Aurelia
blew it. They couldn't be evil things, since evil had gone out of
these horns as it had gone out of the Prince those millennia back
when he had become a magus. But there was a cloud and a fog of
multitudinous small creatures coming out of that blown horn.
Many of them were red-eyed and glowering. If not evil, they were
at least neutral or compromised.
Birds, fanged birds! These were very small birds as coming
out of the clouds from the goat-horn that Aurelia had j ust blown.
And yet they showed the straining and lean power required of
large birds, and the apparent proportion of weight to span that
indicated that they were really very large birds. (With birds, as
with so many other things, the very most difficult of them were
made first. These were the largest birds that could possibly fly.
Then later, and still later, the smaller and easier-to-make birds
appeared.]
These were the large and difficult birds seen through
demagnifications, and yet no detail was lost in their reduction.
The thousand-faceted eyes of each of them glittered in every
separate and impossibly small facet. It was as though quantum
vision did not apply to the viewing of these birds.
Out of the horn came flying-dragons, flying-reptiles, sky
flying fish. There were winged spiders and hydras. There were
also sea-stallions and sea-cattle, and deep-sea tigers. Sea
serpents also, and land-serpents. There were the ancient three
humped camels of Arabia Felix. Behemoths, Leviathans, Mam
moths, Mastodons! There were the big cattle that were earlier
than the small cattle of today. (How can you tell big cattle when
they are miniaturized? Never mind, you can tell.] There were
fire-foxes and muscular apes. But mostly there were the horned
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animals, trumpeting and squawling. What do you think makes
horns blow such masses of sound anyhow? One doesn't get
something for nothing. Multitudes of creatures contribute their
honking and hooting to every horn blast. A truly empty horn
makes no noise at all.
All of these creatures had been obtained in Nysa when the
Prince had first been Prince there. Most curious were the
unfinished creatures dragging mud and slime of twice their bulk
around with them. They were the creatures still being born out of
the slime.
Big insects, yes big insects, elephant-sized insects! One could
tell their real size from their proportions. Aurelia laughed and
shook the horn, and ten thousand more creatures swarmed and
poured out of it.
"Can you see them?" the Prince of Nysa asked.
"Of course I can," Aurelia answered. "Why should I not see
them?"
"Many persons can't see them at all," the Prince said, "but we
know they're there, coming out of every horn always. It's the
shape of the horn that allows this, for all horns are much larger on
the inside than on the outside, having channels and hidden space
that can house almost anything. You know that the whole
universe swarmed out of a horn that was blown quite by accident.
Astronomers know it as the 'Big Blow.' Were that not so, we
simply would not be.''
"No, that is not true," Aurelia said.
It was unsalted Jew-Bread dipped in red wine that morning,
figs instead of dates, morning-manna instead of cheese, mare
milk instead of goat-milk, roast goose instead of duck, perry in
place of apple cider, prairie-cock instead of wood-cock. But one
breakfast as day-opening is very like another, so long as both of
them are blessed.
There was some activity around Herr Boch now. He had set
up an Antikenladen, an antique and artifact shop, to deal with the
immeasurably valuable 'Shining World' artifacts that the Aure
lian monkey had brought down to him from the little space ship.
There was a multiplication here, for the monkey had brought
down only one double handful of small treasures, and now Herr
Boch had set up six pavilions filled with them, and he had a dozen
shop people showing them to connoisseurs and collectors who
had assembled. There j ust hadn't been any such showing of
dazzling art objects within memory.
Towards the end of the Ientaculum-breakfast, there was a
little bit of unpleasantness when a dowdy woman approached
133
Aurelia very much as she had approached her the day before.
"Have you thought any more about the yin-yang balance?"
she asked. "You had better think about it, or it will have your life."
"No, I will not think about it," Aurelia said. "It is all a false
compensation and a false balance. It is a little bit of evil that the
enemy has devised to blur people. I do not believe that if I want to
walk up stairs I must first dig a compensating hole in the ground
for balance. I do not believe that every time we light a light we
must also light a darkness for balance. I wish you would quit
fooling around with those lopsided yoyos. There'll be an accident
with one of them."
"There cannot be," the woman said. "They will go to their
harmless targets only, and return again from those harmless
targets. There is no way they can be deflected by any earthly
material to do damage to any earthly person."
"They're so much out of balance that someone is going to get
killed by one of them."
"Yes, that's right," the dowdy person said, "and that someone
to be killed is you."
Aurelia was so displeased by this bad-taste encounter that
she hurried the departure of the Cavalcade along. And j ust then
she heard the companion horn blow, the other horn of the Prince
of Nysa that he had given to Cousin Clootie. So the Cousin was
still following them relentlessly, only a few minutes behind their
schedule.
"Are the beasts that are tumbling out of his horn more
shadowy beasts than those that are tumbling out of mine?" she
asked herself, but she knew that they were.
"Everybody up!" she cried loudly then, and she blew her horn
another blast and disgorged further swarms of creatures. "Be
ready for the journey while I give the cock-crow first-corner-of
the-day insight:
Happiness i s a habit that can be acquired. Yes, and it
must be acquired by each of you or you are lost forever and
my own record as governor will be very bad. I spoke last
night about the revolt against the idea of unhappiness being
always tied to evil. Well, happiness and goodness do make a
fair fit together. I know that there is another revolt against
the whole idea of goodness. If I followed my first idea and
inclinations as governor, I would bring up heavy fire-power
and blast all such brainless rebels to cinders.
Is habit mere routine? Can we be happy with routine
happiness? Yeah, we can. Routine means "on the route," on
the high road, not down in the gutters. And it is better to be
134
clean and dry and clear-eyed on the road than to be wet and
dirty and red-eyed in the gutter. The whole thing goes by
free choice, and it is better to make a rational choice than an
irrational choice.
People, you are not listening to me hard enough! I have
j ust made a statement that shakes all the fog out of the world
and puts things into clear perspective. It is better to make a
rational t han an irrational choice, I said, and the very
mountains jumped like kids and bleated "Why didn't we
think of that?" It would be so much easier to govern people if
they paid attention then earth-shaking things are said. If I
had suggested that you must do some great and
mountainous thing to achieve ultimate happiness, would
you not try to do it? When I say "Make a rational choice and
all things will be added unto you," then do it! Don't gap like
goopers.
The building of a good habit is the building of a good
road through a swamp or jungle. So who is that who is
hooting over there in the bushes? I'll have your bloody
throats out of you if you hoot at me when I preach sweet
reason to you. There are habits of kindness; there are habits
of peace and patience; there are habits of wit and humor;
there are habits of stunning genius and achievement; and all
of them are yours by the method of easy rationality. Did you
not know that the jagged-flame lightning and rolling
thunder are mere habits that nature has developed? They
are rational and beautiful and resounding habits, and they
get the job done with style. Nature could have developed
other habits nearly as striking [Don't you love striking
lightning? They don't have it on all the worlds,) not nearly as
seemly, and that would be everyone's loss. The name of un
outstanding habits is "grubbiness." The name of no habits at
all is "chaos."
There is nothing easier and more rational than the high
habits of the intelligently aimed road that knows its target.
And that road takes us to the edge of the world and off it to
"Final Happiness" and to "The Father of Lights."
SECOND PRANDIUM
137
"It just seems that you are on a higher plateau, " Marco
Rixthaler said.
"Aw fishnets, fragrant f ishnets!" Aurelia growled with
unclear meaning.
By and by they were all seated in their circle for the Second
Prandium meal. Aurelia scanned the Mid-Morning Cogitator as
she second-breakfasted.
"These Star-Dust Twins, these Seven-Day Wonders (What?
Have they still two more days to go?), these also will pass away
with no more effect than a light breeze passing over the face of the
earth. But we may have had many such breezes from several
points of the compass, and who is to say that they have no effect
at all? They may have caused subtle changes in the faint lines of
our corporate faces and our corporate brains. And the changes
may have been on the better side."
By the by the second Prandium meal was finished.
"Everybody up!" Aurelia cried loudly, and she blasted on her
Prince-of-Nysa horn. "Make ready to resume the j ourney while I
give the second-corner-of-the-day homily:
138
You don't speak plainly on this world, and I want that
failing corrected. It's difficult to govern a verbally-crippled
and thought-crippled bunch. Please understand the
difference between pleasure and happiness. There can be
good pleasure and evil pleasure; but there can be only good
happiness. Good pleasure is not less exuberant than evil
pleasure. It can be much more exuberant. It can be rowdy
dow. It can be words that you don't have at all. It need not be
quiet. And bad pleasure can be of a deadly quiet sort. Please
get rid of the word-trammels and thought-trammels that
bind you.
There is nothing worse than the tedious drudgery of
disordered pleasure, but your imprecision of thought leads
you to believe that deadly tedium may crop up almost
anywhere. It may not. It is confined to a small area. If you
will only understand where that evil tedium is you can avoid
it. Please see the difference between things that sound alike,
between "ordered" and "organized," between "freedom" and
"liberty," between "authority" and "rule." ("Rule" of itself
cannot author anything. "Authority" can.) Oh, why don't
you have intuitive words and statements in the languages of
your world?
In other things, your imprecision with words worries
me. A defined "criminally rich man" may now have wealth
and income below the "poverty level." And a "certified
pauper" may be in the upper five percent of the wealthiest
men. The first one will be denied all aid, and the latter one
will receive all aid. It has something to do with the
"grandfather clause," but it has more to do with your
stubborn imprecision of words and thoughts.
The most rational road will always traverse the richest
and most discovery-prone country. There will be bonus and
bounty at every league of it. The air hums with activity all
along the rational road. There is energy released at every
step. It is the common magic of every day. Why do you keep
falling off of the wonderful road? What's the matter with all
of you anyhow?
It is because I can't make you understand your present
position and composite that I can't make you understand
your choices, though it seems so easy to choose the excellent
over the execrable. A living and bodied person is a sort of arc
of a circle, or perhaps of a parabola. If we continue the lines
of that arc out beyond the body and the person, we come to a
puzzle. The lines cannot be completed in the person's own
139
world or context. They go over the edge. Part of the enclosed,
extended person will be either ultra-natural or infra
natural-anyhow it will be in another world, beyond the
bounds of its supposed nature. We are sometimes told to
become whole persons, and so we must do. But our own life
and world are too small to contain our whole personhood.
Well, is there any way that the circle or parabola of our
persons can be completed? Of course there is. That is what I
talk to you about four times a day. The reason that we are all
so funny-looking, the reason that our institutions and our
worlds are so funny-looking, is that this isn't all of any of
them. There is more of each of us somewhere else. There is
more of everything of ours somewhere else.
140
SECOND MERENDA
144
"but we have to forget the old days. Cousin Clootie is going to say
a few words right now. What if, when she hears them, Aurelia
should permanently leave the Aurelia Camp and j oin that of
Cousin Clootie?"
"I do join it, but only for a short while," Aurelia said.
Yes, Cousin Clootie had his own ship hovering over his head,
but it had much poorer visibility than Aurelia's ship. While
Aurelia's ship was sharp and dark against the bright sky, the
underside of Cousin Clootie's ship was blue-white against the
blue-white afternoon firmamant, and you could lose it j ust while
you were looking at it. And Cousin Clootie had a black tarsier
like mechanism with bright eyes that went up to his ship and
back on errands. It didn't fool around and it didn't pull monkey
shines.
There was another slight difference between the Aurelia and
the Clootie Cases. The daytime constellations could be seen in the
sky over Aurelia's Cavalcade, but they could not be seen over
Cousin Clootie's, and this although the two aggregations were
now only half a mile apart.
There was a very poor-looking man with a push-cart. He
was vending sack-cloth and ashes. It was for the penitents, so he
shouted half-heartedly, should there by any. Karl Talion, Blaise
Genet, Helen Staircase, Michael Strogoff all began to haggle and
buy their sack-cloth and ashes, and they talked about the quality
of it.
"Oh come on," Aurelia protested. "I am still with you. This is
the time for j oy-songs and for aromatic oil and nard to smear on
your heads. Sure I say 'Repent!' But I say 'Repent and Rejoice!' We
should get an 'oil-of-gladness' vendor pushing a happy cart. I will
get one for my own camp."
"We mourn partly for your own death, Aurelia," Helen
Staircase said, "and we repent because we have more need of it
than do these other good people."
Aurelia left them in exasperation and went back to her own
caravan. And she blew the horn for merenda though it was a little
bit early for that meal. Then, after a short bit, giving the people
hardly time to finish (they always ate more than was good for
them anyhow] she blew the horn again and proclaimed:
"All up! Ready for the journey while I give you a Fat-Tom
Insight-of-the-Third-Corner-of-the-day:
Each one of us must become extraordinary, unless we
148
are one of the rare ones who are extraordinary from birth.
There will be a great change in us, but it will not be a change
without preparation and splendid will. One day( this day for
some of you) you will be walking down the ordinary life
road, and you will be transformed. You will in a moment
cease to be ordinary people and will become extraordinary
people. Or else you will cease to be ordinary people and
become veritable swine. The choice will be an easy one, so
please do not stumble over it. You can have it whichever
way you wish. And when the change takes place, you will no
longer be walking down an ordinary life road. You will be
walking down an extraordinary road, or you will be
stumbling down a swine-trough. But if some of us fail in the
transmutation, or go swinish, then the rest of us of the
kindred cannot become as extraordinary as we would wish.
Please keep this in mind.
Things will always go well when everybody has
become extraordinary. It is those who have not become so
who slow the rest of us down and keep our surroundings
grubby. I am telling you grubby people, stop dragging your
feet!
It's said that the rule by which we play the game is "the
world of things as they are." Well, that's a rule that can be
bent then, for we can change that world. The world changes
every day by natural decay and ultra-natural renewal. We,
the all of us together, make a peculiar picture. It is peculiar
because we are able to enlarge or diminish the frame of it
while we are part of the picture.
There are not virtues. There is only virtue. We cannot
have some of the particular virtues without having them all.
To lack even one of the six particular virtues is like having a
geometrical cube lacking one of its six sides. Without one of
its sides, it wouldn't be a cube at all.
What did you say, man? You say that seven particular
virtues are commonly counted on this world? Aw
blacksnake blood! H ow am I going to come up with a regular
seven-sided figure to use for analogy?
You ask me for an account of the technology of "Shining
World" as though that might have something to do with my
credentials. I will not give any such account to you. It isn't
important enough to give. It is not that I am completely
ignorant of our technology, but technology is a mere trifle, a
barrel of trifle s. It is always good enough, whatever it is.
Technology is accomplished in several different ways,
149
sometimes by "modern" (in one of the modes] research and
development by public push, sometimes by private-sector
brain-busting, sometimes by fetish- application and
counterpoint (the latter method is often called magic.) These
methods work about equally well. There are fetish-magic
technologies that are superior to our own technology on
"Shining World." But some of the lands or worlds with the
better technologies are not always better-governed or more
readily governable.
Tell me (and I don't mean to skip around in my talk]
why do you have so few three-storied and five-storied and
seven-storied words on this world? Why, for instance, have
you forgotten the great depths of "wind." Wind is an
animation for the anemos the wind is also the anima t h e
spirit. Why have you forgotten that the gust is the same
word as ghost? They are the same word and thing. Why have
you forgotten that the spirit is the breath, and that we
respire and inspire when we breathe? And that the Holy
Spirit is the Holy Breath?
Why can I not make you see that the spirit blows new
every day? Why can I not make you see that he's knocking at
every door and window of you. Oh, that's what's bugging
Blaise Genet! He has more acute hearing than some others.
He hears th spirit knocking to come in. Then why doesn't he
let it come in?
There is a new wind blowing this day and every day. It
is your skins and your noses that are stale, so you do not
recognize it. It is your eyes that are bleary and do not see the
fruited wake of the wind.
You there, dammit, if you go to sleep while I am talking,
I will break every bone in your body and throw you in the
garbage can!
SECOND CENA
1 54
There was about a hundred kilo-weight of cut-off ears and
tongues deposited in the big barrel after Aurelia's talk. They
filled the barrel only about one-fifth full. Many of the worst of the
people were unwilling to take extreme means for their own cure.
Even in that one-fifth quantity, there were many cow and pig
tongues and ears. The people who put them there seemed to be
deriding the whole business.
Further Magi erected great houses that night and made them
available. But, first and meanwhile, everybody of both the
Aurelia and the Clootie camps had a hootnanny after the cena
meal. And the people on the shore were j oined in voice and sound
and spirit by the people of the River Boat and a number of private
boats.
Overhead, Aurelia's ship blew all its horns, and with more
orderly sound than usual. And Cousin Clootie's ship resounded
with the music of the Aeolian Zither (actually a space zither). It
was a very good concert and multi-group sing-along and fun-fest
there by the river. Very good, but not perfect. Other things crept
into it. The words of some of the lyrics were raunchy, and those
were only the ones that could be understood. The hatred-is-a
way-of-life faction was out in force. The hate-em-ails were there.
A lot of bootleg hatred and partisanship was smuggled in. The
people still have a long way to go on the road to happiness.
1 55
THIRD lENT ACULUM
156
leave even a memory behind them."
1 58
can give you either life or death at the end of this day, depending
on your disposition.
"I am not at all disposed to deal with a yo-yo," Aurelia said.
"Begone with that damned thing, woman! I tell you that it is out of
balance." It was the meanest-looking yo-yo that Aurelia had ever
seen. A person could get hurt badly with a thing like that.
"And I say it is in perfect balance," the woman said. "And it
isn't a yo-yo."
Aurelia stopped the woman's mouth with a spoonful of
Slowpoke Snails. Then she blew cock-crew on her Prince-of
Nysa horn, and she heard Cousin Clootie around the bend
blowing his own. All the people sat down for early Ientaculum
breakfast.
There were a lot of Slowpoke Snails still in the bowl. Aurelia
went around through the sitting crowds and gave big spoonfuls
to each person. "Good," they said. "Very good," others said.
"Where did you get them?" some of them asked her. "You j ust
can't get Slowpoke Snails any more." Aurelia ladled them out to
all five thousand persons of her regular entourage and to many
irregulars. And the bowl was still half full.
"I will tell the world this," she said. "The tenth helping of
Slowpoke Snails is not nearly as good as the first. I have had
enough of them, and I believe that the people have." She went and
dumped them in the river, and the fish rose to them gratefully.
But by then the breakfast was over with, and it was time to be
moving again. Aurelia gave the break-up signal, and she gave her
final cock-crow homily:
We have an intrinsic claim to light. We have an intrinsic
claim to component peace. We have an intrinsic claim to
happiness. We have these claims and rights because we are
human creatures. We belong to the privileged and magic
species, and that gives us right and title to these good things.
We can forfeit these rights and titles only by becoming
something less than human creatures.
These are not the things that a governor should talk
about, I have been told. "A governor should talk about
governing." Aw great goitrous goats! No such thing. Who
wants to hear talk about governing. The mechanics of
governorship are now performed be mechanism-computers.
But the ghostly components of governorship will still be
called out by such as myself.
Humans are magic creatures, with something very
much the matter with them. All nature cries out with
apprehension "There is something the matter with the
1 59
People." It is true. There is a crippling that had already taken
place before any of us came here. This old destruction of part
of us does not belong to our original human nature, but now
it is part of our second human nature. This makes it harder,
but we were not told that it would be easy. We will be able to
follow the bright and rational road with the uncrippled part
of us that remains. We have the guarantee that there is road
enough for our feet and ship enough for any voyage. We are
defective, but our defect is not such as will prevent our
making our good way to t he end.
Ah, I had another analogy rigged up, but it came apart
when I was trying to shape it a little better. I will not use it
this time, but perhaps another time. I'd better hurry though.
According to what everybody tells me of myself, I have only
three times left after this one, only three corners of the day
left.
There is an obstreperous house in the middle of our
road, whether it is a sea-road or a land-road. The name of
that house is the "Mystery of Iniquity." Who groaned,
dammit, who groaned? Do not make that "oh-what's-eating
that-kid-anyhow" gesture so loudly at me! Oh really, it is not
my fault that I have to hang a stilted name on the house. It is
the fault of yourselves and the languages of your world that
have nothing but stilted words.
We can pass by that house named the "Mystery of
Iniquity" and leave it on the road behind us. And then we
will see it once more in the road ahead of us, and this will
happen again and again. But there is not a multiplication of
the mysterious house. There is only one of them. Sometimes
we forget what is in the house, and we open the door and
look in. We are blasted then, and we are set back on the
board a thousand kilometers and a thousand days to a place
called "Swampy Junction." And coming out of "Swampy
Junction," the road is always twice as hard as it was before.
People are always making excuses for people, which is
good. And they over-do it, which is bad. They say that a lot
of the stumbling that people do is accidental. Fat-Tailed Fish
it is! None of it is accidental. Some of it is done by the people
themselves, and some of it is caused by obscene
contraptions. There are grubby little machines that scurry
around and pass out cards "Accidental Stumbling Arranged
Cheap." They will provide it too. And even the mighty will
stumble and break their noses, but it will not be accidental.
This is the end of my cock-crow oration for this day.
1 60
Short minutes ago I heard the cock crow, after a little urging.
And now both friends and enemies tell me that it is the last
time I will ever hear it crow.
Do I believe that? Do you?
THIRD PRANDUIM
"I have half a kilo of athanatos bark," Herr Boch the dealer in
antiques and oddities and ancient artifacts told Aurelia. "And it
works."
"How do you know, Herr Boch? Have you tried it?" Aurelia
asked him.
"I have not tried it on myself," he confessed, "but that is only
because I'm afraid of it. I have it to sell, not to use. But others have
tried it, and it works for them."
"Who has tried it?"
"The Prince of Nysa here, for a conspicuous case. He's been
using it for many centuries, and he does not age further or die."
"He looks aged to me," Aurelia said. "No offense, Prince, but
you looked aged j ust these last seven days. Did Uncle Silas use
it?"
"Uncle Silas? The spaced-out boy? Yes, he started to use it a
few decades ago, but he was already pretty well gone when it
started. It did keep him from dying normally, but there was an
abnormal circumstance."
"Would you recommend it, Prince?" Aurelia asked.
"Not unreservedly, no," the Prince said. "It's j ust a question
of how much tedium you can take. The world is too much with me
now-a-days. There was one time when I had a great capacity for
tedium, but now I can tolerate it less and less."
"I haven't much tolerance for tedium myself," Aurelia said.
"Is it expensive?"
"Very expensive, Aurelia," Herr Boch told her, "but you are
the ward of a group of very rich men. They'll give you anything
you want."
"But what are the contradictions?" she wanted to know.
"What if it is my time to die, and I take some of your bark?"
"If you take it, you will not die. But there would be
contradictions, yes. Very painful contradictions. You might wish,
after you had taken it, that there was some way out where you
could un-take the bark."
"It is all a joke about it being an athanatos bark, a no-dying
bark, isn't it, Herr Boch?"
"No. 'Athanatos' is the correct botanical name for the bush."
161
"But it's still a j oke, isn't it?"
"Would you call the thirty thousand dollars an ounce that I
get for it a j oke?"
"Yes, a grand joke, Herr Bach. If you weren't an antlered man,
you wouldn't get half that much for it. You wouldn't even know
about it."
Uncle Silas, as a matter of fact, was there right now, standing
dimly and smiling vacantly. He had his head on, but he also had a
red line running around his neck where it had once parted from
him.
"Uncle Silas, would you recommend Herr Bach's athanatos
bark?" Aurelia asked.
"No," he said dimly. "I don't believe that I ever used more than
an ounce of it anyhow. Or maybe he let me smell the burlap sack
that it had been in, not much more. No, it didn't give me life. I had
already gone past that."
And yet Uncle Silas was a strong testimonial for the bark. It
had kept this last fragment of him from dying, even after his head
had been cut off. Uncle Silas was now very vague of outline.
Aurelia picked up pebbles and threw them through him. He
howled mildly when he saw one pass through him, but he made
no noise when he didn't notice them.
"Who killed you, Uncle Silas?" Aurelia asked.
"Nobody. I died, ah, unnaturally, spaced out, and a little bit at
a time. But I'm not clear dead yet, so no one killed me."
"Who cut your head off?"
"Oh, Cousin Clootie did that. He understood the case with
me, that I was already gone except for j ust this last shadow. He
knew that I was really quite old. I told you the truth that I had
been in old wars and engagements. Do you not have, on 'Shining
World,' a number of 'World's oldest teen-agers' as we have? I had
been spaced out for a long time when Clootie met me. You have
heard of people being half dead. I was probably ninety percent
dead and decayed. In some cultures somewhere, the cutting-off
of-the-head had something to do with dispatching the 'walking
dead' and giving them release. That was the case in the world
where Cousin Clootie came from. He believes it is part of his
governing to do things that are too distasteful for other persons to
do, cutting off the heads of such unfortunates, for instance. He
thought he could release me by cutting off my head, and he did
release a lot of me. There's less of me here than there was before he
did it, and more of me in the pleasant place on the other side. I'm
almost all on the other side now. I wonder how I'm doing over
there." He dimmed out.
162
"I notice that you harve been seeing and talking to an
apparition," the Prince of Nysa said. "Young girls see and hear
vividly on the last day of their lives. They sometimes see and hear
things that aren't there."
"Oh, is that all it is?" Aurelia asked. "I thought that
something was the matter with me."
Crowds of useless people were playing with those damnable
yin-yang yo-yo's.
"Oh, stop playing with those cursed things," Aurelia snapped
with a mouth full of spite.
"We'll not stop," they said. "And we're not playing. We mean
every bit of it."
It's a wonder they didn't get hurt with those things. They
were dangerous.
165
Did you ever notice how the shadows are when it's
exactly noontime? They're panoramic. And the air is in
abeyance. The ears of you people are like this, but your eyes
are open, and I think that you see.
Oh, Aurelia was still clear enough, but it was a scanning and
dancing sort of clearness that she had. It didn't touch all the keys.
1 66
THIRD MERENDA
They had passed from the river to the lower lake now. All the
boats had made it down. They had watched the River Boat and
found the locks that weren't generally known.
"Aurelia, if things had been a little bit different, then might
we not possibly have-" young Marco Rixthaler tried to ask
something.
"Possibly, Marco, possibly," Aurelia said. "If you hadn't been
so bashful, something might have come from our meeting. About
the possible chromosome differences, I was joking. About the
other objections, I was j oking too. But you aren't ready for me, and
I didn't meet anyone else.
"I really wanted to leave a child of mine on this world. That
would prove that I was more than an erratic bolide. As late as last
night it could still have been done. We could have lit it last night,
and it would have been far enough along by tonight. Then I could
have arranged for someone to take it from my body and put it in
the body of another girl. It would have been born on this world
then, which would make me a real partaker of this world. But it's
too late now. It needs a few hours after it is lit before it can be
found, and there aren't that many hours left to me. The next time
167
you meet a star-girl, don't be so bashful. Say what you want to
say. Of course it probably wouldn't have worked anyhow."
Aurelia and Marco had gone onto the River Boat in a slack
time that afternoon. Aurelia had wondered about the internation
al personages. They were always in the gambling room on the
River Boat, and yet they were often other places as well. And they
were in the gambling room now, Karl Talion, Julio Cordovan,
Blaise Genet, Helen Staircase, Michael Strogoff, and Aurelia
herself. And they were playing 'brag,' except Michael who was
playing solitaire with blank cards and with one Aurelia-value
card.
Well, they were wax figures, wax over some sort of j ointed
armatures, and they moved very mechanically. That Blaise Genet
himself was dead did not seem to matter to his wax image. That
Julio Cordovan was now the Marshal-Julio the bodyguard didn't
seem to matter. Nor did Aurelia-present-in-the-flesh seem to
matter to the wax Aurelia.
Aurelia scraped a little wax off the hand of Karl Tali on, and
he shuddered at the pain of it and bled blood-like fluid . .
"Do not injure the wax figures," an attendant said. "It is
believed that if you injure them, their primaries will receive the
same injury. Oh, it is Aurelia! We are honored. We have made
your image as well as we could, but it doesn't do j ustice to you."
There was a memory that these persons, on first encounter,
had looked waxy and smelled waxy. Well, had they been wax
figures when they had played 'brag' for blood, and when they had
drunk blood?"
"How do you tell whether they are themselves or their
replicas?" Aurelia asked.
"There is no sure way," the attendant said. "Sometimes they
are mixed. At present, I believe that one of them is real and the
other five are replicas. I had believed that, the very first night of
your landing, it was a wax figure of yourself who was here
playing with us. Was it?"
"I don't know," Aurelia said. "I thought it was myself. But
now I remember that I smelled waxy then and didn't seem to be
quite myself."
Aurelia and Marco left the River boat and came onto shore
again.
"Aurelia, is something wrong?" Marco asked. "Do you feel
bad?"
"No. I feel all right, but I'm terminal. My fever is rising
dangerously, but it's all outside of my body. See! A lot of my fever
is in those groups over there. Do you see their horns?"
168
"No."
Time and events would be telescoped now. The horned
people, whenever they appear, are very disruptive of time and
events. Disruptive of time especially; but the day had already
begun to disintegrate when the horned people appeared.
The people hadn't visible horns, except corner-of-the-eye
visible when you weren't quite looking at them. They were the
ordinary people of the Cavalcade, people from the countryside
and the towns and cities. They were the ordinary people gone
ornery as they had gone when they had howled "Jump, Jump!"
when Aurelia had been on the high tower and they wanted her to
jump to her death, not knowing that she had bird bones and that a
height like that was nothing to her.
Rams' horns, goats' horns, bulls' horns, buffalo horns', and all
of them were unnaturally sharp. But were they unnatural? What
is the nature of horns anyhow, and what is their function?
Their function is to kill.
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THIRD GENA
172
How do persons of the 'Media Extinction Arm' kill? By slow
poison mostly. A poisoned dish they may have employed recently
is 'Slowpoke Snails.' These have been used especially by persons
of the Jimmy Candor Cell of the Extinction Arn.
Who will finally do it? The open outrage stands defiant and
simmering. Any of the groups might do it. And so the suspense
builds.
"No, no, no," Aurelia contradicts this. "Suspense is one thing
that we don't want. Not in my death we don't. There is something
so cheesy about suspense.''
Why was all this animosity with its urge to kill building up?
"It's their last chance," Aurelia said, "before the inexorable
law 'Be Happy' finally takes over and puts an end to their
vagrancies.''
The Magi had begun to pitch their tents early tonight, before
full dark had come on, before the cena-supper had been eaten.
One of the new, hundred-room, seven-s tory tents erected by one
of the newly-arrived Magi was named the 'House of Iniquity.'
That name was in bad taste, and so was the Magus. A corruption
had come onto everything.
Aurelia had gone to Cousin Clootie's camp for the next to last
time, to take farewell from him; she had the intuition that they
would not have many words on their final meeting. And after
that, Cousin Clootie talked informally, in his difficult way, to
anyone who would listen to him.
"The beautiful, sinful, rational road is not all that easy, not
for everyone. The easiness presupposes clarity and sparkling
intelligence, and clarity is often in short supply with fallen
humanity. We must look for clarity. We must cry 'Turn up the
Lights!' For clarity won't be found in the dark. And it is darker
here than even I am used to.
"I do not have a certificate that says 'Home Free.' I have an
unsigned certificate that says 'Home, maybe, against long odds,
and through a thousand perils.' I am the governor of hard cases. I
am an advocate of the fear-and-trembling people. But I will
govern, even with a broken rudder, for as long as I am set to
govern here. I will open my eyes, though they be glued shut. You
have misunderstood about the governorship here of myself and
my fair skip-blood cousin. It isn't a political governorship. The
old word 'to steer a ship' is the same as the old word 'to govern.'
But the best steering of a ship isn't political steering, and neither
is the best governing in a world.
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"Sometimes my cousin misses things that are trampled in the
mud. It isn't that she is fastidious or prideful; it is j ust that she
doesn't see low or dark things. I pull them out of the mud. There is
a division of mission between us. Maybe I cannot see as high as
she can. Maybe she cannot see as low as I can. She does things
easy. I do them hard. Now she goes out of the door unafraid, and I
go out of it afraid. But we both go out of it.
"How does one say to a world that one has enjoyed its
companionship, even though the goodby is rather abrupt?"
175
The best thing about this curious encounter is that we may
be able to learn something from it," Doctor Thorgrimson spoke
the next morning in the publication Wide A wake, the Morning
Medical Journal. "We will have other visitors in time to come, and
indeed there is the belief that we have previously entertained
several visitors unaware. For this reason, it is important that we
examine why these two young creatures have died from their
encounter with our world. The deaths were accidental, of course,
as are all deaths by chronic allergy. And yet there was multiple
purposive death waiting for them if the accidents did not happen.
"This world responded to the children by classifying them
anaphylaxically as intruders' and by secreting a murderous toxin
against them as 'intruders.' The response is so complex as almost
to go beyond the province of the medical. This is at the same time
a physical, a chemical, a medical, a sociological, and cosmological
response-problem. The question is whether a mucous membrane
is responsible for its reaction against an alien pollen or irritant.
Yes, as a matter of fact, it should be held responsible. The
behavioristic approach to allergies does make a membrane
ashamed of any violent or excessive reaction to an intrusive
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stimulus, and it is proved that the membrane is able to modify its
reaction by membraneous resolve and will. And we do have
cases of the 'rag weed' being shamed out of attacking people with
the dreaded 'hay fever.'
"Considering our world and its dominant human fauna as a
responding mucous membrane, it may be possible to teach it to
modify its responses to para-human intrusive contact. We must
convey this idea, on conscious or unconscious or membranous
level. that the murder-response is entirely out of order and will
not be tolerated.
"This may be quite a simple adjustment that we have to
make. Let us hope that we are able to make it before we are next
visited from the sky.''
But Doctor Thorgrimsson's comments were printed the
following morning. Now it is still tonight. Yes, that is an
indication of the way the sequence was disintegrating and
becoming irrational.
The two cavalcades of Aurelia and Cousin Clootie had
merged, and then their mass had shattered into specialized
groups making islands among frightened spectators. The
violence factor rose exponiently. There were fanged wolves and
horned killers bawling and howling and shuffling around,
though they were still in human guise. Everyone knew that
Cousin Clootie's death would come first, and yet there was no
way that anyone could know anything at all about the matter.
Aurelia blew her Prince-of-Nysa horn, and Cousin Clootie
answered with his. But then noisome clouds of creatures and
prodigies poured out of both of the horns and near blinded the
blowers. These clouds of delirious content would remain through
the whole action, giving a surrealist counterpart to all of it.
Aurelia and Cousin Clootie were not more than thirty meters
apart, and they couldn't come closer for the crowds. Uncle Silas,
in very vague and weightless form, was standing with Cousin
Clootie and regarding him with friendship. Cousin Clootie had
tried to give Uncle Silas release, not knowing how spaced-out he
was or how much of him was then on each side of the barrier.
Nervous bull-frogs were bellowing on the splashy shore of
the lower lake, and manipulators of those yin-yang yo-yos were
flying them at targets in simulated murder, and then whistling
them back again.
"Play with those things somewhere else," Aurelia said
crossly. "They're atrocious, and they have an evil philosophy
behind them."
"No we won't," a player said. "This is the world tournament
177
for manipulating them, and we're having it here."
"People shouldn't be allowed to kill those two little children"
a woman said.
"It's all right," her husband told her. "It's what they call an
'Inexorable Chthonic Movement.' There's no way of stopping it.
It's a little bit like killing snakes.''
"I don't think it's anything at all like killing snakes.''
"Besides, the children will die by accident. No one will kill
them. There are some experts here to observe. They are studying
Chthonic-Movernent accidents. And most of the things that those
kids said are against everything that we stand for.''
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Cousin Clootie and harassed him. One of them tore his arm off
with a swinging grapple. One of them drilled him right through
the chest with a red-hot pike. One of them split his skull with an
old-fashioned axe. And they jeered at him and he fell dead at their
feet with multiple murder wounds.
Only it didn't happen quite that way.
Cousin Clootie's little space ship had a good shielding
system, and it was programmed to shield Cousin Clootie in
moments of stress. It smashed the swinging grapple before it
could touch Cousin Clootie. It sent down a protective shaft and
diverted and bent the red-hot pike. And it sent another protective
shaft that intercepted the swinging axe and vaporized it. There
was no way that it would permit assault on Cousin Clootie.
The newly-formed society withdrew in anger and added
words to their slogan-flag 'And Kill That Damned Space-Ship
First.' And they went to get a small cannon that one of them knew
about to shoot it up.
Then the horned people came to the assault. There was a
sizeable coven or cornutus of them and they encircled Cousin
Clootie. Their horns were invisible to the eyes, but they were
sensed by every other sense. The hornies encircled Cousin Clootie
and closed in. There were horrid screams that went on for quite a
while and then subsided to what sounded like dying gurgles. The
'horned people' drew back again then, and the victim Cousin
Clootie lay dead in the middle of their old circle. The weapon
would not be found, and all the 'horned people' would be like one
single stony-faced person in their refusal to explain. It was a
scene from the movie 'Vengeance of the Horned People' all over
again.
Only it didn't happen quite that way either.
Cousin Clootie was still on his feet in the middle of their old
circle. He was gurgling in incoherent anger, but it wasn't a dying
gurgle. The 'horned people' had cut the hair from one side of his
head only. They had pulled one sleeve off his tunic, and the
opposite leg off his trousers. They had smeared him with black
and scarlet paint, and they were laughing at him with derisive
laughter. But they hadn't killed him. The 'horned people' knew
about shielding devices, and they knew what liberties they would
be permitted to take and what they would not. And they knew
that Clootie was really killed already by the spirit they had
engendered.
Herr Boch brought his antlers to Aurelia. They had fallen off,
so now he would not be an antlered man after all. They were still
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quite small, about the length of the end j oint of a little finger.
Aurelia, not knowing how else to keep them, swallowed them.
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the yo-yo dart panicked or got mad, and killed them both.
"Oh this is silly!" Aurelia said in her last words.
"Clumsy," Cousin Clootie said as he died. "Is there no sense of
drama on this world? Bad show. Ridiculous."
The ballad-makers of the multi-media 'with-it' group had
been singing the new song 'She was a Bolide,' with horn
accompaniment.
Now all the people seemed to wake up at the same time and
they all said, "What strange daze have we been in anyhow? Well,
no matter, we are not in it any longer. That little dead girl seems to
have something to do with our daze, and that little dead boy also.
Oh, it's been a silly week!"
See! Hear! The ballad-makers were already making a song
about it, "Silly week." Listen to the way the horns come in on it,
Oh clumsy, clumsy, cool, cool!
After Aurelia had been dead for a year, an ailanthus tree did
grow there. It did smell funny, but it was pretty. It was the tree
that should have most reminded people of Aurelia, but there was
no memory of her left to be revived. A set of branched antlers also
grew out of the ground there, and people do stop to look at them.
182
"Want to guess?" the other one asked. "We're getting up a pot
on it. Nearest guess wins it all."
183
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