East of Laughter, Page 3

  “‘In the Sioga or Kobald Belt (Iceland, Ireland, Great Britain, the Scandinavias and the Germanies, Moravia, Brittany in France, Transylvania in the Balkans, Huesco in Spain, Epirus in Greece, Esh Sharqi in Syria, Nazanderan in Persia or Iran), in all these places of the belt there are families who renew the rocks so they say, who keep the piles of rocks in their ritual arrangements that compel the Sioga-Kobalds to remain underground. But in reality these families make new arrangements of the rocks which still keep the Sioga-Kobalds underground, but let far worse peoples than the Sioga-Kobalds come to the surface. And in these places also were families of giants who renew the tales so they say, who maintain the giant writing on the cliffs: but in truth they introduce new giant writing which all the people will have to obey.’

  THE BACK DOOR OF HISTORY, Arpad Arutinov.

  “‘“Of course the fairies of Ireland are monkeys,” Shamus McJames mumbled as he tried, unsuccessfully, to light his clay pipe with a smoldering piece of turf. “There is not one word in any description of them that allows them to be something else: little people, much smaller than human, agile, capricious, looking at the same time like old men-and-women and like little boys-and-girls, ugly, chattering, climbing into all sorts of dangerous places, capering, dancing, thieving, outrageous, comical. And for proof positive that fairies and monkeys are of the same species, you may count the chromosomes in the individual cells of a fairy and a monkey and you will find that they number the same in each of them.”

  “‘“And what is their chromosome number, Shamus?”

  “‘“I forget it, Milligan. Look it up, boy. ’Twill do you good, and then you’ll remember it, as I do not.”’

  ENNISCORTHY CHRONICLE.

  “‘“It’s that they have dug completely through the earth, is it? And now they’ve come out of the ground in both the Americas and the Australias and in all further lands and islands. But I know how to stop them, as they have always been stopped in the Old World. If the mayor will lend me seven good policemen for seven hours beginning at dawn tomorrow, we’ll drive all the local tribe of them back underground. And then I’ll set and renew the little piles of rocks to form a ritual against them and to compel them to remain underground. But my offer is not one that you may sleep upon. Accept it now or you will have lost it forever.”’

  Townsperson Jane McBane at a City Commission Meeting of the First Thursday of January of This Year.

  “‘Larva of Humans, that’s what the Shoga are. They are the tadpoles, the caterpillars, the imagos of humans. And as such they are always of the one-in-a-million cases, for this intermediate stage in the human development is now quite rare. But with the many millions and billions of humans in the world, even one-in-a-million makes quite a few Shoga. Often they are sent by their parents to special places till they have passed through their awkward stage. Boarding schools in several countries are really places where the Shoga, the human larvae, are kept.’

  THE OTHER SIDE OF STRANGE, Peter Tompkinson.

  “‘The days and years spent as a Shog do not count against the allotted days and years of a life. A person will enter the Shoga larva-stage when at the physical age of about ten. He or she will be in the larva-stage for anywhere from a year-and-a-half to two-hundred-and-fifty years. And then he will leave the larva state (if indeed he does leave it, for in ninety percent of the cases the larva-state terminates in death) still at the physical age of about ten, but a much more graceful and accomplished age of ten than at the entrance to the larva-stage. I here set down the rules: every person living through the human-larval state subsequently becomes a genius; and every genius of the human species will have gone through this human-larva state.

  “‘The population of humans who enter the larva state (about one in a hundred thousand) is so small as to be precarious, and it cannot be a permanent ratio. Either the ratio of the larvae was much larger in the past or it will be much larger in the future. If it is not larger in the future, then there will be no future, realistically speaking. The human species will have lived in vain. Even so, it will behoove us to recover the past, if the larvae-predominance proves to have been an affair of the past, so that the grandeur of our species may be somewhere recorded.

  “‘The very fact that Shoga do sometimes mate and reproduce in this larva state, and that they produce apparently normal human infants, necessitates a complete rewriting of human biology. These human infants (called changelings in the past when they appeared among populations of goblins) are almost certainly of legitimate Shoga-Goblin generation. There is a lot of work to be done on this subject, and it looks as if I will have to be the one to do it if it gets done.’

  A COMPLETE REWRITING OF HUMAN BIOLOGY, Hieronymous Talking-Crow.

  “‘The larvae-state humans were antediluvian. And, apparently, God did not intend them to be postdiluvian. He washed his hands and his world of them, so he thought. But those in the larvae-state went into their caves, for much of their larvae-lives had always been spent in caves; and then they stoppered the entrances to their caves with large and fine-fitting stones. They made these stoppers tight with fiber and they covered them with pitch inside and out. So they made liveable air-bubbles inside the mountains and stocked them with food for seven years. But they needed food for less than one year.

  “‘In the whole affair of the ancient larvae, there is the problem of the flow of time, or of the twin flows of time that are called contemporaneousnesses. It seems as if larvae time is of a different nature from world time. The longest life of a larva (about two hundred and fifty years, larva time) might occupy as little as five years world time, or as much as five thousand years of world time. If only we knew which and how many of the ancient patriarchs had larval intervals, we might do a new correlation of ancient chronology. We might do it, that is if we were able to fill seven other gaps in our knowledge.’

  IN THE CELLARS OF GENESIS, Paul (The Python) Pemmican.

  “Isn’t it fun though to have a computer research a subject and throw so many fascinating things together for you! And isn’t it startling when it includes a piece of your own! Here it is:

  “‘I was in a Shoga boarding school for fifty-five years. But by the count of the common world I was in there only a single day and night; and I returned to my own home on the second morning. “It is the best bargain ever,” my mother said, “only seven dollars for a day and a night of it, and how you have lost all your awkwardness and ugliness, Laughter-Lynn. Oh, you will be a pretty one when we get you cleaned up!” “That is all very well,” I said, “but finish getting me out of the shell of this big goose egg and then we’ll have some explanations. I’m of two minds about all of this. With one mind I ask: How’d I get into this big goose egg anyhow?”

  “‘“Oh, that’s what you slept in at the boarding school,” my mother said. “It is your cocoon, your larva, or perhaps your imago-sheath. You passed all your awkward age in it last night, snug as a worm in your big container hanging on the wall. And this morning we went and got you and threw you, egg cocoon and all, into the hay wagon and brought you here. And we have just now broken the shell on your big goose-egg cocoon, and now you must step the rest of the way out of it. That’s it. Now look at yourself in the big glass. You are the most beautiful girl in the world.”

  “‘“Yes, that’s true, mother, I am,” I said. “But I was in that big goose-egg for fifty-five years, not just one night. And during those same fifty-five years I was indeed in my awkward stage, for I lived those fifty-five years in the deep underground as a Goblin, a Kabouter, a Shoga, a Kobald, a Troll, a Fairy, a Monkey-Face.”

  “‘“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it,” my mother said, “so long as you have your youth. You’re still just sixteen years old, dear. And your health, and your unique education.”’

  ENTRY IN MY DIARY IMMEDIATELY AFTER BREAKING OUT OF MY GOOSE EGG, Laughter-Lynn Casement.

  “So that is it, Group of Twelve,” Laughter-Lynn had told her associates on a private video-world-conference. “I am n
ow one of the most respected marine biologists and under-earth biologists, and under-mind biologists in the world. I am a person of great beauty and high humor. I have my head on straight (a Kabouter phrase), and at the same time I am a person who spent fifty-five years underground as a Goblin or Shoga. And again I am a person who spent the same fifty-five years in a giant goose-egg that served me through my larval-or-imago period, my caterpillar-in-a-cocoon period. And I can say that those fifty-five years (which occupied only a day and night of ordinary time) were a great learning experience, and they have served me well during the seven years and seven quarantines of my life that have passed since then.”

  Such was Laughter-Lynn’s own explanation of a quirky experience in her life.

  As an artist, Laughter-Lynn was best known for her great paintings, (Earth and Ocean and Sunshine, Earth and Ocean and Mist, Earth and Ocean and Sea-and-Storm-Wrack, Earth and Ocean and People, Earth and Ocean and Drowned People and a hundred others of the Earth and Ocean sequence). And she was known for her astonishing fantasy series, The World on the Inside of a Goose-Egg, those beautiful psychological and fabulistic works.

  Laughter-Lynn Casement is a person of present competence verging on the fantastic, as well as being a person of great beauty and high humor. But one question about her still remains: Just how high is her humor anyhow? What is the real significance of her given name Laughter?

  And then we come to:

  5. LEO PARISI. He is a nuclear scientist who knows that the atoms are no more than empty boxes. “It is this damned ‘child labor’ that gives our Group of Twelve its reputation for immaturity,” Caesar Oceano had growled once, and he was referring to Leo Parisi when he made that comment. For Leo was still a teenager, and one could only guess how many more years he would be a teenager. His wife Perpetua was surely older, but it’s possible that she also was a teenager, though barely. But in her case, as her name Perpetua indicates, she was also a forever person. Oh, she was the daughter of Gorgonius and Monika Pantera, and they were still a youngish couple.

  Leo wasn’t old enough to have legitimately become a nuclear scientist unless he had begun to learn the subject before he was born. Well, he had been in on an in utero experiment, a learning experiment, but it had been only a for-fun-experiment that his parents had subjected him to. From it, he hadn’t learned enough to make much difference. But in truth he hadn’t been one who learned that intricate stuff but one who had been born knowing it. He did give Intimations of Transcendent Intellect in Early Childhood. He did come into the world trailing clouds of glory when he came.

  He was one of those who remembered where he had been. And all his life he lived but a short day’s travel from that wonderful place, to the East. Well, in the hot light of day he lived at Sora on the eastern slopes of the Apennine Mountains, sixty miles or ninety-nine kilometers east of Rome in Italy. He had been born there.

  As well as years may be made to relate to him, Leo Parisi was sixteen years old and his wife Perpetua was nineteen when the last series of video-world-conferences and then the in-the-flesh-conferences began among the Group of Twelve.

  The main frustration of the strange youth (in that part of Italy they called them twice-born youths), Leo Parisi the nuclear scientist, was that the atoms of which the universe and its furniture were made were empty boxes. (This bothered several of the Group of Twelve.) Leo’s had been the thought-provoking paper The Problem of the Flimsiness of the Atoms of the World.

  “Yes, to all appearances, the atoms are empty boxes,” he would rant. “They lack detail. They contain only such scribbles as a three-dimensional cartoonist might make. They contain only rough schematics of even rougher schematics. It’s as though a person would spend thirty million lira for a new Tuono Automobile and receive for his money a child’s drawing of a car with an informative line below it. It looks a little bit like this, not much, but a little bit. The buyer of that would feel himself shortchanged. And I feel myself short-changed whenever I consider the interior of an atom.

  “But this isn’t the way that I remember them! I remember them as totally detailed. I remember every atom as having a totality of interior detail equal to the total detail of the universe exterior to it. Someone has short-changed me. Great God of the Atoms, You have short-changed me! Mend your ways, Oh mend your ways! The atoms of the apparent universe are completely unworthy of you.”

  And now there had come another obsession into the mind and life of Wonder Boy Leo Parisi. A wet camel’s nose had nudged him in the dark of night and sent a shudder of giantism through him. And in the morning he went out on the low mountain top and found it. He immediately transmitted the information to the others of the Group of Twelve. “Atrox is near. I have found a feather that is three meters or nine feet long.”

  This message puzzled the other members of the Group of Twelve when they received it, and it had puzzled Leo when he sent it. What had Atrox Fabulinus, a man dead at least fifteen-hundred years, if indeed he had ever lived at all, to do with a feather that was nine feet long?

  Yes, Leo Parisi had really found a feather that was nine feet long. He brought it into his house, and his wife Perpetua pealed like bells in her glee. “Leo,” she chortled, “you always brag about the big one that got away. Leo, Leo, this time you have proof!” But then she paled.

  “Oh, Oh, Oh!” she cried. “It has blood and gore on the quill end of it, and it’s splashed on the shaft and the aftershaft and on many of the lower barbs. Somebody has been speared with this, clear through the body. Somebody has been murdered with this.”

  “Yes, Perpetua, somebody has been speared entirely through the body with this, if he was an ordinary-sized person. And murdered, yes. But I know that the feather belonged to Atrox Fabulinus. Somehow I never thought of him as a murderer. I’m sure there were circumstances to explain it.”

  Leo put the long feather up on a tall wall in his kitchen, but he didn’t examine it carefully. He knew for certain what he would find if he did examine it, and his surety was so strong that he was able to tell his curiosity “Go to sleep.”

  He knew that the atoms of every cell and molecule of that big feather would be finely detailed, as the atoms of the whole universe are supposed to be, and commonly aren’t. He knew that this grotesque thing was a shaft of reality.

  And then there was Leo’s wife Perpetua:

  6. PERPETUA PARISI. Perpetua would in no way be overshadowed by her boy-husband who barely came to her middle-breast. Perpetua was a logician. And Leo had no belief at all in logic, and especially he had none in the Behavioristic Logic of his wife. “There is no sense to it at all,” Leo would insist. “Oh, but it works, it works most amazingly!” Perpetua would counter.

  “So does the basest peasant work, amazingly and drudgingly, but there is no sense in him either,” Leo would try to have the last word; but there is no way that one can have the last word with a behavioristic logician.

  By what she set out for Leo’s breakfast, and the little ornaments and thought-jogs and flowers and French journals that she strewed about the breakfast table, Perpetua could predict well what Leo would do all day long. She could even predict the sharp cry that would break from him at three seconds after thirteen-fifteen in the afternoon, and the five things he would grab first when he came breathless into his laboratory to put his new and sudden idea to a test. Oh, that was just from her starting a dozen trains of thought in him and letting them interplay and uncoil in their perfect logic. At least she said that she could do these things. Behavioristic logicians lie a lot.

  She even said that she would make Atrox Fabulinus, he who had been dead for at least fifteen hundred years, if indeed he had ever lived at all, reveal what he was up to.

  Well, Atrox certainly seemed to have his nose into every household around there now. The old giant would either have to state his case, or he would have to be a little bit more quiet about his being dead. Why had Leo and Perpetua both come to believe that Atrox Fabulinus had been a giant?

  Perpet
ua even believed that she could make God do pretty much what she wished him to, just by her behavioristic logic, by her setting out strips of brightly colored silk in symbolic patterns in the hills in the mornings where he could see them on his very first flight over. And she did get exceptionally good results in influencing God in his conduct every day.

  And the next-named member of the Group of Twelve is:

  7. GORGONIUS PANTERA. He was the father of Perpetua Parisi, of course, but he was not especially influenced by his female cub. He was a piano-maker who lived high in the German Alps. He made huge, powerful pianos. He gave a very few of them away. He had given thirteen of them to his daughter Perpetua Parisi, for thirteen is the minimum number for a piano orchestra. But he kept most of them, and now he had nearly seven hundred of them. This required that he should have a large house, and he did have a very large house. It also required that he should have a money-producing business, and he had that too. He was the richest man in the German Alps and was becoming richer. But if the secret of his wealth should be commonly known, everybody would get into that business and the wealth would vanish.

  All of his pianos were player pianos, and he could set them all to playing at once, or as many as he wished, for as long as he wished. He himself was his own composer, with three assistants. He now had about a hundred of his player pianos playing his ongoing Giant Suite which was based on newly-discovered chapters of Atrox Fabulinus the Roman Rabelais who was dead at least fifteen hundred years.

  Gorgonius built his pianos from Klavierholtz and from nothing else, and this had become a problem. It was a slow-growing wood, and he had already plundered much of the German Alps for it. He had to find some way to extend his own length of life, or to make the Klavierholtz to be faster-growing, or to discover new stands of this great and resounding wood; or else he could never bring his plan to full music before his death. Already his crest of the German Alps had lost some of its great sound, the resounding music of the free-standing Klavier-trees in the howling crest-winds. The trees must not be thinned further, and they would not grow faster, and he had Klavier-wood for only about twenty more pianos. The neatest solution, of course, was that he should extend his own length of life, by a thousand years at least.