Рафаэль Лафферти: The Best of R. A. Lafferty

“We can’t afford to look silly,” the schools and activities commissioner said. “We have been made to look silly in quite a few cases lately, not all of them our own fault. We can’t afford to buy limestone for a project like this from someone like you.”

“I wonder if you could get me about a hundred and twenty tons of good quality pink granite?” asked a smiling pinkish man in the hearing room.

“No, that’s another island entirely,” the limestone salesman said. “I’ll tell them if I see them.”

“Mr. Chalupa, I don’t know what your business is here today,” the mayor said severely to the smiling pinkish man, “but you will wait your turn, and you will not mix into this case. Lately it seems that our open hearings are just one nut after another.”

“How can you lose?” the limestone salesman asked the commissioners. “I will supply and cut and set the stones. If you are not satisfied, I will leave the stones at no cost, or I will remove them again. And not until you are completely satisfied do you pay me the three hundred dollars or the three hundred bushels of cracked corn.”

“I want to go to your country with you,” Miss Phosphor McCabe burst out. “I am fascinated by what I have heard of it. I want to do a photographic article about it for the Heritage Geographical Magazine . How far away is your country now?”

“All right,” the limestone salesman said. “I’ll wait for you. We’ll go just as soon as I have transacted my business and you have transacted yours. We like everybody and we want everybody to come and visit us, but hardly anybody wants to. Right now, my country is about three miles from here. Last chance, gentlemen: I offer you the best bargain in quality marble-limestone that you’ll ever find if you live two hundred years. And I hope you do all live to be two hundred. We like everybody and we’d like to see everybody live two hundred years at least.”

“Absolutely not,” said the mayor of the city. “We’d be the laughing-stock of the whole state if we did business with someone like you. What kind of a country of yours are you talking about that’s only three miles from here? Absolutely not. You are wasting your time and ours, man.”

“No, no, it just couldn’t be,” said the streets and sewers commissioner. “What would the papers print if they heard that we had bought limestone from somebody nearly as disreputable as a saucerian?”

“Rejected, rejected,” said the parks and playgrounds commissioner. “We were elected to transact the city’s business with economy and dignity .”

“Ah well, all right,” the limestone salesman said. “You can’t sell a stylobate every time you try. Good day, commissioners. No hurry, lady. I’ll wait for you.” And the limestone salesman went out, leaving, as it seemed, a cloud of rock-dust in his wake.

“What a day!” the schools and activities commissioner moaned. “What a procession of jokers we have had! Anyhow, that one can’t be topped.”

“I’m not so sure,” the mayor grumbled. “Miss Phosphor McCabe is next.”

“Oh, I’ll be brief,” Phosphor said brightly. “All I want is a permit to build a pagoda on that thirty-acre hill that my grandfather left me. It won’t interfere with anything. There won’t be any utilities to run to it. And it will be pretty.”

“Ah, why do you want to build a pagoda?” the streets and sewers commissioner asked.

“So I can take pictures of it. And just because I want to build a pagoda.”

“What kind of a pagoda will it be?” the parks and playgrounds commissioner asked.

“A pink pagoda.”

“How big will it be?” the schools and activities commissioner asked.

“Thirty acres big. And four hundred feet high. It will be big and it won’t bother anything.”

“Why do you want it so big?” the mayor asked.

“So it will be ten times as big as the Black Pagoda in India. It’ll be real pretty and an attraction to the area.”

“Do you have the money to build this with?” the streets and sewers commissioner asked.

“No, I don’t have hardly any money. If I sell my photographic article ‘With Camera and Canoe on Sky-High Stutzamutza’ to the Heritage Geographical Magazine I will get some money for it. And I have been snapping unrehearsed camera portraits of all you gentlemen for the last few minutes, and I may be able to sell them to Comic Weekly if I can think of cute headings for them. As to the money to build the Pink Pagoda, oh, I’ll think of something.”

“Miss McCabe, your request is remanded or remaindered or whatever, which is the same thing as being tabled,” the mayor said.

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure. The legal commissioner is absent today, but he always says something like that when we want to pass the buck for a little while.”

“It means come back in one week, Miss McCabe,” the streets and sewers commissioner said.

“All right,” Miss Phosphor McCabe agreed. “I couldn’t possibly start on the Pink Pagoda before a week anyhow.”

And now we set this odd-shaped stone over in the other corner:

The seventeenth century discovery of the Polynesian Islands by common seamen was one of the ancient paradise promises fulfilled. The green islands, the blue sea, the golden beaches and the golden sunlight, the dusky girls! Fruit incomparable, fish incomparable, roast pig and baked bird beyond believing, breadfruit and volcano, absolute and continuing perfection of weather, brown-skin paradise maidens such as are promised in alcoran, song and string-music and surf-music! This was the Promised Paradise of the Islands, and it came true.

But even this was a weak thing beside the less known, the earlier and continuing discovery of the Floating Islands (or the Travertine Islands) by more intrepid farers. The girls of the Floating Islands are lighter (except for the cool blacks on the Greenstone Dolomites) than the Polynesian maidens; they are more intelligent and much more full of fun; are more handsome and fuller-bodied; are of an artier and more vital culture. They are livelier. Oh how they are livelier! And the regions themselves defy description. For color and zest, there is nothing in Polynesia or Aegea or Antilla to compare at all. And all the Travertine people are so friendly! Perhaps it is well that they are little known and little visited. We may be too weak for their experience.

Look closely at that little stone ere we leave it. Are you sure that you have correctly noted the shape of it?

Then a still smaller stone to be set in, here where there seems too empty a little gap. It’s a mere quotation:

“In Lapidary Inscription a Man is not upon Oath.”

Miss Phosphor McCabe did visit the limestone salesman’s country, and she did do the photographic article “With Camera and Canoe in Sky-High Stutzamutza.” The stunning, eye-blowing, heart-swelling, joy-filled color photography cannot be given here, but these are a few extracts from the sustaining text:

“Stutzamutza is a limestone land of such unbelievable whiteness as to make the eyes ache with delight. It is this super-whiteness as a basis that makes all the other colors stand out with such clarity. There cannot be anywhere a bluer sky than, for most of the hours and days, surrounds Stutzamutza (see plates I and II). There cannot be greener fields, where there are fields, nor more silvery water (plates IV and V). The waterfalls are absolute rainbows, especially Final Falls, when it flows clear off the high land (plate VI). There cannot be more variegated cliffs, blue, black, pink, ochre, red, green, but always with that more-white-than-white basic (plate VII). There cannot be such a sun anywhere else. It shines here as it shines nowhere on the world.