Рафаэль Лафферти - The Best of R. A. Lafferty

Many of the stone-island people are well known along certain almost regular routes. These people are all of a powerful and rather coarse beauty. They are good-natured and hearty. They actually traffic in stone, trading amazing tonnages of top grade building stone for grain and other simple provisions.

There is no scientific explanation at all of how these things can be, how the stone islands are able to float in the sky. But that they do so is the open secret of perhaps a million persons.

Really, I am now too wealthy to be put in a madhouse (though I made my money in a rather mad traffic which would not be generally believed). I am too old to be laughed at openly: I will merely be smiled at as an eccentric. I have now retired from that weather profession which served me as a front for many years (which profession, however, I loved and still love).

I know what I know. There are more things in the zone fifteen miles above the earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio.

Miss Phosphor McCabe did another really stunning photographic article for the Heritage Geographical Magazine . It had a catchy title: “All Right, Then You Tell Me How I Did It, or The Building of the Pink Pagoda.”

“The Pink Pagoda is complete, except for such additions as I shall have made whenever the notion strikes me, and whenever my high-flying friends are in the neighborhood. It is by far the largest structure in the world and also, in my opinion, the most beautiful. But it is not massive in appearance: it is light and airy. Come see it in the stone, all of you! Come see it in the color photography (plates I to CXXIX) if you are not able to come yourself. This wonderful structure gives the answers to hundreds of questions, if you will just open your eyes and your ears.

“Of ancient megalithic structures it has sometimes been asked how a hundred or more of one-hundred ton blocks of stone could have been piled up, and fitted so carefully that even a knife-blade could not be inserted between the blocks. It’s easy. You usually don’t set a hundred one-hundred ton blocks, unless for a certain ornamentation. You set one ten-thousand ton block, and the joinings are merely simulated. In the Pink Pagoda I have had set blocks as heavy as three hundred thousand tons of pink limestone (see plate XXI).

“They bring the whole island down in place. They split off what block is wanted at that location (and, believe me, they are some splitters); then they withdraw the island a little bit and leave the block in place.

“Well, how else was it done? How did I get the one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand ton main capstone in place four-hundred-and-fifty-feet in the air? With ramps? Oh stop it, you’ll scare the cuckoos. The stone pillars and turrets all around and below it are like three-dimensional lace-work, and that main capstone had to go on last. It wasn’t done by rocking it up on ramps, even if there had been a place for the ramps. It was all done on one Saturday afternoon, and here are the sequence pictures showing just how it was done. It was done by using a floating island, and by detaching pieces of that island as it was floated into place. I tell you that there is no other way that a one-hundred-and-five pound girl can assemble a thirty-million ton Pink Pagoda in six hours. She has got to have a floating island, with a north cliff of pink limestone, and she has got to be very good friends with the people on that island.

“Please come and see my Pink Pagoda. All the people and all the officials avert their eyes from it. They say that it is impossible that such a thing could be there, and therefore it cannot be there. But it is there. See it yourself (or see plates IV, IX, XXXIII, LXX especially). And it is pretty (see plates XIX, XXIV, V, LIV). But best, come see it as it really is.”

Miss Phosphor McCabe did that rather astonishing photographic article for the Heritage Geographical Magazine . Heritage Geographical refused to publish it, though, stating that such things were impossible. And they refused to come and see the Pink Pagoda itself, which is a pity, since it is the largest and most beautiful structure on earth.

It stands there yet, on that thirty-acre hill right on the north edge of town. And you have not heard the last stone of it yet. The latest, a bad-natured little addition, will not be the last: Miss Phosphor swears that it will not be.

There was a flimsy-winged enemy flew down, shortly after the first completion of the pagoda, and set the latest very small stone (it is called the egg-of-doubt stone) on top of the main capstone. ’Twas a crabbed written little stone, and it read:

That crabby little ballad-stone on the top almost spoils the Pink Pagoda for me. But it will be removed, Miss Phosphor McCabe says, just as soon as her traveling friends are back in this neighborhood and she can get up there.

That is all that we have to say on the subject of stone setting.

Does anyone else have something further to add?

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

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

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

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

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

Come along.

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

Rifles are handed out.

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

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