Рафаэль Лафферти - The Best of R. A. Lafferty

“How long could we fall,” Welkin asked, “if we had not stopped time, if we let it flow at its own pace, or at ours? How long could we fall?”

“Hephaestus once tumbled through space all day long,” Icarus Riley said, “and the days were longer then.”

Karl Vlieger had gone wall-eyed from an interior-turned sexual passion that he often experienced in diving. Icarus Riley seemed to be on laughing gas suddenly; this is a sign that Sky is not having a perfect effect. Joseph Alzarsi felt a cold wind down his spine and a series of jerky little premonitions.

“We are not perfect,” Joseph said. “Tomorrow or the next day we may be, for we do approach perfection. We win a round. And we win another. Let us not throw away our victory today through carelessness. The Earth has bowed his old back a little bit, and we make ready for him! Now, guys, now!”

Four of them (or maybe only three of them) pulled the rings. The chutes unpeeled, flowered, and jerked. They had been together like a sheaf in close conversation. But suddenly, on coming to earth, they were spread out over five hundred yards.

They assembled. They packed their chutes. That would be all the diving for that day.

“Welkin, how did you pack your chute so quickly?” Icarus asked her suspiciously.

“I don’t know.”

“You are always the slowest one of us, and the sloppiest. Someone always has to reroll your chute for you before it is used again. And you were the last one to land just now. How were you the first one to be packed? How did you roll it so well? It has the earmarks of my own rolling, just as I rolled it for you before we took off this morning.”

“I don’t know, Icarus. Oh, I think I’ll go up again, straight up.”

“No, you’ve sailed and dived enough for one morning. Welkin, did you even open your chute?”

“I don’t know.”

High on Sky, they went up again the next morning. The little plane named Shrike flew up as no plane had ever flown before, up through Storm. The storm-shrouded Earth shrank to the size of a pea-doogie.

“We will play a trick on it,” said Welkin. “When you’re on Sky you can play a trick on anything and make it abide by it. I will say that the pea-doogie that was the world is nothing. See, it is gone. Then I will select another pea-doogie, that one there, and I will call it the world. And that is the world that we will come down to in a little while. I’ve switched worlds on the world, and it doesn’t know what happened to it.”

“It’s uneasy, though,” Joseph Alzarsi spoke through flared nostrils. “You shook it. No wonder the world has its moments of self-doubt.”

They were one million feet high. The altimeter didn’t go that high, but Ronald Kolibri, the pilot, wrote out the extended figure in chalk to make it correct. Welkin stepped out. Karl and Icarus and Joseph stepped out. Ronald Kolibri stepped out, but only for a while. Then he remembered that he was the pilot and got back in the plane. They were so high that the air was black and star-filled instead of blue. It was so cold that the empty space was full of cracks and potholes. They dived half a million feet in no time at all. They pulled up laughing.

It was invigorating, it was vivifying. They stamped on the clouds, and the clouds rang like frosty ground. This was the ancestral country of all hoarfrost, of all grained-snow and glare-ice. Here was weather-maker, here was wind-son. They came into caves of ice mixed with moraine; they found antler hatchets and Hemicyon bones; they found coals still glowing. The winds bayed and hunted in packs through the chasms. These were the cold Fortean clouds, and their location is commonly quite high.

They came down below Storm, finding new sun and new air. It was pumpkin-summer, it was deep autumn in the sky.

They dropped again, miles and millennia, to full Sky-summer: the air so blue that it grew a violet patina on it to save the surface. Their own space formed about them again, as it did every day, and time stopped.

But not motion! Motion never stopped with them. Do you realize that nothingness in a void can still be in motion? And how much more they of the great centrality! There was Dynamic; there was sustaining vortex; there was the high serenity of fevered motion.

But is not motion merely a relationship of space to time? No. That is an idea that is common to people who live on worlds, but it is a subjective idea. Here, beyond the possible influence of any worlds, there was living motion without reference.

“Welkin, you look quite different today,” Joseph Alzarsi spoke in wonder. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. It’s wonderful to be different and I’m wonderful.”

“It is something missing from you,” said Icarus. “I believe it is a defect missing.”

“But I hadn’t any, Icarus.”

They were in central and eternal moment, and it did not end, it could not end, it goes on yet. Whatever else seems to happen, it is merely in parentheses to that moment.

“It is time to consider again,” Icarus mused after a while. There is no time or while in the Moment, but there is in the parentheses. “I hope it is the last time we will ever have to consider. We, of course, are in our own space and beyond time or tangent. But the Earth, such as it is, is approaching with great presumption and speed.”

“But it’s nothing to us!” Karl Vlieger suddenly raged out in a chthonic and phallic passion. “We can shatter it! We can shoot it to pieces like a clay pigeon! It cannot rush onto us like a slashing dog. Get down, world! Heel, you cur! Heel, I say!”

“We say to one world ‘rise’ and it rises, and to another one ‘heel’ and it heels,” Icarus Sky-spoke in his dynamic serenity.

“Not yet,” Joseph Alzarsi warned. “Tomorrow we will be total. Today we are not yet. Possibly we could shatter the world like a clay pigeon if we wished, but we would not be lords of it if we had to shatter it.”

“We could always make another world,” said Welkin reasonably.

“Certainly, but this one is our testing. We will go to it when it is crouched down. We cannot allow it to come ravening to us. Hold! Hold there, we order you!”

And the uprushing world halted, cowed.

“We go down,” said Joseph. “We will let it come up only when it is properly broken.”

(“And they inclined the heavens and came down.”)

Once more, three of them pulled the rings. And the chutes unpeeled, flowered, and jerked. They had been like a sheaf together in their moment; but now, coming to earth, they were suddenly scattered out over five hundred yards.

“Welkin, you didn’t have your chute at all today!” Icarus gaped with some awe when they had assembled again. “That is what was different about you.”

“No, I guess I didn’t have it. There was no reason to have it if I didn’t need it. Really, there was never any reason for me to have used one at all, ever.”

“Ah, we were total today and didn’t know it,” Joseph ventured. “Tomorrow none of us will wear chutes. This is easier than I had believed.”

Welkin went to the Sky-Seller to buy new Sky that night. Not finding him in the nearer shadows of the Rocks, she went down and down, drawn by the fungoid odor and the echoing dampness of the underground. She went through passages that were man-made, through passages that were natural, through passages that were unnatural. Some of these corridors, it is true, had once been built by men, but now they had reverted and became most unnatural deep-earth caverns. Welkin went down into the total blackness where there were certain small things that still mumbled out a faint white color; but it was the wrong color white, and the things were all of a wrong shape.