Рафаэль Лафферти - The Best of R. A. Lafferty

The City was varied, it was joyful, it was free, and it covered the entire world. The mountains and heights had all been removed, and the City, with its various strips of earth and sweet water and salt water, floated on the ocean on its interlocking floaters. As to money values, everything was free; and everything was free as to personal movement and personal choice. It was not really crowded except in the places where the people wanted it crowded, for people do love to congregate. It was sufficient as to foodstuff and shelter and entertainment. These things have always been free, really; it was their packaging and traffic that cost, and now the packaging and traffic were virtually eliminated.

“Work is joy” flashed the subliminal signs. Of course it is. It is a joy to stop and turn into an area and work for an hour, even an hour and a half, at some occupation never or seldom attempted before. William and Kandy entered an area where persons made cloth out of clamshells, softening them in one solution, then drawing them out to filaments on a machine, then forming (not weaving) them into cloth on still another machine. The cloth was not needed for clothing or for curtains, though sometimes it was used for one or the other. It was for ornamentation. Temperature did not require cloth (the temperature was everywhere equitable) and modesty did not require it, but there was something that still required a little cloth as ornament.

William and Kandy worked for nearly an hour with other happy people on the project. It is true that their own production was all stamped “Rejected” when they were finished, but that did not mean that it went all the way back to the clamshells, only back to the filament stage.

“Honest labor is never lost,” William said as solemnly as a one-horned owl with the pip.

“I knew you were a readie, but I didn’t know you were a talkie,” Kandy said. People didn’t talk much then. Happy people have no need to talk. And of course honest labor is never lost, and small bits of it are pleasurable.

This portion of the City (perhaps all portions of the City) floated on an old ocean itself. It had, therefore, a slight heave to it all the time. “The City is a tidy place” was an old and honored saying. It referred to the fact that the City moved a little with the tides. It was a sort of joke.

The two young persons came ten blocks; they came a dozen. For much of this traverse the City had been familiar to William but not to Kandy. They had been going west, and William had always been a westing lad. Kandy, however, had always wandered east from her homes, and she was the farthest west that she had ever been when she met William.

They came to the 14th Street Water Ballet and watched the swimmers. These swimmers were very good, and great numbers of curiously shaped fish frolicked with them in the green salt-fresh pools. Anyone who wished to could, of course, swim in the Water Ballet, but most of the swimmers seemed to be regulars. They were part of the landscape, of the waterscape.

William and Kandy stopped to eat at an algae-and-plankton quick-lunch place on 15th Street. Indeed, Kandy worked there for half an hour, pressing the plankton and adding squirts of special protein as the people ordered it. Kandy had worked in quick-lunch places before.

The two of them stopped at the Will of the World Exhibit Hall on 16th Street. They wrote their names with a stylus in wax when they went in, or rather William wrote the names of both of them for Kandy could not write. And because he bore the mystic name of William, he received a card out of the slot with a genuine Will of the World verse on it:

Really, had it taken such great will and heart to build the City of the World? It must have or there would not have been a Will of the World Exhibit Hall to commend it. There were some folks, however, who said that the building of the World City had been an automatic response.

Kandy, being illiterate (as the slot knew), received a picture card.

They stopped at the Cliff-Dweller Complex on 17th Street. This part of the City was new to William as well as to Kandy.

The cliffs and caves were fabricated and not natural cliff dwellings, but they looked very much as old cliff dwellings must have looked. There were little ladders going up from one level to the next. There were people sitting on the little terraces with the small-windowed apartments behind them. Due to the circular arrangement of the cliff dwellings, very many of the people were always visible to one another. The central courtyard was like an amphitheater. Young people played stickball and Indian ball in this area. They made music on drums and whistles. There were artificial rattlesnakes in coils, artificial rib-skinny dogs, artificial coyotes, artificial women in the act of grinding corn with hand querns. And also, in little shelters or pavilions, there were real people grinding simulacrum corn on apparatus.

Kandy Kalosh went into one of the pavilions and ground corn for fifteen minutes. She had a healthy love for work. William Morris made corndogs out of simulacrum corn and seaweeds. It was pleasant there. Sometimes the people sang simulacrum Indian songs. There were patterned blankets, brightly colored, and woven out of bindweed. There were buffoons in masks and buffoon suits who enacted in-jokes and in-situations that were understood by the cliff-dwelling people only, but they could be enjoyed by everyone.

“All different, all different, every block different,” William murmured in rapture. It had come on evening, but evening is a vague thing. It was never very bright in the daytime or very dark at night. The World City hadn’t a clear sky but it had always a sort of diffused light. William and Kandy traveled still farther west.

“It is wonderful to be a world traveler and to go on forever,” William exulted. “The City is so huge that we cannot see it all in our whole lives and every bit of it is different.”

“A talkie you are,” Kandy said. “However did I get a talkie? If I were a talkie too I could tell you something about that every-part-of-it-is-different bit.”

“This is the greatest thing about the whole World City,” William sang, “to travel the City itself for all our lives, and the climax of it will be to see the Wood Beyond the World . But what happens then, Kandy? The City goes on forever, covering the whole sphere. It cannot be bounded. What is beyond the Wood Beyond the World ?”

“If I were a talkie I could tell you,” Kandy said.

But the urge to talk was on William Morris. He saw an older and somehow more erect man who wore an armband with the lettering “Monitor” on it. Of course only a readie, or bookie, like William would have been able to read the word.

“My name-game ancestor had to do with the naming as well as the designing of the Wood Beyond the World, ” William told the erect and smiling man, “for I also am a William Morris. I am avid to see this ultimate wood. It is as though I have lived for the moment.”

“If you will it strongly enough, then you may see it, Willy,” the man said.

“But I am puzzled,” William worried out the words, and his brow was furrowed. “What is beyond the Wood Beyond the World ?”

“A riddle, but an easy one.” The man smiled. “How is it that you are a readie and do not know such simple things?”

“Cannot you give me a clue to the easy riddle?” William begged.

“Yes,” the man said. “Your name-game ancestor had to do with the designing of one other particular thing besides the Wood Beyond the World .”