Aurelia Read online

  AURELIA

  R. A. Lafferty

  www.sfgateway.com

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Aurelia

  Website

  Also by R. A. Lafferty

  About the Author

  Copyright

  We’ll scorch the skies and dip potluck

  From Hound-Dog Hulk to Skokumchuck.

  World Government Ballad

  They carried on and sang that evening before they took off:

  “We are the quanta, we are the wave,

  We are the bravest of the brave.”

  They sang the ballad, but they weren’t as brave as all that. They were scared.

  Were they crows or were they people? They perched up on the spheres like crows. They sang like scared crows, and singing was supposed to be one of their accomplishments. They were having kick-off night together and giving a rousing send-off to their own adventures, but they were scared of it all. And yet, being scared wasn’t a thing they could admit to themselves or to each other.

  They were not only jittery but they were also a little bit ridiculous (it was planned that they should be), perched like big birds on the tops of their oblate spheres which in turn were balanced atop launching needles that stabbed into the night sky. What ungainly, roosting crows they were! It took all their ingenuity to appear beautiful, and they barely made it.

  All of them were fourteen-year old children. In one hour, after they had embarked, they would all be fourteen year old men and women. This night marked a change in their lives. It was the ready-or-not adventure, and they could never be ready enough for it.

  They had to trust to their schooling and to their competence. They had almost completed their tenth form courses. All that was left was the ‘World Government’ portion (on which they would embark within an hour), and then the composing of the tenth form thesis after they should return. Usually though, not all of them would return from such a flight and governing.

  They were supposed to spend the hours before kick-off in prayer on their solitary launching needles. And they did pray, yes: but they used a free sort of corporate prayer. The launching needles that seven of them had selected and on which they had built their flight crafts were quite close together, within singing distance; even within conversation distance considering the expanded sort of operatic-conversevole voices, very carrying, that they had developed. Close friends should not be completely solitary on kick-off night. Other groups had been modifying their kick-off night prayers for several years. They had to proclaim themselves some way. Proclamation was prayer too.

  “We are the kings of the coming years.

  We are the young-blood pioneers.”

  So they sang in chorus from their respective launching needles. It was praying and vaunting and inventing all at the same time. The seven young people were inventing modes and guises and persons for themselves, mysterious person-fronts that they would use for only part of this one year. In a way, they were spouting and fledging wings for themselves, for only this double flight, a going-out and a return. This was the last time they would ever use even figurative wings. But they would always remember that once they had had wings, even if they had not been of a completely physical sort.

  “Consider this as a purging of yourselves that, for convenience sake, comes at the time of your flights and governorships,” one of their instructors had told them. “This is something to be got rid of and got over with. This will be the only—ugh!—romantic episode that any of you will ever be allowed. It is something to have had at the early turn of life. And it is something to put behind you when you are fully adult.”

  That was put pretty prosaically by the instructor, but to themselves they presented it more singingly. There were seven of them on their launching needles that night, four males and three females, and they shared one ‘romantic episode’ soul between them.

  “But you have been kept very busy, very hour-filled, day-filled, night-filled busy,” another of the instructors had said, “so that you have not been able to be precocious in all directions. You have developed towering loyalties and affections, but you have not yet become polarized. After your flights and your governorships, then your feelings may be polarized, but not yet. It is a question whether any world governor should ever have polarized feelings. They get in the way of pure intuition.

  “Last year you had your first essays in marriage and reproduction, and yet that was all pretty basic. You learned and experienced by rote, but the realization and completion of these things are reserved for a future time. Next year, your feelings and attitudes will be more fulfilled. But it is not merely of the polarized aspects, coming on you when you are too young, that you must be wary.

  “There are variant attitudes in all of you. That is the unnatural fact of the matter. There are unregulated and un-oriented thoughts in all of you. These must be removed from you without killing you in either mind or body. These thoughts and residues will fly away with you when you fly on your kick-off night voyages. But they will not return with you when you return. You will leave these behind you in the strange and uncouth places where you will travel and govern. All such flighty things (if I may so pun about the undesirable traits to be jettisoned) will be scattered and extinguished during your flights. By these flights, we sift you like wheat. Those of you who are too small and too ungenuine will fall through the sieve and will no longer be a part of the ‘golden world cultus.’ Whether you are alive or dead, you will be dead to your own world if you fall through the sieve.”

  Yes, the instructor was proved right. There were flighty things and notions and ideas, explosively flighty things, in all of them that night. But the instructor (he was one of the most gentle of them) had had a sort of afterthought at that time.

  “Ah, perhaps you will not be quite dead to us even so. We know that there are those who do not come back, and yet live somewhere for many years. They form a sort of penumbra that is always partisan to the golden world. If you cannot be true ‘Children of Light,’ perhaps the next best is that you should be ‘Children of the Penumbra.’ ”

  Now Aurelia, the most awkward of the s
even of them by far, was trying to declare herself. “It is with the utmost trepidation, but with total fealty to duty, and with a hunger for the high heroic, that—“Aurelia began to sing or speak in that operatic—conversevole voice that carried strongly to the various launching needles.

  “Oh cut it out, Aurelia! Do not be stuffy,” Rex boomed in his own strong basso-parlante.

  “But I will be stuffy,” Aurelia counterpointed. “I am stuffed full of things and feelings. I can feel the stirrings, not entirely physical, of the one-term wings on my shoulders. Aye, and my mouth is full of the feathers from them. Give me your loyalty, all of you. Give me your affection. I am the one of us who is the most lacking in everything. I am the one of us who needs support the most.”

  “None of us is lacking, nor can be!” Lavender said or sounded in her easy contralto. “It is not possible that any one of our species should ever be lacking in any way. Let us sing our fine arrogances:

  “Swift to the dens of the lesser breeds!

  We are the gardeners. They are the weeds.”

  That was the arrogance that they all gave voice to. With the ‘people themselves,’ such things were always lawful arrogance. Well, which of the lesser breeds could send their young people out on such flights and governorships? Not one, not one, except maybe the people of Delphinia, and they were very far away. And yet, Lavender was mistaken in her boast. They were all of them lacking in a hundred different ways. They had been deficient in their pupal and larval stages, and in all their growing up. They were deficient for any expectations that might be held for them. Really, it seemed that the time-table that had been set for them was too swift a one. And Aurelia was the most lacking and deficient of the seven-group, or of many seven-groups.

  Well, in her own way at least, she was also the object of the most affection and the most loyalty. She had to be, or she’d never have made it even this far. But now, tonight, they would be flying off singly, and the loyalties and affections of the others would accompany her only in the way that good wishes might accompany one.

  Had Aurelia even constructed an adequate ship? It was frightening to have to ask a question like that. But Aurelia just wasn’t as smart as the rest of them. Her life would be sailing with the ship that she had built, and no one else could aid her in its design or operation. But would a faulty ship mean the end of her life? For every sortie, there was usually the death of one or two of the seven; and it would take some hard remembering to come up with a farer as badly equipped as Aurelia. It would be hard to come up with one with more friends too. But, sadly, Aurelia was the most likely bet for destruction.

  Whatever sort of deep-space ship she had constructed for herself, it couldn’t be very good. Aurelia had always been weak on ‘Space Ship Design.’ And she had always been weak in navigation, so what sort of world would she likely arrive at anyhow? At her second or third choice world, maybe? For the little bit that she knew about worlds, one would have to shudder at what her second or third choice might be. None of the young persons could actually ask one another for help. But one could ask for information after the barn door was already burned, as the proverb has it.

  “How will they know when one of us has come to govern a world?” Aurelia wailed in fluty frustration. “We are not allowed to announce to anyone that one of us has come to govern. How will they recognize one of us as having the power and right to rule them? And what can one of us do if they do not recognize me? I’m lost already, I’m lost.”

  “When a lion appears in the midst of a herd of hartebeests, the hartebeests will recognize the fact,” Pandolfo sang from a near needle. “When a lighted candle is placed inside a hollowed-out pumpkin, the pumpkin will know it. You will be that candle wherever you go, Aurelia. You will be the light of that world. You will illuminate it even from its east unto its west. A lot of things you don’t have, but you do have light, Aurelia.”

  “Want to bet?” Aurelia chanted sadly. “I couldn’t illuminate even the legendary Kolokynthekephale, Pumpkin-Head World itself. If there is such a place, that’s probably where I’ll end up.”

  “Aurelia, don’t you know what world you’re going out to govern?” Adrian sang in amazement. “Haven’t you recorded the navigation sets for your first and second and third choices?”

  “Nah,” Aurelia caroled. “It’s all in that vile number code.”

  “Concatenated Calculi Modules, girl!” Patmo exploded in rough song. “You’re fourteen years old! Don’t you understand the ‘Navigation and Selection Number Code?’ ”

  “Not nearly as well as I’d like to,” Aurelia voiced. “And my ship doesn’t understand the subject much better than I do. You see, my ship isn’t really very much smarter than I am, even though I tried to make it smarter. What if the people on the world I go to govern won’t know that I am supposed to be superior? How will I ever convince them that I am?”

  “That is quite a problem, Aurelia,” Audry sang sweetly. “There has to be some way we can help you. We’ll cheat, we’ll lie, we’ll slip you answers. We will do something.”

  Kick-off Nights are always nights of good weather, even if favorable weather must be borrowed from nights before and after. This was a perfect night.

  “We are the bright, unruffled folk,

  With buck-skin bellies and hearts of oak.”

  so the intrepid seven sang. Six of them were no longer nervous for themselves. Now they were nervous only for Aurelia. This was a good thing. It was bad when young persons were nervous for themselves on kick-off, and six of them were saved from that now.

  “It isn’t even fatal if you bear in on a world that is not one of your proper targets, Aurelia,” Patmo called to her. “Every ship is programmed (you programmed your own ship to this, though you may not remember doing it since your own programming overrides your conscious thoughts and intentions) for seven alternate worlds if it misses its first world by faulty navigation. And it won’t very much matter which one of them you come to. They will all be types of the one that you first agreed to go to; they will all need governing; and they will all fit the conditions of your assignment sufficiently. Confidence! That is what you need, girl, confidence!”

  They all meditated and prayed. And they sang some more:

  “Tougher we be than barbs and thorns!

  We are the horniest of the horns!”

  That is what they sang for their last vaunt verse, and then things began to happen to them. Like the crows that they so resembled in their perching on their high spheroids, they began to wake, one by one, to the scent and sound of dawn somewhere. They began to loosen their wings to take compulsive flight.

  They were full of unbottled feelings, and they had better get out of there fast. Indeed, their ships were programmed (by themselves) to take flight when their exact trajectory-second arrived. They went into their ships. They seemed to melt into their oblate spheres, their space-craft that they had made themselves. They took off smartly without unnecessary fire or fume.

  Audry took flight. Then Rex. Then Adrian (his ship was heavily laden, for it would have an important and far flight.) Then Lavender and Patmo.

  “Don’t forget to set your Compensating Contingency Grid just as you feel yourself going into the grasp of the flight, Aurelia,” Patmo called to her with his last song for that while. “You do forget things, you know, if you’re not reminded of them.”

  “Oh, I’ll say so!” Aurelia confessed in shameful measures. “But it wouldn’t have mattered if I forgot to set my Compensating Contingency Grid at the last moment. What does matter is that I’ve forgotten even to make the grid. Oh, what a flight this is going to be!”

  Pandolfo flew, the last of the others.

  Then only Aurelia was left. She was very tense about it, and she shouldn’t have been. This was only a tenth grade school assignment such as every fourteen year old child must take. The worst that could happen to her was that she might fail the assignment. The commonest way of failing such an assignment was getting killed or vaporized in
flight or in governorship. That caused one automatically to fail the course.

  ‘World Government,’ the going out to govern one of the minor worlds for a few equivalent months, was an important course. But all the courses were important.

  Aurelia flew on sudden impulse. She had no way of knowing whether she flew at her proper moment, at her ‘exact trajectory-second or not. Another thing that she had forgotten to make was a Monitoring Chronometer.

  “There isn’t any way to make a bad flight,” one of the instructors had said to them two days before their kick-off. “If there were such a way, then Aurelia would do it. But she won’t. You have all constructed your flight ships on the basis of your multi-level intelligences, and there is no way at all that any of you could have really faulty intelligence. You belong to the ‘Golden People,’ and the ‘Golden People’ cannot fail in routine things, nor in special things. If it were possible for one of your to fail, Aurelia would be the one. But she will not fail. Too many people like her too much, and being liked provides one of the most powerful intellectual feed-backs known.

  “All of you will always have more things go right than will go wrong, simply because you are the people you are. You will always have more reason than unreason. You will always have more logic than illogic. You will always have more luck than unluck. That is because you are of the special people.

  “All your inventions and constructions will be special, and they will not fail. They will have built-in safeguards. Should one of you be rendered unconscious during your flight, it would not greatly matter. You will have constructed your ships so that they will follow the instructions of your unconscious if you are unconscious. And they will follow the instructions of your death-mind (one of the most improvising and inventive of all mind-stages) if you are dead. But it is unlikely that one of you should die on your outward flight. If any of you would do it, it would be Aurelia. But she won’t.