Archipelago Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Bonus Material

  Anamnesis

  Of fossils from the recent past

  Out of gigantothereous strata

  Across a triple-decade vast,

  Observe the bones! Regard the data!

  Oh dear than the Mastodont!

  They lie in ash of fading ember

  While sexton-beetles eat and hunt

  Lest flesh remain that might remember.

  A surging gallimauferie

  Of broken reeds upon a charger,

  And something of serenity,

  And something yet a little larger.

  They knew the evoluting crock,

  They knew a taller star than Vega,

  A firster Peter for a rock,

  Not yet so empty an Omega.

  They gave the Ghostly Thing release

  From pink-eyed heretics who bound it.

  They sought the ancient Golden Fleece

  And, what is better yet, they found it.

  Before ‘Triumphant’ grew a taint,

  Before (in catch-words and kerygmies)

  Falsetto Chorus raised its plaint,

  They never knew the race of pygmies;

  Nor guessed the Situation Bit,

  Nor found the Lord so dull a lover,

  Nor used the love-as-catch-word kit

  A multitude of sins to cover.

  And some are dead, and some are done,

  Or (fallen to heroics fever)

  Still oddly seek the All-in-One;

  And some are better folks than you are.

   — R. A. Lafferty

  Chapter One

  In A Southern City

  1.

  All this begins in a southern city and at nine o’clock in the morning, the same hour at which the world was made. It was a Thursday when originally man was not. Indeed, in these latter days there were few people in the streets and not many in the pubs. But beer was available (barley and hops had been made on the third day), and the morning had a freshness as in the earliest weeks of the world, as the older people remember them. A fast wind was driving the clearing clouds, and the pavements were wet. (When the world was first made it was as though it had just rained.)

  The first man in the world was drinking the first beer. He was Finnegan (not in name, but in self), and he looked at himself in the bar mirror. He saw for the first time that first face, and this was his appearance: he had a banana nose, long jumpy muscles along cheek and tempora, and a mouth in motion. He was dark and lean, like a yearling bull. His eyes had a redness that suggested a series of stormy days and nights, were not previous days and nights impossible. He was a little more than half Italian and a little more than half Irish, as was Adam his counterpart in a variant account.

  His mind was clear but not of a pattern. He was rootless and renegade. A moment before this, he had been in the Garden. Then he raised his eyes from the drink. The Garden was gone, and he was in the middle of the World. Finnegan looked at the World with new-made eyes, and he doubted that he would ever find a place in it.

  But he was not alone. He had a companion named Vincent. Vincent, however, was neither rootless nor renegade. His mind, not so clear not so deep as that of Finnegan, did have a pattern. He had not known the Garden. He was born in the World, and he would always have a place in it.

  “In principio,” said Finnegan, “creavit Deus masculum et feminam, that is to say, God made the first pair a man and a woman.”

  “But the earliest stories always begin ‘There were these two guys in a bar,’ ” Vincent contradicted. “I'd say it in Latin if I knew how.”

  “The two versions cannot be reconciled, and I worry about it,” Finnegan said. “But, every time the world begins, it does begin with two young men in a pub. All things else are subsequent to this.”

  Beer before breakfast, and you'll have sudden luck all day. Toohey's, Tooth's, K. B. Lager, the same beers they had in Paradise: it hadn't all been a dream. The boys left the pub but they didn't leave the pubs; there were many of them to visit.

  The visiting of them took them all the way through King's Cross and Darlinghurst and down the hill to Down-Town. There is something about the morning buildings and the brightness of trams (trams were made on the fifth day) that stays fresh.

  In a longue they met Loy and Margaret, red-headed girls of the city. They didn't remember meeting them. They had already been talking to them.

  “We're stewardesses,” said Loy. “We have a man in every port.”

  “Loy has. I haven't,” said Margaret.

  “In all the major ports,” Loy amended. “In one place the camel-drivers wouldn't have anything to do with us. They said that red-headed women were witches. What do you call your dark friend?”

  “Red-headed women are witches,” Vincent insisted. “Him. Not by his name: that's John Solli. We call him Finnegan. You know, like in Duffey's Tavern.”

  “I miss the reference but I recognize the type,” Loy said. “There's a Duffey's in Cork, and one in Port Said, and one in New York. Why don't you take us to the Plaza? It isn't Duffey's, but you could put Duffey's in any of its pockets.”

  They went to the Plaza. It was a large building and had forty-eight bars though no one person had ever been in all of them. There is one Ladies’ Bar that has never known man. There are half a dozen of the bars that have never had a female of any sort. But most were open to all.

  Two stories below street level was the railway station with its bars and cafés and supper clubs. One story down were the trams, with lines to the harbor and elsewhere; and there also were the taxi ramps. And the street floor was a multitude of arcades and shops interspersed with bars.

  On the upper floors were the special clubs: the Norwegian Seamen's Club, the Dutch Seamen's Club, several English Seamen's Clubs, and a large number of private and social clubs of the city and of the world.

  This was the center of town. Less blessed cities have other sorts of centers: government buildings, cultist edifices, even commercial or financial structures. But the Plaza was the center of this city, and here the shimmering people passed pleasurable hours. The bright morning slid into golden afternoon.

  Finnegan phoned Hans to join them there. And Margie phoned Marie. And these ran around together all the rest of the time they were in the city.

  2.

  They were at the track. The girls had brought them there. When they first mentioned Ranwick, Finnegan thought it was the name of another bar.

  “The horses are running backwards,” he said, “clockwise instead of counter-clockwise as in the States. Hans will know the reason for this, as for everything.”

  “No, it's unreasonable,” Hans said. “They're running against an elemental. How could they make the same mistake in both hemispheres?”

  “What, dear?” Marie asked him.

  “The Coriolis, an elemental force. North of the Equator, everything turns clockwise: whirlpools, whirlwinds, the flight of projectiles. An object falling from a height does not fall straight down. It falls in a slight spiral. And people lost in the wilderness wander in clockwise circles, not because the right leg is shorter than the left (they are usually within inches of the same length), but because of Coriolis, the great Earth force. And here South of the Equator everything is reversed, and all things should turn in a counter direction. But in both halves of the world the horses run against the prevailing elemental,” Hans complained. “I don't understand it.
”

  This was a fine establishment, the best track that the boys had ever seen. Perhaps twenty thousand people were there. Among them were Tom Shire and Freddy Castle, Aussie soldiers. With these they became friendly. They placed bets: and naturally they all won. They drank beer together, and sat on the green lawn of the infield and watched the ponies stretch and run.

  There are several hours not accounted for. Then the races had been over for quite a while. The girls wanted them to finish up drinking and take them to supper.

  “Why do all Aussies eat left-handed?” Finnegan asked.

  “We do not eat left-handed,” Tom Shire explained. “We eat with both hands, just as you do. But you keep changing hands. You hold your knife in your right hand and your fork in your left when you cut your meat. Then you change hands and eat with your fork in your right. We always keep the knife in the right hand and the fork in the left as they should be.”

  “It doesn't matter,” said Freddy. “Fingers were made before forks.”

  “They say that,” said Hans, “but it isn't so. We have knives, spoons, and forks much older than fingers. While there are no ancient table forks, there are two- and three-tine fish spears, and there are certain un-tined stabbers (the earliest eating forks) that are very ancient. And any archaeologist will tell you that ancient fingers are almost unknown. On clear evidence, forks were made before fingers.”

  “How can you make forks without fingers?” Loy asked him.

  “Make them any way you like. The argument is over unless you can find a finger as old as the earliest fork. We never find old fingers, only jaw bones and brain pans and pelvises. I would never claim that forks were made before pelvises.”

  “The Italians invented the fork,” Finnegan maintained. “We invented them to get olives out of bottles. We also invented the olive. We also invented the bottle.”

  But Vincent believed that the Irish had invented the bottle.

  This was the appearance of the eight as they sat and talked after dinner:

  Vincent was handsome within the limitations of the Irish, his face being made out of whatever Irish faces are made from and put together as a sort of joke: the eyebrows not on straight, and the mouth too mobile. But it was a better face than a lot of them and he had fun wearing it.

  Hans was a merry-looking kraut, and powerful. If his head were on a platter, Salome would not have lifted it easily. He seemed to read minds with his blue eyes, and he read them better than they were. Strangers, seeing him, sometimes asked each other if he were not somebody important, which was unusual, considering his youth. He was somebody important, but not as they meant it, not presently in name.

  Tom Shire was large and fair. Freddy Castle was smaller and with a rusty tinge. Both were unmistakable Australian: if they were dressed in burnouse and desert robe and seen at a distance of a mile dimly through a sand storm, you would still know they were Australian. There is a stamp on these men and it will last forever. If, thirty thousand years from now, the femur of one of them should be found in Turkestan, the professor of the future would be puzzled; but he would recognize it. “What in the bone-bleached world is the femur of an Australian doing here?” he would ask.

  Margaret Murphy was like a little girl dressed as a grown-up. She was quiet; she darted her eyes about the group. Loy Larkin was a pink cloud.

  There were two ways of looking at Marie: through the eyes of the six; or through the eyes of Hans. To the six she was a chubby girl, with a roguish look, a tart way of talking, a store of private jokes, and the habit of brushing her hair from her eyes with the back of her hand. But Hans already looked at her with other eyes.

  Finnegan was at a disadvantage when seen at close range. From a distance, or in dim light, or from behind, he was perfect. He had the lightness and grace of young Mercury, the loose strength and frightening speed of Dionysus before he became puffy with indulgence, the compelling aspect of Prometheus on the morning when he challenged the older cosmos.

  But closer inspection revealed him not as an angel, but as a gargoyle. His face was a comic mask with a bugle nose in the middle of it. It was always felt that he would take it off and reveal his true face, but he never did.

  His voice, at a slight distance, so as not to be understood, had a ring and rhythm that was almost magical. But, to closer harkening, it also was grotesque: for Finnegan spoke a dialect that was like nothing else ever heard in the world, not even in his home town. There are blocks in New Orleans where they throw more OI sounds than in Brooklyn. There is a waterfront Irish that sounds as if it were made out of old shirt-tails. There are Little Italy lingos that are unintelligible in the next street. There is a shapeless drift of Cajun French come to town that simply amazes the hearer. And there is a form of speech that the mud-cat uses and which is not understood by other catfish. Finnegan's speech was compounded of all of these. And it had something else in it so peculiarly his own that no one who has ever heard it has ever completely recovered from it.

  “Yes, we can't understand you, Finn,” Margaret said, “but it sure is fun trying.”

  “A blinking Aussie, and talking about how people talk!” Finnegan objected.

  After coffee, Margie and Loy had to catch a train; and Vincent and Finnegan took them to their station.

  Tom and Freddy went back to their barracks where the wet canteen was on.

  And Hans Schultz and Marie Monaghan went down to a coffee house by the harbor.

  3.

  They drank coffee for a long time and laced it with brandy. “I don't know why I so love coffee,” said Marie. “All good Aussies should love tea. The English and the Chinese and the Russians drink tea. The Arabs and the Yanks and the South Americans drink coffee. Do you know that Englishmen and the Chinamen are very alike, Hans?”

  “I could never tell them apart.”

  “And the Arabs and the Yanks are nearly as close. They are both Peoples of the Book, though their intellectuals are irreligious. They both distrust alcohol for the wrong reasons. The plainsmen of the lands are similar, and the thugs, and the slum children.”

  “It was Clement VIII who made a Christian out of coffee,” said Hans. “It was considered an infidel drink in Europe till he gave it sanction. And the objections to it were that it was non-alcoholic. It has the social leanings of alcohol but it shirks its responsibility. You can sit and drink it for hours and not have to be carried home; this makes coffee the greater encourager of loitering. How long have you been in this town?”

  “A hundred fifty-six years.”

  “I didn't think you were that old.”

  “I mean that we Monaghans have been here for a hundred and fifty-six years. The Larkins and Murpheys are old families too. We're the lot of us old Irish. But this has always seemed temporary to me. I thought I'd try to find a husband the next time I'm in Dublin or Cork. Now, though, I may trap you.”

  She already head. Hans had known it long before she did. Hans knew everything before everyone else, even if it concerned himself.

  Salvation Sally came, and after a while she selected them and sat at their table. They were the only ones who contributed when she passed the cup that hung on the end of her hymn-strumming guitar, and she was friendly.

  “Jesus is coming,” she said.

  “He's already been here,” said Marie.

  “Oh, I mean He's coming again. Will you be ready? I'm Sally. We preach the Second Coming and we give testimony. The harvest is at hand. Coffee, yes, please. You're probably R.C.s since you're flippant, but you're the only ones who've been kind to me. Even the Apostles must have had flippant unbelievers who talked to them kindly and invited them to rest. I bet they weren't so quick to shake that dust off their feet along after sundown when they had no better prospects. No thank you; no brandy in it; it's from the Devil. We avoid all Churches, which are traps; and yours is the deepest trap of them all. You listen to us less than anybody. We know you, but you do not know us.”

  “Je congois le faulte des Boemes;

&n
bsp; Je congois le povoir de Romme,” Marie quoted in in-person fashion.

  “I have the gift of tongues, of course,” said Sally. “We know the power of Rome all right, but I don't think that you understand the heresy of Bohemia. The question is, who are the heretics? You? They? Or we? You know the people who lived on the island?”

  “And insisted that their island was the mainland?”

  “Yes. Maybe that's you.”

  Sally was an odd one both in appearance and voice. Often she talked in catchphrases; but she was electric, she was the real thing. They talked a long time. The three of them made commitments to each other to the ends of their lives and beyond.

  “It's raining outside, Sally,” Marie said when it was late. “Here's my key. Go to my room. The address is on the tab.”

  “No, Marie. You two are frivolous. I don't want your charity. It would have to be love.” (The sound of Sally, the sound of her, like clattering crows.)

  “You ARE mixed up, Sally,” Marie told her. “Charity is only a Latin word for love. We can love by no other rite. Go to my room and be at home. Leave the door unlocked. I'll be late.”

  “No. You might come together. There might be immorality.”

  “We will not come together. We will not have an assignation.”

  “All right, I will go there. Don't stay out too late. As the Word says, if you can't be good, be careful.”

  “Sally, you're a poor preacher,” Hans told her. “It's ‘If you can't be careful, be good.’ Only the bad have to be careful.”

  “I'm afraid that I don't recognize the source of the quote.”

  “The Wisdom of Finnegan.”

  “It cannot be canonical. Goodnight Marie. Goodnight, Mr. Schultz. What does she call you?”

  “Hanschen.”

  “Goodnight, Hanschen.”