Entire and Perfect Chrysolite - R. ...

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Entire and Perfect Chrysolite
by R. A. Lafferty
Having achieved perfection, we feel a slight unease. From our height we feel impelled to look
down. We make our own place and there is nothing below us; but in our imagination there are
depths and animals below us. To look down breeds cultishness.
There are the cults of the further lands and the further people. The Irish and Americans and
Africans are respectable philosophical and industrial parties, but the cultishness is something
beyond. Any addition to the world would mar the perfect world which is the perfect thought of
the Maker. Were there an Africa indeed, were there an Ireland, were there an America or an
Atlantis, were there Indies, then we would be other than we are. The tripartite unity that is the
ecumene would be broken; the habitable world-island, the single eye in the head that is the
world-globe would be voided.
There are those who say that our rational and perfect world should steep itself in this great
unconscious geography of the under-mind, in the outré fauna and the incredible continents of the
tortured imagination and of black legends. They pretend that this would give us depth.
We do not want depth. We want height. Let us seal off the under things of the under-mind, and
exalt ourselves! And our unease will pass.
—Audifax O’Hanlon,
Exaltation Philosophy
The
True Believer
was sailing offshore in an easterly direction in the latitude of fifteen degrees
north and the longitude of twenty-four degrees east. To the north of the coasting ship was the
beautiful Cinnamon Coast of Libya with its wonderful beaches and remarkable hotels tawny
in the distance. To the east and south and west were the white-topped waves that went on
forever and ever. The
True Believer
sailed along the southernmost edge of the ecumene, the
habitable and inhabited world.
August Shackleton was drinking Roman Bomb out of a pot-bellied bottle and yelping
happily as he handled the “wheel” of the
True Believer
.
“It’s a kids’ thing to do,” he yipped, “but there were never such beautiful waters to do it in.
We try to call in outer spirits. We try to call up inner spirits and lands. It’s a children’s antic.
Why do we do it, Boyle, other than for the fun of it?”
“Should there be another reason, Shackleton? Well, there is, but we go about it awkwardly
 and without knowing what we’re doing. The thing about humans (which nobody apparently
wishes to notice) is that we’re a species which has never had an adult culture. We feel that
lack more and more as we become truly adult in other ways. It grows tedious to stretch out a
childhood forever. The easy enjoyments, the easy rationality, the easy governments and
sciences are really childish things. We master them while we are yet children, and we look
beyond. There isn’t anything beyond the childishness, Shackleton. We must find a deeper
view somehow. We are looking for that something deeper here.”
“What? By going on a lark that is childish even to children, Boyle? I was ashamed before my
sons when I confessed on what sort of diversion I was going. First there were the séances that
we indulged in. If we raised any spirits there, they were certainly childish ones. And now
we’re on this voyage on the
True Believer
. We’re looking for the geographical home of certain
collective unconscious images! Why shouldn’t the children hoot at us? Ah well, let us not be
too ashamed. It’s colorful and stimulating fun, but it isn’t adult.”
The other four members of the party, Sebastian Linter and the three wives, Justina
Shackleton, Luna Boyle, and Mintgreen Linter, were swimming in the blue ocean. The
True
Believer
was coasting very slowly and the four swimmers were clipped to outrigger towlines.
“There’s something wrong with the water!” Justina Shackleton suddenly called up to her
husband. “There’s weeds in it, and there shouldn’t be. There’s reeds in it, and swamp grasses.
There’s mud. And there’s green slime!”
“You’re out of your lovely head, lovely,” Shackleton called back. “It’s all clear blue water off
a sand coast. I can see fish twenty meters down. It’s clear.”
“I tell you it’s full of green slime!” Justina called back. “It’s so thick and heavy that it almost
tears me away from the line. And the insects are so fierce that I have to stay submerged.”
But they were off the Cinnamon Coast of Libya. They could smell the warm sand and the
watered gardens ashore. There was no mud, there was no slime, there were no insects off the
Cinnamon Coast ever. It was all clear and bright as living, moving glass.
Sebastian Linter had been swimming on the seaward side of the ship. Now he came up ropes
to the open deck of the ship, and he was bleeding.
“It
is
thick, Shackleton,” he panted. “It’s full of snags and it’s dangerous. And that fanged
hog could have killed me. Get the rest of them out of the water!”
“Linter, you can see for yourself that it is clear everywhere. Clear, and of sufficient depth, and
serene.”
“Sure, I see that it is, Shackleton. Only it isn’t. What we are looking for has already begun.
The illusion has already happened to all senses except sight. Stuff it, Shackleton! Get them out
of the water! The snakes or the crocs will get them; the animals threshing around in the mud
will get them; and if they try to climb up onto the shore, the beasts there will break them up
 and tear them to pieces.”
“Linter, we’re two thousand meters offshore and everything is clear. But you are disturbed.
So am I. The ship just grounded, and it’s fifty meters deep here. All right, everyone! I order
everybody except my wife to come out of the water! I request that she come out. I am unable
to order her to do anything.”
The other two women, Luna Boyle and Mintgreen Linter, came out of the water. And Justina
Shackleton did not.
“In a while, August, in a while I’ll come,” Justina called up to the ship. “I’m in the middle of a
puzzle here and I want to study it some more. August, can a hallucination snap you in two?
He sure is making the motions.”
“I don’t know, lovely,” August Shackleton called back to her doubtfully.
Luna Boyle and Mintgreen Linter had come out of the ocean up the ropes. Luna was covered
with green slime and was bleeding variously. Mintgreen was covered with weeds and mud,
and her feet and hands were torn. And she hobbled with pain.
“Is your foot broken, darling?” Sebastian Linter asked her with almost concern. “But of
course it is all illusion.”
“I have the illusion that my foot is broken,” Mintgreen sniffled, “and I have the illusion that I
am in very great pain. Bleeding blubberfish, I wish it were real! It couldn’t really hurt this
much.”
“Oh elephant hokey!” Boyle stormed. “These illusions are nonsense. There can’t be such an
ambient creeping around us. We’re not experiencing anything.”
“Yes, we are, Boyle,” Shackleton said nervously. “And your expression is an odd one at this
moment. For the elephant was historical in the India that is, was fantastic in the further India
that is fantastic, and is still more fanciful in its African contingency. In a moment we will try
to conjure up the African elephant which is twice the mass of the historical Indian elephant.
The ship is dragging badly now and might even break up if this continues, but the faro shows
no physical contact. All right, the five of us on deck will put our heads together for this. You
lend us a head too, Justina!”
“Take it, take my head. I’m about to let that jawful snapper have my body anyhow. August,
this stuff is real! Don’t tell me I imagine that smell.”
“We will all try to imagine that smell, and other things,” August Shackleton stated as he
uncorked another bottle of Roman Bomb. In the visible world there was still the Cinnamon
Coast of Libya, and the blue oceans going on forever. But in another visible world, completely
unrelated to the first and occupying absolutely different space (but both occupying total
space), were the green swamps of Africa, the sedgy shores going sometimes back into rain
forests and sometimes into savannas, the moon mountains rising behind them, the air
 sometimes heavy with mist and sometimes clear with scalding light, the fifty levels of noises,
the hundred levels of colors.
“The ambient is forming nicely even before we start,” Shackleton purred. Some of them
drank Roman Bomb and some of them Green Canary as they readied themselves for the
psychic adventure.
“We begin the conjure,” Shackleton said, “and the conjure begins with words. Our little
group has been involved with several sorts of investigations, foolish ones perhaps, to discover
whether there are (or more importantly, to be sure that there are not) physical areas and
creatures beyond those of the closed ecumene. We have gone on knobknockers, we have held
séances. The séances in particular were grotesque, and I believe we were all uneasy and guilty
about them. Our Faith forbids us to evoke spirits. But where does it forbid us to evoke
geographies?”
“Ease up a little on the evoking!” Justina shrilled up to them. “The snapper just took me off at
the left ankle. I pray he doesn’t like my taste.”
“It has been a mystery for centuries,” said August (somewhat disturbed by his wife’s vulgar
outburst from the ocean), “that out of the folk unconscious there should well ideas of
continents that are not in the world, continents with a highly imaginary flora and fauna,
continents with highly imaginary people. It is a further mystery that these psychic continents
and islands should be given bearings, and that apparently sane persons have claimed to visit
them. The deepest mystery of all is Africa. Africa, in Roman days, was a subdivision of
Mauritania, which was a subdivision of Libya, one of the three parts of the world. And yet the
entire coast of Libya has been mapped correctly for three thousand years, and there is no
Africa beyond, either appended or separate. We prove the nonsense of it by sailing in clear
ocean through the middle of that pretended continent.”
“We prove the nonsense further by getting our ship mired in a swamp in the middle of that
imaginary continent and seeing that continent begin to form about it,” said Boyle. And his
Green Canary tasted funny to him. There was a squalling pungency in the air and something
hair-raisingly foreign in the taste of the drink.
“This is all like something out of Carlo Forte,” Linter laughed unsteadily.
“The continental ambient forms about us,” said Shackleton. “Now we will evoke the
creatures. First let us conjure the great animals, the rhinoceros, the lion, the leopard, the
elephant, which all have Asian counterparts; but these of the contingent Africa are to be half
again or twice the size, and incomparably fierce.”
“We conjure them, we conjure them,” they all chanted, and the conjured creatures appeared
mistily.
“We conjure the hippopotamus, the water behemoth, with its great comical bulk, its muzzle
like a scoop-shovel, and its eyes standing up like big balls—”
 “Stop it, August!” Justina Shackleton shrieked from the water. “I don’t know whether hippo
is playful or not, but he’s going to crush me in a minute.”
“Come out of the water, Justina!” August ordered sternly.
“I will not. There isn’t any ship left to come out to. You’re all sitting on a big slippery broken
tree out over the water, and the snappers and boas are coming very near your legs and
necks.”
“Yes, I suppose so, one way of looking at it,” August said. “Now everybody conjure the
animals that are compounded out of grisly humor—the giraffe with a neck alone that is
longer than a horse, and the zebra which is a horse in a clown suit.”
“We conjure them, we conjure them,” they all chanted. “The zebra isn’t as funny as I thought
it would be,” Boyle complained. “Nothing is as funny as I thought it would be.”
“Conjure the great snake that is a thousand times heavier than other snakes, that can swallow
a wild ass,” Shackleton gave them the lead.
“We conjure it, we conjure it,” they all chanted.
“August, it’s over your head, reaching down out of the giant mimosa tree,” Justina screamed
warning from the swamp. “There’s ten meters of it reaching down for you.”
“Conjure the crocodile,” Shackleton intoned. “Not the little crocodile of the River of Egypt,
but the big crocodile of deeper Africa that is able to swallow a cow.”
“We conjure it, we imagine it, we evoke it, and the swamps and estuaries in which it lives,”
they all chanted.
“Easy on that one,” Justina shrilled. “He’s been taking me by little pieces. Now he’s taking
me by big pieces.”
“Conjure the ostrich,” Shackleton intoned, “the bird that is a thousand times as heavy as
other birds, that stands a meter taller than man, that kicks like a mule, the bird that is too
heavy to fly. I wonder what delirium first invented such a wildlife as Africa’s anyhow?”
“We conjure it, we conjure it,” they chanted.
“Conjure the great walking monkey that is three times as heavy as a man,” August intoned.
“Conjure a somewhat smaller one, two thirds the size of man, that grins and gibbers and
understands speech, that could speak if he wished.”
“We conjure them, we conjure them.”
“Conjure the third of the large monkeys that is dog-faced and purple of arse.”
“We conjure it, we conjure it, but it belongs in a comic strip.”
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