04AD: "One-Eyed Mocking-Bird"

And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle. And his brother’s name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ. And Zillah, she also bare Tubal-cain, an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron: and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah. —Genesis 4:19–22

Those students who are now developing best ways to motivate and mythologize sub-microscopic smears to get maximum performance and invention from them are an odd lot. They have to be, for they are working with small, lefthanded orders that are more goatish than sheepish, that are very near to the grotesque heart of matter. And some of those students had a hop on the subject, those who had read Tobias Lamb’s New Physics for Middle-School Children and had been enchanted by it. They have accumulated and analyzed a frightening amount of dream material from molecular-level and smaller entities, and the dream material in those little worlds is absolutely grotesque. And the mythic configurations can not even be conceived of in the geometry of human myth. They are quite otherwise. Those brilliant, odd-lot students have their own cultus and fraternity now, and their token and mascot is the One-Eyed Mocking-Bird.

Last of the audio dramas: Lafferty’s short piece that casts John von Neumann’s “technological singularity” as a one-eyed mocking-bird. Vernor Vinge popularized the term four years after Lafferty wrote the story.

Given how rough these dramas are, I suspect I’m the only one who likes them. As I wrote when I posted the first one, they make for a fun drive when I’m thinking about a Lafferty story. Working out the music and getting the voices as close as I can to what I want is the fun part.

Not a much-loved Lafferty story. That must partly reflect its appearance in hard-to-get books: Golden Gate and Other Stories in the early 1980s and, more recently, Centipede’s Mad Man volume. But you probably have to be pretty into Lafferty to enjoy it.

Lafferty sets himself a really strange task: tell the story of a bullet that moves through space, then comes back and blows a hole in the head of the man who fired it, but use definalization to keep the story going. The bullet carries a microscopic nation that must invent a way to turn around and come home.

Formally, I think it’s pretty neat, albeit very minor Lafferty. Lafferty does his thing where character digressions do most of the plot work. A character portrait, scientific quarrels, and Toby’s account of the Cainite space-ark delay the rifle experiment.

The ark is the kind of wonderfully weird thing one gets in late Lafferty (the story was written in 1979). Cain, banished to the Land of Nod, is said to have married Awan and fathered Enoch, his firstborn. His later descendants include Lamech, Jabal, Jubal, Tubal-cain, and Tubal-cain’s sister, Naamah. Lafferty imagines that Cain’s descendants escaped the judgment of the Flood by building a space-ark. He attributes the explosion of inventiveness after the Middle Ages to the ark’s return to Earth. In the mocking Toby, the inventive genius of Cain’s family (they ate of “the horrible tree of knowledge for the second time”) takes a modern form at the advent of the singularity.

The embedded history of Cain’s family provides the proto-pattern for the bullet’s projected flight: eight thousand years and two and a half seconds become corresponding spans in the histories of communities forced to invent their way home. This nesting then moves upward when Toby says that somebody larger tells him stories to motivate him, just as he tells stories to the microscopic nation.

“Oh what stuff, Toby, what stuff!” Viola Rafter admired. “That is the sort of stuff you tell to the small chemical smudges to motivate them, is it? That is something like the stuff I tell to my own house plants to motivate them; but I don’t do it nearly as well as you do. Is some larger person telling you this to motivate you for something?” “Yes, somebody larger tells me such narrations now and then. Yes, to motivate me, I suppose, as I motivate the small molecular smudges. And I do find myself curiously motivated now and then, and especially now.”

Narration thus becomes one of the forces acting within the fiction, something Lafferty develops most fully in East of Laughter, written four years later.

At the same time, there is something wobbly about it, as if Lafferty is trying to give the complications of his late fiction the easy-to-digest form of his earlier genre stories. The more one thinks about it, the more convoluted it becomes.

Still, a lot of Lafferty comes bundled in a pretty tight package here.