The Ends of Outward

Lord Randal had invented the bow-and-arrow. But Axel could shoot the arrows farther and faster. And higher. And when he was six years old, Axel did what many persons have dreamed of doing: he made his mark on the sky. He dipped the heads of his arrows in mud, and he shot them up with uncanny accuracy and made mud marks on that transparent sky-cover which was twenty meters above them. He made about a hundred mud marks that conveyed a message in the written form of ‘code Chaldee’ that the three had independently reinvented. The message was “If there is anybody up above that sky, let him give us a sign.” — Serpent’s Egg

“The limit isn't set so high as we imagined. The ancients were correct that the limit, the sky, could almost be reached by thrown rocks and shot arrows and catapults. We're pressing against that sky now.” — Fourth Mansions

Every morning, whether you see them or not, persons go out into an open field and shoot arrows straight up into the air as high as they can shoot them. Most of these arrows come whistling back down after a while, things to beware of. But a few of the arrows do not come down. They are ‘accepted’, or they ‘stick in the sky’, and they do not fall back. The person whose arrow does not return to him is then blessed by a Strong Belief in something; this is by reason of the acceptance of the arrow. He is then a ‘True Believer’, a potent person. — “The World’s Narration”

“Watch this, I'm going to hang an arrow in the sky for quite a long interval,” Casad said boastfully. “Do so,” Barra told him, “but no trickery.” “Oh, of course I'll use trickery. Don't you realize that we are re-entering the Age of Trickery?” Ike Casad fitted the arrow to the bowstring, drew, and shot it straight up. The arrow rose for fifty meters, slowed, stopped, and hung there. — “The End of Outward”

“If there's a way, I will find it, and I believe that I have. I know more about tight-rope mathematics than you do, Ike. And I believe that I, with a small group of others, have calculated the quantum interval exquisitely. We will remain as unfalling arrows in the sky, slim lad. We will not go down that grubby hill with most of you.” — “The End of Outward”

The idea of an arrow hitting the edge of outward recurs in Lafferty’s fiction. I was reminded of this in rereading Serpent’s Egg, and I think other minor examples of the trope occurred to me. As with a handful of the tropes that caught his fancy, the arrow and the edge of space became the basis of one of his interesting but completely ignored short stories, “The End of Outward.” It belongs as a pendant in the Institute sequence because of important cameos. The story itself centers on a claim made by a character named Jorden Dorner. He is a scientist the others treat as a crank. At the scientists’ quarterly meeting, he tells them:

I will reiterate today that the universe has begun to contract, yes.

This is another variant on the Flatland theme—that the world has lost something in its verticality. Dorner himself thinks the reality contraction started around the time of the moon landing, which was as far “out” as we ever got. People just think Dorner is a crank because nobody can see the shrinking in the sky yet. It doesn’t bother Dorner because he knows that the astronomical evidence won’t show up for millions of years. If you can see it here at home, and really that should be enough, it’s because human life runs in step with the universe on a much smaller scale. Since the contraction started, he says, our world has been running backward. Cars have turned back into horse-drawn carriages, though look around, and you see that people still call them Ford Phaetons. Animals have lost their breeding. Beards have come back into style. The big projects, like a Mars landing and creating life, stay “almost ready” year after year, but they never materialize. Historians nowadays even write their drafts backwards, which I take to be Lafferty saying that modern history has become what Foucault said history should be: a history of the present. The other scientists laugh at Dorner; then they ride off in their horse-carriages without noticing what they’re riding. A few people, though, Fausto Barra among them, decide to stay at the high point instead of going back. They’re the kind of people Lafferty likes. They do, however, become slightly see-through to everyone else, and Lafferty writes they are still out there, out of sight:

They are as far out as anybody ever went.

The story is vivid to me for a handful of reasons.

One of these is Dorner’s own image for understanding what has happened: a vernier, the small sliding scale on a caliper or barometer that lets you read finer than the big scale’s marks allow. Dorner says our lives, our civilization, and our society form

. . . a very small vernier scale that is counterpart of the cosmic scale.

Bored this afternoon, I’ve been playing around with the idea of what the concept-metaphor would look like. Following the story, the tall fixed scale is the cosmos, and the small slide is our world. Large marks map onto small marks, shrunk to nine-tenths of their sizes, a kind of dilational symmetry. A tiny move of the slide makes the point where two lines meet jump a whole mark. When the slide moves one tenth, the meeting point moves ten times as far. A small change in the cosmos shows up as a big change in our world, which is what is going on and is being overlooked.

The great contraction in “The End of Outward” becomes the ambient of Flatland felt by those who aren’t amnesiac and who know that the end of outward has happened. This is anti-anagogical, pessimistic Lafferty: there is no leap forward. It is just over in a profound way, as it is in “And Name My Name” or in the other Outward is Over stories, from the best-known of them (such as “Ginny Wrapped in the Sun”) to the least-known of them (“The Most Forgettable Story in the World”) to those that might be up for debate (“You Can’t Go Back”). It is why Dorner can say of the universe’s turn:

But physically the reversal was hardly felt.

Our old friend Arutinov says:

Why have so few people noticed this?

When Lafferty is in this mood, the most generous thing he can offer is a chance to hang on at the top, as an arrow stuck in the edge of it all, even as the whole thing contracts.