"The Pani Planet" (1963/1965)

Colonel Zornig instituted flogging to show the Pani thathe was serious about them keeping their places. He didn'tknow if it did any good. The Pani grinned when they werewhipped, and they grinned about it. “Have you people no sense of pain?” he questioned. “Man colonel, we sure don't like the stuff,” Ieska said. “But you grin when you're whipped.” “The happy grin is a convention of your own sort, Ibelieve. With us the grin doesn't mean the same thing.” “What does it mean then?” Zornig demanded. “It mean, ‘there will come a day, men tnings, there will come a day.”

“Pani Planet” is both ahead of its time and slightly ambiguous. Daniel Otto Jack Petersen has pointed out that Pani is the French form of Pawnee. He and others have also noted the story’s colonial and anti-colonial elements. Those are astute observations because the story is fundamentally about military occupation and who gets to tell it.

The story takes place in the wake of the death of the human expedition's commander, General Raddle. The officious Colonel Zornig assumes control of the Pani Planet. Zornig is one of Lafferty’s unlikeable martinets. He rejects a request from Ieska, an alien Pani interpreter, to take the general's corpse and "fix" it, a conversation that highlights the profound disconnect between the two cultures:

“Our companion and commander is dead,” said Colonel Zornig. “Do you understand the word?”“Sure. It is broke like I said. Haven't you parts to fix it?”“There are no parts that would avail. One dies completely.”“Bad design. Give it to me. Maybe I can fix it.”

Despite Ieska's protests, General Raddle will get a traditional guarded burial. Viewing the puzzling indigenous population as a treacherous threat (the previous group of humans on Pani Planet were all found dead, and Zornig suspects poisoning), Zornig institutes severe punitive measures—including floggings, weapon confiscations, and the destruction of Pani homes—to keep colonial order. That all goes to hell when the humans discover that Raddle's grave seems to have been opened. His body is missing.

Shortly after the disappearance of the body, General Raddle reappears at the human garrison, looking pretty rough. He says that he had actually been in a cataleptic trance and that the Pani had rescued him from being buried alive. That is what Ieska meant by fix. And they did fix them by curing him with their traditional remedies. Re-asserting his command, Raddle reverses Zornig's security policies. He places the expedition's doctor under arrest, the only character who seems sane in the story. Mobley later provides the story's most incisive critique of the colonial mindset when questioned by Zornig:

“Could a simple people like the Pani somehow have the knowledge to bring a dead man back to life?” “That is what I lost my mind over. But even as a crazy man let me correct you in one error. Primitive peoples are never simple. They are frighteningly complex. It is we who are simple, because civilization is nothing but a simplification.”

Following the doctor's arrest, Raddle next grants Ieska unrestricted freedom, and he dismisses the regular military guards in favor of an unseen special guard. Early on, we are told that Raddle is a master strategist, but this obviously leaves the garrison vulnerable. Paranoia abounds among the human soldiers, leading Zornig to suspect an impending, coordinated Pani ambush.

Acting on his strategic instincts and a warning from a subordinate, Zornig takes action, the way any red-blooded colonial hero would in a story set behind, say, Zulu lines. He captures and physically tortures Ieska to get the truth. Under the threat of a steel pike, Ieska upends the illusion of control:

“Kill me then, but this is truth: we didn't do anything to him. What could we do? We couldn't any more fix him than anything. After a while he got pretty what you call foul smell and we got rid of him.” “Then who has been commanding us?” “Like in one of your joke books, man Colonel—‘Who, me driving? I thought you were driving!’ Nobody has been commanding you, man Colonel. We like it that way.”

The tortured Ieska confesses that the real General Raddle died and was discarded by the Pani. The figure issuing orders is neither Raddle nor a zombie version of him, but a Pani impostor. Zornig then executes a preemptive counter-coup. He neutralizes multiple pockets of Pani infiltrators just before their grand trap can be sprung, and the whole episode plays like a replay of the last days of General Gordon. How did Zornig work it out? Ieska let slip that the Pani could mimic anything, and the colonel ordered the captured aliens to be kept alive as exhibition specimens. Readers who missed the earlier line about mimicry are thus given a detective story that plays fair.

It took a long time for “Pani Planet” to be republished or collected. That did not happen until 2025, when it appeared in Volume 8 of the Centipede Press edition of Lafferty’s short stories, The Man Who Lost His Magic. The story is far better than it has generally been taken to be, though it does not, in my view, rise to the level of the best SF-styled work he was doing at the time. In that 1963 cluster, one finds “All But the Words,” “Crocodile,” “Vestige,” “Mad Man,” and “Last Laugh.” I would place “Pani Planet” fourth from the bottom, ahead of “All But the Words,” “Last Laugh,” and “Vestige,” though “Last Laugh” is later rehabilitated when its ideas are developed in Past Master. “All But the Words,” by contrast, seems to me an exceedingly minor Lafferty story.

Unlike the major “Ride a Tin Can,” which also uses the device of storytelling aliens, “Pani Planet” does not work terribly hard to secure the reader’s sympathy for the aliens themselves. Instead, Lafferty tells the story from the other side, from the side of the colonizers. One is meant to see how nasty they are from within, as it were. It would be like learning about the Sheni through a story told by the people running the tinning operation. The question “Pani Planet” asks is one we all know well now, though in the early 1960s, it was fresher: who gets to tell the story?

Here are the main candidates. Zornig imposes a military narrative. False Raddle imposes a narrative of trust. Doctor Mobley imposes a paranoid narrative. Ieska works all three while claiming that he is too stupid for anything but storytelling. By the end of “Pani Planet,” whoever controls the narrative wins, and Ieska very nearly does, because he controls more narratives at once, while the humans do not realize they are characters in a colonial uprising plot until it is almost too late.

There is an irony here. The otherwise loathsome Zornig defeats Ieska by doing what colonizers are often condemned for failing to do: he actually listens. Because he listens, he catches a single word dropped early, “mime,” listed as one of the Pani trades. Ieska had claimed to be bad at it, and that slip ruins the Pani counter-operation against the human colonizers. Once confronted with this, Ieska admits defeat:

“Ah, there I have dropped the molasses jug, there I have cracked the cooky jar, there was where the excretion hit the air-vanes—your say words all. That we are mimes who can mimic anything—I let that cat out of the carpet bag. In this I was near as stupid as yourself.”

The false Raddle calls it Ieska's "mouth disease."

In addition to the listening ambiguity, there is an ending, which keeps us a world away from the pathos of “Ride a Tin Can”: Ieska, facing death or the zoo, asks for a copy of Billboard:

“I'd kill you with perfect delight, but we have our instructions as to the handling of interesting specimens. You will be on exhibition. You always have been.” “I must find about bookings. Where is multi-list planetary edition of Billboard man soldier have lying around?”

As I said, it is ambiguous. Lafferty finished "The Pani Planet" in July 1963, a few months after completing Okla Hannali. Both involve a colonial power arriving in a promising land and subjugating the resident people. Okla Hannali treats this with seriousness; "The Pani Planet" lets the colonizers win as a plot twist.

And there is the further issue of reception. The story appeared in 1965, just as American awareness of Vietnam was growing, and the coincidence was on my mind rereading the story this time: the flogging, the kill-perimeters, the destruction of food and dwellings. Americans would learn of My Lai only in November 1969. A few years after its publication, the story would have read differently. I question whether Lafferty would even have written it then, given how closely anti-colonialism had become tied to other aspects of youth culture, and given his belief that Vietnam was in the national interest because of his fierce hatred of all things communist. It is telling that the bad guys in "Ride a Tin Can" are not military, but commercial. In any case, one can see in “The Pani Planet” themes that receive better but less ambiguous treatment elsewhere.

Pani Planet Notes.pdf

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