NOT TO MENTION CAMELS by Lafferty, R A 1 With mortal coil in death uncurled And body ripe to dump or doff it, We stand like dummies on a world Or be like sharpies jumping off it. "World-Jumper's Ballad" Pilger Tisman lay in the article of death. He was attended by three outstanding doctors: Funk, Austin, and Ravel; by their numerous aides; by a coroner; and by a brigadier of police. Their care was not to save Pilger's life (there was no chance for that, and no reason for it), but to weigh his death. This business of weighing a death was something new in that place, even though it was said to be common elsewhere. For this weighing, the men used both highly sophisticated and wildly ingenuous equipment. Pilger Tisman was being executed for his shockingly murderous and irresponsible deeds and behaviors. Public opinion had cried out for his death, and his few supporters were in hiding. He had been sentenced "to die with discomfort." His punishment was quite cruel, but it was not unusual. He was breathing the old ritual gas named Yperite or Mustard, and he had been in absolutely ghastly discomfort before losing consciousness. "Well, he endured the pain well," Doctor jude Ravel admitted. "like a man, as they used to say. Or like a stoic wise-in-death animal. My father used to say that animals had a clear death-accepting ritual; and that if, after accepting the fact of death, the animal should be released from that circumstance, it would go ahead and die anyhow." "Oh, certainly, certainly," said Doctor Wilcove Funk. "That's known about animals, but Tisman wasn't a wise-in-death animal. He's a frustrated-in-death man. He's a betrayed-in-death cult figure. A cult figure owes the world a showy death, and Tisman didn't deliver it. He had it planned, I believe, and somehow the pain and the shock jolted it all out of his mind. If that girl had been with him, she could have reminded him of it. She was responsible for many of the showy elements of his career. He went under trying desperately to recall his planned words and gestures, and he's still trying to remember them in his death delirium. If we had equipment just a bit more sophisticated, as we are told that they have in some of the other enclaves, we could still lift those clouded-over words and acts from his flickering mind. As it is, we're denied his heroics. We are cheated." Another article of Tisman's sentence was that he "should take nothing with him." Most persons, in dying, do not take anything with them. But there are a very few tricky individuals who do. The number of those who took something with them when they died had now risen to one in a hundred of the known cases, and possibly as many of the unknown. With cult figures it was much higher: two out of three at least who took something with them, and who left something behind them that hadn't been there until their going. Cult figures were always tricky. This man Tisman had been tricky in very many ways, and possibly he was tricky in this. It wasn't like him to die blankly. A difficulty for the death-monitors or death-weighers was that each dying person who took something with him when he went used an individual or peculiar trick to do it. Nothing was standardized. No two persons, apparently, had ever used the same device. The tracing technique was quite new in this place, but already the catalogue of tricks numbered more than a hundred. This made the carrying-forward of material or weighable substance difficult to prevent. The thing that most dying persons took forward with them -- this was no more than an instrumental guess -- was probably memory. Or it was identity. Or it was consciousness (or the capacity for consciousness, for it was mostly unconscious persons who made the leap). Were these three things the same? At least all of them were weighable. Did one who took something forward with him always leave something extra behind also? Probably. It couldn't always be detected immediately -- perhaps it wasn't always weighable; but the departing ones who took something with them did seem always to leave a new and compensating thing in its place. Cult figures particularly did often leave a fast-spreading residue (can a newly appearing thing be called a residue?) in place of what they took with them. The thing taken and the thing left may have been two halves of a unity, and it threatened to crush a world like a shell between the riven halves. The world was hard shelled, though, and very seldom was it actually crushed by such a circumstance. In earlier times, those who carried such minimum personal baggage (memory, identity, consciousness) forward with them from the death drama did often have after-appearances that were nothing worse than harmless ghosts. But in these recent decades, and as the cults had evolved into a new natural force, the tricky departing ones seemed able to erect horrendous ghost worlds or counterworlds that impinged, sometimes physically, upon the real world. The encounters with these intrusive worlds were dislocating, disturbing, eroding, and fright-inducing in their effects. And they were not harmless. "As a hulk I don't like him," Doctor Jon Austin said. "I don't really see how anyone could like him as a hulk, or as a man, as well as I had known him. But cult figures are loved. They have devoted followings. They have magnetic effects. Do you understand how this Jisman could have been loved by anyone?" "I half understand it," said Doctor Wilcove Funk. "It may be that I understand the other half of it," said Doctor Jude Ravel. "We two would never understand the same half of anything." "We have paralyzed all his centers," Doctor Wilcove Funk said to the room at large, "even some of the involved centers whose purpose we do not understand. We have muted but not quite silenced his call-tone or person-tone. We have dimmed his corona spectrum, but we sure have not been able to put it out. That is really all we can do. The next move is up to him. "It would seem that his numbed areas could not translate their data to any point beyond. And yet we know of cases where absolutely dead areas have done so. We will see. We've been tricked before, and by persons of lesser reputation than this man. We learn, with every person who slips by us, to guard a little better against this sort of encounter. We still don't know what death is, but we do know that nothing ever winds all the way down without winding something else up." Doctor Funk was a man with a huge head, with heavy orbital ridges; with a protruding muzzle on him that made a true chin unnecessary and impossible; with a large back-brain; and with a great good humor. He was a tremendous man with a steep amount of animal in him, and with a sharp apperception of things in between. But the dying Pilger Tisman had an even larger back-brain. How was there room for it? It was almost a case of the inside of his skull being bigger than the outside. And as to the humor of Tisman -- well, those who had known him exten sively had testified that he had a large, craggy, towering humor, outrageous, noisy, overflowing, and fearsome. But it was not always a good humor. Those assisting at his death were all secretly afraid that he would give them a stroke of his strong humor even out of his death delirium. "It is inconsiderate for any man to take so long a time to die," the brigadier of police said testily. "Are you sure we're more likely to muff it if we hurry it along? Or have some of you the compassionate sickness?" "Yes, I have the compassionate sickness," Doctor Funk said. "And we're not sure which way we're most likely to muff it. We're keeping records, as you know, and we will try to determine that as we determine other things." Doctor Funk regarded the dying Tisman with sympathy and kindred feeling, even though he agreed that Tisman was unnecessarily slow about giving up the ghost. Funk's giant hands were compassionate as he monitored the guttering brain and body of Tisman. It was the centralized memory prints that he worried about, that area of abridgments and handy essences that nearly duplicated, in highly compressed form, the gangling memory that ran all through the brain itself. This was the cerebral juglans, that small nodule whose purpose and content had but lately been discovered. Funk marred the juglans, the "remembering acorn," but what would be the effect of his marring it? The juglans was a fat composite of chemical fixes and electrical charges that inhabited the patterned wrinkles and grooves o( that small nodule; and it was the containing nodule itself, that which seemed always on the nervous edge of explosion. But it was the patterns, even the empty patterns, that held the power. Content and detail were not important on this level. Patterns could always create their own new detail. Taking the patterns away might seem like stealing holes or tunnels: not to be done. But it was often done nowadays. "There was never such a call-tone or person-tone as this man has," Doctor Jude Ravel said admiringly. "It hardly needs amplifying. I believe that a person of exceptionally acute hearing would be able to pick it up with his bare ears. It is too rough and rambunctious to be a musical tone, and yet it has almost infinite depth and texture to it. It is a whole orchestra full of randy harmonics, and a mighty randy orchestra it is. In some cases, the person-tone or the call-tone will make a very good resume of a man. Not here. Tisman can't be expressed by one sense, but this tone is a sort of signature of this man. No other person, thank the god of ears, could ever sound that sound." Doctor Ravel was talking about Tisman's call-to...
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