Then the surface to some little depth and all its superstructure was taken away. It was gone. And then it was quickly forgotten.
From the Twenty-second Century Comprehensive Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, page 389:
ANGELENOS. (See also Automobile Gypsies and Prune Pickers.) A mixed ethnic group of unknown origin, much given to wandering in automobiles. It is predicted that they will be the last users of this vehicle, and several archaic chrome-burdened models are still produced for their market. These people are not beggars; many of them are of superior intelligence. They often set up in business, usually as real estate dealers, gamblers, confidence men, managers of mail-order diploma mills, and promoters of one sort or other. They seldom remain long in one location.
Their pastimes are curious. They drive for hours and days on old and seldom-used cloverleafs and freeways. It has been said that a majority of the Angelenos are narcotics users, but Harold Freelove (who lived for some months as an Angeleno) has proved this false. What they inhale at their frolics (smog-crocks) is a black smoke of carbon and petroleum waste laced with monoxide. Its purpose is not clear.
The religion of the Angelenos is a mixture of old cults with a very strong eschatological element. The Paradise Motif is represented by reference to a mystic “Sunset Boulevard.” The language of the Angelenos is a colorful and racy argot. Their account of their origin is vague:
“They came and took our dizz away from us,” they say.
Afterword by Gregory Frost
In 1967 Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions was first published by Doubleday. I, in high school in Iowa and already devouring the likes of Fredric Brown, Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, Zelazny, and Dick, might as well have been the target Harlan put in the crosshairs. In retrospect we peer through many great annual Best of anthologies—edited by Gardner Dozois, David Hartwell, Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling, Kelly Link & Gavin Grant, Terry Carr, etc.—and we forget how monumental was Harlan’s lashing together of what he termed “Thirty-two Soothsayers.” I’m near Philadelphia now, and so I think of Harlan as the Albert Barnes of science fiction. Barnes’ collection of impressionists is an extraordinary thing; and to be fair there are a few disappointing works hanging among the Matisses, Van Goghs, Gaunguins, Picassos, and Renoirs—lesser paintings by artists who faded into obscurity, though obviously Barnes thought he saw something in them. Dangerous Visions really is the Barnes collection of science fiction. A few “what happened to…” pieces, but otherwise breathtaking.
Dangerous Visions proved to be my gateway into the worlds of Raphael Aloysius Lafferty through the story Harlan selected, called “Land of the Great Horses.” I did not know at the time how extraordinary that would prove to be, just as I didn’t know that Lafferty himself was a fellow Iowan (born in the southwestern town of Neola, Iowa—if anyone from Neola is reading this, you need to put up at least a plaque for Heaven’s sake!)
As Lafferty stories go, this one is short and seemingly simple, but oh, by the end it has shape-shifted on you more than once. It can be read, in a way, as a companion story to another tale of his called “Narrow Valley,” also concerned with unreliable topography.
It is also exemplary of the way Lafferty entered stories sidewise, producing a text that dives straight into a situation already in motion and seems to be about one thing, yet turns out to be about something else. And then when you think you have its measure, the author adds a punch line you never saw coming.
Here, we begin with a sort of dictum: “They came and took our country away from us,” the people had always said. But nobody understood them.
What country and what people, we must read to discover. We are then introduced to two Englishmen, Richard Rockwell and Seruno Smith, driving across the Thar Desert, which is to say the Great Desert of India. They approach and behold a famous mirage called the Land of the Great Horses, or Diz Boro Grai. It’s what they’ve come to see. Things immediately start to go wrong. In this extremely barren desert, they hear the sound of thunder from an approaching storm, and then find their mirage shot with lightning. The improbable climatic event seems to transform Seruno Smith: he suddenly and inexplicably knows the names of places (a draw called Kuti Tavdavi, Little River); he bursts into song in tongues he does not speak. When asked how by Rockwell, he explains that he has only to remember these tongues to sing, and that “They all cluster around the boro jib itself.” Smith seems to be leading this “great life” out of nowhere. He confesses to Rockwell that he speaks all languages in play—the so-called Seven Sisters, but Smith names only six. Rockwell notices and finally requests the name of the missing language: Deep Romany. Rockwell tries to head back, but Smith refuses, and calls him “Sarishan,” or “English,” as if they are suddenly foreign to each other, and then begins to scale the heights that until moments ago were part of the mirage.
The story shifts then to various small scenes of people speaking various dialects of Romani, Punjabi, Hindi—in each it’s clear that someone with Romany blood is feeling the pull of Diz Boro Grai. Some are Romani Rai, gypsy gentlemen; some are dukkerin-women, that is, fortune-tellers; some perhaps Athinganoi, considered to be the ancestral tribe of the Roma. And so it goes as various people with some percentage of gypsy blood pull up stakes and head “home” because “the rez has riser’d,” and it tugs at them, smells like rain, cannot be ignored. Home is the Land of Great Horses, which became a mirage for thousands of years but now is no longer.
To reveal more would be to spoil the story for the reader. Suffice it to say that once you understand what is going on, Lafferty still has a coda to deliver—one that plays on the “Diz” of “Diz Boro Grai” and “dizz” in a newly coined dialect that refers in all probability to Disneyland.
In “Narrow Valley,” where, Michael Swanwick tells me, Lafferty is having his little joke with the Pawnee language, here he effortlessly tosses off terms and phrases in various Romany dialects … all of which leads to a final, signature jape that can only exist because of his skill with those dialects.
As so often happens in a story by R. A. Lafferty, you are turned and turned and turned again, but always within the framework of the remarkable story itself. As a reader, I’m agog. As a writer, I’m forever asking, “How does he do this?”
EUREMA’S DAM
Introduction by Robert Silverberg
This is a story about a schlemiel, to use a word probably not too often heard in Raphael Aloysius Lafferty’s hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The schlemiel story is a genre I always thought I’d avoid, if I were an editor, for it has seemed to me that stories about schlemiels, losers, twerps, dullards, or schnooks would be of interest only to an audience of schlemiels, losers, twerps, dullards, or schnooks, at best, and no such people would be reading anything I edited. Well, never mind all that. R. A. Lafferty was a cunning and tricky writer and—as can quickly be seen—the schlemiel he created for us here is of an extraordinary sort.
“Eurema’s Dam” won a Hugo in 1973 at Toronto. I am not all that awed by stories that win awards, nor all that scornful of those that don’t, but Lafferty’s feat of winning a Hugo for “Eurema’s Dam” deserves some commemoration. Virtually all Hugo-winning stories then were first published in science fiction magazines or in paperback anthologies easily available to a wide segment of the electorate, but my anthology New Dimensions II had appeared only in an expensive hardcover edition that had sold perhaps six thousand copies. How, given that handicap, Lafferty’s story had ever reached enough people to get the required number of votes, I have no idea. Yet it won, beating out, among other things, a story of mine. I will not pretend that I would not have preferred it the other way around, but I was undilutedly delighted that so fine and special a writer as Lafferty had carried off his first trophy with a story I had published.