“I don’t think they’ll come out though, Selim, since they’re made out of wax instead of iron. Effigies should always be made out of iron.”
“What do their names mean, Oread?”
“No, they won’t come out. I’d have to be a bee-brain to evoke anything out of wax.”
“Oread, I love you very much.”
“No, they won’t come out at all. I’ll have them come over here themselves some night and make iron effigies of themselves. Then you can get rid of those silly wax ones.”
“Little iron-ears, I said that I loved you very much.”
“Oh, I heard you. You won’t be alarmed when they come out some night to make the effigies? They’re kind of funny-looking.”
“So are you, Oread. No, I won’t be alarmed. Why should a Syrian be alarmed over fabulous people? We’re fabulous people ourselves. And if they’re your uncles they cannot be dangerous.”
“Sure they can. I am. You said yourself that I’d set the flaming ducks after you again. I go home now, Selim, to get my homework made, and also to make that concept-symbol system for Mr. Zhelezovitch the instructor. It’s important, isn’t it?”
“I’ll go with you, Oread. Yes, it’s important to Zhelly and to the class and the course. It’s true that he might as well end the class forever if he doesn’t find it. But it isn’t true that we might as well end the world if we don’t find it. It’s not quite that important.”
“Who will watch the museum if you leave? I want very much to make this correctly and understandably for Mr. Zhelezovitch. I am a Funnyfinger, and making things for people is the whole business and being of the funnyfingers.”
“Oh, tell Kelmis to watch the place for me. Will it take long for them and you to make the concept?”
“Sure, he’ll watch it for you. Even a Waxman-Kelmis will be faithful in that. Oh no, they never take very long to make anything for anybody any more.” (Time had slipped by, though not much of it; Selim had a sporty car that he drove like a flaming rocket; and it wasn’t very far to the northwest side of town. They were out at the Funnyfingers’ place now, and into the back, back rooms that turned into tunnels.) “They never take very long to make things anymore,” Oread was continuing, “not since that time, you know, when God got a little bit testy with them on Sinai when there was a little delay. They first made the tablets out of iron entirely, and they wouldn’t do. They had to make them out of slate-stone with the iron letters inset in it, and the iron had to be that alloy known as command iron. Since then they are all pretty prompt with everyone, and they follow instructions exactly. You never know who it really is who places an order.
“Kelmis has the original all-iron set. I’ll get him to show them to you some time.”
“Where do you get your stories, Oread?”
“I tell my mother that I make them out of iron.”
“And where do you really get them?”
“I make them out of iron.”
Selim talked easily with the three uncles while they wrought and hammered the white-hot parts that Oread was to assemble into a symbol concept.
“How is it that you work inside a little hill in Oklahoma?” he asked them. “Shouldn’t you be in the forests or hills of Phrygian Ida? How did you come to leave the Old Country?”
“This is the Old Country, and we haven’t left it,” powerful Acmon said. “Everything underground anywhere is part of the Old Country. All hills and mountains of the world connect down in their roots, in their toes, and they make a single place. We are in Mount Ida, we are in Crete, we are in Oklahoma. It is all one.”
They made the pieces. And Oread, dipping the parts out of the white-hot iron as if it were water, put them together to make the thing. It was a new concept-symbol system, and it looked as if it would work.
And it looked much more as if it would work the next afternoon. Mr. Zhelezovitch the instructor was almost out of his mind with it. The graduate students and the regular students (for this was one of those advanced, mixed classes) crowded about it and went wild. The implications of the new thing would tumble in their minds for weeks; the class would be a marathon affair going on and on as the wonderful new things were put to work to uncover still more wonderful things. The stars were out when Oread and Selim left the class, and no one else would leave it at all that night. But these two had something between them, and it might take another new concept to solve it.
“Oread, give me your answer,” Selim was saying again. “I want to marry you.”
“Make a wish on a star then. On that one where I’m pointing.”
“Triple jointed funnyfingers, who can tell where you’re pointing?”
“On that male star there between the several eunuch stars.”
“Yes, I see the one you mean, Oread. I make a wish. Now, when will you answer me?”
“Within a half hour. I go to question two people first.”
Oread left there at a run. She went home. She talked to her mother.
“Mama, why is my father so boyish? Is he really just a boy?”
“Yes he is, Oread. Just a boy.”
“After some years would he be a man, really, and not just a pleasant young kid?”
“I think so, Oread, yes.”
“Then after some years you two could have children of your own? Being a funnyfingers isn’t an obstacle?”
“I’ll never know that, Oread. When he is grown up I will be long dead.”
Oread ran out of there and ran to the convent that was behind the school she used to attend. She entered and went upstairs and down a hallway. She knew where she was going. One funnyfingers can always find another one. Besides, the eight years was up. She opened the door and found Sister Mary Dactyl playing solitaire with iron cards.
“How old?” Oread asked.
“Three hundred and fifty-eight years,” said Sister M.D. without looking up. “Were I not vowed, I would be coming to the family age now.”
Oread ran all the way back to where Selim was still waiting in the street under the stars. She was crying, she was bawling.
“The answer is no,” she blubbered. Selim, under the stars, was as white-faced as it is possible for a Syrian to be. But he must not give up.
“Oread, I love you more than you can know,” he said. “Maybe we can make a different answer out of iron,” he proposed in desperate jest.
“This is the iron answer,” she bawled, “and the answer is no.” She ran away too fast to follow.
Deep under the hills Oread was crying. She was weeping big hot tears. They weren’t, however, iron tears that she wept. That part is untrue.
The tears were actually of that aromatic flux of salt and rosin that wrought-iron workers employ in their process.
THIEVING BEAR PLANET
Introduction by Jeff VanderMeer
“Anomalies are messy,” R. A. Lafferty writes at the beginning of “Thieving Bear Planet,” and the reader might be forgiven for thinking Lafferty was referring to his own career and body of work. But, in fact, he’s referring to the alien thieving bears of the title, which follow their own peculiar set of rules. Too often science fiction gives us humans in uncanny bear suits, so to speak, when it comes to aliens. But Lafferty in this story and several others manages to create deeply strange and original alien encounters that both unsettle the reader and send up traditional science fiction approaches.