As ever with Lafferty, too, he manages feats of compression that are beyond most writers. Take the deliberately blithe reference to a Directory and Delineation of Planets, which, in offering an entry on the Thieving Bear Planet, tries from the start to impose a cage of logic on the unknowable, with its catalog of the usual planetary attributes, even if it destabilizes its authority in the same instant by including irrational statements from a former explorer of the planet. Or take Lafferty’s riotous description of the current expedition’s gastronome’s delight of a meal—which proves to be a great set-up to the stealing of the thieving bears, who are not just robbing the explorers’ very stomachs of plain old pork-and-beans, but a sumptuous feast, that the reader may feel the loss quite viscerally. These are lovely stories within the main story, little whirlpools of magnificent narrative energy.
“Visceral” is a key word when thinking of Lafferty’s triumphs, alongside “weird.” In, again, a condensed tale-like form Lafferty accomplishes what some space operas take trilogies to get to. A space opera, in its finest form, is just a mimic: a commercial delivery system for some of the strangest moments and situations in science fiction. (See: early Alastair Reynolds, for example.) With Lafferty, the traditional tropes of SF—alien contact, alien invasion, the noble exploration of space—are jewels he likes to put beneath tattered overturned cups, daring the reader to bet on where in the world the true treasure lies. But beware—when you pin down the location of that treasure, it’ll likely change shape, grow legs, and hop off the table.
This applies even to the thieving bears of the title, who take on a marvelous initial form, able to fly not so much because of having lightweight bones but because they’re almost like drifting toupees in structure. The mimicry they are capable of seems cute at first and then horribly brutal as the explorers become caught up in events they cannot control. Yet even then, Lafferty isn’t content, restless. It would have been easy enough for him to take the initial set-up to a very satisfying conclusion, but instead he roughs up and destabilizes his own story with the second act, which makes the reader question … well, everything. Is all that occurs just a joke by the thieving bears? Is there some other animating impulse at work? How is it that this Jenga-like structure Lafferty creates doesn’t fall and crash to the ground?
Along with many other complexities, then, “Thieving Bear Planet” chronicles the impossibility of comprehension of the alien, the war between the logical and illogical in ourselves that spills out into the cosmos beyond—all in the context of the certain knowledge that human beings will never know everything about this world, let alone the next, or the universes we inhabit. And that there is something wonderful about that fact.
Not many writers could grapple with such ideas and create a story that’s both so creepy and so funny and in the moment, but as in Lafferty’s best work in general, the author manages to channel a narrative momentum and a kind of joy in the very act of outrageous and madcap invention that provides unity, depth, and, yes, even a kind of beautiful closure.
Thieving Bear Planet
1.
“A simple explanation was needed for the conditions on Thieving Bear Planet. It was needed because, as the great Reginald Hot had phrased it, “Anomalies are messy.”
Every decade or so, somebody with a passion for regularity takes over the administration of the Directory and Delineation of Planets, that massive cataloging operation, and makes a new survey of the anomalies. And there was not any way that such a survey could miss Thieving Bear Planet.
“It offers no threat to human life or activity, no danger to bodily health, and only slight danger to mental health,” the great John Chancel had written about it a century before this. “It has almost uniformly ideal climate, though it is not a place to generate sudden wealth. It is serene in environment and in ecological balance, and it is absolutely caressing in its natural beauty. But it does have a strange effect on some of its visitors. It forces them to write things that are untrue, as it is forcing me to do at this moment.” That was an odd thing to write in a ship’s log.
And, as one later old hand put it, “There is nothing to conquer here. It is a poorly endowed and counterproductive world. And everything goes wrong here. I will say this for it: things go wrong here in the most pleasant way possible. But they do go wrong.”
Now another expedition consisting of six explorers—George Mahoon (he was wrestler-big, and with a groping, grappling, leverage-seeking wrestler-mind); Elton Fad (he was long on information and short on personal incandescence); Benedict Crix-Crannon (buff and charming, and he knew all the jobs of the expedition); Luke Fronsa (he was a “comer,” as they said in the department, but wasn’t he a little bit overage in grade as a “comer” now?); Selma Last-Rose (what can you say after you say that somebody has everything?); Gladys Marclair (pleasant, capable, but she wasn’t a genius, and genius was really required for an explorer); and Dixie Late-Lark (sheer Spirit, she!)—had set down on Thieving Bear Planet. These were not the most experienced explorers in the Service, but they were among the newest and freshest. And they had already demonstrated that they were top people at clearing up anomalies.
“It’s a pleasant place, but not good for much,” George Mahoon said before they had been there ten minutes. “Why didn’t the earlier explorers simply say that it was ‘Only marginally or submarginally productive, indicated by fast scans to be poor in both radioactive and base metals and also in rare earths and fossil fuels, not recommended for development in the present century when so many better places are available,’ or some such thing as that? Why did they put so much stuttering gibberish in their reports? I’m going to like it here, though. It’s nice for a brief vacation.”
“Oh, I’m going to like it too,” Selma Last-Rose spoke in her curious rat-a-tat-tat voice. “There must be a puzzle here, and I like puzzles. And there’s a minor mystery in this ‘Plain of the Old Spaceships.’ I may as well solve that.”
They had landed in a clear place on the Plain of the Old Spaceships. Here there were remarkable full-scale drawings or schematics of old spaceships, twelve of them in two-thirds of a circle, from the earliest to the latest, going clockwise on the ground. What medium these schematics were done in was not certain, but the lush grass refrained from growing on the lines of them and so marked them off. The “drawings” showed the circle-spheres of the spaceships and their fore and aft bulges. They gave accurate indication of the interior bulkheads. This was really a life-sized museum of ships that lacked only substance and the dimension of height.
“I recall two passages in the log of the ship Sorcerer about this plain or meadow,” Elton Fad said. “The first of them stated, ‘Some of our party believe that the plain of the ships was actually done by the Thieving Bears in a historical marker sort of response, but I myself do not credit the little beasties with that much intelligence.’ And there was a later entry in another hand, ‘The Thieving Bears really did make those schematics-in-the-grass memorials of all the spaceships that had been here, but they didn’t do it in any way that we had imagined.’ But that latter log entry, like latter entries of several of the explorers, had been written in something other than ink.