The Unreasoning Mask

"The greatest science fiction writer ever!" --Leslie A. Fiedler
Philip Jose Farmer
THE
UNREASONING
MASK
" The Unreasoning Mask is a moving, carefully written,
realistically motivated, and impeccably designed novel." --Foundation
Overlook SF&F Classics
THE
UNREASONING
MASK
PHILIP JOSE FARMER
THE OVERLOOK PRESS
Woodstock & New York
This edition first published in paperback in the United States in 2007 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
Woodstock & New York
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Copyright © 1981 by Philip José Farmer
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
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or broadcast.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN-13 978-1-58567-715-3
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
For my parents, George Farmer (1895-1950) and Lucile
Theodora Jackson (1899-2000), who gave me love and the
best of care.
"What I saw in the mirror was not what the mirror saw."
-- Lord Ruthven's Prisoner
"Where there is only one, there is also another; where two, always three."
-- Nur el-Musafir
"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But
in each event -- in the living act, the undoubted deed -- there,
some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mould-
ing of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man
will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner
reach outside except by thrusting through the wall!"
-- Moby Dick

 

 

 

 

... 1 ...

 

 

"The 'Bolg' kills all but one!"

 

 

The voice was weak, whispering, and wet. If a shadow under water could
have a voice, it would sound like that.

 

 

Then the voice boomed like a giant's in the sky, like a rocket exploding
near his ear. It propelled him far up into a grayness. Then he was falling
down a well, the glimmering walls of which sped slantingly away from him,
but were always visible.

 

 

Ramstan had never been so terrified.

 

 

He hurtled in the twilight past two naked giants shaped like men but sexless
and suspended upside down by chains attached to ankle bands. Harut and Marut?
The fallen angels punished thus forever because they had had no compassion
for the children of Adam and Eve?

 

 

They flashed away into the darkness above, and the well opened out into
Space in which myriads of bits of Matter glared. Stars? Eyes?

 

 

Suddenly, he was skimming the surface of a white star. He held a bucket,
and it was scooping up the thin stuff, which burned with a cold light so
strong that even when he turned his head away from it the light filled
his skull and blinded him.

 

 

Then he was in darkness and squeezed by something neither dry nor wet,
hot nor cold, moving nor unmoving.

 

 

The voice whispered.

 

 

"God is sick. Unbreakable flames fall from the black sky. The earth ripples.
Oceans charge. Blood blazes. Flesh fries. Bone burns. Wicked and innocent
flee. All die. Where to go?"

 

 

Now he was the lone survivor of the shipwreck but was clutched by darkness
and cold. He was struggling up towards light, warmth, and air.

 

 

"Run, Ramstan, run!" the voice shrieked.

 

 

Run? He was drowning in an element that permitted no running.

 

 

But he surged from the black, the cold, the deep. He was a fisher who had
hooked the fish, himself, and had reeled himself up and out. The oily,
icy abysm drained from him as he gasped like a fish on land.

 

 

That voice. Where had he heard it before? Long ago? Had it spoken then
in Terrish or in Arabic, his natal tongue? What had it spoken in just
now? He did not remember.

 

 

"I dozed off! In all this noise!"

 

 

He sat on a chair of stone covered with thick leather. The top of the
table before him was a hard, shiny, brown wood shaped into a symbolic
bird, a flat crescent body, the tips upturned to represent wing feathers.
On it was a double-stemmed goblet cut from the green-and-red fossilized
bones of a reptile. It was half full of a thick yellow wine in which
swam blood-red worms, thin as the veins in a drunkard's eyes.

 

 

He sipped the wine, which tasted of honey and grapes and faintly of almonds.
The latter, he supposed, came from the worms. These were so thin and fragile
they slipped unfelt by the tongue into the throat. There was always in the
sweetness of Kalafala a barely perceptible bitterness.

 

 

Life could be good sometimes, but evil was sure. The end of any life,
good, bad, or good-bad, was death and corruption. Everything Kalafalan,
in all its airiness and delicate involutions, nodded to the Destroyer.

 

 

The interior of the tavern was shaped as if it were a coliseum built
by drunken Romans. Seen from above, the edges of the tiers of seats
formed sine waves. The seats were separated by translucent clamshell-form
partitions three meters high. They held the same customers as when he'd
fallen asleep. No one had left; no one had entered.

 

 

Ramstan's booth, on a middle tier, faced the entrance, which was beyond the
top level of the row of tiers. The floor of the central area was smooth and
glistening and sometimes used for dancing and sacrifices. In its center
was an oval counter. Within it were four bartenders. Around the oval area
were four slender columns of white-and-black stone, fluted vertically
but banded with jagged rings. At the flaring top of each column was a
chair, and in the chairs sat the harpist, the flutist, the violinist,
the bassoonist. They were playing the insane-Mozart music of Kalafala.

 

 

"The bolg kills all but one!"

 

 

If that voice came from his unconscious, where did the name of bolg
come from? What flowers of the dark mind had been pulled up from even
darker earth and assembled to make the bouquet of bolg? Why would that
dark part of himself speak in a code?

 

 

Bolg.

 

 

A waitress walked by him. He glimpsed multitudes of himself in the
oval-shaped mirrors forming a belt around her waist. His ruff-necked cloak
and cockaded hat, his long curving nose, thick black eyebrows, and large
black eyes, and the mask now slipped down around his neck made him look
like a great bird. He was a huge, handsome-ugly eagle crouching over the
stone-bone goblet, dipping now and then to suck in the liquid and worms.

 

 

Doctor Toyce stepped out of the shadows of the hall entrance. Her mask
hung below her chin, giving her a puff-throated appearance. She was short,
though taller than any Kalafalan, blonde, bronze-skinned, and pug-nosed.
She paused to squint through the green-blue currents of smoke and the
shallow, sea-bottom-green light floating down from the stained glass
ceiling. She waved her hand at Ramstan and walked down the curving ramp,
disappeared behind a tier, and came out of a dark, oval doorway two
booths from Ramstan's.

 

 

There were no straight or obvious routes for getting in or out of the
tavern. All was twist and turn, retwist and return. The mind of the
Kalafalan was a Möbius strip; everything they said, did, or made was
inturn of outturn. Yet, all was beautiful, if tinged with the sadness
of the inevitable.

 

 

Toyce gestured at the bartender. He grinned with two rows of shark teeth.
Even the Kalafalan face reflected the inner person. Humanoid, its bright
red lips were connected to the nose and the chin with two triangles of red
cartilage which made the face circus-clownish. The black eyebrows curved
around the eyes to the prominent, almost pyramid-shaped cheeks. A clown
until he smiled, the Kalafalan, then he flashed teeth like Death's own.

 

 

"The bolg kills all but one," Ramstan said in Urzint.

 

 

Toyce's pale eyelashes flickered. She sat down and said, "What?"

 

 

"The bolg kills all but one."

 

 

"What in hell is a bolg?"

 

 

"I don't know. I heard somebody say that just as I was waking up from
a catnap. But whoever said it was gone. Did you see anybody leave here
just as you came in?"

 

 

Toyce shook her head and crooked a finger at Wilimu, a bartender.
Wilimu tapped a small gong in the shape of a butterfly and pointed out
the new customer to a waitress. She disappeared in a doorway beneath the
two Earthpeople and presently came out of the doorway which Toyce had
used. In a delicate, three-fingered, very long-thumbed hand, she held
the bottle of black liquor which Toyce loved. It glittered in the goblet
like obsidian under an Aztec sun. It tingled like a dying electric eel
in the throat. It shot flaming stars in the belly and comets in the brain.

 

 

Toyce sucked in the waitress with her eyes. "Answer my question,"
Ramstan said.

 

 

"What? No. I saw no one."

 

 

Ramstan wrote three Xs and a spiral on a chit and stood up.

 

 

"I'm going back to the ship. That was no dream. I feel . . ."

 

 

Toyce said, "I thought maybe we could get stoned. You could
forget whatever's troubling you and maybe . . ."

 

 

"I'm not troubled or in trouble, Aisha."

 

 

"Whatever you say, Hűd. Or are you now in your official persona, and I call
you Captain Ramstan?"

 

 

"Just try, for once, to keep your nose out of the glass and your hands
off alien flesh. There might be an emergency."

 

 

"Then you are expecting trouble. But, if you won't tell anybody what's
up, how can you expect . . . ? Look, either we're on shore leave or
we're not. Which is it?"

 

 

"I'll . . . as of present, shore leave. Meanwhile . . . never mind . . .
forget it. That voice . . .'

 

 

 

 

 

 

... 2 ...

 

 

He put the mask on his face. Its edges clung to his skin, sealing in the
nose and the mouth. He walked through three halls and four doors, bathed
in sonic waves that were automatically beamed if a door opened. This was
for the safety of non-Kalafalans.

 

 

Outside, the sun, much like Earth's, was riding out the late afternoon.
It was midsummer in the temperate zone of the northern hemisphere,
but a cooling west wind flapped his cloak. The spaceport, built by the
natives for visitors long long ago, was on the plateau-top of a small
mountain. Ramstan could see past the houses and down the slope to the
great city on the plains.

 

 

Two hundred kilometers east, a dark-purple mountain range loomed. The
Kalafalans called this 20,000-kilometer-high mass Tha'ufukwilala. The
Westering Beast

 

 

Overhead, perhaps a hectometer up, two purple creatures floated toward
the purple range. They were shaped like hump-backed boxkites with thick
disks on the lower side. Born on the low hills of the west coast, they
were now being pushed in their final form toward their final home by
the west winds.