In the Wake of Man

by Roger Elwood (ed)

  “You young people—the child-hero, the hoyden, the Countess—are you not all in the presentation tonight at the Decatur Street Opera House?” Mary Virginia asked.

  “Why, of course,” the young Countess said. “We are the splendor and interest of it, up till the slaughter starts.”

  “And this mountains-and-thunder nonsense that you’re talking, that’s part of the presentation, isn’t it? This is just advertising talk, yes?”

  “Come to the show, lady, come to the show,” the child-hero said. “We give away lots of free things here, but we don’t give away everything.”

  Black people of the town strode by wearing the new badges “Are You Splendid Enough?” There were other people of unspecified sorts. The dying people and dying animals were about gone. As the life left their members, their flesh turned into plastic or plywood or papier-mache, and then they were regarded as no more than leftover carnival debris.

  “How does it happen?” Margaret Stone asked.

  “They lost faith in themselves and in their flesh,” the Countess said. “The dragon there had the most faith. It was a human, and then it collapsed into the dragon totem as it died. Most of its flesh is turned now, but not all.”

  Margaret Stone bought a box of crackers at one of the kiboshes and fed the crackers to a dying dragon. Most of the body of this biodegradable dragon had already been transmuted into papier-mache, but some flesh remained.

  “That one mountain was the Mountain of the Commandments,” the hoyden said. “Notice the number ten in all the versions. That meant that this god had ten fingers and ten toes. He was an anthropomorphic god. Had he been a god in the image of the earlier peoples, he would have given twelve commands for his twelve fingers. Had he been an abstract or transcendent god, then he would have given an abstract or transcendent number of commands.

  “It was the same mountain they used in Greece both earlier and later. They played king of the mountain on it. They played Titans and Thunderguns. They played Giants and Jovians. They had small-caliber thunder then, but none of the big stuff.

  “Very often, the people put rollers under the mountain and rolled it around to the different countries, since there was only the one mountain in the world. The name of that first mountain was Ziggarat. Now there are more and more mountains. There’s supposed to be a new one somewhere this morning.”

  “What’s the real story, guys?” Salvation Sally asked.

  “Oh, these morning people (we’re all turning into them, you know, and I hate it) were around a long while ago,” Stein said, “and they were a nuisance. A demiurge put them all to sleep on a mountainside and told them they must sleep till he called them with a thunder of a certain tone. Then, a few millennia later, the demiurge forgot about it and used that tone of thunder for something else. The morning people woke up at the tone of the thunder (it was only the other day), and the first thing they saw was the mountain they were on. They thought the mountain was their mother, and that they were thunder dimension people. That’s all there was to it.”

  “Is it possible you speak truth when you intend to joke?” the child-hero cried. “We are the thunder dimension people. The mountain is our mother. It was only the other day. We aren’t fully awake yet, but we’re in a fever to resolve it all. We’re in a hurry to get rid of the flesh-weeds and the remnants and see who are the thunder people and who are not.”

  An alligator was eating a little boy who had come too close to the fountain. The sight of this nauseated Mary Virginia, and indeed it wasn’t a pleasant thing to watch.

  “I know it isn’t real,” she said, “but who is the illusion master who puts these things on? Is it possible there is some meaning to it? Or is it just a piece of unfortunate clownishness?”

  “Oh, the eating is real enough,” the child-hero said. “And the little boy was real once. But then he failed it. That’s the thing that will happen to at least half of you here present. You’ll be found short, and you’ll be destroyed. It’s best for all. Some simple persons who have lost their shine will be eaten by the alligators here. Others, a bit larger and older, are destroyed by the fire drakes when they prove to be inferior, or of some inferior species. And then there are certain strong and bright but crookedly talented weeds; and they must be destroyed by the thunder colts. Two will be working side by side at the harvest. And one will be taken and one will be left.

  “But the little boy is gone for good, and his puzzled parents will not even remember his name. Look at his mother there. She knows she brought someone or something to the park with her, but she can’t remember who or what it was.”

  “Come along, Stein,” Duffey said. “We’re too close to it. Let’s stand off from it a little way where the dazzle won’t be in our eyes. We can solve these puzzles. It comes to my mind that we are both good at puzzles, and Zabotski here also. There’s a group of master illusionists in town.”

  “Or of master destroyers of illusion,” Stein said. “We will step aside from their influence and take a clear look at it all.”

  “Good-by, the men,” Margaret Stone wished them on their way. “Be splendid!”

  Duffey and Stein and Zabotski all went over to Stein’s apartment. There was always a lot of high-class sanity at Stein’s. The three men looked at one another. They laughed. They set themselves to solve some doubtful happenings that had made a shambles of the morning.

  “We all know that buildings cannot disappear overnight and be replaced by pleasant parks that are curiously stylized,” Stein said. “We must now bring reason to bear. There is an illusion working in all this, and we must see through it. They are all dislocated scenes that we have watched this morning, but they may be only halves of a binocular vision; they may come into clear focus if we are able to find the other halves. These things are something like the aberrations I describe in my paper—”

  Mary Virginia, Margaret Stone, and Salvation Sally had gone around the park to Duffey’s bijou, which they believed to be one of the sources of confusion. The sessions were going great. One had the feeling that these people really were getting rid of much of the trash of the world, and consolidating other things. The speaker now was Hugh de Turenne of Xavier there in town. Hugh seemed to be a genuine member of the inner Royal Pop Historians. He interrupted himself as the ladies from the Pelican Enterprises came in, and he spoke directly to them:

  “What are the people saying about the Black Sea cataclysms, Miss Margaret?” he asked.

  “They are saying that it’s a terrible thing,” Margaret Stone called in her jangled voice. “An hour ago, the people were saying that it was a terrible, terrible thing. And two and a half hours ago they were saying that it was a thrice-terrible thing.”

  “Exactly,” Hugh beamed. “The obliteration of the Black Sea isn’t really important. But if we claim to have clarified geography and have things like that left over, who can credit our sincerity? We have to get rid of all the non-existents. There may still be a small note on the disaster in the afternoon papers; there may still be a short mention of it in the evening broadcasts; but it will be nowhere near so terrible a thing this evening as it was this morning. Tomorrow it may not be mentioned at all. In a week none but scholars will even recognize the name, and they will apply it correctly to an entirely different body of water. And in a month there will not be any reference anywhere in the world to the place that we used to call the Black Sea.”

  “But the people!” Salvation Sally cried. Sally had always liked people. “Can the deaths of millions of people be so easily forgotten?”

  “No people died in the catastrophe,” Hugh said. “None at all.”

  “How is that possible?” a man of the city asked. “There were millions of people living on the shores of the Black Sea. Consider just those who were on ships there when the sea disappeared. In fact, the first reports said that more than a million persons had died. Now the newspeople estimate that the figure will be nearer to a thousand, but that’s still a lot of people.”

  “An
d this evening they may say that possibly a hundred persons died there,” Hugh filled in. “But nobody really died at the Black Sea. It would have been impossible for anyone to have died there.”

  “Well, drop a tear for the slaughter of the fish, then,” Mary Virginia chirruped almost in laughter. Why should she laugh? Great natural catastrophes are serious events. “Consider that the famous Black Sea sturgeon are no more.”

  “I consider that the famous Black Sea sturgeon never saw the Black Sea,” Hugh said. “It was a good trade name to peddle sturgeon under (‘Black Sea’ brand was a little bit like ‘Golden Mountain’ brand or some such), but most of those sturgeon came from the Mukmuk Sea in high Turkestan. Perhaps Cyrus Roundhead here, who is an expert on the Black Sea legend, would like to say a few words on this disappearance that is in the news. In any case, my time is up, and his time begins.”

  “Ah, yes,” Roundhead agreed, clicking a second and third lens into his monocle to give him enough distance vision to see across the room. “Ah, yes, the Saga of the Sea That Never Was, the legend that took on a life of its-own. Isostasy analysis had determined years ago that there had to be a fairly high land rather than a low sea there. The world would have known the difference otherwise, by the difference of weight. But the theorists went there—where the sea scientifically could not have been, where it was documented as having been for so many centuries—and they thought they found it there. They were puzzled. Illusion will deceive, if it were possible, even the elect. But we Inner Royal Pops have always known there was no Black Sea in the common meaning.”

  “There has to have been a Black Sea!” one of the neo-Pops exploded. He was wearing one of those “Time Is Short. Are You Noetic Enough?” badges.

  “So it was once thought that it had to be,” Roundhead conceded, “though it’s now been decided that there’s no longer any psychological need for a Black Sea. For several thousand years, the Black Sea legend was allowed to grow undisturbed. Then it was deemed ripe. So, the night past or very early this morning, it was removed surgically and quickly. It was the legend that was removed, of course, not the sea. There never was any sea there, only a small swamp where several rivers disgorged, and then the flow was passed through the Bosporus Strait.

  “The Adriatic Sea was the only sea of Europe ever named the Black Sea. It is still called that, for adris or hadris meant ‘black’ in the early Latin and in the Etruscan. There is always a human requirement to believe in ‘Lands

  Beyond’ or ‘Seas Beyond.’ Some of the credited places are harmless and even inspiring: the Isles of the Blessed, the Hesperides, Antilla, Cibola. But the Black Sea legend was baleful. When we came to the present updating of legends, it had to go. The dislocation will not really be severe. Several million persons who believed they had villas on the Black Sea will only know that their comforting belief is gone; they will not remember what it was. Well, that’s history.”

  “Are there any other legend places that have to be destroyed?” a fearful lady asked.

  “No, not at this time,” Roundhead answered cautiously. “There are three that I myself would like to have destroyed, and I’ve voted for their destruction. But it’s believed that they’re not ripe for it yet. They remain too strong and too entrenched.”

  “What are their names?” the fearful lady asked.

  “Oh, Rome, Athens, Jerusalem,” Roundhead said.

  “Roundhead, you shrivel me in all my ancientries,” Margaret Stone hollered out in her beautiful and gaunt voice.

  “You are saying that Rome and Athens and Jerusalem do not exist?” gasped a man who wore the badge “Ride It Out. They’ve Got to Keep Some of Us.”

  “I’m aghast.”

  “Yes. It’s because of the aghast crowd that we don’t do away with them forthwith.” Roundhead smiled. “Well, let’s say that those three cities or syndromes were slightly in history, and they do have some technical connections with their own legends—as a flea will sometimes have the same surname as its dog. And we will admit that there is presently to be found a sort of carnival, tourist-oriented settlement on each of those sites. But that’s about all.

  “It served the mordant humor of the Etruscans to bandy about the name ‘Roman.’ It applied to a destitute neighborhood of hillbillies who scratched out (literally) an existence in the hound-dog hills above the Tiber swamps. The Etruscans were an excellent, ardent, archaic, talented, and vastly cultivated people. If they addressed one another in such manner as ‘Hey, Brain Rot,’

  ‘Hey, Nosebleed,’ ‘Hey, Okie,’ ‘Hey, Rumdum,’ ‘Hey, Roman’—well, that was their humor. Even their enemies took to calling them the ‘Romans’ for fun. That’s where the thing should have stopped, in fun. There were never any real Romans except that small settlement of shiftless hillbillies.”

  “Whence do you have this information?” a scholarly man asked.

  “Oh, from the rocks of the region,” Roundhead said. “The patinas lifted from them give us a pretty detailed view of things there. And from other sources.”

  “But what about the City itself? The Capital City of the World? Rome?” Margaret Stone called in her hot Italian voice. (She had several voices.)

  “Ah, Miss Margaret, the seven leading Etruscan Cities shared and made up the common Capital City of Etruria, and of the Italic Peninsula, and of the World. They were sometimes referred to as the Seven Eminences, and one meaning of eminence is ‘hill.’ And they were sometimes given the name (in fun, and also in fraternal lodge hocus-pocus) of the Seven Hillbilly Hills. The ‘Capital’ was officially called ’The City of the Seven Eminences.’ ‘City’ was here used in its original meaning of ‘league.’” “But what of the famous-name Roman emperors?” a man with the nose like the knobbiest Roman of them all asked. “They must have existed. They are too well known to be made up.”

  “Some of them were the names of vaudeville and music hall performers,” Roundhead said. “The Etruscans excelled in vaudeville and variety presentations. And some of them were the names of mascots of their army regiments. Some were nothing at all. The simple fact is this: Rome, with its supposed culture and art and law and might, began as no more than a joke. The joke became old, but even an unfunny joke is sometimes accorded privileged status in its old age. But there is no reality at all in the main Roman legend. Ah, I believe some of us wish to go on a little safari in a few moments.”

  “What about Athens?” This was asked by John the Greek himself, the owner and proprietor of John the Greek’s Famous French Restaurant. “I come from there. I lived there till I was thirteen years old. I’ll not be easily convinced that there isn’t such a place.”

  “I’ll not easily be convinced that there is,” Roundhead said. “I journeyed there once to find it, and I didn’t find much. I obtained a map of the city, but it was defective. Only about one street in five that appeared on the map was to be found in reality. The comment on the back of the map said there were seventeen different streetcar routes in the city, but there was only one. The directory showed there were fifty-five cinemas in the city. There were only two, and both of them were showing American cowboy films.

  “There was a hill there with an old-new building on it. Half of it consisted of some broken old limestone pillars; the other half was a combination of milk bar, old hickory barbecue house, hotel, honky-tonk, estiatorio, and fried chicken emporium. I would ask someone how to get to the Panathenaic Stadium, or the Olympieum, or the Dionysus

  Theater, or the Odeon, or the Parthenon. In each case, the person would point to the old end of that half-and-half building. It was whatever building one wanted it to be.

  “I would ask how to get to Churchill Street or Constitution Square or Sophocles Street or Concordia Square or University Boulevard. ‘Behold, your feet are upon it,’ someone would say. They had one street, and it was whatever street they wanted it to be. But I was at a disadvantage in my journey to Athens. I looked at it all with clear and open eyes.”

  “You joke,” an olive-colored lady
challenged.

  “He jokes only a little bit, Helen Petrides,” John the Greek admitted. “I had forgotten it, but when I was a boy there, it was very much like that. But for it to be even like that, it has to be. Tell me again why you say there is no Athens, man.”

  “Oh, I said there was a contrived, tourist-oriented settlement on each of the sites,” Roundhead reasoned with John. “How it was anciently, I will come to in a moment. I see that some of our own young people and also some of the young and middling people of the town are seeking an end of words and a beginning of action, or at least they wish to mix a little action with the words. You ladies from the Pelican Press, I will promise you a safari after large and medium game in just a few minutes. You were not with us on the first little safari we took through the town last night.

  “There was a man, a laborer in the SF vineyard, who used always to suggest that the company might as well be chasing fire lizards on Venus while they talked. So they chased the lizards: They determined that they were identical to the fire drakes of Earth. But the quality of their dialogue always suffered from the dilution and division of attention.

  “Well, we will now go out and assault strategic parts of the city and the world with thunder axes, and we will carry out our talk at the same time. And we will not let the quality of our dialogue suffer, no matter what else we are doing.”

  Then they left the buildings of the Duffey establishment. They took to the roofs and the balconies and the iron ladders of the town. The young people of the Royal Pop Historians were very agile, but the townspeople kept up with them. The townsfolk found the thunder ax an easy weapon to master. They quickly learned the trick of hacking fraudulent persons and structures to death.