Fourth Mansions

by R. A. Lafferty

  Bedelia Bencher brought a red rose to Letitia Bauer — “for your death” — but neither of them understood it.

  “We come to the problem again and again,” Big Jim Bauer rumbled, beginning on the big thing rapidly, and there was an overpowering medical smell in the room, compounded with the usual odor of mysticity that the Harvesters exuded. “As to the world and the people of it, we have come to a too early perfection more quickly than we imagined, for all that it's taken these thousands of years to bring us here. If there is not to be another cycle of rise and bust we must make a breakthrough right now. The limit isn't set so high as we imagined. The ancients were correct that the limit, the sky, could almost be reached by thrown rocks and shot arrows and catapults. We're pressing against that sky now. Soon we'll be crushed flat between the unyielding sky and the upraised earth. In all our amplitude we now come to the new narrowness. I believe that humans have been at this crisis-plateau many times before and have always failed. This time we will not fail. We will break through. We will shatter the sky. We will be free to complete our growth.”

  “I've always hated that sky and all it stands for,” Arouet Manion whined sharply, like a saw cutting through elm-wood. “One of my spiritual fathers swore always that we must first put out the lights of heaven. I agree that we must shatter this heaven-sky completely and forever. It's no more than a filthy membrane that prevents us from being born. Let's use words correctly for a while. The love business is gone and over with. We can now speak of the higher love or the cosmic love, but we all know that it must be a great surge of hatred that will break through the sky. We've climbed up through our puling infancy; we've come into our awkward and disgusting adolescence; and we all know that we've been two utterly different creatures in those two states. Tadpole does not differ nearly as much from the frog as we do from our earlier and later state, except in appearance. But now we'll break through to the third state, to full adulthood. There hasn't been even one fully adult human being from the beginning of the world until now. We'll correct that tonight. We'll finally, the seven of us, become creatures of the third state, adults.”

  “I feel there's something hellish about it,” Wing Manion protested. “Who are we to shatter the sky, even by metaphor? There's a framework and a timetable somewhere for us to follow, I'm sure of that. Isn't it arrogance and dishonesty for us to break that up?”

  “Certainly, certainly, arrogance and dishonesty,” Big Jim Bauer agreed heartily. “Arrogance and dishonesty are exactly what we need. We'll find likelier words for these virtues in due time, but they're the exact names in the present context. We can clean it up, we can clean it all up when we have the time for it. Oh, it's the easiest thing in the world to move and bend the limits on the local level. I've already done so. I'm not called the bishop's left-hand man for nothing. I knead him like a lump of sour dough. I had but to use a few phrases which Arouet lifted from Teilhard, and he made them his own. We become now the Overpeople of the Third Testament, I explained it to the bishop. The father was the type-figure of the First or Old Testament, the ancestral, chthonic, black-earth beast figure, our origin and our animality. The son was the type-figure of the Second or New Testament: that momentary puling thing that was called Love, that momentary puling thing that was called God, the awkward adolescence of ourselves. Now we come to the holy spirit who is the type-figure of the Third Testament This is ourselves when we shatter the sky and become full and free people.” Jim Bauer rubbed his big hands in complete pleasure with himself.

  “I explained it to him and I explain it to you,” he went on, “that God was the missing link, a weak categorical imperative for a weak interval, but necessary. May that dismal interlude quickly be excised from our unconsciousness when we've become adult. God stood between the beasts and man in the evolutionary sequence: lower than full man, of course. And now we'll be done with that figure forever. God could never be spoken of as holy without laughing, but man may be spoken of as holy after tonight.”

  “How did the bishop take it?” Bedelia Bencher asked Bauer. “Doesn't he ever get chock-full of you? I do sometimes.”

  “He took it completely and trustingly as a backward child would, Bedelia. He's even going on television with a presentation of it when I've cleaned it up a little for him. The camera-eye, for him, is the pearl beyond price. For this he's given up and traded all that he owns. ‘But what will a man receive in exchange for his soul, or his intellect?’ I taunted him a little; but he only grinned vacantly. Both of us know that he never had any soul, or intellect. But we are untouchable from that quarter, and also from the legal sector. We've played with our power over others, having good game with it. Now we'll turn back our powers on ourselves, and we won't be playing. Tonight the seven of us will make the big jump. We'll become the first of the privileged mutation. We'll shatter the sky like the dirty glass it is, the unauthorized membrane that has shut us off from life. We'll become the first of the new people, the Third Testament of the world.”

  “Well, will we be the end of it then?” Letitia Bauer asked. “What if we receive everything ever and I still want to say ‘No, no, that is not near enough’? I will say it. I hate to be the end of anything. If we break into the last land, I'll hate it, even if it is infinitude. There has to be something beyond even infinity for me. Is there no hope of danger beyond?”

  “Of course there is!” Jim Bauer boomed. “We'll be the beginning and not the end. Even the little murky half-brained theologians, grubbing into a thing long dead, have speculated that Three as the number of persons in the Godhead was never more than a contingent number. They speculate that there may be as many as five, or seven, or even nine persons in what used to be called the Trinity. Even such little pigs’-eyes as they may look a little ways forward. I tell you that there may be many thousands of stages or person-types in the humanity thing, and we now break intrepidly to only the third. There is hope of danger for millions of years, Letitia, forever.”

  “We're clear on the medical aspect,” Arouet Manion said. “I'm an M.D. I was a general practitioner and surgeon before I became a psychiatrist. And James Bauer was a medical doctor on his way to becoming an eminent biologist. We'll set the stage for the induced mutations now, and each of the seven must give every aspect of himself.”

  “Will it hurt?” Bedelia Bencher asked cheerfully.

  “Certainly, certainly,” Jim Bauer said. “It doesn't have to, as far as the surgery goes, but we want it to. We want to bring out the agonizing awareness of every one of us in every possible way. Begin the inward-turned brain-weave, all of you, while we get ready for the rest of it. Weave it to the ultimate! It is ourselves we are mutating now.”

  The helical passion of Salzy Silverio stung them all with the strength of it, for all that she was gobbling little cheese snacks and chattering inanities with Bedelia Bencher. The weave needed the passion of Salzy more than any other thing. It was possibly the strongest element in the whole weave.

  A strong smell of ammonia had been released into the air. There were two large brass-colored spheres there and they sent lavender lightning dancing between them across the room. They raised a lot of acrid ozone with their eerie sparking, and also raised all their spirits unaccountably. The pink hair of Bedelia rose up from her head into quivering extremities from the charge in the air and there was a garish corona about her.

  “It's all hokus, of course,” said Hondo Silverio in an easy voice that seemed to come out of a nest in the rocks. “It's my own arranging. It sets up something of the primitive conditions of the world when life sparked for the first time; or at least something of the laboratory myth of those probable conditions. It was a hoax that first time too, but a primitive glob did allow itself to be hoaxed by it and was conned into coming to life. The hoax has been a condition ever since then, and will be forever. And the first glob, you know, was itself a mutation, and against stiff statistical odds. The normal didn't slip in till later, sideways and ashamed of itself, and the normal has never
been of any use to anything: not then, not now, not ever. We're tampering with the double-helix centrality of our own body cells, and the helical passion of my own serpentine wife has already set it to going. Come with it, all of you! We need show-boats tonight, we need outlandish showoffs! Outdo yourselves! Scatter the ectoplasmic confetti. This is carnival!”

  “Throw serpentine, you old serpent,” Wing Manion called out, like a laughing fish. “Throw streams of it. It's a water carnival, but we're the seven-headed dog at the bottom of the water. What's the dog doing down there anyhow? Does anyone remember the name of the seven-headed dog?”

  James Bauer and Arouet Manion were arranging for the surgery, but they had everything draped in plush purple instead of antiseptic white.

  “We disregard all infecting!” Bauer boomed. “We welcome it. How can infection hurt us? We are ourselves setting about the infecting of the world. How can we fear what we'll get from each other? We wish to get everything possible from each other. What can environmental germs do to us? We ourselves are evolutionizing all environments tonight.”

  “Mighty sloppy medical practice,” said Bedelia Bencher, but who can take seriously a girl with her pink hair standing on end? The contribution of Bedelia to the weave had always been a sort of cosmic hilarity.

  And she was into the weave now, pink and pungent, the numinous spook, the cinnamon cookie, the mad anima who had never left off being a kid. Plappergeistic and poltergeistic, the lavender lightning was about her especially, the witch who was no more than a sketch in red chalk. She had really never had a body, that Bedelia, only a chalk sketch of one. This gave her a certain lightness, and there was enough heaviness in some of the others. Summer lightning, lavender lightning inside the walls, and hazel-colored sparks out of her eyes. She had been, perhaps, the primordial mutation — light enough to come to life — and the heavier normal things had not arrived till later.

  Hondo Silverio was now into the weave with his mottled-green humor and his ancient nobility. “You forget sometimes,” he had said once, “that the first motley, the first mottled-green clown suit, was a snake suit. We were the original humorists. Our sudden scaring of people, that's the best practical joke of all, and it never wears out.”

  And what he said now was “We need even the very first types for this induced mutation and don't forget that the original person-type was a double one, and that the nobler and more humorous half of that original father image was the snake.”

  A noble snake was Hondo, but he seemed to crawl less than the others.

  Once more Jim Bauer was projecting his person with big hands as he arranged instruments and vials and needles. He was a joyous rumble, the arrogance and dishonesty that was needed to break the stifling sky-limit on them. He was power, do not doubt that. He was rumbling spirits. He was smashed fountains. He was lightning.

  He struck like lightning.

  Bauer, with blinding speed and incredible force, smashed his wife Letitia in the face with a stunning chopping knife-blow, felling her. She screamed but once as she fell. He had gashed her suddenly and deeply with the ghastly Harvester mark. She bled deep red as she went chalk-white. Perhaps she was killed by that one blow; her head lolled as though her neck was broken.

  Danger!

  But was it such a dirty danger she had wanted?

  She came strongly into the weave at the instant of her fall, in with the whimper of death but still with that same crying for danger. All the ashen and angular passion that this moon-colored slim woman could give she gave them. But she had broken and died at that moment of first bloodshed, and they all acquired pieces of her. The gouging of the sector out of her head, the long needle into her side under her arm where the lymph is closest, the deep rasping and inoculation of the round, were all bloody and botched with her. They were meant to be.

  Arouet Manion slid into the brain-weave with his own cool elegance, his chilly passion for these hot things. Arouet loved the blade; he loved the needle; he was a sadist in these things. He slashed and gouged. He had the cold passion for blood. “The old barber-surgeons were right,” he whined dreamily. “Bleed the patients, bleed them all, bleed them for everything! It weakened and killed the patients, of course, but it brought such soul-filling satisfaction to the barber-surgeons. I love it, I love it!” There was something almost inelegant in the Arouet elegance carried so far.

  Wing Manion, the speckled Klee-fish, the saintly sex-pot, swam into the weave with a billow of underwater excitement. She belonged to the waters that are under the world, and she bled pale but ancient fish-serum instead of blood when she was gashed in head and side and round. Oh, she bled a small bucket of it, though. There was a lot of it in her.

  “The mechanism of this is quite simple,” Jim Bauer rumbled as he struck Salzy Silverio such a bloody, deep, blinding gash on the head that she fell to the floor stunned. The power was in the rumbling sound of Bauer's words, not in their meaning. “We extracted serum and specimen from each of you some time back,” Bauer growled out like a throaty lion, “and little glots of flesh, nerve stringers, samples of every sort of cell. We made living broths of these, and we mixed in the tissues of mutating worms and newts. We shot the broths through with high voltages and frequencies, we bathed them in every sort of ray, we bombarded them with strange particles, we encanted them: ‘Mutate, damn you, mutate,’ we encanted. We took one half of each broth and distributed it among the other six. Now each one of us will receive back most of his own, but a little of all the others. There are a dozen triggers inside the broths, the serums. They reenter us. They should produce cellular explosions inside of us. We'll mutate in our smallest cells and in our total symbiosis. Each of us has now received three violent wounds and has received the serums into them. Ah, isn't the pain exquisite? Fainting again, Arouet, and you love it so much? There is an additive to the serums, the most painful known. It harms nothing, but it tortures. We want us all to feel it to the utmost.

  “What, two others of you are still conscious? Are there two others here as strong as myself? The men are gone under, and two Shes remain unbroken. Bedelia, you surprise me! I didn't know that you were one of the strong ones.”

  Bedelia Bencher was not particularly strong now. She was retching violently, and her pinkishness had turned to purple. She had probably lost a quart of blood, and she was blinded by the ammonia fumes and the lavender lightning from the brass spheres. But she was still conscious.

  And Salzy Silverio was most certainly conscious. Her mouth was in motion without words; her lips were moving with the illusion of a double-helix motion, a snake-mouth motion; her frame was shaking, her eyes sparked with hate and green laughter at the same time.

  This Salzy had not collapsed for long when she was struck down with the gaping head wound. She would be the last to give up, always. She was conscious and snapping with color. She even flicked her tongue out from broken moving lips. She was the twisted passion itself.

  Jim Bauer, swaying and falling all over himself, already far over the threshold of pain, opened wall jets to let measured amounts of noxious gas into the room. This would bring unconsciousness to all of them for a half hour.

  But Bauer stayed on his feet by blind last effort, until the blackness or the purpleness should overwhelm him. He wanted to savor the pain and arrogance and hate as long as possible. He deliberately walked on the bodies of all six of his companions as they lay on the floor, heeling lavishly into vital sectors. He trod last on the sinewy, lithe, snake-strong body of Salzy Silverio, on stomach, on breast, on throat, while she watched him with defiant snake's eyes bright with hatred. Then Bauer collapsed in a final spasm, falling heavily atop the firm fish-body of Wing Manion.

  Salzy Silverio closed her inner eyelids, her snakes’ eyelids, but she could still see as though through mist and she would not give up her consciousness. And the brain-weave itself remained fully conscious.

  They all came around about the same time. Hondo Silverio opened windows to clear the room. It had just c
ome on deep twilight while they had been out. They were all new people now, of course; they had mutated. There was truly a stronger linkage among them, a stronger mastery of the world. They had shattered the sky, and now there was no limit at all upon them.

  They would have looked disheveled and disreputable to other eyes, but to their own new seven-faceted eye they did not.

  “Are we all all right?” Salzy Silverio asked with a certain huskiness in her voice. After all, big Jim Bauer had stood on her throat and ground a heel into it; but it could have been a very elephant and it wouldn't really have hurt her. And, of course, nothing could ever hurt her again, now that she had mutated.

  “Yes, all are all right,” said James Bauer. “Except Letitia, that is. Ah — she's dead. I somehow expected that, though.”

  “Isn't that a little bit awful?” Bedelia asked sharply.

  “We are all of us consummately awful now,” Bauer rumbled, “in the real meaning of the word. We are filled with awe of ourselves, and we are completely awe-inspiring.”

  “Oh shut up that stuff!” Bedelia flared angrily. “Your wife is dead. This should bring you out of your silly daze. For one thing, there's the legal thing. I think you murdered her. You must have broken her skull, you struck her so terribly.”

  “Oh, possibly, possibly; yes, I'm sure I did. But it's no great matter.”

  “No great matter?”

  “Of course not, Bedelia. You have some carryover, I'm afraid. It's almost as if you hadn't mutated completely. Oh, I can get a new wife easily enough, and I will, within the present hour. As for my legal aspects, don't you realize that we're now the masters of the law and of everything?”

  “No, I sure don't realize that,” Bedelia protested. “I think it's horrifying.”

  “A little horror makes the soup taste better, Biddy,” Salzy Silverio consoled her. “Don't you just love to come onto threshing monsters in a bowl of soup? I think the new way will be fun. I've taken a liking to the arrogance and hatred bit already.”