More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  Well, there were whole shanty notions in Bagby, that's what it was. The Bagby mind couldn't be despoiled in quick raids as could most other minds. One couldn't carry that loot away in the hands or in a suitcase. It would take drays, it would take trucks, it would take box cars and whole trains, it would take barges and flat-boats, it would take ships to haul away the Bagby mind-freight. It was mostly shanty stuff, but it was of immense bulk.

  How could Bagby have devoured and become possessed of this living population, this extensiveness of whole nations, in his short years? He wasn't eternal nor extensible. He didn't even have the thin golden dust of touched-eternity that Duffey and Mary Louise had, that Sebastian Hilton and others had. How could he have known the interiors of eighty thousand houses in St. Louis itself. Oh, Duffey had free entry into the big and shabby warehouses of Bagby's mind, but he hadn't the means of hauling the material away. He hadn't the depots to store it in. He had magic methods of handling materials, but here was a bulk that defied his magic.

  Bagby was a baroque, a flawed pearl. The pearly sickness was all over him. He was a friend and a sort of business associate of Melchisedech Duffey. He was a person of surpassing depth and scope. But he was a slob. He frequented the fleshpots of Chestnut Street, and he brawled in every section of town. There is always room in the world for a royal brawler, but Bagby missed the royalty by a bit. He had a bad name in many places.

  Art critic Duffey said that Bagby's St. Louis was a series of Doré drawings. All views of the physical world are the subjective views of somebody, and Duffey could watch even the subjective views of Bagby and others. He loved these ink drawings that made up the Bagby City, those black and white and gray sketches (due to technical difficulties there were no colors in Bagby's mind), and he loved the Bagby-esque shape of the people and the town.

  Bagby's battling had sometimes been of a murderous and evil sort. There are men who love to battle even to death. In that era, there was a sort of shanty dueling ground by the river, on a lone patch of sandy clay under the bluffs and edged in by a sand bog. There were vicious bare-hand and rough-shod fights there, fights for the sake of fighting, and to finish. Bagby had once left a man for dead in such a fight. And Bagby had once been left for dead himself.

  “It's those three slanted-faced men that he brawls with the most,” Mary Louise told Duffey once.

  “Oh my God!” Duffey said.

  Bagby had violent ideas on politics and economics and religion. He believed that all the parishes in the city, including the cathedral parish, had lost their orthodoxy. He believed that most of the pastors and all the assistants were a bunch of Judas Priests. He went to mass at St. Malachy's clear across town, this being the church that came nearest to preserving the true faith.

  Bagby was a mess. If he were indeed a part of Duffey, then perhaps it was best that that part was externalized and that it could be segregated.

  Mary Louise liked Bagby pretty well in spite of all this. She ran around with him a little bit. She said that he was usually right in his opinions, but that he was so rock-headedly right that he defeated himself.

  “Oh really, I wouldn't mind Bagby so much,” she said once, “if only he didn't work so hard at being Bagby.”

  And Bagby was to Duffey, and to Mary Louise also, a sullen and magnificent piece of shanty, monochrome art.

  4

  And then there was the ballooning. Duffey joined (according to one version, he founded it) The World-Wide Argonauts Argo Balloon Club. This was a club of very rich sportsmen. and the entry fee paid to join the club was three thousand dollars. Well, Duffey had three thousand dollars and quite a bit more of loose money at that time, but he may not have paid it for his membership. Bagby said years later (and Bagby was the only one who could remember the balloon adventures in detail in later years) that Duffey did not pay anything at all for his membership, that he rather collected three thousand dollars from each one of twenty three sportsmen, he acting as North American Bursar of the World-Wide Argonauts Argo Balloon Club. Duffey was supposed to transmit this money to the World Headquarters at Geneva. So he would have done, but the World Headquarters at Geneva did not then exist and would not ever exist. So Duffey was stuck with the money.Duffey paid twice three thousand dollars for a custom-made balloon, and that was more money then than it has ever been since. It was a large silk-bag balloon. It ran on hydrogen gas and sand bags. The great silk-bag would be inflated with hydrogen, and at about the same time four thousand pounds weight would be loaded into the basket or gondola. With this balance, the balloon would rise resolutely but not too swiftly as soon as it was uncabled from its mooring. Part of this weight always consisted of hundred-pound sand bags, and part of it was people and supplies for them. Duffey would sometimes take as many as nine or ten persons up on an ascension. With them and with water and food for them, that would be more than two thousand pounds of the four thousand pounds ballast.

  The balloon would descend when Duffey would let part of the hydrogen out of the bag. It ascended again when Duffey threw some of the sand bags out; or, in extreme case, when he threw some of the people out. It went, generally, where the wind went. Duffey did have a sort of tacking sail rigged up by which, in theory, he could depart from the direction of the wind somewhat. In practice though, that tacking sail merely made the wind angry, and it would tear the sail to pieces and then blow the balloon where it had intended to blow it originally. And Duffey also installed a gasoline engine and a propeller, but it would influence the balloon only about five miles an hour. But Duffey, and Bagby even more, learned to select winds by ascending and descending and by controlled drift. They learned to see the different winds, to know their speeds and strengths and directions. They learned to sidle into them.

  Duffey first named his magnificent balloon “The Argo Twelve” for a reason that he was not able to explain to any of his companions. Then a misty person of great power and status came to him and told him that the Argo Twelve was currently active, that he Duffey should have known that it was, and that Duffey would not be able to use the name Argo Twelve for his balloon. But this person told him that the balloon might sometimes be used as a pinnace or ship's boat for the Argo of the Twelfth Voyage. Duffey thereupon changed the name of his balloon to “The Argo Twelve and Half', a name still harder to explain than the original name.

  Duffey used to ascend with Bagby, with Mary Louise, with Charley Murray, with Beth Keegan, with Dorothy Tarkington, with other friends and acquaintances and employees, with young Gretchen Sisler, with Papa Piccone, with Evelyn London. At first they would go up only in the sunny daytime. They had not yet settled on proper lighting for “Argo Twelve and a Half” . Duffey was all for electric lights to be powered by well-cell electric batteries. Charley Murray thought they should use kerosene lights or compressed gas lights. Bagby was in favor of carbide lights or lime lights. Duffey finally won when he showed them reports on other balloonists.

  Other balloonist sportmen had been blown to Kingdom Come when using non-electric lights on their balloons. Balloon descent involved releasing large amounts of hydrogen gas right out of the bottom of the balloon sack, right into and around the balloon gondola.

  Duffey and his friends would go about two miles high and would fly as much as two hundred miles on the long days; and they had good luck at coming back to their starting point. They were lucky in leaving such a starting point. The prevailing westerlies blew above St. Louis, and the Gulf southerlies blew there; and local ‘river winds’ were generated by the Mississippi itself, by the Missouri River that spilled into it from the west a little above the town, by the Ohio River that merged with it from the east a few miles below the town. St. Louis was not the windiest city in the country (though it was one of the five windiest), but it had the best selection of winds of any town in the country. There is just no touring like touring in a balloon. It is open, it is fresh, but it isn't unpleasantly windy: you go generally at the same speed is the wind goes. It is cloud cruising. Sometimes it is storm c
ruising. It was the highest and most classy sporting activity that had ever been.

  Beth Keegan proposed a balloon dinner party. She insisted on it, and it was brought about. There were four couples of them at the dinner party, and a serving man to wait on tables. There were Duffey and Beth, Mary Louise and Bagby, Charley Murray and a girl named Monica, and Cyrus and Edith Summerfield. The serving man was off one of the loafers' benches at the Rounders' Club, but he looked splendid in livery; and he had served elegant persons before, counts, earls, a duchess, barons, even the late Duke of Kent. The Summerfields were members of St. Louis high society as well as commentators on that same high society in both the Globe and the Post Dispatch. They were a young couple full of glitter; Edith was a sort of cousin of Beth Keegan, and they responded readily to the invitation to attend a formal dinner party in the gondola of a balloon two miles high.A little modification of the gondola was necessary for it to carry an eight-place table, and another bulky object, but the modification was made. The supper itself was catered from Duffey's own kitchen at the Rounders' to the balloon at ascension time. Then they dined high in the sky, in candle-lit splendor, as the late-ish darkness settled first on the earth below them and then above to enfold them on high. Listen, that was only part of it! Another thing they had with them in the gondola was a player piano. The serving man pumped it after he had served dinner to them. And Beth herself pumped it when it was time for the serving man to serve the after-dinner wine. It was all excellent Rag Time on the player piano.

  “The next time we have formal dinner up here, we will have a small but sufficient dance floor installed,” Beth said. That part, somehow, never came to pass. Even so, we ask you, did you yourself ever dine in conditions of such unusual elegance? And Cyrus and Edith Summerfield would give it elegant treatment in the press.

  Duffey, however, was a little bit worried about their candle-lit splendor when it came time to descend. He put the roll “Black Midnight Rag” into the player piano, blew out the candles, accidentally knocked Charley Murray's cigar overboard, and opened the gate valve to let the hydrogen gas whoof out and the balloon came down.

  That was not the last time they went up in the wonderful balloon, but it was the most memorable time.

  In later years, when Duffey had left St. Louis and Bagby was the custodian of the balloon, Bagby several times wrote to Duffey that ghosts had inflated the balloon and taken it up for nonscheduled voyages. “It is all right,” Duffey would write back. “I know who they are.”

  5

  So things went for some months (most of two years anyhow) after Duffey had exploded into enterprises and affairs in St. Louis. And then it ended. What ended? Oh, only the world. The world that we have now isn't the same is the world that we had then. Or it may have been only the multitudinous, golden-touch world of Melchisedech-in-St.-Louis that ended.

  “I'm Freudian now,” Beth Keegan announced one evening. “All of us superior persons have become Freudians. I want superior dreams from all of you right now. Mary Louise, you stuffy sister of the King, do you dream?”

  “I dream passionately about every one of you here, though Melky says that my passions are bovine,” Mary Louise said. “My dreams are superior, and all of you here are in them, and I'll not reveal them.”

  “Charley,” Beth said to the Murray, “tell me one of your dreams. You are my second love. You are my second passion and pride. Please do not disappoint me. Come up with something good.”

  “No I won't,” Charley Murray said. “You have no business analyzing my dreams, since they are mostly about you. Sometimes you are a pea-hen, sometimes you are a talking statue, sometimes you are a bicycle. I won't tell you my dreams. I won't be uncovered before you.”

  “Melchisedech, my king and my concupiscence, tell me a dream.”

  “Yes. Here's the just-before-morning dream of today. I was in my own person as the Boy King or Boy Magician. I was making birds, which isn't difficult if you're a Boy Magician. I was making them out of clay and setting them in the sun to dry. Then I would transmute them to the color of living gold and I'd set them to flying. Other colors would come to them as they rose in the air. They were brilliant Paradise Birds. Then someone began to shoot them down.

  “I called the royal game warden to stop the depredations. He notched an arrow to his bow-string and came along with me to kill anyone who was transgressing against the bird law. And we found the transgressors immediately.

  “ ‘They are killing Birds of Paradise,’ I said. ‘Explain to them that it's against the law to kill them.’ ‘It's against the bird law,’ the game warden told one of the rough men who were shooting the birds down. ‘They're Birds of Paradise.’ ‘ ’Birds of Paradise, my slanted face!’ one of the rough men cried. ‘These are clay pigeons and I can prove it. Here! Look what's raining down from the sky from the last ones we shot!’

  He was right. It was clay. My birds had turned from Birds of Paradise into clay pigeons, and clay pigeons were always in season. The game warden shot the rough men and killed them, but he wasn't happy about it. ‘I don't care whether you are the king,’ he told me. ‘You call me out on one more clay pigeon chase and you're going to get shot with my next arrows.’ ”

  “Oh, that's an easy dream,” Beth said. “It means that you're beginning to doubt your own powers and your own creations. Yes, I know that you do make people, and you put some pretty fine features on them. But you have to make them out of clay. There's nothing else to make them out of. What really happens is that you collect people like you collect pictures or statues. Then why will it shock you when some of your brightest people turn out to be forgeries? But that wasn't your main dream for last night. Tell me the real one now, since you tried dishonestly to hide it.”

  “There was a big division in my central dream of last night,” Duffey said then, “and I believe that it will prove to be a watershed of my life. It was at first a conventional apocalyptical dream. A pythoness voice was giving explanation of it in a running narration as it went along; and I believe that it was you, Beth Keegan, who were taking the pythoness role…

  “A chasm opened up and began to undercut all the tall structures and all the towns also. I went down into the chasm to halt this attrition, for it was eating up everything. Multitudes of people were falling into the hole, and especially children and young people. ‘It's lucky that I'm on the spot here,’ I said. ‘For this requires deep magic.’ But I found that my magic was paralyzed. I was helpless and I could not find any bottom to the chasm. But I was able to to cross the bottomless ditch to the other side. I'm on this other side now, and the rest of you are on the other side where you were, and there's a veil between us.”

  “I called on my giants to impose a stasis on the chasm and prevent its spreading. I called for giant's hands to come and perform prodigies. They came, but they were severed hands, lopped off bloodily at the forearms, and with their strength dead. They were joined together with manacles.

  “Then I saw that they weren't giant's hands at all. They were a pair of little boy's mittens, and the manacles that fastened them together were only the drawstring of the mittens. Then I heard a voice (and it was your own exaggerated voice practicing for the pythoness role, Beth) ‘These are the years that the cows have eaten’. That is it, Beth. Do you know what it means?”

  “Of course. When are you going away, Melchisedech, tonight or in the morning?”

  “I didn't know that I was going away. Does the dream say that I will?”

  “Of course. You can't impose a stasis on a chasm from here.”

  “Then you will have to take over the Rounders' Club, Charley,” Duffey said.

  “All right. When will you be back, Melchisedech?”

  “When will I be back, Beth?” Melchisedech asked her.

  “In seven years, I suppose. That's a common period. And the ‘years that the cows have eaten’ are almost certainly the seven sheaves of grain. Will you be all right for seven years? I can't wait for you, you know. I love you a
lot, but not for seven years' absence. No, no, not me to wait for seven years.”

  “Will I get my magic back after the seven years, Beth? Will I be able to command the hands again?”

  “I think so. But you haven't lost much of your magic. Only a part of it.” They went to Meinkmuellers for a good supper, and both friends and strangers came to Duffey and sad that they had heard that he was going away. But Duffey hadn't told anybody; nobody had told anybody.

  At Meinkmuellers, Charley Murray and the rest of them were joined by the two Monicas, Monica Drexel who was sometimes Charley's girl, and Monica Murray who was Charley's sister. Both of them said that they had come there because they wanted to see Melchisedech for the last time. And yet nobody had told them that Duffey was going away, and nobody had told them that the group was going to Meinkmuellers for supper.

  It was there that Melchisedech gave a talisman to one of the Monicas, to the wrong one at first, apparently. He was confused by these two since they were named alike and ran around together and looked alike.

  “I don't know what this thing is,” said the Monica to whom Duffey first gave the talisman. “I don't understand it at all. I never saw anything like that before.”

  “Oh, I think it's for me,” the other Monica said. “I think I know what it is. Thank you, Duffey.”

  The bunch of them went to the Star and Garter after that, and the skits there seemed to be better than usual. Duffey was called up onto the stage, and the proprietor Papa Piccone announced that their good friend was going away on a seven year assignment. Some of the burlesque girls came out and kissed Duffey.