More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  This simple answer seemed to throw the Moral Sanction Committee into some sort of confusion. Yes, they did remember that it was only yesterday that they had talked to Zabotski about the distasteful subject. But they also remembered that it had been eight years. Could it have been both?

  “Of course it could have been both,” Zabotski assured them. “In the context of Pristine History it was only yesterday. In some trashier context that you may have been dabbling with it may have been eight years. I do wish that people would not indulge in such contexts as have become common. They waste time. They waste it a thousandfold.”

  “It is still an eye-sore and an abomination,” one of the Moral Sanction men said. “What do you intend to do with the monstrosity?”

  “Until I figure out what it is that I'm building, I simply haven't any idea what I will do with it,” Zabotski said. “If it had wheels, I might roll it to Pristine World, but I can find no wheels on the plans.”

  “If Pristine World is so swift and so superior, why do you come back here every time?” I, Melchisedech asked my associate Zabotski.

  “Ah, I believe that I'm imperfectly accelerated for Pristine World as yet,” the Zab said. “I have to come back to catch my breath. And sometimes I just come back to this stuck-in-molasses world to rest and to see my friends. I believe that, ever since I was a child, I have had this present dream of living on a grubby and slow-moving and molasses-filled world. Myself, I seem to fall between the two worlds. Old Molasses here is much more fascinating as a dream than as a reality though.”

  The Fundamentalers came about noon that day. Zabotski and myself Melchisedech Duffey met with them at a big table under the trees. It was not known why the Fundamentalers wanted to exchange views with Zabotski and myself. Both of us were students of history and paradox, that's true. And the Fundamentalers were avid about history. But there may not have been much resemblance between the several sorts of history that now came under discussion.

  “Mr. Zabotski and Mr. Duffey,” said a member of the Pattenite faction of the Fundamentalers, “we have here publications by both of you in the realm of history, but (slippery, slippery!) we are not sure that you are dealing straight in your history. Are you?”

  “I never pretended to deal history ‘straight’ ” Zabotski said. “I am an artist and a prophet before I am an historian. I believe that history is an involuted epicycloid and not a straight line at all. But I do deal with history as honestly as I am able to do it.”

  “And so do I, Fundamentalers,” I, Melchisedech said. “But I am not so sure about yourselves. I believe that you often supply arbitrary answers when there are no real answers available.”

  “We would not have any answers if they were not given to us from above,” the Pattenite man said. “I have here, Mr. Zabotski, a copy of your ‘Pristine History of the World’. I find that its chronology is almost identical with our own: the probably instantaneous creation of first life between 20,000 and 10,000 BC; the ‘sixth-day’ creation of land, animals and man between 10,000 and 2,800 B.C.; the Floodtide Catastrophes, the instantaneous rising of the Alpine-Himalayan System, and the flotation of Noah's barge (which you do not quite call by that name) all about 2,800 BC; the re-population of the planet and the development of new zoological variations from 2,800 to 1,450 BC; then the times of the Ancient Empires, of Exodus, and then the Redemption followed by the Diaspora, of Rome's Fall and of the Medieval Period, of the Modern and Western Interludes, right up to our present year of 2,000 AD.”

  “Why not up to our present year of 200,000 AD?” Zabotski asked. “I believe that is as likely a number for our present time as is 2,000 AD. The multitudinous happenings, they have been happening quite a lot lately. Yes, there is some agreement between our chronologies, but it is probably accidental.”

  “There are no accidents,” said a Fundamentaler of the Hatch school. “All is foreordained.”

  “I believe that nothing is foreordained,” Zabotski said, “but I believe that accidents are the closest of all phenomena to being preordained.”

  “Widow Waldo, why are you hanging lace curtains in my contraption?” Zabotski called this latter question loudly and across a good space to his monstrous and unnamed and unmanned and unfinished contraption.

  “Because it needs them, that's why,” Widow Waldo called back. “It's drab otherwise. Lace curtains are always meshes of sunshine, until they become very dirty.”

  “But my contraption hasn't any windows, so far anyhow,” Zabotski called. “And I'm not even sure it's the type of construction that could have windows. Widow, it isn't a house. It's a machine of some kind.”

  “It will have lace curtains whether it has any windows or not,” the Widow answered. “I will paint windows on the inside walls if it comes to that. I like things nice and homey.”

  “My good people, this is the way it is:” Zabotski spoke again to the Fundamentalers. “I have written my Pristine History of the World to fill a gap. I travel much in the Pristine World, and I know it a little bit. I may even have come from there originally. I'm a little bit vague on my own origin. There are no duplications in the Pristine World, and there are no non-valid persons or situations. So I eliminated all duplicated or non-valid persons or situations from my thinking and from my history, and by that trick, I came up with my Pristine History. This makes it very much shorter than conventional histories which do sometimes list duplicate and non-valid things. The two worlds, the Pristine World, and the Everyday-or-Molasses World occupy the same space, but they do not occupy it in the same way. It is consequently difficult to explain one of them to the other.

  “For analogy, let us consider a football game which generally uses three hours of clock time to cover one hour of whistle time. Let us take the films of that one hour of whistle time and select the time (about twelve minutes) when the ball is actually in play. Let us then omit the time when nothing much is happening even though the ball is in play, and let us also omit a few worthless and completely repetitious plays. We can then get it down to about three minutes of hectic action. Please note that this would not merely be the highlights of the game; it could be the complete essence of the game. Well, the Pristine World is like that: it is the real and essential world. It does exist. Nothing is left out of it except the duplicated and the non-valid but very much is added to it. The Pristine World, in fact, is so intuitively imbued and indwelt that I can live overflowing years of it in the same space that is taken up by a day or two in the Molasses World. The Pristine World can travel in a thousand years where it took the Molasses World a million. We have got to throw in our lot with that faster and more valid world.

  “That the chronology of the Pristine World somewhat resembles your own chronologies is no more than a humble coincidence. Possibly we do have the same time scale, but we do not arrive at it by the same way.”

  “We don't know how you arrived at it,” said one of the Fundamentalers of the Rev. Patrick O’Connell following. “We came in through the front door.”

  “And I came in through the walls,” Zabotski said.

  The Widow Waldo carried loaded pots and hampers over and served good dinners to the Fundamentalers and to Zabotski and to myself Melchisedech.

  “No, no, it's no trouble at all,” she protested to the protesting Fundamentalers. “There is plenty of everything, All I have to do is take it out of the mouths of the poor orphans. We have so many poor orphans that there is almost no limit to the amount of food that I can take out of their mouths.”

  (The golden roof of the ‘Golden Childrens Home and Haven Orphanage’ gleamed in the sun. It had been built and endowed several decades before by a bloated plutocrat named Harry Goldchild.)

  “Do you believe that the true ark is still to be found in the high mountains of Armenia, half buried in the snow and ice, and guarded by angels?” A Cummings-clan member of the Fundamentalers asked Zabotski and myself Melchisedech Duffey. “To us, this is a test of faith.”

  “So that's what those things are!
” Zabotski explained. “I've gazed at the things without even being able to guess what they are. Yes, now that you turn my mind to consider the subject, I believe that the ark is to be found there in the original and in at least twenty copies. It must have been the most popular build-it-yourself kit of that era. And yes, of course I believe that it is guarded by angels. When things get too inaccessible to be guarded by humans any longer, then angelic guards always take over. Yes, it is there, in High Armenia, but we don't know for sure where High Armenia is to be found.”

  “But of course we know,” said the Cummings-clan member. “We have three expeditions there now.”

  “But of course you do not know where it is,” Zabotski explained to them. “The divided country that is now known as Armenia, the mountain that is now known as Ararat, they were neither of them known by those names before the fourth century of our era. A king of that country then decided to call his country, which had been named Haik, by the biblical name of Armenia. Armenia merely means a mountainous place. Like Montana, which means exactly the same thing, the name was then applied to a definite area: but it was not so originally. And that king decided to call the mountain which had been named Aghri Dagh by the biblical name of Ararat (which means simply ‘Mountain’. But there is nothing to indicate that the king was making correct identification. Or that he was not making them. Likely, he was merely trying to establish a bright history for his poor mountain country.”

  “We know these things,” said the Cummings-clan member, “but there is something to indicate that he was making correct identifications. The Hand of God stood in the sky above him and a large assembly of the King's followers and pointed down on the mountain and land to identify them. This is to be found in the King's own words.”

  “By your own chronology mountains weren't there before the flood,” Zabotski said. “They would have to have risen up under the ark. I have evidence that this is exactly what did happen.”

  “As to the Ark or arks that have been sticking out of the snow on some of the peaks of this Ararat,” said myself Melchisedech, “they are remnants of great wooden structures, but it is unlikely that they were water-craft of any kind. I believe that they were great wooden castles. There is a genuine tradition of a dozen or more great wooden castles existing on those crags before the cyclic climate turned colder and buried them in quasi-perpetual snow.”

  “And would angels be guarding old wooden castles that were not the Ark?” a person asked.

  “Yes they would,” Zabotski stated. “When anything becomes remote from the eyes of men, then angels take over. I don't know why there was ever any confusion on that point.”

  “Mr. Zabotski,” asked a Hatch follower of the Fundamentalers, “what did you mean a while ago when you said ‘Why not up to the present year of 200,000 AD?’ Was that a joke?”

  “It was a riddle, which is a form of a joke, yes. Why do you say that this is 2,000 AD? Why not say that it is 1,000 AD? By any count, we very plainly do not know where we are right now. This might very well be 500 AD or 600 AD. We haven't clear evidence for a larger number of valid years than that. I think of one possible exclusion, one period of one thousand years that might have been written into history by a young boy in the year 1348, at the depth of the ‘Black Death’ plague. About the only people left alive then were children and very young people, and some of them continued the chronicles. There is an even chance that the whole notion of a thousand-year-long ‘dark ages’ was no more than the delirious dream of a vivid boy in that dismal crisis time of sickness. There isn't any very strong independent evidence of any such period of ‘dark ages’.

  “You find it strange that a young and sick boy might have been writing our history then. Tell me, can you find out who is writing our history now?”

  “Mr. Zabotski,” one of them said, “there are dark rumors that you sometimes go away for two or five or a dozen or even more years at one time. Do you?”

  “Yes I do, friend,” Zabotski said. “What is amiss with that? Many persons travel for various lengths of time.”

  “And there are further dark rumors that you always come back from your years-long journeys in a day or two or possibly three. Do you?”

  “Yes I do, friend. What is wrong that? Many persons return again and again to a place that is familiar to them.”

  “And you are really gone such a number of years? And you are really back in such a number of days? And you do not find anything strange about that?”

  “Oh but I do!” Zabotski howled. “I find it all strange and wonderful! I wouldn't trade places with anyone in this respect. Hardly anyone else has this sort of mobility.”

  “Mr. Duffey,” another Pattenite said to me, “you in your own works sometimes seem to doubt part of the evidence that has been dragged out of the Olduvai Gorge of Africa, evidence that puts human existence into terms of millions of years. You seem to doubt some of this evidence a little bit. But you don't doubt it nearly enough.”

  “How do you doubt it? What is enough?” I, Melchisedech asked him.

  “Have you not noticed that all the evidence for the extreme antiquity of man has been taken from one long rift fault in the earth, and most of it from that tumbled portion of the fault named the Olduvai Gorge of Africa?”

  “I have noticed this, yes,” I said.

  “Do you not know that the sequence of strata is nullified by a rift fault? Do you not know that the whole idea of in situ evidence is meaningless in such a formation where the situs, the location, is jumbled?”

  “That is a little bit extreme, but not much?” I said.

  “And have you not noticed that all the significant ‘discoveries’ have been made by persons of just four families, the Brooms, the Darts, the Oakleys, and the Leakys, a benighted and ingrown feudal group? Have you not noticed that they are all vouched for by each other, but not really by anyone else ever?”

  “From my childhood I have noticed all this, yes,” I said.

  “Do you not know that all South African science is justly held in contempt by all thinking persons as being trivial and provincial and inept?

  “Sure, except — ”

  “Except in this one case,” the Pattenite pursued, “the ‘evidence’ for the extreme antiquity of man. And all of this ‘evidence’ is found where normal evidence will not apply, and all of it is found by a group of mind-already-made-up duffers. This ‘evidence’ is used by the infidelity crowd to prove what they want to be proved. But they do know better than to put that ‘evidence’ to a test. It is too distant for them to test, they excuse. But it is really ‘behind God's back’ stuff. It is ‘bottom of the world’ stuff.”

  “We call it ‘behind the barn’ evidence,” I, Melchisedech told him, “and we know that it is grotesque. These things are giddy frauds. Nevertheless, there is, in other places and discovered by other people, fairly reasonable evidence for an antiquity of man beyond what you will allow, though far short of the African-Extravaganza claims. Actually the African Extravaganza is a sort of pop-rock hymn (rock hymn, fossil rock, get it?) sung to the real antiquity of man. Hymns are not expected to contain accurate evidence.”

  “Of the many great wooden structures sticking out of the Ararat snow, one is valid,” an Ark-advocate said. “Some of us have been inside the structure.”

  “So have I,” Zabotski said, “but I didn't tumble to what I was inside when I was there.”

  “Things have been brought back out of that Ark to prove its authenticity,” the Ark-advocate said.

  “I know it,” said Zabotski. “I brought this back from there.” It was the rock drawings and writings that Zabotski had been using as a guide to building his own contraption.

  “What is it, Mr. Zabotski?” one of the Fundamentalers asked.

  “Oh, it's the instruction and maintenance manual,” Zabotski said. “Every vehicle of every sort comes with an instruction manual. I took this one from your Ark.”

  “But you two are not with us in our teachings and beliefs
,” one of the Fundamentalers said after a while. “Whoever is not with us is against us.”

  “And whoever gathereth not with us splatterith,” Zabotski said. The Fundamentalers left Zabotski and myself Melchisedech then.

  “I don't know whether anything at all is to be gotten from them?” I doubted.

  “Sure it is,” Zabotski said. “I learned what it was that I was building. That's something that I learned from them. Duffey, you need a change to a faster pace and a look at real reality. Go to Pristine World. I will show you how to go. I will give you letters of introduction to it. You can go there for three or five years, and you can be back in two days. You're a scabby-necked chicken if you don't go.”

  “All right, I'll go,” I said. I went to the Pristine World for three or five years. And I was back in two days.

  The night before my return, the Orthodoxers burned a ‘Clear Bright Flame of Science’ on that tiny little front lawn of Zabotski. When the Orthodoxers burn a ‘Flame’, one can almost expect anything from a routine horse-whipping or tar-and-feathering to a genuine hanging and drawing and quartering.

  Some of the children from the Golden Childrens Home and Haven Orphanage were carrying clumsily-made green clay animals into the Zabotski contraption when I, Melchisedch got back. The animals were kicking and moving weakly.

  “If you would bake the green clay animals, it would toughen them and make them hold together better,” I, Melchisedech called to them. “You're losing the legs and heads off half of them while you carry them.”

  “It would kill them to bake them,” one of the children called back to me. “What's the matter with you anyhow?”