More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  Among these, for several days now, had been Crissie Cristofero the famous painter, Therese Doucet the famous casting director, and Cleo Mahoney the famous playwright. And sometimes Rebeka Stein, who did not go to mass (she was a Jew) joined them there. Melchisedech Duffey had been coming into the Ghost Coffee Shop for thirty years, so one morning he talked with the girls about the play ‘Seven Roads’ that was to be presented the following evening at Ursulines Auditorium.

  “The seven roads are really seven cruces of happenings, seven scenarios, or seven variant futures,” Cleo Mahoney the playwright of ‘Seven Roads’ was saying. “There is not enough room in the play to do other than to suggest them with short and trenchant flashes. Crissie Cristofero, our great artist here, caught them superbly in that advertising sign ‘The Future Begins Right Here’, with its seven scenes, and the verses written athwart each of them. Unfortunately she used a water soluble paint, and the constant heavy rains this past week have almost destroyed it. Crissie is trying to reconstruct it in oils now, but it eludes her.”

  “I saw the original when it was still wet,” Melchisedech reminded her.

  “So you did,” Cleo said. “Now the case is that the Patriarch Melchisedech cannot end, but neither can he continue on here in this world in the way that he has been doing. There are seven contingent futures waiting for him. Which ones he chooses, and the order he chooses them in, will be accidental. And I give you a million guesses as to what are the determinants to the futures he chooses.”

  “No, I cannot guess it, not in million guesses,” Melchisedech said. “What are the determinants?”

  “Pot holes,” Cleo said, “potholes in the streets and the sidewalks. That caught you flat-footed, didn't it, Mr. Duffey? There are seven special potholes in the streets and sidewalks of this town. No two of them are in the same block or even in the same street. Each of them has a little valve or activator or switch in it. The Patriarch Melchisedech will stumble or turn his ankle in one of the potholes. He will activate the valve or switch by that; and (in some cases, without even realizing the transition) he will be into one of the seven alternate scenes or futures.”

  “But what if I don't step in a pothole?” Duffey asked.

  “If there's a pothole around, you'll step in it, Duff,” Anthony Ghost the proprietor said.

  “The fetish transformation activator, in dream context or in detached experience, is almost always a ridiculous and incongruous thing,” Rebeka Stein said. “I believe that Cleo's unconscious is to be complimented for dredging up the potholes as symbols. They are just randy enough to be fitting. Watch where you're walking these days, Duff, or you might stumble into the wrong hole.”

  This Rebeka Stein had known Melchisedech Duffey for all the fifteen years of her life.

  “I have trouble naming the seven variant scenarios,” Cleo Mahoney said. “They are really seven aspects of another world, not of this one. But essentially they are these:

  “One.” Perhaps this is best expressed by the verse that Crissie Cristofero here printed on the scene of that contingency:

  ‘This is a case to crack your heart.

  This is the day it falls apart.’

  “It is a contingent world in which everything changes and is on the verge of collapsing. Rooms do not have walls, whisky does not have bottles, and people do not have skulls. There are no boundaries at all left in that world, no marks where one thing ends and another thing begins. It doesn't run together yet, but it is ready to do so at any time. The Damocles Sword, which now has no surface to separate its steel from the non-steel of its ambient, hangs directly over everything.

  “Two.” And this is expressed by Crissie's verse:

  ‘Here is compassion hoked and hammed.

  A K.C. swap is a swap bedamned.’

  “We do not know what this verse means, or what a K.C. swap is, and neither does Crissie. The essence of this contingency is a very bad trade, the dealing away of something of very high value for something that is worthless. It is the compulsive trading off of the worthy for the unworthy, and it diminishes the world by every such swap that is made.

  “Three.” This is the Crissie verse to it:

  “This is The Count who meets countdown.

  And a dead man wears the triple crown.’

  “A man is elected to a very high office. He says that he will not serve in it. ‘I am dead, that's the reason that I won't serve,’ he says. ‘That is no reason at all,’ a powerful voice answers him. So the dead man is ordered out of his crypt and put into action. Then it is a helter-skelter runaround combined with a spy story. It is really “The World as Spy Story’. But the high office is as high as the World, and the World must be drawn into the involvement.

  “Four.” The Crissie verse has this one this way:

  “Here is the fleece, and the golden gloat.

  The ‘Endless’ ends, and the world's a boat.’ ”

  “I believe that Crissie Cristofero is a sibyl or a pythoness,” Rebeka Stein interrupted. “She comes up with these prophetic couplets. They're good, but she doesn't have any idea at all what they mean. Is there any market for good prophetesses these days, Duff?”

  “There is always a market for good prophetesses,” Melchisedech said.

  “I believe that this is the ‘Ongoing Quest Adventure’,” Cleo Mahoney said. “The Quest succeeds, and then it becomes addictive. It succeeds again and again, and the high persons become avid for that continuing golden success. Oh, it strews goodness all along its route, but still there is something a little bit poisonous about success going on and on and on. A revenge must be taken against such successful questers. Some of them die then, or they are killed. That is at least part of the revenge. But they have such momentum that they don't realize or admit that they're dead. Even when they are shown their bones and ashes they don't believe it. They withdraw a bit into the past from that point, and they are alive again, but the problem is still unsolved. This is about a world and a high group in it who are driven to shining excellence, excellence, excellence, and a broken record of it.”

  “I say ‘On with it and on with it,” ‘ Rebeka interposed. “There can't be too much of it. It isn't a broken record at all.”

  “Five,” said Cleo, “and the Crissie verse here is:

  ‘A shattered world, and an end of fuss.

  A new folk comes, and it isn't us.’

  “The world is turned inside out, and the world and its people are seen to be made out of a grotesque stuffing, trash and old paper and pieces of wood. This stuffing is weighed in the scales and found wanting. ‘Wait, wait!’ someone calls ‘you are only weighing the stuffing that leaked out of it. You're not weighing the thing itself.’ ‘What I have weighed, I have weighed,’ the weigher says, ‘and it weighs short’. Then the people are replaced by finer non-people. We don't like it, but we are no longer there, so it doesn't matter. There is a slaughter scene in this one somewhere.

  “Six. It happens that the Patriarch and his adversary are the only persons left in the world. All of the other people are held in abeyance somewhere. The Adversary presses the Patriarch to sign an agreement. They battle grotesquely somewhere, or maybe they Indian-wrestle.

  “The Crissie verse has it like this:

  ‘This is the duel, and the bill of cost.

  Oh sign it not, or it all is lost.’

  “There is something very, very wrong about that covenant that the Adversary is pressing the Patriarch to sign. If it is accepted, then we are all undone. Undone literally, destroyed, unmade, negated, nullified forever.

  “Seven. The Crissie verse gives this:

  “The Melk is a bust, and a crown, and toff.

  He had it all there, and he booted it off.’

  “Everything is going right in this one, everything. In this one, we will all come into our glory, immeasurable and eternal. The people of the Golden Fleece have won for us, and we have won for ourselves with our own high qualities. There is not one chance of our missing the beatific v
ision. Well, yes, there is one chance of our missing, but it's one chance in a hundred billion. We'll play with odds like that all day. There is not a cloud in the holy blue sky. Not a cloud, but there is something else. It is a rowdy looking bird coming in on loutish wings. And the rowdy bird trails, in its beak, a pennant on which are the words ‘Whatever can go wrong will go wrong’. But it's only one chance in a hundred billion that we will miss. Then why do we suddenly go all clammy like this? That is the seventh and the last contingency.

  “The only thing after this seventh scrappy vision and a short counter-ode by the chorus is your rousing curtain speech, Mr. Duffey. Oh, don't let it frustrate us! I hope it will be a success.”

  “Or a successful frustration,” Melchisedech said.

  “If Crissie only knew what her verses meant we would have an easier time of it,” Rebeka Stein commented.

  “Yes, it is like working with priceless but unset and odd-shaped stones,” Cleo Mahoney complained. “It is a frustration. But the play itself is a study of frustrations. Oh, I hope it will be good.”

  The play was presented the following evening. It was pretty good.

  3

  Well, did you ever watch the way the future comes out of its jug? The jug is of smokey glass or rock crystal. Shapes and forms and movements can be seen in there, and some of the details of it can be guessed. But it is all distorted and deformed. It is the curvature of the smokey glass that deforms the images. No future is ever seen undeformed.

  But the globs of the future trying to get out will push each other back, and there will be clotting at the mouth of the jug. Only thin juice will roll out for a while. Then it will break loose and big hunks will come out. But they are never quite as you imagined them to be when you peered through the smokey glass.

  Can one cheat to catch an earlier look at what is coming out? One can try. There is a thin leading edge between the devouring present and the waiting future. What happens if one is too eager and crosses this leading edge? The world ends, for that person, for that while.

  If this thin line is crossed, then one is out in the narrow interval of unreality. It's a chancey though flexible place there.

  Melchisedech Duffey and his history had come up to the absolute present time, and then had gone a thumb's width beyond that, Duffey and his nimbus had gone into the future then? No, they had gone into the shattering state of contingency. It was a fracturing of reality. And it was a fracturing of Melchisedech Duffey.

  There has always been a quantity of unreality leaking out of the future into the present. Then the unreality has to be negated, and the reality revived. The reconstructing of reality is what is being talked about when we talk about reconstructing the world.

  Duffey had been into the future before, spottily, off and on, for seven years once. And he had returned several times to those same seven years. And yet it was not strictly speaking into the future. It was a mixture of future and past and present. It was an interval or series of intervals removed out of time and held apart. The intervals of Seven Years did not necessarily count in regular time, which is why they could sometimes be revisited. They did not fracture reality. They stood on the far side of reality.

  Melchisedech had been on the fourteenth voyage of the Ship Argo, and this fourteenth voyage was technically in the future. And his own ashes had been brought back to him from that future land. Anything brought back from the future has unreality as a major component. Anyone who ever looked at or handled Duffey's ashes with seeing eyes and sensing fingers knows something about their index of unreality. Teresa the Showboat knew about their unreality, but she believed that she was blowing them into real fire.

  In a misbehaven case like this, when a complex over-runs itself, it is shattered into a number of apocalypses or possible manifesting futures. A number seven is often mentioned of these futures. Really, there is no limit to the number of contingencies: but seven of them, like eager olives of different sizes, seemed to be disputing the mouth of the jug. And the seven most jostling ones were these:

  “One.” This is called, from a remnant of it that has been found, ‘The Great Day Contingency’. It is characterized by a bewildering unstructuring or unstructuring of all things. It is further characterized by the obliterating of boundaries, which results in the obliteration of persons also. The irony is that Duffey was the one who had first thought of this, and that as a joke. It would take a lot of misplaced faith on the part of a faithless world to bring it off, but misplaced faith is the easiest sort to come by. If you go imagining a trap like that one, you had better imagine yourself leaping out of its jaws pretty nimbly. Duffey hadn't done this, and he had been caught.

  (This sounds a little bit familiar. Yes, the pretty girls who were putting on the play, and one of them was a prophesying pythoness who hit some of this imagery pretty close.)

  ‘This is the clock that stopped at twelf.

  This is the snake that swallowed itself.’

  That was the theme of the Great Day Contingency. Wouldn't it be an absurd ending? Or even an absurd future segment? But one does not say ‘Absurd’ to a thing that swallows one up.

  “Two.” This is the Goat Contingency. (‘Whence do I have this partial understanding of the alternatives,’ Duffey asked himself, ‘my understanding of these alternatives offered to me and to the world? Oh, I simply have them in my prophetic function. Even the little verse-writing prophetess at the academy had pieces of this understanding.’) This contingency was that of the Promontory Goats or the Scapegoats as passionate motivators of the world and as receivers of the world and as receivers of the world's bankruptcy. This contingency involved one of the Prodigious Persons or Splendid Animations, Casey Szymanski, as cosmos scapegoat and bad-trader of worlds. Nobody could ever make a bad trade like Casey. Compassionate goats keep picking up the tab for the deficiting world. Casey had tried to trade souls with the Devil to spare that person punishment. Whether that trade was ever consummated, or whether it was still in the process of being consummated, is not known. Casey did trade souls (or perhaps it was just one of his old souls that he had lying around, as Absalom said) with Absalom Stein. Casey and his sort will trade off everything till there is nothing left to trade. And, when the debts of all the world fall due and must be collected, they must be collected from them the scapegoats. They will pay forever in a lower and more painful hell than the one commonly known, the fearful hell that is under the name-board “The End of Compassion’. This is a very doubtful contingency, but it does answer the question ‘Who is going to pay for it all?’ Like all the contingencies, it involved the entire world.

  “Three.” This is the eschatological resolution presented in the form of the Petrine Spy Story. In plainer words  —  no, there are no plainer words to lend it. This is about a very special selection and fingering of a man for a great station. Spy stories are in, especially those on whose outcome the fate of the world hinges. Count Finnegan is the main person in this alternate. Finnegan's death on the Marianao Coast of Cuba near Havana was a trick (Oh, certainly he died there), a cover drama to spring him loose for a great masquerade. His appearance, whether in effigy or in body, was exactly the same as that of Peter the Second, banana nose and all. When forces move to kill Peter, there will be some very intricate movement and counter-movement. Dotty Yekouris (dead-undead on the Marianao Coast also) has an incredible role in this. God knows what!

  Someone will be dead on the Petrine throne, and yet someone will still reign over that diminished and tottering and holy kingdom. The only thing preventing this chase-farce-tragic-drama from moving out of contingency and into certainty is that Finnegan cannot be found, dead or alive, to play his role. Or he is already playing that role, And this version of the world is already happening. Once more, the whole world is involved in this alternative. But it's a pretty chancey thing to try to save the world on such a shoestringy thing as this is.

  “Four.” This is the Fourteenth Voyage of the Ship Argo, and the Reduction of Melchisedech Duffey.
It must happen (this is the only one of the contingencies that is sure to happen) but it will not preclude other alternatives from happening. This is in the pretertemporal circumstances of the Seven Lost Years (they are called the Seven Golden Years in their own context). This is concerned with ongoing beatitudes, and the strong promise of Final Beatitude. It is concerned with Shipboard Romance in a wider sense than it is usually understood. It is the ‘Quest Accomplished’ motif (and what will you do for an encore now?) The fleece has been found, and the big moment of that finding abides forever.

  All of the Splendid Animations have sailed on the Argo, are sailing on it now even though they believe that they are doing other things in the flatland that is taken for the ordinary world, and they will still sail on it on the high seas after every shore has sunk.

  The splintering contingencies are not, in all cases, exclusive things.

  The last death of Melchisedech Duffey has to occur on this Fourteenth Voyage of the Argo, or his ashes could not be brought back from it.

  We will return to this case again with more massive information.

  “Five.” This is called the Thunder Colt Complex, or the Decatur Street Opera House Presentation of the World. Duffey had once been frightened to learn that the Decatur Street Opera House had moved into the realm of the possible to the extent of advertising in the Bark. The Presentation is an Ending and a Beginning, except that it is some other species and not ourselves that begins when we end. Were we members of this glorious new species, we would applaud. Being of the old and unregenerate species, it will stick in our throats.