Margaret Stone bought a box of crackers at one of the kiboshes. She fed the crackers to the dying dragon. Most of the body of this biodegradable dragon had already been transmuted into papier-mâché. But some flesh remained.
“That one low mountain that they had at first was the Mountain of the Commandments,” the hoyden said. “Notice the number ten in all of 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 splendid people, 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 little mountain that 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 little mountain in the world. The name of that first mountain was Ziggarat. It was a prefiguration of Ararat. Now there are more and more mountains. There's supposed to be a new one appearing this morning.”
“What's the real story, guys?” Salvation Sally asked.
“Oh these Morning People, these Royal Pop People (we're all turning into them, you know, and I hate it) were around for a long time,” Stein said, “and they were a nuisance. A demiurge put them all to sleep on a mountainside and told them that they must sleep till he called them with thunder of a certain tone. Then, a few millennia later, the demiurge forgot about that and used that tone of thunder for something else. The Royal Pop People woke up at the tone of the thunder (it was only the other day) and the first thing that they saw was the mountain they were on. They thought that the mountain was their mother and that they were thunder dimension people. That's all there was to it.”
“Is it possible that 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 that we woke up. 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 near to the fountain. The sight of this nauseated Mary Virginia, and indeed it wasn't a pleasant thing to watch.
“I know that it isn't real,” she said, “but who is the illusion master who puts these things on? Is it possible that there is some meaning to it? Or is it just a piece of unfortunate clownishness?”
“Oh, the alligator eating the little boy 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, and by other creatures in other parks. Other people, a bit larger and older, will be destroyed by the fire drakes when the people prove to be inferior. And then there are certain bright and strong, but crookedly talented weeds. Even the flesh weed eater will not be able to do away with some of them. 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 will be gone for good, just as soon as the — Yes, there goes the last bit of him down the gullet. And his puzzled parents will not even remember his name. Look at his mother there. She knows that she brought something or someone to the park with her, but she can't remember what or who it was.”
“Come along Stein,” Duffey said. “We're too close to it. Let's stand off from it a little ways where the dazzle won't be in our eyes. We can solve these puzzles. It comes to my mind that both of us are good at puzzles, and Zabotski here also. There's a group of master illusionists in town.”
“I believe that they are a group of master disillusionists,” Stein said. “They destroy the sustaining illusions of the people, and then they move in and take them over or demolish them. Yes, let us withdraw from their influence and take a good look at things.”
“Goodbye, you 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 each other. They laughed. They set themselves down to solve some doubtful happenings that had made a shambles of the morning and of the city.
“We all know that building after building after cluster of 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 of 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, and they may come into clear focus if we are able to find the other halves. These things are something like the aberration that I describe in my paper on…”
3
The revolt of the failing-apart people began about eleven o’clock in the morning. It hadn't a very strong basis as to tactics and strategy, but it had a lot of burning resentment banked up.
But the non-splendid people, the unrevolutionary old-line humans, had no good starting place. They were being assaulted from the inside and from the outside, and they could not come at their opponents at all. Most of the old-liners had awoken that morning feeling that they were afflicted with terminal diseases, diseases that would finish them off within short hours, that would rot them inside and turn them into trash.
Some leaders tried to come forward and tried to lead them, solid people with names like Callagy and Fitzherbert and Chastellain and Faucher and Panebianco and Cassady and Loubet. These were leaders who swore that they would not change and would not give up while they had a quart of blood or a pound of styrofoam left in them. But these leaders failed the old people in two ways.
Some of them did change greatly, in spite of their swearing that they would not. They changed greatly and suddenly, they ate fine bread and went over to the fine people, they became splendid and they joined the Splendid Royal Pop People. And may the green grass never grow on their fine graves!
And others of the leaders died the most withering deaths imaginable, and their dying came within minutes of their taking leadership. The trash death came so weirdly that it was as if the victim was shot in the paunch with an exploding shell. It seemed that this shell laid them open (they were quickly laid open, that's sure) and filled them with expanding trash that absorbed their entrails and turned them all into plastic and styrene and papier-mâché and pieces of all-purpose willy board. And so in their deaths they were derided by those they had tried to lead, since it was revealed that they were full of trash and had likely been full of trash all along. It was ridiculous that they should die of such ludicrous wounds (whether of internal or external origin); it was ridiculous that they should turn into trash. But how is such a thing to be battled?
Many of the stubborn old humans gathered together and holed up together in certain strong buildings, swearing that they would defend themselves and each other from all assaults, human, anti-human, pop-royal, bodily, phenomenal, mental, psycho, ghostly, Fortean, hellish, inexplicable, unholy.
They dug themselves in and formed strong pockets of people. They united their minds and resolves, so that the assaulting influences could not overpower them individually. So the pop people would hunt them out and break up their gatherings.
The hunting out of the holed-up old humans became good sport of the royal-pops and their recent recruits. Mary Virginia Schaeffer, Salvation Sally, and Margaret Stone joined in these exterminating hunts, though we'd have bet that they wouldn't. It came about this way:
These three persons of the female persuasion had gone around the park to Duffey's bijou, and throu
gh it to his auditorium. They believed this place of Duffey's to be one of the sources of confusion in the City. The Pop-Historical sessions were going great. The speaker now was Hugh de Turenne of Xavier College there in the City. Hugh seemed to be a genuine member of the Inner Royal Pop Historians. And he was speaking thus: “Yes, the Black Sea had been obliterated this morning, with all waters and shores of it, with all people and settings of it, and soon with all memories of it. After today we will never mention it again except to say ‘What Black Sea?’ if someone is so gauche as to mention it. Himself wanted it destroyed, and Himself wanted it to be completely forgotten. That this is done is a measure of the power of Himself. He wanted it obliterated because he had been imprisoned on its shores, and he wished that distasteful episode to be expunged completely. And he wanted it obliterated because Colchis was on the Black Sea shore and had always been a bastion of strength of the Argo Forces. It was believed that some of the strength of The Argo, and of The Fleece, would go out of them if their geological base were destroyed.
“It now becomes the case that the Black Sea never existed, just as it becomes the case that several cities of renowned names — Athens, Jerusalem, Rome — never existed either.”
“Be noetic,” said one person who claimed the floor to speak for a moment, “but are you sure that those cities never existed?”
“Of course I'm sure of it,” Hugh de T. said. “These were names in legend, and now they don't serve any further purpose so we won't use them. Oh, we are not fetish-ridden. The names may still be used in some connections. Black Sea Sturgeon may still be spoken of, though most of those sturgeon come from the Muk Muk Sea in Turkestan. ‘Black Sea’ brand is a little bit like ‘Golden Mountain’ brand, or some such. Persons do put what they consider to be catchy names on commercial products. Perhaps Cyrus Roundhead here, who is art expert on those old blinking-out legends, would like to say a few words on the disappearances.”
“Ah yes,” Cyrus Roundhead agreed, clicking a second and third lens into his monocle to give him enough distance vision to see across the room. “Be noetic, everybody! Ah yes, the Saga of the Sea that never was, the legend that took on a life of its own. Isostatic analysis had determined long ago that there had to be a fairly high land there, rather than a low sea. The world would have known the difference otherwise, by the difference of sectional weight, if there really had been a sea there. And people thought that they saw the sea, that they lived upon it and fished in it, that they sailed on it and had habitations and industries on its shore. But they were wrong. Now it is gone, and with its going, we are also rid of the legends of that great prison and its great prisoner, and also of Colchis and of the influential Golden Fleece which was supposed to be there.”
“Oh plague, take the Black Sea and all its caviar!” shouted a non-pop man who wore a badge that read ‘Ride it out: they've got to keep some of us’. “You are saying that Rome and Athens and Jerusalem do not exist? I'm aghast.”
“It served the mordant humor of the Etruscans (who were a pop people) to bandy the name ‘Roman’ about,” Cyrus said. “It referred to a destitute neighborhood of hillbillies who scratched out (literally) an existence in the hound dog hills above the Tiber swamps. But there was nothing there large enough to be called a town.”
“But what of the famous name Roman emperors?” a man with a nose on him like the knobbiest Roman of them all asked. “They must have existed. They were too well-known to be made-up.”
“Some of them were the names of music halls and vaudeville performers,” Cyrus Roundhead said. “Some of them were the names of mascots of the army regiments. Some of them were nothing it all.”
“What about Athens?” John the Greek shouted. He was the owner and operator of John the Greek's Famous French Restaurant. “I come from there. I lived there till I was thirteen years old.”
“Ancient Greece was made up of a blasted inner core named ‘Hellas’ and five concentric rings about it named Aetolia, Thessaly, Epirus, Macedonia, and Thrace. The only part of it of any importance was Macedonia which was made up of strong and warlike men who, in consequence of their being strong and warlike, also became rich. Then, being not quite complete in their capabilities, they took one step backwards and became nouveau riche. So they decided to give themselves a culture, a portfolio of the growth arts, and a history. They had to make a past for themselves, and they had nothing but imagination to make it out of. So these prideful Macedonians created the legend of an old and heroic Greece. And they invented a fantasy city, Athens (the name is Atlantean originally), and they developed a fiction form of Athenian Romances and Athenian Novels. But there was never any Athens in Greece.”
“How about Jerusalem then?” an unsatisfied person asked Roundhead.
“The name dates only to the first part of the present century or the last part of the previous one,” Roundhead said. “The name was used in a promotional real estate venture by the Turks, but it never caught on except in fantasy. It was to be built near various ruined cities: the Jewish city Jebus, the Greek city Solyma, the Idumaean city Hiero-Solyma or Holy Solyma, the Roman city Aelia Capitolina, the Syrian city Uris Lem, the Arabian city El Quds. But there was never any city named Jerusalem, except in the imagination. Bonds were sold to begin construction, but the builders went bankrupt before ever beginning it.”
“But where were the Jews?” the now doubly unsatisfied person roared out.
“Oh, most of the Jews were in Babylon. They still are. Even today, you can dig down in the ruins of old Babylon and you will find the ruins of old Jews. But we will speak no more about the three imaginary cities. We will speak no more at all for right now. One hour of talking and then one hour of action is a good rule. Let us go out and see about the slaughter of non-splendid remnants. Weapons are available. Take what you wish.”
So Mary Virginia, Salvation Sally, and Margaret Stone took weapons and went out into the city with splendid and semi-splendid persons. They took to the roofs and balconies and the iron ladders of the town. The young royal pop people were very agile, and the new pops from the city there kept up with them. All the newly splendid townspeople found a sudden competence and strength and speed in themselves. They found the thunder axe an easy weapon to master. They quickly learned the trick of hacking fraudulent persons and structures to death.
“This is illusion,” Mary Virginia said to Margaret Stone and to Salvation Sally. “Just keep saying to yourself ‘This is illusion’.” If it hadn't been illusion, none of them would have been able to climb so wildly.
“Ah, we've finished with clearing out this building of its nothing people, have we not?” Cyrus Roundhead asked as they made their rounds.
“Child hero and myself cleared out the third floor,” Salvation Sally announced. “The other floors should already have been taken care of.”
“Then we remove the structure by deflation,” Roundhead said. “We let the air out of the building, and we deflate it down to nothing. Do not be surprised, you who are on your first safari of this sort. There wasn't really any building here; there was only the illusion of one. There wasn't any iron. There wasn't any stone.” The building was quickly deflated down to absolute trash, old cardboards and old papers. The wind blew the papers away, and with them it blew away all memories of the building. By and by, in a couple of hours, a park would begin to grow there.
Breaking up the faces and bodies of the pseudo-persons in the buildings was a queasy business. A little blood usually came out of them, but always more trash and fragments of plaster than blood. Some of the quasi-persons were even wearing those new ‘Are You Splendid Enough?’ badges, but the answer for them was ‘No!’ No, they weren't. They were not splendid enough, or they wouldn't have been fingered for obliteration.
“Some of them don't want to go,” Mary Virginia cried from a crumbling building where she was deflating false people. “Some of them protest and they fight. Yes, and they bite like hell. If they never existed at all, where do they get the will
to protest so violently when we put an end to their fictions?”
“You must insist that they go,” said Roundhead, “or we will insist that you go in their places. It's fair that the persons having the least reality should go.”
Yes, some few of the persons and creatures and effects that were being obliterated by the thunder axes and other weapons did not accept their obliteration willingly. They fought, though they had little to fight with. They hissed their hatreds. From looking like people they came to look like cur dogs and sick spirits. They were being dislocated from their pieces and forms. “It's you who are destroying our houses and our bodies,” some of these un-creatures spit at Mary Virginia, and she could not tell whether they were cur dogs or snakes or persons.
“Why are we destroying these persons and things whose only fault is that they are unimportant?” Mary Virginia asked as she destroyed a half-grown lout or boy of the pseudo-people, the un-splendids.
“Why? Oh, because we are important and we must be intolerant of anything that is not,” Roundhead said. “We destroy them because they seem to exist, and so seeming they dilute the whole worth of the world.”
“Come, quickly, quickly!” the Countess was crying as she swooped down on them from an iron ladder out of the sky. “There are great numbers of pseudo-people, of human remnants, of morphic dragons, of papier-mâché fire lizards who have barricaded themselves in that building there. They say that they will resist forever. I never heard people make such a fuss about dying. Bring thunder axes, bring lightning rams. We'll route them out!”
Many meetings and conventions do not provide such interesting safaris for their folks as do the Royal Pop Historians.
4
Meanwhile, back in Stein's apartment:
More Than Melchisedech Page 43
