More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  He was in a shallow notch of the very high reaches of an ice-coated cliff. And that cliff was slick. There was an icy gale blowing, and ice was falling in glops of many tons, falling and falling for a mile or more. He seemed to be in a sleeping bag that threatened to spill him out upside down. All ice support was eroding and breaking away under him, and the bottom of the cliff was out of sight in the darkness. Whenever he shifted to get into a more safe position, he dislodged more of his support.

  “Kaloosh!” came the sound when the first and largest portion of the dislodged snow-ice finally hit far below. He had changed position three times while it fell. It was a thousand meters or more straight down. His head was out over the abyss and he gawked down into the white darkness.

  White darkness? Yes, such frosty surroundings do provide a white darkness at night.

  “If I am a man, I can reason,” he said, and his voice dislodged still more of his support. His voice had been doing something else, and his out-loud comment had provided a jarring conflict. Now he seemed to be tilting downward on the disappearing icy ledge at an angle of more than sixty degrees. “If I am a man, I can reason,” he said soundlessly this time, being careful to set up no disturbance with the vibration of his voice. “If I can reason, I need not be afraid. If I am afraid of such a little thing as death by falling, then it will not matter whether I fall. What falls will be worthless. (Who is singing that damned song?) If I were afraid, it would not be my own heroic self that fell. If it is not my own heroic self, it will not matter whether it dies. There is a person who is trying to remind the me-in-another-place to awaken to further life and to further inventions. He reminds me that I can say to bodily death ‘I will go with you, only not yet’. Man, are you ever caught in a ‘continued in next chapter’ hiatus! The suspense, the suspense! What will we do about the suspense!”

  And somebody was still singing that damned song:

  “I'm stuck in peril most extreme,

  Hi, HO!

  Oh morning danger is the theme!

  Hi, HO!

  My enemies will soon prevail.

  Oh where's a bailiff for my bail?

  The wind is blowing quite a gale.

  My fall will leave me plain un-hale.

  I'll bust my head and bust my tail.

  Hi, HO! the gollie wol.”

  Aw, it was himself singing that stuff. It was the galey wind that gave it its strident tone. So he went with another bit.

  “It's great to be young and in danger,

  Hi, HO!

  It's great to be young and in danger.”

  Then he saw that he was not in a sleeping bag at all, but was wrapped only in half a dozen very long and very warm threads. He recognized them as a few combings from the Original Great Fleece of Colchis. So then, wrapped in no matter how few threads of the great fleece, he could not freeze and he could not fall and he could not die. Aye, he had been hung on the cliff in an impossible position by an almost fatal fall. And he had been left there until the next section of the adventure should begin. This was sky-high adventure serial drama he was in, and it was also real as Ragnarok.

  He slipped completely then, as he shifted once more, and slid clear off of the precarious ledge or notch. But then he was dangling by one single golden thread out over the abyss and he knew that he was perfectly safe. He turned a fragment of the fleece outward to show its glint, and this quickly brought an answering glint from the still unrisen sun. The fleece and the sun were brothers. The sun now arose, a little bit early, being wakened by the greeting.

  Then the man saw his ship very far below, possibly half a mile. It was frozen solid in blue ice, and three monkey-like figures were romping on the tall and ice-sheeted rigging and rejoicing in the dawn. The man saw the entire earth covered with ice, and he marveled at the solidly-frozen birds hanging motionless in the high air, spread-winged and asleep. It was so cold that all physical forces were frozen up and inoperative.

  The man flung gold threads of the great fleece upward and climbed up them towards the top of the ice cliffs. He had spent one day climbing up to his ice station, and now he would move more rapidly. There had been nothing wrong at all. It was just that Argonauts, from the hectic life that they lead, do often wake up scrambled and with lost bearings. The man whistled sharply, and the three monkey-like figures came off the tall rigging of the ice-covered ship and boiled up the slick and frozen cliffs like inverted cascades. They were wraiths, or at least of a lighter flesh, and they could climb like ascending lightning. They brought ice axes with them, and they were cheerful and ready for any assignment.

  Reaching the top of the ice cliff, the man took a work order from the breast of his chlamys and read it. He looked around for what should be there. The three monkey-like seamen had already discovered it and were attacking it with their ice axes. It was a woman frozen in a solid block of ice.

  “No job too big, no job too small,” the man said in his laughing voice. “Sometimes a dozen jobs a day, from saving a lost cat to saving a lost soul. Oh, this is in the nature of a vacation really, to have been allowed to spend a night on the high cliffs that I love and to carry over the rescue into the bright morning. We appreciate these little leisures when they come to us. And there is probably a reason for drawing her out of the ice.”

  The woman was ivory-fair, and her veins as shown through her flesh and the ice were sky blue. The lids of her closed eyes were also of this gentle and ghostly blue, as was the web-like flesh between her toes. The man attacked the encasing pillar of ice as the monkey creatures also were doing. They hacked and split great hunks out of the pillar and quickly sculptured it down almost to the woman.

  The woman woke up, and her blue eyes darted here and yon, following the bladed axes. She grinned with her eyes at the magus (the man had already remembered that he was a magus and he was quite close to remembering his own name; morning forgetfulness was only a temporary thing to one piloting the Ship Itself). The woman grinned with her eyes at the monkey-like creatures also, and they echoed grins back at her. Her people and theirs had once been in close league. There would be complete accord throughout this whole company. The woman seemed to be as near akin to the scampering simians as she was to the magus himself.

  The woman cringed with mock horror whenever the axes came too near to her, and she grimaced broadly when, now and then, an axe came absolutely too close and bit her flesh to send out little red gushets on the inside of the ice. These things do happen, however canny is the wielder of the axe. The woman was probably beautiful, and she was wrapped in the blond skin of a female cave-bear. There were primordial and archaic aspects to her appearance, but both the man and the monkey creatures smiled to show that they liked her and the way she looked.

  “How did you know where I was?” she talked out of the ice when a crack in the pillar of it allowed her to move her chinless jaw. She spoke with human sound but not with usual words. It was the vocalized thought-speaking that primordial persons use so easily and understand so universally. Later in the morning she would be using usual words, all of the early people being fast learners. She had a swept-back face that was a bit fish-like, and a bit teras-like, and a bit troll-like. Nice looking, but behind that face she was toothed more massively than are most of the people you know.

  “I had a work order to come and get you and wake you up,” the man said, “What a way to run a hotel! Someone leaves an order with the desk clerk to be wakened in forty thousand years and it might not even be the desk clerk on duty when that time comes around. And it was a hard cold journey to come for you. Why couldn't you have used an alarm clock like anyone else?”

  “Oh poor you,” the woman said, and a lot of her was already out of the ice. She used words at random, but the expressions and messages were clear enough. “I almost feel sorry for you,” she was saying, “but I know that you can't really be cold with those golden combings on you. We had heard about them, but we could never find them. Oh poor monkey faces too! But you don't resent having to come
and get me, not when we are such good friends as we really are.”

  “When I'm running the Argo (that's the name of the Ship frozen in the ice below us there), I have quite a few of these work orders to fill,” the magus said. “I never know where they come from or why, and some of them do not seem to have much reason. This is the ship that can go where no other ship would ever reach, the ship that can find places that would otherwise be lost forever. But I like to understand my missions as well as I may. Who are you?”

  “Ewaglouwshkoul, of course,” said the fair woman with that pleasant big-mouthedness that so many of the older families have. “Who did you think I was?”

  “Oh, Little Eva, yes, of course. There's one in every era.”

  “The Neanderthal Eve, I suppose they would call me, using your own words,” she said, beginning herself to use a few real words mixed in with her thought-speaking. “It would be a sort of nickname. But I'm not the first woman of my tribe. I'm the last, I guess. There was only myself, and I under-aged, and thirteen of our fellows left, and things were going badly with us. Every day we went out to fight and every day we got whipped. Then our ghostly mentor suggested that some of us should go into cold storage for a very long time, and we would be awakened when things looked more peaceful. I decided that I would go into freeze, and the thirteen fellows all took different courses of action. One or two of them went into freeze also, I think. And some others of them may have survived somewhere. If not, it's a real loss. We have so much to give. I'm sure that there are a lot of my half-blood kindred around, but we'd like to preserve the real thing if we could. Pride in stock, and all of that. I was about to say that everybody knows me, but the everybodies who knew me are mostly dead by now. Since I am returned and refreshed and awake, I will immediately set about the business of having children. They are needed.”

  “Don't look at me,” the man said. “I'm a holy magus. I can't get involved in such things, certainly not with a client on whom I have a work order.”

  “Oh no, I didn't mean you. It will have to be one of the real ones if possible. But how will I go about it? I'm of an unfallen nature, and besides I'm pretty naïve. I was only a child, really, when I had them freeze me in this ice block. I should have a designated mate, but any of the thirteen would do if one of them were still alive. And there may have been other bands of us who survived somewhere. I don't know whether there is any chance of that or not.”

  “Were people of other bands also frozen in ice blocks?”

  “No. Not all of them anyhow. The report was that most of them said they would tough it out. But I guess that most of them are gone after these forty thousand years. Do you know where there are any more of my kind?”

  “No, not exactly,” the magus said. “But I believe I do know where there are several half-bloods. And I know where there are a few Groll's Trolls, and they are pretty nearly the same thing. I'm all for the revival of the more talented of the old races. Things were getting a little bit bland without you.”

  “Does your work order say what you're supposed to do with me, holy magus?”

  “It just says to release you from the ice and wake you up, and to take you to any sea port in the world that you designate.”

  “Do you have very many other work orders today?”

  “No. Just a few. I am to pick up a man who has been waiting thirty years for this ship to come. We make a lot of mistakes, but he's a patient man and I believe that he's been enjoying himself. Besides, he's one of our group. He is a Master of the Ship himself. I will just pick him up in a sea port a third of the way around the world, and then he will travel with me on a tour of duty. He is an accomplished seaman, as I am.”

  “Which sea port is it, magus?”

  “Biloxi. It's in Mississippi.”

  “Those are names that sound a little bit like our kind of talk. Take me there too then. I don't know much about the different ports you have now. Some of the ports we had would be underwater now, and some of them would be on the mountain tops. If Biloxi is a cosmopolitan place, then there will be seamen of every sort who will come there. I will pick me out one who is the closest to my blood. Soon or late some such will turn up. I'll get me a saloon or a hotel where everybody passes, and finally one of them will come. Papa ran a waterfront place named ‘The Old Stone Ship’. We invented ships and seamen, you know. I will find some of my folks somewhere, no matter where I start. And I will save you a trip if you let me off at a port where you are already going.”

  They all went down the great ice cliff. They blasted the ship out of the ice, and they blasted a passage for it. They opened up a fresh water stream with their explosives, and they filled their water casks from the stream. They gathered dead fish from their blasting and filled their stores. They killed blond cave bears to get bear grease to soften and make supple their frozen lines, and to give a new bear cloak to Eva. The old one was shedding after forty thousand years in the ice. They weighed anchor, and they sailed.

  “This ship sails against the wind, doesn't it?” Eva asked as they were high-seaing it along. “Do you want it that way, or do you just not know any better?”

  “This is the best way, for the Argo,” said the magus-man. “It's just like a kite that will rise best against the wind. It goes against the wind and against the waves, and did you ever see a ship move so smoothly and rapidly?”

  “Oh often, magus, often,” Eva said. “We had such ships, surely, but I was not expecting to see the more degenerate people having them. You've come a long way while I was asleep. It must be a very interesting sort of life, filling every different kind of work order.”

  “It's quite interesting, Eva. I foresee that I will die while filling one over-interesting order soon, but that is to be expected. But it's a pleasant life, and I do meet interesting people. And now I begin to remember most of it about myself. But sometimes, as one becomes younger, it takes longer to recollect oneself in the morning. But now it all comes to me.”

  They sailed against the winds and currents to Biloxi.

  2

  “I will no more believe that there is a do-good ship sailing under the flag of the Kingdom of Colchis, under patent of Divine Intervention, crewed by ancient remnants of the Argonauts and by black giants, sailing cavalierly through time and space and tampering with the future than I will believe in Divine Intervention Itself. Both the Ship and the Divine Interventions are conceits of Melchisedech Duffey the mountebank. But belief in the Ship Argo seems to have become cult belief of the month.”

  [Elwin K. Elkheart, Secretary-General of WSMA (affiliate of WSMAASRTFM).]

  The magus had now attained such clarity that he remembered his own name. He was Melchisedech Himself, the King of Salem, the ship pilot extraordinary, art dealer and life expert and sometime lover, adventurer into futures, and righter of wrongs. In latter-day contexts, he was sometimes named Melchisedech Duffey. He considered about the three monkey-like or wraithlike seamen who served him; and they were persons that, to some extent, he had made himself. And there were many more than three of them. There were others in the galley, and off-duty here and there. They were good seamen, when actual seamen were not always to be had. Then Duffey considered the ship that he was sailing, the ship that had several times borne the name of the Argo.

  Melchisedech had never completely understood this ship, though it was flesh of his flesh and ghost of his ghost. For all of the dozens of different times that he had sailed on her, he could still get lost on her. He could not even be sure how many masts she had: she had as many as were needed for any voyage, and funnels too sometimes. And, also, she had engines, whether or not it was proper that she should have them. There were unfamiliar apartments and mansions on the ship. Sometimes there were cavernous holds with stanchions and stalls for the many nameless animals quartered in them. There were doors to which Melchisedech had no key, and he was not even able to count the number of decks on her. And yet, from a slight distance, she seemed trim and complete and almost small.

&nbs
p; Melchisedech would sometimes come into fascinating and memorable rooms and ward rooms and halls on the Argo, and he would not be able to find those same places again. He would come to rooms where large numbers of persons were talking and discussing gravely; he would find places where groups of families, all unknown to him, were living. And there were booths and shops and stores on the ship, and even cottage industries were carried on. Nobody really had any good idea of the size of the ship. The Bible gives dimensions of one sort in the Vulgate and of another sort in the Septuagint, and perhaps a third sort in the Hebrew. And there are any number of different cubits, from nine inches to thirty-nine: and who can say which cubit is intended? At berthing, the Argo would go into very small slips designed for boats and not ships. And yet she would sometimes stand up as tall and long as any craft on the ocean.

  There was an intimate room, ‘The Bread and Wine Room’ on the Argo. Very meaningful gatherings were sometimes held there. But, as to the present Argo, she was surely much smaller than once she had been. There was even the opinion that the present Argo was only the ship's boat or the pinnacle of the Great Ship Itself. And yet it carried all the relics and identifications of the great ship: the wheel itself with the piece of the ‘talking oak’ set into it, the molar of Noah buried in a ship's plank where he had bit down and broken it off in exasperation at the irritations of the voyage, the cote of the Special Dove (it isn't always remembered that this was a prodigious dove with a wing span of more than ten feet), the grist mills and the grain grinders that had been on the big ship for the feeding of all aboard. And the name, and the log book itself, were preserved there. So was the original lantern, the lantern that was so constructed that it would shine around headlands and promontories and corners and show what was beyond them, this while the ship was still a good distance from them.