More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  “ ‘The hull is of oak,’ the dealer told me. ‘It's unusual for there to be an oaken hull this old. Oak is the noble wood of legend, but in practice it is usually too crooked and cranky for ship building: and too hard, and with no real spring to it. It will break before it will bend, and that's intolerable in ships' timbers. But this old hull seems to have plenty of spring in her. She is very, very old, but she is worm-free.’ ‘I know,’ I said, and I told the dealer a bit about her: ‘Her keel was laid at Ragusa on the Adriatic, and she is built of oak from the Dinaric Alps. If she had been laid in a Black Sea port, she would have been, at that distant time, built of cedar. But she's oak. She even has built into her several pieces of the talking oak named  —  no, I'll not name that special oak. But she talks, man.’ ‘She talks, yes,’ the sly hull dealer said, ‘I've heard her. Shall I have her fitted for you, and how will it be financed?’ ‘She'll fit herself,’ I said, ‘She has but to remember all her fittings and she'll have them again.’ And so it was. The above, though not an accurate account by common standards, is accurate symbolically.

  “Could I ride on her?” Gertrude asked. “I'm oak myself. Live-oak.”

  “Any time, before late this night,” Melchisedech told her. “There are seamen on her who are like monkey-shaped wraiths, but if they like you — ”

  “They will like me,” Gertrude said. “All wraithy things like me.”

  “Oh then, they'll take you on a crisp and fast trip around all the little islands. She's in singing shape, the Argo. This is a sort of climax voyage we're on, the Fourteenth.”

  “Brannagan says that you tamper with history and with events on the voyages,” Gertrude said. “He says that things would be in bad shape if you didn't interfere so judiciously. I say that things are in judiciously bad shape now. What do you do, sail backwards in time and destroy the seeds of dire events before they can grow?”

  “Backwards in time!” Brannagan gasped. “Have I an insane wife, and have I only discovered it on my last day with her? You shame my bald hairs, woman.”

  “Backwards in time!” Duffey gasped. “That is the most brainless thing I've ever heard of. It sounds like a science fiction idea or a blatt-brained notion. How would anyone ever voyage backwards in time?”

  “Well then, you little nimble noggins, where do you voyage to?” Gertrude asked.

  “Forward into time or sideways in time,” Brannagan said. “Into the future or into the present. We are already going forward in time, and we have only to accelerate a thousand-fold (that's critical speed for a time trip to the future to do it). But there is no way that one could go back in time.”

  “And there is no way that we could change things if we did go backwards,” Duffey said. “We cannot change the past that has already happened. But we can change the present in the process of happening, by being a part of that happening. And often we can change the future which has not already happened. But not all our piety or wit will blot out any line of the past. Besides, we have already lived through the past, or died from it. Let us go on to other things.”

  “But changing the future won't help the present,” Gertrude objected.

  “It's the best that can be done,” Duffey told her. “Every attempt to get the people to change the present to improve the future has been a dismal failure, though it would be the best way if it worked. But there is a very great amount of spill-back from the future into the present. Almost all of the worst effects of the present come from the future, and the future is continually turning into the present, The future is trial balloon country. Some of the balloons are mighty evil, and if they are not shot down at once they will drift into reality. Prescient types see some of the things that are trying to become, and we do what we can about them. We are constantly moving out in front and making changes in things before they happen. Brandon, the time before last when I sailed with you, were you not St. Brandon of Ireland?”

  “Certainly, I was and I am St. Brandon of Ireland. To be St. Brandon once is to be St. Brandon forever.”

  “But so is it also that to be a priest once is to be a priest forever. ‘Thou art a priest forever according to the order of Melchisedech.’ Myself, I belong to an obscure oriental rite where marriage has always been permitted. But with the Irish priests it was not so. So how do you square all that with your life with Gertrude here?”

  “Gertrude is a holy woman and a merry one,” Biloxi Brannagan said, “and we get along high and fine. She has been set to minister to me in this little beer garden which is like a piece of paradise.”

  “Well, I'm glad to know that it wasn't me,” Gertrude said. “Thirty years I've been worried about the affair and wondering where I've failed. But if there has been this impediment all the time, why that explains it.”

  Biloxi and Gertrude had a better home life than do many of the patriarchs and Argo Masters. Usually they do not remember their sailing on the Argo at all during the times when they are on shore. They do not remember it, but it overshadows their daily life. It makes that daily life seem a little bit trivial, and they do not give it the attention that it deserves. The Argo Master will sometimes be listless in his months and years on shore, and then people will say ‘He is waiting for his ship to come in. He is no good for anything while he waits.’

  Along about then, Eva, the beautiful and archaic young Neo-Neanderthal lady came to them with a lopsided proposition.

  “Does either of you gentlemen have fourteen thousand dollars that you don't need right now,” she asked. “I can make a solid down on the Neanderthal Bar for fourteen thousand dollars cash on the barrelhead. I can buy Kate's Neanderthal Bar just the way it is, and I'm sure I can make a go of it. And if I get a mate out of it, we'll settle here and give Biloxi a more old fashioned flavor than it's ever had before. Consider it as a civic investment and as a broadening of the base of things.”

  Melchisedech Duffey rubbed his two hands together, and two hundred and eighty of the old fifty dollar gold pieces cascaded onto the table with fine old music.

  “There is something so boyish about all you sorcerers,” Gertrude commented.

  “I'll say so,” Eva agreed. “But it's going to look fishy, my bringing in two hundred and eighty of these fifty dollar goldies. People will think I've robbed a Swiss bank. And I don't think there were any such things as fifty dollar gold pieces in the years shown on these, though they are real gold. When I was a kid, there was a lot of gold around on the ground that hadn't been washed down by the streams yet. Don't you have any green stuff?”

  Biloxi Brannagan rubbed his hands together, and one hundred and forty of good one hundred dollar bills thumped onto the table in a bundle banded together with rubber bands. Eva undid the bundle and examined the bills with her sparkling fingers and her sparkling blue eyes. “These are good,” she said after a moment, “but people will challenge them as fakes if I push this many of them all at one time, They all have the same serial number. Can you make them with a hundred and forty different serial numbers?

  “It's a hundred and forty times is hard that way, Eva,” Brannagan said, “and when we manufacture something by mind-power alone, well, there's a limit to mind power. It would take me about a week to do it that way, Eva. I'd have to rest in between times.”

  “Well, what will I do?” Eva asked. “What if Kate sells the Neanderthal to some simpleton while we're fooling around here? I need the Neanderthal. It's the best place ever for meeting some of my own kind and getting things going again.”

  “Don't fret, Eva,” Gertrude said. “We just have to work around these damned sorcerers if we're going to get anything done. We'll take care of it ourselves. Wait till I go in the house and get my checkbook.”

  4

  About those crewmen on the Argo, why they were there to work as crewmen, of course. Sure, they were as robotic as the zombie devil himself, only not cute. They were not really wraiths or effigies. They were place tokens.

  They were notices which said in effect, ‘This is my place, unti
l I come once more to fill it. Respect my place as you would respect me.’ The ghostly mechanical ‘crewmen’ were the residues of persons who had sailed on the Argo, who would sail on her again, and who would always have the right to sail on her. There were quite a few of these token residues on the ship, and the ship couldn't have operated without them, seamen's wages being want they are.

  Indeed, when Melchisedech Duffey and Biloxi Brannagan were not on the Argo themselves, their animate memories or notices or residues were there. And these memory residues were materialized and programmed to do a little happy work. So these monkey-like things were the old crewmen themselves, as much of them as could be left behind for identification and service. And one could discern, or at least guess with reasonable probability, what great Argo Master was represented by each of them.

  Melchisedech and Biloxi had been going into the future to root out things that might spill back into the present, and to have some of those evils already cleared out of the way when that future might have become the present.

  This day, they had a work order to prevent a rumored evil or distaste of an extreme sort. It was really a little bit funny to consider just what it was, but hell was roofed and timbered by such pervertedly funny things. It was something so vile that it was hard to see how humans could possibly tolerate it, and yet samplings from the future showed humans not only accepting it but reveling in its gustatory depravity. Comics of the past and present had already brought it into their swampy humor, and they were grooming the future to accept it. Some of these were good but randy people, and they did not realize what they were doing.

  Henry Salvatore, a fat Frenchman of the Louisiana swamps, a man known to both Melchisedech and Biloxi Brannagan, had used to tell stagnant swamp stories. And the most distasteful thing in any of his stories was the damnable Puff Fish. Henry told about people who ate the things. There was no way that anybody was ever going to get all the swamp country humor out of Henry. Other people have also referred to this coming abomination in a spirit of misguided humor. Swamp stories will always refer either to things of the past or present or future, and there were no Puff Fish in the past or the present. The very idea of them was rancid. The possibility of people really eating them was horrifying. They were in every water, so the story went, and they were only waiting till somebody would find the bait they would bite on. Oh what bait would be horrible enough for the horrible Puff Fish?

  The future that they might be in was getting closer, so there was nothing to do except to go forward into the future and root them out and save the world from that shameful era.

  It was on the futuristic trail of the Puff Fish that the Argo, on a sunshiny day, was apparently sailing through a sea of grass in waterlogged rural Louisiana. The Argo was really sailing down one of those weed and reed grown canals. The Masters of the Ship brought the Argo to a little landing in the swamp, and they tied up there. They were met by three brackish water gentlemen, Leonard Archive, Oliver Greenflag, and Harry A. (Honeybucket) Kincaid, three pleasant and hospitable persons.

  “We have everything here that you salty travelers might need or name,” Leonard Archive said. “Name it.”

  “It's to destroy the naming or needing of one foul thing that we are here,” Biloxi Brannagan said. “But, as to your hospitable invitation, bring me a nine pound gar. Then flense about three pounds off the tender flanks of it and grill it.”

  “I'll have about a fourteen pound Blooper Fish,” Melchisedech Duffey said. “You should be able to get about fourteen pounds of good head steak from a fellow that size.”

  Honeybucket Kincaid set certain dials for voltage and frequency, and threw the power. He also made slight adjustments to the underwater electrodes, but that was just because he loved to fiddle with them. For small jobs, it didn't matter how deep in the water the electrodes were.

  The green of the channels was literally galvanized into life. The water meadows, thick with both rooted and free-floating flora, showed white wakes. Shadows of gar were sliding in at every level, but they were very selective shadows. Allowing for perspective and distance, all those gar were the same size. All the nine pound gar for about a mile around had quickly arrived. Out of perhaps three thousand of them, Honeybucket selected three and lifted them out of the water. Of these, he further selected just one, for its fine color and proportion, and he threw the other two back. He put the one superb alligator gar into the eviscerator. He adjusted dials, and the perhaps three thousand other alligator gar scooted out of there.

  Honeybucket let the boiling water set for ten seconds. One does not mix fish-ways too closely. Then he set the dials anew. There was quickly a new turmoil and arriving, of a different speed and movement, of differently shaped shadows, of different foaming and wake. There was another large and rapid assembly, and it was made up of fourteen pound Blooper Fish. Honeybucket selected the best of them, and he dismissed the others. He put this finest Blooper Fish into the eviscerator, and at the same time he took out three pounds of tender flank meat of the Gar. He put the Gar in a high frequency oven.

  “For salad, I'll have globigerina glace,” Duffey said. “For fruit you might make me a chlamydomonas with kelp syrup. I'll have pond scum bread, and sea lice soup. And a Hashed-Ectocarpus Collins for cocktail.”

  “I'll have a desmid salad with ulothrix,” said Biloxi Brannagan. “For fruit you might fix me a volvox colonial. Spirogyra bread, I suppose, and hydrodictyon soup. And a Foraminifera Julip for drink.”

  Honeybucket made the drinks first. Volvoxa and ectocarpus can be brought to congregate in waters by frequencies in the same part of the scale. They can, in fact, be brought in by common carrier and then unscrambled. And alcohol is one of the things (sugar and petroleum are others) that could be gathered as rapidly as might be wished from any water. Honeybucket had the drinks quickly, and he had the dinner ready in not much longer time.

  “We have it all here,” Leonard Archive told those travelers Duffey and Brannagan. “We've got it made. We could vegetate here now, except that we don't even let the vegetables vegetate. We insist that the vegetables supply us with electrical power. We have plenty of it from the sun, of course, and from the water flow, and from the wind. But a canny man will always have at least four strings to his bow. The breathing of the plants exhibits a voltage differential, as does the polarity between the brown and the green plants. We draw on the bountiful sea, and on the bountiful blending of the sea and land here. Fishermen have always known that a couple of electrodes in the water and a little voltage applied to them will attract fish. We found that by using a variety of voltages and a variety of frequencies, and sometimes many pairs of electrodes, we could attract every sort and sub-sort of fish or crustacea or animals or plants or chemicals or minerals or salts or alcohols or petroleums or sugars. We found that there were minute quantities of everything in saltwater and in brackish water and in fresh water. And we found out that these minute quantities of everything will count up, in a very little while, to mountainous quantities. We learned selective polarization of every medium. We learned that wherever there are differences of potential there is power a-plenty, and that there are differences of potential everywhere. We learned a lot of things because we were too lazy to work for a living. And we have given all these techniques to the world.”

  “How about Puff Fish?” Melchisedech Duffey asked.

  “It's a moral problem, of course, and a problem of individual vileness,” Oliver Greenflag said. “If people want Puff Fish, who are we to prevent? I do not believe there is any way of blocking them anyhow. Now that the principles of frequency modulation and of frequency braiding also are understood, Puff Fish can be attracted in unlimited quantities just as anything can be. Puff Fish bait is a frequency. Frequency itself would have to be tampered with to make Puff Fish unavailable again.”

  “Let us talk about something less depraved than eating Puff Fish though,” Leonard Archive said. “We can attract everything by frequency modulation and broadcasting, you know, feel
ings of pleasure and of displeasure, weather of every sort, notions of every sort, ideas, emotions, even people. We can attract any sort of people, of any age or station. They come readily to the particular frequencies that they cannot resist. Honeybucket, surprise us with a visit of interesting people.”

  “All right,” Honeybucket said, and he began to do things with dials and to set the special frequencies into effect.

  “Gentlemen, there is always a sufficiency of everything near at hand,” Greenflag said. “The problem his always been in finding the dippers to dip the different things up. The frequency signals are such dippers. They will dip anything out of water or land or sky. What kind of folks are you bringing to visit us, Honeybucket?”

  “Twenty-one year old girls,” Honeybucket Kincaid said. “I've always liked them at about that age. Ah, another thousand cycles here, and a few more pairs of electrodes there. Young people come to high frequency signals more readily than old people do.”

  Three twenty-one year old girls were seen coming down a waterway in a rowboat. It had taken only two and a half minutes from the frequency activation until their appearances. They paddled to the dock, and they tied up the rowboat there.

  “I never saw such a tide as is running along here,” said one of the girls who was named Janeway Celeste Lynne. “It just seemed to catch up our boat and propel it right along.”

  “But the oceantide is pulling in the other direction, through all the salt water meadows now,” Melchisedech Duffey pointed out. “You came here against a strong tide. It was the frequency modulation that caught you up and propelled you right along. Ah, that was a fine demonstration that you gave, Honeybucket.”