More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  “The sea would be glassy, they argued. It would swell and it would trough, but it would still be of a dull and opaque glass. It would heave, perhaps, but it would not crest. They had all seen such seas for very brief moments. But the sea, by ordinary, pays true homage, pays brilliant homage, and it is not of that opaque glassiness. We see the wrong ocean now.”

  “And I will heave, perhaps in a moment,” Duffey said, “but I will not crest. Yes, what homage the sea is paying this morning is to a different thing. What homage my own stomach is paying is different and wrong, but I may get to like it a little. I know too what the world would look like, if it were secular. I've seen snatches and pieces of such a world: places where, in the autumn, the leaves turn from green to dull brown with no brilliant interval; tropical trashlands where it does not lighten or thunder at all; steppe lands where it goes to deep snow and deep freeze with neither rime frost nor hoar frost coming first; swamps too dismal to have swamp lights or fox fire or St. Elmo's fire. Ah, I do feel queasy this morning, Brannagan, and I do think queasy. In my black little heart, it seems as if I would welcome all the brilliant things going out, and the new brotherhood and new regularity coming in.”

  “I'm sick too, Duffey,” said Brannagan, “and it bothers me that it doesn't — ah — bother me a lot more. Ulp! Such pleasant retching I've never known before. I can see why the thing's attractive to most. It's a new form of expression. I'm less a man than I was yesterday, and it doesn't bug me out. Have you heard what rot that piece of talking oak in the Ship's wheel has been talking lately? It's all other seas and other plaudits now, Duffey. Why does it bother us so little?”

  “That piece of talking oak in the Ship's wheel, it says that it has been baptized in the spirit and is speaking in tongues now. There's more than a thousand craft following us and surrounding us, Brannagan. What is the big attraction? Above all the other atmospheric changes, it is becoming more shimmery now, which means that we are even further and more uncertainly into the future. It may break at any time and send us back into one of the presents, or cast us up on one of the shores of the ‘Lost Years Sea’. If it is going to happen, I hope that it happens before the Argo and ourselves disgrace ourselves. Do you believe that the things may, by their numbers and their confusions around us, succeed in getting the codenamed ‘Man of Mystery’ onto the Argo? And why does the general stickiness become less and less sticky until it is nearly tolerable?”

  Aye, maybe you'd get to like that regularized sea and that regularized din also. You'd get to like the false regularization and acceptance that had been done to the people.

  “Is it going to be a slow and uneventful event, this taking us over?” Brannagan asked. “What do you think, Duffey? What do you think Gunboat?”

  No, it wasn't completely uneventful. Just after sundown that night, events began to happen. One of the effigy seamen came and said that the compass in the binnacle was awry. The needle deformed itself and kept pointing at something on the Ship itself, something below decks.

  “It is the magnetism,” the effigy seaman said. “It is a personal magnetism that deforms needles.”

  “We feel it,” said Melchisedech.

  There was a series of sharp explosions on the Argo. Exploration revealed that every mirror on the Ship was shattered, but not a piece of glass had fallen from any of them. One looked in the glass now, and saw himself in a thousand aspects, a different reflection in each shattered segment. This was cubism come into the world as actuality. Then, when one looked away from the mirror, one saw the whole world as shattered and cubistic.

  “It's the only way to see the world,” another effigy seaman said. “This is the new depth and dimension, the freedom from integrity. Praise it, praise it!”

  “Oh shut up!” Melchisedech said.

  Very many people were on the Argo. Gunboat Smith had near bitten the legs off of many of them, and still they came. They were coming over the sides of the ship. They were coming up from the depths of it. There would be no way to keep out the ‘Man of Mystery’ with so many unidentified people coming in. But Brannagan and Duffey now knew that the ‘Man of Mystery’ had been on the Argo for quite some time.

  People cried out in tongues, and talking dogs interpreted what they said. Gunboat Smith was not able to come to any of the talking dogs, though he railed furiously against them. The world had changed, or it had somehow been given over to a queer power.

  And there was a real attraction to the power. The Argo was going at a still greater rate towards the East, though there was no longer any way of verifying directions; and the smell of hot and rocky land was near. This was the abomination of desolation that was spoken of in the prophets; and it was entirely too attractive an abomination.

  A crooked peace had settled over everything. All breathing stopped. Then the Great One appeared, out of the bowels of the Argo.

  Breathing began once more, but at a different pace. The world still moved, but not as it had moved before. The Great One appeared in colors that had been long outlawed, and the noise that greeted his appearance ruptured ears and sent double red streams down every head on all the ships and boats of the retinue.

  “It's getting more and more shimmery,” Brannagan said, “and this is not all the effect of the ‘great’ event that seems to be happening. We've just gone a little further into the future than we should. But how do we go back?”

  “I think we can go back simply by refusing it,” Duffey guessed, “but all these poor people cannot go. They live in this time and they are deluded in this time. And the Holy Argo cannot go back until she brings her mysterious passenger to land.”

  The Apparition, the Man of Mystery, the Mystery of Evil, the Master of the World for That Time, the ‘He Who Must Come First’, stood there in glory, but the glory was made out of tampered-with light. And yet that's the only kind of light there was left.

  He was Peleus, he was Kasmir Gorshok, he was Prince Casimir, he was Casey Szymansky of Chicago and of the Zodiac, and he was the Antichristus. And this was his world. There were paeans heaped up on mountainous sound. There was worldwide adoration on the spherical screen of the apparition-sphere.

  The Argo landed at Habonim where the hilly ‘Plains of Megiddo’ began, and from there this Prince Kasimir who was the Antichristus would rule the world for his period. Then he would destroy the world in the last big battle. It became more and more shimmery.

  But Duffey was solidly back into his own flesh. No bones — only man was he now. There was a returning to basics for him.

  There must have been a million people waiting on that shore, and most of them were the high notables of the world. There were very few of the five billion people of the world who didn't accept it. Every compass needle of the world pointed to the Plains of Megiddo now. It was the new center of the new earth, and the Antichrist was king of the earth. And what sort of elect was it that remained undeceived, though powerfully influenced?

  Only three of them there that we know of, and some would find them a little bit shabby.

  “I wonder why Casey didn't sweep us in too,” Brannagan said. “I never knew that he had such power. We're lucky to have escaped him here, and to be able to escape out of here.”

  “A false prophet is not without honor, save on his own ship,” Melchisedech said.

  “Thank God for the shimmering,” Gunboat Smith growled. “We're fading out of it and leaving it to itself. What, the Argo had disappeared while we gaze here with the noddies on the shore. She'll be the object of our new search for a while.”

  “Aye, but I seem to see myself rediscovering her, in disguise and in the hands of a sly hull dealer in New Orleans many years from now,” Melchisedech said. “There, or somewhere else we'll find her. Till then, my friends!”

  “We go back,” Gunboat growled. “We couldn't stop that kinky future this time. Maybe we will stop it the next time, if we're capable of learning anything.”

  “Gunboat, Gunboat,” Brannagan chided him. “From the unhol
y talking dogs who had caught the false spirit, you have picked up the unholy habit of talking. Give the evil and unseemly thing over. Yes, we have failed to stop it this time. Possibly we have failed to stop it many times, and we are not even sure there is another chance. Well, we go back, one way or the other, and we fade out — ”

  ?

  Biloxi Brannagan faded out first. Gunboat Smith, after a deep and comprehending growl to indicate that he would never again indulge in unholy dog talk, faded out next. The entire Surroundings and ambient were gone —

  And Duffey himself was fading out of there, and fading in somewhere else, in another time and place. Duffey was swimming in doubtful water, and perhaps he was drowning in it, Then the ocean became a little more cheerful, a little more self-assured as it were. “If I'm drowning I may as well drown cheerfully,” Duffey said in an aside to himself. No, the whole of his life did not flash before his eyes in those fragments or seconds, but significant pieces of his early life did flash before him.

  There were the times when he had been the Boy King of Salem and had done magic. And he'd had black giants to serve him. He had made birds out of clay and flung them into the air and they flew.

  A couple of millennia later in his boyhood, in Iowa and in other places, he had been the Boy King in disguise. There also he had had black giants to command, but they were invisible to all except himself. There were early years where he was shuffled from one set of false kindred to other sets of false kindred. There was the forever blessed boarding school where a few persons (Sebastian Hilton, John Rattigan, Lily Koch), understood that he really was a king in disguise. There was Charley Murray who did magic tricks while Duffey did real magic. But Charley, his best friend, had a better line of patter, and was more applauded than was Melchisedech.

  The sky and the water had become younger now, and it was foolish to fear that one might die by drowning. There was the exuberance of youth on everything.

  There had been the meteoric gold-touched business venture in St. Louis. There was the foster brother Bagby. There was the Rounder's Club, as fine a club as any in the world. There was Sister Mary Louise. There was Olga Sanchez of the torchy shoulders, Helen Platner of the Bavarian Club, Papa Piccone of the Star and Garter Club, Beth Keegan who was an ivory statuette.

  And following that, Melchisedech, then probably being in his seventeenth year, in a very early morning, had walked out on the river shore low-lying boat that had been the Argo in disguise. Oh happy water, he was very near that place again.

  “I had forgotten how wonderful it was to be not quite seventeen,” he chuckled to himself. Then he quoted “I shall arrive. What time, what circuit first, I ask not.” What a time to be quoting Browning. A new joy, even a glee, had taken over everything. It was a young ocean now and a young sky over it. There were youthful sea creatures and river creatures, possibly not entirely authentic, cavorting around him with happy noises. They looked a little bit like creatures in certain comic paintings that Finnegan had done long ago. Long ago from when? Just how old was Finnegan now?

  It was the year 1923 and Duffey was quite a young man. Finnegan (John Solli) had been born June 1, 1919 so he was about four years old and hadn't done any significant painting yet. Now it was the year 1923 and Melchisedech Duffey swam at the same time out of the ‘Sea of Lost Years’ and out of the young and joyously muddy Mississippi River. He climbed onto the shore just below the Eads Bridge in St. Louis, MO. He has never been so happy in any of his lives. He was twenty-three years old and no age is happier than that.

  “Oh, I see by your face how young and handsome I am,” he cried in joy to Pseudo-Melchisedech who was standing before him there looking very young-mannish and very sad. “It isn't permitted to be sad, not when you're so happy,” Melchisedech told the creature.

  “You have now lived through the lost years of your life seven times,” the young and sad creature told Melchisedech, “and you've died seven deaths. These lives and these deaths have been widely different. You know that, don't you?”

  “Not consciously, but, yes, I've known it,” said Happy Duffey. “You've known that each set of your lost years were pretty sketchy, haven't you? That you've lived only selections of those world years?”

  “Absolutely no!” Duffey declared. “What I have lived, I've lived fully. There's been nothing sketchy about it.”

  “Have you any idea why this has happened to you?”

  “Because I am a Magician, a Magus,” Melchisedech spoke out of his youthful joy. “And also because (I hate to say this about so great an entity) because God doesn't quite know how to end the World Affair. He's started many things, but he's never ended anything yet. And the endings are the hardest. I think he's using myself and various other of his Magicians to explore various endings.”

  “Do you really think so? Oh, no, no, you laughing Judas! That wouldn't be possible. You do know that after three of your deaths you were damned to Hell.”

  “And after the other four of them I wasn't,” Melchisedech spoke happily. “So I'm ahead of the game. And I know that the rehearsals are over with, or that they were an illusion. Now I must play my happy role in the last five or six decades of the world. And this time we will do it without the instructions that were given us during the rehearsals. I do not understand it at all, and I'm happy that I don't. Some of those who have other roles may understand it. But I'm twenty-three years old, probably for the last time, and the world is my oyster.”

  “Do you know what I am?” the strange and boyish double of Melchisedech Duffey asked him.

  “I know that you are an Angel,” Melchisedech said. “But there are two sorts of them. Are you an Angel of God or of the Devil?”

  “Of God,” said the creature. “Yes, I'm quite certain of that.”

  “Look, pale reflection of myself,” Melchisedech crowed, “I've just had a seven part daydream or hallucination. And whether each part of it lasted one minute or seventy years is no matter. It seems now that the whole thing was no more than one minute.

  “The world is a kaleidoscope, ever-changing, ever-enchanting, did you know that, My Reflection? And one best strides happily laughing and singing through it. And the fact that one is striding through the hot ashes of Hell every step of the way is no reason to be less merry. If one looks down and sees that he is no more than ankle-deep in Hell, let him continue with a happy heart. But if he sees that he is more than knee-deep in Hell, then he must, then he must, what must he do then, pale reflection of me?”

  “I don't know,” said the creature with its paler face of Duffey.

  “Maybe that's when he should leave the land for a while and walk on the water,” Melchisedech declared. “Remember, Reflection, that man in his original nature was able to walk on water. He is still able to do it, but sometimes he forgets that he is.” Then Melchisedech Duffey turned and ran to the city singing happily.

  “I lied to him and I lied to myself,” said the unhappy Angel who wore Duffey's face. “No, no, I'm not certain at all which one of them I serve. I'm afraid to be certain or even to think about it. Is it God or the Devil that I serve in my confusion and darkness?”

  But Melchisedech Duffey, singing happily, was into the city in the bright morning. And he didn't hear the creature at all.

  And so ends R. A. Lafferty's masterful conclusion to MORE THAN MELCHISEDECH.

  Or does it?

  We shall quote from that ruddy-faced, near-genius Enniscorthy Sweeny on the matter.

  “An event is like a box or other geometrical object,” Ennis would say, “and it should be pretty much the same no matter which side it is viewed from. Let us say that we look at it from the south side (that is the past), or from the east side (that is the present), or from the west side (that is an alternative (!!!-ed.) present), or from the north side (that is the future). The event will look a little bit different from these various viewpoints, but not much. You must not reject one view of it when you come to another view. They are all equally parts of it.”


  Let us turn our faces to the west then — to that alternate reality which “should not be rejected” .

  Direction! Direction! Should we run rampant over all the 45 degrees of the thing?

  No. No, of course not. We shall plot a course for south south-west to begin and let the sun in its course draw us where it will.

  Turn back now. Turn back the pages until you find this sign:

  ?

  And then, after re-acquainting yourself with the compass points, read on!

  Biloxi Brannagan faded out first. Gunboat Smith, after a deep and comprehending growl to signify that he would never again indulge in unholy dog-talk, faded out also. The entire surroundings and ambient were gone  —  the congress of ships and boats and the land itself.

  So, for the moment, or for the regression of the moment, there faded out the whole coming of the Antichrist who had possibly deceived all but three people in the world, and one of them a dog.

  And Duffey himself was fading out of there and fading in somewhere else, in another time and place. Duffey was swimming in —

  Hold everything right there! The hour grows early again, and there will never be a better place for some short notes on the nature of time and related things. The things related to time are aeon and eternity.