More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Ah, you know him, Finn. You knew him for many years. And you may have sailed that ship even more than he has. I sailed with him recently. I didn't know him at first either, behind that mask. He says that it is for the vanity of the ‘All of Us’, the ‘Ekklesia’, that we must now be served by such outré instruments as himself, as thou, as I.”

  “He mentioned the two of us specifically as outré instruments?”

  “He did. Then I knew him by the broaching of the wine and the baking of the beans. Yes, we go on that voyage soon. We sail with him within one hour. We do, if the ‘Track and Total’ agents do not kill us first.”

  “My own double, the Cardinal Hedayat, who is pontiff in petto of God, tried to explain to someone recently the importance of the thing that we maintain, the thing that the world has set itself the task of stamping out. He said that it was a special dimension. He said that it was a necessary element in everything and that the world would not be the same world without it. He said that any mathematics that disregarded it as a function would be a false mathematics, and any physics or philosophy that failed to include it would be false and incomplete. It is a real intrusion into time and space, and it has changed time and space irreparably. I say that it is the source that enlivens, the spark that unites, the only live growing thing on which all other things are parasites. It is the covenant that has changed the form of everything.”

  “But not everybody agrees which is the Covenant.”

  “All the killers agree that this is the Covenant that they must kill. It is, among a hundred other things, a biological mutation. But biological mutations are chancy for quite a few centuries and subject to being wiped out by regressions. If we break this covenant, then we regress. By the covenant, we are already supermen. But if we refuse it we cannot go back to being natural men, we can only go back to nothing. We cannot now be natural men, if we ever could, which I doubt. We must be supernatural men (which is supermen), or we must be unnatural men or monsters. And monsters are never anything else than creatures on their way to extinction. I'd better go back to my room for an instant, if we are to sail within one hour.”

  “No, Finn, you're dead if you go back to your room. They wait for you there.”

  “Then I will just take a midnight stroll through Bally Alley for one more time. Come with me, Herman, mutt Hercules.”

  “No. They're in Bally Alley too. We will go to the harbor by the ‘harbor express’. We've a half-chance of living through it if we go that way. We've no chance at all if we go any other way.”

  The ‘harbor express’ was a crawl-way through and under the cellars of buildings and through the tunnels that connected them, through storm-sewers and through ceramic tiles that carried electrical feeders, through heat ducts and thieves' catacombs. And the ‘harbor express’ came out under wharfs somewhere. But the midget Hercules could go anywhere and Count Finnegan could go almost anywhere.

  Had there somehow been a slight slip in the conversation of Herman Hercules? Had someone not learned that role quite well enough? How else, but for some slip, could Count Finnegan have known that this was Martino Cardinal Erculo of Milan hiding in the disguise of his own double, Herman Hercules, and that it was not Herman Hercules himself?

  Or perhaps those weren't the exact cases either. Perhaps it wasn't given to anyone to know the exact identity of these two double or triple masqueraders.

  8

  The killings had been coming along almost as well as could have been desired. Less than fifty of the Abdicated Princes were left, but they didn't really amount to anything, anyhow. Only four of the Princes In Hiding were left alive and they did amount to something, but they were going fast. All thirteen of the doubles were still, as far as anyone knew, alive; but they didn't amount to much either. They were a minor puzzle though. “The doubles or shadows have all disappeared when their primaries disappear,” John Mogul said, “but they haven't been accounted for. I believe that it's simply the case that dead men don't cast shadows.”

  A little horn-pipe music please. Then!

  This is the ship that has rocked and rolled

  And sailed in the scorchy zones.

  This is the pilot who's thousands years old

  (Skull for his face, and a mask of gold!),

  And his hands are nothing but bones.

  Finnegan, Gilbert, and Hercules

  Ride in the troughs and rolls,

  Under a spread of yard-arm trees,

  Into the Santo Simeon Seas,

  Into the Sea of Shoals.

  Certainly dead men cast shadows. That's what history is about. John Mogul was wrong about the doubles or shadows ceasing to exist when their primaries were put under ground. All thirteen of the primaries had been buried now, under stones that read:

  For Hedayat, “Upon this Peter I will build my church.”

  For Brokenbolt, “The Lord walking by the Sea of Galilee saw two brothers.”

  For Ti, “My chalice indeed you shall drink.”

  For Merry, “So I will have him remain until I come, what is that to thee?”

  For Leviathan, “So long a time have I been with you and have you not known me?”

  For Artemis, “This is the Israelite in whom there is no guile.”

  For Lloyd-Spencer, “And, leaving all things, he rose up, and followed him.”

  For Salvatore, “Lord, thou hast proved me and known me.”

  For Gregorio, “These seeing it shall be troubled with terrible fear, and shall be amazed at the suddenness of their unexpected salvation.”

  For Runosake, “ — but others, save them, snatching them from the fire.”

  For Doki, “Their sound went forth into all the earth; and their words to the ends of the world.”

  For Gabrailovitch, “One of these must be made a witness with us of his resurrection.”

  For Erculo, “Thou art a vessel of election.”

  The last of the thirteen to die had been the prince of them all, the primary of Count Finnegan, Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of Antioch. His death (he was impaled upside down) was reported in the press as “Last Gate Swings”.

  But the ‘Track and Total’ people hadn't caught or killed any of the shadows yet, and now they didn't care very much. They didn't even put the murders out to sub-contract. But they did put prices on the heads of the thirteen shadows. And the shadow-men were converging on a part of the world where there were sharp bounty hunters on land and still sharper ones on the ocean. Private enterprise had not yet died out in some of those chopped-up little oceans. A man there would murder you for four dollars, but that was surely better than having him draw four dollars from some commonalty for doing no work at all. Count Finnegan and Gilberto Levine-and-O'Brien and Herman Hercules, three double-men or shadow-men who had lost their primaries were sailing on a ringing bell-way in the ancestral ship named the Argo. The bell-ways were resonating channels in the ocean that led one straight to the one hundred booming bells around the mooring stone north of San Simeon. There had been, when the bells first began to summon and ring there, a premonition or prescience of great things to happen in an assembly there. But now all the great persons who had figured in the premonition were dead and buried, the only part of any of them still above ground being the flayed skin of Cardinal Artemis. But the shadows of the great and hinge men were going to keep a rendezvous in the place of them. And there was a lot of shadow-play going on concerning their voyages. There was the pilot and captain of the Argo who had something very shadeful about him.

  This captain and pilot wore a golden mask, a golden scarf around his neck, and golden gauntlets on his hands and wrists. These golden garments were made from combings of the Great Golden Fleece of Colchis Itself. All three of the doubles who had taken passage on the Argo knew this mysterious pilot; and one of them, Count Finnegan, had known him very well for many years. But an impediment was in-between. The pilot was swathed in gold fabric because the flesh was all gone off him and what was left was mostly bones. The pilot could not spe
ak because of his throat condition (he had no flesh at all to his throat; he had, in fact, no throat; he had neck bones and nothing else in that region), but he could communicate. And he was always in good spirits. (His flesh had been reduced to ashes and now reposed in a cigar canister that had once belonged to the King of Spain, but his spirit and his bones were intact. He was, as everyone will guess soon or late, Melchisedech himself, the father of all magic men.)

  The Argo sailed continuously against the wind and the currents, and it was not by ordinary standards a very sea-worthy ship. The monkey-faced midget wrestler, Herman Hercules, was constantly cobbling things together in the high rigging, and Count Finnegan was often following the keel-haul around under the ship to make emergency repairs. But, of course, the Argo could never sink, not forever.

  “Let me see thy skin, Gilberto,” Count Finnegan said to his friend the Levine-O'Brien when they were half seas over. “You made certain marks on thy skin so you would know it if you ever saw it again.” “Oh, no, no, no,” Gilberto said, and he seemed a little bit frightened about it all. “Something has gone wrong with those marks so that I am not absolutely certain whether they are the same marks I made or not. It is a frightening thing to wake up on a morning and find oneself in somebody else's skin. It is equally frightening to be not really certain whether this has happened or not. The marks that are on the skin I am wearing now, they are very like the marks that I made on my own skin, and yet there is something about them that shouts ‘Forgery! Forgery!’.”

  “Let me see them, Gilberto,” said Count Finnegan. “I watched you make the marks on your skin, and I have my fine artist's memory and sense of style for these things. I can spot forgery.”

  “I'd rather not, Finnegan,” Gilberto said. “Let's leave it in doubt.”

  The primary of Gilberto, Cardinal Artemis of Santa Cruz, had been flayed by one of those arranged accidents that had become common in the world. The Cardinal had gone to bless a new cork-cutting machine in Portugal, though knowing the danger of assassination. And when the blessing was finished, the machine was somehow joggled to run. It reached out its arms and took the Cardinal in its grasp. It flayed his skin off completely in one piece. The Cardinal died almost immediately afterwards. But the skin, the skin, which skin was it, and which man was wearing it at the time? Sometimes doubles will identify so completely with their primaries that there's no telling them apart.

  There was something else here. Finnegan had painted, using a radiation imprinting technique, a masterwork at least as great as ‘The Resurrection of Count Finnegan’, on the endoderm, the inside of the skin of Cardinal Artemis. He had done it when the Cardinal was hale and living, but the Cardinal hadn't known that he did it. Finnegan knew how to reproduce this inside-imprinted masterwork now. But was it on the inside of the trophy skin of the Cardinal that was now cherished by John Mogul? Or was it on the inside of the skin of this Gilberto Levine-and-O'Brien who was beside Finnegan now? If John Mogul had seen the masterwork and if he had it beside him at all times, the exploding and kinetic beauty of the work may have accounted for the strange behavior of John Mogul at his end.

  A Saucerite from the Big Triangle region joined them on the Argo when they were short days from the mooring-stone. He was a pleasant person. “You four here are the only gentlemen I have met on World,” he noted. “All others stare at me in that unseemly way that humans have. Then they poke at me with their fingers and ask me if I am one of the ‘Big Brothers’ sent to supervise their civilization. Do I look like a Big Brother?”

  “You do, little owl-eyes, you do,” said Herman Hercules. Herman and the Saucerite were about the same size.

  “I am an eleven-year-old student,” the Saucerite said. “And, taking advantage of a misunderstanding, I am enrolled in classes with eleven-year-old humans. But I cut a sort of path among those kids. In the evenings, in my saucer, I sweep back to my under-sea nest in the Triangle, and I often take several of my classmates with me. This makes me seem to be an important person to my classmates, and I love it.”

  “What school do you attend?” Gilberto asked him.

  “Gaetano Polytech in Balbo City. Next season I will go to the University of Miami if I can get a chess scholarship.”

  “I want to poke you with my fingers myself, rude or not,” Gilberto said. “Well, are you real? Tell me, and I won't have to poke you to find out.”

  “Does ‘Reality’ have to be that consensus grubbiness that calls itself ‘real’ on so many worlds? Oh, I'm real. But poke me, and your fingers will go right through me. Your world's like all the others.”

  “You're a poor student, Sauce, not to know that our world is unique,” the fleshless Melchisedech, pilot and captain, said. “We are not like other worlds. You must realize that.”

  “Oh, your world is of special interest, of course, since it is the ‘World of the Covenant’,” the young Saucerite said. “But it isn't a world of special accomplishment or attainment. That some of you are really the first super-people is likely, and that you carry super-seed is almost certain. But the results aren't overwhelming. There's unevenness in you, and the super-tang is rare. It's because of your special category and dimension that we send more students here than to many other places. It's because of your unevenness and barren areas that so many of us students return as empty-minded as we were when we left home.

  “But some few of you are die-hards, and this interests us. Most of us, most of the people everywhere, are die-easies; you are different. I'll be covering the Conclave at Mooring-Stone for a little press network of which you likely haven't heard.”

  Three others of the double-men or shadow-men, Cecil Octavian of England who was the double to the dead Cardinal Brokenbolt of Australia, Niku Kazuko of Honolulu who was double to the dead Cardinal Runosake of Kobe, Daniel Jean Boulle who was the double of the dead Cardinal Salvatore of New Orleans, were coming up from along the Mexican coast in a tramp steamer. They had been impersonating archeologists for the purpose of deceiving assassins and bounty hunters, and it was in their archeological activity that they had acquired the presence of a person who was about as archeo as one can be.

  “It isn't a bad life,” this very odd person gave the stony communication. “We were the High Lords once and we had everything our way. We had the jaguar by the tail, as they say, and the Jaguar in the Sky was our own constellation. We were the Lords of the Square Hills which you now call the pyramids of Quintana Roo. The Holy Hills had grace then. They didn't seem so square-tapered and flat-headed as they are now, not before the spirit went out of them. And we had bells then, gold bells. Did any of you ever hear the rich clanging of solid gold bells?

  “We understood prophecy. We knew that there would be a Pact and a Lineage. We were pretty sure that the Pact would be with us. Should it be with the monkeys of the trees, or the humans of the river shores, or the alligators of the swamps, or the whales of the ocean, when we were there? We were the Pyramid Lords. We were the Rulers of the World. We had a touch of the divine fire; we could feel it in us. We still have it. We maintained order in the world. The monkeys and humans and alligators and whales were our cattle.

  “We set our golden bells to booming to call God to come down. I believe now that we were too early by a few thousand years. The bells set up a golden roaring with words; ‘We have pen and ink here,’ they called, ‘Come down with the Pact and we will sign it and then You can countersign it.’ ‘Be quiet,’ God said. ‘It isn't even morning yet.’ ‘Come down with the Pact,’ we set our bells to speaking, ‘and bring the morning with you when you come. We are ready now.’ ‘Be quiet,’ God said again. We rang the bells still louder. He came down then. And He turned all of us to stone. ‘Now you will be quiet,’ He said.

  “So we have been stone-stiff and buried inside our pyramids since then, except that one of us is allowed to move about every few centuries, as I do now, and bring news to his fellows. ‘But I will not forget you,’ God had said on that day when He turned us to stone. ‘I will alway
s treat kindly with you. And I have wonderful things in mind for you, after a few thousand years. Until then, be quiet.’ So He made a Pact with the humans instead, a puzzling choice, and He made it with an unlikely variety of them. And then He renewed the Pact, with the most uncouth humans ever. So be it.

  “But now we have heard the bells ringing again, not gold bells as we once had, but bells nevertheless. I've come to report on the event, for an underground press of which you have not heard. It is the Pyramid Roots publication, and it is circulated entirely underground, from the roots of one pyramid to those of another. Why do we not have fresh lamb on this voyage? On the Argo, Melchisedech gives them fresh lamb.”

  This rock-headed person was something of a clown, but it is distinction aplenty for a person made entirely of stone even to walk and talk. And Rocky was a pleasant companion, and he knew the passages through the shoals. He himself had laid these passages out originally, he said.

  Three others of the double-men or shadow-men, Bolo Manolo, Douglas McAfee, Lloyd Cardigan-Pembroke the pig butcher of Tywyn in Wales, came down from Bimini on a luxury yacht, and they looked to be the richest and sportiest fishermen ever. They didn't talk with any Saucerites or Pyramid Lords. But there was one ancestral dolphin who followed along with them and spoke to them when they dangled a coded communication apparatus overboard.

  Yes, the dolphin knew about the Testament, the Pact, the Covenant also. What creature does not know about it? He knew about the line which is the life-line of the world. He had expected, as they all had, that the Pact would be made with the dolphins as the most intelligent and most obedient creatures in the world. It wasn't. The Pact was made with humans, and it contained the sad clause that other humans would try to nullify it until the end of time. But the dolphins accepted their being passed over for the lesser folk. They had a bell of their own, the dolphin said, and it was the largest bell in the world. A number of the dolphin's fellows were towing it, and were already quite near to the Mooring-Stone.