Not To Mention Camels

by R. A. Lafferty

  “That is your own personal projection of what he was and did, Doctor,” Fairfronter cautioned. “It is only a slight bit of the total projection that is Pilgrim. It is only one of many slivers of his past, but I suppose it is authentic.”

  “Why are you two Doctors Medical here?” Clarence Music from the Daylight Museum asked. “What is there in him that attracts you? You are the two members of our cult who most bother me. The rest of us seem to be a part of his troubled and shattered spirit, his nonessentiality. But you two seem to be otherwise.”

  “His spirit? I don’t believe in any spirit,” the Doctor Medical Judas Raffels said. “My own interest is in his body, in his medical body. This is as much a mask thing as is his figurative face. Have you not noticed that he sometimes looks larger, sometimes smaller? That he is sometimes robust and sometimes extenuated? Have you not noticed that he is sometimes in the lower end of the spectrum and sometimes in the upper end? Surely you have noticed that his shadow refuses to follow his body.”

  “Oh, that’s the case of all of us now,” Mary said. “There was never any reason for shadows to be so fixed as they were in the past.”

  “Who notices your shadow?” Raffels asked. “Have you not noticed that Pilgrim Dusmano intercepts neither light nor heat nor wind? ’Twould do no good to choose the lee side of him.”

  “No. In many ways that does no good,” James Morey said.

  “Have you not noticed that he seems weightless sometimes, and of an awkward pseudoweight at others? And he refuses to be touched and tested. He’ll not be weighed in life; but I believe that once somewhere we did weigh him in death.”

  “He is inextricably allied with the Lords of the Media,” Noah Zontik said sadly. “Shall I blame his evil on them? I must blame it on someone, since I am charged with delivering him from all evil. In no such time but this, on no other world but this, could the Lords of the Media have become so powerful. They serve no purpose. They attack purpose. They have no rightful authority. The thing they hate most is authority. I don’t believe they would ever accept it, even for themselves—not without changing the name of it. But for the last century we’ve had no elected officials at all on our world. Yet the Media Lords, the most powerful of all the Lords Spiritual, do rule by election in its deeper sense. We have chosen them and we have elected them, but not by ordered voting. For there is no ordered rule on our world, no rationality. We have the calculated opposites of these things. For just as the Media represent the anti-intellect, just as the dissemination of the Media is the anti-illumination, so are the Media Lords the true Lords of Unreason and Darkness.

  “Who brought it about?

  “Someone must have thought of all this when he put tongues in human heads to talk with, when he put fingers on hands to signal with, when he put styli in fingers to write with, when he created the ethereal tinsel to carry waves of a hundred sorts to a dozen senses to communicate with, when he put ears and eyes in heads to receive with, when he put the perverse lobe in our brains to defame and subvert with. The Lord of the Worlds has put these things in these places. But shall we hold him, or ourselves, responsible?”

  They walked down Sycamore Road, almost knee-deep in leaves. Vehicles were not allowed on Sycamore. It was rustic. People were dragging off old wood and cutting out sick and spindly bushes and trees. They would have bonfires and celebration fires tonight. People were sacking up leaves in huge plastic sacks to add to the pleasant reek of the evening fires.

  “Do you know who it is who will kill Pilgrim in the end?” Fairfronter asked. “In the end, and this, of course, is the end. It will not be ‘the Camel’s Revenge’ or any such societies that have stored up resentments against him. No, it will be the Media and the Lords of the Media with whom Pilgrim worked pestle in mortar for so long a time. The Media and their Lords rend and kill Consuls when they can find them behind their masks. And they kill them because of the good that is in them. And now they begin, as do all of us, to see behind Pilgrim’s mask a little bit. And now they will kill him for—get this!—for the very small amount of good that is in him. What sophisticated microscopes they do have these days! Talk about straining at gnats! The microscopic good that is in Pilgrim Dusmano is the gnat reversed. Oh, how they are straining at it at this moment! Oh, how all the great Lords are straining at the stool! It’s near to destroy them (the great camel-passers, they), as can be told by their groaning.”

  “All the final things are happening now,” Doctor Judas Raffels said. “I seem to have a new sort of receiver, and I can tick them off in my head: anything that is happening anywhere in the city.

  “Evenhand is dead and dismembered. Pilgrim has just dined on him, a rare, rich bit, and that in fine company. But something went weird there, weird even to the susceptibilities of Pilgrim; something turned weird in that fine company. There had not been such a fine dinner ever, perhaps. Nor so fine a company, not since the preanarchic days, at least. That full and rich dinner should have sated. It didn’t. All the great men at that table looked around at one another.”

  “Since when have you had this little illuminated theater in your head?” Rhinestone asked him.

  “Barely since the present moment,” Raffels said. “The great men sat, and an idea formed about them on black wings. ‘What next?’ they asked each other with their nictitating snakes’ eyes, or ‘Who next?’ ‘What is the titillation beyond?’ they asked. ‘Somewhere there must be found either rarer food or ranker persons to devour it. And where are ranker persons than ourselves to be found?’ Each man’s eyes were on his neighbor.

  “That was only a moment ago. Then the moment shifted. All the eyes of them were drawn to the nervous, magnetic fluctuations of the most attracting man present. Each man’s eyes were on Pilgrim Dusmano, to destroy him and to devour him in fortune and flavor. And, finally, to devour ritual pieces of him literally.

  “Even then, for a moment just now, it could have gone either way. It could be Pilgrim. Or it could be the rest of the Lords assembled. And Pilgrim was, or he had been, quite able to devour them all, almost, if the tide were running strongly enough in him, if he had full impetus and momentum.

  “He has the extensible jaws of the python, you know: figurative jaws, figuratively extensible at least. He could have stretched those jaws over that whole company there, swallowing and smothering those Lords in a transparent and hardly visible membrane, doing them to death, and then eating them individually at his ecstatic leisure. Many men have lately been done to death by things absolutely transparent.

  “Pilgrim Dusmano could have done this. Only he couldn’t. And when the tide turned, it turned with a great slosh and splash. He tried to divert them with his mind and his voice and his flowing hands. They wouldn’t be diverted. They would have no substitute. He swept for a moment very strongly against them and almost hurricaned them down. But his mind tires easily after a nervous day, and there were a number of strong minds against him. They beat him back. Pilgrim bolted. He rushed out from that fine Club. Now he is a fugitive.”

  “Why should he be fugitive from anything?” Zontik asked. “He intended to trap the ‘Camels’ into murdering him tonight. What does it matter now if he is killed by the Lords instead?”

  “He’s lost his initiative,” Raffels said. “His momentum is gone. Now he’ll die afraid and beaten, and I’ve heard that it’s the worst of luck to do that. They broke him! And that leaves him open to every danger and ambush on the road. I wish there were a way for me to withdraw from his cult.”

  “There isn’t,” said Doctor John Augustine. “That’s as though one on a rational world should say, ‘I wish I could unbelieve.’ But nobody who has ever really believed can cease to believe. One may say that he has ceased. One may act as though he had. One may defame and defile and revile what one has believed in. But that one still believes, however blackly. And we will all still belong to this cult, however much the cult figure fails us. We’ll prop him up with sticks and false witnesses. If the straw leaks out of him, we’
ll insist it is the ichor of the gods. We’ll feed him with our own blood. But it’ll be dark and chilly on our world after he’s gone. He was our light and heat. It didn’t matter that we first brought those things to him and laid them at his feet. It doesn’t matter that he squandered and wasted them and was the least efficient cult figure ever. It seems yet—and we will erect it as an unquestioned fact—that all our light and heat come ultimately from this contemptible Pilgrim.”

  They all went to a small private upstairs room from which they could watch the bonfires and the murders when they began. Nobody knew who had arranged for them to come to this room, or to whom the room belonged. They should have been able to watch the fires and the deaths, except that there were no windows in the room.

  “Why? Is there someone here, at this late time, who still cannot see through walls?” Mary asked. “And if there is, why is he here?”

  “There are a few clashes now,” Doctor Raffels said while he rolled his eyes up and back as though reading an inward presentation. He was seeing things at various places in the city. “Certain militia of the Media Lords are battling with bravos of ‘the Camel’s Revenge.’ It’s all good clean battle, mostly for the forgotten joy of open fighting. It’s one of the few clean things that are left these days. There’s a clutch of dirty things gathering in the corners, though. It’s been decided, not in these clashes and scuffles, but it’s been decided that Pilgrim will go, and that he will go dirty.”

  “When became you a prophet or a seer over the distances?” Doctor John Augustine asked his colleague, Doctor Raffels. “I hadn’t noticed that power in you before.”

  “Ah, John, we are all of us dripping with new powers. It’s the season for it. Mine came quite recently, within the half hour, and with no warning at all that I would be cursed with such gifts. New talents always appear suddenly and completely. They’d be refused if they didn’t set such quick roots into one before even the first protest could be made. And a rooted talent cannot be torn out, ever.

  “Pilgrim is hiding now. He’s in the largest thorn thicket along that parkway that he maintains. He’s in good cover, and he’ll not be found unless someone tells where he is.”

  “Why should Pilgrim hide?” Spurgeon asked. “He’s always been fearless and serene, whether in his good or in his evil.”

  “Oh, he’s an absolute coward!” Mary Morey contradicted in flashing anger. “He always has been. He’s the tallest sniveler of them all. Why should anyone defend him? We all know he’s worthless and that he makes us become worthless. But James and I will go with him whenever he goes. He’ll need someone.”

  “And now the people are being carefully unconfused about things,” Doctor Raffels said. “I don’t trust the unconfusers, but they are illuminating things all over town, to everybody; and everybody had better listen, for the unconfusers are backed by force. It’s being explained to the people which is their right hand and which is their left. The right and the left sometimes change places, and we will not even notice it unless we are dull as the common herd. That’s why the right and the left must be explained in every changed time. The world flips over, and we find ourselves living on the reverse and unfinished side of it. The people are being told that Pilgrim Dusmano is deeply involved in the Evenhand affair. That’s all that’s needed to set them to howling. There are only two bloods left for the people to howl over now: the blood of Pilgrim Dusmano, and the blood of the man code-named Wut, he who’s now in an innocent rage or mania.”

  “Pilgrim will be torn in the thorn thicket,” Mary said. “We’d better go to him and give him heart for the end of it all. Even a coward can go grandly, if he is flowing-haired and of the dripping hands and elegant voice. Yes, and we’ll give the people at least two more bloods to howl for and to drink. I don’t want them to be thirsty.”

  “Pilgrim will be torn, but not in the thicket,” Raffels said. “It’s green-thorn time in the thicket. The bushes are just out of the bud.”

  “You’re crazy,” Fairfronter said. “This is autumn, and the thorns should be in full thorn.”

  “Maybe, but they’re not. And Pilgrim will not be torn by the thorns. I see what I see. He has enough control over the times and the seasons to make it green-thorn time around him.”

  This had become a cult meeting in the small and unwindowed room. There was the particled walnut bread, the cult bread that Mary Morey took with tongs and placed on the tongues of the cult members. There was the grace cup, the parting cup that was filled with quince wine. But Doctor Raffels did not wait for the ritual serving. He rudely put out his hand and seized the cult bread and ate it. He took the grace cup in his two hands and drank directly from it, disdaining to use the golden straw.

  “So you are the one,” Mary Morey said. “Who would have guessed that a great man and a doctor would be the one to break the cult?”

  “Yes, I am the one who will break it,” Raffels said, munching on the walnut bread and wiping his mouth. “Now I continue with my visions. Pilgrim Dusmano is doing some very nervous talking to himself. ‘I will salvage what I can,’ he is saying. ‘It will be a bad jump, yes, but it need not be as bad for me as it would be for another. I have my powers and my balance. I can steer unwrecked past most of the shoals. I can catch fish in foamy waters. I’ll have barratry profit even from my own shipwreck. Must I go at all? Likely I must. It is so hard to back out of a noose; it leaves the neck suspiciously marked forever. But I can jump, and jump, and jump again. I’ll jump loose, and nobody will bind me. Who says one cannot mock death and transformation? One can mock anything if he’s named Pilgrim Dusmano.’ But that is only Pilgrim trying to brave-talk himself through a chancy evening. He’s whistling down the dark caverns of his own mind, but he’s scared clear out of that mind.”

  “Heavy footsteps,” Howard Praise muttered. “They’re not from the curly boots of the bravos. They’re from the jackboots of the militia of the Media Lords.”

  “Even now at the door,” Raffels mumbled. And there was a great hammering at the door.

  “Open, open in the names of the Media Lords,” came a clear and commanding voice.

  “Name us some of their names,” Mary jeered at the rattling door. “We’re little people from the country and never heard of the Media Lords.”

  “This room and house are under the umbrella,” Noah Zontik called out. “They’re under the protection of my own organization. They’re certified and recognized and notarized as protected; they’re recognized by the Media Lords and by others.”

  “We claim ‘Freedom of Entry’ under the authority of those same Media Lords,” the clear voice called in. “In the world of Total Freedom, who can dispute our ‘Freedom of Entry’?” The militiamen shattered the door and came in.

  “Where is Pilgrim Dusmano?” the young man of the clear and commanding voice asked. “We have a warrant for his arrest.”

  “Let me see that warrant,” Noah Zontik requested. “There’s no reason for his arrest.”

  “Oh, it isn’t a written warrant,” the militiaman said. “It’s a flesh-and-blood warrant. We have that warrant; we live that warrant, in every limb and line of us. Our own strength and the outreaching power of our Lords are our warrant to arrest any man. ‘Freedom to Arrest’ is one of the fundamental freedoms. Where is he? Shall we have twelve tongues out and floating in this bowl here, or will you tell us?”

  “Nobody here will tell you,” young Howard Praise said absolutely.

  “Nobody, nobody, nobody,” others of them said.

  “Yes, there is one here who will tell,” Mary Morey said. “It isn’t I. It’s another one.”

  “Dusmano is out by that parkway that is north of his commodity receiving area on the edge of town,” Doctor Raffels said. “He is hiding in the largest thorn thicket there. Come. I’ll show you.”

  The militiamen went out, and Doctor Raffels went with them. Raffels whistled a couple of bars of “Heads Will Roll” as he went. He didn’t yet understand what sort of execution it would b
e.

  Out on the edge of town, on that parkway of his, Pilgrim Dusmano came out of a thorn thicket like a startled stoat at the approach of the militiamen. He was white-eyed and twitching with fear. The people gathered around him and howled for his blood. They began to buffet him. But a man who struck him found his hand withered, and the crowd fell back.

  “Leave off the cheap tricks, Dusmano,” a militiaman ordered sternly.

  “Yes,” Pilgrim said, “yes.” He was whipped down to nothing.

  And suddenly he surged up to everything again. He became the Pilgrim of old, the cult figure without equal. There was the curling and pleasant mockery on his mouth. There was the unbroken-horse look in his face, the look of the rebel forever. There was the incredible vulgarity in the set of his fat jaw. Pilgrim was again that handsome man with the contoured and flowing fair hair. He was the man with the powerful and carrying voice, the voice that was at the same time intricate and modulated, almost feminine. He was the man with the shimmer, with the dazzle about him. He was the hypnotic man, the electric man, the magnetic man, the transcendent man. He was the man with the flowing hands that dripped beneficence. He was the mythic man with the dripping hands.

  But what does the term “dripping hands” mean, outside of its mysterious cult usage? His hands dripped light, they dripped dazzle, they dripped grace and gift. They dripped seed and solace. And the spreading-out of the hands was a grand gesture, whatever else it was.

  Pilgrim Dusmano was not arrested by the militia of the Media Lords, not yet. It was rather that he arrested both the militia and the crowds. Pilgrim went, and everybody followed him. There was a persimmon tree beside the road. Pilgrim cursed it. “Its fruit is not of my cult,” he said, and he went on.

  Only Raffels and Zontik and Spurgeon and Mary and James Morey had followed the militiamen out from the cult meeting.

  “Presumably we will look back and the tree will be withered,” Noah Zontik said. “But I’ll not look back.”