“Except my own daughter,” was the answer.
Ah, that was the sort of bait the elites could rise to. Oh, they had that Marshal’s daughter there soon enough. They ran the drama through again, with the Marshal’s daughter in the starring role. And she proved herself to be a fine actress with her vivid portrayal of fear and horror and defiance and other emotions. And she was dismembered quite easily, in pieces handy for the wild dogs, for she was young and tender.
But she departed from the script just when the riddling was lending itself to the climax. Her other Jezebel hand, which was the true Jezebel head, gave a riddle of its own in place of the riddle that was in the scenario. It used other meter and other pace and gave a whining rending:
“Who thus forgets, in hell or hot:
No drop of blood will be forgot?”
And the fourth Jehu Companion forgot his lines and said nothing.
A new Marshal of Animations was appointed, and the old Marshal was beheaded and disarmed—one arm here, one arm there, pieces all over for the wild dogs to gnaw. And then the head of the old Marshal rhymed a rhyme that was an unheard thing. There was not even a part written for him in the drama.
“Who has nine lives that extra be,
And suffers aye for suffering we?”
It’s a good thing they got rid of that old Marshal.
Pelion Tuscamondo was in a bright and breezy seashore booth with Janie, who was his frequent couch companion. Pelion was a handsome man with contoured and flowing fair hair. He had a powerful and carrying voice, but at the same time it was intricate and modulated, almost feminine. He had a shimmer, a dazzle about him. He had been called the hypnotic man, the electric man, the magnetic man, the transcendent man. He was the man with the flowing hands that dripped beneficence. There was the curling and pleasant mockery on his mouth, the incredible vulgarity in the set of his fat jaw, the wild-horse look in his face. And Janie, oh, she was the stereotyped perfection of all the bright women who share in the Legacy.
Pelion and Janie watched eight fine dramas, all based on great illustrations by the workman Dore: The Strange Nations Slain by the Lions of Samaria; Babylon Fallen; The Giant Antaeus; The Perilous Pass (elements from the Pass have gone into the Narrow Corner, you know); The Mourners of Durandarte; Don Quixote in His Library (this is a misnamed illustration and drama; it is really God in the throes of Creation, before he learned to delegate the details); The Panther in the Desert; The Resurrection of Lazarus. Both Pelion and Janie had jeweled eyes by which they might easily watch eight dramas, and jeweled minds by which they might understand them.
They watched the eight dramas at the same time, then?
No, no, you misunderstand. There is no such thing as “at the same time” on Cannes World, or on any of the Nine Worlds of the rivière or litany, the worlds that comprise the Legacy. The Legacy was not made out of nine segments of time. It had no point of contact with time, so it could never become an elapsed thing. The Legacy consisted of Nine Moments, which is to say nine momentums or powers.
The Resurrection of Lazarus was the best of the dramas: it was always a joy to watch. The Christus would raise him quickly and then be called away on other matters. Lazarus would rise from the dead putrid and thirsty; and putrid he would remain with rotted and half-rotted streaks of flesh, and the more completely rotted pieces sometimes falling clear off of him. And thirsty he would remain, and this was the delight of the whole animation. The elite audience would order cold drink after cold drink to allay in themselves the thirst of Lazarus. The Resurrection was always an audience-participation drama.
But Pelion Tuscamondo could hold more than eight attentions in his multiplex mind. This Resurrection of Lazarus didn’t seem sufficiently researched to his taste. He felt that it needed mountains for its backdrop, and he ordered mountains. He had “Faith Sufficient,” and he had station and connections. How could they refuse him mountains?
Albert Fineface, as spokesman for the elites that day, effected the order. And there were mountains, Gothic mountains, Dore mountains, steep menacing mountains, but their spires were twinkling blue instead of midnight black. Lazarus was resurrected in Bethany, perhaps, or in some other small town very near to Jerusalem. And the Anti-Lebanon mountains, or the Hermon or Hauran or some such mountain mass, loomed into the foreground with the breath-catching thrill of very great depth both above and below. And there was very great depth in the resurrected man, depths of thirst and agony.
A cup of water was set before Lazarus. Then, by the power of the group mind of the partakers of the drama, the cup was set out of reach of the suffering man. Once more, small and putrid pieces fell off that good man (where would be the drama in torturing an ungood man?) who did not seem aware of his good fortune in being alive again. With a frantic, animal cry, Lazarus reached mightily for the cup, and the audience-participation group mind moved the cup away from him again.
“It’s authentic,” Albert Fineface said. “One always experiences intolerable thirst on being raised from the dead. But now, friend Pelion, turn one facet of your jeweled mind to me. You, who have everything, have been wishing for one additional thing; you have not yet formulated this wish well, but you’ve been wishing it for a long interval. You wish to give testimony of your personal flame and image. As a cult figure, you wish the largest possible publication for your testimony.”
“Yes,” Pelion declared. “I would like to publish myself in every extent of every ocean that underlies every world. There is a deal to be made somewhere. I’ve followed some unusual commerces, but I don’t know where to make this transaction.”
“I can help you,” Fineface said. “We’ve both followed unusual commerces, and we’ll let our trading realms intersect here.”
The avid crowd with its avid mind power moved the cup just out of the reach of Lazarus again.
This man, Albert Fineface, was a factor in some very dubious transactions, but he did not fail in any of his promises. Should a genie, for his own cloudy reasons, wish to be back in his imprisoning bottle, Albert could arrange it, for a fee. He could fill stranger requests.
“This ocean that underlies every earth,” Fineface was saying, “that underlies every creature and manifestation, that infuses every mind and memory, even the memory of that concocted mountain there, the pervading water that is the uterine as well as the ultimate ocean, this ocean may be suffused as well as suffusing. We will suffuse it with your flame and image. You will publish your testament in every gout of its water. And then you will be permanently in the cellar of every mind that is, and has been, and will be. When a cobwebby bottle is brought up from the cellar of the mind of glow-worm or giant, drops of your own flame will sparkle out of that bottle. It will cost you, though. You will buy the pervading water as Lazarus does, but you will buy oceans as he buys drops.”
By a dramatic device not immediately explained, Lazarus had mortgaged the livings of his descendants for seven generations, and he had turned it all into mortgage-gold. He was allowed to drop gold coins into the cup of water and to lap up what drops of water overflowed the brim of that cup. But the cup itself seemed insatiable, and it drank up many coins for every drop of water that it brimmed over.
“The recording ocean is known on some of the worlds as the ‘Group Unconscious’ and on others as the ‘Folk Ocean,’ ” Fineface was saying, “and any trace of substance in any part of it is immediately in all parts of it. This ocean, as you may not know, Pelion, is made up of the personal testaments of a group of devils. The testaments of these devils may be known and distinguished by their literary or eidetic styles in this repository, which is the most plastic of all the mass (non-lineal, of oblated bulk of mass) media. And each of these testaments receives very wide publication (infinitely wide, in billions upon billions of minds and nexuses); but most of them are without excellence. There are not many (a few more than one hundred) of these testifying devils who have achieved group-unconscious publication. When they were first raveled out and identified by th
eir styles, they were given letters, as ‘a,’ ‘b,’ ‘c’ scrivener or eidetic devil, to distinguish among them. Soon it was seen that the conventional alphabet would not have enough signs. The Tarshish Syllabary was therefore used.
“Symbols of the elements are also used in the latest literary criticism of these authors and creators. It is believed that there will be the same number of these devils publishing their testaments as there are elements in the universes. It is worth noting that the discovery of the nine most recent elements has coincided with the discovery of the nine most recent of the scrivener or media devils. Should you reach this inner circle, Pelion, your equivalent would have to be an unstable element; that’s the only kind left.”
“I wouldn’t want it any other way, Fineface.”
“So it’s been asked for some time, ‘Cannot others play this game?’ And we say, ‘No way’; we say that if the asker is short of heel. But must it be so restricted? May one not, by fabulous expenditure, buy a membership? May one not buy a pew-stall in this most unchurchly of churches? Yes, I think it may be done. I think it has been done. I believe you or I might be able to do it, Pelion. We are very rich, and we are very flexible in our talents.”
“Is it really worth it, Fineface?” Pelion asked. “I don’t fund every extravagant idea that comes into my head.”
“It will be worth it to you. You will be able to lodge your flame and your image in every mind and every flesh, from the most attenuated flesh to the most gross, from the fire-flame spirit-flesh of the ethereals to the gamy and humpbacked flesh of the camel (your totem animal, is it not, Pelion?). For all of these drink out of that rank-water ocean called the group unconscious, or called other things.”
“Other new ones have joined in this?” Pelion asked. “It has been done?”
“Yes, it has been done by several of the Media or Eidetic Lords of various worlds. It has been done by several of the cult figures on and between the worlds.”
“With whom might I deal?” Pelion asked. “This is a thing I would like to master.”
“Pelion, I can tell you who can tell you who can tell you who. You must pay heavy toll at each station, of course.”
“Ah, who can tell me who can tell?” Pelion asked.
“Oh, I can.” Albert Fineface made ready for the commerce.
So Pelion paid him very heavy toll and was on the way to contrive entrée in and influence on the inmost under-minds of all creatures and uncreatures, living and dead. When one is “in” there, one is in forever.
The cup from which Lazarus sought to drink developed a deep crack from the weight of all the heavy gold coins placed in it, and all the water ran out of it. It was a badly built cup. And Lazarus moaned with his mouth in the sand.
(A nonessential change in worlds and lives and persons happens here.)
11
Nine worlds unto satiety
Of joy unending till you hate it,
Nor any way to cool it be,
Nor any way to terminate it.
Endymeon Ellenbogen, Arena del Mar
“There’s an umbrella salesman waiting to see you, Pelion,” Janie said.
“I’ll catch him on the next world,” Pelion-Palgrave said. “I’ve got to go now.”
“All right. I’ll tell him,” Janie-Jeanie said.
He did not go, of course. There is no going from any of those places ever. A particular scanner may leave him there and focus on someone else in some elsewhere; but there was no way that Pelion Tuscamondo could ever leave.
The Nine Lives to La Spezia are not over with. They are still going on; they go on forever. Remember when you are in hell that there are still nine other versions of you enjoying the nine lives of almost intolerable pleasure and enjoying it forever. It is always a cooling thought, and they can’t take it away from you.
But what have certain sets of persons in common? What have Pilger Tisman, Pilgrim Dusmano, Pelion Tuscamondo, Palgrave Tacoman, Paladin Tajiman, Polycletus Tasman, Palmas Thasomen, Paulus Theissmand, Pilatus Dosmens, Philemon Dorsetmoon, Philip Dusselmon, Polder Dossman, and so many others to do with each other? What, for that matter, have Janie, Jeanie, Joanie, Junie, Ginny, Jenny, Johnnie, and so many other couch companions to do with one another? Are all of each set the same person?
Let us be careful here; all of us have to live on all these worlds sometime (we are all elites when the elite number of the nine-sided die-cube comes up for us). We cannot discuss here just what a person does consist of; the pillars would split and the roof would fall down on our heads if we did.
All these of the same set are of the same complex; certainly they are all persons of the same complex. There are some very different persons within some of the same complexes (as you understand persons, as you understand complexes). There may, for example, be one saint among many sinners in a complex. This has advantages. You just think you can’t get a drink of water down there in the fires of Jehol. You can if you have one accepted saint in the complex of your personality. You can slake your perishing thirst now and then.
(The death thirst, the hell thirst, the Lazarus thirst continued. Only the play and the people in and out of it, and the world, were changed. We’ll come back to that thirst.)
But nobody ever uses up the Nine Lives to La Spezia. They are there forever: Cannes, Oraioi Polloi, Hy-Brasail, Smart Set, Savona, Delectable, Theleme, Luogo Perfetto, La Spezia. Now the focus is on Oraioi Polloi, and Palgrave Tacoman is at leisure in a loge with a couch companion named Jeanie and with Albrecht Fairbrow. There was an umbrella salesman waiting, but menials must always be kept waiting a bit.
This was Hieronymus Bosch Day. Did Bosch ever paint a Resurrection of Lazarus? It’s not known; but he did paint Thirst, again and again. And perishing thirst was on the boards at the Atrium Theater in Oraioi Polloi. The arrangement of all these living theaters of the Nine Worlds to La Spezia was a geometric one in which every point was but slightly removed from the center.
This is sometimes the arrangement to be found in Adobe Pueblos, where the arena and the village and the world are identical. It is to be found in Ghetto Complexes and in Hogan’s Alley arrangements. It is found in Courtyards, on Blocks Facing Inwards, in West Side Story sets. Tomorrow, as a matter of fact, will be West Side Story Day at the Atrium Theater in Oraioi Polloi. This communicating set is destroyed by wide and heavily trafficked roads running through it, but it is not destroyed by alleys or footpaths. It is the archetypical arrangement for dream presentations: all the world watching and aware; and it was the arrangement here.
“Don’t buy it, Palgrave,” the umbrella salesman said suddenly and rudely. “You’ll pay too much to become an archetype.”
But he was the man named Lorica. Why had Janie said that he was an umbrella salesman? Why had Jeanie said it? And why had Palgrave himself known it of the man when it wasn’t so? For Lorica was one of the elite, and an adept and powerful man in his own right. He sold worlds and systems and whole galaxies. He didn’t sell small notions, though he did now have the air of a man trying to sell a notion. And how would there be an umbrella salesman on Nine Worlds, where the weather was completely controlled and localized and individualized?
“You are a good man, Palgrave,” Lorica said as though he had been commanded to say it but didn’t quite believe it. “I am commanded to effect it that you be a good man; and I say you are; but you aren’t. You already have your fragmented existence in thousands of minds besides your own, and you are of evil effect in those minds. Do not move in to have existence in billions of minds. There are devils enough without you. No good man (Rotten thunder take it! The instructions say that you must be a good man!) will go to live in the pit that is under the worlds, or to manipulate in the pit that is under the minds.”
“Lorica is a donkey,” Fairbrow said with that easy urbanity that is part of the equipment of all deeply evil men. “In the underlay, the pit that is under the worlds and under the minds, is to be found all power and influence. The gold-symbol demon Aureli
on is pushing your application for membership in this always exciting and ever new cartel that creates. You have the chance to become the substance that men and minds and worlds are made out of. Dare to create!”
“Fairbrow is right,” the Putty Dwarf stated. “All things in all worlds are putty in our hands when we become part of the great creative ocean. Dare to be exciting!”
“Faugh!” Lorica snorted. It sounded like an umbrella being let down.
“Lorica is common. He is in trade,” the Putty Dwarf said. “He really does sell umbrellas. Has an umbrella peddler the key to the power of the universes?”
“Pay no mind to these mangy mice, Palgrave,” the man Lorica said; but the damage was already done to Lorica. “There is opportunity, there is newness, there is excitement, there is real creativity running through all the worlds. The spirit moves. And these gnawing mice of the under-minds know nothing at all about the new things. Great happenings are few, Palgrave. Life happened to matter once; that was a great thing. Transcendence is happening to life now; that is another great thing. Be a part of it.”
But there was a cheap echo in Palgrave’s mind: “Lorica is an umbrella peddler.”
“Antilife happened to matter once,” said the Putty Dwarf. “That was our kind of thing. And now something analogous is happening to our valued antilife. This is where we live. All new things begin at the bottom. Dare to be a part of the bottom!”
“What Lorica offers you is free,” Fairbrow pointed out. “Can anything good be free? But what we are urging you to strive for—and it’s not at all certain you will be able to reach it—is very expensive. The gold-symbol demon Aurelion insists on a huge payment right now. Then he will push your application a little harder. Is not the great cost a proof of the value?”
“Aye, men pay a high price to get into hell,” Lorica jeered. “They make application and they politick to get there. It is the shriveling madness.”
Not To Mention Camels Page 14
