Not To Mention Camels

by R. A. Lafferty

  Polder Dossman, eidolon-man and cult figure, Archetype and Zodiac Lord, member of the High Seven Dicers who are the same as Fate, rose to his heights.

  There was the curling and pleasant mockery on his mouth. There was the unbroken-horse look in his eyes. There was the incredible vulgarity in the set of his fat jaw. He was the handsome man with the contoured and flowing fair hair; with the powerful and carrying voice, whether for reason or for gibberish. 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 magic hands that dripped light, that dripped grace and gift, that dripped seed and solace, that dripped healing. That dripped death. The spreading out of his hands was always a grand gesture. And his intricate and carrying voice was always power itself.

  “I accept your challenge!” Polder cried, not in golden gibberish, but in a voice of message. “Name it. Tell it. Set it out. There is nothing you can imagine that I cannot do. If I fail in any test, then I step down and put off my attributes. Then you can break me to pieces and grind me like grain. Speak up! I challenge your challenge.”

  “You are a faker. Gibberish is easily faked,” a lead heckler was bawling. “You pretended athletes of the special gifts and graces, the proof that you give of your specialness is no proof at all. You flaunt the gift of tongues, that last refuge of a scoundrel. You say that yours are tongues of fire, but it is fake fire. There is one proof you cannot fake.”

  “Tell me the unfakable proof and I will prove myself by it,” Polder said with that voice that made everything seem momentous. “Anything you can imagine, I can do.”

  “Snake handling can be faked,” another heckler took it up. “Speaking in tongues is the fakery beyond any other. Poison drinking can be faked. Even loving one’s neighbor can be faked. But there is one proof that will convince.”

  “Name it,” said Polder with golden patience. He cracked lightning around them like bullwhips, but it was only fun-lightning.

  “Mountain-moving!” a thousand hecklers barked together.

  There was a long pause as the shaft went home to Polder.

  “There’s no way to fake that, is there?” Polder whispered to his nearest followers.

  “No, there sure isn’t,” Og Scath admitted, “and my advice was wrong. I try to hold the umbrella over you and your doings, but I find that my protecting umbrella has a hole in it big enough for a mountain to pass through.”

  “It’s better this way,” Polder said with a sort of nervous glow. “I’d never have tried it except for the hecklers. I’d always have been in doubt about one of my own powers, except for this testing.”

  “There isn’t any way, Polder.” Hector Bogus spoke as he came to Polder’s side. “I’d know it if there were. I’ve been forced to take you as a client, and I’ve done all I could. But there just isn’t any way to move a mountain.”

  “Yes. There is one way,” Polder said softly.

  “Leave off conferring with your prop men and your dogs and your ariels and your umbrella peddlers, Polder Dossman,” the head heckler was bawling out. “You have your challenge. If your cult is the true one, if all authority in the worlds should abdicate to you, then answer the challenge and give proof. Move a mountain and we will believe that you have faith and power sufficient. There, above our town, looms the mountain named Shining Mountain. Move it! Why are you silent? Why do you not speak? Or act?”

  “Be quiet.” Polder spoke softly but carryingly in his powerful and intricate voice. His right hand was raised in a gesture of power. In his left hand he held an attribute, a camel goad. “Watch the mountain,” he said.

  The mountain moved.

  Any description of mountain-moving is understatement. It can’t be helped. It wasn’t illusion. Nor was it some tricky weightlessness. The mountain rose and moved in its full weight and mass. There was earthquake, there was airquake, there was skyquake. There was a blast of heat; there was a fearful scurry of clouds and the rising of high towers of dust and hot vapor. There was a dazzling gushing of decapitated fountains. There was unnatural lightning discharge between the dangling roots of the mountain and the raucous pit they had left.

  There was a roaring of boulders and the riving wail of split slate strata. The long igneous roots of the mountain broke, turning from thin threads to thousand-ton fragments. Hot fires quickly scorched the mountain itself, and its pine trees flamed and crowned. Deer and goats leaped from the mountain and posed in graceful swift fall against the writhing clouds, picked out by the lightning that now suffused the whole night sky.

  The mountain moved swiftly. It stood over the area of the gathering. Looking up at it, one might see flames and explosions working through the whole shaggy underside of the mass. Seven large clusters of boulders fell and killed the seven main groups of hecklers. Then the mountain moved off south and east. Its swift progress could be followed for more than an hour by its roaring and by the unnatural lightning that hovered above it.

  The mountain-moving incident had marked Polder Dossman’s highest height. From there on he went down rapidly. And at once.

  The Hand from Heaven that had pointed out Polder for these last several weeks had been destroyed by the mountain-moving. Outrageous rains began to fall on the gathering area about an hour after the mountain-moving. The people had stood silent and stunned for that hour. Then the sudden drenching and dangerous flooding broke up the gathering, the last gathering that the Polder Dossman cult would ever hold. Why would it be the last?

  Had not Polder given proof of his power? He had. But now there came a reaction to that proof. Mountain-moving will always set up an equal force in the opposite direction, and the effect of that equal force was to dissolve the Dossman cult.

  Polder himself withered like a ringed tree. The bottom fell out of his spirits and powers and imaginations. He believed that he was on Prime World, and that Prime World was the one place from which one might fall into hell everlasting. He would ride his favorite camel out in Longram’s Acres for hours. This had been utterly barren land; it had been ceded to a good man named Longram, and it had flourished for him. When it had flourished a bit more, it would be taken away from him, and other utterly barren land would be ceded to him. This is one use to which the influence of good men may be put.

  Polder felt that he was at an end, and he had always tried to build many-dimensional lives that could not end abruptly, that could not end at all. The camel, being of primordial and humpbacked flesh, seemed to be Polder’s last creature contact. But now even the camel would loft its head, peel back its upper lip, and blink in bloodshot contempt.

  And Polder’s followers followed him no longer. “I’ve been given the task of shielding you from adversity,” Og Scath said bitterly. “I must hold an umbrella over you, come hell or high water. (My orders were given me in the vernacular, I know not by whom.) I held an umbrella over a boatful bunch in one high water, and I wouldn’t want that again. And I’d not like to follow you to hell, but I suppose I must. I’ve left orders to be called when your death-hour comes, and I’ll do what I can for you then and thereafter. But I don’t want to see your living face again.”

  “Do you believe that I might be damned to hell eternal, Og?” Polder asked fearfully. “Do you think it’s possible that this is Prime World?”

  “Be a little more of a man, Polder,” Og said, and his upper lip curled in contempt very nearly like the camel’s. “You know that the odds are billions to one against this being Prime World. I mean it though; I don’t want to see you alive again.”

  The mountain-moving effort had finished Polder. And now he came up against the cruelty that is sometimes found in humans, and much more often found in the hybrids of humans and eidolon-men. Most of these fringe folk were of mixed credentials.

  “There’s nothing more I can do for you, Dossman,” Hector Bogus was saying after he had dodged Polder Dossman to no avail. “It was you who broke the Hand of Heaven. It was you who broke
all the devices with your mountain-moving caper. I believe I’m relieved of any further responsibility to you. I’ll be there to watch at your last destruction, but I don’t want to see you again till then.”

  “Bogus, isn’t there some way I could get back to Nine Worlds?” Polder asked with vain hope. “The pleasure goes on there forever, but I am here.”

  “Polder, have you lost your last wit?” Bogus exploded. “I could ask how you even know there are the Nine Worlds, but I will not hide in a fiction so blatant. Polder, you are in Nine Worlds. You are there now and forever. You are present nine times in Nine Worlds.”

  “But I don’t know it, I don’t experience it, I don’t enjoy it. If I don’t feel it in this person, then those dimensions of me on Nine Worlds might as well be dimensions of someone else. I want to be conscious of myself being in Nine Worlds.”

  “It can’t be done, Polder.” Bogus spoke as if to a malodorous child. “It was your nine persons already enjoying the pleasures there who decided that the pleasures would be spread too thin if less immediate persons of yourself were allowed to share them. Blame nobody for your own greed. Be satisfied with the arrangement. Nine-tenths of you are in the pleasure worlds right now, and the worst that can happen to you is that the other and present tenth of you will fall to hell eternal. You’ll still be in good shape on the percentages.”

  “Bogus, is it possible I will go to hell?” Polder begged for a negative. “Is it possible that this world we are in is Prime World which is one of the gates of hell?”

  “I hope it is, Polder. I wish you in hell today.”

  “You are a coward to be afraid when the odds are so steep in your favor,” Moira Mara told Polder when he had tricked her into giving him a minute of her time. “Flip a coin. Flip it twelve billion times. Win every time. If it comes up ‘Cities,’ then that means this is not Prime World. And if it comes up ‘Camels,’ that also means this is not Prime World. Or throw dice. Whichever combination of the six sides comes up, they mean that this is not Prime World.”

  “What if the coin stands on edge?” Polder asked fearfully. “What if a die comes to rest with its seventh side up?”

  “Those things also mean that this is not Prime World,” Moira said. “How can you lose? Try it. It may ease your mind.”

  Polder flipped a coin into the air, and his fate rode on that flip of the coin. The coin didn’t come down ‘Cities.’ It didn’t come down ‘Camels,’ either. And it didn’t come down to stand on its edge. It didn’t come down at all. It simply disappeared into the air and was not seen again.

  “Hector Bogus, or whatever eidolon-master or Media-master did that, it was cruelly done,” Moira railed out of almost her last sympathy for Polder. “He was scared before, and that prank has scared him to death.”

  Polder Dossman began to cry with his pasty, fat face, the only one of his faces that he had left. Whether some manipulation-master had played a trick with the coin or whether the coin had then come naturally to the end of its existence is not known.

  But for Polder, he was on a flopover Jacob’s ladder forever, and it took him jerkily down and down. He fell and floundered to the bottom of everything with one clumsiness after another.

  Several days later, Polder was declared to be a public nuisance.

  Then a writ was obtained for his termination and dismemberment.

  And a good man was to be killed by Media machinations at the same time. Otherwise, where would the fun be?

  15

  Be he an avid Jump or Jimp,

  Be he a crippled or outcast one,

  He comes onto (no mind what scrimp)

  An end of jumping. This the last one.

  “World-Jumper’s Ballad”

  Polder Dossman lay in the article of death. He was attended by the three outstanding doctors, Vonk, August, and Raphaelson; by their numerous aides; by a coroner; and by a brigadier of police. Their care was not to save Polder’s life (there was no chance for that, and no reason for it), but to weigh his death. For this weighing, the men used various equipment.

  “Poor old Polder,” Og Scath said. Og was filling the office of coroner. “He is not even a main attraction at his own show.” For Polder had a “light companion” in death, the good man Longram who had been butchered by the mobs to give some substance of a spectacle.

  “His proxy may even have to fulfill some of the basic requirements,” said Hector Bogus. Bogus was filling the office of brigadier of police.

  “That he shall die with discomfort is part of the requirement,” Doctor Vonk said, “but he is beyond any feelings of comfort or discomfort. Longram will have to add Polder’s discomforts to his own.”

  “I have some private ideas of how Polder might be discomforted,” Bogus said. “And I’ll make them public right at the end.”

  Longram had been disarmed by the mobs. (That was mob talk for pulling a man’s arms out by the roots.) He had been mutilated in a dozen painful ways; and he was still dying in the brightness of his own disposition. But he was given torture gas to breathe, a death potion for himself, a death potion for Polder Dossman. The torture gas will turn the face of the victim into a mask of most hideous agony. Whether that good man Longram remained of bright disposition within is one question; but he was darkly disposed on the outside. Longram’s bloody and torturous death had fulfilled the dramatic requirements that Polder was now too empty a person to fulfill. But it was the analysis of Polder that was official and important, so the three doctors bent their efforts toward it.

  Doctor Vonk was a man with a huge head, with heavy orbital ridges, with a protruding muzzle on him that made a true chin unnecessary and impossible, with a large back-brain, and with a great good humor. He was a tremendous man with a steep amount of animal in him. And he was an expert at analysis.

  Doctor Judah Raphaelson was not so bulky a man, but he was— Wait a minute; he’s speaking now.

  “Well, was this thing at all alive? Was he of flesh before someone went to work on him? And of which flesh?” Judah asked.

  “Oh, he was alive,” Doctor Vonk murmured. “He still is. And he was human, or he had been human somewhere along the way. Human remnants are easily discoverable.”

  “Well, when was he made, then?” Judah asked.

  “Oh, not all at once. It was at various points along the way. I believe that several eidolon-masters added to him when it was seen that he was an incurable rogue anyhow. He was an experimental model made by several experimenters.”

  “You are sure that those are flesh fragments among the eidolon fiber?” Doctor Hans August asked. Hans was a thin and active man. He lifted his head, and his face— Wait a minute; Doctor Vonk has something to add.

  “Oh, there’re plenty of flesh fragments,” Vonk said. “Some of them are human and some of them are regressed flesh. The eidolon and human and regressed are pretty well mixed together.”

  “The regressed flesh?” Og Scath asked. “Just what is that?”

  “Oh, the primordial flesh, what is sometimes called the humpbacked clay (from a passage in Rimskanski, I believe); it’s just an idea, a debasement of the old idea of a ‘vital fluid’; just a silly idea, except that I have some good samples of that silly idea on the slide now. Ah, eidolon fiber, human flesh, regressive or camel flesh all mixed together. Say, Bogus, how did this man Polder happen to bust so badly?”

  “An overload failed. It should have blown quite early in the mountain-moving caper. But the overload failed to blow, and the creature blew instead. Yeah, a thing like that was enough to blow anyone.”

  “What shall we do about the requirement that this man or movement must have one powerful friend and one powerful enemy present at the end?” Doctor Judah Raphaelson asked.

  “Perhaps I can be the one powerful friend,” Og Scath said. “I’m not very friendly to him anymore, but it is written somewhere that I would go to hell for him, or with him.”

  “Perhaps I can be the one powerful enemy,” Hector Bogus said. “Though I’m not very
unfriendly to him anymore. It is written somewhere that I will stomp on his fingers as they weaken on his last handhold. I wonder just where it is that all these fateful things are written.”

  About all that was now left intact and unanalyzed of Polder Dossman was one hand which still held a camel’s flem for attribute, and some central masses of the still pumping heart.

  “There is a hound and an ariel waiting outside,” Hans August said.

  “Yes, the brother and sister,” Bogus explained. “I suppose there is some fateful thing written about their following him forever. They wouldn’t do it without a fateful writing lodged in some murky place. But you, Og, you will not need to follow Polder to hell. You will only follow him down into a shallow and dingy ditch. And that will not be for long: only for a dingy moment.”

  “He thought this was Prime World,” Og said.

  “Then for him it was,” Bogus told them. “It’s a boondocks world; it’s a sadly fundamental world. But the odds are billions to one against its being Prime World.”

  “He thought he’d go from here to perdition or damnation. He said that oblivion was the best deal he could hope for.”

  “That’s the best deal anyone can hope for, Og.”

  “He was sure he’d fall into hell from here.”

  “Then, for him, it will be hell, since he dies with his mind set on it. But we’ll watch real close. He can’t jump again. He has to fall. We’ll see where he falls to.”

  It was about finished. The good man Longram who served as Polder’s proxy in some of this was certainly dead. Polder Dossman was dead in ninety-nine percent of him, and what still fluttered would not live long.