More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  Duffey became adept at moulding figures out of clay and baking and painting them. He also made figures out of bread dough, wheat flour and corn meal mixed and with pigments added when he mixed them; then he baked them hard and varnished them. He probably made ten thousand of these figurines to fill in his thematic displays and collections and provinces and mansions. And some of them he just made for personal need.

  3

  ‘Three things are necessary for the preservation of the world: the Law, Worship of God, Deeds of Kindness and Charity.’

  That seemed clear enough and easy enough. Get enough people to comply with these things and the world will be preserved. And preserving the world is really the same thing as rebuilding the world. It is the everlasting raising up of pieces of it as often as they fall down.

  Duffey himself had a great respect for The Law, and a working respect for laws-lower-case. He ostentatiously worshipped God. But does not ostentation take much of the grace out of worship? Sure it does. It takes some of it out, but not all of it. And some people are made with the ostentatious character in them. Duffey could be kind. He could be charitable. It was just that he had trouble being both of them at the same time. And do not try to tell him that the meaning of the two words are the same. The chances are that Duffey knows more about the meaning of words than you do.

  It is the first two things that are really the same under different names: The Law, and the Worship of God. The comprehensive name for the congruence of these two things is ‘The Faith’.

  Faith and works it must be then. And faith and works had come under deadly and devious siege. Duffey valiantly defended a sector against this siege. No, that wasn't safer than other sectors, and it wasn't bloodless. There were skulls to be split here, and enemies to be eviscerated. There were sub-segments to be defended, and some of them had become slippery with blood.

  Art as Law. Art as Worship. Art as Kindness. Art as Charity. Art as Creation. A synthesis of all these things must be built. The synthesis was already present in the articulate body to which we belong. But could it not also be made on a clay-human and daily basis? Possibly. It already had been, almost certainly.

  Duffey was haunted by the feeling that he had already built this synthesis somewhere. If he had built it, why couldn't he remember it?

  Vincent and Teresa came down to New Orleans from St. Louis for a visit about that time. Then Duffey remembered. This Teresa was the synthesis of all these arts, and Duffey had already built her.

  She came with Vincent and a couple of their children. The wanderer Finnegan was also in town, and Teresa sent Vincent and Finnegan off to carouse together. She sent the children out to play.

  “And stay out,” she told the children, “for a week at least. I don't know where the custom ever developed of letting children and dogs come into the house. Oh, at home I let them come in two or three days a year, in very cold weather. But here there's no need for that.”

  Showboat Teresa put out an issue of The Bark by herself, writing every word and line of it, and setting it up too. “Yes, it's botchy looking,” she acknowledged, “but it's got soul. None of that correct and professional appearance of a Dotty edition. I meant it to look correct and professional though, but the main thing is excellence of content. Dotty, did you fully appreciated my article on — ”

  “We fully appreciate you, Teresa,” Dotty said. “The issue is truly a Special, and the essence of a Special is that it should happen only once.” Teresa also put out an edition of ‘Show-Bill’ by herself. This was a little show business sheet that they had been doing on the Pelican Press every Friday morning. They had always used to send it to Teresa in St. Louis. In fact, the Star and Garter in St. Louis always carried an ad in ‘Show-Bill’ until the S and G was forced out of business. The issue that Show-Boat put out now had a large advertisement for the Decatur Street Opera House.

  “There isn't any Decatur Street Opera House, you dumb Guinea,” Dotty told her. “What's the matter with you anyhow? How do we get money for ads from imaginary places?”

  “There is a Decatur Street Opera House, now,” Showboat said. “This is just the first appearance of it. Oh Duffey, there's no reason for you to shake like that just because one of your premonitions comes home to roost. Yeah, here's a hundred dollars for the ad, Dotty. They'll pay you a hundred dollars a week to run the same ad.” Showboat gave the hundred dollars to Dotty.

  “They are very futuristic people who are behind the opera house,” the Showboat said. “It's one of the places that had to happen. There wasn't any good place in town to present eschatological dramas.”

  Teresa Showboat Piccone Stranahan put a hundred pounds of Italian vegetables into the Giant Pot that was simmering forever. Sure Italian vegetables are different from other vegetables. They aren't grown, not anywhere. They are imported by Importers into all the major ports of the world, but no one knows where they originate. Even in Italy they are imported from elsewhere. They are received on open-ended manifests.

  “It is a test, it is a test,” Showboat said.

  “Yes, people will have to be really hungry to eat out of the Pot for a few days,” Mary Virginia told her.

  Teresa cooked all-Italian meals for everybody, three times a day for three days. Ah, they weren't like those you get in O'Conner's Italian Restaurant or even in Peterson's Italian Restaurant. One had to love Teresa to eat them. They were works of art, yes, and they were fine to look at. There should have been a way to make them edible, Margaret Stone said.

  Showboat went out street-preaching with Margaret Stone one midnight. “That's the time to get the really unsavory ones, between midnight and six in the morning,” Margaret said. Showboat had been addressing herself to every sort of audience since she was three years old, and she wasn't bashful about things like this. She knew all there was to know about showmanship and presentation. She had been making lots of political talks as well as rebuild-the-world talks in St. Louis. She had a voice that would carry to every corner of a theatre and to every recess of a city block. Her spiels, like everything else about her, were works of art.

  What went wrong then? Over-confidence probably. Her talks didn't go over, not in the night-time Quarter. Never in her life had she come up against so complete a bad-show as this.

  “Aw stuff it, Dago!” the rough guys would holler at her. They booed her and made dirty noises. Showboat could always handle hecklers, but this was massive and contrived heckling. But Margaret Stone always began to talk after Showboat had been shouted down, and she hooked every one of those ruffians. She broke them down. She shook them up. She poured out love and tongue-lashing. She enchanted the damned fools off their feet. She made them sob, some of them, and repent of their sins.

  They tried it on another corner. Once more, Showboat busted all over the place. And then Margaret would sweep whole blocks of people clear out of themselves. Margaret Stone didn't know anything about showmanship or presentation. She hadn't the voice to fill a theatre or a block. Sometimes her voice failed her so completely that she cried in frustration, and the fellows would refer to her as Whispering Maggy. The people often had to crowd in very close to catch all that she was saying. But when they came in close, they were changed forever.

  But Showboat saw something out of the corner of her eye, and then something else, and then a third something. She knew about the ‘three-spot device’ for instigating or corrupting a crowd, the device that the red-brains use so successfully. It's a minimum of three points for manipulating a mob. Three hyenas were working three corners of every gathering crowd, three hyenas with disguised faces and disguised voices. And they had been getting in part of their dirty work even before Showboat and Margaret arrived. One or more of them knew Margaret Stone's routes.

  One of the hyenas was Finnegan, Damn him! Another of them was Showboat's own husband, Vincent Stranahan. Damn him twice! And the third one of them was Absalom Stein. Treasons such as this pass for humor with some people. Oh what a vile trio of entrail-eating, presenta
tion-shredding hyenas they were!

  Ah well, Showboat fingered them to the crowd then. (This wouldn't have happened to begin with except that Showboat was so short-sighted that she couldn't distinguish people at twenty feet.) The crowd had already been conned and subverted by the hyenas, but it could be turned around. And Teresa turned those hooters around. People quickly pinioned those false three and ripped off their false noses and Mardi Gras masks and held them there secure. Teresa railed at those three sick perverts and had the street folks ready to perform an Old Testament stoning execution of them within five minutes. And Margaret Stone got some of her old faithful friends to force those three jokers to their knees and to pour dust and ashes over their heads. “That the Grace may enter into their unwilling souls and they may be saved by the miracle of interposition!” Margaret croaked out in her cracked-laughter voice. People didn't bad-show Showboat very long after she caught onto a thing, and they didn't bad-show Margaret at all.

  This rebuilding of the world on street corners can be a lot of fun.

  Teresa said one day that she wanted everybody assembled. The Showboat was going to explain the fundamentals to all the special people and lay bare the roots of creation and substance. They had wakened imperfectly from a long sleep, she said, and it was time that they remembered their own earlier episodes. She phoned Father Henri Salvatore at his parish in Boondocks Louisiana and told him that she wanted him to come to town.

  “Be quiet, woman,” Henry told her. “Go home and be subject to your husband. Oh, I forgot, your husband is my old buddy Vincent, isn't he? Well then, take him home and make him be subject to you. No, Showboat, I really can't come. And I do know how it is. Was I Euphemus for nothing? But explain it to those with heads and memories less open than mine.”

  Teresa got her husband Vincent, and Finnegan, Duffey, Stein, Dotty, Mary Virginia, X (who had just got to town on his third or fourth visitation), Letitia, Margaret Stone, Salvation Sally, Gabrielovitch, Zabotski, maybe several other folks, all together.

  “Quite a few of us are special people, very old people,” this Showboat Teresa said. “We extend very far into the past and also into the future. Give me your ashes there, Duffey. We are too much in the daily world, and we tend to forget just what substance we are made of.”

  “Not for tricks, Showboat,” Duffey said. “My ashes are holy.”

  “So am I,” Teresa said. She took the ashes in their urn, that artful cigar canister that had once belonged to the King of Spain, and opened it. She washed her hands in the ashes, and they were so fine as to be almost liquid. Then she was washing her hands in flame.

  “It isn't everybody's ashes that will flame like this,” she said.

  “Melchisedech has a lot to him.” She washed her face and hair with flame also. There was only the slightest smell of burning hair and of burning flesh. Teresa seemed to be in passion or pain, but not from the ashes-turned-to-fire. She gathered up the flame again.

  “There is another one in your hair,” Margaret said. “No, on the other side.”

  Teresa gathered that flame in also. She put all the flames back into the urn, and they crawled back under their ashes.

  “We are all flame-persons,” Teresa said. “Well, most of us are. Even under the appearance of death and reduction we can still flame. We had been active a long time ago, and then we had rested and slept. Then one of us came and woke the rest of us up again. He woke us up in blundering fashion, for he was still half asleep himself. And he still is.

  “Melchisedech, you haven't even understood your own role. You didn't make us. That's only a way of speaking. You can't make people, but maybe you can assemble them. You aren't a creator, Melchisedech the Magus! You are an awakener. No, really, that's all you had to do, just wake us up. And now you've done that. Don't try to do too much else. You're not capable of a very great lot.

  “Yes, you woke us up. And you made us to go into other bodies and bellies to be born again. That was no great thing. But why were we waked? It was because we were among the few folks who were around before the Devil was imprisoned. Now he is loosed. So we are loosed also and set to action to be able to combat him. We knew his on-the-loose tactics from of old. Gah, won't they ever change!

  “Casey in Chicago, Mary Catherine in Chicago also, Hans and Marie in St. Louis, Henry in Boondocks Louisiana, listen, I want to talk to you! Of course you can hear me! We were not the first crew nor the first pilots, nor did we go on the first voyage. But we did sail on that first ship The Argo which is the actual as well as the phonetic equivalent of the Ark. We put the first sails on it and the first rudder. It had neither before, since it was going nowhere except afloat.

  “We'elleh shemoth. And these are our names. Duffey is the real and original Melchisedech, though his Argonaut name was something other. All of our names have many depths and versions to them. Finnegan is Iason himself, but the later Romans called him Jason. Hans is Orpheus, and at a later time he was manifest as Faust. Henry is Euphemus (his ocean-father taught him to walk on water, but he seldom does it now). Vincent is Meleager. Casey is Peleus. Dotty is Medea the vile sorceress (but it is all a mistake about her having a vile name and reputation). Marie is Eurydice. But did not Eurydice die and go to the underworld? No, she pretended to misunderstand, and she pulled a trick. She went to the down-under world of Australia instead, and she is the mother of all Australians and South Island people. Mary Virginia is Laonome. I am Atalanta, and that's only a small part of who I am. Mary Catherine is Antigone. Stein is Ab-Salom, the Father of Peace. He was a ship's chandler and provisioner on the Euxine, and he decided to go along on the Argo to look after his investments. I don't know what dynasty you others belong to, but you would hardly be in this company now if you weren't special. I don't know what company Gabrielovitch and Zabotski and Salvation Sally belong to. It may be one even more ancient than ours. I do know what company Margaret Stone belongs to, but I'm not telling. And I sure don't know about X.”

  “You are talking about people in a Greek myth.” Zabotski asked. “Why?”

  “No, no, not in Greek myth. In ancient fact before that. We are older than the Greeks. Even Homer referred to us as unaccountably ancient. And our quest was the prototype of all quests. We went to Colchis on the Black Sea on the best known of our voyages. We went past the Devil's preordained prison on the Chersonese on that same voyage. We found the shining garment, the Golden Fleece, at the end of our famous voyage, and we have it yet. The Devil would give his thousand-year molars to know where we have it hidden. As long as we have it inviolate, the Devil is not completely loose.

  “We went over rock beaches and rock wastes that were sown with Dragons' Teeth; we went over them to get the Fleece. We got it without triggering the Dragons' Teeth to spring into armed-warrior life. They were the guards and the threat. We buried them very much deeper under rocks, and now the Devil wants them and he can't wake them up. He blows on that Dog's-Horn Bugle of his, but he can't wake them.”

  “He is cashing in quite a few dragons' teeth lately,” Stein said, “and they are devilishly well-armed warriors.”

  “Those are from lesser dragons' teeth,” Teresa said. “He has not been able to use those in the main caches. The obliteration of the Black Sea in the Thunder-Colt aspect of History (we're within a couple of decades of that, one way or the other), is only an attempt by the Devil to obliterate all traces of his prison on the Black Sea. There was always the chance that he might be locked up there again. But the shore is obliterated along with the sea, and part of it is dragons'-tooth shore. Are they destroyed there, or can he save them? Can he have it both ways?

  “What's the matter. Don't you people remember these things even yet?”

  “I remember only snatches of them,” Mary Virginia said, “but now you bring other parts of it back to me. I hated my name of Laonone then and I hate it now.”

  “It seems to me that there were several voyages we took,” Dotty said. “There were others besides the one to Colchus.”


  “There were nine voyages, I think,” Teresa Showboat said.

  “There were thirteen,” said Absalom Stein. “But I forget where the Argo is now.”

  “That's a thing the Devil would give his five-hundred-year molars to know,” Melchisedech said. “But I'm assured that the Argo is still seaworthy. You'll not demean me with your words, Showboat. It was the Argo herself that was called the Show Boat. Oh what a castled masterpiece she was when we got all that superstructure on her! The Show Boat was not the lady love of the third officer. But people, I did make you, though it's hardly worth arguing about. I evoked your clay, yes. That's the same thing as to make you.”

  “Was it the thirteenth voyage on which you were reduced to ashes, Duffey?” Margaret Stone asked him.

  “Nay, it was the fourteenth. Some of the others don't remember it yet. It's technically in the future, but the ashes here are proof that some parts of the future have already happened.”

  They had quite a few such talks together during the few days that Vincent and Teresa were in town. It isn't every gang that has such sort of talks. It isn't every gang that holds the shining fleece in a place that the Devil would give his thousand-year molars to know.

  It isn't every gang that was around before the Devil was imprisoned a thousand years ago, who knew him when he was loose before, and who therefore know how to combat and obstruct this loosened Devil.

  There were meteorological trash-falls over the whole world for years and years. They are still going on. The accounts of these partly immaterial trashings have not been allowed in the papers or journals, and they may not be referred to on radio or TV. So they are ignored.

  But still it falls, trash, trash, trash, into every cranny of soul and person in the world.