More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  There were ovations for a ‘The Majesty’ who had wound down his speech and was starting to depart. Several of the persons present took off all their clothes out of sheer ecstasy. It was all pretty meaningful. Giggle-nuns and androgynous priests were still clutching each other with claws and snickering “You know — giggle — who he really is, don't you?”

  “The bare account it is unfair.

  Hi! Ho!

  The bare account it is unfair. It leave out half the hide and hair,

  Hi! Ho! The Golli Wol!”

  Oh, get back to the Quarter with that stuff, Margaret. They should never have taught you the Gadarene Swine Song. Drink Coffee, Save Souls, Get out of here with your gang!

  Yes, the bare account is unfair. The canonical ratio would still hold: only one priest out of twelve would be a Judas Priest. And only one nun out of twelve would be a giggler for the Devil. But, during those ‘tedious years’ there, it sure seemed as though there were more of them. And only one out of twelve of the laymen joined the abomination of desolation, but they made much more than one twelfth of the noise.

  Why has history been made difficult? The ‘never use two words when three will do’ people have controlled it for too long. But the real history of the last few decades, as given here and in other places, is straight and simple.

  2

  This is the whole framework of recent history and the forces that matter.

  The Devil was released from his imprisonment.

  Then, by a sort of center-trap play, the Emperor Henry (Henri Salvatore) was sprung loose to score upon him. Melchisedech Duffey had first been released to be ready to oppose the Devil. Then, for his pride, Melchisedech was forced to serve as a satellite to one of his own satellites. This was Henri Salvatore (The Keeper of the Enclosure of the Savior). Henry had once been Euphemus. Later he had been The Emperor Henry of Neustria. Now he was Emperor of the Invisible Neustria, He was a balanced and powerful and intellectual man, though he had been a sinner in his youth.

  To common eyes, it seemed that Henry didn't rule to great effect. After his first enthusiasm he became a little bit dreamy about it all. But he had set several one-person and several-person fiefdoms into intense action, enough so that the destruction of the world was averted or at least postponed for decade after decade.

  (Quick out to Salvation Sally doing ‘This World Was Destroyed Before’ with that voice and that guitar that both had Australian accents.) The struggle was joined between the Devil and the fiefdoms of Invisible Neustria. The details of the struggle make up the ‘History of Modern Times’. The Devil lost credit for his tiresome and premature predictions of his total victory. The Fiefdoms had only to produce a minimum for the world, and there was some possibility that it could be done.

  “It's really no great trick to find seven just men in the world, if you count women,” Margaret Stone said. “But the number Seven is symbolical, and it may mean seventy times seven. That makes it very, very hard. I'm surprised that we get by every day.” But this minimum was maintained (whatever it was), for every day year after year, though some days it was very close and it really seemed that not enough just persons could be found in the entire world. Close, close. But they were saving the world from destruction.

  The trashing of the world on a massive scale was undertaken by the massive enemy of the world. The Law was subverted to anti-law or license. The custodians of form were perverted into accepting deformity. Morals disappeared completely: that was said again and again, and louder every time. It was one of the lies of the father of lies. It was a cheap-shot statement by the father of cheap-shotters. Morals never quite disappeared from the world: they fought their way back against every natural and unnatural assault.

  Structure had been perverted to un-structure, so the unstructured crowd crowed like red roosters. Watch out there! We will see how enduring real structure can be.

  Patterns and customs of treason were imposed by the ravening enemy, and the commonwealth of cowardice was instituted by the anti-institutionists. Brittle variety was brought into the areas where it becomes a blatant stultification and cloying, and rigidity was forced onto all free fields. Art, which is another name for life-well-handled, was trashed almost beyond belief.

  This was a war that was not always seen as war. A war may be between grass growing in one place, and erosion taking over a neighboring plot. And the Fiefdoms maintained a spotty loyalty very much of the time, so the thing was never lost.

  Absalom Stein made elegant war by system of interlocking promotions in fields both familiar and scarcely known. Absalom had big hands. He had big brains. He had a huge heart. He had more gall than is given to ordinary humans. And he was absolutely loyal to the ordered and structured arts. He reintroduced shape and order into places so abandoned of them that they came now as something new. “Oh, that Absalom has pulled another one!” one of his rival impresarios railed. “Decency! Imagine someone introducing that as an art concept. Imagine anybody pulling that one again and getting away with it. Some things are out for so long that they are in again. It's a permeating form of structure, I believe. Ah, let's see what we have of decency. We'd better stake out a few plots in the decency field. A going thing deserves company.” Absalom did well at everything, even at this. Ah, he was an expansive and expensive fellow!

  Teresa Piccone Stranahan made her own war against the stifling confinement of the un-structureds. She was the St. Louis housewife who made noises that were heard around the world.

  Hans Schultz got rich accidentally in his businesses, and he couldn't keep himself divested of that sticky green stuff. He was like a boy who got a new boomerang for his birthday and went crazy trying to throw the old one away. But he created a consensus of conscience in one field of business where conscience had almost disappeared.

  Vincent Stranahan counted coups somehow, in spite of a great measure of incompetence that was his. Finnegan fumbled it all away for twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours, and then tried to make it up on that hectic last hour. There weren't any final results in on Finnegan.

  “We don't even know whether he's dead,” Salvation Sally said. “With Finnegan, how can you tell?”

  Letitia, Mary Virginia, Dotty —

  “Be she alive or be she dead,

  Hi! Ho!

  Be she alive or be she dead,

  She'll serve baked brains from the Devil's head.

  Hi! Ho! The Gollie Wol!”

  (Why did they ever teach Margaret Stone that damned Gadarene Swine Song?), yes, Margaret Stone, Sally, Mary Catherine, Casey in Exile, Zabotski, X, they fought a war against the big smokiness.

  Duffey did it in art and in stubbornness. With Fire and Finesse he did it. Oh what smokey and sputtering fire and what clumsy finesse, Duff!

  There were several other Empires doing battle against the Principality, but we do not have full data on them.

  This is a world history of modern times into the present. Clip it and save it.

  “My dear brother,” Bagby wrote in one of those ‘Letters After I Am Dead’, “we have it pleasant here. We are freed from the tyrannies of hours and places. We provide for ourselves and for others. It requires hard but not torturous work, and we are given plenty of leisure. We do not sleep. What would we have to sleep about?

  “We still have our passions, and they are immeasurably strengthened and heated. But we break them to bridle again and again, like breaking horses. There are no evil passions, and there are few evil horses. But a passion unbroken or a horse unbroken is in evil case for a while.

  “We work in very complex personal relationships. That is what refines us and improves us. We enter into relationships with creatures militant and triumphant, with our own kindred, with species whose reality we had once doubted, with aliens, with angelics, with damned. (Not all the damned are irrevocably damned: it is not known whether any of them are.) Our own characters grow in complexity. These are very fruitful interchanges.

  “We do have particularity.
And our particularity is not accompanied by all the phenomena that philosophers have thought should accompany the possession of particularity. Really, it isn't a new gift. It is only an enhancement of a general human gift. We know things and relationships in their billion-aspected and billion-detailed particulars. We know all about you. We know all about everything.

  “There is no analogy to our difficulty in explaining to you what our state of being outside of time is. A waggy-tongued man might be able to explain colors and minute differences in colors to a man born blind. He might be able to explain, in salivary detail, the taste of a persimmon to a person who had never known that fruit. He might be able to explain the direct reception of radio waves to humans who know them only in their audio translation.

  “But he could not explain the  —  (the correct word here, extemporaneous, has taken on a different meaning so we may not use it in its real meaning), he could not explain the out-of-time case to one who had never been outside of time. There isn't duration. There is only moment. I always come back to that. The moment cannot end, for endings are within time.

  “We have our Earth-hours, though they are not inside time as are the hours of Earth. Our Earth Hours are appointments from which we contemplate Earth. We review your happenings there, with growing maturity and with wide particularity. I can see now, as I could not see when I was in the middle of it, that we neglected certain crucial fields and left them to the enemy. Theoretical mathematics is one of the fields that we neglected in the world. We allowed false theory to move into this field, which is also a tool. Especially did we abandon the field of mathematical philosophy to the enemy, and yet we had superior qualifications in that field.

  “Economic philosophy is another area that we left to the enemy. We still combat him in economic theory, but that is not quite so fundamental a thing. We barely contest him in theology. We assume all too quickly that all the theologians have gone over to the party of the Devil. The enemy does have all the theoreticians of knowledge processing, but such theoreticians can be made out of almost anything.

  “We still have beach-heads in art, which is another name for the schematic ordering of life. Beware of those who promulgate false schemas or no schemas at all. We live in pleasant thatched huts in the first circle. We thence (not in the future, but in intensity) move into other circles. The hierarchies of circles are not inner and outer; they are only more intense and more transfigured.

  “Am I content here? Of course I'm not content. I'm not at all sure that contentment is one of the things we're supposed to be learning. But I am happy, with a growing kinetic happiness (kinetics outside of time and motion? That's right, brother, that's right), and I am happy with the mustard-seed happiness that expands exponentially until whole worlds can nest in its branches.”

  There was more. There was always much more. Duffey would get a full week's enjoyment out of each of Bagby's letters, rereading parts of one of them in his mind several times a day, following out the branching implications of some of the phrases, sampling beforehand personal relationships more complex than he was used to, experiencing patches of particularity. Duffey, in his person of Melchisedech, had often experienced brief moments of near total particularity, but he hadn't encountered the particularity that is beyond moments.

  Then, before the last letter had been near exhausted, there would come another Monday morning and another letter.

  “There is an art dealer in New Orleans who is more than four thousand years old. The name of this man is Melchisedech Duffey. Let the reader smile if he will, but there is proof of this statement of great age. This proof would have to be accepted, as based upon scientific sources, if it showed the man to be of more likely or less extreme age. But valid scientific proof must be accepted even when it gives unacceptable answers.

  “What began as a routine physical examination eventually showed that this man was actually more than four thousand years old, on the basis of his birefringence flow index, thrombocyte-shaped remnants, Howship's lacunar frequency, linkage patterns of Volkman canals, wall thickness of the splanchnic capillaries, lateral line remainder of the post-auditory placodes, Kreb's cycle consonance, Gompertz function analogies, collagen contractility, secretion of Golgi bodies around the lipid vesicule, diatomic diffusion, lobation of Metanephrio, Pentose phosphate pathway data, peptide linkage characteristics, and every other standard test that is used to determine age of body. Over four thousand years old was the answer in every case. Stereogram studies of the glomerules gave the same answer, and a general archaism of characteristics was in accord with it. These things cannot be challenged.

  “But at the same time, there are general indications that the unessential body material is that of a fifty-five year old man. The characteristics thus are much older than the body itself: and the unseemly conclusions of medical experts are that the man is older than his body. Mr. Duffey's own conclusions concur with this to an extent.

  “ ‘From the inside, one body looks pretty much like another,’ Mr. Duffey has said. ‘I am sure that I have passed through several bodies. I am equally sure that I have brought my essence and pattern and individual substance (my signature cytogens) with me into whatever body has served as a temporary vehicle. Or possibly it is the same body, renovated and given back to me each time. I will not contradict the theology of the case. But I believe that a man can be older than his body, just as a body can be older than a car it rides in.’

  “ ‘Do you consider your history to be a form of reincarnation?’ Duffey was asked. ‘Incarnation? No, only an utter fool would believe in reincarnation,’ he said. ‘Then how would you explain your case?’ we asked him. ‘It's simply that I have lived a little longer a life than the average person has,’ Mr. Duffey said. Mr. Duffey also brought in several of his acquaintances, who however do not wish their names given, who tested more than three thousand years old in their essential make-up. The evidence is convincing in all of these cases. Do you know any people of proven greater age than these?”

  [The Eighteenth Book of Strange Encounters,

  by the Editors of the Sixteenth and

  Seventeenth Books of Strange Encounters.]

  3

  Quite a few years slipped by one way or another. The battle lines were never finely drawn. The people of the world weren't greatly concerned about the battle that was being fought over them. If told that the battle concerned their degradation and extinction, they answered “That's as good a way to go as any.” The battle wasn't in sight on any decision, but the Devil was ahead on points.

  One afternoon, Duffey was reading through a bunch of clippings that Letitia had saved in a scrapbook. The words “Oh Murder!” were lettered on the cover of it, And smaller letters on that cover, in the perfect and orderly inking of Letitia, gave the information “All Murders and Mayhems and Excerpts here are exactly as indicated. Nothing faked, nothing uncontexted. Everything is in its original tedium.” Well, the words on the cover were better than anything inside it, but Duffey was going through it because it had recently been pasted up by the loving hands of Letitia. Her silver laughter echoed out of it, that laughter! “God loves it, and I kind of like it myself,” Duffey had said of it.

  But Duffey was having a slow go in leafing through the scrapbook. He sobbed and snuffled, and his eyes were brimming with tears, which made the reading difficult:

  “I believe in the total education of the young person,” Father Blevins told your reporter. “In particular I believe in education in the most important things in life, which are the leisures of life. It curdles me that we have college girls here without any first-hand experience in Fornicational Intercourse. This has been a gross neglect on the part of everyone. I give them that first-hand experience myself. Frankly, I am good at it, and it is best for them to learn from an expert. I had previously given this instructional experience to high school girls and to grade school girls. So what is all the fuss now when I am giving it to college girls? What is the matter with everyone anyhow? The yuks an
d cretins have had their say long enough. No, technically it isn't compulsory yet, but for my part I am making it as compulsory as I can. No, I don't see anything ‘wrong’ with a chaplain at a student center holding intercourse with students as part of an organized program. But I do see something wrong with the whole concept of ‘wrong’. Let's throw that out.”

  “What are the views of your bishop on this?” your reporter asked. “The bishop is a clerical-fascist, and as such is not entitled to have any views,” Father Blevins said.

  “We'll not deny a slippage of ten years in attainment levels, so that now the sixteen and seventeen-year-olds are reading at the level of material that the six and seven-year-olds formerly read. This was planned so, and rightly planned. It is part of our leveling process to reduce tensions. When all are of equal attainment, what will there be to be tense about? It is essential that the rising curve of intelligence be reversed. We are reversing it. We are pioneers in this. Certainly we are introducing pornography into the texts, but it is pornography geared to the level of six-year-old and seven-year-old reading ability.”

  “The difference between just wars and unjust wars? Any war waged by Amerika or any other fascist country is unjust. Any war waged by a peoples-Marxist country is just. No, I don't believe that is too simplistic. It is merely clear-cut and incisive. And we have the teaching of the Church that one may support a just war but not an unjust war. The trouble is that people now accept the teaching of the Church only when they want to. They do not accept it in fields such as this.”