More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Yes, and again yes. We are doing considerable ornithological engineering now, and we are implanting completely new patterns in many of the birds.”

  ‘Have you fitted a curb to the Pleiades, or loosened the bond of Orion?’

  “No, we haven't, primitive deity, and we don't believe that you have done it either. But we are working on it. We will bet that we do it before you do.”

  “There are not ghosts of the past that we track down and set right. Really, there are no ghosts. There are only some persons or things that are wasted more than others. And there is no ‘past’. There are certain times and incidents that have been misplaced. But we can find them, all of them, buried in barrows or trapped under the cement of barnacles, and we can free them from their incrustations. But even we adepts are in danger of thinking in terms of inimical incrustations and surrogates, in treating some events as though they were not still happening. What? If a thing is not still happening, then how will it be revised? It is for the ordering and revision and clarification that we come together for these continuing meetings. That, and to reassure ourselves, and to enjoy each other's company.

  “When we as a people arrive at our full splendor, then we create a sparkling history for ourselves, and we devise noetic and sophisticated and splendid techniques. Ah, the tracking down, the digging up, the freeing, with the finest weapons and tools ever, that's where the fun is. It is the rich ritual of historical evidence, the formula in our own hands of what was and is and what shall be. We will keep it all in our hands. A line by an always contemporary poet reads, ‘Here lies one whose name was writ on water’, as though that name might become difficult to read after the water had grown old and forgetful. But this is not the case. The reading would never be difficult, not to initiates like ourselves. Even the writing of it on rapidly running water would make the reading of it just about difficult enough to be interesting. It's always easy to develop transparencies from living water.

  “I have heard it said by an erudite man that it would be wonderful to have placed recording microphones at various spots in the time and place of history. Oh, but it has been done! We have the recordings of billions of such microphones, we have the recordings of billions of cameras. We use such microphones all the time! I have never found a dingle or dell on this earth in which there were not many such microphones. Stones are the most common recorders. Everywhere, to a person with informed eyes and ears, these stones shine and shout their presence. It is in their thin (but not so thin as a non-historian might imagine) patinas that we can read complete histories.

  “We commonly live or peel off transparencies at six-second intervals. Each such transparency will give a detailed and accurate analysis of the air for its period, the temperature, direction of wind, light intensity (whether in shade or sunlight or dark night or bright night; even, from the angle of the shine, the hour of the day and the day of the year), sulphur content of the air, significant pollen, aroma, and quality generally. Do you realize that it would take fewer than three hundred billion such six second intervals, less than three hundred billion such transparencies to carry us back through the last fifty thousand years of history, the period in which we are most interested, the period since our own first appearance. We can go deeper, of course, but frankly we have not yet the technique to go more than ten times deeper, or to about half a million years. Beyond that, we lose accuracy. But why should we go deeper than our own period? In those murky depths we find only animals and uncouth creatures and peoples who are not ourselves.

  “But we can slice the transparencies much thinner than six seconds. We can slice them down to a hundredth of a second for any period we wish to focus upon. Six second interval is merely cruising speed or hunting speed. The patinas deposited on good rock surfaces can be lifted down to the thickness of a single molecule.

  “Complete visual pictures, from any aspect or direction, can be reconstructed of anything whose light or shadow fell even indirectly on one of our stones. We can get detailed pictures of animals, of plants, or people as they lived and moved thousands of years ago. We can reconstruct color pictures of the clouds moving overhead, and we can read the spectra of those clouds for trace materials trapped in them. We can reconstruct anything that was ever visible, that was ever to be discerned by any of the senses, that was ever subject to any sort of analysis. Give us a dozen tuned stones (they resonate to each other, and those of the same locale will always know each other) and we can reconstruct a complete countryside for any period we wish. We can zero in on an individual grasshopper in that countryside. We can zero in on a virus infecting that grasshopper, and we can analyze it. We can prescribe for that virus, but we are not yet able to send medication back to that ancient grasshopper. If it were important, we would find a way to do even that. Nor would the various upheavals that might seem to scramble the rocks and their records make as much difference as you might suppose.

  “We can trap sounds and play them back with perfect fidelity. We can play the song of the ancestral cicada that had two more chromosomes than its present descendants have. The old cicada (it is only coincidence) had two more notes in its song. We can say what the two disappeared chromosomes were. We can even, by very advanced techniques, duplicate those chromosomes.

  “And smells! Of course they are even more simple than sounds to life in the transparencies. We can go back and pick up nearly every scene complete for the last fifty thousand years. We can do it at ten times that depth, if there were anything interesting happening there. The patinas and deposits on stones and other things are only one of the dozens of tools that we have for such historical reconstruction.”

  “If I had a rock in this room, could it tell me the hanky panky that my husband does when I'm gone?” a woman asked. She was a walk-in from the street. She wasn't an associate of the pop historians. “If it takes a special rock, where could I get one?” she asked.

  “Oh, it takes at least a dozen seasons to set patina layers so that they can be removed as transparencies,” the speaker said. “I don't know why this is so, but it does protect and make privileged all current information from the hot eyes and gawky ears of suspicious persons. You wouldn't be interested in hanky panks that are more than a dozen years old, would you?”

  “I sure would,” the woman said. “I want to find about them as far back or as close up as I can go. Where can I find one of these rocks?”

  “Oh, any rock in the vicinity will do. But just any technician will not do,” the speaker said. “We exercise a certain discretion as to just what patinas should divulge their information to whom. But many things other than rocks have secrets.”

  “Aye, goat skins have secrets too,” Duffey told his beard. He had been thinking about the parchment that he had found nailed to his door that morning. Now he was inspired to use his own technique to lift transparencies and tracings from it. The parchment was still on the door. Duffey realized that it was a proclamation and that it was intended to remain there for the stay of the Royal Pop Historians.

  He rolled a violet light thing through the throng and to the door. Several of the people, the child hero, the hoyden, the countess and others, were very interested in his doings. They followed him about as he made his hook-up.

  “Why do you use that obsolete apparatus?” the child hero asked him. “There is nothing intuitive about it at all, nothing dumbfounding, nothing splendid. I wouldn't be caught dead with an apparatus that wasn't in some way dumbfounding.” Duffey's violet light wasn't obsolete. He had bought it that very year. His older violet light had been obsolete but still workable. But neither of them had very intuitive or dumbfounding in their operation.

  “What is it with you children?” Duffey demanded. “This does not make great speeches, but it works. Well, what is the latest thing that you Pop Historians would use to define the depth and past history of this goat skin?”

  “For such primary work as that, where the levels are the doings and undoings of people (some of them probably human), and with
so few such recordings a peach branch would probably be the newest and most sophisticated device,” the child hero said. “It must be a forked branch, and it must be cut like — ”

  “Like a dowser's forked stick,” Duffey finished. “Yes, I have one of them somewhere. I often use it. And also I often use my violet light here.” In his business of art dealer and pawn broker, Duffey often examined things by his violet light. It would bring out underlays of paintings. It would bring out filed-off serial numbers of pawned equipment. And also he often used his dowser's forked stick which was from a red peach tree. It would tell whether blood had been shed in the history of an article or artifact. It would tell particularly whether there was a murder in the history of ownership of an item (only the forked sticks told all those things scientifically and not intuitively).

  For this particular job, the violet light was best. The parchment was a palimpsest, written over many times and scraped imperfectly. The latest underlay of it was quickly made manifest under the violet light. It consisted of some unfamiliar verses of Boëthius, but it was in his overly familiar style.

  “I never cared for his doggerel,” Duffey said. “It would be valuable in a money way, I suppose, but essentially his stuff is completely worthless. May the weedeater take him!”

  “He was never really one of our group,” the child hero said. “There was just too much of the human element in him.”

  The next underlay was a first century copy (or perhaps it was the original) of the Fourth Gospel. It had marginal notations in the pagona shorthand that had been secret for so many centuries, and indeed had been cracked only two centuries before this time. The document had the sweep of understanding and authority both in its lettering, and in the hen script of its shorthand.

  “A fine hand,” Duffey said. “I wonder if it was his own.”

  “Oh, it was, it was,” said the hoyden. “If we had realized that it was on this piece, perhaps we would have used another piece of parchment and given this one special care. Did you ever know him, Duffey? He was one of our group. And he was so patient and thoughtful. He once put up more than two hundred of us in a small-sheep shed. I don't know how he did it, but he made us feel at home. That was one of the better segments of our always-continuing meeting. Yes, this is the original. But of course the thing can be found in print now, so there's no need to save even good hand. And there is only about a thousand word segment on this.”

  The next latest underlay was a spate of priceless drivel of the classical Greek era. Well, what more can one say about it. It was priceless. And it was drivel.

  “It's fake, of course,” the child hero said. “All of the classical period was a fake. There wasn't any classical period in reality. You'll hear more of that. It's a favorite colt-to-ride of Cyrus Roundhead who will be speaking by and by.”

  Then, a bit deeper on the goat skin, there was a highly polished passage of epic from one of the pre-pre-Homerics.

  “No need to flash that into the light of day,” Duffey said. “It's good and it's important, but it would only excite the scholars.”

  “He belonged to us once,” the child-hero said, “but then the weed chopper cut him down. There were a lot of defections among the pre-pre's.”

  A bit earlier then, there was all imposing, closely written, clearly alphabetical screed from the pre-alphabetical time. It might easily establish itself as the earliest alphabetical writing known. And below this there were many depths of writings and scriptings. But Duffey, not wishing to tip his hand, went no deeper at this time.

  “Times are hard,” he whispered hoarsely in his shyster voice, for he had come under the influence of a part of himself that he could never control, “and I don't know where the devil I'd ever find a buyer for the thing. But I feel generous today, and I cannot resist the plea in your entreating eyes. I'll go nine dollars for this worthless old piece of goat skin.”

  There were peals of laughter from the countess and several others of the people there. The child hero was too choked up with merriment to laugh out loud. But for the kindliness of it, the laughter would have shriveled Duffey irreparably. The laughter meant that the parchment was not for sale. It meant that not nine dollars, or even nine million dollars would touch it. It meant that Duffey was a perfect clown in this: so he accepted the role. But he would dearly have loved to have that parchment for nine dollars or even nine thousand. He put his violet light away. The parchment would never lodge permanently in Melchisedech Duffey's Walk-In Art Bijou.

  Back in the auditorium, the main and largest room of the Duffey buildings, the opening speaker was still holding forth on stones and their patinas.

  “We forget that our time scale is purely conventional,” he was saying, “and that all events are pretty much simultaneous. Take the case of God, and the person who presently holds most persuasive claim to that position. There was a sort of vacancy several months ago, and the question was which strong man would seize the opportunity. There was one man (who almost certainly had suffered a human interval), who had mutated quite recently (though some maintain that it was his second mutation), and who learned the total trick of time-dealing while doing so. Then he intruded himself back into time, into history and history's records, into the oceanic unconscious mind that is shared by both creatures and uncreatures: and so he became God. Certainly he is all-powerful and all-knowing and all-present now… Part of his peculiar mutation was his mastering of the tricks of power and knowledge and location. And certainly he created the worlds. Or at least he created the historical evidence that he created the worlds. That's almost the same thing.”

  “How long his he been established in this position?” Duffey asked from the floor. “I try to keep up with such things.”

  “About three weeks,” the easy speaker said. “We'll give him another couple of months and then assay him a little more completely.”

  “I'd certainly challenge one who went back no further than that in his power,” Duffey maintained stubbornly, “even if his power includes the mastery of historical evidence and of simultaneousness.”

  “Oh, he is being actively challenged,” the speaker said. “There are at least three main challengers. Back to our subject then, for simultaneity and backward intrusions remain deep mysteries that are beyond many of us. Stones of the countryside are not our most important records, as there isn't very much going on in the country. Transparencies and live tracings may also be lifted from city stones, whether they are natural or artificial. Several of our members are at this very moment busy at lifting transparencies from certain strategic stones that are built into the Decatur Street Opera House of this very city. Sometimes one hears the expression ‘if these stones could only talk!’ People, we initiates know that these stones can talk.

  “There are several special stones in and around the old opera house which is our demonstration for today. Know you all that there is a private corner in every inspired builder, that this private corner of the person knows about special stones. It may know about them only while the man is asleep but it knows. And the man, while the construction of the building was going on, will convey the command (he may convey it without knowing that he does so, or he may know that he does it and still wonder at himself), will convey the command that several special stones are to be built into the building and around the building. And the building will then become memorable. It will become resonant and in accord with its town and its times. It will accumulate living legends, and memories and ghosts. The old opera house in this city is such a building.

  “Two dozen cheap gem stones or gim cracks on the inside of that building do hold the total record of the short but tumultuous two-hundred-year history of the building. They not only have the all-sense record of every performance that has been played on those boards, but they have the record of every person who has attended each performance. They have the record of every gesture of every person. They have the record of every accent and sigh and word and whisper of every person. And also, by highly scientific e
xtrapolation of every contingent datum, they have the probable content of the most improbable thoughts of every person who has ever been there. Minor miracles of intrapolating gestures and expressions into thought have been wrought. Major miracles in extracting fine transparencies from stoney patinas have been achieved.

  “The gim crack stones will have the glow of every wax candle or rush light that ever lighted the performing house. They have the hot wax smell, and the rush-fat smell, even the evocative rig-wick stench. They have the glittering and guttering of the bear oil that was burned in the earlier days, of the whale oil, of the pig lard lamps. They have the whispering sound and flicker of old illuminating gas flames, the garishness of the limelights and the carbide lights, the later and stronger shine of the electrical chandeliers and of the mercury spotlights. Oh, do any of you remember the unearthly whiteness of the old sodium lights? The stones will remember it.”

  The speaker had a stone that was apparently set into his turban, but closer examination would show that it was set into his head. The speaker was a highbrow in the literal sense. The stone was one of the best, and it had recorded many scenes in many years.

  “And there are some quaint stones set in the outside of the building, and all in the surface of Decatur Street itself,” the speaker went on. “There is one old dalle or flagstone that would be recognized as distinguished by any investigators. It was set in the midst of the random rocks when the road was first laid out. This stone developed a will of its own, and it has survived a dozen changes. By accident (but there are no accidents), it was not discarded when the first random stones were thrown out and the slates and the mud shales were brought in to give the street a better finish. And the special flagstone survived when these old slates and mud shales were replaced by ironstone cobbles. It maintained its place even when the cobbles were replaced by bricks. It prevailed again when it was buried clear up to its eyes in asphalt. What things it could tell if it had tongue.”