More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  “We will have dinner before the opera,” Duffey said. “Some of us won't be alive afterwards. The Presentation at the Decatur Street Opera House is billed as an Eschatological Drama. It will be the end of an affair, probably the end of the human affair.

  “Have we any friends to go with us to a fine dinner at Girardeau's Irish Restaurant? Nobody does things so fine as does Girardeau lately, though he didn't used to be so grand. Have you noticed how grand all of us have become since, well, just these last few hours. Except Zabotski, of course. I mean it. Never have there been so many really grand people in the world, or in our city, before.”

  They walked in their grand get-ups through the streets. Trash men were loading their scoop trucks again and again with the debris. It was mostly broken effigies of people and animals that were being loaded into the trucks: polyvinyl bits, styrofoam bits, clay bits, plastic bits, paperboard bits, even fleshy and bloody bits. These latter showed signs of twitchy life. ‘Duffey, Duffey, it's me. Alexi Ravel. Help me, help me,’ one of the bloody bits said. Things like that were weird. And sometimes there were severed fleshy pieces mixed with the general trash  —  a leg, a head, a dripping loin that seemed to be of real flesh and vein and blood. The animal pieces also came from the destroyed people, it was said. Many of these disappearing people pass through the animal form on their way back to clay and trash.

  Duffey, Zabotski, Finnegan-not-Finnegan (the young painter, his real name was Jacob Soule), Mary Virginia, Margaret Stone, the Child Hero, Salvation Sally, the Urchin, the Countess, Absalom Stein, the Royal Pop Historian named Cyrus Roundhead, maybe some others. They were all together at that big, plush, oaken table at Girardeau's. This was the number one table in the front window. They were all splendid and supreme and superb. They were escharotic and noetic. They were mutated and metamorphosed and specified (is ‘specify’ not the word that means to change into a new species?): they were euphoric and willful and wonderful and transcendent.

  “Only not all.”

  There was somebody who said “Only not all” , and this indicated that at least one of them would fail of splendor and would betray all the new and splendid things and fall back to the old dullness. Well, whoever it was, he would be done away with this night. “Just what is it that you Royal Pop Historians are doing to our town, Roundhead?” Stein asked him. “Mostly I like the effect, but I do have reservations.” Things and attitudes were beginning to clarify themselves.

  “Oh, we're making selective recordings of the last remnants of mankind, at the same time that we terminate those remnants,” Roundhead told them. “The last pocket of humanity is here in your city. I say ‘selective recordings’ for this is very tricky. The records may not be as things originally were. They will be as we say that things were. Objectivity in these things is fine, when it is properly directed by ourselves.”

  Mary Virginia still had the broken body of the child with her, the last child that she had killed on safari. She wasn't making quite such a big thing of it now, but she wasn't quite ready to throw it away either.

  “It's one of the old kind, Mary Virginia,” the countess told her. “It isn't good for anything. Wouldn't be good for anything even if it were alive. You know what it is, don't you?”

  “I know that it's human,” Mary Virginia said. After a while, one of the waitresses took it from her to throw it on a trash truck. “It's not nice to have something like that at table,” the waitress said. No, that's not accurate. Mary Virginia refused to give it to the waitress. Margaret Stone took it from her and said that she would have it thrown away.

  But Margaret lied. She gave it to somebody to bury it.

  “I just remembered that there isn't any Decatur Street Opera House in this city,” Duffey said with a puzzled grin. “How do I know where it is then.” But you're not supposed to puzzle too much when you're possessed by Euphoria.

  “I just remembered that there isn't even any Decatur Street in this town,” Mary Virginia Schaeffer said. But they were both wrong.

  “Are we being elegant enough?” Margaret Stone asked. She asked it with a certain duplicity or irony or bitterness, some such things as the humans used to have in their speech, things that would soon be gone out of all speech forever. Duplicity and irony and bitterness are things that simply have no place in splendid speech.

  “Oh yes. You're in the clear. You're splendid and elegant enough, Margaret. You'll pass easily,” the hoyden said.

  Horse carriages were waiting in the streets outside. They had really elegant horses on some of those carriages. They were thunder colts who are part artifice, part legend, and part horse.

  But inside, Girardeau's Irish Restaurant had become a work of living art. Transcendent persons are themselves works of art, and their transcendence flows from themselves to their groups, and from both to the surroundings. Any resulting arrangement must of necessity be perfect. Every person in this great dining hall was so seated as to contribute to the most striking composition of appearance and voice and aura. Every order that was served became a part of an olfactory and gustatory orchestration. Each gesture and nuance of the thousand diners (Girardeau's didn't used to be so large: only yesterday it could seat only forty-eight persons) was part of a living panorama and pandemonium. There was nothing accidental about the deeply textured and strong, musky scene. There would never be anything ‘accidental’ again. It was all a perfectly-fitted and balanced contrivance, ruthlessly beautiful… or horrible, depending on the sensibilities. The only ineptly clashing notes to be met there were provided by the several persons present who were lacking in the finer sensibilities. There were Zabotski and a few others. Bloody death be upon them!

  But even the human remnants and preservations might be arranged and toyed with and enjoyed. They were interesting bric-a-brac in the now all-ways interesting world. But the human remnants could be much more handily arranged and enjoyed after they were dead.

  “We are unable to account for the human interval,” the man named Roundhead was saying. “It's like one of those flimsy visions that sometimes come to one in the moment of waking up, and that then vanish, with full wakefulness. I do not believe that any of us splendid people were ever human, and yet our bodies appear very similar to the human. But the body is related to the person and to the species only as the brain is related to the mind: it is a temporary place for it to live, that is all. It may be that both humans and ourselves moved into bodies that had been developed by a still more primitive species. Myself, I can live in a house of almost any shape. The body isn't important to me. The body and the brain cannot live without their visitors, the person and the mind. But the converse may not be true. I believe that a species may travel, like flame, through many bodies of various sorts: through that of the totem animal, through that of the contrived effigy, even through that burlesque thing that is called human.”

  “What is wrong with the human thing?” Zabotski flared up.

  “Human mental processes are subject to error, and they are almost wholly lacking in true kinetic intuition,” Roundhead explained. “Humans have the sickness of introspection and guilt. They have the sickness of depth, but sanity is always a surface phenomenon. They have the sickness of awkwardness, and that is the most incurable sickness of them all. Thunder is the specific against most of these sicknesses, but who is it who prescribed it for us? Humans are crude and tedious and full of malodorous trash. Humans, Zabotski, are like you.”

  “What is special about Duffey here?” Stein asked. “I keep feeling that he had a foot in both of the worlds.”

  “So he did. So have you. There is no salvation for those who haven't it. But there's not much special about him,” Roundhead said, “except that he is the oldest of us bright ones who are here present.”

  “You speak sometimes, Roundhead, as if you were all very old yourselves, and yet you speak as if you awoke very recently.”

  “Aye, so we did, but from an ancient sleep,” Roundhead said. “And we found that, as in the case of bears,
many of us cubs were born during that sleep. I don't know whether I'm new born or new awakened.”

  “And what is, all, unspecial, about Zabotski here?” Stein asked.

  “Oddly enough, Zabotski has been invaluable to us since we have been in this city,” Roundhead said. “He's so damned human! He spots the old humans for us, dozens and dozens of them. He leads us right to them. Ah, as soon as we clear out this city, then the old humans will be gone forever, except for the very few who escape us for a while. But we will track them all down and sink them. The human ship will be the one that left no wake.”

  “Nothing at all to be left?” Stein asked. “Not even the echo of an empty vain?”

  “Nothing it all left?” Margaret asked. “Not even the perfume of an empty vase?”

  “Nothing it all left?” Deutero-Finnegan asked. “Not even the guffaw of an empty gag?”

  Margaret herself, who seldom wore such deceptions, was wearing the perfume named ‘The Last Night of Her Life’. She also wore a sullenness that was unusual for her. “No wake, no remnant, no impact, no influence, we will have none of these from the human thing,” Roundhead stated resolutely. “We eradicate the thing completely.”

  “How chorasmian of us!” the Countess exclaimed.

  “I think there will be a legacy,” Zabotski said sullenly. “I think that I will be a part of it.”

  “So will I be,” slid Deutero-Finnegan, the young painter who had some of the memories and aspects of Finnegan clinging to him.

  “Was humanity really a species apart from us?” Roundhead talked to the tableful and to himself. “Or was it a disease that afflicted the world for a little while? Possibly it was both, a double, donkey-headed monstrosity. But now it will not be either. When we arrange the human things, in their histories, even in their possible influence on ourselves, we will arrange them in our own ways. We will arrange that they drop into the bottomless void from whence there is no echo.”

  Time was running apace. The people began to enter their horse carriages to travel to the opera.

  6

  There was a Decatur Street in that city, though there hadn't been before. It had used to be called Magazine Street, or perhaps Peters Street. It was fed into by the Grand Concourse through which a thousand horse carriages came without crowding. There was a Decatur Street Opera House in that city, one of the memorable opera houses of the world, though the people there who had been living in New Orleans didn't remember it being there before. It had a great façade of laughing stone. The special stones set in that façade recorded the flood tide of arrivals at the Opera. Everything was of a stylized splendor under the jeweled night sky, and the splendid people dismounted and went grandly in.

  “Only not all.”

  Somebody said “Only not all” because there were tests that would winnow out a few of those who sought entrance. There were tests to discern the stubborn old humanness of people going in. Perhaps a dozen out of every thousand seeking entrance were flagged out by the Kinetic Intuition Indicators. These flagged-out persons were made to wash their hands in ashes. If they were human persons they would be washing their hands in flame. And several persons came there of their own will without being compelled by the Kinetic Intention Indicator.

  Of those first ones who took the test, they failed it every one of them. They failed it in dirty flames and curling smoke.

  Zabotski, of course! It didn't take the Indicators to spot him. He was flagged out by everybody's intuition. He was unregenerate, old-line human, and this was apparent to everybody. He was stubborn and unchanging, devoid of easy euphoria, devoid of intuition, empty of transcendence, and of cloggy depths.

  The ashes of the tests were in large, bronze basins. They were recent human ashes, of that very day. They were the strong-smell ashes of newly burned and very stubborn flesh, of flesh that refused to break down into trash and trifles as it died. These test ashes were really a little bit special, if anything of the relieved human can be called special.

  Zabotski rolled his hands in the deadly ashes. And the ashes burst into stifling and reeking flames. Old human flesh recognized other old human flesh. Zabotski, from the pain of the flame, gave out with a horrible, wrenching sound that was both a moan and a laugh.

  There was a blood roar against this Zabotski from all the bright people entering the Opera. It had been known that Zabotski was unrepentantly human, but the pleasure of catching him was not dulled by its being expected. Zabotski was big and wild and loud and silly, and there was a lot of blood and fun to be got out of him. Powerful men put a halter over his head, a bit in his mouth, and a rope around his neck. They begin to lead him off, into the Opera House by the animal entrance.

  “I'll leave me a wake behind me!” Zabotski roared (it was a deformed half-animal roar, for the mouth bit had a tongue spike in it). “I will strew me a path in this world and out of the door of this world! I will make me be remembered!” He did strew a pretty wide path made out of half a dozen felled strong men. But he was only back into his youth for one furious moment there. He was too old and too fat, and he was overpowered again and dragged away. But he left a stenchy wake from the smell of his burnt and broke-open hands, human stenchy.

  Well, what was there in human ashes that would still kindle fire at the touch of kindred flesh? There was something in the ashes that remembered.

  Then, a short moment after Zabotski had been dragged along, there was an out-of-order incident, a happening that was not anticipated at all. A person came out of the crowd to the total consternation of all the intuitive people. This was a slight, quick, powerful young man, with a big nose and with sudden moves. He was certified splendid and noetic. He was an intuitive, with-it person. This young man had been a puzzle around town to various sorts of people. He had been a puzzle even around the Walk-In Art Bijou and the Pelican Press. Stein had called him Deutero-Finnegan because of his supposed resemblance to dead Finnegan and because of the real resemblance of his paintings to those of Finnegan. This man was not compelled either by the intuitions of the crowd or by those of the Instruments to declare himself. But he did. He left the concourse of the people entering the Opera House, and he went to one of the large, bronze basins that held cold human ashes.

  “This is a mistake,” one of the Marshals of the Opera said to him. “You are not suspect. You have not been questioned at all.”

  “This is no mistake,” the Deutero-Finnegan said. Then he declared himself by putting his hands deep into the ashes. They flamed to his touch. But it was not the black-red, reeking flame that had been the case with Zabotski. It was a paler flame, yellow at first, then deepening a bit and shifting to orange color.

  “You can withdraw from this,” the Marshal of the Opera said. “This is some sort of a technical error. We all know that you're not human, that you are one of us. We know that you're new and splendid and sane. Why do you young men like to be eccentrics? You are causing a false flame for an antic. It isn't even the right color of flame. Why do you love the extravagant gestures?”

  “I won't withdraw,” the young fellow, the Finnegan Image said. Then his face crumbled and broke with the realization of the flame of his burning hands. “I am human if I die to be human,” he shuddered the words out. “Where I am unhuman, it is not in your direction.” He staggered, and he watched the flames on his hands.

  “No, it's not quite the right color,” he said. The color deepened a bit when the flesh began to support the flame. “Still not quite the right color,” the young man croaked as he watched the flame turning to a richer orange. “I'll have to work on that color.” Strong men put a rope about the young painter's neck, and they led him into the opera house by the animal entrance. But they didn't inflict the bridle or bit on him.

  Seconds later, there was another out-of-order incident, one still less anticipated than the episode of the Double Finnegan. But who was the person who broke out of the concourse and ran towards one of the oracular ash pots?

  “Come along inside,” Duffey
was insisting to his party with curious haste. “Come, Sally. Come, Mary Virginia. The show is inside, not here.”

  “Wait, I want to see who it is,” Salvation Sally protested being hurried.

  “Inside, inside,” Stein was insisting with false heartiness. “We are supposed to have some excellent prelude music tonight. We don't want to miss it.”

  “I'll not be rushed,” Mary Virginia objected strongly. “Where's Margaret?”

  But the small party was swept inside by the concourse of people. Of course the prelude music was excellent. There was the Painted Thunder Suite by Kandarsky. The Countess and the Child Hero left the party. “We're in the bullfight sequence, you know,” they said.

  There was the Shining Mountain Fugue by Palfrey. The Hoyden left the party. “I'm in the Thunder Cold Games, you know,” she said.

  “Where is Margaret Stone?” Mary Virginia asked again.

  “She must have gotten lost in the crowd,” Salvation Sally said.

  “Nobody could lose Margaret, not anywhere, not ever,” Mary Virginia objected.

  One does not come to the Opera House to hear excellent prelude music, nor to wait overlong for the curtain to rise. It is all right to wait just long enough for anticipation to peak, yes, but then…

  …but then the curtain didn't rise at all in the Decatur Street Opera House that night. Instead of rising…

  But Margaret Stone hadn't entered the Opera building with her party. She hadn't gone in with the press of people. Instead of that, she became the least expected episode of the evening. She was the second of the out-of-order persons who went to the oracular ash pot.

  She put her hands deeply into the human ashes, but these ashes were cold and grainy and dead and remained so. So then, of course, Margaret was not old and unregenerate human. She belonged with the splendids and noetics. But wait!

  She flicked her tongue. She often did this before making a sparky statement. She flicked her tongue again, and there was genuine holy ghost fire flying about it. She scooped up the ashes in her tangled and tense and electric fingers, and put them into her mouth. They flamed.