The things that Azazel demonstrated were fleshy in the extreme. They were like old pictures, but they came on multidimensional and musky and writing. Wherever the creatures came from white-eyed cows that were not quite cows or out of the ground that was not quite ground Greg did not know. Perhaps they were no more than surrogate projections. What then of those whose lives were no more than surrogate projections, they of the great disordered majority?
“They have so much, Greg,” Azazel said, “and you miss it all.”
Gregory Thatcher broke the whole complex of devices to pieces with a shattering laugh. It was a nervous laugh though. Gregory had an advantage. He was young, he was only twelve, and he was not precocious. (But from this day on it couldn't be said that he was not precocious. In that complex instant he was older by a year; he was as old as Azazel now.)
“I'll not say ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’ for I wouldn't trust you behind me for one stride,” Gregory laughed. “I will say ‘Get thee back into thy cow and be off’ for I now perceive that the white-eyed cow there is no cow at all but only a device and vehicle of yours. Into it and be gone, Azazel.”
“Greg, boy, think about these things,” Azazel spoke as a knowing young fellow to one even younger and not quite so knowing. “You will think about them in any case. I've been talking to you on various levels, and not all my speech has been in words and not all meant to enter by the ears. Parts of it have gone into you by other orifices and they will work in you in your lower parts. Ah, some of those things of mine were quite good. I regret that you refuse the savor of them in your proper consciousness and senses, but they'll be with you forever. We've won it all, Greg. Join it. You don't want to be with the losers.”
“You worry and fret as though you'd not quite won it, Azazel,” Gregory mocked. “Into your vehicle and be off now. The show was really as well done as I expected.”
“The show isn't over with, boy,” Azazel said.
There had been a white-eyed cow standing, stock-still, blind-still, too stupid to graze, less animate than a stone cow, an empty cow skin standing uncollapsed.
There had been a teen-aged devil named Azazel, sometimes in a silver dazzle, sometimes in a blue funk, who had talked in words for the ears and in non-words for other entry.
Then there was only one of them. With a laugh, the devil disappeared into the white-eyed cow and she became quite animate. She whistled, she did a little cross-legged dance, she skittered off, blind and bounding. She was full of loco weed as were almost all the creatures of these plains. Aye, and she was full of the devil, too.
And how was one to distinguish an artificial and vehicular cow from a real one? All the cows now looked artificial. They had become like great spotted buffalo in their going feral. They were humpbacked now and huge, wild and wooly, except that they were mostly somnambulistic and stumbling, with an inner pleasure, perhaps, or an inner vacuity.
And the horses of the plains also. What was the tired weirdness about the horses?
And the dogs. However had the dogs become undogged? How is a dog disarticulated?
And the people. They were unpersoned and perverse now. They all shared a secret, and the secret was that they were a shared species with few individuals among them.
Cows, horses, dogs, people, the four artificial species. Now strange contrivances had spouted out of them all and recombined in them. They were all wobble-eyed, white-eyed, vacant-eyed, and freakish.
Except the Queer Fish. The Queer Fish Gregory Thatcher whistled, and the birds whistled and called back to him. How had the birds been spared? Meadow Larks, Scissor Tails, Mockingbirds, they all still used structured music.
The Queer Fish Gregory had been noticing movement in the center plains where his mother Judy had been traveling. The movement did not seem to constitute a threat. Some dozen of the ordered bulls of Judy Thatcher had surrounded a creature. They escorted him down into the center of the valley; they escorted him with a benign throating and bellowing. So it was a visitor to them, and not a hostile visitor. It was possibly one of the Seventy-Two, or one of the looser penumbra. Gregory stood and waited a moment for the signal. It came. The two eyes that Judy Thatcher had outside of her head she called in to her now. Gregory went down into the valley from its west slope. His sister was descending from the opposite rampart.
2
“We owe so much to one phrase that we can hardly express it. Without it, we'd have had to invent a phrase, we'd have put a modicum of meaning into it (overestimating the intelligence of the people as we have done so many times), and we'd have failed and failed and failed again. One smiles to recall that phrase that our fathers accidentally stumbled on and which later came back to us a hundredfold like bread cast upon the waters: ‘I am all for relevant religion that is free and alive and where the action is, but institutional religion turns me off.’ Incredible? Yes. A hog, if he could speak, wouldn't make so silly a statement: a blind mole wouldn't. And yet this statement was spoken many millions of times by young human persons of all ages. How lucky that it had been contrived, how mind boggling that it was accepted. It gave us victory without battle and success beyond our dreams.
“It was like saying ‘I love animals, all animals, every part of them: it is only their flesh and their bones that I object to; it is only their living substance that turns me off.’ For it is essential that religion (that old abomination) if it is to be religion at all (the total psychic experience) must be institutionalized and articulated in organization and service and liturgy and art. That is what religion is. And everything of a structured world, housing and furniture and art and production and transportation and organization and communication and continuity and mutuality is the institutional part of religion. That is what culture is. There can no more be noninstitutional religion than there can be a bodiless body. We abjure the whole business. We're well quit of the old nightmare.
“What was, or rather what would have been, the human species? It was, would have been, the establishment of a certain two-legged animal. This had never been done of any species, and by a very narrow margin it was not done in this case. It would have been Structuring and Organization and Institution erected where such things had never been done before. It would have been the realization of worlds where worlds had not been before. It would have been the building of the ‘Sky Bucket’ for containing and shaping humanity. And if that ‘Sky Bucket’ should actually have been built and filled to the brim, the human race would have appeared; and it would have been transcendent. The first requirement of the ‘Human’ is that it should be more than human. Again, we abjure the whole business. We'd rather remain unstructured monkeys.
“Fortunately we have halted it, before critical mass could have been achieved, before even the bottom of the ‘Sky Bucket’ was covered with the transcendent flowing that might have become human. We have succeeded in unmaking the species before it well appeared. And a thing unmade once is unmade forever, both as to its future and its past. There never was a ‘Sky Bucket’; there never was a transcendent flowing; there never was a structured human race or even the real threat of one.
“Our surviving enemies are slight ones, the plague-carrying Queer Fish and others of their bias. We'll have them down also, and then it will be the case that they never were up, that they never were at all. We have already disjointed the majority of them and separated them from their basis. And when they have become disjointed and destructed and disestablished, they become like ourselves in their coprophility and in their eruction against order.
“We have won it. We have unmade the species. We have created the case that it has never been. We have carried out our plan to the end that there never need be any sort of plan again. We have followed our logic to its conclusion. The logical conclusion of the destructing process is illogic. So we had intended it to be. So we have now achieved it.”
The Unmaking of the Species. Analities.
— The Coprophilous Monkey
The visitor was a long, lean, young man
who had been put through the torture. He was close cropped and bare faced and he wore only that day's dirt and dust. He was washing now in the shallow stream. Gregory gave him soap made of bull fat and potash, and he took the visitor's clothes from him for strongest washing.
The visitor had made his request from Judy Thatcher before Gregory's arrival. She had felt a sudden fear at it, but she put it away from her. Now Judy, the mother and magic person, was writing a letter. She wrote on a great flat stone that providentially would serve her for table and desk and for a third function. Why should the stone not serve her providentially? Judy was a child of Providence.
Trumpet Thatcher, the daughter of Judy, the sister of Gregory, had called a horse. This was an ordered horse (there were still a few such), and not one of the wobble eyed not-quite-horses of the plains. Being an ordered animal, of its nature it obeyed her orders, and she rode it freely across the valley.
“He has not been followed, not closely at least,” Judy Thatcher called to her daughter, looking up from her writing. “The danger is not now. The danger is tomorrow, after he has left us for a while, when he may fall in with the destructed ones who have followed him (but not closely), when he might bring them, if he is of the treason.”
“Nevertheless, I will ride and look,” the girl named Trumpet called. And she rode and looked.
The long, lean, young man seemed uneasy at the speculation that he might belong to the treason. He was tired eyed, but he was not yet truly wobble eyed. He was wordless and not quite open, but he seemed to have a sanity about him. That he was of the torture meant nothing; he might still be of the treason.
He had been lashed and gashed and burned and broken, that was true. It had been done to him in other years, and it had also been done to him recently, within a week. But had he been burned and gashed and broken for the Faith?
Many of the unstructured persons now tortured themselves or had themselves tortured, sometimes to try to stir their tired sensations, sometimes out of mere boredom. It was a last sensation of those who had sensationalized everything. But the threshold of pain of those tired ones who had almost disappeared; the most severe pain would hardly stir them from their drowse. It wasn't the same with them as if an alive and responding person were tortured.
The tired-eyed young man said that he was named Brother Amphirropos. He had come to Judy Thatcher, one of the Twelve, and asked for a Letter. This she could not refuse, even if the giving of it meant her life. She gave the letter now, and perhaps her life, with great sweeps of writing in a rowdy hand out of a rowdy mind. She was a special figure. Two thousand years ago she'd have been a male figure and yet that is not quite correct. The Twelve, in their office, had always been hermaphrodites for God. So was Judy in her special moments.
Yet she wrote with difficulty, for all the free-handed sweep of her writing. There are things hard to write, there are things impossible. She dipped her calamary pen in lampblack and in grace and wrote to somebody or something that might no longer be in existence.
Gregory had cleaned up the visitor and his clothes. The visitor rested on cool stones by the stream. He was wordless, he was almost eyeless, he gave out no confidence at all. It would have been so easy to slay him and bury him there under the cottonwoods and then be off a few quick miles before dark. He had no papers, he had no recommendations. He knew the Sign of the Fish, but there had been something unaccustomed and awkward about his way of giving it.
Gregory had gathered a quantity of wild wheat. He threshed it between the palms of his hands, keeping the good grains, blowing the awns and glumes of chaff away. He threshed a good quantity of it. He ground it between quern stones which were naturally about on the plain, ground it fine to flour for the small bread, and coarse to meal for the large bread. He built a fire of cow chips, put a flat capstone or oven stone over the fire on which to bake the two breads. The small bread (which, however, is larger than the world) he mixed with water only and put it, unsalted and without leaven, on the oven stone. The large, or meal bread, was salted and leavened and kneaded with cow milk, and was then let to rise before it was set on the stone to bake.
Trumpet Thatcher, fine eyed and proud, returned from her circuit ride. Her good eyes had missed nothing, neither flight of birds nor cloud of dust nor unusual drifting of cattle as far as any of the distant horizon that could be seen from the highest ridges. There was no enemy within three hours ride of them, none within seven hours walk, and the stranger, Brother Amphirropos, had come on foot. Or had he come on foot? Trumpet Thatcher, a strong and freckled girl, was now freckled with blood and it was not her own. She took a packet to the stranger.
“It is yours,” she said. “You will need it when you leave.” It was a small, heavy saddlebag, but she handled it as if it were light. And the stronger went white-faced and kept silent.
Trumpet set to work to dig a pit. She was a strong girl, two years older than Gregory, and she dug easily. Also she dug with a queer humor. The pit should have been nearly square but she made it long and narrow. Sometimes she looked at the Stranger-Brother Amphirropos as though measuring him with her eyes, and he became very nervous.
“It is long enough and deep enough,” she said after a while. Indeed it was long enough and deep enough to serve as grave for this stranger if it were intended for such. Trumpet put cow chips in the bottom of the pit and set fire to them. Then she put in wood from felled cottonwood and sycamores that lined the stream. It gradually grew to a rousing hot fire.
Judy Thatcher looked up and grinned at the shape of the pit her daughter had made, at the joke she had been playing. And Judy became a little more serious when she observed the shaken appearance of Brother Amphirropos.
“It is time,” Judy Thatcher said then. She set her writing to one side of the providential flat rock, that rowdy looping screed on which she had been laboring so seriously. She brought the small bread to the providential rock. She also set out water and wild wine from gone-feral grapes.
“Brother Amphirropos, is there something you should say to me or I to thee, either apart, or before my two?” she asked clearly.
“No,” the Stranger-Brother said shortly.
“We begin it then,” Judy declared. Her two children and the Stranger-Brother gathered around her. She said ordered words. She did ordered things. She structured, she instituted, she transformed. She and they (including the strange Brother Amphirropos) consumed and consummated. The small bread and the small wine were finished. Judy washed her hands with the small water and then poured it Into the porous earth. She returned then, smiling and powerful, to her writing.
Trumpet Thatcher put the large bread on to bake.
Gregory ordered a young bull of six months to come. It came, it nuzzled him, it was an ordered young bull and a friend. It went down before him, on foreknees first as though kneeling to him, but that is the way cattle go down. Then down with its high haunches also and on the ground before him. It rolled its head far back into the bulging of Its hump. Gregory and the young bull looked eye to eye. Then Gregory cut its throat with a whetted knife.
They strung the young bull up on a tripod of cottonwood poles. Trumpet understood how to aid in this. Brother Amphirropos didn't quite. He was clumsy and unaccustomed to such labor, but they managed. They skinned the animal down. They cut and separated. They set portions of fat aside. They put large parts of ribs and rump into the burning pit to be seared and roasted.
Trumpet made a frame of poles meanwhile. She cut a great quantity of bull meat into long narrow strips and put them on the pole frame to dry in the wind and the smoke. She did other things with other parts of the animal, set aside in crocks blood that she had drawn and further fat. The great intestine and the stomach she had out and everted. She washed them seven times in the stream, using lime, ochre mixed with bone ash (from the bull's own bone), gypsum, soap, soda, natron, and salt in the water for the seven washings.
The large bread was finished. Trumpet Thatcher brought it to the broad providential stone.
They had butter and honey with it. Gregory brought aromatic roasts from the burning pit. They cut and broke and feasted, the four of them. They had cider and small wine. They had milk and cheese. They had blackberries and sand plums and feral grapes. They had sour cider for sauce. They feasted for quite a while.
Two coyotes came and begged and were fed. They could have all the small meat they wanted on the plains, but they loved the big meat that had been roasted.
“Will you be staying the night?” Trumpet Thatcher asked the Stranger-Brother Amphirropos.
“No he will not,” Judy the mother answered for the stranger. “He must be gone very soon, as soon as we have finished, and I have finished.”
“I'll make him a sling of provender then,” Trumpet said. She cut a length of the bull's intestine and knotted it. She took strips of the beef that had been wind-drying and smoke-drying and sizzled them in the fire of the pit. She stuffed the length of intestine with them. She melted fat and poured it in with the meat, added honey and berries and grapes, scaled it with more fat, and knotted it finally with the second knot. It was a twenty pound length.
“Take it with you,” Trumpet told him.
“I'll have no need for a great thing like that,” the Stranger-Brother protested.
“You may have need,” Gregory growled. “The treason cuts both ways. You may have to ride hard and fast when it is accomplished, or when it has failed. You can live on that for a very long time. I doubt if your days, will near come to the end of it. Mother, are you not finished yet?”
“Yes, I am finished. It's a short and inept thing, but it may carry its own grace.”
This was the letter (it was titled Epistle to the Church of Omaha in Dispersal):
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 139