Not To Mention Camels

by R. A. Lafferty

  But Pilgrim was leaving this life and this world tonight, and he had not overplayed his hand for the short time that he had left. He would leave a death’s-hand on his fortunes, and a death’s-hand is often harder to remove than a living hand. And tomorrow there would be in the arena an alternate, a parallel, a newly arrived Pilgrim who would have all the Pilgrim brains and daring, and a certain transworld impetus besides. He’d have the advantage that spook-arrivals from other worlds often have.

  “We are always on our own in things like this,” Pilgrim told himself and his sensing parallels. “We will do our corporate best, and we will bring many persons of us to bear at one point wherever the going is tricky. We get better at this all the time.”

  And Pilgrim and the knacker worked rapidly and with intuitive illogic. They printed, they planted, they cut and trimmed, they instigated, they pulled canny strings on deadfall traps. And they documented. Then, in a quick hour, Mary Morey and her brother James were back to the All-Effects Hall with the laden and groaning dray.

  It was the biggest load of gold in the world, but it came humbly dressed in sackcloth and ashes. Some of the rough sacks were bursting open from the weight of their metal, and the gleam shone through the ashes and trash that are commonly used to cover gold shipments.

  Even Pilgrim was impressed. Even the knacker was. One does not come on fortunes like Mut’s (Strength-in-Purity Cult, Strength-in-Serenity Cult) every day.

  “I’ve no greed in me at all,” the knacker said. “You take eight parts, and I take one. You take all the loot of the other eight men, including the empires of that good man Evenhand. And I will take all the gold of Mut that these young persons have brought. What does it weigh?”

  “A bit over twenty-six thousand kilograms,” James Morey said.

  “Thank you, good young people. Thank you, good strong dray,” the knacker said. “Now we will take this gold quickly to—”

  “We will take it nowhere till you have finished your job, knacker,” Pilgrim Dusmano said. “You have not yet knackered the material remains of Wut, who is rage or mania. Wut is very, very rich. I want that rageful property processed at once. Then we will see about dividing the gold of the Mut Cult which gleams here so beautifully.”

  “There’ll be no dividing the Mut gold,” the knacker warned. “It’s all mine.” And he was weighing the three of them with his eyes. He would draw this out a bit. There was a leftover situation here that would go away in a few moments.

  “I never finish a job till I have been paid in full. Dusmano, we’ve completed the processing documents for eight men and eight fortunes. And you are impatient for the ninth? No, we will hold rich Wut over. Let me have all this Mut gold stowed safely in a place of my own; let me have it received and garrisoned by my own people. Then we will come back here and process the fortune of Wut. Really, his should be slightly greater than that of Mut, though not in so delightful a form.”

  “Mary!” Pilgrim Dusmano called sharply. “Quickly, quickly!”

  Pilgrim also understood about the leftover situation here that would go away in a few moments. Mary and James still had their numinous strength, till it should falter. Mary pinioned the knacker. Then she began to mutilate him with a knife. Had he needed to document so strong a numinosity in these two young people?

  “James, quickly, quickly!” Pilgrim called, and James began to shovel and throw gold into the furnace that Pilgrim had already fired.

  “You told me to be careful that I did not harm or break anything, did you not, knacker?” Mary laughed as she opened the belly of the knacker without harming or breaking anything much. She worked with almost surgical precision. “And you said that numinosity was always accompanied by exceptional strength. Oh, it is, and I’m in love with it. Pardon if I hurry, knacker-man, but we all know that my strength is for only a little while.”

  It became more difficult then. Mary was emptying the visceral cavity of the knacker-man, and this cannot be done without harm or breaking. Her numinous godly strength had ebbed, but that of the mutilated knacker-man was gone completely.

  “You break thieves’ honor, Dusmano,” the knacker gasped in his torture.

  “I know, I know,” Pilgrim gloated. “How slow thieves are at understanding that in the postanarchic world thieves’ honor has become a patchy thing! But I build my own honor so high that no one can see just how broken it is.”

  “You throw away the Wut fortune for the glittering Mut hoard, which is less,” the knacker grunted slowly and painfully. “And you make a strong and dangerous enemy—me.”

  “Dying enemy, how will you touch me? But maybe I do not throw away the Wut fortune,” Pilgrim said. “I am no mean knacker myself, and I have just been watching the best knacker in the world at his documentation. I’ll try it myself on the Wut holdings. And I worry not at all that a dying dog should hate me.”

  “I’m onto as many tricks as you are, Dusmano,” the knacker gave out in agonizing gulps. “I also am leaving this world today by your decision. But you thought I knew not what to do nor how to handle it. These things I do know. For your intemperance, I leave the world now, several hours before you do. I’ll prepare a welcome for you in a new place, man. Oh, how I’ll prepare a welcome for you!”

  “You’ll go to no new place, knacker,” Pilgrim said. “You don’t know how.”

  “If you’d touched me yourself in any of this murder, I’d have had you spooked, Dusmano,” the failing knacker moaned.

  “Yes, I know,” Pilgrim said placidly. “I know about the bad-death touch of the knackers. Several times you thought to lunge to touch me. You couldn’t have done it.”

  Mary Morey was now having more trouble with the limp knacker. The exceptional strength that always accompanies numinosity had faded clear away, now that the numinosity was gone. It didn’t matter, except that the going was slower. The strong knacker was dying, and now he was far beyond resistance or words. The molten gold was ready to be poured from the flash-furnace.

  “We will want a better expression than that for a cult figure, knacker,” Pilgrim gibed at the eviscerated man. “We want the expression of one who is looking into the innermost depths of something. Please, please, we want an interesting expression. And yours is dull.”

  Mary Morey went out from the All-Effects Hall.

  “His expression will change when hot gold is poured into his cavity,” James Morey said. “But I don’t know whether it will change for the better or for the worse. Even if he is dead, his expression will change in some gaping rictus.”

  “There isn’t any better or worse that I know about,” Pilgrim said. “There are no such opposites in the postanarchic world. I want something cultish to show on that face. Eight-ninths-dead knacker, you are trying my patience sorely.”

  “It is ready, Mr. Dusmano,” James Morey said, wheeling the great, glowing bucket above the gape-belly knacker.

  Mary Morey came back into the All-Effects Hall. She carried the dead body of a goat-kid. Never mind where she had gotten it in so short a time, it was a small and recently dead body.

  “Dead-eyed knacker, look, look with your dead eyes!” she invited, and she put the small goat body before his ashen face and blank eyes. And at the same moment her brother James began to pour the melted gold into the body cavity of the knacker. Ah, a great pour! More than two hundred kilograms it was. The dying-dead body jerked, and a new expression came onto the death face.

  “You wanted all the gold, knacker. Now have it. Have a belly full,” Pilgrim said vulgarly.

  The expression on the new cult face that had belonged to the knacker was one that few people would understand. But animals, who have respected knackers for attending to their remains, just might have understood something of it. The face was a gaping rictus, yes, and it was so red that it was black. But in its death agony the face now showed the strangest compassion ever. Someone, something might understand it. The small goat body probably understood it. Even the people of the cult might understand it someday.
Cult people often understand much more than do their cult figures. There was a unique expression on this new cult face. It was the expression of one who was looking into the innermost depths of something.

  All the light and numinosity had gone out of Mary Morey then. She was once again a freckled, rusty-haired, unlarge girl who was in the middle of a tangled and worried adolescence. It’s worse when one is entangled with a cult figure. She sat in the bright light of the All-Effects Hall and gave herself over to dirty-faced weeping.

  The glowing bucket had done its work and was withdrawn. James Morey now maneuvered the lifting fingers of a big hoist under the body of the knacker. He lifted the body easily, with only a feather touch on the controls. Easy, easy, so that the body wouldn’t tear completely apart with its load of not yet solidified gold.

  And then the dipping of that body into the vat of the flash-furnace itself. Oh, it would be beautifully coated and plated there! It would come out of there as an authentic cult image, golden and startling. Give it a minute, give it five, measured only by the sniffling of Mary Morey.

  And then the new statue was hoisted out, dripping with the rippling fire of molten gold, ponderous and powerful, breath-catching with the pain and compassion of that slaughtering and knacking man who had died on a croaking catch of a last breath, and who had reacted after he was dead to the need of a goat-kid asking care and disposal.

  Mary Morey understood then, and gave the kid body that care and disposal.

  The gilded knacker hung there in the skylike height of the All-Effects Hall, pulsing with its own golden incandescence. The ponderous doorways between the All-Effects Hall and the Golden Grotto were thrown open, and the new cult statue was rolled out into the Grotto. Workmen were just completing a pedestal there.

  “Make another one,” Pilgrim Dusmano ordered. “We pre-empt this one.” The knacker-statue was set slowly onto the pedestal.

  “There’s a glow to it beyond the glow of gold,” James Morey said with a touch of fear. “I’ve never seen a thing like it.”

  “I have,” Pilgrim said. “You dipped it so well and so cannily, boy, that the soul had no chance to escape. It’s trapped inside, forever.”

  There was a sigh from the statue. There was contradiction in the sound of it. Cooling but still incandescently hot gold will sometimes sigh almost like that. Almost like. So will a soul, making a tricky escape, sound like that.

  “It needs a name!” Pilgrim called out, and raised his hands. It was as though he were commanding that a name should descend on the statue. “We must invent a name for it, a name that our cult people will spontaneously apply to it when they first view it.”

  “The name of it is ‘the Holy Knacker,’ ” Mary said. And that is the name of it to this day.

  James Morey stood in the shadows, out of the bright light of the All-Effects Hall, out of the cascading brilliance of the Golden Grotto. More and more often he stood in shadows these days. The gold lust and the blood lust had drained out of him, as it would never drain out of Pilgrim Dusmano. James was sobbing silently, but maybe not tearlessly.

  It’s a hard thing for young persons to be attached, body and soul, to a cult figure. It’s as though they became mere eidolons of an eidolon, mere graven images of a graven image.

  8

  To save a self, perdition bent,

  What does a ten-thumbed, murksome meddler?

  Which plea to God should he present,

  The unctuous umber-ella peddler?

  Golden Grimoire

  “Pilgrim Dusmano is such a good man,” Mary Morey said, “that I would change every name on everything else in the world rather than say that he was anything else. I will say that white is black, I will say that sweet is sour, I will say that up is down (and I’m not sure that it isn’t), and I will say that Pilgrim is a good man. What we need to do is convince the Lord of the Worlds of this fact. But how will estranged ones like ourselves even get an audience with him?”

  There were eleven of them sitting there in the sunlight of what Rhinestone Suderman said was “the last sunny day ever in this world for us.” These persons sitting in the sunlight were Mary Morey, Rhinestone Suderman and Howard Praise, who were students of Pilgrim Dusmano, as well as being disciples, catamounts, doxies, shills, and members of his cult. They were Clarence Music, who was curator of the Daylight Museum; Randal Muckman, who was a Media Lord; Judas Raffels and John Augustine, who were Doctors Medical; Spurgeon, who worked for Pilgrim in his commerces; Cordcutter and Fairfronter, who had many points of contact with Pilgrim Dusmano; and Noah Zontik, the umbrella man.

  There were eleven persons sitting in the sunlight, and one person, James Morey, sitting in the shadows. All of them were members of the Pilgrim Cult on some level.

  “Pilgrim is not merely the projection of one particularly dull person, as someone, probably myself, has said,” Noah Zontik was explaining. “He is the projection of several hundred very bright persons. And ultimately, as he becomes a living legend and his cult takes hold throughout the worlds and sends its eddies out and out, he will become the projection of millions of persons of all sorts.

  “And we project what we want to be. Apparently we want to be crawling evil things, for Pilgrim is such, even where white is black and up is down. Why are we like that? I don’t know. We aren’t bad individually, except where we touch him. But the cult is evil, and that evil is generated either in ourselves or in Pilgrim. Does a transmission belt become evil as it transmits, or is the evil to be found in the power source? Or is it to be found at the point of power reception? Is Pilgrim more than a receptor of power? Is there anything real about him? If there were, it would be very difficult to find it. But the transmission belt is transmitting apace. All of the projections are of some effect. Pilgrim does change and develop as he becomes more and more a center of interest. There are aspects of him that he is not at all aware of. And his unconscious has its fragmented existence in thousands of minds besides his own. He believes that these fragmented containers are parallel beings of himself. I believe they are ourselves, all who have ever taken part in his cults or incorporations, here or elsewhere. And I am a man who does not believe in an elsewhere, does not accept the multiplicity of worlds either parallel to our own or scattered afar. Nevertheless, if Pilgrim leaves this world and life tonight, I will leave also. I don’t believe in him, but I believe even less in myself without him. And I have a commission from beyond to guard him forever, and to share his destruction if I cannot avert it. I believe that I have this commission from beyond, but I do not believe in any beyond.”

  “And tonight he is leaving this world and we will not see him again,” Rhinestone Suderman mourned. “He has lighted a light in each of us—what matter if it gutters and burns with an uneasy and unorthodox reek? Will he remember or will he forget to blow out those lights again before he leaves? And what sort of things will we be without him, left to ourselves with our unpleasant and stenchy burning?” Rhinestone was a large young fair-haired female person.

  “He says that we will see him again,” Howard Praise reminded them. “He says that a parallel aspect of himself will come to us in his place.”

  “What is he, a Christus, that he should send us a Paraclete?” Fairfronter asked with false disdain.

  “Yes, he says he is exactly that.” Mary spoke like leaves. She sat freckled and unaccountably brilliant in the sunlight. Dappled and sun-beamed, she was daylight itself, freckled daylight with clouds roiling up behind her.

  “And he is, to us,” James Morey said out of the shadow.

  “Can we talk the end of the world away?” Howard Praise asked worriedly. “Can we not act? Or has our activation been transferred entirely to Pilgrim? Has he no care that he breaks worlds like eggs when he passes through them? Will this broken world be no more than a mirrored image of broken us and broken Pilgrim?”

  The bawling and roaring and gibing of crowds of people could already be heard in the middle distance, and the daylight was not nearly spent.
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  “I believe that ours is a peculiar world and that we are a peculiar people,” Noah Zontik said. “I doubt that most worlds are in the postanarchic era. I doubt whether many of them have even entered the period of full anarchy. The younger of you will not remember this, but here we had rejected all rule so completely that even now, in the post age, we will have no ruler unless he is anonymous and masked. And we will defame him at the least glance behind that mask. All we have to do is discover a human person behind that ruler and we will attack him to death. We will defame him and assault him to death if the Media Lords have their way about it. The Media Lords? They also are projections of ourselves. We have a lot of projections. We would have to be quite sick to have so many. We all have this blood lust for the murder of a ruler, but it cannot be a good thing, and ours cannot be a good age. But there is no one anywhere who has this blood lust as strongly as Pilgrim Dusmano has it, and he cannot be a good man. But if he is not good, then what are we? We make him a cult figure and a godlet. Well, perhaps he is the correct godlet for the postanarchic age.”

  “Have we not realized that Pilgrim himself is set up as a ruler, and that we ourselves are set up as his mask?” the Doctor Medical Judas Raffels asked. “But they’ll not trap him as he trapped Evenhand, as others have been trapped. They will shatter the mask (ourselves), and there will be no Consul revealed behind it. Pilgrim will have gone, the pieces of him scattered throughout a thousand worlds and a million minds, and there will be nothing left.”

  “Oh, he never did have a face,” the other Doctor Medical John Augustine said. “He always had to have a mask, even before he used the corporate one that is the cult. I seem to remember him, somewhere, possibly not here, as living in body after body, speaking out of them, slaying them when they proved bad cover, going on to others and bursting or slaying them in turn. Before he was a world-jumper he was a body-jumper.”