Not To Mention Camels

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Oh, maybe not. He wasn’t really alive. He had left off being alive, left off being a man a long time ago. Someone filled him with the god-goop long ago, and he believed in himself. But those things are always done for utilitarian purpose. The peasants on that side are supposed to believe; we on the manipulation side may not believe in our own galopading goop. The run-amuck ones have always been a trouble. And Og tells me now that the Polder was ‘protected.’ Well, I understand the small animations, and he isn’t any more intricate. A touch of the galvanic shock and we’ll have him fixed as bad as ever.”

  Bogus set further special modifications into the dangling control of the Hand. The Hand came down again, caught Polder up, and moved him to a shock-plastic yard. It lifted him in between two very large brass balls that were opposite members of a giant condenser. The operator of the shock-plastic manufacturing company built up the voltage on the condenser, up and up to the flash point. It flashed.

  And Polder Dossman twitched with apparent life.

  “Real life cannot be restored by galvanic shock,” Jake Mara protested fretfully.

  “No. But eidetic life can be,” Bogus said, “which is proof positive of what we are dealing with.”

  For Polder Dossman was alive. Whether his was only a Media-created, eidetic life or whether it was a real life is something that will have to be argued out between the eidetics and the reals. The Hand from Heaven set Polder down on his feet and patted him on the head.

  “The thirst, the thirst, the terrible thirst!” Polder croaked with thickened tongue as he clasped his own throat.

  “You’re wrong, Bogus,” Og Scath exclaimed. “His life is real. Eidetic contrivances do not suffer resurrection thirst on being reanimated.”

  “No, of course they don’t. But sometimes they think they do. They mimic living forms in both mental and physical processes.”

  Water, green camel milk, and whey were brought to Polder Dossman. He drank nervously and noisily. He shuddered and moaned and drank some more.

  “Now you will just get busy and make it up to him, Bogus!” Moira was saying hotly. “You will modify that Hand to give him every benefice we can imagine, or we’ll have you for illegal tampering.”

  “Aye, you have me where I’m short, young lady,” Hector Bogus said. “I’ll do what I can. That’s the only Hand on this world, so I don’t know much about them.”

  “You’re the only one who knows anything about them. Now then, we want low, rumbling thunder about him all the time,” Moira said, “and we want it to conform to this beat.” She gave Bogus a notation or score. “It’s our cult tune or chant. And lightning should be flickering around him constantly. Not just any little lightning; we want sky-high stuff.”

  “Aye, we’ll make a hot Hand of it all,” Bogus said glumly. Polder Dossman looked mighty disheveled and sick. “It’s grotesque when an experimental contrivance like Polder goes out of control and becomes a cult figure,” Bogus complained. “Ah, why do even the people of no brains at all follow such a fellow?”

  “And Resurrection Roses, the towering aroma of them—” Moira was enumerating.

  14

  A tidal wave, a forest fire

  So hot and strong that nothing caps it,

  A juggernaut, a gobbling pyre;

  What power ventures to collapse it?

  S. Smith, Cup to Lip Compendium

  “Ovations, Triumphs, Exultations, Accolades, Fanfares, Flourishes, let them all pour out! Let the days be scandalous with loud light and the nights be sleepless with shouting! Let it be the millennium, the thousand years, or the thousand days! As if there were a difference!” Moira Mara was giving the orders for the thing, and Hector Bogus was making halfhearted notes.

  “That’s enough,” Bogus said. “However did I become eidolon-chief on this scurvy little world? We’ll give Polder a little noise for his cult, and a little sky-pageant. But we won’t overdo it.”

  “That is not enough!” Moira whooped. “Of course we’ll overdo it. We want spectacles, prodigies, monstrals, miraculi. We want everything.”

  “It will look better for everyone if Polder thrives,” the young-old man Og said. You eidolon creators, Bogus, you Media manipulators, you don’t want a failure hung around your necks.”

  “What matter. We’ve had many. And I believe that this Polder person has had many failures in other places. There may be human correspondences to Media creations, and I believe that this Polder is one. Many of the eidolon creatures in fact were originally human, and the Media superstructure was grafted onto the human person. And some humans had, from the very first, an orientation similar to those of Media contrivances. I suppose he’s flesh basically. But I wonder if he may not be partly of what is called cryptically ‘humpbacked flesh,’ that plastic, less-than-human substratum that gives us so much trouble. We don’t understand it really, and intuition is useless when one runs into the amorphous stuff. We’re going to destroy him. I wish it would be fun to destroy him, but it’s only fun to destroy a good person. Notice that sometime. Polder must be someone’s experimental model. We’ll have to find what has gone wrong with the experiment and make a report to the experimenter on whatever world he operates. I will get a writ and have Doctor Hans August and some of his associates examine him.” Bogus seemed worlds-weary and exasperated.

  “No, no, those doctors take one apart to examine one,” Jake Mara protested.

  Polder had begun to speak, loudly and eloquently, but it was in a language that none present could understand.

  “Oh, certainly, Polder will have to be disassembled,” Hector Bogus said. “He’s of no interest the way he is, but a minute investigation of his parts might reveal something. These persons of eidolon construction erected on a human base are pretty unstable. They world-jump a lot, for one thing. I’ve protested against such manufacturing. But we simply do not get really fine physical detail in completely artificial persons. And the human base should work all right, if we scrape it clean, if we assure that it will be no more than a base. I have preached to my colleagues here and on other worlds: ‘Be sure there’s no live spark left in one. Just one live spark can flame the most awkward tinder, and then we are left with an unpleasant and stenchy conflagration that walks and talks like a man. We should always terminate one that gets the “walk-abouts” and goes wrong.’ But many of my colleagues are themselves back-feed constructs of eidolon and human.”

  Polder was declaiming with wonderful power. None of those present could understand his words, but all of them understood his power a little.

  “It’s like the old sculptor who carved a statue of a sculptor complete with chisel and mallet,” Bogus said. “And the original sculptor put a bit too much of himself into the sculptor-statue. So that statue in turn carved a statue more sophisticated than himself. And that second statue carved a third, and so it went till there were nine of the statues or eidolons variously made. And the nine eidolons had progressed from the plain stone of the first one to the rapture-flesh of the ninth. Then they all turned on the old sculptor himself and began to unlimb him for his improvement. I tell you that won’t work. The basic human sculptor would be justified in obtaining writs for the disassembly and destruction of the nine images. And we are justified in getting a writ for the destruction of Polder Dossman.”

  Polder was speaking powerfully and movingly, but without literal meaning.

  “Fix his voice and expression,” Moira told Bogus. “The tone is fine and spirited and a little bit ghostly. But it isn’t making sense. Put some sense into it.”

  “I’m not doing it,” Bogus protested. “I hadn’t even begun to work on his voice or expression. That’s coming to him from somewhere else.”

  “I tell you, you are not justified in destroying Polder,” Jake Mara said harshly. “Better to destroy a hundred worlds than one such spirit as this. How would there be improvement if the first flesh should carry veto power over its superior derivatives?” That was more than Jake Mara usually spoke.

 
; But now all of them, even Hector Bogus, had become a little afraid of the power in Polder’s voice and person. There was nothing quite like that fiery eloquence in the unknown tongues. Even Bogus, who was supplying part of the effect, the tongues of fire that flicked in and out of the mouth of Polder, was impressed.

  “He is genuine,” Og said. “He has become one of the archetypes in the ocean that underlies every mind. He has become one of the Lords of the Zodiac. This is greatness.”

  “No,” Bogus objected, though he was becoming uncertain on the matter, “it isn’t genuineness; it isn’t greatness. It’s just the way the dice roll. Oh, little green eidolon-godlings! I just thought of something. What if he achieves highest and least known status of all? What if he becomes one of the seven Dice Throwers? There’s a vacancy, you know. Merope has disappeared to most of the worlds for near a decade now.”

  “But Merope, one of the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades, is female.”

  “Not necessarily; not always,” Og said. “Within my own type-memory, Merope has been seven times female, seven times hermaphrodite, and six times male.”

  “It would be odd if Merope were back in the sky tonight,” Jake Mara said.

  “Odd. It would be disastrous!” Hector Bogus exploded. “This misbegotten freak, and you his twitter-brained followers, have gotten clear out of hand.”

  Merope was back in the sky that night. Would she, he, have a hot hand for the dice? Would he throw them well for himself?

  “It does not really matter whether Polder has become one of the High Seven Dice Throwers,” Moira said. “But it must be believed that he has become one of the seven. I suspect, with the treasonable part of my mind, that he has not become either Archetype or Zodiac Lord. But it must be believed that he is these things; and I myself will believe it all with the more faithful parts of my brains.”

  And from that night on till the end of it, the cult movement was like a skyrocket. A skyrocket is a meteor that falls upward and is not consumed. The cult grew by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the millions, even. Every person who signed with the cult signed with a pen that writhed with cold, phosphorescent fire; but the new joiners believed that it was only their intense faith that kept them from being burned. And each new cult person received a tongue of fire that hovered over his head night and day and followed wherever he went.

  Polder spoke and blessed and cursed and withered and healed mostly in high gibberish in those days. But now and then he talked to Moira and Jake and Og Scath in almost rational speech out of a corner of his mouth.

  Polder sent a command to every ruler in that world to abdicate on a certain very near day. The cult, by intuitive accord and implementation, would take care of all the affairs of the world, Polder said. The abdication commands were also sent to all subrulers, province heads, county heads, business executives, bureaucrats, high and middle and low officials, and tacit leaders—about a million persons in all. These commands were sent out with individual handling and detailing, and all in the same day.

  That would take a large work force, would it not? No. No more than three or four persons were employed in the work. Intuitive Implementation really does work, to a degree. It takes the place of all addressographs and labeling machines, all gang-print machines, all mailing and dispatching. The messages were simply intuited to take form and to arrive in the proper time at the proper place.

  Some persons were puzzled at receiving their abdication commands; some were angry; some were frightened. But none of the persons on that world was puzzled as to the identity of the flaming cult figure Polder Dossman. The intuition of Polder’s personality was the strongest thing going out.

  Then Polder sent out twelve billions of sets of abdication commands to twelve billion worlds. The Intuitive Implementation was not quite so strong here, and the delivered messages were often a bit hazy. Was Polder biting off too much? Possibly. Not everyone on the twelve billion worlds intuited Polder’s personality. Here and there the messages encountered absolute incomprehension.

  But on his operating world, on his world of record, Polder began to hold very large meetings in the evenings. There were impossible circumstances connected to these gatherings, but the impossibilities seemed to be easily solved. It would seem rather improbable that a million persons could gather on a plot no more than a hundred meters on a side, and that each of these persons could be speaking to Polder Dossman at once, could be understood by him, and could understand him also, though he still spoke the convoluted high gibberish.

  There was a little resentment developing against this gibberish, and it irrupted into abrasive heckling. And the abrasive heckling quickly irrupted into a number of twitching corpses.

  But Polder performed massively. He received huge gifts; he spread out his beneficent hands; he thundered and lightened with casual movements of those beneficent hands; he blessed, and sometimes he cursed; he blew minds; he left cooling corpses twitching on the ground; he withered; and he healed.

  There was fear and trembling, there was lamentation, and there was high hope; there were the real goods certified and delivered. But was it possible that some fragment of humor had appeared in that cloud-wrapped, thunder and lightning eidolon-man at whom the mile-long finger of the Hand from Heaven pointed morning and night? Humor in Polder? Well, here was a person in great pain from a rotted and abscessed tooth and begging to be cured. And Polder did cure him of his pain and his poisoning. But did he restore the tooth to its original sound state, white and healthy and unblemished? No, not quite. He lanced and healed and drilled and filled that tooth, but he did not fill it with its own original substance; he filled it with a bogus-gold plug. And the plug even bore the stamp “Plugs by Suggs.” Suggs was a local dental supply and plug house. The creatures of every eschatological case laughed at that one.

  But Polder was startled by the laughter. “Find out why they’re laughing, Moira.” He spoke out of the side of his mouth to Moira Mara.

  “They’re laughing because it was funny,” she said.

  “Oh,” he grunted, and then he went into high gibberish again. But he still didn’t understand the laughing. Shouldn’t an Archetype and a Zodiac Lord and a High Dicer even understand his own joke?

  There were millions of healings though, hundreds of thousands of witherings, tens of thousands of simple blessings, a few hundred twitching corpses of hecklers and heathens. The heckler movement had lost momentum from so many of its practitioners being turned into twitching corpses. There had been those who guessed that the hecklers might abandon their tactic. They didn’t, though.

  For now there came a night meeting when the hecklers were stronger and louder and more bitter than they had ever been before. And they were better armed against the strike-dead tactic. Who had armed them against it, and how? This was the eve of the great abdication and take over day, and a feeling of powerful confrontation had been building up. There had even been threats that the cult might be defied. But the hecklers tonight did not seem to be of the ruling or official consensus. They seemed to be young and informed and determined and vengeful. Whatever could they be vengeful about?

  Polder watched it building up. He began to talk out of the side of his mouth to his closest people, not in high gibberish though, but in rational if somewhat nervous speech.

  “I am an Archetype,” he whispered melodiously in one of his golden asides. “I am a Zodiac Lord. I am one of the High Dice Throwers, and our dicing is another name for Fate. How can anything be happening that I do not know about? How can there be meanings hidden from me?”

  “Tin tongue, tin tongue. Empty barrel, broken bung,” some of the hecklers were chanting. How could they be so metallurgically ignorant? Polder was always known as the golden tongue, not as the tin tongue.

  “We don’t understand it either,” Moira said. “Can’t you kill them?”

  “I’ll try it again,” the baffled Polder pledged. He killed several persons in the throng with his lightning. Afterward he tried it on the hecklers. B
ut his lightning shattered on whatever shield they were using. The lightning blew back; it exploded; it rained fire on everyone except the hecklers.

  Polder attacked the hecklers electrically. But they were electrically shielded.

  Polder attacked them meteorologically, with whirlwind and plasma explosion. And they were meteorologically shielded.

  “Find out what you can about them, Jake,” Polder whispered furiously. “It’s important.”

  “A challenge, a challenge,” one of the hecklers was crying in a ringing voice. “Gibberish is no sign of power. Gibberish can be faked, and you fake it. But there is a test of power and faith that cannot be faked.”

  “Is Bogus crossing me?” Polder whispered angrily.

  “He says he isn’t,” Moira answered. “And some of the assaults you throw are his. But some are your own devices. The failures are your own.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Polder said. He healed three persons absentmindedly, and then he blasted one person dead. Change of pace—that’s always been the thing. Heal them all, and they will no longer come to you in fear and trembling. But why was he not able to blast the hecklers tonight?

  Polder attacked the hecklers encaustically. He burned to death a few persons who were standing near some of the groups of hecklers, but he could not burn the hecklers. They were shielded encaustically.

  “The hecklers are angry because you have killed the children of some of them,” Jake Mara said as he arrived back with the hasty information. “There are some of these people who consider the killing of their children as an insult. To them it’s as serious a thing as trampling their gardens or hewing down their trees.”

  “A challenge, a challenge!” many of the hecklers were chanting. “We challenge you to a display of power.” They made an increased noise about it, and one could not quite see what they were up to.

  “What do I do?” Polder asked in a whisper.

  “Accept their challenge,” Og Scath answered. “I am your shield and your protection and I tell you this. This shield-man tells you that it is sometimes a good idea to lower the shield and come out to unrehearsed meeting. You have more imagination than any group of hecklers, and you have infinitely more power. Anything they can imagine for a challenge, you can do it, or you can seem to do it. Rise to your heights, Polder. You haven’t really risen to your heights for several evenings now.”