R. A. Lafferty - Melchisedek 03 - Argo

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VOLUME THREE:
ARGO
"Sine Patre, neque Finem,
Tu Melchisedech ordinum,
Panem proferens et Vinum."
[Bascom Bagby. Letters After I Am Dead.]
He, whoever he was, stirred out of a sick sleep into a frozen and
fitful fear of falling. He supposed that he was a man of the human sort, as
he usually was when he woke up in such a turmon. It seemed as if he had
always had these horrifying awakenings, and now as usual there was a
horrifying reason for it.
His stirring had caused him to sup another notch and to dislodge
something else of whatever was holding him up. And what had woke him up was
the sound of substance falling, through the frozen air, to a very great
distance down. He felt insecure, and he realized that most of what he had
been lying on had now vanished into space.
He was in a shallow notch of the very high reaches of an ice-coated
cliff. And that cliff was slick. There was an icy gale blowing, and ice was
falling in glops of many tons, falling and falling for a mile or more. He
seemed to be in a sleeping bag that threatened to spill him out upside down.
An ice support was eroding and breaking away under him, and the bottom of
the cliff was out of sight in the darkness. Whenever he shifted to get into
a more safe position, he dislodged more of his support.
"Kaloosh!" came the sound when the first and largest portion of the
dislodgcd snow-ice finally hit far below. He had changed position three
times while it fell. It was a thousand mcters or more straight down. His
head was out over the abyss and he gawked down into the white darkness.
White darkness? Yes, such frosty surroundings do provide a white
darkness at night.
"If I am a man, I can reason," he said, and his voice dislodged
still more of his support. His voice had been doing something else, and his
out-loud comment had provided a jarring conflict. Now he seeme to be tilting
downward on the disappearing icy ledge at an angle of more than sixty
degrees. "If I am a man, I can reason," he said soundlessly this time, being
careful to set up no disturbance with the vibration of his voice. "If I can
reason, I need not be afraid. If I am afraid of such a little thing as death
by falling, then it will not matter whether I fall. What falls will be
worthless. (Who is singing that damned song?) If I were afraid, it would not
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be my own heroic self that fell. If it is not my own heroic self, it will
not matter whether it dies. There is a person who is trying to remind the
me-in-another-place to awaken to further life and to further inventions. He
reminds me that I can say to bodily death 'I will go with you, only not
yet'. Man, are you ever caught in a 'continued in next chapter' hiatus! The
suspense, the suspense! What will we do about the suspense!"
And somebody was still singing that damned song:
"I'm stuck in peril most extreme,
Hi, Ho!
On morning danger is the theme!
Hi, Ho!
My enemies will soon prevail.
Oh where's a bailiff for my bail?
The wind is blowing quite a gale.
My fall will leave me plain un-hale.
I'll bust my head and bust my tail.
Hi, Ho! the gollie wol."
Aw, it was himself singing that stuff. It was the galey wind that
gave it its strident tone. So he went with another bit.
"It's great to be young and in danger,
Hi, Ho!
It's great to be young and in danger."
Then he saw that he was not in a sleeping bag at all, but was
wrapped only in half a dozen very long and very warm threads. He recognized
them as a few combings from the Original Great Fleece of Colchis. So then,
wrapped in no matter how few threads of the great fleece, he could not
freeze and he could not fall and he could not die. Aye, he had been hung on
the cliff in an impossible position by an almost fatal fall. And he had been
left there until the next section of the adventure should begin. This was
sky-high adventure serial drama he was in, and it was also real as Ragnarok.
He slipped completely then, as he shifted once more, and slid clear
off of the precarious ledge or notch. But then he was dangling by one single
golden thread out over the abyss and he knew that he was perfectly safe. He
turned a fragment of the fleece outward to show its glint, and this quickly
brought an answering glint from the still unrisen sun. The fleece and the
sun were brothers. The sun now arose, a little bit early, being wakened by
the greeting.
Then the man saw his ship very far below, possibly half a mile. It
was frozen solid in blue ice, and three monkey-like figures were romping on
the tall and ice-sheeted rigging and rejoicing in the dawn. The man saw the
entire earth covered with ice, and he marveled at the solidly-frozen birds
hanging motionless in the high air, spread-winged and asleep. It was so cold
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that all physical forces were frozen up and inoperative.
The man flung gold threads of the great fleece upward and climbed up
them towards the top of the ice cliffs. He had spent one day climbing up to
his ice station, and now he would move more rapidly. There had been nothing
wrong at ill. It was just that Argonauts, from the hectic life that they
lead, do often wake up scrambled and with lost bearings. The main whistled
sharply, and the three monkey-like figures came off the tall rigging of the
ice-covercd ship and boned up the slick and frozen cliffs like inverted
cascades. They were wraiths, or at least of a lighter flesh, and they could
climb like ascending lightning. They brought ice axes with them, and they
were cheerful and ready for any assignment.
Reaching the top of the ice cliff, the man took a work order from
the breast of his chlamys and read it. He looked around for what should be
there. The three monkey-like seamen had already discovered it and were
attacking it with their ice axes. It wa a woman frozen in a solid block of
ice.
"No job too big, no job too small," the man said in his laughing
voice. "Sometimes a dozen jobs a day, from saving a lost cat to saving a
lost soul. Oh, this is in the nature of a vacation really, to have been
allowed to spend a night on the high cliffs that I love and to carry over
the rescue into the bright morning. We appreciate these little leisures when
they come to us. And there is probably a reason for drawing her out of the
ice."
The woman was ivory-fair, and her veins as shown through her flesh
and the ice were sky blue. The lids of her closed eyes were also of this
gentle and ghostly blue, as was the web-like flesh between her toes. The man
attacked the encasing pillar of ice as the monkey creatures also were doing.
They hacked and split great hunks out of the pillar and quickly sculptured
it down almost to the woman.
The woman woke up, and her blue eyes darted here and yon, following
the bladed axes. She grinned with her eyes at the magus (the man had already
remembered that he was a magus and he was quite close to remembering his own
name; morning forgetfulness were only temporary things to one piloting the
Ship Itself). The woman grinned with her eyes at the monkey-like creatures
also, and they echoed grins back at her. Her people and theirs had once been
in close league. There would be complete accord throughout this whole
company. The woman seemed to be as near akin to the scampering simians as
she was to the magus himself.
The womann cringed with mock horror whenever the axes came too near
to her, and she grimaced broadly when, now and then, an axe came absolutely
too close and bit her flesh to send out little red gushets on the inside of
the ice. Theese things do happen, however canny is the wielder of the axe.
The woman was probably beautiful, and she was wrapped in the blond skin of a
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female cave-bear. There were primordial and archaic aspects to her
appearance, but both the man and the monkey creatures smiled to show that
they liked her and the way she looked.
"How did you know where I was?" she talked out of the ice when a
crack in the pillar of it allowed her to move her chinless jaw. She spoke
with human sound but not with usual words. It was the vocalized
thought-speaking that primordial persons use so easily and understand so
universally. Later in the morning she would be using usual words, all of the
early people being fast learners. She had a swept-back face that was a bit
fish-like, and a bit teras-like, and a bit troll-like. Nice looking, but
behind that face she was toothed more massively than are most of the people
you know.
"I had a work order to come and get you and wake you up," the man
stid, "What a way to run a hotel! Someone leaves an order with the desk
clerk to be wakened in forty thousand years and it might not even be the
desk clerk on duty when that time comes around. And it was a hard cold
journey to come for you. Why couldn't you have used an alarm clock like
anyone else?"
"Oh poor you," the woman said, and a lot of her was already out of
the ice. She used words at random, but the expressions and messages were
clear enough. "I almost feel sorry for you," she was saying, "but I know
that you can't really be cold with those golden combings on you. We had
heard about them, but we could never find them. Oh poor monkey faces too!
But you don't resent having to come and get me, not when we are such good
friends as we really are."
"When I'm running The Argo (that's the name of the Ship frozen in
the ice below us there), I have quite a few of these work orders to fill,"
the magus said. "I never know where they come from or why, and some of them
do not seem to have much reason. This is the ship that can go where no other
ship would ever reach, the ship that can find places that would otherwise be
lost forever. But I like to understand my missions as well as I may. Who are
you?"
"Ewaglouwshkoul, of course," said the fair woman with that pleasant
big-mouthedness that so many of the older families have. "Who did you think
I was?"
"Oh, Little Eva, yes, of course. There's one in every era."
"The Neanderthal Eve, I suppose they would call me, using your own
words," she said, beginning herself to use a few real words mixed in with
her thought-speaking. "It would be a sort of nickname. But I'm not the first
woman of my tribe. I'm the last, I guess. There was only myself, and I
underaged, and thirteen of our fellows left, and things were going badly
with us. Every day we went out to fight and every day we got whipped. Then
our ghostly mentor suggested that some of us should go into cold storage for
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a very long time, and we would be awakened when things looked more peaceful.
I decided that I would go into freeze, and the thirteen fellows all took
different courses of action. One or two of them went into freeze also, I
think. And some others of them may have survived somewhere. If not, it's a
real loss. We have so much to give. I'm sure that there are a lot of my
half-blood kindred around, but we'd like to preserve the real thing if we
could. Pride in stock, and all of that. I was about to say that everybody
knows me, but the everybodies who knew me are mostly dead by now. Since I am
returned and refreshed and awake, I will immediately set about the business
of having children. They are needed."
"Don't look at me," the man said. "I'm a holy magus. I can't get
involved in such things, certainly not with a client on whom I have a work
order."
"Oh no, I didn't mean you. It will have to be one of the real ones
if possible. But how will I go about it? I'm of an unfallen nature, and
besides I'm pretty naive. I was only a child, really, when I had them freeze
me in this ice clock. I should have a designated mate, but any of the
thirteen would do if one of them were still alive. And there may have been
other bands of us who survived somewhere. I don't know whether there is any
chance of that or not."
"Were people of other bands also frozen in ice blocks?"
"No. Not all of them anyhow. The report was that most of them said
they would tough it out. But I guess that most of them are gone after these
forty thousand years. Do you know where there are any more of my kind?"
"No, not exactly," the magus said. "But I believe I do know where
there are several half-bloods. And I know where there are a few Groll's
Trolls, and they are pretty nearly the same thing. I'm all for the revival
of the more talented of the old races. Things were getting a little bit
bland without you."
"Does your work order say what you're supposed to do with me, holy
magus?"
"It just says to release you from the ice and wake you up, and to
take you to any sea port in the world that you designate."
"Do you have very many other work orders today?"
"No. Just a few. I am to pick up a man who has been waiting thirty
years for this ship to come. We make a lot of mistakes, but he's a patient
man and I believe that he's been enjoying himself. Besides, he's one of our
group. He is a Master of the Ship himself. I will just pick him up in a sea
port a third of the way around the world, and then he will travel with me on
a tour of duty. He is an accomplished seaman, as I am."
"Which sea port is it, magus?"
"Biloxi. It's in Mississippi."
"Thoose are names that sound a little bit like our kind of talk.
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Take me there too then. I don't know much about the different ports you have
now. Some of the ports we had would be underwater now, and somc of them
would be on the mountain tops. If Biloxi is a cosmopolitan place, then there
will be seamen of every sort who will come there. I will pick me out one who
is the closest to my blood. Soon or late some such will turn up. I'll get me
a saloon or a hotel where everybody passes, and finally one of them will
come. Papa ran a waterfront place named 'The Old Stone Ship'. We invented
ships and seamen, you know. I will find some of my folks somewhere, no
matter where I start. And I will save you a trip if you let me off at a port
where you are already going."
They all went down the great ice cliff. They blasted the ship out of
the ice, and they blasted a passage for it. They opened up a fresh water
stream with their explosives, and they filled their water casks from the
stream. They gathered dead fish from their blsting and filled their stores.
They killed blond cave bears to get bear grease to soften and make supple
their frozen lines, and to give a new bear cloak to Eva. The old one was
shedding after forty thousand years in the ice. They weighed anchor, and
they sailed.
"This ship sails against the wind, doesn't it?" Eva asked as they
were high-seaing it along. "Do you want it that way, or do you just not know
any better?"
"This is the best way, for The Argo," said the magus-man. "It's just
like a kite that will rise best against the wind. It goes against the wind
and against the waves, and did you ever see a ship move so smoothly and
rapidly?"
"Oh often, magus, often," Eva said. "We had such ships, surely, but
I was not expecting to see the more degenerate people having them. You've
come a long way while I was asleep. It must be a very interesting sort of
life, filling every different kind of work order."
"It's quite interesting, Eva. I foresee that I will die while
filling one over-interesting order soon, but that is to be expected. But
it's a pleasant life, and I do meet interesting people. And now I begin to
remember most of it about myself. But sometimes, is one becomes younger, it
takes longer to recollect oneself in the morning. But now it all comes to
me."
They sailed against the winds and currents to Biloxi.
2
"I will no more believe that there is a do-good ship sailing under
the flag of the Kingdom of Colchis, under patent of Divine Intervention,
crewed by ancient remnants of the Argonauts and by black giants, sailing
cavalierly through time and space and tampering with the future than I will
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believe in Divine Intervention Itself. Both the Ship and the Divine
Interventions are conceits of Melchisedech Duffey the mountebank. But belief
in the Ship Argo seems to have become cult belief of the month."
[Elwin K. Elkheart, Secretary-General of WSMA (affiliate of
WSMAASRTFM).]
The magus had now attained such clarity that he remembered his own
name. He was Melchisedech Himself, the King of Salem, the ship pilot
extraordinary, art dealer and life expert and sometime lover, adventurer
into futures, and righter of wrongs. In latter-day contexts, he was
sometimes named Melchisedech Duffey. He considered about the three
monkey-like or wraithlike seamen who served him; and they were persons that,
to some extent, he had made himself. And there were many more than three of
them. There were others in the galley, and off-duty here and there. They
were good seamen, when actual seamen were not always to be had. Then Duffey
considered the ship that he was sailing, the ship that had several times
borne the name of The Argo.
Melchisedech had never completely understood this ship, though it
was flesh of his flesh and ghost of his ghost. For all of the dozens of
different times that he had sailed on her, he could still get lost on her.
He could not even be sure how many masts she had: she had as many as were
needed for any voyage, and funnels too sometimes. And, also, she had
engines, whether or not it was proper that she should have them. There were
unfamiliar apartments and mansions on the ship. Sometimes there were
cavernous holds with stanchions and stalls for the many nameless animals
quartered in them. There were doors to which Melchisedech had no key, and he
was not even able to count the number of decks on her. And yet, from a
slight distance, she seemed trim and complete and almost small.
Melchisedech would sometimes come into fascinating and memorable
rooms and ward rooms and halls on The Argo, and he would not be able to find
those same places again. He would come to rooms where large numbers of
persons were talking and discussing gravely; he would find places where
groups of families, all unknown to him, were living. And there were booths
and shops and stores on the ship and even cottage industries were carried
on. Nobody really had any good idea of the size of the ship. The Bible gives
dimensions of one sort in the Vulgate and of another sort in the Septuagint,
and perhaps a third sort in the Hebrew. And there are any number of
different cubits, from nine inches to thirty-nine: and who can say which
cubit is intended? At berthing, The Argo would go into very small slips
designed for boats and not ships. And yet she would sometimes stand up as
till and long as any craft on the ocean.
There was an intiiiiate room, 'The Bread and Wine Room' on The Argo.
Very meaningful gatherings were sometimes held there. But, as to the present
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Argo, she was surely much smaller than once she had been. There was even the
opinion that the present Argo was only the ship's boat or the pinnacle of
the Great Ship Itself. And yet it carried all the relics and identifications
of the great ship: the wheel itself with the piece of the 'talking oak' set
into it, the molar of Noah buried in a ship's plank where he had bit down
and broken it off in exasperation at the irritations of the voyage, the cote
of the Special Dove (it isn't always remembered that this was a prodigious
dove with a wing span of more than ten feet), the grist mills and the grain
grinders that had been on the big ship for the feeding of all aboard. And
the name, and the log book itself, were preserved there. So was the original
lantern, the lantern that was so constructed that it would shine around
headlands and promontories and corners and show what was beyond them, this
while the ship was still a good distance from them.
It was the piece of talking oak in the ship's wheel that would give
the history of the ship when it was questioned. The ship, after it had been
The Argo or variants of the name those first few times, had been the
Navicula Petri or Peter Ship, and it served both as a fishing skiff and as a
salvation ship. It had been the Anthony Ship at Actium and had been shamed
there. It had been the flag ship of the great Abd-Aliah of the Sea, and the
famous daughter of Abd-Aliah had ridden on her. (Who does not love the
description of Abd-Aliah's beautiful daughter. "She had a face round like
the moon, and long hair and heavy hips, and black-edged eyes and a slender
waist, but she had a tail"?). Abd-Aliah of the Sea sold the Ship to Sindbad
of El-Basrah.
There was still a stunning Sindbad Lounge or drinking bar on The
Argo, to be in which was like being down underneath sun-drenched water with
the air filled with fishes, and with sands like gold. And yet these
decorations and appointments were much later than Sindbad's own ownership.
The magnificent and oceanic paintings in the lounge were, in fact, painted
by Count Finnegan in his youth. That was at a time when the Ship was named
the Brunhilde and was owned by evil men. The Holy Argo had the strumpet
habit of coming into the ownership of infidels.
The Argo, at different times in its sun-drenched and sea-drenched
history, had carried such dverse notables as St. Paul, and the Crusader
Godfrey of the Gate, and Mark Twain.
The ship had been named 'Land of Behest'. When St. Brandon sailed
her from Ireland to America that first time, when he had encountered the
great fish Jascoyne in her, when he had carried the traitor Judas in her
(and Judas was not the most hellish passenger ever to travel on the ship).
The Argo had once been a Saracen Ship, but she had been recaptured
from the Saracens by King Richard of England. She was named Salle du Roi
when Robert of Namur sailed her for another King of England. She was named
the Flying Serpent when Willy Jones sailed her in the Moluccas, and the
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Catherine when Dana Coscuin took her around the Horn. This is only part of
the history of the ship that was given by the piece of talking oak to anyone
who asked. And there were also whole rooms full of old log books of old
voyages, some of which lasted for centuries.
Melchisedech had the opportunity all that morning of reviewing the
history of his great ship, there being no one with him on this gusty trip a
third of the way around the world except the effigy seamen of his own
shaping and the beautiful woman whom he had taken out of the pillar of ice
that morning. And this woman was of an unfallen nature and was naive
besides, and beside she was too young for him, even in his new green and
youthful cycle. And yet there were many people on The Argo unbeknownst to
Melchisedech, and some of these made themselves manifest during the morning.
The unaccountable people seemed to be attracted to Eva and her
luxury bear skin wrapper and her fair ways. She was very popular, even
though she had been out of things for quite a few years. And so had some of
the mysterious passengers been out of things for a long time. Everyone who
had ever traveled on The Argo had left enough of his essence on her to be
able to make a wraithy return to her at any time. Some of these passengers
were curiously dated, but others were as current as the day.
Melchisedech was one of the very special persons who sometimes
served as pilot of The Argo. There are certain persons, and Melchisedech was
one of them, who live extraordinarily long lives. And they must pay for
their length of days with extraordinary service. The purpose of The Argo was
to sail anywhere in the world and to haul passengers and cargo that would be
too dangerous for other ships to handle; to open up dark lands and ports;
and to break up secret plots and conspiracies. It was also intended to bring
joy and grace to dark places, and to provide entertainment. It was, in the
primary sense, a show boat. And she was also the 'Hope Ship' for
unfortunates. "The Argo will come" was a promise among the promises.
There had never been another ship that knew all the seas and islands
and mains and promontories (each one with its own goat) of the world, and
all the salty sea port towns and raffish ports of call. The Argo also knew
all the migrating islands, andd all the (still more rare) migrating seas
that travel yearly from north to south with all their birds and fish.
What other ship had sailed all the seas: the Timor Sea and the Savu
Sea and the Arafura Sea? She had even, according to one old log on her,
sailed the Mare Nectaris, and that is on the moon. What other ship had
prowled the Molucca Sea and the Ceram Sea and the Banda Sea? What ship had
sailed the Java and the Flores and the Bali, the South China and the Andaman
and the Coral, the Solomon and the Tisman and the Philippine, the Mindanao
and the Visayan and the Sibuyan, the Japan Sea and the East China Sea and
the Yellow Sea, the Okhotsk and the Bering and the Kara, the Arabian and the
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Malabar and the Oman, the Ionian and the Aegean and the Marmora? What
memories did these not bring back to Melchisedech, for he had sailed on
every one of those. And those were only drops of water in the ocean of all
the seas that had been sailed by The Argo.
What other ship had visited all the shores of that most mysterious
of all seas, the Sea of the Seven Lost Years?
But do not ask too closely about that Sea of the Lost Years. There
were a lot of things about that most strange of all seas that neither
Melchisedech nor any of the other Pilots or Captains of The Argo understood.
It was not always a contiguous sea. In many ways, it was like the migrating
seas. Channels of it ran in the midst of other waters, and some of its
shores seemed to be very far inland. They seemed to be river shores and even
lake shores at times, rather than sea shores.
There had been one very early morning in Melchisedech's youth, in
his fifth or sixth youth, really, when Melchisedech had walked out onto the
river shore in St. Louis, just below the Eads Bridge, and had walked right
on to a low-lying boat. And it had been the The Argo in disguise.
Melchiscdech had then traveled on that ship for seven years, but not all of
it consecutively with much time out for land adventures (the land adventures
do not count in the Seven Lost Years, and neither are they deducted from the
years of life).
Melchisedech still encountered many stray days out of the Seven Lost
Years, and today may have been one of them. Some of those days were
separated from others by very wide spaces in between. And there is another
body of water (or anyhow of fluid), the Sea of Amnesia, that is connected
with the Seven Lost Years by a hidden strait.
No, no, there was nothing at all notable going on aboard The Argo
this morning, except a lot of loud hornpipe music and some carousing and
singing and laughing, with Eva and some other girls discovered somewhere on
the ship having a lot of fun with fellows of uncertain origin. Back to the
memories, Melchiscdech. Nothing at all is going on here.
Sea Islands, Mains, Promontories or Capes, Waterfronts. There have
been some great waterfront places. Remember the Fanged Fish at Ogopo and the
Benevolent Shark at Maule? Or the Drowned Whale, or Costerman's Whalers' Inn
or Octopus Joe's, or Salty Dog's Shack-Up House, or the Rusty Harpoon, or
O'Brien's Polynesian Palace, Ching Ling Charley's Doss House, the Barbary
Ape, the Sulu Ritz, Harold's Blow Fish Ball Room, the Sand Flea, Biddy's
Barracuda Bar, the Beacon Club, Kate's Neanderthal Bar, the...
"I wonder if Kate's Neanderthal Bar in Biloxi is for sale?" Eva
asked Melchisedech about the time he came to that place in his catalog of
memories. It was almost as if she had been reading his mind. She was flushed
a bit, from the rapid dancing and carrying on, but always she had her mind
open for business. "One of the seamen says that there's always a few of my
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruisw...0A.%20Lafferty%20-%20Melchisedek%2003%20-%20Argo.txt (10 of 72)23-2-2006 22:42:08
摘要：

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20do...en/spaar/R.%20A.%20Lafferty%20-%20Melchisedek%2003%20-%20Argo.txtVOLUMETHREE:ARGO"SinePatre,nequeFinem,TuMelchisedechordinum,PanemproferensetVinum."[BascomBagby.LettersAfterIAmDead.]He,whoeverhewas,stirredoutofasicksleepintoafrozen...

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