Universe 4 - [Anthology] Read online

  “Whatever are you talking about, Barney?” Cris asked, puzzled.

  “Kinship, apposition, parallelism, the riddle of flesh and of election. Austro was found in Ethiopia, on the Guna slopes, northwest of Magdala. But there is another Magdala, more blessed by its circumstance and location; it is near Tiberias on the shores of the Lake of Galilee. Its first name (the first name of both of them, I suspect) is Migdol, the Watch-Tower. Tell me the kinship between the two cities (there are very many analogs and references to the Two Cities) and then perhaps I can tell you the kinship between Austro and ourselves.”

  (Austro, the houseboy and bartender, was of the species called Australopithecus, which is either ape or ape-man or man: we don’t really know. He could speak only one word, “carrock,” but he could speak it in a hundred different ways. And he had now learned to read and write very hairy English.)

  (Loretta Sheen was a life-sized sawdust-filled doll: Barnaby always insisted that this object was the body of his real daughter Loretta. We all knew Barnaby very well from boyhood, but there was a cloud here. We couldn’t remember for sure whether he had ever had a real daughter or not.)

  (Mary Mondo was a ghost. Actually she was the schizo-personality of the ghost of a girl named Violet Lonsdale who was long dead.)

  Few households have three such unusual persons.

  * * * *

  “I believe that Austro is a qualified col to us,” Harry O’Donovan tried to explain in his rather high voice. “In Irish, col means first a prohibition, a sin, a wickedness; and only after that does it mean a cousin. So first cousin (col ceathar) really means first impediment or first wickedness, and second cousin (col seisear) really means second impediment or second wickedness. But there is (yes, you are right, Barney) another relationship whose very name is forgotten. Perhaps it is col carraig or rock cousin. Whyever did I think of a thing like that? Tis flesh which is the opposite of rock. But this outside thing is at the same time a holy and a forbidden relationship. It is the Flesh Between.”

  “Has anyone ever sounded the real meaning of Dutch Uncle?” Cris asked. “Frisia (which is Dutch) was the latest home in Europe of some almost-men or early-men.”

  “In Greek, cousin is exadelphus,” George Drakos contributed as he studied the thing, “the out-brother or outer-brother. But it isn’t an old word. The old word for cousin is unwritten and forgot. And yet there is, or there was, another kindred name (as Barnaby says) that is not father or mother, not son or daughter, not brother, sister, niece or nephew, not uncle or aunt or maternal grandfather. There is another and expunged relationship name, I agree: and it does represent an expunged flesh. But all expunged things leave traces.”

  “Austro is such a trace,” Barnaby insisted. “He is the flesh between: not entirely expunged, though. Nor let us forget that we also have angelic and diabolic kindred. We’re a big family.”

  “Ishmael was a more moral and more upstanding man than Isaac,” Cris Benedetti said suddenly. “Why was Isaac more blessed? Why are we more blessed than Austro?”

  * * * *

  These were the four men who knew everything? They may have been. Do you know other men who talk like that?

  * * * *

  “Carrock, carrock,” said Austro, coming in and refilling Barnaby’s drink: spilling it too, for he was reading an old funny paper (Elmer Tuggle, it was) at the same time, and he wasn’t good at doing two things at once.

  “Rumble, rumble,” said that old unused room a few yards distant.

  * * * *

  3

  The past it is a big balloon,

  I blow it all I can.

  We all be ghost and all buffoon,

  A close, explosive clan.

  —Lines expressed by Mary Mondo

  (medium unknown)

  Several evenings later it was, in the same place, and the talk had turned to ancient libraries. I don’t know how it had. I came late.

  “The present explosion of knowledge is fact,” Barnaby Sheen was saying. “But there is also an occasional (though continuing) explosion of knowledge in another sense. One of the most false of legends is that the two great libraries at Alexandria, with their seven hundred thousand books or rolls, were deliberately destroyed, partly by Aurelian, more completely by Theodosius. That’s all false, I tell you. Those two royal gentlemen would no more destroy valuable books and scrolls than you royal gentlemen here would burn up hundred-dollar bills. They knew what things had money value, and those old book-rolls had it.

  “The only thing correct about the story is the chronology. Actually the two libraries exploded: the one in the Serapeum in the time of Aurelian; the one in the Museum in the time of Theodosius.”

  * * * *

  Give him a while. Barnaby always liked to savor his own startling statements for a few moments after he had made them. Don’t ask him (for the while) what he’s talking about. He’ll clarify it in a few moments.

  * * * *

  “Austro really looks more like a big frog than like an ape,” Harry O’Donovan commented as the unusual houseboy ambled (is it more froggish than apish to amble?) into the room. Austro winked at Harry. Austro had learned to wink; he had also learned how to draw cartoons.

  * * * *

  “There is the leaky past, but it cannot leak out fast enough for safety.” Barnaby had taken up his tale again. He always came as directly as possible to a point, but the point was often a tricky one. “The staggering corpus of past events is diminished swiftly. More and more of the things that once happened are now made not to have happened. This is absolute necessity, even though the flesh between the lines (it is, I guess, the supposedly expunged flesh) should scream from the agony of the compression.

  “Velikovsky was derided for writing that six hundred years must be subtracted from Egyptian history and from all ancient history. He shouldn’t have been derided, but he did have it backwards. Indeed, six times six hundred years must be added to history again and again to approach the truth of the matter. It’d be dangerous to do it, though. It’s crammed as tight as it will go now, and there’s tremors all along the fault lines. As a matter of fact, several decades have been left out of quite recent United States history. They should be put back in (for they’re interesting, and we lived through parts of them) if it were safe to do so.”

  “Just what do you have in mind, Barney?” Cris Benedetti asked him.

  “I have never discovered any historical event which happened for the first time. Either life imitates anecdote, or very much more has happened than the bursting records are allowed to show as happening. As far back as one can track it, there is history, and I do not mean prehistory. I doubt that there was ever such a time as prehistory. I doubt that there was ever uncivilized man. I also doubt that there was ever any manlike creature who was not full man, however unconventional the suit of hide that he wore.

  “But when you try to compress a hundred thousand years of history into six thousand years, something has to give. When you try to compress a million years, it becomes dangerous. There comes the revenge of events left out.

  “Were there eight kings of the name of Henry in England, or were there eighty? Never mind: someday it will be recorded that there was only one, and the attributes of all will be combined in his compressed story.

  “There is a deep texture of art and literature (no matter whether it is rock scratching or machine pressed) that goes back over horizon after horizon. There is the deeper texture of life itself that is tremendous in its material and mental and psychic treasures. There are dialects now that were once full vernaculars, towns now that were once great cities, provinces that were nations. The foundations and lower stories of a culture or a building are commonly broader than the upper stories. A structure does not balance upside-down, standing on a point.

  “A torch was once lighted and given to a man, not to a beast. And it has been passed on from hand to hand while the hills melted and rose again. What matter that some of the hands were more hairy than others? It
was always a man’s hand.”

  “It may be that you are balancing upside-down on your pointed head, Barney,” Harry O’Donovan told him.

  “It may be, but I believe that is not the case. Atrox Fabulinus, the Roman Rabelais, reconstructs some of the omissions and compressions in the form of fables. It is a common belief that a fable is less weighty than history and less likely to break down the great scaffold; it was a fabled straw, though, that broke the camel’s back (a real event). We know from Atrox that there were three Roman Kingdoms, three Roman Republics, and three Roman Empires, each series extending for more than a thousand years. We know that some of the later Roman Emperors (as today presented in history) are each composed of several men who may be a thousand or more years apart. We know that some of the more outré and outrageous of the Emperors (and Kings and Tyrants and Demagogs and Rebels and Tribunes) are no longer to be found in proper history at all. Clio is a skittish muse and very fearful of the breakdowns.

  “Yet Humerus Maximus and Nothus Nobilis and Anserem-Captator and Capripex Ferox were in reality men of such bursting vigor and feats that history has not been able to contain them. But their suppression shouts at us and shocks us.

  “And it goes back many times farther, the stone pages that have been crowded (for a while) out of history. It was clear man from the beginning, but at its earliest it was man in an ape suit.”

  * * * *

  Austro had a bunch of patio blocks (thin concrete blocks) under his arm. Austro was very strong and he carried two dozen of them easily. He was drawing cartoons on them; no, he was drawing primordial pictures: they are almost, but not quite, the same. He drew with a bone stylus and used an ocher and water mixture for his paint. How had he known to do that? He showed his drawings to the saw-dusty Loretta Sheen and to the unbalanced ghostly Mary Mondo. They laughed gaily at the drawings, and then they laughed with a peculiar pathos.

  Mary Mondo brought some of the stones to us. We looked and laughed. Then we looked more and laughed less. They were sharp cartoons, striking caricatures. They were something more. Once there was a species to which humor was more important than seriousness. Once there was a species so vivid and vibrant that it had to be forgotten by history (and Austro was a member of it). But, for a moment there, we almost knew what kindred Austro was to us.

  * * * *

  “François, the French Rabelais, pulled greater tricks than did Atrox,” Barnaby Sheen was saying. “As you have probably suspected, there are a full thousand years lost out of the Lower Middle Ages. History ran up to the year fourteen hundred and fifty-three once, and then reverted to the year four hundred and fifty-three. It was a much different Year Four Hundred and Fifty-Three than had been the first time, though. The Millennium really has been and gone, you know. It’s forgotten now; it wasn’t what had been expected, but it was what had been promised.

  “Nobody promised you that it would be a thousand years of peace and prosperity; nobody promised that it would be an era of learning and suavity; and certainly nobody promised that it would be a time of ease and gentility.

  “It was the Millennium itself, and the Devil was bound for a thousand years. But he surely was not quiet about his binding. He clanked and howled; he shook the whole world and he caused land tides and sea tides. He caused mountains to collapse and people to go fearful or even to die literally petrified. And then the people discovered a cloud-capping and roaring humor in their tearfulness. A giantism appeared, a real awareness, a ridiculousness which has always been the authentic rib-rock of the world.

  “François Rabelais caught a little of that giantism and jollity. But it is banned from history (that thousand years) though it was more real than most things in history. History is too fragile to contain it. History, and all its annals and decades and centuries, would be shattered forever if these ten centuries were included.”

  “What happened afterwards, Barney?” Harry O’Donovan asked, “when the Devil was unbound again and we resumed the historical count (wrong by a thousand years, of course, but who minds that?) and things became as they are now? How are they now?”

  “Oh, the unbound Devil fragmentized (an old trick of his) and spread himself wherever he could. His is a feigned omnipresence, so there is a little of him in everything and every person. He believes (he isn’t really very bright) that he can’t be bound again if he keeps himself scattered. But his shriveling effect is on us all: we are no longer giants.”

  * * * *

  “Barnaby, would you like your daughter to be carrying on seriously with an ape-man?” George Drakos asked with the veriest bit of mockery.

  “There was never an ape-man, George,” Barnaby Sheen said softly. “There was, and there still is, this not-quite series of cousins for whom we miss the name. But it’s a ghostliness, not an apishness, that sets him a little apart from us who are his kindred. And my daughter (whether she lived in flesh or not I no longer know for sure) is now no more than a girl-sized doll full of sawdust and a few words or mottos. And yet she is more than that. If not a true ghostliness, then she has at least a polter-ghostliness about her. So has Mary Mondo.

  “The children, Austro and Loretta and Mary (none of the three is more than a child or at most an adolescent), are close kindred, closer to each other, perhaps, than to us. It is common, perhaps universal, that children are of a slightly different race (I mean it literally) than they will later become. But it is all right with them.”

  “When were the several decades left out of United States history, Barnaby?” Cris Benedetti asked him.

  “Early, and recent, and present, for I rather suspect that our own contingent present will not be firmly inscribed in the records. I’ll give but one example: there is the case of father, son, and grandson from one family, John Adams, John Braintree Adams, and John Quincy Adams being Presidents of the United States. I notice, though, that only two of them are now believed in, or should I say are now written in? The best of the three (wouldn’t you believe it? it’s always the best) has been left out. And part of the foreshortening, I believe, took place during our own boyhoods. There was much more happened there (three times more) than we are allowed to remember. Sometimes it seems that it was a million years and not just a couple of decades left out here.”

  “You don’t mean this literally,” said Harry O’Donovan. “You talk in parables, do you not?”

  “Am I Christ that I should talk in parables? No, I talk literally, Harry. These things have happened, or rather, they have been made to seem not to have happened.”

  “By what possible process could it have been done? It would have required a simultaneous and multitudinous altering of records and of minds.”

  “By the human process it was done, and I cannot say more about that mysterious process. It isn’t a natural thing, of course, for man isn’t a natural animal. He is supernatural, or he is preternatural or he is unnatural. I’m not sure which class this weird and repeating amnesia (with its mechanical adjuncts) belongs to.”

  “I suspect that I should professionally recommend you to an alienist, Barney,” said Dr. George Drakos.

  “I suspect that you should professionally study this problem yourself, George,” Barnaby said somewhat stubbornly. “Even medical men have good ideas sometimes.”

  * * * *

  “Did there used to be a funny paper named Rocky McCrocky?” Harry O’Donovan asked the ceiling (he always sat leaning far back in his chair). “It was about, it seems, cave men.”

  “I don’t remember it,” Cris said. “If there had been one, John Penandrew would know, but we seldom see John in these latter times. There was Alley Oop, of course, and later B.C. And many of the others, Happy Hooligan, Down on the Farm, Her Name Was Maud, Boob McNutt, Toonerville Trolley, were troglodyte or cave-man funny papers in disguise.”

  “I wonder if the, ah, troglodytes themselves had funny papers?” George Drakos asked.

  “Certainly,” said Cris. “Has not Austro just been making such funny papers and passing them
around? And he is a troglodyte, or a troll, which is the same thing.

  “And our older rock-uncles (they of the kindred forgotten, of the flesh between) have left such funny papers in thousands of places. Mostly they were scratched on slate-rock or on limestone or on old red sandstone; and they had, it seems to me, the intensity and context almost strong enough to move mountains.”

  “By the way,” Barnaby Sheen said dreamily, “there was once an explosion or implosion of certain archives or annals at Migdol which in fact did move a mountain. It was quite a strong blast. And we are inclined to forget just what an explosive pun is the word ‘magazine’ in its several senses. For it means a periodical publication, which is to say a Journal or Annals. But it also means a depot in which explosives and ammunition are stored. Every library, I believe, is a magazine in both these senses, and I use the word ‘library’ quite loosely.”

  “You’ve nibbled at it from every edge, Barnaby,” George Drakos said. “You might as well go ahead and tell us what you mean when you say that the two great libraries at Alexandria exploded, and when you say that the archives or annals at Migdol (the Magdala of the more blessed location, I presume) exploded so violently as to move a mountain.”