Not To Mention Camels, Page 3

  “But if it were not for the possibility of being trapped there, would you not like to see Prime World sometime, if only for its absolute uniqueness?”

  “Never, Noah, never. It could be called unique only in its being the dullest of all possible worlds. Prime World is where all the sordidness of mythology is still in existence. It is where compensation is calculated and extracted. It is the world where all facts are hard and there is no buoyancy at all. It is the base and anchor of the four final or eschatological things. Thankfully, there are no final things attached to any of the other worlds. Prime is the fetish world where there must be a solid reality corresponding to every speculation, where the very metaphors are material and weighted objects. It is the world of muck and of bottomless sloughs for a bottoming-earth, and of a sky coming down far too low for a ceiling. I mean thoroughly material mud, and detailed, textured sky. It’s the world of sinewy hands gripping one with no release; it’s the place of delirious minds that permit no deviation. The absolute logic of total delirium is the most fearful thing to be found anywhere. Prime World is murk, it is mud, it is miasmic fever. It would not be possible to world-jump from Prime. Hairy and fetish hands coming out of that earth would grip one about the ankles, and grip with bone-crushing strength. According to students of that dark contingency, there are only two ways off of Prime World. And the one of the two that sounds the most bearable to me is named hell.”

  “Pilgrim, does your theory, or your presumption—or claim, as you call it—have room for prime people and for derivative people?”

  Pilgrim twisted a small scarf in his almost womanly hands. “This is the scarf with which I do small miracles,” he said, “miracles with an eye to my cult. But first, Noah, do not parallel prime world with prime people. There is mere verbal coincidence there.”

  “First, Pilgrim, there can never be mere verbal coincidence. Every coincidence goes beyond itself. There are no accidents; these are your own words somewhere.”

  “My own words in another context. All right, Noah; yes, my presumption has room, barely room, for prime people. We are open on that subject. There do seem to be multitudes of derivative people and only a few of us primes.”

  “Then you consider yourself to be a prime person, Pilgrim?”

  “Certainly, Noah, if there are such. How could I not be prime?”

  “But suppose that there is an analogy between prime people and Prime World. And, Pilgrim, there is. What if the prime people, like Prime World, are all sordid and crabbed and careful and fetishistic? What if they are logical and dull? What if they are narrow—”

  “No, no!”

  “Yes, Pilgrim, yes. What if the prime people are murky and mucky and miasmic? What if the prime people are those with the sinewy, gripping hands and the delirious minds? In the beginning there were sinew and delirium. Where would that leave you?”

  “Noah, you are making an upside-down, soaring joke, like an eagle joking in the sky. I’ve seen them, very early in the mornings, roll over like that on the wing. And this scares the world. The world believes, for a moment, that it has disappeared when the eagle can no longer see it, when the eagle looks down and sees only sky. The world does not think clearly in the early mornings. No, Noah, the world hasn’t ended. You’ve just made an eagle fly upside-down for an instant. Do not shake me with such ideas! Do not turn me upside-down! If the prime people were the degraded ones, it would leave me with no place at all to stand.”

  “Yes, Pilgrim, it leaves you with everywhere to stand and to saunter. For you do stand, and you do stride on the successive, or alternate, worlds as your stepping stones. You will not be hemmed in by anything, so why will you be hemmed in by two words? The fact is that you are not any prime person at all. You are a derivative.”

  “Noah, whatever else I am, I am an authentic original. I could never be a derivative.” Pilgrim twisted his scarf, that with which he worked small miracles, with a certain petulance.

  “No!” Noah said sharply. “You are not a dull, muddy, logical, fevered, low-sky original, Pilgrim. You are an exciting, though shallow, derivative. Really, you are entirely too extravagant and flamboyant to be in any way a prime person. I believe that you had your origin in the compensating imagination of some particularly dull individual, some prime person indeed. You are a projection, even a secondary projection, and you catch the light, as do all such gaseous projections. Dull flesh cannot catch the light like that, Pilgrim. It cannot become such a dazzle, such a shimmering sundog. Only ionized gas can shine with such light. And the most shining gas of all is swamp gas, always charged and luminescent, and always the projection of the most dismal swamp.”

  “Stop it, Noah, stop it,” Pilgrim moaned.

  “Let me tell you a little bit more about the Prime World of prime people, Pilgrim. It is the uninfused world, the grubby world, the spiritualist world, the quack world, the Fortean world. That world is real, and all others are shadows of it. You say this, but you are afraid to mean it, and you are afraid to acknowledge yourself a citizen of it. But your only alternative is to own yourself to be a reflected and not a real person. On Prime World, fish and rocks and blood do indeed fall on the earth out of low and stationary skies. For these are stale skies and do not turn. One can reach those skies with stones thrown by a ballista, and such shots will bring other stones falling in showers onto prime earth. Everything moves very slowly on prime, like objects moved by poltergeists. It is like things moving underwater. It is things moving in prime atmosphere and the reek and heaviness of it. There are vulgar shouts out of that lowering sky. Why not? There are giants living up there, dimwit giants who are the pride of prime. This is the original world, and the dimwits are the original people. What, Pilgrim—would you swallow only half a camel? And what will you do with the rest of it?”

  “You joke, Noah,” Pilgrim cried with a nervous heartiness. “And this isn’t an upside-down eagle joke; it’s a malodorous rock-shrew joke. How those foul things can attack the quick flesh of one! But I must go now. At once.”

  The scarf that Pilgrim had been twisting in his hands now overflowed or exploded into a mantle or a cloak. Arrayed in this, Pilgrim went right through the walls of the Prismatic Room and the Personage Club in incipient flight. Noah Zontik stepped to a window and watched Pilgrim ascend the incandescent blue air of the outdoors in slanting, soaring flight. He had a finesse beyond that of any bird. A bird doesn’t understand how to pose in the air, how to get the most from his natural lines, how to live a lyric in quick stanzas of flight. Pilgrim covered half a city in the ticking off of a dozen seconds. It was perfection.

  “I never will know how he does such things,” Noah Zontik muttered in hoarse wonder. “But, really, it’s a scruffy little handful of tricks and miracles that he has. Are they enough to make him into an authentic cult figure?”

  Pilgrim Dusmano, halfway across town, descended from his flight into the interior of an unspecified house. He quickly killed a startled man there.

  “A bit casual, was it not?” the victim rasped with his dying breath.

  Well, yes, it was too casual. It was badly done, without style, without timing, without elegance, without taste, completely without drama. It was a sordid and common thing, not something out of the soaring freedom. It was a prime world sort of gaffe. But was it a prime person sort of clumsiness, or a derivative kind of gaucherie?

  “This will have to be heavily redacted, revised, scripted, dramatized, before it can enter into the gestes of my cult,” Pilgrim thought, but he was uncertain in his feelings. The killing was something that had to be done for expediency, but doing it badly was not in any way expedient. And Pilgrim didn’t know where he had gone wrong in his presentation.

  “It’s no good saying that nobody saw the maladroit thing except myself. Such busts are written plainly on the air itself for everyone to read. I’ll get it revised as much as I can.”

  Pilgrim soared through walls again to an unobtrusive street. He stood on his feet there. “Enough of small m
iracles for one morning,” he thought. He twisted the flowing mantle-cloak back into a small scarf. He sauntered along the way and flew no more for that while.

  “I am diminished,” said the one powerful enemy of Pilgrim Dusmano in that environs. The enemy wrestled with his dark intuition in his murky headquarters. “I have just been slain in one of my limbs,” he said, “and it was done without drama. Oh God, completely without drama! A hog would deserve more drama than that in having his throat cut. It is the creature named Dusmano who has done it. I don’t call him a man; I don’t know what he is. I believe he is a giant insect in the form of a man, one veined with green scum and inelegant instincts. Ah, I’d like to know what color blood that fellow bleeds.”

  This one powerful enemy of Pilgrim Dusmano was named Cyrus Evenhand, and he was accounted a good man. He was a serious, pleasant, slow-thinking but sure-thinking man of rough appearance. His eight henchmen (seven now, for Pilgrim had just killed one) were much swifter of thought, much more suave, much more urbane than was Evenhand. They were all men of public position, for which reason their names will not be given here. Cognomens, yes; but not their names.

  Evenhand himself worked behind a mask, and the public didn’t guess the connection between his two main identities. He was behind the scenes always, a big, gently awkward man with stumbling insights and clumsy power.

  “It’s easy enough to kill this Pilgrim Dusmano,” one of the henchmen suggested. “It can be done in a quick moment and forgotten about before noon. The problem isn’t that tall, Evenhand. You make mountains out of middens.”

  “How else are mountains ever made? Even if we sentence him by kangaroo, it must be a fair trial and a fair sentence. But this Dusmano has been killed before, or parallels of him have been. These are fuzzy things on removed planes, and we can’t have direct knowledge of them. But the killings weren’t final. When you fumble the killing of a man, he loses respect for you. That his more immediate killing should be a final one will depend, I believe, on the shape of the way we kill him.”

  “When you finish with the riddles, then you may be able to tell us what you have in mind,” another of the henchmen said, “and we may be able to help you.” These men all had very great respect for Evenhand, but sometimes he seemed unnecessarily slow in his actions and irritatingly pure in his motives.

  Only three of the henchmen were present physically. Two others were present by voice-and-vision device, and two by voice hookup only. And the one who had just been killed was present by psychic vehicle; but the rules would not allow him to speak at this time.

  “Well, thank you, gentlemen,” Evenhand was saying lamely. “We don’t have to act today, but we will act before the season has turned over. You all be thinking about it.”

  “Thinking about what?” another of the henchmen asked with exasperation. “You haven’t given us any clear idea of what you have in mind. ‘The shape of the way we kill him’ be damned! You can count on us, Evenhand, but first you have to learn to count.”

  “Well, Evenhand, about this Pilgrim. Do you want to know what color blood he bleeds?” a fourth henchman asked.

  “Yes,” said big unpolished Evenhand. “I want to know that.”

  “I’ll find out,” the henchman said.

  Pilgrim Dusmano had gone to war with a powerful and secret apparatus, and he had drawn first death in that war.

  “I don’t know what he’s done now, but he’s just made another of his lightning strikes,” Noah Zontik had told himself, a bit after he had seen Pilgrim soar off into the steep air that morning. “I felt it, and I shivered. This Dusmano is the trickiest friend or client any man ever had. He’s the big millstone around my neck. He’s the punishment from God.”

  God had once told Noah Zontik, told it to his battered inner ear, “Every man needs one powerful friend who will be surety for him. This man who is sometimes named Pilgrim will need you for his friend and shield. No one else will serve for this job at all, for he’s a difficult one. Now you will be responsible for him. I cannot find anyone else capable of handling the job, and I’ve considered a great number. You will be responsible for him in every way. If he goes to hell for a final place, you will go there too.”

  “And who will be responsible for me?” Noah Zontik asked God as reasonably as he could.

  God told Noah a name. Noah barely recognized it. “That man will be responsible for me?” Noah asked.

  “Yes. Don’t make his job too hard for him.”

  This was an unreal business. The man didn’t mean much to Noah. Then Noah forgot both the man and his name. What to do?

  “I forgot the name and the man you told me,” Noah said fearfully. “Tell me again.”

  God told him again. It still seemed unreal. Noah forgot the name and man again. And he was ashamed to ask once more for the information. It was a nervous situation.

  “It is hard to hold an umbrella over so protean a man as Pilgrim Dusmano,” Noah continued to himself on that latter day. “And if it’s hard for me, it would be impossible for anyone else. I’ll do my best.”

  Noah Zontik was sometimes known as the Umbrella. He dealt in shielding, in protection, in hiding persons both guilty and innocent, in thwarting prosecutors and trackers. He was good luck against the inundations and torrents such as may sweep over a person. He was a good man and a crafty man, but he had dirty hands always from the sort of business he was engaged in. He was a professional.

  But he would never have taken Pilgrim on as a client except on a direct order from God. There was something familiar about it from the first, as though he had been through that before. And Noah would never have come to love Pilgrim in any natural order of things. Noah suspected that he had done this also on a direct order from someone, but not from God. Pilgrim was unlovable, and now he was becoming a cult figure. The young people of his cult, those who really loved him, were all ashamed of the fact. With them it was a dirty and secret vice. And Noah hadn’t the excuse of being a young person. It was an unpleasant sort of happiness that attached to the Dusmano cult, and particularly to those who were on the fringes of the cult.

  3

  Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons that know not how to distinguish their right hand from their left, not to mention many camels.

  God

  Even in a single world, Pilgrim Dusmano lived half a dozen simultaneous lives. Every morning he attended to the seedbed or seminary of selected students at Rampart University. No matter what he did, if he followed any sort of deep plan, he would always need small and select groups of outstanding people, generation after generation of them. And the best way to get them was to grow them in such seedbeds as this. Pilgrim did not literally plant and grow these young people, but he did shape them to his own liking. And he did graft certain little brain scions of his own selection onto all of them.

  It would seem that a jumper like Pilgrim would not be around in one environs long enough to have a need for generation after generation of select groups. But to think this way is to disregard Dunlunk’s Fifth Law: “Any action in any world will inevitably set up parallel actions in parallel worlds.” So the shaping of the plastic younglings on this orb would shape their correspondence-integers on corresponding orbs. It would shape them less and still less according to distance in attitude and space and time, but it would always shape them somewhat.

  There’s a proverb about casting bread on waters and its coming back to one a hundredfold. Well, it won’t come back a hundredfold to everyone; there are many persons who will get back no bread at all. But one who is in on this exchange early and carefully can always depend on an increase of bread. Pilgrim was always well organized as to his corresponding persons. The different integers of him helped one another, for they were all the same person on the final plane. And this cultivating of the young grain, with bread-casting in mind, was to provide for multiple eventualities. It is always a queasy feeling to go into a strange world cold.

  But Pilgrim Dusma
no seldom went cold or unprepared into new lives or new earths or ecumens nowadays. His echoes, his coronal fields, his ripples were always going before him now. Wherever he went, there would be competent persons waiting to serve him, to organize for him, to build highways for his projects. And there would be intelligent young persons waiting to be instructed by him; aye, and waiting to set up cults in his honor.

  These people had never truly heard of Pilgrim before. They did not really know him. They had not actually expected him. They would not recognize him. There wasn’t any close kindred or accord. There wasn’t any memory; there wasn’t a call of like to like across a void.

  But these people of several sorts had almost heard of Pilgrim. They had come very near to knowing him. They had been expecting, in expectations that did not put themselves into words, someone very much like him. And, while they did not exactly recognize him, they all recognized the thrill that his coming had brought to them. The specifications of that thrill of encounter had been implanted in all of them strongly. It had been enkindled in them in that infinity where parallel worlds meet.

  It wasn’t that there was very much to Pilgrim. He was a walnut with a small and tasteless meat inside. But it was recognized that he was of a rare and special species, and somewhere out of the encounter with him there would be a more ample and a nuttier harvest. And Pilgrim himself, whenever he arrived at a place, would stand on that shore and take hundredfold bread, dry and warm and savory and salted and wrapped in honey-wax, out of the water.

  One of the high pleasures for Pilgrim Dusmano was the manipulating of minds, particularly the very plastic minds of the young. Pilgrim lived entirely for pleasure; that much must be understood about him. He hadn’t any conscience; one who travels as often and as far as Pilgrim did must lighten his baggage of all such unessentials. But Pilgrim had so many possible pleasures tumbling around him at one time that he could select only the most exquisite of them. And moulding, sometimes eradicating, sometimes forcing, sometimes raping these minds and psyches and individualities—these things were exquisite to him.