Michael Bishop: Ancient of Days

Finally, the hyena-hominid bowed its doglike head. This gesture of resignation or reverence or bodily surrender turned into something else, an act both grotesque and moving. The creature, stretching out its arms and gripping the rock face behind it for support, bent forward until its snout was nuzzling its left breast. The vertebrae on its neck and spine strained against its taut hide. With a jerk of its head, the creature tore the flesh of its own pectoral muscle. Then it straightened, removed one hand from the wall, and cupped from this narrow wound its own beating heart, which it held out to the wonder-struck habiline wraiths as a love offering. All who ate of it would know that the Mind implicit in Nature had affirmed their lives—through the agency of this hyena-headed messenger. Their salvation lay in this knowledge and in their ability to cohabit in a necessarily imperfect world.

Come, the hyena-hominid challenged its pursuers, still extending its heart. Come and partake of my life’s blood.

The largest of the habilines, the alpha male of their spectral party, advanced to accept the offering. Dwarfed by the dog-headed messenger, he tasted of the heart. Having tasted, he carried it to each member of the band, and they, too, cupped the beating organ to their mouths, bit into it, and took into themselves a living piece of their miraculous prey. Loyd could only watch. None of the habilines brought the heart to him—clearly, they regarded him as alien to their world, too alien to benefit from this rite—and he was glad that they ignored him. When the heart was altogether eaten, the gloom of the catacombs absorbed the hominids into itself, and Loyd found that he was alone with the creature that had sacrificed its heart to feed a small remnant of feisty but unprepossessing human forebears.

Agarou, the god of ancestors, had mediated this confrontation in the immaterial realm of Yagaza, but now it was Loyd who had to face the hyena hominid and to demand of it some explanation. His fear came back. What authority did he have to question such a being? What answers—if any—could he expect? The silver-crimson light of the caves coalesced around the two of them like a contracting womb….

LOYD: Who are you?

( The hyena-hominid only laughs. Its demeaning animalish laughter echoes in the half-light like a huge coil unwinding .)

LOYD ( apprehensively insistent ): I said, Who are you?

I AM: Names fail. If you like, call me Yagaza, or Lord, or Logos, or even Anima Mundi. None of these titles suits absolutely, but if you have to have a name, pick one that doesn’t belittle me.

LOYD: God?

I AM: In this context, Yagaza might be more appropriate. After all, I’m Adam’s God—Adam Montaraz’s, that is. But, ultimately, I’m yours, too.

LOYD: I thought Yagaza meant Africa—either Africa or the afterlife.

I AM: In the vaudun scheme of things, it does. Because you’re here through the good offices of Agarou, perhaps we should honor him by adopting vaudun terminology. Without that body of ritual, we wouldn’t be talking like this.

LOYD: I can’t call you Yagaza. I’m not a voodooist. I’m a victim of possession, but I’m not a voodooist. And you—you call yourself Adam’s God, but all I can see, squinting and cocking my head, is a heartless chimera, part man-ape and part African scavenger.

( The hyena-headed being places both palms against the sides of its face. It lifts this face away like a mask, revealing the horror of a human countenance that has been three quarters obliterated by .357-caliber ammunition. Loyd is reminded of Craig Puddicombe in the parking lot behind Abraxas; he cannot understand why God would choose to appear to him in the guise of a mutilated dead murderer. He tries to turn aside, but he cannot make his possessed body obey even the simplest internal command .)

LOYD: Please. Don’t make me look at you now. It’s crueler than you know.

I AM ( restoring the hyena mask ): That I doubt. It’s just that I have no desire to slip my responsibility in matters that you must regard as terrible manifestations of evil. I don’t explicitly order them, but neither can I countermand them without sabotaging creation itself.

LOYD: But you can inject yourself into the affairs of your temporal creation, can’t you? You did that with your hyena-hominid revelation to Adam’s Pleistocene ancestors. You’ve let me witness a reenactment of that “disclosure event.”

I AM: What I’ve permitted you to see is an allegory of that event intelligible to your contemporary human understanding. Had I given you a reenactment of the event as it occurred, you would have misinterpreted it. More than likely, you would have utterly missed its sacred aspect.

LOYD: But you were there, weren’t you? You made yourself manifest in the otherwise mundane history of the planet. You appeared to a small band of habilines whom most of us today would dismiss as protohumans.

I AM: I did.

LOYD: Why?

I AM: You’ve already anticipated me here. To demonstrate my love for them. To affirm them. To validate their struggles to survive and evolve.

LOYD: Can your appearance to them have had any measurable effect? At first, you terrified them. Momentarily, you made them forget their terror by appeasing their hunger. That’s all, surely.

I AM: The Rutherford Remnant—Adam, Erzulie, Hector, Toussaint, Dégrasse, and Alberoi—demonstrates that it did have a lasting effect. They continue to celebrate my earliest quasi-human incarnation by observing Voodoo Saturday Night. Indeed, you’re celebrating that event with them. Possessed by Agarou, god of ancestors, you’re a vaudun devotee in spite of yourself, Mister Paul.

LOYD: But what if there were no Rutherford Remnant? What if the species known as Homo habilis had died out about when paleoanthropologists supposed, namely, two million years ago?

I AM: Does a falling tree land with a thud if there’s no one there to register the thud? Yes. The thud exists as a receivable potentiality in the sound waves generated by the tree’s impact with the ground. Because I was received by creatures now dead hardly suffices to demonstrate that I wasn’t received at all. I appeared to them, and they knew themselves blessed—validated, if you like—by my holy concern.

LOYD ( shaking his head ): Impossible.

I AM: It wounds your vanity to think that Homo sapiens was not the first hominid species to experience a sacred disclosure event?

LOYD: You wrong me, Yagaza. Frankly, I’m by no means certain that Homo sapiens has ever experienced its own such event. Frankly, I doubt it. I’ve always doubted it.

I AM ( laughing in a melancholy-merry hyena voice ): Then what about this, Mister Paul? What’s happening to you now?

LOYD: I’m possessed. I’m dreaming. I’m talking to a sardonic corner of my own consciousness, not to—God forgive me—God.

I AM: But God has a corner of your consciousness, doesn’t he? If God created you, why, then, he has a lien on all the physico-spiritual systems making up your identity. You’re one of my most valuable means of comprehending God—along with all the other self-aware entities, terrestrial or otherwise, of an ever-questing creation. You should take advantage of your dreaming—your possession—to help me in this self-reflexive quest.

LOYD: You called yourself Adam’s God. Why? Because you appeared in hyena-hominid form to his ancestors?

I AM: In part, certainly. But also because in searching for an element of the sacred to append to his Batesonian philosophy of evolutionary holism, which lacks such a dimension, he decided to repostulate God. I’m the God That Is, but I’m also the God that Adam humbly repostulated. Your species’ hunger for the sacred, going back even to the Pleistocene, doesn’t arise in the absence of satisfying spiritual meat, but in response to its availability in the miraculous slaughterhouse of creation. I AM that meat. I AM the architect of the sacred abattoir. Those who refuse to ignore their hunger will at length find me.