Damon Knight - Orbit 17

“Good-by, Duff, I mean good-by, person,” Mary Virginia said.

“And do take your clothes off, please,” Salvation Sally said. “Why do you always want to be conspicuous?”

Melchisedech Duffy left the Pelican. If this was indeed the Great Day, then he left it forever.

This is the Michael making moan

With stony tears and a sword of stone.

Melchisedech walked over to St. Michael’s. A bare yellow sliver of sun was showing at the end of one street.

“Ah, you crooked, cranky thing,” Melchisedech told it, “I’ll trap you now. Move once and I’ll have you.”

But the sun did not move. It would not move while anyone was watching. If it could be seen to move, then time was still running; and that would be a contradiction on the Great Day. The Great Day, if this was it, must remain forever dawning.

Melchisedech looked away a bit to test it. When he looked back, the sun had moved, but only to make itself more comfortable, to get a better hold on its dawning. Now it would move no more.

St. Michael’s was being unstructured by various people. They were using faith rather than hammers and rams, but they had brought most of the building down. The building had contained something, so it was said, and that was disapproved. Melchisedech stopped to talk to the stone statue of St. Michael in what had been the entry.

“It’s a sad day, Mike,” he said. “If an oasis cannot be found here, then it can be found nowhere.”

“It’s a sad day,” Michael agreed. “And the living water has gone out from this place. You’ll find no oasis here.” Michael had had an eye gouged out, by hammer and chisel it seemed, perhaps faith-hammer and chisel, perhaps real.

“Look, mama,” a little girl was saying somewhere. “There’s the crazy old man who talks to statues.”

“Shh, don’t look at him,” the mother said. “It isn’t nice to look. He’s wearing clothes.”

“Will there be mass this morning, Mike?” Melchisedech asked.

“There won’t even be any this morning,” the statue said sadly. “This Great-Day business has bitten the whole world. Ah, Duff, if there were only some way to put a good edge on a marble sword, then I’d have at them. They are unstructuring the church and they have put up the twelve signs of the zodiac and the sun and the moon in place of the stations of the cross. But the Unfaithful Assembled will not notice any difference at all in the services, they have gone so weird for such a long while.”

The holy figure of the demiurge Teilhard had come down on the altar. With him appeared McLuhan on his right hand and McGonigal on his left. They were transfigured with light.

“Lord, it is good that we be here,” the Unfaithful Assembled intoned. “Great Day.”

“Peduncle, peduncle, Point Edhead, cosmogenization, valorization, obfuscation. Great Day,” the holy demiurge blessed them.

“Lord, let us build three tents here,” the Unfaithful Assembled intoned. “Great Day.”

“Peduncle, neo-anthropocentrism, corpusculization, nooko-nos, peduncle. Great Day,” the holy demiurge blessed again.

“Kind of gets you, doesn’t it, Duff?” Michael said. “What am I saying? Well, it would kind of get me if I weren’t Michael. Ah, I wish there was some way to put a good double edge on a stone sword. If you run onto a good blade man, send him by. I’ll have me a cutting and flaming sword yet. Who’s going to know that I’m an archangel when I’m here with the toes broken off me and one eye gouged out and only a dull stone sword in my hand?”

“If I run onto a good blade man I’ll send him by,” Melchisedech said. He left Michael there crying stone tears.

“Well, I bet I know an oasis that is wet if nothing else,” Melchisedech said. He left St. Michael’s and headed for the Stumble-Bum Royal Rendezvous and Oyster Bar. Young fellows tried to pull his beard off as he walked through the streets, and they did pull out some bloody gouts of it. He noticed that most of the beards had been shed, both of the teen-agers and of the few grown men who had sported them. They were shed by acts of faith. If one has faith, what does he need with a beard? The beards of most of the folks had come off easily. An easy breeze was now blowing remaining beard-patches off various faces. Soon it would be a barefaced world.

Young ladies tried to pull his clothes off as he walked through the streets, and they did pull some ripped strips of them off. “Be free, be unenclosed, be emancipated, be unstructured,” they all insisted to him. “Is there anything dirtier than a dirty old man with clothes on?”

“A sazarac,” Melchisedech ordered as he entered the Stumble-Bum. He felt the looks at him like those manifold whips with little tearing hooks at the end of the lashes. The barkeep shook his head. “A salty dog, then,” Melchisedech said, and he felt the hatred rising against him. “An old fashioned,” Melchisedech said. He should never have said that.

“Get this nut,” the barkeep said, hooking a sneering thumb toward Melchisedech, and the grumbling hatred rose against this nonconformist who refused to be free. “We haven’t had any of those drinks since yesterday.”

“What do you have to drink, then?” Melchisedech asked humbly.

“The New Day Dawner. That’s what everyone drinks. Who would want anything else?”

Melchisedech left the Stumble-Bum. There were no wet oases, no green oases, no unfailing fountains anywhere.

This is the drink that nothing slakes:

This is the dream whence none awakes.

Melchisedech experimented a bit. He had noticed people, here and there, walking through visible walls as easily as if they were not there.

“Why, then they are not there,” Melchisedech said. “The people have removed them by faith, and they are visible only to my faithless eyes. Let me see whether I can walk through those walls also.”

But he could not. He bruised and bloodied himself, but he could not go through this sort of walls as other people could.

“Then part of this wall-demolishing is a subjective thing,” he said. “But I am outnumbered. Many persons pass through, and I do not. It must be my own subjective that is awry.”

The sun was still in the process of dawning, but it had not moved at all since it was last viewed. There was not a lot of movement of any sort on the Great Day. The real action was hidden, and yet almost everything had all the wraps off it.

But the people were all interiorizing themselves. Some skinless, some only part so, they looked blank, blank in every part of them. And they were merging. They were coming together witlessly, blankly, spherically. Dozens of them had now formed into great balls all together. These rolled, and they merged with other great balls of people-substance. Soon all the people in the whole city would be coalesced into one big fleshy sphere, communicating and interiorizing like anything.

Then the peoples of all the world would somehow roll together and become one thing, although the mechanics of this were far from clear.

“Everybody will have joined it except myself,” Melchisedech said, “and I invented it in a time of cranky humor. Should I stand proud apart then? But how can one stand proud with no one to stand before?”

Subjectively, quite a while went by, but the sun did not move. Melchisedech walked himself weary, and then sat on a bench in Jackson Square. Most of the buildings of the city had disappeared now. That business of them standing after their walls and supports had been removed was only a transition thing.

“This is only a nightmare,” Melchisedech said. “I am sleeping, and this is not one of my better dreams. Now I must make a great effort to wake up.”

“You can’t,” Morpheus said. “You will have to change your whole idea about sleeping. More important, you will have to change your whole idea about waking up. Both are illusions.”