"But we reappear. You will not be rid of us. We grow back. Why are you ifrand to let the tenth of one percent speak? You shake, you fume, you slander, you vilify."

"You are our prey and you have no right to opinion or voice. We keep a very few of you for the hunting only. You will not grow back if we wish to end the game. Why have you never accepted our consensus? It is really rather interesting, rather arty, rather gentle, rather novel."

Several sets of nothoi-hunters were waiting in the near distance. There was in particular the set of Peeler and Slickstock and Quickcoiner; these had claim on Morgan Saunders as their special game.

"The same novelties for a hundred years are no longer novel, old man,"

Morgan shot, shifting nervously but having to endure the talk. "And divergentart is of some interest for a while, as long as there is a main thing for it to diverge from. Yes, you even had a touch of humor and a touch of kindness once. But now you are cut flowers, no more than that; worse, you are artificial cut flowers. It is your loss of nerve, it is your regression, it is your dwarfing yourselves and creeping into strange wombs for shelter. You lost your courage first of all, then your honesty and your common sense. As falsehood and ugliness are equated, you set out to create a world of unsurpassed ugliness. Painting and sculpture were perverted first. Then music withered and whimpered into stringed idiocy. Then all the arts went and all the life ambients. You claimed that it was an opening up, a meaningful development. It wasn't. It was an end, and there is no meaning or development in a dead end. These are the Terminal Days that you have brought about."

"You are jealous of our success, little Morgan from over the sea. Judge us by our beautiful divergence that works. Recognize us by our results."

"Aye, by your fruits we may know you," Morgan said. It was an unkind jibe, and it got under the Instigator's skin. That Ancient Hippie piled in anger.

"We are irreconcilables!" he howled. "You are impossible, not to be reformed, not to be converted. You are impossible unto death."

The Ancient Hippie made a downward sign with his arm, and there was a clatter of armament coming alive from every direction. Morgan smashed the Ancient Hippie in the face (an unkind and illegal thing); he feinted and ran like a bolt of rabbits in three directions at once.

"He is a deformity," Morgan spoke in his churning head about the Ancient Hippie, who still lingered in his mind. "He is perfect in his logic to the system with the central thing left out. There is no meeting ground at all in this life. Impossible, irreconcilable!"

A street-sweeper knows the streets. A moving cat-spring man can get the jump on food-hungry nothoi-hunters. Bullets banged and clattered into wells of buildings, but Morgan had movements that the prediction scopes of the nothoi-hunters' rifles could not predict. And the hunters really weren't very good at movement shot, no matter how fancy the wrappings of their colt. Mostly they had hunted down and killed very small children and heavy and distraught women. It was higher sport to bring down a prime man, but they were less practiced at it.

Morgan was away from the first circle of them, going like ragged lightning, striking and vanishing. He sent several of the hunters on their dead way. He seemed always to go toward the inner city, and yet he retreated two steps toward the fringe and the Barrens for every conspicuous step that he took toward the center.

But they were all out after him now. Jazzbo horns sounded to call all hunters. Dogs of the two-legged variety took up the bay after him to trap him or tree him or sound him for the hunters. This was no illegitimate child to be hunted down. It was an illegitimate man, grown and known, illegal and illicit in his tongue and his life. They would have him in their dully murderous way.

There was novelty (almost the only remaining one) and diversion in a nothoi-hunt; but there was no heroism, not in the hunters, not even in the prey.

For Morgan Saunders certainly had nothing heroic in him now. He ran sick and scared; he had believed it would be otherwise. He was a man of no special ability or intelligence. He had come to the old central way of things quite late, and by accident or intuition. He had no magic; he had no plan or program now but to run and evade. He had the unworldly hope and peace, but he hadn't them immediately or vividly is he came to the end; only as buried certanties.

He ran himself to weariness. The cat-springs and the movement died in him, and when he could no longer evade and elude, the nothoi-hunters had him and killed him on the edge of the city within sight of the miserable Barrens.

Jane the Crane found him a little later, still in the early morning. She picked him up in sudden strong arms. She walked and keened, carrying the deadMorgan in her arms and the live Ishmael under her belly, wilkeul back into the city and among her flowers, trampling them (which was illegal), shrilling and wailing, a walking forky-tongeed aand agonizing pieta.

Morning crows gathered about her and followed here; and even some of the folks from the regular swing-hours world were up and blinking at the spooky sunlight and the keening woman. They jeered and defamed her, and she came back with her forky tongue and harangued them all.

"Bedamned with you all and the fouled nest of you!" she cried. "You are vermin, you are no longer people. And the Instigators are lice on the body of the world."

And already the Instigators were holding council about her.

"Why not now?" some asked. "She is certainly illegitimate in her conduct, and she carries one illegitimate burden in her arms and one in her belly. Why not now?"

"The hunting has come to be too slim," others of them said. "The nothoi-hunters insist that a small bit of it must be reserved. Here is an additional quarry for them, in two years from now, or at most three. There is prescience about the unborn one. It is sworn that he will be prime game. And the hunters must retain a small reserve."

Another yellow-card street-sweeper, a man very like Morgan Saunders and a friend of his, came by with his working things. With great compassion he took Morgan from Janine's arms, bent him difficultly in the middle, and stuffed him into his wheeled He also spoke some words to Janine in a low voice. We do not know what words they were, but they were like a flame. And now Janine became a new sort of flame.

She brightened, she burned, she erupted with laughter.

What? What? With laughter?

Yes, with laughter and with a quick spate of gay words: "But why am I mourning like one who doesn't believe?" she sparked. "It's the dawn of the world to me! I am a berthing woman, and I will give merriment with my milk. I take the old motto 'This is the first day of the rest of my life.' It's a new dawn, and I have loved the dawns. To be otherwise would be to miss the main things as they have missed them. Hurry, Ishmael, you leaping lump in my belly! We have to get you born and agile before they come to eat us up. But by tomorrow's morning we will see each other's faces. God knows the wonder of it, to send births in the early mornings."

She went to her hidden shanty-room in the ghetto under the ghetto, singing and whistling. Really, she was an odd one in those fl@it False Terminal Days of the world.

(A question, perhaps out of context: Why were those False Terminal Days not truly terminal to the race and the world? O, there were other movements and powers that had not been taken into account. And the plateau, as a matter of fact, that low, level, artificial construction, that been built atop an area of old volcanic and earthquake movement. There was a great underlying fault, and it would erupt there. But this is not an account of termination of the Terminal Stasis.)

3.

I'll climb Sinai's rocks to the thunder-clad crest And learn all that Moses forgot, And see if the Bush is at Hebron or Fiest And if it is burning or not.

Archipelago Here are some pages which possibly do not belong here at all. If that is so, then it is the fault of the randoming machines. This illegal private account of Janine Pervicacia and Morgan Saunders and their illegal issueIshmael was first composed by a grieving friend and was printed (as everything was printed then) in scatter-print. The unnumbered pages, even of a private journal, had to go through a randoming machine and be randomized; the print machine would not function otherwise. Now, in sorting them out as best we can (for we are reader and not depth-comprehender), a certain section falls together that is not directly a part of the account of Janine and Morgan. Yet this section was mixed up with their account, whether or not it was also written by the hand of the grieving friend, and it will be given here. We do not know whether this intrusive section is comic or ironic or straight. There is even a chance that it may be a sample of a rare and secret form of the period, a satire upon a satire: an ironic counterpoise of a sterotyped satire form. We nominate this misfit section, "The Interlude of the the Odd Man and the Odd God," and it is as follows: "In the early springtime of the year 2040 of the common era, the original sparse population having been removed from the area, three hundred persons of a troubling sort were sealed into the Vale of Pailliun, which is in the Knockmealdown Mountains of the Disunited Commonwealth of Ireland. These three hundred perons included certain fossils, diehards, and "yesterday's leaders" of all irreformable religious and ethic sort, among them the last "Pope" who strangely insisted that he was not the last of them. These three hundred persons, families and singletons, were allowed the sheep and kine of the valley and such primitive tools as they chose to bring in. Seals were set for one thousand years (we do have the historical sense) on both the upper and lower entrances of the valley. All communications with the persons of the vale are evermore prohibited under pain of death. Nothing may go into the vale by earth or by air, and nothing may come out. If there is increase in the valley, then let that increase choke on itself."

-- Joint statement of the United Nations Obsolescence and Terminating Board and of the One Ecumenical Liberal and Secular Church, May 1, 2040.

Matteo Matuitine (Matthew Morning -- what kind of a name is that!) who was Pope Paul XIII, had said mass before dawn for the twelve who still adhered to him out of this remnant; they had assisted standing with tapers ind rushlights. Then he had brought one flock of sheep (150 of them) up to the high pasture just a little before sunrise. He was a rugged old man and barefoot (for the ground of the vale was holy ground), though it was sharp November. The high grass of this pasture had browned and cured itself where it steel], making winter hay, and the sheep would be kept on such pastures till May when the close-grazed river meadow turned green again. Paul XIII had a hammer, a pestle, and a mattock sort of tool, which the Italians call zappa.

He was mending a little stone sheep-bridge over the stream there.

What? Is it odd that a shepherd should herd sheep and that a pontiff should maintain bridges?

And Paul XIII talked with the Odd God there in the high pasture, as he talked with Him every morning: "When we first came into this valley (our desert, our prison; our delight if You say it is our delight), we found certain beings here who were more ghost than flesh, who were not on the manifest of the proper fauna of this valley. I had seen such strange half-creatures (neither proper flesh nor yet honest brimstone) in the high mountain valleys of Italy, We always believed them to be the shades of the old supplanted Italic gods and their devotees. But what are we to think when we find them here in Ireland? They are awkward and ungainly and not all there, either in mind or body. You must know of them, for You made them, though they deny it. They are not quite like men, not quite like devils; still less are they like angels. Yet they have some knowledge of the old established things. "A great shapeless bulk of one such spook ran to me on my first morning in this vale. I could see the dew on the grass sparkling through him; and yet he had substance, for lie kicked therocks about with his big splay feet. He was in torment then, but was not I also in torment? 'Has Rome fallen?' he cried out to me in anguish. 'Is it true that Rome has fallen? Are all the golden walls and towers nung down?' 'Yes, fallen,' I said sadly. 'Rome had fallen before, but now she falls again in a special way.' At hearing that it was as if his outsized pumpkin-shaped head broke. His lumpish face cracked and he cried. He went back up into his rocks with a roaring and sobbing like dragons wailing their dead. And some of the stones in this valley also cried out at the news that Rome had fallen.

"What I would like to know, though, is whether we now become as they are. Do we (our remnant here) become like them: not quite like men, not quite like devils, even less like angels? Do we become here no more than ancient haunts, devotees of vanished gods, spooks of the waste places? Assure me that we are more than just one more layer of the stratified fossil formation.

Assure me that we will be something more than this, even in our exile."

The Odd God spoke and assured Paul that they were something more than that. He spoke by a still-green thorn-bush bursting into flame.

Paul XIII spoke again, for only this one Person really listened to him: "I have a little theory," said Paul XIll. "The first offense was the taking of the forbidden fruit. The second offense (which I believe is more grievious than the first) is the refusing of the bidden fruit. It is even the hacking down of the tree of the fruit. I believe that all the noisome oddities of the present world are entwined with this refusal and hacking. They kill an entire ecology when they hack down the growth tree. The people starve now in every aspect and do not even know that the name of their unease is starvation, that their pale fever is the starvation fever. Because they have food and ease they do not realize that they starve.

"Did You know that there is no landscape any more in the world? That there are no longer any real rocks or towns out there? Instead there are only weak splotchy pictures of them. A countryside vanishes, and in its place is a poster dizzy with scatter-print that says, 'This represents a countryside.' A town goes down, and in its place is a psychedelic blob proclaiming, 'This stands for a town.' People are terminated, and in their place are walking spooks with signs around their necks: 'We are we instead of people.' In place of life there is narcosis. Hack back the growth enough, and the thing dies.

Cut a foot length from the top of a child, and it goes badly with that child.

'Oh, but the child would grow till he overflowed the world and broke the sky,'

is what they said. 'How else to regularize the child and the world than to cut off their heads?' This I believe, is the wrong way.

"But will You not bid the fruit again to us? Offer it. Offer it again and again! In some way that only You understand it will be accepted. Will You not still bid the fruit to fruit?"

A fruity breath; a clear glitter of green leaves; a flash of blossoms that hung and then fell like snow; and a runty dead tree was red with apples.

Remember that this was sharp November and the tree had not previously leaved that year.

"You remember the child who found a root and said he would pull it out?"

Paul XIII continued. "But when he tried to pull it out, distant people and buildings shriveled and collapsed and were pulled down to nothing and died.

The child pulled down the whole world but couldn't pull out that root. It was a special root; it was the root of everything. And for seven decades now, men have tried to pull out that same root; and instead they have pulled down that same world.

"They did if all to us with catchwords," Paul continued his morning conversation. "'We accept it all,' they said, 'except the flesh and blood of if. We are for all these things. We are only against the structure and body of them.' I had a little joke for the critics who said they loved the Church Itself but hated the Institutional Church. 'What was the verb that God did about the Church?' I would ask in my guileless way. 'He instituted the Church, and therefore it is Institutional.' But perhaps I cheated a little in my jibe.

For the verb that in the Vulgate is instituo is actually in the Greek -- but Ialways forget, You know more Greek than I do. Is it true that there is one construction in the Greek historical optative that is now understood only by the Devil and Yourself? But tell me, are we now in an historical optative time? And what are the options? Will Thou not reveal them to me?"

There were other early and devout men about in the vale. A kaftaned Jew had a stone shed there in the upper pasture where he prepared parchments from sheepskins, and he had set to work now with a low merry chanting. A Hard-Shell from the southern United States was there looking for a lost calf, having left the ninety-nine to find the one (having left them, however, in the careful care of another Hard-Shell). A Mosulman came down from the height of the sealed upper entrance of the valley where he had just performed his morning rites.

The several men looked till and about with a slight impatience. It was time.

"Must You always be reminded?" asked the Hard-Shell.

"We do not even ask the manna which You gave the Fathers," the kaftaned Jew said.

"Only the plain morning fare of this country," said Paul XIII. Quick fire came down on a smoothed stone. And the browned oaten pancakes were there, rampant with ewe butter and honey and aroma. The several men began to eat them.

"I have to laugh at the late line of us from that Paul to this," Paul XIII reminisced. "I swear that we infuriated the world eleven times in these seven and a half decades. We were all known for our proclivities toward the accommodating secularism, we were all devoted to the soft surrogate thing, we were all intending to voice the easy agreement and be done with it, we were all elected to do so. And then You touched each of our tongues in turn with a burning coal. You think our actions bewildered and angered the world? I tell you that they bewildered ourselves a thousand times over. How does the speaking horn know what words will be spoken through him? Oh, well, I suppose You have Your reasons, but it has been a little hard on each of us, each being the only transcendent man living in the world in his time."

Paul XIII ran on with other talk because he was old and garralous. It was sunlight on the high pastures now and soon the sun would reach down to the depths of the valley. Tinkle bells on the animals filled the air. Kids of sheep and goats and human were everywhere. Women were at work stone-grinding oats and barley. A smith was hammering copper and tin together into orange-colored tools and ornaments. Clipping men were long-clipping sheep. It was sharp November, and the sheep would not be short-clipped again till late spring. The sealed vale in the Knockmealdown Mountains was a busy and burgeoning place.

"I believe that we should have a little of the special this morning,"

Paul XIII wheedled. "We can make it ourselves, of course," he flattered, "but we cannot make it nearly as good as You can. And I have forgotten. I have not so much as brought a pot for it this morning.We can manke pots ourselves of course but we cannot make them anywhere as good as You can."

There was a sigh in the wind over the vale, almost a sigh of exasperation, if He were capable of exasperation. But of a sudden a three-measure stone crusca-jar stood there, full of the, most extraordinary Wine Ordinary, the blood that ever bled from the earth. And several of them drank of it.

"Leave it off for a while, Paul the Thirteenth," the Hard-Shell growled.

The Hard-Shell only half approved of the extraordinary Wine Ordinary, and he seldom took more than a sip of it. He was stricter than the Odd God but only by a little.

"He has talked to you as to a child, Paul," the Hard-Shell said, "and it wearies Him after a while, if He could be wearied. It is my turn now. This morning He may talk to me as to a man."

"I am a child," said Paul XIII. "I even flatter myself that I am a childof grace"

Then Paul returned to mending the stone slieep-bridge, and the Hard-Shell talked to the Odd God in his own way. And later the kaftaned Jew came and talked to Him, deeply like low music, shivering with fear and quaking with merriment at the same time. Old Jews are said to have several private jokes between themselves and the Odd God.

And again later the Mosulman came and talked to Him in the desert manner which He especially understands.

They were in odd clutch in that valley of the Knockmealdown Mountains, and it was an Odd God who provided for them.

4.

Lo, blessed are our ears for they have heard; Yes, blessed are our eyes for they have seen: Let thunder break on man and beast and bird And the lightning. It is something to have been.

G. K. Chesterton Jane the Crane had the boy Ishmael born and agile in less time than might be believed. There was a very great hurry now. A baby is vulnerable: not Ishmael, perhaps, but most babies. But he was not born ignorant or uninstructed. For the many months of Janine's carrying him (well, it had been long; he was part monster, surely, and their period is a longer one), she had instructed him all the hours of the day and night, when she was working over her flowers, when gawking about in the street, when abiding in her hidden shanty-room. Especially in the afternoons (these were her nights, when she slept) she instructed him, for they shared the same dreams just as they shared the same blood.

"I tell you, I don't know whether I can hide you better inside or out, she would say to him. "I leave it to you now. Come out when you're ready. You are already bigger than I am. I tell you to get smart fast, to get fast fast.

Are you listening to me? You must learn to hide and to disguise. You must learn to look like this one and that one. You will live in the sewers and an the roofs and in the trees. Let me tell you one thing: it is better even to have lived in the dankest agony and fear than never to have lived at all. It is better to be a vermin than never to be anything. It is better to be weird and deformed (I do not mean deformed as the world is deformed now) than to be empty and without form. It is better to be conscious in horror and delirium than to miss consciousness. If you have a nomination and a soul, then nothing else matters greatly, This I believe. If you can hear and understand me, whistle."

And the boy Ishmael always whistled from out of her belly. He always heard and he always understood. Then, when they both realized that it was no longer possible to hide him within, he was born. When they both realized immediately that it would not do to have him newborn and helpless, he became agile. The open eyes of Ishmael were clouded for only short instants after birth. Then they cleared; he understood; he knew. Nobody ever heard him cry like a human child. He had more sense than that. Sometimes he chirped and whistled like a chimney bird, sometimes he whined like a dog pup. (Dogs, as surrogate to human persons and human affections, were everywhere privileged.) Sometimes Ishmael gurgled like sewer water; but he was always able to communicate -- even to communicate without sound.

But where could Ishmael hide? Illegal stories attached to his mother, Jane the Crane. She was watched and followed and checked. All the shanty rooms of the city were searched from time to time by the "rat catchers" who anticipated the nothoi-hunters with the not yet mobile illegals.

Ishmael lived in the sewers and on the roofs and in the trees. But mostly he lived under the floors and in the walls. All the shanties were fiftyto eighty years old. Nothing was ever built now, only obbled up a little just before it tumbled clown. Inside the walls was the best place. A young boy not yet able to walk could still climb about inside the walls. And not even the dogs of of the rat-catchers would snuffle him out from them. Ishmael could whine and rattle and yap in the dogs' own talk. He could pass for a dog in the dark corners, under the floors, inside the walls. When Ishmael seemed like this one or that one, he seemed so to every sense.

But how did Jane the Crane feed him? However did other illegitimate mothers feed their offspring? Oh, there had never been any shortage of food.

The swing-time people wasted far more food than they ate. The illegitimate mothers, mostly servile workers to the swingers or morning yellow-card workers, had only to carry leavings home "for the clogs." It wasn't starvation that killed the illegal children; it was the "scatter eyes" and the rat-catchers prowling to find and kill them, doing the work voluntarily mostly, from some inner need of theirs.

lshmael, however, passed all the other illegal children in earliness and agility. He was one of the few authentic geniuses born in the first half of the twenty-first century: thinking like a pot-a-boil before he could talk; reading minds before he could read the simplest scatter-print; imitating animals by sound and scent and movement; imitating legal children by face before he ever saw the reflection of his own face. He was a wild colt of a boy destined, should he live, to be a wild ass of a man. And he had fame. He was known everywhere before he was seen. Fame is a weed that grows up overnight and can be rooted in anything or nothing.

Some of the nothoi-hunters already talked about the agile Ishmael, possibly before he was ever out of the womb, certainly soon afterward. There was Peeler, a big man among the hunters. There was Slickstock. There was Quickcoiner, a tipster gentleman such as was always a part of a hunter team.

These three were now dining together on the popular Chinese dish, egg gone wrong.

"There's a new one, I tell you!" Peeler gloated and rubbed his long hand together. "I can feel him like a new wind ruffling my hackles. He's the dog that barks different, he's the bird that whistles different, he's the sewer rat that squeaks different. He's the one of the kind we always hoped for. It will make our season whenever we kill him. The next best thing to killing that seven-year-old male would be to kill this new one."

"He's under the streets, he's in the trees," said Slickstock, "and I tell you he's mine! His father killed a teammate of mine at his own hunting-down. How had we missed his father all his years? Where did he come from?"

"This new one is out of Jane the Crane, the forky-tongued flower woman,"

Quickcoiner said. "Is she not game yet, now that he is born? Is she not game?

Why must we hold off? He is named Ishmael."

It was known, even before his father came to this city, that there would be a boy named Ishmael.

"But nobody has ever seen this Ishmael," Peeler said. "We hear him, we sense him, but we do not see him. We know that he is the wild ass of a creature who climbed in the trees and crawled under the streets before he could walk. We know that he dog-sounded and bird-whistled in code before he could talk. We know also that he imitated the talk of our own children before he could talk himself. We do no[ know his age, though he must be about two years old. But we know that he will be the wildest of them all, even wilder than the seven-year-old male that we have never been able to kill."

"And we have not been able to got Jane the Crane declared open game,"

Slickstock complained. "Tire Instigators claim that there is no evidence of a child. No evidence! Have they no senses except the regular ones?"

When he was three years old, Ishmael slipped off during the swing-hours and got clear to the Barrens where he met the eight-year-old male that the nothoi-hunters had never been able to kill. So it was all over then, the little drama? The boy had got free and gained his own hunted kind. And whatever happened to the wild children in the Barrens, how they were hunted down and almost extinguished again and agiin, is surely of another account. Then we are finished with the wild boy Ishmael?

No. He didn't stay in the Barrens. He came back to Janine's slanty room in the ghetto under the ghetto, back to the sewers and the spaces in the walls and under the floors and streets, back to the trees.

Three swing-periods later, Ishmael got clear to the Barrens again, taking another small boy with him. It was harder with another boy (though Ishmael had instructed him well) and they made it barely. They ran atangle of a set of nothoi-hunters (not the Peeler set, however), not a quick-sensing set that know there was an Ishmael. But the wild-ass boy had a shot lodged behind his ear just where his wiry mane rose highest. He left it there for memento though it festered him. He received this shot in memory of his father, who hadn't been able to leave him anything tangible.