"We intended to have our way in the post-cataclysmic world. We do have our way now and the world has all the predicted marks of the post-cataclysmic world, but the cataclysm did not happen. Since our whole objective was for flatness in all things, perhaps we were wrong to expect grandeur in the execution. Ah, but all the fabled mountains of the world were deflated so easily as to leave us unsatisfied. They were made of empty air, and the air has gone out of them.

"The Queer Fish have the saying that the Mysterious Master and Maker of the Worlds came and walked upon this world in historical time; that he will come again; that, perhaps, he has already come again and again.

"Let us set up the counter saying: that the Mysterious Masters and Unmakers of the Worlds (Ourselves) walk upon this world now; that we diminish it as we walk upon it; that we will not leave a stone upon a stone remaining of it.

"How is a person or a world unmade or unformed? First by being deformed.

And following the deforming is the collapsing. The tenuous balance is broken.

Insanity is introduced easily under the name of the higher sanity. Then the little candle that is in each head is blown out on the pretext that the great cosmic light can be seen better without it. Then we introduce what we used to call, in our then elegant style, Lady Narkos, Lady Porno, Lady Krotos, Lady Ephialtes, and Lady Hypnos; or Dope, Perversion, Discordant Noise, Nightmare or Bad Trip, and Contrived Listlessness or Sleep. We didn't expect it to work so easily, but it had been ripening for a long while.

"The persons and the worlds were never highly stable. A cross member is removed here on the pretext of added freedom. Foundation blocks are taken away on the pretext of change. Supporting studs are pulled down on the pretext of new experience. And none of the entities had ever beensupported more strongly than was necessary. What happens then? A man collapses, a town, a city, a nation, a world. And it is hardly noticed.

"The cataclysm has been and gone. The cataclysm was the mere gnawing away of critical girders and rafters by those old rodents, ourselves. And who are we? The Queer Fish say that we are unclean spirits. We aren't; perhaps we are unclean materialities. We do not know or care what we are. We are the Unmakers, and we have unmade our own memories with the rest o fit. We forget and we are forgotten.

"There was no holocaust, there was no war, there was no predicted overcrowding or nature fouling. The nature fouling came later, from undercrowding. Parts of the cities still stand. Certain diminished black tribes are said still to inhabit their jungles. But, though it has been only thirty years, nobody remembers what the cities really were or who built them.

"We discovered that most persons were automatic, that they operated, as it were, by little winders. One had only to wind them up and they'd say 'That's where the action si, that's where the action is,' and then they'd befoul themselves. And to these little people winders there was always a mechanism release. When tired of playing with the mechanical people, we pushed the release. And the people were then rundown, inoperative, finished."

The Destroying of the World. Aphorisms -- The Jester King It was late in the day after the Stranger-Brother left them.

"Let us flame the fire high," Gregory said, "that they may think we are still here. Then, when full dark comes, let us take horse and ride South to reverse our direction: or better, go West whree there has been no show of action."

"I have not been told to go anywhere beyond this place," Judy said doubtfully. "Besides, we do not know for sure that it is the treason."

"Of course it is the treason!" Trumpet Thatcher affirmed. "But I do hope he gets clear of them after he has betrayed you and us. I've never liked their treason that cuts both ways. Why must they always kill the traitor as well as the betrayed? From his eyes, though, I don't believe that he wants to get clear of them."

"What are you waiting for, mother?" Gregory asked.

"For Levi, I think," Judy said doubtfully, dreamily.

"And who is Levi?"

"I really don't know. I believe he is just Levi from over the sea."

"Is there to be a meeting?" Gregory asked. "Are you to be a part of it?"

"There is to be a meeting, I think. I do not believe now that I will be a part of it. I will be dead."

"Well, have you any instructions at all for Trumpet and for myself,"

Gregory asked, "what we should do?"

"None at all," Judy admitted. "It goes blank. I am out of it soon."

"Should we not at least flame the fires and then move maybe two miles North under the dark?" Gregory asked. "We should not be completely sitting prey."

"All right," Judy said. "We'll go a ways, but not far yet." But she seemed listless as though it had indeed ended with her.

They flamed their fires to mark their old position. They packed meat into slings to carry with them. They burned the remnants of the young bull in the flaming pit then. They moved maybe two miles North. Judy gave instructions to a dozen of the big, horned, ordered bulls. Then Judy and Trumpet bedded down for the night.

Gregory took horse and rode in the night, anywhere, everywhere. As a Queer Fish, Gregory bad now come of age on the plains, but be was still a twelve-year-old boy whose personal memory did not go back to any of the great events.

The Day of the Great Copout had been thirty years before. Even Gregory'smother Judy had nothing but scant childhood memories of the days before the Copout. The legends and the facts of that event had now parted company considerably, but it had always been more legend than fact to it. The only fact was that the human race had one day slipped a cog; that it had fallen down from the slight last push, though it had withstood much more severe buffeting. The fact was that the race now built no more and sustained no more, that it had let the whole complexity run down and then looked uncomprehending at the stalled remnant of it.

The legend was that the Day of Freedom arrived for everyone, and that thereafter nobody would ever work at all. The people were very heroic in their refusal to work, and many of them starved for it. Their numbers fought in the cities (always under the now universal peace symbol) for what food and goods could be found there. Their greatly diminished numbers then moved into the countrysides which had for a long time been choked with their sad abundance.

Every grain elevator was full to bursting, every feed lot and pasture had its animals to excess. Every haybarn and corncrib was full.

Before the Day of the Great Copout the population had already greatly diminished. In the Americas it was less than a third of what it had been a century before. In other lands it was down variously. The world bad already begun to fall apart a bit (being so alike everywhere there was not much use in keeping up communication between the like parts) and to diminish in quality (why run if no one is chasing you?).

But the Day of the Great Copout was worldwide. As though at a given signal (but there had been no signal) people in every city and town and village and countryside of earth dropped their tools and implements and swore that they would work no more. Officials. and paper shufflers ceased to officiate and to shuffle paper. Retailers closed up and retailed no more.

Distributors no longer distributed. Produccrs produced nothing. The clock of the people stopped although some had believed that the hour was still early.

The Last Day had been, according to some.

"The Last Day has not been," said a prophct. "They will know it when it has been."

There was a little confusion at first. Though distributors no longer distributed nor retailers retailed, still they objected to their stores and stocks being looted. There was bad feeling and bloodshed over this, and the matter was never settled at all.

The law people had all resigned from the law; and every congress and assembly in the world stood adjourned indefinitely or forever. There were, for a while, new assemblies and gatherings, freely chosen and freely serving, but these quickly fell apart and left nothing in their places but random gangs.

Minorities of odd people resisted the disintegration for a while, becoming more odd and more minor in their exceptions. The Crescent Riders kept up a little order for some years in the older parts of the world, not really laboring, looting just enough that the art be not forgotten; still keeping leaders who looked a little like leaders. The Ruddy Raiders maintained that there was nothing wrong with rape and arson so long as it was done as fun and not labor. The Redwinged Blackbirds and the Mandarins held together here and there.

And among certain groups that had always been considered pcculiar, The Witnesses, the Maccabees, the Queer Fish, the Copout had not been complete.

Certain numbers of these folks, somewhere between five and ten percent of them, resisted the Freakout, the Copout, the Freedom Day. These minorities of minorities had the cornpulsion to continue with their building, their ordering, their planting, creating, procreating.

This caused a disturbance in the New Free World. Groups should not be free to reject Free Think. So these remnants were hunted down. Even though it was against the new ways of the Free World, a certain organization was necessary for the hunts.

Most of that had passed now. Most of everything had passed. After thirty years had rolled by, the Free People of the world had become pretty old,pretty old and pretty crabby. Though most of the males among them still wore the beards of their boyhood and youth, yet they had aged in every way. They hadn't been reproducing themselves to any great extent; and the most of them hadn't really been so very young when the Great Day had come and gone. The cult of youth had become a bit senile.

There were still some populations in the cities. The cities have always been built on the best lands of the country and have always occupied the best river bottoms and river junctions. There was good fishing, there was good grazing on the new grass that shattered the pavements and sidewalks, on the open places which became still more open, there was good fuel of several sorts, there were buildings remaining that were still tight enough to give year-round protection.

But most of the folks were in the countrysidcs now. The special grasses and hemps and poppies necessary to the Free Culture had long been established and abundant; they were in the cities and the countries and the fringe areas.

In the country were millions upon millions of now feral-cattle to be had for easy killing. Wheat and corn still grew of themselves, rougher and more ragged every year, but still more than sufficient. The scattered crops would apparently outlast the diminished people, the disappearing human race.

What children and young people there were now belonged, much beyond their expected percentages, to the peculiar groups. Children also showed some tendency to join these peculof the regular peop iar groups.

It was almost the case that any young person was now suspect. It was quite rare that any young one should really adhere to tile Free People. There had even come the anomalous situation (to one who remembered the earlier days and the earlier slogans) that beards were now more typical of old men than of boys.

Such was the world. So had it been for thirty years, for the Freedom Era.

"But there is always hope," Judy Thatcher (and John Thatcher before her) used to preach. "Never has there been so much room for hope, never so great a vacuum waiting to be filled by it. Hope is a substance that will fill a vessel of any shape, even the convoluted emptiness that is the present shape of the world."

"And now in the sabbatical year" (this was Judy Thatcher alone preaching now, for John Thatcher was dead before sabbatical year rolled around) "there is more room for hope than ever before. There are still the Twelve (we have the Word that we will not diminish below that); there are still the further seventy-two traveling and laboring and building somewhere; and there are still the scattered hundreds who will not let it die. Oh, there will be a great new blooming! It begins! It begins!"

"Where? Where does it begin?" Gregory and Trumpet used to ask this rowdy-minded mother of theirs with laughing irony. "Where does it begin at all?"

"With the two of you," Judy would say. "With the dozens, with the hundreds, with the thousands of others."

Knock off the last zero, mother," Trumpet would always laugb. "There are a few hundreds, perhaps, very widely scattered. But you know there are not thousands."

"There have been thousands and millions," Judy always insisted. "And there will be thousands and millions again."

The Thatchcrs bad been moving for all these years North and South in the marginal land that is a little to the West of the land of really adequate rain. There was plenty here for small bands. The Thatchers and their friends knew all the streams and pools and dry runs where one could dig to water. They had their own grain that seemed to follow their paths and seasons with its own rough sowing. They had their own cattle that were devoted to them in a strangely developed way.

Gregory Thatcher, as the summer starred night was rolling overhead (theywere quite a ways North), was remembering the murder of his own father, John Thatcher, two years before. It bad been a nervous night like this one, following a daytime visit of a man with not-quite-right eyes, a man with the slight tang of treason on him.

But the man had asked for a letter to take to one of the churches in dispersal. This was given; it could not be refused. And it was given under John Thatcher's own name. The man had also asked for the sacrament; that could never be refused. And the man had been allowed to depart in peace and on foot as he bad come. On foot-but a thousand yards away and he was on horse and gone in the afternoon's dust to meet a scheming group.

The group had come just at next dawn, after such a nervous night as this one; had come from an unexpected direction and killed John Thatcher in one swoop. They then were all away except the several who were tossed and killed on the horns of the ordered bulls.

And the stunned reaction had found voice and words only in Judy's puzzled lament: "It is broken now. There are no longer the full twelve. It was never supposed to be broken."

"Bend down, woman," dead Thatcher said. "I am not quite dead. I lay my hands on you." John Thatcher laid his hands on his wife Judy and made her one of the Twelve. Then he died (for the second time, Gregory believed. Gregory was sure his father had been killed by first assault, and hai come alive for a moment to accomplish what he had forgotten).

"It is all right then," Judy Thatcher had said. "We are still the Twelve. I make the twelfth. I was wrong ever to doubt of that; I was wrong ever to doubt of anything."

So they had buried John Thatcher, the father and still a young man, and rejoiced that the Twelve still survived. That had been two years ago.

Gregory rode his circuit all night. It was his to do. It was not for his mother Judy or for his sister Trumpet. They had other roles. This was Gregory's night. It had a name which he did not know. It was the Watch Night, the night of squires on the cvc of their knighting, of princes on the nocturne of their crowning, of apostles on the vigil of their appointing.

There was a nervousness among the cattle here, and again there. There might be several strange bands in motion. The Thatchcrs had no firearms, no weapons at all that could not be excused or justified as being tools. A few of the roving gangs still had rifles, but these were sorry things near as dangerous to raldcr as to victim. All such things were thirty or more years old, and none had been well cared for. But the raiders always had bludgeons and knives.

Gregory fell asleep on horseback just before dawn. This was not a violation of the Watch Night for him. It was the one thing for which he never felt guilt. Actually he was cast into deep sleep; it was done to him; it was not of his own doing or failing at all. His horse also was cast into deep sleep, standing, with head bowed down and muzzle into the stiff grass. They both slept like wind-ruffled statues.

Then there was movement, double movement, intruded into that sleep.

There was the stirring and arraying of the ordered bulls. There was the false attack; and the bulls went for the false attack, being faithful beasts only.

Then there was the death attack, coming apparently from the West.

Gregory himself was struck from his horse. One of the raiders had counted coup on him, but not death coup. He was on the ground bcgrimed with his own blood and his horse was dead.

Then he heard the clear ringing voice from which his sister had her name. It rose to a happy battle cry and was cut off in quick death. The last note of the Trumpet was a gay one, though. This had been a big happy girl, as rowdy in mien and mind as her mother.

Trumpet Thatcher was dead on the ground: and the mother Judy Thatcher was dead beyond all doubt. There was confusion all around, but there was noconfusion about this fact.

The ordered horned bulls had wheeled now on the real attackers. They wrecked them. They tossed them, men and horses, into the air, and ripped and burst them before they came to ground. And the only words that Gregory could find were the same words that his mother Judy had found two years before.

"It is broken now. They are no longer the full Twelve. It was never supposed to be broken."

His mother was quite dead and she would not come alive even for a moment to accomplish what she had forgotten. This dead Thatcher was not able to say, "Bend down, boy. I am not quite dead." She was quite dead. She would speak no more, her broken mouth would be reconstituted no more, till resurrection morning.

"Are there no hands?" Gregory cried out, dry-eycd and wretched. "Are there no hands that might be laid upon me?"

"Aye, boy, mine are the hands," came a voice. A man of mature years was walking through the arrayed bulls. And they, who had been killing strange men in the air and on the ground, opened their .irray and let this still stranger man come through. They bowed liortis down to the turf to this man.

"You are Levi," Gregory said.

"I am Levi," the man answered softly. He laid hands on Gregory. "Now you are one of the Twelve," he said.

4.

"There has been a long series of 'Arrow Men' or 'Beshot Men' who have been called (or who have called themselves) Sons of God. These Comet-like Men have all been exceptional in their brief periods. The Queer Fish, however, insist that their own particular Mentor 'The Mysterious Master and Maker of the Worlds' was unique and apart and beyond the other Arrow Men or Comet Men who have been called Sons of God. They state that he is more than Son of God: that He is God the Son.

"We do not acknowledge this uniqueness, but we do acknowledge the splendor and destroying brilliance of all these Arrow Men. To us, there is nothing wrong with the term Son of God. There is not even anything wrong with the term God, so long as it is understood to be meaningless, so long as we take him to be an unstructured God. Our own splendor would have been less if there had not been sonic huge thing there which we unstructured. This unstructuring of God, which we have accomplished, was the greatest masterwork of man.

"The second greatest masterwork of man was the unstructuring of man himself, the ceasing to be man, the going into the hole and pulling the hole in after him; and the unstructuring, the destroying of the very hole then.

"We were, perhaps, the discredited cousins of man. We are not sure now what we were or are. We who were made of fire were asked to serve and salute those who were made of clay. We had been Arrow Men ourselves. Our flight was long flaming and downward, and now it has come to an end. We destroy ourselves also. We'll be no more. It is the Being that we have always objected to.

"The collapsing of the human species was a puzzle for the anthropologists and the biologists, but both are gone now. They said though, before their going, that it is a common thing for a new species to collapse and disappear; that the collapse, in these common cases, is always sudden and complete; they said that it was an uncommon case for any species to endure.

They said also that there was never anything unusual in the human species.

"They were almost wrong in this evaluation. There was, or there very nearly was, something unusual about the human species. It was necessary that we alter and tilt things a bit to remove that unusualness. We have done that.

We've blown it all for them and for ourselves.

"Fly-blown brains and fly-flown flesh! What, have you not lusted for rotted mind and for rotted meat? Here are aphrodisiacs to aid you. Have you not lusted for unconsciousness and oblivion? You can have them both, so longas you accept them as rotted, which is the same as disordered, or unstructured, or uninstituted. This is the peaceful end of it all: the disordering, the disintegrating, the unstructuring, the rotting, the dry rot which is without issue, the nightmare which is the name of sleep without structure. Lust and lust again for this end! We offer you, while it is necessary, the means and the aids to it."

Mind-Blowing and World-Blowing. Aphrodisiacs. -- Argyros Daimon.

(No, really we don't know why these Unstructured Scriveners chose such oddities for calamary names.) Levi and Gregory were walking northward at a great easy ambic. "It is no use to be bothered with horses and so be slowed," Levi said. They moved without hurry but at unusual speed. It was a good trick. Gregory would not have been able to do it of himself, but with Levi he could do it. Levi had a magic way of delving in the earth, as for the two burials. He had this magic way of moving over the earth.

"You are Levi from over the sea," Gregory said once as they moved along over the stiff grass pastures, "but how have you come? There are no longer any planes. There are no longer any ships. Nobody comes or goes. How have you done it?"

"Why Gregory, the world has not slumbered as deeply as you had believed.

Things have not ceased completely to be done. Anything can be builded again, or builded a first time. And there are no limits to what a body can do when infused with spirit. Perhaps I walked on the water. Perhaps I traveled for three days in the belly of a whale and he brought me all this way and vomited me up on these high plains. Or perhaps I came by a different vehicle entirely.

Oh, is it not a wonderful world that we walk this morning, Gregory!" They were in the dusty Dakota country, coming into that painted and barren region that is called the Bad Lands. Well, it was wonderful to the eye, perhaps, but it was dry and sterile.

"My father and my mother, both gone in blood now, have said that the world has gone to wrack and ruin," Cregory was speaking with some difficulty, "and that there is nothing left but to trust in God."

"Aye, and I say that we can build wonderful things out of that wrack and ruin, Gregory. Do you not know that all the pieces of the world are still here and that many of them are still useable? Know that the world has been not dead but sleeping. 'Twas a foolish little nodding off, but we come awake again now.

And this Trust is a reciprocal thing. We must trust in Cod, yes. And He must trust in us a little. We are the Twelve. He puzzles a bit now I think. 'How are they going to get out of this one?' He wonders. Yes boy, I jest, but so does the Lord sometimes. He jests, He jokes, and we be the point of His most pointed jokes. An old sage once said that there were only twelve jokes in the world. What if we be those twelve? The possible humor and richness of this idea will grow in you, Greg, when you meet the others of the Twelve. There are some sly jokes among the pack of us, I assure you of that."