"Are the nothoi living creatures, Morgan? Not in law, not in fact. Who will admit ever seeing such creatures? Who will admit that there are such things living anywhere? They are fables, Morgan, fables from the Barrens. They are less substantial even than ghosts. Prove that they are not. Take me and show me a nothos."

"That would be the death of both myself and the small thing." "If they cause deaths, then they are demons. Who could find fault with the ritual laying of such ghosts and demons?"

This Official Instigator was one of the authentic Ancient Hippies, those in the hundred-years-and-over class. They had station and rights. They hadfinal honor.

"We are the open world," said this Ancient Hippie. "We open, and you will not come in to us."

"You are not open, old man," Morgan insisted. "You close the great way itself. You open only mole runs, and you go blind in their windings, proclaiming them to be the great way. We stubborn ones are for the open world that is gone."

"It is you who withdraw, Morgan. You withdraw from the Gentle World."

"You withdraw from life, old man, and the withdrawal syndromes are weird and twitchy."

"Be careful, Morgan. I and mine are main things in the withdrawal syndromes, and we will not be spoken of slightingly. Can you not see that you are wrong? You do not see how curiously you withdraw from life in opposing me here? Do you not know that you have just passed death sentence on yourself?"

"Certainly I know it," Morgan said.

It was true, Everything spoken to an Instigator was recorded, and the records were fed to appraisal machines. But how many seals does it take on a death sentence? Morgan Saunders knew that there were very many on his already.

But he walked out on the Instigator, which was illegal. He went on about his work, on past the Hippie Hippodrome, with its high sign of writhing splatter-paint: "MAN, OUR STUNTED PURPOSE AND OUR GREATEST STUNT."

The nothoi-hunters plagued both Janine Pervicacia and Morgan Saunders, following them, leveling guns at them, mocking them, hungering for them. The nothoi-hunters had the sense of prey; they had sophisticated equipment. They killed a lot. They were authorized to kill a lot. But they did not want to hunt out their field. Here it wis a special prey that they waited for and counted on, that they counted on even before it came into being, that they everlastingly hoped for. The hunters asked both Janine and Morgan when Ishmael would be along, this even before the time when Janine and Morgan had met. But now Morgan and Janine had met, and they talked about Ishmael, not realizing it, never having heard the name, not realizing that they were talking about a coming person.

"Expectation of anything is out of order, of course," Morgan said to Janine, "and is not much hope in hope. Nevertheless, I got a distant tang of something that may not be all wrong. Are you with me in it, Janine, if we discover some good way (even if it is a short way) away from this?"

"I am with you in anything you want to do, 0 Morgan with the short bramble hair, but it is all at an end. Everything goes down, and we go down with it."

"We will not go down, Janine. This is not the end yet, even for such as we are."

"Yes, the ending, Morgan, the evening of the seventh day."

"Janine, the seventh day had no evening. For better or worse, for many thousands of years we have lived in the afternoon of the seventh day, maybe even in the morning of it. And we live in it yet. Will I see you here tomorrow?"

"No. Not for several days, or weeks, or months. I will do a thing, and I will not tell you what it is till it's done. Goodbye, then, for some days or weeks or months, or forever."

2.

What things a man or a world believes or disbelieves will permeate every corner and shadow and detail of life and style, will give a shape to every person and personifact and plant of that world. They will form or they will disorder, they will open or close. A world that believes in open things is at least fertile to every sort of adventure or disaster. A world that believes in a closed way will shrivel and raven and sputter out in frosty cruelty. Audifax O'Hanlon When Morgan saw Janine no more in the mornings the world became a deprived place. He was still plagued by the nothoi-hunters, who mocked him, and by the official instigators, who conversed with him. One afternoon, after he had put away his brooms and rakes and shovels and was on his rest period, he walked out into the Barrens, which was illegal. He found no nothoi there at all nor any trace of them. He did find cattle that had gone feral, wild swine, and rabbits and deer. He found streams that were full of fish and frogs; he found berries and fruits and hazelnuts. He found patches of wild wheat and rye, and sweet corn and melons.

"What is the reason I could not live here?" he asked himself out loud.

"I could come here with Janine and we could live and flourish, away from the clang of industry and the clatter of the guitar-makers' factories. What is the reason I could not live here?"

But his left ear left his head at that moment, and immediately afterward he heard (with his right ear) the sound of the shot. Angry and scared, he clawed and crawled and rolled and made his way out of the Barrens and back to the fringes of the city.

"The reason I cannot live in the Barrens is that the nothoi-hunters will kill me as a nothos if they see me there," he said quietly. "They all kill any illegal person they find in the Barrens. And it was no mistake they made. They could see plainly that I was a grown man and not a nothos. Here I am now, one-eared and sad-hearted and -- oh, oh, oh -- here is an even sadder thing come to worry me!"

It was an Official Instigator wishing to talk to him. Morgan could not be sure whether it was the same Instigator who had talked to him several times before. Those Instigators who belong to the Ancient Hippie aristocracy (the one-hundred-years-and-older class) all look pretty much alike.

"We get you piece by piece, Morgan afraid to wander." the Instigator said. "Today an ear, tomorrow another thing, and very soon we will get you all and entire. If you would not listen to reason with two ears, how can you listen with one? There was a question that arose many years before you were born, so it does not really concern you at all. The question arose, and the answer was given. The question was simply, 'What will we do when there are too many people in the world?' And the answer given was, 'We will pass edict so that there never will be allowed too many people in the world.' Why do you not accept the gentle and wise answer?"

"The answer was out of order. Your whole complex is out of order in several senses of the term. That is why you will not accept order in any of the central things. That is why you must substitute deformity for form. I do not accept your answer because it is the wrong answer."

"How is it wrong, one-eared Morgan? What could possibly be wrong with it?"

"It is the static answer to a dynamic question and therefore the wrong inswer."

"Could you have given a righter answer?"

"Of course not. But I could have contributed to it, and you could have also. The answer would have to grow like an organism. And it would have grown."

"There was no time to permit an organism to grow. It was a matter of great hurry."

"No, there was no great hurry, and the answer was already growing apace until it was hacked to death. There had been some signs or a full blooming springtime for mankind, and this frightened the The Population Blessing was a challenge, as all large and fine things are. There was only one question: whether we were a good enough people to accept the greatest gift ever offered.

And the answer given was, No, we are not." "But we splendid ones in our youth gave another answer, little die-hard Morgan," the Instigator said. "We will not abide a clutter of people, we said.

Chop them off; there are enough and too many, we said. Really, it was a splendid answer, and I tell you that we were a splendid people."

"'Evil always wins through the strength of its Splendid Dupes', as a wise man said, and yet I doubt that you were ever splendid. You aren't now."

"But we are, little Morgan the philosopher of the street-sweepers, we are splendid and talented, gentle and random, creative and in ventive."

"No, old man, you know that creativity and invention have disappeared completely. Why should they not? Residue technique will suffice to maintain a plateau. It is only for mountain-building that creativity and invention are required. You were the loss-of-nerve people. And it is hard for a small remnant to restore that nerve when every thing has flowed the other way for near a hundred years."

"Morgan of the remnant, your pieces are so little that they cannot even find each other. You lost everything completely before you were born. Listen to me: I am a wise and long-lived man. The old sophistry that there are two sides to every question has long passed away. Instead of that, there are mutual exclusions that cannot live in the same world with each other. The great consensus and the small remnant can no longer live in the same world.

What odds could you post, little Morgan, on our going and your remaining?"

"Very weak odds, but I am more and more inclined to play them out."

"We have recorded almost enough on you to terminate you right now. Is it not curious that a man shot in the ear will bleed out of the mouth -- in words? The nothoi-hunters are better shots than that, you know.They but practice of you till we give them the final word on you. We have checked your own ancestry. You yourself are a nothos, for all that we can find to the contrary. No kin-card was ever issued for you. We could classify you for extinction at any time, but we will wait a little while and have spectacle out of you."

The nothoi-hunters in fact were very good shots. They had prediction scopes on their rifles. These small directors had the evasion patterns of many small ailinials and ofthe small nothoi worked out: the rush, the scurry, the broken pace, the double, the zigzag. With the pattern of those built into a scope the hunters could hardly miss.

The nothoi-hunters themselves were square pegs who happened to fit into certain square holes of the Gentle World. They were not gentle (not every one can be gentle even on that low plateau); they were naturally troublesome and warlike. Now their proclivities were channeled to a special job. They exterminated certain unlawful things. They did it thoroughly and well. And they made high sport out of it.

And there were other summary things in the system of the Gentle World.

This very afternoon, right at the begining of the swing hours, there were several executions under the recusancy laws. Many persons refused to take part in the swing hours. This was the same as refusal to be happy. To the offenders, first there was warning, then there was mutilation, then there was death. A half dozen of such public hangings would usually minimize the absences from swing time for a while.

There was a stubborn girl ready to be hanged, and at first Morgan thought that she was Janine. She was much the same type. She refused to recant; she refused to take her dutiful place in the Gentle World. She had refused three times to join the swing fun. Likely she was mad, but her madness might be dangerous and contagious.

"You refuse to have fun with the funsters?" an Ancient Instigator asked her almost tearfully.

"I always have fun," the girl said loudly. "It's more fun to be me dead than you alive. And I will not endure anything as stifling as the swing times.

Drop dead, old man!"

"You might at least respect my positon is Ancient Instigator." "I'd see the last Instigator strangled with the strings of the last guitar!"So the girl was hanged, drawn, and quartered. Morgan, though he had often seen these little dramas, was deeply shocked: not so much by the girl's bad-mannered defiance as by the punishment itself. She looked so like Janine and talked so like her that it was frightening.

Then Janine came back and was busy with her flowers again one morning.

The flowers remembered her (it had not really been such a long time), and they came alive to her. Janine was not impassioned with the flowers (as many in the Gentle World had the pose of being), but they were impassioned with her. They always had been.

"Where have you been this while?" Morgan asked her. "At the end of every morning I examined all the bodies gathered up by all the sweepers, and yotirs was never among them."

"I And awhile. And I had an illegal operation performed on myself."

"Which?" Morgan asked. "What did it do to you?"

"It undid," Janine said. "It undid the earlier operation. Now I am open to life once more."

"And under the automatic sentence of death you are! And I am if I say the word. I say the word. I am."

"I know a Papster priest," said Janine.

"And I know one," said Morgan. "We will go to mine."

"No, we will go to mine," she insisted. But they couldn't have quarreled over that or over anything. There wasn't room for that in the narrow margin of life left to them. Besides, it happened that it was the same Papster priest they both knew. There weren't more than two or three of those hidden ones in that city of a million.

They went to the Papster priest and were inarried, which was illegal.

The Papster must have been lonesome for the central things, so he brought out his eloquence, which had grown rusty, and gave a doctrine to their act.

"What you do is right," he said, "no matter how illegal it is. This world had become a stunted plant, and it was not meant to be. Deformity can never be the norm. The basic and evil theory was: that (by restriction) fewer people could live better and more justified. But they did not. Fewer people live, an(] they live as dwarfs. Not even China in the thousand yeirs it was frozen (it also muclily in an opium dream) was as deprived and listless as this world. The Cities of the Plateau may be destroyed as were the Cities of the Plain, I do not know. We live in that which calls itself a biological world, but no one seems to understand the one central fact of biology, of the life complex.

"This is the one biological fact that all present biologists ignore to their own incompetence: that every life is called into being by God and maintained in being by God at every instant of that life; that an without God there is no bios, no life, and certainly no biology. There can never be an unwanted life or an unwanted person, ever, anywhere. If a person were not wanted by God, God would not call him into being, There can never be too many persons, because it is God who counts and records and decides how many there should be. There can never be a person unprovided for, because it is God who provides. Whoever does not believe in this Providence does not believe in God.

Once there was some nonsense on this subject. Now it is pretty well dispelled, and the pretense of believing in one and not the other has about vanished."

The priest wrinkled his nose for the sweat running down it. It was a hot underground hole that they came to for the secret marriage.

"But they bug me, the biologists and their dwarfed biota," the priest went on "If they cannot see the central fact of their own science, if they cannot see this fact in the knotted tangle of chromosomes and in the ladders of the double helices, then they have eyes in vain. Ah -- I talk too much, and perhaps you do not understand me."

"We understand you," Morgan and Jane said together.

"May the God of Abraham, the God of Issac, ah -- the God of Ishmael --the God of Jacob be with you, and may He fulfill in you His blessings," the Papster said; then he said other things, and they married each other before him.

The background didn't mean much immediately after that. It could have been still on the plateau; it could have been on a mountain or in a deep ravine or over the sea. What happened was gaiety. Morgan and Janine cut up in their lives. No, no, not the dwarfed singing and jittery whining of the Gentle World grown old so gracelessly. This was the song-central thing. They joked, they carried on, they startled, they set fires in what had been too dry, too lacking in substance, even to btirn. Like magic they came to know other couples of their same state, ten of them, twenty of them, all in subservient positions and none of them servile. All of them hidden, all of them dangerously open. They were a new thing in the air. The Official Instigators flared their nostrils at the new scent; and the nothoi-hunters caught wind of a now strong prey and shook in their hate and anticipation.

Morgan and Jane the Crane even joked about which of them would run out his string first. "It will be you, Janine," Morgan jibed. "I will sweep you up one morning. 'Is it Agar?' I will ask, 'or is it the Crane?" And I will say, 'Oh, she bends hard in the middle!' And I will Stuff you into my canister. And then there will be another girl selling Flowers, and I will begin to carry on with her."

"Be in not so much hurry to sweep me up," Janine said, "or you will have to bear Ishmael yourself. It will be hard on you, Morgan, you so narrow in the pelvic girdle, you lacking in so many ways. When you come to give birth to him, you will wish that I were back to do it."

"Oh, we will keep you alive a little while then," Morgan said, "and I will try to stay alive myself. A doubly posthumous child always has a hard time of it. AL least one of its should be around. Ah, the hunters shoot me through with their eyes a dozen times a day, and the Instigators are fashioning the last seal for my certificate. What is taking Ishmael so long anyhow? Mayhap he'll be a monster. They have longer gestation periods. Better a monster than the sort of dwarfs that abound now."

"He will be a wild ass or,, man, and that is surely monster enough,"

Janine said. "Get gone. The flower-care inspector has been plaguing me, and he is coming now. I love you more than the sky itself. Not much more, but a little. Get gone."

The flower-care inspector was always in a great fury with Janine now.

"Do you not know that the flower-care girl over on Western Avenue had her tongue cut out for talking overly much with a sweeper?" she asked.

"Yellow-card morning people have not the right to talk freely. And why are you so clothed? Why are you so overclothed? There is scarcely a square foot of flesh showing on you. What do your silly affectations work toward anyhow?"

"The world clothed and in its right mind," said Janine Pericicacia.

"Clothes sometimes hide things!" the flower-care inspector shrilled.

"Oh, they do!" Janine beamed. "They do."

Those were the days. When you rise above the plateau you rise above it in all ways. There was hope everywhere; and there was no single detail that could give any possible hope. There was a man from over the sea (as was Morgan of that name) who said that things were much the same elsewhere, congealed, dwarfed, and vapid. Yet he was full of sunny strength and quick laughs. There was a man there from over the prairies. He said that the prairies were disaster areas now for all free and illegal people. They were hunted down and killed from the air by fog poisons that had first been tried out on coyotes.

There was a man there from the north woods. He said that the nothoi-hunters up there were real hunters, and there was no bag limit. They didn't seem to care if they did hunt out the game. It would be replenished, they said, or they would hunt elsewhere when they had done with it. There was a man there from that ghetto that is under the ghetto, from the sewers that are under thesewers. He said that the very small pockets of free and illegal people underground were being systematically killed by spray poisons that had first been tried out on rats.

But still there was high hope: not for long life, of course, but for bright and embattled life, fine for issue. But the way was getting mighty narrow.

"All joking aside," Morgan told Janine one morning, "you win our little bet and game. This is the last morning of my life. They get me today."

"Take some of them with you, man!" Janine spat with her forky tongue.

"No. We won't go to the same place; but I may send some of them another way."

"Break for the Barrens, man!" Janine sounded. "In short months I and the boy will come to you there."

"Oh, I break to them now," Morgan said, "but I must pass through an Instigator and a circle of hunters first. This world, my love, is only temporary, of time. We have another one. But we are appointed to this world first. It is of ourselves, part of our bodies. It is mean, and are we not also? It is not better, because we did not make it any better, this withered world is both our ancestry and our issue, however deformed it may be.

Remember, Janine (and this is important) never hate this world; but it will be hateful. Remember also we always loved the early mornings."

"I will remember,, Morgan. Go happy with it now. See how joyful I say it! Your dead ears may hear me shrilling like a demented woman fifteen minutes from now; do not believe them. Remember that I said, 'Go happy with it.'"

Morgan Saunders slid through the early morning streets toward the edge of the city in the direction of the Barrens. He was a moving man with cat-springs in him. It was his last morning by all the odds, but he would give them a run or a fight for it. Then his own particular Official Instigator loomed up in front of him, the Ancient Hippie of the more-than-a-hundred-years class, the nemesis who had already obtained the warrant for Morgan's death and who would turn the hunters loose on him whenever he wanted to.

"Get out of my way, old hip," Morgan warned. "I'm in a hurry." "Oh, do not be in a hurry, man," the old Instigator protested. "Talk to me. It is you who are going to die today. It is you of the illegitimate life that we have enough to kill a dozen times. If I were you I would say, 'Let them be impatient; let them wait a little.' They cannot kill you till I give the word.

Talk to me, man."

"Talking won't change a thing, oldster. And I go to a better thing than this, whether I get to the Barrens or to my death. Why shouldn't I be in a hurry for a better thing?"

"Talking did change everything once, Morgan-Sorgen. We whipped you once by talk alone, not even very good talk. We won the world to our way by our talk. And now you are nothing at all but a remnant and a sport. You are less than the tenth of one percent. If I were of the tenth of one percent I would be silent. And we can extinguish even that minuscule of you whenever we wish."