3 Well, did you ever watch the way the future comes out of its jug? The jug is of smokey glass or rock crystal. Shapes and forms and movements can be seen in there, and some of the details of it call be guessed. But it is all distorted and deformed. It is the curvature of the smokey glass that deforms the images. No future is ever seen undeformed. But the globs of the future trying to get out will push each other back, and there will be clotting at the mouth of the jug. Only thin juice will roll out for a while. Then it will break loose and big hunk will come out. But they are never quite as you imagined them to be when you peered through the smokey glass. Can one cheat to catch an earlier look at what is coming out? One can try. There is a thin leading edge between the devouring present and the waiting future. What happens if one is too eager and crosses this leading edge? The world ends, for that person, for that while. If this thin line is crossed, then one is out in the narrow interval of unreality. It's a chancey though flexible place there. Melchisedech Duffey and his history had come up to the absolute present time, and then had gone a thumb's width beyond that, Duffey and his nimbus had gone into the future then? No, they had gone into the shattering state of contingency. It was a fracturing of reality. And it was a fracturing of Melchisedech Duffey. There has always been a quantity of unreality leaking out of the future into the present. Then the unreality has to be negated, and the reality revived. The reconstructing of reality is what is being talked about when we talk about reconstructing the world. Duffey had been into the future before, spottily, off and on, for seven years once. And he had returned several times to those same seven years. And yet it was not strictly speaking into the future. It was a mixture of future and past and present. It was an interval or series of intervals removed out of time and held apart. The intervals of Seven Years did not necessarily count in regular time, which is why they could sometimes be revisited. They did not fracture reality. They stood on the far side of reality. Melchisedech had been on the fourteenth voyage of the Ship Argo, and this fourteenth voyage was technically in the future. And his own ashes had been brought back to him from that future land. Anything brought back from the future has unreality as a major component. Anyone who ever looked at or handled Duffey's ashes with seeing eyes and sensing fingers knows something about their index of unreality. Teresa the Showboat knew about their unreality, but she believed that she was blowing them into real fire. In a misbehaven case like this, when a complex over-runs itself, it is shattered into a number of apocalypses or possible manifesting futures. A number seven is often mentioned of these futures. Really, there is no limit to the number of contingencies: but seven of them, like eager olives of different sizes, seemed to be disputing the mouth of the jug. And the seven most jostling ones were these: "One". This is called, from a remnaiit of it that has been found 'The Great Day Contingency'. It is characterized by a bewildering unstructuring or unstructuring of all things. It is further characterized by the obliterating of boundaries, which results in the obliteration of persons also. The irony is that Duffey was the one who had first thought of this, and that as a joke. It would take a lot of misplaced faith on the part of a faithless world to bring it off, but misplaced faith is the easiest sort to come by. If on go imagining a trap like that one, you had better imagine yourself Ieaping out of its jaws pretty nimbly. Duffey hidn't done this, and he had been caught. (This sounds a little bit fimiliar. Yes, the pretty girls who were putting on the play, and one of them was a prophesing pythoness who hit some of this imagery pretty close.) 'This is the clock that stopped at twelf. This is the snake that swallowed itself.' That was the theme of the Great Day Contingency. Wouldn't it be an absurd ending? Or even an absurd future segment? But one does not say 'Absurd' to a thing that swallows one up. "Two." This is the Goat Contingence. (Whence do I have this partial understanding of the alternatives,' Duffey asked himself, 'my understanding of these alternatives offered to me and to the world? Oh, I simply have them in my prophetic function. Even the little verse-writing prophetess at the academy had pieces of this understanding.) This contingency was that of the Promontory Goats or the Scapegoats as passionate motivators of the world and as receivers of the world and as receivers of the world's bankruptcy. This contingency involved one of the Prodigious Persons or Splendid Animations, Casey Szymanski, as cosmos scapegoat and bad-trader of worlds. Nobody could ever make a bad trade like Cascv. Compassionate goats keep picking up the tab for the deficiting world. Casey had tried to trade souls with the Devil to spare that person punishment. Whether that trade was ever consummates, or whether it was still in the process of being consummated, is not know. Casey did trade souls (or perhaps it was just one of his old souls that he had lying around, as Absalom said) with Absalom Stein. Casey and his sort will trade off everything till there is nothing left to trade. And, when the debts of all the world fall due and must be collected, they must be collected from them the scapegoats. They will pay forever in a lower and more painful hell than the one commonly known, the fearful hell that is under the name-board "The End of Compassion'. This is a very doubtful contingency, but it does answer the question 'Who is going to pay for it all?' Like all the contingencies, it involved the entire world. "Three". This is the eschatological resolution presented in the form of the Petrine Spy Story. In plainer words -- no, there are no plainer words to lend it. This is about a very special selection and fingering of a man for a great station. Spy stories are in, especially those on whose outcome the fate of the world hinges. Count Finnegan is the main person in this alternate. Finnega's death on the Marianao Coast of Cuba near Havana was a trick (Oh, certainly he died there), a cover drama to spring him loose for a great masquerade. His appearance, whether in effigy or in body, was exactly the same as that of Peter the Second, banana nose and all. When forces move to kill peter, there will be some very intricate movement and counter-movement. Dotty Yekouris (dead-undead on the Marianao Coast also) has an incredible role in this. God knows what! Someone will be dead on the Petrine throne, and yet someone will still reign over that diminished and tottering and holy kingdom. The only thing preventing this chase-farce-tragic-drama from moving out of contingency and into certainty is that Finnegan cannot be found, dead or alive, to play his role. Or he is already playing that role, And this version of the world is already happening. Once more, the whole world is involved in this alternative. But it's a pretty chancey thing to try to save the world on such a shoestringy thing as this is. "Four". This is the Fourteenth Voyage of the Ship Argo, and the Reduction of Melchisedech Duffey. It must happen (this is the only one of the contingencies that is sure to happen) but it will not preclide other alternatives from happening. This is in the preter-natural circumstances of the Seven Lost Years (they are called the Seven Golden Years in their own context). This is concerned with ongoing beatitudes, and the strong promise of Final Beatitude. It is concerned with Shipboard Romance in a wider sense than it is usually understood. It is the 'Quest Accomplished' motif (and what will you do for an encore now?) The fleece has been found, and the big moment of that finding abides forever. All of the Splendid Animations have sailed on The Argo, are sailing on it now even though they believe that they are doing other things in the flatland that is taken for the ordinary world, and they will still sail on it on the high seas after every shore has stink. The splintering contingencies are not, in all cases, exclusive things. The last death of Melchisedech Duffey has to occur on this Fourteenth Voyage of The Argo, or his ashes could not be brought back from it. We will return to this case again with more massive information. "Five". This is called the Thunder Colt Complex, or the Decatur Street Opera House Presentation of the World. Duffey had once been frightened to learn that the Decatur Street Opera House had moved into the realm of the possible to the extent of advertising in the Bark. The Presentation is an Ending and a Beginning, except that it is some other species and not ourselves that begins when we end. Were we members of this gloriotis new species, we would applaud. Being of the old and unregenerate species, it will stick in our throats. To this case also we will return with much more massive information. "Six". This is the confrontation of Melchisedech with the Loosed Devil in a closed place. There are instructions given before the confrontation. 'You stand for Mankind in this meeting,' someone tells Melchisedech as he goes to the doom place. 'I will just be damned if I stand for Mankind, here or anywhere," Melchisedech swore. He never knew whether these unbodeed voices were those of friend or enemy. This was a duel that shook the whole spider web in which the suns are caught, the web that is called the cosmos. Or else it was not that at all. It was a fancy that Melchisedech might or might...
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