THE OUTPOST UNDISCOVERED BY TOURISTS

A Tale of Three Kings and a Star for this Sacred Season

Harlan Ellison

When future generations look back at the twentieth century and can view things in perspective, I suspect they will highlight only a handful of writers whose dynamism and creativity made them amongst the most original and influential in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. I would be very surprised (and disappointed) if Harlan Ellison is not amongst them. Ellison (b. 1934), who is far better known in America than he is in Britain, has produced some of the most startling and incisive stories of the last forty years, the best of which will be found in The Essential Ellison (1987). His stories are often so bleak and harrowing that it is easy to forget he also has a puckish sense of humour, and I can think of no better way to close this book than with Ellison’s story of the Three Kings.

They camped just beyond the perimeter of the dream and waited for first light before beginning the siege.

Melchior went to the boot of the Rolls and unlocked it. He rummaged about till he found the air mattress and the inflatable television set, and brought them to the cleared circle. He pulled the cord on the mattress and it hissed and puffed up to its full size, king size. He pulled the plug on the television set and it hissed and firmed up and he snapped his fingers and it turned itself on.

“No,” said Kaspar, “I will not stand for it! Not another night of roller derby. A King of Orient I are, and I’ll be damned if I’ll lose another night’s sleep listening to those barely primate creatures drop kicking each other!”

Melchior glowed with his own night light. “So sue me,” he said, settling down on the air mattress, tidying his moleskin cape around him. “You know I’ve got insomnia. You know I’ve got a strictly awful hiatus hernia. You know those latkes are sitting right here on my chest like millstones. Be a person for a change, a mensch, it couldn’t hurt just once.”

Kaspar lifted the chalice of myrrh, the symbol of death, and shook it at Melchior. “Hypochondriac! That’s what you are, a fake, a fraud. You just like watching those honkytonk bimbos punching each other out. Hiatus hernia, my fundament! You’d watch mud wrestling and extol the aesthetic virtues of the balletic nuances. Turn it off… or at least, in the name of Jehovah, get the Sermonette.”

“The ribs are almost ready,” Balthazar interrupted. “You want the mild or the spicy sauce?”

Kaspar raised his eyes to the star far above them, out of reach but maddeningly close. He spoke to Jehovah: “And this one goes ethnic on us. Wandering Jew over there drives me crazy with the light that never dims, watches institutionalized mayhem all night and clanks all day with gold chains… and Black-is-Beautiful over there is determined I’ll die of tertiary heartburn before I can even find the Saviour. Thanks, Yahweh; thanks a lot. Wait till you need a favor.”

“Mild or spicy?” Balthazar said with resignation.

“I’d like mine with the mild,” Melchior said sweetly. “And just a bissel apple sauce on the side, please.”

“I want dim sum,” Kaspar said. His malachite chopsticks materialized in his left hand, held far up their length indicating he was of the highest caste.

“He’s only being petulant,” Melchior said. “He shouldn’t annoy, Balthazar sweetie. Serve them cute and tasty ribs.”

“Deliver me,” Kaspar murmured.

So they ate dinner, there under the star. The Nubian king, the Scrutable Oriental king, and the Hebrew king. And they watched the roller derby. They also played the spelling game called ghost, but ended the festivity abruptly and on a rancorous note when Balthazar and Melchior ganged up on Kaspar using the word “pringles”, which Kaspar contended was not a generic but a specific trade name. Finally they fell asleep, the television set still talking to itself, the light from Melchior reflecting off the picture tube.

In the night the star glowed brightly, calling them on even in their sleep. And in the night early warning reconnaissance troops of the Forces of Chaos flew overhead, flapping their leathery bat-wings and leaving in their wake the hideous carbarn monoxide stench of British Leyland double-decker buses.

When Melchior awoke in the morning his first words were, “In the night, who made a ka-ka?”

Balthazar pointed. “Look.”

The ground was covered with the permanent shadows of the bat-troops that had flown overhead. Dark, sooty shapes of fearsome creatures in full flight.

“I’ve always thought they looked like the flying monkeys in the 1939 MGM production of The Wizard of Oz, special effects by Arnold Gillespie, character make-up created by Jack Dawn,” Kaspar said ruminatively.

“Listen, Yellow Peril,” Balthazar said, “you can exercise that junk heap memory for trivia later. Unless the point is lost on you, what this means is that they know we’re coming and they’re going to be ready for us. We’ve lost the element of surprise.”

Melchior sighed and added, “Not to mention that we’ve been following the star for exactly one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine years, give or take a fast minute, which unless they aren’t too clever, should have tipped them off that we were on the way some time ago.”

“Nonetheless,” said Kaspar, and fascinated by the word, he said it again, “nonetheless.”

They waited, but he didn’t finish the sentence.

“And on that uplifting note,” Balthazar said, “let us get in the wind before they catch us out here in the open.”

So they gathered their belongings—Melchior’s caskets of Krugerrands, his air mattress and inflatable television set, Kaspar’s chalice of myrrh, his Judy Garland albums and fortune-cookie fortune calligraphy set, Balthazar’s wok, his brass-bound collected works of James Baldwin and hair-conking outfit—and they stowed them neatly in the boot of the Rolls.

Then, with Balthazar driving (but refusing once again to wear the chauffeur’s cap on moral grounds), they set out under the auspices of power steering, directly through the perimeter of the dream.

The star continued to shine overhead. “Damnedest thing I ever saw,” Kaspar remarked, for the ten thousandth time. “Defies all the accepted laws of celestial mechanics.”

Balthazar mumbled something.

For the ten thousandth time.

“What’s that, I didn’t hear?” Melchior said.

“I said: at least if there was a pot of gold at the end of all this…”

It was unworthy of him, as it had been ten thousand times previously, and the others chose to ignore it.

At the outskirts of the dream, a run-down section lined with fast food stands, motels with waterbeds and closed circuit vibrating magic fingers cablevision, bowling alleys, Polish athletic organizations and used rickshaw lots, they encountered the first line of resistance from the Forces of Chaos.

As they stopped for a traffic light, thousands of bat-winged monkey-faced troops leaped out of alleys and doorways with buckets of water and sponges, and began washing their windshield.

“Quick, Kaspar!” Balthazar shouted.

The Oriental king threw open the rear door on the right side and bounded out into the street, brandishing the chalice of myrrh. “Back, back, scum of the underworld!” he howled.

The troops of Chaos shrieked in horror and pain and began dropping what appeared to be dead all over the place, setting up a wailing and a crying and a screaming that rose over the dream like dark smoke.

“Please, already,” Melchior shouted. “Do we need all this noise? All this geshrying! You’ll wake the baby!”

Then Balthazar was gunning the motor, Kaspar leaped back into the rear seat, the door slammed and they were off, through the red light—which had, naturally, been rigged to stay red, as are all such red lights, by the Forces of Chaos.

All that day they lay siege to the dream.

The Automobile Club told them they couldn’t get there from here. The speed traps were set at nine miles per hour. Sects of religious fanatics threw themselves under the steel-belteds. But finally they came to the Manger, a Hyatt establishment, and they fought their way inside with the gifts, all tasteful.

And there, in a moderately priced room, they found the Saviour, tended by an out-of-work cabinet-maker, a lady who was obviously several bricks shy of a load who kept insisting she had been raped by God, various shepherds, butchers, pet store operators, boutique salesgirls, certified public accountants, hawkers of T-shirts, investigative journalists, theatrical hangers-on, Sammy Davis, Jr, and a man who owned a whippet that was reputed to be able to catch two frisbees at the same time.

And the three kings came in, finding it hard to find a place there in the crowd, and they set down their gifts and stared at the sleeping child.

“We’ll call him Jomo,” said Balthazar, asserting himself.

“Don’t be a jerk,” Kaspar said. “Merry Jomomas? We’ll call him Lao-Tzu. It flows, it sings, it soars.”

So they argued about that for quite a while, and finally settled on Christ, because in conjunction with Jesus it was six and five, and that would fit all the marquees.

But still, after two thousand years, they were unsettled. They stared down at the sleeping child, who looked like all babies: like a small, soft W. C. Fields who had grown blotchy drinking wine sold before its time, and Balthazar mumbled, “I’d have been just as happy with a pot of gold,” and Kaspar said, “You’d think after two thousand years someone would at least offer me a chair,” and Melchior summed up all their hopes and dreams for a better world when he said, “You know, it’s funny, but he don’t look Jewish.”