“But why?” Chemise asked. “What will you actually get out of it?”
“You go to the heart of the matter. But that is because you are a witch. Did you know that, child?”
“I suspected it,” Chemise said.
“You’re a witch, and you know the answers as well as I do. Tell me, what is the point of magic?”
“Power,” Chemise said, after a moment’s thought.
“Yes. And what is the point of power?”
She thought for a while, then said, “I can think of many answers, but none of them feels correct. I do not know.”
“Still, little witch, you know a lot for one so young. The answer will come to you. When you know the purpose of power, you’ll know why I need Glorm.”
“All right,” Chemise said. “But why are you telling me all this? What are you going to do to me?”
“You are my enemy, appointed, as it were, by the universe, or by the law of dramatic struggle that characterizes all life, and which demands that every protagonist have an antagonist. I am not permitted to operate in a vacuum, Chemise. I must have my opponent. I am very pleased that it is you.”
“I can understand your pleasure,” Chemise said. “As an enemy, I’m not very formidable, am I?”
“No,” Tlaloc said, smiling, “I would not characterize you as formidable.”
“So if you killed me, the universe might appoint a tougher opponent for you. Is that it?”
“Precisely. You’re going to have to go to Glorm, you see. It’s your only hope of defeating me.”
“How am I supposed to get there?”
“I’ll send you there myself. I’m always glad to oblige an enemy. But only if you want to go.”
“Yes, I want to go!” Chemise said.
A description of the journey will be given later. For now, let us say that after certain instructions and preparations, Chemise found herself on Glorm . . .
12.
Dramocles’ best technicians were huddled around the big three-dimensional readout tank, trying to interpret the changing patterns of colored blips, light-streaks, and cabalistic notations that represented the movements of three spacefleets, those of Druth, Crimsole and Vanir. Dramocles joined them, with Max and Chemise close behind. The display conveyed nothing to Dramocles; he relied on trained men to tell him what was happening.
At last the Operations Chief made a notation on his clipboard and addressed the king.
“A preliminary report, Sire.”
“Let’s have it.”
“Sectors 3A and 6B report a sixty-seven degree movement along axis 3J, and—”
“Give it to me in plain Glormish, man.”
“Well, then, the enemy is moving directly toward Glorm, slowly, but with acceleration.”
“What a mess!” Dramocles said. “But there’s yet time to correct it. One more order should suffice to bring the fleet of Druth to battle.”
Dramocles reached for a telephone. Before he could dial, a glowing purple light appeared in the middle of the War Room. It pulsed strongly, and from it came the incongruous sounds of tinkling bells. Sparkling red and yellow streamers of light appeared, and there was a sound of trumpets and timpani, and the low thunder of kettledrums was not absent, though it did come in late.
When the purple light faded, a man stood where it had been. He was tall and strongly made, and wore a long, iridescent cloak with a high collar. Beneath it he wore a simple one-piece jumpsuit of red nylon. He was somewhere beyond the middle years of life, was bald, and had long, thin, drooping moustaches that caused him to resemble Ming the Merciless.
Everyone was momentarily dumbstruck, except for the computer, who pretended to be, for his own purposes. At last Dramocles found his tongue—it was attached to the roof of his mouth, as usual—and said, “Father! Is it indeed you?”
“Of course it is,” Otho said. “Quite a surprise, huh, kid?”
Chemise tugged urgently at Dramocles’ sleeve. “You say he’s your father? That’s impossible! I met this man on Earth. He is Tlaloc!”
“I don’t understand this at all,” Dramocles said, “and I like it even less. Dad, you’re supposed to be dead. It seems we have some things to discuss. But first, I have an important phone call to make.”
“I know about the call to Rufus,” Otho said, “and I must ask you to wait a few moments. I have information to give you which bears upon your decision.”
Dramocles looked skeptical. “Well, make it quick,” he said. “I’ve got an interplanetary war starting any minute.”
Otho found a chair and sat down. He crossed his legs, unzipped a pocket in his jumpsuit and found a cigar. He lit up and said, “I suppose you’re wondering what I’m doing here when I’m supposed to have been killed in a lab explosion on Gliese thirty years ago. What actually happened is this . . .”
Sensing what was to come, everyone in the War Room prepared themselves for a long and unavoidable interpolation.
Glorm, Crimsole, and Druth shared one unique feature. That was the existence of great, man-made mounds, some of them miles long, scattered across most of their land masses. These middens, as they were called, had been in existence since prehistoric times. There was no accounting for them. Early man on Glorm had worshiped them as the last vestige of the departed gods. Slightly later, man had tried to discover what was buried in them, but was frustrated by the reinforced concrete shell that encased each midden beneath a few feet of dirt.
The first of these mysterious mounds was not cracked until the time of Horu the Smelter. Horu was a Bronze Age engineer who learned how to make steel through dreams in which a spirit named Bessemer explained the techniques. The Horu Process, as it came to be called, enabled the Glormish to shape steel tools with which to break open the concrete shell.
Within the middens there were vast quantities of machinery, still functioning after incalculable centuries. Several huge middens were found to contain nothing but spaceships, and this was the discovery that propelled Glorm into the Age of Spaceflight before anyone had even invented quantum mechanics.
The key find was the Long Midden in Glorm, in the foothills of the Sardapian Alps. This mound, forty miles long by five wide, was composed entirely of spaceships, packed closely together and separated only by a strange white substance that later came to be known as styrofoam. At least fifteen thousand usable ships were taken out, and many others could be scavenged for souvenirs. The ships were small, simple to operate, armed with laser weaponry, and powered by apparently eternal sealed energy units. The ships were identified as products of Old Earth. The reason for their concentrations on Glorm, Crimsole, and Druth was unknown. The main conjecture was that they had something to do with the Terrans’ attempt to escape their doomed planet, an attempt thwarted by the suddenness of the still-unexplained aerosol catastrophe. Thus Glorm and the other planets entered the Age of Spaceflight, which quickly became the Age of the Space War.
Terran spaceships and weaponry ushered in a confused period of warfare, both intra- and extraplanetary. It was at this time that the Vanir migrated from Galactic Center in their lapstraked spaceships, entering world history and further complicating it.
Attempts were made throughout this period to form world governments, but Glorm was not united politically until the reign of Ilk the Foreswearer, so named because he would say anything to get his way. Planetary unification made possible another dream: single control of all the local planets, or “Universal Rule” as it was somewhat grandiosely called. The Glormish Empire came and went, and Otho’s father, Deel the Unfathomable, was the first to publicly declare it an invalid proposition, and to propose in its place the republican principle as it applied to kings. Otho carried on his father’s work, and, by the end of his reign, peace among the planets was a reality.
Otho was a man of high intelligence, iron will, and raging ambition. With warfare, the sport of kings, barred from him by his own decision, he looked around for something else to do, something sufficiently bold and challen
ging to capture and hold his sometimes fickle attention. After trying chess, trout fishing, landscape painting, and cross-country bicycling, in all of which he excelled, he turned to the occult.
In Otho’s time, the occult included science, itself a deep mystery to the Glormians, who had inherited their technology, ran it blindly, had little or no idea how it worked, and couldn’t fix it when it broke down. Otho’s approach was on several levels. He suspected that science and magic were coexisting realities, in many ways interchangeable. Despite this insight, Otho might have remained a mere dabbler if he had not acquired, in a momentous trade, an advanced computer from Earth, along with a skilled robot technician named Dr. Fish. For these two semi-sentient machines, Otho paid King Sven, Haldemar’s father, a thousand spaceship-loads of pigs. The pork barbecue that followed remains a high point in Vanir history.
The computer could be considered a living thing, except that he had no bodily functions except for occasional unexplained discharges of electricity. In his years on Earth, he had in fact known Sir Isaac Newton. At the time of their meeting in 1791, Newton had already been recognized as England’s most outstanding scientist. A quiet, unpretentious man, pleased with the honors his accomplishments had won him, Newton chose not to reveal his discoveries in magic to the superstitious gentry among whom he lived. The world would not be ready for such knowledge until mankind had reached a much higher moral and scientific level. Newton kept his real occult knowledge to himself, only hinting at it in the many volumes of arcana which he wrote in his last years. But he saw no harm in discussing what he knew with the strange, brilliant Latvian exile who was earning a living grinding lenses for Leeuwenhoeck and others.
Subsequently, the computer instructed Otho in Newton’s mysteries, though denying any interest in them himself. The computer was interested in men, whom he found more interesting and less predictable than the subatomic particles whose habits and configurations he had been studying previously.
Under the computer’s tutelage, and concealed from the populace at large, Otho learned many matters of a curious and profound nature. He proved to have an incredible gift for the work. As a student of Newton, he soon surpassed his master. The computer often said that Otho was better than any magician he had ever known. The person he most resembled, the computer said, was an Earthman named Dr. Faustus.
In the course of his studies, Otho discovered the key to the ultimate mysteries, which was the ability to move between different worlds and into different realities. Possession of this key opened the way to the magician’s final objective—the secret of eternal life.
Power was the key, freely available power for the magician to bind, to direct, to flow with. Power enabled him to get more power, and still more. But to get the initial quantum of power, the magician needed the explosion of atoms, the unbinding of the ultimate particles. Controlling these forces within the lines of a mandalic visualization, the magician could project himself into another world, another reality.
Traveling between realities was the way to life everlasting.
This is what Otho told his twenty-year-old son, Dramocles, shortly before setting off to his laboratory on Gliese, smallest of Glorm’s three moons, and blowing it to bits, and himself, too, apparently.
In actuality, Otho didn’t die. He had planned the explosion. Directing it, riding it, joining it, Otho journeyed to a different dimension along a wormhole in the cosmic foam. Where he came out, there was a place called Earth, its history different from that of the Earth in Otho’s reality. In this reality, there was no Glorm.
In their final talk, Otho told Dramocles about his destiny. Young Dramocles had been awestruck by the splendor that lay before him; for Otho intended immortality for his son as well as for himself, intended the two of them to be as gods in the cosmos, self-sufficient, and bound to nothing at all. And Dramocles had also understood the necessity of having his memories of this destiny suppressed for a while. Otho had allotted himself thirty years to get control of Earth. During that time he needed Dramocles to rule quietly, passively, unconsciously. Dramocles had to wait, and it was better for him not even to know that he was waiting.
“But now,” Otho said, “the final veil is lifted. We are together again, my dear son, and the time of your destiny has come at last. The final act approaches.”
“What final act?” Dramocles asked.
“I refer to the great war which is soon to begin, yourself and Rufus against John and Haldemar. It is what I planned, and it must take place. We need an atomic holocaust to produce enough power to open the wormhole between Earth and Glorm, and to keep it open. Then we will be able to travel between realities as we please, using our power to get more power. You and I, Dramocles, and our friends, will control the access to other dimensions. We will be immortal and live like gods.”
“But have you considered the price?” Dramocles asked. “The destruction will be almost unimaginable, especially upon Glorm. The war can still be stopped.”
“And that would be the end of our dreams, our immortality, our godhood. They’ll all be dead in a few decades anyhow. But we can live forever! This is it, Dramocles, your destiny, and the moment of decision is here. What do you want to do?”
13.
Decision time! At last the long years of waiting were over. Now Dramocles knew what his destiny was, and the terrible choices which were required of him so that it would come to pass. It was a heavy knowledge, and required of him an agonized decision. Everyone in the War Room watched him, some with bated breath, others with ordinary breath. And each moment seemed to slow down and stretch out, as though time itself were waiting for Dramocles’ deliberations to resolve themselves.
Chemise tried to read the expression in Dramocles’ yellow eyes. In which direction was he leaning? Did he have compassion for the world of mortals, of which, temporarily at least, he was still one? Or had Otho managed, with his well-shaped words of wizardry, to captivate the good-natured but notoriously vagrant attention of the king?
At last Dramocles heaved a deep sigh and said, “You know, Dad, this immortality thing is really tempting. But it’s not a good thing to do, killing everyone except your friends. It’s more than just bad—I could maybe put up with that—but the fact is, it’s downright evil.’ ”
“Yes, it is,” Otho admitted. “That which brings death to further its own existence may fairly be called evil by those whose lives are about to be taken. But one must not sentimentalize. Killing in order to live is the universal condition from which nothing and no one is exempt. To the carrot, the rabbit is the very personification of evil. And so it goes, all up and down the chain of life.”
“I’ve always known you as a kindly father and compassionate man,” Dramocles said. “How can you consider killing millions of people, even to gain yourself so great a thing as immortality?”
“You’re not looking at it properly,” Otho said. “From the viewpoint of an immortal, humans are as ephemeral as houseflies.
Still, I’d spare them if I could. But when the rewards of godhood are within your grasp, standard human morality no longer applies. Your choice, Dramocles, is to live as a god or die as a man. All the evidence is in. It is time for you to decide.”
Before Dramocles could speak, his computer stepped forward, its cape swirling. “I must point out,” it said, “that not quite all the evidence has been heard yet. Dramocles, I have what you have been awaiting for so long. It is the key. It is the key key. And it will unlock the key key memory.”
“Tell it to me,” Dramocles said.
“La plume de ma tante,” said the computer.
The key key unlocked a memory of a day thirty years ago. Otho had just left Glorm in his space yacht, going to his laboratory on the moon Gliese, which he would soon blow up, apparently destroying himself in the atomic blast. Among the very few who knew differently were Dramocles, the computer, and Dr. Fish.
Dramocles had always remembered his father with love and appreciation. Or so he had thought. In this
memory, however, that was not true at all. In this memory he disliked his father, had disliked him since childhood, considering him tyrannical, mean-minded, uncaring, and more than a little crazed with his grandiose occult notions.
Father and son had talked before Otho’s departure, and the conversation had gone badly. Young Dramocles had been vehemently opposed to Otho’s plan for personal immortality at the cost of many millions of lives. And he had found Otho’s plans for Dramocles himself and for his reign totally unacceptable. Dramocles was furious at his father, not only for refusing to die, but also for insisting on exercising control over his son from beyond the grave or wherever he was going, thus making his son’s lifetime no more than a footnote to his own monstrously extended existence.
“I won’t go along with your plans,” he had told Otho. “When I’m king I’ll do as I please.”
“You’ll do as I want you to,” Otho had told him, “and you’ll do it willingly.”
Dramocles had not understood. He had stood with Dr. Fish in Ultragnolle’s highest observation tower, watching his father’s ship, a yellow point of light quickly lost in the bottomless blue sky. “He’s gone at last,” he had said to Fish. “Good riddance to him, wherever he goes. Now, at last, I can—”
He had felt a pinprick in his arm, and turned, startled, to see Dr. Fish putting away a small syringe.
“Fish! What is the meaning of this? Why—”
“I’m sorry,” Fish said, “I have no choice in this matter.” Dramocles had succeeded in taking two steps toward the door. Then he was falling through a midnight sea of enervation, filled with strange bird-calls and eerie laughter, and he knew nothing more until he returned to consciousness. Then he found himself in Dr. Fish’s laboratory. He was strapped to an operating table, and Fish was standing over him examining the edge of a psychomicrotome.
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