by Ian Wallace
If now there was a faint blur in his chirr, Krell could be pardoned. “Thank you, Pan. Now I owe you one. You’ll get it when you least expect it—at my pleasure. What do we do now . . . for Croyd?”
Greta, pallid on Nereid, squeezed her chair arms, facing the totocolor tri-d image of Freya floating free in the receptor cubicle. She saw a mirror.
She said, “I have to go there.”
“I know.”
No, Freya was not a mirror image; such an image would present reversed objective orientation; instead, Freya was Greta, only Freya was over there. And, too, Freya was over there after a very long intergalactic transmission relay; where Freya was, apparently it was snowing.
Greta leaned forward, her fingers interlacing. “You and I were one, we were with him as one. Do you not feel an urgency to go?”
Freya bowed her head, covering her face with her longfingered hands. She said soon, “This lousy language of ours does not have the prior experience for discussing the ridiculous situation.” Her hands came down and slapped her thighs, her head came up, her eyes grappled with Greta’s. “Pan has Croyd memories prior to 2502; but he has his own subsequent memories; and so do I, and they are with Pan. It is Pan, not Croyd, that I would wish to be with. And yet I would wish to be with Croyd also.” Greta’s mouth approached a smile. “I would wish to embrace you. But even if it could be done, I would be diffident about that.”
Freya’s mouth approached a smile. “I suppose one does not embrace oneself, even though one is different from oneself. Nevertheless, I would wish to embrace you; but I too am diffident about that”
“Four years ago, we two were one woman.”
“Yes.”
“Four years ago, Croyd and Pan were one man.”
“Yes.”
Greta smiled playfully. “At least, if Croyd lives, he is not lonely. I happen to know about a Princess Djeelian shipping with him aboard the Castel Jaloux."
Freya smiled wryly. “For Pan, there has been a Princess Medzik. I give him that she looks comfortable.” She grew serious. “Does this trouble you, about Croyd?”
Greta, gravely: “Of course not. If there has been a coupling with Princess Djeelian, it is a transiency. Croyd and I are not a transiency, and I must go to where he is. But it will take so long. . . .” She paused, then leaned forward. “How is it with you, Freya?”
Her eyes closed. “I am secondary. I am weary.”
“Secondary to whom?”
‘To you.”
Greta studied her for a while. Then she articulated, “I suspect that Pan too is weary because he is secondary,”
Freya nodded.
Greta added, “But Pan is leaping into the breach.”
Freya nodded.
Greta stood. “I have to go to Croyd, if only to preside over his disintegration. Our fleet has other ships that can clear the barrier, but it will take many days. And then, too . . She sank back into her chair, head down on a clenched fist. She muttered, “I seem to be temporary chairman of this galaxy. Croyd charged me with this, Tannen charged me with this. If I shifted it even to the next guy . . . ” Her face came up; she was in trouble. “Freya, I am not at all sure that even a dying Croyd would welcome my presence, knowing that I had left this galaxy.”
Freya was grave. “Perhaps what we need is a brief mind touch.”
Greta: “Have you kept this skill?”
“Yes, but I have no notion whether I can project it over an intergalactic relay.”
Greta leaned toward her. “Croyd could. Try.”
Silent communion.
Withdrawal.
Now the face of Greta was serene. And Greta said, “Do that, Freya. Be me, down there. We are I again; be me; I love him.”
But Freya was weeping.
Greta, concerned: “Tell me.”
Freya, brokenly: “I find now that I would wish to return into you.”
Nonspace:
Pan and Krell stood on the bridge of a transparent spaceship out of Andromeda, a ship that resembled an oversize stick insect. On the pseudograss that Pan four years ago had created for this nonspace Krell colony clustered the decapod females. Like their males, these females were sterile; on the other hand, barring accident, they were practically immortal. That is to say, they had less biological need for progeny than most species; on the other hand, in the longer or shorter run their numbers could be whittled down to a point where these barren ones could have more need for impossible progeny than most species. Here in their nonspace exile they were dwelling in a sort of Ellis Island in preparation for ultimate galactic entry.
The grim expedition on which Pan was about to conduct Krell and the youngest, most vigorous of the male decapod adults promised, if it would succeed, to shorten their probation. On the other hand, failure could produce rather an abrupt whittling down of numbers.
“There will be no failure,” Pan had told them last night; and he meant it. He had all of them plus Croyd plus Freya plus Greta plus himself on his soul.
Young Krell, golden-armored like Roland (only his was organic), crisp-chirred to Pan, “We appear ready for takeoff. Your orders?”
Pan, intently checking Krell’s instrument check, murmured, “There is nothing you men wish to say to the women?”
Krell responded, “I have already made our speech to our women. I await your navigation and drive orders.”
Pan absently scratched the bridge of his nose, gazing at the instrument panel. “I think you know, Krell, that nonspace is immediately adjacent to every space.”
“True, sirrah. But is nonspace adjacent also to metaspace?”
“No, but space is, Krell—and I think that you yourself have penetrated both ways the metagalactic skin.”
“I apprehend you, sirrah. We will move immediately to a point in space adjacent to the metagalactic skin, and use drive to penetrate the skin. Still I await your navigation and drive orders.”
Pan stared at him. “Are you sure you have nothing more for the women?”
“Sirrah Pan, isn’t it that Sirrah Croyd is waiting—if he is still able to wait?”
Pan’s tone was queerly subordinate. “Krell, are you telling me just to take us off—just like that—now?”
Krell’s antennae were straight down in front. Low he chirred, “You are taking us to rescue your duplicate Croyd whom for some irrational reason you consider superior to yourself. And you hesitate. Can it possibly be that you are . . . afraid of succeeding?”
Pan stared at him.
Pan snapped orders.
The ship vanished.
Where the stickbug ship materialized in space was midway between Sol and Djinn galaxies by ordinary light routes—roughly nine hundred million light-years each way.
Seven decapod officers, armored in various brilliant colors (as a cultural mode, they dye-dipped), thronged the bridge, their variously configured antennae interlacing, the five eyes of each warrior focused on the central Pan-Krell conference. Several dozen other kaleidoscopically armored males, back in the hull, at once watched the bridge and stared out through the transparent hull one way at Sol and another way at Djinn, both of which were small-magnitude stars among larger stars. All three ways at once—each warrior.
Pan said, terse, “This places us a parsec from the extreme inwardness of the metagalactic fissure. From the observations by Freya in Duke Dzendzel’s Moudjinn castle, I have to conclude that we are directly beneath the prime fissure of the feudally organized brain that has captured Croyd and threatens the metagalaxy. That brain is so colossal that if now, from here, we were to direct all our hyper-nuclear weapons into the body of that fissure, allowing that any one of the weapons could annihilate a star, the entire salvo would do no more than give that brain a local and inconsequential thrill. So now we decide the next thing.”
Krell remarked with some degree of suppressed wonderment, “I thought maybe you had.”
Pan studied space. “Probably I should have, but I haven’t. Maybe I had to be spaced here fir
st, to appreciate the problem concretely. I do not know how to ruin that brain without rupturing the metagalactic shell. More concisely, I do not know how to ruin that brain. Finally, I do not know whether to ruin that brain; probably I would ruin Croyd along with it, and anyway, he may not want it ruined, he may have found a use for it. And I am tempted to go home with ail of us,”
Krell said concisely, “But you will not.”
“I will not. Instead, we will enter. But we have to enter delicately. It is a bit like having to drill delicately through the impervious vault of a bank without knowing where within the police may lurk.”
A green commander queried, “How can we enter? We are motionless here a mere parsec from the metagalactic skin; we cannot develop the velocity to punch through.” Krell turned to him, antennae frowning. “Thank you, sirrah. Pan will find methods, once he finds purposes.”
Pan pursed lips. “Methods are easy; you are right, Krell. As for purposes—let me tell you what I think . . .
Somewhat later, the stick ship vanished.
Phase Six - ULTIMATE TEMPTATION
Day 5
Yes, let me dare those gates to fling asunder
Which every man would fain go slinking by!
Tis time, through deeds this word of truth to thunder:
That with the height of Gods Man’s dignity may vie!
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (1808)/Baynard Taylor
So Jurgen shrugged, and climbed down from the throne of the god . . .
—James Branch Cabell, Jurgen (1919)
THREE ROLANDS gazed down upon Croyd, blurring in and out of each other; and the interweaving voices of perhaps five Rolands indescribably confounded Croyd’s hearing. Feebly Croyd raised a hand; the five Rolands quieted, the three Rolands stayed. Croyd spoke, but he heard no sound emerging. Clearing throat and wetting lips, he spoke again, and his ears were assaulted by dozens of Croyd voices. He rested, thrusting himself into clarifying thought. One of the three Rolands clicked into unity with another; now there were only two. Hazily concluding that his voice might be all right even though his addled sensorium denied it, Croyd required himself to say deliberately through the addlebabble that his own noises were making, “Roland, I see two of you and I hear several of you and many of me. Is either of us really alive?”
The effort helped him; Roland resolved into a single semiblurred knight, and Roland’s voice became an intelligible clatter. “Lie quiet, sir, please. You sustained a skull fracture and a severe concussion. We have repaired both, but you must not hurry the process of reintegration.”
When Croyd had that comprehended, he lay back, closed eyes, and smiled wearily. “Thank you for repairing me. And I am glad you are alive, sir; I was afraid I had killed you.”
“You did.”
Croyd’s face did not change. “Then during our fight you were playacting. You weren’t really there.”
Roland shook his head. “I was real in the fight. Your sword cleverly entered a kidney, and it appears that this wound was quickly mortal, because I died of physical shock. Once this had been diagnosed, the duke had me duplicated. While they carried my corpse off the field in one direction, I followed you in another direction and saw to the beginnings of your own recovery treatment. Then I went to preside over my own rites of disintegration, received orders from the duke, and returned just now. It appears that your treatment has succeeded.”
With caution Croyd sat erect, swinging legs off the cot. Feet on floor, he commented gravely, “It does appear that the work on both of us was well done, sir. Thank you for your knightly courtesy. And now I believe that I have earned a boon crave.”
“And a boon collect, sir. The duke gave me explicit orders about this. But only, of course, until tomorrow morning, when we begin your terminal brain scan.” Roland coughed and added, “I had some hopes of killing you, if only to spare you that brain scan. But on that score my thoughts were divided.”
“I sense an ambiguity,” Croyd declared, “but it is one that for now I will pass.” He looked upward at the knight. “Sir, my boon is simple enough. Tomorrow I die; tonight I wish to taste the pleasures of your incomparable city.”
The response was interesting: Roland, looking down upon him, went facially all guarded as he probed, “One wishes to prowl the boulevard?”
“One wishes to prowl the back streets.”
“Those near the bright center, perhaps?”
“No. Those toward the far end, where the men and women display the most interesting anatomical specializations.”
Roland had his great sword out, but only to lean upon its hilt; with its point grounded, as he studied Croyd. “I thought I had some reason to hope, sir, that you would opt for a less trivial final night. Nevertheless, I respect your manly needs; your boon is granted. Does it perhaps entail any ancillary complications?”
Croyd counterstudied Roland. Croyd decided to project a hint that would have to be transparent to a young-old man as astute and honest as this Roland seemed to be. He said deliberately, “There are a complication and a subcomplication. The complication is that the human-type distances in your city are rather great; I shall need, for my comfort, to be able on foot to traverse parsecs in blink-time without feeling hurried. And the subcomplication is that this kind of leisurely velocity on the boulevard will need to be maintainable on the back streets, at least during the short distance from that end of the boulevard to the center of my desire.”
Having said this, he waited, watching Roland.
Presently Roland stood erect, slowly sheathed his great sword, and folded arms, frowning downward. Roland said then, “I shall have to come with you.”
Croyd leaped to his feet with an eager smile. “Shall we start now, gallant comrade?”
He watched the polymorphic people all about him meeting and glowing, and very particularly glowing in the brave genital prominences that they externally displayed. During a long while he watched many encounters. Ultimately the stoic Roland, growing restless, inquired, “Sir, may I assist you in making a pleasant contact?”
Croyd turned to him, “You have no desire, Roland?”
“I have latent desire, but I have not chosen to release it. If you release yours, I will feel free to release mine.”
“If I do not release mine, will this frustrate you?”
Roland was mildly surprised, all the while watching Croyd as though he wished to intercept any guarded facial or vocal cue that Croyd might choose to let slip. “I did not think that it was any longer a choice for you, whether to free your desire. I thought that I had stolen from you all those special, powers, Croyd.”
“Is this self-restraint a special power for you, Roland?”
“No, not for me; but I am—”
“I know what you are, Roland. You are lord of the Rolandic fissure of this brain that we stand in. This brain has evolved through aeons, and you have evolved as its liege lord, since a liege lord is a necessary outcome. Unhappily, you have given your feudal allegiance to Duke Dzendzel; and now he is the liege, and he has anointed himself with l’oint du seigneur; but you remain his high vassal, and you are of the quintessential mind substance that this brain is generating. But believe me, Roland, if you were wholly human like me, and without special powers, by the very power of your own minded brain you could if you chose and insisted inhibit any and all desires whenever they would seem inappropriate to your long-range interests. You would dislike it, but you could do it. So I.” (In his mind he added wryly: Usually, that is.)
The men contemplated each other—Croyd calm, Roland going through an intricate intercombination of realizations.
Roland said presently—it was a question, but it sounded like a statement—“Then you know that this is a brain.”
“Yes.”
“And that I am . . . its senior outcome.”
“Yes.”
“Then where are we now, and why did you want to come here?”
“We are in the lowest extremity of a one-lobe Rolandi
c fissure, actually a bit in under the curve of the cerebral cortex—the extremity of this fissure that is devoted to sexual representation but also happens to be nearest of all to the commanding diencephalon. Roland, I have now told you a very great deal indeed. Will you tell me a thing or two, or will you instead paralyze me and take me back to the dungeon keep?”
Roland thought.
Roland said, “Through the offices of my brain I learned about the existence of the Djinn Galaxy. Again through my brain’s offices, naively I went to Moudjinn because I was not an introvert and I wanted to establish relations with other intelligences. I had no other motive. The Emperor of Djinn brushed me off to his prime minister, who happened to be Duke Dzendzel. By hindsight I credit the duke as a man whose ambitions transcend galaxies and who knows opportunity when he sees it.”
Croyd murmured, “It is beginning to come through. Dzendzel evidently appreciated what few do appreciate: an analogy between feudalism and brain organization, and very particularly, the efficiency-beauty of the Rolandic fissure which in its administrative transactions corresponds to an operational bureaucracy. And he seems also to have grasped a remote physical analogy between the walnut convolutions of the metagalactic skin and the walnut convolutions of a human cerebral cortex; and while the analogy in itself is fallacious, in this case it led him to a good thing.”
“Precisely,” Roland affirmed, gazing at Croyd with new appreciation.
“Only, Roland, why would you allow him to take over from you?"
Roland ruminated.
“Because,” Roland finally said, “he had an idea about this brain that was higher than any idea that I had ever conceived. And because, sir, constitutionally I am a number-two man, a highest-level vassal—and a vassal requires a liege for his soul completion.”
Two accomplished and rich-glowing belly dancers, wholly human in form, without any grotesque enlargements, were performing enthusiastically before these two men. Neither man was noticing.