“Which am I?” Slider asked with a sour grin.
“Oh, you’re the nothing man. The other is the less-than-nothing. What? He flushes with anger? Why is sheer truth so hardly embraced?”
And Scrivener was indeed flushing with anger.
“What in particular are you fishing for, Father Oddopter?” asked Thomas More the revenant with the double sign on him.
“You’ll see,” the monk said.
Circumstances began to assemble like cawing crows. You had doubted the color of the Evita’s eyes, how they seemed now one thing and now another? Now they were green, green, the green of sparkling anticipation.
The monk wound a cord around his wrist and handled a harpoon thing a meter long. He peered into the green water with crinkling black-green eyes. Then he dived, robes and all, as a hawk dives, powerfully into the green water. And there was a sudden turbulence.
There was a struggle of resounding great power under water, a startling force striking and rupturing something of very great weight.
The green-robe broke water again and surged up onto the rooty platform all in one motion. He drew up the cord with hands and wrists of such terrifying size that it seemed impossible that they should belong to him. The water was bloody and churning when he brought the thing to the surface and drew it half out.
It was a fat discoid thing, black and quivering, and one third of its circuit was angry-toothed mouth. It weighed a hundred and fifty kilograms and it could have snapped a man in two through the trunk.
“I called myself a fisherman on Old Earth,” Thomas said in admiration, “but I never in my life took so grand a fish as that. Days of my life, to see it is hardly to believe it!”
“Thomas, Thomas,” the green-robe chided, “it’s but the grasshopper that one catches in his palm to use on the hook. This isn’t the fish. It’s the bait.”
The green-robe put three more harpoons into the creature that fought and groaned. There was something else now: great wings, as it were, deep under water and gathering for the pounce upward, the greatest wings ever. The green-robe made the harpoon lines fast to various thick branches and roots. His giant bait was threshing and churning with two thirds of it in the water.
Then the green-robe leapt onto the bait creature, slashing it deeply with a hand knife. It bled in spectacular fountains of dark rushing red that exploded with the lustful smell of rampant iron and stripped green wood and battlefield stink.
From a powerful underwater organ the creature was roaring with a rage that set both the water and the air to reeling. The green-robe rode and slashed the pitching thing at great risk of limb and life.
“Devil, Devil, rise and die, come and find what thing am I,” Evita chanted like a little-girl rhyme, but her eyes were green volcanic fire a billion years old.
“Hurry!” Paul shouted. “It’s rising like a thunderclap.”
“I know, I know,” the green-robe crooned. “Holy Cathead, it does rise fast! But the last second is the best.”
“Devil, Devil, come in hate! Take the fine Evita bait!” the wild-girl chanted, but her eyes no longer focused and she was frozen in hysteria.
The green-robe leapt clear from his bait-creature at the last possible second. Then the great thing swooped and struck upward: a thousand kilograms of center bulk that swallowed the trussed creature in a single gulp, thirty-meter-long tentacles that reached blindly for more prey, the big eye in the middle mad and livid with malevolence. The Devil! The main bulk was clear out of the water with the speed of its upward surge smashing the surface. It was but a lightning instant, but many things were observed simultaneously in that instant, not the least of which was the lightning itself—the corona-like discharge and blinding aura of the great sea-creature.
It was the hydra taking the bait.
“Now!” clanged the green-robe with the belfry sound of Saint Lo which is under water.
“Now!” Paul croaked like a rampant bull-frog.
“Now!” Evita sang in a voice that was green bronze pickled in brimstone.
They had spoken together, and no time at all had elapsed.
The three of them were onto the hydra before it thunderously shattered the water as it fell back from its great surge. They went with snake-like knives for the hydra eye and the brain behind it, feverish in their haste before the terrible tentacles could be brought to defend and to attack. Hysterical battle, hooting challenge, high screaming triumph.
The hydra trumpeted with an anger and agony that stabbed through the whole feral region, killing small birds by the very pitch of the scream. It submerged with the crashing fall-back from its great surge; and the three attackers stayed with it, cutting and hacking in near hysteria.
The hydra screamed under water. And after a while it rose again.
The huge tentacles lashed and writhed, but no longer with great power in them. The green-robe and Paul and Evita were through the giant eye and into the brain, cutting relentlessly and furiously. Evita had the head and most of her inside the big eye, and her chant came out of that cavity: “Devil, Devil, boom and bell! Watch Evita give you Hell!”—the weird voice of a small child gone mad.
The hydra-devil groaned with an echoing hollowness that shook the whole region.
And then it died.
“Why, this is allegory acted out before my very eyes,” Thomas exclaimed, and he was shaking from the passion around him. He was finding words to deny what he had seen.
“Enjoy it, Thomas, enjoy it,” the green-robe cried as he leapt back onto the rooty platform, the almost-land. “Give it accolade. You were a London play-goer, but you never saw so high and roaring a comedy as this. A man may not do it twice in one day. A strong body will stand it, but the emotions will not.”
“It isn’t real,” Thomas said, “it cannot be real. It’s but a grand illusion. Look, our Paul has been drained, and he rolls his eyes like one half dead as he totters back onto the land. What is the content and real substance of this, Father Oddopter?”
“Why, it’s the killing of the Devil, good Thomas. The Devil must be killed afresh somewhere every day. If ever he is not, then our days be at an end. Say, he is a big one today, isn’t he? He’s not always a hydra, you know. Some days he is a mad dire-wolf. Some days he is a porche’s-panther gone musk. The Devil has his several forms, but we must kill him every day to limn his limits.”
“Our good Thomas is not beyond hope,” Paul panted as he came back from the deeper shadow world to one less deep. “You are not completely revolted, Thomas. You were near as impassioned as ourselves, however you deny it. Golden Astrobe hasn’t yet got you entirely in her effete wiles. You weaken and you conform, and they seem to be winning you. But this will stand as a sign for you before you weaken completely. In this blood be you blessed, Thomas!”
“Ye be all daft,” Thomas growled, uneasy, and yet somehow caught up into the blood-lust of the thing. “It is an unnatural satanic thing that happens here, and you revel in it. And the child-woman, has she gone brand-mad?”
“She’s possessed,” the green-robe said. And Evita had almost disappeared into the cavernous brain of the hydra-devil. She gorged and reveled there.
“She has consorted with the Devil in his other forms,” the green-robe said, “and there is a curious hatred and tension between them. I have never been on a devil-kill with the child before, but I have heard of them. She becomes wild sometimes.”
“You actually believe in the Devil here in the feral lands?” Thomas asked as Evita withdrew somewhat from the monster.
“What an odd fellow you are!” the green-robe Father Oddopter marveled. “You have just seen us slay the Devil, and you ask whether he be. Do you not believe your eyes? Does this seem like an ordinary creature to you?”
“Nowt ordinary, of course,” Thomas said weakly, as though he were pleading a losing case in court, “but by definition, it is
within the order of nature, since there is no other order.”
“Thomas, Thomas, you cannot win that little game even when you make your own rules.”
“I can understand how to the superstitious or to the ignorant—”
“No, no, good Thomas. Look at it! The ignorant Scrivener and the superstitious Slider are aghast at the violence of the thing, and they yet stand trembling. But they do not believe it.
“The half-ignorant Maxwell also quakes, but he only half believes. It is we of the intellect who believe what we see and feel—that we have drawn the Devil from his lair and killed him. You do not believe it?”
“I do not believe it,” Thomas said, but he was not feeling particularly calm. “It’s but a bloody, violent, and dangerous sport you indulge.”
Evita had finally emerged from the monster, glistening with blood and gore, and bearing a great arm-load of Devil brains. She was disheveled, and her eyes were completely mad.
And then in a flash they were no longer any such thing. She came out of her passion and seizure as easily as she would leap from a tree. She winked at Thomas, and broke into chiming laughter.
“My seduction of you is a little different from what I planned,” she chortled. “I’ll seduce you in mind and belief instead. Bodily I’d burn you up too quick and fry the poor tallow out of you, Thomas. But this way we burn a brand on your brain. Whoop! Imagine, a grown man too ignorant to believe in the Devil!”
You ever cook any Devil brains yourself? Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it. Paul and the green-robe cooked the brains. They cased them in a ball of mud, and set it into a quickly-started and explosively hot fire of oil-dripping vines. These burned torridly with a staggering, almost emetic smoke—the water in them fighting with the oil. The whole thing gave off a brightness that was like sodium flame. They roasted the brains roaring for an hour, and then the ball burst open with a real explosion. There was the smell of sulphur in the air. And all was made ready.
With dishes of this sort, you like them or you like them not.
Scrivener and Slider would not partake.
Maxwell had to force himself. “After all,” he told himself, “they are only fish brains. The rest is but the rough kidding of these feral people.” But he liked them more and more as he ate them.
Thomas tasted in a surly manner, and out of curiosity. And then he was hooked on that bait. He welcomed them as one of the rarest and heartiest foods ever. They entered into him. Ah, the salt and the sulphur of them would stand him well in his crux hour when it came. By eating its brains, he would always have a certain mastery over this enemy.
Hydra brains were known in some of the mod places of Cosmopolis, but at fifty stoimenof d’or a kilo. The price was high there, and the brains were not; some of the old Devil always went out of them in the marketing and fixing.
Here it was finer, eating them new-killed, kilo after kilo to satiety. They needed no condiment. They had their own salt and sulphur.
Who laughs? Who laughs? None but a necromancer laughs like that. It was Walter Copperhead who came out of the jungle with eyes for nothing but the hydra. He had known, of course, the hour and the place of the Devil-kill. He would lay out its entrails and examine them, and try to unriddle riddles there, as though he were an old augur. And he was.
He built a sort of jungle winch with a counter-poise of straining vines and bent branches. He worked to lift the monster and disembowel it. The members of the party withdrew a space and left him with it. It was a private thing that Walter Copperhead did.
They traveled again after they had spent an hour or two in the fine talk that should always follow a fine meal. The green-robe Father Oddopter went with them, he having no home and being sworn to the rule of never laying his head in the same place for two nights. They came on other hunters and fishers. They came on one bunch who were killing ansels and hauling them out of the water. This puzzled Thomas.
Rimrock the ansel was a creature of intellect, and therefore human. But these ansels, Thomas understood at once, were not creatures of intellect and were not human. The difference was clear on the practical plane, but the theory was not clear. Thomas was surprised that he felt no repugnance at seeing them killed. Nor did he hesitate to eat raw hacked-off pieces offered him. So he puzzled about it.
“There’s a question I hardly know how to ask,” he said to Paul. “Would Rimrock the ansel eat ansel?”
“He would and he has,” Paul said, “but he doesn’t care for it much. Says it’s overrated. An ansel doesn’t need ansel in his diet, but there’s no repugnance. And an ansel who has crossed the line becomes an entirely different creature from a natural ansel. How the new species is acquired I do not know, but every species can tell the difference. A dire-wolf, for instance, will eat a natural ansel with as easy a mind as he’d eat a jerusalem coney. He’d also eat a transfigured ansel just as he’d eat a man, but he wouldn’t eat him with as easy a mind. There is a difference between natural and transcendent prey, and all the meat-eaters know it. It is known that all animals are greatly disturbed in their minds after they have eaten humans, and Rimrock would be human by this test.”
“The theology of it is impossible,” the green-robe said. “It cannot be that a creature already in full life will sometimes receive a soul and intelligence, and yet that appears to be quite the case with certain exceptional ansels. And I talked to your friend Rimrock today. He had gone on just a little while before you came.”
They traveled again. And the mountains grew higher and came closer. They traveled through the afternoon—stalked always by the Programmed Killers—and at dusk they came to Goslar the City of the Salic Emperors.
(Here follows History quickly given.)
The Salic Emperors had their origins as an underground university fraternity in Wu Town. Certain young persons, believing themselves daring, maintained a revolt, half-humorous, half-doctrinaire, and altogether brainless, against the golden mediocrity of Astrobe, the humanist planetary dream. Several of these young people then (two centuries before this telling) established the small town of Goslar and called it their imperial capital. Hunting families had accreted to the settlement for it was, in a way, central to the Feral Strip. It was here that the Dismal Swamps and the Rain Forests and the Savannas all came together; and it stood right at the foot of Electric Mountain, the first high pinnacle of the mountain complex.
Goslar now had about a hundred people, and a big shanty building that was public house, royal palace, hotel and skinners’ center.
From the founding, there had always been one Salic Emperor in residence at Goslar. The present Emperor was Charles the Six Hundred and Twelfth; for no Emperor had reigned as long as a year, and many of them less than a month.
The automatic killers had assigned themselves automatically to the destruction of every reigning emperor. These Programmed Killers of Astrobe have been described as garbage disposals, as the ultimate police, as the precision wardens of the Astrobe Dream. They got rid of everything that stood in the way of that dream. They had been so constructed, and they had so propagated themselves and continued. On the breast of each Programmed Killer was blazoned the motto I have not been false to the Vision.
The sensing of these killers was faultless and relentless. Anything that threatened the Astrobe Thesis was the enemy and they would follow it to the end and kill it. They had never ultimately failed, though certain tricky persons sometimes eluded them for years.
A personal surrender was sensed by them. One who relented and accepted the Astrobe Dream, albeit interiorly and silently, was no longer hunted by them. The Programmed Killers could be destroyed. But at the moment of the destruction of any one of them, another one was created in a distant center and was given the same assignment.
And they had pursued and killed the Salic Emperors, just as they were pursuing and would finally kill every threatening member of the Thomas More party.
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br /> But there was a peculiarity about the succession of the Salic Emperors that paralleled that of the robot killer species. Whenever a reigning emperor was killed, his replacement was also created instantly. Knowing of the death by no orthodox communication (in several cases, knowing of it a few hours before it happened), the Salics at the University in Wu Town would hold instant convocation, by day or by night, and would select a new emperor in a matter of minutes. The new emperor would start on foot to Goslar immediately, without script or staff or food or coin or extra garment, and would arrive in wild Goslar in about ten hours. He always traveled intuitively, since Goslar is not mapped and the new emperor would never have been there before.
And so the dynasty continued.
Charles the Six Hundred and Twelfth had reigned less than twenty hours when the Thomas More party arrived. He had arrived in the darkness of the night before, and had been crowned by a dumb birdliming man.
(That be History longishly given.)
Charles the Six Hundred and Twelfth was about eighteen years old, a bewildered young man with a frightened smile. But he comprehended the party even as they approached. As Emperor he was infused with certain special powers of understanding. He beckoned the party to enter the big shanty building, and then motioned them to stow their gear against the walls and to spread straw for their beds, for this was hotel as well as royal palace.
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