“People? Little more than slaves to their fears,” his mouth twisted still farther, now reminiscent of a satanic grin. He alone offered and maintained protection from the enemy who rode the unprecedented surges.
The masses laboured below—sweat on their backs glistening in the moonlight. But the Goddess was waxing. They had to finish soon. They could only work at night, to keep their secret.
“Only my magic is strong enough,” he affirmed, taking his powers for granted. Powers that by now he found intoxicating.
He held out his arms before him. Immediately, even in the relative darkness, he could see the workers turning their heads in uncanny unison, and slowly lowering themselves to their knees. Not to honour him, nor to give him praise. They did so out of abject fear. Out of inbred cowardice. They all knew that a single thought from his dark mind could kill any one of them easier than an arrow carrying fragments of Little Jewels on its tip. Some recovered from the poison of the worms, none from his wrath. Ever. So great were his powers. The powers of darkness.
That is what they all believed.
“Fools,” he interrupted his own dark thoughts.
He’d never killed anyone. At least, not for many years. Yet, legends have a life of their own.
When he’d risen to the throne, his predecessor had attempted to kill him with his own evil spells. But he’d been well versed by his mother on how to fight them off. In that alone lay his real strength. He’d learned early, not to direct his own power at others, but to reflect their own evil at them. He’d never killed anyone, but he’d helped many to kill themselves. That was the real secret of his ascendancy; only no one suspected this truth. Not even his closest guards. No one was ever tempted to find out.
Occasionally people died. People who had dared to oppose him. They’d died in a variety of ways. He alone knew that the choice of death his enemies succumbed to had been their own. They’d chosen the horror that they’d wished upon him. This was the real essence of Black Magic. It wasn’t really black; it was just highly polished. Like the Ancient Amulet on his royal chest.
For once, he smiled a benevolent smile.
It was the amulet his people have noticed. Their eyes were used to the darkness resulting from the constant, onerous, cloud cover. In recent times, fragments of moonlight were rare blessings. His enemies had darkened the sky. For them, the pale moonlight was like the dim sunshine they enjoyed on hazy days. Raising their arms and stretching them upwards in humble supplication, they slowly lowered themselves to the ground into a posture of absolute obeisance. He was not their master. He was their god.
“Arise!” He heard his own voice. He stepped back. His voice sounded like a horn blown by a bull elephant.
The Divine King had spoken. His minions could return to work. By his grace.
Alec slept late that morning. Images of a dark island… forest of tall monoliths towering over the waves... kept flooding his mind. He’d waken up a number of times, but the dream kept coming back like a mosquito trapped in a tent. As though he was meant to learn something. As if he would not be set free until he knew what lesson he was to memorize. Could this have been Sandra’s doing?
Finally he awoke, feeling a stranger in his own bed. He found his six-foot-two frame meager, not sufficiently commanding to impress, to intimidate his people. He sensed a wave of disappointment.
And then he sat up with an ease he hadn’t experienced for months. He looked around. Matt was still asleep. It was at this instant that Alec realized that he was still held in a vise of power. Only he wasn’t wielding it. It was someone he’d once been. Portrayed? One wielding absolute power over life and death. And suddenly he was afraid. Afraid of the capacity that still lingered within him. Nothing, nothing was as despicable to him as the sensation of absolute power. Of power over others. Of controlling other people’s minds. Of being someone else’s god.
He shook his head.
Am I to be wary of my work? Is there such power in knowledge alone? More questions. What exactly am I to learn from my peculiar visions? And even as he formulated the last question in his mind he fell back on his pillows. Listless, prosaic like a rubber doll deprived of its dilating air. Once again he was hardly aware of his body.
“I am still just an observer,” he whispered in amazement. “When shall I start living?”
And once again he rebelled against his fate. He felt anger. Anger at God, at Sandra, at fate, or just at his mental and physical ineptitude. He turned his eyes towards Matt. His massive body stirred, then relaxed again. But Matt couldn’t offer to solve Alec’s mounting enigma. It wasn’t his job.
***
17
Hades
“It must have been Lemuria,” Alec told Suzy over breakfast. He’d already given her a rough sketch of the dream. “The South Sea Island was unmistakable. So were the statues.”
“And I suppose you enjoyed playing god?” She’d decided to humour him. She had little to lose.
“I wasn’t playing god, I was...” somehow even the joke of being a god over others was repugnant to him. He wondered how some people managed to sit in judgment over others, to control others’ lives, when they had no idea what intricacies wove their avowed subjects’ particular realities.
It was time to ‘go’ to the office. His arms retained enough dexterity to do his work. He couldn’t quite propel himself in his wheelchair with his arms, but the electric motor took care of that. At least after last night’s experience, once his anger subsided, he felt neither physically tired nor mentally exhausted as he had been after his glimpse of the Dark Ages. He hoped he would never have to witness the depth of human depravity again. Never.
“But the images of me cut in hard stone weren’t bad at all,” he confided after he finished the last sip of coffee. At least he imagined so. He felt it. He’d never actually saw himself there and then.
They chatted for another few minutes. Suzy remembered the time when Alec would run out, sprinting, like a student who might be late for his lecture. Actually, even in those days, he’d seldom scheduled his lectures for the mornings, but he enjoyed running. If he didn’t have to carry a stuffed briefcase, he jogged all the way.
Suzy felt a tear forming in her eye. It was all such a very short time ago. Seemed like yesterday.
Alec was convinced that both dreams, or nightmares, had been etched in his subconscious for a purpose. It might have been to stop him from ever attempting to impose his views on others. He was to stay away from looking for converts to his own particular view of reality. History was replete with examples of insidious harm perpetrated by men who tried to impose their views on lesser minds. Even with the best of intentions.
But surely, it had nothing to do with the Information Theory. Was there power dormant in its equations? Or was it a question of casting pearls before swine?
He also had been shown that the emotional nature was cruel in the extreme. He strongly suspected that the religious imposition of beliefs had more to do with emotions than with intellectual appreciation. It was levying a strangle hold on people’s feeling, which in turn would not allow their minds to function. In Lemuria, as he now called it, the power of the intellect was made evident to him. It was pure and simple black magic. There, in that strange body of his, he did not control people's emotions, he held a psychic garrote on their minds. Mind control was not emotional at all. It was cold, rational and calculated for maximum effect. If you controlled their minds, you were their God. If you controlled their emotions, you were more like Satan. He was not quite sure there was that much difference between them, although Satan did appear to be more cruel. Gods demanded obeisance. Satan hungered for blood. Both repelled him—virtually with equal force.
Suddenly he remembered that for the first time he’d forgotten to kiss Sacha when leaving home. He felt guilty. And then his thoughts of Sacha overlapped with the memory of his dream. He thought of Sacha’s eyes. It came to him that even as good reflects only good, so evil can only reflect evil. We all live
in houses of mirrors, he thought.
He was nearing Caltech.
Whatever else happens to me, he told himself, I’ll do my darndest to avoid travelling in time through the Dark Ages, or any ages where a few wielded absolute control over the many. He hoped, dearly, that the horrid past was not making its way back to the present. There was considerable evidence that some men wielding power in the world today were practitioners of both emotional and mental control.
Right now.
Not in some God forsaken demagogic middle-eastern potentate, or some far-eastern oligarchy, but right here. At home. In the dear old US of A.
Alec got to the Institute feeling more alive. He could neither walk nor run, but he could think. He was ready for a good day’s work. The Information Theory was not the only subject of Dr. Alexander Baldwin’s lectures. He had developed informed opinions on a variety of subjects. They were all related to physics or often, more precisely, to mathematics. The subject was as broad as it was fascinating. He tried to present physics to aspiring scientists as a subject that would be to man today what religions once were. It was a search for truth. He recalled some of his early lectures in which he pointed out that early Greeks, or Athenians really, as Greece had not been at all homogenized in those days, accepted Apollo as their chief god.
“This Apollonian allegiance” he’d said in that early lecture, “distinguished the rationalistic theology of the West from the mysticism of the East. And this was not only true of the early Pythagoreans, but of later philosophers to whom mathematics was the very foundation of philosophy. And mathematics will lead us to the truth, even as logic delivers us from evil.”
He’d taught this, believing firmly, at the time, that he’d been preaching the gospel of Truth. Now, he was not so sure. He still espoused mathematics as the only way to define objective reality, but... and this was the problem, his view of reality was becoming, quite unwittingly, more and more subjective.
And that he couldn’t teach. It would not be ‘scientific’. It would not be guided by logic alone. It seemed to him, that scientific or objective reality was a compromise. A sort of average derived from the countless individual realities, countless individual points of view.
Could it be that there was a link, a common ground, where the objective and the subjective realities met in a union of understanding? Could it be that God is both, a Number and a beautiful Melody? Why should we put limitations on the Infinite? Would that be a virtual oxymoron.
“And if He or She or It is, more power to Them, the Three-in-One,” he muttered, grinning to himself.
Could it be that both the East and the West must seek a common ground to finally step on the right road to an objective reality that all man could espouse? Enjoy?
Or was man destined to remain, forever, the only reality. Forever trapped in the reality of his own making?
He feared the latter.
It was at moments like this that Alec needed support. He feared stagnant, though to others he was still the bright kid on the block. He was the one who was supposed to provide answers. That was his job. This was not a kindergarten where the boys and girls were led by the hand. This was the place, the agora, where you threw ideas in the hope that some of them would strike fertile ground. You didn’t tell people what was right or wrong. You told them what axioms have not as yet been disproved.
“It is up to you, each one of you, to find your way,” he told them, repeatedly. “I cannot tell you what is your subjective reality. There, within your realm, you are gods. The only gods. And ye shall have no other gods before ye...” he quoted from memory.
Suzy would have liked that last one. She liked to read up on mysteries of the East, even as he liked the logic of the West. And yet they loved each other. Perhaps this was the secret. Perhaps it was all as simple as that. Two peas in a single pod. Different peas, one pod. Now––was that mysticism or just plain logic?
“I must ask her,” he promised himself.
And then there was Sacha. Sacha still sang, trolled, on special occasions. When he did, his eyes shone, sparkled, as though heaven had opened and allowed the stars to twinkle within them in celestial harmony. He had an incredible affinity for happiness. Not that he never cried. But his displeasures were few, far between, and normally well substantiated. Usually it had something to do with a food. The intake or the exhaust. Both were of vital importance. Perhaps, Alec thought, they should be more important to us all. We seldom think when, what, and how much we eat. We seem even less concerned with the reverse gear. We do not assign special times to the evacuation as we do to the intake. Perhaps we should. Perhaps if we did, we would be as exuberantly happy as Sacha was.
But food was not the sole preoccupation that stimulated Sacha’s psyche. On occasion, both, Suzy and Alec noticed that Sacha attempted to manipulate their wills.
“It was as though he was checking how far he can push us. I had a cat once, in Montreal. When still a kitten, he did that to me a number of times. Or tried to.” Then she laughed. “It’s a little hard to admit, but he often succeeded!”
“I suppose we all try to find our ground. As a sort of base of operations,” Alec agreed.
“Oh, but Sacha goes much further. A few times I had the distinct feeling that he was honing me, at night, during sleep, to do something to his liking,” Suzy persisted.
“Just how would my son succeed where I have failed repeatedly?” Alec demanded.
“Very funny,” Suzy ignored Alec’s feeble attempt to steal the limelight. “Explain to me, why, on some days, I wake up with an overwhelming desire to take him to the park?”
“Perhaps you like taking him to...”
“On a day pouring with rain?”
They reached no conclusions, but agreed that their son is a very special son. Alec refused to suggest that perhaps, just perhaps, all parents feel that way about their first-born. But joking apart, he also tasted some echoes of Sacha’s will. He also thought that Sacha was much too young to understand that trying to impose one’s will on another was a nono. He wondered if he should tell him that in his sleep. They say that the subconscious never sleeps, he recalled, and when the body reposes, the ego is not there to object to outside interference.
But when push came to shove, the very opposite happened.
And the funny thing was that Alec was grateful.
As so often lately, the Sacha incident took place when Alec was a sleep. At least it felt like sleep. As usual on Saturdays, Sacha had been left in Alec’s care, while Suzy went shopping. With Matt’s help, Alec had stretched himself on the sofa, and began flipping pages of some scientific dissertation, until be began to feel drowsy. Sacha seemed happy on the floor, surrounded by his favourite toys. After a while, Sacha leaned back, uttered a few unintelligible syllables of the goo-goo-goo variety, and closed his eyes.
The next thing, Alec found himself floating in the Far Country.
Alec’s first reaction was to reach out for the Home Planet. Nothing happened. Only then he’d noticed that there was something very wrong. This was the Far Country, surely... only where were the stars? Where were the galaxies, the wonders of the infinite universe?
“Where am I?” he marveled.
He was reacting to the potential within himself. A potential trapped, static, unfulfilled. He was replete with thoughts, which weren’t yet thoughts. It was as though he’d held all the unwritten symphonies in the palm of his hand ready to be put on paper, to be conducted, played… Only there was no one to write them, let alone play them. And his hands were empty? He had no hand. He, in an absurd way, wasn’t there at all.
Where is there? Here?
He suspected he was some sort of mental construct, a mental state of being. Not yet becoming—the incredible potential welling within... within what?
If this is heaven why is there no bliss? A stasis? Perhaps patience is a divine virtue. It’s easy if you’re immortal... Immortal? There is no life here. You can’t be immortal if you are not alive.
&nbs
p; But if I’m not alive, who am I?
I am dead. I am in Hades. Sheol. Gehenna. In hell. Why? What have I done to not-be? Lethe has washed over me. Oblivion? Is this what hell is? Not-being? Who am I? If I am not, who is it that is aware of my not being?
Why don’t I like it? Is this where you abandon all hope?
It was at this instant of non-time that he heard laughter. He saw, he felt, he sensed Sacha’s carefree laughter. In that same instant, that same fraction of whatever measured duration before time was born, he wanted, wanted with the whole power of his non-being, to see Sacha. He felt that Sacha and he would be somehow similar. That Sacha would be his mirror. That he would learn the nature of his own beingness, even in non-being.
He desperately wanted to create a mirror. To see the potential in a mirror he needed light. And there was no light. There was no darkness either. There was nothing.
Just stasis. Hades. Not the land of the dead. Was this the land of not yet being? Of them that never were? Not yet?
He wondered if he’d ever live again?
Sacha?
And the first real emotion was born in his state of non-being: a first motivating impulse of the worlds yet to be. It would take the vastness of time to create his own mirror—a mirror that would show him his innermost potential. A mirror of what he could be—of what he could become.
He sighed with great pleasure. He was aware of being aware.
I am, he repeated nonverbally; this single thought permeating the awareness of his being.
I am, I am, I am…
Joy and love, and the sense of oneness, the forerunners of bliss, came into being simultaneously… then, the bliss of self-awareness.
Alexander: [Alexander Trilogy Book Two] Page 22