The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde

by Norman Spinrad

  He handed the pills around. Lazar Marashovski was about to gulp his down.

  “Wait a minute!” said Brunei. “Let’s all do it together.”

  “One, two, three!”

  They swallowed the pills. In about ten minutes, thought Brunei, we should be feeling it.

  He looked at the crew. Ten of us, he thought, ten brilliant misfits. Lazar, who has spent half his life high on baronite; Vera Galindez, would-be medium, trying to make herself telepathic with mescalin; Jorge Donner… Why is he here?

  Me, at least with me it’s simple—this or jail.

  What a crew! Drug addicts, occultists, sensationalists… and what else? What makes a person do a thing like this?

  It’ll all come out, thought Brunei. In sixteen years, it’ll all come out.

  “Feel anything yet, Ollie?” said Marsha Johnson. No doubt why she came along. Just an ugly old maid liking the idea of being cooped up with five men.

  “Nothing yet,” said Brunei.

  He looked around the room. Plain steel walls, lined with cabinets full of Omnidrene on two sides, viewscreen on the ceiling, bare floor, the other two walls decked out like an automat. Plain, gray steel walls…

  Then why were the gray steel walls turning pink?

  “Oh, oh…” said Joby Krail, rolling her pretty blond head, “oh, oh… here it comes. The walls are dancing…”

  “The ceiling is a spiral,” muttered Vera, “a winding red spiral.”

  “O.K., fellow inmates,” said Brunei, “it’s hitting.” Now the walls were red, bright fire-engine red, and they were melting. No, not melting, but evaporating…

  “Like crystal it is,” said Lin Pey, waving his delicate oriental hands, “like jade as transparent as crystal.”

  “There is a camel in the circle,” said Lazar, “a brown camel.”

  “Let’s all try and see the camel together,” said Vera Galindez sharply. “Tell us what it looks like, Lazar.”

  “It’s brown, it’s the two-humped kind, it has a two-foot tail.”

  “And big feet,” said Lin Pey.

  “A stupid face,” said Dormer.

  “Very stupid.”

  “Your camel is a great bore,” said the stocky, scowling Bram Daker.

  “Let’s have something else,” said Joby.

  “Okay,” replied Brunei, “now someone else tell what they see.”

  “A lizard,” said Linda Tobias, a strange, somber girl, inclined to the morbid.

  “A lizard?” squeaked Ingrid Solin.

  “No,” said Lin Pey, “a dragon. A green dragon, with a forked red tongue…”

  “He has little useless wings,” said Lazar.

  “He is totally oblivious to us,” said Vera.

  Brunei saw the dragon. It was five feet long, green and scaly. It was a conventional dragon, except for the most bovine expression in its eyes…

  Yes, he thought, the dragon is here. But the greater part of him knew that it was an illusion.

  How long would this go on?

  “It’s good that we see the same things,” said Marsha. “Let’s always see the same things…”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes!”

  “Now, a mountain, a tall blue mountain.”

  “With snow on the peak.”

  “Yes, and clouds…”

  One week out:

  Oliver Brunei stepped into the common room. Lin Pey, Vera, and Lazar were sitting together, on what appeared to be a huge purple toadstool.

  But that’s my hallucination, thought Brunei. At least, 1 think it is.

  “Hello Ollie,” said Lazar.

  “Hi. What’re you doing?”

  “We’re looking at the dragon again,” said Vera. “Join us?”

  Brunei thought of the dragon for a moment. The toadstool disappeared, and the by-now-familiar bovine dragon took its place. In the last few days, they had discovered that if any two of them concentrated on something long enough to “materialize” it, anyone else who wanted to could see it in a moment.

  “What’s so interesting about that silly dragon?” said Brunei.

  “How about the camel?” said Lazar.

  The dragon turned into the two-humped brown camel.

  “Phooey!” said Lin Pey.

  “O.K.,” said Vera, “so what do you want?”

  Lin Pey thought for a moment.

  “How about a meadow?” he said. “A soft lawn of green grass, the sky is blue, and there are a few white clouds…”

  “Clover is blooming,” said Lazar. “Smell it.”

  Brunei reclined on the soft green grass. The smell of the earth beneath him was warm and moist. “A few apple trees here and there,” he said, and there was shade.

  “Look over the hill!” said Lazar. “There’s the dragon!”

  “Will you please get rid of that dragon?” snapped Brunei.

  “O.K., Ollie, O.K.”

  One month out:

  “Get out of the way!” yelled Brunei. He gave the dragon a kick. It mooed plaintively.

  “That wasn’t very nice, Ollie,” said Lazar.

  “That dragon is always underfoot,” said Brunei. “Why don’t you get rid of it?”

  “I’ve taken a liking to it,” said Lazar. “Besides, what about your Saint Bernard?”

  “This ship is getting too cluttered up with everyone’s hallucinations,” said Brunei. “Ever since… when was it, a week ago?… ever since we’ve been able to conjure ’em up by ourselves, and make everyone else see ’em.”

  Daker dematerialized the woman on his lap. “Why don’t we get together?” he said.

  “Get together?”

  “Yes. We could agree on an environment. Look at this common room for example. What a mess! Here, it’s a meadow, there it’s a beach, a palace, a boudoir.”

  “You mean we should make it the same for all of us?” asked Lazar.

  “Sure. We can have whatever we want in our cabins, but let’s make some sense out of the common room,”

  “Good idea,” said Brunei. “I’ll call the others.”

  Three months out:

  Brunei stepped through the stuccoed portal, and into the central Spanish garden. He noticed that the sky was blue, with a few fleecy white clouds.

  But then, the weather was always good. They had agreed on it.

  Lazar, Ingrid, Lin Pey and Vera were sitting on the green lawn surrounding the fountain.

  Daker, Joby, Linda and Donner preferred the shade, and lounged against the white arabesqued wall which enclosed the garden on four sides, broken only by four arched entrance portals.

  The garden had been a good compromise, thought Brunei. Something for everyone. Fresh air and sunshine, but also the mental security offered by the walls, which also provided shade for those who wanted it. A fountain, a few palm trees, grass, flowers, even the little formal Japanese rock garden that Lin Pey had insisted on.

  “Hello, Offie,” said Lazar. “Nice day.”

  “Isn’t it always?” replied Brunei. “How about a little shower?”

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “I notice a lot of sleeping people today,” said Brunei.

  “Yes,” said Lin Pey. “By now, the garden seems to be able to maintain itself.”

  “You think it has a separate existence?” asked Ingrid.

  “Of course not,” said Vera. “Our subconscious minds are maintaining it. It’s probably here when we’re all asleep.”

  “No way of telling that,” said Brunei. “Besides, how can it exist when we’re asleep, when it doesn’t really exist to begin with?”

  “Semantics, Ollie, semantics.”

  Brunei took a bottle of Omnidrene out of his pocket. “Time to charge up the old batteries again,” he said.

  He passed out the pills.

  “I notice Marsha is still in her cabin.”

  “Yeah,” said Lazar, “she keeps to herself a lot. No great—”

  Just then, Marsha burst into the garden, screaming: “Make it
go away! Make it go away!”

  Behind her slithered a gigantic black snake, with a head as big as a horse’s, and bulging red eyes.

  “I thought we agreed to leave our private hallucinations in our cabins,” snapped Brunei.

  “I tried! I tried! I don’t want it around, but it won’t go away! Do something!”

  Ten feet of snake had already entered the garden. The thing seemed endless.

  “Take it easy,” said Lazar. “Let’s all concentrate and think it away.”

  They tried to erase the snake, but it just rolled its big red eyes.

  “That won’t work,” said Vera. “Her subconscious is still fighting us. Part of her must want the snake here. We’ve all got to be together to erase it.”

  Marsha began to cry. The snake advanced another two feet.

  “Oh, quiet!” rasped Lazar. “Ollie, do I have your permission to bring my dragon into the garden? He’ll make short work of the snake.”

  Brunei scowled. “You and your dragon… Oh, maybe it’ll work.”

  Instantly, the green dragon was in the garden. But it was no longer five feet long and bovine.

  It was a good twelve feet long, with cold reptilian eyes and big yellow fangs.

  It took one look at the snake, opened its powerful jaws, and belched a huge tongue of orange flame.

  The serpent was incinerated. It disappeared.

  Brunei was trembling. “What happened, Lazar?” he said. “That’s not the same stupid little dragon.”

  “Hah… hah…” squeaked Lazar. “He’s… uh… grown…”

  Brunei suddenly noticed that Lazar was ashen. He also noticed that the dragon was turning in their direction.

  “Get it out of here, Lazar! Get it out of here!”

  Lazar nodded. The dragon flickered and went pale, but it was over a minute before it disappeared entirely.

  Six months out:

  Things wandered the passageways and haunted the cabins. Marsha’s snake was back. There was Lazar’s dragon, which seemed to grow larger every day. There was also a basilisk, a pterodactyl, a vampire bat with a five-foot wingspread, an old-fashioned red spade-tailed demon and other assorted horrors.

  Even Oliver Brunei’s friendly Saint Bernard had grown to monstrous size, turned pale green, and grown large yellow fangs.

  Only the Spanish garden in the common room was free of the monstrosities. Here, the combined conscious minds of the ten crew members were still strong enough to banish the rampaging hallucinations.

  The ten of them sat around the fountain, which seemed a shade less sparkling.

  There were even rainclouds in the sky.

  “I don’t like it,” said Bram Daker. “It’s getting completely out of control.”

  “So we just have to stay in the garden, that’s all,” said Brunei. “The food’s all here, and so is the Omnidrene. And they can’t come here.”

  “Not yet,” said Marsha.

  They all shuddered.

  “What went wrong?” asked Ingrid.

  “Nothing,” said Donner. “They didn’t know what would happen when they sent us out, so we can’t say they were wrong”

  “Very comforting,” croaked Lazar. “But can someone tell me why we can’t control them any more?”

  “Who knows?” said Brunei. “At least we can keep them out of here. That’s—”

  There was a snuffling at the wall. The head of something like a Tyrannosaurus Rex peered over the wall at them.

  “Ugh!” said Lin Pey. “I think that’s a new one.”

  The dragon’s head appeared alongside the Tyrannosaur’s.

  “Well, at least there’s a familiar face,” tittered Linda.

  “Very funny.”

  Marsha screamed. The huge black snake thrust its head through a portal.

  And the flap of leathery wings could be heard. And the smell of sulphur.

  “Come on! Come on!” shouted Brunei. “Let’s get these things out of here!”

  After five minutes of intense group concentration, the last of the horrors was banished.

  “It was a lot harder this time,” said Daker.

  “There were more of them,” said Donner.

  “They’re getting stronger and bolder.”

  “Maybe some day they’ll break through, and…” Lin Pey let the sentence hang. Everyone supplied his own ending.

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” snapped Brunei. “They’re not real. They can’t kill us!”

  “Maybe we should stop taking the Omnidrene?” suggested Vera, without very much conviction.

  “At this point?” said Brunei. He shuddered. “If the garden disappeared, and we had nothing but the bare ship for the next fifteen and a half years, and we knew it, and at the same time knew that we had the Omnidrene to bring it back… How long do you think we’d hold off?”

  “You’re right,” said Vera.

  “We just have to stick it out,” said Brunei. “Just remember: They can’t kill us. They aren’t real.”

  “Yes,” the crew whispered in a tiny, frail voice, “they aren’t real…”

  Seven months out:

  The garden was covered with a gloomy gray cloud layer. Even the “weather” was getting harder and harder to control.

  The crew of starship Number Thirteen huddled around the fountain, staring into the water, trying desperately to ignore the snuffiings, flappings, wheezes and growls coming from outside the walls. But occasionally, a scaly head would raise itself above the wall, or a pterodactyl or bat would flap overhead, and there would be violent shudders.

  “I still think we should stop taking the Omnidrene,” said Vera Galindez.

  “If we stopped taking it,” asked Brunei, “which would disappear first, them… or the garden?”

  Vera grimaced. “But we’ve got to do something,” she said. “We can’t even make them disappear at all, any more. And it’s becoming a full time job just to keep them outside the walls.”

  “And sooner or later,” interjected Lazar, “we’re not going to be strong enough to keep them out…”

  “Brr/”

  “The snake! The snake!” screamed Marsha. “It’s coming in again!”

  The huge black head was already through a portal.

  “Stop the snake, everyone!” yelled Brunei. Eyes were riveted on the ugly serpent, in intense concentration.

  After five minutes, it was obviously a stalemate. The snake had not been able to advance, nor could the humans force it to retreat.

  Then smoke began to rise behind the far wall.

  “The dragon’s burning down the wall!” shrieked Lazar. “Stop him!”

  They concentrated on the dragon. The smoke disappeared.

  But the snake began to advance again.

  “They’re too strong!” moaned Brunei. “We can’t hold them back.”

  They stopped the snake for a few moments, but the smoke began to billow again.

  “They’re gonna break through!” screamed Dormer. “We can’t stop ’em!”

  “What are we gonna do?”

  “Help!”

  Creakings, cracklings, groanings, as the walls began to crack and blister and shake.

  Suddenly Bram Daker stood up, his dark eyes aflame.

  “Only one thing’s strong enough!” he bellowed. “Earth! Earth! EARTH! Think of Earth! All of you! We’re back on Earth. Visualize it, make it real, and the monsters’ll have to disappear.”

  “But where on Earth?” said Vera, bewildered.

  “The Spaceport!” shouted Brunei. “The Spaceport! We all remember the Spaceport.”

  “We’re back on Earth! The Spaceport!”

  “Earth!”

  “Earth!”

  “EARTH! EARTH!”

  The garden was beginning to flicker. It became red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, invisible; then back again through the spectrum the other way—violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, invisible.

  Back and forth, like a pendulum through the spectrum…
>
  Oliver Brunei’s head hurt unbearably, he could see the pain on the other faces, but he allowed only one thought to fill his being—

  Earth! The Spaceport! EARTH!

  More and more, faster and faster, the garden flickered, and now it was the old common room again, and that was flickering.

  Light was flickering, mind was flickering, time, too, seemed to flicker…

  Only Earth! thought Brunei. Earth doesn’t flicker, the Spaceport doesn’t flicker.

  Earth! EARTH!

  Now all the flickerings, of color, time, mind and dimensions, were coalescing into one gigantic vortex, that was a thing neither of time, nor space, nor mind, but all three somehow fused into one…

  They’re screaming! Brunei thought. Listen to the horrible screams! Suddenly he noticed that he, too, was screaming.

  The vortex was growing, swirling, undulating, and it, too, began to flicker…

  There was an unbearable, impossible pain, and…

  The sight of starship Number Thirteen suddenly appearing out of nowhere, and sitting itself calmly down in the middle of the Spaceport was somewhat disconcerting to the Spaceport officials. Especially since at the very moment it appeared, and even afterward, they continued to have visual and laser contact with its image, over three light-months from Earth.

  However, the Solar Government itself was much more pragmatic. One instant, starship Thirteen had been light-months from Earth, the next it was sitting in the Spaceport. Therefore, starship Thirteen had exceeded the speed of light somehow. Therefore, it was possible to exceed the speed of light, and a thorough examination of the ship and its contents would show how.

  Therefore… You idiots, throw a security cordon around that ship!

  In such matters, the long-conditioned reflexes of the Solar Government worked marvelously. Before the airwaves had cooled, two hundred heavily armed soldiers had surrounded the ship.

  Two hours later, the Solar Co-ordinator was on the scene, with ten Orders of Sol to present to the returning heroes, and a large well-armored vehicle to convey them to laboratories, where they would be gone over with the proverbial fine-tooth comb.

  An honor guard of two hundred men standing at attention made a pathway from the ship’s main hatch to the armored carrier, in front of which stood the Solar Co-ordinator, with his ten medals.

  They opened the hatch.