Image of the Beast

by Philip José Farmer

  "What is your true shape?" Forry said.

  "You were not to talk," Alys said, flashing white teeth. She looked so beautiful and so young that he felt a pang of desire. Or was it an ache for his own lost youth?

  "We have no true shape, unless you would call the shape we use the most our true one. I suppose you could, since long utility of a particular shape results in a certain 'hardening' of that shape. It becomes more difficult to change it as time goes on. And it requires more energy to keep it in a nonhuman form. So, since most of us have been in the human shape for so long, you might say that that is our true shape."

  The Ogs and the Tocs had come into contact when space travel was invented. Neither used rockets or antigravitational machines. They traveled from one place in space to another by means of a very peculiar device. That is, it was peculiar from the human viewpoint.

  The device was made of a synthetic metal formed into the shape of a large goblet or chalice. That particular form was required because only that form could gather, or focus, the mental energies of a Mover. Perhaps a closer translation of the Toc word would be Captain. The Captain was the only person who could activate the device so that the Tocs could be teleported from one point in space to another.

  "Why would the Captain be the only one able to activate the device--this chalice?" Forry said.

  "That is the limitation of this device, let us call it the Grail," Alys said. "It has a certain superficial resemblance to the grail of your medieval myths, although the inner surface has a geometry that would be alien, even terrifying, to human eyes.

  "The Grail is matter, but it is activated only by a certain rare type of energy radiation. Of brainwave radiation, I suppose you would call it, but there is more to it than that. Anyway, the Grail, to act as a spaceship, or a teleporter, must be controlled by a Mover, or Captain. And there were only about a hundred Captains born for every million of us born."

  "Born?" Forry said, his eyebrows raising. "How can an energy configuration be born?"

  She waved her hand impatiently and said, "I am speaking by analogy only. If I have to explain every detail of an exceedingly complex culture, we'll be here for twenty years. Let me talk."

  The Ogs had discovered their Grails and found their Captains the same time as the Tocs. There was travel between the two planets almost at once and war a little later. The Ogs were evil and wanted to enslave the Tocs.

  Forry had some mental reservations about this. He would wait until he had heard the Ogs' side before he judged.

  The Tocs had repulsed the Ogs with heavy losses on both sides. Finally, there was peace. The Tocs and the Ogs then turned their attentions to other worlds. Since distance meant nothing to the Grail, since a hundred thousand light years could be traversed as swiftly as a mile, that is, instantaneously, the universe was open to both races.

  But with the billions on billions of habitable planets in the universe, and the limited number of Captains, only a few could be explored. Earth was one of them, and about a thousand Tocs had come here. Almost immediately, the Ogs had sent an expedition here also. The peace did not extend to planets outside their system, so the Ogs had no compunctions about attacking the Tocs.

  The Ogs and Tocs had waged a mutually disastrous war. They had destroyed each other's Grail and killed each other's Captains. And so they were marooned on Earth.

  "We lived among the humans but not of them," Alys said. "Our ability to take different forms gave rise to a number of superstitions about the supernatural origins of vampires, werewolves, fairies, and what have you. We Tocs were the basis of the good fairies, although we changed into animal shape, or other shapes, quite often. But we weren't hostile to human beings, that is, if they followed the proper ethics we weren't."

  Over the ten thousand years, the War, the occasional killing of human beings, and suicide cut the original number of about two thousand Tocs and Ogs down to about a hundred each. However, every Toc or Og whose material form was slain was not dead. He became an energy configuration again and could regain material form. But this process took a long time on Earth because the magnetic conditions here were not the same as in the mother system.

  "That accounts for ghosts?" Forry said.

  "Yes. Human beings don't have ghosts. When they die, they are forever dead. But a Toc or Og who has died in material form needs to attach himself to a locale where he has both the optimum magnetic conditions and human beings. He has to, shall we say, `feed' off the energy of human beings. And when he has gained enough form, in a phase which you humans call ectoplasm, he needs blood or sex to get a completely material body. The Tocs need sex and the Ogs need blood."

  She paused and then said, "One of us recently regained corporeal form by contact with Herald Childe. She literally fucked herself into flesh. Of course, she was able to do it far more swiftly with Childe than she would have with one who was completely a human being."

  * * *

  CHAPTER 34

  "What the hell does that mean?" said Forry, who almost never swore.

  "I mean that Childe is the only Captain in existence. But he doesn't know it as yet."

  "Why not?"

  "Because he was born half-human and raised by human parents. Because a Captain has a delicate psychic constitution and must be handled delicately until he has fully matured. Childe is a fully mature man in the physical sense, but he is a baby in regard to his psychic powers."

  "Just one minute," Forry said. "I don't want to digress, but if you beings can come back to material life after being killed, why haven't these Captains that were killed come back to life?"

  "Some did and were killed by one side or the other because their existence could not be kept secret. Others never made it because conditions weren't right. You see, if we had a Captain and a Grail, we could not only return to our home world. We could also bring all our departed comrades back into corporeality. The Toc or Og in his pure energy-complex phase is a rather mindless being. He has some intelligence, but the main reason he gets back to matter is that he has a drive to do so, an instinct. He wanders around until he happens to come across a locale with the proper setup for reconverting him. And reconversion takes a long long time generally."

  "Pardon the interruption," Forry said.

  If he had not seen that transformation from middle age to youth, he would have thought he was experiencing the world's biggest hoax. But he was convinced. He was actually talking, face to face, with an extraterrestrial. One that would have made the strangest creature of science-fiction, or even those in Weird Tales magazine, rather mundane.

  He thought, In a sense, she's telling me the story of the Martians and Venusians waging an underground war for control of Earth. Hugo, you should be here! Oh, boy, if I could just flip a switch and let the sci-fi fans and the Count Dracula Society in on this!

  And then he sobered. If this was true, and he believed it was, this was no mere fiction story or child's delight. It was a deadly war.

  "Childe?" he said.

  "Let's go back to 1788," she said. "To the birth of the male who would become George Gordon, Lord Byron, the famous, if not great, English poet. At the time he was born, of course, no one, including us, knew that he would become world-famous. Nor did we have any way of predicting whether he would become a Captain or just another human being. Or just another Toc."

  "I'm bursting with questions," he said, smiling. "But I refrain."

  "He was our first birth," she said. "On Toc, where conditions are optimum, births are very rare. That is, births from a copulation between, or among, our energy configuration phases do not happen often. But then that is counterbalanced by our lack of a death rate.

  "Here on Earth, we had never succeeded in producing an infant in the energy configuration. Then a Captain was reconverted into material form. One of us had the idea of preserving his genetic abilities in case he should get killed, which he was later on. The Captain happened to be living near the Byrons at that time, and he became the lover of Lady Byron with the p
urpose of impregnating her. There were a hundred of us, almost our full complement, gathered together nearby the night she conceived George. I suppose it is the only case, except one, where a hundred people copulated to produce one baby. We poured our mental energies into Lady Byron, and we succeeded. Coexisting with the fusion of sperm and ovum was the creation of an energy embryo. This embryo was attached, no, was fused with the body of the infant Byron. You might say that he was the only human being up to then who actually had a soul."

  "Pardon me, but how did that energy embryo develop? Did it become a separate entity or...?"

  "It fuses with the nervous system and becomes one with the corporeal entity. Not identical but similar. It survives after the death of the body.

  "However, this creation of an energy baby requires much outpouring of energy on our part. At the same time that we were concentrating our metal energies, we were fucking like mad corporeally. It was probably the biggest gang-bang in history, if you will pardon such language, Forry dear. I know you don't like to use dirty words or especially to hear them.

  "Unfortunately, though the baby grew up to have some remarkable talents, it did not develop the psychic abilities of a Captain. Not that that would have done much good, anyway, because we did not have a Grail. But we hoped to make the metal for one; we had been creating the metal, bit by bit, over thousands of years. On Toc we could have done it in a year, but here, where the minerals are scarce and the materials for building the potentializers are even more rare, we took an agonizingly long time getting what we needed. Then the Ogs made a raid and stole what metal we had.

  "They knew that Byron was to be our Captain. They moved in, became acquainted with him, and we could do little about it. Then they abandoned him when they found out that he lacked the Captaincy.

  "We were in despair for a while. But Byron still had the genetic potentiality for a Captain, and we decided to take advantage of that. If he couldn't be a Captain, perhaps his child could be."

  "Childe?" Forry said, ever alert for the chance to pun. She nodded and said, "Exactly. We got specimens of his sperm by a method I won't go into and froze it. Not with ice or liquid hydrogen but with an energy configuration. And we waited.

  "We waited while our enemies, the Ogs, obtained more metal, enough to make a Grail. Then we chose a woman with suitable genetic qualities, humanly speaking, because those have to be considered, too. You wouldn't want the Captain to be an inferior physical or mental specimen. And we deliberately settled on Mrs. Childe because of the name. And its association with Byron, too. After all, we use human languages and so we think something like humans. Only like, not exactly as."

  "Thus, the Herald Childe from the Childe Harold?"

  "If you said H-E-R-A L-D, yes. Herald. The Child that Heralds the rebirth of our Toc energy ghosts, their rematerialization. And our return to the Promised Land of our native planet. The dead shall rise and we shall cross the river Zion into the land of Beulah, if I can mix up a few quotations. You get the idea."

  "And what about Childe and the Grail?" Forry said.

  Alys Merrie opened her mouth to reply, but she shut it when someone beat at the door and shouted

  * * *

  CHAPTER 35

  At noon, the ringing of the doorbell awakened Childe. He staggered out into the front room, past Sybil, who was still sleeping, and threw open the door. A gust of rain wet him and covered the three men standing on his porch. He realized immediately that he should have been more cautious, but by then it was too late. The first man stepped inside, holding a spray can. Childe held his breath and ran towards his bedroom, where he kept a gun. He stopped when the man called, "Childe! Your wife!"

  The second man was by Sybil with a knife at her throat. The third, Fred Pao or his twin, held an air gun.

  The first man sprayed a gas over Sybil just as she opened her eyes and said, "Wha...?"

  She fell back asleep, and Pao said, "It won't hurt her. Now your turn, Mr. Childe."

  He could still run for the bedroom, he thought. But these men would cut Sybil's throat if they thought they had anything to gain by it. Of course, he might be able to kill all three of them with his gun, but what good would that do Sybil? On the other hand, if he surrendered, wouldn't he and Sybil be as good as dead?

  He did not know. That was the paralyzing factor. He did not know. And from what had passed between Vivienne and Hindarf he surmised that he was regarded as something special.

  "All right," he said. "I surrender."

  The man with the spray can approached him and shot the vapor in his face. He wanted to hold his breath, but it was foolish putting off the inevitable. After glancing at his wristwatch, he breathed in.

  It was thirty minutes later when he awoke. He was lying on a comfortable bed and looking up at a canopy. He turned his head and saw Sybil beside him. She was still unconscious. He got out of bed with some effort, noting that he had a slight headache and a brassy tongue and gums. His teeth felt enlarged.

  Their prison was a single bedroom and a bathroom. There was one door for entrance.

  Sybil woke up. She lay there for a while and then got out of bed. She went to him, and he put his arm around her and said, "I'm sorry about this. If I had made you leave, you wouldn't be in this mess."

  "That can't be helped," she said. "Do you think that we'll ever get out of this? I wish I knew what these people wanted."

  "We should find out sooner or later," he said. He released her and prowled around the room. There was a large mirror fixed in the wall above the dresser and another wall-high mirror on the opposite side of the room. He supposed that these were one-way windows.

  An hour passed. Sybil had quit trying to talk and had started to read, of all things, a mystery novel she found in a bookcase. He investigated again with the idea of using something to help them get out. He observed that the door was heavy steel and was set tightly against the wall. It swung outward.

  An hour and a half after awakening, the door was opened. Pao and two men entered: Sybil spoke to one. "Plugger!"

  Plugger was a tall, well-built, dark-skinned man. His hands were long and narrow with long tapering fingers. These were covered with small protuberances, a feature Sybil had not described.

  "Our enemies--and yours--were moving in fast," Pao said. "That is why we had to take you two away. I am sorry; we're all sorry. But it had to be done. Otherwise, you would have fallen into the hands of the Tocs."

  "Tocs?" Childe said.

  "Everything will be explained," Pao said. "Very quickly. Meanwhile, we require your presence elsewhere."

  "And Sybil?"

  "She will have to stay here. But she won't be harmed."

  Childe kissed Sybil and said, "I'll be back. I don't think they intend us any evil. Not now, anyway."

  He watched Plugger shut the door. There was a button in its middle; when this was pressed, an unlocking mechanism was activated. Childe reached out and pressed the button, and the door swung out swiftly.

  Pao said, "What are you doing?" and pressed the button to shut the door.

  "I just wanted to see how it worked," Childe said.

  They started down the hall, which was wide and luxuriously carpeted and furnished. He stopped after a few steps. He had been right. The mirror was a one-way device. He could see Sybil still standing in the middle of the room, her hands clenched by her side.

  He decided to see how valuable he was to them.

  "I'd like that mirror turned off," he said. "I don't like being spied on."

  Pao hesitated and then said, "Very well."

  He pressed a button on the side of the mirror and it darkened.

  "I'd like the other mirror turned off, too," Childe said.

  "I'll see it's done," Pao said. "Come along now."

  Childe followed him with the other two men behind him. At the end of the hall, they turned left into another hall and halfway down that turned right into a very large room. This looked like the salon of a millionaire's house as constructed f
or a movie set. There was a magnificent concert piano at the far end and very expensive furniture, perhaps genuine Louis XV pieces, around the room. A peculiar feature, however, was the glass or transparent metal cube set in the middle of the room. Inside this was a slender-legged dark-red wooden table on top of which was a silvery goblet. Or half a goblet. One side seemed to be complete, but the other was missing. It was as if a shears had cut through the cup part of the goblet at a forty-five degree angle,

  Pao led Childe to the transparent cube and motioned to a man to bring a chair. Childe looked around. There were six exits, some of them broad enough for three men to go through abreast. There were also about fifty men and women in the room, a large number of them between him and the exits. All were dressed in tails and gowns. Pao and his two men were the only ones in business clothes. He recognized Panchita Pocyotl and Vivienne Mabcrough. Vivienne wore a scarlet floor-length formal with a deep V almost to her navel. Her pale skin and auburn hair contrasted savagely with the flaming gown. She was holding a big ostrich fan. Seeing his eyes on her, she smiled.

  The crowd had been talking when he entered but the conversation softened as he was brought before the cube.

  Now Pao held up his hand, and the voices died away. A man brought a chair with three legs, a heavy wooden thing with a symbol carved into the back. The symbol was a delta with one end stuck into the open mouth of a rampant fish.

  "Please sit down," Pao said.

  Childe sat down in the chair and leaned against its back. He could feel the alto-relief of the carved symbol pressing into his back. At the same time, the dull silver of the goblet inside the cube became bright and shimmery. The brightness increased until it glowed as if it were about to melt.

  A murmur of what sounded to him like awe ran through the people.

  Pao smiled and said, "We would appreciate it if you would concentrate on the goblet, Herald Childe."

  "Concentrate how?" Childe said.

  "Just look at it. Examine it thoroughly. Let it fill your mind. You will know what I mean."