Dramocles: An Intergalactic Soap Opera (17 page)

Glorm, Crimsole, and Druth did share one unique feature. That was the existence of great, man-made mounds, some of them miles long, scattered across most of their land masses. These middens, as they were called, had been in existence since prehistoric times. There was no accounting for them. Early man on Glorm had worshiped them as the last vestige of the departed gods. Slightly later man had tried to discover what was buried in them, but was frustrated by the reinforced concrete shell that encased each midden beneath a few feet of dirt.

The first of these mysterious mounds was not cracked until the time of Horu the Smelter. Horu was a Bronze Age engineer who learned how to make steel through dreams in which a spirit named Bessemer explained the techniques. The Horu Process, as it came to be called, enabled the Glormish to shape steel tools with which to break open the concrete shell.

Within the middens there were vast quantities of machinery, still functioning after incalculable centuries. Several huge middens were found to contain nothing but spaceships, and this was the discovery that propelled Glorm into the age of spaceflight before anyone had even invented quantum mechanics.

The key find was the Long Midden in Glorm, in the foothills of the Sardapian Alps. This mound, forty miles long by five wide, was composed entirely of spaceships, packed closely together and separated from each other only by a strange white substance that later came to be known as Styrofoam. At least fifteen thousand usable ships were removed, and many others were scavenged for souvenirs. The ships were small, simple to operate, armed with laser weaponry, and powered by sealed energy units. The ships were identified as products of Old Earth. The reason for their concentrations on Glorm, Crimsole, and Druth was unknown. The main conjecture was that they had something to do with the Terrans’ attempt to escape their doomed planet, an attempt thwarted by the suddenness of the still-unexplained aerosol catastrophe. Thus Glorm and the other planets entered the Age of Spaceflight, which quickly became the Age of the Space War.

It was at this time that the Vanir migrated from Galactic Center in their lapstraked spaceships, entering history and further complicating it. But the various wars, alliances, treaties, and battles involving them are not part of this history.

Attempts were made throughout this period to form world governments, but Glorm was not united politically until the reign of Ilk the Forswearer, so named because he would say anything to get his way. Planetary unification made possible another dream: single control of all the local planets, or “Universal Rule” as it was somewhat grandiosely called. The Glormish Empire came and went, and Otho’s father, Deel the Unfathomable, was the first to publicly declare it an invalid proposition, and to propose in its place the republican principle as it applied to kings. Otho carried on his father’s work, and, by the end of his reign, peace among the planets was a reality.

Otho was a man of high intelligence, iron will, and raging ambition. With warfare, the sport of kings, barred from him by his own decision, he looked around for something else to do, something sufficiently bold and challenging to capture and hold his sometimes fickle attention. After trying chess, trout fishing, landscape painting, and crosscountry bicycling, in all of which he excelled, he turned to the occult.

In Otho’s time, the occult included science, itself a deep mystery to the Glormians, who had inherited their technology entire, ran it blindly, had little or no idea how it worked, and couldn’t fix it when it broke down. Otho’s approach was on several levels. He suspected that science and magic were co-existing realities, in many ways interchangeable. Despite this insight, Otho might have remained a mere dabbler if he had not acquired, in a momentous trade, an advanced computer from Earth, along with a skilled robot technician named Dr. Fish. For these two semisentient machines, Otho paid King Sven, Haldemar’s father, a thousand spaceship-loads of pigs. The pork barbecue that followed remains a high point in Vanir history.

The computer could be considered a living thing. It had no bodily functions except for occasional unexplained discharges of electricity. In its years on Earth, it had in fact known Sir Isaac Newton. At the time of their meeting in 1718, Newton had already been recognized as England’s most outstanding scientist. A quiet, unpretentious man, pleased with the honors his accomplishments had won him, Newton chose not to reveal his discoveries in magic to the superstitious gentry among whom he lived. The world would not be ready for such knowledge until mankind had reached a much higher moral and scientific level. Newton kept his real occult knowledge to himself, only hinting at it in the many volumes of arcana that he wrote in his last years. But he saw no harm in discussing what he knew with the strange, brilliant Latvian exile who was earning a living grinding lenses for Leeuwenhoek and others.

Subsequently, the computer instructed Otho in Newton’s mysteries, though denying any interest in them itself. The computer was interested in men, whom it found more interesting and less predictable than the subatomic particles whose habits and configurations it had been studying previously. When asked to explain certain illogicalities, inconsistencies, and even downright contradictions in its behavior, the computer had replied that it was practicing being a man. The computer’s own story–by whom it was built, how it came to visit eighteenth-century London, why it turned up later as part of a shipment of booty on Vanir–though interesting in its own right, has no place in the present account.

Under the computer’s tutelage, and concealed from the populace at large, Otho learned many matters of a curious and profound nature. He became an occultist, and proved to have an incredible gift for “The Work.” The computer often said that Otho was better than any magician he had ever known, better than Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus, better even than Raimondo Llull, the Majorcan polymath. The person he most resembled, the computer said, was an Earthman named Dr. Faustus, a mage of great capacity who came to a bad end and whose story has been told in many garbled versions.

True magicians are extremely practical and hard-headed men. They are spiritual stockbrokers, trying to get a corner on the most precious commodity of all, longevity. Life is fundamental to all enterprises, the acquiring of it the most fundamental of occupations. The magician, seer, shaman, or mystic seeks the rejuvenating effects of astral travel. Through long practice in trance, he acquires the power to separate mind from body and to project the essence of himself to other times and places. The magician’s personality is able to survive the death of his body, at least for a while. How long depends on the power he can attract, bind, and direct. Living is a matter of power.

Modern magicians can bypass the tedious methods of the past and go directly to the source of power–the explosion of atoms, the unbinding of the ultimate particles. Controlling these forces within the lines of a man-dalic visualization, the magician can project himself to another world, another reality.

Traveling between realities is the way to life everlasting.

This is what Otho told his twenty-year-old son, Dramocles, shortly before setting off to his laboratory on Gliese, smallest of Glorm’s three moons, and blowing it to bits, and himself, too, apparently.

In actuality, Otho didn’t die. He had planned the explosion. Directing it, riding it, joining it, Otho journeyed to a different dimension along a wormhole in the cosmic foam. Where he came out, there was a place called Earth, its history different from the Earth in Otho’s reality. In this reality, there was no Glorm.

In their final talk, Otho told Dramocles about his destiny. Young Dramocles had been awestruck by the splendor that lay before him; for Otho intended immortality for his son as well as for himself, intended the two of them to be as gods in the cosmos, self-sufficient, and bound to nothing at all. And Dramocles had also understood the necessity of having his memories of this destiny suppressed for a while. Otho had allotted himself thirty years to get control of Earth. During that time he needed Dramocles to rule quietly, passively, unconsciously. Dramocles had to wait, and it was better for him not even to know that he was waiting.

“But now,” Otho said, “the final veil is lifted. We are together again, my dear son, and the time of your destiny has come at last. The final act approaches.”

“What final act?” Dramocles asked.

“I refer to the great war which is soon to begin, yourself and Rufus against John and Haldemar. It is what I planned, and it must take place. We need an atomic holocaust to produce enough power to open the wormhole between Earth and Glorm, and to keep it open. Then we will be able to travel between realities as we please, using our power to get more power. You and I, Dramocles, and our friends, will control the access to other dimensions. We will be immortal and live like gods.”

“But have you considered the price?” Dramocles asked. “The destruction will be almost unimaginable, especially upon Glorm.”

“That’s true,” Otho said, “and no one regrets it more than I. If there were any other way, I’d spare them.”

“The war can still be stopped.”

“And that would be the end of our dreams, our immortality, our godhood. They’ll all be dead in a few decades anyhow. But we can live forever! This is it, Dramocles, your destiny, and the moment of decision is here. What do you want to do?”

40

Decision time! At last the long years of waiting were over. Now Dramocles knew what his destiny was, and the terrible choices that were required of him so that it would come to pass. It was a heavy knowledge, and required of him an agonized decision. Everyone in the War Room watched him, some with bated breath, others with ordinary breath. And each moment seemed to slow down and stretch out, to take longer and longer, as though time itself were waiting for Dramocles’ deliberations to resolve themselves.

Chemise tried to read the expression in Dramocles’ yellow eyes. In which direction was he leaning? Did he have compassion for the world of mortals, of which, temporarily at least, he was still one? Or had Otho managed, with his well-shaped words of wizardry, to captivate the good-natured but notoriously vagrant attention of the King?

Dramocles’ lips moved, but, though all strained to hear, no translatable sound came forth, nothing but a faint susurration of breath that, despite its apparent meaninglessness, all sought to interpret.

At last Dramocles heaved a deep sigh and said, “You know, Dad, this immortality thing is really tempting. But it’s not a good thing to do, killing everyone except your friends. It’s more than just
bad–
I could maybe put up with that–but the fact is, it’s downright
evil
.”

“Yes, it is,” Otho admitted. “That which brings death to further its own existence may fairly be called evil by those whose lives are about to be taken. But one must not sentimentalize. Killing in order to live is the universal condition from which nothing and no one is exempt. To the carrot, the rabbit is the very personification of evil. And so it goes, all up and down the chain of life.”

An alarm sounded above the readout tank. The Operations Chief called Dramocles’ attention to the fact that Rufus’s ships were out of contact with the enemy and still withdrawing. A decision would have to be made immediately if Dramocles wanted any help from the fleet of Druth.

“I can give us a few more moments,” Otho said. “I’m going to create a very small nexus which will let us operate out of time temporarily while we finish our discussion.”

Otho paused to create a small nexus. It looked like a hemisphere of shiny, gauzy material and enclosed the control room entirely.

“I’ve always known you as a kindly father and compassionate man,” Dramocles said. “How can you consider killing millions of people, even to gain yourself so great a thing as immortality?”

“You’re not looking at it properly,” Otho said. “From the viewpoint of an immortal, humans are as ephemeral as houseflies. Still, I’d spare them if I could. But when the rewards of godhood are within your grasp, standard human morality no longer applies.”

“That’s too much for me,” Dramocles said.

“Then forget about immortality. It’s an idealized concept, anyhow. What we’re really talking about is an open-ended longevity, and all that we’re trying to do is get from this moment of life to the next, just like any other living creature. This moment, and the hope of the next, is all we have.”

“We have this moment,” Dramocles said, “and we kill in order to go to the next moment, and we go on doing that forever. Is that correct?”

“Not forever,” Otho said. “Only for as long as you wish. Living for a day and living forever require exactly the same decisions, the same sad choices. It takes energy to live. A rose needs energy just as surely as a Rosicrucian. Death is always the result of a failure of power.”

Otho paused to see how the nexus was holding up. It was dissolving at the usual rate. He still had a few moments of hiatus left.

“Since power is an irreducible requirement of existence, it is appropriate to seek it in order to maintain your existence. But you must understand the ramifications of this. There’s no homeostasis in nature, no point where you can say, all right, it’s enough, I’ll coast for a while. It’s never enough, there must always be more power, power or death. This struggle to survive is a universal condition. The power one needs for oneself is evil for all the other seekers, and this is true throughout the entire range of life. When intelligence enters the picture, the need for power becomes greater, the moral questions more acute. And now you stand at the point where intelligence must leave instinct behind or perish. Your choice, Dramocles, is to live as a god or die as a man. All the evidence is in. It is time for you to decide.”