The Real Story: The Gap Into Conflict

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  As its gold gave me power without limit,

  now let its magic bring death to whoever wears it.

  No happy man shall be glad of it,

  no fortunate man know the smile of its bright gleam.

  Whoever possess it shall be seared by anxiety,

  and whoever has it not, shall be nagged by envy.

  Everyone shall hanker for its possession

  but no one enjoy it to advantage.

  Without gain its master shall guard it,

  for it draws him to his assassin.

  Condemned to death the coward will be in fear’s grip.

  As long as he lives he shall long for death,

  the ring’s master be slave to the ring….

  Now Wotan is in real trouble. The ring is cursed, but he desires it too much to give it up. Yet it is the only payment the giants will accept in Freia’s place. Without her, the gods must die. Wotan can’t simply declare war on the giants because the enforcement of his bargains is carved into his staff, the source of his power: to violate his own commitments will undo him. And the natural order of existence can only be restored by returning the Gold to the Rhine Maidens—which will force Freia into the hands of the giants.

  At last Wotan begins to understand his plight. With a little help from Erda, the Earth Mother (another of those preexisting beings), he gains enough insight to realize that he must surrender the ring. So the giants take the ring; Freia remains with the gods; and Wotan gets Valhalla.

  Alas, this is only a stop-gap resolution. The natural order is still in jeopardy. The ring remains a threat to the gods. And the curse works: The giants proceed to slaughter each other until only one remains to hold the ring; and that one sequesters himself (as a dragon), dedicating his entire being to the simple goal of preventing anyone from getting the ring away from him.

  Die Walküre

  Wotan is now obsessed with understanding his dilemma. After some intensive study with Erda (study which just happens to produce eight daughters—the Valkyries), he learns that the only cure for the evil of the ring is to return the Gold to the Maidens. Unfortunately, he can’t do that: He can’t get the ring away from the dragon without breaking his bargain with the giants. However, in due course he hits on the only apparent solution to the problem: He decides to use an agent to obtain the ring for him.

  First, on a human woman he gets himself a son, Siegmund (and, not coincidentally, a daughter as well, Sieglinde, Siegmund’s twin). Then he trains his son to be strong, brave, and desperate enough to tackle a dragon. Sadly, this training involves separating Siegmund and Sieglinde and abandoning them both to lives of extreme loneliness, abuse, and danger. Neither of them has any idea that their father loves them—and needs them. All they know of life is bitter survival against cruel odds.

  Too bad. Wotan’s plan was flawed from the beginning—a fact that becomes transparent when Siegmund and Sieglinde find each other and fall in love (she gets pregnant). This attracts the attention of Fricka: As goddess of matrimony, she’s responsible for punishing sins like incest. She forces Wotan to recognize that any agent of his is no different from him; that for Siegmund to get the ring will be the same as if Wotan himself took it. Therefore Wotan can’t use Siegmund to solve his problems for him; and so he has no defense against Fricka’s argument that Siegmund and Sieglinde must die for their crime. Broken-hearted—and aware of his own doom—Wotan commands his favorite Valkyrie, Brünnhilde, to make sure that Siegmund and Sieglinde are killed by Hunding, Sieglinde’s rapist/husband.

  It is Brünnhilde’s act of unselfish heroism which changes the nature of the dilemma.

  As Wotan’s favorite, she thinks of herself as his will incarnate. However, his pain when he condemns Siegmund and Sieglinde moves her deeply. And she is further distraught by Siegmund’s passionate and fatal loyalty to Sieglinde. At the last, the Valkyrie chooses not to help Hunding execute Siegmund. Instead, she fights for Siegmund against Hunding, directly defying Wotan, the All-Father.

  Outraged, Wotan intervenes personally, killing both Siegmund and Hunding. In the confusion, however, Brünnhilde escapes with Sieglinde. If Siegmund cannot be saved, perhaps his son can be preserved. She helps Sieglinde flee into a trackless forest (the same forest, incidentally, where the dragon guards his treasure), then turns to face Wotan’s wrath (thereby buying Sieglinde time to run).

  Because she has opposed him, Wotan condemns Brünnhilde to an enchanted sleep, from which she can only be awakened by the shame of being “taken” as a mortal’s lover. And because he loves her, he guards her sleep with a fire which will prevent any man who isn’t utterly fearless from approaching her.

  Siegfried

  Sieglinde, meanwhile, struggles on into the forest. Close to death, she comes upon a cave where Mime, Alberich’s brother, has been living ever since Alberich’s hold over the dwarves was broken. Mime keeps her alive until her son, Siegfried, is born; after she dies in childbirth, he raises young Siegfried with one goal in mind: to make Siegfried utterly fearless so that he’ll be brave enough to fight the the dragon and get the ring for his foster father.

  Like most plans in this story, Mime’s proves flawed. For one thing, both Wotan and Alberich know what he’s doing—and Alberich has plans of his own. For another, Mime succeeds only too well: He teaches Siegfried to be so fearless that Siegfried can’t stand the sight of his craven foster father and won’t do anything for the dwarf. Trying to trick him, Mime tells Siegfried he’ll learn something wonderful—fear—if he meets the dragon; so Siegfried decides to accept the adventure, despite his loathing for Mime. But this, too, doesn’t work out well for poor Mime.

  Instead of learning fear, Siegfried kills the dragon (laughing all the way) and gets the ring; in addition, he captures a magic talisman, the tarnhelm, which makes him a shape-changer, and gains from the dragon’s blood the ability to understand birds. At once, a bird tells him that Mime is about to poison him. In righteous indignation, Siegfried kills Mime. Then the bird tells him about Brünnhilde. Hungry for more adventures, he goes off to rescue her.

  Along the way, he encounters Wotan, who forbids him to approach the magic fire. But Siegfried is nothing if not self-willed: Oblivious to symbolism, he breaks Wotan’s spear and continues his quest to rescue the enchanted woman.

  (Without his spear, of course, Wotan is finished. In fact, he had reason to believe that his spear wouldn’t stop the boy. His decision to challenge Siegfried regardless is complex. On the one hand, he knows that if his spear can’t stop Siegfried the gods are doomed anyway: They’ll never be able to control whatever use is made of the ring. On the other, he understands that unless his spear—his rule—is shattered, the world will never be free of the destructive effects of his bargains. He challenges Siegfried in an attempt to simultaneously save and destroy himself.)

  Götterdammerung

  In a manner of speaking, Siegfried is a dream come true for Brünnhilde—a mortal so heroic that he might as well be a god. She gives him her heart, as well as a spell to protect him from any danger as long as he doesn’t turn his back on it; and he goes out into the world to have more adventures so that she’ll be proud of him. (I should perhaps have mentioned earlier that Siegfried isn’t very bright.)

  Almost immediately, he finds himself in the domain of the Gibichungs, a human tribe with failed ambitions and an imprecise moral sense. They are led by Gunther, unwed; his spinster sister, Gutrune; and his half-brother, Hagan (Alberich’s son and agent). The Gibichungs want glory through Siegfried; Hagan wants the ring. Toward those ends, they conspire to give Siegfried a potion which causes him to forget Brünnhilde. Then they send him to obtain Brünnhilde for Gunther (using the tarnhelm to appear as Gunther), for which his reward will be Gutrune’s hand in marriage. (This only works because Siegfried can’t remember ever meeting another woman, so to him Gutrune looks good.)

  When Brünnhilde is brought from the safety of her magic fire and given to Gunther, she is quite understandably outraged by Siegfr
ied’s apparent betrayal. She denounces him furiously. Hagan promptly gives Siegfried another potion which causes him to remember Brünnhilde and forget Gutrune; and as soon as Siegfried unselfconsciously admits the substantial accuracy of Brünnhilde’s denunciation, Hagan claims that revelation as an excuse to spear Siegfried in the back.

  Even in death, however, Siegfried is so strong that no one can get the ring away from him. And Brünnhilde is at last able to see the truth of his behavior. To honor him, she commands a funeral pyre and joins him on it. As soon as fire melts the ring, the Rhine Maidens are able to reclaim their gold. The story ends with the natural order restored—and Valhalla burning in the background. So the gods are brought to an end, and humankind is freed from arbitrary external dominance to work out its own destiny.

  (The logic here is profound, yet difficult to explain. Once Wotan’s spear was broken, the gods were, in effect, kept alive by the force of Alberich’s curse. They couldn’t die: The holder of the ring could be murdered, but everyone else who fell under the curse was compelled to yearn and suffer helplessly, as long as the ring—and therefore the curse—endured.)

  So what, one might well ask, does all this have to do with ore piracy and space stations?

  The answer is simple enough, as long as another, more concrete question is answered first. If Angus Thermopyle is a pirate who preys on human miners and shipping, to whom does he sell his booty? Ore isn’t cash, after all: It’s relatively useless unless it can be processed. And ore processing is capital intensive. Pirates like Angus and Nick would never exist—and the UMCP in turn would have no mandate to combat them—unless they had a market for their ill-gotten gains. So what kind of world lies behind The Real Story? Is humankind publicly divided against itself? Or is it in conflict with something else; something anti-human? Doesn’t the UMCP mandate against piracy derive its moral authority from the fact that the pirates are, in effect, selling out humankind?

  Once such questions have been asked (in the context of Der Ring des Nibelungen), the step from The Real Story to the next book, Forbidden Knowledge, is a small one. As soon as I began to think of the UMCP as legal gods threatened by the science fiction equivalent of shape-changing dwarves, I could hardly stop before I reached the wonderfully perverse notion of Angus and Morn as Siegmund and Sieglinde. And after that, as I’ve already indicated, my story became a gusher.

  However, imagining Angus and Morn as Siegmund and Sieglinde suggests just how fundamentally non-literal my use of The Ring is. The Ring is not my story: It is one of the seeds from which my story grew. In several ways, I’ve moved a considerable distance from my source.

  For one thing, there are themes in Wagner that I don’t want to pursue. His work contains a kind of structural sexism which leaves me cold. (The Rhine Maidens make me think of the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where a peasant shouts at Arthur, “You can’t wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart pitched a sword at you!”) And I don’t respond to characters whose power derives from their “innocence”: To my mind, Siegfried is untrammeled by fear, not because of his innocence, but because he’s too stupid to live. Wagner’s idea that knowledge paralyzes power seems inadequate to me—witness the entire Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

  For another, “Angus Thermopyle” alters the essential terms and possibilities of “Richard Wagner.” In a sense, setting is story—and the setting of The Real Story is science fictional rather than mythopoeic. Almost by definition, the conflicts of the story now become political rather than archetypal. Of necessity, every valence of The Ring is transformed. The most obvious result is that the onus of the story shifts from gods and dwarves to human beings. If human life in space is to be preserved, it must be preserved, not by All-Fathers and Valkyries, but by the descendants of the Gibichungs.

  The consequences of this transformation are everywhere. Just to mention a few examples. My “gods” derive their ability to endure, not from immortality, but from their control over information. As a crime against the order which the UMCP is pledged to protect, incest would have no meaning; so there’s no reason for Angus and Morn to be siblings. And I use no direct analogues to either Wotan’s staff or Alberich’s ring—although Angus’s ability to edit datacores has interesting implications.

  Yet The Ring is present in each of the four novels which follows The Real Story. When characters like Warden Dios, Min Donner, Godsen Frik, and Hashi Lebwohl take the stage, they come, as one might say, “trailing clouds of glory”—the ether of their Wagnerian avatars. And who better to represent the dwarves than the Amnion, who desire nothing less than the destruction of the natural existence of humanity?

  Whether Angus and Morn can preserve their own humanity (not to mention their entire species) is a question which could only have arisen from the intersection of The Real Story and Der Ring des Nibelungen.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Stephen R. Donaldson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1947, and as the son of an American missionary spent his early years in India. After serving as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he attended Kent State University, where he earned a master’s degree in English. Donaldson made his writing debut with the first Thomas Covenant books in 1977; the series quickly became an international bestseller and earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He was awarded the prestigious John W. Campbell Award as Best New Writer in 1979. He currently lives in New Mexico, where he is working on the fifth and final novel in the Gap series.

  Read a special preview of Forbidden Knowledge,

  the second volume in the Gap Cycle—

  available now

  wherever Bantam Books are sold

  In FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE, Morn Hyland has traded the evil Thermopyle for the doubtful sanctuary of Nick Succorso, Thermopyle’s archrival. She now possesses the control to her own zone implant. That power, and her careful manipulation of Succorso’s desire for her, may be her only defense against a new enemy—the Amnion. An alien force that barters a bizarre reward for the right to mutate human bodies into alien forms, the Amnion is Morn’s most terrifying challenge yet—a challenge only slightly less daunting than the struggle to fight the insanity that seizes her whenever faster-than-light travel drags her through the madness of the Gap.

  FORBIDDEN

  KNOWLEDGE

  Morn Hyland didn’t open her mouth from the moment when Nick Succorso grabbed her arm and steered her through the chaos in Mallorys to the time when he and his people brought her to the docks where his frigate, Captain’s Fancy, was berthed. His grip was hard, so hard it made her forearm numb and her fingers tingle, and the trip was a form of flight; frightened, almost desperate. She was running with all her courage away from Angus even though Nick never moved faster than a brisk walk. Nevertheless she clung to the zone implant control in her pocket, kept both fists buried in the pockets of her shipsuit to mask the fact that she was concealing something, and let Nick’s grasp guide her.

  Over his shoulder, he told his second, “Assign her a cabin. Get her food. Cat if she wants it. God knows what that bastard did to her.”

  As he strode away, Morn heard him say, “We’re leaving. Now.” He had hunger in his voice and a livid flush in the scars under his eyes. “Security doesn’t want us to hang around. That’s part of the deal.”

  Morn knew what his hunger meant. But now she would have a little time to get ready for it.

  Inside her shipsuit, she was sweating so fearfully that she reeked of it.

  Nick’s second, a woman named Mikka Vasaczk, was in a hurry. Maybe she was eager to get to the bridge herself. Or maybe she knew she was being supplanted, and didn’t like it. Whatever the reason, she was brusque and quick.

  That suited Morn.

  Riding the soft pressure of hydraulics, they took the lift down—“down” would become “up” as soon as Captain’s Fancy undocked and engaged her own internal-g spin—to the cabin deck, which wrapped around the ship’s holds, engines, databanks, scan- and armament-drivers. Capt
ain’s Fancy was luxurious by any standards, and she had more than one cabin for passengers. Mikka Vasaczk guided Morn to the nearest of these, ushered her inside, showed her how to code the lock and key the intercom. Then the second demanded, not quite politely, “You want anything?”

  Morn wanted so many things that her desire left her weak. With an effort, she replied, “I’m all right. I just need sleep. And safety.”

  Mikka had assertive hips; she moved like she knew how to use them in a variety of ways. The way she cocked them now suggested a threat.

  “Don’t count on it,” she grunted sardonically. “None of us are safe while you’re aboard.

  “You’d better be careful. Nick has better sense than you think.”

  Without waiting for a reply, she left. The door swept shut behind her automatically.

  Morn was running out of time.

  As Captain’s Fancy floated free, g disappeared. The involuntary contraction of her muscles, bracing herself against undock, sent her adrift in the cabin.

  In moments, however, the intercom piped a warning, and the bridge crew engaged the spin that produced internal g. The berth reoriented itself; Morn settled to the new floor.

  Such maneuvers were familiar to her. Instead of distress, she felt simple gratitude that Nick engaged g so soon. Most captains liked to run a considerable distance out from dock—to be sure they were clear, and to refresh their recollection of zero g—before they took on the inertial inflexibility of spin.

  Grimly she pushed another button.