Dramocles: An Intergalactic Soap Opera

by Robert Sheckley

  Grossfoot then sent a petition to Hjrod Dugelnose, the master builder, requesting that he construct wooden shelters inscribed with rune lines of great power. Dugelnose agreed, but was killed while robbing a tavern in Snaak, though some claim Sniick. His son, Bijohn Longsmasher, the assistant master builder, had gone south for unspecified purposes and not returned. And so Grossfoot had to leave his warriors sleeping on the loamy forest floor. To protect them from the forest rats, Grossfoot used a pack of trained terriers. Two blasts on the silver whistle that depended from his neck by an earthenware lanyard of curious design sent the dogs to work; another blast, and they went to a recreation area for their naps. Three more blasts produced a swarm of chi-chi worms. They spread out and devoured all the doggie-do that the terriers had deposited. And so a balance was struck and all remained neat and sanitary.

  When the day’s work was done, Grossfoot liked to make up little songs–for such is the way of the Vanir people. One of his favorites went like this:

  My name is Grossfoot.

  I kill people.

  I love women with big tits.

  My tooth hurts.

  My name is Grossfoot.

  In order for the Vanir to be useful in battle, they first had to be awakened from their long sleep. There was a magical word that was supposed to bring this about, a word of great antiquity, passed down from chief bard to chief bard, and not to be repeated here since, even weakened by mispronunciations, it can still shatter a TV tube at thirty feet.

  The chief bard came forward and intoned the word, but it bore no result. There was not so much as a quiver or a twitch among the sleeping warriors.

  King Haldemar was in despair over this turn of events. He called for his drinking horn, preparatory to tying on a monumental drunk. But Vitello begged him to wait, and went over and inspected several of the sleeping figures.

  Straightening up, he said, “Haldemar, all is not lost.”

  “How not?” quoth Haldemar. “For these were the troops I had counted on to give overbearing Dramocles a turn.”

  “And so they shall be,” Vitello said. “It is a mere trifling defect that keeps these men in sleep’s thralldom. Notice, O King, how their ears, from long propinquity with the forest floor, are quite stuffed with moss, small pebbles, twigs, pinecones, and the like. Due to this, these men are unable to hear the command to awaken.”

  “Why, so it is,” Haldemar said, stooping to inspect. “This shall be rectified at once. We’ll issue small trowels to the assembled company, though maybe soup spoons would do as well. And then we’ll dig passageways to their understanding.”

  “I would not advise it,” Vitello said. “Overforceful application of these crude instruments could result in damage to the inner ear, perhaps to the brain itself. What you need is a good sonic cleaner.”

  “We have none such,” Haldemar said.

  “I can arrange to rent you some,” Vitello said, “and at a trifling price when you consider the replacement cost of a good warrior capable of berserking on cue.”

  Sonic cleaners and other equipment were rushed in from Hoover XII, a nearby planet devoted to the cleansing arts, and the berserkers were stripped of many layers of hardened mud, dead twigs, rich black compost, and small flowering plants. Multiple fumigations removed all trace of Dutch elm disease and boll weevil eggs. So there was no failure when the magic word was spoken again. Rank upon rank, the deadliest warriors of ancient times blinked open their eyes, scratched their matted hair, looked around in wonderment, and called, each to his fellows, “Hey, how about this, huh?”

  25

  Count John, ruler of Crimsole, had a court that was done entirely in shades of red. Count John was actually a king, just like his brother Dramocles. But John had asked everyone to call him the Count of the Crimson Court because Irving J. Bedizened, his public relations man, had sold him on the title as a sure way of generating interest in him. At the time, John had considered it a really good idea, and he had loved getting letters addressed to the Count of the Crimson Court. Now the whole thing bored him, nobody was interested or even amused, and Bedizened was always in conference when John called.

  As soon as he returned from Glorm, John learned that his wife, Anne, was inspecting the military installations on Whey, one of Crimsole’s five moons. He decided there was no time to waste. Calling in his commanders, John outlined the situation briskly. Dramocles must be checked, and friendly Lekk protected. His commanders agreed with him entirely.

  John acted without hesitation. He ordered his best tactician, Colonel Dirkenfast, to take thirty thousand converted robot troops and go to the immediate relief of the hard-pressed citizenry of Lekk. Dirkenfast activated his troops, loaded them into carriers, and was off. These troops had been Delta Null agricultural workers before their conversion at the Soldier Factory on Antigone. Short and stocky, with built-in harrowing and winnowing equipment that could cause great damage at close quarters, the Delta Null robots were good fighters despite their habit of picking up vegetables wherever they found them and converting them into quick-frozen V-8 juice.

  Dirkenfast set his troops down near the south entrance of Sour Face Pass, concealing them behind a dense growth of aspen and larch that he had brought along for this purpose. Not even waiting to set up his fuel depots, Dirkenfast pushed out patrols to the north and northwest, advancing onto the plain of Unglaze toward Rivington’s Cairn, where Rux’s base of supply was located. The Delta Nulls got through Rux’s picket line undetected, and met no resistance until they reached the scrubby hills southwest of Ubbermann Falls. They overran several guard posts, and Dirkenfast followed quickly with his main force. So complete was the surprise that it looked as if Rux’s position would be overrun despite its defensive strength, nestled as it was behind Lekk’s only sand dune. It took time to program the Mark IV’s to defensive mode, and time was what Rux no longer had.

  Then took place one of those odd incidents brought on by the confusion and uncertainty of battle. Just as Dirkenfast’s main troops reached the jump-off position, there was a flash of brilliant light in the sky and a low rumbling noise that seemed to come from a point several hundred yards ahead, near the granite outliers of the Kronstadt glacier. It was difficult country, perfect for an ambush, and so Dirkenfast sent Platoon Leader DBX23 to survey the position.

  The robot crossed a low bridge, passed a stand of red cedar, and, in a little hollow, discovered a young woman sitting in an armchair reading a book. She was blond and had green eyes. (“She could be considered attractive,” DBX23 said later when questioned, “if your taste runs to human beings.”)

  “Did you hear that rumbling sound?” DBX23 asked the woman.

  “I think it was thunder,” the woman said.

  “And the flash of light?”

  “I didn’t see that.”

  “There was one, you know,” DBX23 said.

  “It must have been lightning,” the woman said.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” DBX23 said, and returned to his platoon.

  His report was studied and argued over for more than an hour, until a cyberpathologist recognized it as a machine hallucination. Another patrol found no sign of the woman. Dirkenfast ordered his robots to attack. But the delay had given Rux a chance to reprogram his Mark IVs and get them faced about. They stood up to Dirkenfast’s assault, and the opportunity for a quick victory was lost to Crimsole. Still, it was an unexpected setback for Dramocles’ forces, and Rux’s robots remained in a precarious position.

  John was pleased when he got the report. He thought he had made a good beginning. Proudly he told Anne what he had done as soon as she returned. To his surprise, she was angry with him.

  “You sent troops into battle against Dramocles? Without even consulting me first? John, you are an idiot.”

  “But it was the only possible response to the situation.”

  “What situation? Has Dramocles attacked you or taken anything belonging to you?”

  “No. But Aardvark and Lekk–”


  “–have nothing to do with you.”

  “My dear, you surprise me. They are our friends, our allies. Dramocles has broken the peace, his incursions are insufferable, he is a threat to the common good. My actions were absolutely in the right.”

  “I’m not talking right and wrong,” Anne said. “I’m talking business. What makes you think we can afford a war?”

  John was momentarily dumbstruck. At this moment he disliked Anne even more than usual. At the time of their marriage, he had welcomed her dowry of one fertile moon and a million golden hex nuts. Her candor had been refreshing then. Now, the hex nuts spent and the moon reduced to barrenness through the inept administration of his cronies, Anne didn’t seem like such a good deal. She was a tall, skinny, hawk-nosed bleached blonde with more balls than a herd of bull elephants.

  “War,” he told her, “has nothing to do with whether or not you can afford it. War is a natural phenomenon. It just happens.”

  “In this case,” Anne said, “it happened because you sent your troops into Lekk. Is that what you call a natural phenomenon? John, we simply cannot afford it. Must I remind you what a disastrous year this has been? First famine in Blore, and then flooding on the lower Stuntx.”

  “Appalling, of course, but the Royal Insurance Company of Crimsole paid for all the damage.”

  “Yes. But since we own the company, the loss is still ours.”

  “So it’s a loss,” John said. “We’ll amortize it, or whatever you do to get rid of losses. Thirty thousand robots on Lekk can’t cost all that much.”

  “Have it your own way,” Anne said. “Just remember this conversation when we go bankrupt.”

  “Surely you exaggerate,” John said. “How can a planet go bankrupt?”

  “A king can go bankrupt when he’s run out of money and can’t get any more, as is about to happen to you.”

  John thought about it. “Maybe we’d better raise the taxes.”

  “The people are at the point of rebellion now,” Anne said. “Another increase and they’ll put up the barricades.”

  “We’ll put down their revolt with our robot troops.”

  “Of course. But we lose even more revenue that way.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “We lose the money our subjects aren’t paying us while they’re revolting, and we also lose the money it costs us to put them down.”

  “Well … We’ll print more money, then.”

  Anne reminded him, not for the first time, how entire civilizations had collapsed once their currency was debased. John didn’t understand–since it was his planet, it seemed only logical that he could have all the money he wanted–but he grudgingly conceded the point.

  “I don’t care what it costs,” he said. “I had to do something about Dramocles, and I don’t care if I go bankrupt for it. There’s also my friendship with Snint to be considered.”

  “Snint! That sly man!”

  John nodded unhappily. Ever since his troops had landed on Lekk, the local Lekkian forces had been melting away. Snint said they were rallying, but it looked very much as if they were out in the fields, getting in the fall harvest. Snint even had the temerity to point out that what his people really needed was money, so they could buy robot armies of their own. If John chose to send his own troops instead, he must be prepared to let them do the fighting.

  “Snint’s no fool,” Anne said. “My spies report that he still sends Dramocles friendly postcards. He’s prepared to profit no matter how this turns out.”

  “I’ve heard enough,” John said. “You can’t expect me just to bring back our soldiers and call the whole thing off!”

  “I could never expect anything so reasonable of you. But if it’s to be war, we must practice economies.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No more clothes buying this year. No more spaceships, no more Terran cigars–”

  “Come on, now.”

  “–no more vacations, no more eating out in fancy restaurants.”

  John’s round face grew pensive. For the first time it had been brought home to him what war really meant.

  “It’s a complicated situation,” he said. “I must think about it.”

  “I shall go think about it, too,” Anne said. John knew that meant she was going to talk it over with her advisers–Yopi, the hairdresser, Maureen, the children’s nanny, Sebastian, the gardener, and Gigi, the ficelle.

  “I’ll see you at dinner,” Anne said, turning to go.

  “Yes, my love,” said John, sticking out his tongue at her retreating back.

  “And don’t do that,” she told him, halfway down the corridor.

  26

  A few days passed before Dramocles reacted to John’s armed intervention on Lekk, but when he did, his retribution was swift and more than a little cruel. With typical cunning, he struck directly at a matter dear to John and Anne’s hearts. This was the annual Interplanetary Charity Dinner, given by the Glorm Broadcasting Company on the restaurant planetoid Uffizi, at which prizes were awarded for Best King of the Year, Best Queen, et cetera. It was the top social event in that part of the galaxy. By using all his influence, and employing not inconsiderable bribes, Dramocles managed to have John and Anne stripped of their membership and barred from the celebration. The reason given was Aggression Toward a Fellow Potentate. John was outraged, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  And this was not the end of his troubles. Up till now, the Glorm Broadcasting Company had been mildly sympathetic toward Crimsole. But then came a swift corporate takeover, and a policy change. The new GBC management decided that John’s incursion into Lekk was morally reprehensible. John was left in the position of running an expensive war and getting nothing but bad publicity for it. He complained about this to Irving Bedizened.

  Bedizened agreed to meet him and discuss the matter in the Sortilege Club in downtown Crimsole. It was a dimly lit cocktail lounge furnished in a style in which Humphrey Bogart would have felt right at home. Guy Fawkes and His Rhythm Rascals were on the bandstand laying down cool jazz sounds involving a lot of saxophone arpeggios. Bedizened was already there, sitting in a leatherette booth and stirring a Scotch mist. He was a short, skinny, sharp-nosed man wearing cream-colored slacks, a Hawaiian shirt, a gold chain around his neck, and huaraches. He liked people to call him Joe Hollywood, but only his employees did so.

  John ordered a frozen daiquiri and got right to the point. “Why are they picking on me at GBC? Dramocles began all this by taking Aardvark.”

  “That’s different,” Bedizened said. “Dramocles was following his destiny, and that was noble even if misguided. Whereas you were actuated solely by pique and petty envy. That’s what the new GBC directors think.”

  “They’re not being fair,” John said.

  “There’s worse to come,” Bedizened said. “Are you ready for this? The network is canceling your TV show.”

  John’s television show, “Comments from the Crimson Court,” had a modest but solid following throughout the Local Planets. It had been running for five years and there had even been talk of airing it next season on the Galactic Network.

  “Prejudice!” John declared.

  Bedizened shook his head. “Show business. They need your time slot for a new show.”

  “What is it?”

  “‘The Agony of Lekk,’ a twenty-part documentary.”

  John almost choked on his drink. “Damn it, that really tears it. Lekk’s agony is about to end because I am going to pull out my troops at once, no matter how great the loss of face.”

  Bedizened frowned and pinched his nose. “I wouldn’t be too hasty about that, if I were you.”

  “Why not? I thought everyone would be pleased.”

  “It’s not as simple as that,” Bedizened said. “I’m going to tell you something confidential. I was talking with my friend Sydney Skylark the other day. The new management has hired him as an associate network manager for GBC, so of course he knows what’s
going on up top. Sydney told me he had the distinct impression that GBC wants this war to go on a while longer. It’s been a long time since they’ve had a good war to cover.”

  John gave him a scornful look. “They’ll just have to cover it without me or my troops. You can’t expect me to go on fighting on Lekk when all I get for it is busted robots and canceled TV slots and trouble from my wife and general ostracism from everyone else and my name taken off the guest list of the Interplanetary Charity Dinner. Forget it, Irving, I’m closing down the war here and now.” John stood up.

  “Sit down,” Bedizened said. John sat down. “Ending the war now will get you nowhere. Like I said, GBC likes the war and wants it to continue. Sydney told me that if you cooperate, they’ll work out something for you. Nothing on paper, you understand, but I’ve known Sydney Skylark all my life and I know I can trust him.”

  “What’s the deal?” John asked.

  “It’s not a deal,” Bedizened said. “And don’t quote me on this. But Skylark intimated that if you continue this war for a while longer, they’ll make it up to you.”

  “How?”

  “By rehabilitating you as soon as public interest in Lekk dies down a little.”

  “How will they rehabilitate me?”

  “They’ll do a TV documentary representing you as a misunderstood social reformer, weak but lovable, a charming but impractical idealist, a sort of William Blake without talent.”

  “But it was all Dramocles’ fault! Why doesn’t he get blamed?”

  “Face it, Dramocles is a more sympathetic type than you. Don’t worry, though, you’ll come out of this looking good.”

  “So I’m to go on with the war on Lekk?”