Megalomania

by Ian Wallace

  “I hate myself for asking, but—consoles for what?”

  “For having mincemeated my career.”

  “Oh, come on! Nobody knows for sure about us!”

  “That’s not what I mean, Dino. Even if everybody knew, what could they do? You are my big boss—”

  “I was your big boss. Until today.”

  “That last makes it all the worse. F’Cressakes, Dino, don’t you understand that I have stolen the Sterbenräuber and am keeping the ship under wraps in uptime without filing a flight plan, en route to another galaxy? Hell, I could have passed the buck to you if you were still my big boss—but after today—Dino, why today?”

  “You saw it all?”

  “And heard it all, yes. My dear friend—why?” His grip on her bare shoulder tightened. Flat voice: “Because I hate Croyd.” Dino had convinced himself.

  Distressed Kolly palmed his left pap while from his right side she looked into his half-averted face.

  “Of all men in the universe—why would you hate Croyd?”

  His grip on her shoulder loosened, and he queried the rounded ceiling: “You know, that’s a superb question. Until now, I have loved him, felt enormous gratitude for all he has done for me. So today, I attacked him—unfairly, which is normally not my way, but there it is, 1 did it—and he defeated me. Well, fine, but that shouldn’t make me hate him. And yet I do! and I’ve been brooding over the why of that—”

  His face hardened, and he told the ceiling: “It has to be because he mother-smothered me.”

  “Croyd? a mother?”

  “He was jammed down my gullet as an ego-image from the time when I was eighteen months old and just beginning to get into decently fluent verbal communication with my natural father. By my nineteenth year—when I was master of a myriad arts: master of all, not mere jack of all—Croyd’s mythos had ceased to overawe me; for I was realistic enough to understand that I couldn’t hope to equal him, let alone excel him, without an enormous amount of experience and probably a deal of further aging.

  “So then, at my father’s request, Croyd espoused me and patronized me and nurtured me, while I fawned on Croyd and emulated him during the next three decades—and evoked within myself every special ability that had ever been attributed to Croyd.”

  “Every special ability?”

  “Had not Croyd always contended that any human could learn to do everything that Croyd could do, and more? Every, I said. Projective hypnosis, telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, time-diving—the whole bit. I seasoned myself, acquired scientific and political status under him, knocked off a few Croyd-challenging achievements, and added decades to my own age—”

  “Only fifty, Dino? No wonder you are so young in bed. Clever, though. Croyd-taught?”

  “Bitch! I was going to say that then I felt strong enough to challenge him on his own ground. I had no illusions about the primitiveness of my own urge to topple the king: sheer self-satisfaction was my desire, and sheer self-satisfaction has always produced the highest ecstasies that I have ever known.” (Was this Darkside-inspired Dino talking, or was it Darkside pure?) Kolly purred: “Me too, Dino.”

  He was driving it out, clutching and hurting her breast now, rhythmically beating the bed with his free fist, staring into nowhere with a smile that expressed the ultimate in sardonicism. “Long ago, my first major self-satisfaction came out of my victory over my father with whom my conflict had been kept subterranean so that he never knew about it. Adoring me, he steered me; hating it, 1 wanted above all things to win that gentle conflict; so, from the age of two, I never disobeyed him in any matter which would come to his attention, and I usually disobeyed him in any matter which would not. Thus I retained his cloying attention, while I diddled my schoolmasters and marms, and used Croyd-type time-tricks to steal small fortunes. I whored women, preferably those who worshiped me while I enjoyed and tolerated them; and I brushed off the whoring because I wanted to study and practice and get ahead in the business of becoming better than Croyd.

  “And he won’t soon forget my challenge today. And in the long run, believe me, bitterly will he regret his defeat of me!”

  She had managed to work her breast free from his clutch, but now he was bruising her shoulder again. Squirming a little, she put a question: “Are you enjoying and tolerating me while I worship you?”

  It made him grin like the starship. “Do you worship me?”

  “Are you a god, Minister?”

  “If so, I’m the sort of god who wants Kolly, not to worship him, but just to play with him.”

  “And play along with him?”

  “That too.”

  “In between whoring women, do you ever whore men?”

  To her dismay, Dino went cold. He grated: “Don’t ever again, even in fun, associate me with homosexuality. My frigging father was one.”

  She started to retort, “Well! big deal!” but she bit off the sarcasm when a suddenly softened, pensive-puzzled Dino murmured: “And you know, my dear little mother knew it—but she thought she was too ugly to find another man—and so she took it—”

  Silence, while Kolly considered proliferating implications—until, recomposed and re-eroticized, smiling Dino caressed her cheek and reminded her: “But Kolly is voluptuously a woman.”

  His inward Darkside regained his enthusiasm as he-in-Dino romped with avidly erotic Kolly. A devil could hardly expect every delight from a mere human man who had to be carrying at least some silly inhibition. And what a trifling limitation it was—compared to the ultra-Faustian scope of a mind which could conceive and seriously intended to carry out the ruination of three or four galaxies, doing all this with high-velocity music, just to get even with one man!

  On the Captain’s Bridge next morning, Kolly inquired: “May the skipper now have a bit of supplementary flight plan, First Minister?”

  “Such as?”

  “Two questions. One: which planet in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud?”

  “And Two?”

  Dino was teasing, and she counter-teased: “After you answer One, I may name Two. So give.” With a straight face, he told her: “The planet Hudibras. We’re going to a party there, you and I.”

  “Party? What party?”

  “The retirement party for a super-distinguished musician named Zauberger.”

  “All this intergalactic hypertransit energy just for fun?”

  “I’ll have fun, and I hope you do too, but there’s more to it. Tell you about that later, Kolly. Which of those questions was Number Two?”

  “None of them. Two is—other than partying, why are we making for the Magellanic Clouds?” Sobering, he pondered. He said then: “We’d better get away from the crew for this. Do follow me down to the President’s Bridge.” She assented, dying to know what Dino was up to.

  Once down there, with Dino seated in the admiral’s swivel chair with Kolly in the slightly lower captain’s swivel chair, he requested that she bring up the Magellanic Clouds in the i-televideoport. (The prefix i denoted the use of i-rays which were almost instantaneous over astronomical distances.) These two galaxies were irregulars, cloudily ill-defined spirals, one seeming much smaller than the other. Kolly and Dino were looking at the Erth-visible two of the three Magellanic Clouds; the Lesser, being the more distant, was actually not that much smaller. (The from-here-invisible third cloud was called Least.) Once one has gazed upon these clouds (from the southern hemisphere of Erth or from its sky, necessarily), one will always tend to use them as a criterion for celestial beauty—not only because of their exquisite lack of definition, sketchily vignetted differentiations out of the cosmic continuum, but also because of their rare wealth of extra-radiant star-jewels, young blue-white luminosities a hundred times as massive and a million times as bright as the Sol-sun of Erth. Lesser is particularly distinguished by the Tarantula, 30 Doradus, the largest of all known emission nebulae. On the Tarantula the eyes of endlessly yearning Dino and sensibly admiring Kolly were now fixed.

  Dino e
xclaimed in high excitement: “Kolly, look—we can just barely make out that star-and-gas tendril connecting Greater with Lesser.” The tendril in question was parsecs long.

  “Means what, Minister?” Astrofleet Captain Kedrin knew what it meant, but she remembered just in time that Trigg was the astronomer here— and biologist, and politician, and statesman, and just about anything effective that a body might mention.

  Knowing that she was humoring him, he humored her. “Means that several billion years ago, the three Magellanic Clouds were one. Some cosmic near-miss pulled Lesser out of Greater—or else they formed independently and then almost collided with each other. Too bad they didn’t actually collide.”

  “Say why.”

  “Because the combination probably would have produced a galactic jet-spume. You’ve seen galactic jets, Kolly?”

  “Aye. Pretty things. I admired the ones you showed at that lousy board meeting.”

  He deep-breathed for moments, then uttered: “They are sublime/” So aroused was Dino that his voice almost cracked.

  More matter-of-fact than he, Kolly, having duly admired the galactic clouds, observed: “But still, First Minister, you have not answered my Question Two. Why are we going into those clouds?” He swiveled around to her and replied taut: “I am going to merge those two galaxies. Out of the amalgam I am going to raise up a jet. And I will use Zauberger’s high-velocity music as my prime tool for bringing it off.”

  Kolly studied this idea. Her jaw dropped. Staring glitter-eyed at Dino, she bit: “Either you kid me—or you are insane.”

  He was grinning broadly. “Not kidding. Not insane, either. Psychoneurotic, maybe—but thoroughly in touch with the mighty reality that I intend to change.”

  CAPER TWO

  HIGH-VELOCITY

  MUSIC

  4. The Bird-People of Hollow Hudibras

  Dino and Kolly hovered over Hudibras, a planet having noteworthy physical and biophysical features. Because all of these were about to be used by Dino in the structuring of his revenge, it is worth our while to overview Hudibrasian evolution…

  Planets are formed by dust-accretion during the later stages of star-forming. Most planets end up with extremely dense cores rich in some such metal as iron which has sunk through the original silicates.

  Most. Not all.

  At least one departure from the general rule occurred in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Hudibras, the third planet away from a developing star called in some languages Ojis, had barely got its silicates collected when it was hit head-on by an anonymous comet whose total substance was gnudium pure. Impact exploded the comet; windcast gnudium dusted down, forming an iron-impervious layer which sphere-shelled the silicate core of Hudibras.

  Thereafter, as the accreting of Hudibras entered into an iron-dust phase, the planet evaded the general planetary-formation rule that iron (or whatever else may be denser than silicates) will sink through the silicates to form a predominantly iron (or whatever) core, with silicates displaced outward into mantle and crust. Instead, accumulating iron pressed inward-down upon Hudibras’s core of silicates, compressing the core until it became semi-rigid and semi-fluid, ready to melt into ultra-hot liquid at the first release of pressure.

  Eons proceeded; gnudium held. On the Hudibrasian surface, free oxygen was in process of formation; a mantle, mainly peridotite, was forming, with a crust-epidermis; continents were amassing, and drifting, and subducting, and mountainously wrinkling, and mutually repudiating, and redrifting. Free oxygen went into combination with hydrogen; water eventuated; oceans formed between continents. Iron continued to press downward-inward upon the silicate core.

  Stress rended crust and mantle into faults which penetrated to the core. Ocean-water seeped down into the faults, generating steam when it hit the core. Steam drove magma volcanoing out. After numerous repetitions of the fault-drip-steam-spurt cycle, so little magma remained in the core that it cooled below the boiling point of water.

  Hudibras now was hollow. The gnudium layer held. Hudibras stayed hollow.

  Organic evolution on Outer Hudibras followed a course much the same as the course it took on Erth.

  A new departure developed at the class-level of birds. One of the genera consisted of sparsely-feathered creatures some of whose distant descendants would become the planet’s dominant species. In that primordial time, however, this genus might have been christened Aves Schlemiel.

  The birds in this genus (which eventually would be known as Garbans) were up against so many disadvantages with respect to other birds that a god’s-eye view would instantly predict either early extinction or eventual dominance through challenge-response compensation. All birds on Hudibras were hexapods, typically with two legs and four wings; Garbans had six legs and no wings. All birds had feathers; those of Garbans were so scanty that skin showed through. All birds had beaks, usually hardened for self-defense or for attack and for seed-cracking or tree-boring or ground-penetration in search of whatever food; Garbans had a soft proboscis which it had to maneuver out of its own way in order to tongue-in surface grubs and slow insects.

  Garbans did boast one unique feature: long eyebrow-antennae having neural connections to the brain. So far as any later Hudibrasian scientist could determine, these antennae were a gratuitous mutative characteristic; and they persisted, not having proved unfavorable.

  The primordial bird-feature which would evolve into present significance was the following: all birds sang, or squawked. As evolutionary time went on, many species developed syrinxes so astonishing that they could competently handle all the operatic songs between basso profundo and coloratura; and during much of the time they sang from pure joy of living, quite apart from mating calls and territorial challenges. Unhappily, the scope of the Garbans syrinx varied from a hiss to a bullfrog-croak.

  In the jungle of wild life on Hudibras, Garbans was doomed. (And yet, members of this genus will be centrally agent in the cosmic threat to be posed by Dino.) Nearly a hundred million years later, in the era when civilizations flourished on Erth, only one species of Garbans remained on Hudibras. This species had acquired total dominance; there had never been a chance for primates.

  The physical deficiencies of Garbans had driven Garbans sapiens, as one might by hindsight expect, upward and onward, first for survival, eventually for supremacy. As the prime fruition of this course, contemporaneously with the rise of Homo sapiens sapiens on Erth, two Garbans sapiens subspecies entered into dominant vigor on Hudibras: Garbans sapiens fabricator, and Garbans sapiens synngus. As between the two coexisting subspecies, fabricator (flabby-nosed and hoarse-voiced) was prime dominant; while syringus (firm-nosed, smaller than fabricator, and blessed by vocal cords which with training could produce quite lovely singing) tossed in the dominant genes for musical interest and expertise.

  It was fabricator, early in its subspecies history, which discovered a no-longer-volcanic shaft-fault and, over generations, worked its hazardous and often suicidal way downward through it (creating j en route a gnome-mythos about it) until downward became upward, and subsequent generations of fabricator (accompanied by syringus, for joy) emerged downward-upward into the vast central Hudibras hollow. It was syringus that filled Inner Hudibras with music sung sweetly in the acoustical marvelousness of this grotto world. It was fabricator which eventually established a whole industrial system in the hollow where ecology could be controlled and energy-efficiency could be maximized.

  The outer surface of Hudibras, in all her sunlit and star-spread magnificence, was reserved for the relatively small numbers of fabricator aristocracy and their sycophants.

  Valuing always its singers and instrumentalists—up to a point—the fabricator aristocracy saw to it that musical contest winners were rewarded with topside vacations in luxury along ocean shores under sun and stars. And at suggestions by syringus, fabricator kept inventing new and more complex instruments to enhance or even replace the singing of syringus.

  Noblest of such instruments was
the ultrasynthesizer—whose all-time maestro (bloodline two-thirds fabricator and one-third syringus—was Professor Doktor Frey Zauberger.

  The most loyal, timid, and put-upon servant of the master was his little wife (bloodline one-third fabricator and two-thirds syringus) Freya Zauberger.

  These two, by Dino and the golden god, were about to be cosmically had.

  5. Party on Outer Hudibras

  You should know a prior bit about the Zaubergers and Dino.

  The Good Companions, Frau Freya Zauberger used to call Croyd and Dino. She would watch them, separately and together, on ivisiradio; she would read about them in their glamorous remoteness, all the more glamorous by reason of their alien Erth-humanness.

  One newskenner video pleasurably haunted Freya’s mind—and yes, being haunted can be pleasurably thrilling without thought of evil, as when in a sleep-dream a supernal serpent swims in out of nowhere and you are fearlessly uplifted by the sight and feel of its beauty. It was a shot of the good companions together—debonnaire auburn-haired blue-eyed Chairman Croyd and debonnaire golden-haired-and-bearded mahogany-eyed First Minister Trigg—happily promenading a boulevard in a fabulous Erth-city, first coming up toward camera (which was hidden from them for verisimilitude, insisted the newsken), then (by the camera whirled) prancing on away, delightedly chatting, taking in everything, their holiday demeanor eliding the graveness of the galactic affairs which daily concerned them…

  (In another room of the Zauberger apartment, Freya’s husband Professor Frey broke off nis music— making to roar: “Freya, for the love of Saint Gebustian, turn down the volume on that idiot-box!) This entrancing duo had become a delicious obsession with Freya. She flaked every telecast of one or both of them on one or another planet in one or another star-system; she would replay the incidents—ad nauseam, Frey thought, although he admitted that it was a step up from soap opera, and once in a while, weary of prolonged solitary rehearsal, he would deign to watch a clip with her.