Megalomania

by Ian Wallace

  Aye, the smaller partners watched and listened; and this was unusual for Captain Kolly Kedrin, but quite usual for Freya. Incredible Frey, with whose brilliance Freya had originally fallen in love: handsome, dark and slender and handsome, smoothly bird-chested and handsome (for Garbans, being oviparous, had no need of women’s mammae or men’s degenerate paps); sensitive and ingoing and handsome, sexually not all that much but never weary of trying and then crowing over his own pseudo-success; deploying his long prehensile antennae with undulant grace—those same brow-antennae whose agility on the stops of the ultrasynthesizer delectably modulated the duodecimal keyboarding by his four six-fingered hands and his two bare six-longtoed feet. In sharp contrast, that Dino Trigg: grotesquely shaped like any Erth-human, antennae-shorn, lamentably handicapped by his crippling two-handedness and his shod feet; nevertheless, clever and tall and blond-charismatic and personally charming with his pleasantness toward Freya, his deference to Freya, his flattering politeness to Freya, all reinforced by the friendliness of Captain Kedrin.

  Once or twice during the evening, Kolly caught herself frowning: was Freya a rival, really? But if Freya was inadvertently threatening Kolly, Freya obviously was too timid to imagine that this was so. It seemed more appropriate for Kolly to be proud of Dino for the ego-support that he was extending to this rooster-pecked birdling.

  Anyhow, Dino’s main business was with Frey, to whom eventually he said: “I am describing a house that you of all people peculiarly merit, Professor Zauberger, in an Outerly environment that you merit. I do want to show it to you as a recommended nonretirement home, bearing in mind that your retirement will comprise many vigorous decades. It is not a house for those who want eternal rest; rather, it is a house for those whose energies are only just beginning to express themselves in full maturity.”

  Frey, with his drink casually poised, had in his easy chair assumed his loose-hanging man-of-the-world posture. When he spoke, the college-cultured accent on his Hudibrasian Anglian was barkingly intriguing (in contrast to the softly slurred accent of his wife). “Indeed it does sound attractive, Doctor Trigg, particularly with the Outer Hudibras entailment; but from the way you describe it, the house seems a bit grand. How are you supposing that a poor musician on retirement pension might manage to swing such a deal?” He coughed: “The word swing, you understand, was not referent to music.” Lifting his too-flexible nose, Frey drank, then dropped the nose; because they were being casual tonight, he had discarded his formal schnozzleshood.

  Dino’s unexpected response was to arise, drain his drink, and hurl the glass smashing against the Zauberger Fireplace (ignoring the Freya-hands that were clapped to the Freya-mouth). “It must work!” Dino ejaculated. “It will work! I will personally see to it that it does work! Herr Professor-Doktor, Frau Zauberger, regrettably the captain and I must quit this pleasant evening, I will replace your fine crystal, but—might something prevent you from accompanying me to view the house tomorrow? I would arrange dinner there, and would bring you home the same night or the next day at your election.”

  Questions were rabbiting in Kolly’s worried mind. Freya was hoping to be consulted by Frey, at least with a look; but Freya should have known better. On his feet, Frey caroled: “Marvelous! marvelous! we’d love it!”

  “Done!” sang out Dino. “No obligations, you understand—I am handling the sale as a favor to a friend; I won’t get a commission, I’ve been looking for the right people, and I never saw people any righter. Good; we’ll pick you up here in my skimmer at noon tomorrow; you may wish to have early lunch before we arrive; we’ll plan on early dinner at the house in question, whereafter we can decide about your time of return. Professor Zauberger—there is no way for me to describe the delight that has been kindled within me by this evening’s hospitality. Frau Zauberger—” here Dino turned to standing Freya, came to her, took and kissed her two upper hands, took and kissed her two lower hands, erected himself looking downward to meet Freya’s upward-gazing eyes—“the effort has been yours, the gain has been ours; we are grateful.” He turned back to Frey: “You have a remarkable wife, Professor—a remarkable wife—and because you are a remarkable man, you two deserve each other: you for your career-brilliance, she for her unselfish devotion. The best of all good evenings to both of you.”

  They stayed away from Sterbenräuber that night, Flaherty being on hand, having tubed them down to Innerly (the planetary localism for Inner Hudibras). There was a decent cabin in Flaherty for any crew-chief who might command this roboat; in this case it was for Dino, but there was a double bed. Into it, Kolly retired early; but Dino stayed up, working hard with the mind-controlled mouse of Flaherty’s computer.

  Sleepless and irritated because of Dino’s bed-desertion, Kolly at about 0200 hours emerged nude from the cabin (here in the bowels of impersonal Flaherty, with no other crew aboard), came up behind Dino, grasped his shoulders, leaned over him tickling his neck with a nipple which his downy neck counter-titillated, and queried soft: “What might we be doing?”

  “We might be drafting a novel,” he answered dry, not turning from his work, “but in fact, we are refining previously composed musical themes to be elaborated as velocity-music. Lay off for now, Kolly, this is hot stuff; I will spread it all out for you privately tomorrow night in Zauberger Manor.”

  Obediently yet rebelliously, she went back to bed and slept nightmares.

  7. Seduction

  With astounding expertise did Dino Trigg, having only two hands, maneuver the four-handed skimmer along the congested major highway of Inner Hudibras—an artificially lighted and oxygenated world-hollow which was one mighty city (having high-tech agricultural enclaves) without any horizons because, as in Pellucidar, its levelness upward-sloped in every direction. Kolly, in the front seat with Dino, felt as though she were scudding through a dream-world weird.

  Frey, in the tonneau with Freya, felt giddy with champagne-brain emotion. His appreciation of his own musical genius constituted only a semiconscious grounding for his euphoria. Far more important was this new recognition, by a highly distinguished ET named Dr. Trigg, that Frey was now a man of high galactic distinction. Despite his humble beginnings as a bastard of fabricator and syringus—even despite his silly syringus wife Freya whom he had married in haste for leisurely repenting—it was clear to Frey that his humorous, gracious, ingratiating manner had made him acceptable to everyone high and low, particularly high, in Innerly and, during vacations, even at resorts among the fabricator £lite on Outerly. And wasn’t this acceptability being culminated now in his new honoring by this same First Minister Trigg?

  Not the least of Frey’s accomplishments, in the high Outerly society of which he had become a fringe member, was his easy domination of his woman Freya. In middle-and lower-class Innerly, all kinds of male-female matrimonial adjustments operated, and none had any special universal value—a state of affairs which Frey had always regarded as depraved. But in the free air of Outerly—not so! Out there, women bowed to their men; and if occasionally, while bowing, a woman subvertly dominated (scandalous!) or intersexdivagated (tsk tsk), never did a wife have the bad taste to let the world know that anyone but her husband mastered the house. Well: in the art of male household-domination, Frey outdid the best husbands of Inner or Outer Hudibras—and never did he leave either Hudibras or Freya herself in doubt about that!

  When, during two weeks of each year, Professor Doktor Frey Zauberger of Inner Hudibras ascended into the exhilarating haut monde of Outerly, his domestic dominance (he was convinced) was always his success-secret. Entertained by the Outerly elite in the great houses, never asked to play music at parties because of vacation ground rules, he was lionized nevertheless. On Outerly under sun and stars and moons, during a precious eighteen days annually, he and his Freya dwelt in a luxurious resort-condo which had its own ten-kilometer stretch of ocean frontage—in order that (as Frey would never learn) he and the other purely or partly syringus faculty people who stayed here would be m
inimally tempted to intrude uninvited into the haunts of Outerly’s multi-generationally pure fabricator 61ite. (Freya caught on to this—and kept it to herself, knowing that if she should tell Frey about it, Frey would belabor her for being stupid enough to imagine anything unfavorable to Frey.) All right. But now this excellent Trigg person was guiding them to Outerly in the context that the Zaubergers might end up there for life in what amounted to being a small palace…

  The skimmer dipped gently into a vast vertical tube like the downgrade to Hell. Here Frey momentarily clasped the shoulders of his wife to infuse courage into her; and Freya thrilled, not because this indip was new, for they took it annually, but because the shoulder-embrace proved to her that Frey still wanted to protect her. Or was Frey merely hanging onto her to protect himself?

  They clung, as annually they did (for neither of them was a skimmer-driver) while Dino swung them into the downgravity slide which looked and felt like a tunnel from here to the antipodes. At their high velocity, the down-feeling persisted during perhaps an hour; whereafter it yielded to an up-feeling. The shift was familiar to them, but for Freya it never ceased to be out-of-this-worldly—particularly at the run’s midpoint here occurring, three thousand kilometers from their start, when, after a period during which falling seemed to have ceased and they were semi-floating, they began to rise, without any directional change. The experience was bizarre even for Kolly who understood the reasons.

  “I never could comprehend this,” Freya whispered to her husband—who answer-spat: “For the love of Hestung, how many times do I have to remind you? we’ve just passed through Critical Gravity!” Mentally, Freya punched her own little receding chin for asking him; she’d learned long ago that every question would earn her a kick in her ego; questions she shouldn’t ask, not of Frey; if she would ask him no questions at all only part of the time would she make a mistake that would get her soulclobbered. She wondered why in hell she didn’t ever clobber his soul for his rotten mistakes.

  Dino turned all the way around to them, which a driver could safely do in this tube where all cars drove themselves. He said with sympathy: “I don’t fault you for your confusion, Freya; I always feel it even though I know the answers. Maybe I can help you with a new way of looking at it. You comprehend that Hudibras is like a ball with a hollow center?”

  “Yes—” Freya knew that Frey was watching her sardonically; but with Dino’s luminous eyes upon her, for once Freya didn’t care. (Kolly was perceiving most of this.) “All right,” Dino proceeded. “Now: all the mass of the Hudibras-ball is in its shell-thickness between the outside and the central hollow. Got that, Freya?”

  “Well, yes—”

  “One more thing. Down means, toward gravity’s pull; up means, away from it. In your central hollow called Innerly, gravity is pulling you toward the outside of the world-ball, so down therein is the concave floor of the hollow. But on Outerly, everything seems magically turned inside-out! There, gravity is pulling you toward the inside of the ball; and down is the convex outer shell.”

  “It might even be,” smoothly interposed Frey, “that somebody on Outerly and somebody in Innerly are standing on the soles of each other’s feet.”

  “Brilliant aperçu, Professor!” Dino bootlicked. “Now, Freya—in this tube, down from either outer or inner surface of the planet means toward Critical Gravity, which in turn means the spheroid stratum of maximum-gravity mass. When we started downtube from Innerly, we were heading toward the Critical Gravity stratum, that is, down; but now that we have passed through the stratum we are heading away from it, or up. And when we return to Innerly, it will be just the opposite. Got it, Freya?”

  “GOT IT!” Freya yelled. “Doctor Trigg, you are absolutely GREAT!” She turned to her husband, all set to demand: “Why didn’t you explain it to me that way?” but she cut it off. Stonily, Frey stared forward uptube. Freya knew the expression: it was poison. Oh, dear. Well, let it alone: the sepsis of the moment might drain away.

  Freya was considering Dino an absolute dear! Why couldn’t Frey be like that? Before their marriage, and for a while afterward, Frey had been sweet—and then something had seemed to happen. After the first decade of patience, Freya had come to understand that Frey’s nastiness to his little wife was not transient; but the habit of acceptance had set in, Freya couldn’t fight it. And now it had been five decades…

  Recognizing Freya’s feelings, Dino was irresistibly drawn to play with them eventually, just as an incidental diversion from his main thrust. For now, though—and with primacy, even during any incidental diversion—THE GALACTIC JET-SPUME!

  Toward this end, Frey Zauberger’s mind-and-music-enslavement was centrally dynamic.

  Vacationing year after year, the Zaubergers had been repetitiously amazed by the outlandish magnificence of Outer Hudibras. No traffic congestion here: wealth had built the highways, and only wealth and select tourism used them. No manmade drab out here, either: Outerly had been mostly left alone in its natural wild, snowcapped mountains and all.

  Just here, they were running along a mountain apron out of which the highway was tastefully carved. Stretches of thick twisty-tree forest, curtaining sight of ocean which they could hear on their left (but sometimes remotely below) alternated with multikilometer squares of meadow-plateau. Sun. Skyblue. Birds (inferior to Garbans, being fliers)…Just for this while of reverent silence, Frey and Freya were close; but ironically, neither of them felt it, so rapt were they in the gigantic mysteries of outer-planetary nature.

  As to Hudibras’ outer world, lots of Innerly folk, perhaps a large majority, stayed uninterested, desiring to avoid the ravages of agoraphobia. The Zaubergers, blessed with clean absence of that, always came outside with exultation (which, in Freya’s case, was timid and even a bit guilty).

  Leaving them with it, Dino concentrated on driving and on mental weaving. He was maximizing the scenic drama of their approach. He had Croyd to ruin.

  Taking a byway, they darted left then right to run along a narrow dirt road with portside ocean in unobstructed view. Here Dino lowered three wheels out of the skimmer body and switched-off the elevator air-jets; otherwise, they would have choked on dust, losing view of the ocean and everything else.

  The Zaubergers, Roily noted, were immersed in oceanizing, particularly inhaling the most magical of all Outerly magics brought to sharp point as one gazed at water (large bodies of the stuff!) exhibiting a spherical convexity which outraged sensory habits nurtured in concave Innerly planetary surface—a convexity complete with horizoning beyond which sailing things gradually appeared upward or disappeared downward.

  Entering a village whose unexpectedly dingy buildings (among Outerly folk, dinginess could sometimes be in) cut off their ocean view, they pulled up in front of a particularly drab two-story weathered-timber structure. “Out all passengers!” Driver Dino sang; and, having assisted Freya out of the car, he led her into the building, with bemused Frey and Kolly at their heels.

  They ascended a long steep flight of straightforward wooden stairs: no landings, just step above step. At stairtop, Dino turned right, ushered them a short distance down a narrow corridor, swung left, and conducted them through an undistinguished door. Beyond the door, a down-stair confronted them; Dino descended, his passengers descended; at stairfoot, they passed through still another door and unaccountably emerged upon a semi-high place: no floors, no walls, no roof: entirely outdoors, but with nothing special to be seen left or right or forward. Dino uttered: “Be alert, now—we are on the threshold!” and he drew them forward, with confused Freya on his arm and Frey abreast of them on the other side of Freya while Kolly eagerly followed, until the side-walling foliation of this trail fell theatrically away and Dino, pointing left, cried: “LOOK!”

  Look indeed! They were gazing from a true high place across an ocean bay, and the far bayside was was picture-filled by what Frey saw/felt as pale blue sky-cydorama centered on an imperfectly suggested white unCrested Crest-cross whose elongate l
ower stem downfingered without touching it a spreading low varicolor-tourmaline mansion broad-reclining on sharp shards of icy-white alabaster floating eternally fixed in liquid turquoise Frey whispered: “You conceive that this is—for met”

  Replied Trigg: “Conceivably.”

  Freya expostulated: “It can’t be! it just can’t—” Swinging on her, Frey bellowed: “What in Untergaara does can’t mean?”

  “What indeed?” cooed Dino (but the distant palace was only an instrumental aspect of his reference). “Let’s get back to the skimmer and go there.”

  Their skimmer (whose wheels had vanished at a new incursion of pavement) halted, when shadows were long, beside a noble gateway of wrought marodion; beyond the wall, a hint of the majestic manse extruded itself into visibility out of an arborescent-foliaceous copse. Deploying a remote-control device, Dino swung inward-open the gates. The invaders penetrated the private forest, their elevation gently rising all the time, until they; stopped near a singularly undistinguished masonry stair; here Dino cut the engine, and the skimmer soughed to the ground. “All out here!” he lilted, dismounting and going back to help delicate little Freya down. “I could have brought you in by the grand entrance, but this private postern has charms of its own. Forgive me if I precede you, for guidance and for safety.”