Megalomania

by Ian Wallace

  He led them up the time-rotted-and-patina’d stairway, here where twilight was shadowed into dusk; the stair was dank and precarious, the steps and the walls were mossy-slippery stones which often wobbled, and there was no handrail. “In fact,” he commented, “there is a Fine stressed-calumnion handrail, so valuable that I have hidden it; but if you buy, I will restore it.” Eager Frey was mounting just behind him, having thrust Freya back so that she had to balance herself, with Kolly below-rear ready to catch Freya if necessary.

  Reaching stairtop, they debouched upon a house-encircling veranda whose floor was slabbed blue slate and whose waist-wall seemed nondescript in twilight. Following the course of this terrace, they circled manse-end until, rounding a sharp curve, they found themselves at manse-front “GREISSHEIST!” swore Frey, stopping dead; and the two women, coming up to him, filled their lungs audibly. All the ocean lay below and beyond, with the westering sun sinking into her to create a watery gold fingerblaze crossing ocean and laying a dull-radiant fingertip on the manse-front. The opulent low light illuminated this facade, gilding the varicolor tourmaline which constituted the veranda’s outer walling. Frey stepped quickly to the waist-high wall to peer downward at the sharp shards of alabaster on which the manse was founded, seeming to float on the ocean which then had been turquoise but now (except along the ruddy sun-track) was indigo…

  Dino insisted that Frey play host at an opulent dinner in the dining hall whose vaulting was lofty and whose appointments were delicately luxurious. Frey sat proudly at the head, and Freya confusedly at the foot, of a table four meters long and indefinitely extensible; precisely two meters from either end, Dino and Kolly faced each other across the table’s two-meter width. There were a waiter named Neunbals and a busboy named Tenpinz whose countenances and motions were unusual and whose arms were suitably long.

  When all was downed, Dino personally served a brandy whose bouquet wafted them heavenward; and he suggested that they enjoy their liqueurs in the music room which, until now, the Zaubergers had not seen. He caused Frey, with Freya on his arms, to precede him and Kolly thither. They passed through a low doorway…

  “HAUGENLAUGEN!” roared Frey, mule-halting; and once again frightened Freya sucked in breath. This parquet-floored music room, whose area was perhaps three hundred square meters, was in all respects the ultimate in high baroque, almost grotesque in its wall-and-door inlaying of gold and ivory. Every piece of furniture was an obviously authentic example of that centuries-ago period when the nobles of Outer Hudibras had celebrated grace, gallantry, villainy, and the muses while the middle classes were burrowing into Innerly. High above, the ceiling carried the baroque i motif to Faustian infinitude in a many-plied complex of submarine curvatures and trompes l’oeil at whose deep centrality an irregular semidome of profound blue suggested no ceiling at all but only i space. (Kolly yearned toward that ceiling.) “BLAUFLAULAU!” howled Frey. “Freya, look!” Gripping both his wife’s right arms, he was two-arm pointing obliquely upward with his pointy arms-and-fingers quivering stiff like those of an excited child. At the room’s focus of highest interest, perhaps four meters above the floor hung a marble-railed balcony whose rail and whose twin approaching stairways curved to harmonize with the prevailing space-curvature; and rising above the rail was but Frey, having forgotten Freya, was already up one of the twin curved stairways; and while fearful Freya upward watched, Frey settled himself onto the bench (with his back to the watchers below) and slammed thirty-six long fingers and toes onto the twelve keyboards of the mightiest ultrasynthesizer that any world had ever known. The resulting diapason ricocheted intricately in the convolutions of ceiling and walls and even furniture; catching this, Frey cut it off and listened to the residual echo—short-hit it again, cut it, listened—leaned on it prolongedly, now requiring his ears to listen more to the echoing than to the direct sound—galvanized his antennae into a dancing among stops while holding one complex dissonant chord and listening for the echo-variations—positioned a system of stops with his antennae and held them constant while first varying the chordation and then running into a rambling staccato fugue, attending to the echoes…

  Cut!

  .…Swung himself off the bench, lurched to the balcony rail, gripped it, peered breathless down not at Freya or Kolly but at Dino whose arm Freya was now clutching with four hands, felt his own lack of breath and began breathing deeply until he was able to talk, barked down at Dino: “HOW MUCH?”

  Blandly Dino counter-queried: “How much whatr “How much money, for the love of Heldenlieger! What the devil is your asking price for this joint?”

  “What the devil, you say?” Dino frowned at the infernal implication; then Dino remembered his tactical program and named a price beyond prices.

  Downstaring, Frey digested it, paled, began to lean dizzily too far over the rail; Freya’s muldclutch hurt Dino’s biceps; Kolly yelped, “Professor, get hold of yourself!” Grasping the rail just in time, Frey rescued himself, studied himself, uttered white-weak: “But Doctor Trigg—that is a hundred times my annual retirement income including all royalties and interest—but I have got to have this palace!”

  He uptold him: “There is a condition under which it might be done.”

  Ghastly Zauberger down-groaned: “Name it!”

  “Tell me, Professor: could you swing a lifetime annual payment of—” After delay for suspense, Dino named a revised figure that was all but microscopic.

  Frey snarled: “Don’t play games with me!”

  “Can you swing it?”

  “Of course I can! Any pauper could! It’s too easy. Trigg! What’s the catch?”

  “Would you be willing to spend a litde daily time playing and recording music of my own composing? I mean, my music is only linear themes—” Kolly murmured: “Jeoud!” Dino continued: “We would have to work together on developing the variations and orchestrations, but—would you?” Having assimilated that, Frey sat heavily down on the bench. In a strangulated voice: “What if I find that I simply hate your music?”

  “I understand hate, Professor—oho, do I understand it! But perhaps you won’t hate it. And in any case, two or three hours daily during at most a month should do it. After that—no obligation except the nominal annual mortgage payment, so highly do I value my themes and your elaborative executions.”

  “You are saying that for the silly little annual Figure which you named, and for maybe a hundred hours of playing your music on this divine instrument, I can be lord of this manor during all the remaining years of my life?”

  “For that price, my friend, and just this small bit more. I will need to approve your development of my themes, so you must permit me to be here whenever I choose, and you must not interfere with anything I do here. But I promise to maintain my own apartment in a secluded part of this house, and you will be unaware of me except during my music times with you.”

  Frey, standing now and leaning forward on the rail, down-husked: “Only that, and it’s all mine—ultrasynthesizer and all?”

  “Only that, and it’s all yours,” Dino upward-assured him. Dino’s arm was now around Freya’s waist; neither stricken Freya nor transfigured Frey appeared to be noticing.

  Frey Barrymore-surrendered: “Done! What must I sign in my blood?”

  “Done indeed!” sang out Dino, and he could feel Freya shuddering. “No signing, Frey; no blood. All our conversation has been flaked, Captain Kedrin here will add her vocal witness to the flake, I will give you a copy, and all that is legal enough on Outerly. Stay there: let me bring you a few samples of my theming, now that the agreement is already sound-sealed; and I do feel that you won’t find the samples disagreeable to work with.

  8. Repose at Zaubergerschloss

  The samples of Dino’s musical theming captivated Frey by stimulating high-intensive concentration-pressure. Most of these experimental themes were linear-simple yet extremely rapid, entailing labyrinthine series of cadenza-variations using only the seventeen-note scale spanning s
everal octaves. But every so often came a surprise: a veritable loop-the-loop in the music, which would encourage Frey’s elaboration to skitter over multiple keyboards before settling back for a while into the linearity. Every note was staccato-distinct from all others: no ligatures, no slurs—although an untrained ear might seem to hear slurring because of velocity, just as a strip of distinct cinema frames generates an illusion of continuous movement. Delicious embroidery-potential! Why, performing such unusual studies would be fun! Frey was cheating Trigg! What a miraculous retirement!

  At Dino’s urging, Frey decided to forget In-nerly on the spot, remaining here tonight and permanently. (The day would soon come when Frey would be desperately of two minds about this decision.) Dino promised to move everything in the Zauberger apartment out here; that same night, he brought off this transfer by teleportation.

  In bed, Freya touched a Frey-shoulder and timidly whispered: “Honey, do we really own this magnificence? are you sure he hasn’t somehow trapped us?”

  Frey growled: “I keep telling you that Trigg and I have it all figured out. Why don’t you trust me for a change, you dumb doxy? Go to sleep.” Long-and-often-lacerated Freya shrugged and turned away from her trenchant mate. Drowsily she reflected that after all she was as inferior as he kept saying she was; faith in him was the best way, probably. But until she went unconscious, fear about the life-change persisted; and in sleep, she tiptoed with foreboding before a certain door behind which must surely lurk a horror.

  Turning away from his wife, Frey for a little while fell into the futility of wishing that he had tried to reassure her rather than swatting her. But soon Frey was able to terminate that silliness by reminding himself that he had to stay on top if their marriage was to keep succeeding. During decades with Freya, hadn’t Frey established that this was the best formula in this man’s world wherein wives kept deploying their feminine-emotional wiles to insinuate themselves into marriage-mastery? With that issue mentally settled for now, Frey drifted off into dreaming suffused with the golden joy of personal and social grandeur among the noble peers of Outerly.

  “Dino—”

  “Kolly?”

  “Are you going to sleep, there?”

  “No.”

  “Will you be kissing me soon?”

  “No. Not tonight. I have to think tonight.”

  “What about?”

  “Progress. Go to sleep.”

  “Don’t you want my comments?”

  “Not tonight. Tomorrow, maybe. Go to sleep.”

  “But—”

  “Go!”

  He was doing what he had taught and disciplined himself to do: lying in a species of relaxation which was the resting-equivalent of sleep but was not sleep, review-integrating projects with progress—on The Project, in this instance.

  Inwardly he preened himself on his exquisite organization of psychic and cosmic factors: it counted as creativity, really it did, even though his creativity was meant to destroy. Already he had charisma-enslaved Kolly, thereby acquiring himself the Sterbenräuber as a handsome and spatiotemporally multipotent vehicle, and had bribe/charisma-enslaved Frey Zauberger, thereby acquiring himself the perfect cosmic stimulus-injector. The ensuing steps were radiant with audacity, clarity, and promise.

  How glowingly had his horizons expanded since he had encountered that supra-Dino who called himself Darkside!

  Kolly was purring a ladylike snore, agreeably and soporifically soft. Perhaps he would take her with him tomorrow, on the spatiotemporal scouting aimed at verifying that the theories on which his anti-Croyd plot was based did indeed apply, here among the Magellanic Clouds: his well-grounded and partially established theories related to galactic mantles, galactic fountains and jet-spumes, and the time-trace dynamics which that excellent Darkside had accepted under the acronym NORAP for Nodes of Rejected Alternate Possibilities.

  He envisioned a helpless Croyd trembling with anger and frustration. Good father Croyd, he mind-murmured, eat your heart out: your galaxy is doomed, and you will witness its demise.

  Did he mind-hear an exultant tenor Yea verily?

  “Darkside,” he whispered, not to awaken Kolly, “1 smell doubt in your mind-voice, and I advise you to quench every doubt, lest you end by feeling foolish. Up and out will go the Zauberger music, cosmically out, along all-but-instantaneous iradio gradients which I will have preestablished. So easily, so very easily, am I initiating the prelude to Gotterdammerung!”

  9. Meanwhile, Elsewhen

  Croyd, temporarily released now from routine galactic duty, was pursuing special emergency galactic duty—seeking Dino Trigg, who had abandoned Nereid and his galaxy in a mood of vengeful frenzy and was mentally, emotionally, and psycho-physi-cally capable of anything at all, good or evil. With heart-hurt, Croyd was expecting evil; and it had to be headed off, or the galaxy would suffer, perhaps fatally.

  Only, how would one go about finding Dino? The chances of him being at any specific point in germinal space could be expressed as one in pi r3; in view of the time that had elapsed since his departure with Sterbenräuber, and in view of the ship’s known maximum acceleration, r could be set at a maximum of 8 x 10’ light-years—which amounted to a spatial volume of 25 million cubic light-years. In such an astronomical volume, the chances of randomly locating Dino, a mere spatial point, were practically infinite. But it was worse than that: because Dino was able and crafty enough to do his maneuvering in uptime (the specious past), it was necessary to factor-in all time; and now the chances against finding him were infinite.

  It followed that Dino Trigg, who had departed in a mood of malevolence, must be quietly fertilizing-and-hatching his plans in a locale that was unfindable by randomly chosen search-methods. But he must be found! Could reason help?

  Croyd thought it might, within limits. There was, however, an obvious need to start with a raw hound-dog tracking.

  Every event in any present time develops out of an event that preceded it, and that prior event out of a prior event, and so on. As a series of events futurizes, each new event thrusts its line of ancestral events into uptime; and such event-lines, or traces, are indestructible. If Croyd therefore should invade uptime—“go into the past”—by just a few days, to the moment when despairing Dino had pushed off into space in a suicide try, Croyd could follow Dino’s time-track, accelerating Croyd’s tracking faster than the speed of the original Dinotrack formation, until Croyd would catch up with Dino now, wherever and whenever Dino now might be.

  Dino, nearly a week ago, was poised on a Nereid docking platform for his suicide leap into Neptune-space. This time, Croyd stood immediately behind him. It was Dino’s past observed in Croyd’s present; Croyd was sentient, but the rigidifying traces of Trigg were no longer so.

  As Dino flexed for the death-leap, Croyd mounted him and clung to his back: the Old Man of the Sea with Sinbad; thus Croyd hurtled into space with Dino. Croyd was fully experiencing all the current experiences of the disaster-depressed Trigg-mind; while the Dino Trigg whose back Croyd embraced was experiencing nothing any longer, being a mindless organization of bygone time-tracks.

  So mounted, Croyd was able to see what Dino had seen and feel what Dino had felt, precisely as Dino had seen and felt. He mind-heard himself mind-calling to Dino, and bitterly he felt the angry rejection by Dino. And then, in time’s fullness, in the beginning terminal enfeeblement of Dino’s asphyxiation…

  Croyd, in Dino’s brain-traces, heard and saw Darkside.

  Although, as Croyd had indicated to Tannen, Croyd knew that Dino had an alter ego with whom Dino held imaginary conversations to assist his own thinking process, this was Croyd’s first sight of projected Darkside. Certainly Dino’s double did closely resemble Dino himself—and certainly, seen and heard via the Trigg sensorium, Darkside appeared absolutely real! Just for an instant, Croyd detached himself from the Trigg-brain long enough to look directly at Darkside: the image had vanished; but still through Dino’s brain the phenomenon was real and vital… />
  Darkside and Dino unexpectedly vanished, leaving Croyd floating alone in uptime Neptune-space—and leaving no trace of themselves.

  Vexed at the escape, Croyd comprehended what must have happened. He had taught Dino about nontime-, and in this last-ditch oxygen-emergency, Dino-Brightside-and-Darkside had remembered and had gone there. And just as running water, entered by a fugitive animal, foils pursuers by obliterating the spoor of the hunted one, so nontime, in which uptime traces do not form, had cut off Dino’s track.

  Croyd might have entered nontime to pursue Dino—but to what end? since nontime, or nonspacetime, is an infinitely extended noncontinuum of unformed potentials: in nontime, Dino could be instantly anywherewhen. Which put Croyd right back to the point of his initial frustration.

  Where now to turn?

  Wait, now. Sterbenräuber… .

  Oho! there was another tracking approach!

  CAPER THREE

  GALAXIES

  IN DEEP

  SPACETIME

  10. Two Billion Years Ago—NOW!

  After an elegant breakfast outdoors on the ocean-side terrace (for Frey and Freya simply could not get enough of Outerly’s fresh air and fantastic horizon), Dino stuffed the Zaubergers with instructions about their new castle; Neunbals, who was present, would relay all that was needful to Tenpinz whose structure was simpler but more muscular. Kolly was confused when Dino announced that he would leave the skimmer at Frey’s disposal (Neunbals could drive, too); but Dino gave Kolly reassurance that Flaherty could “pluck us from our castle eyrie.” In the event, Dino took Kolly out onto the high balcony of their tower apartment and simply teleported both of them into Flaherty’s interior.