Megalomania

by Ian Wallace

  His exuberance wasn’t blunting the point of his analytical exploration.

  “Croyd,” he remarked to Kolly through his throat-mike, “adores the sensation of swimming naked-free in space; and so would you, if it were possible for you.” It was a satirical observation, a put-down both for Croyd and for Kolly. In the Trigg-mind, space-nakedness meant liberation from restraints to his practical progress; in the Darkside-motif, it was the only ecstatic way to go; and Darkside-haunted Dino could come to terms with it only with sarcasm which allowed him to be space-naked without seeming naive. (Croyd needed no such tortuous self-justification, but Dino didn’t appreciate this.) Practical progress? toward galactic destruction? progress? Well; but isn’t progress double-edged like a knightly sword and two-faced like Janus, so that it can proceed in any direction, toward good or evil or any interblend thereof?

  Kolly, suited, minnow-swam in uptime infragas. That which Dino was exploring (using visual hypermagnification aided by brain-supplied transcolor) was a frozen kelp-forest of the ultrafine-ultramassive uptime-traces of gaseous events in past germinality, the eternally changeless debris of past presents.

  There existed, however, a certain operation which could supplement the unchangeable forest with new germinality. Dino Trigg had developed the operational theory: it was what he and Darkside had called NORAP—Nodes of Rejected Alternate Possibilities. Dino had never applied the theory, but he had mathematized it and pseudo-tested it with computer simulations; and the ferocity of his thrusting for revenge on Croyd drove him recklessly now to depend on his theory and plunge into the main chance. And Croyd, in his knowledge of Dino’s capabilities, would not have hesitated to bet on him—provided that Dino would have the will to go all the way with it.

  Dino swam naked looking for NORAPs, and his brain-enhanced vision would detect their radiation if any were there. So aroused was he in this quest, that he kept running low on buttock-stored oxygen and having to refuel on Kolly’s life-support pack (but there was plenty for both). Once, during a rest-pause, he briefed Kolly who, hypo-euphoric with the beginnings of deep-rapture, kept seeing an aureola around and above Dino’s head: “The trace-filaments of uptime,” he reminded her, “are the serial fossils of microparticular moments piling one atop another like coral in a building reef. Generally, the traces are immutable and unmovable—with a subtle type of exception related to if-nodes.”

  “And if-nodes are—?”

  “A NORAP or if-node occurs at each particle-instant when an individual particle might have moved in any one of several ways, but actually did move in just one of those ways, leaving one or more unexplored possibilities. Even at the level of complex and more-or-less intelligent creatures, whose uptime-traces are bundles of filaments like the multiple neurone-fibers in a spinal cord, compounded if-nodes occur in a bundle whenever the creature has chosen to do one thing when instead it might have done some other thing.”

  Well, then: Dino was seeking if-nodes in the infragas corona and in the central jet of the original, amalgamated Magellanic Cloud.

  And he kept finding them!

  And he knew that, given certain types of influencing forces, an if-node could be made to germinate into reality an alternate developmental possibility. This new-reified course of action could then be developmentally accelerated to compete with what was already in place.

  Entranced Kolly queried: “What types of influencing forces?”

  “Well, Kolly, just for instance: a hyper-intensive radiation bombardment, when the cyclical variations of the radiation are controlled by certain planned patterns of ultra-high-velocity stimuli—such as music.”

  Kolly didn’t get it, but her own elation was too high for studying it out or asking questions. Much later, she would get thinking about it—and only then would dismay set in.

  Herenow, though, Dino was inwardly snarling: “Croyd, whether your galactic civilization lives or dies depends right now on my success or failure with the music of Frey Zauberger!”

  “Are you there, Minister, Captain?”

  “Trigg answering. We are here, Flaherty. Were you worried about us?”

  “What is worry?”

  “It is a condition of doubt coupled with an unfavorable feeling.”

  “I was worried. Will you return into me?”

  “The captain and I are returning into you immediately. Then all of us will return into Sterbenräuber, and 1 will set things up for the operation I have in mind—an operation toward whose success you are central.”

  “1 am flattered, sir, ma’am, by your confidence. Bill Bailey, won’t you please come home?”

  “Now where did you ever pick up that?”

  “I heard you singing it on the way down—or up, I think you said it really is.”

  “It really is neither, Flaherty. Temporal indexicals are not spatial directions.”

  “Sir, I know that!”

  11. “Certain Planned patterns of Ultra-High-Velocity Stimuli”

  In the Zauberger castle on Outer Hudibras, with steadily mounting euphoria, Dino kept feeding new musical themes to Frey. Above him beyond vision, the Sterbenräuber droned about in orbit, in process of being internally fitted with some sophisticated audio-amplification wiring, under the direction of Captain Kedrin whose irritation at Dino’s protracted absences was impelling her toward an emotional brink.

  Frey kept driving into the music, not two but twelve hours daily, taking rest-breaks only at the insistence of his music-master (who wanted to keep Frey fresh and psychophysically vigorous) or sometimes at the piteous importunings of Freya (who was soul-crawlingly afraid of the situation’s demonism).

  During such breaks, Dino would conduct Frey and Freya to a white-enameled wrought-durundium table on the veranda with the sea overlook; he would sit there with them while diminutive android Neunbals brought drinks and snacks. During such breaks, Frey kept hammering at Dino: “My God, man, I am running out of your themes!” (Dino continued learning that humanoids or hominids had, in their several tongues, God-or god-or totem-oaths on every planet where they had arrived or evolved.) For a while, he was ready with new themes, having run off a lot of this quasi-genetic music (corresponding to sequences of amino acids in genes) aboard the Sterbenräuber. These themes he stored in his brain to regurgitate for Frey at will; but so swiftly did Frey convert Dino’s barebone themes into richly ornate compositions, that the master had to hit the ship’s computer again. Despite interruptive shipboard interludes with Kolly, who was beginning to bore him but whose servitude must be serviced, his growing urgency was keeping him sufficiently ahead of Frey.

  Dino’s days and evenings were not entirely worktimes. Frey knew how to relax over meals, and he taught his new music-mentor discreet relaxation-secrets (which had nothing to do with sex). Even his little wife Freya was losing some of her inferiority-tension and playing up to her two companions; she hoped that eventually she could once more be demonstrating, to Frey and to herself, her usefulness by doing the cooking and housework. But after most of a lifetime at that, Freya was for the moment content to be relieved by that excellent Neunbals—particularly since leisure brought ught her into more and more familiar contact with this admirable Minister Dino Trigg on whom Freya was developing something that resembled a crush.

  During one or two days and nights per week, Dino was back aboard Sterbenräuber, to the delight and relief of Kolly whether she was working with him or abed with him. He had much to inspect, and the Kolly-body was the least of it. In the grinning breadth of the yacht, there was space for a high-energized rekamatic impulse to become hyper-energized by being pingponged back-and-forth from wingtip to wingtip; but a circular cycling for many-times-multiplied angular momentum would be far more effective. This they were achieving by a deployment of six roboats (petty-officered by Flaherty) in front of the yacht and behind it, making with the wingtips an eight-point pseudocircle; from a viewpoint of charge-acceleration, a true circle was achieved by putting a bit of english on each point-discharge. A cyclot
ronometer aboard this experimental yacht established the effectiveness of the technique: it raised a particle’s kinetic energy by r3 per cycle, and there seemed to be no end and indeed no taper-off to the increments.

  There was, of course, no truly equivalent substitute test for the real McCoy: bombarding primitive galactic if-nodes two billion years old. And Dino didn’t want to do test-partials on the archaically consolidated Magellanic Cloud, for fear of throwing something out of balance. Luckily, analogous approaches were conceivable. Far out on the periphery of the Greater Cloud, and two billion years deep in backtime, he found the start of a star which, millions of years later, had been gravitationally overwhelmed by a neighboring and slightly older star; so remote were these stars from his centers of intended action, that he felt he could safely play around with them. Downtiming Sterbenräuber (which Flaherty had well coached), with its roboat-satellites, to the spacetime locus of the later-unfortunate star, he surrounded it equatorially with his one-ship six-roboat task force, thrust the cyclotron into action, and (when the meter showed an adequate energy level) sprayed the star’s if-nodes with the yacht’s energy cannon. When he then downtimed a billion years, he found the sprayed star still alive and growing, while of the cannibal star there lingered no trace.

  If, on a summer’s day at the seashore, you have ever spent most of your swimming time under water, delighted and aroused by submarine scenes on the bottom and around and above you, then you can taste the subjectivity of Dino’s repetitious uptiming. Even though Flaherty had, with entire fidelity and felicity, internalized his (its?) spacetime coordinates and had correctly coached his (his!) brood, Dino Trigg trusted the accuracy of none of it. In his naked body The Master kept uptiming profoundly in order to spot check the positionings of the roboats and the adjustments of their new rekamatic fittings for receiving and transmitting and focusing Zauberger-music.

  Compulsively Dino kept time-diving: to review the primitive Cloud-jet, to recheck the primitive Cloud-mantle, to be certain that both were there unchanged and ready for his if-node tampering. Toward the end of each heavenly break, he would fidget with unease: all the dispositions were perfect, the yacht and all the roboats were ready, Flaherty was the perfect petty officer—but what about the Hudibras connection? Grudgingly he would spend some sack-time with Kolly, because her illicit command of the Sterbenräuber made her his virtually indispensable instrument and required that she be kept in thrall. But early in the morning, he would be aboard Flaherty en route to the Zauberger castle, there to pass days and nights inspiring and critically auditioning Frey’s musical output.

  Between such frenetic yet studiously meticulous operations, Dino relaxed with the Zaubergers. And often, when Frey would go back to his ultrasynthesizer for another bout of swift-intricate genius, Dino would lead Freya away for one or another excursion out into the marvelous aromas and sights and sounds of this magical Outer Hudibrasian world.

  Frey and Dino flake-recorded this music whenever a segment of it had attained a degree of perfection which almost satisfied both of them (for neither was capable of being totally satisfied about anything). In his off moments, Dino kept rerunning the stereoflaked progression of themes and variations; and if he was doing this for selfreassurance, it was working, because the Zauberger realizations of his intertwined gene-pattern scorings were Berlioz-fantastic-bombastic. He could not pretest the effectiveness of this music on a cosmic scale, somewhat as one cannot test the effects of a new missile-weapon on an enemy city for want of a war; but in terms of theory, content analysis, and his indirect uptime-testing of the interfaced cyclotron-cannon, the music was absolutely certain to work.

  In the course of Dino’s wanderings with Little Wife Freya, who so tenderly and curiously reminded him of his mother, it was inevitable that the Freya/Dino conversations should grow intimate. A time came when Freya, weary of being a soul-battered wife, having found finally a friend whom she could trust (and for whom, if Freya would admit it to herself, Freya was feeling the least little bit of desire), opened her heart to Dino about the tribulations of marriage with Frey. She summated: “Oh, Minister, I keep feeling so damn inferior!”

  That was when Dino slipped his arm around Freya’s waist for her comforting, here in the twilit woods where they wandered; and then they paused in their stroll, for Freya was pressing her head against Dino’s upper arm (being too short to head-reach his shoulder) and was weeping bitterly. Dino held her, avuncularly of course; but in the solar plexus of Dino there stirred the piquant quivering that signified, not mere desire, but desire for conquest of what is morally off limits.

  While he and Freya eased themselves back to the Zauberger castle, the Master’s mind and heart and gonads were deliciously aswirl with a delectable side-project. Something like this was what he needed for his unwinding, after his prolonged fury-driving and immediately after he would have pulled the trigger of triumphant destruction.

  Over dinner—where the three sat at two sides of the banquet-table center, with Dino facing the Zaubergers—Frey, dinner-dressed in an astonishingly feminine off-one-shoulder blouse (but with pants) which semi-revealed the breastless midridge of his avian chest, aroused the Master’s enthusiasm by presenting to him, across table, a little pewteroid casket which was a flake-system depository. “Herein repose,” Frey announced with god-pride, “our most recent collaborative compositions, all magnificent, my dear Dino, and all now recorded to my—well, perhaps not to my absolute satisfaction, since nothing 1 ever do attains perfectly to that standard, but at least, recorded so well that any small improvements I might make would inevitably be canceled by blurrings at some other points.”

  Dino accepted the casket with real emotion. He told Frey—contriving to include Freya in the communication and to huskify his voice a trifle—“My gratitude is greater than I can express. Dear Frey, you have discharged the major condition of our contract, leaving only the insignificant annual payments to make this castle yours in fee simple.” The payments were silly, except that without them, Zauberger would have been motive-suspicious; just now, Frey was merely grateful.

  Nevertheless, Frey drove it to the wall: “Ultrasynthesizer and all?”

  Magniloquently he assured him: “Ultrasynthesizer and all, indeed!”

  Freya injected: “But you didn’t tell us how much fee simple we will also have to pay.”

  Frey scorned down upon her: “Fee simple means simple property, nitwit!” Beaming, he turned to Dino: “I am happier than you can possibly know. My only regret is, that there will be no more of your incomparable themes.” He hesitated: “Or—might there be more?”

  Having gazed ardently at doting Freya, Dino leaned toward Frey, engaging the musician’s eyes. “Possibly so, depending on inspiration. Tell me, Frey Zauberger—you who must surely be wearied by your prolonged bout of high-pressure creativity—might you be tempted by a vacation offer?”

  Frey narrowed his eyes. “A vacation? From all my new castle-splendor?”

  Dino kept darting direct enticement-glances at Freya. “I mean, a vacation in deep space. We can travel in luxury whither you wish, from galaxy to galaxy should you desire that, aboard my yacht Sterbenräuber.”

  “That is the name of your yacht? How robustly romantic!”

  “Is it not! And the high point of our vacationing will be, that you will be on hand when I broadcast your sublime conceptions into space—and with your own eyes, you will see their effect on the stars.”

  “Oh, heady, heady!”

  “Freya must come along, of course.”

  Frey turned to Freya whom in fact he loved in Frey’s peculiar way. On a shy nod from his wife, Frey turned upon Dino a gaze of resplendent radiance.

  *

  Aboard drone-orbiting Sterbenräuber, Kolly murderously paced the Operations Bridge. It was absolutely beyond doubt, now: Dino was using her, he had always been using her, he had lightly destroyed her career in order to use her, she had lightly destroyed her own career in order to be used by him; and now he wa
s using Zauberger and without question was positioning himself to use that sweet little Freya, and the message from Dino that Flaherty had just relayed to Kolly made it clear that Dino was about to use Kolly to help him use Frey and Freya right here aboard ship .…

  “Captain.”

  Kolly froze in her tracks. That baritone voice…“I spoke to you, Captain Kedrin.”

  Kolly swung to the squawk-box: that was the source, all right, but the voice…Getting control of herself, Kolly responded cold: “Skipper here. Who is calling?”

  “Kolly, I think you know.”

  Good God, was Kolly had already? Taut she said: “I require that you identify yourself.”

  “That is prudent, Kolly; I could be a fake, you know. But I’m not. I am—”

  “You are?”

  “The voice of the ship’s computer.”

  It was unnerving. “That is unlikely,” Kolly managed; “the computer’s voder is mezzo.”

  “That vocal timbre is internally adjustable. We’ll quit the stretch-out, Kolly; you know quite well that I am Chairman Croyd.”

  The worst!

  Kolly’s legs weakened, and she sank into the President’s chair. She deep-breathed three times. She enunciated: “Of course, Mister Chairman, I’ll vacate your seat when you need it—”

  The voder chuckled, and the chuckle destroyed Kolly. “Forgive me,” said the voder almost sympathetically, “but the situation is faintly comical if you can look at it objectively. May I brief it for you, dear Kolly? Has anything like this ever happened before, do you think? You fell for a combination of charisma and hot sex. Believing that it was romantic love, you stole my ship and placed it at Trigg’s disposition. And now, two things are catching up with you at the same instant: realization, and me.”