Megalomania

by Ian Wallace

  Cosmic silence.

  Quietly said Dino, having licked lips: “I do not want Sol Galaxy destroyed.”

  You don’t? Why? Because you love its people?

  “Come off it, Darkside: I have never loved people.”

  Because you love Croyd, then?

  “Ha!” But Dino found the question disconcerting.

  Because you love to be powerful—and to be admired?

  “Well—”

  Power you have demonstrated: power at a godly level, power challenging anything ever attributed to Yah of the Sinites. You have merged a trio of galaxies into one, you have raised up a galactic jet-spume, you have accelerated two billion years of galactic evolution into the space of hours, you are about to destroy all society and therefore virtually all human life in still a fourth galaxy. As for admiration, I admire your achievements, even though l have escaped from your now-boring person.

  After heavy silence: “Four difficulties, Darkside. One: the achievements of that sort of power invariably turn out to be self-terminating. Two: your admiration I can do without, and I won’t be finding any other admirers. Three: as for destroying in order to created, I haven’t been able to think up any galactic social system that 1 might create which would improve on Croyd’s destroyed one in terms of actualities and envisioned potentials. Finally, as to this marvelous new jet that 1 have created, my achievement lacks one desideratum: reversibility. I cannot destroy it.”

  Do you want to destroy it?

  Dino coughed; whereafter he emended: “I meant to say that I could not destroy it even if 1 wanted to.”

  Are you sure you could not?

  “Well, of course, if you should care to help me—

  NO, STOP! DONT HELP ME EVER AGAIN! I have it, Darkside: this is purely hypothetical, you understand, because I wouldn’t think of activating the whimsy; but recall that I generated the jet with flakes of Zauberger music, and I could—”

  Play the flakes in reverse?

  Subdued: “I destroyed the flakes.”

  But surely the magnificent Dino Trigg could himself play all the cadenzas backward from memory?

  Dino raised his chin. “No, I could not. But what does it matter, as long as this is purely hypothetical?” It matters because it establishes how purely you are specialized as a destroyer par excellence. Your miserable creativities, even, have been instrumental to destructive purposes. Now it appears that you have moved on over the brink: you cannot destroy your own creation because you destroyed the means of destruction. Having been taunted with that unpleasant irony, will you now follow your frequent bent by lapsing into psychotic depression? Be warned that I will not again boost you out of it!

  Darkside hung there, coppery now and dull-incandescent, in front of nonspace-hanging Dino—who did indeed feel depression beginning to creep into him. Darkside, his doppelganger, wore a crooked smile, and his arms were folded signifying decision.

  Resolutely Dino thrust away depression; up came his chin, and he stood at graceful ease in his floating, with his left arm and leg slightly advanced and his hair irrationally blown by nonwind. “I have never felt depression,” he asserted, “except when you have been in me.”

  Come now: after you were defeated by Croyd and space-hung in a decaying Neptune-orbit, was it not I who pulled you out of a death-depression?

  Dino, resolute: “I would never have defied Croyd unless you had been in me exciting me into it. I now think that my depression after my defeat was your depression after your defeat. I think that you are a mood-god who falls into his own depressions and rebounds out of them into irrational highs and imbues his host with his own moods of extremism. And as to the question of my ability to destroy my own jet, it is you who must taunt yourself; because 1 have only to find Herr Frey Zauberger, who is likely in fact to be Frau Zauberger now 1 think about it, and 1 can require him, or her, to play all her music backward from her unbelievable musical memory. You doubt that she can? I have endless confidence in her, I know that she can.”

  Darkside challenged: Prove it.

  “You will have to take it on faith; because, as I keep reiterating, this is all hypothetical, and I do not really want to do it.”

  In that event, my former friend, I can only express my heartfelt sympathy, because it does appear that the destruction of your destructivity is already in progress. LOOK AT YOUR JET!

  The transcoloration of the jet was dimming, the image was going all pointilla, the points were losing concrescence…

  The jet was gone. And far below, the same sort of degeneration was invading Dino’s consolidated Magellanic Cloud.

  Dino collapsed upon himself—not in depression, but in the sort of twisted emotional relief that a compulsive and sin-conscious flagellant might feel if a force beyond his control should take his whip away.

  Tannen told Croyd: “In subconscious fact, this is the way he really wanted it.”

  Frey Zauberger aboard Sterbenräuber brought off the backwards last of her dino cadenza-variations, leaned back on the bench of her ultrasynthesizer, closed eyes, lapsed into trance. They let her alone.

  After a while she opened eyes, felt a face close to hers, turned her head a little, recognized that the head was Freya’s: behind Frey’s music-bench, Freya had hung his chin on her shoulder.

  Frey dull-queried: “Did it work?”

  “We have confirmation that it did. How could you doubt that it would?”

  Frey down-frowned, thinking. Presently she closed eyes and ventured: “How could you hold such faith in me, after all these years of me kicking your teeth in?”

  “Maybe,” Freya suggested, “you kicked faith into ^ » me.

  “I cannot guarantee that it will never happen again.”

  “Thank you for honesty, finally. Let me give you a counterhonesty: I would have surrendered to Dino, only she got hung up when she found out that both of us were female. All right, that’s done. I’m having Captain Kedrin deliver us immediately to Hudibras, we have this old castle of ours to go over for repair needs; there are instances of dry rot.”

  The heavy Tannen voice now came into Dino: “I think the adventure is all done, Croyd. The jet and the new galaxy have dissolved back into the undifferentiated cosmos, and the two Magellanic Clouds are as they were, the Zaubergers are now the good opposite of the crumbiness that they were because of Frey’s arrogant macho. I don’t yet know whether we can forget Kolly Kedrin, but she will have to face you and me before we decide whether to remand her for court martial.

  “Now, dear friend Croyd, what seems to remain is, the judging of Dino Trigg.”

  “Agreed,” responded a familiar and love-hated baritone. “Do you agree that we should now proceed with the necessary confrontations?”

  “I do. I suggest that you be the first to confront him.”

  Floating Dino felt himself growing gravity-loaded; and presently he foot-plopped onto the golden-fila-mental breezeway-bridge between the two white towers of Croyd’s nontime house. He was almost eyeball-to-eyeball with Croyd.

  19. Showdown

  Dino and Croyd stood facing each other on the bridge; they were some ten paces apart. Both men were wary.

  Tannen invisibly hovered. The interplanetary president was barely controlling taut anxiety, mainly for Croyd, importantly also for Dino whom he liked and Croyd son-loved.

  Dino, completely alert, demanded: “What?”

  Croyd silently pointed at a revolver which lay at their feet about halfway between them. It was a museum piece: a post-medieval, early twentieth-century Colt forty-five.

  Dr. Trigg, a part-time amateur of antiquities, twisted his mouth in a scornful grin. “High noon, Master? We wrestle, and one of us gets the gun?”

  “Good thought,” said Croyd, “but no. You pick it up.”

  After hesitation: “Why not?” Dino possessed the gun, stepped back, examined it, broke it to make sure that it was fully loaded, shook all six cartridges into his palm to ascertain that none was a blank, reloaded, relocked,
snapped open the safety, looked up at Croyd with the gun hanging in his right hand.

  Croyd queried: “Familiar with it?”

  “I played with one in a museum. Does it work?”

  Beautifully. Why don’t you try it?”

  “On what or whom?”

  “On me.”

  “Why?”

  “Your doom-spume had disintegrated. Nevertheless, you want some sort of revenge. 1 am dispensable.”

  “Can you be killed, Croyd?”

  “Your gun is loaded with explosive bullets. I can’t be revived if I am smithereened.”

  “There has got to be some kind of catch. You say the gun works. Ah—are the cartridges charged?”

  “Fully.”

  “When I fire the gun, it will explode in my hand and kill me.”

  “The gun will not explode. It will fire normally, and safely for you.”

  “Then—what catch? Oh: we’re in nontime; I am b synthesizing my breathing-air around me, but there is no air in the small sector of cartridge-ignition. Old-time explosives need oxygen to fire.”

  “Your scholarship glimmers there, Dino. The major component of the explosive charge is potassium nitrate which supplies the oxygen for the detonating drive of the bullet, in short, the cartridge has its self-contained oxygen supply. Believe me: the gun will fire kill-Croyd bullets.” Frowning, Dino again examined the gun. He queried: “Why does the great Croyd place himself at mortal risk?”

  “Because I do not believe that you will shoot me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I am dead, you will not have me around to hate.”

  “May I—test the gun first?”

  “You have six shots. Save at least one for me.”

  “A test target?”

  “We’re in nontime. Here, you can mentally synthesize one.”

  After pause for thought, Dino half-turned and pointed to a nonlocus in the nonsky out beyond the rail. A ring-target materialized there. Taking aim with one perfectly rigid arm, he squeezed the trigger. A small hole appeared in the bullseye, but there was no noise, for there is no sound-mediating atmosphere in nontime—which reminded Dino that his current converse with Croyd must, after all, be mental.

  He fired three more times at the target. All holes were in the bullseye: only three tightly-patterned holes, but one was wider than the others.

  Croyd remarked: “Pray save the remaining two. If your first shot should fail to kill me, I’d appreciate a coup de grace.”

  Dino, in profound trouble, turned to his mentor. “Croyd, I’ve made an ass of myself; but we can’t brush it off so easily, because only brilliant intervention prevented me from annihilating three or maybe four galaxies. And now something is telling me that my hatred of you is frivolous. Nevertheless, Croyd, 1 continue to hate you. Why is that?”

  Said Croyd: “You have the gun—and two remaining rounds.”

  Snake-strike Trigg jammed the gun-muzzle into his own mouth and fired. brief anguish whereafter, painlessly awkward feeling of own head splitting open and brains exploding out a scene from which Dino gently drifted backward-upward (but not too far away) and hovered helplessly perceiving the dramatics on the breeze-way-bridge. where the Trigg-body, eyes glazed and wide, let his gun hang in his right hand, trying with his left to palpate his permanently ruined skull, then let drop his left and shoved the gun again into his mouth and fired again but nothing further happened to him because he was already ruined.

  In the impotently soul-anguished overviewing of double-Dino, the Trigg-body’s open-blasted head came up and he stared wildly at Croyd—who observed, almost tenderly: “Yes indeed, my dear Dino: either shot would certainly have killed you—had you been alive. Happily, your body and its bloody brains are astral rather than physical: your magnificent jet-spume absolutely murdered you.”

  20. The Judging of Dino

  Dino lowered eyes, and he was suffering, not from fear, but because he felt that it would be impossible to punish him adequately.

  At first in him there was dullness, then wonder, then vast amazement when he heard Tannen inquire: “Tell me, good Dino—what judgment would you consider just?”

  Up came Dino’s head, very slowly. “Good Dino?” he ejaculated. He felt himself dissolving in the profound eyes of now-visible Tannen; and he felt the steady gaze of Croyd upon him.

  Dino studied the question, scanning for possible retrieval of an idea all the vastness of his mindsoul.

  With his nontongue he nonwet his nonlips. Tannen waited. Croyd watched.

  Shakily, but with determination, Dino deposed: “Hell.”

  Up went a Tannen-brow, and the President’s mouth twitched. “One is not being profane?”

  “Not at all. You asked me a question. Hell is my answer.”

  “You would have me send you Hellward?”

  “I deserve the absolute worst. I want to be punished by the absolute worst. Is not Hell the absolute worst?”

  “Hell, for a mindsoul like yourself, would consist in hanging forever helpless in featureless nontime compulsively uphill-rolling the rock of your guilt.”

  “I will take it.”

  “—Knowing at every noninstant of eternity that you will never be free of this compulsion, that you will never regain any control at all, that the selflaceration of it will never be dulled.”

  “1 accept it. I beg for it!”

  “Bit of a waste, don’t you think?”

  Dino, after hesitation, blinked and queried: “I beg your pardon?”

  “Croyd, tell him what I mean.”

  Promptly said Croyd: “He means, good friend Dino, that your cosmic adventure may have cleansed you of all your compulsions, leaving your marvelous mind free to swing loose, at last, in the process of dreaming great dreams and finding means to make them real. To be sure, you did nearly annihilate several galaxies; on the other hand, as a classical Freudian error, you brought aboard ship a double device for canceling-out your own doom-spume—”

  “I did what?’

  “You didn’t need Musician Frey aboard, you didn’t need that ultrasynthesizer aboard: the Zauberger flakes would have done the job.”

  “Are you suggesting that I wanted my diabolism to be canceled-out?”

  “Not consciously so, but way down deep in. Remember that Trigg never made mistakes: perfect control, remember? and since Trigg this time did make just those mistakes, and consequently for the first time lost control, clearly the actions of Serpent Trigg were speaking with a forked tongue.

  “No, don’t argue any further. We’re talking all around the central point, which is, that no matter how many people and civilizations and natural environments you might have slain in the course of your silly vendetta, still your mind is cleansed and freed, and it now can be powerfully creative in the service of the ultrasynthesis. That you may have purged your soul, your intimate-inward self, came clear to me when you sighed with honest relief at your jet’s neutralizing, when you shot yourself instead of Croyd, and finally, having heard Hell thoroughly defined for you, when you opted for Hell.

  “Tannen—otherwise Osiris, lord of judgment but also lord of physical and psychic fertility—I have now a compound judgment to recommend, subject to Dino’s consent. It is, first, that you rule out Hell as a possibility for Dino. Then second, it is that you consign Dino to me.”

  “It is so ruled, Croyd Thoth,” quietly declared Tannen. “Dino Trigg—is it to be Croyd?”

  In the quietude of ultimate blessing, Dino responded without any quaver at all: “Great Judge, for me to be once again a creature of Croyd is an exquisitely refined form of Hell. Indeed—Croyd!” Whereat both Tannen and Croyd vanished in a swirling of nonfog. Enveloped therein, Dino non-heard a well-known mind-voice: The if-nodes in uptime are usable in a number of ways. One can recreate a very complex past situation and inject a germinal mind back into its old body track in that situation, to learn whether this time he will make the same old choices at his choice-points. Want to try it, Dino? Win o
r lose?” “Having gone through all this,” Trigg retorted, “I am sure to do it differently.”

  Doesn’t follow. You see—you will be deprived of your recent memory; it will all seem new to you.

  Baffled, Dino demanded: “Then how can I fail to make all the same mistakes?”

  I said that your inward attitudes appear to have been changed by the experience. They may produce change. “And if they do?”

  Then you will have released yourself from karma.

  “And if I fail?”

  If you fail, you fall back into the same old cycle, over and over again, including your defeat, over and over again. Only, during your eternal recycling, you will remember, and remember, and remember. I think you recently remarked that this would be Hell?

  The austerely functional board room was ovoid. Seated people were arranged along both side walls, one parenthesis open-facing the other. Between them, a broad space of floor was empty; but by crouching and peering upward, Kolly could see a large device hanging above and presumably lower-able.

  Chairman Croyd was seated behind a small desk at the center of one parenthesis of small desks facing the board. He was flanked by the ten ministers who were his top officers in Galactic.

  Trigg sat at Croyd’s immediate right, being first among these ministers. He was smilingly relaxed at the moment, but poised for electrical deployment. Croyd—recalling (as Dino did not) all that had transpired the first time around—prickled with apprehension.) Croyd and his battery of ministers were gazing somewhat upward at a toward-them-open, daised counter-parenthesis: a broad semicircular high-polished ebonoid table behind whose convex edge were nine swiveling easy chairs eight of which were occupied (Croyd having vacated his own center chair for this quintennial occasion).

  Behind and above the board-arc sat President Tannen: he, too, remembered and was apprehensive.