The Keith Laumer MEGAPACK®

by Keith Laumer

  In the end I hunted them down in those corners whither they had dragged themselves and each did I put to the sword. And I turned at last to find the Rthr gone and some few with them, and madness took me that I had been gulled like a tinker by common men.

  In the chamber of the memory couch would I find them. There they would seek to give back to the mindless one that memory of past glories which I had schemed so long to deny him. Almost I wept to see such cunning wasted. Terrible in my wrath I came upon them there. There were but two and, though they stood shoulder to shoulder in the entry way, their poor dirks were no match for my long blade. I struck them dead and went to the couch, to lay my hand on the cylinder marked with the vile gold and black of Qulqlan, that I might destroy it and with it the Rthr, forever—

  And I heard a sound and whirled about. A hideous figure staggered to me from the gloom and for an instant I saw the flash of steel in the bloody hand of the accursed Gholad whom I had left for dead. Then I knew cold agony between my ribs….

  * * * *

  Gholad lay slumped against the wall, his face greenish above the blood-soaked tunic. When he spoke air whistled through his slashed throat.

  “Have done, traitor who once was honored of the king,” he whispered. “Have you no pity for him who once ruled in justice and splendor at High Okk-Hamiloth?”

  “Had you not robbed me of my destiny, murderous dog,” I croaked, “that splendor would have been mine.”

  “You came upon him helpless,” gasped Gholad. “Make some amends now for your shame. Let the Rthr have his mind, which is more precious than his life.”

  “I but rest to gather strength. Soon will I rise and turn him from the couch. Then will I die content.”

  “Once you were his friend,” Gholad whispered. “By his side you fought, when both of you were young. Remember that…and have pity. To leave him here, in this ship of death, mindless and alone….”

  “I have loosed the Hunters!” I shrieked in triumph. “With them will the Rthr share this tomb until the end of time!”

  Then I searched within me and found a last terrible strength and I rose up…and even as my hand reached out to pluck away the mind trace of the king I felt the bloody fingers of Gholad on my ankle, and then my strength was gone. And I was falling headlong into that dark well of death from which there is no returning….

  * * * *

  I woke up and lay for a long time in the dark without moving, trying to remember the fragments of a strange dream of violence and death. I could still taste the lingering dregs of some bitter emotion. But I had more important things to think about than dreams. For just a moment I couldn’t remember what it was I had to do; then with a start I remembered where I was. I had lain down on the couch and pulled the headpiece into place—

  It hadn’t worked.

  I thought hard, tried to tap a new reservoir of memories, drew a blank. Maybe my earth-mind was too alien for the Vallonian memory-trace to affect. It was another good idea that hadn’t worked out. But at least I had had a good rest. Now it was time to get moving. First—to see if Ommodurad was still asleep. I started to sit up—

  Nothing happened.

  I had a moment of vertigo, as my inner ear tried to accommodate to having stayed in the same place after automatically adjusting to my intention of rising. I lay perfectly still and tried to think it through.

  I had tried to move…and hadn’t so much as twitched a muscle. I was paralyzed…or tied up…or maybe, if I was lucky, imagining things. I could try it again and next time—

  I was afraid to try. Suppose I tried and nothing happened—again? It was better to lie here and tell myself it was all a mistake. Maybe I should go back to sleep and wake up later and try it again….

  This was ridiculous. All I had to do was sit up. I—

  Nothing. I lay in the dark and tried to will an arm to move, my head to turn. It was as though I had no arm, no head—just a mind—alone in the dark. I strained to sense the ropes that held me down: still nothing. No ropes, no arms, no body. There was no pressure against me from the couch, no vagrant itch or cramp, no physical sensation. I was a disembodied brain, lying nestled in a great bed of pitchblack cotton wool.

  Then, abruptly, I was aware of myself—not the gross mechanism of bone and muscle, but the neuro-electric field generated within a brain alive with flashing currents and a lightning interplay of molecular forces. A sense of orientation grew. I occupied a block of cells…here in the left hemisphere. The mass of neural tissue loomed over me, gigantic. And “I”… “I” was reduced to the elemental ego, who possessed as a material appurtenance “my” arms and legs, “my” body, “my” brain…. Relieved of outside stimuli, I was able now to conceptualize myself as I actually was: an insubstantial state existing in an immaterial continuum, created by the action of neural currents within the cerebrum, as a magnetic field is created in space by the flow of electricity.

  And I knew what had happened. I had opened my mind to invasion by alien memories. The other mind had seized upon the sensory centers and driven me to this dark corner. I was a fugitive within my own skull.

  For a timeless time I lay stunned, immured now as the massive stones of Bar-Ponderone had never confined me. My basic self-awareness still survived, out was shunted aside, cut off from any contact with the body itself.

  With shadowy fingers of imagination I clawed at the walls surrounding me, fought for a glimpse of light, for a way out.

  And found none.

  * * * *

  Then, at last, I began again to think.

  I must analyze my awareness of my surroundings, seek out channels through which impulses from sensory nerves flowed, and tap them.

  I tried cautiously; an extension of my self-concept reached out with ultimate delicacy. There were the ranked infinities of cells, there the rushing torrents of gross fluid, there the taut cables of the interconnecting web, and there—

  Barrier! Blank and impregnable, the wall reared up. My questing tendril of self-stuff raced over the surface like an ant over a melon, and found no tiniest fissure. It loomed alien, inscrutable: the invader who had stolen my brain.

  I withdrew. To dissipate my force was senseless. I must select a point of attack, hurl against it all the power of my surviving identity…before it too dwindled away and the abstraction that was Legion vanished forevermore.

  The last of the phantom emotions that had clung—for how long?—to the incorporeal mind field had faded now, leaving me with no more than an intellectual determination to reassert myself. Dimly I recognized this sign of my waning sense of identity but there was no surge of instinctive fear. Instead I coolly assessed my resources—and almost at once stumbled into an unused channel, here within my own self-field. For a moment I recoiled from the outré configuration of the stored patterns…and then I remembered.

  I had been in the water, struggling, while the Red soldier waited, rifle aimed. And then: a flood of data, flowing with cold, impersonal precision. And I had deftly marshalled the forces of my body to survive.

  And once more: as I hung by numbed fingers under the cornice of the Yordano Building, the cold voice had spoken.

  And I had forgotten. The miracle had been pushed back, rejected by the conscious mind. But now I knew: this was the knowledge that I had received from the background briefing device that I had used in my island strong-room before I fled. This was the survival data known to all Old Vallonians of the days of the Two Worlds. It had lain here, unused, the secrets of superhuman strength and endurance…buried by the imbecile of censor-self’s aversion to the alien.

  But the ego alone remained now, stripped of the burden of neurosis, freed from subconscious pressures. The levels of the mind were laid bare, and I saw close at hand the regions where dreams were born, the barren sources of instinctive fear-patterns, the linkages to blinding emotions; and all lay now under my overt control.

  Without further hesitation I tapped the stored Vallonian knowledge, encompassed it, made it mine. Then
again I approached the barrier, spread out across it, probed in vain—

  “… vile primitive….”

  The thought thundered out with crushing force. I recoiled, then renewed my attack, alert now. I knew what to do.

  I sought and found a line of synaptic weakness, burrowed at it—

  “… intolerable…vestigial…erasure….”

  I struck instantly, slipped past the shield, laid firm hold on an optic receptor bank. The alien mind threw itself against me, but too late. I held secure and the assault faded, withdrew. Cautiously I extended my interpretive receptivity. There was a pattern of pulses, oscillations in the lambda/mu range. I tuned, focussed—

  Abruptly I was seeing. For a moment my fragile equilibrium tottered, as I strove to integrate the flow of external stimuli into my bodiless self-concept. Then a balance was struck: I held my ground and stared through the one eye I had recaptured from the usurper.

  And I reeled again!

  Bright daylight blazed in the chamber of Ommodurad. The scene shifted as the body moved about, crossing the room, turning…. I had assumed that the body still lay in the dark but instead, it walked, without my knowledge, propelled by a stranger.

  The field of vision flashed across the couch. Ommodurad was gone.

  I sensed that the entire left lobe, disoriented by the loss of the eye, had slipped now to secondary awareness, its defenses weakened. I retreated momentarily from my optic outpost, laid a temporary traumatic block across the access nerves to keep the intruder from reasserting possession, and concentrated my force in an attack on the auricular channels. It was an easy rout. Instantly my eye coordinated its impressions with those coming in along the aural nerves…and heard my voice mouth a curse.

  The body was standing beside a bare wall with a hand laid upon it. In the wall a recess partly obscured by a sliding panel stood empty.

  The body turned, strode to a doorway, emerged into a gloomy violet-shadowed corridor. The glance flicked from the face of one guard to another. They stared in open-mouthed surprise, brought weapons up.

  “You dare to bar the path to the Lord Ammaerln?” My voice slashed at the men. “Stand aside, as you value your lives.”

  And the body pushed past them, striding off along the corridor. It passed through a great archway, descended a flight of marble stairs, came along a hall I had seen on my tour of the Palace of Sapphires and into the Onyx Chamber with the great golden sunburst that covered the high black wall.

  In the Great Owner’s chair at the ring-board Ommodurad sat scowling at the lame courtier whose red hair was hidden now under a black cowl. Between them Foster stood, the heavy manacles dragging at his wrists. Ommodurad turned; his face paled, then flushed darkly. He rose, teeth bared.

  The gaze of my eye fixed on Foster. Foster stared back, a look of incredulity growing on his face.

  “My Lord Rthr,” I heard my voice say. The eye swept down and fixed on the manacles. The body drew back a step, as if in horror.

  “You overreach yourself, Ommodurad!” my voice cried harshly.

  Ommodurad stepped toward me, his immense arm raised.

  “Lay not a hand on me, dog of a usurper!” my voice roared out. “By the Gods, would you take me for common clay?”

  And, unbelievably, Ommodurad paused, stared in my face.

  “I know you as the upstart Drgon, petty Owner,” he rumbled. “But I know I see another there behind your pale eyes.”

  “Foul was the crime that brought me to this pass,” my voice said. “But…know that your master, Ammaerln, stands before you, in the body of a primitive!”

  “Ammaerln…!” Ommodurad jerked as though he had been struck.

  My body turned, dismissing him. The eye rested on Foster.

  “My liege,” my voice said unctuously. “I swear the dog dies for this treason——”

  “It is a mindless one, intruder,” Ommodurad broke in. “Seek no favor with the Rthr for he that was Rthr is no more. You deal with me now.”

  My body whirled on Ommodurad. “Give a thought to your tone, lest your ambitions prove your death!”

  Ommodurad put a hand to his dagger. “Ammaerln of Bros-Ilyond you may be, or a changeling from dark regions I know not of. But know that this day I hold all power in Vallon.”

  “And what of this one who was once Qulqlan? What consort do you hold with him you say is mindless?” I saw my hand sweep out in a contemptuous gesture at Foster.

  “An end to patience!” the Great Owner roared. “Shall I stand in my inner citadel and give account of myself to a madman?” He started toward my body.

  “Does the fool, Ommodurad, forget the power of the great Ammaerln?” my voice said softly. And the towering figure hesitated once more, searching my face. “The Rthr’s hour is past…and yours, bungler and fool,” my voice went on. “Your months—or is it years?—of self-delusion are ended.” My voice rose in a bellow: “Know that I…Ammaerln, the great…have returned to rule at High Okk-Hamiloth.”

  “Months?” rumbled Ommodurad. “Indeed, I believe the tales of the Greymen are true and that an evil spirit has returned to haunt me. You speak of months?” He threw back his head, laughed a choked throaty laugh that was half sob.

  “Know, demon, or madman, or ancient prince of evil: for thirty centuries have I brooded alone, sealed from an empire by a single key!”

  I felt the shock rack through and through the invader mind. This was the opportunity I had hoped for. Quick as thought I moved, slashed at the wavering shield, and was past it——

  I grappled onto the foul mind-matrix, scanned its symbolisms: a miasma of twisted concepts like great webs, asquirm with bristling nodes like crouching spiders—and through it all a yammering torrent of deformed thought-shapes.

  In my eagerness I was careless. The invader mind, recovering, struck back. Too late I felt it slip into my awareness, flick over the stored information. I leaped to protect one fact…and lost my gains. With only a single tenuous line of rapport with the alien mind still open, I clung, shaken—but hugging precious patterns of stolen data. My raid had been no more than an irritation to the other mind…but I had fetched away a mass of information. I interpreted it, integrated it, matched it to known patterns. A complex structure of relationships evolved, growing into a new awareness.

  Upon the mind-picture of Foster’s face was now super-imposed another: that of Qulqlan, Rthr of all Vallon, ruler of the Two Worlds!

  And other pictures, snatched from the intruder mind, were present now in the earth-consciousness of me, Legion.

  The Vaults, deep in the rock under the fabled city of Okk-Hamiloth, where the mind-trace of every citizen was stored, sealed by the Rthr and keyed to his mind alone.

  Ammaerln, urging the king to embark on a Far-Voyage, stressing the burden of government, tempting him to bring with him the royal mind-trace; Qulqlan’s acquiescence and Ammaerln’s secret joy at the advancement of his scheme; the coming of the Change for the Rthr, aboard ship, far out in space—and the vizier’s bold stroke; and then the fools who found him at the lifeboat…and the loss of all, all….

  There my own memories took up the tale: the awakening of Foster, unsuspecting, and his recording of the mind of the dying Ammaerlin; the flight from the Hunters; the memory-trace of the king that lay for three millenia among neolithic bones until I, a primitive, plucked it from its place; and the pocket of a coarse fibre garment where the cylinder lay now—on the hip of the body I inhabited but as inaccessible to me as if it had been a million miles away.

  But there was a second memory-trace—Ammaerln’s. I had crossed a galaxy to come to Foster, and with me, locked in an unmarked pewter cylinder, I had brought Foster’s ancient nemesis.

  I had given it life, and a body.

  Foster, once Rthr, had survived against all logic and had come back, back from the dead: the last hope of a golden age….

  To meet his fate at my hands.

  * * * *

  “Three thousand years,” I heard my voice s
aying. “Three thousand years have the men of Vallon lived mindless, with the glory that was Vallon locked away in a vault without a key.”

  “I, alone,” said Ommodurad, “have borne the curse of knowledge. Long ago, in the days of the Rthr, I took my mind-trace from the vaults in anticipation of the day of days when he should fall. Little joy has it brought me.”

  “And now,” my voice said, “you think to force this mind—that is no mind—to unseal the vault?”

  “I know it for a hopeless task,” Ommodurad said. “At first I thought—since he speaks the tongue of old Vallon—that he dissembled. But he knows nothing. This is but the dry husk of the Rthr…and I sicken of the sight. I would fain kill him now and let the long farce end.”

  “Not so!” my voice cut in. “Once I decreed exile to the mindless one. So be it!”

  The face of Ommodurad twisted in its rage. “Your witless chatterings too! I tire of them.”

  “Wait!” my voice snarled. “Would you put aside the key?”

  There was a silence as Ommodurad stared at my face. I saw my hand rise into view. Gripped in it was Foster’s memory-trace.

  “The Two Worlds lie in my hand,” my voice spoke. “Observe well the black and golden bands of the royal memory-trace. Who holds this key is all-powerful. As for the mindless body yonder, let it be destroyed.”

  Ommodurad locked eyes with mine. Then, “Let the deed be done,” he said.

  The redhead drew a long stiletto from under his cloak, smiling. I could wait no longer….

  Along the link I had kept through the intruder’s barrier I poured the last of the stored energy of my mind. I felt the enemy recoil, then strike back with crushing force. But I was past the shield.

  As the invader reached out to encircle me I shattered my unified forward impulse into myriad nervous streamlets that flowed on, under, over and around the opposing force; I spread myself through and through the inner all-mass, drawing new power from the trunk sources.