Megalomania Read online

  All space was now illuminated by his jet-spume. He must give it a name. Deathfire? no; corny. War-Dog? no. Helljet? nah…

  An inspired whimsy hit him; and his grin was twisted, for the whimsy had been twistedly begotten upon him by his female, music-master Frey Zauberger. Call the jet Schnarliwarli!

  Spreadlegged on the back of the grinning star rover, shock-paralyzed Dino Trigg taut-stared at the cosmic monster whose horning he had engendered and whose galloping growth now increasing threatened himself. The growth of his jet-spume was of course four-dimensional, but it described in spacetime a geodesic describable by two vectors: rate of growth in length, and rate of time-approach to the surface of actuality. The stem-length was now expanding at the rate of four hundred light-years per hour, and the rate was doubling hourly; already the undulating, incandescent stalk was more than 600 light-years long, and proportionally thickening, tipped by a hot-angry glans the size of a star-cluster.

  Meanwhile, gradually it came through to jeopardized Dino, something had happened to halt the commensurate uptiming of the Sterbenräuber— which now was glued herewhen in temporal stasis, exposing himself and Dino to brain-and-body-riddling ionic engulfment. Minutes ago, the entire length of the jet from origin-galaxy to hotspot tip had crossed perhaps a third of his visual field, with its linear direction relative to himself vertically upward (toward the whither that Sol Galaxy occupied). Now already he could not see both tip and base in a single glance; instead, he had to shift his gaze alternately upward and downward to encompass both; while the breadth of the uprushing stem, from having been laser-thin, was a quarter of his visual field thick, and thickening as it gained on him.

  Staring horrified, he was at first indecisive about what to do. Go see Kolly? kick her into action? but his orders to her had been clear, so either she was deliberately negating, or she had lost control; so forget it. Abandon ship? downtime individually in the body? no way: he as an individual did not have the uptiming-downtiming speed of the yacht; him as an individual the jet would quickly overtake. Summon Flaherty? but Flaherty had been dispatched on other duty.

  The stem-width was half his visual field and thickening; now, both mantle-origin and hotspot-tip were beyond the range of his vision when he stared as he was staring hypnotized at the stem.

  As a final self-rescuing resort, he had always the option of killing his jet-creation—which he wouldn’t think of doing, of course, being willing to sacrifice himself to his Croyd-vendetta—and yet it is intelligent to know your options even if you won’t use them, so that was an option…

  O God no it was not an option, because the only way to kill his jet involved the Zauberger music-flakes which he had just vaporized!

  So here he stood, spreadlegged on the back of his own gigantic grin, about to become not merely the cause but also part of galactic destruction.

  In the face of certain death, some flee (but he could not), some shrivel (but he would not), some stand and defy. Dino turned-on a Sterbenräuber—grin energized by his own self-mockery; and he screamed at his jet—screamed silently into space, of course, but all his head vibrated as what would ordinarily activate waves of sound spewed out of his joyous jaws: “Hey, Jet! You Jet! I aimed you at Sol Galaxy, remember! I aimed you at Croyd! 1 did something wrong, and now you are chasing me, but recall your orders: your target is Sol! And just in case you think you are shaking off your master by devouring me, forget it, because I’m joining you! Joining you, dja hyah me? So go, so roar: you can’t escape my orders because I will be part of you, your guide, your death-god! And what will you do to me? Incinerate me? hardly, until you spew me all the way up to your hot spot. Ionically addle my brain-rekamatics? but I think I have defenses against that. Flatten me with thrust against inertia? anyone else, yes, in a hurry, but not me, Jet!” The stem of plasma uprushing at many times light-speed now entirely filled his visual and mental world.

  Kicking himself off the body of Sterbenräuber, he drove himself at his jet, exultantly screaming: “LOOK OUT, SPOUT! HERE I COME! WELCOME ME ABOARD!”

  CAPER ULTIMA

  REALITY-

  FACING

  17. Aboard Schnarliwarli

  Terrifying turbulence whipped him like a terrier-whipped microscopic snake, and kept on whipping him prolongedly until his mind was flung free of his ion-addled bodybrain and he perceived that the body being whipped was his own—and that, apart from the rekamatic brain/body addling, there was an increasingly colossal inertial wind which grew with the growth of the jet aiming toward | maturation at a length of two hundred thousand light-years beginning at zero in the timespace of thirteen hours from activation: a permanently brain-pulping nonshielded thrust which Dino’s powers allowed him partially to counteract but not enough so for the preservation of sanity he sought to work his way back to himself, but his body kept vanishing and reappearing with face contorted in its grim unsouled brain-effort to cope when ionic intra-bombardment scrambled any possibility of coping which the brain might otherwise by now the face was a ghastly-distorted strontilite mask, and the brain was a shambles, and the mind out here separate from the body was almost equally addled by reason of its tenuous connection-filaments with its disintegrating mother-brain hours and hours while his jet-spewn body kept vanishing and reappearing and vanishing.

  Croyd reactivated the inhibitors, restoring the automatic temporal interval which the yacht had been ordered to preserve between itself and the jet; only, the interval now was only a quarter what it had been, so the yacht-cybernetics labored to drive the yacht downtime at a compensating acceleration.

  Croyd whished; it had been a very near thing. Through intercom, he called: “Now hear this, Captain Kedrin! You and the Zaubergers get down to the ultrasynthesizer console room and do what you have to do! Croyd out!”

  Internalizing his computer-vision, he watched Kolly and the Zaubergers obeying his command. Whereafter he gave all his attention to the remarkable spectacle of a literally electrified Dino Trigg riding the swift expansion of the galactic jet-spume which Trigg had created to spite Croyd his benefactor.

  Did the Zaubergers appreciate how tight the time was, to bring off what Frey now had to bring off in order to prevent the permanent mind-scrambling of humanity and all animals throughout Sol Galaxy—while, at the same time, saving their own galaxy and therefore their own planet Hudibras—and therefore, of course, Frey Zauberger’s ultimate joy, her Dino-given high house?

  Standing by the ultrasynthesizer:

  Frey: “It’s a ridiculous assignment, I can’t do it.”

  Freya, stern: “But you must!”

  Frey, distraught: “But I can’t—”

  Reaching upward with her two top hands, grim Freya let Frey have an open-palmed one-two on the sides of Frey’s face while Freya’s two lower hands firmed on Frey’s torso to hold her for the punishment. Frey’s eyes squeezed shut against the slapping, then opened to stare stonily at her new-aggressive consort. She began with frosted voice: “You didn’t have to—”

  “But I did!” yelled little Freya, wide-waving his upper hands while continuing to clasp tall Frey with his lower ones. “Good God, husband, I don’t know what’s been subtracted from you! don’t you comprehend the incredible brain that you have? Would that brain find it insuperably difficult to replay all your music exactly as it was broadcast the first time? Well now, look: all you are being asked to do is—play it all in reverse, note-for-note backward/”

  Trembling, Frey mounted the bench before the ultrasynthesizer. She poised hands, feet, antennae. Shivering took possession of her long body. She { quavered: “But he played my music in a different order—”

  Freya’s reply was firmly bracing. “Now listen, my dear husband. You have your weaknesses in other respects; but musically, there is nothing you cannot do, and you know it, and I know it! Frey: so he played your music in a different order—so recall that different order, and play that backward!”

  Intently at work within the computer, Croyd (wondering why the nonpar
eil computer of this wonderful ship hadn’t automatically backup-recorded for ship’s log the Zauberger music whether or not Kolly or Dino had wanted that) brought off an intricate system of astrogational adjustments. These ended by positioning the yacht at a particular vantage point of frozen motion with respect to the spatiotemporal geodesic being described by the generating-downtiming jet.

  Disenfranchised and helpless Kolly, gazing at the cycloramic video on the President’s Bridge, stared at the resulting effects. The whole jet from galactic base to hotspot tip was now vertical in the picture-frame. Its downtiming toward germinal present, with consequent growth, was known to be happening but was invisible. Generative extensional growth of the vertical jet also was known to be happening but was invisible, although the jet did waver and seem to be alternately stretching and contracting as the automatic ivideo-adjustments from instant to instant spotted changes a bit inaccurately and then self-readjusted.

  The Croyd-mind of the computer was enriching Kolly’s viewscreen with a small superimposed inset. In a flame-yellow circle near the base of the jet, but infinitesimally rising along the stem toward the tip, writhed a vastly magnified image of Dino Trigg. This close-up image was relatively enlarged so that his size appeared to be a quarter of the jet-stem thickness, although in fact Dino was no more than an infinitesimal of the jet’s thickness and continually shrinking relative to its growth. He kept twisting within the jet-stem; and when occasionally he turned up full-face toward the Sterbenräuber (sometimes upside-down), his expression was horrid, as though he were gorgon-gazing.

  Catatonically fascinated Kolly stayed in deepfreeze for an incalculable period of time, while the circle containing Dino appeared (in this perspective) to ooze upward along the jet-stem. The computer was now providing informational side-lettering:

  Kolly, consulting the figures, grimaced and snorted: “Damn computer has no morals—” A percept brought her up short: Captain Kedrin, necessarily a mathematician, had noticed the numerical relationships: every hour, the rate of the jet’s growth was doubling, while its descent from the deep past into germinal actuality was proceeding at a remorseless 170 million years per hour. These extrapolations meant that the jet formed profoundly in the past would break out into present actuality only four hours from now—which would give it time to overcome the jetless reality of the Magellanic Clouds and envelop Sol Galaxy only two hours later!

  The ghastly concept, coupled with the hypnotic tri-d depth of the video, drew the conscious Kolly-self entirely out of the ship. She was in effect floating free in spacetime, seeing Dino directly without screen-mediation, as Trigg ascended along the jet-stem, while some demon provided glowing explanatory words over to one side. There were mesmeric periods when she seemed to be looking at some supernatural Dino-spirit who had catapulted himself radially upward from the surface of some planet at escape velocity toward a nonexistent moon…

  A bluish-white glow was beginning to intrude from frame-top precisely above the hotspot jet-tip yet still somewhat remotely beyond that tip. Kolly knew that the new shape was another galaxy: it was, in fact, her own Sol Galaxy. A shivering beset her: the galaxy was the jet’s target, and in it, her planet Erth. Dino-Shiva, brazenly riding the stem of the jet that he had created with the aid of Kolly-Kali, goddess of fertility and of death (Kedrin was no illiterate), was about to realize his saturnine purpose whose full import Kolly, in her damnable infatuation, had never really grasped until now.

  The video-encircled Dino-image was three-quarters of the way up the stem toward the hotspot tip. The legend read:

  The schedule remained implacable: in one more hour, the jet would actualize itself; in still another hour—curtains for Sol…

  But, wait. Wasn’t the galaxy-searing hotspot tip, roiling with the energy of half a million suns, intended to disrupt all energy including mental energy in the target galaxy? Then should not his inhuman ride along the jet-stem have disrupted and therefore destroyed the Dino-mind so that he would be unable to appreciate his own triumph? Might he not even be dead? for his dreadful stonied expression was not changing.

  Kolly’s own mind, in the course of her prolonged concentration, was going abstract. The vertical jet became for her a dotted line extending itself beneath Dino as though it were representing and pseudo-animating the course of his self-lofting into space; and the abstract circle that was driving itself toward the dotted line’s forward-upward tip was the rising Dino, a projectile aimed at a concentrically circled target called Sol Galaxy only, from out of nowhere another swift dotted line headed by a personalized circle whizzed horizontally across the picture from right to center and coalesced with the Dino-circle. The joined circles shimmered and vanished.

  Kolly was on her feet, distraught. With an enormous mental-moral effort, she collected herself and stared at the picture which still contained the extending jet with its source the amalgamated Magellanic Cloud and its target Sol Galaxy— but which did not any longer contain any circle or any circle-embraced Dino Trigg.

  Remembering that she was the ship’s captain, she taut-spoke to the intercom: “Computer, give me a replay of that—slow-mo, magnification max, image divided into four quadrants. Execute!”

  Now the lower left quadrant of the screen was filled by Dino: the comet-god Asterios rising through space, his divine golden hair streaming out behind him (illusion, probably, since his hair was neatly barber-tailored), his godface fearsomely distorted.

  As the comet-god began to ascent into the upper-left quadrant, across the upper-right quadrant came out of nowhere Triggward-plunging flame-topped Croyd.

  Croyd grappled with Dino.

  They vanished.

  Kolly caused ivideo to close on the point of Croyd’s first appearance. There was no source; Croyd merely appeared.

  (Natch. He had hit that spacetime-entry out of nontime—concerning which, Kolly had no knowledge.) Croyd’s voice Filled the President’s Bridge: “Captain Kedrin, are you there?”

  Confused Kolly got herself into line and snapped: “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Kolly, you have the con, I have departed the ship. Now listen. You are to continue cruising in this spacetime-frame until Professor Zauberger completes her musical assignment successfully. If she fails, you will require her to try it again. You will continue this program until you are redirected by myself. If I never redirect you, then you will forever continue this program. Understood?” Straightening, Kolly emitted a show of defiance. “Now why would you do such a thing as leaving H me forever in this Tantalus bit?”

  “Because, you poor fool—and you aren’t normally a fool, but right now you are being a fool—because if Zauberger fails, everybody in Sol Galaxy including myself will be permanently mindless, and the Magellanic Clouds as you have known them will no longer exist. Where then will you be?” Having gulped, Kolly responded small: “Point well taken. However—is there some way for me to know when I can quit the bit?”

  “There is; but you have the con, and it will be up to you to discover how to know; and if you make a mistake and do the wrong thing, you will answer to me and to Astrofleet Command—if we then still exist. Okay, no more pish-tush. Croyd out.”

  18. Consequence of Backwards Music

  When Dino drifted back into a sort of consciousness that was intelligently perceptive but unable to exercise will, he was floating in what he recognized as nontime. But some compulsion prevented him from inspecting the nonscene; instead, his eyes were immovably fixed on spatiotemporal reality—on his jet Schnarliwarli.

  Lethargic Dino gazed, drifting. Listlessly he recognized that his jet was reaching nearly its desiderated length of 200,000 light-years, was only a few centuries short of the germinality which would make it all-of-a-sudden real. It was a mighty tree of incandescent polychrome flaring at the tip into hotspot foliage which was about to envelop Sol Galaxy.

  One who appeared to be Darkside, glow-floating a little way off, wore an expression that seemed faintly melancholy as he spoke in Dino’s mind: So here y
ou float, acknowledging your own helplessness.

  Dino chose to answer aloud in silent nonspace: “I? Helpless? In view of this colossal destruction that I have created? Oh, come, now!”

  Helpless, aye: hung here in nontime by this archvillain Croyd, hung in perfect position for watching the destruction of his galaxy. So helpless that even if you wanted to stop this destruction, you would be powerless to do it. I mention the paradox only because you felt strong enough to taunt Croyd by revealing to him your truly admirable villainy—and to do so against my advice, which doubled the audacity of the act. Clearly it had not crossed your mind that by douching him with the fire-venom of your hatred, you might thrust him beyond vengeance by fatally breaking his heart. But at least, Dino, it proves that you are purely malevolent, you even goose yourself Angered: “Go ahead, sandpaper my balls!”

  Sorry. I’m not really sorry, but it’s a nice thing to say. The big thing is, I am delighted that you are holding to your destruction of Sol Galaxy. Even if you should now change your mind and try to stop the process that you have started, you could not do so. In my view, this makes your decision so pure that it can be called holy. You have contemplated the robust power-future that would have been yours if, instead of destroying the galaxy, you had decided merely to kill Croyd and to substitute yourself into the resulting power-vacuum. That would have been the materialistic yuppy-choice. But instead, in your ethereal sainthood, you have elected for no future at all.