Creatures of Light and Darkness Read online

  and scattered by the Nameless.

  But he was not afraid.

  Holding forth his right hand,

  he drew upon it the Gauntlet of Power,

  which instantly grew

  to cover over his body,

  that but the brightness of his eyes shone through.

  He placed upon his feet

  the boots

  which permitted him

  to straddle the air and the water.

  Then, with a black strand

  he hung about his waist the sheath of the Star Wand,

  ultimate weapon,

  born of the blind smiths of Norn,

  which only he might wield.

  No, he was not afraid.

  Ready then was he to depart my circling fortress,

  descend upon the world,

  where the Nameless crept,

  spread,

  swirled,

  furious and hungry.

  Then did his other son, my brother Typhon,

  black shadow out of the void,

  appear,

  begging to go in his place.

  But Set did deny him this thing,

  opened the hatch,

  pushed himself into darkness,

  fell toward the face of the world.

  Now, for three hundred hours did they battle,

  over two weeks by the Old Reckoning,

  before the Nameless began to weaken.

  Set pushed the attack,

  hurt the Thing,

  prepared the blow of death.

  He had fought it on the waters of the oceans

  under the oceans,

  had fought it on dry land,

  in the air’s cold center,

  and on the tops of mountains.

  He had pursued it about the globe,

  awaiting the opening that would permit

  the final thrust.

  The force of their conflict shattered two continents,

  made the oceans to boil,

  filled the air with clouds.

  The rocks split and melted,

  the heavens were laced with sonic booms

  like invisible jewels of the fog,

  the steam.

  A dozen times did I restrain Typhon,

  who would go to his aid.

  Then, as the Nameless coiled and reared

  to a height of three miles,

  a cobra of smoke,

  and Set stood his place,

  one foot upon the water

  one foot on the dry land,

  then did that accursed master of mischief—

  Angel of the House of Life—

  Osiris,

  work his deadly betrayal.

  What time Set had stolen his consort, Isis,

  who had borne him both Typhon and myself,

  Osiris had vowed Set’s undoing.

  Backed by Anubis,

  Osiris wielded a portion of the field

  in a manner used for release of the solar energies,

  driving suns to the limit of stability.

  I had bare warning ere he struck.

  Set had none.

  Never directed at a planet before,

  it destroyed the world. I escaped,

  removing myself to a place light years away.

  Typhon tried to flee

  to the spaces below where he made his home.

  He did not succeed.

  I never saw my brother again. Nor thyself, good

  Nephytha.

  It cost me a father who was a son,

  a brother,

  my wife’s body;

  but it did not destroy the Nameless.

  Somehow,

  that creature survived the onslaught

  of the Hammer that Smashes Suns.

  Stunned,

  I later found it drifting

  amid the world’s wreckage,

  like a small nebula

  hearted with flapping flame.

  I worked about it a web of forces,

  and, weakened,

  it collapsed upon itself.

  I removed it then to a secret place

  beyond the Worlds of Life,

  where it is yet imprisoned

  in a room having doors nor windows.

  Often have I tried to destroy it,

  but I know not what it was that Set discovered

  to work its undoing with his Wand.

  And still it lives, and yet cries out;

  and if ever it is freed,

  it could destroy the Life

  that is the Middle Worlds.

  This is why I never disputed the usurpation

  which followed that attack,

  and why I still cannot.

  I must remain warden,

  till Life’s adversary is destroyed.

  And I could not have prevented what followed:

  the Angels of my many Stations,

  grown factious in time of my absence,

  fell upon one another,

  striving for supremacy.

  The Wars of the Stations were perhaps thirty years.

  Osiris and Anubis reaped what remained at the end.

  The other Stations were no more.

  Now, of course, these two must rule with great waves

  of the Power,

  subjecting the Midworlds to famines,

  plagues, wars,

  to achieve the balances

  much more readily obtained by the gradual,

  peaceful actions of the many, of many Stations.

  But they cannot do otherwise.

  They fear a plurality within the Power.

  They would not delegate the Power they had seized.

  They cannot co-ordinate it between them.

  So, still do I seek a way to destroy the Nameless,

  and when this has been done,

  shall I turn my energies

  to the removal of my Angels

  of the two surviving Houses.

  This will be easy to accomplish,

  though new hands must be ready to work my will.

  In the meantime,

  it would be disastrous to remove

  those who work the greatest good

  when two hands stir the tides.

  And when this final thing is true,

  shall I use the power of these Stations

  to re-embody thee, my Nephytha—

  Now Nephytha cries beside the sea and says, “It is too much! It shall never be!” and the Prince Who Was A Thousand stands up and raises his arms.

  Within a cloud which hovers before him, there appears the outline of a woman. Perspiration dots his brow, and the woman-form grows more distinct. He steps forward then in an attempt to embarce her, but his arms close only on smoke, and his name, which is the name “Thoth,” sounds as a sob within his ears.

  Then he is all alone beside the sea, beneath the sea, and the lights in the sky are fishes’ bellies digesting fishes’ food.

  His eyes grow moist before he curses, for he knows it is within her power to end her own existence. He calls her name and there is no reply, not even an echo.

  He knows then that the Nameless will die.

  He hurls a stone into the ocean and it does not return.

  Crossing his arms, he is gone, footprints crumbling in the sand.

  Sea birds shriek through the moist air, and a massive reptile rears its green head thirty feet above the waves, long neck swaying, then sinks again beneath the waters a short distance away.

  Marachek

  Regard now the Citadel of Marachek at Midworlds’ Center….

  Dead. Dead. Dead. Color it dust.

  This is where the Prince Who Was Once A God comes often, to contemplate many things.

  There are no oceans on Marachek. There are still a few bubbly springs, these smelling like wet dogs and being warm and brackish. Its sun is a very tired and tiny reddish star, too respectable or too lazy ever to have become a nova and passed out in a burst of
glory, shedding a rather anemic light which makes for deep, bluish shadows cast by grotesque stands of stone upon the enormous beach of dun and orange that is Maracheck beneath its winds; and the stars above Marachek may be seen even at midday, faintly, though in the evening they acquire the intensity of neon, acetylene and flash bulb above the windswept plains; and most of Marachek is flat, though the plains rearrange themselves twice daily, when the winds achieve a kind of sterile climax, heaping and unheaping the sands and grinding their grains finer and finer—so that the dust of morning and dusk hangs throughout the day in a yellowish haze, which further detracts from Marachek’s eye in the sky—all, ultimately, levelling and settling: the mountains having been ground down, the rocks sculpted and resculpted, and all buried and resurrected perpetually: this is the surface of Marachek, which of course was once a scene of glory, power, pomp and pageantry, its very triteness crying out for this conclusion; but further, there is one building upon Marachek at Midworlds’ Center which testifies to the saw’s authenticity, this being the Citadel, which doubtless shall exist as long as the world itself, though mayhap the sands shall cover and discover it many times before that day of final dissolution or total frigidity: the Citadel—which is so old that none can say for certain that it was ever built—the Citadel, which may be the oldest city in the universe, broken and repaired (who knows how often?) upon the same foundation, over and over, perhaps since the imaginary beginning of the illusion called Time; the Citadel, which in its very standing testifies that some things do endure, no matter how poorly, all vicissitudes—of which Vramin wrote, in The Proud Fossil: “…The sweetness of decay ne’er touched thy portals, for destiny is amber and sufficient”—the Citadel of Marachek-Karnak, the archetypal city, which is now mainly inhabited by little skittering things, generally insects and reptiles, that feed upon one another, one of which (a toad) exists at this moment of Time beneath an overturned goblet upon an ancient table in Marachek’s highest tower (the northeastern) as the sickly sun raises itself from the dust and dusk and the starlight comes down less strongly. This is Marachek.

  When Vramin and Madrak enter here, fresh through the gateway from Blis, they deposit their charges upon that ancient table, made all of one piece out of a substance pink and unnatural which Time itself cannot corrupt.

  This is the place where the ghosts of Set and the monsters

  he fights rage through the marble memory that is wrecked and rebuilt Marachek, the oldest city, forever.

  Vramin replaces the Generals left arm and right foot; he turns his head so that it faces forward once more, then he makes adjustment upon his neck to hold the head in place.

  “How fares the other?” he inquires.

  Madrak lowers Wakim’s right eyelid and releases his wrist.

  “Shock, I’d suppose. Has anyone ever been torn from the center of a fugue battle before?”

  “To my knowledge, no. We’ve doubtless discovered a new syndrome—’fugue fatigue’ or ‘temporal shock’ I’d call it. We may get our names into textbooks yet.”

  “What do you propose to do with them? Are you able to revive them?”

  “Most likely. But then, they’d start in again—and probably keep going till they’d wrecked this world also.”

  “Not much here to wreck. Perhaps we could sell tickets and turn them loose. Might net a handsome penny.”

  “Oh, cynical monger of indulgences! ‘Twould take a man of the cloth to work a scheme like that!”

  “Not so! I learned it on Blis, if you recall.”

  “True—where life’s greatest drawing card had become the fact that it sometimes ends. Nevertheless, in this case, I feel it might be wiser to cast these two upon separate worlds and leave them to their own devices.”

  “Then why did you bring them here to Marachek?”

  “I didn’t! They were sucked through the gateway, when I opened it. I aimed for this place myself because the Center is always easiest to reach.”

  “Then suggestions are now in order as to our immediate course of action.”

  “Let us rest here awhile, and I will keep these two entranced. We might just open us another gateway and leave them.”

  “‘Twould be against my ethics, brother.”

  “Speak not to me of ethics, thou inhuman humanist!—Caterer to whatever life-lie man chooses! Th’art an holy ambulance-chaser!”

  “Nevertheless, I cannot leave a man to die.”

  “Very well… Hello! Someone has been here before us, to suffocate a toad!”

  Madrak turns his eye upon the goblet.

  “I’ve heard tales that they might endure the ages in tiny, airless crypts. How long, I wonder, has this one sat thus? If only it lives and could speak! Think of the glories to which it might bear witness.”

  “Do not forget, Madrak, that I am the poet, and kindly reserve such conjectures to those better able to say them with a straight face. I—”

  Vramin moves to the window, and “Company,” says he. “Now might we leave these fellows in good conscience.”

  Upon the battlements, mounted like a statue, Bronze whinnies like a steam whistle and raises three legs and lets them fall. Now he exhales laser beams into the breaking day and his rows of eyes wink on and off.

  Something is coming, though still unclear, through the dust and the night.

  “Shall we, then?”

  “No.”

  “I share thy sentiment.”

  Sharing, they wait.

  Sexcomp

  Now everyone knows that some machines make love, beyond the metaphysical writings of Saint Jakes the Mechanophile, who posits man as the sexual organ of the machine which created him, and whose existence is necessary to fulfill the destiny of mechanism, producing generation after generation of machinekind, all the modes of mechanical evolution flowing through man, until such a time as he has served his purpose, perfection has been reached, and the Great Castration may occur. Saint Jakes is, of course, a heretic. As has been demonstrated on occasions too numerous to cite, the whole machine requires a gender. Now that man and machine undergo frequent interchanges of components and entire systems, it is possible for a complete being to start at any point in the mech-man spectrum and to range the entire gamut. Man, the presumptuous organ, has therefore achieved his apotheosis or union with the Gaskethead through sacrifice and redemption, as it were. Ingenuity had much to do with it, but ingenuity of course is a form of mechanical inspiration. One may no longer speak of the Great Castration, no longer consider separating the machine from its creation. Man is here to stay, as a part of the Big Picture.

  Everyone knows that machines make love. Not in the crude sense, of course, of those women and men who, for whatever economic purposes may control, lease their bodies for a year or two at a time to one of the vending companies, to be joined with machines, fed intravenously, exercised isometrically, their consciousness submerged (or left turned on, as it would be), to suffer brain implants which stimulate the proper movements for a period not to exceed fifteen minutes per coin, upon the couches of the larger pleasure clubs (and more and more in vogue in the best homes, as well as the cheap street-corner units) for the sport and amusement of their fellows. No. Machines make love via man, but there have been many transferences of function, and they generally do it spiritually.

  Consider, however, an unique phenomenon which has just arisen: the Pleasure-Comp—the computer like an oracle, which can answer an enormous range of inquries, and will do so, only for so long as the inquirer can keep it properly stimulated. How many of you have entered the programed boudoir, to have enormous issues raised and settled, and found that time passes so rapidly. Precisely. Reverse-centaur-like—i.e., human from the waist down—it represents the best of two worlds and their fusion into one. There is a love story wrapped up in all this background, as a man enters the Question Room to ask the Dearabbey Machine of his beloved and her ways. It is happening everywhere, always, and there can often be nothing quite so tender. More of this later.


  Chief of Missions

  Now comes Horus who, seeing Bronze on the wall, deposeth and saith:

  “Open this damned gate or I’ll kick it down!”

  To which Vramin makes reply over the battlement, saying:

  “Since I did not fasten it, I am not about to undo it. Find your own entrance or eat dust.”

  Horus does then kick down the gate, at which Madrak marvels slightly, and Horus then mounts the winding stair to the highest tower. Entering the room, he eyes the poet and the warrior-priest with some malevolence, inquiring:

  “Which of you two denied me passage?”

  Both step forward.

  “A pair of fools! Know you that I am the god Horus, fresh come from the House of Life!”

  “Excuse us for not being duly impressed, god Horus,” says Madrak, “but none gave us entrance here, save ourselves.”

  “How be you dead men named?”

  “I am Vramin, at your service, more or less.”

  “…And I, Madrak.”

  “Ah! I’ve some knowledge of you two. Why are you here, and what is that carrion on the table?”

  “We are here, sir, because we are not elsewhere,” says Vramin, “and the table contains two men and a toad—all of whom, I should say, are your betters.”

  “Trouble can be purchased cheaply, though the refund may be more than you can bear,” says Horus.

  “What, may I inquire, brings the scantily clad god of vengeance to this scrofulous vicinity?” —Vramin.

  “Why, venegance, of course. Has either of you vagabonds set eyes upon the Prince Who Was A Thousand recently?”

  “This I must deny, in good faith.”

  “And I.”

  “I come seeking him.”

  “Why here?”

  “An oracle, deeming it a propitious spot. And while I am not eager to battle heroes—knowing you as such—I feel you owe me an apology for the entrance I received.”

  “Fair enough,” says Madrak, “for know that our hackles have been raised by a recent battle and we have spent the past hours waxing wroth. Will a swig of good red wine convey our sentiments—coming from what is, doubtless, the only flask of the stuff on this world?”

  “It should suffice, if it be of good quality.”

  “Bide then a moment.”