Dramocles: An Intergalactic Soap Opera (2 page)

“So,” he said, “you have come.”

“At the very time appointed,” the old woman said. “It took no little courage for me to bring myself to your awesome presence, and I did so only because I greatlier feared the not doing so.”

“At first I thought you were a crazy person,” Dramocles said. “But then I said to you, ‘Indeed,’ and you replied, ‘Aye, indeed,’ and I recognized one of the mnemonics that I use as a private recognition code between me and my agents. In the next sentence I used the word
green
, and you replied with
orange
, putting the matter beyond doubt. Did I teach you others?”

“Ten others, making twelve in all, so that I could signal to you somehow if a different sequentiation of dialogue had occurred between us.”

“Twelve mnemonics,” Dramocles marveled. “My entire stock! I must have judged this a matter of earth-shaking importance. I don’t even know your name, old woman.”

“That, Sire, is how you said it would be, back when you taught me the mnemonics. My name is Clara.”

“A mystery! And it’s happening to me!” Dramocles said happily. “Tell your story, Clara.”

Clara said, “O great King, you visited me thirty years ago, in my city of Murl, where I earned a modest living remembering things for people who are too busy to remember them for themselves. You said to me, ‘Clara’ (reading my name above the door–Clara’s Rememberatorium), ‘I have a message of great importance that I want you to learn by heart and tell me thirty years from today, when I shall need to remember it. I myself will not even remember this conversation until you come to remind me of it, because that’s the way it’s got to be.’

“ ‘You may rely on me, Highness,’ I said.

“ ‘Of that I have no doubt,’ you replied, ‘because I have taken the precaution of putting your name on the official criminal calendar, to be executed summarily thirty years and one day from today. That way, I figure you’re going to show up on time.’ And then you smiled at me, Sire, gave me the message, and took your departure.”

“You must have been a trifle nervous about possible unexpected delays on your way here,” Dramocles said.

“I took the precaution of moving to your great city of Ultragnolle shortly after our meeting, and setting up my trade of Remembrancer in the Street of the Armorers just five minutes’ walk from the palace.”

“You are a wise and prudent woman, Clara. Now, tell me what I told you to tell me.”

“Very well, Sire. The key word is-Shazaam!”

Upon hearing that word from the Ancient Tongue, Dramocles was flooded with a luminous memory of a certain day thirty years past.

3

Thirty years sped backward like a dissolving newsreel montage. Young Dramocles, twenty years old, sat in his private study, sobbing. He had just received the news that his father, King Otho of Glorm, popularly called “The Weird,” had died minutes ago when his laboratory on the moonlet Gliese had blown up. Presumably this was due to some miscalculation on Otho’s part, since he was the only person in the laboratory or even on Gliese at the time. It was a fittingly flamboyant way for the king to depart, in an atomic explosion that had blown apart the entire moonlet.

Tomorrow, all Glorm would be in mourning. Later in the week, a coronation would be held, confirming Dramocles as the new king. Although he looked forward to this, Dramocles cried because he had loved his difficult and unpredictable father. But grief struggled with joy in his heart, because, just before his ill-fated trip to Gliese, Otho had had a heart-to-heart talk with his son, reminding him of his duties and responsibilities when he was king, and then quite unexpectedly revealing to him the great destiny that Dramocles had before him.

Dramocles had been amazed by what Otho had told him. He had always wanted a destiny. Now his life would have meaning and purpose, and those were the greatest things anyone could have.

There was only one hitch. As Otho had explained, Dramocles could not begin the active pursuit of his destiny just yet. He was going to have to wait, and it would be a long wait. Thirty years would have to pass before the conditions were right. Only then could the work of Dramocles’ destiny begin, and not a day sooner.

Thirty years! A lifetime! And not only was he going to have to wait, he was also going to have to keep his destiny a secret until the moment for action came. There was nobody he could trust with something as big as this. No one must know, not even his most trusted friends and advisers.

“Damn it all,” Dramocles grumbled, “come to think of it, I can’t even trust myself with this. I’ll just blurt it out sometime when I’m stoned or tripping or drunk. I’m the last person I’d trust with a secret like this.”

He brooded for a while, chain-smoking cigarettes and considering various alternatives. At last he came to a momentous decision and called for his psychiatric android, Dr. Fish.

“Fish,” he said briskly, “I have a certain train of thought in my mind. I don’t want to remember it.”

“Easy enough to suppress a thought, or even an entire topic,” Fish said, in the squeaky voice that androids have despite great advances in voicebox technology. “Your esteemed father, Otho, always had me blot out the names of mistresses who didn’t work out, all except their birthdays, since he was a kindly man. He also insisted upon not remembering the color blue.”

“But I don’t want to lose this thought, either,” Dramocles said. “It’s a very important thought. I want to remember it thirty years from now.”

“That’s considerably more difficult,” Fish said.

“Couldn’t you suppress the thought but give me a posthypnotic command to remember it thirty years hence?”

“I did use that technique successfully for King Otho. He wanted to think of Gilbert and Sullivan every six months, for reasons he never disclosed to me. Unfortunately, thirty years is too long for a reliable posthypnotic memory trigger.”

“Isn’t there something else you can do?”

“Well, I could key the memory to a word or phrase. Then Your Highness would have to entrust the key word to some trusty person who would say that word to you in thirty years’ time.”

“Such as a remembrancer.” Dramocles thought about it for a few seconds. Although not entirely foolproof, it seemed a pretty good plan. “What do you suggest for a key word?” he asked Fish.

“Personally, I’d pick
shazaam
,” the android replied.

Dramocles consulted the Galactic Yellow Pages for a reliable Rememberatorium. He decided upon Clara’s. Piloting his own space yacht, he went to the city of Murl and gave Clara the key word.

When he returned to Ultragnolle, he summoned Dr. Fish once again. “Now I want you to suppress my memory of what we discussed, keying its revivification to the word
shazaam.
There is just one more matter before you begin, but I don’t quite know how to tell you.”

“No need to discomfit yourself, my King. I have already put my affairs in order since I believe that you are planning to destroy me.”

“How did you figure that out?” Dramocles asked with a surprised grin.

“Elementary, Sire, for one who has studied your character and appreciates your need for the utmost secrecy in this matter.”

“I hope you don’t resent me for it,” Dramocles said. “I mean, it isn’t as though you are a living person or anything.”

“We androids have no sense of self-preservation,” Dr. Fish said. “Let me just take this last opportunity of wishing you the best of luck on the splendid enterprise upon which you will eventually be launched.”

“That’s good of you, Fish,” Dramocles said. He stuck a sticky blob of blue plastic onto Fish’s collarbone and implanted a pale green detonator. “Good-bye, old friend. Now let’s get on with it.”

Fish set up the narcopsychosynthesizer and did the various things required of him. (Dramocles could not remember what all of his final decisions had been, because he had had Fish excise certain of them for self-disclosure at a later date.) Fish finished. Dramocles got up from the operating table thinking he had just had a massage, and now wanted to take a brisk walk. A posthypnotic command took him a hundred yards from Fish’s laboratory. Then he heard the explosion.

Hurrying back, he saw that Dr. Fish had been blown up.

Dramocles couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to blow up an inoffensive android like Fish. He never considered the possibility that he had done it himself, since exploded androids tell no tales.

The android had done his job well, and Dramocles went to work ruling his planet and wondering what his real destiny was. And that’s how it had been for thirty years.

4

After the memory had run its course, Dramocles leaned back in his armchair and fell to musing. How wonderful and unexpected a thing was life, he thought. An hour ago he had been bored and unhappy, with nothing to look forward to but the dreary business of running a planet that pretty much looked after itself. Now everything was changed, and his life was transformed; or soon would be. He had an important destiny after all, and meaningful work to fulfill; that was really all a man could desire after he was already a king, and rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and had possessed uncountable numbers of the most beautiful women on many worlds. After you’ve had all that, spiritual values begin to mean something to you.

He took a few extra moments to marvel at his own cleverness–his genius, in fact, in arranging all of this for himself thirty years ago so that he would have something to do now, at the age of fifty, at a time when he really needed it.

He roused himself from self-adoration with an effort. “Clara,” he said, “you have earned your bag of golden ducats. In fact, I’m going to make it two bags’ full and give you a castle in the country as well.”

He called up the Rewards Clerk and told him that Clara was to be issued two standard bags of golden ducats and one standard castle in the county of Veillence, where she was to be maintained in Condition Four style.”

“Well, Clara,” he said, “I hope that pleases you.”

“Indeed it does, Sire,” Clara said. “But might I inquire what Condition Four style means?”

“Reduced to its essentials, it means that you will live in your castle in utmost comfort, but will not be allowed to leave its walled surround, not to receive visitors or to communicate with anyone aside from the robot servants.”

“Oh,” said Clara.

“Nothing personal, of course,” Dramocles said. “I’m sure you’re an old lady of absolute discretion. But surely you can appreciate that no one must find out that I know what my destiny is, or will know shortly. They’d act against me, you see. One simply doesn’t crap around with something as big as this.”

“I fully understand, Sire, and I applaud the wisdom of your action toward me despite my lifetime of unsullied rectitude.”

“I’m so glad,” Dramocles said. “I was afraid you might feel badly used, which would have been tiresome.”

“Fear not, great King. It is my pleasure to serve you, even if only by my incarceration. I am only too happy to oblige, even if it does mean that I must live out my few remaining years in solitude, without the comfort of my friends, and with the added annoyance of possessing a fortune in gold which I cannot spend.”

“You know,” Dramocles said, “I never thought of that.”

“Not that I’m complaining, Sire.”

“Clara,” said Dramocles, locking his fingers behind his head, then hastily unlocking them just in time to take a smoldering cigarette out of his hair and snub it out in a solid-silver sardine can, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Give me a list of the people you want with you up to the number of twenty. I’ll have them arrested on trumped-up charges and exiled to your castle, and I’ll never tell them you knew about it.”

“That is really surpassingly kind of you, Sire. The matter of the unspendable gold is insignificant and I apologize for having brought it up.”

“I’ve got a way of handling that, too, Clara. I’ll have one of my clerks send you catalogues from all the best shops on Glorm. You can order what you please. Yes, and I’ll see that you get the royal discount, which amounts to sixty percent of the true manufacturer’s cost and ought to make your ducats go a long way.”

“God bless Your Majesty, and may your destiny be as splendid as your generosity.”

“Thanks, Clara. The Payments Clerk at the end of the hall will set it all up for you. One thing before you go: did I say anything to you about what, specifically, my destiny was, and what I was to do in order to accomplish it?”

“Not a word, great King. But didn’t the key word unlock all of that for you?”

“No, Clara. What I remember now is that I
have
a destiny, and that I am supposed to do something about it. But what that something is, I don’t know.”

“Oh, dear,” Clara said.

“Still, I’m sure I can figure it out.”

Clara curtseyed and left.

5

Dramocles spent the next hour trying to remember what his destiny was, but without success. The details, the specifics, the instructions, even the hints, seemed to have been lost or misplaced. It was a ridiculous situation for a king to find himself in. What was he supposed to do now?

He couldn’t think of anything, so he went down to the Computation Room to see his computer.