The Warlock of Rhada by Robert Cham Gilman Read Free Book Online Page B

battle-partner.
    “Look at them up there, will you? Glamiss and the priest, settling the hash of the whole bloody world.”
    The Vulk smiled inwardly. He had seen it all happen before in the course of his race’s group-life. Passive, directed by forces humans would not begin to understand for a million years, the Vulk had seen the wheel of history turn many times. We watch, Vulk Asa thought, and we wish you well. But we do not interfere.
    And across the miles he felt the caressing touch of his sister-wife’s thought: Guide them gently and they will go far.
     
     

Chapter Six
     
    Conditions will be so terrible that no man will be able to lead a decent life. Then will all the sorrows of the Apocalypse pour down upon mankind: Flood, Earthquake, Pestilence and Famine; neither shall the crops grow nor the fruits ripen; the wells will dry up and the waters will bear upon them blood and bitterness, so that the birds of the air, the beasts in the field and the fishes in the sea will all perish.
    --From the Nürnburg Chronicle (AD 1493 Old Style)
Middle Dawn Age period
     
    The cyclic repetitions of human history fill me with a sense of déjà vu. I am the mightiest of men--and the most frightened.
    --Attributed to Rigell XXVIII,
last Galacton of the First Stellar Empire
     
    In his drugged sleep of dreams, the old man who had been Ophir ben Rigell ibn Sol alt Messier, Nephew and Heir to the Great Throne, Lord of the Sky Isles and the Marches, Prince of Rhada and High Duke of Cygnus, Amir of Tau Ceti and King-Elector of the Empire, could both see and remember.
    His robe, on orders from the hospital computer, administered his maintenance dose of trilaudid each time he slept. The regimen was an improvisation, for the hospital computer having waited in vain for centuries, for someone to tell it how to cure the old man’s addiction and drug-induced blindness could prescribe nothing better. Once the patient was taken from the cold Sleep, the withdrawal of the drug would kill him--and he was too old to be put back in the vaults. He could not again be wakened.
    The effect of trilaudid was, in its early stages, a feeling of well-being and euphoria. The user became aware of intense pleasure in every physical and mental activity, and the unpleasant aspects of life were transmuted into sources of joy. The Lord Ophir had, long before coming to the vaults of the cold Sleep, passed through that stage. He had entered the final stages of addiction in which the trilaudid addict began to shut down his sensory extensions into the real world, the more fully to appreciate the delights to be enjoyed inwardly. The first faculty to go was generally sight, and so it had been in the case of Lord Ophir. He had been almost totally blind before the Lady Dihanna (at the Lord Rigell’s insistence) had prevailed upon Ophir to take the Sleep.
    Cannily, he had known even as he boarded the Delos that night, millennia ago, that her real purpose had been to store him until some cure for his addiction (rather than merely his blindness, which was but a symptom) could be found.
    In his alert dream, at his own choice, he relived those days. He remembered that trilaudid addiction had been widespread among the lords and nobles of the Empire. That “unimportant” civil conflict on the Rim had been, in fact, unimportant only to an aristocracy and a large upper-middle class removed from reality by trilaudid and its derivatives. The Inner Worlds had been gutted of purpose or discipline by their own popular, drug-oriented, and permissive culture. A few nobles--Dihanna had been one of them--had striven for a rebirth of discipline. Ophir considered this with dreamy pleasure: they had obviously failed. The Empire was no more.
    With trilaudid rerouting the electrical impulses of his brain, Ophir could survey the softly featureless landscape of his memories with joy. Even the knowledge that in his waking state he would be irritable to the point of paranoia, that his memory