Dramocles: An Intergalactic Soap Opera Read online

  Dramocles

  An Intergalactic Soap Opera

  Robert Sheckley

  Contents

  1

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  3

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  8

  9

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  11

  12

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  47

  Epilogue: The Final Clue

  To Jay, with Love

  1

  King Dramocles, ruler of Glorm, awoke and looked about him and couldn’t remember where he was. This happened to him frequently because of his habit of sleeping in different rooms in his palace as the mood struck him. His palace of Ultragnolle was the largest man-made structure on Glorm, and perhaps in the galaxy. It was so large that it required its own internal transportation system. Within this colossal structure, Dramocles had forty-seven personal bedrooms. He also kept another sixty or so rooms equipped with couches, pullout beds, convertible sofas, air mattresses, and the like, for impulse sleeping. On account of this, going to bed was a nightly adventure for him, and waking up was a daily mystery.

  Sitting up and looking around, Dramocles discovered that he had spent the night sleeping on a pile of cushions in one of the Hirsute Rooms, so called because of the large clumps of black hair growing in the corners. With that much settled, he turned to the matter of coffee.

  Generally, this involved no more than pressing a button beside the bed. This would sound an alarm in the royal kitchen, activating the enormous cappuccino machine. It had a boiler large enough to drive a locomotive, and ten servants worked around the clock stoking the fires beneath it, cleaning filters, adding freshly ground coffee, and performing all of the other steps. Shortly thereafter, steamed cappuccino, exactly sugared to the king’s taste, was supposed to flow through miles of copper tubing, coming out at last through a spigot in whatever room Dramocles desired to have it in.

  This time, however, Dramocles had slept in a part of the palace that was not yet plugged into the coffee circuit. Grumpily he slipped on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and went out into the corridor.

  A neatly stenciled sign on the corridor wall told him that he was at coordinates R52-J26. A monorail ran down the middle of the corridor, so at least he was within the palace transportation network. Of course, there was no train in sight. Dramocles consulted the schedule posted on the wall, and saw that the next train–a Cross Palace Local–was not due for another forty minutes. He lifted the emergency phone from the wall and called Transport Central.

  The telephone rang many times. At last an uncultured voice said, “Yeah, whaddya want?”

  “I want a train sent to me immediately,” Dramocles said.

  “You do, hah? Well, forget it, buddy. Half our trains are in the repair shop and the rest of them are at locations of more importance than where you’re at. There’s nothing out where you’re at except a lot of hairy bedrooms.”

  “This is King Dramocles speaking,” Dramocles said, in a dangerous voice.

  “For real? Let me just check your voice print. … Yeah, you really are. Hey, Sire, I’m sorry about how I talked to you, but you know how it is, noblemen calling me at all hours of the day or night trying to get trains diverted for their personal convenience. Especially now, because of the peace celebrations.”

  “Never mind,” Dramocles said. “How soon can you get a train to me?”

  “Seven minutes, Sire. I’ll divert the Pantheon Express just before it pulls into Chapultepec Station, and–”

  “Does it have coffee-making equipment aboard?”

  “I’ll just check that.… No, Sire, the Pantheon only carries instant coffee and stale Danish. Give me twenty minutes and I can get you a modern breakfast train–”

  “Just send what’s nearest,” Dramocles said. “I’ll have my breakfast later.”

  Fifteen minutes passed. No train came down the monorail. Dramocles picked up the telephone again, but all he could get was a maddening series of clicks. At last a recorded voice told him that all circuits were busy and he would have to place his call through the palace operator. In vain Dramocles shouted that he was the King and that all other calls should be disconnected at once. No one was listening.

  He stalked back to his bedroom to get his cigarettes, but now he couldn’t find which room he had slept in. All of the rooms in this sector were hirsute. Nor did any of the other telephones seem to work. Not even the fire alarm gave any response.

  Furious, Dramocles stomped down the corridor. He figured he had at least an hour’s hike before he reached one of the populated sectors of Ultragnolle. What had he been doing out here in this godforsaken sector last night? He seemed to remember a party, some drugs, some booze, a lot of laughter, and then, oblivion. He trudged along and stopped when he heard the sound of a motor behind him.

  Far down the corridor he could see something tiny with a winking yellow light coming toward him. It grew in size, and was discernible at last as a corridor car, a type of one-wheeled vehicle used by the nobility to get around the palace in a hurry.

  The car came to a neat stop beside him. The bubble top opened and a cheerful, curly-haired boy of twelve or so looked out and said, “Is that you, Father?”

  “Of course it’s me,” Dramocles said. “Which one are you?”

  “I’m Samizat, Father,” the boy said. “My mother is Andrea, whom you divorced two years ago.”

  “Andrea? Small, dark-haired woman with a piercing voice?”

  “That’s her. We live in the St. Michel sector of Glorm. Mother frequently telephones you about her dreams.”

  “Portents she calls them,” Dramocles said. He got in beside Samizat. “Take me to Palace Central.” Samizat threw the corridor car into gear and accelerated fast enough to scorch the wax on the corridor floor.

  After a while the corridor opened into a wide, balustraded balcony. Samizat turned abruptly down a long flight of stairs, then slowed as they approached the vast domed room that contained St. Leopold’s Square. It was an important regional market, filled with striped tents in front of which men and aliens sat and sold a great variety of goods. There were Geiselmen from Glorm’s northernmost province, offering bright wallisberries in small wicker baskets. There were Grots, members of the ancient race that had inhabited Glorm before the arrival of humans, nodding over their bowls of narcotic porridge. Brungers from Dispasia and the flatlands of Arnapest were there too, imposing in their national costume of polished leather and taffeta, offering the intricately carved walking sticks and miniature peaches for which they were famous. And, floating high above the animated scene, were the great blue and gold banners that proclaimed this the thirtieth year of the Pax Glormicae.

  Dramocles spotted a coffeehouse and had his son drop him there. He gulped a double cappuccino, signed for it, and took a corridor taxi to Palace Central.

  Rudolphus, the Chamberlain, was waiting for him by the inner steps, agitation showing on his plump, mustached face.

  “Sire,” he said, “y
ou are late for the audience!”

  “Since I am the King,” Dramocles said, “I can’t be late because whenever I get here is the right time.”

  “Casuistry aside,” Rudolphus said, “you set the time for the audience yourself, and you ordered me to scold you if you were late.”

  “Consider me scolded. Tonight is the official beginning of the Pax Glormicae celebration, I believe?”

  “It is, Sire, and everything is in readiness. King Adalbert of Aardvark arrived last night, and we housed him in the small mansion on the rue Mountjoy. Lord Rufus of Druth is here with his retinue, and they have been given Trontium Castle for their stay. King Snint of Lekk is in the Rose Garden Hotel on Temple Avenue. Your brother, Count John of Crimsole, is docking in the spaceport even now. Only King Haldemar of Vanir has neglected to show up or even RSVP.”

  “Just as we suspected. I will meet with the kings later. Was there anything interesting in today’s mail?”

  “Just the usual junk.”

  Rudolphus gave Dramocles a bunch of letters, which Dramocles shoved into a hip pocket. “I’ll get to this later. Now, let’s have that audience. And try to move it along faster this time, Rudolphus.”

  “Sire, unless you order otherwise, I will follow the protocol exactly as it was laid down by your revered father, Otho the Weird.”

  Dramocles shrugged. Otho’s rules, laws, and precepts were for the most part highly useful, and Dramocles had never gotten around to thinking of rules to replace them with. He entered the audience chamber, followed closely by Rudolphus.

  2

  The audience was the usual boring affair of deciding the penalties for various counts and barons who had come under the royal disfavor for cheating the peasants, or the tax machines, or each other. There wasn’t anything for Dramocles to do, or even to think about, because the Chamberlain had already made all of the decisions, following the precepts of Otho the Weird. The cases droned on, and Dramocles sat on the high throne and felt sorry for himself.

  Despite being absolute monarch of Glorm, and preeminent throughout the Local Planets, Dramocles knew that he had done very little with his life, had just responded to circumstances and absentmindedly ruled Glorm through a long period of unprecedented peace. Bored and unhappy, he fidgeted on his throne and chain-smoked and thought to himself that being a great king was not so great after all. And then the old woman stepped forward, and from that moment everything in his life changed.

  She was a small, humpbacked old woman dressed entirely in black except for her gray shoes and wimple. She pressed through the crowd of lesser nobility and made as to approach the throne, until the guards stopped her with their crossed halberds. Then she called out, “O great King!”

  “Yes, old lady,” said Dramocles, motioning the outraged Rudolphus to be quiet. “I take it you wish to address us. Please do so, and for your sake I hope it’s good.”

  “Sire,” she said, “I must humbly request private audience. What I am to say is solely for the ear of the King.”

  “Indeed?” Dramocles said.

  “Aye, indeed,” the old woman replied.

  Dramocles looked at her appraisingly, and a change so subtle as to be unnoticeable crossed his high-colored features. He snubbed his cigarette in an ashtray carved from a single emerald.

  “Lead her to the Green Chamber,” he said to the nearest guard. “There she may await our pleasure. Will that suit you, my dear?”

  “Yes, Sire, so long as it is not orange.”

  The court gasped at her effrontery. But Dramocles merely smiled and, after the guard had led the woman away, signaled the Chamberlain to get on with the day’s business.

  An hour later the audience had ended for the day. Dramocles went to the Green Chamber. There he seated himself in a comfortable armchair, lit up a cigarette, and turned to the old lady who sat primly before him in a straight-backed chair.

  “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.