Star Winds

Chapter FIFTEEN

As the months passed, the atmosphere within the Aegis sank into gloom. Outside, the Kerek were encamped in force. A constant barrage of ballista missiles, cannon balls and sticky fire was hurled against the sloping walls of the fortress. Galleys sailed overhead and dropped immense stones from great heights. None of this was felt or even heard within the adamant casing, however. Once the original exultation of victory and escape was over, the Aegis’s all-pervading reservoir of silence, of cloying degeneracy, took over.

King Lutheron made some effort to prevent this. He tried to keep his own people apart from the Duke of Koss’s followers as much as possible and forbade most of the pleasures the fortress offered, tearing apart the intricate bordellos, destroying extensive apartments whose weird artistic purpose offended him, and spoiling the dream-slime by mixing acid in it. But nothing, not even the regular military drill he insisted on, seemed able to halt the slow, steady slide into listlessness.

It could not even be said that the whole of the Aegis had fallen into his possession. When Rachad attempted to lead a party through the inner maze, it was to find that he no longer knew the way. Amschel had rearranged the labyrinth, rendering his number code useless and prompting him to retreat hastily, afraid of becoming lost or possibly trapped. He had refused to venture into it again despite Matello’s gibes.

When he could he avoided Matello who, nominally Duke of Koss now, had taken to prowling the Aegis in a fury of pent-up energy, lashing out angrily with his tongue, and sometimes his fists, at anyone he met. Rachad, who himself was utterly appalled by the way events had turned out, did not see how the baron would be able to endure his imprisonment, even in so capacious a refuge as the Aegis. He feared that he would do something foolish, such as open up the Aegis again so as to go down in a blaze of glory.

He had spoken to Zhorga about the dismal prospects for them all. The former merchant airman had stuck out his lower lip glumly.

“We’ve got two choices: either to stay here or take our chances with the Kerek,” he had said. “They’ll be crawling all over Maralia by now—and I reckon it won’t be long either before they get to Earth.”

One night, as Rachad lay in his private room, restlessly trying to sleep, the door opened slowly, and someone entered.

Rachad quit his bed and raised the wick of the night lamp. The intruder closed the door behind him and stared solemnly at Rachad.

“Wolo!” Rachad exclaimed in surprise. It was one of Amschel’s assistants, clad in a plain blue robe. Wolo nodded his head in greeting.

“The master has sent me to take you to him,” he said calmly. “Kindly get dressed, and come with me.”

Rachad felt an acute embarrassment “Why does he want me? He knows?…”

“That you opened the Aegis to the duke’s enemies? Yes… but the fastness of the Aegis is not, after all, Master Amschel’s concern. His work nears culmination. He reminds you of his promise.”

“Promise?”

“He made a bargain with you.”

“Oh. Yes.” A note of suspicious belligerency entered Rachad’s voice. “Well, what if I refuse to come with you?”

Wolo lowered his head, as if understanding something. “I see… Then I will bid you good night, Master Rachad. I will inform the master that you have no interest in the Stone of the Philosophers.”

“Wait!” Rachad said as the other turned to go. “I’ll come.”

Quickly he dressed. Having come this far in pursuit of Gebeth’s goal, he might as well see the business through, he thought. At least it would provide a temporary diversion in what promised to be a lifetime of tedium.

Wolo led him calmly and confidently toward the maze. The Aegis seemed to be sleeping. Once they heard the sound of carousing, as some of Matello’s troops, in defiance of King Lutheron’s orders, disported with the Duke of Koss’s former courtesans. Then they were in the maze, and a distracted look came over Wolo as he repeated the sequence of numbers he had learned, guiding Rachad through into the dim wood.

In the laboratory, Amschel was waiting, wearing a colorful smock on which were woven patterns of star clusters. He sat at a table on which lay The Root of Transformations, the two halves bound together now in lead covers. Beside it was a thick pile of loose papers.

“Good evening, Rachad,” he greeted genially. “Your intrusion into our lives was not, it seems, entirely from honest motives.”

Rachad reddened, and felt sufficiently stung to retort angrily. “What I said was true—I did come to Maralia to obtain the secret of the Stone, though originally I had expected to look no farther than Mars. As for the other thing—yes, I admit it. Baron Matello sent me in here, to open the Aegis and unseat the duke. And for good reason!” Rachad’s voice became more heated. “Don’t you know what’s going on outside? Humanity is being invaded! Koss’s estates could have helped in the war—but now it’s too late!”

“Oh, I am aware of what is happening,” Amschel said quietly. “Did I not tell you that I am a much-traveled man? At a time when Matello and his ilk took cognizance only of their own private quarrels, I already knew how scant mankind’s chances were of prevailing against the Kerek.”

“And so you hid yourself in here and studied philosophy!” Rachad accused. “Why didn’t you invent new alchemical weapons to fight the Kerek, instead? That’s all alchemy is good for anyway, Baron Matello says.”

“Weapons alone will not prevail. The Kerek are too numerous, too ferocious, too resourceful. They will swallow Maralia, then Wenchlas, as they have swallowed others. As they go their numbers increase by reason of their control over captured populations. A large part of the galaxy, if not all the galaxy, may one day comprise the Kerek empire.”

“How readily you seem to accept it,” Rachad muttered.

“I fight the Kerek in my own way,” Amschel told him. “At last I have made azoth. I have impregnated it with all five elements in equal measure. Now only the last two operations remain to be performed: reduction to prima materia, and the creation from that of the Stone. I believe I now have sufficient information to carry these operations through to completion.” He gestured to the book and file on the table. “There is The Root of Transformations, together with a set of my explanatory notes. Together they form an extremely valuable corpus of knowledge. You may take them, in fulfillment of my promise.”

“Why are you giving them to me now? Why not after you have made the Stone?”

“Immense energies are involved in the final operation,” Amschel explained. “The process could go wrong, the laboratory could be destroyed. Then this knowledge would also be destroyed.”

“I see… But how will the Stone help you fight the Kerek? Is it some sort of weapon, then?”

Amschel smiled. “No, the Stone is not a weapon. The true secret of Kerek strength is not, in fact, in their fighting ability but in the factor known as the Kerek Power. I have visited a Kerek planet, and I have seen how this power works. It is a mental force that takes command of cogitation. When under the Kerek Power a man’s thoughts are not his own—they are given him by the Power, and he is unable to generate thoughts from his own consciousness. This force is such that the human mind is unable to withstand it, and that is why the galaxy may, in time, be dominated by a single mentality, a single thought.”

He paused before continuing. “But a man who possesses the Philosopher’s Stone is proof against the Kerek Power. His thoughts are his own, his consciousness is complete and invulnerable. He can rotate the elements, he can expand his consciousness into the macrocosm.” Amschel shrugged, spreading his hands. “Perhaps, with Hermetic art, I could indeed do much to help combat the Kerek. I could create armies of semi-beings. Armed with the Stone, perhaps I could even turn Ouroborous, the great serpent of nature, against them. But still they might be victorious, and then we would have lost forever, with no man free of the Kerek Power. No, I must think centuries ahead. I shall be subtle. I shall train adepts. I shall formulate simpler paths to the Stone, paths requiring but rudimentary apparatus so that the great work may be carried out in secret. Only in this way can I ensure that others besides myself remain free of the Kerek Power—for it is a law that only he who himself prepares the Stone may possess it. A secret brotherhood of those not subject to mental slavery will come into being, albeit that the whole galaxy lies under the Kerek Power.”

“Is this the reason for your work?” Rachad asked.

“I sought the Stone for its own sake. But to save mankind—that, certainly, has increased the urgency.”

“And the duke—was it also his aim?” Rachad continued, thinking that perhaps he had wronged the haughty aesthete.

Amschel snorted softly. “The duke? No. His interests always began and ended in himself.”

Again Amschel indicated the documents on the table. “Take these, then. Wolo will take you back through the maze and stay with you. After three days you may return.”

Reluctantly Rachad picked up the volumes. “You talk of what you will do—yet none of us can even leave the Aegis!”

“As to that, we shall see.”

Wolo beckoned him. Rachad followed, then turned back to Amschel. “If Master Gebeth were to study these, could he make the Stone?”

“I think not, from what you have told me. For one thing, he would not be able to duplicate my equipment.”

“It saddens me to think that his search was hopeless from the start.”

“Nothing is ever completely hopeless,” Amschel said.

According to tradition there were three methods of attaining the Hermetic goal. The first was the slow method, in which the subject had to be enclosed in a sealed vessel and heated over a period of years. The second method, conducted in an open crucible, was quicker but more dangerous. And finally there was the instant or lightning method, about which tradition said very little except that the adept had first to master forces of a colossal order and that therefore it was the most dangerous of all.

The lightning method was the path Amschel had adopted. Once his assistants had helped him to make the final preparations he had sent them away for their own safety, through the inner maze to seek the protection of King Lutheron. He was now alone in the laboratory, ready to put the instructions embodied in The Root of Transformations to the test.

The infusorators, along with the accumulators and giant capacitors that accompanied them, had all been raised to their highest possible pitch; they could scarcely contain their pent-up energy. The great cucurbit Amschel had chosen to be the scene of the drama hummed loudly on low charge, the ten-foot globe’s interior almost enmeshed in the iron and silver arrays that were designed to deliver precise patterns of etheric heat into the transmutation area.

The load of azoth, impregnated with all the elements it lacked as primus agens so that it was dominated by none, had already been introduced into the vessel. It floated in the globe’s center, swirling slowly, suspended by magnetic emanations from the surrounding galvanic coils.

All that day Amschel had spent preparing himself for the ultimate moment, practicing meditation so as to clear his mind. He checked all connections for one last time, then pulled the master lever that, all at once, enlivened the apparatus within the cucurbit.

A haze of golden light filled the glass vessel. The floating ball of azoth seethed. It seemed to go through a multitude of color changes almost too fast for the eye to follow. Amschel put his hand to his eyes to shield them from the glare. Peering through his fingers, through the now white-hot grids and coils, he tried to watch what happened in the center of the cucurbit.

It took about a minute for the transformation to take place. And with every second of that passing minute, Amschel’s joy and wonderment increased. How easy it all seemed, how flawless the art, when everything went according to exact knowledge! The most crucial secret, he now saw, was not in ever-increasing power, as he had once thought, but in the preparation—in azoth, that marvelous and unique substance, in exact and careful balancing, in the perfect measure with which the subject was slowly evolved, by process after process. No wonder life-times had been vainly spent attempting to perfect this subject!

Swirling, raving, boiling, the subject became a gas, a plasma, then solid, then liquid again, each of the five elements predominating in turn as the hypostatic principles governing them fought furiously, locked in a death battle destined to end with their disappearance in the merging of opposites. Again a procession of color changes, ending in nigredo—the blackest black.

So far everything was as predicted. And now the miracle happened. The subject became nebulous, seemed to expand and at the same time to sink in on itself, as though subsiding in a direction not contained within the cucurbit. The final sign appeared and Amschel knew that the subject had reduced itself to prima materia.

This sign was described by the book in most curious language, but Amschel at once recognized it. At one moment the sample of prima materia seemed to be a roiling black cloud, at another a mass of obsidian, at yet another there seemed to be nothing there at all—just darkness. This, Amschel understood, was because hyle could not be seen by the eye. It was formless; it was primordial chaos—not the chaos of form in confusion, but the chaos that had existed before form ever was. It was the original substance of the world as it had been before separating into space, time, the elements, life—it was the One that had become many. It was nigredo, a black hole, an empty plenum.

If left alone it would dissolve and vanish into the hylic substratum that some said underlay the phenomenal world, or, if there were no such substratum (The Root of Transformations was vague on this point) it would degenerate back into a compound of elements. The final operation, to further transform this fused mass into the Stone, had therefore to be carried out without delay.

Amschel trembled as he pulled a series of levers. There was a loud sizzling and crackling as all the infusorators, including many he had kept standing by, poured their total energy into one vast capacitor he had erected in an adjoining chamber—filling nearly the whole of the chamber. When he knew from the quality of sound that there was not one trickle of infusoration left to be gained, he pulled the final lever.

In one colossal bang, the capacitor discharged its entire load, sending it flooding through the thick bars of solid iron laid across the floor and into the cucurbit, there to leap from an arrangement of sturdy black grids that had not been used hitherto. The resultant explosion flung Amschel across the laboratory. The flash blinded him.

The bang deafened him. He felt as though he were being burned alive.

He regained full possession of his senses to see that the chamber was wrecked. The bars of iron had fused and melted. Of the cucurbit, scarcely anything was left There was a strong stench in the air, a stench he knew well from previous infusoratory disasters.

His clothing was charred. And when he tried to move, he discovered that the flesh beneath, too, was blistered and seared. Every inch of the front part of his head, limbs and body—the part that had faced the cucurbit—blazed with agony.

He knew that he was lucky to be alive. Ruefully he recalled the other precondition for attempting the lightning method—that the adept must have a nearly indestructible body. Even so, the damage was not so great that it could not be attributed solely to the release of electric fluid. The greater forces locked in the prima materia had evidently not gotten out of control.

He hobbled over to the shattered remnants of smoking metal and molten glass, stirring through the mess with his shoe and kicking aside fragments.

He was not long in finding it, even though it was coated lightly with a white ash which dropped away when he picked it up, leaving it clean and unmarked.

In color it was pale green, slightly translucent, like jade. Despite the intense heat it had undergone it was cool, smooth to the touch but with an odd smoothness so that the fingers were not quite sure they had touched anything.

Amschel was vibrant with anticipation as he carried the reward of his labors into the next chamber for evaluation. His injuries almost forgotten, he placed it on a table and sat down.

Through a magnifying glass he could detect no blemish on the perfectly spherical surface, or beneath it. Laying down the lens, he proceeded to the specified tests. He imagined the sphere to be a cube, and projected the thought. Instantly it was a cube, the sides perfect planes, the edges straight and square-set. Likewise he transformed it, by thought, into a double-ended cone, a tetrahedron, a torus, a statuette of the goddess Demeter.

He nodded, letting it revert back to a sphere. The test of amorphism was satisfied. The stone had no intrinsic shape. Next he took up a sharp saw-bladed knife and set himself to carve off a portion of it. Although of gemlike hardness in the hand, the stone offered little resistance to the blade, and he sliced off a piece of about an inch in thickness.

The severed portion hit the tabletop, but no longer as the jade-like substance of the stone. It had instantly decomposed into a scintillant red powder.

Amschel well understood this. Divorced from the fundamental unity of the stone, the fragment could not maintain itself and had begun to decay into merely normal states of matter. Already it was compound, partly elemental.

With this powder marvels could be performed. Compounded further, introduced into other substances, it would create a whole new range of efficacious agents.

More important, however, was that when pared the stone had immediately reconstituted itself. It was as if the knife had done no more than slice through water.

The test of wholeness and indivisibility was satisfied.

Amschel lifted the pale green ball and stared straight into its heart. This, then, was the Stone. This was the Tincture, the Most Excellent Medicine, the secret substance of the universe, wrenched out of the hylic realm by a blast of manmade lightning. Gazing upon this wonder, Amschel experienced a supreme joy and exultation. Now he knew that the Hermetic art was real, that the vision of Zosimos was true, that nature applied to nature transforms nature!

This much proved, it remained but to verify one more property of the stone—a little-known property conveyed cryptically, elliptically, in the alchemical code word V.I.T.R.I.O.L.: Visita Interiora Terrae, Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem—“Visit the Interior of the Earth, Through Purification Thou Wilt Find the Hidden Stone.”

Few indeed knew that this formula indicated how the adept may be transformed into a Magus of Power. The earth symbolized the adept’s own body, the place where the Stone could be hidden away from the sight of ordinary man. Amschel moved the Stone. He pressed it to his forehead, between his eyes—and pushed. The Stone moved—inward, passing through skin and bone.

Into Amschel’s brain.

In the Philosopher’s Stone was no differentiation of parts. The Stone was Ultimate Oneness. Immersed in the Stone, the tissues of Amschel’s brain experienced transcendental unity, total access—to one another, and, eventually, to the macrocosm itself.

Amschel’s consciousness was whipped away from the narrow laboratory where he sat. It expanded and expanded, until he seemed to be moving through an endless dark, a dark that was paradoxically filled with light.

The Black Light of the adepts, by which one saw without seeing. Vastness, vastness. And now Amschel perceived the macrocosm.

It was not a place, or region. It was the infinite world system seen from the point of view of totality, endless movement without destination, coming without arriving, going without departing. Man’s reason, evolved in the microcosm, could not grasp the essence of the macrocosm. Even when super-conscious as Amschel’s was, the mind could see it only in terms of entities, signs and symbols, the ancient eternal symbols of alchemy. The mighty Worm Ouroborous, appearing as a vast ring galaxy larger than milliards of galaxies put together, spinning at colossal speed, endlessly devouring and reevolving itself—thus was the macrocosm maintained! The alchemical marriage of King and Queen, conjunction of opposites by which the eternal mystery of merging and separating was brought to pass.

These and other visions of macrocosmic processes blasted into Amschel’s consciousness with such a sense of super-reality that the myriads of worlds flowing away from them seemed mere shadows. Then the direction of his gaze became more specific. He witnessed, as if it lay below him in some multidimensional region so that he saw it from countless vantage points at once—from north, south, east, west, nadir and zenith, externally and internally—the staggering spiral blaze of his own galaxy. He saw, slumbering coiled like a quiescent serpent within the spiraling star arms, the power known as the Sleeping Sulphur, and he saw that this power could, if one knew how, be prodded and disturbed, even, momentarily, awakened.

But he saw, too, that the struggle between man and Kerek, between self-determined consciousness and hypnotized slavery, was of no consequence to nature. It had no place in the macrocosm.

But Amschel did have a place. He was a Magus of Power. He could rotate the elements, converting one substance into another. He could rotate space and time, projecting himself to distant places. He was not governed by number: he could project himself into several different locations at once, unlimited by a single body.

He could, if he chose, disturb the Sleeping Sulphur.

With an effort, Amschel scaled his mind down from the Great World that was not available to him. He was back in the microcosm, sitting in his adamant-lined chamber, the burns on his body beginning to heal.

He had discounted the use of purely physical powers to achieve his long-term mission, but that did not preclude their deployment in a more limited sense, at this juncture, anyway. He must, he decided, arrange some means for his helpers to escape their adamant prison.

Also, he must cover his tracks.

Four days passed before Wolo could be prevailed upon to lead Rachad and Baron Matello back into the laboratory. The other assistants had come out two days before, but had said little.

As soon as the trio entered the dismal wood, a strong smell of burning reached their nostrils. When they passed through the door of the laboratory, it was to find a spectacle of devastation.

From the look of it a tremendous explosion had spread through the network of chambers, wrecking and charring everything that was not adamant. A penetrating stink, arising from numerous volatile substances, permeated the air; underfoot the floor was slippery with some foam-like stuff—the result, most likely, of the spilling of reactive chemicals.

Wolo moaned, then began to run, slipping and sliding in the mess. Pressing kerchiefs to their faces to ward off the acerbic vapors, Matello and Rachad followed, coming after a few minutes to the infusoratory laboratory where Amschel had sited the great cucurbit for the completion of the work.

Here, evidently the center of the explosion, the destruction was even more complete. With an expression of woe, Wolo looked on an almost empty chamber, practically its whole content being fused into one messy coagulation.

The baron looked about him sourly. “So Amschel’s great experiment was very much a failure after all. Lucky for you he sent you away, or you’d have ended up as dead as he is.”

“But where’s the body?” Rachad said.

“Blown to shreds, and the shreds burned to smoke, I imagine. What’s left of him will be soot, and you’re treading that underfoot. Come along, let’s get back. Later you can sort through all this and see if you can find anything useful.”

“I can hardly believe it,” Wolo intoned emptily. “Years of work—all for nothing!”

“Oh, an alchemist thrives on lost labor!” Matello retorted jovially. He strode from the chamber, Rachad and Wolo trailing reluctantly after him.

Rachad’s heart was heavy as they retraced their steps through the maze. He had not expected this outcome, and it made him feel somber and shaken. In a way it seemed to dash any last vestige of hope—for the Hermetic goal, for the future of mankind, or indeed for his own future.

He no longer believed in the Stone, he told himself. It was all fantasy, and Amschel’s exaggerated claims for it were the dodderings of an old fool. Matello had the right idea: he was a rude realist, unswayed by fanciful notions.

Back in his headquarters, news was waiting for Baron Matello that something unusual was happening outside on the plain. He hurried to the observation post and peered through the eyepiece that, by means of lenses and mirrors, brought a view seen from a narrow slit high in the adamant wall of the Aegis.

On the sloping ground before the Aegis, the Kerek were encamped in force. But now something was astir in the riotous sprawl of tall tents and grounded galleys.

The bombards and catapult guns were abandoned. Men and Kerek rushed to and fro in apparent panic, jostling together. Galleys were hastily taking off, both human and alien forms clinging to their sides and sometimes falling away as they ascended raggedly into the sky.

A ruddy, wavering light illuminated the scene. This in itself was not so unusual—the planet’s sun burned sometimes white, sometimes red, sometimes both together in a fiery, whirling manner. The light was, however, much brighter than normally.

Was this what had caused the Kerek to take fright? Intrigued and excited, Matello continued to watch, until the glare increased so much that he snatched himself away from the eyepiece with a cry, holding his streaming eye.

A visible cone of light came from the lens. Curtly Matello gave the order for the observation slit to be closed up.

They all sat huddled blindly in the adamant shell, waiting and wondering.

The star which the Aegis circled had never been particularly stable, though human memory could not, of course, know that. Ever since mining had begun on the planet, the sun’s temperature had never varied by more than a degree, and its unsteady appearance, the disk writhing and whirling like a flame, had generally been taken to betoken no more than an unusually mobile photosphere.

With the violent etheric storm that was now sweeping through the southern part of Maralia, however, the depths of the star became disturbed. The photosphere began to flash and boil, blasting out in fantastic storms as extra energy poured from the core. The amount of radiation it sent winging through the ether increased, erratically but substantially.

The effect on the small mining planet, the only one of three to be inhabited, was to scorch and bake it unmercifully. The atmosphere expanded, became unbreathably hot and thin. The landscape was pounded by furious red and white light, by great waves of searing heat. The mining towns burned like paper in a furnace, the Kerek camps burned, their ships burned as they vainly tried to claw through the sky. Only a few survived, those who were quick enough to seek refuge in the deepest mines.

For a week the solar storm continued. On the whole planet, one place was safe—the Aegis. Slits and flues tightly closed, the fortress remained cool, unaffected by the drenching energy that poured futilely onto its adamant exterior, for fire and ether could not penetrate those walls of pure earth. For several months the denizens skulked within, not daring even to open an observation slit for fear of what might come pouring through it.

Outside, meanwhile, the sun quieted and the planet gradually cooled, like a ball of clay that was taken out of an oven. Eventually those within the Aegis peered out. More cautiously, they ventured out, finding a world even deader than it had been before.

Further empty months passed. And then a military starship bearing a Maralian standard sailed over the mountain range and set down before the Aegis. At first Matello and the king were suspicious. It had puzzled them when no Kerek arrived to replace their brothers annihilated by the wild sun, and they suspected trickery. But at length a party from the ship was admitted, led by the young Baron Rodrigeur, whom Matello had met briefly once and thought he recognized.

Rodrigeur, though barely above twenty years of age, was capable and self-confident, and already hardened by war. In the king’s own quarters he told an incredible but heartening tale of a series of ether storms more violent and widespread than anything previously known, dashing the Kerek fleets to pieces before they could effect a proper occupation of their latest conquest. In the respite, Maralia had rallied. And though the struggle still went on, the cause was no longer regarded as completely hopeless.

Those present listened in amazement. “A miraculous delivery!” King Lutheron breathed.

Rodrigeur turned to him apologetically. “Your brother Murdon currently reigns in your place, Your Majesty,” he said. “Everyone had thought you dead, until it was remembered that the Duke of Koss’s Aegis lies close to where the first battle took place and it was suggested you might have token refuge here. I was dispatched to investigate, as soon as could be managed.”

“And where is the seat of government?” Lutheron asked sternly.

“At Myrmidia, liege-lord. All the western part of the kingdom lies in Kerek hands.”

“But not for long!” Matello blazed. “We have half a chance of victory, you say? A quarter of a chance is good enough for me! Let’s be away from here, liege-lord, and into the fray!”

“Steady, Sir Goth,” King Lutheron murmured. “First, we travel to Myrmidia. It will be interesting to see how my brother takes the news of my continuing good health…”