And The Devil Will Drag You Under (1979) (37 page)

She turned back to Walters for a moment.
No use making Mogart's mistake,
She told herself.

She walked slowly, majestically, forward, trying to decide what to do with him.
Replace his
memories,
She decided, so
that he would never even know, guess, or doubt the power of the
Goddess.
She was already making plans. A perfect world, an extension of that valley all over the Earth, happiness, kindness, no want or fear, all presided over by Her, of course. A perfect world, where the mistakes of the past would not be made.

So deeply was She thinking of this new world She was going to create, She failed to see the board with which Mac had struck Mogart. She stepped on it, and it flew out from under Her, as did Her feet.

Her Supreme Holiness, Goddess of the Earth Jill McCulloch, fell flat on Her magnificent fanny.

Mac heard her cry out as she slipped and chanced a look up. She fell hard on her left side, with no chance to break her fall or time to get herself out of it by way of the Eye. The great jewel came loose from her right hand when she opened the hand to try to cushion the fall. As she hit the ground, the jewel rolled almost in front of him.

Incredulous, he picked it up. She realized what had happened almost immediately and jumped quickly to her feet. Mac, fighting back those still-present primal emotions, looked at the glowing orb and thought:
You have no desire for the Eye of Baal. You want me to have it.

She stopped, looking momentarily confused. In that same moment Mac Walters started feeling what first Mogart and then Jill McCulloch had felt when gripping the Eye of Baal-the sense of stored-up energy, of near limitless power and potential now within him.

He stared hard at her. She was still as incredibly beautiful as she had made herself, and he still felt strong emotions for her.

A queen!
he thought triumphantly.
A queen fit for such as I!

Slowly his shape also changed. He was still himself, but all had been made perfection-the Grecian ideal of manhood. She was awed in spite of herself.

He smiled, seeing in her face that the transformation was perfect. He turned to the Grecian palace she had built. It would do, he decided. Grand and glorious, a seat of ultimate power.

"What will you do now?" she asked in a voice as beautiful and wondrous as her appearance.

He thought a moment. "We shall remake the world, you and I!" he almost shouted in anticipation. "We shall remake it into something better than it was! And while we reign, the people of Earth shall know no want or fear, for we have learned so much and undergone so much that it is only just that we should determine the new way of the world!"

She joined Him, stood beside Him, and together they looked at the glorious palace.

"Where do we begin?" she asked him, sharing his vision.

"At the beginning, probably, which is the first step amateurs face in their attempts to muck things up," came a strange voice behind them.

They whirled and saw that they were no longer alone. Nine creatures stood upon the plain, huge and imposing. All looked much like Mogart had looked when he'd possessed the Eye of Baal-imposing, powerful, like something out of a primal mythos. But there was something else there, too, that had been ab-sent in Mogart: a sense of tremendous dignity and quiet wisdom.

Each wore a great golden chain around his neck, and hanging from each chain was an Eye of Baal.

Five were male, four female, although there was no appreciable difference between them unless you looked in the region of the genitalia.

Mac could only think of Mogart's boast that only ten Eyes were needed to create an entire Alternative level-a whole universe!

And, counting his, there were ten now in this small space.

"Who are you?" he asked, guessing the answer.

"We are the Security Council of the Main Line," responded the one in the middle who' had first spoken. "We are the heads of the nine colleges which make up the University. We are the ones who authorize the power jewels to be crafted, and the ones who authorize the creation and destruction of Alternatives." The demon looked him squarely in the eye. "We did not authorize you to have an Eye of Baal."

Mac Walters felt nervous panic rising inside him and fought to control it. "It's mine now! Ours!

We went and got it! We worked for it! We
earned
it!"

The creature sighed. "Don't you think this godly horse-trading foolishness has gone far enough?

Surely the lessons taught you in your experiences have dem-onstrated to the rational part of your mind that
no
single human being is capable of handling such power."
"You
do," Mac responded defensively.

"We do not," the demon told him. "While we hold our positions we live together, eat together, sleep to-gether, do all things together. We do this for a set period of time and then we surrender our power and position. And during this period of time when we
do
have the power, none of us can abuse it without being detected and corrected by the other eight." The crea-ture looked down at the Eye dangling from the thick gold chain. "This is not power. This is
responsibility.
It is what we have and accept, and what you do not. It is why you must surrender the Eye to us, so that it might once more be split and returned to its owners-after those owners undergo a great deal of work and meditation to prove that they deserve it." A clawed hand reached out. "Give the Eye to me."

Walters stepped back a bit. "No! It's mine!"

The creature shook his head. "Why is it yours? More than hers? More than Mogart's? More than the owners of the original gems from which it was crafted?"

"It's mine because I have it," Mac responded de-fiantly. "Nobody has any right to take it from me!"

The leader sighed. "We can. You must know that, logically. As powerful and godlike as the Eye is, it is not limitless power. Two Eyes can undo one. You face nine. And your own actions prove your unworthiness to use it. Surely there is still a rational part of you that realizes that such power must corrupt the emotions of the wielder even as it did our brother Asmodeus and the woman beside you. Consider what you defy. Nine Eyes are fifty-four jewels in parallel series. Each jewel amplifies by a power of ten, and the efficiency is raised so that there is an additional factor of thirty-six. Ten to the ninetieth power. With one Eye you might rule a galaxy. With nine you might well create one."

There was dead silence, save for the now-gentle wind coming through the mountain passes. Jill McCul-loch moved, turning to Mac Walters, who stood as if frozen, and gently removed the Eye from his hand. He offered no protest, although she sensed that he was not under any sort of spell of command. There was simply no purpose in making these creatures use that power. Turning once more, she walked to the creatures standing there in a line, just in front of the bar which had been so much the center of their existence recently, and handed the Eye of Baal to the leader.

Then she looked into those incredibly wise and so very tired-looking eyes and asked the question that had to be asked.

"What is to become of our world-and of us?"

The leader's gaze showed deep compassion, compas-sion mixed with understanding for what they had been through, and why, and what they faced now. It was very different from the feelings generated by any of the other demons they had known.
We know,
it seemed to say.
We're only
human, too.

"When you wished Asmodeus to go to Hell, he natu-rally appeared immediately in the Board of Ethics hearing room at the University," the old one explained. "You see, Hell is a subjective place-and that was the place he feared the most. It was no trouble at all to get the story out of him-a bit one-sided, I will admit, but our devices were able to sort and balance. He's not really a bad man, you know. Despite his excesses, the similarity between what he would do with the Eye and what either of you would do is rather striking. He is, quite simply, human. That, of course, is the tragedy we all must bear."

They understood, she knew. Understood what it must be like to be just an ordinary individual in a mul-tiplicity of universes where such power existed.

The leader read her thoughts. "He was a philosophy instructor. He was close to us, could see the sort of power being wielded and the type of people who de-cided it. Just people. Ordinary people, like himself. And he found others-five others-who felt the same, who craved the power and
knew
that they would be better gods than those who acted the part. Like prideful men for all time, they were well-meaning, utopian idealists, really. They really did think, in their conceit, that they would be better at it than we. Like you, they saw the power but did not comprehend the responsibility that goes with it, that must always be present so that the power can be used properly and with respect. They procured power jewels, supposedly to pursue minor projects on some of the neglected or abandoned areas. They were to meet later and fashion an Eye, thence to create their own visions."

All nine seemed to sigh in unison.

"But there were six such, of course, and their vi-sions differed, even as two people look at the same flower and perceive different aspects of it. Each was trapped. They dared not join together because they were jealous and mistrustful of one another; they could not return to the University without their plot being un-masked-as now it has been. They became prisoners of their own scheme, trapped in their own petty greeds and ambitions in the backwaters of reality. Be not de-ceived by the manner of some of them. They were the five from whom you procured the jewels, and Asmo-deus, of course. They have been trying to steal one another's amplifiers for tens of thousands of years now.”

Mac Walters seemed to snap out of it. "But
this
is
our
reality," he pointed out, moving his arm in a sweep-ing gesture. "Desolation. Ruin. Death."

"What is done may be undone," the demon leader replied. "Not exactly, of course, but a close approxi-mation. You wish this area-by which I mean this planet-restored. It is possible. But that is not the full answer to your question, nor can I give it. You must give it. Tell us-how would you wield the power of nine Eyes in regard to your own planet and also to yourselves?"

Jill looked at Mac and saw the same message on his face that she had on hers. "We fought-and killed-to save our world. For all that to mean anything at all, our world must be saved, restored.

We realize that now.”

"But your society had its evils; it was a race that lived in pain and faced new threats daily. Is this the society you would recreate?"

Mac stepped in. "I think we were fools," he ad-mitted. "We were thinking of godhead and a land of pastoral peace. But such a land has no value if it is imposed from above and maintained by dictatorial power, no matter how benignly applied."

"The more I think of myself a few minutes ago, the more ashamed of myself I am," Jill added.

"The first world I went to had this godlike morality, and it was a stagnant, dreary world. I should have remembered. The most perfect society that I saw was the valley I was forced to destroy, and it was not imposed, merely protected. Human beings created it. Not all that world, or all humanity, but it showed that such things are pos-sible if people truly want them and work for them. That is the only enduring type of human utopia."

Mac Walters nodded in agreement. "I, too, saw an imposed, hierarchical society-and hated it, and hated you for imposing the limitations on those people. Now I see that I, too, was ready to do the same sort of thing here, to my own world. Like Jill, I feel a little ashamed of myself."

The demon leader smiled kindly. "Don't be ashamed, either of you, for you have learned some great lessons. You have gained a great wisdom that few would have received from your experiences, and that makes you greater than most human beings. Be proud, for in this moment you have shown yourselves greater than As-modeus, who is unrepentant. In a few brief days and nights you have learned that millennia could not teach him. Your words gladden us and make our decisions much easier. Your world has been ignored, a back-water-but it did produce such as you. It will no longer be ignored."

"But Mogart said he shaped and trained us," Jill pointed out.

"False," exclaimed the demon leader. "One cannot teach an idiot to read, or a blind man color, or a deaf man a symphony. Mogart is all three. You are not. You are pupils who transcended your teacher."

Jill had a sudden thought. "The others-the ones between the planes, the alien enemy. They were active, very active in the world we left last. Something must be done to stop them."

"We have already considered the information, hav-ing drawn it from your minds and from a check of the five planes you visited. They are active
every-where,
even here. You can never be rid of them or their threat. We are on guard, rest assured. But we learned other things from reading your accounts. A special quality you possess that is the prerequisite for true wisdom. You, McCulloch, upset over the stagnancy of one society and remorseful in the extreme over the deaths of innocents you were forced to carry out. And you, Walters, upset at us for retarding a world that means nothing to you-and taking precious time to get one of our own, whom you had no cause to like or to help, to safety on another plane. That quality is com-passion."

The demon looked around once, as if surveying the scene. "It grows late. This is business that takes up far too much of our time. There are over six thousand Alternatives and over seventy trillion projects. We can dwell here no longer. It is time. A consensus is easily reached."

Mac and Jill looked at the nine expectantly, a little hesitantly.

"Hear our words. What if the trajectory of the object had been altered, not for collision, but in the same manner opposite to collision? It would have been cap-tured by the sun at a slower speed and drawn inward to burn. We reach back to that point and make the adjustment so!"