Ulan Dhor muttered, “Soon there will be none left in Ampridatvir upon whom to work Rogol Domedonfors’ power.” He turned to Elai. “Have you no father, no mother, for whom you fear?”
She shook her head. “I have lived my life with a dull and tyrannical uncle.”
Ulan Dhor turned away. He saw a yellow dome; no other was visible: The Tower of Fate.
“There.” He pointed, turned down the nose of the air-car.
Parking on a high level, they entered the dusty corridors, found an anti-gravity shaft, and rose to the topmost floor. Here they found a small chamber, decorated with vivid murals. The scene was a court of ancient Ampridatvir. Men and women in colored silks conversed and banqueted and, in the central plaque, paid homage to a patriarchal ruler with a rugged chin, burning eyes, and a white beard. He was clad in a purple and black gown and sat on a carved chair.
“Rogol Domedonfors!” murmured Elai, and the room held its breath, grew still. They felt the stir their living breath made in the long-quiet air, and the depicted eyes stared deep into their brains …
Ulan Dhor said, “‘Red to the left eye, yellow to the right; then blue to both.’ Well — there are blue tiles in the hall, and I wear a red coat.”
They found blue and yellow tiles, and Ulan Dhor cut a strip from the hem of his tunic.
Red to the left eye, yellow to the right. Blue to both. A click, a screech, a whirring like a hundred bee-hives.
The wall opened on a flight of steps. Ulan Dhor entered, and, with Elai breathing hard at his back, mounted the steps.
They came out in a flood of daylight, under the dome itself. In the center on a pedestal sat a glistening round-topped cylinder, black and vitreous.
The whirring rose to a shrill whine. The cylinder quivered, softened, became barely transparent, slumped a trifle. In the center hung a pulpy white mass — a brain?
The cylinder was alive.
It sprouted pseudopods which poised wavering in the air. Ulan Dhor and Elai watched frozen, close together. One black finger shaped itself to an eye, another formed a mouth. The eye inspected them carefully.
The mouth said cheerfully, “Greetings across time, greetings. So you have come at last to rouse old Rogol Domedonfors from his dreams? I have dreamed long and well — but it seems for an unconscionable period. How long? Twenty years? Fifty years? Let me look.”
The eye swung to a tube on the wall, a quarter full of gray powder.
The mouth gave a cry of wonder. “The energy has nearly dissipated! How long have I slept? With a half-life of 1,200 years — over five thousand years!” The eye swung back to Ulan Dhor and Elai. “Who are you then? Where are my bickering subjects, the adherents of Pansiu and Cazdal? Did they kill themselves then, so long ago?”
“No,” said Ulan Dhor with a sick grin. “They are still fighting in the streets.”
The eye-tentacle extended swiftly, thrust through a window, and looked down over the city. The central jelly twitched, became suffused with an orange glow. The voice spoke again, and it held a terrible harshness. Ulan Dhor’s neck tingled and he felt Elai’s hand clenching deep into his arm.
“Five thousand years!” cried the voice. “Five thousand years and the wretches still quarrel? Time has taught them no wisdom? Then stronger agencies must be used. Rogol Domedonfors will show them wisdom. Behold!”
A vast sound came from below, a hundred sharp reports. Ulan Dhor and Elai hastened to the window and looked down. A mind-filling sight occupied the streets.
The ten-foot vestibules leading below the city had snapped open. From each of these licked a great tentacle of black transparent jelly like the substance of the fluid roads.
The tentacles reached into the air, sprouted a hundred branches which pursued the madly fleeing Ampridatvians, caught them, stripped away their robes of gray and green, then whipping them high through the air, dropped them into the great central square. In the chill morning air the populace of Ampridatvir stood mingled naked together and no man could distinguish Green from Gray.
“Rogol Domedonfors has great long arms now,” cried a vast voice, “strong as the moon, all-seeing as the air.”
The voice came from everywhere, nowhere.
“I am Rogol Domedonfors, the last ruler of Ampridatvir. And to this state have you descended? Dwellers in hovels, eaters of filth? Watch — in a moment I repair the neglect of five thousand years!”
The tentacles sprouted a thousand appendages — hard horny cutters, nozzles that spouted blue flame, tremendous scoops, and each appendage sprouted an eye-stalk. These ranged the city, and wherever there was crumbling or mark of age the tentacles dug, tore, blasted, burnt; then spewed new materials into place, and when they passed, new and gleaming structures remained behind.
Many-armed tentacles gathered the litter of ages; when loaded they snapped high through the air, a monstrous catapult, flinging the rubbish far out over the sea. And wherever was gray paint or green paint a tentacle ground off the color, sprayed new various pigments.
Down every street ran the tremendous root-things and off-shoots plunged into every tower, every dwelling, every park and square — demolishing, stripping, building, clearing, repairing. Ampridatvir was gripped and permeated by Rogol Domedonfors as a tree’s roots clench the ground.
In a time measured by breaths, a new Ampridatvir had replaced the ruins, a gleaming, glistening city — proud, intrepid, challenging the red sun.
Ulan Dhor and Elai had watched in a half-conscious, uncomprehending daze. Was it possibly reality; was there such a being which could demolish a city and build it anew while a man watched?
Arms of black jelly darted over the hills of the island, threaded the caves where the Gauns lay gorged and torpid. It seized, snatched them through the air, and dangled them above the huddled Ampridatvians — a hundred Gauns on a hundred tentacles, horrible fruits on a weird tree.
“Look!” boomed a voice, boastful and wild. “These whom you have feared! See how Rogol Domedonfors deals with these!”
The tentacles flicked, and a hundred Gauns hurtled — sprawling, wheeling shapes — high over Ampridatvir; and they fell far out in the sea.
“The creature is mad,” whispered Ulan Dhor to Elai. “The long dreaming has addled its brain.”
“Behold the new Ampridatvir!” boomed the mighty voice. “See it for the first and last time. For now you die! You have proved unworthy of the past — unworthy to worship the new god Rogol Domedonfors. There are two here beside me who shall found the new race —”
Ulan Dhor started in alarm. What? He to live in Ampridatvir under the thumb of the mad super-being?
No.
And perhaps he would never be so close to the brain again.
With a single motion he drew his sword and hurled it point-first into the translucent cylinder of jelly — transfixed the brain, skewered it on the shaft of steel.
