Empire of Two Worlds

“It’s crazy!” I blurted suddenly. “When we got driven out of Klittmann you’d have sworn we didn’t have a chance in hell. But Bec got us through the gateway and here to Earth — with your help, that is. Even then, you’d think we still didn’t have a chance, except maybe just to stay alive. We were jumping into the dark. Yet here we are moving back to Klittmann with an army. In a few days we’ll own the place. It just doesn’t make sense.”

Harmen nodded. He seemed to know what I was trying to say.

“Becmath is a man of destiny. That’s why it happened. A lesser man taking such a chance would have landed in the middle of a desert. There would have been nothing for him. A man like Becmath lands in the middle of a whirlpool of events, of which he can take advantage. The universe denies him nothing.”

I stared at him. “Why, you crazy loon. …” I shook my head. “All that philosophising is just junk. It doesn’t mean anything.”

The alk’s mouth creased in a tolerant smile. “Indeed? And yet that is how the universe works. I know. I am close to the preparation of the Tincture.”

I waved my hand. “Junk,” I repeated.

“And the gateway — is that junk?”

He had me there. Then, too, I remembered the frightening little homunculus that had appeared in the retort under the garage in Klittmann. Harmen had proved he knew what he was talking about. If it was junk, then it was junk that worked.

“I can see that you are confused,” Harmen said, his voice becoming confidential. “Becmath’s ambitions do not interest me except insofar as they help or hinder my work. But I can see what shape they take. Even when we were travelling over the barrenness of Killibol I knew that something was ahead that would enable Becmath to rise to power. I did not know what it would be, but I knew there would be something.”

“But how could you know?” I said, fascinated now. “Did you have a premonition? A vision?”

He shook his head, smiling again. “I had merely studied the patterns events make. They are not what we take them to be: sometimes the effect draws on the cause.”

He paused. “My life’s work is the preparation of the Tincture. The Tincture, or the Primordial Hyle, is the basic material of existence of which all other elements and forms are corruptions or superficial appearances. Hence it is the goal of all alchemical work. It is indivisible, subtle and fugitive; it is not ruled by the laws of space and time. The ancient texts say that a man who possesses it can know all, can travel anywhere through space and time.”

I remembered him making similar claims years before. Then, the meaning of what he said had been lost on me. Now I seemed to understand it better.

“You speak of visions,” he continued. “I can give you visions. Come with me.”

He rose and led me out of the study and into the laboratories beyond. Purple-smocked apprentices made way for us. We passed through one workshop filled with a confusion of electronic valves, retorts, and other stuff I couldn’t begin to describe. Some of it was glowing and buzzing. Then, at the far end, big wooden doors swung open for us. We passed through and they closed again.

The chamber facing us was like a long hall, deathly quiet. It was empty except for electrode-like devices protruding from the walls, floors and ceiling at the far end.

“Preparation of the Tincture is the primary aim of alchemy,” Harmen explained, “but there is another related, subsidiary aim: the creation of artificial beings. This apparatus goes a short way towards both.”

He stepped to a control board and activated it with a loud snap, then adjusted certain controls. The chamber began to hum.

“Do not be frightened by anything you see,” he warned me. “Theoretically the Tincture is everywhere, at the basis of everything. All forms and creatures are derived from it — to obtain it, one merely has to make it manifest itself.”

A sense of frightful tension between the electrodes began to make itself felt. My muscles began to tighten up. Instinctively I backed towards the door.

“Easy,” Harmen murmured. “No harm will come to you.”

Suddenly there was a sound like the clap of a giant electric spark. The space between the electrodes became a riot of colour. Then the spark coalesced into a tall figure — that of a man, dressed in bizarre, coloured clothes!

It was the figure in the retort all over again, but this time the creature was life-size — and undeniably real! His face was of a dark colour, almost black, which was offset dazzlingly by the crimson of his tunic and the whites of his eyes. His gaze lit on us and he began to walk towards us.

For a moment he seemed to rush towards me, growing bigger. Then he vanished, to be replaced by another figure between the electrodes, this time a woman dressed in simpler, green garments.

“Ignore them,” Harmen murmured. “They are merely momentary creatures, produced spontaneously from the primitive Tincture by the field of stress.”