Chapter verse quotes are selected from the poetry of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The TWILIGHT OF THE GODS
A story of Mantra and Black September
By Aladdin and Christopher Leeson
Chapter 1
"The Man on the Doorstep"
But suddenly my anger grows,
A mighty spirit fills my nose.
My inward feelings all revolt.
A creature such as thou! A dolt!
By Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
I stood off with the man on the doorstep of my Canoga Park tract home. The stranger wasn’t formidable or even frightening in appearance. About five feet tall with light red-brown hair, he looked soft-bodied and overweight. His features were mildly West European. His unassuming garb, a dark tan suit, was topped off with an old fashioned shoestring tie. But I had brushed by this man at the mall only a couple hours earlier, and now he had followed me home. That wasn’t good.
"I saw you at the restaurant," I said through gritted teeth. "What are you doing here?"
He returned an awkward smile. "It is of urgency that we confer. Something happened to you today, Mrs. Blake, something that you do not as yet understand. But it is crucial that you do understand."
His accent sounded foreign, but I couldn't place it. I had gone through hell within the last few hours, and now he was implying that he knew about it. How did he know? Was he part of it? I was ready for a fight, but there was nothing outwardly threatening about him. Also, he seemed to be only asking for a parley.
With my arms crossed, I demanded, "When I ask something, I expect an answer!"
His reply came as a jabber. "Forgive me for being maladroit. I don't normally involve myself in -- operations. I am only here now because a crisis has arisen. I have a very demanding task ahead of me and I cannot deal with a menace of such scope without assistance of the most gifted kind."
"What menace?" I asked with a snarl.
"That is hard to explain. But to meet the challenge, I need to recruit a hero, the most powerful hero I can locate."
“Well, good luck in finding one,” I said.
"Please, Mrs. Blake. I know who you are and I know what you can do."
I sighed. "Listen, fella, you must be mistaking me for somebody else. If by 'hero' you mean you want an ultra, I can assure you that I’m only an office worker."
"Oh, but I'm very well aware that you are one of this world’s most notable ultras, Mrs. Blake."
I hate it when people call me out for being Mantra. They’re mostly blackmailers. "Sir," I said, "would you please go away before this suburbanite shows you her dark side?"
"I of course expected that you would deny the secret life you are living," he said, mildly, "but I know that you are Mantra. I know everything about you, in fact. I even know the events you experienced during your short trip this evening.”
Short trip? To me it had lasted days, and everything about it was a horror story. Did he really know what I’d lived through? “You’re babbling, mister,” I said.
“Please, madam – sir -- we need to speak." He glanced over his shoulder, as if checking for enemies. “I can't emphasize how vital it is that we come to an accord.”
I cringed to be called “sir!" Only a tiny cadre of my friends and enemies knew about my incomprehensible past.
"I'm afraid I'm not expressing myself very well," the little man stated. "Please suggest some means by which I can prove my rectitude and earn your trust. Time is of the essence."
He had pronounced “time” in a funny way, as if -- to him – it was more than just a common noun. I hoped that there wasn’t some new crisis coming. I had just been battered by several crises and wasn’t up for another.
But who was he and what did he represent? I used my mystical senses to scan him for power traces. Some very dangerous foes were able to hide behind pacific disguises.
What I registered in his energy aura didn't reassure me one bit.
It was like the stranger was standing inside a vortex of overlapping power-fields, the likes of which I was beyond my experience. Whoever or whatever this being was, my scan results had put me on notice that I didn’t dare take him lightly.
"Why are you here?” I asked sharply. “To fight with me or kill me?"
"No indeed!" the little man blurted. "It's as I’ve said. I need your help. While I might go seek out assistance of others, the calculated odds offer the best success if you join me willingly."
"I don’t know what your trouble is, but why should you expect me to help out a total stranger?"
He sighed. "I would gladly explain everything, Mantra. May I speak from the heart?"
"If you aren’t speaking from the heart, what else are you doing? Lying?" I demanded.
"Not at all. But I’ve been taking care not to say too much too quickly. My story is a daunting one and thought you should be eased into the scope of the danger gradually. Forgive my caution, but a mistake made in this first contact might later lead to failure at a time when failure is unthinkable."
"How unthinkable?"
"The Multiverse faces extinction and uncountable trillions of inhabitants will blink out of existence.”
“The only multiverse I know of comes out of my son’s comic books.”
“Oh, the Multiverse is real. There are a near-infinity of universes. These, collectively, are called the Multiverse.”
“If there's a multiverse, it has to be pretty big. What is so terrible that it could damage a thing so unbelievably huge?”
“What a god makes, a god can unmake.”
I grimaced. Was he talking about gods now? Was he some sort of religious nut? To be fair, though, I knew that gods were real. I myself had met three of them last Christmas, but none of them had seemed to have the moxie necessary to build even one universe, much less a multiverse. But I also knew something about alternate realities. I’d encountered one such last month and a second one just today.
"May we go inside?" he inquired.
“Why ask? You’ve got power crackling all about you. Can’t you force your way in?”
“That would be impolite.”
“Is showing good manners more important to you than rescuing the...Multiverse?”
“Not at all, but wherever good manners are observed, cooperation is made easier, don’t you agree?”
"I wouldn’t know. People give me precious little cooperation. Look, let’s take this one step at a time. I think you’re more than you seem to be, so I can't let you out of my sight until I figure out what you are. Where you come from?"
His smile manifested as a brief tightening at his mouth-corners. "I come from a place you already know exists. The Godwheel."
Yikes! I did know something about the Godwheel. One thing I knew was that nothing but trouble ever came out of the thing! I glanced over my shoulder, toward the bedrooms. “It's not a good time for me to be entertaining super beings,” I said. “I've got children at home."
"I know that you do, Mrs.... ah, Sir Lukasz. But if we speak in soft tones, our conversation should not wake the tykes. Or, should we instead select some alternate locality for our parley?"
I frowned. "Here on Earth decent parents don’t go out and leave children alone in an empty house."
He smiled again. "Then I have a proposal that might satisfy your concerns. May I ask whether the youngsters are secure and well – at just at this instant?"
I answered warily. "As far as I know."
"Excellent. Then we shall remain in this instant for as long as necessary. The little ones will not hear a whisper of our interview."
"Could you be a little more clear about that?"
"It may be hard for a person of Earth to understand. Watch carefully and I shall demonstrate the phenomenon of stopped time."
The man reached into his pocket and this, reflexively, made my force field flare up at its greatest strength. It manifested so strongly that it cast a green glow across his innocuous face.
The stranger didn’t react overmuch and I watched him take a small foil-wrapped item from his coat pocket.
"What's that?" I asked. I had seen some terrible things come out of small packages.
"It's a piece of candy – a chocolate kiss, actually," he said. The little man held the milk chocolate between his right thumb and forefinger. Then he took his fingers away.
And the candy didn't drop.
It had stopped in mid-air, hanging there in levitation.
But my surprise was brief. "What is this game? If I wanted to, I could pull a trick as good as that one myself.”
"What is important is not the manifestation, but the cause of the manifestation. You are seeing a very elementary illustration of the effects of the two of us occupying a field of zero time.”
“Oh, come! You said you were rushed. So why do you talk so much and say so little that makes sense?
“I will try to be more clear. We are in zero time now. In the place where we stand, no significant time is passing.”
“I still don’t get it. But before you explain anything else, tell me how it is that you know so much about my most important secrets."
"My people have very efficient data-gathering technology. I have virtually all your memories downloaded into my VIGOPS and I may draw upon them at will!"
"What's a VIGOPS?"
"It's an English anagram signifying the technology in use. In your speech, a VIGOPS is a -- a memory bank. When I introduced nanotechnology into your bloodstream, it commenced to monitor your brain activity and has converted large parts of your retained memory into a retrievable data stream. This data is recorded by the VIGOPS that is housed within my vehicle and I am able to tap into it remotely wherever -- and whenever -- I am."
I looked at him incredulously. "You’ve put something into my bloodstream? Was that the reason you poked me in the backside at the restaurant? You did it to steal the whole contents of my mind? And now you’re saying that you can read the juiciest parts of my life history anytime you want?"
"Why, yes. But the VIGOPS is useful in so many more ways than mere its basic function.”
I was steamed. "So you shot me full of high-tech crap without asking?"
He nodded contritely. "That was a discourtesy, I grant, but I am under great pressure to actively engage my mission. Be assured that these nanites do not adversely affect the human physiology. Another useful function they have is to allow a controller to maintain contact with his subject across multiple planes of reality and through extreme degrees of temporal displacement."
"Are you appointing yourself my 'controller'? Get this! I don't care for being controlled. You’d better hope that your control is really good, Mac, or else I’m going to do something that’s painful and very long-lasting."
"I sincerely hope not, madam -- sir. Once I have demonstrated to your satisfaction that I'm acting in the interest of the entire Multiverse, I have every confidence that you will judge my course of action to be honorable and necessary."
If this character was actually in control of me, could he make me do anything he wanted? Could he make me drop dead with a single thought? I glanced again at that damned chocolate kiss of his, still hanging in space.
“To reassure you, perhaps I should brief you more fully about zero time,” he suggested.
“Yes, do that,” I told him guardedly.
“Because we have the appropriate nanites in our bodies, we can carry out joint functions. At the moment we occupy a time-dilation field. This field displaces us into a shared temporal sub-dimension, and while we are there, chronological progression around us is so attenuated that a single nanosecond of real time may be perceived by us like a year – or, at a different setting, a thousand years."
Was he claiming to have stopped time? I looked around, trying to pick out some anomaly to contradict a notion so wild. The second-hand on the wall clock wasn't moving, nor were the leaves across the street swaying with the breeze. All our surroundings, in fact, now looked eerily still, like images in a photograph. On the other hand, my face, clothes, and hair all felt perfectly natural to the touch.
"Anything that contacts our bodies will be acclimatized into the field," the stranger explained, as if reading my mind.
Damn it! I didn’t need another mind-reader after spending time with Pinnacle very recently!
My caller concluded, saying, "The effect of the field affords us the illusion that Time is passing normally, but that is by no means the case. Experiment with the phenomenon all you like."
My glance went to the small table beside the doorpost. Upon it rested one of Gus's model autos. I reached out and pushed the latter over the edge. The toy started to fall, but the instant that my finger lost contact with it, it stopped dead in space -- just like the candy.
I rounded on my visitor. "Did you switch the kids off, too?"
"Of course. They are switched off from our own perspective, at least!"
He had said that with gaiety, as if it were a good thing! I was very close to flying off the handle.
"Preserving the cherubs in perfect safety was the whole point of suspending Time, was it not?" the stranger inquired.
"Maybe we should talk inside," I finally admitted.
I stood aside to let the little man enter and guided him into the living room. I sank down on the edge of the couch, next to Mr. Paws, Evie’s teddy bear. "Please, take a chair," I told the weird strange. Inwardly, I was not feeling the least bit hospitable.
He did as bidden. He sat quietly for a moment, as if at a loss as to how to begin his appeal to me.
"You're a very peculiar man," I remarked. "How can you do the things you do?"
He gave a modest shrug. "I have had an excellent technological education."
"Education has its value," I agreed, "but you need to stop being so vague. For starters, is there some reason that you haven't told me your name yet?"
Again he flashed a grin. "I have been remiss. On Earth I usually go by the name of Gabriel."
"All right, Gabriel, you have some explaining to do. Are you really able to play tricks with time?"
"I'm afraid so," he admitted. The man’s apologetic manner didn't exactly reassure me. Some of the most notorious serial killers in history have been innocuous-seeming men. "But a full explanation would hardly be possible to one from a civilization which hasn’t as yet learned even the basics of time law."
"If you're saying that I'm too dumb to understand your explanations, I'd suggest that you recruit a different person."
"Oh, I’m sure you are not...dumb. You have answered many challenges across the span of centuries and doing so takes profound intelligence."
"I don’t see myself as anything special," I told him. "I've made plenty of mistakes. If you really know everything about me, you’ll know how often my enemies have bested and killed me." In the alternate world that I had just visited, I had made errors that had caused people I loved their lives.
"Oh, you must take great care not to die before our mission is completed. Previously, you were fated to live for centuries, but until the crisis is passed, you cannot count upon that being true.”
“Previously fated?” I echoed.
If my prophesied life span had suddenly been cut off at the knees, I wanted to know the reason why!
TO BE CONTINUED IN CHAPTER 2
