After the victory, however, things changed. The Puppet Kings returned from the wars with a new sense of individual worth, even of “rights.” To bring them into line, Kronos announced an urgent maintenance-and-repair schedule. Many cyborgs failed to keep their appointments at his workshop, preferring—in the case of those damaged in battle—to live with their disabilities: their malfunctioning servo-mechanisms and partially burned-out circuitry. Groups of the Puppet Kings became secretive, conspiratorial, surly. Kronos suspected that they were meeting covertly to plot against him and heard rumors that at these meetings they addressed one another not by number but by new names, which they had chosen for themselves. He became tyrannical, and when one of the Three Society Girls was insolent to his face, he made an example of her, turning against her his much feared master blaster,’ which caused an instant, irreversible deletion of all programs: in other words, cybernetic death.
The execution was counterproductive. Dissension grew more rapidly than before. Many cyborgs went underground, erecting, around their hideouts, sophisticated anti-surveillance electronic shields, which even Kronos could not easily penetrate, and moving frequently, so that by the time the Professor had broken down one set of defenses, the revolutionaries had already disappeared behind the next. We cannot say for sure exactly when the Dollmaker, whom Akasz Kronos had created in his own image and imbued with many of his own characteristics, learned how to override the Prime Directive. But soon after that breakthrough it was Professor Akasz Kronos who disappeared. No longer safe from his creations, he had to go underground while the Peekay revolution triumphantly emerged into the daylight to be greeted by the cheers of all the cyborgs in Baburia.
The so-called lost word from Kronos exists only in the form of an electronic message to his usurper, the cyborg Dollmaker. It is a rambling, incoherent text, self-exculpatory and full of accusations of ingratitude, threats, and curses. However, there is good reason to suppose that this text is a forgery, perhaps the work of the Dollmaker himself. The creation of a “mad Kronos.” whose sane mirror image he was, suited the cyborg’s purposes perfectly: and such is history’s appetite for the lurid that this version was widely accepted. (That single portrait of Kronos is notable, as we have remarked, for the scientists insane eyes.) Lately, the discovery of fragments of Professor Kronos’s journals has shed new light on his state of mind. A very different Kronos emerges from these fragments, whose authenticity seems beyond dispute: the handwriting is clearly the Professor’s. “The gods. too. murdered the Titans who made them,” Kronos writes. “Artificial life here merely mirrors the real thing. For man is born in chains but everywhere seeks to be free. I too once had strings. I loved my puppets, knowing that, like children. they might walk away from me one day. But they cannot leave me behind. I made them with love, and my love is in each one of them, in their circuits and plastics. In their wood.” Yet this Kronos, so free from bitterness, seems too good to be true. The Professor, a master of dissimulation, may have been plotting his vengeance behind a screen of fatalism.
After Kronos’s disappearance, a PK delegation led by the Dollmaker and his lover, the Goddess of Victory, took the scientist’s place at the next annual Day ofthe Shoes, and informed the Mogol that the Professor’s con tract was to be considered void. Henceforth the “Peekays” and Baburians must live on their twin islands as equals. Before walking out of the Mogol’s presence (instead of shuffling out backward as protocol dictated—a custom that even Kronos had not dared to ignore) the Goddess of Victory threw down the challenge that still reverberates between the two communities: “Let the fittest survive.”
A few days later a small. battered amphibious craft landed unnoticed in a forested corner of the northern island of Baburia. Zameen of Rijk had escaped the destruction of her lost civilization and made her way, against overwhelming odds, to the island refuge of the man who had left her to die. Had she come to renew their love or to avenge her abandonment? Was she here as lover or assassin? Her uncanny resemblance to the cyborg Dollmaker’s lover, the Goddess of Victory, meant that the Puppet Kings deferred to her without question, believing her to be their new queen. What would happen when the two women confronted each other? How would the Dollmaker react to the “real” version of the woman he loved? How would she. the real woman, react to this mechanical avatar of her former lover? What would the Puppet Kings’ new enemies, the andpodeans to whose territory they had now staked so extensive a claim, make of her? How would she deal with them? And what had actually befallen Professor Kronos? If he was dead, how did he die? If alive, how great were his remaining powers? Had he genuinely been overthrown, or was his disappearance some sort of fiendish ploy? So many questions! And behind them, the greatest riddle of all. The Puppet Kings had been offered by Kronos a choice between their original, mechanical selves and some, at least, of the ambiguities of human nature. What would be their choice: wisdom—or fury? Peace—or fury? Love—or fury? The fury of genius, of creation, or of the murderer or tyrant. the wild shrieking fury that must never be named?
The continuing story of the twin goddesses and doubled professors, of Zameen’s search for the vanished Akasz Kronos, and of the struggle for power between the two communities of Baburia will be reported on this site in regular bulletins. Click on the links for more PK info or on the icons below for answers to 101 FAQs, access to interactivides, and to see the wide range of PK merchandise available for INSTANT shipping NOW All major credit cards accepted.
13
As a young man in the early 1960s, Malik Solanka had devoured the science fiction novels of what was later recognized as the form’s golden age. In flight from his own life’s ugly reality, he found in the fantastic its parables and allegories, but also its flights of pure invention, its loopy, spiraling conceits—a ceaselessly metamorphosing alternative world in which he felt instinctively at home. He subscribed to the legendary magazines, Amazing and F&SF bought as many of the yellow-jacketed Victor Gollancz SF series as he could afford, and all but memorized the books of Ray Bradbury, Zenna Henderson, A. E. van Vogt, Clifford D. Simak, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Stanislaw Lem, James Blish, Philip K. Dick, and L. Sprague de Camp. Goldenage science fiction and science fantasy were, in Solanka’s view, the best popular vehicle ever devised for the novel of ideas and of metaphysics. At twenty, his favorite work of fiction was a story called “The Nine Billion Names of God,” in which a Tibetan monastery set up to count the names of the Almighty-believing this to be the only reason for the existence of the universe-buys a top-of-the-line computer to speed up the process. Hard-bitten industry mavens go to the monastery to help the monks get the great machine up and running. They find the whole idea of listing the names pretty laughable, and worry about how the monks might react when the job’s done and the universe goes on going on; so once they’ve done their work, they sneak quietly away. Later, on a plane home, they calculate that the computer must have finished its work. They look out of the window at the night sky, where—Solanka had never forgotten the last line—“one by one, very quietly, the stars were going out.”