Kingdom of the Worlds

by John Brunner, Damien Broderick

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

This unique novel represents a collaboration between two greats of science fantasy writing, published for the first time on the SF Gateway. Between 1956 and 1962, John Brunner wrote three novellas that blurred the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy. Following Brunner's untimely death, Damien Broderick was given permission to develop these works into a full-length novel, expanding on the ideas and concepts that had captured his imagination when he first read them. The result is a story that blends the technological with the magical, and travels to different worlds and undiscovered parts of our own. Weaving together ideas from No Other Gods But Me, The Kingdom of the world and Father of Lies, Broderick takes us from the modern day Earth, across dimensions and into battle with cults, dragons, ogres and people with psychokinetic powers. This is a fantastic read for both fans of Brunner's original works and readers looking to be swept away on a new adventure.

Release date: January 21, 2021

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

At his back, in the bedroom, he could hear Stephanie moving. A moment later, her voice came sleepily through the half-open door. “Where have you got to now?”

Moshe Kaplan felt the sweat cold on his hands as he drew a deep breath and counted five. For a long moment he gazed down at the relaxed, still-chubby face of his five-year-old daughter. He did not know, even then, whether he dared trust his voice, but he had to answer.

“I thought—I thought I heard Sandra crying,” he said huskily, and was glad the lie did not betray itself in a quaver. “But it must have been in her sleep—she’s quiet now.”

He heard Stephanie’s muffled sigh of acceptance, and then paused with his hand on the light switch by the door before going back into their room.

And it was not all a lie. He had heard a child scream. He had heard Sandra cry out; he was certain of it. Yet he was also certain that she burned like a brand, but that was impossible, and unthinkably cruel.

It was one of those heart-stopping terrors of imagination found only in dreams or insanity, incomprehensible to the waking mind and perhaps more horrible for that. His psychological training told him that snarling wolf and relentless quicksand and falling helplessly from a great height are images that have the power to make the idea of returning to sleep horrible even when the body is so tired the mind cannot stir a finger. Moshe knew them all well, and was grateful for the coldness of the floor under his bare feet, and the twelve paces separating him from the warmth of the bed. In that space he could awaken himself.

But to be certain, he did not lie down again at once; he sat back against the headboard and stared in the dim moonlight at Stephanie’s long fair hair coiled into the tidy, compact bun she made of it each night with nimble fingers. Robert Browning’s poem “Porphyria’s Lover” whispered from two hundred years past in some scholarly partition of his mind. Yes, he thought, Porphyria’s lover would have known that silky, honey-golden rope. He shuddered, then, at the notion. The poem had sensual Porphyria strangled by that lover, her radiant hair in one long yellow string wrapped murderously around her throat until she lay in passive death at his side.

Alarmed, Moshe clenched his fists in a spasm of self-loathing. And yet there was no sense in that. It was nonsense, literally, from horrors stored in the unconscious.

But that idle cross-referencing thought from the Victorian age somehow had to do with the nightmare of Sandra screaming in terror, alight. It had something to do with the way he had risen in his sleep and found himself looking down at his daughter’s little bed.

And all of it was out of a dual past: his own, yes, but the other discarded and rejected by him. That was a long and dark and bloody past, humanity’s, of which he had been taught and which he had renounced as without meaning for the twenty-first century, despite the brutality still racking much of the world.

His eyes strained into blackness beyond the window, wondering if there were a star to be seen, but cloud was thick overhead, almost blocking the moon, and the air was oppressive.

The possibility of sleep was receding; he felt almost fully awake now, and that brought relief. His thoughts slipped to less frightful things. For the thousandth time he thought of the contrast between Stephanie’s warm blondness, her skin that tanned so easily and beautifully, and his own ascetic appearance. Sandra had inherited more from him, and he was glad, in a way. She would be one of the dark exciting women he had turned away from when he decided to marry, but he’d had that tribal past to load him with pain, a legacy of words overheard when he was too young to understand them—“Kike,” “Shiksa bitch” and worse—which drove him to fury now he did understand.

And who would that other man be, now surely still a child, the man who was to be captured by the tantalizing eyes and the pouting lips and the sleek black hair of the woman his daughter would become? She would not be ugly, this woman, this child born of his genes and Steph’s, nor dull. She would have her choice of men, without doubt, and brilliant children of her own. And the interweaving tangled network of human life would have another nexus…

Meaningless on the cosmic scale, this train of thought, except to a human being—but what of that? What judge shall there be of human values but humankind?

The sky split in the distance with a long streak of white lightning. He waited for the thunder, mechanically counting. When it came, Stephanie stirred again, her eyes still closed.

“Was that thunder?” she whispered. “Has it woken Sandra?”

A second peal—louder and closer—came to them before Moshe could reply. “If it hasn’t already, it will any minute,” he said.

Stephanie turned and looked blurrily at the threadlike lightning in the distance. They waited for Sandra to call out and come running to seek protection from the storm beside her mother.

“I’m sorry for waking you,” he said, voice raspy, not knowing why the lightning made him want to hear her answer.

“More of those damned dreams, Moishe?” came the automatic, instant response. Without touching her, he knew the stiffened resentment of her body.

“Bad, yes. Very bad.”

“I used to feel sympathetic,” she told him in a bleak tone. “For the first couple of years. But this is intolerable. Get help, damn it. See a different shrink.”

And Sandra stood in the doorway asking whether there was thunder, because if there was she was frightened and please could she sleep with them?

It had stopped raining before he had to walk across the small park in West Washington Heights to catch the A train, but even at half past nine, when he reached his office on Water Street at the south end of Manhattan, the sky was a sad gray and the few scrawny trees looked bent with the weight of the rain. Should have taken a cab, wasn’t as if it cost him anything with his company taxi card. But usually he was refreshed by the crush and odors of his fellow workers, despite the cruel memory of the pandemic, preferring the subway to an Uber or a cab. Not today. As he soared into the heights of the building and began the meaningless string of morning greetings, he was troubled by a sort of directionless, useless frustration. Why waste breath on this hollow invocation to inanimate forces—“Good morning!” to the armed lift operator accompanying the mechanical device—“Good morning!” to the teenaged messenger—when no one sane could imagine that wishing someone well—“Good morning!” to Mr. Cochran—could bring about the desired effect?

One of these days I’d like to wish everyone an awful morning, he reflected wistfully. Just see one happen. If wishes worked that way.

His coat felt damp as he peeled it off and hung it up in his office closet: the wrong kind of dampness, like a stone thinly layered with algae. It wasn’t going to be a good day, he felt certain.

He dropped into his chair, ran both hands swiftly back over his hair, and logged onto his computer. Moments later he looked up as the door opened for his new administrative assistant. Astarte Agarita wore a brown suit this morning. Somehow her glasses looked more severe for the similarity of color in their rims. Extravagant, self-chosen name, surely, and what was her nationality? He couldn’t place her accent. However, it was contrary to Foundation and indeed Federal rules to probe such employee details, even for a former psychologist outside the clinical setting. A thin sheaf of handwritten memos was in her hand. No emails any more, damn it, since the Clinton leaks had helped derail her Presidential ambitions and finally hung Trump out to dry. We’re sinking back into the twentieth century, he told himself. The basic technology is getting too dangerous to use, let alone rely on. He had never expected to find himself dictating to a secretary.

“Morning, Ms. Agarita,” he said, watching her place the memos in the tray. “Anything urgent?"

She took him literally. “There’s a gentleman named Mr. Bell waiting to see you,” she said with half a smile. “I have a tiny confession to make. I am acquainted with Mr. Bell, and he sought an interview with you. I understand that he has substantial business interests. But please, call me Astarte, sir.”

Moshe gritted his teeth slightly, and answered with his eyes on the monitor screen. “Give me a minute, Astarte, then send him in.”

The sixty seconds went by, and when he glanced over to the door again, there was a man standing in the opening. Moshe he felt his hair prickle, his muscles tighten—

Some people, he told himself, feel this way about cats.

Mr. Bell was of medium height, plump, dressed in an expensive dark suit. His hair was receding, but glossy and as black as Moshe’s own. He had fat hands and his lips were just slightly shiny with wet, as if he had passed his tongue over their plump soft surface the instant before Moshe looked at him.

After a long pause, Moshe rose and put out his hand. “What can I do for you, Mr. Bell?” he said, not intending to sound rude and yet succeeding in making it appear that if it was the last thing he didn’t do, he would do nothing for the visitor.

Mr. Bell left the question unanswered for as long as it took him to grasp Moshe’s hand with a touch like soft feather pillows (and with exceptionally well-tended nails, shiny and oval, Moshe noticed with a spurt of revulsion), release it, and step back a pace, running his gaze down and up again from head to foot. Bell half-chuckled in a fruity manner and spoke in a warm tenor voice marked by the same unidentifiable accent as his new assistant. “So despite the fact that you think it meaningless, you won’t wish me good morning. I suppose, in one sense, you’re very wise.”

There was a discontinuity. Moshe’s consciousness, having refused to accept the possibility that Bell, whoever the hell he was, could have known his most intimate thoughts of only a few minutes previous, took refuge in momentary fugue. When he was again fully aware of what was going on, he was waving Bell to a chair.

Before Moshe had properly reseated himself behind the desk, Bell said, “To answer the question you put to me, Mr. Kaplan. I came here to make you an offer. You are, after all, a philanthropist.”

Irritated, Moshe let his gaze move sardonically to the large bold highly polished sign standing out in relief from the wall facing the curtain windows:

GOLDSTEIN

PHILANTHROPIC

FOUNDATION

“Uncanny insight, Mr. Bell.” He pressed against the back of his ergonomic chair. “Sadly, I’m not a philanthropist, just a worker bee.”

“Yes, but in direct charge of the disbursement of many hundreds of millions—or is it billions?—of dollars. You are driven, I think, by two impulses.”

He paused, and raised an eyebrow.

Moshe said nothing.

“You truly enjoy helping people, especially by aiding them to find their own solutions. Suitably enough, for a former psychologist. And you are thrilled by the exercise of power.”

Gripped by a sudden urge to seize the little shit by the collar and throw him out of his office, Moshe said instead, with an edge in his voice, “What kind of offer, Mr. Bell? Do you have a substantial donation in mind?”

“More precisely, Mr. Kaplan, I am here to let you make a demand. What do you want?”

Moshe blinked. “I beg your pardon?” Hairs bristled again on his nape.

Bell gestured sweepingly. “What do you want?” he repeated patiently.

Moshe leaned forward, slightly dazed, shaking his head. “I don’t understand. Are you head-hunting me?” He felt tired and bemused. Bell smiled.

“In a sense.”

The peculiar inflection of the phrase conjured up the horrifying vision of last night: the vast smoky arena or perhaps place of worship resounding to a shouted chant. For an instant Moshe knew an associated pleasure—the joy a child knows on being disobedient in revenge for imagined wrong—but the pleasure lasted no longer than the scream.

“What firm do you represent?” he said, swallowing.

“The oldest firm, if you care to put it that way,” Bell said pensively, and then chuckled as if at an original joke. “Soon to be the newest firm in a new world!”

Moshe’s temper had teetered on the edge of imbalance. This was enough to tip it over. He drew a deep breath.

“I’ve got better things to do with my time than sit here and listen to nonsense,” he said sharply. “Say what you have to say, or leave.”

The door of the outer office opened and shut, and Godfrey Gellner’s cheerful young voice was heard. Bell blinked across the desk.

“But I can’t do that, Mr. Kaplan,” Bell said, as if it were a self-evident truth. “I can never do that.”

Gellner put his head round the door. “Morning, Mr. Kaplan,” he began, and abruptly started to withdraw again, apologizing. Moshe stopped him.

“It’s all right, Godfrey,” he said. “This gentleman is just going. Perhaps you could direct him to the elevator?”

The documents on his desk seemed to jump and dance before his eyes as he dictated his responses to Ms. Agarita. Sell became Bell; ball became Bell; Beltway became Bell. He fastened his teeth on his lower lip to give himself the reality of pain, to control this shifting of sense and nonsense. Out of sight, out of my mind—

He forced himself to continue dictating. The third document was an effort; the fourth was an ordeal. The fifth was impossible; he stopped after the second sentence and wondered if he were coming down with a fever. Considering the evidence carefully, he decided against it. His pulse was reasonably slow, he wasn’t shivering—but he had somehow to run away, without running from a vision of a place filled with chanting, and that dreadful scream of the blazing child.

Abruptly, he realized that what he was saying had nothing to do with philanthropic disbursements.

His eyes shifted uneasily across the top of the desk. Astarte’s hands were stilled above her keyboard, but poised waiting.

At least it was this new person who had heard his dissociated babbling. If it had been Mrs. Tepman, he did not think he could ever have faced her again. Dry-mouthed, he said, “Read back—what I was just saying.”

“I didn’t take it down, Mr. Kaplan,” said Astarte Agarita gravely.

“Of course not.” He moved something on the desk, distractedly. “Was it—was it bad?”

“Bad?” The word was a whole encyclopedia. “I’ve heard such things in other places, from other people.”

“How? Where?” Moshe knew a mixture of relief and annoyance; he had never heard such things—hardly even thought them…

“Cheap hotels and boarding houses, if you must know.” Astarte spoke with a patient weariness, as if all this were supremely unimportant.

“You’d better print the letters and bring them for me to sign.” Moshe stared at her with complete attention for what he thought must be the first time since he had met her. “What a hell of a lot of things people don’t know about each other!” he said savagely. “Thank you, Astarte. It won’t happen twice.”

She rose and went out, closing the door with no more and no less noise than any other staffer. Somehow that helped Moshe back towards his self-control, but almost half an hour passed while he sat with fists clenched, trying to clench his mind likewise and grasp the thing within it.

The desk phone broke the spell. He raised the receiver and gave his name, heard the flat voice of McNulty, the Foundation’s CEO.

“You sound worse than when I heard you last!” McNulty declared in the subdued roar he owed to his partial deafness. “Thunder keep you awake last night?”

“Yes, I didn’t get much sleep,” Moshe answered.

“Hmm! I doubt that’s all the trouble. You’re too damned respectable, Moishe! Ought to break out a bit sometimes—isn’t natural for a young fellow like you, even if you are married. More to life than philanthropy, y’know, important as our work is. You responsible for a blasted idiot called Bell?”

Moshe stiffened. “Well, he was in here earlier—”

“And you told him to get the hell out?”

“More or less,” Moshe admitted. “He wouldn’t say anything that made sense—”

“I’m not after excuses,” McNulty cut in. “I wasted ten minutes trying to get sense out of him. Feller’s crazy. How long did you give him?”

“About two minutes.”

McNulty chuckled. “It’s not only money the Scots and the Jews understand alike,” he said. “And on that line—do you have the estimates for the donors’ Spring Black Tie Gala? I trust your pretty wife will be attending the event with you?”

“She wouldn’t miss it.” Stephanie hated such glitzy formal gatherings as much as he did, and they’d have to suffer through the angst of finding a suitable sitter for Sandra. There was no alternative, it was part of the job. Moshe gave figures and location details mechanically; he was relieved to hear that McNulty had treated Bell sharply. But the whole episode left a dozen unanswered questions, and a nasty taste which yet managed to imply that a liking for it might be acquired.

He put down the phone and it sounded again instantly. Caller ID showed no name and went at once to voicemail. He swiped at the phone; Bell’s warm tenor spoke to him:

“You’ll find my offer attractive sooner or later, Mr. Kaplan. I’ve waited so long that I can’t stand waiting much longer, but I won’t need to. Be seeing you!”

The last syllable ascended into an obscene cackle; Moshe stared at the phone, knew again that prickling behind his head: the cat-presence sensation.

“What the hell?” He hit voicemail again, and heard Bell’s words repeated.

Sweating, he raised his voice, calling for Astarte; she came back into his office, moving with a kind of imperturbable stateliness. “Listen to this,” he told her, and played Bell’s message. “How did he get my office number?” he asked, not expecting an answer. “And this came through the moment I finished speaking to McNulty. Hasn’t Bell left the building?”

“I think so. I saw Godfrey taking him to the elevator.”

“Well, how could he possibly know…” His voice trailed off. He felt faintly sickened.

She shrugged. “How does anything happen?” she said. “Anything is impossible on the face of it. Nothing is more of a miracle than anything else.”

“What? My god, you actually believe that, don’t you?” he said, searching her face, and she nodded.

“But you don’t,” she said. “You’re a rationalist—unmystical.”

“Of course I am. It’s the twenty-first century, not the Dark Ages.” Moshe was vaguely surprised that he felt no reticence about justifying himself to her. The sense of freedom it entailed was refreshing, though, and he finished the statement. “I’ve seen too much emotional nonsense and bad intuition to trust unprovable ideas.”

“That’s wonderful until you want to explain the manifestly impossible,” said Astarte flatly, and went out again.

Godfrey Gellner had already left for lunch when Moshe glanced around before going out for his own. There was too much work in Godfrey’s tray, and probably a lot more stored in his computer. But there were bigger problems than Gellner’s procrastination.

It must have been Mrs. Tepman he heard still at work, for as he approached the elevator he found the car was already open at his floor. He called and hastened the last few paces, to find Astarte the only passenger. The ride down was strained silence. He wanted to speak further about the impossible—the manifestly absurd—but had trouble casting his opening phrase, and when they reached ground level they were just in time to run into McNulty emerging from the executive elevator, red-faced, also about to leave. Moshe felt at once annoyed and glad to have been spared the problem of making that opening when the man boomed, “Come and have a drink with me before lunch, both of you!”

McNulty had been doing that sort of thing for years, with everyone from the messengers up, and only he could get away with it.

They walked fifty yards to a boutique bar, not yet as crowded as it would be in a little while; McNulty bought them their drinks, spoke caustically for twenty seconds on Bell’s putative ancestry, and proceeded to tell an outrageously funny dirty story at the top of his voice. Half the customers were his audience when he finished.

Moshe wondered what Astarte’s reaction would be; he did not imagine she would be embarrassed, and she wasn’t. The fact pleased McNulty greatly, and he insisted on buying a second round while he told the one about the man in the furniture trade, which Moshe listened to with only half an ear, intending to laugh when the punch line arrived by way of thanks for the drinks.

Three or four places along the bar, there was a well-dressed man not part of McNulty’s audience. He was talking into a glass of bourbon and driving his points home with jabs of his right index finger in the air. He had been done down in a business deal, that was obvious; Moshe had been attending absently for three sentences and was about to transfer his interest elsewhere, when the speaker’s tone grew vehement.

“It’s always the same with these goddamn Jews—they’d swindle their mothers out of—”

Shaking with instant rage, Moshe started to turn on the oaf, fists clenched. At the same instant, McNulty’s voice rose to maximum volume. “How did she guess what trade I was in?” Laughter bubbled up around them, and under it he heard Astarte’s voice say coolly, “Mr. Kaplan…”

He controlled himself with an effort, and gave her a ghost of a smile. “Thanks—I should be used to it,” he answered in an undertone, and managed to make the words run together with an appreciative remark about McNulty’s story.

It was no use asking to be allowed to buy McNulty a drink—he would just insist shamelessly that he was claiming the lot as expenses anyway, and refuse to accept. They parted only a few minutes later, and Moshe found himself outside again, Astarte standing a few paces away studying him. If her expression had been sympathetic, he doubted that he could have borne it, but it revealed no emotion at all.

“All right, yes, I nearly lost it,” Moshe said harshly. “I suppose I’m not as used to that kind of bigoted filth as I like to think. It seems to be on the rise again.”

“I don’t expect you ever gave yourself a chance to get used to it,” said Astarte after a pause. “Didn’t you rather run away from it?”

Whatever did she mean? The woman knew nothing about him. “Ignoring and running away are different things.” Moshe looked at her challengingly. “I could have killed that fool with my bare hands. My family moved to Israel when I was fifteen, and before I came back to the States to finish my degree I spent nearly three years as a conscript with the Defense Forces. Luckily they taught restraint as well as lethal combat skills.” He felt again the memory of the youthful idealism with which he had finally put to one side what he thought was damaging his life—the endless memories his father had passed along to him and his siblings Naomi and Tobias, of his grandparents escaping from the horrors of Nazi Germany. The idea of revenge had given place to sick pity and wan, ill-directed hope that this present moment, this millennium, might somehow be the time to break those patterns.

“Saying that something doesn’t matter doesn’t make it not matter.”

“Any more than wishing someone good morning ensures their having one, I suppose?” Moshe tried to make it biting. He thought how ridiculous it was to be standing outside a bar arguing with an admin assistant several years younger than himself and not to be able to tell what was going on behind those glasses.

“But if someone wished you a bad morning,” said Astarte calmly, “you would probably have one from sheer force of habit—wondering why custom had been suspended. Look, Mr. Kaplan, I don’t think you want to face me across a luncheon table, so I’ll see you back at the office. Goodbye.”

Somehow he had failed to notice how direct and perceptive Astarte could be; somehow, too, knowing that made him wonder if he had any insight into human nature at all.

“In fact, when you made your decision, did you base it on impracticable ideals without relation to facts?” suggested a tenor voice with a hint of a chuckle in it. The plump figure of Bell was facing him a few feet to his right.

Moshe took a step toward the man, had to pause as an instant of dizziness came over him. Something cold and soft struck the back of his head and spattered the tips of his ears; whirling, he saw a ragged boy with his right hand mud-coated, left extended towards Moshe in the sign that wards off the evil eye: first and fourth fingers outstretched like horns. What the hell?

His feet shifted in soft ground, not on pavement; the flung mud trickled into his collar with convincing chill and wetness. The boy’s shouted insults in a half frightened, half defiant tone were the only loud noise where there should have been sounds of cars and buses, busy traffic and pedestrians. Temporarily incapable of thinking clearly, Moshe tried only to see his surroundings. It was as if the world had become astigmatic to him. The jeering boy was clear, but the background was not, and he could not see what lay to either side of him. All he could tell was that it was not what it should have been. Was that an ancient castle in the distance?

Amid a sudden beat of hoofs, a horseman joined the boy as the only two solid, real-seeming objects in this world. The equestrian was tall, proud in the saddle; his mount moved splendidly and was well cared for. Moshe started to draw aside as the horse approached; but not fast enough. As the rider passed he contemptuously drove down with his crop, and the short lash st. . .