He shuddered and tried to put out of his mind the pictures that this thought painted. One thing at a time.
He looked at the others. They were watching him intently. Although they would have strongly denied it, they regarded him as a leader. He was not the oldest brother and one of his cousins was older. But he had taken immediate and forceful measures whenever any crisis had come up on this world. And he had the beamer. Moreover, they seemed to detect something different in him, a dimension that they lacked-although they would have denied this, too. His experience as Robert Wolff, the Earthman, had given him a grip upon matters that they had always considered too mundane to bother with. Insulated from hard labor, from having to deal with things at a primitive level, they felt lost. Once they had been makers and semi-divine rulers of their own private universes. Now they were no better-perhaps not as good-as the savages they so despised. Jadawin- or Wolff, as they were beginning to call him-was a man who knew his way around in a world of savages.
Wolff said, “It’s one fate or the the other. A case of eenie meenie minie moe.”
“And what barbaric language is that?” Vala said.
“Earth type. I’ll tell you what. Vala is the only woman here . . .”
“But more of a man than most of you,” Vala said.
“. . . so why don’t we let her pick out which one we enter? It’s as good a method as any for choosing.”
“That bitch never did anything right in her life,” Palamabron said. “But I say, let her designate the gate. Then we won’t go wrong if we enter the one she doesn’t choose.”
“Do what you like,” Vala said. “But I say–that one.”
She pointed at the right-hand hexagon.
“Very well,” Wolff said. “Since I have the beamer, I’ll go first. I don’t know what’s on the other side. Rather, I know what is there–death-but I don’t know what form it’ll take. Before I go, I’d like to say this. There was a time, brothers, cousins, sister, when we loved each other. Our mother lived then, and we were happy with her. We were in awe of our father, the gloomy, remote, forbidding Urizen. But we did not hate him. Then our mother died. How she died, we still don’t know. I think, as some of you do, that Urizen killed our mother. It was only three days after she died that he took to wife Araga, the Lord of her own world, and so united his domain with hers.
“Whoever murdered our mother, we know what happened after that. We found out that Urizen was beginning to be sorry that he had children. He was one of the very few Lords to have children being raised as Lords. The Lords are dying out; they are paying for their immortality, so-called, and for their power, with gradual extinction. They have also paid with the loss of that one thing that makes life worthwhile: love.”
“Love!” said Vala. She laughed, and the others joined her. Luvah half-smiled, but he did not laugh.
“You sound like a pack of hyenas,” Wolff said. “Hyenas are carrion-eaters, powerful, nasty, vicious brutes, whose stench and habits make them despised and hated everywhere. However, they do serve a useful function, which is more than I can say for you.
” ‘Love,’ I said. And I repeat it again. The word means nothing to you; it has been too many thousands of years since you felt it. And I doubt that any of you felt it very strongly then. Anyway, as I was saying, we found out that Urizen was considering doing away with us. Or at least disowning us and driving us out to live with the aborigines on a planet in one of his universes, a world which he intended to make gateless so we could never strike back at him. We fled. He came after us and tried to kill us. We got away, and we killed other Lords and took over their worlds.
“Then we forgot we were brothers and sisters and cousins and became true Lords. Hateful, scheming, jealous, possessive. Murderers, cruel alike to each other and to the miserable beings who populated our worlds.”