Mickey Reichert: Dragonrank master

"Galin's research is detailed in previous volumes of his journal. To protect him, I've blotted out his last name, and those of our numerous assistants, everywhere they appear in his notes. I have no idea what impact my disappearance may have on him. Whatever happens, I want to give him the option of disclaiming his role in my mistakes. I take no credit for the brilliance of his project, but I deserve all the blame for the consequences my subsequent actions unleashed upon the world."

Larson paused. He knew Mannix's revelation lay beyond the comprehension of his companions, especially with the huge and myriad gaps lost to translation. But the word "Dragonrank" farther down the page seized Larson's attention. He continued reading.

"Our laboratory was understandably nonstandard. We needed modern living facilities to take with us on our hops through time and solid barriers to defend us from warrior cultures. The time travel required a huge cyclotron buried beneath the sand. Its ends pass through Gal-in's workroom in the basement. He used it to accelerate antiparticles to relativistic speeds, continuously feeding the generated energy back into the system. A single, contained nuclear fusion blast liberated enough additional energy to drive larger particles beyond light speed. Once the threshold was breached, the process became exothermic. By channeling the massive amounts of power thus created, Galin made an essentially infinite energy line which we tapped in small amounts to move through time and run the standard electricity in the laboratory. A series of complicated equations and experiments with inanimate objects determined the amount of energy needed to travel instantaneously to various times and places. That's how I understand it, but I'm no physicist. I have to rely on the simplified information of Galin's verbal explanations. I'm certain, friend reader, you could learn more from Galin's notes."

I doubt it . Larson's head was pounding already, and he made no attempt to translate the paragraph for the others. "Anyone for lunch?"

"I'll take care of it." Taziar opened his pack and set to the meal while Larson returned to Mannix's journal.

"A miscalculation brought me to ninth/tenth century Scandinavia rather than b.c. Egypt. I've reviewed Galin's calculations a thousand times without finding it. Over time, I've come to believe it's a mistake so small as to be within the natural error of the gauges. That would also explain why Galin was never able to rescue me. Regardless, I soon realized that if I was to ever see my wife and son, my friends, my home, my world again, I was going to have to find my own way back. In the meantime, I set out to meet the people of my new era.

"My Norwegian-English dictionary proved of little use in translating their ancient language, but desperation makes a damn good teacher. Eventually, I learned to communicate with them. They called me Geirmagnus. At first, I thought it was their accented pronunciation, but that didn't quite fit. Then I convinced myself it was a title of respect. Within a year, I met six other Geir-magnuses and realized it was simply a common name and the closest to my impossibly strange American one.

"No history text could describe just how filthy, foul-smelling, and diseased these people were." Larson looked up quickly, but his companions did not seem to take offense. "More than ever, I wanted to go home, but the same curiosity which pushed me into research drove me to gain their trust and experiment. It was then I discovered the fascinating truth. Not one of them could be hypnotized! I tried every technique I could think of, carefully adapting it to the culture of their time without success. Certainly, there are people from my own time who can't be hypnotized, and theories abound as to the reason. But, after due consideration, there was only one reason I could see for an entire primitive race, perhaps the entire era, evolving barriers to mental exploration. Protection. Apparently someone or something could meddle with minds, perhaps destroy them. And I was the only one defenseless against it!"

Larson ate the jerked meat Taziar handed him, feeling a sudden kinship with a parapsychologist named Gary Mannix. But how did a man without mind barriers become a Dragonrank Master ? Understandably intrigued, Larson read on.

"Obviously, the people had little or no knowledge of their gifts. When questioned about mind-reading beings, most mentioned mythological gods. Nevertheless, my persistence won out. Eventually, I was told of a rare subculture of people known as "dream-readers." For a fee, a dream-reader would interpret dreams and thought obsessions, provided his client withdrew the mental barriers. As with all things not well understood, the dream-readers were looked upon with a mixture of fear, hatred, and respect.

"Scientist to the end, I couldn't let the discovery rest. I began a search which took me across Norway and parts of Sweden. I believe I interviewed and hired every dream-reader in existence. There were only eleven. More importantly, my efforts turned up Hosvir. He was a gawky youngster, not well suited to feats of strength or skill. After failing at multiple apprenticeships and on his father's farm, Hosvir was sent away from home. But Hosvir had the ability to perform tricks which I would have believed were simple sleight of hand were it not for the fact that he had the coordination and agility of an old plow horse. Because of his odd gift, he decided to try becoming a dream-reader.

"Hosvir did not fare well. He lacked the honey-tongued, used-car-salesmanlike sweetness which successful dream-readers use to relax clients enough to drop their mental barriers. Of course, I was no challenge. Hosvir read my thoughts. Then he read my memories. When I asked about his past, he didn't tell me. He showed me, with vivid images placed directly in my own mind. Hosvir was to other dream-readers what Harry Houdini's water tank was to my six-year-old son's card tricks. I thanked Hosvir for a unique experience. He thanked me for having flawed mind barriers. I took him back to the lab, and the first Dragonrank sorcerer was made."

Larson sighed, wishing his own experiences with Dragonrank mind powers had been equally benign.

"It didn't happen overnight. Through trial and error and good communication, I elicited the mechanism for Hosvir's ability. Some special difference in his internal makeup, I never discovered exactly what, allowed him to channel what I called 'psychic energy' and he referred to as 'Chaos.' In truth, his term was probably more accurate. He would summon this entropy as a scattered force and mold it into whatever he wanted or needed. It was the ultimate conversion of energy to matter, an alchemist's dream. Hosvir could turn lead to gold, but it was just as easy for him to create gold from nothing.

"It didn't end there. Strengthened by psychic exercises of my invention, Hosvir's powers seemed unlimited. He could create anything his mind could conceive, even life itself. He made Ingeborg, a large-boned, stout, and sturdy woman, beautiful by the standards of the era. Unfortu-nately, he couldn't conceive of antiparticles, nuclear fusion, or time travel. Even his exploration of my thoughts didn't help. Spanning epochs remained beyond Hosvir's abilities. And we soon discovered that we paid a great price for Hosvir's art.

"There is truth to the Chinese concept of yin and yang. Our world has two forces which must remain in relative balance: one, the natural entropy or randomness of the universe, the other, the ordered systems of matter. Hosvir's magic required him to summon large magnitudes of chaos-stuff from some source I never uncovered. The working of his spells would consume a certain amount of that energy, but there was always some left over. With time, the liberated chaos was becoming significant. Gradually, it took on a physical form. It looked to me rather like a small, European dragon. (Later, I learned this is the natural shape of huge volumes of banded entropy. Perhaps this opens a new area of research in Europe.) Unfortunately, the single purpose of the entropy-force was destruction.