Dramocles: An Intergalactic Soap Opera Read Free

remember it.”
    “Easy enough to suppress a thought, or even an entire topic,” Fish said, in the squeaky voice that androids have despite great advances in voicebox technology. “Your esteemed father, Otho, always had me blot out the names of mistresses who didn’t work out, all except their birthdays, since he was a kindly man. He also insisted upon not remembering the color blue.”
    “But I don’t want to lose this thought, either,” Dramocles said. “It’s a very important thought. I want to remember it thirty years from now.”
    “That’s considerably more difficult,” Fish said.
    “Couldn’t you suppress the thought but give me a posthypnotic command to remember it thirty years hence?”
    “I did use that technique successfully for King Otho. He wanted to think of Gilbert and Sullivan every six months, for reasons he never disclosed to me. Unfortunately, thirty years is too long for a reliable posthypnotic memory trigger.”
    “Isn’t there something else you can do?”
    “Well, I could key the memory to a word or phrase. Then Your Highness would have to entrust the key word to some trusty person who would say that word to you in thirty years’ time.”
    “Such as a remembrancer.” Dramocles thought about it for a few seconds. Although not entirely foolproof, it seemed a pretty good plan. “What do you suggest for a key word?” he asked Fish.
    “Personally, I’d pick shazaam ,” the android replied.
    Dramocles consulted the Galactic Yellow Pages for a reliable Rememberatorium. He decided upon Clara’s. Piloting his own space yacht, he went to the city of Murl and gave Clara the key word.
    When he returned to Ultragnolle, he summoned Dr. Fish once again. “Now I want you to suppress my memory of what we discussed, keying its revivification to the word shazaam. There is just one more matter before you begin, but I don’t quite know how to tell you.”
    “No need to discomfit yourself, my King. I have already put my affairs in order since I believe that you are planning to destroy me.”
    “How did you figure that out?” Dramocles asked with a surprised grin.
    “Elementary, Sire, for one who has studied your character and appreciates your need for the utmost secrecy in this matter.”
    “I hope you don’t resent me for it,” Dramocles said. “I mean, it isn’t as though you are a living person or anything.”
    “We androids have no sense of self-preservation,” Dr. Fish said. “Let me just take this last opportunity of wishing you the best of luck on the splendid enterprise upon which you will eventually be launched.”
    “That’s good of you, Fish,” Dramocles said. He stuck a sticky blob of blue plastic onto Fish’s collarbone and implanted a pale green detonator. “Good-bye, old friend. Now let’s get on with it.”
    Fish set up the narcopsychosynthesizer and did the various things required of him. (Dramocles could not remember what all of his final decisions had been, because he had had Fish excise certain of them for self-disclosure at a later date.) Fish finished. Dramocles got up from the operating table thinking he had just had a massage, and now wanted to take a brisk walk. A posthypnotic command took him a hundred yards from Fish’s laboratory. Then he heard the explosion.
    Hurrying back, he saw that Dr. Fish had been blown up.
    Dramocles couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to blow up an inoffensive android like Fish. He never considered the possibility that he had done it himself, since exploded androids tell no tales.
    The android had done his job well, and Dramocles went to work ruling his planet and wondering what his real destiny was. And that’s how it had been for thirty years.

 
    4
    After the memory had run its course, Dramocles leaned back in his armchair and fell to musing. How wonderful and unexpected a thing was life, he thought. An hour ago he had been bored and unhappy, with nothing to look forward to but the dreary business of running a