Vikings of Scorpio

Eventually, Sygar posed the big question:

"Where in Sicce am I?"

Slowly but forcefully I explained to him that the mental hospital he was staying in was within the city of Toronto, which was the largest city of a country called Canada, and that this country was not on Kregen, but rather on a planet called Earth.

Sygar nodded solemnly. He had seen the sun through windows, and was frightened by it; Kregen, as you probably know, lies in a binary system with one large red star (which Prescot says is Antares) and one smaller green star; these stars have a variety of names, depending on where you go.

Sygar told me that he had originally thought that the two suns had somehow merged, or fused together. Perhaps they had collided; but whatever had happened had left the sky with only one sun. But the moons were changed as well; Kregen has seven moons, some of which appear larger than ours, while most of them seem much smaller. This strange moon was not like the moons of Kregen; it always showed the same face, and shone with a pale bony white light. He could not imagine what would cause the moons of Kregen to be replaced by this deathly spectre.

Gradually he came to a new theory, that he might actually be dead, and this some strange afterlife. His imprisonment was perhaps the result of a wicked life, and now he was doomed to suffer for eternity.

That idea didn't especially appeal to him.

But his keepers seemed mortal enough; he seemed to be in a real place, not some mystical land of the dead. It was not what he expected at all.

He had quickly discarded the notion that he could be on a part of Kregen where the suns and moons shone differently. He knew enough about astronomy and navigation to know that couldn't be.

It gradually dawned on him that he might be in another world entirely, a different world, where different rules applied to how things worked. But beyond that he was at a loss. So my words did not rattle him too much. He wanted to know more and more about our world. Where were the diffs, he asked. Were they not allowed in Canada?

I explained to him that there were no diffs on Earth; that the only intelligent species were Homo Sapiens Sapiens, what he would call apim. That surprised him somewhat.

He had a flurry of questions about the things of Earth, particularly to explain things unfamiliar to him in his surroundings. How did the lights work? How did the doors lock with no apparent locking mechanism? I tried to explain to him about electricity, and found the subject difficult at best, with the limited vocabulary at my disposal.

The first thing I tried to get across what that whatever it was that powered our technology, it wasn't magic. He found that notion puzzling; after all, if something produced a magical effect, wasn't that magic? Gradually I realized that we had different definitions for the word; he seemed to feel that magic was not necessarily mysterious, just that magicians tended to be secretive about how their magic worked. I explained that the main difference was that the workings of technology did not depend on some sort of natural talent in the operator, rather they always worked, no matter who used them. That seemed to satisfy him somewhat.

I of course had a great deal of questions for him about Kregen, and I was finding it hard to be patient with him while he probed me for information. I understood that he needed to get his bearings, but I had my own questions for him.

When I started asking questions about him, he was cagey at first; he wasn't sure why I wanted all this information. But eventually we decided to exchange information about things, so we took turns asking questions.

I discovered that Sygar was from a part of Kregen called Mengradrin, which was a modest-sized nation on the Island of Urndrin. Kregen has many islands, but only nine "Islands", prominent subcontinent-sized land masses, of which Urndrin was one. His hometown was called Sundergar, and he was from a large family; not only did he have a variety of siblings but also many cousins, aunts, uncles, and other relations, most of whom lived in Sundergar, a place where he was no longer welcome.

Sygar, on the other hand discovered that there were no slaves kept in Canada, or in most of the world, for that matter, and it was illegal in the places where it was still practiced. I also told him that no amount of wealth would buy his release (well, probably), and that he would be released if the doctors judged that he was no longer Makib, or insane. He discovered that wealth on Earth is measured with little pieces of paper, rather than through gold or silver, and that even those papers are becoming unnecessary, with bankers being able to keep electronic ledgers of things. He also discovered that though we have a monarch in Canada, we have no nobles to speak of, and government is determined by elections. That seemed pretty strange to him.

Well, all these things shocked him somewhat. They made Earth seem much stranger than the fact of only one sun and moon, or technology based on electricity.

It was at this point I realized that I believed in Sygar.

I can't really say what it was that clinched it for me, but upon realizing this I felt that I must try to contact either Dray Prescot, or his editor/author Alan Burt Akers, who I had formerly believed were one and the same. For those of you who don't know, the Dray Prescot books are narrated by Dray himself, through the means of a bunch of audio cassettes that are passed on to one Alan Burt Akers, who according to the story transcribes them into novels.

If Sygar Sygarhan is genuine, and Kregen truly exists, then the Dray Prescot story must be at least partly true as well. If that is the case, then the story of the tapes being sent to Alan Burt Akers must also be true.

Contacting Alan Burt Akers was more easily said than done. The original publisher for the books, DAW publishing, is now under new management and is not interested in questions about the Dray Prescot series, which they no longer carry. A company called Heyne has had more recent contact with Alan, having continued to publish the books in translation in German. They are apparently expecting the fifty-third book in the series, and apparently it is past deadline.

They were able to give me a mailing address of the Akers household, and I wrote a letter to Alan about his books, asking if the tapes really did exist. I thought this might make me look like a nut, but if it was true then it did not matter.

About a week and a half later, I got a call from a police detective from Alan's home town, and he was asking pointed questions about my relationship with Alan. I realized that the letter must have made me seem even nuttier than I thought. But the questions of the detective seemed strange; no, I had never met Alan Burt Akers, I was merely a fan of the books he wrote.

The question that hit me like a bolt of lightning was:

"Do you know the current whereabouts of Mister Akers?"

I was floored. Alan Burt Akers missing? I responded after a moment that I would have hardly written him a letter at his home if I even knew he was not there. The detective had to acknowledge the sense in that, and I gathered that he was somewhat desperate for leads. He wouldn't discuss the case, except to say that Alan when missing suddenly about three years ago and that his family is presuming that he is dead.

I was then able to contact the family and was told that there were no such tapes by Dray Prescot; that the entire series was a work of fiction and that the Akers family still retained the rights to it. I asked if Alan was still being sought, and the answer was no. The family was likewise reticent to discuss the case.

I searched around for the name Akers in the newspapers for that year and found more; apparently Alan was found missing early one morning, his bedclothes piled up haphazardly on the floor. No evidence of a break-in was found, nor was any evidence of a struggle apparent. No ransom note was ever given, nor was a body ever found. Since Alan was elderly the authorities thought that he had simply wandered off, but no reports of a naked old man wandering the streets ever surfaced.

Hmm.

I decided to try and track down Geoffrey Dean, the man who supposedly given the tapes to Mr. Akers. This was even tougher; the US State Department was not keen to release any lists of employees to a stranger, and it ultimately turned out that Geoffrey Dean was not a real name anyhow. To make a long story short, through the agency of the police detective I had spoken to earlier I was able to find out if the police during their investigation had called anyone named Geoffrey Dean or anyone in the Washington area.

They had, although Geoffrey Dean was not that name.

Well, I called the person up, and discovered that he did have contact With Alan Burt Akers many years ago, and did give a large number of cassettes to him, though he had not personally listened to them. He did not want his name connected with the publication of any books, so he had asked Alan not to mention his real name, and si I have not named him either. No, he had not seen Alan since his disappearance, or for that matter for several years before that; they had drifted out of touch. He cautioned me, saying that whatever was on those tapes is still just the word of one man, and that I should not take them too seriously.

This approach seemed like a dead end, and I decided I had wasted enough of my time trying to find the cold trail of Dray Prescot. After all, I had Sygar right here, and nothing but a bunch of vague connections elsewhere.

When I returned to Sygar, it had finally occurred to him to ask how it was I knew some Kregish, if he was truly on another world. Had I been there? I found it difficult to explain that I had read about it in paperbacks; I doubted that Sygar had ever really read fiction for pleasure. That seemed to be something alien to the culture he was from.

However, when I mentioned the name Dray Prescot, Sygar rolled his eyes, though he declined to comment; in fact, he seemed to want to avoid the subject of Dray Prescot altogether. Well, I could let that lie for now, but if Sygar did have some sort of relationship with Prescot, that might explain what he was doing here.

The notion of tape recorders did intrigue him though, and I was able to bring a tape recorder and demonstrate it's use to him. He considered it to be more magic, though again I argued the point. He suggested that what the people who built the device were doing was just the same as an enchanter, only with more volume. Nevertheless, he found the tape recorder fascinating, and was entertained for quite some time by that, though when I told him that most people used it to record music, he thought that was sort of odd.

"Can't they sing for themselves?" he asked. It seemed to him that listening to a recording robbed one of the pleasure of singing songs, of participation. I tried to explain that there were too many songs written on Earth for people to know them all, and besides, our music also was very strong with instruments rather than voices, and only the best musicians are able to succeed at making such recordings. He didn't seem convinced.

So, the next day, I brought some tapes from my limited but eclectic music collection. I had a secret hope that Kregans would like Rock Music. I tried to select a variety of musical styles, to give Sygar a sampling of what sort of things were available. His reaction was suspicious, but curious.

He enjoyed the Irish folk music that I brought, and I had played that first expecting him to be able to understand it. Classical orchestral music seemed to befuddle him; the heavy instrumentation and lack of lyrics were more than he could handle. But when I played a version of Brahms' Waltz #15 in A flat minor Op.39, which was played on a solitary piano, he was quite enthralled, and made me play it back several times. Jazz seemed interesting to him, but he had a hard time following that as well. I played for him "Out of my House, Roach" by the Shuffle Demons, and he seemed to get into the spirit of that, though he didn't ask me to play it again.

He liked the rhythm of Elvis and The Beatles, but the music he could take or leave. He liked some more recent stuff, like ballads by Sting. He thought highly of Sarah MacLauchlan's voice, and he particularly liked Dire Straits' "Brothers in Arms". Considering the subject matter, that did not surprise me.

Harder stuff like the Kinks and AC/DC he enjoyed as well; the simplicity of it made it accessible to him, I suppose. But when I played "Bombtrack" by Rage Against the Machine, he became uncomfortable. That surprised me; I always enjoy the angry visceral response I get from such music. But he refused to get into it. He said:

"This sounds like a war song."

"I guess..." I said, not certain where this was going. "It is an angry song."

"Turn it off, please", he said, in a firm way that made me do it quickly. Sygar seemed disturbed, maybe even upset. So I put the tape player away. Besides, the doctors really didn't approve of my entertaining him; they wanted information, and, well, so did I.

The information I really wanted from Sygar was about just who he was (and so did the doctors, since they needed more information about Sygar's "persona" to understand just what sort of psychosis he was under). So I started asking him about what he did on Kregen, and what his family did. I started with the question: "Are you a warrior of some kind?"

"Of course", he responded. "Every man from Mengradrin that is worth anything is a warrior. But I was also raised a sailor and a fisherman, and I can tend herds and do most of the ordinary thing that most Mengradi can do. No matter what, though, an Urndrinner man is judged first on one thing, his ability to fight."

That sounded a lot like the Kregen I had read about. So I pressed on, saying: "Were you any good at it?"

A strange look came over him. His eyes seemed very penetrating at that moment, and I can hardly imagine what emotions ran through his head right then, though it looked like a combination of pride, shame, sadness, and wistfullness, all at once.

"Oh, yes," he said after a moment. "I was very good. My kind is among the most feared among the Mengradi. You see, I am a berserk."

I then asked him if he could tell me about it. He assured me that the story was long, and would take a while. I suggested that he use the tape recorder, and much to my delight, he accepted.