Read Online Dramocles: An Intergalactic Soap Opera by Robert Sheckley - Free Book Online

the first clue: capture Aardvark. The second clue bade me invade Lekk. But that was a few days ago and I don’t know what I should do next.”
    “Can you tell me what your destiny is, Father?”
    “I can’t because I still don’t know myself. Although many of my memories have returned, I still don’t have that particular piece of information. That’s why I’ve come here. I don’t know what to do next. I need your official oracular help.”
    Drusilla looked at her father’s eager face, boyish despite his beard and shaggy eyebrows. Although her father’s story made little sense to her, she hoped to learn more later.
    Rising, she took her father’s two hands. “Come, then, let us go to the Shrine of the Goddess. We will take the sacred substances. In a state of trance you will walk in the Palace of Memory, where all the answers lie.”
    “Sounds good to me,” Dramocles said. “Those sacred substances of yours are the best dope on Glorm.”
    “Daddy! You’re incorrigible!” Laughing, they proceeded to the Shrine Room.

 
    16
    Drusilla made her preparations in the dressing room just behind the oracular chamber. First she took a bath, using some of her dwindling supply of sacred bath salts, the secret of whose manufacture had been lost in the destruction of the ancient world. Her skin all tingly, she next anointed herself with a few precious drops of Mazola corn oil and dressed in the special robe used only for oracular mutterings. Dramocles smoked a cigarette during all this and thought of other matters.
    They proceeded to the Shrine Room–a subterranean chamber carved from black basalt. It was dimly illuminated; torches, set in walled embrasures, cast long flickering shadows across the polished marble floor. At the far end of the long, narrow room was a pool of water. It reflected the austere face of the Goddess carved into stone above it. A faint monotonous drone of bagpipes and scratching of snare drums filled the air: a tape of these potent sounds had been activated by a pressure-sensitive switch as they had entered. Dramocles pulled his cloak more closely about him, suddenly chilled by the air of ancient and uncaring mystery that the place exuded.
    Drusilla led her father up three flagstoned steps leading to the marble altar in front of the pool. The altar itself was composed of semiprecious stones joined by veins of silver. Upon its surface were three sandalwood boxes of various sizes.
    “Is that where you keep the dope?” Dramocles asked.
    “Oh, Father, jest not,” Drusilla said, her voice issuing deeply from her previously described chest. With reverent fingers she opened the first chest and removed from it a chamois bag pricked out in gold and silver thread. Opening it, she spilled a quantity of dried green herbal matter into an ebony handled sieve. Quick motions of her deft fingers separated the powdery residue from the seeds and twigs, the latter being reserved for the tame swallows who staggered around the castle’s atrium. She poured the herbal matter into a rectangle of rice paper inscribed with the name of the ancient Terran deity Rizla, deftly rolled it into a slender cylinder, lighted it, and gave it to her father.
    “Far out,” Dramocles said, inhaling deeply. A second and third inhalation followed, each of them combined with an appropriate exhalation. Dramocles let smoke dribble out of the corners of his mouth and sniffed appreciatively. “Hey, where’d you get this stuff?” he asked.
    They were speaking now the ancient lost psychedelic language of their visionary forefathers from Earth. Question and response proceeded ritualistically, in the manner revealed in the ancient records.
    “It gets the job done,” Drusilla said.
    “Dynamite,” Dramocles said reverently. “Kindly do not bogart that joint, my friend.”
    “The trip is only beginning,” Drusilla said, passing the rice-paper cylinder and opening the second sandalwood box.
    From it she removed a flat silver case.