contests being played out instant by instant until the end of time. Yet whatever the odds in Death's favor, Saberhagen stubbornly proclaims that Life will wear the victor's crown.
The same ground rules obeyed in the berserker series reappear in all Saberhagen's fiction because they express his personal — and highly traditional values. Length and continuity permit some especially engrossing refinements of play in The Empire of the East (1979), the revised one-volume edition of a trilogy originally published as The Broken Lands (1968), The Black Mountains (1971), and Changeling Earth (1973).
Ingenious though he is, Saberhagen has never been wildly innovative. His strength as a writer lies in seeing old concepts from new angles and employing them with unswerving thoroughness. Empire is a monument to these qualities. It rests on that venerable fantasy premise, 'a world where magic works.' In the version pioneered by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt in their Incomplete Enchanter (1942), magic totally replaces science. However, in Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away (1978), magic is being supplanted by science. Works like Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos (1971) and Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy series show the two kinds of knowledge co-existing unequally in realistic twentieth century settings, but series by Andre Norton (Witch World) and Marion Zimmer Bradley (Darkover) set them at odds in archaic alien societies.
Saberhagen's Empire takes place in a post-catastrophe North America whose culture is vaguely medieval. Wizardry dominates this demon-ridden age while the rare bits of technology surviving from the Old World are objects of superstitious awe. Sometimes Old and New can unite, as in the temperamental person of the djinn technologist, a being as maddeningly literalminded as a computer, who must be properly programmed to perform his magic feats.
The novelty of the situation is why magic has become feasible. There was no thaumaturgic breakthrough. Instead, the very nature of physical reality has been fundamentally altered by the doomsday weapons used in a past global war. The probability of occult phenomena occurring has increased enormously. 'Since the Change it could scarcely be said that anything was lifeless; powers that before had only been potentialities now responded readily to the wish, the incantation, were motivated and controlled by the dream-like logic of the wizard's world.' Meanwhile, the likelihood of certain physical reactions and technical aptitude itself have correspondingly declined. Or as the author himself remarks, 'We are not justified in assuming that all physical laws are immutable through the whole universe of space and time.'
But no matter how much else may change, the craving for mastery endures. Whether engineers or wizards build their war gear, conquerors will be conquerors still. The tyrant of the age is John Ominor ('The AllDevourer'), Emperor of the East, a man far wickeder than the demons he binds to his will. Not long before the story opens, Ominor's armies consumed the last independent bit of the continent, the Broken Lands along the West Coast. But before his world dominion can be perfectly secured, rebels calling themselves the Free Folk challenge his despotic rule. Aided by a quasimaterial power named Ardneh, they fight their way up through the feudal hierarchy, from satrap past viceroy to confront the Emperor himself.
Each volume of the trilogy has a different source of mythic inspiration. As the text itself explains, The Broken Lands is based on an Indian myth concerning the god Indra and the demon Namuci. The gods (devas) and demons (asuras) of India are the opposite poles of the same transcendent nature. Each side continually struggles to amass enough spiritual energy to subdue the other. Indra the Thunderer; god of storm, war, and fertility; rider of the white elephant Airavata; Guardian of the Eastern Quarter of the Universe; once swore an extravagant oath of friendship with the powerful drought demon Namuci. Later, he slipped through a loophole in the terms to slay the complacent demon. (Georges Dumezil's Destiny of the Warrior exhaustively analyzes this episode as a key Indo-European myth.) In other adventures, mighty Indra also slew Trisiras, a triple-headed hybrid of god and demon, and Vritra, a cosmic dragon who had impounded the waters of life.
Saberhagen works some clever and selective transformations on this raw material. Indra's discus-shaped Thunderstone appears as a practical device for making rain or war. The oath becomes a prophecy of retribution by Arneh, the mysterious presence who can manifest himself in persons, places, or things. Namuci is the East's cruel satrap Ekuman, leigeman of demons, and the sea-spume that kills him is fireextinguisher foam. The instrument of Arneh's justice is a youth named Rolf who has a natural affinity for technology and the courage to ride the atomic- powered elephant to victory.
The Black Mountains borrows motifs rather than specific incidents from mythology and arranges these in opposing pairs to render the next great battle between East and West. Defeated Easterner Lord Chup, 'the tall broken man,' is wounded and healed, slain and reborn, degraded and redeemed so that he at last stands tall and whole — on the Western side. Som the Dead, an inhuman man, is annihilated by a godlike beast, the immortal Lord Draffut. (These two fantastical characters seem to echo every remembered tale of animated corpses and kindly nature spirits — the Nazgul king and Tom Bombadil from The Lord of the Rings spring to mind. Nevertheless, they are strikingly original creations.) Rolf's twin quests for his kidnapped sister and for the hidden life-principle of the demon Zapranoth end in the same place, resolved by the familiar fairytale device of the separable soul. Ultimately, demons prove as vunerable to men as men are to demons.
Ardneh's World (the retitled Changeling Earth) reveals the secret of that being's identity. As the war front spreads out to its widest expanse, the distinctions between the two sides reach their sharpest contrast through the use of mythic prototypes. Like the ancient battle Indra the Generous fought with Vritra the Enveloper, this is a duel to the death between mankind's Advocate and its Adversary. The personifications of Defense and Aggression meet in mortal combat.
The Demon-Emperor Orcus bears the Latin name for both Hades and its ruler. He is an Old World hell bomb turned New World hell-lord. (In the Mahabharata, demonic Vritra looks uncannily like a nuclear explosion's mushroom cloud: 'He grew, towering up to heaven like the fiery sun, as if the sun of doomsday had arisen.') The malevolence of Orcus is sordid. This haunter of waterless places is not Milton's glamorous rebel but Meredith's bully who cringes away from starlight. Ominor, once his servant but now his master, chained him away beneath the earth for a thousand years. Now like Satan or Loki, the fiend bursts forth for the day of wrath and falls like lightning on his foe.
Ardneh, like Orcus, has a substance 'only partially subject to the laws of matter.' But he was born of benevolent technology as the consciousness of a defense system that 'damped the energies of nuclear fire' and 'freed the energies of life.' (His home base may have been SAC Headquarters in Omaha.) Although he is the actual author of the Change that transformed the world, he denies being a god. Perhaps a more appropriate title for the Archdemon's counterpart is Archangel like an angelic power, Ardneh 'is where he works.' By sacrificing himself to annihilate Orcus, he brings victory out of defeat while the Western army retreats to win the day.
This paradoxical resolution recalls major triumphs in the berserker wars and even the Pascal mystery. It is, the capstone of all the paradoxes and ironies that shape the story. Draffut destroys Som the Dead by trying to heal him. Blows wound the one who struck them; spells rebound on the one who cast them. Tiny flaws widen and small kindnesses expand to undermine the mightiest citadels of evil. The weak can prove surprisingly strong and the strong, shockingly weak.
Westerners, even Ardneh himself, resist temptation but Easterners sink ever lower in depravity by freely chosen stages. Refusing one shameful order pivots Chup against the East. The Western cause draws persons together but the East, that 'society of essential selfishness' is hopelessly divided against itself as each member scrabbles for more influence. Absolute dominion as an end in itself brings scant satisfaction to him who wields it. At best, Ominor finds mild distraction in sadism.
The white-clad supreme tyrant is 'the most ordinarylooking' of the nine 'Unworthies' who sit on his council. His manner is as banal as his first name and his capital on the site of Chicago is nothing like Sauron's, its charm being marred only by a few impaling stakes among the flowerbeds. Sheer untiring wickedness has raised this apparatchik above the direst demons in malignant force.
Exotic Lady Charmian, on the other hand, is supernally fair but eventually boring as she slithers from bed to bed. Her monotonous scheming inevitably brings about the very opposite of what she sought to achieve, at her father Ekuman's court, in Som's stronghold, and among the leaders of the East. Although she is mired in her rut of malice, her husband Chup still claims her. The same stubborness that saved his own integrity may yet undo the effects of her childhood pledging to the East. Chup's regeneration stands for the transformation of his troubled world. But the future of that world belongs to Rolf and his kind. As in The Lord of the Rings, the major figures on both sides disappear, leaving the world to men and to powers they can control. However, magic will not entirely vanish here, although technology will slowly revive. Having won the contest for mastery, men can now make of their lives what they will, whether by sorcery or science — or both.
