The Warlock of Rhada by Robert Cham Gilman

would be paralyzed, that his blindness would force him to rely on the prosthetic eye he wore--all this gave him drug-pleasure. For it assured him that he would turn to sleep again--the sleep of trilaudid.
    Dihanna, he thought dreamily, and his pleasure-sharpened mind recreated her. He touched her glossy ebony skin, felt the tight, wiry texture of her flame-colored hair. She seemed to be saying: “You see, I did join you after all, Ophir.” And: “I was wrong, wrong to oppose pleasure and happiness and love--” Some ancient flicker of reality sparked in his brain, and for just an instant he knew that he was with a false Dihanna, that she would never have spoken so about drug-happiness. But almost instantly, the trilaudid in his bloodstream blunted the single synapse, and Dihanna became once again the soft, acquiescent creature his addiction had made her.
    His uncle, the Galacton, said: “You are the heir, Ophir. You cannot--” The mere suggestion of the word “cannot” triggered the drug reaction again, and the Galacton smiled down at his favorite nephew from the Great Star Throne and said, “Yes, of course, yes--whatever gives you pleasure, my young lion--”
    The images darkened, faded. The computer had detected visitors at the tunnel mouth and, knowing they sought the Warlock, was waking him. Lord Ophir fought to keep to his drug-dream, but the computer was immune to the ethic of trilaudid: “Whatever gives you pleasure, do.” It turned his robe cold and he awoke. Bitterness overwhelmed him. Once again he could not remember his own name. His brain seemed to have ceased to function. He felt half-alive as the infusion of the drug slowed, a million tiny needles withdrawing from his withered flesh.
    He opened his electronic eye. On the telescreen above his sleep-tank the computer had projected the scene in the moraine.
    The villagers of Trama were there in force. Torches burned, though the last light had not yet faded from the sky. They were chanting dark verses from that mess of superstition they called The Warls.
    The computer said, “Go. It is good for you to see other humans.”
    The Warlock snarled, “Humans? Savages. Beasts.”
    The computer made no distinctions. It was concerned only with the well-being of its patient, and it had been told, aeons ago, that without contact with others of his kind, man, the social animal, withers and dies.
    “It is bad therapy for a patient to refuse visitors when he is able to see them,” the recorded voice said.
    “Why do they bother me?” the Warlock asked, rising unwillingly from the tank.
    The question was recognized as rhetorical and not answered.
    “Why me!” This time an answer was wanted. But the hospital computer’s billion software packages did not include anything pertinent to skin-wearing savages in the hospital valley. Instead, like any doctor, it said, “It will do you good to see them.”
    The Warlock’s eyes, dark with trilaudid blindness, jerked and trembled. “Who am I?” he burst out hopelessly.
    This information the computer did have, but it was considered poor therapy to present trilaudid addicts with contradictions. The computer, again like any doctor, lied for the patient’s good. “I am not programmed to answer that. When the doctor comes, he will decide what must be done. “
    “The doctor is never coming!” the old man screamed. “No one is coming--ever!”
    “You have visitors,” the computer said primly. And then, with maddening electronic smugness, repeated, “It is bad therapy for a patient to refuse visitors when he is able to--”
    The Warlock fled from the room.
     
    In the deepening dusk, Shevil Lar led the villagers in the litany, the chant from the Warls.
    “From the rage of the star-raiders,
Save us!”
    The torch-lit faces, raised in supplication to the blank and empty tunnel mouth, swayed in the flame-brightness. The response came like a rumble on the wind from the mountains.
    “Salve!”
“From the fire in the