Free Compleat Traveller in Black by John Brunner

landed you with it, if I may ask?”
    “You may not. I’m very sorry.” The tone was final; still, the words were succeeded by a chuckle. This black-garbed fellow was really very pleasant, Bernard reflected. Casting around for the other question he had meant to put, he recalled it.
    “Well, then! May I at least ask what it was I did? ”
    “That, yes! You see, there was dissatisfaction in Ryovora so long as the people felt they had to have a god. So I gave them one … of a kind. And in the end they realized their god – you! – had done nothing for them which they themselves could not have achieved by using their heads. My compliments, by the way, on the elegant manner in which you demonstrated that.”
    “I was scared silly,” confessed Bernard.
    “But you kept your wits about you, and refused to be overawed by mere size. The universe is a big place, and there are many corners of it where chaos on the grand scale still obtains. This, then, is a valuable attitude.”
    Bernard pondered for a while. At last he shook his head and sighed. “It’s no good. I can’t deal in these terms. Magic – monsters staring out of hillsides – creatures half man, half beast – stone idols that can walk … It’s the stuff of nightmare! Even though I seem to remember seeing it, I don’t believe it’s real.”
    “Thank you,” said his companion dryly. “That you speak thus is an earnest of my eventual success. Sometimes it seems a very long way off.”
    “What will – if this is the right way to put it – what will happen then?”
    “ I don’t know,” said the traveller. “Why should I care? I’ll have finished my appointed task. And since you have now concluded yours …”
     
    When he was alone, the traveller in black stood awhile leaning on his staff of curdled light, contemplating the wreck of Manuus’s castle.
    Chaos.
    He decreed it out of existence. Since Manuus no longer held it tenaciously in being, it disappeared. Across the site the grass grew green and orderly.
    The traveller wished that Bernard had not asked his last question. It was discomforting. Now and then he regretted that he must inevitably find out its answer.
    Yet it was not in his nature – and his nature was single – to undo anything he had done. Therefore, inexorably, he was approaching that ultimate moment.
    He shrugged, and then there was nothing but the knoll and the afternoon sunlight, while people made merry in Ryovora.
     
     

 
    TWO
    Break the Door of Hell
     
     
    I will break the door of hell and smash the bolts; I will summon the dead to eat food with the living, and the living shall be outnumbered by the host of them.
     
    –The Epic of Gilgamesh
     
    I
     
    Time had come to Ryovora.
    The traveller in black contemplated the fact from the brow of the hill where he had imprisoned Laprivan, more aeons ago than it was possible to count. Leaning on his staff of light, he repressed a shiver. Single though his nature might be, unique though that attribute certainly was, he was not immune from apprehension; his endowments did not include omniscience.
    Time had come to that great city; time, in which could exist order and logic and rational thought. And so it was removed from his domain forever, vanished from the borderland of chaos situated timeless in eternity.
    Given the task for which his single nature fitted him, one might have expected that he should feel the satisfaction of achievement, or even pleasurable if mild conceit. He did not, and for this there were two most cogent reasons and a third which he preferred not to consider.
    The first, and most piquing, was that his duty lay upon him; this season followed the conjunction of four significant planets hereabout, and he was setting forth, as he was constrained, to oversee that portion of the All which lay in his charge. And he had grown accustomed to terminating his round of inspection at Ryovora. Lapses and backsliding from common sense had occasionally minded him to alter