LORD of a THOUSAND SUNS
By POUL ANDERSON
A Man without a World, this 1,000,000-year-old
Daryesh! Once Lord of a Thousand Suns, now condemned
to rove the spaceways in alien form, searching
for love, for life, for the great lost Vwyrdda.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories September 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"Yes, you'll find almost anything man has ever imagined, somewhere out in the Galaxy," I said. "There are so damned many millions of planets, and such a fantastic variety of surface conditions and of life evolving to meet them, and of intelligence and civilization appearing in that life. Why, I've been on worlds with fire-breathing dragons, and on worlds where dwarfs fought things that could pass for the goblins our mothers used to scare us with, and on a planet where a race of witches lived—telepathic pseudohypnosis, you know—oh, I'll bet there's not a tall story or fairy tale ever told which doesn't have some kind of counterpart somewhere in the universe."
Laird nodded. "Uh-huh," he answered, in that oddly slow and soft voice of his. "I once let a genie out of a bottle."
"Eh? What happened?"
"It killed me."
I opened my mouth to laugh, and then took a second glance at him and shut it again. He was just too dead-pan serious about it. Not poker-faced, the way a good actor can be when he's slipping over a tall one—no, there was a sudden misery behind his eyes, and somehow it was mixed with the damnedest cold humor.