The World of Tiers Volume Two: Behind the Walls of Terra, the Lavalite World, Red Orc's Rage, and More Than Fire

by Philip José Farmer

  Righteous fire is never quenched.

  Burn, burn, burn, burn!

  That said it all, yet it was not enough.

  That was why movies, paintings, and the beat of rock—above all, the beat of rock—were sometimes better than words. The unsayable was said. Better said, anyway.

  For a moment, the street around him seemed to become wavy. It was as shimmering and as unstable as a mirage in a desert. Then it cooled off and became unmoving again. Cornplanter Street was as solid as it had been a few seconds ago. Just as squalid, too. Seven blocks away, above the roofs of the houses, the gray-black smokestacks and upper stories of the Helsgets Steel Works mills were metal giants. Dead giants because no stinking and black smoke poured from them. Jim remembered when they had been alive, though that seemed so long ago that it might have been in another century.

  Cheap foreign steel had shut down the area’s industrial-steel complex. Since then, or so it seemed to Jim, his parents’ troubles and, thus, his own troubles, had started. Though the busy furnaces had poured clouds of dirt and poison over the city, they had also showered prosperity. Now, hand in hand with cleaner air had come poverty, despair, rage, and violence. Though the citizens could now see a house two blocks away, they could not see the future and were not sure they wanted to.

  This street, the whole city, was Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row.”

  Jim shuffled along the cracked sidewalk in his dirty and scarred cowhide boots. He passed two-story bungalows built just after World War II ended. Some of the front yards were fenced in; some of these fences were white with paint and had been repaired not too long ago. Some of the yards sported nice-looking lawns. Those with little grass or none at all were occupied by old cars up on blocks or motorcycles partly torn apart.

  The morning sun was glorious in the unflecked blue sky. Yet the light in Belmont City had seemed for a long time to Jim to be unlike the light elsewhere. It was particularly harsh and, at the same time, gritty. How could sunlight in clear air be gritty? He did not know. It just was. He did not know when it had first seemed so to him. He suspected that it was about the time his pubic hair began to grow. SPOING! There It was, the irrepressible It. SPOING! It rose and swelled like an angry cobra at just about anything, as long as that anything hinted of sex. Anything in movies, photos, ads, you name it, unaccountable stray thoughts and mental images—all called It up like a witch waving a magic wand. SPOING! There It was, no matter how embarrassing.

  That was when the sunlight in Belmont City had started to be harsh and gritty.

  Or was it?

  Maybe it had begun when he had had his first “vision.” Or when his “stigmata” had first appeared.

  Jim saw his best buddy, Sam “Windmill” Wyzak, a half block away down Cornplanter Street. Sam was standing by the white picket fence on his front yard. Jim stepped up his pace. Only Jim’s grandfather, Ragnar Grimsson, the Norwegian sailor and locomotive engineer, and Sam Wyzak really loved him. All three had souls like forks attuned to the same pitch. But his grandfather had died five years ago (maybe that was when the light got harsh and gritty) and now only Jim and Sam vibrated on the same frequency.

  Sam was six feet tall and very skinny. His sharp and pointed face could have been a model for that of Wile E. Coyote of the “Road Runner” cartoons. He looked just as hungry and desperate, but his deep-brown and close-set eyes lacked Wile E.’s never-quenched light of hope. His glossy black hair was unruly and bushy, almost an Afro.

  When Jim got closer, Sam called out, “Jimbo! My man!” in a high-pitched and whiney voice. He danced a shuffle-off-to-Buffalo while he sang the first six lines of a lyric of Jim’s. Jim thought it was good, but the Hot Water Eskimos had rejected it as “not rock enough.” Its first line was a phrase used by Siberian Eskimo shamans when they worked magic, words that organized chaotic lines of force into powerful instruments for good or evil.

  The song in its entirety went thus:

  ATA MATUMA M’MATA!

  You in trouble, deep in crap?

  Hire the ancient Siberian shaman.

  Wizard magic guaranteed to work.

  Shaman chants a Stone Age spell:

  ATA MATUMA M’MATA!

  Gather all these witchy items!

  You don’t get these at Neiman Marcus!

  Angel’s feather, Dracula’s breath,

  Polar bear’s malaria.

  Politician’s unbroken promise,

  Scream from Captain Hook’s toilet stall,

  Earwax from Spock of far-off Vulcan,

  Nielsen rating of Tinker Bell,

  Turnip blood—Rh-negative,

  Jack the Ripper’s love for women,

  Needle’s eye which traps the rich,

  Belly buttons of Adam and Eve,

  Visa stamped by Satan himself.

  Mix them like you’re Betty Crocker.

  Stir the bubbling brew around!

  When it cools and when it shrieks,

  Drink it down, drink it down!

  ATA MATUMA M’MATA!

  “The ‘Ata Matuma M’Mata’ spell won’t work, Sam,” Jim said. “I’m down, way down. I’m also pissed, really got the red-ass.”

  Mrs. Wyzak was looking out a window at him. She was big and had Mother Earth breasts and was a mighty big mother herself. She was, unlike his mother, the powerhouse in the family. Mr. Wyzak was no wimp, but he was his wife’s shadow. When she moved, he moved. When she spoke, he nodded his head.

  Mrs. Wyzak had a peculiar expression. Was she wishing that Jim was also her son? She had wanted at least six kids, a brood, a pulsation of progeny. But she had had a hysterectomy after Sam, her firstborn. Mr. Wyzak, in his less charitable moments, and he had many, said that Sam had poisoned her womb.

  Or was her face set so oddly because she thought that Sam’s friend was so odd? A boy who had had such strange visions and who suffered from stigmata was not your normal playmate for your child.

  Jim’s mother … that was a different case. She had thought at first that Jim was a latter-day St. Francis because of the unearthly things he had seen and his unexplainable bleedings. But when Jim got older she had put aside her dreams of sainthood for him. Now she was not so sure she had not mated with the devil when she was sleeping and Jim was their child. She had never said so, though Jim’s father had. But Jim believed that his father was repeating what she had told him. However, his father could have made it up. He did not put in full time hurting his son, but that was only because he had other things to do. Like getting drunk and gambling.

  Jim waved at Mrs. Wyzak. She stepped back as if startled, then moved to the window again and waved at him. Since she was not afraid of anyone—he wished to God that his mother was like her—she must have been thinking something bad about him. For a moment, she had been ashamed. Or was he, he thought, too damn sensitive and self-centered? That was what his father and his school counselor had told him.

  Jim and Sam walked away. Sam shook his head, and his near-Afro waved like the plume on the helmet of a Trojan warrior.

  “Well?” Sam whined in Jim’s ear.

  “Well, what?”

  “Jesus, you said you were down, way down, and we’ve walked a whole block, and you ain’t said a word! Down about what? Same old story? You and your old man?”

  “Yeah,” Jim said. “Sorry. I was thinking, lost in my thoughts. One of these days I’m going to lose my way and never come back. And why should I? Anyway, here’s my sordid and sad tale.”

  Sam listened, interjecting only a grunt or a “Weird, man! Weird!” When Jim was finished, Sam said, “Ain’t it the shits? What can you do now? Nothing—according to The Man. But it won’t be long ’til you’re eighteen, and you can tell your old man to go fuck himself.”

  “If we don’t kill each other first.”

  “Yeah. Th-th-that’s all, f-f-folks! Period. No Continued Next Chapter. You’re pissed off? Listen, me and Mom got into it this morning, about some of the same things you and your Dad argued about. But, you
know, with Mom it’s always the music.

  “‘I worked my ass off,’ she says, ‘so you could take music lessons, and now you can play the piano and the guitar. But I didn’t work myself to a frazzle as a grocery clerk and a baby-sitter and God knows how many other jobs and pinch my pennies so you could be a rock musician. And now you want to dress up like a punk, look like some drunken murdering redskin, embarrass me and your father and my friends and Father Kochanowski! The saints help me, the Virgin Mary help me! I wanted you to be a classical musician, play Chopin and Mozart, be somebody I could be proud of! Look at you!’ And so on. Same old shit.

  “Then I said what I should’ve never said, but I was seeing purple by then.”

  Sam rotated both arms several times, the lunch bag in one hand. “Windmill” Wyzak was really going into action.

  “‘Worked your ass off?’ I said. ‘What do you call that? A camel?’ I pointed at her big ass. God forgive me, I do love my mother even if she’s mostly a pain. Anyway, I had to run for my life. Mom threw dishes at me and took after me with a broom. I had to run through the house and then into the backyard with her screaming at me and the old man laughing like crazy, rolling on the floor, glad to see somebody besides him being picked on by her.”

  Jim was hurt by Sam’s seeming not to care about his troubles with his father. Jim was open, panting and slavering, for sympathy and understanding and advice. So what was his supposed best friend doing? Ignoring his friend’s absolutely pressing crises to talk about his own problems, which Jim had heard too many times.

  CHAPTER 6

  They turned off Cornplanter Street onto Pitts Avenue, which led straight for six blocks to Belmont City Central High School. Cars loaded with students sped by them. No one in the vehicles waved or shouted at the two pedestrians, though all knew them. Jim felt like an outcast, a leper whose only skin disease was acne. That made his mood blacker, his anger redder.

  Jesus H. Christ! Those uppity snobs didn’t have any right to look down on him because his father was out of work and the Grimson family was pisspot poor and lived in a run-down low-class blue-collar area. The students who had their own cars were not so rich themselves, except for Sheila Helsgets, and her family wasn’t doing so well either. The closing of the steel mills had socked it to her father. He probably wasn’t now worth more than a million or so, and that would be mostly just property and low-value stocks and bonds. At least, that’s what he had heard about the Helsgetss’.

  Sam had no idea how madly and badly in love with her Jim was. Jim held some things back from his old buddy because he didn’t want to be laughed at. Like his passion for Sheila Helsgets and his writing “straight” poetry at the same time he was writing rock lyrics and reading many books and his vocabulary, which was much larger than Sam’s and that of the other guys he hung around with though he wasn’t always sure of the precise meaning of the words he used.

  “… a cigarette?” Sam said.

  Jim said, “What?”

  “Christamighty!” Sam said. “Get with it!-Where are you? Lost in space? Beam me back to Earth, Scotty. I asked if you want a coffin nail.”

  Sam was holding in a dark hand, the fingernails dirty, two nonfilter Camels. Jim should have been grateful for the offer; he was so short of money he couldn’t buy a pack. But, for some reason, he did not want to smoke.

  “Nah! How about an upper?”

  Sam slipped a Camel into the right corner of his lips, put the other in the pocket of his black shirt, and dipped his hand into the outside pocket of his blue jacket. It came out with three capsules.

  “Yeah. Black beauties. Guaranteed to give you a balloon ride to the moon. But watch out for the landing.”

  “Thanks,” Jim said. “I’ll take one. I’ll have to owe you.”

  “That’s seven dollars you owe,” Sam said. He quickly added, “Just keeping the books up to date. No hurry. Your credit’s always good with me, you know. I ain’t billing you for the cigarettes I been giving you, either. I know when you get them, you’ll help me in my distress. Like you always say, we’re Damon and Pithy-ass, whoever they might be.”

  Jim popped one upper into his mouth and swallowed it dry. He worked his mouth to generate saliva to help it on down.

  The Biphetamine worked far faster then usual. Zap! Where there had been tired blood, as the ads said, was now a river of molten gold. Coursing through his veins, not to mention his arteries, each molecule racing the others to get back to his heart first and then back to the merry-go-round for another race at breakneck speed. The harsh and gritty light melted into a soft smoothness.

  Sam had put a black beauty into his mouth before stopping to cup his hand and then flicking the Bic. He drew in deeply and blew out smoke as he resumed walking. Jim, waiting for him, looked around as if he had never seen this place before. He could see the top of Belmont Central over the scrungy houses (Pitts Avenue was the pits). Beyond that, to the northeast, was the two-story building of earth-colored brick and Tuscan columns, Wellington Hospital. To the southwest was the spire of St. Stephan’s, smack in the Hungarian neighborhood. His mother bypassed St. Grobian’s, the Irish church, to attend St. Stephan’s even though she had to walk an extra mile.

  Looking north again, Jim could see the dome of City Hall. Lots of action there, most of it dirty, if what Sam Wyzak’s drunken uncle, a judge, said was true.

  And straight north went Pitts Avenue, ending at the foot of Gold Hill. Up above, so high in the sky, were the homes of the kings and queens of Belmont City. While they sipped their martinis and counted their money, they could look down on the rabble, the proletariat, the salt of the earth, those who would inherit, not trust funds but the earth, that is, the dirt itself.

  What made Jim’s father especially angry about Gold Hill people was that his wife worked there. Her job was only part-time, and the wealthy did not pay much (the tight-assed skinflints!), but the money was better than none. Eva Nagy Grimson was employed by a small company to houseclean on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Eric’s unemployment checks had long ceased to come in. Reluctantly, Eric had applied for and gotten welfare. He was of a generation that regarded welfare as shameful. He also believed that a wife should not work. The husband was humiliated if she did. He was a failure as a man and a provider.

  Jim could understand why his father writhed with shame and despair and frustration. But why did he have to take it out on his wife and son? Did he think they liked the mess they were in? Were they responsible for the bad things in their lives?

  Why did his father spend the precious money his wife made on booze? Why didn’t he just up and pull anchor, leave the doomed house behind, take his family to California or some place where he could get a job? However, if he did that, he was up against his wife. She went along with everything he did, no matter how rotten it was, never complained or argued. Except once. When he had suggested leaving Belmont City, she had told him firmly that she would not obey him. She would not move away from the Nagy clan and their friends.

  “Jesus Christ!” Eric had shouted. “If you got a Hungarian for a friend, you don’t need an enemy!”

  Jim and Sam were now two blocks from Central High, a huge old three-story redbrick building. At least, Jim thought, my body is two blocks from it. My mind, Jesus, where’s my mind? All over the place. I got to get with it.

  The day you were living in was the present. But the past was often with you, poking a sharp-nailed finger in the tissue of your brain and gouging out a piece, then pressing on a nerve to remind you that the bottom line of life was pain, then groping around other parts, feeling your dick, giving you a proctological examination, thumping your heart’s naked flesh to make it beat like a hummingbird’s wings, tying your intestines into a running sheepshank knot, vomiting hot acid into your stomach, whipping up nightmares with the blender of old Morpheus, ancient Greek god of sleep.

  A title for a lyric. “The Dead Hand of the Past.” Nah. A cliché, though that never stopped most rock lyricists. Anyway, the
past was not a dead hand. You carried it with you like it was a living thing, a tapeworm. Or like Heinlein’s parasitic slug from Titan, the ice-moon of Saturn, the slug growing tendrils in your back and sucking the life and brains out of you. Or like a fever no pills could cool down until you were cold-dead, and you didn’t need pills then.

  “… trying to get a gig tonight, no soap,” Sam was saying. “Got one Saturday night at the Whistledick Tavern out on Moonshine Ridge, but that’s redneck territory, and we gotta play that godawful country-western. We might cancel. Anyway, we couldn’t get one tonight, and my cup runneth over. Halloween’s for fun. Remember how we pushed over old man Dumski’s outhouse when we was fifteen? Maybe it was when we was fourteen. Anyway, remember how Dumski came out of his house screaming and shooting his shotgun? Man, did we run!”

  “Sounds good,” Jim said. “I’ll call work and tell them I’m sick. I’ll probably get fired, but what the hell.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Just before he and Sam joined the gang, Sam slipped him a stick of chewing gum. “Take it. You got a breath would knock down King Kong.”

  “Thanks,” Jim said. “Must be the Polish sausage, too much garlic. Anyway, my stomach’s upset.”

  Three guys were waiting for them. Hakeem “Gizzy” Dillard, a short chunky black suffering from yellow jaundice. Bob “Birdshot” Pellegrino, a big youth with a huge black walrus moustache and one glass eye. Steve “Goat-head” Larsen. They gave each other five fingers, Jim noticing that the greeting only seemed a hundred percent natural when Gizzy did it. Goathead brought out a marijuana butt from which each took a puff while keeping an eye on the big front entrance for an appearance of Central’s principal, Jesse “Iron Pants” Bozeman, or one of his teacher snitches.

  “Hey, man, you hear about what Kiss did in that hotel room in Peoria?”

  “I got an upper trade you for a downer.”

  “… said Mick Jagger caught the clap from the mayor’s wife …”

  “The old man said, ‘You get a Mohawk, I cut off your balls.’”