“Keep watching it,” he said. “I’m going to work my way around the wall again in a smaller circle. But I’ll be looking for other views of Orc. Or anything familiar. Oh, I did find another gate. But it led to a desert. We won’t take it except as a last resort.”
She nodded, her gaze still locked onto the images.
Before he turned to go, he saw a flash of what had to be downtown Los Angeles. There was the Bradbury Building. The next twenty views were of unfamiliar places.
Then he saw briefly a landscape of the Lavalite planet, the world from which he and Anana had escaped. A mountain was slowly rising from the surface, and the river at its base was spreading out as its channel flattened out.
What was the use to anyone of all these monitor views when no one was here to see them?
He felt creepy.
There were too many questions and no answers. The practical thing to do was to quit thinking about them. But being pragmatic did not stop him.
After completing the circuit, he stopped. The Horn had opened no more gates. And he had not seen any more scapes of things familiar. Nor could he see the higher views on the curving wall.
He started when Anana yelled, “I saw Red Orc again!”
Before he could get to her, the view was gone.
“He was about to walk through a gate!” she said. “He was on the same cliff by the sea, but he’d walked over to a gate. An upright hexagon!”
“Maybe he’s not doing that right now. The view could be a record of the past.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
Kickaha went back to his work with the Horn. When he was done, he had opened no new gates. Anana had not seen their most dangerous enemy again.
He started toward the tomb to examine it when Anana cried out a Thoan oath, “Elyttria!”
He wheeled just in time to see the last two seconds of the view. It showed part of the interior of the great chamber and the nearer half of the tomb and occupant. Very close were himself and Anana staring slightly upwards.
“Us!” he bellowed.
After a few seconds of silence, she said, “That should not surprise us. If so many worlds and places are being monitored, it’s only natural that this place should be. For one thing, the monitors should know when this room has been invaded. And we are intruders.”
“Nothing has been done about us.”
“So far, no.”
“Keep an eye on the views,” he said. He walked to the tomb and felt around the base but could not detect any protuberances or recesses. The controls, if there were any, were not on the base.
The cube resisted his efforts to raise it from the base.
After that, he toured the wall again. Inside of an hour, he had examined the wall for as far as he could see up. He even pressed his hand against the displays to find out if this disclosed any means of control. He also hoped that the pressure would swing open a part of the wall and offer access to somewhere else. As he expected, it did not happen. It was not logical that it would, but he had to try. If there was any central control area, it was not visible. And it was not available.
Meanwhile, the hidden monitors in this chamber would be recording his actions.
That thought led to another. Just how did these monitors record so many places in so many worlds? They certainly would not do it by the machines Earthpeople or the Lords used. The “cameras” on these worlds would be of an indetectible nature. Permanent magnetic fields of some sort? And these transmitted the pictures through gates of some sort to this place?
If they were stored as recordings, they would have to be in an immense area. Inside this planet?
He just did not know.
There had to be some purpose to all this.
“Kickaha!” Anana called.
He ran to her. “What?”
“That man who was wearing the clothes of Western Earth-people of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century,” she said, looking excited. “The man we saw inside that floating palace on the Lavalite planet. I just saw him!”
“Know where he was?”
She shook her head but said, “He wasn’t in the house. He was walking through a forest. The trees could have been on Earth or the World of Tiers or any of hundreds of worlds. I didn’t see any animals or birds.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” he said in English.
He looked around again, then said, “I don’t think we can do anything more here. We can’t just wait around hoping to see flashes of Red Orc or the stranger or, I wish to God we would, Wolff and Chryseis.”
“But we might be able to retrace our gate routes back to here someday.”
“We’ll do it. Meanwhile, let’s go. I don’t like to re-enter the tower room, but we have no choice.”
They walked to the wall area enclosing the gate through which they had entered the chamber. He raised the Horn to his lips and blew into the mouthpiece. The air shimmered, and they could see the room in the tower they had left a short time ago. Anana stepped through with Kickaha on her heels. But he turned around for a last view of the chamber.
He saw that the cube was being filled with many beams of many colors and hues. They flashed and died and were replaced within a blink of an eye by other beams. An orange light surrounded the corpse, which was sinking slowly toward the floor of the cube.
“Wait!” he cried out.
But the view faded swiftly. Not, however, before he saw the lid of the cube beginning to raise up.
He did not explain to Anana why he was blowing the Horn again. This time, the gate to the gigantic room did not open. Instead, they were in another place.
He was in despair. It seemed impossible that they could ever retrace their route to the tomb.
Nevertheless, he automatically blew the Horn again and again as they were shot through a circuit. And then they were on a plain on which two-foot-high grass flourished. Far beyond that was a thick forest and, beyond that, a wall of rock towering so high that he could not see its top. It ran unbroken to his right and his left. The sky was bright green, and the sun was yellow and as bright as Earth’s.
They had time to run out of the area of influence of the gate before it shuttled them onwards. They leaped like two jackrabbits startled by a coyote, and they ran. They had known instantly where they were.
They were in the universe of the planet called Alofmethbin. In English, the World of Tiers. This was his most beloved planet of all the universes. The vast wall of rock many miles in front of them was one of the five truly colossal monoliths forming the vertical parts of the Tower-of-Babylon-shaped planet. And they were standing on top of one of them, though they did not as yet know which.
After they had stopped running, Anana said, “Didn’t it seem to you that the gate lasted suspiciously long? We had plenty of time to get away from it, and we never did in any of the others.”
“I thought of that,” he said, “but we can’t be sure of it. However, it did seem like we were on a nonstop train that slowed down long enough for us to jump off.”
She nodded. Her face was grim.
“I think someone set it up so we’d get off here.”
“Red Orc!”
4
That seems most probable,” Anana said. “However, he might’ve set up the circuit and the trap for one of his numerous enemies. And done so long before you and I appeared on the scene. Or it might’ve been his emergency escape route.”
“Nothing is certain until it happens. To quote your Thoan philosopher, Manathu Vorcyon, ‘Order is composed of disorder, and disorder has its own order.’ Whatever that means. In any case, I’m mighty suspicious.”
“Whenever were you not?”
“When I was still living on Earth, though even there I was what you might call wary. The things that happened after I came here have made me trust very few people. And they’ve made me consider what might happen in every situation before it could happen. You look at all the angles or you don’t live long. It’s not paranoia. Paranoia is a state
of mind in which you suspect or are certain about things that really don’t exist. The dangers I’ve been suspicious of have existed or could exist.”
“Almost every Lord is paranoiac. It’s a deeply embedded part of our culture, such as it is. Most of them don’t trust anybody, including themselves.”
Kickaha laughed, and he said, “Well, let’s go on into Paranoia Land.”
They began walking across the plain. They were as constantly watchful as birds, glancing up often at the sky, at the grass just ahead of them, and at the vista beyond their feet. The grass could conceal snakes or large crouching predators. Something dangerous could suddenly appear in the sky. But for the first hour, they saw only insects in the grass and herds of large four-tusked elephantlike and four-horned antelopelike beasts in the distance.
Then a black speck emerged from the green sky. It was behind them, but Anana saw it during one of her frequent glances behind her. After a few minutes, it came low enough for them to see a bird with a ravenlike silhouette. It got no lower then but continued in the same direction as they. When they saw it circle now and then before resuming the same path, they suspected that it was following them.
“It could be one those giant language-using ravens that Vannax made in his laboratory for spying and message-carrying when he was Lord of this world,” Kickaha said.
He added, “Looks more and more like Red Orc is watching us.”
“Or somebody is.”
“My money’s on Orc.”
He and Anana stopped to rest awhile in the knee-high, blue-stalked, and crimson-tipped grass.
“I suppose it could be a machine disguised as a bird,” he said. “But if it’s a machine, it’s being controlled by a Lord. That doesn’t seem likely.”
“When did we ever come across anything but the unlikely?”
“Seems like it. But it’s not always so by any means.”
He was on his back, his hands behind his head, looking at the dark enigma in the sky. Anana was half lying down, leaning on one hand, her head tilted back to watch the bird or whatever it was.
“That figure-eight the bird’s now making in the sky,” Kickaha said, “looks from here like it’s on its side. That reminds me of the symbol for infinity, the flattened figure-eight on its side. One of the few things I remember from my freshman mathematics class in college. Which I never finished. College, I mean.”
“The Thoan symbol is a straight line with arrowheads at each end pointing outwards,” she said. “If the line has a corkscrew shape, it’s the symbol for time.”
“I know.”
Visions of Earth slipped past in his mind like ghosts in coats of many colors. In 1946, he had been twenty-eight years old, a World War II veteran going to college on the G. I. Bill. Then he had been hurled into another universe, though not unwillingly. This was the Lord-created artificial universe that contained only the tiered planet, Alofmethbin.
This was, he had found, only one among thousands of universes made by the ancient Thoan, the humans who denied that they were human. Here was where he, Paul Janus Finnegan, the adventure-loving Hoosier, had become Kickaha the Trickster.
And, since coming to the World of Tiers, he had seldom not been fleeing his enemies or attacking them, always on the move except for some rare periods of R&R. During these relatively infrequent times, he had usually gotten married to the daughters of a tribal chief on his favorite level, the second, which he called the Amerindian level.
Or he had become involved with the wife or daughter of a baron on the third level, which he called the Dracheland level.
He had left a trail of women who grieved for him for a while before inevitably falling in love with another man. He had also left a trail of corpses. The debris, you might say, of Finnegan’s wake.
Not until 1970 did he return to Earth, and that was briefly. He had been born in A.D. 1918, which made him fifty-two or fifty-three Terrestrial years old now. But he was, thank whatever gods there be, only twenty-five in physiological age. If he’d stayed on Earth, what would he be there? Maybe he would have gotten a Ph.D. in anthropology and specialized in American Indian languages. But he would have had to be a teacher, too. Could he have endured the grind of study, the need to publish, the academic backbiting and throat-slitting, the innumerable weary conferences, the troubles with administrators who regarded teachers as a separate and definitely inferior species?
He might’ve gone to Alaska, where there was, in 1946, a sort of frontier, and he might have been a bush pilot. But that life would eventually have become tedious.
Perhaps by now he would own a motorcycle sales and repair shop in Terre Haute or Indianapolis. No, he couldn’t have stood the day-to-day routine, the worrying about paying bills, and the drabness.
Whatever he would have been on Earth, he would not have had the adventurous and exotic life, albeit hectic, he had experienced in the Thoan worlds.
The beautiful woman by his side—no, not a woman, a goddess, poetically speaking—was many thousands of years old. But the chemical “elixirs” of the Lords kept her at the physiological age of twenty-five.
She said, “We’re assuming that the raven is on an evil mission, bad for us. Perhaps it’s been sent to keep an eye on us, but by Wolff. He and Chryseis might have escaped from Red Orc’s prison and gotten to this world and now be in the palace. And they may have ordered the Eye to watch over us.”
“I know.”
She said, “It seems to me that we’ve been saying a lot of ‘I knows.’”
“Maybe it’s time we took a long vacation from each other.”
“It wouldn’t do any good,” she said. Then, looking slyly side-wise at him, “I know.”
She burst into laughter, fell on him, and kissed him passionately.
Kickaha kissed her back as enthusiastically. But he was thinking that they might have been isolated from other human beings too long. They needed lots of company, not all the time, but often enough so that they did not rub against each other, as it were.
Her comments about “knowing” probably indicated a sadness born out of expectation based on hindsight. Because she had lived for many millennia, she had had far more experience than he. She had lived with hundreds of male Lords and had had a few children. Her longest time with a man had been about fifty years.
“That’s about the limit for a faithful couple, if you don’t age at all,” she had said. “The Lords don’t have the patience of you leblabbiy, a word I don’t mean in a derogatory sense. But we are different in some respects.”
“But many couples have lived together for thousands of years,” he had said.
“Not continuously.”
He was not tired or bored with her. Nor did she seem to be so with him. But being able to look backward on so many experiences, she was unable to keep from looking forward. She knew that a time would come when they must part. For a while, a long while, anyway.
He was not going to worry about that. When the time came to deal with it, he would. Just how, he did not know.
He rose, drank water from his deerskin canteen, and said, “If Wolff had sent that Eye, he would have told it to tell us that it was watching for us. And he would have told the Eye to give us directions to get to wherever he is. So it definitely was not sent by Wolff.”
He paused, then said, “Do you want to go now?” He knew better than to order her to leave with him. She resented any hint of bossiness by others. After all, though more empathetic and compassionate than most of her kind, she was a Lord.
“It’s time.”
They put their knapsacks and quivers on their backs and started walking again. He thought, On top of the many thousands of feet high monolith ahead of us is, probably, the level called Atlantis. And on top of that is the monolith, much more narrow and less lofty than the others, on top of which is the palace Wolff built.
Three hours passed while they strode toward the forest. By now, they could see that another hour would bring them to its edge. Kickaha stepped up his
pace. She did not ask why he was in such a hurry now. She knew that he did not like being on the plain for very long. It made him feel too exposed and vulnerable.
After about ten minutes, Kickaha broke the silence between them.
“I suspect that no one had come through that gate in the tomb until we did. There were no signs of previous entry. And, surely, the thing in the tomb or whoever put him there had set up many safeguards. Why, then, were we able to use the gate?”
“What do you think?”
He said, “There was some reason we and only we were allowed in. Emphasis on the ‘allowed.’ But why were we?”
“You don’t know that we were the first there. You don’t know that we were ‘allowed’ in.”
“True. But if someone else did get in, he or she didn’t trigger the raising of the cube, and, I bet, the resurrection of the scaly man.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“Yes, but I think that only someone with the Horn of Shambarimem could have penetrated that tomb.”
She smiled and said, “Perhaps. But the scaly man must’ve put himself in that tomb eons before the Horn was made. He couldn’t have known that the Horn would be made or that its frequencies would open the way to the tomb.”
“How do you know that he didn’t know it would be made? In his time, a device similar to the Horn could have been available.”
She laughed and said, “No one can predict the future. Besides, what significance did our entering there have?”
“It started a chain of events that’s only begun. As for predicting, maybe it’s not a matter of predeterminism or predicting. Maybe it’s a matter of probabilities. Don’t forget that that chamber contains devices surveying many universes. I think that, when certain events are observed, the scaly man is raised from the tomb. After that, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. That’s it.”
“Okay, you’re probably right!” he said. “But if I’m right, I expect you to apologize and kiss my foot, among other things, and be humble and obedient thereafter to the end of eternity, amen.”
The World of Tiers Volume Two: Behind the Walls of Terra, the Lavalite World, Red Orc's Rage, and More Than Fire Page 72
