The Black Tower

by Phlip Jose Farmer

  The woman nodded vigorously. "Firm tiff!" she said.

  Firm tiff? Clive pondered. What could she mean? The phrase seemed meaningless—but, combined with her affirmative nod—affirmative! That was it! Some of her statements did make a kind of fantastic sense; others were as baffling as if she were speaking in ancient Egyptian.

  "This place is the Dungeon of Q'oorna," Clive said. "But my friends and I don't understand where Q'oorna actually is. We were exploring in Equatoria, trying to cross the Bahr-el-Zeraf, in the Sudd. We were headed for the Sudan, in search of the headwaters of the Nile. And in search of my brother Neville. Then—"

  He found himself indicating his puzzlement with a shrug of the shoulders and a gesture of his hands.

  "Linkage fault, sounds like. Nasty bug."

  There she was again, speaking that baffling argot that sounded so much like English but conveyed no meaning.

  "But you, young lady. We don't even know your name. Nor you ours." Clive introduced his companions and himself.

  Now it was the young woman's turn to seem puzzled, but after a few seconds she nodded vigorously and said, "Tiff, tiff. Eyedee protocol, sure. User Annie, sure." She extended her hand to be shaken, but quickly drew it back, giggling. "Downs short your chips. Hah!"

  Clive asked where the woman was from, and that, at least, drew a coherent answer. "San Francisco," she said. He'd heard of that place, a roaring seaport somewhere near the gold mines of America. "Default option San Francisco," she went on. "Absolute address was London before Dungeon."

  Absolute address? Clive exchanged blank stares with Sergeant Smythe. But he was determined to press on. This woman, this User Annie or whatever her name was, was the only person in the polyglot conglomeration in the Dungeon who seemed willing and able to converse with him. If only he could fathom her meanings—and communicate to her his own!

  "User Annie, do you mean you had moved from San Francisco to London before you came to, ah, Q'oorna?"

  "Tiff! Address London, Annie anna Crackbelles playing Piccadilly for two thousand openfile protocol when—zap!—bused to Dungeon, Stings, user, valid stings. Too many creeps here. Mostly tempoids." She burst into laughter, staring at Clive.

  She reached inside her blouse and did something, then held her hand toward him again. Cautiously, Clive took the hand and shook it, then dropped it quickly. It had been warm and pleasant—the first touch of woman flesh in too long. User Annie reached inside her blouse again.

  "You're a tempoid yourself, aren't you, Clive?"

  He merely stared at her.

  "Or maybe I am!" A curious look passed across her features. "Who can say? Where's the clock? How can anybody crunch that?" She appeared baffled.

  "Tempoid?" Clive asked. But at least she was speaking comprehensibly. It was a struggle to understand User Annie, but to some degree at least he could do it.

  "Io functional?" User Annie asked. That was a baffler. Io was the daughter of Inachus, was she not? He tried to remember his myths. Something about a magical transformation. Sometimes identified with the minor Egyptian deity Sis. Was User Annie trying to ask him something about Egypt?

  "Closefile nineteen ninety-nine," User Annie said. "Big audio output function in Piccadilly. Openfile two thousand. Zap! Bus here." She spread her hands.

  Nineteen ninety-nine?

  Two thousand?

  Was she talking about the years 1999 and 2000? But those were more than a century in the future? and tempoids . . .

  "Tempoids?" he asked. "As in tempus—"

  "Fugit!" she supplied, grinning. "Valid! What's your clock, anthro?"

  Clive hesitated.

  "Download!" User Annie commanded. She seemed agitated with him. Probably she was becoming as frustrated by their bizarre conversation as he was. "Activate your modem!"

  She had asked something about his clock. That made no sense at all. But tempoids—tempos fugit— time flies—and she had spoken of 1999 and 2000. "This is the year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred sixty-eight," he stated solemnly.

  "Only relative," User Annie said. But she did seem pleased that they were getting some information to each other. Clive was pleased as well.

  She waved her hand again, indicating the whole of the Dungeon. "Data insufficient for this address. Probably virtual anyhow. Absolute clock and address unavailable. Huh. Performance degrades, too bad, eh, user?" .

  Clive addressed his companions. "I think—strange as this seems—that, ah, User Annie is telling us that she was brought here from London. But not only that. She was brought here from the future. From the year 1999 or 2000. Closefile, openfile; 1999, 2000. I suspect she's talking about a New Year's celebration. Something happened to her on December thirty-first, 1999, and she was brought here. To the year 1868."

  "Are you so certain, sah, that this is 1868?" Smythe inquired. "Maybe we were brought to the young lady's time, rather than she to ours. Or maybe something even stranger than that. Didn't the young lady make some remarks about relatives and clocks and virtues? Not that I took her meaning precisely, sah, but one thinks she's telling us that the Dungeon isn't quite in, ah, I don't quite know how to put it, sah. P'raps the major could 'elp me out with some o' his fine Cambridge words, sah."

  Before Clive could respond, Sidi Bombay spoke. "Time and time, Englishmen, and space and space. Both have their shapes and their turnings. There are more times and more spaces than thou knowest."

  Clive found himself staring at the gaunt face. What did he know of this man? That he came from India, that he was very old. But what was his philosophy? What were his thoughts? Clive did not even know whether Sidi Bombay adhered to the Hindu attitude or the Buddhist or the Muslim—although he had spoken of Allah and the coffin of the Prophet. That meant that surely there was something of the Mussulman in him. Nor had he unraveled to the slightest degree the connection between Sidi Bombay and Horace Hamilton Smythe and the strange symbol of the swirling, spiraled stars.

  He looked at the roof of the Dungeon and saw only blackness—the blackness of rough, living basalt further blackened by uncounted numbers of torches that had burned and burned in the Dungeon. What would he give for a glimpse of the blue sky ... or even of the black, crystalline sky of the swirling world of Q'oorna!

  And yet, by persistence, he was able to gain some understanding of User Annie's story. And, he thought, to make the young woman understand something of his.

  She was indeed an American. It was astonishing to ponder that she lived as she did, independently, with neither family nor chaperon. Traveling about her country—indeed, the entire globe—in company of a band of itinerant musicians known by the odd name of the Crackbelles.

  He tried to grasp the music she described, but even the instruments that her companions played had strange names and were incomprehensibly described. But User Annie, at least, indicated that her own part in the enterprise was to sing and dance before audiences. She seemed hardly the music hall type of girl—independent and brash she was, but neither cheap nor crude.

  The distressing effect of her touch was the result of something she called an electrofield, powered by a tiny device hidden beneath the bodice of her costume. The device was powered by her own body energies, and User Annie feared that if she became too weak or tired, it would fail. And then she would be at the mercy of those around her.

  She cast a fearful glance at some of the more brutal types whose shadows seemed to dance and leer in the flickering light of torches.

  Clive asked what the device was called, that powered User Annie's electrofield.

  "A Baalbec A-nine," she answered. "Cono model. Couldn't bus bastante bux for a -ten. May be a catastrophic error, that!"

  There had been no food since Clive and the others had arrived here, but there were more urgent concerns than meat and bread. Clive persisted, "Who are all these persons? What are tempoids? What are extroids? What are cybroids?"

  "You're missing some chips, user!" Annie shook her head. "You joking me? You on downtime lately
?" Clive persisted.

  User Annie heaved a sigh of exasperation. "Tempoids are clock busers. Future users, past users. Maybe even other kind of time users. Raghead understands that better than you do, User Clive. Raghead validates! Good data, crunch that, User Clive!"

  Clock busers? As in omnibuses? Did she mean those who traveled on clocks? No—those who traveled in time! "And extroids?" he asked.

  She shook her head. "Heepers, anthro! Open your file! Counter Earthers, Zimarzlans, Beta Tories! User never input planets?"

  Clive jumped to his feet. "They're from other planets? From Mars and Venus and Jupiter?"

  "All over the scan. Tiff, tiff, user. That's outside your protocol, dimp?"

  Clive put his hands over his eyes. "Du Maurier was right after all," he whispered. "He should have been brought here, and I should have remained in England. Or at most, in Zanzibar." He lowered himself carefully so that his eyes were at the level of User Annie's. "And cybroids?" he asked. "Tell me please, what are cybroids?"

  "Oh, anthro! You're really missing chips! System interface biomass with hardware, that's all. Protoplasm seepeeoo, mekky perifs, mixed wetware and chips-resiaent routines. Get your program debugged, user! Upgrade your system specs!"

  Sergeant Smythe interrupted the colloquy by placing his hand on Clive Folliot's wrist. "Take a look this-a-way, sah." He jerked his head toward a group of savage-looking individuals dressed in maroon and yellow mottled gear. At least, the rags that covered their scabrous bodies showed the traces of those colors.

  They were casting glances at Clive and the others, and a couple of the more energetic among them were indicating that they might have violence in mind.

  "Miss, ah, Annie," Clive addressed the young woman. "Can your—what did you call it?"

  "Electrofield."

  "Yes. Can it include more persons than yourself?"

  "Firm tiff. But high power drain, clock time, possible system failure."

  "Could you include all of us?" He indicated Sidi Bombay and Horace Hamilton Smythe as well as himself.

  User Annie said she could include them.

  Horace Hamilton Smythe strode to the pond into which the black stream disappeared. "What precisely does that thingumabob do, Miss Annie?"

  She looked puzzled for a moment, then her face cleared. " 'Lectrolyzes impinging matter, bub."

  "And water, miss? What would it do in water? Would it keep it away from yer, so's yer could still breathe—like a diving bell, so to speak?"

  "Oh, firm tiff. Pozzi tiff! Pozzi tiff!" Her words conveyed their message, and her vigorous nods and gestures confirmed it.

  "Well, miss, I propose that the four of us gets ourselves out of here, because there i'n't much future with those blokes turning restless."

  He jerked a thumb behind him, toward the parties in the maroon and yellow rags. Clive Folliot followed Smythe's gesture with his eyes. He couldn't determine the racial identity of the men, and their guttural language was completely foreign to him. By contrast, User Annie's odd argot was the Queen's English to perfection.

  He looked more closely at the ragged group. There was a strange look to their eyes, as if they were pairs of tiny telescopes embedded in place of the natural organs.

  One of the men opened his mouth and Clive caught the flash of metal and the glimmer of something else, the nature of which he preferred not to try to guess.

  Were these cybroids? Something about protoplasm and mekky perifs, whatever those were. Mekky? Mechanical? A mixture of living matter and machine? He knew about crude artificial parts—peglegs and hook hands and carefully carved wooden teeth. But these creatures ...

  Clive Folliot shuddered.

  Horace Hamilton Smythe led the way to the edge of the pond. The other women who surrounded it allowed the party of four to pass among them. When they reached the edge of the pond, Smythe said, "Now's the time, Miss Annie. If you can understand what I'm asking yer, miss, now's the time."

  He pointed to the young woman's bodice, and User Annie nodded. She reached inside her clothing with one hand, and with the other took hold of Smythe's. Sidi Bombay and Clive Folliot linked their hands with the others'. User Annie made another adjustment and Clive Folliot felt a brief tingle. Then everything returned to normal.

  "Don't decouple!" User Annie urged.

  The four of them, by mutual consent, leaped into the pond.

  Clive felt the water close over his head. It was pitch black and as cold as a North Country winter, but instead of rushing into his nostrils the liquid stayed a tiny distance away from him. He tried to recall the experiment in natural philosophy he had witnessed at Cambridge. Something about the application of a galvanic force to electrolyze water into oxygen and hydrogen.

  The phenomenon had seemed merely a curiosity to him at the time, but now it meant that he and his companions could breathe even though they were wholly covered by water!

  Their downward momentum had carried them to the bottom of the pond. Clive knelt on the rocky bottom, holding to one of the others' hands—he didn't know whose—and with his free hand feeling about the raw stone floor.

  It tended toward a low point, and there Clive found what he had hoped against hope to find: an opening as large around as a man!

  He tried to speak to the others, to explain what he had found, but the thin coating of air that permitted breath was insufficient to permit speech. The only sound that emerged from his mouth was an incoherent gurgling.

  Counting on the others to follow his lead, he began to slide his foot into the opening. But he pulled back and reversed his posture. He felt the hand that he had clasped in his own slide down his flank and his leg, and grasp him at last by one heavy boot. He offered up a prayer to whatever deity might oversee this dark and terrifying world, that the precious contact of hand to ankle would not be broken.

  He pulled himself slowly through the opening, feeling a slow, steady flow of water around him. What would he find on the other side? Another chamber? A lengthy channel? A passageway in which he would become lodged, there to die an agonizing death?

  Or—freedom?

  He could see nothing—at first.

  He could hear nothing—save the pounding of his pulse, the rush of his bloodstream.

  Then—perhaps his eyes were adjusting to their new surroundings, his ears to the watery medium— shapes and colors and sounds began to make themselves apparent.

  Sleek-bodied denizens of the flowing water approached and stared at the humans. Luminous eyes peered into their own. Tentacles wove and thrust. Clive felt a rubbery, muscular appendage touch him. For whatever reason, the shocking effect of the electrofield did not deter these creatures; either that, or it had ceased to function in the watery medium.

  The passage widened around them. They were swimming, now, borne along by the flow of the stream, no longer touching the walls of the passage through which they moved.

  Clive felt the hand that had clutched his ankle work its way up the side of his body. He reached to find his companions. They could now link hands once again, and move forward through the water side by side. They were unarmed, defenseless against any attack that might occur.

  With a jolt, Clive's toe collided with a solid mass.

  He placed his foot carefully, found that there was a fairly smooth, rocky floor beneath him. He looked up and realized that above the water there was no longer a cavernous roof but the high black sky of Q'oorna. The familiar swirling spiral of stars glinted down, distorted and made to appear to waver by the moving stream.

  In a while Clive and his companions were wading onto the bank of the black stream. They dropped one another's hands—perhaps a moment too soon, for the shield of force disappeared and they were suddenly drenched in the icy water—all except Annie, who remained protected by the electrofield. The others stood shaking like dogs to rid themselves of soaking water. Shaking and laughing all at once.

  Clive trembled with cold. The stars were, if anything, brighter than ever. He peered into the blacknes
s above and began to perceive distant nebulae and constellations. Bands of light, unmeasurably distant, swept across the sky. The total illumination was far greater than that of any ordinary night; the landscape and its occupants were bathed with the gloomy illumination of a grim midwinter twilight.

  "Has anyone an idea of where we are?" Clive asked the others. "This is Q'oorna, of course—but where is Q'oorna? What is Q'oorna?"

  User Annie had reached inside her bodice to switch off the Baalbec A-9. "Load some astronomy software, anthro." She swung a graceful arm above her head. Clive could not help noticing the swell of her bosom, the soft movement that accompanied her gesture.

  "Data inconclusive," she continued. "But high order probability Q'oorna is a rogue planet."

  "A rogue planet? What can you mean?"

  "Maybe people decided to take a jaunt, took their world with them, left their sun behind." User Annie looked at the stars. An unreadable expression flickered across her face. "Maybe somebody else aited their sun. Left Q'oorna orphan, not rogue. Computation result equivalent, orphan or rogue. Nonsignificant differentiation, User Clive Folliot."

  Clive shook his head. "Ate their sun? Ate it? As in mythology?"

  User Annie snorted. "Not ate it, user. Read error, data link fault. Aited. As in, propriated. Appropriated. Uh—uh—intermittent device jam. Correct and proceed. Appropriated, equivalent term—uh—uh— took, took away, lexicon software limitation, swiped, crook'd—uh—uh—cross-ref bobbyvescoe, jamesboys, robinhood, nickdixon. Linkage complete, user? Heepers! file closing."

  She started walking away.

  Clive couldn't tell whether she really knew where she was going or had decided arbitrarily to follow the course of the stream, but in this baffling place that seemed as good as idea as any.

  The party moved together.

  They reached a level of fatigue and hunger just short of acute discomfort, and there they leveled off. Water was no problem—they paused to rest and drink from the stream every few hours. Horace Hamilton Smythe's turnip watch had miraculously survived both the battle and the soaking. How much longer it would function was subject to speculation, but for the moment at least it continued to tick away.