The Black Tower

by Phlip Jose Farmer

  Somehow, Tomàs took little convincing. Perhaps it was Clive's eloquence and obvious sincerity that swayed the Iberian. Or perhaps it was the thought of daylight and clear skies and running water as contrasted with the filth and misery of his present surroundings.

  At any rate, Tomàs' saturnine features were split by an eager grin. "Aye, Major! Good old Gram is a mighty one, and I've other friends. Strange creatures here, Major! Wolfish ones and lionish ones and others that I can't even put words to—but they're all prisoners of the Dungeon and they're all ready for an escape. They only need someone to lead 'em. Are you it, Major? Are you it?"

  Clive hesitated only a moment. He was a contemplative, passive man by nature. He would rather study, and think, and plan, than act. But this was no time for such conduct.

  "I am your man, Tomàs! Yes, I will lead you! Come, let us gather with Gram. And with whatever others you believe have the will and the intelligence to join us at the center of our plot. We shall develop a scheme, and then we shall act. The Q'oornans brought us here against our will, every man and woman and inhuman creature of us. But they shall not keep us here. We shall become our own masters once again!"

  'Nrrc'kth rested while Clive and Tomàs and Gram formulated their plan. Tomàs suggested two more prisoners to join the conspiracy. One was a strange creature with skin like a lizard's and claws like a tiger's. The other was far odder, a shadowy, whispery thing that Clive could never quite bring his eyes to focus on and that seemed to grow and shrink and shift restlessly.

  There was the danger, always the danger, that some of the prisoners were traitors, double agents planted among the polyglot mass by their Q'oornan captors, for reasons of their own. There was no easy way to uncover such traitors, and the presence of turncoats seemed unlikely.

  They would just have to trust Tomàs' judgment— and Gram's—Clive decided.

  The plan that was evolved required the digging out of paving stones from the floor of the dungeon. The stones were not cemented into place, but were simply laid side by side, carefully Fitted so that it was almost impossible to raise them from their places.

  But Clive's ceremonial dagger had escaped the notice of his captors in the turmoil of his confrontation with the Lord of the Castle. Now, with its polished blade as a tool, Clive and his allies managed to raise a block near the window-wall a fraction of an inch.

  And now the tigerish talons of Tomàs' friend came into play. No ordinary fingers could have held that stone in place—Clive estimated that it weighed nearly four hundred pounds, and its sides were smooth and slippery. But the claws dug in, and then the form shifter managed to penetrate the narrow opening with tendrils of its being and get part of its mass beneath the stone so that it pressed upward upon the block.

  With a concerted effort they managed to raise the stone. With a common exclamation they shoved it sideways onto the adjacent block.

  For a fleeting moment Clive hoped that the removal of the stone would give them access to some hidden escape route, some forgotten tunnel that would lead them from the dungeon to the outer world, whence they could make a full escape from the castle.

  Such was not to be. They saw only black earth beneath the stones. In a way, Clive was relieved. He did not really wish to leave the castle and escape across country. Not after he'd got this close to Neville. Oh, no! Now Clive craved the confrontation that he knew awaited him.

  They worked in shifts, digging at the dirt beneath the black stone. Their food was brought at regular intervals and it was an easy matter to shield the excavation project with the bodies of ever-moving prisoners. Nor did their warders pay attention to what they did. The prison had been secure for so long a time that they had been lulled into a treacherous overconfidence.

  The wall itself shimmered and glowed and became gradually transparent. Clive found himself staring open-mouthed. 'Nrrc'kth was at his side. She had recovered her strength and become a vital part of the inner cabal that plotted the prisoners' escape. Tomàs was supervising the work of excavation, and he exclaimed aloud at the vision, calling upon his patron saint for protection.

  He had been right all along, Tomàs exclaimed. The Dungeon was part of heaven's plan—perhaps it was purgatory! Perhaps it was a precinct of hell itself! And now—

  Clive commanded calm. He had grown comfortable with the Dungeon's patois, and the problem of languages no longer impeded the exercise of his authority.

  Now, standing where the wall of close-fitted stones had held the motley prisoners helpless, there was instead a shimmering, glowing field. And in the center of it, illuminated by an inner light, surrounded by Shriek and Finnbogg and Horace Hamilton Smythe, stood the dark-haired, willowy figure of User Annie!

  Clive strode forward. He felt his brain execute a twist, his sense of time and space turning through some strange dimension so that he had access to the information he had carried in him since the strange communion he had experienced with Horace Hamilton Smythe and with Finnbogg and with Annie, through Shriek. He had thought, at the time, that he had refrained from merging his mind with that of User Annie. But he realized, now, that he had indeed shared his mind with her, and she had shared hers with him. He had repressed until now the shocking information that he had received from her, but in this moment of confrontation and reunion it came pouring forth from whatever chamber of the mind in which it had been sealed.

  While the scene before him froze into a tableau, his mind traveled through the tale that he had received from Annie.

  Yes, you call me User Annie but my name is Annabelle Leigh. My lovers call me Anne, or Belle. I like Belle. My grandmother knew Belle Starr.

  You think I speak strangely, but that's the way we speak in my time, in my world. In my business. Computers are so much a part of our daily lives, our speech has taken on the jargon of the programmer and the systems designer. Your speech sounds as alien and incomprehensible to me, Clive Folliot, as does mine to you. Bless Shriek for helping us to understand each other. I do care for you, I am attracted to you, but there is something between us already that you do not understand—and yet you must.

  I was born in San Francisco in 1980, so I'm nineteen years old. I was a virgin until I was fifteen—average for girls in my time. I have a good education and a good profession—or I did, at least, until the Q'oornans plucked me from Piccadilly Circus and brought me to the Dungeon.

  My mother was a singer before me. She was born in Denver, in 1959, and made her way to San Francisco. She sang in the chorus of the San Francisco opera and she won a few small roles as a coloratura. She was twenty-one years of age when I was born. She was never married. That's a tradition in our family. I'm the fifth generation to maintain the tradition, and I won't change it if I can help myself.

  We never marry. We take lovers of our choice, we bear daughters, we live our own lives, go where we will, and above all—we never marry!

  My grandmother was born in Chicago in 1925. She was a saloon girl. She sang and danced and she was a part-time hooker on the side. She had few advantages. Her mother hadn't been able to give her much, but she taught her the family law: live as you choose—take the lovers that you wish—bear a daughter—never marry!

  Grandmother had it hard, but she remained true to the family tradition. She bore my mother at the age of thirty- four. She raised her on her poor earnings, but she taught her what she had to learn, and she helped her to rise in the world.

  My great-grandmother was a Boston scrubwoman. She was scorned there as a bastard. She had come to America in her mother's arms, a toothless infant. Her mother had tried to claim widowhood, but somehow word got out that she had never been married, that her child was illegitimate. She was the one who made the great resolve, who laid down our family law.

  The family name was not always Leigh. It was shortened somewhere along the years, from Leighton.

  Our line was founded by the Englishwoman Annabella Leighton. She had taken a lover, but this was before our great law had been created. She intended to marry. H
er lover had promised to marry her. She trusted him, poor fool! Poor Annabella Leighton!

  Her lover was the second son of a baron. His older brother was lost on an expedition to East Africa. Great-great-grandmother's lover went in search of his brother. Neither brother returned.

  Great-great-grandmother waited to the bitter end. She gave birth to her child alone, alone and unattended in a freezing London flat. When she realized that her lover was not returning—when old Baron Tewkesbury died and the title and fortune passed to a distant cousin who turned Great-great-grandmother away from his door—she created the great law of our family.

  She booked passage to America, and lived in Boston, and raised her child to live as she would, to take lovers as she chose, to bear a daughter and pass on to her the family law. And above all, never to marry.

  That is the story of my family. That is who I am.

  You played a part in that story, Clive Folliot. You know who you are. You know the part that you played.

  My feelings about you are mixed, to say the least. If we get out of this alive ... if you find your way back to

  England and to Annabella Leighton ... if you marry her after all...

  What will become of my family? What will become of our law? What will become of me? I don't know, Clive Folliot. That is the end and the answer to it all. I simply do not know.

  Clive shook his head, as if that could change the universe and break the stasis that had held him, sound and movement resumed all around him.

  User Annie—no, Annabelle Leigh—stood in the center of her glowing nimbus. Colors for which Clive had not the vaguest of names shimmered and wove around her as she moved her hands, melting away the stone wall of the dungeon.

  He had no idea what the computers were that she had spoken of in that blinding moment of communication, save that they were machines of a wondrous sort, machines that seemed almost to have minds and consciousness of their own, and that could be used as either the servants or the masters of men. Baalbec A-9 was obviously one such.

  The prisoners were pouring through the opening in the wall of the dungeon that Annabelle Leigh had made. Clearly this marvel was another wonder worked by her Baalbec A-9.

  How much of her own strength this deed had consumed, how much remained, how much more the machine could do at Annabelle's command, Clive could not even guess. She had told Clive that the machine was powered by the energies of her body. When she was fatigued and her strength depleted, then the Baalbec must lose its power as well, until Annie had rested and taken nourishment and replenished her strength.

  And, for that matter, how had she got here? He could only guess, and his guess was that she had flown in the Nakajima Model 97. Brought it to earth where? Perhaps in the courtyard of the castle. Or perhaps beyond the moat, and from there transported Shriek and Finnbogg and Horace Hamilton Smythe.

  Questions, always questions, and each answer brought only a new freshet of puzzles in its train. There was not time, certainly not time now, to pursue the matter.

  He looked back at 'Nrrc'kth. Her white gown, her pale skin, her black-green hair, her unearthly beauty still stirred him to the core. He looked away from her, looked once more at Annabelle Leigh. Was this young woman truly the great-great-granddaughter of Annabella Leighton? She had to be; the story she told fitted too well, for all its fantastic features, with the realities of Clive's and Annabella's lives.

  Annabelle Leigh—User Annie—was his own great-great-grandchild. She was the flesh of his flesh, the flower of his—and Annabella's—loins, of their passion.

  He thought of how he had held her on their ride in the cart. He knew that if the situation had been different, if the opportunity had presented itself, he would have done more than hold her in his arms. He would have . . . She was his own great-great- grandchild, his direct descendant, his very daughter, and he would have. . . .

  But no, that had been only a dream, a curious flight of fantasy, a thing half of the stuff of sleep and half of wishful musings. And he had not known, had not known at the time. . . .

  But then he was swept by a more tangible force, by the rush of the prisoners from the dungeon seeking their freedom.

  A few of them ran away, fleeing the dungeon, the castle. He heard a series of splashes as they plunged into the broad moat. Then a series of screams as the denizens of that precinct began to feast.

  Most of the prisoners remained, clustering around Clive and Tomàs and Gram and 'Nrrc'kth. This group merged with the newcomers, with Annabelle and Horace Hamilton Smythe and Finnbogg and Shriek.

  And all of them—all of them—were looking at Clive.

  No, he realized in a stunning moment of comprehension. They were not looking at him. They were looking to him. Looking to him for decision and leadership.

  He did not wish the role of commander, but it had been thrust upon him. There were guards in the castle above. It was a miracle that they had not yet responded to the mass escape of the prisoners, but at any moment, Clive knew, they would arrive.

  He could lead his motley band in flight—or he could lead them as they stayed to fight.

  The first course might save injuries, even deaths— for the time being. But someone had to face down the Q'oornans. Someone had to solve the mystery of the Dungeon. Someone had to conquer the overlords!

  That someone would be Clive Folliot, along with his band of human and inhuman followers.

  There was time for one brief exchange with Annie, and while the others took brief respite, Clive took this chance. "I understand now," he said to Annie.

  She looked into his face and said, "I'm glad, Clive." In her look was the knowledge that Annie, too, knew what it was that Clive understood. She had learned as much of him, through that moment of psychic unity, as he had learned of her.

  "Is there anything else—anything I must find out?"

  Annie smiled. "Whole ROM libraries, Clive. Grandfather. The Q'oornans—they're just one group, one world in a universe you can hardly imagine. We're pawns, Grandfather. Pawns in a mad n-dimensional chess game where we don't even know whose hand it is that moves us."

  "Is there no hope, then?" Clive almost pleaded.

  "There is always hope, Grandfather! Always! Only when we surrender hope does it cease to exist for us. As long as we cling to our aspirations and as long as we do not give up the struggle, we may yet win. Someday. Somehow. We will win, Grandfather!"

  Clive smiled at Annie. At this beautiful woman, this creature of courage and of mystification. He realized that he loved her, loved her in a way he had never loved before.

  They would win! In his heart he knew that they would.

  The first task that lay ahead was to confront Neville.

  Clive Folliot set out to accomplish that task.

  CHAPTER 29

  Chang Guafe

  Of all the prisoners to join Clive's army outside the castle, the most striking in appearance was Chang Guafe. Not man, not beast, not machine, Chang Guafe was none of these and all of them.

  His face was an ever-moving amorphous mass of eyes and teeth and other objects that must have been the product of a maddened experimenter rather than nature even at her worst. There were tentacles and gears, pincers and claws. Chang Guafe might have been the acromegalous parent of the monster of the great black bridge, outfitted with the product of a malevolent munitions maker.

  In a rapid exchange of information with the monster, Clive learned that he—even that word is inaccurate and insufficient to designate Chang Guafe, but it will suffice—was the product of a world where life was simple and primitive. Chang Guafe himself had begun as little more than an amoeba.

  But the great achievement of evolution among Chang Guafe's species was their ability to retain the features, and to a limited extent even the conscious personalities, of the creatures they encountered and absorbed.

  Left alone, Chang Guafe's world had developed into the habitat of a formless mass of living, pulsating protoplasm. Undifferentiated, unspecialized, unintell
igent, and even unconscious—until the first space explorers had arrived from a distant planet. Once the visitors' spacecraft had come to rest, it was inexorably absorbed, and both the mechanical devices of the craft and the physical and mental organs of its occupants were incorporated into the makeup of the native life form.

  With the knowledge and the technique of its new members, the native life of Chang Guafe's planet had in turn become spacefaring—and had spread itself, enveloping and incorporating all life and all technology that it encountered.

  Then Chang Guafe had reached a planet already dominated by the Q'oornans. It would be inaccurate to say that Chang Guafe traveled by spaceship, or alternately that he traveled without need of one. There was no distinction between occupant and vehicle. Chang Guafe and his supplies and equipment and spaceship were a single entity.

  But something on this planet had frozen Chang Guafe's form. He could move, he could function, he could even change, within limits. But no longer could he absorb new organisms or new mechanisms. He was stuck. And he had been imprisoned in the Dungeon. And he sought vengeance against his captors.

  Chang Guafe saw in the leadership of Clive Folliot an opportunity to gain that vengeance—and at least a hope of escape from this planet and the restoration of his power to grow and adapt.

  And Clive Folliot saw in Chang Guafe an ally in his own fight against the Q'oornans and in his quest for his missing brother.

  Clive and his band found themselves in an open area, the castle with its now breached dungeon wall behind them, the broad moat separating the castle from the mainland ahead. He wanted to talk with them, to tell them what he had experienced and ask what they had learned during the time of their separation. Above all he wanted to speak with Annie— Annabelle Leigh, his own descendant! But this was not the time to do that.

  He threw back his head to scan the sky above. The ever-circling stars of the miniature constellation that lighted this world within the Dungeon were as bright as noonday.