Esrever Doom

by Piers Anthony

  “Efforts?” Kody asked.

  “Fully understanding the sniffer and orienting on the Bomb will likely take several efforts. Things are seldom as simple as they may appear from a distance.”

  She was probably right. “Night place,” he agreed.

  They looked around. There was a path leading from the beach into the deep woods. “Where would a path lead, except to a residence?” Kody asked.

  The others laughed. “Never trust an innocent path,” Yukay said. “It well might lead to a tangle tree.”

  “What kind of tree?”

  “It’s a good thing you have Companions. Otherwise you’d be dead by now.”

  “Squawk.”

  Yukay looked at Zap. “This nice path does lead to a tangler? Then we’d better show Kody.”

  They followed the path, Zap leading the way, the sniffer puffing along behind. It went to a large green tree with branches that drooped so deeply that they almost looked like tentacles. Ivan picked up a stone and threw it at the tree.

  The tentacles whipped around to catch the rock. Then, disgusted, they dropped it to the ground. But in that moment of disarray Kody had caught a glimpse of the trunk of the tree. It had a big gnarled mouth coated with what looked like dried blood, and there was a pile of broken bones beside it.

  “Now I think I know what a tangle tree is,” Kody said soberly. “I would have blundered into it, alone.”

  They walked back to the beach. “Let’s see if the sniffer can help,” Yukay said.

  Kody looked at the sniffer, which was pacing them while emitting balls of smoke. “It sniffs only bombs,” he reminded her.

  “There are different kinds of bombs,” she reminded him in turn. “We just have to think of an appropriate one.”

  “What about when you’re bombed out?” Ivan asked. “And need a place to sleep it off?”

  “I wonder. Kody, why don’t you try that?”

  This was so far-fetched as to be ludicrous. But he humored her. “Sniffer, can you sniff out a safe place for several bombed-out folk to find shelter?”

  The sniffer perked up. It sniffed the air and rotated its antenna. Then it belched out another ball of smoke and started walking on its rollers. Kody noted how it really did walk, and the wheels enabled each leg to move forward after touching the ground, to provide further progress. It was actually fairly efficient.

  They followed it along the beach. It seemed to know where it was going. The walk took some time, and the day was getting late. It strolled/rolled right up to—

  A sleeping cat.

  They stood and looked at the feline. “This is for bombed-out folk?” Kody asked.

  The base of the sun dipped below the upper foliage of the trees. Darkness was closing. They had, it seemed, wasted their time on this foolishness, and now would be caught out in the open for the night.

  The cat woke. It stretched. Then it changed. It expanded hugely, causing them to step back, startled. It became the size of a house.

  “A house cat!” Zosi exclaimed.

  A pun! Yet there was the house, its door somewhat mouthlike, complete with side whiskers, its windows eyelike with vertical slits of light from the interior, its tail curled up to make a bushy thatchlike roof. It looked quite peaceful and perfect for shelter.

  Ivan opened the door and entered. There was no protest, so the others followed. The inside seemed to be well appointed, with a couch and table in the main room and beds in the two bedrooms. There was even a bathroom and a kitchenette, though no food except for a pitcher of clear water.

  “We will feast on sandwiches,” Yukay said.

  They did. Zosi conjured a fine assortment of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with no hint of gasoline smell.

  “Now we sleep,” Yukay said. “Zap, I trust you will guard the door so that we get no unwelcome nocturnal visitations. Ivan and I will take one bedroom, Kody and Zosi the other.” She looked at Ivan. “Whose chip do we use: mine or yours? We can’t use both together, as the reversals would cancel out.”

  “Mine,” Ivan said. “That way we’re actually normal. That’s better.”

  “That’s better,” she agreed.

  Kody looked at Zosi. “Oh, yes, I’m willing,” she agreed.

  There was a beeping sound. They all looked around.

  “Squawk.”

  They looked at Zap. On her side was printed SNIFFER LOW.

  “The robot!”

  Yukay exclaimed, “We forgot about it. Of course it needs more fuel.”

  “Squawk,” Zap agreed, and bounded out of the house. Soon she was back with a beakful of dry branch.

  Ivan took the branch and broke it into smaller sticks. Then he kneeled and opened the robot’s side door. Only glowing coals remained inside. He fed in the sticks and watched as they blazed up. Then he shut the door. “But we’ll need to keep an eye on it,” he said. “I don’t know if that will last the night.”

  “Squawk.”

  “You’ll handle it? Good enough.” Ivan stood up. “Where were we?”

  Yukay took his arm. “Dig out your chip. We have a date.”

  “But don’t you still see me as ugly?”

  “Women are more sensible than men. We judge by more than mere appearance. When you sacrificed your hot date with Polly Ester for the good of the Quest, I saw that there was more to you than looks.”

  “Well, I didn’t do it to impress you. It was just the right thing.”

  “Precisely. Anyway, as I said, it will be dark.” She drew him on into the bedroom and shut the door behind them.

  Kody did not inquire why, if darkness sufficed to nullify the Curse, they had not done it before.

  Zosi took Kody’s arm. “Our turn.”

  “But you see me as ugly too.”

  “Yukay already answered that.” She drew him to the other bedroom. “Good night, Zap and Sniffer.”

  “Squawk.”

  The robot beeped. Zosi’s mouth fell open. “It acknowledged!”

  “It may be more of a machine than we realized,” Kody agreed. And realized that the Bomb Sniffer now had a name. It was a person machine.

  Alone together in the bedroom, Zosi was suddenly shy. “I assumed you would like to be with me tonight. Maybe I presumed too much, and you are just being polite. If so, I apologize. Sometimes I get carried away. So if—”

  He cut her off with a kiss. Then they lay on the bed clothed, embraced, and talked.

  “Zosi, you know how mixed up I am about Naomi. I treated her politely but distantly, yet she gave her life for me. I know it’s foolish, but I can’t help fearing that it could be similar with you. Because I can’t stay here in Xanth. I don’t think it’s right to lead you on, when we have no future.”

  “You said you didn’t even let her seduce you. Would you have, if you had known she was about to die for you?”

  “Yes, I think I would have. I didn’t love her, but maybe it would have reduced the unfairness of the situation.”

  “Yet you plan to leave without doing it with me?”

  That hurt. “Zosi, in Mundania we usually don’t do it without the expectation of a larger commitment. I can’t make that commitment.”

  “Just as I can’t make the commitment to stay alive long enough to governess Plato and solve the zombie problem. I’m as bad as you are.”

  She was actually trying to make him feel better about it! “To make it worse, the way I resisted Naomi’s seduction was to think of you. Of my love for you. It would have been a betrayal of you.”

  “And the reason I remained on your Quest was that I couldn’t bear to be away from you. Being near you is my main reason for being willing to remain alive. I betrayed my own quest because of personal weakness.”

  “Oh, Zosi!” he said, anguished. “I didn’t realize.”

  “Not your fault,” she said quickly.

  “Or yours. We’re both victims of hopeless love.”

  They kissed again. This time there was fire.

  After that things
proceeded on their own course, not allowing any further dialogue to get in the way. In one moment they were embracing and kissing. In the next they were both nude. In another they were embracing and kissing again, more intimately than before. The room was filled with little floating, glowing hearts. Then came the finale that blasted the hearts away and left them both happily exhausted.

  “Oh, Kody, I would tutor Plato forever if I could just come home at night to you.”

  “I don’t want to leave Xanth. I want to stay with you.”

  “And we can’t,” she said, her tears flowing.

  “We can’t,” he agreed, his tears joining hers. They were united in their frustration about not being able to unite.

  But this was not the past or the future. This was the present. There was nothing between them but passion.

  They slept between bouts of love. It was a busy night.

  In the morning Zosi’s eyes suddenly went wide open. “The stork!”

  “The what?”

  “We signaled the stork. What will we do if it brings a baby?”

  “Storks don’t bring babies! That’s just a fantasy told to children.”

  “Yes, they do. This is Xanth, a fantasy land. When people do the signaling ritual, as we did several times, they bring babies. They’re not very efficient; it takes about nine months. Suppose the stork brings me a baby and you’re gone and I’m not alive? I never thought of that last night.”

  Kody realized that in this magic realm some significant details really were different. What was a fairy tale in Mundania was literal here. “You were distracted.” It was a gentle understatement.

  She was not consoled. “We couldn’t have made it any plainer. But the storks don’t always deliver. I’ll just have to hope they lose the order this time. That poor baby!”

  He had no answer. So he kissed her. That seemed to suffice.

  They cleaned up, dressed, and went out to join the others. Ivan and Yukay emerged at about the same time, Ivan putting away his chip. Zosi and Yukay exchanged a look that covered the whole situation and then some, so that no questions were necessary. They had just proved that they knew all about entertaining men.

  “Squawk.”

  “The house!” Yukay agreed. “By day it returns to feline form. We need to get out.”

  They got out. The house shrank back into the cat.

  “Thank you for the night’s lodging,” Zosi said to the cat. “It was very nice.”

  The cat opened one eye and gazed at her. Zosi blushed. Of course the cat knew all about the events of the night. Then it went to sleep.

  “I wonder what dreams it has?” Ivan murmured.

  “What dreams could it have, wilder than the reality?” Yukay asked rhetorically.

  Kody just hoped they were not of having guests who did not leave in time, and got caught inside and digested.

  They foraged for breakfast, finding a pie tree nearby, together with milkweed pods filled with fresh milk. Zap found more dry wood to re-stoke Sniffer. Kody was still getting used to the way Xanth provided for its residents. It seemed that no one really had to work. But everyone had to be on constant lookout for magical dangers, like dragons and tangle trees. On the whole, he preferred Mundania, work and all.

  “Now let’s try to make Sniffer locate one more thing, so we are sure we know how it works,” Yukay said briskly. “I thought of another kind of bomb.”

  “Bombe,” Zosi agreed.

  That glance had really communicated!

  The men looked blank.

  “Bombe,” Yukay explained. It was pronounced the same, but Kody heard the different spelling. “An eye scream dessert. See if Sniffer can find one.”

  “Find a bombe,” Kody told Sniffer. He hoped the robot had a better idea of it than he did.

  The robot puffed out smoke and started moving. They followed, alert for dangers along the way. Soon they came to a literal candyland. The rocks were chocolate, lollipops grew from the ground, the trees were covered with candy balls, and Ivan harvested a walking stick that was a sugar cane made of solid sugar. This was a child’s delight, but they knew better than to stuff themselves with sweets.

  And there was the bombe, a round dish of ice cream—eye scream, Kody corrected himself—holding another kind of eye scream inside. In the shape of an eyeball, of course. This time they indulged themselves and ate it. It was sinfully delicious.

  The sniffer had pretty well proved itself.

  12

  GHOST

  “One last thing we should do, before we move on,” Yukay said. “We need to calibrate our two kinds of Bomb locators to be sure they align. Then we’ll be sure we know what we’re doing.”

  “Calibrate?” Kody asked.

  “You can tell how close we are, but not specific direction. Sniffer can tell what direction, but not proximity. We need to know both, so we don’t make any mistake or walk into any ugly surprises.”

  “Good point. The three of you and Zap all look perfectly normal to me.”

  Yukay looked around. “Zosi looks a degree uglier than she used to. Ivan looks a shade more brutish. And you, Kody, are stomach-turning loathsome.”

  “That suggests we are closer, as we expected.” Kody looked at Ivan. “How do you see the rest of us?”

  “If I hadn’t had the chip, I would have vomited on Yukay when she touched me last night. Zosi’s no prize either. And Yukay’s right: you are loathsome, worse than before.”

  “And you, Zosi?”

  “It’s a good thing it was dark last night, in the bedroom, or I might have retched. Ivan’s not a lot better, and Yukay is the crone of crones.” She smiled. “But I never judged you by your appearance. I love you for other things.”

  Kody had to smile. “So we are agreed: the contrast is stronger than it was. So we are closer to the Bomb. But we still don’t know how close. It could be several days’ walk away, or several minutes’. We need a better measure.”

  “Squawk.” On the griffin’s side was the word PERSPECTIVE.

  “You’re a genius!” Kody said. “That’s magic that works in both Xanth and Mundania.”

  “But how do we apply it?” Yukay asked.

  “We move sidewise and triangulate.”

  But the faces of the others were blank. This was not magic they understood.

  “I will demonstrate,” Kody said. “Um, I think I will need a compass. But maybe I can make do with the sun and shadows.”

  They still looked blank.

  “Zap, you stand here, with your back to the sun,” Kody said. “See where your shadow points: pretty much west. So I take my position due west of you, so your shadow points right toward me.”

  “This is weird magic,” Ivan muttered.

  “Now I will travel crosswise, going north,” Kody said, walking a few paces. “And sight on Zap again. And lo: she’s no longer aligned with her shadow. The angle is different. I can tell by that that she’s about as far away from me as the distance I just walked north. I am triangulating: sighting along two sides of a triangle. From those two sightings I can tell about how far away something is.”

  “But you can see Zap without all that,” Ivan protested.

  “But I can’t see the Bomb. But the same technique will work on that. We can get an approximation today, and know how near or far from it we are.”

  It took awhile, but finally they came to understand the magic of perspective and triangulation and agreed that it should work.

  They did a sighting based on Sniffer’s pointing and judged its direction. “Just about due west,” Kody said.

  Then they marched north a distance and sighted again. It was still pretty much west. “That means it’s not too close yet,” Kody said.

  They went farther north, to take another sighting. And something bothered Kody. There was a bit of clouding at the edge of his vision that disappeared when he looked directly at it. Was he having a vision problem? He dismissed it and walked on.

  He saw a vague shape. It reminded hi
m of something, or rather someone. Was his imagination playing tricks on him?

  Then he got a better glimpse. “Naomi!” he exclaimed.

  The others looked at him. “Is that guilt getting to you again?” Yukay asked.

  “Maybe. I thought I saw her. And of course that’s impossible, because—”

  “Because she’s dead,” Yukay finished. “But it’s not impossible. You could be seeing her ghost.”

  Kody paused. “Are ghosts literal too, in Xanth?”

  “Oh, yes. If a person dies and can’t make it immediately to Heaven, Hell, or somewhere else, s/he may hang around the place where s/he died.”

  S/he? “This isn’t that place.”

  “But you are the one who killed her. That will do.”

  “She’s haunting me?”

  “Not necessarily. She liked you, and maybe that emotion survives her death and keeps her close. Maybe she still has something to tell you.”

  “I have something to tell her: I’m supremely sorry about killing her.”

  “I’m sure she already knows that.”

  “So what does she want with me?”

  “You’ll have to talk with her and find out.”

  Kody shook his head. “I’m not used to this kind of dealing.”

  “Don’t be negative. It might be important. Remember, she was the alter ego crafted by the enemy. She could know things.”

  Kody resumed walking. The apparition became stronger. It was as though the ghost were still zeroing in on him, somewhat the way he was trying to zero in on the Bomb. What did she have on her vaporous mind?

  When they reached another reasonable distance north, they stopped for another sighting. This time the direction was a little south of west. “Still not really close,” Kody said. “I think we have at least another day’s walk ahead of us.”

  You do.

  Kody looked around. “What?” Then he saw the ghost. She remained translucently faint, but it was definitely Naomi. “Did you just speak to me?”

  “No,” the others said almost together.

  “Be quiet,” Yukay said. “He’s trying to communicate with the ghost of Naomi.”

  “Squawk.”