Sojan the Swordsman ; Under the Warrior Sky

by Michael Moorcock

  “The mice traveled in this?”

  “Yes.”

  “No space craft? I don’t get it.”

  “You’re not traveling through space, you’re traveling . . . Ah, how to explain, son. You are traveling through dimensions, through time, and space is of no consequence. If the mice went, and came back, then the air on the particular planet where we plan for you to arrive can be breathed. We learned that.”

  “What planet?”

  “The planet we call Fourth From The Sun. Meaning the particular sun in the particular solar system inside the universe we’ve made. The mice went there, and most of them survived.”

  “The ones that didn’t survive. They went elsewhere?”

  “No. They went to the same place. But they didn’t come back.”

  “Did the vehicle come back?”

  “Once, yes. It was empty. The other time. No. It didn’t return.”

  I thought about that a moment. “All right, I presume that you do not intend for me to fit in that little ball.”

  He smiled at me and guided me toward a room that connected to the laboratory. Inside he closed the door. On a pedestal was a ball like the mice had traveled in, but it was, of course, huge, and there was a set of stairs that led up to it. Across from it was a glass, and it showed into the room containing the created universe I had seen before. Looking at it, it was amazing to think that that microcosmic universe housed stars and planets and suns, and maybe, life.

  Dr. Wright walked up the steps and touched the ball. The silver fingers opened slowly. There was a seat inside with straps. There were a few simple controls.

  “Is it like flying a plane?”

  “You fly nothing. These switches,” and he touched a red one and a yellow one, “are for opening and closing the ball. Once you arrive, you have one switch to set.” He pointed at a larger yellow switch. “And then, it doesn’t matter if you’re inside again or not. You can be anywhere, and it will gather you up.”

  “Gather me up?” I asked. “How’s that?”

  “Once you’re there, when the mechanism decides to return you, it will gather you into atoms and pull you inside the ball. It will find you, like a mother hen collecting her chicks. You need do nothing. Your atomic structure will be broken into fragments, so that it can make the journey back unharmed, and when you arrive, they will be pieced together again. Then, you touch a certain switch if all goes well, and you can open the ball, and come out. It’s that simple.”

  “How long will I have there?”

  “Here, your time gone could be seconds, minutes, days, a few weeks. Possibly a year. No way to tell for certain. But your time there, on that world, in that solar system, inside that universe . . . It could be a lifetime.”

  And then it struck me. The mice had traveled there and come back, and the life span of a mouse, compared to a human, is quite brief.

  I said, “Did the mice age?”

  “No,” he said, smiling slightly. “We think that may be a peculiar side effect of the transfer. A freezing of the physical; an end to aging. From what we can

  tell from the mice, they have ceased to age. And they seem even more spry. None of this has worn off. Perhaps in time it will. But not so far. Not a bad side effect.”

  “Why?”

  Dr. Wright shook his head. “I don’t know. We don’t even have a theory. It’s a mystery.”

  “And you don’t know that humans will be effected the same, do you?”

  “No,” he said. “We don’t. But it seems highly likely.”

  “Of course,” I said. “There were the two that didn’t come back.”

  “True, Brax. Quite true.”

  As he escorted me out of there and back to my room, I thought: He has not even asked my last name, not once. And then I thought: Unless I made the round trip, there wasn’t really any reason for him to know.

  It was three days later when I awoke to find that through the slot in the door they had slipped me fresh clothes. Jeans and tee-shirt, fleece-lined jacket, socks and tennis shoes. I put them on, and an hour later I was brought breakfast. When I finished I was conducted by my guardian back to the room with the large ball in it. The last three days had been used to show me what I needed to do, which was minimal, and what I might expect, which was merely speculative. The only ones who might be able to explain that to me with any authority were the rats who had gone and come back, and they weren’t talking.

  Inside the ball I strapped myself in the chair. Dr. Wright said, “It will seem to spin. It isn’t spinning, and it isn’t moving, but it will feel that way. When you arrive, you should make sure the ball is in a safe place. It should, if all goes well, bring you back, as long as it isn’t damaged. Do you understand?”

  Of course I had heard this for the last few days, but I nodded as if it were the first time the information had been imparted to me. Before I pushed the button to close the door, which was almost all of the left side of the device, I noticed that Dr. Wright was teary eyed. I was uncertain if he felt some concern for my safety, or if he was merely excited to find that his human guinea pig had been so willing and so cooperative without him having to push the hard sell.

  “Brax,” Dr. Wright said. “I wish you all the luck there is.”

  He produced a broad belt with a little case fastened to its side, and gave me a fat pocket knife. It was one of those knives with all manner of gadgets attached. Awl, scissors, spoon, two different blades, as well as some devices I didn’t recognize.

  “You may need these things,” he said. “They will all travel with you, will materialize with you when you come to a stop, wherever that may be.”

  “Provided it’s not the middle of a star or underwater,” I said.

  “Yes, there’s that,” he said. “But remember. The mice came back.”

  “Most of them,” I said.

  He nodded. “The case on the belt contains first aid materials, some other odds and ends. It might come in handy.”

  I put the knife in the pack and fastened the belt.

  “Before I go,” I said, “I want you to know this. I know full well that I wouldn’t have left here alive had I not chosen to go. Or at least someone would have tried to prevent me. I wouldn’t go down easy. I just wanted you to understand I knew what my options were.”

  “Accident laid you in our hands,” Dr. Wright said, and his voice was choked up, as if a knot had been tied in his throat. “I didn’t want it this way, but the organization who sponsors us. They leave us little choice. And if we fail, or if the laboratory, our experiments are closed down, then I would suffer the same fate you might expect for yourself. I knew that going into this project. I had a chance to get out. I didn’t take it.”

  “The difference is you chose to be here,” I said. “But I will offer you this consolation, Doctor. I want this. I want it bad. I don’t like not having a choice, but in this case, it’s the choice I want to make.”

  “You’re an odd one, Brax.”

  “This world is too tame for me, Dr. Wright.”

  “Then let’s hope the next world excites you more.”

  I smiled at him. “Enough small talk. Let’s do it.”

  I touched the button on the device. Dr. Wright left the room. A moment later all the colors of the universe leaped through the ball and the planets and stars charged toward me like bullets.

  Then all was a swirl of darkness, and then the darkness was splattered with white stars. Then they were gone. There was a feeling as if my ears might break. I saw my hands, resting on the small console in front of me, come apart in a billion flakes of colorful energy. I tried to lift my arms, but they appeared to be dissolving. And then they were gone, and my memory of The Jump, as Dr. Wright called it, ended.

  Chapter Four

  Giants and Monsters

  I was whole again. I lifted up my hands and inspected them. Everything seemed okay, all the fingers were in the right place. I patted myself down. A superficial examination proved me to be sound and ab
le bodied. The belt with the pack Dr. Wright had given me was still strapped on me. I was a little dizzy, but other than that, I felt fine.

  The ball was wrapped in a green color and the green color was full of light. It took me a moment to adjust, but I soon realized it was foliage around me; a big mass of leaves and boughs, and the leaves were easily the length of an average man’s body, two feet or more across. The arrival, the impact after materialization in this mass of greenery, had cracked a band of the machine’s see-through covering. It hadn’t broken the clear plastic loose, but it had put quite a mark on it; it ran all the length of the glass, like a giant dueling scar. Maybe something similar had happened to one or both of the missing mice. One mouse got out, and something got it. The other mouse may have had its device damaged, and that’s why it and the device failed to go back.

  All I knew was I was a human mouse, and so far, so good in the physical department. As for my ride? At this point it was debatable. I had no idea how badly it had been damaged, or how little damage it took for it to be nonfunctional.

  The leaves were pressed tight as a coat of paint against the clear parts of the ball, dotted with large dollops of dew, or recent rain. The light shining through the leaves made them appear artificial, almost like some kind of ornament.

  I set the return button, and then pressed the hatch release. When I did, the powerful, but unseen hinge that was one side of the ball sprang open and knocked the leaves back and the light from the sun shone in bright as a spotlight.

  I unfastened my seat belt and got out of the ball, and when I was clear of it, it automatically closed and sealed with the quickness of a snapping turtle. There was no way to open it now. Not until it was ready. I wouldn’t be going back inside until it dissolved me again, or whatever it was it did, and returned me to Earth. Provided it was still working.

  Before me was a long stretch of brown ground that sloped off at one end. The ground was smooth for the most part, but there were bumps and rolls here and there. I moved away from the ball, and glanced back. The leaves that my machine had pushed aside, now that it had closed, were slowly wrapping themselves around it again. They did this until the only way you might see my traveling machine was to know it was there. And even then, it was doubtful. The sunlight was resting on the leaves, but unlike the view from inside the ball, the leaves appeared dark from the outside.

  I looked up.

  Above me were limbs and leaves. They climbed high, high, high. It was as if I were trying to see the top of a mountain. Light came through in gaps between the boughs. The gaps were enormous. Some of the limbs were the size of entire redwoods in California.

  I walked where there was plenty of light shining through a break in the boughs and vegetation in the manner of great leaves and long needles and flowers, all of which were easily the size of rowboats and all kinds of colors. Through the gap, I could see the sun, and assumed it was the star that had been pointed out to me in the laboratory. Now, here I was on the Fourth Planet from that sun.

  The sky was as blue as a Robert Johnson song.

  I ambled along, and soon I was walking along the dark brown surface with no limbs above me. I felt as if it should be hot, but it wasn’t. I also realized that I felt really good. The air was terrific, so sweet and full of oxygen, I felt a little euphoric.

  I walked for a long time. When I looked back, I realized that where I had landed was well in the distance. I turned and walked some more, and then the ground thinned on both sides, became narrow before me.

  The land kept tapering. Soon, I could see a clutch of bushes. A moment later I realized they were not bushes at all. They were little growths off of what I was walking on, and what I was walking on wasn’t ground.

  I was walking on a mostly barren limb, except for that little eruption of greenery. My ground was in fact a limb larger than any tree I had ever seen. I finally came to where it forked and broke off in a jagged manner, most likely due to natural causes.

  I carefully looked down.

  The earth was miles below. I could make out rivers, like blue lines, and above the rivers, mountain peaks, even a few spotty clouds surrounding the mountains, as if someone who was about to pack it up and move it all were in the process of packing everything in cotton.

  I turned around and looked back at the tree. The trunk of the tree was very thick around. It went for a far distance in either direction before it curved on either side. It was filled with massive limbs and all those big leaves, needles and flowers.

  Next to that monstrous, strange tree, far away on either side, were other trees, and next to them were more, on and on, beyond vision, into the depths of an unknown world. Between the trees were patches of light and shadow, spreading left and right, climbing high and expanding broadly, and like all the trees, it too was festooned with all manner of different leaves and needles and flowers, and some had round and oblong, multicolored fruit, like Christmas decorations, large as beach balls.

  I was standing on one giant limb projecting from one monstrous tree that was merely one of many in a massive forest that rose higher than the mountains and clouds, and yet the air was thick and easy to breathe. I wasn’t a scientist, but I knew enough to feel that this world violated certain base assumptions of scientific fact. It wasn’t that I felt it lacked science, merely that when created, certain laws of physics had been altered in the creation.

  So large were the trees, and so close to one another, the limbs so even and so wide, it would not be difficult to walk from one tree to another. I even determined that the bark of the trees was jagged, and could be grabbed and climbed like a mountain face. Vines hung from a large number of the limbs like ropes, and at a glance, I saw something monkey-like scramble up one and disappear into a wad of foliage.

  It was overwhelming, and for a moment, so amazing, I felt as if my legs might fold out from under me and I would collapse.

  Gladly as I had come, I now wondered what I was to do here. Then the words Dr. Wright had spoken to me about time here being different than time at home struck me.

  I could be here on this fourth planet from this massive sun, for a long, long time.

  If the ball no longer worked, if it no longer had the power to break me apart and gather me up in all my pieces, and throw me out of this miniature universe, through dimensional barriers, through time and space, back to my world, then this world of trees was my world forever.

  As was often the case with my life, I had made a hasty, impulsive decision and thought it good at the time. I wasn’t so sure now.

  Of course, there was another factor.

  If I had not made the decision, it would have been made for me.

  A moment later, standing there on the tip of the branch, all of this running through my mind, my concerns were abruptly lost to me when I saw the most extraordinary sight. A sight that made me believe what I had seen so far was minor in comparison.

  Between the large trees, some distance away on another smaller limb, I saw a man moving swiftly. He was on foot and was covering considerable ground (or to be more precise, tree) in great hopping strides, like an excited grasshopper. He was a small man, perhaps five feet in height, and he was lean and dark as the bark of the trees around him, his hair was long and red as a vicious wound. Short as he was, he was large chested, long legged, and long armed. His only clothing was a loincloth. His feet were bare.

  He rushed out on the limb, stood on the edge of it, and leaped from it, caught a dangling vine, swung across a vast gap, and landed on the base—again, quite some distance away—of the massive limb on which I stood.

  I could see that he had a bow slung over his shoulder, and a quiver of arrows, and he also had what appeared to be a long spear slung by a cord of some kind over his back. He carried a long blue metal sword in his hand. When he spied me, he sort of crouched, as if I were a problem.

  I didn’t move.

  In the distance I heard a sound akin to bamboo being knocked together by a violent wind, saw behind the man ther
e was a stir between the trunks of the trees, where a thick growth of what in fact did look like bamboo grew along a patch of intertwined limbs. The tall green and brown stalks knocked together like angry children banging oversized chopsticks, then from between the long reeds something burst into view that seemed to be out of the imaginings of a lunatic. For a moment I considered the possibility that I might in fact still be lying on that Alaskan shore, my back against a tree, the plane I had stolen in ruins. Or perhaps I was in the spinning ball, somehow lost in limbo, as Dr. Wright said I might be, and my head was stuffed with confusion and imagination as I moved eternally through . . . nowhere.

  For what parted the reeds and came into view was what I can only describe as something akin to a praying mantis. It was astride a great blue and yellow, multi-legged critter that looked like a humongous aphid or beetle. There really is no word to describe it. The mantis’s mandibles snapped at the air like old-fashioned ice tongs.

  Behind it, came another, and another, until three of the mounted creatures were in view, and their mounts were scrambling over limbs and vines with an almost magical grace.

  It didn’t take a genius to understand that the man was on the run.

  There was no way for me to know if the manlike creature was in fact the worst of villains, and the Insectoids, as I named them at first sight, were just and correct in the matter of their pursuit. But, I suppose certain cultural instincts involving man and bug took over, and of course, the fact that he was one and they were three was a deciding factor as well, although I was soon to discover that there were more than three.

  At that moment, I didn’t consider anything deeply. I just responded, as was my nature, and was soon running toward them. This seems to be a Booker trait. When we should be silent and observe, or run away, we become loud and charge forward, directly into the mouth of trouble.

  I was soon aware of the fact that I had incredible energy. Not just adrenaline, but as I ran I found that I was almost leaping. At first I thought it might be due to a lighter gravity, but soon realized it was another reason altogether. My muscles felt extraordinary. I’m not sure what the journey, the transmitter, or the planet, or this universe, had done to me, but it was as if I had been given an enormous transfusion of muscle, and power.