Then they were in a cave, bright sunlight coining from its opening. He lifted the Horn to his lips. Before he could below it, they were on a tiny rock elevated a few feet above a sea. He gasped, cutting off his blowing of the Horn, and Anana cried out. A gigantic wave was charging toward them. Within seconds, it would carry them off the rock.
Just before the base of the wave reached the rock, they were in one of the small rooms so numerous in this circuit. Again, Kickaha tried to blow the Horn and activate a gate that would shuttle them off from this circuit. But he did not have time. Nor did he have during the next twelve stations they whizzed through.
Like it or not-and they did not-they were caught in the dizzying circle. Then, when they were again in the room at the top of the tower set in the deserted city, he had just enough time to complete the seven notes. And they were transmitted to the most amazing and unexpected place they had ever encountered.
“I think we’ve broken the circuit!” Kickaha said. “Have you ever heard of a place like this?”
Anana shook her head. She seemed to be awed. After living so many thousands of years, she was not easily impressed.
3
THE SCALY MAN WAS THE CENTERPIECE OF THE ENORMOUS room.
Whether he was a corpse or in suspended animation, he had perhaps been born one or two hundred thousand years ago. The two intruders in this colorful and vibrant tomb had no way of testing its antiquity. They just felt that the tomb had been built when their own exceedingly remote ancestors had not been born yet. It seemed to sweat eons.
“Have you ever heard of this person?” Kickaha whispered. Then, realizing that he had no need to whisper, he spoke loudly.
“I get this feeling that we’re the first to be here since that … creature was laid to rest here.”
“I’m not so sure that he is permanently resting. And no, I’ve never heard of this place. Or of him. Not of his name, anyway, whatever his name is. But…”
Anana paused, then said, “My people had stories about a sapient but nonhuman species who preceded us Thoan. They were said to have created us. Whether the tales were originally part of the prehistoric Thoan cultures or were early fiction, we don’t know. But most Thoan insist that we originated naturally, that we were not made by anybody. My ancestors did make the leblabbiys, your kind. These, with a multitude of lifeforms, were made in my ancestors’ biofactories to populate their artificial pocket universes. But that we Thoan could be artificial beings, never!
“However, the stories did describe the Thokina as somewhat like that creature there. But the Thokina were a different species from us. We were supposed to have invaded their universe and killed all but one. I don’t know. There were conflicting legends about them.”
In the middle of the room was a short, massive pillar on top of which was a large, transparent, and brightly lit cube. The being, its seemingly dead eyes open, was suspended inside the cube.
“One of the early tales was that the one Thokina who survived the war hid somewhere. He placed himself in an impenetrable tomb. Then he went into a sleep from which he will not be awakened until the worlds are in danger of destruction.”
“Why should he care if the worlds are destroyed?”
“I’m just telling you the story as it was handed down for countless generations, she said. “But how do you explain him? Or this place? Part of the legend was that he was keeping an eye on the world. Look at all those images on the wall. They show many universes. Some of them look contemporary.”
“How could he keep an eye on the worlds? He’s unconscious or, for all we know, dead.”
Anana spread her hands out. “How would I know?”
Kickaha did not reply. He was looking around the dome-shaped chamber, which was larger than a zeppelin hangar. In the sourceless light filling the room, the intensely blue ceiling dazzled him. Despite this, he could, by squinting his eyes, see that thousands of shifting forms were spaced along the curve of the ceiling. Most of them seemed to be letters of a strange alphabet or mathematical formulae. Sometimes, he glimpsed art forms that seemed to have been originated by an insane brain. But that was because of his own cultural mindset.
Horizontal bands of swiftly varying colors and hues sped around the wall. Set among the bands were seemingly three-dimensional scenes, thousands of them. These flashed on and were replaced by others. Kickaha had walked around the wall and looked at the scenes that were at eye level. Some were of landscapes and peoples of various worlds he had visited. One was a bird’s-eye view of Manhattan. But at its lower end was a twin-towered skyscraper higher than the Empire State Building.
The images came and went so swiftly. His eyes ached after watching them for a few minutes. He closed them for a moment. When he opened them, he turned to look at the main attraction. The base of the tomb was round, and vertical bands of colors and hues raced up and down it. The creature inside the cube was naked and obviously male. Its testicles were enclosed in a globular sac of blue cartilage with air holes on its surface. Its penis was a thick cylinder with no glans or foreskin and bore thin, tightly coiled tentacles on each side.
Anana, first seeing these, had grunted and then said, “I wonder … ?”
“What?” Kickaha had said.
“Its mate must have had an extra dimension of sex, of sexual pleasure, I mean. True, those tentacles could have just been used for purely reproductive purposes. But they may have titillated the female in some way I can’t imagine.”
“You’ll never know,” he had said.
“Maybe I won’t. However, the unexpected happens as often as the expected. It certainly does when I’m in your neighborhood.”
The creature was about seven feet long. Its body was very similar in structure to a man’s, and the four-toed feet and five-fingered hands were humanoid enough. Its massive muscles were gorilloid. The skin was reptilian; the scales were green, red, black, blue, orange, purple, lemon-yellow, and pink.
The spine, ridged like a dinosaur’s, curved at its top so that the very thick neck bent forward.
Seven greenish plates that could be of bone or cartilage covered the face. The eyes were dark green and arranged for stereoscopic vision, though much more widely apart than on a man’s face.
A bony plate just below the jaw made it seem that the creature was chinless. Its lipless, slightly opened mouth was a lizard’s. From it hung a tongue’ looking like a pink worm.
The nose and the rest of the face above it formed a shallow curve. Halfway up the head, short, flat-lying, and reddish fronds began and proceeded down around the back of the head to its columnar neck. If there were bony plates under the mat, they did not show.
The tiny ears were manlike but set very far back on the head.
“You don’t suppose,” Anana said, “that that thing could actually be the last of the Thokina?”
She answered herself. “Of course not! It’s just coincidence!”
They stood silently for a while and stared around. Then Kickaha said, “There’s no way we can find answers to our questions here. Not unless we stay a long while, and we don’t have the food, water, and instruments needed to do that. Yet, we should spend some time here.”
“We have to get out of here,” she said, “and we don’t know we can do that. I suggest we find out how to do that now!”
“There’s no danger. Not any we know about, anyway. I think we should stay here a while and see what we can find out. It might come in useful someday.”
They had enough food and water to last four days if they were conserved. There was no place to get rid of their body wastes, but a corner in this immense chamber could serve. It seemed to Kickaha that doing that desecrated the place, but that was an irrational feeling.
“What if something happens here that makes it imperative we leave at once?” she said.
Kickaha thought for a moment, then said, “Okay. You’re right.”
He walked to the place near the wall where they had stepped through the gate, and he blew the H
orn of Shambarimen. As it often did, the music evoked in him images of marvelous beasts, wondrous plants, and exotic people. It seldom failed to send shivers along the nerves of those who heard it and to summon up from the depths of their minds things and beings never imagined before.
The last note seemed to hover like a mayfly determined to have several more seconds of its short life. A shimmering area about five feet wide and ten feet high opened before Kickaha. The flashing wall of the chamber behind it disappeared. He was looking at a stone floor and stone walls. He had seen them before and not long ago. From the room they formed, he and Anana had gated through to this gigantic tomb. It was an escape avenue, but he preferred to take another gate, if it was available. This one would lock them into the circuit again.
The room faded away after five seconds. The walls of the chamber and the on-off bursts of light were views of parts of other universes. “Find another gate if you can,” Anana said.
“Of course,” he said, and he began walking slowly along the wall and blowing the Horn over and over again. Not until he had gotten halfway around the chamber did a gate open. He saw a large boulder twenty feet ahead of him. Around and beyond it was a flat desert and blue sky.
He did not know in what universe this landscape was located. For all he knew, it could be somewhere on the planet on which he now stood. Gates could also transport you only a few feet or halfway around the planet.
The rest of the walk along the wall found no more gates. He then began a circuit twenty feet out from the wall. But Anana, a few feet from him, called.
“Come here! I just saw something very interesting!”
He strode to her side. She was looking up at a spot where images seemingly shot out of the wall and then shot back into it. “It showed Red Orc!” she said. “Red Orc!”
“Recognize the background?”
“It could have been on any one of a thousand worlds. A body of water, could have been a large lake or a sea, was behind him. It looked as if he were standing on the edge of a cliff.”
“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 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 upward.
“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 Earth people 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 reenter 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 twofeet-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 onward. They leaped like two jackrabbits startled by a coyote, and they ran. They had known instantly where they were.
They where in the universe of the planet called Alofmethbin. In English, the World off 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-Babylonshaped 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.”
More Than Fire Page 3
