More Than Fire

by Philip José Farmer

“We never claimed to be friends of yours,” Eleth said. “But we would never have gone out after you.”

  “You’re too lazy,” Anana said.

  “He did not tell us why he thought you were there,” Eleth said. “We were not in a position to ask him questions about his methods and results.”

  The Lord had not been able to determine just where the two were on Whazzis. But he did find the only gate existing, the one that Kickaha and Anana eventually came to. The hexagon in the Tripeds’ temple had long been there. Orc had rechanneled it, making it a resonant circuit, and then gone elsewhere.

  “He did say that it would lead to a certain area on the World of Tiers. When the alarm was set off-where, I do not know-Red Orc would know that the circuit had been entered. Of course, he could not be sure that some other Lord had not activated it. But he said that he was approximately ninety-percent sure that you two would do it.”

  “How could he be sure that we could survive all the traps?” Kickaha said.

  “He apparently had great faith that you two would. He did pay you both a compliment. He said that if anybody could get through the circuit, you could.”

  “I had shambarimen’s Horn.”

  “He never mentioned that.”

  “He wouldn’t. If you’d known that, you would’ve been tempted to betray him and risk everything for this great treasure.”

  “You’re right,” Eleth said.

  The Lord, or perhaps a servant of his, had gotten them somehow to the middle of the forest where Kickaha and Anana had found them. The sisters had been unconscious during the entire journey from their world to this.

  “I can assure you that there is no gate in that forest,” Kickaha said. “I know. I’ve seen the diagram of the gates, in Wolff’s palace. You must have been sent through another gate somewhere on this world and then transported by air to the forest.”

  “There couldn’t be gates of which you have no knowledge? Red Orc could not have opened a new gate?”

  Kickaha shrugged.

  The women had awakened among the trees. For fifty-five days, they had had to struggle to survive there. Orc had given them only a few necessities, the stuff they might have taken with them during a very hasty departure.

  “We had almost given up on your getting here,” Eleth said. “It wasn’t certain that you would survive the circuit or that you would find us. But Red Orc, may he suffer the tortures of Inthiman, did not care if we starved to death or were killed by predators! We had decided we’d stay there five days more. If you hadn’t shown up by then, we’d set out for Jadawin’s palace.”

  “A noble ambition,” Anana said. “But you had little chance to make it up the two monoliths.”

  Eleth did not have much to add to her story. She only said that she and her sister did not know why Red Orc wanted them to lead the two to this gate. Ona said that that was true.

  Kickaha and Anana withdrew from the women to talk softly.

  “They probably don’t know why,” he said. “Red Orc wouldn’t tell them. What I’d like to know is how he knew about this gate.”

  “I’m not sure that he did or does know,” she said. “He may be following us now to see where we go. When he sees us open the gate, he’ll pounce.”

  She looked up the mountain slope and then down it and across the great plain.

  “Or, if not he, then someone in his service,” Kickaha said.

  “He or whoever may be a hundred miles away. Across the plain or up there in an aircraft. One missile would wipe us out.”

  “He wouldn’t blow us apart,” Kickaha said. “He wants us alive. We’re in a Hamietish situation. There’re so many ifs and buts to consider, we’re being paralyzed. Let’s do something now, and ride out the consequences.”

  He blew the Horn again. Anana herded the sisters, who protested strongly but vainly, through the shimmering curtain in the rock. She stepped in on their heels. He dropped the Horn into the bag and leaped through the shimmering. On its other side was a hemispherical chamber. The floor was as covered with the opaque brightness as the walls. He could, however, feel bare and level rock under his feet.

  Ona screamed and darted by Kickaha. He thrust out an arm to catch her. She ducked it and leaped back through the curtain. The upper part of her body had disappeared when the shimmering snapped off. Only part of her robe, her buttocks, her long legs, and some blood remained. Eleth shrieked and then began sobbing loudly.

  Without warning, they were in another place, some sort of pit cut out of rock. Crouching, he spun around, his beamer ready, taking in all that was his new environment. There did not seem to be anything that demanded immediate defense or attack. A man whom Kickaha recognized stood at one end of the pit, but his open hands were held high above his head in a sign of peace.

  Kickaha’s gaze passed from him to examine the prison they were in. It was a hole twelve feet square and approximately ten feet deep. Straight above was a bright blue sky. The sun was out of sight, and the shadows of the vast cliff on one side were moving swiftly toward the opening of the hole.

  They were in a pit at the bottom, or up on one side, of an immense abyss. Both sides went up at a thirty-degree angle from the horizontal, though they had many ledges and holes. Here and there on the walls, some puny trees grew, extending at forty-five-degree angles from the steep slopes. Great patches of some green mosslike stuff covered parts of the walls.

  The heat was a vicious magical wand that tapped him and brought forth from his skin a spring of water. He estimated that the temperature was approximately 101°F.

  He did not waste time. He took the Horn from its bag and blew it. The seven notes died, but no gate appeared on the walls of the pit. Red Orc had trapped them, no doubt of that.

  He put the Horn back in the bag and turned to face the man at the end of the pit. He was tall and handsome and looked twenty-five years old, though he must have lived at least a century and a half ago, possibly more.

  His long hair was brown and pulled tightly back into a ponytail. His suit of clothes was of a style in fashion among the Lords a long time ago. But he must have had them made in some Thoan universe. The threads of the jacket pulsed with green, red, white, blue, and yellow as if they were colored tubes. His once-white shirt was ruffed and open at the neck. His trousers were a bottle-green velvety material ending at the calves in a tight band. A scarlet triangular patch covered his groin.

  On the middle finger of his left hand was a heavy ring of silver. It wound around the finger three times. Though Kickaha had glimpsed the ring when he had entered the pit, he now saw it in detail. He was startled. It was in the form of the scaly man. That insectile head on the ring looked exactly like the head of the being in the chamber of the dead.

  “We meet again,” the man said in English, smiling. His pronunciation, though, was not like any English Kickaha had ever heard.

  “I am Eric Clifton. At your service. Like you, I am the prisoner of Red Orc. At least, I assume that that loathsome Lord brought you here against your will.”

  7

  ELETH WAS NOW WAILING LOUDLY. KICKAHA SHOUTED, “STOP that caterwauling! You hated your sister, yet you’re carrying on something awful, as if she was very dear to you!”

  Eleth stared with red eyes at him while she choked back her grief. Sniffling, she said, “But I did love Ona! Just because we disagreed now and then…”

  “Disagreed? Now and then?” He laughed. “You and your sister were bound in a ring of loathing and spite! The only reason you didn’t kill each other was because you’d lose somebody you could hate!”

  “That’s not true,” Ona said. She sobbed once, then said, “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  He turned back to Eric Clifton.

  “I’m Kickaha. You may have heard of me. This is Anana the Bright. She was born at the beginning of the war with the Black Bellers, so that gives you an idea of how long she’s lived. This wailer is Eleth, one of the hardhearted daughters of Urizen,
once known as the gentle-hearted daughters of Ahania, Urizen’s wife. You may have heard of them.”

  He paused, then said, “Anana and I saw you briefly when you were in the floating palace of Urthona, Lord of the Shapeshifting World. Anana and I had a hard time with Urthona and Red Orc when we were passing through Urthona’s World. But we killed him. Red Orc was also a prisoner on the palace, but he escaped.”

  “I wondered what happened to you,” Clifton said.

  “Details later. You can explain to us just how you got into the Thoan universes from Earth and how you happen to be here. And how in hell did you get that ring?”

  While he was talking, he was looking at the sides of the pit. An oily substance filmed them.

  “It’s a long story,” Eric Clifton said. “Shouldn’t we be thinking just now about how to get out of here before Red Orc shows up?”

  “I’m doing that,” Kickaha said. “But that won’t interfere with my hearing your story. Keep to the highlights, though.”

  Clifton said that he was born somewhere around 1780 of very poor parents in London, England. His father had managed to work his way up from a day laborer to owner of a bakery shop. When that failed, he and his wife and six children had been put in debtor’s prison. There his father and three children had died of malnutrition and fever. His mother had gone insane and was sent to Bedlam. Not long after he and his siblings had been released, his fourteen-year-old brother was caught and hanged for having stolen a pair of shoes. His younger sister became a whore at the age of twelve and died at eighteen of syphilis and gonorrhea.

  At this point, Clifton sucked in a deep breath, and tears filmed his eyes.

  “That was a very long time ago, but as you see, I am still affected by the memory of … never mind … anyway…”

  He had been very fortunate in being adopted, though not legally, by a childless couple. That had saved him from being deported to Australia.

  “Though that could have been my great chance to be a free man and, perhaps, a rich man,” Clifton said.

  The man who raised him was Richard Dally. “A bookseller and publisher. He and his wife taught me to read and write. I became acquainted with Mr. William Blake, the poet, engraver, and painter, when my stepfather charged me with delivering a book to him. Mr. Blake-“

  “Does this have anything to do with the main story?” Kickaha said.

  “Very much so. I cannot leave it out. Do you know Blake’s poetry?”

  “I read some of his poems when I was in high school.”

  Blake had been born, if he remembered correctly, in 1757 and had died in 1827. He was an eccentric who was Christian, but his ideas about religion differed much from the views of his time. Or from any other views then and in Kickaha’s time. That much he had learned from his English teacher.

  Clifton said, “Did you know that Blake wrote poetic works in which he made up his own mythology?”

  “No.”

  “He mixed them with Christian elements.”

  “So?”

  “His didactic and symbolical works were apocalyptic poems in which the characters were gods and goddesses he invented, or said he invented. He conceived his own mythology, and the deities in them had names such as Los, Enitharmon, Red Orc, Vala, and Ahania.”

  “What? You must be … no, you’re not kidding!” Kickaha said. He turned to Anana. “Did you know this?”

  Her eyes widened. “Yes, I did, but don’t get angry with me. The subject just didn’t come up, though I’ve met Blake.”

  “You met Blake?”

  Kickaha was so flabbergasted that he spluttered. Yet he knew that she must be telling the truth. This Blake matter had meant little to her, and she would have recalled it if he had mentioned the poet’s name.

  He said, “All right. It’s okay. I was just surprised.” He turned to Clifton. “Tell me how this happened.”

  “Mr. Blake was a mystic visionary and exceedingly eccentric. His eyes were the wildest, the brightest, and the piercingest I’ve ever seen. His face was like an elf’s, one of the dangerous elves. Mr. Dally said that Blake claimed that when he was a child, he saw angels in a tree and the prophet Ezekiel in a field. It was also said that he had seen the face of God at his bedroom window. If you saw him and heard him talk, you’d believe that these stories were true.

  “A few times, Mr. Blake visited Mr. Dally to buy a book on credit. He was very poor, you know. Twice, I overheard him and Mr. Dally in conversation, though Mr. Blake did most of the talking. Mr. Dally was fascinated by Mr. Blake, though Mr. Dally felt uneasy when Mr. Blake was indulging in his wild talk. I did too. He seemed possessed by something strange, something not quite of this world. You’d have to talk to him to know exactly what I mean.

  “Anyway, one afternoon, Mr. Blake, his eyes looking more wild than I’d ever seen them, more spiritual or more visioning, I should say, told Mr. Dally that he had seen the ghost of a flea. I don’t know what he meant by a flea since the ghost, as he described it, had very little of the flea in it. It looked just like the figure on this ring, except that its hand did not hold a cup for drinking blood.”

  Clifton held up the hand with the ring on its finger.

  “The flea was just one of what he called his `visitations.’ That is, the figures of beings and things from the supernatural. Though sometimes he spoke of them as visitors from other worlds.”

  Anana said, “Sometimes he called them emanations from the unknown worlds.”

  “From whom did you hear this?” Kickaha said.

  “I heard it directly from Blake. As you know, after Red Orc made the universe of Earth and the universe of Earth’s twin, he forbade any Lords to visit them. But some did go there, and I was one of them. I’ve told you that I’ve been on Earth One several times, though I didn’t mention all the times and places I’ve been there. When I was living in London, a fascinating though disgusting place, I was disguised as a wealthy French noblewoman. Since I collected some of the best of the primitive art of Earthmen, I went to see Blake. I purchased some engravings and tempera sketches from him but asked him not to tell anyone I’d done so. There didn’t seem to be the slightest chance that Red Orc would hear about it, but I wasn’t taking any risks.”

  “And you didn’t tell me about this?” Kickaha said.

  “You know how it happened that I didn’t. Let’s hear no more of that.”

  “All right,” he said. “But how could Blake have known anything of the Thoan worlds?”

  Clifton opened his mouth to say something, but she spoke first.

  “We Thoan who know about Blake have wondered that, too. Our theory is that Blake was a mystic who somehow tuned in, you might say, to a knowledge of the people inhabiting the other universes. He had a sensitivity, perhaps neural, perhaps from a seventh sense we know nothing about. No other Earth person has ever had it. At least, we haven’t heard of his like, though there is a theory that some Earth mystics and perhaps some insane Earth people…”

  “No theories unless they’re absolutely relevant,” Kickaha said.

  Anana said, “We just don’t know. But somehow Blake received some what should I call them? visions? intimations?-of the artificial pocket universes. Perhaps of the original Thoan universe, or of that universe that some say preceded the Thoan’s. In any event, it couldn’t have been coincidence that he knew the exact names of many Lords and some of the situations and events in which they played their parts.

  “But his, ah, psychic receptions of them were distorted and fragmentary. And he used them as part of his personal mythology and mingled Christian mythology with them. The mixture was Blakean, highly imaginative and shaped by his own beliefs. Blake was a freak, though of a high order.”

  Kickaha said, “Very well. Anyway, what he saw as the flea’s ghost was the scaly man we saw in that curious tomb. No Thoan knew about the scaly man, yet Blake saw him.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Remarkable!”

  “All universes and everything in them are
remarkable,” Anana said. “Some more than others,” Kickaha replied.

  He pointed at the ring. “What about that, Clifton? How’d you get it?” “And how did you get into the Thoan worlds?” she said.

  Clifton shook his head. “That is the strangest thing that’s ever happened to an Earthman.”

  “I doubt it’s any stranger than how I happened to get to the World of Tiers,” Kickaha said.

  “I have some ability at drawing,” Clifton said. “Mr. Blake’s description of the flea’s ghost so intrigued me that I drew a sketch of it. I showed it to a friend, George Pew. Like me, he had been a child of the streets, a cutpurse who also was a catchfart for a jeweler named Robert Scarborough.”

  Kickaha said, “Catchfart?”

  “A footboy,” Anana said. “A footboy was a servant who closely followed his master when he was out on the street.”

  Clifton said, “Pew showed the sketch to his employer, Mr. Scarborough, though he did not mention its source. Mr. Scarborough was so taken up with the sketch that he told a customer, a wealthy Scots nobleman, Lord Riven, about it. Lord Riven was very intrigued and ordered that a ring based on the sketch be made for him. It was done, but it was never delivered because it was stolen.”

  Clifton paused to hold up the ring to look at it. Then he said, “My friend Pew was one of the gang that stole it. He gave it to me to hide because his employer suspected him. I didn’t really want to have anything to do with it, though to be truthful, I did consider plans to obtain permanent possession of it. I was at that time not as honest as the rich people would wish me to be, and you might not be if you had been me.”

  “We’re not judges,” Kickaha said.

  “Pew had told me that only he knew he’d given me the ring for safekeeping. But Pew was killed while fleeing the constables. Thus, I considered the ring to be my property. But I did not plan to sell it until much time had passed. The constabulary had a good description of it; it was dangerous to try to sell it.

  “And then, one fine summer day, that event happened that resulted in my being propelled willy-nilly into these other worlds and resulted in my being confined in this pit. Though just what Red Orc plans for me, for us, I don’t know.”