“That can wait,” Kickaha said. “How many of your brothers are left, by the way?”
“Four of us, unless you really did kill Absalos.”
“I did.”
“Three out of the original nine still live. Ashatelon, Wemathol, and myself. Ashatelon and Wemathol insist on accompanying us to the Caverned World. They want to be in on the kill.”
“The more, the merrier,” Kickaha said.
But he was thinking that he could not trust any of the clones, though Kumas seemed to be different from the others. Red Orc might have done some genetic tampering with the clones. Or perhaps environment counted for more than the Lords thought it did. In any event, he would have to watch them closely, though he doubted they would be a danger to him until Red Orc was out of the way. They were afraid of their father, and they would need a leader who was not the least bit scared of him. Then, like jackals who’d helped the lion during the hunt, they might fall upon Kickaha.
Kumas resumed talking. “At least four of my brothers so far have died when our father sent them on suicidal missions. Kentrith was sent into Khruuz’s world not knowing that a bomb was in his backpack. We were not aware of it until our father told me about it. He laughed all the while. You would think that he would be kind to us since his father was so cruel to him. But that did not happen. Los seems to have twisted him so much that he takes an especial pleasure in tormenting his own sons. Sometimes I think he brought us into being just so that he could, in a certain way, torture himself.”
‘What do you mean?” Kickaha said.
“He hates himself, I am sure of that. By punishing us, he is punishing himself. Does that idea seem too farfetched to you?”
“It could be valid. But I don’t know if it is. Right or wrong, it doesn’t change a thing. You’ve swept this room for recording devices he might’ve planted?”
“Of course. So, that leaves me and Ashatelon and Wemathol. Those two are what my father wanted, men of action. I disappointed him because I was too passive. He didn’t understand it. After all, I was his genetic duplicate. So why didn’t I have his nature? He tried to explain it, but-“
Kickaha cut in. “We can always talk about that later. But if we don’t stop your father dead in his tracks, and I do mean dead, we won’t have a later time.”
“Very well. He is now in the Caverned World, if what he told me is true, and I can never be sure about anything he tells me. He should be there a long time. Reactivating that world won’t be easy. Our logical next step should be to attack him while he’s there. First, if it’s possible, we should seal up all gates there except the one we use for entrance. Don’t you agree?”
Kickaha nodded. But while listening to Kumas, he could not keep from thinking about Anana. What if she could not love him again? It was then that an idea pierced him like an arrow made of light. If it worked, it would turn her against Red Orc.
He said, excitedly, “Kumas! Listen! We’re going to fix your father. In one way, anyway. He seems to anticipate just about everything, but he won’t have foreseen this. At least, I hope not. Here’s what we’re going to do before we leave.”
An hour later, Kumas left the room to be with Anana. Kickaha watched them via a screen. By then, she was out of the pool and in a green semitransparent dress, her long black hair done up in a Psyche knot. She was reading from a small video set while sitting on a bench in the flower garden. She looked up when Kumas stopped before her. He handed her the cube he and Kickaha had prepared. He talked to her for a while, then walked away. Frowning, she held the cube in her hand for a long time.
Kickaha turned the screen off when Kumas walked into the room.
“Do you think she’ll look at it?” he said.
Kumas shrugged his shoulders. But he said, “Would you be able to resist doing it?”
“That depends upon whether or not he made her promise not to listen to any derogatory comments about him. If he did, she probably won’t watch it. But I’m betting the Bluebeard syndrome will overwhelm her. She’ll drop the cube into the slot and turn on the screen. I hope so, anyway.”
“Bluebeard syndrome?”
Kickaha laughed. He said, “Bluebeard was the villain in an old folktale. He married often and killed his wives and hung them up to dry in a locked room. But he had to go off on a trip, so he told his latest wife she could use the key he’d given her. It would open every room in the castle. But she was definitely not to unlock one room. Under no circumstances was she to do that. Then he took off.
“Naturally, her curiosity overcame her wifely duty to obey him. So, after fighting temptation for some time, she surrendered to it. She unlocked the room where the former wives hung from hooks. She was horrified, of course. She told the authorities, and that was the end of Bluebeard.”
“We Thoan have a tale similar to that,” Kumas said.
“If Red Orc just commanded her not to pay any attention to anything bad she hears about him from his sons, she’ll do it anyway. But if she gave her word … I don’t know. In her mind, she’s eighteen years old. The Anana I knew would hardly have waited until he had left her to find out just what it was he didn’t want her to know. But eighteen-year-old Anana must have been a different woman from the older woman.”
“We’ll find out when we come back,” Kumas said. “If we do come back.”
17
“HERE WE ARE,” KICKAHA SAID CHEERILY. “BACK IN THE LAND of the dead.”
He and the three clones, the “sons,” were in the tunnel of Zazel’s World where he had entered it on his first mission. They had not passed directly from Red Orc’s mansion to this place. The first step, a comparatively easy one, had been to find a gate to Manathu Vorcyon’s World. The Great Mother had told Kickaha before he had been sent on his first passage to Khruuz’s World that she was again setting the trap that had whisked him away to her world. He could return to her through that.
On entering the Great Mother’s world, the party was in the forest surrounding the great tree in which she lived. Again, warriors appeared from the trees and led them to the palace-tree. After a series of conferences with her, they were sent on to Khruuz’s universe. They landed in a room cut out of rock and with no windows or doors. A few minutes later, the gate passed them on to a prison cell. This was in Khruuz’s underground fortress. The scaly man had set up a shunt in the gate-passages. This had allowed him to seal all the immediate entrances to his world. But they would be opened when Eric Clifton’s instruments told him that the preliminary gate was occupied. Khruuz had gone to Zazel’s World, and Clifton had been left behind to monitor the gates.
The Englishman had released them from their cell after he was sure that Kickaha was not the captive of Red Orc’s sons. Kickaha had told him immediately of events to the minute he had left for here. Then Clifton had told his news about Khruuz.
“Or at least he started to go there,” Clifton had said. “He intended to use the same route you used when you gated there.”
“How long has he been gone?”
“Ten days.” Clifton had rolled his eyes and looked mournful. “It seems to me that he should have been back five days ago. However, he might have tried to reactivate the world. I didn’t know it was dead until you told me, and he wouldn’t find out it was until he got there.”
“I don’t know what he’s up to,” Kickaha had said. “He should’ve waited for us. Maybe he thinks he can do just as well without us. I don’t know.” “You’re suspicious?” Clifton had said.
“Khruuz has never proved that he’s trustworthy. On the other hand, he’s given me no reason to suspect him. He seems to be very friendly, and he sure needs us. Did need us, anyway. Maybe something’s happened so he doesn’t need us anymore. But what could he have up his sleeve?”
“His hatred for the human species?”
“He hates the Lords. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t. But then, he’s not human. Why should he have anything against us leblabbiys? We never did anything to him.”
; “We do look just like the Lords,” Clifton had said. “Hatred is not by any means always rational.”
“But he’s never shown anything but friendliness toward you and me. He’d have to be a hell of an actor to repress his hatred all this time.”
“That may be significant. I wouldn’t blame him a bit if he frothed at the mouth when he spoke about them. But he seems to have a self-control cast in bronze. Is that in itself suspicious?”
“It could be,” Kickaha had said. “But for the time being, there’s nothing we can do about it. We go ahead without him.”
An hour later, the war party had gated out to Zazel’s World, not knowing what reception it might get at its destination. The tunnel, however, was empty. There was one difference, no small one, from Kickaha’s first trip. The symbols were again marching along on the tunnel wall.
He said, “Somebody’s had some success resurrecting this stone carcass.”
“Let’s hope the somebody is not Red Orc,” Kumas said.
To avoid their confusing Red Orc with the clones in a situation where individual identity was crucial, the clones had changed the color of their hair to purple. They also wore orange headbands and carried light-blue backpacks.
“That those characters on the wall are moving again means that either Khruuz or Red Orc has started the computer up again,” Kickaha said. “Let’s find out who did it.”
This time, he was not going to walk the wearying and time-consuming tunnels. The four men had gated from Red Orc’s palace riding small foldable one-seater airboats weighing thirty pounds. They were more like motorcycles than the conventional airboats. But the oxygen and water tanks and the case of supplies and the “small cannon” beamers fixed to the fuselage nose put a strain on the tiny motor.
Their craft were cruising at thirty miles an hour. Nevertheless, in these close quarters, the boats seemed to be going very swiftly.
Through his goggles, the infrared light made the tunnels even more ghostly than in photonic light.
In less than an hour, he saw the two-tunneled fork ahead. He held up his hand and stopped the boat.
“What in hell!”
The entrance to the left-hand tunnel was blocked with a single stone. The symbols disappeared there. But those on the other wall kept marching into the right-hand tunnel.
He got off the craft to inspect the stone. It was smooth and contained many fluorescent chips. It also merged with the sides of the entrance as if it were stone grown from stone. Or as if a stone-welding instrument had been used.
He took from his backpack a square device with a depth indicator on its back. After pressing the front part against the stone, he said, “There’s thirty feet of solid stone there. Beyond that is empty space, the continuation of the tunnel, I suppose. Someone has set it up to make us go where he wants us to go.”
Kumas’s voice came over the tiny receiver stuck to Kickaha’s jaw. “I hope Khruuz did it.”
“Me, too. But we can’t do anything except follow the route so thoughtfully laid out for us. From now on, you and I, Kumas, will be as close to the ceiling as we can get. Ashatelon and Wemathol, you keep your boats several inches above the floor and about ten feet behind us. That way, we can have maximum firepower and yet not shoot each other. I’ll be slightly ahead of Kumas.”
Although he did not like having the Thoan at his back, he had to be the leader. Otherwise, they would believe he was a coward. He had told Kumas to stay at his side because he was not at all certain that Kumas would know what to do in a fight unless he had orders.
Five minutes later, they decelerated quickly and then stopped. The entrance to the cave was also blocked. But a new hole had been made in the wall by the mouth of the cave. It led at right angles to the tunnel they were in. The symbols had reappeared on the previously blank part of the wall.
“Onward and inward,” Kickaha said. “Keep your eyes peeled and your fingers on the firing button. But make sure you don’t shoot unless you have to.”
“If our father did this,” Kumas said, “we’re done for.”
“Many a Lord has thought that after setting a trap for me,” Kickaha replied. “Yet here I am, as healthy and unscarred as a young colt. There my enemies are, dead as the lion who tackled the elephant.”
“A braggart is a gas balloon,” Wemathol said. “Prick him and he collapses.”
Ashatelon spoke harshly. “This man is not called the Slayer of Lords, the man who won the war against the Bellers, for nothing. So why don’t you keep your sneering to yourself?”
“We’ll discuss this later with knives,” Wemathol said.
“Nothing so heartening as brotherly love,” Kickaha said. “You Thoan make me sick. You think you’re gods, but you haven’t graduated from the nursery. And you wipe your asses just like the lowest of leblabbiy, though you don’t do as good a job of it. From now on, no more squabbling! That’s an order! Keep your minds on our mission! Or I’ll send you back to your nurses to wipe your noses!”
They did not speak again for some time. The boats took them along a tunnel for a mile before another stone blocked their passage. But this was not stone-welded. The separation between it and the tunnel wall was obvious. Nevertheless, the men were stopped.
Either the symbols had ceased moving or they were somehow slipping through the blocking stone.
Again, Kickaha used the depth sounder. Looking at the indicator, he said, “It’s ten feet deep. Then, emptiness.”
“Do we turn back?” Kumas said.
“And wander around here until we run out of food?” Wemathol said.
“Maybe we should use the cannon to melt our way through,” Ashatelon said. “That might use up much of the battery energy. But what else can we do?”
“We’ll blast our way in,” Kickaha said.
They did as he ordered and took turns in beaming the stone. Under the force of the rays, the stone melted swiftly and lava ran out on the floor below. Scraping the semiliquid away from the stone was hot and hard work. Their small shovels made the labor longer, but it had to be done. Sweating, making sure they did not come within range of the narrow beams, they succeeded in throwing the glowing stuff away from the tunnel entrance. When one craft had used up half of the battery, the second boat moved in. But a minute after the second boat had started its melting, the stone began to roll into a recess in the wall.
Kickaha told Ashatelon to turn off his beamer.
“It’s a wheel!” Kumas cried.
“Tell us what we don’t know, stupid,” Wemathol said.
They backed the boats away and then waited. The craft noses were pointed at the opening, and the pilots had their fingers on the FIRE button. “Be ready to shoot,” Kickaha said. “But don’t be trigger-happy.”
“Why would anybody except Red Orc have closed the entrances?” Wemathol said.
“I don’t know. Maybe Khruuz did it, though I don’t know why. Just don’t assume anything.”
The huge wheel had completely moved within the wall recess. Beyond that was a cave.
Kumas had removed his goggles at Kickaha’s order. He was to determine if photonic light was present. He said loudly, “The cave is lit up!”
The others now took their goggles off. The brightness from the cavern was much stronger than could be given by luminiferous plants. There were no shadows, so the illumination seemed to have no source. That meant that a Thoan was providing it. Maybe.
Now they could see that the cave was gigantic. Cool air brushed their bodies. To test it, Kickaha took off his oxygen mask and breathed deeply. Though the air was delightfully fresh, he said, “We’ll keep our masks on for a while.”
He could not see the distant walls and ceiling of the cave, so vast was it. But he could see strange-looking plants, some of them tree-tall, growing from the soil on the floor.
Kumas said, “Red Orc is waiting for us in there.”
“Somebody is,” Kickaha said.
“You go first,” Kumas said.
“Of course
!” Kickaha said loudly. “If I waited for one of you to lead, we’d sit here until we starved!”
“No man calls me a coward!” Ashatelon said.
Before Kickaha could stop him, Ashatelon had shot his boat forward and through the opening. But he did not stop at once. Instead, he accelerated until he seemed to be going at the maximum speed of the craft, fifty miles an hour. The boat rose. For a moment, it was out of sight. Then it appeared and, a moment later, hovered a few inches above the floor and ten feet in from the entrance. Its nose was pointed toward them.
“Now you may know who’s a coward!” Ashatelon bellowed.
His words echoed from the distant walls.
Kickaha’s boat moved into the cave. He looked around. A green lichenous stuff covered most of the wall behind him. Somehow, the plants had been given a new life. Or else they had never been dead in this cave. The walls near them were about two miles apart, and the ceiling was about a hundred feet high. The other end was so far away that it shrank to a point. The symbols paraded on both walls and toward the end of the cave until they were too small to see.
The other two Thoan entered. “No one here,” Kumas said. He sounded very relieved.
“Someone rolled that wheel aside,” Kickaha said. “We’ll go on.”
He started to press his foot down on the acceleration pedal. Then he felt wet drops on his bare skin, and a fine mist was around him.
When he woke up, he was inside a square cage made of bars. Above him were bars through which he could see the cave ceiling. He got slowly to his feet, becoming aware that they were unshod while he did so. His clothes had been removed and were nowhere in sight. The cage floor was solid metal. In a corner was a pile of blankets. In another was a metal box, and the third corner held another box, the top of which had a toilet-seat hole. In the center of the metal floor was a painted orange-lined circle with a diameter of three feet.
And there were other cages, widely separated, arranged in a circle. Six, including his. Inside each one was a man. One of them, however, was not a member of Homo sapiens.
“Khruuz!” he said hoarsely. He gripped the bars facing the inner part of the circle. For a moment, he was weak and dizzy. Despite wearing oxygen masks, he and the Thoan had been gassed. The gas must have been of the kind that did its dirty work through the skin.
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