The Spiral Labyrinth

by Matthew Hughes

  Though the man who had rescued me was equally naked and hairless, he showed no sign of discomfort. Now he raised both hands and brought his palms together, rotating them against each other while speaking some words I could not catch. Then he smoothly pulled his hands apart and, as he did so, I was suddenly no longer cold, but comfortably warm. The weakness that had afflicted my limbs disappeared. I felt refreshed and well rested.

  "Better?" he said.

  "Yes."

  "A spell of sufficiency," he said. He looked me over and added, "It will also help heal where the skin was torn away. The hair will have to grow back on its own."

  "I am grateful," I said. "Now what?"

  "We leave here, before the master of the house returns. I am not ready to face him head on." He turned and led the way across the cavern, our feet sinking into the luminous and resilient stuff that carpeted it, as it covered the walls and the high, high roof of the cave. We were heading for a dark rift in the glowing far wall which, when we reached it, turned out to be a narrow crevice that trended upward.

  We had to fit ourself sideways into the crack and inch our way along a short distance until the fissure widened. Then we climbed, at places finding scalable inclines, at others vertical shafts where I had to scootch upwards with my shoulders braced against one wall and my feet against the other. Finally, we came up into the back of a horizontal cavern whose front opened on a graveled slope a short distance above a level plain. My rescuer stepped out and I followed after him, sliding down the incline to the flat. I looked around at bare rock as far I could see in any direction, then up at the black sky, almost devoid of stars except for one high, bright pinpoint.

  "Bille," I said.

  "Yes."

  I looked at him in the harsh, thin light of the white dwarf. His features were vaguely familiar. I thought I might not have seen him in the flesh before, but I had studied his image. After a moment, my well calibrated mind supplied the referent.

  "You are Orlo Saviene," I said, "the regulator."

  He smiled at me, and somehow that expression was familiar, though I recalled no smiling images of Saviene. "No," he said, "his was just the best preserved body. Our captor had to put me somewhere, and Saviene, along with the other two, had long since faded into a final senesence."

  "Then who are you? Why do I feel that I know you?"

  "We lived together for a while," he said.

  It was then that I recognized him.

  He saw comprehension arrive in my face, then he turned and said, "Now, come. There is a cavern beyond the spread of our fungal friend, but it's a fair distance. He has been growing for a long time."

  And so, across the gritty surface of Bille, I followed my former inner sharer, Osk Rievor.

  Chapter Ten

  "I feel that I owe you an apology," Osk Rievor said, when we were settled in a cave a good, long hike from where he had found me. "I was completely taken in, and by the most elemental of tricks. The fungus showed me what I wanted to see, and I went happily along with him."

  Having had a taste of exactly the same sweet-tasting medicine, I could not judge my alter ego too harshly. When I thought about how I had preened myself in the Archon's pseudopresence, and about how my supposed romp with Elthene Messeram had been merely a dream inculcated in me by a creature not much more sophisticated in its fundamental nature than a patch of moss, I was in no position to point the accusing digit.

  "I forgive you," I said. "You have made up for it entirely by delivering me from a torture chamber."

  "Literally?"

  "As literal as possible, given that it was an illusion. Thought it certainly did not feel like one at the time."

  He flinched. "I have learned a lesson. Though it is my nature to be impulsive, I will strive to develop the qualities you exhibit, and try to analyze before accepting a conclusion."

  "It may not be possible," I said. "I now find myself with no intuition at all, not a shred of insight. I reach for it and it is not on the shelf. Yet rational analysis, applied to the situations I fell into after we parted, proved to be not a reliable tool."

  "We need each other," he said. "We must work together."

  "That much is obvious."

  "We also need our assistant."

  "That is problematic," I said, and described how I had last seen the grinnet making a scampering escape into the darkness of ruined Bambles. "Where it is or how it is faring I do not know."

  Osk Rievor swore a bitter oath. "You should have kept better track of it," he said.

  "At the time, I was being threatened by a dragon. Have you ever been at close quarters with a dragon? I guarantee that you would remember the experience."

  Our new-born amity had not lasted long. My other self gave me a look that implied a certain carelessness in my grinnet-keeping style. I found it necessary to remind him by whose agency I had come to be in the predicament in the first place. "You left me stranded on a rural road," I said. "I could go south into a wilderness whose skies were haunted by ravenous flying reptiles, or north into unknown circumstances that turned out to include inquisitive thaumaturges, one of whom wielded a white-hot poker."

  He made a gesture that was both dismissive and faintly apologetic. "It just makes things difficult," he said. "I find, now that I am translated into this age of sympathetic association, that the more powerful spells and incantations I had memorized have simply bulled their way out of my awareness."

  I told him I understood and related the experience of casting Orrian's Hasty Dwindling at Ovarth's retainers. He was fascinated and had me describe in detail the effects on the victims, as well as the peculiar sensations that afflicted me as I spoke the syllables.

  "And you cannot remember a single sound of it?"

  "No. It was as if it was erased from my awareness even as it passed through my mind and mouth. And yet the grinnet had it, and dozens more." I remembered what our assistant had said and added, "It has something to do with having, or not having, a will."

  "Yes," he said, "and with having a will in an age when will is the prime consideration. When we were in the former age, I could hold a dozen or more spells in my mind."

  "Because they had less power," I said. I saw that he intended to continue the discussion of what was, to me, a side issue and raised a hand to prevent him from going on. "The issues before us are, first, how to deal with the symbiote; second, how to escape this barren rock, and, third, how to get back to our own time."

  "Agreed," he said.

  "Then you had better start by telling me what you have learned about our captor."

  He did so. Most of it was, of course, inference and intuitive grasp, that being his way of apprehending the universe. But I applied analysis and rational sorting of the facts as we went along, and between the two of us we formed a picture that made sense.

  When Ewern Chaz had stumbled upon it -- it must have been many centuries ago now -- the symbiotic confederation of lichen and insects had been a simple entity, evolved to deal with the wants and cravings of other simple creatures. It could not have been hard, even for a fungoid intelligence, to find out what satisfied a mind no more developed than a sow bug's and to deliver an illusion of it. But when it had to meet Chaz's needs, it had to adapt to the mingled currents and eddies of a much more sophisticated cerebrum. Yet the fungus had risen to the challenge.

  Then came Orlo Saviene, followed by Franj Morven and, for a time at least, Chup Choweri. None of these would have been markedly more intellectually complex than its first human catch, but each probably would have represented a new field that had to be tilled in its own manner. Then came the integrator from the Gallivant, with its crush on Ewern Chaz. The decanted device would not have been biologically susceptible to the symbiote's seductions, but its overpowering desire to be with Ewern Chaz would have kept it as happily settled in the cave as the three men and the original trove of insects.

  We decided that telepathy was its means of interaction with its symbiotic partners. I said, "It would
seem that the flow was in two directions. The fungus became aware of complexity, then it developed a taste for what it could pluck from the minds of its captives. It began to hunger for knowledge."

  "Which the spaceship's integrator supplied in vast quantities, through Chaz Ewern."

  I thought about it. Some of what the integrator knew would have been of direct application to the fungus's needs: chemistry, mineralogy, and geology, including a great store of specialized knowledge about caves. "Instead of simply growing vegetatively, it could plan and carry out expansion operations -- concentrating acids derived from unsentient plants and using them to dissolve rock and derive nutrients, sending its roots burrowing much farther down into the rock than required by its immediate needs so that it could use temperature differentials between the surface and deeper levels to generate electrical energy."

  "It appears to have done so quite happily for a long time," Osk Rievor confirmed. "It grew to cover the walls, floors and ceilings of a vast network of underground caverns and galleries, with millions of small creatures happily toiling for it in closely organized battalions. It was doubtless as content as any semi-sapient organism could be."

  "And then," I said, "something happened."

  In stories, "things happened" in order that a plot might be kept boiling and bubbling along. In life, when "things happened" they all too often meant that happiness came to a sudden stop, to be followed by periods of prolonged misery. So it had been for the contented fungus of Bille when the Great Wheel had turned and pitched it into a new age.

  Detached from any extenuating devices, such as its original spaceship, the Gallivant's integrator had suffered a catastrophic decline, as had such devices all up and down The Spray. The hard scientific knowledge that had allowed the symbiote to grow beyond any dream previously known to fungal lifeforms became ephemeral and difficult to retain. That which had been reliable was reliable no longer.

  On the other hand, that which the Wheel took away it compensated for, after a fashion. The symbiotic entity now entered an age when will was paramount, and it turned out that a massive organism that telepathically united a huge fungus, the remnants of three deeply narcissistic human beings, an addled spaceship's integrator and hordes upon hordes of single-minded arthropods was possessed of a will that would have won prizes in any competition it might have deigned to enter.

  I remembered how Ovarth's whirlwind had been flicked away and Chay-Chevre's dragon deterred. At the time I had thought it was by magic, now I saw that it had been an application of sheer force of will.

  "Still," I said, "it must have been deeply shocked by the transition. I saw what the coming of the new age did to the fine old city of Lakh."

  "I'm sure it did not know what to do," Osk Rievor said. "It would have been confused, its memories unreliable. But it had will, and it exercised that will. It said to the newly arranged universe: I want."

  "And what did it want?"

  "Us."

  Centuries had gone by, but the fungus remembered our visit as a turning point in its development. We had been a formative experience, though with the change, its recollection of who and what we were had become somewhat murky. The name that filtered up from its damaged memory was distorted. And so, stranded on its lonely dot of a world, far at the end of anywhere, it began to psychically bellow "Apthorn!" into the ether.

  The bellowing would have got it nowhere in an age of rationalism. But under the new dispensation, so powerful was the shouter's will that it was able to bend the interplanar membranes that separated our continuum from the other eight of the Nine Planes. "It is possible," Osk Rievor said, "that its will was even strong enough to create a tenth plane, at least temporarily -- a new layer of metareality that let it reach out into our own cosmos through space and time."

  "The spiral labyrinth," I said.

  "Indeed. It was able to project a full version of it to the forest at Hember, where the major ley lines met. At the Arlem estate, the lines were less potent and it appeared as only a wispy mandala."

  "And the odd little fellow?"

  "An avatar of the fungus itself. Probably based on how we appear to it. I don't think it 'sees' in any real sense of the word."

  I went back over the sequence of events. The fungus knew about us from its contact with the Gallivant's integrator, and from its brief connection to our own assistant. I had no idea what a fungus's memory might be like, but obviously it had retained some vestiges of recollection about Arlem. It had reached out to us there through interplanar means, connecting with Osk Rievor. His mind had been in the forefront when we approached the door at Arlem, and he had immediately fallen for the symbiote's blandishments. It had seen that Hember, with its convergence of major ley lines, would be a more accommodating environment in which to wield its powers. It had telepathically gulled my other self into taking us there, where it could manifest its interplanar gateway in a more potent form. My other self had stepped boldly into the labyrinth and been transported here to Bille. The grinnet and I had been dropped as surplus baggage.

  "Of course, when I got here," Osk Rievor said, "it soon realized that I did not have what it wanted."

  "Which was?"

  "Which was, and more to the point, still is, command of magic. It has the will, but not the skill, you see."

  I did see. I also suspected that something remained unsaid. How did it go from half-remembering my name to knowing it exactly?

  "What did it do when it discovered that you were not the trove of spells and practical advice that it craved?" I said.

  My other self looked away. "It might have made some idle threats."

  "And might those idle threats have involved torture chambers cribbed from some old tale of derring-do?"

  "Nothing definite was specified."

  "Still," I said, "you managed to avoid finding out for certain."

  "Well, yes."

  "By telling our willful friend that what he really needed was Henghis Hapthorn."

  He looked away again. "That might have been the gist of it." When he looked back at me, I was sure that he saw a man slipping into justified rage. He quickly added, "I had a plan."

  "Did you?" I said. "When I use the word 'plan,' I refer to a carefully worked out series of actions, each flowing from the one before and leading to the next, in a chain of cause and effect that leads to a predictable result."

  "Very sensible," he said.

  "But what does 'plan' mean when you use it?"

  "Roughly the same."

  "How roughly?"

  He lifted his shoulders and let them fall.

  "What you mean," I said, "is that you mistook a hoped-for outcome for a certainty. Is that not right?"

  His index finger stirred patterns in the dust of the cave floor. "Usually, that is how things go."

  I went to the flaw in his argument. "Usually, you are not intuiting an outcome in the face of a contrary will so powerful that it is capable of distorting the very fabric of the universe and giving a mature demon the megrims."

  "Well, no, not usually," he said, but then he defended himself. "You see, I thought you'd bring the grinnet. And then, while you were engaged with our host, I would escape with our assistant and, using its stores of magical knowledge, put things to rights."

  He had skipped over a crucial part of the scheme. "Why would it have bothered with me when it had the grinnet?" I said.

  More patterns appeared beneath his finger. "It may have gained the impression that you were the one who possessed the real knowledge. Its memories of our original encounter were sketchy."

  "You threw me," I said, "to the attentions of a single-minded torturer, just to buy time."

  "It never occurred to me that you would have lost the grinnet. The two of you were inseparable."

  "And now we are stranded on a barren pinpoint, a place that few spaceships ever visited, even when there were such things as spaceships. A place ruled by a willful fungus who lacks the imagination to do anything but torture us incessantly to
get from us what we cannot give it."

  "Still," he said, "we are alive. We are free. And I have a sense that things will work out."

  "Unless our cave-coating nemesis wills otherwise. Which reminds me: how did you distract it so that you could rescue me?"

  "I will be honest," he said. "I did not distract him. Something else did. The labyrinth appeared, hovering above us in the cavern where I was. The fungus seemed surprised, but he formed his avatar, which rose to enter the spiral. Then both disappeared."

  "Perhaps he found a way to locate our assistant," I said. "In which case, all is lost."

  "The grinnet is, at heart, an integrator. It should be able to resist temptation."

  "Not if it comes in the form of fruit," I said. "In any case, we may soon know." I pointed up at the tiny, white sun visible through the cave's entrance. A swirling spiral mosaic of red and black was wavering into existence, obscuring the dwarf star. Moments later, the lumpish, pallid form of the fungus's avatar emerged from the center of the labyrinth. Here at home, it was gigantic. It descended to the ground near where the gritty plain rose into slopes of bare rock. When it reached the vicinity of the fissure we had escaped through, it thinned, became semi-transparent, then disappeared. I saw no sign of a grinnet.

  "It will now recover its awareness of conditions in the cavern and find that I am gone," I said.

  "It may come seeking us," my other self said.

  I began to consider logistics. "Can it maintain its avatar form for long? If so, it could cross the distance to us in a few score steps and pull us out of here like a pair of sleekits from their den."

  "It only takes that form when using the labyrinth to project its will across interplanar membranes."

  "Are you sure of that?"

  "I think it is so."

  I looked up at the spiral labyrinth, which continued to rotate in the sky. "We may soon find out," I said. "The labyrinth is not disappearing."

  "Perhaps the symbiote means to go dimension-traveling again."