The Lovers * Dark Is the Sun * Riders of the Purple Wage

by Philip José Farmer

  Deyv decided that if he had come this far up the mountain, he might as well go to the very top. With two hundred feet more altitude, he just might be able to see land. The path curved round and through the thick brush, which was stripped of branches along the edges. The numerous droppings showed that some large herbivores had used the trail, though so far he had seen none.

  When they had ascended a hundred feet as the khratikl flies, Jum stopped. His bristling hairs and soft growl told Deyv that there was danger ahead. Quietly, he urged the dog onward. Though reluctant, Jum obeyed. The slope became abrupt close to the top, forcing them to dig into the mingled soft earth and eroded stones to prevent their slipping backwards. Then the soil ceased and the tip became a hard rock spire. There was nothing alarming on it, only a little monkey-like creature with huge red eyes and a low cooing cry.

  Jum pointed his nose towards the forest to their left. Deyv went ahead of the dog into the foliage. He held the sword in one hand and his tomahawk in the other. Slowly, he brushed past the bushes and the low-growing branches of daunash trees. He made sure that he did not step on any twigs.

  Ahead he could see that the mountain dropped off. There was a cliff there, though he could not see how high it was. Out beyond its edge was something that shimmered, danced, expanded, contracted. It seemed to be about ten feet in diameter at its smallest; twenty, at its largest. From its centre a large log stuck out which had been roughly flattened on top. The other end rested on the lip of the cliff.

  It was a bridge that disappeared at the far end into the shimmering.

  Deyv could hear nothing, but the dog’s sensitive ears had certainly detected something. Whatever the sound was, it had put fear into him. Now, seeing the shimmering, Deyv felt afraid too. And he also felt nauseated. This thing was unnatural.

  He turned his head away to prevent his vomiting. He was so dizzy that he had to sit down. Jum pressed against him, his tail between his legs. He wanted desperately to run away.

  After a while Deyv became less sick. But when he looked with one eye at the shimmering, he felt his nausea return full-strength. Was this the abode of some deity or demon? If so would he or she or it need a log bridge to get to the ground? It did not seem likely. On the other hand, what did he know about such beings? Especially those of strange lands.

  Sloosh was the one to deal with this, if anyone could. Deyv felt that it would be best to stay away from the place. He stood up but, his curiosity overcoming his dread, glanced again at the swelling shrinking brightness. Then he saw footprints in the earth at the near end of the log.

  That scared him even more. Had the dweller come out into the forest?

  He whirled, feeling for a terrible second that something horrible, beyond imagination, was standing behind him. He gasped with relief. Only the forest was behind him.

  But whoever lived in that thing might be returning home at this moment. Deyv had better get away – fast. He retraced his path with an eager Jum behind him. When they reached the trail they walked swiftly down it. Deyv had to use all his self-control to avoid a headlong flight. But the rule was that you never ran in the jungle unless someone was definitely after you or you were after someone.

  When he got back to camp, he was greeted by the Yawtl.

  ‘You look as if you’d seen a ghost.’

  ‘I’ve seen something worse,’ Deyv said. He hurried onto the skeleton of the ship-beast. Sloosh was not there. A little while later, the Archkerri came out of the jungle burdened down by clusters of fruit.

  When the plant-man heard the whole story, he said, ‘I won’t say that you should have at least followed those tracks.’

  ‘You just said it.’

  ‘No, I said I wouldn’t say it. I had to specify what it was I wouldn’t say, otherwise you wouldn’t know what I was referring to. Anyway, let’s all go up there.’

  The slaves refused to go. Feersh’s children dared to go only because they were afraid to be far from their mother. Besides, they did not want to be at the mercy of the slaves. Vana stopped butchering the two large rodents she had shot and put them in the vessel for safe keeping.

  As they approached the shimmering, though they could not see it yet, Jum dropped back. Deyv did not call him; he did not blame the dog. His own heart was hammering, and the hairs on the back of his neck felt as if they were bristling. When the party were within sight of the phenomenon, they felt the same sickness and dread he had experienced. Only Sloosh had the courage to go to the near end of the log, and he looked as little as possible at the thing into which it disappeared.

  ‘The person who made the prints is wearing boots,’ he announced. ‘I’ve never seen any quite like them. The heels are rather high. And the soles have some kind of marks impressed on them. I’d say their wearer weighs about one hundred and thirty pounds. And he limps on his right leg.’

  Deyv felt somewhat better about the possible viciousness of the tenant. He had never heard of a god or demon who wore boots. Then he thought that that was just the problem. He had never heard of one, but this was a long way from his homeland. He started to feel worried again. He felt even worse when Sloosh said they should track the person into the jungle. Deyv consoled himself with the thought that at least Sloosh had not said they should go across the bridge.

  The footprints led them around the base of the spire, where they found a small cave. This held the remains of fires and a bundle of blankets. Far below the mouth, of the cave lay the scattered bones of various animals.

  Other tracks led them here and there to places where the person had buried his excrement or had been stalking animals.

  They returned to the cliff. Sloosh looked at the shimmering as long as he could. When he turned away, he said, ‘I could be wrong, but I’ll venture that that is an entrance to another universe. Feersh, do our descriptions sound like the one The Shemibob gave of her gateway?’

  ‘Something like it,’ the witch said. ‘Only she said that hers wasn’t open yet.’

  ‘Really? How would she know when it would be?’

  ‘She didn’t say.’

  ‘Did she send slaves through it to test it?’

  ‘She tried to, but they refused. They said they’d rather die.’

  Deyv could understand that.

  ‘The Shemibob also told me that she’d sent mechanical devices on wheels into it. They didn’t come back, and they failed to transmit any information.’

  ‘She should have gone in herself,’ Sloosh said.

  Easy for you to say, Deyv thought.

  ‘It shouldn’t be difficult to enter the shimmering,’ the Archkerri said. ‘It’s not just a matter of closing one’s eyes, though. Feersh is blind, yet she too feels nausea and dizziness. Perhaps it also emits subsonics or supersonics. The dog evidently heard it before he saw it. I’d volunteer to be blindfolded and have my ears stopped up, but I am, I must admit, too large and clumsy to crawl across that log. Compared to you bipeds, anyway. Who would like to try it?’

  No one spoke up.

  ‘I thought so, It’s not that you lack courage. Any animal has that. You lack the desire to know, which raises sapients above the animals. Which makes you what, then?’

  ‘You don’t have to shame us,’ Deyv said. ‘We’re ashamed as it is. At least, I am. I thought I was brave. But now I know I’m a coward. Never mind. I will be called that. I won’t, I can’t, face that terrible thing.’

  Sloosh put his war axe in the strap attached to his belt at the junction of his upper and lower torsos. He walked past the group into the forest and after a while returned with a waxy substance he had dug out of an avashkutl tree. He filled his earholes with this and waited for it to dry. Then he got down on the log with his eyes closed and lowered his upper trunk until it was parallel to the log. Grasping the log with his hands, his legs dangling, he began dragging himself over the abyss. The others, unable to look long into the shimmering, glanced now and then to observe his progress.

  After a few feet, Sloosh stopped. ‘I still f
eel fear. But it’s not as strong. However, I am still having to fight it with all my will. I hope I can continue, especially after my scornful words to you. My own words were never part of my diet.’

  A moment later he said, ‘I opened my eyes for a quick look. It’s strange, but the closer I get, the less bright it is. However, it’s just as nauseating.’

  Deyv’s shame became anger.

  ‘If he can do it, then I can!’ he said loudly. ‘I won’t be shown up by a plant-man, a vegetable-thing!’

  A moment later, he wished he had said it only to himself. Now he could not back down.

  The Archkerri was halfway over when he stopped again. He started to buzz a word, but it changed into an exclamation of amazement. A face had popped out of the shimmering.

  It was so unexpected and so strange that Deyv forgot for a moment his horror and looked straight into the shimmering. It was a man’s, if anyone who grew hair on his f ace could be called such. The hair was long and dark, falling in a bushy cascade that would have reached his waist if it had been visible. The hair on the head, also dark, was cut short. On top of it, visible only because the man was leaning over, was a small round dark cap. It fitted closely the back of his head. His skin was as pale as Vana’s but with a sallow colour. The eyes under the thick black brows were large and dark. His nose was big and hooked.

  If Sloosh was startled, he was no more so than the owner of the face. Deyv heard a strangled shout, and then the man disappeared. A moment later, he was back again. He stared at the plant-man and at the group down the path. He said something in a strange tongue. Then he stepped out, seeming to hang onto something beyond the shimmering with one hand. The other hand held a large square dark object which looked at first like a box. But it had strange designs on one side and, when the man gestured with it, it flopped open a little. The covers seemed to contain square leaves of some kind.

  Deyv had never seen such exotic clothes. The man wore a long black blanket which had been cut so it fitted around his shoulders. Cylinders of the same material clothed his arms, and the ends of the cylinders were sewn to the blanket. Under this was a black waistcoat and under that another garment of white. On top of this, fitting around the neck, was a white ring, at the front of which was a narrow black cloth that hung down onto the waistcoat.

  His waist and legs were covered with a single garment to which cloth cylinders were attached so his legs could fit into them. These were stuffed into black leather boots.

  The man howled his gibberish at Sloosh, shaking the black box-thing in his hand. He seemed to be trying to warn the plant-man about something. He did not sound as if he meant to attack Sloosh.

  Suddenly, water trickled out of the shimmering near its bottom. The man looked down at it, looked up at Sloosh, and shouted more unintelligible words. The trickle suddenly became a gush. It poured out over the end of the log. Then it subsided into a trickle again. Shortly thereafter, another gush came, larger than the first. This, too, subsided, only to be succeeded by an even bigger one. This soaked the man’s garments up to his thighs.

  The man shouted once more, pointed down at the other end of the log, then dipped his hand into the shimmering as if to indicate an end. He let go of whatever he was hanging onto, teetered and put his hands together, the box still in one of them. After this, he opened his arms, turned, grabbed at something beyond the shimmering, and was gone.

  Sloosh at once started moving backward. Though this method of travel was more difficult than going forward, he managed to go faster. There was something panicky in the haste of his manner. Deyv, overcoming his horror for just a minute, dashed up to help him. Vana followed him a second afterwards. They grabbed hold of the skin under the tough leaves and helped him lift his buttocks. But he was too heavy.

  ‘Thanks,’ Sloosh buzzed. ‘I’ll make it myself! Just get out of the way!’

  He got up on his hind legs, hanging onto the log with his hands, and then he lifted the front legs up. Crouching, still clutching the log, he backed onto the edge of the cliff. He raised his upper torso then and turned around. Vana and Deyv had run away as if something terrible was bounding after them.

  Just as Vana and Deyv reached the others, they heard screams. They whirled. The near end of the log was just disappearing over the cliff. It struck a projection below with a crash, starting a small avalanche of stones. Later, another crash came faintly up over the cliff.

  26

  The Archkerri trotted elephantinely up to them.

  ‘He was trying to tell me that the gateway was moving,’ he said. ‘It apparently has been moving very slowly all along. That would, I think, be because the aggregation of matter in space, which makes the gateway, is also changing in density and location. The end of the log was about to slip off when I started over it!’

  He buzzed the equivalent of ‘Whew!’

  ‘I don’t know whether that hairy-faced man intended to come back over the log or whether he just wanted to take one last look at this universe. Whatever the reason, it is indeed fortunate that he emerged. Otherwise, I would have dropped quite a distance. I am tough but not tough enough to survive a fall from that altitude.’

  ‘I wonder where that water came from,’ Deyv said.

  ‘I’ve a theory about that, which I’ll tell you about later. It involves a satellite of Earth and its effect upon the ocean. I’m more interested in that man. He was wearing garments which I’ve seen depicted in my prism, men wore them only during a brief period early in their history. That was an unimaginable number of sleep-times ago, unimaginable to you, I mean.

  ‘Why was he wearing them? And the hair on his face? Men haven’t had facial hair for a thousand times a thousand times four hundred sleep-times. Obviously, then, the man is by no means our contemporary. If not, then what is he? It is most puzzling, very engaging.’

  ‘I think he was a demon who assumed the form of an ancient,’ Deyv said.

  Sloosh buzzed scornful contempt.

  ‘That’s more believable than that he could be an ancient who’d lived since man’s early days,’ Deyv said.

  For five sleep-times, the shimmering continued to spill water at regular intervals. Then it ceased. Sloosh made a rope to which he tied a heavy rock. He heaved it through the shimmering, where it remained. Then he tied the other end of the rope to a tree trunk. Two more sleep-times passed, the rope tightened, and the rock fell out of the shimmering.

  ‘It’s moving,’ the plant-man said. ‘Upward at an angle.’

  In the meantime he had gone down to the base of the cliff above which the shimmering hovered. He tasted the water that had fallen from it.

  ‘Salty. The ocean there, if it is an ocean and not a lake, contains salt. So did Earth’s at one time and several times after that. Perhaps that other planet in that other universe is a young one. That doesn’t mean that if we should get through another gateway, we’ll find ourselves in the world to which this gateway is the entrance. There must be many universes, and so there can be different gateways to these.’

  Sloosh finally decided that the hairy-faced stranger had not originated in Earth’s universe. It seemed to him highly unlikely that he had come on purpose to this island to enter the gateway. How could he know there was one here? Not only that, but a thorough search of the shore had failed to yield any craft which he might have used to get to the island.

  Therefore, the man had come into this world from the neighbouring one.

  ‘But he cut down a tree here to make a log-bridge to get to the gateway,’ Deyv said. ‘He didn’t make one in his world to get to ours.’

  ‘No. What must have happened is that he came through from his world when the gateway was much lower in ours than when we found it. The gateway ascended afterwards, and he had to cut a log here to get back.’

  The Archkerri was worried that the gateway which Feersh said was in The Shemibob’s land might no longer be there. It, too, must be changing location. Or it might even have disappeared.

  Meanwhile, Sloos
h also looked the dead sailing ship-beast over very carefully. For a while, he had thought that perhaps they could right it, launch it and sail it back to the mainland. He gave up the idea when he considered the labour it would take to do all this.

  Deyv organized the slaves and Feersh’s family to make boats. In a comparatively short time they had four dug-outs of varying sizes, each fitted with a mast and sail. But these were swept away when an earthquake shook the island, which was followed some time later by a tremendous sea wave. They all had to flee to higher ground to save themselves. The carcass of the sail-beast was also carried far out and, presumably sunk. The upper part of the cliff near the shimmering broke off during the quake and fell to its base. About a fourth of the trees on the island were uprooted.

  Some time during the near-catastrophe, the shimmering pivoted a half-circle. Sloosh was the first to see this. He came huffing and puffing into the camp from the other side of the island.

  ‘If you stand behind the shimmering, you can’t see it,’ he buzzed. ‘You have to go round to the other side for it to be visible.’

  ‘So what does that mean?’ Vana asked.

  ‘What it means is that we may have passed other shimmerings and not seen them because we were on the wrong side. And the same thing may happen in the future. It is most disconcerting. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about it.’

  Deyv and Vana listened politely and then went back to making a second dug-out. They had no intention of going through a gateway unless someone forced them, and then they would have to be thrown through. Also, they had decided that this time the boat would not be a community venture. They would make their, own, and if the others did not want to, so much the worse for them.

  When Deyv and Vana were not working on the boat, hunting, eating or sleeping, they stood on a promontory and watched the sail-beasts. From their observations they were convinced that they could sail against the wind, too.

  Once, Sloosh came up to stand beside them while they watched.