The World of Tiers, Volume 1

by Philip José Farmer

  He did not hear the footsteps of the approaching Beller. The fellow had undoubtedly had his beamer on Kickaha, ready to shoot if he thought Kickaha was pretending to be dead or unconscious. Kickaha would not have had a chance.

  But luck was with him again. This time it was a bull buffalo. It rose behind the Beller and, bellowing, tried to charge him. The Beller whirled. Kickaha rolled over, using the dead HalfHorse as a shield, and looked over it. The buffalo was badly hurt and fell on its side again before it had taken three steps. The Beller did not even use his beamer. But his back was momentarily turned to Kickaha, and the attention of those in the craft seemed to be on the other Beller on the ground. He was walking toward Anana’s pile of buffalo.

  At the bellow, one of the men in the craft turned. He swung the projector on its pivot. The Beller on the ground waved reassuringly at him and pointed to the carcass. The fellow in the craft resumed watching the other Beller. Kickaha rose and rushed the man, knife in hand. The Beller turned slowly, completely taken by surprise. He swung his beamer up, and Kickaha hurled the knife even if it was unfamiliar and probably unsuited for such work.

  He had spent literally thousands of hours in practicing knife-throwing. He had cast knives of many kinds at many distances from many angles, even while standing on his head. He had forced himself to engage in severe discipline; he had thrown knives until he began to think he was breathing knives and the sight of one made him lose his appetite.

  The unending hours the sweat, frustration, and discipline paid off. The knife went into the Beller’s throat, and the Beller fell over backward. The beamer lay on the ground.

  Kickaha threw himself at the weapon, picked it up, saw that, though not of a familiar make, it was operated like the others. A little catch on the side of the butt had to be depressed to activate the weapon. The trigger could then be pulled; this was a slightly protruding plate on the inner side of the butt.

  The Beller in the rear of the craft was swinging the big projector around toward Kickaha. Its ray sprang out whitely and dug a smoking swath in the ground; it struck a mound of buffalo, which burst into flames. The projector was not yet on fullpower.

  Kickaha did not have to shoot the Beller. A ray struck the Beller from the side, and he slumped over. Then the ray rose and fell, and the craft was cut in half. The others in the cockpit had already been struck down.

  Kickaha rose cautiously and shouted, “Anana! It’s me! Kickaha! Don’t shoot!”

  Presently Anana’s white face came around the hillock of shaggy, horned carcasses. She smiled at him and shouted back, “It’s all right! I got all of them!”

  He could see the outflung hand of the Beller who had been approaching her. Kickaha walked toward her, but he felt apprehensive.

  Now that she had a beamer and a craft—part of a craft, anyway—would she need him?

  Before he had taken four more steps, he knew that she still needed him. He increased his pace and smiled. She did not know this world as he did, and the forces against her were extremely powerful. She wasn’t going to turn on such a valuable ally.

  Anana said, “How in Shambarimen’s name did you manage to live through all that? I would have sworn that you had been cut off by the herd and that the Half-Horses would get you.”

  “The Half-Horses were even more confident,” he said, and he grinned. He told her what had happened. She was silent for a moment, then she asked, “Are you sure you’re not a Lord?”

  “No, I’m human and a mere Hoosier, though not so mere at that, come to think of it.”

  “You’re shaking.”

  “I’m naturally highstrung,” he said, still grinning. “You look like you’re related to an aspen leaf, yourself.”

  She glanced at the beamer, quivering in her hand, and smiled grimly. “We’ve both been through a lot.”

  “There’s nothing to apologize for, for chrissakes,” he said. “Okay, let’s see what we have here.”

  The Tishquetmoac men were small figures in the distance. They had begun running when Anana had started beaming, and they evidently did not plan on returning. Kickaha was glad. He had no plans for them and did not want to be appealed to for help.

  Anana said, “I played dead, and I threw a spear at him and killed him. The Bellers in the craft were so surprised that they froze. I picked up the beamer and killed them.”

  It was a nice, clean, simple story. Kickaha did not believe it. She had not been helped by a disturbunce, as he had, and he could not see how she could have gotten up and thrown a spear before the beamer went into action. The Beller was pierced in the hollow of the throat with the spear, but there was little blood from the wound, and there was no wound that could have been made by a beamer. Kickaha was certain that a close investigation would find a small hole bored through the corpse somewhere. Probably through the armor too, because the Beller wore chain mail shirt and skirt and a conical helmet.

  It wouldn’t do to poke around the body and let her know his suspicions, though. He followed her to the craft, the two sections of which still hung two feet from the ground. A dead Beller sprawled in each part, and in the front section, huddled in a charred mass, was a Tishquetmoac priest, the Bellers’ interpreter. Kickaha pulled the bodies out and examined the aircraft. There were four rows of two seats each with a narrow aisle running down between them. The front row was where the pilot and copilot or navigator sat. There were many instruments and indicators of various sorts on a panel. These were marked with hieroglyphs which Anana told him were from the Lords’ classic writing and used rarely.

  “This craft is from my palace,” she said. “I had four. I suppose the Bellers dismantled all four and brought them through.”

  She told him that the two parts did not fall because the keelplate had been charged with gravitons in stasis when the craft halted. The operating equipment was in the front section, which could still be flown as if it were a whole craft. The rear part would continue to hover above the ground for some time. Then, as the graviton field decayed, it would slowly sink.

  “It’d be a shame to waste the rear projector or let it fall into the hands of somebody else,” Kickaha said. “And we’ve only got two good handbeamers; the others were ruined when you rayed the ship. Let’s take it with us.”

  “And where are we going?” she said.

  “To Podarge, the harpy-queen of the green eagles,” he said. “She’s the only useful ally I can think of at this moment. If I can stop her from trying to kill us long enough to talk to us, she may agree to help.”

  He climbed into the rear section and took some tools out of the storage compartment. He began to disconnect the big projector from the pivot, but suddenly stopped. He grinned and said to Anana, “I can’t wait to see the expressions on your face and Podarge’s! You will be looking at yourselves!”

  She did not answer. She was using the beamer and the knife to cut off parts of a buffalo calf. Later, they would fly the meat to a spring and cook it. Both were so hungry they felt as if their bellies were ravening animals eating up their own bodies. They had to feed them swiftly or lose their flesh to their flesh.

  Though they were so tired they had trouble moving their arms and legs, Kickaha insisted that they fly on after eating. He wanted to get to the nearest mountain range. There they could hide the craft in a cave or ledge and sleep. It was too dangerous to remain on the prairie. If the Bellers had other craft around, they might detect them and investigate. Or try to communicate with them.

  Anana agreed that he was right, and she fell asleep. Kickaha had learned from her how to operate the craft, so he took it toward the mountains as swiftly as it would go. The wind did not strike him directly, since the cowling protected him, but it did curve in through the open rear part, and it howled and beat at him—at least it kept him awake.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  They got to the mountains just as the sun went around the monolith, and he flew around for fifteen minutes before finding exactly what he wanted. This was a shallow cave with an
opening about twenty feet high; it was located two thousand feet up on the face of a sheer cliff. Kickaha backed the craft into the cave, turned off the controls, lay down on the floor of the aisle, and passed out.

  Even in his exhaustion and in the safety of the cave, he did not sleep deeply; he swam just below the surface of unconsciousness. He dreamed much and awoke with a start at least a dozen times. Nevertheless, he slept better than he had thought, because the sun was quartering the sky before he fully awoke.

  He breakfasted on buffalo steak and round biscuits he had found in a compartment under one of the seats. Since this was the only food in the craft, he deduced that the fliers had been operating out of a camp not too far away from the scene of the stampede. Or else the craft had been out for a long time and rations were short. Or there might be another explanation.

  If there was one thing certain in both worlds, it was uncertainty.

  By the time Anana awoke, she found that her companion had eaten, exercised vigorously to remove the stiffness from his muscles, and had dabbed water on his face and hands. He had bathed in the spring the evening before and so was presentable enough. He did not worry about shav

  ing, since he had applied a chemical which re

  tarded beard growth for months, just before he left the Hrowakas’ village. It was a gift from Wolff. It could be neutralized at any time by another chemical if he wished to have a beard, but this chemical was not available; it was in a cabin in the Hrowakas’ village.

  Anana had the ability to wake up looking as if she were getting ready to go to a party. She did complain, however, about a bad taste in her mouth. She also voiced dislike for the lack of privacy in excretion.

  Kickaha shrugged and said that a ten thousand year old woman ought to be above such human inhibitions. She did not respond angrily, but merely said, “Do we take off now? Or could we rest today?”

  He was surprised that she seemed to give him authority. It was not what he would have expected from a Lord. But apparently she had a certain resiliency and flexibility, a realistic attitude. She recognized that this was his world and that he knew it far better than she did. Also, it must be evident that he had a tremendous capacity for survival. Her true feelings about him were not apparent. She was probably going along with him for her own sake and would drop him if he became a liability rather than an asset—which was an attitude he approved, in some respects. At least, they were operating together smoothly enough. Not too smoothly, since she had made it obvious that she would never think of letting him make love to her.

  “I’m all for resting,” he said. “But I think we’ll be better off if we rest among the Hrowakas. We can hide this boat in a cave near their village. And while we’re living there, we can talk to my people. I’m planning on using them against the Bellers, if they’re willing. And they will be. They love a fight.”

  Shortly afterward, Anana noticed a light flashing on the instrument panel. She said, “Another craft is trying to call this one or perhaps the headquarters in Jadawin’s palace. They must be alarmed because it hasn’t reported in.”

  “I’d bluff by talking to them, but I’m not fluent enough in Lordspeech to fool them,” Kickaha said. “And you could try, but I don’t think they’d accept a woman’s voice either. Let it flash. But one thing does bother me: do the Bellers have any means for tracking down this craft?”

  “Only if we transmit a message for several minutes,” she said. “Or if the craft is in a line-of-sight position. These are my machines and I had them equipped with some protection devices. But not many.”

  “Yes, but they have the devices of four palaces to draw on,” he said. “Wolff’s, yours, Nimstowl’s, and Judubra’s. They may have removed devices from these to equip their crafts.”

  She pointed out that, if they had, they had not equipped this one. She yawned and got ready to take a catnap. Kickaha shouted that she had slept over twelve hours already, and she should get up off her beautiful rump. If they were to survive, they had better get in gear, stir their stumps, and so on with a number of earthier and more personal cliches.

  She admitted he was right. This surprised him but did not put him off guard. She got into the pilot’s seat, put on the stasis harness, and said that she was ready.

  The machine slid parallel to the face of the mountain and then headed for the edge of the level, keeping a few feet above the surface of the jagged terrain. It took two hours to get out of the range, by which time they were on the lip of the monolith on which rested the Amerind level. The stone cliff dropped vertically—more or less—for over a hundred thousand feet. At its base was Okeanos, which was not an ocean but a sea shaped like a ring, girdling the monolith and never more than three hundred miles wide.

  On the other side of Okeanos, entirely visible from this height, was the strip of land which ran around the bottom of this planet. The strip was actually fifty miles across, but from the edge of the monolith, it. looked thread-thin. On its comparatively smooth, well-treed surface lived human beings and half-human creatures and fabulous beasts. Many of them were the products of Jadawin’s biolab; all owed their longevity and unfading youth to him. There were mermen and mermaids, goat-hoofed and goat-horned satyrs, hairy-legged and horned fauns, small centaurs, and other creatures which Jadawin had made to resemble the beings of Greek mythology. The strip was a type of Paradeisos and Garden of Eden with, in addition, a number of extra-terrestrial, extra-universal touches.

  On the other side of the Garden strip was the edge of the bottom of the world. Kickaha had been down there several times on what he called “vacations” and once when he had been pursued by the horrible gworl, who wanted to kill him for the Horn of Shambarimen. He had looked over the edge and been thrilled and scared. The green abyss below—nothing beneath the planet—nothing but green sky and a sense that he would fall forever if he lost his hold.

  Kickaha told her of this and said, “We could hide down there for a long time. It’s a great place—no wars, no bloodshed beyond an occasional bloody nose or two. It’s strickly for sensual pleasure, no intellectualism, and it gets wearisome after a few weeks, unless you want to be an alcoholic or drug addict. But the Bellers’ll be down there eventualy. And by that time, they may be much stronger.”

  “You can be sure of that,” she said. “They have started making new Bellers. I suppose that one of the palaces has facilities for doing this. Mine hasn’t, but …”

  “Wolff’s has,” he replied. “Even so, it’ll take ten years for a Beller to mature and be educated enough to take its place in Beller society, right? Meantime, the Bellers are restricted to the original fifty. Forty-four, I mean.”

  “Forty-four or four, they won’t stop until we three Lords, and you, are captured or killed. I doubt they’ll invade any more universes until then. They’ve got all of us cornered in this world, and they’ll keep hunting until they’ve got us.”

  “Or we’ve got them,” Kickaha said.

  She smiled and said, “That’s what I like about you. I wish that you were a Lord. Then …”

  He did not ask her to elaborate. He directed her to fly the machine down the monolith. As they descended, they saw that its surface, which had looked so smooth, was broken, gnarled, and flattened in many places. There were ledges and projections which furnished roads for many familiar and many strange creatures. There were fissures which sometimes widened to become comparatively large valleys. There were streams in the valleys and cataracts hurled out of holes in the steep side and there was a half mile wide river which roared out of a large cave at the end of a valley-fissure and then fell over the edge and onto the sea seventyfive thousand feet below.

  Kickaha explained that the surface area on all the levels of this planet, that is, the horizontal area on the tops of the monoliths, equaled the surface area of the watery bodies of Earth. This made the land area more than that of Earth’s. In addition, the habitable areas on the verticalities of the monoliths were considerable. These alone probably equaled the land
area of Earth’s Africa. Moreover, there were immense subterranean territories, great caverns in vast networks that ran under the earth everywhere. And in these were various peoples and beasts and plants adapted to underground life.

  “And when you consider all this, plus the fact that there are no arid deserts or ice and snowcovered areas, you can see that the habitable land of this planet is about four times that of Earth.”

  Anana said that she had been on Earth briefly only and that she didn’t remember its exact size. The planet in her own universe, however, was, if she remembered correctly, about the size of Earth.

  Kickaha said, “Take my word for it, this is a hell of a big place. I’ve traveled a lot in the twenty-three years I’ve been here, but I’ve seen only a small part. I have a lot ahead of me to see. If I live, of course.”

  The machine had descended swiftly and now hovered about ten feet above the rolling waves of Okeanos. The surf shattered with a white bellow against the reefs or directly against the butt of the monolith. Kickaha wanted to make sure that the water was deep enough. He had Anana fly the craft two miles further out. Here he dumped the four caskets and bellshaped contents into the sea. The water was pure and the angle of sunlight just right. He could see the caskets a long way before the darkness swallowed them. They fell through schools of fish that glowed all hues of all colors and by a Brobdingnagian octopus, striped purple and white, that reached out a tentacle to touch a casket as it went by.

  Dumping the bells here was not really necessary, since they were empty. But Anana would not feel easy until they were sunk out of reach of any sentients.

  “Six down. Forty-four to go,” Kickaha said. “Now to the village of the Hrowakas, the Bear People. My people.”

  The craft followed the curve of the monolith base for about seven hundred miles. Then Kickaha took over the controls. He flew the craft up and in ten minutes had climbed a little over twelve miles of precipitousness to the edge of the Amerind level. Another hour of cautious threading through the valleys and passes of the mountain ranges and half an hour of reconnoitering brought them to the little hill on top of which was the village of the Hrowakas.