The World of Tiers, Volume 2

by Philip José Farmer

  The land beyond the edge of the clearing had become high hills covered with a rusty grass and queer-looking bushes with green and red striped swastika-shaped leaves. There were trees on the hills beyond the nearest ones; these were tall and round and had zebra stripes of black, white, and red. They swayed as if they were at the bottom of a sea responding to a current.

  Urthona’s jumping up and down had resulted in his attaining heights of at least six feet. Now he picked up his beamer and ran in great bounds toward them. He seemed in perfect control of himself.

  Not so with Red Orc, who started to whirl toward them, his mouth open to ask what had happened. The motion carried him on around and toppled him over. But he did not fall heavily.

  “Stay down,” Kickaha said to Anana. “I don’t know where we are, but the gravity’s less than Earth’s.”

  Urthona stopped before them. His face was almost as red as the sky. His green eyes were wild.

  “The Horn of Shambarimen!” he screamed. “I wondered what you had in that case! If I had known! If I had known!”

  “Then you would have stayed outside the rim of the giant gate you set around the clearing,” Kickaha said. “Tell me, Urthona, why did you step inside it? Why did you drive us toward the boulder, when we were already inside the gate?”

  “How did you know?” Urthona screamed. “How could you know?”

  “I didn’t really know,” Kickaha said. “I saw the slight ridge of earth at several places on the edge of the clearing before we came on in. It didn’t mean much, although I was suspicious. I’m suspicious of everything that I can’t explain at once.

  “Then you hung back, and that in itself wasn’t too suspicious, because you wouldn’t want to get too close until you were certan we had no hidden weapons. But you wanted to do more than just get us inside this giant gate and then spring it on us. You wanted to drive us into our own gate in the boulder where we’d be trapped. You wanted us to hide inside there and think we’d fooled you and then come out after a while, only to find ourselves in this world.

  “But you didn’t know that Anana had no activator and you didn’t know that we had the Horn. There was no reason why you would think of it even if you saw the instrument case, because it must be thousands of years since you last saw it. And you didn’t know Jadawin had it, or you would have connected that with the instrument case, since I am Jadawin’s friend.

  “So I got Anana to blow the Horn even if she didn’t know why she was doing it. I didn’t want to go into your world, but, if I could take you with me, I’d do it.”

  Anana got up slowly and carefully and said, “The Shifting World! Urthona’s world!”

  In the east or what was the east in the world they’d just left, a massive red body appeared over the hills. It rose swiftly and revealed itself as a body about four times the size of the Earth’s moon. It was not round but oblong with several blobby tentacles extending out from it. Kickaha thought that it was changing shape slightly.

  He felt the earth under him tilting. His head was getting lower than his feet. And the edge of the high hills in the distance was sagging.

  Kickaha sat up. The pains seemed to be slightly attenuated. Perhaps it was because the pull of gravity was so much reduced. He said, “This is a one-way gate, of course, Urthona?”

  “Of course,” Urthona said. “Otherwise I would have taken the Horn and reopened the gate.”

  “And where is the nearest gate out of this world?”

  “There’s no harm in telling you,” Urthona said. “Especially since you won’t know any more than you do now when I tell you. The only gate out is in my palace, which is somewhere on the surface of this mass. Or perhaps on that,” he added, pointing at the reddish metamorphosing body in the sky. “This planet splits up and changes shape and recombines and splits off again. The only analogy I can think of is a lavalite. This is a lavalite world.”

  Red Orc went into action then. His leap was prodigious and he almost went over Urthona’s head. But he rammed into him and both went cartwheeling. The beamer, knocked out of Urthona’s hands by the impact, flew off to one side. Anana dived after it, got it, and landed so awkwardly and heavily that Kickaha feared for her. She rose somewhat shakily but grinning. Urthona walked back to them; Red Orc crawled.

  “Now, Uncles,” she said, “I could shoot you and perhaps I should. But I need someone to carry Kickaha, so you two will do it. You should be thankful that the lesser gravity will make the task easier. And I need you, Urthona, because you know something of this world. You should, since you designed it and made it. You two will make a stretcher for Kickaha, and then we’ll start out.”

  “Start out where?” growled Urthona. “There’s no place to go to. Nothing is fixed here. Can’t you understand that?”

  “If we have to search every inch of this world, we’ll do it,” she said. “Now get to work!”

  “Just one moment,” Kickaha said. “What did you do with Wolff and Chryseis?”

  “I gated them through to this world. They are somewhere on its surface. Or on that mass. Or perhaps another mass we haven’t seen yet. I thought that it would be the worst thing I could do to them. And, of course, they do have some chance of finding my palace. Although …”

  “Although even if they do, they’ll run into some traps?” Kickaha said.

  “There are other things on this world …”

  “Big predators? Hostile human beings?”

  Urthona nodded and said, “Yes. We’ll need the beamer. I hope its charge lasts. And …”

  Kickaha said, “Don’t leave us in suspense.”

  “I hope that we don’t take too long finding my palace. If you’re not a native, you’re driven crazy by this world!”

  The Lavalite World

  For Roger Zelazny, The Golden Spinner

  My thanks to J. T. Edson, author of the Dusty Fog sagas, for his kind permission to integrate the Texas fogs with the British Foggs.

  —Philip José Farmer

  AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

  When I finished writing the manuscript of this novel, I typed out The End on the final page. This was to indicate to the proofreaders at Ace Books that the page was the last one. I don’t know why I did it; I usually don’t think it’s necessary. However, the proofreaders, in setting up the manuscript for galley proofs, failed to delete the terminal signal. (They also failed to catch many typos in the galleys when they came back from the printer.)

  No harm done, I thought, when I saw the printed book. But I was wrong. Many readers thought that The End had a special significance. They believed that I’d indicated that the series, of which THE LAVALITE WORLD was the fifth, was concluded and that there would be no more Wolff-Kickaha stories. Many sent letters to me which expressed sadness or indignation.

  This foreword for this special edition gives me an opportunity to assure the readers that there will be two more books. Seven in all. The sixth will be titled KICKAHA’S WORLD, and the concluding volume may be titled THE GARDEN OF EVIL. I haven’t made up my mind about this yet, though.

  I hope I’ll be able to finish the series. So far, though I’ve started many series, about fifteen, I think, I’ve not yet finished one. One of the reasons for this is that I get so many ideas for stories that I just have to write immediately after inspiration strikes. Result: there may be years between the writing of, say, the second and third volumes of a particular series.

  The advantage for me is that I don’t get tired of a series. The creative battery connected to a series has a chance to get recharged.

  A disadvantage is that the reader caught up in a series gets impatient; he or she would like to see the next book soon.

  Another disadvantage is that I may lose interest entirely in the series. As time passes, I change. My interests change, I’m enlarging my knowledge, my tastes are mutating, and I may even forget that I have a series which is uncompleted.

  Then someone writes to me and asks when the hell the next volume in a series is coming out. I
feel guilty, and I should. After all, I have a definite responsibility to the reader. And so I write the next book. Or I don’t, depending on what idea is possessing me with passion at the moment.

  I tell myself that I really ought to live to A.D. 2018. When I’m a hundred years old I may have had enough time to write all that I want to write and finish all that I started. But I know better. During the next thirty-seven years I’ll be getting more and more ideas and inspirations—if things go as they have for the past thirty years—and I’ll be in the same situation as now. Or in one far worse. Who knows how many more series I may start in the future while at the same time neglecting those I began long ago?

  What to do about it?

  I don’t know. As of August 20, 1981, the day I’m typing this, I’m sixty-three years and seven months old. I did not start selling fiction steadily until 1952, when I was thirty-three years old. By the time you read this, I will have been writing successfully for thirty years and will have about fifty-six books—novels, short-story collections, and two biographies—to my credit or discredit. Most of these are of the genre mislabeled “science-fiction.” I prefer to call them “neomyths.”

  Yet, for many years before 1952, my ambition was to be a mainstream or nongenre writer. In my early manhood, I dreamed of being the American Dostoyevsky or Balzac or the 20th-century Melville. Somehow, my path veered into science-fiction, perhaps because my unconscious knew better than my conscious what I should do. Sidetracked once again, not in the particular this time, but in the general.

  However, though I backslide, fall from grace, as it were, tend to follow the primrose path, slide along on a Moebius strip, I do straighten out now and then. Thus, I go back to earlier projects and ambitions. Often stalled or lost but eventually getting the motor started and finding my way again.

  Which is why, if I live long enough, I may conclude some, perhaps all, of the series I’ve started. Which is why I decided last year that I’d write a long-deferred mainstream novel in 1982. This was conceived in 1943, and the notes and outlines for it and a hundred pages of text have been sitting around for thirty-eight years, waiting patiently. They won’t be of much use to me, though I may be able to cannibalize some of them. I’ve changed too much since I first began working on the novel. But, unless circumstances prevent me, what was titled THE UNRULY LANCE, or The Green Knight, will be called PEARL DIVING IN OLD PEORIA.

  It will, though mainstream, embody some science-fiction techniques.

  The age of sixty-three seems to be rather late for a person to launch a new career. But I have precedents. Among them, Thomas Hardy. He wrote mostly novels until he was about sixty-three, when he published the first part of his great poem, THE DYNASTS. And, after he was sixty-nine, he began his third career, lyrical poetry. Writers don’t have to retire unless they suffer from brain damage, loss of inspiration, or world-weariness. Unfortunately, some who suffer from these don’t retire even then.

  As an example of my tendency to get sidetracked, take my interest in linguistics. For many years, I’ve delved into this fascinating and vital field. But broadly, not deeply. I can tell you much about the phonetics and phonemics and structures and history of many languages, but I can’t speak any non-English tongue. And my reading knowledge of any of them is limited indeed. To know one tongue well, you have to stick to it, spend years not only studying it but live among those who speak it. Unless you’re a linguistic genius like Michael Ventris, the decipherer of Mycenaean Linear B, and I’m not.

  I’m a linguistic grasshopper, hopping from one tongue to another, chewing on a piece of a blade here, a piece of a blade there, instead of devouring a blade to the root before moving on to the next.

  But my years are numbered. (They always were, but I was too young to be keenly aware of the limitation.) So … I’ve finally determined to ignore the golden prospects of other beckoning exotic languages and stick to one subject until I’ve gained at least a respectable mastery of it. This will be Homeric Greek, and I’ll at last attain my long-held ambition to be able to read The Iliad and The Odyssey in the original.

  “Sez you!” says my scornful demon—the one that sits on my left shoulder. “What about this Albanian grammar you recently acquired? What about the Esperanto translations of THE WIZARD OF OZ and TARZAN OF THE APES that you started but never finished? How about that long essay in which you were going to show how English, in six thousand years, could develop into a language similar in sound and structure to Swahili? Should I go on?”

  “Live and yearn,” I replied.

  The thing on my left shoulder, the thing which looks like Gollum, laughs and laughs.

  The demon on my right shoulder, the demon who looks now and then like Athena but more often like an owl or a snake, also laughs.

  Life isn’t long enough, and if it were extended to a thousand years, it would still be too short.

  So, let us deal with the here and now, with THE LAVALITE WORLD.

  Sometime before the first episode of the Star Trek series appeared on the TV screen, I had a talk with Gene Roddenberry in his office. While we were discussing the possibility of my writing a treatment, the outline of a script, I noticed on a desk a lavalite, the first I’d ever seen. While gazing entranced at it, I thought that surely a Lord would have fashioned for himself or herself a pocket universe based on the lavalite principle. But it was some years before I got around to doing something about the idea. The result: the book at hand.

  While rereading it for Phantasia Press to correct typos and discrepancies and to slightly revise it, I began to feel uncomfortable. This feeling increased the more I got into the book. And I had to agree with Lester del Rey, who’d told me that he felt very uncomfortable and uneasy while reading it. He was glad when Kickaha finally got back to the World of Tiers.

  The reason for this is, I believe, that we take for granted a stable Earth. There are, it’s true, occasional and violent changes, earthquakes, volcanoes erupting, storms, and other colossal natural phenomena. But these changes are limited to relatively small localities and are usually not unexpected. At least, if they do occur without warning, they don’t do so very often, and even then they affect only a small part of the terrain.

  But the lavalite world has no predictability or stability at all except for the areas immediately around the large bodies of water, and these can’t be inhabited very long. On the lavalite world, mountains become plains in a few days and vice versa. Rivers and lakes form and are gone in a short time. All life has to keep moving to survive, and even then the place towards which the life is running may change in form before the life gets there.

  Nor are there, as here, the reassuring points of the compass and the rising and setting of the sun. There is no determinable north, south, east, and west. No sun. No familiar landmarks. No place to put down roots or even a place to stay for more than a week. There is little rest for both wicked and innocent.

  It’s a hell that makes Earth look like paradise.

  Though Kickaha and Anana had some great adventures there and were in some mind-boggling situations, they were very happy to get back to the tiered-planet universe.

  Kickaha must have thought that his life while in the lavalite world was something like Alice’s and the Red Queen’s. They, you’ll remember, had to run fast just to stay in one place. But Kickaha’s predicament was even worse than theirs. Though they were forced to race madly, they at least were not worried that the ground under their feet would sink or rise or twist into strange shapes or tear itself away from the main body of Earth and go floating into a decaying orbit and then crash.

  Whew!

  Philip José Farmer

  CHAPTER ONE

  Kickaha was a quicksilver Proteus.

  Few could match his speed in adapting to change. But on Earth and on other planets of the pocket universes, the hills, mountains, valleys, plains, the rivers, lakes, and seas, seldom altered. Their permanence of form and location were taken for granted.

  There were small loca
l changes. Floods, earthquakes, avalanches, tidal waves reshaped the earth. But the effects were, in the time scale of an individual, in the lifetime of a nation, minute.

  A mountain might walk, but the hundreds of thousands of generations living at its foot would not know it. Only God or a geologist would see its movements as the dash of a mouse for a hole.

  Not here.

  Even cocksure, unfazed Kickaha, who could react to change as quickly as a mirror reflects an image, was nervous. But he wasn’t going to let anyone else know it. To the others he seemed insanely cool. That was because they were going mad.

  CHAPTER TWO

  They had gone to sleep during the “night.” Kickaha had taken the first watch. Urthona, Orc, Anana, and McKay had made themselves as comfortable as they could on the rusty-red tough grass and soon had fallen asleep. Their camp was at the bottom of a shallow valley ringed by low hills. Grass was the only vegetation in the valley. The tops of the hills, however, were lined with the silhouettes of trees. These were about ten feet tall. Though there was little breeze, they swayed back and forth.

  When he had started the watch, he had seen only a few on the hilltops. As time passed, more and more had appeared. They had ranged themselves beside the early comers until they were a solid line. There was no telling how many were on the other side of the hills. What he was sure of was that the trees were waiting until “dawn.” Then, if the humans did not come to them, they would come down the hills after them.

  The sky was a uniform dark red except for a few black slowly floating shapes. Clouds. The enormous reddish mass, visually six times the size of Earth’s moon, had disappeared from the sky. It would be back, though he didn’t know when.

  He sat down and rubbed his legs. They still hurt from the accident that had taken place twelve “days” ago. The pain in his chest had almost ceased, however. He was recovering, but he was not as agile and strong as he needed to be.