The World of Tiers, Volume 2

by Philip José Farmer

  Jim had been aware of this some seconds before Orc was fully roused. Though he had screamed voicelessly with his no-tongue, he could not, of course, be heard.

  Orc tried to tear off the thing covering his face. It felt fuzzy and sticky, and the tendrils enfolding the front part of his tongue tasted like prunes. He rolled around in the sleeping bag, which covered him to his waist. Then he scrambled out of it, stood up, and then began whirling around and around as he struggled. He heard Ijim’s half-strangled bellows just before he bumped into him. He fell backward from the impact and landed on his buttocks. Making no effort to get up, he dug his fingers into the meaty layer under the sticky and fuzzy top of the thing. He was unable to lift it. Then he felt along its edges, his fright now become mindless panic as his nose and mouth were entirely filled. When he found that the edges were near his ears, he got to his knees and groped around until he found his sleeping bag. If he could not tear off the thing choking him, he would die in a minute or so. Very soon, anyway.

  Thrusting a hand into the bag, he located the scabbarded flint knife he kept by his side while sleeping. He slid its point under the edge of the choker. Though he cut his skin, he did not care. When he had half the length of the stone blade under the meaty layer, he lifted it. Then he turned the knife so that the cutting edge was up. Savagely, he pushed upward. The blade sliced through the fleshly stuff. He grabbed its edges and ripped them to one side. The stuff came out of his nose and mouth and from his eyes, though the violent removal hurt as if he were tearing tape from his skin. Now, he could see and breathe.

  The thing in his hand looked like a bright-green piece of thick cloth with tendrils and thick growths on its underside. Drawing in deep breaths, he hurled it away and hastened to help Ijim. The Lord, who had also gotten out of his sleeping bag, was rolling back and forth on the ground while he vainly tried to rip the smotherer from his face. Orc used his knife to pry it loose and hurl it away. It fell among hundreds of similar things on the ground. The tree branches were festooned with them. Dozens more were slowly descending to the ground. Unlike those that had landed, they had swollen backs. Then he saw the humps of those that had just struck the earth. They were deflating. He supposed that they had been filled with gas.

  He became aware that a half-dozen of the things were sticking to his body and that his sleeping bag was covered with them. These fell off shortly afterward. Apparently, if they did not land on an orifice in living flesh, they did not stay attached.

  Everywhere he looked, up, down, around, on the trees and bushes, out in the river, were the bright-green plants. Or were they animals?

  Ijim, blood streaming from his face, gasped for a while before speaking. His fingers, moving over his face, felt the liquid. He lifted his hand to stare at it.

  “You cut me!” He laughed. “But you cut your own face, too! Only way to do it, hen?”

  “Did you ever run across these things before?”

  “Certainly not! I’d have never gone to sleep in the open without covering my face, you can bet on that! From now on …!”

  “What about the stuff that also comes down from the sky, the things that look like blue flakes?”

  “Sure,” Ijim said as he rose. “At least a dozen times. It isn’t bad eating.”

  Jim thought, Ijim’s not Ijim. He’s not human. If he ate the blue flakes, he’s been taken over by the ghostbrain by now. The identityless nonentity had attained identity and entitydom. But it would not know that. It would think that it had always been Ijim. It had no mind in its viral state. When it took over Ijim’s mind, it began thinking. But it itself had no history of which it knew. So, it would always be Ijim to itself. Which, in a sense, was true.

  Mister Lum had once said that humans had identity, but they had not yet succeeded in defining “identity.” Jim tried to make his own definition now. The only result was confusion and a phantom headache. He abandoned the attempt and did not intend to resume it.

  The thing that was called Ijim was to all intents and purposes the exact same as the original Ijim. Or so Jim thought. Somehow, that the Lord was occupied by a ghostbrain seemed to make him more sinister. That, Jim told himself, was because he had read too many science-fiction stories and seen too many horror movies. In these, the almost always evil alien meant to eat, enslave, or mind-possess humans. Yet, could anything be more sinister than a human being? Some human beings, anyway, like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin—the list was as long as a census report. So evil were they, they seemed to be nonhuman. But being evil was part of being human, just as being good was part of being human. And these demonstrably evil people, without exception, high or low, Albanian dictator or Chicago alderman, corrupt Senator or Washington pimp, thought of themselves as being good.

  The two Lords broke camp and went east along the river. Late that afternoon, they set up camp again. Though they would normally have pushed on until close to dusk, they had to make sleeping masks to protect their mouths and noses from the green things. During the following two days, they saw a number of animals that had succumbed to the “chokers,” as Orc called them.

  Their tendrils were growing over the rotting carcasses. Those that had failed to kill were turning brown and brittle.

  After that incident, Ijim began to fall into long silences broken by a low muttering. During these, he would stare wildly around. Orc would endure this behavior as long as he could. He would ask Ijim what he was thinking about. Always, Ijim would react as if he had suddenly been wakened from a very deep sleep. He would blink his eyes and shake his head and say, “What? What are you talking about?” Then he would deny that he was disturbed by anything.

  Jim Grimson thought that the ghostbrain, not Ijim, was speaking during the fugues. Maybe it was having flashes of its life in a previous form before it became a virus or whatever drifting around on the blue things. Who knew what phases it had gone through? A person seeing a butterfly for the first time would not dream that it had been a caterpillar.

  Thirty more days passed, though not without dangerous incidents. There were no more green chokers in their path, but they did see hundreds of thousands on the ground in another valley when they were going through a mountain pass. One afternoon, a sickening gas rolled down a hole in a mountainside, enveloped them, and left them vomiting for several hours and unwell for two days. The larger animals were similarly affected; all the small birds and animals died.

  They thought that they were getting close to the place where the gate was if Los had not lied. Ijim checked the map on his nephew’s back.

  “The markings are almost at an end. Those wavy parentheses should mean the big lake just ahead of us.”

  They were standing at the top of a steep slope. Two miles or more away, at the foot of the slope, was the immense lake Ijim had expected. It was about two miles wide at the end nearest to them and broadened out until it melted into the horizon. The forest grew almost to the water. About two miles east, towering cliffs suddenly bordered the lake and ran as far as Orc could see.

  “We’ll have to build a boat or climb up and go along the edges of the cliffs,” he said. “They’re very rough and precipitous. I think we should make a canoe.”

  “Agreed.”

  Ijim continued his map reading.

  “Apparently, when we come to near the end of the lake, we bear right. The last mark must point out the gate place. It’s a circle with a cross in it and many horizontal thin lines over the cross. Maybe close, maybe not. But … one step at a time. As the Grandmother of All, Manathu Vorcyon said, ‘Who gets ahead of himself sees his own backside.’”

  Twenty days later, they had built an outrigger dugout with a mast and a woven-grass sail. It took them another ten days to kill enough animals, smoke and salt the meat, and collect nuts and berries for boatboard supplies.

  “Los is making us work hard,” Ijim said. “If I get a chance to capture him, I’ll make him pay for that. How about skinning him alive, just to start off with?”

  Orc smiled. If anyone w
as going to skin his father, he would be the one.

  CHAPTER 20

  The two lords had traveled an estimated three hundred miles since leaving the lakeshore. Yet they had seen nothing resembling the symbol on Orc’s back.

  Ijim’s fugues were becoming more frequent and longer-lasting. When he came out of them, he remembered nothing about them. In fact, he did not know that he had been in them. Orc, he said, was making up the whole business. He wanted to drive him crazy. Orc asked him why he would want to do that. Because, Ijim said, Orc was crazy, and the insane loved the company of their kind.

  The young Lord realized that it was useless to continue arguing with his uncle. Ijim was the mad one in this twosome. Therefore, he would have to be watched carefully. Orc had thought that his uncle was going to refrain from violence until the gate was found. Now, he was not sure.

  Jim Grimson was even more apprehensive than Orc. Ijim must die, and he must do it in Anthema. If he got to another world, he—the thing in him—might propagate its kind, and the next world and the next, all the worlds, might be taken over. Just how, Jim could not guess. The how no longer mattered. Ijim had to be killed here, and it would be best if his body and the thing possessing it were destroyed.

  He knew that. Orc did not.

  Ten days later, near high noon, the Lords were on top of a lofty ridge forming a wall along the right side of a river. They had been forced to climb up its slope and go along its back until they found more level ground. “For all we know,” Orc told Ijim, “the landmark could be on the other side of the ridge.”

  And it was.

  At the foot of the ridge was a plain stretching for perhaps forty miles. Another chain of mountains to the south bounded the plain. This contained scattered woods and rivers and creeks and some hilly country. A large, black, slowly moving object relatively near them was a herd of animals, grass-eaters.

  “There it is!” Orc said. He pointed at a circular object about two miles from the foot of the ridge and close to a river so small it barely escaped being a creek. The structure glittered in the sun as if made of glass. Its outer walls, forming the circle, were high and thick. Enclosed by the circle was a cross-shaped structure. Its walls were as thick as the enclosing walls. Thinner walls ran parallel to the horizontal wall of the cross. The whole structure had to be that represented by the symbol on Orc’s back.

  “Great Mother of Us All!” Orc shouted, and he struck his hand against his forehead. “Mighty and wise Enion! How dumb can we be? We call ourselves Lords, and we’re as mindless as worms! Why did we never connect the symbol on my back with that on the medallion! They both represent the grillwork in the end of Shambarimem’s Horn! It was there right in front of us, and we never connected the two!”

  Ijim was, at the moment, not in a fugue. He howled with delight and grabbed Orc’s hands. They danced around and around, both grinning and yelling. Several times, they almost lost their footing on the narrow flat top of the ridge. Finally, panting, they stopped.

  Orc frowned then. He said, “But it’s a building, an artifact! I didn’t know there were humans here!”

  “Neither did I,” Ijim said.

  “Where’s the gate? Inside that building?”

  “Must be,” Ijim said. Grimness had shouldered aside his joy. A few seconds later, he started to mutter. Knowing from experience that the Lord would follow him automatically, Orc started down the steep side of the ridge. Though he had to be careful because of loose stones here and there, he could stay on his feet. Ijim seemed to be enclosed on himself, but he did not fall. A part of him was still alert enough to handle simple situations.

  Halfway down, Orc exclaimed, and he stopped. Ijim, still muttering, halted a few feet above him. The grassy ground around the herd of black long-horned animals had opened in scores of places. Orc was too far away to make out the details, but the openings were like the doors of trapdoor spiders. Where there had been grass were now round black holes with discs, grass-topped on the outer side, sticking straight up from the ground.

  Out of the holes popped long lean gray creatures. They bounded toward the herd, which stampeded in the opposite direction. This was toward the woods fringing this part of the plain. Now, other gray killers were racing from the woods. The herd wheeled as one back toward the plain.

  Directly in its path, more trapdoors swung up. Scores of hunters leaped out of the holes and, like the greyhounds they resembled, sped toward the antelopes. When they got to the edge of the milling herd, they shot long, thin, gray strands from their mouths. These arced up, shining in the sun, fell onto the prey, and stuck as if they were glue. Presently, many antelopes had fallen, their legs entangled in the strands. The hunters, whistling loudly, were on them within seconds and tore them apart with their teeth. The rest of the herd broke through the lines and galloped off.

  Orc started down, saying, “Ijim! Those beasts must come from the glassy building through underground routes to the trapdoors. Now we know how to get inside it, if we have the courage!”

  Ijim continued to mutter. When they were close to the beginning of the plain, they examined one of the trapdoors. Those in the woods had been closed. The gray beasts who had issued from them must intend to return via those on the plain. Orc pried up the round and partially grown-over lid with his spearhead. It rose up soundlessly. Around the neck of the hole was a rim into which the door fitted. The rim was a hard glassy substance, probably the same used to form the circular building.

  The trapdoor was also made from the glassy stuff. Earth had been glued to its top and heaped and impregnated with the fixative. Grass grew from this earth.

  The hinge was provided by a substance spread at the point where the lid would be raised. This was hard on the edges and semihard between them but flexible enough to permit the lid to be raised without breaking loose from the rim.

  Orc suspected that all the glassy substance had been spewed from the gray beasts’ mouths just as the entangling strands had been.

  About three feet below the opening of the hole was a platform of dirt. The animals must have jumped out from this to the surface. Beyond that, the tunnel slanted down and probably became horizontal about ten feet below the ground. Its wall was enclosed with the gray glassy substance. This must line the tunnel all the way to the entrance inside the building and thus keep the tunnel from collapsing.

  Orc lowered the door. They then watched the hairless beasts tear off chunks of flesh from the carcasses and take these into the holes on the plain. They were much more than the canines they resembled at a distance. A set of insectine pincers projected from the sides of their mouths. These moved independently of the heads’ movements and cut and sliced the meat and then closed on large pieces. The beasts had long prehensile tails which curled around other pieces. Those animals with full burdens leaped into the holes carrying meat with their jaws, pincers, and tails.

  Their ears were round, thick, and flat, and their pale-yellow eyes were large. After listening to their whistling for a few minutes, Orc decided that they were communicating in a limited form of code. He had counted seven variations of a series of long and short whistles.

  “These are no dummies,” he softly told Ijim. “Look at their foreheads. Plenty of room for brains in those skulls.”

  Ijim nodded. He had recovered from the fugue halfway through the woods.

  “Fantastic creatures!” Orc said. “They’re a combination of dog, termite, spider, and monkey! The Vanished Ones went all out when they made these! I’m telling you, Ijim, of all the sciences, biology is the most fascinating! Life and its multitudinous forms! However, the brain, the brain! That’s the apex of life, the jewel!”

  He told Ijim that kamanbur—“whistlers”—was as good a name as any for the beasts.

  “Have to have a name for everything.”

  He and Ijim walked through the woods to the river. There Orc pointed out that the plain inclined downward to the kamanbur structure. “Dig a ditch from the river to the nearest trapdoor. Flood it
. The water should fill the tunnel and drown the stories below the surface level. During the diversion, we enter the nest.”

  “Dig a ditch!” Ijim howled. “Are you crazy? It’ll take us months to make the tools to dig with and then to do the digging! It’s not a small project! Also, we’ll be in full sight of the kamanbur while we’re working. You think they’re going to give us the time we need?”

  “What else do we have beside time?” Orc said. “Or are you so busy with other matters?”

  Ijim grumbled. He spoke of soft beds, soft sheets, and even softer women, and the delicious food and heady liquor and rapturing drugs and his triumphant assaults on the Lords of other worlds in the days before the accursed Los had chased him into this nightmare universe. Orc paid him no attention. He was thinking that antlers could be made into diggers to break up the earth. Shovels and spades could be made from strips of animal horns fixed to a hardwood base. Baskets to carry the dirt could be woven. Their tools would wear out soon, but they would just make replacements.

  First, though, he had to check out the kamanbur nest. Ijim, expecting a ravening horde to burst from the trapdoors, followed him reluctantly. No kamanbur came out, though it was soon apparent that the men could be seen from the structure. There were thousands of holes, a half-inch in diameter, in the walls. These would pass through a certain amount of fresh air and of light and provide observation apertures for the kamanbur.

  During the next few days, the Lords built a treehouse for sleeping and to thwart any arboreal predators. Then they intensively explored the neighborhood when they were not making tools for their project. And, to Orc’s delight, he found a number of trapdoors on the other side of the river.

  “Their tunnels go under the river!” he said. “Under! That means we won’t have to dig that tremendous ditch on the other side! We’ll let the river flood the nest!”

  “You mean we’ll have to go down the tunnel under the river? And just how do you think we’ll break the sheathing? And even if we can, the noise of hammering and pounding will bring the kamanbur running!”