The screen faded into blackness. Everything faded. When Kickaha awoke on the bed, he knew that he had been made unconscious, probably by gas. Then he had been questioned. Red Orc had used some sort of truth drug and gotten out of him everything, including the facts about Khruuz. That must have startled and alarmed him considerably. The appearance of the scaly man was something he could not have anticipated.
After Kickaha had eaten his dinner and placed the tray of dirty dishes on the swing-out shelf, he found out what else Red Orc had done. The screen came on. Again, Red Orc and Anana made passionate and polymorphous-perverse love. Grimly, Kickaha went through the old Hrowaka’s methods. But this time, five hours went by without his being able to blank the screen out.
Suddenly, it stopped in the middle of the tenth replay. The Thoan’s head appeared.
“By now, you have concluded that I canceled the effects of your technique. I did so, of course, with hypnotic commands. You remember the methods, but you can’t make them effective.”
Kickaha managed to control himself and not throw the chair at the screen. He tried to smile as if he did not care. Instead, he snarled.
“I have decided not to wait for Absalos to return from Zazel’s World,” Red Orc said. “Your story that you killed him is probably true. I’ll find out when I get there. I will be gating out to there in a few minutes. When I come back, I’ll have data to make the creation-destruction engine. After that, you and all my enemies and billions who have never heard of me will die. So will their universes. Even my Earths will perish in a beautiful display of energy. I’ve run them as experiments, but I can now predict what’s going to happen to their people. Earth I humans will kill almost all of themselves with their brainless breeding, poisoning of land, air, and sea, and, in the end, the collapse of civilization, followed by starvation. Then the survivors, though plunged into savagery, will start the climb back to civilization, science, and technology, only to repeat the same story.
“This will also eventually happen on Earth II. Why should I continue the experiments when I know by now what the results will be? I’ll use the energies of the disintegrated universes to make a new one. One only. This will be the ideal world, ideal for me, anyway.
“I may take Anana with me to my new world. But I may not. While I am gone on my trip, she’ll be kept occupied. My son, Kumas, will have her. She will love him as much as she loves me because she won’t know the difference.”
He paused, smiled, and said, “That she won’t know the difference shows something about true love, doesn’t it? It’s a philosophical problem in identity. I would like to discuss it with you, though I believe that the discussion would not last long. You’re a trickster, Kickaha, but you do not know Thoan philosophy. Or, I suspect, Earthian philosophy. You are, basically, a simple-minded barbarian.”
He turned his head to look at something. Perhaps, Kickaha thought, he was checking the time on a chronometer. What did it matter what Red Orc was doing? It didn’t, but he was always curious about anything he could not explain.
The Thoan turned his head back to look at Kickaha.
“Oh, yes! Enjoy the movies!”
He walked out of Kickaha’s view. Immediately after, the screen shifted to a room in which Red Orc—or was it his clone?—and Anana were at the peak of ecstasy.
Kickaha tried to become deaf, blind, and unfeeling steel. He failed.
There was more than one way to skin a cat. Or, as the Thoan saying went, more than one direction in which to fart. He had used only one of the three techniques taught him by the shaman, Absakosaw.
He sat down and, once more, watched the films. He was going to sit here until he got bored. Then, he would think of Anana and Red Orc as puppets operated by strings. After a while, they should cease being human—in his mind, anyway—and become mere wooden dolls with articulated limbs.
However, as long as the amplified noises came from the screen, he would have much difficulty ignoring that. The sounds that Anana made kept moving the course of his thoughts back to when he and she had been making love. Just as he was on the edge of giving up and trying some other technique, the screen went blank.
A second later, the Lord’s face appeared.
“Kickaha! I am Kumas, Red Orc’s son!”
Kickaha shot up from his chair. He said, “Are you? Or are you Red Orc playing another trick on me?”
The man smiled despite the strain on his face.
“I don’t blame you. My father breeds suspicion as some breed worms for fishing.”
“If you are indeed his son … his clone … how can you prove that? And what if you are? What do you want of me?”
“Partnership. My father has gone to Zazel’s World. He has left me in charge because he trusts me most, though that is not saying much. I have always been obedient to him and never shown any sign of ambition. He thinks I am shy and reclusive, far more interested in reading and in writing poetry and in gaining knowledge. In that, he is partly correct. But I have hated him as much as my brothers do. Unlike them, I have succeeded in hiding my true feelings.”
He stopped for a moment while he obviously made an effort to slow down his rapid breathing.
Kickaha said, “You want me to help you kill him?”
Kumas gulped audibly and nodded. “Yes! I know much about you, mostly from my father, though I do have other sources of information. I admit that I do not have enough confidence in myself to carry out my plans.”
“Which are what?”
Kickaha’s heart was beating hard, and he had to control his own heavy breathing. The situation had suddenly changed from hopelessness to hope. Unless, that is, the Thoan was playing another game with him.
“We’ll talk about that now. I’ll show you that I am not my father by doing something he would not do. Watch!”
Suddenly, a door-sized area of the wall near the screen shimmered.
“Step through the gate into my room.”
Though Kickaha was still suspicious, he could not refuse this invitation. He went through the shimmering to find himself in a large room. It was Spartan in its decorations and furniture. Along all the walls were shelves filled with books, rolls of scripts, and computer readout cubes. The bed was old-fashioned, one of those that hung from the ceiling by chains. By the opposite wall was a desk that ran the length of the room.
Kumas, if he was truly Kumas, was standing in the middle of the room. A beamer was on the edge of the desk near Kickaha. He could get to it before the Thoan could. Kumas spread his hands out and said, “See! I have no weapons except that beamer. To prove that I trust you, I’ll not stop you from having it. The battery is in it; it’s ready to fire.”
Though he moved nearer the weapon, Kickaha said, “That won’t be necessary—as of now, anyway. Where’s Anana?”
Kumas turned toward the empty space of the wall just above the desk. His back was to Kickaha. He said, “Sheshmu,” Thoan for “open.” The area became a screen showing Anana and several women swimming in an enormous outdoor pool. Anana seemed to be having fun with them. Their cries and shrieks and chatter came clearly.
Kumas spoke another word, and the volume shrank to a barely heard sound.
“As you see, she is quite happy. She has accepted my father’s lies that she was rescued by him from Jadawin when Jadawin—so my father said—invaded her parents’ universe. She believes that she is only eighteen years old, and she is deeply in love with my father.”
Kickaha’s chest was, for a moment, again filled with a searing-hot liquid. He murmured, “Anana!” Then he said, “What’ll happen when she finds out he’s lied? She’ll eventually find discrepancies in his story. How’s he going to keep her from reading histories or overhearing somebody saying something that’ll not contradict what he says?”
Kumas had been looking curiously at him. He said, “I expected you to be concerned only with how we were going to dispose of my father. But your first concern seems to be about Anana. You must really love her.”
&nbs
p; “No doubt of that! But will she ever love me again?”
Kumas said sharply, “That remains to be seen. Just now, if you’ll pardon me, we have something much more important. If we don’t do that, you and Anana won’t have any future. Neither will I.”
“Agreed. It’ll be hard not to go to her, though. Very hard. But you’re right. Let her stay happy until the time when she must be told the truth.”
They sat down at a table. Kickaha outlined his story to the Thoan. When he told him that Red Orc planned to disintegrate all the universes and to start over with a new one, he saw Kumas turn pale and start to shake.
The Thoan said, “I did not know that, of course. He told that only to you because he thought that you would never be able to pass it on.”
“That can wait,” Kickaha said. “How many of your brothers are left, by the way?”
“Four of us unless you really did kill Absalos.”
“I did.”
“Three out of the original nine still live. Ashatelon, Wemathol, and myself. Ashatelon and Wemathol insist on accompanying us to the Caverned World. They want to be in on the kill.”
“The more the merrier,” Kickaha said.
But he was thinking that he could not trust any of the clones, though Kumas seemed to be different from the others. Red Orc might have done some genetic tampering with the clones. Or perhaps environment counted for more than the Lords thought it did. In any event, he would have to watch them closely, though he doubted they would be a danger to him until Red Orc was out of the way. They were afraid of their father, and they would need a leader who was not the least bit scared of him. Then, like jackals who’d helped the lion during the hunt, they might fall upon Kickaha.
Kumas resumed talking, “At least four of my brothers so far have died when our father sent them on suicidal missions. Kentrith was sent into Khruuz’s world not knowing that a bomb was in his backpack. We were not aware of it until our father told me about it. He laughed all the while. You would think that he would be kind to us since his father was so cruel to him. But that did not happen. Los seems to have twisted him so much that he takes an especial pleasure in tormenting his own sons. Sometimes I think he brought us into being just so that he could, in a certain way, torture himself.”
“What do you mean?” Kickaha said.
“He hates himself, I am sure of that. By punishing us, he is punishing himself. Does that idea seem too farfetched to you?”
“It could be valid. But I don’t know if it is. Right or wrong, it doesn’t change a thing. You’ve swept this room for recording devices he might’ve planted?”
“Of course. So, that leaves me and Ashatelon and Wemathol. Those two are what my father wanted, men of action. I disappointed him because I was too passive. He didn’t understand it. After all, I was his genetic duplicate. So, why didn’t I have his nature? He tried to explain it, but …”
Kickaha cut in. “We can always talk about that later. But if we don’t stop your father dead in his tracks, and I do mean dead, we won’t have a later time.”
“Very well. He is now in the Caverned World, if what he told me is true, and I can never be sure about anything he tells me. He should be there a long time. Reactivating that world won’t be easy. Our logical next step should be to attack him while he’s there. First, if it’s possible, we should seal up all gates there except the one we use for entrance. Don’t you agree?”
Kickaha nodded. But while listening to Kumas, he could not keep from thinking about Anana. What if she could not love him again? It was then that an idea pierced him like an arrow made of light. If it worked, it would turn her against Red Orc.
He said, excitedly, “Kumas! Listen! We’re going to fix your father. In one way, anyway. He seems to anticipate just about everything, but he won’t have foreseen this. At least, I hope not. Here’s what we’re going to do before we leave.”
An hour later, Kumas left the room to be with Anana. Kickaha watched them via a screen. By then, she was out of the pool and in a green semi-transparent dress, her long black hair done up in a Psyche knot. She was reading from a small video set while sitting on a bench in the flower garden. She looked up when Kumas stopped before her. He handed her the cube he and Kickaha had prepared. He talked to her for a while, then walked away. Frowning, she held the cube in her hand for a long time.
Kickaha turned the screen off when Kumas walked into the room.
“Do you think she’ll look at it?” he said.
Kumas shrugged his shoulders. But he said, “Would you be able to resist doing it?”
“That depends upon whether or not he made her promise not to listen to any derogatory comments about him. If he did, she probably won’t watch it. But I’m betting the Bluebeard syndrome will overwhelm her. She’ll drop the cube into the slot and turn on the screen. I hope so, anyway.”
“Bluebeard syndrome?”
Kickaha laughed. He said, “Bluebeard was the villain in an old folktale. He married often and killed his wives and hung them up to dry in a locked room. But he had to go off on a trip, so he told his latest wife she could use the key he’d given her. It would open every room in the castle. But she was definitely not to unlock one room. Under no circumstances was she to do that. Then he took off.
“Naturally, her curiosity overcame her wifely duty to obey him. So, after fighting temptation for some time, she surrendered to it. She unlocked the room where the former wives hung from hooks. She was horrified, of course. She told the authorities, and that was the end of Bluebeard.”
“We Thoan have a tale similar to that,” Kumas said.
“If Red Orc just commanded her not to pay any attention to anything bad she hears about him from his sons, she’ll do it anyway. But if she gave her word … I don’t know. In her mind, she’s eighteen years old. The Anana I knew would hardly have waited until he had left her to find out just what it was he didn’t want her to know. But eighteen-year-old Anana must have been a different woman from the older woman.”
“We’ll find out when we come back,” Kumas said. “If we do come back.”
17
“Here we are,” Kickaha said cheerily. “Back in the land of the dead.”
He and the three clones, the “sons,” were in the tunnel of Zazel’s World where he had entered it on his first mission. They had not passed directly from Red Orc’s mansion to this place. The first step, a comparatively easy one, had been to find a gate to Manathu Vorcyon’s World. The Great Mother had told Kickaha before he had been sent on his first passage to Khruuz’s World that she was again setting the trap that had whisked him away to her world. He could return to her through that.
On entering the Great Mother’s world, the party was in the forest surrounding the great tree in which she lived. Again, warriors appeared from the trees and led them to the palace-tree. After a series of conferences with her, they were sent on to Khruuz’s universe. They landed in a room cut out of rock and with no windows or doors. A few minutes later, the gate passed them on to a prison cell. This was in Khruuz’s underground fortress. The scaly man had set up a shunt in the gate-passages. This had allowed him to seal all the immediate entrances to his world. But they would be opened when Eric Clifton’s instruments told him that the preliminary gate was occupied. Khruuz had gone to Zazel’s World, and Clifton had been left behind to monitor the gates.
The Englishman had released them from their cell after he was sure that Kickaha was not the captive of Red Orc’s sons. Kickaha had told him immediately of events to the minute he had left for here. Then, Clifton had told his news about Khruuz.
“Or, at least, he started to go there,” Clifton had said. “He intended to use the same route you used when you gated there.”
“How long has he been gone?”
“Ten days.”
Clifton had rolled his eyes and looked mournful.
“It seems to me that he should have been back five days ago. However, he might have tried to reactivate the world. I didn’t kno
w it was dead until you told me, and he wouldn’t find out it was until he got there.”
“I don’t know what he’s up to,” Kickaha had said. “He should’ve waited for us. Maybe he thinks he can do just as well without us. I don’t know.”
“You’re suspicious?” Clifton had said.
“Khruuz has never proved that he’s trustworthy. On the other hand, he’s given me no reason to suspect him. He seems to be very friendly, and he sure needs us. Did need us, anyway. Maybe something’s happened so he doesn’t need us anymore. But what could he have up his sleeve?”
“His hatred for the human species?”
“He hates the Lords. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t. But then, he’s not human. Why should he have anything against us leblabbiys? We never did anything to him.”
“We do look just like the Lords,” Clifton had said. “Hatred is not by any means always rational.”
“But he’s never shown anything but friendliness toward you and me. He’d have to be a hell of an actor to repress his hatred all this time.”
“That may be significant. I wouldn’t blame him a bit if he frothed at the mouth when he spoke about them. But he seems to have a self-control cast in bronze. Is that in itself suspicious?”
“It could be,” Kickaha had said. “But, for the time being, there’s nothing we can do about it. We go ahead without him.”
An hour later, the war party had gated out to Zazel’s World, not knowing what reception it might get at its destination. The tunnel, however, was empty. There was one difference, no small one, from Kickaha’s first trip. The symbols were again marching along on the tunnel wall.
He said, “Somebody’s had some success resurrecting this stone carcass.”
“Let’s hope the somebody is not Red Orc,” Kumas said.
To avoid their confusing Red Orc with the clones in a situation where individual identity was crucial, the clones had changed the color of their hair to purple. They also wore orange headbands and carried light-blue backpacks.
The World of Tiers, Volume 2 Page 89
