“You’re a leblabbiy, a descendant of the artificial humans we Thoan made in our factories!” Red Orc howled. “You are inherently inferior because we made your ancestors inferior to us! You were made less intelligent than we! You were made less strong and less swift! Do you think that we would be stupid enough to make beings who were our equals?”
“That may have been the case when you first made them,” Kickaha said. “But there is such a thing as evolution, you know. If I am indeed one of a lowly lesser breed, why is it I have killed so many Lords and gotten out of so many of their traps? Why do they call me the Trickster, the Slayer of Lords?”
“You have slain your last Lord!” Red Orc bellowed. “From now on, I will be known also as Kickaha’s Killer.”
“Old English saying: ‘The proof is in the pudding.’ Get ready to choke on what I’m going to feed you,” Kickaha said.
Red Orc was getting into a terrible fury, and that would shape his judgment. Or was he just pretending to be overwhelmed with anger so that his enemy would be too confident?
“I’m pleased you have the dagger,” Kickaha said. “It gives you an advantage you really need.”
“Leblabbiy!” the Thoan screamed.
“Don’t just stand there and call me names like some ten-year-old kid,” Kickaha said. “Try me! Attack! Let’s see what you got!”
Red Orc yelled and ran at Kickaha, who stooped and picked up the marble chunk that had struck him in the forehead. He wound up like a baseball pitcher, which he had been when in high school. He aimed the stone for the Thoan’s chest. But Red Orc stabbed at it, and it struck the point of the dagger. This was knocked loose from his grasp. No doubt, it also paralyzed his hand for a moment. In that time, Kickaha, yelling a war cry, was on him. Red Orc tried to dodge him, but Kickaha slammed into him and squeezed his hands around the thick neck and forced him to stagger backward. The Thoan tried to box both Kickaha’s ears; Kickaha ducked his head so that he was struck on its upper part. The blows made his head ring, but he pulled the Thoan close to him, banged his head against Red Orc’s (it was a question who was more dazed by this), and then fastened his teeth on Red Orc’s neck.
The Thoan fell backward, taking Kickaha with him. Red Orc came out the worse from the fall. His breath whoofed out, and he had to fight Kickaha at the same time that he was trying to get his wind back. Kickaha was now in his own rage. He saw red, though it might have been his own blood or the Thoan’s. Despite the impact and his loss of breath, Red Orc managed to turn over, taking Kickaha with him, and they rolled until they were stopped by a debris heap. Kickaha had fastened his teeth on the Lord’s jugular vein and was biting as deep as he could. He did not expect to cut through the vein. He was no sharp-fanged great ape, but he strove to shut off the flow of blood.
Kickaha’s body was pressed against Red Orc’s left arm so tightly that, for some seconds, Red Orc could not get it free. But he brought the other arm up and over, a finger hooked. It dug deeply into Kickaha’s right eye, and then was yanked back toward Red Orc. Kickaha’s eye popped out and hung by the optic nerve. He was not aware of his other pains; his fury overrode them. But this one pierced through the haze of red.
Nevertheless, he kept on biting the vein. Red Orc then began slamming the side of Kickaha’s head with the edge of his hand. That hurt and dazed Kickaha so much that he unclamped his teeth and rolled away. He was only vaguely aware that the optic nerve had been torn loose. When he stopped rolling, the lost eye, flat, its fluid pressed out of it, stared up at him, a few inches from the other eye.
That sent a surge of energy through him. He got to his feet at the same time that Red Orc rose. He charged immediately. Red Orc turned to meet him. He was borne backward as Kickaha’s head slammed into his belly. Kickaha fell, too, but reached out and squeezed the Thoan’s testicles. While Red Orc writhed in agony, Kickaha got up and jumped on him with both feet. The Thoan screamed; the bones of his rib cage were fractured.
That should have been the end of the fight. But Red Orc was not the man to be stopped by mere crippling and high pain. His hand shot out and gripped Kickaha’s ankle even as he writhed, and he yanked with a strength he should not have possessed. Kickaha fell backward, though he twisted enough to keep from falling completely on his back. His shoulder struck the floor. Red Orc had half turned, his grip still powerful. Kickaha sat up and pried one of the Thoan’s finger loose and bent it back. The bone snapped; the Thoan screamed again and loosed his clutch.
Kickaha got onto his knees and slammed his fist against the Thoan’s nose. Its bridge snapped. Blood spurted from his nostrils. Nevertheless, in a wholly automatic reaction, he hit Kickaha’s jaw with his fist. It was not the knockout blow it would have been if Red Orc had not been weakened. It did make Kickaha’s head ring again. By the time his senses were wholly back, he saw that Red Orc was getting back onto his feet. And now he was swaying as he stood above Kickaha.
“You cannot defeat me,” he croaked. “You are a leblabbiy. I am Red Orc.”
“That’s no big deal. I am Kickaha.”
Kickaha’s voice sounded feeble, but he rolled away while the Thoan staggered after him. Red Orc stopped when he saw the dagger on the ground, and he went to it and picked it up.
“I will cut off your testicles, just as I cut off my father’s,” he said, “and I will eat them raw, just as I ate my father’s.”
“Easier said than done,” Kickaha said. He stood up. “What you did to so many people, especially what you did to Anana, will drive me on, no matter how you try to stop me.”
“Let us get this over with, leblabbiy. It is no use for you to keep hoping you will overcome me. You will die.”
“Sometime. Not now.”
The Thoan waved the dagger. “You will not get by this.”
Looking at the man’s face, squeezed with agony, and at his bent-over posture, Kickaha thought that he might be able to dance around Red Orc until he collapsed. But the chances were fifty-fifty that he might crumble first.
His hand brushed against the deerskin pouch containing the Horn. In his fury, he had forgotten about it. He pulled it out from the pouch and gripped its end as if it were a club. Ancient Shambarimen had not made the instrument to be used as a bludgeon. But it would serve. He advanced slowly toward the Lord, saying, “It will be told that you had to use a knife to kill an unarmed man.”
“You would like me to cast it aside. But no one will have seen this fight. Too bad, in a way. It should be celebrated in epic poetry. Perhaps it will be. But I will be the one who tells others of how it went.”
“Always the cowardly liar,” Kickaha said. “Use the dagger. I’ll kill you anyway. You’ll gain even more fame as the only man ever to be killed by the Horn.”
Red Orc said nothing. He came at Kickaha with the knife. The Horn swung and struck the Thoan’s wrist as he jabbed. But Red Orc did not drop the knife. Instead, he lunged again, and the blade entered Kickaha’s chest. But it only made a shallow wound because Kickaha grabbed the man’s wrist with one hand and banged Red Orc over the head with the Horn. Red Orc tore his wrist from the grasp, retreated for several seconds, breathing heavily, then attacked again.
This time, he used one arm as a shield against the bludgeoning while he thrust with his right hand. His dagger sliced across Kickaha’s lower arm, but Kickaha brought the Horn down and then up and slammed its flaring end into Red Orc’s chin. Though the Thoan must have been dazed by the blow, he managed to rake the edge of the blade across Kickaha’s shoulder and then gash the hand holding the Horn. Kickaha dropped it; it clanged on the ground.
Red Orc stepped swiftly forward. Kickaha retreated.
“You can run now,” the Thoan said hoarsely. “That is the only way you can escape me. For a while, anyway. I will track you down and kill you.”
“You have a lot of confidence for a beaten man,” Kickaha said.
He stooped to pick up the bloody marble chunk. For a few seconds after he had straightened up, he was dizzy. Too much blo
od lost; too many blows on the head. But Red Orc was in as bad a condition. Who won might depend upon who passed out first.
He wiped the blood from the marble chunk on his short trousers, and he held it up for Red Orc to see.
“It’s been used twice, once by you, once by me. Let’s see what the third time does. I doubt you’ll be able to bat it again.”
Red Orc, wincing, crouched, his knife held out.
“When I was a youth on Earth,” Kickaha said, “I could throw a baseball as if it were a meteorite hurtling through space. And I could throw a curve ball, too. A scout once told me I was a natural for the big league. But I had other plans. They didn’t work out because I came to the World of Tiers and from there to other universes of the Lords. Let’s see now how an Earthly sport is good for something besides striking out a batter.”
He wound up, knowing that he was out of practice and that the irregularly shaped chunk was no lightweight ball. Also, he did not have much strength left. But he could summon it. And he was only ten feet from Red Orc.
The chunk flew spinning from his hand. Just as it did, the Thoan dropped to his knees and leaned to one side. But the stone, far from going into its target, the chest, veered off the path Kickaha had intended for it. It thudded against Red Orc’s head just above his hairline. The Thoan fell over on his side, dropping the dagger. His eyes and mouth were open; he did not move.
Kickaha picked up the dagger while keeping his one eye on the Thoan. Then he slammed his boot into the man’s side. The body moved, but only because it had been kicked.
Kickaha knelt down and ripped off the man’s shorts. He held up the testicles and prepared to cut them off. He might eat them raw. He did not know if he was up to it. But, despite his exhaustion, he was still raging. This Thoan must suffer what he had intended to inflict upon his enemy.
Manathu Vorcyon’s voice came to him. “Kickaha! You cannot do that! You are better than he! You are not the savage he is!”
Kickaha looked up at the Great Mother with his good eye. She was sitting on her airboat. But both were blurred. The good eye was not so good.
“The hell I’m not!” he said. His own voice seemed far away. “Watch me!”
He did it with one swipe. And then everything rushed away from him, and the darkness of nothing rushed in to fill the space.
23
Kickaha’s wounds were healed, and a new eye had grown in the socket. The latter process had taken forty days, during part of which time his eye had been a nauseating jellylike mass. But he was as fit and as whole as ever.
He sat near the edge of the monolith on which was the palace Wolff had once occupied as Lord of this world. Now and then, Kickaha sipped a purplish liquor from a cut-quartz goblet. He looked up at the green sky and yellowish sun and then at the vast panorama below him, unique among the many universes.
The palace was on top of a massive and soaring stone pillar, the highest point of this Tower of Babylon—shaped planet. It soared from the center of a circular continent, the Atlantis tier. This, in turn, was on top of a larger monolith, the Dracheland tier. Below this tier was the still larger tier that Kickaha called the Amerind, his favorite stomping grounds. Below this was the Okeanos level. A person on its edge would see nothing but space, empty except for the air filling it. If you jumped over the edge, you fell for a very long time. Where you ended up, Kickaha did not know.
Theoretically, if you had a very powerful telescope and the humidity was very low, you could see to the lowest tier, the outer part of it, anyway. He was content with the view he had.
Anana had survived the collapse of her prison suite, but when she was carried out of the room five days after Khruuz had gated the palace, she was severely injured and much dehydrated. Kickaha had stayed with her until she had recovered. Despite his nursing, she still had hated him.
Red Orc’s wounds had healed themselves. Though not imprisoned, he was closely watched. Red Orc was no longer his name; it was now just Orc. He had not been given a choice of lifelong incarceration or having his memory shorn to the age of five. The Great Mother had worked with the Thoan’s computer until she had found the access code that opened up all the files. She was probably the only one in the many universes who could have done it, and that took her a long time.
After the machine had been built, the Thoan was placed in a chair and subjected to the memory-stripping process. Now, he was only five years old in mind. Those raising him, volunteer native house servants, would give him the love and attention every child required. Kickaha was not glad that he had not killed the man who had robbed him of the Anana Kickaha had known. But he could not hate the man who was no longer Red Orc. However, it would be a long time, if ever, before he would like him.
One problem with Anana had been solved. The machine had been used to strip her memory of the events immediately after Orc had taken away her memory.
The ethics of doing this without her consent had bothered Kickaha. But not very much. She was no longer in love with Orc because she did not remember him. And, now, she did not hate Kickaha. Never mind that she did not love him either. He had already started his campaign to win her back. How could he not succeed? Modesty aside, what other man in all the universes could compare with him?
The Great Mother had returned to her own world, but she and Kickaha would visit each other now and then.
He looked again at the view. Unsurpassed in beauty, in mystery, in promised adventure!
He would never again leave this world, the land area of which was larger than Earth’s. To roam in it forever with Anana by his side would be to live in Heaven. Though it would be unlike Heaven in that it had a streak of Hell and he could be killed … Ah! that gave it its savor.
“My world!” he shouted. And while those words soared out over the planet, they were followed by a roar like a lion notifying everybody that this was his territory.
“Kickaha’s World!”
Travel now from a gritty, down-at-heels city in the Midwest to the fantastic universes of the world of Tiers, as Philip José Farmer walks the knife-edge between fantasy and realism in
Jim Grimson is leading a dead-end life in a dead end town. He’s bright and frustrated and hates his dad. He’s a troublemaker cruising for a fall.
In the World of Tiers, Jim is the bloodthirsty Red Orc, most awesome of the Lords.
Who is Jim Grimson?
About the Author
Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) was born in North Terre Haute, Indiana, and grew up in Peoria, Illinois. A voracious reader, Farmer decided in the fourth grade that he wanted to become a writer. For a number of years he worked as a technical writer to pay the bills while writing. Science fiction allowed him to apply his knowledge and passion for history, anthropology, and the other sciences to works of mind-boggling originality and scope.
His early novella “The Lovers,” published in 1952, earned him the Hugo Award as "most promising new writer,” and he won a second Hugo, as well as the Nebula Award, for the 1967 novella “Riders of the Purple Wage,” a prophetic literary satire about a futuristic, cradle-to-grave welfare state. His best-known works include the Riverworld books, the World of Tiers series, the Dayworld trilogy, and literary pastiches of such fictional pulp characters as Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes. He was one of the first writers to mash-up these characters and their origin stories into wholly new works. His short fiction is also highly regarded.
Farmer won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2001, and the Science Fiction Writers of America named him the 19th recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in the same year.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1970, 1977, 1991, 1993 by Philip José Farmer
Cover design by Amanda Shaffer
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4602-2
This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
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