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The World of Tiers Volume One
The Maker of Universes, The Gates of Creation, and A Private Cosmos
Philip José Farmer
The Maker of Universes
AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
Maker was first published in 1965. Its genesis occurred thirty years earlier when I was eighteen years old and a senior at Peoria Central High School in Peoria, Illinois. Though I was busy studying hard and spending many after-school hours in football and track practice and reading science fiction and adventure stories and much else, I was also daydreaming, making worlds which existed only in my mind. (Perhaps.) I hoped to write about these some day.
One of these fantasies was about a pocket universe containing only a sun and a cylindrical-shaped planet with various levels the size of continents. It was a sort of ziggurat or Babylonian temple or tower with a mass larger than that of Earth. This world had its own “laws” of physics, some of which were like Earth’s and some of which were unique. It was possible on this planet for a person to sit on the edge of the lowest level and dangle his feet over the abysm of space, the sky above and below him. And if a person slipped or jumped off the edge, he’d fall for months before striking the boundary of the small cosmos.
At that time, the planet of tiers was not as well-developed or thought out as it would be when I wrote Maker. However, I did draw a crude outline of the planet and indicate on it places where my hero had his adventures and name some places with exotic beasts and birds and sentients. I even wrote some notes about the wanderings and exploits of my protagonist of the story-to-be. His name was Kickaha, and he was an American Indian exiled from his tribe, forbidden to return until he’d achieved a quest. I don’t remember now just what that quest was.
Where did I get the name Kickaha? I’d read a lot of fact and fiction about Amerinds and had even perused a 19th-century book written by a missionary on an Algonquin language (Penobscot) which I’d found in the local library. What I did was make up a portnameau from two Algonquin names and one Iroquois. I took the “Kicka-” from the Kickapoo Creek, named after the tribe which once lived close to Peoria. (The local joke is that the creek was so named because the tribe came down from the north and kicked the poo out of the Peoria Indians.) The “-ha” came from Minnehaha and Hiawatha. There must have been intimations of rebellion in the name, too, “kicking against the pricks”—a Biblical phrase—and vicariously kicking the authorities in the butt.
But what was my Amerind hero when I was eighteen, a hero based on Hiawatha and Crazy Horse, became when I was forty-seven a Caucasian, though he had some Amerind genes. He was transformed into my alter ego, Paul Janus Finnegan, the wild adventurous twin of the overly self-controlled and bookwormish Philip José Farmer.
The character of Finnegan, who is also Kickaha, was partly based on the semidivine, semibeast tricksters of Amerind folktales, the Old Man Coyote of the Plains tribes, the Great Rabbit Nanabozho of the Ojibway, and many others. Kickaha also had features of the ancient Greek trickster, Autolycus, Odysseus’ grandfather. The trickster character and theme run through some of my fiction, the most recent example being the Jesus of Jesus on Mars. Strangely, I didn’t even realize that Jesus was such until a critic pointed it out to me.
Nor did I consciously derive Kickaha from the characters noted above. It wasn’t until I was writing Tarzan Alive and suddenly realized that Tarzan was a trickster that I also realized that Kickaha owed part of his genesis to my reading about Old Man Coyote et al.
Robert Wolff is the protagonist of this book and its immediate sequel, Gates of Creation. But after that Kickaha takes over, and Wolff gets lost. There’s no mystery about why this happened. Kickaha is much more flamboyant than Wolff. He was the first character I conceived when planning the world of tiers at eighteen. And I strongly identify with him. At the time I wrote Maker, I identified with Wolff. Both of us were trapped in Scottsdale, Arizona, but I got him out of it and to a better world, and I got myself out, too, though vicariously.
All worlds are traps, but some are more fun than others.
Kickaha enjoys the world of tiers, which is why he subtly took over as the protagonist.
The spine-tingling image of sitting on the edge of the world must have come from my frequent readings of that delightful fantasy, The Hollow Tree and Deepwoods Book, by Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain’s good friend. My parents gave me this for Christmas when I was seven. Its pleasure was enhanced by the many illustrations of J. M. Conde. Mr. ‘Coon, Mr. ‘Possum, and Mr. Crow, who lived in the tree, not always harmoniously since each was always playing tricks on the others, often used to sit on the edge of the world and smoke and talk while looking at the stars above and below.
I also got Gulliver’s Travels and Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass that golden though ice-bound morning. These have been far more influential for me than the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, despite surface appearances.
When I was seventeen, before I began shaping the world of tiers, I found Lord Dunsany’s books in the local library and was powerfully turned on by The Book of Wonder and Tales of Three Hemispheres. And by Sime’s illustrations in these. It was probably then that, deep in my unconscious, the flat-earth concept of Paine and Dunsany melded with the Babylonian ziggurats I’d read about in school and the Tower of Babel I’d read about in the Bible. A year later, perhaps less, this melding bloomed in my conscious. Behold! The many-leveled cylindrical planet.
Dunsany’s Tales of Three Hemispheres also inspired a few pages of chapter X of Maker. These derive from the section of Tales called “Idle Days on the Yann.” I’ve always loved that, and I’ve often imagined, in my younger days, myself traveling on the boat Bird of the River down the fabulous legend-and-demon-haunted river Yann. As far as I know, no one has noticed this inspiration of Kickaha’s voyage down the river Guzirit on the merchant caravel Khrillquz. Perhaps someone might have if I’d followed my inclinations and made the voyage longer. But there was no esthetic need to do so. I’d made my sly tribute to Dunsany, and Kickaha must get to the next adventure.
I search my memory, scan the banks, for why I alloted certain levels of the tiered planet to certain people. Why did I make the lowest level a paradise, albeit a stultifying one, for beings from ancient Greek mythology and from Homer? Because, I believe, I encountered Homer when I was three years old and have never lost my interest in him. When I was living in the second story of an apartment building in Indianapolis, the little girl I played with let me look through her parents’ library on the ground floor. I came across The Iliad and The Odyssey, both profusely illustrated with black-and-white drawings based on paintings from Greek vases. The titles meant nothing to me (I couldn’t read, of course), but the girl’s father told me they were pictures about the war at Troy and Ulysses’ adventures after the war. I never forgot the illustrations or his words.
I still remember the thrill I had at the age of seven when I came across Homer’s works in the children’s section of the local library. When I opened The Odyssey and saw the illust
rations in it (not the same as those I’d seen in Indianapolis), I had a hot flashback of the two books in my friend’s parents’ library. I don’t remember the little girl’s name or even what she looked like. I have photographs of me at that time, and it’s incredible (almost) that the infant on the tricycle and on the seat of a Stanley steamer could retain the memory of the Homer books. But it’s true. Something stamped that impression deeply.
I’ll mention, since it’s not irrelevant to my career as a writer, that the little girl and I encountered a ghost in the hall of my apartment and ran screaming downstairs. Since then, I’ve encountered none until 1975, when I was fifty-seven. I awoke in the middle of the night and saw three horrifying apparitions. A few nights later, I again saw from my bed one of the three, an inanimate but mobile object, a very large Oriental-looking lamp.
The reason for the next level on the planet, the Amerindian, needs no explanation after my comments earlier.
The level above that allows me to extrapolate what might have happened to some Middle-European medieval societies if they’d not stayed on Earth. I thought it’d be fun to show how the German Jews of that time developed their own feudal culture, knights and all, and their conflicts with the Gentile society developing side by side with them. Thus, funem Laksfalk, the Yidshe knight. His culture is not shown but only referred to. However, I plan to present it much more fully in the as-yet unwritten sixth book in the series. This will be titled Kickaha’s World, my title for A Private Cosmos, but changed by Don Wollheim, the editor of Ace then, for some reason still unexplained.
Funem Laksfalk, by the way, means in English Of the salmon-hawk.
The Atlantis level remains to be developed. At this moment, I still don’t have any idea of what I’m going to do with it. But I will do something.
The concept of artificial pocket universes, each with its unique physical laws, was, as far as I know, originated by me. I can’t pin down the day on which the concept thrust up from the unconscious, but the year was 1936. The most outre example of such worlds (from the viewpoint of us on Earth, itself an artificial world) is my The Lavalite World. More on this and its mental genesis when I write the introduction to it.
For this edition, I briefly considered expanding Kickaha’s visit to Podarge in her chamber (in chapter VI where he says that he paid “the final price”). At the time that I wrote it, censorship would have prevented publication of a scene in erotic detail about copulation between a human being and a harpy. Now, it could be published, especially in the special edition at hand. But I decided that it wouldn’t be, in this case, esthetically appropriate to present it. I’d rather be like the Greek dramatists, who never showed sex or violence on the stage but only referred to such acts. It’s better to let the reader use his or her own imagination re this episode.
I’ve always had a lot of fun writing this series. I like to write adventure sf or fantasy with all stops pulled out, all systems on Supergo, creativity and extrapolation freewheeling, going where the winds of imagination blow them. Yet, there’s a serious basis for this series, several, in fact. One of them is that I really believe that if humanity doesn’t destroy itself—if it gets past the stage it’s been going through for many millenia—it will someday be able to make its own universes more or less as described in this series.
If it doesn’t fulfill the possibilities, it will at least have dreamed of them.
Philip José Farmer
CHAPTER ONE
The ghost of a trumpet call wailed from the other side of the doors. The seven notes were faint and far off, ectoplasmic issue of a phantom of silver, if sound could be the stuff from which shades are formed.
Robert Wolff knew that there could be no horn or man blowing upon it behind the sliding doors. A minute ago, he had looked inside the closet. Nothing except the cement floor, the white plasterboard walls, the clothes rod and hooks, a shelf and a light bulb was there.
Yet he had heard the trumpet notes, feeble as if singing from the outer wall of the world itself. He was alone, so that he had no one with whom to check the reality of what could not be real. The room in which he stood entranced was an unlikely place in which to have such an experience. But he might not be an unlikely person to have it. Lately, weird dreams had been troubling his sleep. During the day strange thoughts and images passed through his mind, fleeting but vivid and even startling. They were unwanted, unexpected, and unresistable.
He was worried. To be ready to retire from work and then to suffer a mental breakdown seemed unfair. However, it could happen to him as it had to others, so the thing to do was to be examined by a doctor. But he could not bring himself to act as reason demanded. He kept waiting, and he did not say anything to anybody, least of all to his wife.
Now he stood in the recreation room of a new house in the Hohokam Homes development and stared at the closet doors. If the horn bugled again, he would slide a door back and see for himself that nothing was there. Then, knowing that his diseased mind was generating the notes, he would forget about buying this house. He would ignore his wife’s hysterical protests, and he would see a medical doctor first and then a psychotherapist.
His wife called: “Robert! Haven’t you been down there long enough? Come up here. I want to talk to you and Mr. Bresson!”
“Just a minute, dear,” he said.
She called again, so close this time that he turned around. Brenda Wolff stood at the top of the steps that led down to the recreation room. She was his age, sixty-six. What beauty she had once had was now buried under fat, under heavily rouged and powdered wrinkles, thick spectacles, and steel-blue hair. He winced on seeing her, as he winced every time he looked into the mirror and saw his own bald head, deep lines from nose to mouth, and stars of grooved skin radiating from the reddened eyes. Was this his trouble? Was he unable to adjust to that which came to all men, like it or not? Or was what he disliked in his wife and himself not the physical deterioration but the knowledge that neither he nor Brenda had realized their youthful dreams? There was no way to avoid the rasps and files of time on the flesh, but time had been gracious to him in allowing him to live this long. He could not plead short duration as an excuse for not shaping his psyche into beauty. The world could not be blamed for what he was. He alone was responsible; at least he was strong enough to face that. He did not reproach the universe or that part of it that was his wife. He did not scream, snarl, and whine as Brenda did.
There had been times when it would have been easy to whine or weep. How many men could remember nothing before the age of twenty? He thought it was twenty, for the Wolffs, who had adopted him, had said that he’d looked that age. He had been discovered wandering in the hills of Kentucky, near the Indiana border, by old man Wolff. He had not known who he was or how he had come there. He couldn’t even speak English.
The Wolffs had taken him in and notified the sheriff. An investigation by the authorities had failed to identify him. At another time, his story might have attracted nationwide attention; however, the nation had been at war with the Kaiser and had had more important things to think about. Robert, named after the Wolff’s dead son, had helped work on the farm. He had also gone to school, for he had lost all memory of his education.
Worse than his lack of formal knowledge had been his ignorance of how to behave. Time and again he had embarrassed or offended others. He had suffered from the scornful or sometimes savage reaction of the hill-folk, but had learned swiftly—and his willingness to work hard, plus his great strength in defending himself, had gained respect.
In an amazingly quick time, as if he had been relearning, he had studied and passed through grade and high school. Although he had lacked by many years the full time of attendance required, he had taken and passed the entrance examinations to the university with no trouble. There he’d begun his lifelong love affair with the classical languages. Most of all he loved Greek, for it struck a chord within him; he felt at home with it.
After getting his Ph.D. at the University of Ch
icago, he had taught at various Eastern and Midwestern universities. He had married Brenda, a beautiful girl with a lovely soul. Or so he had thought at first. Later, he had been disillusioned, but still he was fairly happy.
Always, however, the mystery of his amnesia and his origin had troubled him. For a long time it had not disturbed him, but then, on retiring …
“Robert,” Brenda said loudly, “come up here right now! Mr. Bresson is a busy man.”
“I’m certain that Mr. Bresson has had plenty of clients who like to make a leisurely surveillance,” he replied mildly. “Or perhaps you’ve made up your mind that you don’t want the house?”
Brenda glared at him, then waddled indignantly off. He sighed because he knew that, later, she would accuse him of deliberately making her look foolish before the real estate agent.
He turned to the closet doors again. Did he dare open them? It was absurd to freeze there, like someone in shock or in a psychotic state of indecision. But he could not move, except to give a start as the bugle again vented the seven notes, crying from behind a thick barricade but stronger in volume.
His heart thudded like an inward fist against his breast bone. He forced himself to step up to the doors and to place his hand within the brass-covered indentation at waist-level and shove a door to one side. The little rumble. of the rollers drowned out the horn as the door moved to one side.
The white plaster boards of the wall had disappeared. They had become an entrance to a scene he could not possibly have imagined, although it must have originated in his mind.
Sunlight flooded in through the opening, which was large enough for him to walk through if he stooped. Vegetation that looked something like trees—but no trees of Earth—blocked part of his view. Through the branches and fronds he could see a bright green sky. He lowered his eyes to take in the scene on the ground beneath the trees. Seven nightmare creatures were gathered at the base of a giant boulder. It was of red, quartz-impregnated rock and shaped roughly like a toadstool. Most of the things had their black furry, misshapen bodies turned away from him, but one presented its profile against the green sky. Its head was brutal, subhuman, and its expression was malevolent. There were knobs on its body and on its face and head, clots of flesh which gave it a half-formed appearance, as if its Maker had forgotten to smooth it out. The two short legs were like a dog’s hind legs. It was stretching its long arms up toward the young man who stood on the flat top of the boulder.
The World of Tiers Volume One: The Maker of Universes, the Gates of Creation, and a Private Cosmos Page 1