A Private Cosmos
AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
A PRIVATE COSMOS was not my title. An Ace Books editor changed KICKAHA’S WORLD to the present title for some reason I’ve not been able to figure out. In fact, the first three in the series were retitled without my permission or knowledge. The fourth and the fifth, BEHIND THE WALLS OF TERRA and THE LAVALITE WORLD, appeared with the Ms. titles. However, one of the reprints of the former was titled BEYOND THE WALLS OF TERRA. By the time that I discovered that, another reprint came out with the correct BEHIND. Some editor or typesetter had goofed, but another editor (or the same) caught the error and rectified it. Or, perhaps, since the word involved was BEHIND, I should say that he rectumfied it.
Kickaha (a.k.a. Paul Janus Finnegan) was a major but not lead character in the first in the series, MAKER OF UNIVERSES. He was not in the second, GATES OF CREATION. But by the time I wrote A PRIVATE COSMOS it was evident, to me at least, that Kickaha had displaced Wolff as the main character. The wild Hoosier trickster had taken over, and I did not object at all. The irrational, the true author, my unconscious, had dictated the choice of protagonist and the course of events. I always obey it even in my most rational moments. When I’m writing, that is. Other times I tend to tell it to get lost, though I usually regret doing so.
One should generally follow one’s nature, however slovenly it be. For instance, I’m a devout procrastinator. This irritates people with get-up-and-go-let’s-do-it-now. But I’ve found that by the time I get around to doing what needs done, it no longer needs doing. The problem or task has been eliminated or it really was better to wait.
Kickaha seems to be very popular character. Poul and Karen Anderson named their parrot after him. And there is a child, born October 30, 1971, whose middle name is Kickaha. He is Bryon Kickaha House, son of Mr. and Mrs. David House, and he first saw the light of day (artificial light, anyway) in Monmouth Medical Center, Long Branch, New Jersey. There is even a tenuous connection of place, though not of genealogy, between Bryon and me. He was birthed in Monmouth County, and that is where one of my ancestors, Mordecai Lincoln (also an ancestor of President Abe Lincoln) lived for a while before moving on to Pennsylvania.
Mordecai’s son, Mordecai, another ancestor of mine, married Mary Webb, whose mother was Mary Boone, Daniel Boone’s aunt. (Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Next he’ll be claiming that he’s not only related to Abe Lincoln and Daniel Boone but to Tarzan and Doc Savage. However, I can validate my Lincoln-Boone ancestry with undeniable documentation)
I met young Bryon Kickaha House in St. Louis, Missouri. I told him that he might have a bad time explaining his middle name to people. But if he decided to become a writer, I said, he’d have a great monicker for the profession, an eye-catching byline. Even better than Philip Jose Farmer.
If any of you out there think I’m pulling your leg, I can show you a copy of Bryon’s birth certificate.)
I might, I will, mention that there is also a real Ralph von Wau Wau. (For those not acquainted with this name, the giant privateeye German shepherd dog appears in Kilgore Trout’s VENUS ON THE HALF-SHELL and in two stories by Jonathan Swift Somers III, “A Scarletin Study,” and “The Doge Whose Barque Was Worse Than His Bight.” Trout and Somers are two of my twelve or so nom-de-plumes.) The real Ralphe von Wau Wau belongs to and was named by Robert Barrett of Wichita, Kansas.
The above examples are proofs of my thesis that fantasy can strongly affect reality. Or is it vice versa? No, it’s both. Farmer’s third law of psychophysicodynamics states that for every action there is an opposite reaction though generally not of the same force and seldom in the same direction and in the same medium.
The Kickaha of the World of Tiers series may be popular because he is our personified unconscious (mine, anyway). He represents also the Trickster of native American tales and of many preliterate African and Asian stories. He is what we (I, anyway) would like to be in our off-moments. Or maybe it’s our onmoments.
I did not set out deliberately to make Kickaha the fictional descendant of the Stone Age folk-tale hero-antihero. I had read about the North American native Tricksters, Old Man Coyote and Nanabozho, when I was young. But not until after I’d written MAKERS did I come a cross Paul Radin’s THE TRICKSTER, a scholarey study of this figure. This and other books have enlightened me on the ancient origins and the psychology of Kickaha, but I’ve not borrowed any of the ancient tricks for use by Kickaha. All of his shenanigans have been invented by me. So far, anyway.
The names of the Tishquetmoac, the people of the city rubbed and drilled out of a single gigantic block of jade, are also my invention. They are based, however, on the phonology and structure of the Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs. Several readers have speculated on these names in fanzines, one saying that they were derived from the Mayan and another that they were of Incan origin. So much for their knowledge of these tongues. Actually, the Tishquetmoac are suppose to be descended from the Olmecs, the people who founded the first civilization in Central America. We don’t know what their language was, but I assume for story purposes that it was an early form of Nahuatl.
The examples of the Teutoniac speech of Dracheland were based on a Middle High German dictionary. This also lists words which have dropped out of modern German. Using this book, I extrapolated how the sounds, syntax, and vocabulary of Middle High German might have changed if a large group of medieval German knights and their serfs had been abducted to the planet of tiers. My qualifications for this are some years of college German courses, a course in Old English, a course in Old Norse, and many years of reading linguistic texts. I even thought about translating one of my short stories into Dracheland just for the fun of it. I might do it yet, if time ever permits.
This reminds me of a complaint (jeer, rather) by the Austrian critic, Franz Rottensteiner. He once made a statement in a fanzine that Blish, Dick, Howard, and Farmer did not use German correctly in their works. I don’t know what Blish’s and Howard’s qualifications in German were. I would imagine that the pendantic and careful Blish would have been quite competent. Dick once told me that he majored in German in college and was fluent enough in it to write long letters in it to the Polish writer, Lem.
My use of German, except in A PRIVATE COSMOS, has always been a hybrid German-English deliberately mangled for comic effect. I suppose that Rottensteiner took this seriously. That’s to be expected from a humorless Central Eoropean critic whose literary attitudes are constipated with ideology and provincialism.
The above explanations are mainly concerned with the mechanics and the background of the universe of the tiered planet. I enjoy inventing such things, but I take sheer delight in portraying Kickaha. He’s lively, shifty, tricky, aggressive, and, I believe, a three-dimensional character, though slightly larger than life. I’ve had a great time living through him. I hope that the readers have enjoyed him as much as I have.
Philip José Farmer
CHAPTER ONE
Under a green sky and a yellow sun, on a black stallion with a crimson-dyed mane and blue-dyed tail, Kickaha rode for his life.
One hundred days ago, a thousand miles ago, he had left the village of the Hrowakas, the Bear People. Weary of hunting and of the simple life, Kickaha suddenly longed for a taste—more than a taste—of civilization. Moreover, his intellectual knife needed sharpening, and there was much about the Tishquetmoac, the only civilized people on this level, that he did not know.
So he put saddles and equipment on two horses, said goodbye to the chiefs and warriors, and kissed his two wives farewell. He gave them permission to take new husbands if he didn’t return in six months. They said they would wait forever, at which Kickaha smiled, because they had said the same thing to their former husbands before these rode out on the warpath and never came back.
Some of the warriors wanted to escort him through the mountains to the Great Plains. He said no and rode out alone. He took five days to get out of the mountains. One day was lost because two young warriors of th
e Wakangishush tribe stalked him. They may have been waiting for months in the Black Weasel Pass, knowing that some day Kickaha would ride through it. Of all the greatly desired scalps of the hundred great warriors of the fifty Nations of the Great Plains and bordering mountain ranges, the scalp of Kickaha was the most valued. At least two hundred braves had made individual efforts to waylay him, and none had returned alive. Many war parties had come up into the mountains to attack the Hrowakas’ stockaded fort on the high hill, hoping to catch the Bear People unawares and lift Kickaha’s scalp—or head—during the fighting. Of these, only the great raid of the Oshangstawa tribe of the Half-Horses had come near to succeeding. The story of the raid and of the destruction of the terrible Half-Horses spread through the 129 Plains tribes and was sung in their council halls and chiefs’ tepees during the Blood Festivals.
The two Wakangishush kept a respectable distance behind their quarry. They were waiting for Kickaha to camp when night came. They may have succeeded where so many others had failed, so careful and quiet were they, but a red raven, eagle sized, flew down over Kickaha at dusk and cawed loudly twice.
Then it flew above one hidden brave, circled twice, flew above the tree behind which the other crouched, and circled twice. Kickaha, glad that he had taken the trouble to train the intelligent bird, smiled while he watched it. That night, he put an arrow into the first to approach his camp and a knife into the other three minutes later.
He was tempted to go fifty miles out of his way to hurl a spear, to which the braves’ scalps would be attached, into the middle of the Wakangishush encampment. Feats such as this had given him the name of Kickaha, that is, Trickster, and he liked to keep up his reputation. This time, however, it did not seem worthwhile. The image of Talanac, The City That Is A Mountain, glowed in his mind like a jewel above a fire.
And so Kickaha contented himself with hanging the two scalpless corpses upside down from a branch. He turned his stallion’s head eastward and thereby saved some Wakangishush lives and, possibly, his own. Kickaha bragged a lot about his cunning and speed and strength, but he admitted to himself that he was not invincible or immortal.
Kickaha had been born Paul Janus Finnegan in Terre Haute, Indiana, U.S.A., Earth, in a universe next door to this one. (All universes were next door to each other.) He was a muscular broad-shouldered youth, six feet one inch tall and weighing 190 pounds. His skin was deeply tanned with slightly copper spots, freckles, here and there, and more than three dozen scars, varying from light to deep, on parts of his body and face. His reddish-bronze hair was thick, wavy, and shoulder length, braided into two pigtails at this time. His face was usually merry with its bright green eyes, snub nose, long upper lip, and cleft chin.
The lionskin band around his head was edged with bear teeth pointing upward, and a long black and red feather from the tail of a hawk stuck up from the right side of the headband. He was unclothed from the waist up; around his neck was a string of bear teeth. A belt of turquoise-beaded bearskin supported dappled fawnskin trousers, and his moccasins were lionskin. The belt held a sheath on each side. One held a large steel knife; the other, a smaller knife perfectly balanced for throwing.
The saddle was the light type which the Plains tribes had recently adopted in place of blankets. Kickaha held a spear in one hand and the reins in the other, and his feet were in stirrups. Quivers and sheaths of leather hanging from the saddle held various weapons. A small round shield on which was painted a snarling bear’s head was sus pended from a wooden hook attached to the saddle. Behind the saddle was a bearskin robe rolled to contain some light cooking equipment. A bottle of water in a clay wicker basket hung from another saddle hook.
The second horse, which trotted along behind, carried a saddle, some weapons, and light equipment.
Kickaha took his time getting down out of the mountains. Though he softly whistled tunes of this world, and of his native Earth, he was not carefree. His eyes scanned everything before him, and he frequently looked backward.
Overhead, the yellow sun arced slowly in the cloudless light green sky. The air was sweet with the odors of white flowers blooming, with pine needles, and an occasional whiff of a purpleberry bush. A hawk screamed once, and twice he heard bears grunting in the woods.
The horses pricked up their ears at this but they did not become nervous. They had grown up with the tame bears that the Hrowakas kept within the village walls.
And so, alertly but pleasantly, Kickaha came down off the mountains onto the Great Plains. At this point, he could see far over the country because this was the zenith of a 160 mile gentle curve of a section, His way would be so subtly downhill for eighty miles that he would be almost unaware of it. Then there would be a river or lake to cross, and he would go almost imperceptibly up. To his left, seeming only fifty miles away, but actually a thousand, was the monolith of Abharhploonta. It towered a hundred thousand feet upward, and on its top was another land and another monolith. Up there was Dracheland, where Kickaha was known as Baron Horst von Horstmann. He had not been there for two years, and if he were to return, he would be a baron without a castle. His wife on that level had decided not to put up with his long absences. She divorced him and married his best friend there, the Baron Siegfried von Listbat. Kickaha had given his castle to the two and had left for the Amerind level, which, of all levels, he loved the most.
His horses pulling the ground along at a canter, Kickaha watched for signs of enemies. He also watched the animal life, comprised of those still known on Earth, of those that had died off there, and of animals from other universes. All of these had been brought into this universe by the Lord, Wolff, when he was known as Jadawin. A few had been created in the biolabs of the palace on top of the highest monolith.
There were vast herds of buffalo, the small kind still known in North America, and the giants that had perished some ten thousand years ago on the American plains. The great gray bulks of curving- tusked mammoths and mastodons bulked in the distance. Some gigantic creatures, their big heads weighted down with many knobby horns and down-curving teeth projecting from horny lips, browsed on the grass. Dire wolves, tall as Kickaha’s chest, trotted along the edge of a buffalo herd and waited for a calf to stray away from its mother. Further on, Kickaha saw a tan and black striped body slinking along behind a clump of tall grass and knew that Felis Atrox, the great maneless nine hundred pound lion that had once roamed the grassy plains of Arizona, was hoping to catch a mammoth calf away from its mother, or perhaps it had some faint hopes of killing one of the multitude of antelope that was grazing nearby.
Above, hawks and buzzards circled. Once, a faint V of ducks passed overhead and a honking floated down. They were on their way to the rice swamps up in the mountains.
A herd of gawky long-necked creatures, looking like distant cousins of the camel, which they were, lurched by him. There were several skinny-legged foals with them, and these were what a pack of dire wolves hoped to pull down if the elders became careless.
Life and the promise of death was everywhere. The air was sweet; not a human being was in sight. A herd of wild horses galloped off in the distance, led by a magnificent roan stallion. Everywhere were the beasts of the plains. Kickaha loved it. It was dangerous, but it was exciting, and he thought of it as his world—his despite the fact that it had been created and was still owned by Wolff, the Lord, and he, Kickaha, had been an intruder. But this world was, in a sense, more his than Wolffs, since he certainly took more advantage of it than Wolff, who usually kept to the palace on top of the highest monolith.
The fiftieth day, Kickaha came to the Tishquetmoac Great Trade Path. There was no trail in the customary sense, since the grass was no less dense than the surrounding grass. But every mile of it was marked by two wooden posts the upper part of which had been carved in the likeness of Ishquettlammu, the Tishquetmoac god of commerce and of boundaries. The trail ran for a thousand miles from the border of the empire of Tishquetmoac, curving over the Great Plains to touch various semip
ermanent trading places of the Plains and mountain tribes. Over the trail went huge wagons of Tishquetmoac goods to exchange for furs, skins, herbs, ivory, bones, captured animals, and human captives. The trail was treatyimmune from attack; anyone on it was safe in theory, at least, but if he went outside the narrow path marked off by the carved poles, he was fair prey for anybody.
Kikaha rode on the trail for several days because he wanted to find a trade-caravan and get news of Talanac. He did not come across any and so left the trail because it was taking him away from the direct route to Talanac. A hundred days after he had left the Hworakas village, he encountered the trail again. Since it led straight to Talanac, he decided to stay on it.
An hour after dawn, the Half-Horses appeared.
Kickaha did not know what they were doing so close to the Tishquetmoac border. Perhaps they had been making a raid, because, although they did not attack anybody on The Great Trade Path, they did attack Tishquetmoac outside it.
Whatever the reason for their presence, they did not have to give Kickaha one. And they would certainly do their best to catch him; he was their greatest enemy.
Kickaha urged his two horses into a gallop. The Half-Horses, a mile away to his left, broke into a gallop the moment they saw him racing. They could run faster than a horse burdened with a man, but he had a good lead on them. Kickaha knew that an outpost was four miles ahead and that if he could get within its walls, he would be safe.
The World of Tiers Volume One: The Maker of Universes, the Gates of Creation, and a Private Cosmos Page 39