The World of Tiers Volume One: The Maker of Universes, the Gates of Creation, and a Private Cosmos

by Philip José Farmer

  If the Black Bellers were observing any of these, they must be alarmed or, at the least, edgy and uncertain. They would have no way of knowing what the lights meant. The kitchen taloses would know, but even if they were asked, they could not reply. They heard orders but had mouths for drinking and eating only, not for talking.

  Kickaha, thinking about this, looked for first aid devices in the cabinets. He soon came across antiseptics, local anesthetics, drugs, bandages, all he needed. After cleaning his wounds, he prepared films of pseudoflesh and applied them to stop the bleeding. They began their healing efforts immediately.

  He got a drink of water then and also opened a bottle of cold beer. He took a long shower, dried off, and searched for and found a pill which would dull his overstimulated nerves so he could get a restful sleep. The pill would have to wait, however, until he had eaten and finished exploring this place.

  It was true that he should not, perhaps, be thinking of rest. Time was vital. There was no telling what was happening in Talanac with Anana and the Red Beards. They might be under attack this very moment by a Beller flying machine with powerful beamers. And what was von Turbat doing now? After he had escaped Podarge, he and von Swindebam must have gated back to the palace. Would they be content to hole up in it? Or would they, as seemed more likely to Kickaha, go back to the moon through another gate? They would suppose him to be marooned there and so out of action. But they also must have some doubts. It was probable that they would take at least one craft and a number of men to hunt him down.

  He laughed. They would be up there, frantically trying to locate him, and all the time he would be underfoot, so to speak. There was, of course, the possibility that they would find the cave near Korad. In which case, they would test all the crescents left there, and one Beller at least would soon be in this cell. Perhaps he was making a mistake in sleeping. Maybe he ought to keep on going, get out of this cell as soon as possible.

  Kickaha decided that he had to sleep. If he didn’t, he would collapse or be slowed down so much he would be too vulnerable. Light-headed from a bottle of beer and three glasses of wine, he went to a little door in the wall, over which a topaz was flashing a yellow light. He opened the door and took a silver tray from the hollow in the wall. There were ten silver-colored, jewel-encrusted dishes on the tray, each holding excellent foods. He emptied every dish and then returned the tray and contents to the hollow. Nothing happened until he closed the little door. He raised it again a second later. The hollow was empty. The tray had been gated up to the kitchen, where a talos would wash and polish the dishes and the tray. Six hours from now, the talos would place another tray of food in the kitchen gate and so send it to the stone-buried cell.

  Kickaha wanted to be up and ready when the tray came through the next time. Unfortunately, there were no clocks in the prison, so he would have to depend on his biological clock. That, in its present condition, was undependable.

  He shrugged and told himself what the hell. He could only try. If he didn’t make it this time, he would the next. He had to get sleep because he did not know what would be required of him if he ever got out of prison. Actually, this was the best place for him in the universe—if the Bellers did not find the cave of gates on the moon.

  First, he had to explore the rest of the prison to make sure that all was right there and also to use anything he might find helpful. He went to a door in one end of the cell and opened it. He stepped into a small bare anteroom. He opened the door on its opposite wall and went into another cylindrical cell about forty feet long. This was luxuriously decorated and furnished in a different style. However, the furniture kept changing shape, and whenever he moved near to a divan, a chair, or table, it slid away from him. When he increased his pace, the piece of furniture increased its speed just enough to keep out of reach. And the other furniture slid out of its way if they veered toward it.

  The room had been designed to amuse, puzzle, and perhaps eventually enrage the prisoner. It was supposed to help him keep his mind off his basic predicament.

  Kickaha gave up trying to capture a divan and left the room at the door at the opposite end. It closed behind him as the others had done. He knew that the doors could not be opened from this side, but he kept trying, just in case Wolff had made a mistake. It refused to move, too. The door ahead swung open to a small anteroom. The room beyond it was an art studio. The next room was four times as large as the previous and was mainly a swimming pool. It had a steady supply of cool fresh water, gated through from the palace water supply above and also gated out. Inflow was through a barred hole in the center of the pool’s floor. Kickaha studied the setup of the pool and then went on to the next room.

  This was the size of the first. It contained gymnastic equipment and was in a gravitic field one-half that of the planet’s, the field of which was equivalent to Earth’s. Much of the equipment was exotic, even to a man who traveled as much as Kickaha. The only things to hold his interest were some ropes, which were strung from ceiling hooks or bars for climbing exercises.

  He fashioned a lasso from one rope and coiled several more over his shoulder to take with him. In all, he passed through twenty-four chambers, each different from the others. Eventually, he was back in the original.

  Any other prisoner would have supposed that the rooms were connected to form a circular chain. He knew that there was no physical connection between the rooms. Each was separated from the next by forty feet of granite.

  Passage from one to the next was effected by gates set inside the doorways of the anterooms. When the door was swung open, the gate was activated and the prisoner was transmitted instantaneously to another anteroom which looked just like the one he thought he was entering.

  Kickaha entered the original cell cautiously. He wanted to make sure that no Beller had been gated here from the cave on the moon while he was exploring. The room was empty, but he could not be sure that a Beller had not come here and gone investigating, as he had. He stacked three chairs on top of each other and, carrying them, walked through into the next room, the one with the shapeshifting elusive furniture. He picked out a divan and lassoed a grotesquely decorated projection on top of its back. The projection changed form, but it could metamorphose only within certain limits, and the lasso held snugly. The divan did move away when he walked toward it, but he lay down and then pulled himself along the lasso while the divan fled here and there. The thick rugs kept him from being skinned, although he did get rugburns. Finally he clutched the divan and hauled himself up onto it. It stopped then, seemed to quiver, solidified, and became as quiescent and permanent as ordinary furniture. However, it would resume its peculiar properties if he left it.

  Kickaha tied one end of the lasso to the projection. He then snared the top of a chair which had been innocently standing nearby. The chair did not move until Kickaha pulled it on the rope. Then it tried to get away. He jumped off the divan and went through a series of maneuvers to herd the divan and chair, still connected by the rope, near the entrance. With the other ropes and various objects used as weights, he rigged a Rube Goldberg device. The idea was that anyone coming through the entrance would step inside the noose laid on the floor. The nearby mass of the intruder would then send both divan and chair away in flight, and this would draw the noose tight around the intruder’s ankle. One end of the noose was tied to the rope stretched between the divan and chair. Another rope connected the projection on the divan to a chandelier of gold set with emeralds and turquoises. Kickaha, standing on the topmost of the three chairs he’d carried, had performed a balancing act while withdrawing the kingpin that secured the chandelier to the ceiling fixture. He did not entirely remove the kingpin but left just enough to keep the chandelier from falling. When the divan and chair pulled away from the intruder, the strain on the rope tied to the kingpin would yank it the rest of the way out, he hoped. The chandelier would come crashing down onto the floor. And, if his calculations were correct, it would fall on whoever was being dragged along
by the noose around his leg.

  Actually, he did not expect it to work. He did not think anybody would be imperceptive enough not to see the noose. Still, there was a chance. This world and the next were full of fools and the clumsy.

  He went to the next room, the art studio. Here he picked up a large ball of plastic. This was extremely malleable and could be fixed to retain a desired shape by shooting a chemical hypodermically into the stuff. He took the ball and needle syringe into the swimming pool room. He dived to the bottom of the pool and jammed the plastic down over the outlet. He molded the plastic into a disc which covered the hole and then fixed it with the hypo. After this, he rose to the surface and drew himself up onto the pool edge. The water level began to rise immediately. It was as he had hoped: there was no regulation or feedback between inflow and outflow, so water continued to pour in even when the outlet was blocked. Wolff had overlooked this. Of course, there was no reason why he should have been concerned about it. If a prisoner wanted to drown himself, he was free to do so.

  Kickaha walked into the next room. Here he piled some furniture and statues against the door, dried himself, and lay down to sleep. He was confident that no one would enter the room without having had much difficulty getting there. And no one could enter without making a lot of noise.

  He awoke with a jerk and a feeling that bells attached to his nerves were jingling. His heart was drumming like a grouse’s wings on take off. Something had crashed into his dreams. No, into the room. He jumped up from behind the divan, the sword in his hand. He came up just in time to see a man strike the floor in a wave of water. Then the door automatically shut. The man was gasping as though he had been holding his breath for a long time.

  He was a long-legged, powerfully built fellow with pale skin, large freckles, and dark hair that might be blond when it dried. He carried no handbeamers. His only weapons seemed to be a dagger and a short sword. He was unarmored. He wore a short-sleeved red shirt, a big leather belt, and yellow tights striped along the seams.

  Kickaha bounded out from behind the divan and ran up with his sword raised. The man, shocked and seeing that he could not get up in time to defend himself and that Kickaha was giving him a chance to surrender, took the only course a wise man could. Kickaha spoke to him in Lordspeech. The man looked puzzled and answered in Drachelander German. Kickaha repeated the order in German, then let him get up so he could sit down in a chair. The man was shivering from the cold water and possibly from the thought of what Kickaha might yet do to him.

  The fact that the man spoke German fluently was enough to convince Kickaha that he could not be a Beller. His speech was that of a native of the Einhorner Mountains. Evidently, the Bellers had not wanted to expose themselves to the unknown dangers of the gates and so had sent in expendables.

  Pal Do Shuptarp told Kickaha everything he knew. He was a baronet who was in command of the castle garrison of King von Turbat of Eggesheim. He had stayed behind while the invasion of Talanac was taking place. Suddenly, von Turbat and von Swindebam had reappeared from somewhere inside the castle. They ordered the garrison and a number of other troops to follow them into a “magic” room in the castle. Von Turbat had explained that their archenemy Kickaha was now on the moon and that it was necessary to go by sorcery—white magic, of course—to track him down. Von Turbat did not say anything of what had happened to the soldiers in Talanac.

  “They’re all dead,” Kickaha said. “But how did von Turbat talk to you?”

  “Through a priest, as he has done for some time,” Do Shuptarp said.

  “And you didn’t think that was peculiar?”

  Do Shuptarp shrugged and said, “So many peculiar things were happening all of a sudden that this was just one more. Besides, von Turbat claimed to have received a divine revelation from the Lord. He said he had been given the gift of being able to speak the holy tongue. And he was forbidden to speak anything else because the Lord wanted everyone to know that von Turbat was favored of the Lord.”

  “A pretty good rationalization and excuse,” Kickaha said.

  “A magical flying machine appeared above the castle,” Do Shuptarp said. “It landed, and we helped take it apart and carried the pieces into the room where we were to be transported magically to the moon.”

  It was a terrifying experience to be transported instantaneously to the moon and to see the planet they had been onjust a moment before now hanging in the sky, threatening to fall down on the moon and crush them all.

  But a man could get used to almost anything.

  The cave in the hillside had been discovered by the searchers when they came across the carcass of an eagle minus her feet and head. The cave held two dead adult apes and another dead eagle. There were five loose crescents on the floor. Kickaha, hearing this, knew that Podarge had escaped via a gate.

  Von Turbat had selected ten of his best knights to use the gates, two to a circle. He hoped that some would find and kill Kickaha.

  “Two of you?”

  “Karl voyn Rothadler came with me,” Do Shuptarp said. “He’s dead. He did not step into the noose, although he stormed into that room so fast he almost got caught in it. A great one for charging in, swinging a sword, and to hell with finding out first what’s going on. He ran in and so that divan and chair moved away swiftly. I don’t know how you bewitched them, but you must be a powerful magician. They pulled the kingpin loose, and the chandelier fell on his head.”

  “So the trap worked, though not exactly as planned,” Kickaha said. “How did you get through the room filled with water?”

  “After Karl was killed, I tried to go back the way I’d come. The door wouldn’t open. So I went on. When I came to the door to the waterfilled room, I had to push with all my strength to open it. Water sprayed out of the opening. I quit pushing. But I couldn’t go back; I had to go ahead. I pushed the door open again. The pressure of the water was very strong. I couldn’t get the door open all the way, and the water spurting out almost knocked me down. But I managed to get through—I am very strong. The anteroom was almost full of water by the time I did get through, and the door closed as soon as I was inside the big room.

  “The water was clear, and the light was bright. Otherwise, I might have drowned before I found the other door. I swam to the ceiling, hoping there would be a space there with air, but there wasn’t any. So I swam to the other end of the room. The water pressure had opened the door there and let some water into the next anteroom. But the door had closed itself again. In fact, it must have been doing this for some time. The anteroom was more than half full when I got into it.

  “By then, the pressure was also opening the door into this room. I waited once while it closed. Then, when it began to open a little again, I shoved with my feet braced on the floor. And I came out like a marooned sailor cast up by a storm on a desert island, as you saw.”

  Kickaha did not comment for a minute. He was thinking of the predicament in which he had put himself—and this fellow—by causing the pool to oveflow. Eventually, every room of the twenty-four would be flooded.

  “Okay,” he said. “If I can’t figure a way to get out fast, we’ve had it!”

  Do Shuptarp asked what he had said. Kickaha explained. Do Shuptarp got even paler. Kickaha then proceeded to outline much of what was behind the recent events. He went into some detail about the Black Bellers.

  Do Shuptarp said, “Now I understand much of what was incomprehensible to me—to all of us—at the time. One day, life was proceeding normally. I was getting ready to lead a dragon-hunting expedition. Then von Turbat and von Swindebarn proclaimed a holy war. They said that the Lord, Herr Gutt, was directing us to attack the city on the level below us. And we were to find and kill the three heretics hiding there.

  “Most of us had never heard of Talanac or the Tishquetmoac or of Kickaha. We had heard of the robber baron Horst von Horstmann, of course. Then von Turbat told us that the Lord had given us magical means to go from one level to the next. He explained wh
y he used only the speech of the Lord.

  “And now you tell me that the souls of my king and of von Swindebarn and a few others have been eaten up. And that their bodies are possessed by demons.”

  Kickaha saw that the soldier did not fully understand yet, but he did not try to disabuse him. If he wanted to think in superstitious modes, let him. The important thing was that he knew that the two kings were now terrible perils in disguise.

  “Can I trust you?” he said to Do Shuptarp. “Will you help me, now that you know the truth? Are you convinced that it is the truth? Of course, all this doesn’t matter unless I can figure out a way to get us up into the palace before we drown.”

  “I will swear eternal fealty to you!”

  Kickaha wasn’t convinced, but he didn’t want to kill him, and he might be helpful. He told him to pick up his weapons and to lead the way back to the cell in which they had arrived. On getting back there, Kickaha looked for a recording device and found one. This was one of many machines with which a prisoner could entertain himself. Kickaha, however, had another purpose than amusement in mind. He took the glossy black cube, which was three inches across, pressed the red spot on its underside, and spoke a few words in Lordspeech at it. Then he pressed a white spot on its side, and his words were emitted back to him.

  Kickaha waited for what seemed like hours until the topaz above the little door in the wall began flashing. He removed the tray, which contained enough food for two. Two lights were now flashing in the kitchen, and the talos, noting this, had made suitable provisions.

  “Eat!” Kickaha said to Do Shuptarp. “Your next meal may be a long way off—if you ever get one!”

  Do Shuptarp winced. Kickaha tried to eat slowly, but the sudden slight opening of the door and spurt of water caused him to gobble. The door shut but almost immediately opened a few inches again to spew in more water.

  He put the dishes on the tray and set it in the wallchamber. He hoped that the talos would not have something more pressing to do. If they delayed gating the tray back, it might be too late for the prisoners.