The World of Tiers Volume Two: Behind the Walls of Terra, the Lavalite World, Red Orc's Rage, and More Than Fire

by Philip José Farmer

  “Ha! Mine again!”

  Five minutes later, Anana stepped out of the same gate through which Kickaha and Urthona had fallen.

  Her uncles looked as if this was the end of the last act. They fully expected to be slain on the spot. At one time, Kickaha would have been angered because neither had the least notion that he deserved to be executed. There was no use getting upset, however. He had learned long ago not to be disturbed by the self-righteous and the psychopath, if there was any difference between the two.

  “Before we part,” he said. “I’d like to clear up a few things, if possible. Urthona, do you know anything about an Englishman, supposedly born in the eighteenth century? Red Orc found him living in this place when he entered.”

  Urthona looked surprised. “Someone else got into here?”

  “That tells me how much you know. Well, maybe I’ll run across him some other time. Urthona, your niece has explained something about the energy converter that powers this floating fairy castle. She told me that any converter can be set to overload, but an automatic regulator will cut it back to override that. Unless you remove the regulator. I want you to fix the overload to reach its peak in fifteen minutes. You’ll cut the regulator out of the line.”

  Urthona paled. “Why? You … you mean to blow me up?”

  “No. You’ll be long gone from here when it blows. I intend to destroy your palace. You’ll never be able to use it again.”

  Urthona didn’t ask what would happen if he refused. Under the keen eye of Anana, he set the controls. A large red light began flashing on a console. A display flashed, in Lord letters, OVERLOAD. A whistle shrilled.

  Even Anana looked uneasy. Kickaha smiled, though he was as nervous as anybody.

  “Okay. Now open the gates to Earth I and to Jadawin’s world.”

  He had carefully noted the control which could put the overload regulator back into the line if Urthona tried any tricks.

  “I know you can’t help being treacherous and sneaky, Urthona,” Kickaha said. “But repress your natural viciousness. Refrain from pulling a fast one. My beamer’s set on cutting. I’ll slice you at the first false move.”

  Urthona did not reply.

  On the towering blank wall two circular shimmerings appeared. They cleared away. One showed the inside to a cave, the same one through which Kickaha and Anana had entered southern California. The other revealed the slope of a wooded valley, a broad green river at the foot. And, far away, smoke rising from the chimneys of a tiny village and a stone castle on a rocky bluff above it. The sky was a bright green.

  Kickaha looked pleased.

  “That looks like Dracheland. The third level, Abharhploonta. Either of you ever been there?”

  “I’ve made some forays into Jadawin’s world,” Urthona said. “I planned someday to … to …”

  “Take over from Jadawin? Forget it. Now, Urthona, activate a gate that’ll take you to the surface of your planet.”

  Urthona gasped and said, “But you said …! Surely …? You’re not going to abandon me here?”

  “Why not? You made this world. You can live in it the rest of your life. Which will probably be short and undoubtly will be miserable. As the Terrestrials say, let the punishment fit the crime.”

  “That isn’t right!” Urthona said. “You are letting Orc go back to Earth. It isn’t what I’d call a first-rate world, but compared to this, it’s a paradise.”

  “Look who’s talking about right. You’re not going to beg, are you? You, a lord among the Lords?”

  Urthona straightened his shoulders. “No. But if you think you’ve seen the last of me …”

  “I know. I’ve got another think coming. I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll bet you have a gate to some other world concealed in a boulder. But you aren’t letting on. Think you’ll catch me by surprise some day, heh? After you find the boulder—if you do. Good luck. I may be bored and need some stiff competition. Get going.”

  Urthona walked up to the wall. Anana spoke sharply. “Kickaha! Stop Him!”

  He yelled at the Lord, “Hold it, or I’ll shoot!”

  Urthona stopped but did not turn.

  “What is it, Anana?”

  She glanced at a huge chronometer on a wall.

  “Don’t you know there’s still danger? How do you know what he’s up to? What might happen when he gives the codeword? It’ll be better to wait until the last minute. Then Orc can go through, and you can shut the gate behind him. After that, we’ll go through ours. And then Urthona can gate. But he can do it with no one else around.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Kickaha said. “I was so eager to get back I rushed things.”

  He shouted, “Urthona! Turn around and walk back here!”

  Kickaha didn’t hear Urthona say anything. His voice must have been very soft. But the words were loud enough for whatever sensor was in the wall to detect them.

  A loud hissing sounded from the floor and the ceilings and the walls. From thousands of tiny perforations in the inner wall, clouds of greenish gas shot through the room.

  Kickaha breathed in just enough of the metallic odor to make him want to choke. He held his breath then, but his eyes watered so that he could not see Urthona making his break. Red Orc was suddenly out of sight, too. Anana, a dim figure in the green mists, stood looking at him. One hand was pinching her nose and the other was over her mouth. She was signalling to him not to breathe.

  She would have been too late, however. If he had not acted immediately to shut off his breath, he would, he was sure, be dead by now. Unconscious, anyway.

  The gas was not going to harm his skin. He was sure of that. Otherwise, Urthona would have been caught in the deadly trap.

  Anana turned and disappeared in the green. She was heading toward the gate to the world of tiers. He began running too, his eyes burning and streaming water. He caught a glimpse of Red Orc plunging through the gate to Earth I.

  And then he dimly saw Urthona’s back as he sped through the gate to the world which Kickaha loved so much.

  Kickaha felt as if he would have to cough. Nevertheless, he fought against the reflex, knowing that if he drew in one full breath, he would be done for.

  Then he was through the entrance. He didn’t know how high the gate was above the mountain slope, but he had no time for caution. He fell at once, landed on his buttocks, and slid painfully on a jumble of loose rocks. It went at a forty-five degree angle to the horizontal for about two hundred feet, then suddenly dropped off. He rolled over and clawed at the rocks. They cut and tore into his chest and his hands, but he dug in no matter how it hurt.

  By then he was coughing. No matter. He was out of the green clouds which now poured out of the hole in the mountain face.

  He stopped. Slowly, afraid that if he made a too vigorous movement he’d start the loose stones to sliding, he began crawling upward. A few rocks were dislodged. Then he saw Anana. She had gotten to the side of the gate and was clinging with one hand to a rocky ledge. The other held the Horn. Her eyes were huge, and her face was pale.

  She shouted, “Get up here and away! As fast as you can! The converter is going to blow soon.”

  He knew that. He yelled at her to get out of the area. He’d be up there in a minute. She looked as if she were thinking of coming down to help him, then she began working her way along the steep slope. He crawled at an angle toward the ledge she had grabbed. Several times he started sliding back, but he managed to stop his descent.

  Finally, he got off the apron of stones. He rose to a crouch and, grabbing handsful of grass, pulled himself up to the ledge. Holding onto this with one hand, he worked his way as swiftly as he dared away from the hole.

  The mountain shook and bellowed. He was hurled outward to land flat on his face on the miniledge.

  The loose rocks slid down and over the edge, leaving the stone beneath it as bare as if a giant broom had swept it.

  Silence except for the screams of some distant birds and a faint rumble as th
e stones slid to a halt far below.

  Anana said, “It’s over, Kickaha.”

  He turned slowly to see her looking around a spur of rock.

  “The gate would have closed the moment its activator was destroyed. We got only a small part of the blast, thank God. Otherwise, the whole mountain would’ve been blown up.”

  He got up and looked alongside the slope. Something stuck out from the pile below. An arm?

  “Did Urthona get away?”

  She shook her head. “No, he went over the edge. He didn’t have much of a drop, about twenty feet, before he hit the second slope. But the rocks caught him.”

  “We’ll go down and make sure he’s dead,” he said. “That trick of his dissolves any promises we made to him.”

  All that was needed was to pile more rocks on Urthona to keep the birds and the beasts from him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  It was a month later. They were still on the mountain, though on the other side and near its base. The valley was uninhabited by humans, though occasionally hunters ventured into it from the river-village. Kickaha and Anana avoided these.

  They’d built a leanto at first. After they’d made bows and arrows from ash, tipped with worked flint, they shot deer, which were plentiful, and tanned the hides. Out of these they made a tepee, well-hidden in a grove of trees. A brook, two hundred yards down the slope, gave them clear cold water. It also provided fine fishing.

  They dressed in buckskin hides and slept on bearskin blankets at night. They rested well but exercised often, hiking, berry- and nut-picking, hunting, and making love. They even became a little fat. After being half-starved so long, it was difficult not to stuff themselves. Part of their diet was bread and butter which they’d stolen from the village, two large bagsful.

  Kickaha, eavesdropping on the villagers, had validated his assumption that they were in Dracheland. And from a reference overheard, he had learned that the village was in the barony of Ulrich von Neifen.

  “His lord, theoretically, anyway, is the duke, or Herzog, Willehalm von Hartmot. I know, generally, where we are. If we go down that river, we’ll come to the Pfawe river. We’ll travel about three hundred miles, and we’ll be in the barony of Siegfried von Listbat. He’s a good friend. He should be. I gave him my castle, and he married my divorced wife. It wasn’t that Isote and I didn’t get along well, you understand. She just wouldn’t put up with my absences.”

  “Which were how long?”

  “Oh, they varied from a few months to a few years.”

  Anana laughed.

  “From now on, when you go on trips, I’ll be along.”

  “Sure. You can keep up with me, but Isote couldn’t, and she wouldn’t have even if she could.”

  They agreed that they would visit von Listbat for a month or so. Kickaha had wanted to descend to the next level, which he called Amerindia, and find a tribe that would adopt him. Of all the levels, he loved this the most. There were great forest-covered mountains and vast plains, brooks and rivers of purest water, giant buffalo, mammoth, antelope, bear, sabertooths, wild horses, beaver, game birds by the billions. The human population was savage but small, and though the second level covered more territory than North and Central America combined, there were few places where the name of Kickaha, the Trickster, was not known.

  But they must get to the palace-fortress on the top of this world, which was shaped like a tower of Babel. There they would gate through, though reluctantly, to Earth again. Reluctantly, because neither cared too much for Earth I. It was over-populated, polluted, and might at any time perish in atomic-warfare.

  “Maybe Wolff and Chryseis will be there by the time we get there. It’s possible they’re already there. Wouldn’t that be great?”

  They were on the mountain, above the rivervalley, when he said this. Halfway down the slope were the birches from which they would build a canoe. Smoke rose from the chimneys of the tiny village on the bend of the river. The air was pure, and the earth beneath them did not rise and fall. A great black eagle soared nearby, and two hawks slid along the wind, headed for the river and its plentitude of fish. A grizzly bear grunted in a berry patch nearby.

  “Anana, this is a beautiful world. Jadawin may be its Lord, but this is really my world, Kickaha’s world.”

  Red Orc’s Rage

  Dedicated to A. James Giannini, M.D., F.C.P., F.A.P.A., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Ohio State University, the consultant during the writing of this novel.

  In 1977, Doctor Giannini was in residency as a psychiatrist at Yale when he got the idea for what herein is called Tiersian therapy. Its actual development began in 1978 when he was in private practice in Youngstown, Ohio. In a letter dated December 28, 1978, he informed me that he was using a novel method of psychiatric therapy to treat troubled adolescents. This technique was based on my five-volume, science-fictional World of Tiers series. The patients, all volunteers, read the series and chose which character or characters to identify with and to try, in a sense, to become. The goals and methods of this therapy are outlined in this novel.

  At present, Doctor Giannini and colleagues are preparing for publication the technical papers describing the actual therapy and its results.

  Wellington Hospital Medical Center, Belmont City, Tarhee County, and all the people and events in the work at hand are fictional.

  My thanks to David McClintock of Warren, Ohio, for the Youngstown area data.

  CHAPTER 1

  November 26, 1979

  Jim Grimson had never planned to eat his father’s balls.

  He had not expected to make love to twenty of his sisters. He could not foresee that, while riding a white Steed, he would save his mother from a prison and a killer.

  How could he, seventeen years old in October of 1979, know that he had created this seemingly ten-billion-year-old universe?

  Though his father often called him a dumbbell and his teachers obviously thought he was one, Jim did read a lot. He knew the current theory of how the universe was supposed to have started. In the very beginning, before Time had started, the Primal Ball was the only thing existing. Outside of it was nothing, not even Space. All of the future universe, constellations, galaxies, everything, was packed into a sphere the size of his eyeball. This had gotten so hot and dense that it had blown up, out, and away. That explosion was called the Big Bang. Eons afterwards, the expanding matter had become stars, planets, and life on Earth.

  That theory was WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!

  Matter was not the only thing that could be put under tremendous heat and pressure. The soul could be squeezed too much. Then: BOOM!

  God Almighty and then some! Less than a month ago, he had reluctantly entered the mental ward of Wellington Hospital, Belmont City, Tarhee County, Ohio State. Then he had become, among other things, the Lord of several universes, a wanderer in many, and a slave in one.

  At this moment, he was back on his native Earth, same hospital. He was freezing with misery, burning with fury, and pacing back and forth in a locked room.

  Jim’s psychiatrist, Doctor Porsena, had said that Jim’s trips into other worlds were mental, though that did not mean they were not real. Thoughts were not ghosts. They existed. Therefore, they were real.

  Jim knew that his experiences in those pocket universes were as real as his pain when, not so long ago, he had driven his fist against his bedroom wall. And was not the blood flowing from the whiplashes on his back a witness to quell all doubts of his story? However, Doctor Porsena, scientist, rationalist, and rationalizer, would explain all puzzling phenomena with superb logic.

  Jim usually loved the doctor. Just now, he hated him.

  CHAPTER 2

  November 3, 1979

  “All previous patients,” Doctor Porsena said, “have tried other types of therapy. These failed to improve the patients, though part of that might be attributed to the patients’ hostility to psychiatric therapy of any kind.”

  “Old Chinese saying,” Jim Grimson
said. “‘You have to be nuts if you go to a psychiatrist.’ Another celestial proverb. ‘Insanity is not what it’s cracked up to be.’”

  L. Robert Porsena, M.D., F.C.P., head of the Wellington Hospital psychiatric unit, smiled thinly. Jim thought that he was probably thinking, Another smart-ass kid I got to deal with. Heard his rest-room-graffiti quotations a thousand times. ‘Celestial proverb’ indeed. He’s trying to impress me, show me that he isn’t just another ignorant drooling pimpled drugged-up rock-freak youth who’s gone off his rocker.

  On the other hand, Doctor Porsena might not be thinking that at all. It was hard to know what went on behind that handsome face that looked almost exactly like Julius Caesar’s bust except for the black Fu Manchu mustache and the patent-leather mod haircut. He smiled a lot. His keen light-blue eyes reminded Jim of the Mad Hatter’s song in Lewis Carroll’s Alice book. “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! How I wonder what you’re at! Up above the world you fly, Like a tea tray in the sky. Twinkle, twinkle—”

  Doctor Porsena’s adolescent patients said he was a shaman, a sort of miracle worker, a metropolitan medicine man with control over magical forces and far-out spirits.

  Doctor Porsena started to say something but was interrupted by his desk intercom. He flipped a switch and said, “Winnie, I told you! No calls!”

  Winnie, the beautiful black secretary sitting at her desk on the other side of the wall, evidently had something urgent on the line. Doctor Porsena said, “Sorry, Jim. This won’t take more than a minute.”

  Jim only half listened while he gazed out the window. The psychiatric unit and Porsena’s office were on the second story. The window was, like all windows in this area, covered with thick iron bars. Past breaks in the buildings beyond, Jim could see the tops of the waterfront structures. These were on the banks of the Tarhee River, which ran into the Mahoning River a mile to the south.

  He could also see the spires of St. Grobian’s and of St. Stephan’s. His mother had probably attended early morning Mass at the latter today. That was the only time she had now to go to worship. She was working at two jobs, partly because of him. The fire had destroyed everything except the painting of his grandfather, which had been brought out of the house along with him. His parents had moved into a relatively cheap furnished apartment some blocks from the old house. Too close to the Hungarian neighborhood to suit Eric Grimson. That ungrateful attitude was just like his father. Eva’s relatives—in fact, the entire Magyar area—had contributed money to help them out of their plight. A large part of the cash had been raised by a lottery. This was remarkable, for charitable donations had dropped considerably in the past few years because of the economic distress in the Youngstown area. But Eva’s family and friends and church had come through.