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

  Anana nodded and said, “Test it.”

  He went to the side of the invisible hexagon opposite that from which they had stepped out. He lifted the Horn and blew the seven notes. Nothing visible happened, but when he thrust his tomahawk through the space where the hexagon must be, the weapon disappeared up to his hand. As they had suspected, each side was a gate.

  “It’s probably part of a gate maze,” she said.

  He leaped through the hexagon, landed on both feet, and stepped forward. Two seconds later, Anana followed. They were in a large, doorless, and windowless room made of a greenish, semitransparent, and hard substance. The room could have been carved out of a single huge jewel. The only light came from outside it. It showed unmoving objects too dim to be seen clearly. Against the wall opposite him was the outline of a hexagon in thin black lines. Unless a trick was being played upon them, the lines enclosed a gate.

  The air was heavy, thick, stale, and unmoving. Near his feet were two skeletons, one human and one semihuman. In the midst of the bones were two belt buckles, golden rings set with jewels, and one beamer. Kickaha leaned over and picked up the pistollike beamer. That made him breathe deeper than he should have. The lack of oxygen was making his heart beat overfast, and his throat was beginning to tighten.

  “I think,” Anana said, “that we don’t have much time to spend trying to get through the gate. Our predecessors didn’t have the code, and so they died quickly.”

  Theoretically, the two previous occupants of the room should have used up all the oxygen in it. But there was enough here to keep the two from beginning to strangle at once. Obviously, the owner of the gate had brought in some oxygen to replace what the dead intruders had used. Just enough to torture the next occupants with the knowledge of their sure fate.

  “We’ve got maybe a minute!” Kickaha said.

  He pressed the button on the beamer that indicated the amount of energy left in the fuel supply. A tiny digital display by the button showed that enough fuel was left for ten half-second full-power bursts. After shoving the barrel of the beamer between his waist and his belt, he put the mouthpiece of the Horn to his lips. It was not necessary to blow hard. The output of the seven notes was at the same noise level, regardless of the input.

  As the last silvery note bounced around in the small room, Anana thrust the head of her spear into the area of wall on which the lines were painted. It disappeared. Then she withdrew it. It showed no signs of damage or fire. That did not mean much, as both knew. Nevertheless, by now Kickaha’s lungs were sending signals to him, and his throat seemed to be falling in on itself. Anana’s face showed that she, too, was feeling panic.

  Despite his increasing need for fresh air, he turned around and blew the seven-note sequence again, directing it at the blank wall opposite the inscribed one. It was possible that there was a gate there also, one its maker had hidden there. The gate with the hexagon might be a deadly trap for the uncautious.

  He could not see any change in the wall, but Anana drove her spear hard against it at different places to determine if an invisible gate was there. The metal head clanged and bounced off the glassy substance, which boomed as if it were a drum. They would have to take the one way open.

  Anana, her spear held out, leaped through the gate. He followed her several seconds later. As usual, he winced a little when it seemed that he would slam into the wall. Though his conscious mind knew that he would not do so, he could not convince his unconscious mind. As he passed through the seeming solid, he glimpsed the hexagonal structure a foot beyond the gate. Then he was through a second gate and had landed by Anana. She looked astonished. This was the first time she had encountered a second gate immediately beyond the first.

  Fresh air filled his lungs. He said, “Ah! My God, that’s good!”

  If they had not had the Horn, they would be dead by now.

  “Less than a second in one world and on to the next,” Anana said.

  They did not have much time to look around. Now, they were in an enormous room. The ceiling was at least a hundred feet high, and it and the walls were covered with paintings of creatures he had never seen before. The bright light came from everywhere.

  And then the room was replaced by a sandy plain that stretched unbroken to a horizon much more distant than that on Earth, an orange sun, and a purple sky. The air was heavy, and Kickaha suddenly felt as if gravity had increased.

  Before he could say anything, he and Anana were on the top of a peak, a flat area so small that they had to cling to each other to keep from falling off. For as far as they could see, mountains extended all around them. The wind blew strong and cold. Kickaha estimated it must be producing a chill factor of zero or lower. The sun was sinking below the peaks, and the sky was greenish-blue.

  There was nothing to indicate that a gate was nearby. It was probably buried in the rock on which they were standing.

  A few seconds later, they were on a beach that seemed to be tropical. It could have been on Earth. The palm trees waved behind them in the sea breeze. The yellow sun was near its zenith. The black sand under their bare feet was hot. They would have had to run for the trees if they had not built up such thick calluses on the bottom of their feet.

  “I think we’re caught in a resonant gate circuit,” Kickaha said.

  But hours passed, and they were not moved on. Tired of waiting for something to happen, they walked along the beach until they came to the place where they had started.

  “We’re on an island—actually, an islet,” Kickaha said. “About half a mile in circumference. Now what?”

  The horizon was unbroken. There could be a land mass or another island just beyond the horizon, or the sea could go for thousands of miles before its waves dashed against a beach. Kickaha studied the trees, which had seemed at first glance to be palm trees. But they bore clusters of fruit that looked like giant grapes. If they were not poisonous, they could sustain life for some time. Maybe. The trees could be cut down and trimmed to make a raft with the beamer. However, there were no vines to bind the logs together.

  The Lord who had arranged for his victims to stop here had meant for them to starve to death eventually.

  Kickaha walked along the beach again while he blew the Horn. Then he walked in decreasing circles until the range of the notes had covered every bit of ground. There were no flaws or unactivated gates here. That the Horn could not reactivate the gate that had admitted them here meant one thing. It was a one-way gate. The Lord who had set this up had put a “lock” on it, a deactivating device. It was seldom used because it required much energy to maintain it. Also, not many Lords had this ancient device.

  “Eventually, the lock will dissolve,” Anana said, “and the circuit will be open again. But I think we’ll have died before then. Unless we can get away from here to a large landmass.”

  “And then we won’t know where we are unless we’ve been to this universe before.”

  He used the beamer to cut a cluster of the baseball-sized fruits from a branch. The impact of the fall split some open. Though he was forty feet from the cluster, its odor reached him immediately. It wasn’t pleasant.

  “Phew! But the stink doesn’t mean they’re not edible.”

  Nevertheless, neither offered to bite into the fruit. When they became hungry enough, they would try it. Meanwhile, they subsisted on the rations in their backpacks.

  On the evening of the third day, they lay down on the beach to sleep. This area was where they had entered the universe, and they stayed within it as much as possible. If the gate was reactivated, they would be within its sphere of influence.

  “The Lord has not only made us prisoner on this islet,” Kickaha said. “He has also confined us to a cell of sorts. I’m really getting tired of being in a prison.”

  “Go to sleep,” Anana said.

  The night sky was replaced by bright sunlight. They scrambled up from their sand beds as Kickaha said, “This is it!” He and Anana grabbed their backpacks and weapons
. Three seconds later, they were standing on a narrow platform and looking down into an abyss.

  Then they were in a cave, bright sunlight coming from its opening. He lifted the Horn to his lips. Before he could blow it, they were on a tiny rock elevated a few feet above a sea. He gasped, cutting off his blowing of the Horn, and Anana cried out. A gigantic wave was charging toward them. Within seconds, it would carry them off the rock.

  Just before the base of the wave reached the rock, they were in one of the small rooms so numerous in this circuit. Again, Kickaha tried to blow the Horn and activate a gate that would shuttle them off from this circuit. But he did not have time. Nor did he have during the next twelve stations they whizzed through.

  Like it or not—and they did not—they were caught in the dizzying circle. Then, when they were again in the room at the top of the tower set in the deserted city, he had just enough time to complete the seven notes. And they were transmitted to the most amazing and unexpected place they had ever encountered.

  “I think we’ve broken the circuit!” Kickaha said. “Have you ever heard of a place like this?”

  Anana shook her head. She seemed to be awed. After living so many thousands of years, she was not easily impressed.

  3

  The scaly man was the centerpiece of the enormous room.

  Whether he was a corpse or in suspended animation, he had perhaps been born one or two hundred thousand years ago. The two intruders in this colorful and vibrant tomb had no way of testing its antiquity. They just felt that the tomb had been built when their own exceedingly remote ancestors had not been born yet. It seemed to sweat eons.

  “Have you ever heard of this person?” Kickaha whispered. Then, realizing that he had no need to whisper, he spoke loudly.

  “I get this feeling that we’re the first to be here since that … creature was laid to rest here.”

  “I’m not so sure that he is permanently resting. And no, I’ve never heard of this place. Or of him. Not his name, anyway, whatever his name is. But …”

  Anana paused, then said, “My people had stories about a sapient but nonhuman species who preceded us Thoan. They were said to have created us. Whether the tales were originally part of the prehistoric Thoan cultures or were early fiction, we don’t know. But most Thoan insist that we originated naturally, that we were not made by anybody. My ancestors did make the leblabbiys, your kind. These, with a multitude of lifeforms, were made in my ancestors’ biofactories to populate their artificial pocket universes. But that we Thoan could be artificial beings, never!

  “However, the stories did describe the Thokina as somewhat like that creature there. But the Thokina were a different species from us. We were supposed to have invaded their universe and killed all but one. I don’t know. There were conflicting legends about them.”

  In the middle of the room was a short massive pillar on top of which was a large, transparent, and brightly lit cube. The being, its seemingly dead eyes open, was suspended inside the cube.

  “One of the early tales was that the one Thokina who survived the war hid somewhere. He placed himself in an impenetrable tomb. Then, he went into a sleep from which he will not be awakened until the worlds are in danger of destruction.”

  “Why should he care if the worlds are destroyed?”

  “I’m just telling you the story as it was handed down for countless generations,” she said. “But how do you explain him? Or this place? Part of the legend was that he was keeping an eye on the world. Look at all those images on the wall. They show many universes. Some of them look contemporary.”

  “How could he keep an eye on the worlds? He’s unconscious or, for all we know, dead.”

  Anana spread her hands out. “How would I know?”

  Kickaha did not reply. He was looking around the dome-shaped chamber, which was larger than a zeppelin hangar. In the sourceless light filling the room, the intensely blue ceiling dazzled him. Despite this, he could, by squinting his eyes, see that thousands of shifting forms were spaced along the curve of the ceiling. Most of them seemed to be letters of a strange alphabet or mathematical formulae. Sometimes, he glimpsed art forms that seemed to have been originated by an insane brain. But that was because of his own cultural mindset.

  Horizontal bands of swiftly varying colors and hues sped around the wall. Set among the bands were seemingly three-dimensional scenes, thousands of them. These flashed on and were replaced by others. Kickaha had walked around the wall and looked at the scenes that were at eye level. Some were of landscapes and peoples of various worlds he had visited. One was a bird’s-eye view of Manhattan. But at its lower end was a twin-towered skyscraper higher than the Empire State Building.

  The images came and went so swiftly. His eyes ached after watching them for a few minutes. He closed them for a moment. When he opened them, he turned to look at the main attraction. The base of the tomb was round, and vertical bands of colors and hues raced up and down it. The creature inside the cube was naked and obviously male. Its testicles were enclosed in a globular sac of blue cartilage with air holes on its surface. Its penis was a thick cylinder with no glans or foreskin and bore thin, tightly coiled tentacles on each side.

  Anana, first seeing these, had grunted and then said, “I wonder …?”

  “What?” Kickaha had said.

  “Its mate must have had an extra dimension of sex, of sexual pleasure, I mean. True, those tentacles could have just been used for purely reproductive purposes. But they may have titillated the female in some way I can’t imagine.”

  “You’ll never know,” he had said.

  “Maybe I won’t. However, the unexpected happens as often as the expected. It certainly does when I’m in your neighborhood.”

  The creature was about seven feet long. Its body was very similar in structure to a man’s, and the four-toed feet and five-fingered hands were humanoid enough. Its massive muscles were gorilloid. The skin was reptilian; the scales were green, red, black, blue, orange, purple, lemon-yellow, and pink.

  The spine, ridged like a dinosaur’s, curved at its top so that the very thick neck bent forward.

  Seven greenish plates that could be of bone or cartilage covered the face. The eyes were dark green and arranged for stereoscopic vision though much more widely apart than on a man’s face.

  A bony plate just below the jaw made it seem that the creature was chinless. Its lipless, slightly opened mouth was a lizard’s. From it hung a tongue looking like a pink worm.

  The nose and the rest of the face above it formed a shallow curve. Halfway up the head, short, flat-lying, and reddish fronds began and proceeded down around the back of the head to its columnar neck. If there were bony plates under the mat, they did not show.

  The tiny ears were manlike but set very far back on the head.

  “You don’t suppose,” Anana said, “that that thing could actually be the last of the Thokina?”

  She answered herself. “Of course not! It’s just coincidence!”

  They stood silently for a while and stared around. Then Kickaha said, “There’s no way we can find answers to our questions here. Not unless we stay a long while, and we don’t have the food, water, and instruments needed to do that. Yet, we should spend some time here.”

  “We have to get out of here,” she said, “and we don’t know we can do that. I suggest we find out how to do that now!”

  “There’s no danger. Not any we know about, anyway. I think we should stay here awhile and see what we can find out. It might come in useful someday.”

  They had enough food and water to last four days if they were conserved. There was no place to get rid of their body wastes, but a corner in this immense chamber could serve. It seemed to Kickaha that doing that desecrated the place, but that was an irrational feeling.

  “What if something happens here that makes it imperative we leave at once?” she said.

  Kickaha thought for a moment, then said, “Okay. You’re right.”

  He w
alked to the place near the wall where they had stepped through the gate, and he blew the Horn of Shambarimen. As it often did, the music evoked in him images of marvelous beasts, wondrous plants, and exotic people. It seldom failed to send shivers along the nerves of those who heard it and to summon up from the depths of their minds things and beings never imagined before.

  The last note seemed to hover like a mayfly determined to have several more seconds of its short life. A shimmering area about five feet wide and ten feet high opened before Kickaha. The flashing wall of the chamber behind it disappeared. He was looking at a stone floor and stone walls. He had seen them before and not long ago. From the room they formed he and Anana had gated through to this gigantic tomb. It was an escape avenue, but he preferred to take another gate, if it was available. This one would lock them into the circuit again.

  The room faded away after five seconds. The walls of the chamber and the on-off bursts of light were views of parts of other universes.

  “Find another gate if you can,” Anana said.

  “Of course,” he said, and he began walking slowly along the wall and blowing the Horn over and over again. Not until he had gotten halfway around the chamber did a gate open. He saw a large boulder twenty feet ahead of him. Around and beyond it was a flat desert and blue sky.

  He did not know in what universe this landscape was located. For all he knew, it could be somewhere on the planet on which he now stood. Gates could also transport you only a few feet or halfway around the planet.

  The rest of the walk along the wall found no more gates. He then began a circuit twenty feet out from the wall. But Anana, a few feet from him, called.

  “Come here! I just saw something very interesting!”

  He strode to her side. She was looking up at a spot where images seemingly shot out of the wall and then shot back into it.

  “It showed Red Orc!” she said. “Red Orc!”

  “Recognize the background?”

  “It could have been on any one of a thousand worlds. A body of water, could have been a large lake or a sea, was behind him. It looked as if he were standing on the edge of a cliff.”