More Than Fire

by Philip José Farmer

  Kickaha put his pack down, reached in, and brought out a small ingot of gold. Holding it up and pointing with the other hand at the nearest animal, he said, “I’ll give you this for a horse.”

  Of course, they did not understand his words, but they understood his gestures. They spoke softly to each other, then turned their horses and charged him, swords in hand. He had expected this, since they looked to him like outlaws. His beamer ray, set at stun power, knocked them off their steeds. He caught one horse by the reins and was dragged for a few feet before it stopped. The other animal kept on running. After doffing all his clothes except for his pants and donning the stinking boots and tunic of the larger man, he rode away. He also had the man’s bow and quiver. He had kept his own pants because they would ease the chafing from riding. He had left the gold ingot on the ground by the unconscious bandits. They didn’t deserve it, but what the hell?

  The ride was far longer than he wanted, because he did not press his horse, and he had to find water and feed for it. As he neared the city, he encountered an increasingly heavier traffic. Farmers with wagons piled high with produce were going into the city, and wagons holding bales of goods rattled out of it. Once he passed a slave caravan, mostly Indian men and women linked together by iron collars and chains. The unchained children followed their parents. Though he felt sorry for the wretches, he could do nothing for them.

  Finally, he came to a pass that led down to the city, which was still some miles away. By then, he had exchanged some gold for local money, round copper or silver coins of various sizes and values. On each was stamped the profile of some big shot, and circling close to the rim were three words in an alphabet unfamiliar to him.

  This was a large city by the citizens’ standards, he supposed. His estimate was approximately one hundred thousand to one hundred fifty thousand population. It had a few squalid dwellings on the edge of the municipality. Their number increased as he rode closer to the ocean, though it was still miles from where he was. Here and there among these shacks and rundown stores were walled estates with huge houses. The streets seemed to have followed the paths of drunken cows until he was halfway along what would be the Hollywood Hills on his native planet. Then the dirt streets straightened out and became paved with large hewnstone blocks.

  Here and there were some tall, square, white stone buildings with twin domes, large front porches, and columns bulging in the middle and covered with the carved figures of troll-like heads and of dragons, lions, bears, and, surprisingly, elephants. Or were they mammoths? The streets were unpaved in this area. Narrow ditches along their sides were filled with water that stank of sewage. He supposed that there were stone-block or cobblestoned streets nearer to the coast, but he did not have time to see them.

  This city had its equivalent of the L.A. smog. The smoke from thousands of kitchen fires hung heavy over the valley.

  While he rode, he had been using his gate-detector. The light in it did not come on until he swept the “Hollywood Hills” area. Unlike the hills he had seen while on Earth I in 1970, these slopes were bare except for a score or so of mansions. Emanating from one on the very top of a hill were several bright spots. Gates.

  He could not be sure, but he thought that the large white building topped by two domes was where the Griffith Observatory would be on his native planet. If he remembered correctly what he had been told while in Los Angeles, a road led up through a park and ended at the observatory. It seemed probable that on this world, a private road to the same spot would have been laid out to the mansion. There was only one way to find out.

  It took several hours of searching to find it, because he could not ask directions of passersby. Finally, he came to a dirt road that led him to a road paved with large flat stones. That led toward the ocean and followed a course at the foot of the hills. But a road that wound to the top of the hill was dirt. He rode unhurriedly up it. The steep slope would be hard on a horse if it galloped or even cantered.

  While he was on a narrow lane flanked by tall trees, he figured out what he would do when he got close to the mansion. Though Red Orc lived in it now and then, he was probably unknown to most of the citizens. He had bribed some prominent citizen to front for him and to put the property in his name. Red Orc might not even leave his grounds. The mansion would be well guarded, and any entrance gates in the house would be trapped.

  At this moment, the Thoan might not be in the house. He was said to have other houses on several continents of Earth II. He gated from one to the other, depending upon what area he was interested in at the time. His spies reported indirectly to him on the current state of affairs in that part of this world, and he no doubt also read the news periodicals.

  Though the creator and hidden observer of both Earths, Red Orc made it a policy to interfere as little as possible with human affairs. The planets were his studies. He had made both in the image of his own planet, that is, the geological and geographical image of his now-ruined native world. But they had been been copies of his world when the human inhabitants were in the Early Stone Age.

  He had made artificial humans, then cloned one set, and put one on Earth I and one on Earth II. Each was exactly like the other in genetic makeup, and each had been placed in the same geographical location as the other. They were both in the same primitive state, and each of the corresponding tribes had spoken the same language. Thus, those placed in, say, what would be Algeria on Earth I and the exact same area on Earth II would speak the same language.

  Red Orc had observed the tribes on both Earths during the last twenty thousand years. Some Thoan said it was thirty thousand years, but no one except Red Orc knew the correct period of time. Whatever the date, he had watched the prehistory and history of humans on both planets. He had not devoted all of his time to observation there. He apparently just dropped in now and then to bring his information up to date. Or to conduct some of his nefarious business.

  Both planets were vast experiments in divergence. Though the various tribes had been, in the beginning, the exact counterparts of their duplicates on the other planet, including not only their physical forms but their languages, customs, and even names, there was a great difference after twenty thousand years.

  Kickaha did not have time to compare in detail how these people had diverged from those of Earth. Red Orc might have spies watching for him. The Thoan left as little to chance as possible; he guarded his own rear end. For all Kickaha knew, word of his coming might have reached Red Orc days ago.

  So be it.

  Halfway up the road, he came to a high stone wall across it and extending up into the hills. A dozen armed men were lounging in front of the gate. He turned around and rode back into town. There he managed to trade some of his small coins for lodging for his horse. The owner of the stables did not seem very curious. There were too many foreigners in this harbor city for him to be surprised to meet one, even out here, miles from the metropolitan area.

  Or it could be that he had been told by a Red Orc agent to pretend indifference.

  Kickaha walked back to the bottom of the hill and went into the woods a few yards from the road. Here he waited for nightfall, meanwhile napping and then eating his own rations and drinking from his own canteen. Though he was theoretically immune to any disease, he did not want to chance the local food or the water. After a long time, midnight came. By then, the sky was overcast. But he wore the headband and its attached night-vision device. He worked uphill through the trees some distance from the road until he came to the wall. Though it was ten feet high, he got over it easily by throwing a grappling hook and climbing up the rope.

  When he was on top and had drawn the rope up, he took from the backpack a sensor-detecting instrument given him by Khruuz. He swept the immediate area with it. It registered nothing. That only meant, however, that any sensors planted out there were not active. There could be plenty of passive detectors camouflaged as rocks or tree bark. It did not matter. He was pressing onward and upward.

  He
let himself down to the ground and whipped the hook free. After coiling it and hanging it from a strap on his belt, he climbed up almost vertical slopes. Then he came to less steep ground. Again, he swung the sensor-detector in a semicircle. Its light, set within a recess, did not come on.

  After he had climbed to the top of another stone wall, he used the detector again. Now, its indicator glowed. He set it to determine what frequency the detectors were on. Having done that, he rotated a dial on the machine’s side until it matched the frequency. Then he pressed a recessed button in its side. Immediately, the inset light turned off. The machine had now passively canceled the transmitted waves so that they would not register his body. But the alarms in Red Orc’s house might go off if this action was detected.

  He was, he thought, in a tiny canoe moving on a river of uncertainty and ambiguity, a craft leaking from holes, with the paddle on the point of breaking. But if it sank, he would swim on upstream.

  He wiped the sweat from his forehead and drank deeply from the canteen. This he had emptied and refilled a dozen times during his trip with water from clean streams flowing from the hills. He pushed through the thick bushes among the trees for a few yards, stopping when he saw the lights in the upper-story windows of the great mansion. The ground floor had no windows. Like those large houses in the valley, this building was constructed of white stone blocks.

  Kickaha removed his night-vision goggles and looked behind him and down. The valley was in darkness except for a few widely scattered lights, probably clusters of torches. He resumed his walk toward the east side of the house. The ground was level, and the gravel path he was following wound through beds of flowers. Forty feet from the house, the lawn began. Glancing at his detector now and then, Kickaha proceeded to the corner of the house and stuck his head around it. Lit by torches set in brackets on the front wall was a wide porch. Along the front edge of the porch were seven columns covered by carved figures.

  Two spearmen stood before the eight-foot-high arched doorway.

  He took two minutes to stun them with the beamer, tie their hands behind them and their feet together, and slap tape on their mouths. He did not know when the change of guard would be and did not care. There was no lock on the big iron door. Since it resisted his push, he supposed that it had been barred from the inside. His beamer cut through the door and the big rectangular wooden bolt behind it.

  The only noise was the sputter of melting metal and the clang as the bolt and metal bracket on the other side fell onto the floor. He had to push them aside when he entered. He stepped inside a well-lit room big enough to hold a medium-sized sailing ship. The illumination was the sourceless lighting of Thoan technology. Cool air was blowing from a wall vent near him.

  No one appeared to defend the house. After searching through the ground floor and finding no one there, he went up a wide staircase to the second story. There he found the room in which Anana had been subjected to the memory-uncoiling. It was as empty of people as the first floor. The third revealed nothing useful except the lights he saw through his gate-detector. So far, he had found gates on every floor, ten in all. Red Orc believed in having many escape routes close at hand.

  The “attics,” the twin domes, were entered by trapdoors in the ceiling of the third story. Though he did not expect to find anything significant there, he was wrong. Each dome housed an airboat. If Red Orc failed to get to a gate fast enough, he could use one of these to escape. Kickaha got into the cockpit of one and reacquainted himself with the controls and instruments. Having done that and started the motor, he pushed the button that energized the control mechanism of the dome door. It slid to one side, showing a still-cloudy sky.

  The airboat lifted and pointed toward the doorway. He was going to fly back to the Vasquez rocks and regate there to Manathu Vorcyon’s World. Since he was one-hundred-percent sure that all the gates in the house were trapped, he would take none. He was beginning to feel that Red Orc had guessed that he would break into the house. It was a wonder that the Thoan had not fixed it so that the house would blow up when any unauthorized person entered it.

  He pressed down on the acceleration pedal. The craft surged forward, pressing him against the back of the pilot’s chair. He should go slowly until he was out of the dome, but he was in a hurry.

  That haste was his undoing. Or maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference.

  In any event, when he saw the shimmering, which was a few inches outside the dome-hangar door, it was too late to stop. He howled, “Trapped!”

  The airboat passed through the shimmering curtain, the gate that Red Orc had set to be triggered when the craft approached it.

  16

  JUST AS HE BULLETED THROUGH THE VEIL, HE PRESSED TWO buttons to fire big and powerful “cannon” beamers, one on each side of the nose of the boat. Whatever was waiting for him on the other side was going to be blasted. Metal would melt, and flesh would be a cloud of atoms.

  No, they would not. The cannons failed to spit out the ravening beams that destroyed everything in their range.

  He should have checked them out before taking off. Red Orc had deactivated them.

  Though furious at himself for not testing the beamers, he did what was needed to keep the airboat from slamming into the opposite wall of the gigantic hangar he had shot into. His foot lifted from the acceleration pedal. At the same time, he turned the magnetic retro-fire dial to the fullpower position. His body surged forward slightly, but the pressure was so intense he felt crushed. The magnetic restraining field kept him from breaking his chest bones against the steering wheel. Its nosetip almost touching the wall, the boat had stopped.

  He slid back the canopy and looked over the side of the cockpit. About fifty feet below was the hangar floor. Parked at the rear of the vast room were two score airboats of different sizes and a zeppelin-shaped and -sized vessel. On the floor near the front of the building, a dozen men were aiming their beamers at him. What he had thought was a wall was the upper part of the closed hangar door.

  Red Orc walked out of the small doorway near the big one. He stood well back of the armed men and looked up. Though he seemed small at this distance, his voice was loud.

  “Bring the boat down slowly, and give yourself up! If you don’t, I’ll detonate the bomb in your boat!”

  Kickaha shrugged and then did as ordered. This was most probably the stonewall end of his life. He was sure that the Thoan did not need the Trickster anymore. Besides, his enemy had slipped away from him so slickly so many times that he would no longer chance his doing it again. But then, you never knew about Red Orc, a slippery and unpredictable customer himself.

  Kickaha turned off the motor. At the command of the soldiers’ officer, he threw his backpack and weapons out. Red Orc would now have a gate detector for his own use. He’d be one-up in the ever-shifting conflict between himself and his foes, Khruuz and Manathu Vorcyon. Kickaha got out of the cockpit and stood, hands held high, while the officer ran a metal detector over him and patted him down. The officer spoke in Thoan, and Kickaha put his hands behind his back. The officer used a hold-band to secure his wrists together.

  A woman walked through the doorway and then stopped by Red Orc’s side. She was beautiful. Her long straight black hair fell past her shoulders. Her dress was a simple red shift; her feet were sandaled.

  Kickaha cried, “Anana!”

  She looked blankly at him and questioningly at the Thoan.

  “She doesn’t know you, Kickaha!” Red Orc said. He put one arm around her. “I haven’t told her about you, but I will. She’ll find out what a vicious and murderous man you are. Not that she’ll be very interested in you.”

  Many bad things had been happening to Kickaha. This seemed the worst to him.

  Red Orc told the officer to take the prisoner away.

  “We’ll see each other soon,” he said. “Our final talk will be, in a sense, our last one.”

  In a sense? What did that mean?

  Anana was looking stra
ight at him. Her face showed pity for him. But that would soon change to repulsion when the lying Thoan told her what a cowardly backstabbing lowlife he was.

  “Don’t believe a word he says about me!” Kickaha shouted at her. “I love you! You loved me once, and you’ll love me again!”

  She pressed closer to Red Orc. He put his hand on her breast. Kickaha surged forward but was brought to his knees by a beamer butt slamming the back of his head. Dazed, his head hurting, and with vomit rising, he was marched away. Halfway to the building that would be his prison, he got the dry heaves. But his guards urged him on with kicks.

  Even though sick, he observed the land around him and the big building he was headed for. It was in a large clearing surrounded by trees. These were growing so closely together that their branches interlocked, moving up and down and sometimes bending around other branches. They looked as if they were feeling each other up. He did not need to be told that they were watchdog trees. Whether or not they just held an escapee or ate him, they were tough obstacles.

  The sky was blue and clear except for some very high and thin clouds. The sun was like Earth’s. That meant nothing, because many suns in many worlds looked like the Terrestrial sun. Some were as large as the sun; some very tiny, though they looked large.

  The guards were tall blue-eyed men with Dutch-bobbed brown, red, or blond hair. They wore yellow calf-length boots and baggy green knee-length shorts attached to a harnesslike arrangement over their shoulders. Broad leather straps running diagonally across their chests bore metal sunburst badges.

  Kickaha had never seen such uniforms before. For all he knew, he could still be on Earth II but in a place distant from the “Los Angeles” area.

  The building into which he was conducted was onion-shaped, and its front bore clusters of demonic and snakelike figures locked in combat or copulating.