The Magic Labyrinth

by Philip José Farmer

  Afterward, they looked for toilets. These were in some nearby giant cabinets which they'd presumed had contained machinery. The toilets didn't flush; they were holes into which the urine and excrement disappeared before they hit the bottom. Gilgamesh ate some of the bread, then vomited it up. "I can't go with you," he said. He wiped his chin and squirted water from his mouth into a sink. "I'm just too sick." Burton wondered if he were as ill as he said he was. He could be an agent and waiting until he could slip away.

  "No, you go with us," he said. "We might not be able to find our way back to you. You'll be comfortable in your chair." He led the others to the shaft. When he took the chair out over the emptiness, he extended a foot to touch below it. His toes met no slight springiness as in the other shaft. Perhaps the presence of the chairs automatically removed the field.

  He pulled the rod back and tipped the disc. The chair moved slowly upward, then swiftly as Burton depressed the disc even more. At each bay he saw more corridors and some rooms. The latter were full of strange equipment, but there were no skeletons until he came to the tenth floor. The chamber he looked into was small compared to the one he'd left. It contained twelve large tables on each of which were twelve plates and twelve cups and some skulls and bones. Other bones lay on the chairs or at their feet.

  A huge food-box was on a table in the corner.

  Burton went on up, stopping now and then, until he arrived at the top of the shaft. The trip had taken fifteen minutes. On one side was another bay with a corridor outside. On his left was a small corridor which quickly opened into a giant one, at least one hundred feet square. After setting the chair down in the larger hallway, he leaned over the shaft and blinked his lantern three times. The answering flashes were tiny but sharp. Nur, the next one, would not make any stops and so would get to Burton in about twelve minutes.

  Burton had never been patient except when it was absolutely necessary and often not then. He got back into the chair and moved down the hall. He'd take a six-minute tour and then return to the shaft.

  He passed many open doors, all very large, giving him eye access to small and large rooms, some with equipment, some apparently for apartments. A number had many skeletons; some, a few; some, none. The corridor ran straight for at least two miles ahead of him. Just before it was time to return, he saw on his right an entrance with a closed door. He stopped the chair, got out, withdrew his pistol, and cautiously approached the door. Above it were thirteen symbols, twelve helices arranged in a circle with a sundisc in the center. There was no knob on the door. Instead, a metal facsimile of a human hand was attached to the door where a knob should have been. Its fingers were half closed as if about to seize another hand. Burton turned it, and he pulled the door open. The room was a very large, very pale-green semitransparent sphere surrounded by and intersected by other green bubbles. On the wall of the central sphere at one side was an oval of darker green, a moving picture of some sort. The odor of pine and dogwood rose from the trees in the background, and in the foreground a ghostly fox chased a ghostly rabbit. On the bottom of the largest sphere, or bubble, were twelve chairs in a circle. Ten contained parts of skeletons. Two were bare of anything, even dust.

  Burton had to breathe deeply. This room brought back frightening memories. It was here that he had awakened after killing himself 777 times to escape the Ethicals. It was here that he had faced the Council.

  Now those beings who had seemed so godlike to him were bones.

  He put one foot beyond the threshold, poking it through the bubble with only a slight resistance. His body followed, feeling the same tiny push. Then his other foot came through, and he was standing on springy nothingness or what seemed to be nothingness.

  He reholstered his pistol and passed through two bubbles, the surfaces closing behind him, but air moving past him, and then he was in the "Council room." When he got near the insubstantial chairs, he saw that he'd been mistaken. One of the seemingly empty seats held a very thin circular convex lens. He picked it up and recognized the many-faceted "eye" of the man who'd seemed to be the chief of the Council, Thanabur.

  This was no jewel, no artificial device to replace an eye, as he'd thought then. It was a lens which could be slipped over the eye. It felt greasy. Perhaps it was lubricated so it wouldn't irritate the eyeball.

  With some difficulty and revulsion, he inserted the lens under his eyelid.

  The left eye saw the room through a distorting semi-opaqueness. Then he closed his right eye.

  "Oooohhhh!"

  He quickly opened the right eye.

  He'd been floating in space, in a darkness in which distant stars and great gas sheets shone and there was the feeling, but not the direct effect, of unbelievable coldness. He'd been aware that he was not alone, though. He knew, without having seen them, that he was followed by uncountable souls, trillions upon trillions, perhaps far more. And then he was shooting toward a sun, and it became larger, and suddenly he saw that the flaming body was not a star but a vast collection of other souls, all flaming, yet burning not as in Hell but with an ecstasy that he'd never experienced and which the mystics had tried to describe but was indescribable.

  Though shaken and afraid, he was also pulled fiercely by the ecstasy. Moreover, he could not allow his fear to overcome him, he who had boasted that he had never feared anything.

  He closed his right eye and was again in space in the same "location." Again, he was hurtling through space, far swifter than light, toward the sun. Again, he felt the innumerable presences behind him. The star swam up, grew larger, became vast, and he saw that the flames were composed of trillions upon trillions upon trillions of souls.

  Then he heard a soundless cry, one of unutterable ecstasy and welcome, and he plunged headfirst into the sun, the swarm, and he was nothing and yet everything. Then, he wasn't he any more. He was something which had no parts and was not a part but was one with the ecstasy, with the others who were not others.

  He gave a great cry and opened his eye. There were Alice and Nur and Frigate and his companions staring at him from the doorway. Trembling, he went to them through the bubbles. He was not so upset, however, that he did not notice that the Sumerian was missing nor that Alice was weeping.

  He ignored their questions, saying, "Where's Gilgamesh?"

  "He died on the way up," Alice said.

  "We left him sitting in the chair in a room," Nur said. "He must have had a brain concussion."

  "I killed him!" Alice said, and she sobbed.

  "I'm sorry for that," Burton said, "but it couldn't be helped. If he was innocent, he shouldn't have resisted. Perhaps he really was an agent."

  He put his arms around Alice and said, "You did what you had to do. If you hadn't, he might've killed me."

  "Yes, I know. I've killed before, but those people were strangers attacking us. I liked Gilgamesh, and now . . ."

  Burton thought it was best to allow her to weep out her guilt and grief. He released her and turned to the others. Nur asked him what he had been doing in the room. He told them of the lens.

  "You must've been standing there for at least an hour."

  Frigate said.

  "Yes, I know, but the state seemed to last only a minute."

  "What about the aftereffects?" Nur said.

  Burton hesitated, then said, "Apart from being shaken up, I feel . . . I feel . . . a tremendous closeness to all of you! Oh, I've been fond of some of you, but . . . now . . . I love all of you!"

  "That must've been a shock," Frigate murmured. Burton ignored him.

  The Moor held up the multifaceted device and looked through it with his right eye closed.

  "I see nothing. It has to be fitted next to the eye."

  Burton said, "I thought that the lens was something which only the chief of the twelve, Thanabur, would wear. I presumed that it was some sort of ritual token or emblem of leadership, something traditional. I may've been wrong. Perhaps everybody took a turn wearing it during the Council meetings. It may be t
hat the lens gave all of them a feeling such as I had, a closeness and love for everybody in the room."

  "In which case, X was able to overcome that feeling," Tai-Peng said.

  "What I don't understand," Burton said, "is why the lens put me into a trance yet didn't seem to affect Thanabur."

  "Perhaps," Nur said, "the Councilors were used to it. After wearing it many times, they got only a mild effect from it."

  Nur fitted the lens under his eyelids and shut his right eye. Immediately, his face took on an expression of ecstasy, though his body remained motionless. When two minutes had passed, Burton shook the Moor by the shoulder. Nur came out of his trance and began weeping. But when he'd recovered and had taken the lens out, he said, "It does induce a state similar to that which the saints have attempted to describe."

  He handed the lens to Burton.

  "But it's a false state brought about by an artificial thing. It's not the true state. That can only be attained by spiritual development."

  Some of the others wanted to try. Burton said, "Later. We may have used up time we sorely need. We have to find X before he finds us."

  48

  * * *

  They came to an enormous closed door above which were more of the untranslatable characters. Burton halted the train of chairs and got out of his. A button on the wall seemed to be the only obvious means of opening the doors. He pressed, and the two sections slid away from each other into recesses. He looked into a wide hall ending in two more huge doors. Burton pressed the button by that.

  They looked into a domed chamber which had to be half a mile across. The floor was earth on which grew a bright green short-bladed grass and, further on, trees. Brooks ran through it here and there, their sources cataracts forty or fifty feet high. Flowering bushes were many, and there were flat-topped rocks which had served as tables, if the plates and cups and cutlery on them meant anything.

  The ceiling was a blue across which wisps of clouds moved, and a simulacrum of the sun was at its zenith.

  They walked in and looked around. Human skeletons lay here and there, the nearest around a rock. There were also the bones of birds, deer, and some catlike and doglike and raccoonlike animals.

  "They must've come here to get back to Nature," Frigate said. "A very reasonable facsimile thereof, anyway."

  They had reasoned that X had transmitted a radio code which had activated the tiny black ball in the brains of the tower-dwellers and caused poison to be released in their bodies. But why had the animals died?

  Starvation.

  They left the chamber. Before they had traveled a mile, they came across another curiosity, the most puzzling and awe-inspiring of all: A transparent outward-leaning wall on their left revealed a Brobdingnagian shaft. A bright shifting light flared from below. They got off the chairs to look down into the well. And they cried out with wonder.

  Five hundred feet below them was a raging furnace of many differently colored shapes, all closely packed but seeming to pass through each other or to merge at times.

  Burton shaded his eyes with a hand and stared into it. After a while he could occasionally distinguish the shapes of the things that whirled around and around and shot up and down and sideways.

  He turned away, his eyes hurting.

  "They're wathans. Just like those I saw above the heads of the twelve Councilors. The well must be of some material which enables us to see them."

  Nur handed him a pair of dark glasses.

  "Here. I found these in a box on a shelf near here."

  Burton and the others put on the glasses and stared into the enormous well. Now he could see the things more clearly, the changing shifting colors in the always expanding-contracting shapes, the six-sided tentacles which shot out, flailed, waved, then shrank back into the body.

  Burton, leaning out, his back pressed against the wall, looked up. The brightness showed him a ceiling of the gray metal about a hundred feet above him. He turned around and tried to see across to the other side of the well. He couldn't. He peered down into it. Far far below was a gray solid. Or was it his imagination, an illusion created by the metamorphosing horde, that made him now think that the solidity was pulsing?

  He stepped back, removed the glasses, and rubbed his aching eyes.

  "I don't know what this means, but we can't stay here any longer."

  They'd passed a number of bays enclosing lift shafts with no upper passage. But after they'd gone a quarter of a mile, they came to one which extended up past their level.

  "This may take us to the floor where the gateway is."

  Again, they waited until each person had gotten safely up the shaft before the next flew up.

  The bay opened onto another corridor. There were thirteen doors along this, each an entrance into a very large suite of luxuriously furnished rooms. In one was a table of some glossy reddish hardwood on which was a transparent sphere. Suspended in it were three doll-sized shapes.

  "Looks like Monat and two other of his kind," Burton said.

  "Something like three-dimensional photographs," Frigate said.

  "I don't know," Alice said. "But there seems to be a family resemblance. Of course, I suppose they'd all look alike to anyone not familiar with the race. Still . . ."

  Croomes had not said a word for a long time. Her grim face had indicated, though, that she was struggling terribly to accept the reality of this place. Nothing here had been what she expected; there had been no welcoming choir of angels, no glory-blazing God on a throne with her mother standing at His right hand to greet her.

  Now she said, "Those two could be his parents."

  There were many things to investigate in the rooms, but Burton hurried them on out.

  They had gone about two hundred feet when they came to a bay, the first they'd seen on the right-hand wall. Burton got out from the chair and looked along the shaft. Its bottom was level with the floor; the top wasn't more than fifty feet up.

  Wisps of fog rushed across it, apparently drawn from the outside and through vents in the wall opposite.

  He withdrew his head.

  "That might lead to the dome on the outside, the one which only Piscator could enter."

  The Japanese had been intelligent and brave. He'd probably done as Burton had, tested the invisible field in the shaft, figured out that it would hold him, and then descended. But how could he have activated the field if he didn't know the codeword or whatever it was that operated it?

  However, this shaft was different from the others. It was very short, and there was only one way to go if you were at the top. Sensors might determine that the field was activated if someone came in from the top. The sensors could detect that there was only one person and that he wouldn't be standing in the field unless he wanted to go down. To go up would require a codeword of some sort. Or maybe it didn't, the bottom part of the field would act like the top, only in the reverse direction.

  Where was Piscator?

  To test his theory, Burton stepped into the shaft. After three seconds, he was lifted slowly upward. At the top of the shaft, he stepped out into a short metal corridor. It curved near its end and undoubtedly opened into the corridor in the dome.

  Fog billowed around the corner, but the lights were strong enough to pierce it.

  He walked into the corridor and at once felt a very slight resistance. Its strength increased as he advanced struggling.

  When he was panting and unable to go even an inch farther, he turned back. His way was unimpeded to the shaft. When he returned to the lower level, he gave a short report.

  "The field works both ways," he concluded.

  The Moor said, "According to the Parseval report, there was only one entrance. Yet . . .there must be an opening, a door of some kind, for the aircraft to come in. There were none on top of the tower. I think, however, that they just weren't visible. Also, there must be ethical fields in the entrances for the aircraft. Otherwise, anybody could go in that way. Including X. Surely he must have gone out on
legitimate business from time to time in an aerial vessel."

  "You forget about the hypothetical wathan distorter," Burton said. "That would've enabled X to get through the dome entrance, too."

  "Yes. I know that. What I'm getting at is that if we could find the hangar for the aircraft, and then find out how to operate them, we could leave here at any time we pleased."

  "They'd better be easier and simpler to fly than an airplane," Frigate said.

  "No doubt they are."

  "Say, I've got an idea," Frigate said, grinning. "Piscator was a Sufi, and he had no trouble entering. You're a Sufi and a highly developed ethicalist. Why don't you go out and try to get back in through the dome?"

  The Moor grinned back at him.

  "You'd like to see if I really am as advanced as I should be, wouldn't you? And what happens if I can't get out? Or, if I do, can't get back in? No, Peter. It would be a waste of time and an exhibition of pride on my part. You know that, yet you urge me to do it. You are teasing me. As a disciple, you sometimes lack the proper reverent attitude toward your master."

  They returned to their chairs and flew slowly down the curving corridor. Burton was beginning to feel that their tour was very informative, even if often puzzling, but useless. This was no way to go about finding X.

  What else could they do? There were no directories on the walls, and they couldn't read them if there were. It was frustrating and futile to proceed in this manner, yet they just couldn't sit around in one place and hope that X would find them. If he did, he'd be armed with some irresistible weapon. No doubt of that.

  On the other hand, they had been fortunate in locating the residences of the twelve and of Monat Grrautut and the dome entrance. Perhaps, the place where X did his experiments or a control center he used might be near his apartment.