The Magic Labyrinth

by Philip José Farmer

  They came to a closed door and passed it. There would be many thousands of such in this vast place. They couldn't afford the time to open every one.

  But when he was thirty feet beyond it, Burton raised his hand to signal a halt.

  "What is it?" Alice said.

  "I've a certain feeling, a strong hunch."

  He lowered the chair to the floor.

  "I'll just take a moment to check this out."

  He pressed a button on the wall by the door, and the door slid soundlessly into a recess. Beyond was a cavernous room with much varied equipment on tables and, against the walls, many cabinets. There was only one skeleton. A violent explosion had evidently caught someone as he was passing by a cabinet or doing something with it. The top of the cabinet had been blown off, judging from the outwardly twisted metal, the pieces of some glassy substance on the floor, and metal pieces inside the skeleton. It lay twenty feet out from the wreck, and under the bones were dark bloodstains.

  Just beyond the skeleton the blast had knocked a star-shaped metal construction from the top of a table. It lay on the floor emitting what looked like many-colored heat waves.

  Straight ahead of Burton and near the center of the room was a flying chair. It was on the floor and tenantless, one side to him, and fresh bloodstains on the arm.

  Just beyond the chair was a great revolving disc on a cylinder about two feet high. Cabinets and consoles were on its perimeter. In the center was a fixed platform. A man sat on a chair of some semitransparent stuff in the middle of the fixed platform. Before him was a console with a sloping instrument panel and several live screens. He was adjusting a dial, his eyes fixed on the largest oscilloscope. His profile was to Burton.

  Burton put a finger to his lips and with the other hand gestured at his companions to get off their chairs. Then he. unholstered his revolver and indicated that the others should do the same.

  The operator had long fox-red hair, a pale white skin, and the eye presented to Burton lacked an epicanthic fold. If the man hadn't been so fat, Burton might not have identified him. Fat, however, couldn't be removed in such a short time.

  Burton walked slowly through the door and toward the man. The others were fanning out, their guns ready.

  When they were within sixty feet of him, the man saw them. He reared up out of the chair, grimaced, and sat back down. His hand shot out, dived into a recess under the panel, and came out holding a strange-looking device. It had a pistollike butt for gripping, a barrel about a foot long and three inches in diameter, and a sphere at its end the size of a large apple.

  Burton cried out, "Loga!"

  He ran forward.

  49

  * * *

  The ethical rose again and shouted, "Stop! Or I'll fire!"

  They kept on running. He sighted along the barrel through the transparent sphere, and a thin scarlet line shot soundlessly from the sphere. Smoke curled up from the shallow arc drawn on the metal before the group.

  They halted. Anything that could melt that metal was very impressive.

  "I can cut you all into two with a single sweep of this," Loga said. "I don't want to. There's been far too much violence, and I'm sick of it. But I will kill you if I must. Now . . . all of you turn around in unison and throw your weapons as far as you can toward the door."

  Burton said, "There are nine guns trained on you. You might get one or two of us, but you'll be blown to bits."

  The Ethical smiled grimly.

  "It looks like a Mexican standoff, doesn't it?"

  He paused. "But it isn't, believe me!"

  Croomes shouted, "No, it isn't! You Satan, you fiend from Hell!"

  Her pistol boomed. The scarlet beam flashed out from Loga's weapon at the same time that eight other guns exploded.

  Loga fell backwards. Burton ran, leaped upon the revolving disc, darted over it to the fixed platform, and pointed his revolver at the prostrate Ethical. The others crowded around him.

  While Turpin and Tai-Peng picked up the bleeding and ashen-skinned man from the floor, Burton seized the sphere-ended weapon. Loga was seated roughly in his chair. He held his hand over a gushing wound on the biceps of his right arm. "He got Croomes!" Alice said, pointing. Burton looked once at the severed body and turned away.

  Loga looked around as if he couldn't believe what had happened, then said, "There are three boxes in the upper-right-hand drawer in the console. Bring them to me, and I'll be all right in a few minutes."

  "This isn't a trick?" Burton said.

  "No! I swear! I've had enough of tricks and murder! I meant you no harm! I just wanted you to be disarmed so that I could explain without worrying about you. You're such a violent breed!"

  "Look who's talking," Burton said.

  "I didn't do it because I loved it!"

  "Neither did we," Burton said, but he wasn't so sure that he was wholly truthful.

  They brought out three silver boxes set with green emeralds. Burton opened each one slowly and inspected the contents. As the Ethical had said, each contained a bottle. Two held liquid; one, some pink stuff.

  "How do I know they won't release some sort of gas?" Burton said. "Or that they aren't poison?"

  "They won't be," Nur said. "He does not want to die now."

  "That's right," Loga said. "Something terrible may happen soon, and only I know how to stop it. I may need your help."

  "You could have had it all along," Burton said, "if only you'd told us the truth in the beginning."

  "I had my reasons for not doing so," Loga said. "Very good reasons. And then things got out of hand."

  He squeezed one of the bottles, and a clear liquid spurted out onto his hand. After rubbing it over the wound on his shoulder, wincing at the pain, he drank from the second bottle. From the third he poured out a pink gooey substance into his left hand and then pressed it over the wound.

  "The first was to sterilize the wound," he said. "The second was to cancel the shock and give me strength. The third will heal the wound in a very short time. Three days."

  Burton said, "Where did we wound you the first time?"

  "The only bad wound was in my left thigh."

  His grayness of skin had been replaced by a normal color within a minute. He asked for some water, which Frigate brought to him. Burton lit a cigarette. His questions were a logjam in his throat. Which one should be spit out first?

  Before the inquisition, though, certain things had to be done. Burton held his revolver on Loga while the others brought their chairs in and Frigate made an extra trip to get Burton's. These were placed on the floor on the side of the disc where they'd be out of sight of Croomes' body. While this was being done, Loga was allowed to lift his bloodstained chair to a designated spot. The other chairs were then arranged closely in a semicircle facing the Ethical.

  "I think we could all stand a little drink," Burton said. Loga told them how to set the controls of a grail box to get their orders filled. His own was a yellow wine which the others had never found in their grails. Burton duplicated Loga's request and tasted the wine. It was comparable to nothing he'd ever had before, delicate yet pungent. For some reason it evoked a slowly receding tide of dark green waters above which flew giant white birds with crimson beaks.

  Burton sat with Loga's weapon across his lap. His first question was how it was operated. Loga indicated the safety lock and the trigger, the use of which Burton had figured out for himself.

  "Now," he said, "I think it best that we start out at the beginning. But what is the beginning?"

  "Pardon me for interrupting," the Moor said. "We should establish one thing right now. Ah Qaaq . . . Loga . . . you must have a private resurrection chamber in the tower?"

  "Yes."

  The Ethical hesitated. "It wasn't just for me. Tringu also used it. He was my best friend; we were raised together on the Gardenworld. He was the only one I could trust."

  "Was he the man called Stern who tried to kill Firebrass before the Parseval took off the tower?" />
  "Yes. He failed, as you know. So, when I saw that Firebrass was going to get into the tower ahead of me . . . and Siggen was too, I had to kill them both. Siggen had not told Firebrass who I was. She believed me when I told her that I'd abandon my plans and throw myself on the mercy of the Council. But only after we'd gotten to the tower and the Council was resurrected. She never would have agreed if I'd not lied, not told her that I'd put an inhibit on communication with the computer and that only I could break it. She said she wouldn't tell Firebrass about me until we were in the tower. But she then made arrangements to be in the tower ahead of me with Firebrass. She meant to check up on the truth of what I'd told her. Also, I was afraid that while she and Firebrass were in the helicopter on the way to the top of the tower, she'd change her mind and tell Firebrass. So . . . I set off the bomb I'd planted in the copter just in case . . ."

  "Who's Siggen?" Alice said.

  "My wife. The woman posing as Anya Obrenova, the Russian airship officer."

  "Oh, yes," Alice said as tears ran down Loga's cheeks.

  "It's obvious that your people found your private resurrector and deactivated it. Otherwise, you'd have killed yourself and been translated to the tower. Have you reactivated your resurrector?"

  "Yes. Actually, I have two. But both were located and deactivated."

  Burton said, "Then if we'd killed you just now, you'd have escaped us. Why didn't you let us do it? Or kill yourself?"

  "Because, as I said, I may need you. Because I'm sick of this violence. Because I owe you something."

  He paused. "I'd set up an inhibition in the general lazarus machinery long ago. It'd be activated at my signal, the same signal which would kill all within the tower, the underground chambers, and in the area of the sea. But Tringu and I had our private lines. One of them was in the room at the base of the tower. Sharmun, the woman in charge in Monat's and Thanabur's absence, told me that the two rooms had been found. She said that it would do no good to commit suicide in the hope that I could rise in the tower and continue my evil deeds. Me! Evil!"

  "This is getting confusing," Burton said. "Start at the very beginning."

  "Very well. But I'll have to be as brief as possible. By the way, where is Gilgamesh?"

  Burton told him.

  The Ethical said. "I'm sorry."

  He paused, then said, "Like his mythical counterpart, he failed to find the secret of immortality."

  Loga rose, saying, "I just want to see the screens. I won't go near them."

  They kept their weapons trained on him while he limped to the edge of the revolving platform. It was useless to keep him in their sights, Burton thought. He could elude them at any time by making them kill him if he was telling the truth.

  Loga limped back to his chair and eased himself into it.

  "We may be able to do something. I don't really know. We do have some time, though. So . . ."

  He began in the beginning.

  When the universe was young, when the first inhabitable planets had formed after the explosion of the primal ball of energy-matter, evolution brought about a people on one planet who differed from those on other planets.

  "I don't mean just in physical construction. All the sentient peoples have either bipedal or centaurine bodies, hands, stereoscopic vision, and so forth. They were intelligent but had no consciousness of self, no concept of the I."

  "We speculated on that!" Frigate said. "But . . ."

  "You must interrupt as little as possible. I'm telling the truth when I say that all sentient beings throughout the universe were without self-awareness. As far as we know, anyway. I know it's very difficult for you to believe. You can't conceive of such a state. But it was and is true – with exceptions now.

  "The people who differed did not differ in their lack of self-awareness in the beginning of their history. They were like the others in this respect. However, they did have science, though they didn't go about dealing with it as self-aware sentients do.

  "Nor did they have a concept of religion, of gods or of a God. That comes only with an advanced stage of self-awareness.

  "Luckily for these people, called by those who followed them The Firsts, one of their scientists had accidentally formed a wathan during an experiment.

  "It was the first indication The Firsts had that there was such a force as extraphysical energy. I use the term extra-physical to avoid any confusion with paraphysical, with such evidently existing but usually uncontrollable and elusive forces as telepathy, telekinesis, and other extrasensory perception phenomena."

  Burton forebore saying that it was he who'd coined the term ESP on Earth, though he'd called it extra-sensuous perception.

  "The wathan may be a form of this, but, if so, it's the only one that's controllable. This nameless scientist who accidentally generated a wathan from the extraphysical forces did not know what it was. He or she continued to experiment and generated more. I say generated because the equipment he was using formed the wathan from the extraphysical energy. Shaped it or perhaps plucked it from the field that exists in the same space as matter but usually doesn't interact with it.

  "The first wathans probably attached themselves to the living beings in their proximity."

  "All living creatures?" Nur murmured.

  "All living individuals. Insects, trees, starfishes, all. After millions of years of experiments, we still don't know why the wathans are attracted to life energy. One of the hundreds of theories is that life itself may be a form of extraphysical energy. An interface, rather."

  The effect of the attachments was not immediately noted. The wathan was the source and genesis of self-awareness. But it could not develop this except through living entities, and these had to have highly developed nervous systems if the potentiality for self-awareness was to be realized.

  "But that also can't be realized if the wathan attaches itself to a human entity beyond the initial zygote stage. Beyond the fusion of spermatozoon and ovum. Don't ask me why. Just believe me when I say that it's true. Apparently, there is a hardening in the entity, a resistance to the interface."

  The machine spat out billions of wathans during the experiments. Millions attached themselves to the zygotes of the sentients. And, for the first time in the universe, as far as anybody knew, self-awareness was born. Infants grew up with this, and neither the older nor the younger generation could understand that this was unique and new. Self-aware children and youths have always had difficulty understanding the adults, but never before had there been such an empathy gap, such lack of comprehension.

  "Eventually, the unself-conscious people died out. It wasn't until twenty-five or so years after the first wathan was formed that the reason for self-awareness was discovered. Then it became a matter of necessity to keep producing wathans."

  Centuries passed. Space flight via rockets came. After several centuries, a new form of propulsion was discovered. Interstellar flight became possible at speeds unheard of before when a method of sidepassing matter was invented. Even so, it took seven days of Earth-time to go a lightyear.

  "The old science-fiction concept of going through other dimensions was realized?" Frigate said.

  "No. But we don't have the time for the necessarily lengthy explanation of it."

  By then The Firsts thought it was their ethical duty to bring immortality and self-awareness via the wathan to all other sentient people. Many expeditions set out to do this. When one found a planet with people whose brains were capable of developing self-awareness, wathan-generating machines were buried so deep in the earth that it was unlikely that they would be discovered by the aborigines.

  "Why hidden?" Nur said. He was pale; he looked as if he'd been hard hit by Loga's revelations.

  "Why hidden?" Loga said. "Why not just give the machines to the first self-aware generation? You should know why not. Consider your fellow human beings. The wathan generators would have been misused. There would be power struggles to monopolize them and through them the basest exploitation
of others. No, the wathan generators can't be entrusted to people until they attain a certain ethical stage."

  Burton didn't ask why The Firsts hadn't set up garrisons on each planet to insure that the generators were the property of all. With their scientific knowledge and ethical knowledge, they could have taught the aborigines to advance much more swiftly. But The Firsts would not consider that ethical. Besides, they wouldn't have enough of their own people to rule all the planets they found.

  The faces of his companions reflected an agonizing struggle, though Frigate seemed the least affected. Nur, who had always been so flexible, so invulnerable to psychological shock, was suffering the worst. He could not accept the idea that wathans, call them souls, were synthetic. Well, not quite that. But they were formed by humanlike creatures through machines. They did not come parceled out by Allah. Nur had believed this far more deeply than some of the others who, though religious, had not had his firmness of faith.

  Loga must have been aware of this.

  He said, "There is no Creator unless we accept the creation, this universe, as evidence. The Firsts did, and we do. But there is no evidence whatsoever that It has any interest in Its creatures. It . . ."

  "It?" Alice and de Marbot said.

  "Yes. The Creator has no sex – as far as we know. The language of Monat's people has a unique neuter pronoun for the Creator."

  "His people are The Firsts?" Tai-Peng said.

  "No. The Firsts have Gone On long, long ago. Monat's people are the recipients of The Firsts' work through a line of five other peoples. These, you might say, have handed on the torch to others and then Gone On. Monat himself is just one of ten thousand of his own kind yet alive. The others have all Gone On.

  "Some theologians say that the Creator has not done anything Itself to give Its sentient creatures wathans. Its divine plan leaves it to sentients to make their own salvation. But this isn't logical, since it was only an accident that the wathans were generated, and billions died with no chance of self-awareness or immortality before this. And billions, perhaps trillions, have died and will die, perished forever, before we Ethicals will have arrived to give them the wathans. So it looks as if the Creator is also indifferent to our self-awareness and immortality.