A Barnstormer in Oz

by Philip José Farmer

  After a while, Sharts wandered off. Hank found a block of stone wider than his parents' mansion in Oyster Bay. About twelve feet of it protruded from the ground. All around it were carved figures of animals and objects and strange-looking bipeds with human hands. Hank thought that they were meant to portray some kind of story. They formed a row running around the block. That this row might be the start or the end of the story was indicated by the tops of figures exposed by erosion below the upper row. A little later, he found a one hundred-foot-long metal obelisk lying on the ground. It was shaped like the "Cleopatra's Needle" in New York's Central Park and bore the shapes of living beings and objects and many inscriptions. He was looking at these when he heard Sharts calling him. Hank made his way through the bushes and trees growing on and along the ruins to the edge of the plateau. Sharts was standing by a place which looked as if an overhang of rock had broken off and fallen into the canyon.

  "Look at this."

  Sharts pointed at a five-foot-high silvery dome sunk into the earth. At the base where it faced the precipice was an arched hole about ten inches high.

  "Interesting," Hank said.

  "Wait a minute. I've been timing them."

  Fifty seconds passed. Then Hank was startled. A tiny figure, a simulacrum of the bipeds portrayed on the block, walked out. It paid them no attention but marched like a wooden soldier to the edge of the plateau and toppled over it.

  "My God, what's that?" Hank said.

  "Wait."

  Sixty seconds later, a duplicate of the first walked out and, like it, fell into the canyon.

  "I think it's a toy-making machine of the Long-Gones," Sharts said. "It's still operating."

  "After two thousand years or more?"

  "I know it's incredible, but how else explain it?"

  When, sixty seconds later, the next figure walked out, Sharts picked the tiny thing up. It still moved its legs and swung its arms as if it were walking on the ground.

  "They must have had some control mechanism so that the child could direct it to turn and so on," Sharts said.

  Hank thought that he was assuming a lot, but he had no basis for argument.

  "There must be thousands on the slope at the base of this cliff," Sharts said. "The others, and there must have been millions, must have been carried off by the river."

  The body of the toy was human, and the face would have been human if it had had a nose. Where that should have been was a hole with many fine strands. These may have represented a network of hairs. On closer inspection, Hank saw that the ears were smaller in proportion than a human's and the convolutions in it were different.

  The joints of the legs and arms and the fingers and toes could be articulated.

  Hank told him what he had found.

  "I'd like to try to read whatever story is on that obelisk," he said. "But we'd have to turn it over. The story is a serial one, and it spirals up from the base to the apex."

  Sharts went with him to the fallen monument. He felt the red metal, which was unrusted, and looked at some of the hieroglyphics.

  "It must weigh from three to five hundred tons," he said. "We could never turn it over to read the other side. We'll have to be satisfied with what we can see. But look at this."

  He pointed at a representation of a dome which had an arched hole at its base. Out of it were proceeding figures like Blogo and the Winged Monkeys and other seemingly unnatural beings.

  "That adds weight to my theory that the Rare Beasts and the Monkeys are descendants of synthetic vivants," Hank said.

  The exposed sides of the obelisk had the beginning and the end of the story. What was on the underside had to remain hidden, and there was much that they did not understand on the sides they could see.

  "Nevertheless," Hank said, "we have enough to know some of the history of the Long-Gones. Including the fact, I suppose it's a fact, that they did not just die out. They left for another world, went through a gate they'd opened between this world and another. If I interpret the pictures correctly, their experiments in trying to open a way to another world is what made weak places in the walls between your universe and mine.

  "Maybe I shouldn't say walls. As I see it, the process is more like going up or down from one level of energy or configuration of energy to another. Anyway, the Long-Gones either could not get to Earth or, after a look at it, decided to go someplace else."

  He did not have to explain to Sharts why the noseless beings had abandoned this world. Sharts had also comprehended that the Long-Gones had decided not to fight any more. They had been pushed into this area, which was about the size of Alaska, and there seemed no way to expand it. They were repelling the forces that had devastated this planet and could do so for a long time. But it was not worthwhile. Not when they could go to a new green world and leave the attackers behind.

  The energy configuration of the universe they went to would not permit their enemy to exist there.

  "I suppose that they also can't exist on Earth," Hank said, thinking aloud. "But I'm not sure. I wouldn't think that the energy entities which possess animals could exist there either. But Glinda told me that she sent a hawk through the opening to Earth, and it came back still possessed."

  "Did she ask you to pass that information on to your people?" Sharts said.

  "Yes. Why? Oh, I see. She may have been lying so that my people would be frightened. I thought of that. However, I won't tell my people... those people... that I think she's not telling the truth. I wouldn't want them to take a chance that she was."

  It seemed from what he'd read on the obelisk that there were two types of energy beings. One was composed of the giant rolling balls that hurled themselves against the edge of the green land. Most of them perished there because the Long-Gones had buried defenses along the border between desert and oasis. These were pictured as huge poles, subterranean lightning rods, as it were.

  A long time before the ancient aborigines had left this universe, they had experimented at making gates to other universes. Their first success had resulted in what was to be disaster. The great balls of electrical fire had poured through before the gate could be closed. Thousands must have entered. And these had propagated their kind by using the earth and atmospheric electricity. They had sucked the electrical energy from all creatures, vegetable or animal.

  "They're not demons or souls loosed from hell to ravage on the living," Hank said. "Your priests are wrong. They're electrical Draculas. And they exist because the physical structure of this universe is not quite like that of mine. In my world they... no. I overlooked something. Why is it that the energy-things originated in another world and can live in this one but not in the world the Long-Gones went to?"

  "Perhaps the physical laws of the world they went to are just dissimilar enough so the things can't exist there."

  Sharts might be a near-psychotic, but he was not unintelligent.

  "You could be right. No!" Hank said hastily when he saw Sharts's face tighten and turn red. "You're right! Absolutely right. It couldn't be anything else but!

  "However, how do I know that the physical laws of my universe won't permit those things to exist there? I don't. I'll make sure that I put that in the report."

  Sharts's face loosened and regained its normal color.

  "The defenses erected by the Long-Gones must be weakening in at least one place," Hank said. "Otherwise, some wouldn't be able to roll onto the green land. I saw some do that one night while I was in Glinda's castle. They were blown up, but I'm sure that it was through Glinda's doing. She was using her own forces to destroy them. What you call magic."

  "Perhaps that is why Glinda established her capital at that point," Sharts said. "There is a weak or weakening spot there, and she wanted to be there to guard it."

  Sharts looked gloomy and said, "What if Glinda dies or the weak spot becomes larger?"

  "I hate to think about that," Hank said.

  Maybe he would be better off if he went back to Earth.

&n
bsp; "Anyway," he said, waving his arm to indicate the whole oasis, "I can't believe that this is the only alive area and that the rest of the world is a desert."

  "Why not? Isn't that made clear on the obelisk?"

  "It was true when the obelisk was made. Or maybe it wasn't true even then. My point is the air."

  "The air?"

  Sharts looked puzzled, and he did not like to be puzzled.

  "Yes, the air. The planetary atmosphere. Its oxygen is continually being renewed by plants on the earth and in the sea. But, if the energy-things have destroyed all the plants, where is the new air coming from? This land isn't big enough to keep its inhabitants from asphyxiating. There's air blowing in all the time from the desert, and it would sweep away the oxygen generated here."

  "Perhaps the plants in the ocean have not been killed," Sharts said.

  "Perhaps. Even so, I doubt that they would be enough. Of course, I really don't know enough about the subject. But I'll bet... anyway, I think... that all the energy beings are in the desert around the green land. Elsewhere, they'd have no prey, and they would, I suppose, die of electrical starvation.

  "So, plants have grown again in many other places, and they've flourished and spread because the energy-things haven't found out about them."

  One of the surprises while reading the Long-Gones' cartoons—that was what they were, cartoons—was that the mind-spirits or firefoxes had not come from the universe of the big energy-beings.

  These had been created by the ancients after the invasion. They were, if Hank had interpreted rightly, the result of another experiment by the Long-Gones. Using the destroyers' configurations as models, the scientists had made a different type of energy-being. These were designed to transfer the neural-mental contents of a person to a synthetic body. By doing this, the scientists had hoped to become immortal, to pass their minds from one body to another.

  Hank did not know why the experiment had gone wrong. But it had. The firefoxes were sentient and, therefore, self-conscious and self-motivated. They had refused to obey the scientists and conduct themselves as laboratory subjects. Also, the hope that the firefoxes would be able to transfer the contents of a mind to another body turned out to be false.

  The things could occupy the bodies of animals and human beings. But they could not possess the minds of the latter, though they could those of animals. Something in the structure of the human neural system and, perhaps, the degree of intelligence, prevented the firefoxes from influencing the brains of Homo sapiens.

  The firefoxes had escaped and, in a manner similar to that of the destroyers, propagated themselves. They occupied the cerebral-neural systems of animals and birds and reptiles, though they were either unable to or did not care to invest those of fish and insects.

  (Hank, learning this, wondered why humans did not eat fish and frogs. Sharts told him that the Quadlings, Munchkins, and Ozlanders did not do so because of religious prohibitions. The fish was the symbol of Christ-Thor and hence sacred. As for the frog, that was forbidden because of the ancient myth that a frog was a fish that had learned how to walk or, at least, hop. The Winkies and Gillikins, however, did not have this tabu.)

  What the pictures could not tell was just how the mind-spirits or firefoxes interacted with the neural systems of the occupied animals. Hank had to extrapolate that from what he had observed. Take, as an example, a firefox which had possessed a hawk just after it had escaped from the Long-Gones' laboratory like a voltaic Frankenstein's monster. The firefox was perhaps as intelligent as a human being. But when it became one, as it were, with the bird, its physical and mental capabilities were limited by the body it invested. It had to operate through a diminutive brain and a body specialized for flight and without speech organs.

  The hawk-firefox could learn language from humans, but it could not utter speech with the bird's oral apparatus. It solved that problem by learning to modulate sound waves with energy output. In some ways, its voice was a telephone transmitter.

  There was also what might be called a negative flow. The hawk's nonhuman nervous system affected the firefox's, and the result was an intelligence level that could never match that of the more intelligent humans.

  Also, the firefox was, when it first occupied the hawk's body, like a human infant. It had to learn language and to gain experience just like a baby. The difference was that the hawk-firefox learned much faster than an infant.

  One of the factors preventing the symbiote's full intellectual and emotional development was the short life of the hawk. It learned much faster than the infant, true, but it did not have a long time to learn.

  However, when the hawk died, the mind-spirit lived on. It traveled around in whatever manner circumscribed it, and, when it came to an unoccupied body, it attached itself like iron filings to a magnet.

  This process, Hank was sure, caused some kind of traumatic shock. The firefox lost its identity as a hawk, or, rather, it lost its memory of its former life as a hawk. But, like an amnesiac, it retained its memory of language and its unconscious knowledge of its environment.

  In some ways, the firefox experienced what the Hindus called transmigration or reincarnation.

  Though the firefox assumed a new identity every time it occupied a body, its retention of certain abilities enabled it to grow mentally and emotionally. The knowledge accreted to a certain extent.

  Thus, it could be assumed that the firefox did not die. That occupying Bargma, for instance, might be anywhere from fifteen hundred to forty thousand years old. But its intelligence was limited in operation by the avian nervous system. Also, much that it had learned was lost or beyond recall.

  Hank did not believe that a firefox could, unaided, invest and make alive an inanimate object. But a witch could do that for a firefox though it probably was not easily done. If it were easy, there would be many more Scarecrows than there were.

  Glinda, he was certain, had animated the Scarecrow. And she had managed to transfer a human being's mind-contents, the Tin Woodman's, from a dying body to a metal simulacrum.

  Another probably rare phenomenon was the dispossession of one firefox by another. A firefox had been made visible by the electrical potential in a storm, and Hank had seen—well, almost seen—the free firefox oust the entity which occupied the hawk. However, the dispossessor had failed to possess the dispossessed. Instead, it had occupied an inanimate object, the airplane.

  Or was it possible that the original entity in Ot, hurled from the hawk-body, had taken up new residence in Jenny?

  Whichever event had happened, Glinda had influenced its course.

  Why had she effected this? Because, Hank thought, she had a use for a living aircraft just as she had had a use for the Scarecrow and the Woodman and had arranged to put them in Dorothy's path.

  Hank explained his theory to Sharts. The giant nodded and said, "That makes more sense than the religious explanations. Though that does not mean that your theory is right and the priests are wrong. It might mean that both of you are wrong. Or half-right.

  "I will admit this, though. Despite your deficiencies of character, you are not without some intelligence."

  Hank did not know whether he should thank Sharts or hit him. Having witnessed the man overpower a bear, he thought that it would be best to control his fists.

  They spent the rest of the day exploring and looking for food. When they found a wide deep creek that tumbled over the cliff, they followed it up until they came to a pool. Here they improvised fishing poles and caught three troutlike fish. They also waded around in a small swamp and seized three large frogs. When they returned to camp, their bellies were full of protein. They also arrived just in time to see Blogo's short legs carrying him at his top speed towards them.

  Blogo stopped a few feet from them. Panting, looking exultant and proud, he cried, "I've found a village!"

  The next day, they followed him to a distant point on the edge of the plateau. There he gestured at a place far down and on the opposite side of t
he river.

  It took a day for the three to climb down and get across the swift rapids-riddled stream. The villagers were not the type of Gillikins expected. They obviously were a nearly pure strain of Neanderthals. They did, however, speak an archaic dialect of Gillikin. The three strangers managed to make themselves intelligible and to make it clear that they wanted thirty gallons of grain alcohol. The villagers had the alcohol, but they refused to give it away. They wanted something in return. They did not know what that something was, but it had to be of equal or superior value.

  "Why don't we just take it from them?" Blogo said. "One burst from your gun, Hank, and the survivors will run like mad."

  "I won't do that," Hank said. "Besides, we're going to need their help to get the fuel up the cliff."

  "It would be a lot of fun seeing the tiny apemen run," Blogo said.

  "Tiny!" Hank said. "Blogo, you're the shortest person here! And you look more like an ape than they do!"

  Blogo said, sulkily, "In spirit, I meant. In spirit."

  They spent the night there, the first half of which was entertainment by their hosts of what must have seemed to them to be rather weird guests. They got up early, however. After a breakfast of acorn bread, fish, frog, nuts, berries, corncakes with wild honey, and a thick, whitish and vanillaish fluid tapped from a milktree, they set out. The headman, the priestess, and six young men accompanied them. They got to the camp just after dusk. Here, by the light of a bonfire, the villagers were shown the toy-making machine.

  "You can have this in return for the alcohol," Sharts said.

  The Kumkwoots' eyes shone, though with fear as much as with desire. This was a holy, a dreaded place. They had stayed away from here because they feared the ghosts of the Long-Gones. But, since they thought that the strangers were spirits of the ancients who had come down to tell them that the ghosts were now friendly, they had agreed to trespass.