Nethe was the trouble. A little way off down the street Sawyer saw her familiar figure, the luminous earrings swinging wildly, struggling between two tall Isier who were carrying her serenely forward down the street toward the Temple. She writhed and fought and spat violent bursts of speech at them. They did not seem to hear. The backward-facing masks of all three turned a blank, uninterested stare at the little knot of humans who watched from the alley.
“She must have followed us after all,” Sawyer said. “Well, that takes care of Nethe. I wonder what the Goddess will do?”
“Force her into the Unsealing ceremony,” Klai said, from a prudent shelter behind him. “And that will be the end of one or the other of them. But whichever wins, the Isier rule will go on the way it always has, unless we find a way to fan this trouble higher. Come back. We’ve got a lot of planning to do.”
“All right,” Sawyer said. “But tell me one thing. What the devil are those masks for?”
A voice from the street corner just beyond their alley said calmly:
“That’s an interesting question, my boy. Look what I’ve brought you.”
Sawyer knew that voice. The thick organ-tones could belong to one man only. He turned and said, “Alper!”
The ponderous figure of Alper moved toward them. He was walking effortlessly still, so the power the Firebird gave him had not yet waned, but there was already a suggestion of a drag to his gait, and his heavy figure stooped a little.
In each hand he carried a pale, smiling, blind-eyed Isier mask.
X
Zatri sat down again upon his haybale throne. The watchful Khom lined the walls, patient and alert in the swinging shadows cast by the relit lamp. Alper stood under it, his heavy head sunk a little, his big legs braced, taking in the group with quick, cold, purposeful glances. Outside, in the night, the noises of battle were much louder. The dull booming of the Sselli, the Younger Brothers, echoed down the narrow streets of Khom’ad, and the shouts and screams of their human opponents, and the ringing calls of the Isier. Alper jerked his head toward the noise.
“They’ll have to speed up the Ceremony of the Unsealing,” he said to Sawyer. “I’ve talked to the Goddess. With these”—he shook the two smiling masks—“it was perfectly simple to communicate. Most of the time you and Nethe were having your little consultation on the island, I was relaying the story to the Goddess. Luckily, she couldn’t understand you. You weren’t wearing a mask, and it takes two of them to make the communication work. So I said nothing about the Firebird. She doesn’t know.” He paused, put one of the masks under his arm and slipped the freed hand into his pocket. His thick voice was grim.
“Where is it, Sawyer?” he asked. “What did you do with the Firebird?”
Rapidly Sawyer cast back over the immediate past. Whenever he had spoken aloud, so that Alper heard him, he had been denying he had the thing.
“I didn’t do anything with it,” he said. “I left it where it was.”
The slightest possible tremor shivered through his skull from the transceiver. Sawyer felt a sudden blaze of murderous rage ignite in him. He spun toward Alper, making no effort to control the fury, letting it show in his voice and his face.
“Stop that!” he commanded. “You know you can’t force me that way! Once more and I’ll make you kill me!”
The tremor ceased. Alper said, “All right, all right. Just a reminder. I know you aren’t lying. I know Nethe searched you once for the Firebird. I know all she told you, and it gave me some interesting ideas. I even traced you here by the transceiver. The strength of the signals was an accurate guide, once I’d escaped from the Goddess. This attack from the savages is going to be very useful to all of us. I got free, Klai got at least a reprive from capture, and you and I are going to the Temple right away, if the old man will guide us.”
He turned toward Zatri, started to speak, then shrugged and held out one of the masks. Zatri took it gingerly, looking at Alper with a searching gaze. Alper dipped his head a little and clapped the pale, smiling thing over his face. He spoke in a slightly muffled voice.
“I have a plan,” he said, “to save your granddaughter. And incidentally myself, of course. I need your help—”
Zatri held up a hand for patience, hesitated an instant longer, and then fitted his own mask over his face. It was curious to see the two blank, Isier-featured faces confronting each other, Zatri’s blue eyes and Alper’s small, cold grey ones blinking through the great ovals of the masks.
Alper repeated his proposal, in English. And Zatri, after an odd moment of complete immobility, as if the result of the mask-donning had startled him, appeared to answer in his own language, quite as if Alper’s words had made sense to him. The listening Khom glanced quickly from one to another and began to exchange uneasy murmurs.
“What’s happening?” Sawyer asked Klai.
She gave him a wondering look. “The masks are for communication,” she said. “Among other things I think Nethe learned English through the use of hers. The Isier, among themselves, have some amazing arts and sciences, so abstract it got to be a problem for a musician, say, to communicate his ideas to a chemist or a physicist. Remember, they’ve lived for a thousand years, and they’ve pursued their arts to tremendous heights. They developed this way of exchanging ideas without the need for learning one another’s abstract terms. I wonder how Alper managed to steal them.”
“So do I,” Sawyer said thoughtfully. “I don’t trust Alper very far. Listen—what’s your grandfather saying?”
“He wants to know Alper’s plan. He says he could guide him into the Temple—at any other time. Not now. The Ceremony of the Unsealing may have started already. And the streets aren’t safe any more.”
“I’ll tell you exactly what I plan,” Alper said, muffled inside the mask. Its thin, pale smile gave him an unfortunate look of conspiratorial malice that might or might not be just. “Sawyer knows where the Firebird is. I must have it! Once I get it, I can force Nethe to open the door back to Earth—”
“How can you force her?” Sawyer asked. The mask swung toward him, smiling. Alper’s impatient voice was incongruous behind it.
“You give me the Firebird,” he said, “and I’ll release you from the transceiver. There, isn’t that fair enough? I’ll get to Nethe and put it on her. After that she’ll do as I tell her.”
Sawyer had his private doubts about this, but he did not voice them, for Zatri was demanding explanations. Rapidly Alper gave them. Zatri spoke to Klai, who led Sawyer forward so Zatri could examine the transceiver clamped to the crown of his skull. But when Sawyer tried to speak, Alper brushed him aside impatiently:
“Don’t waste time now. Will you or won’t you? You want to get rid of the transceiver. I’ll take the Firebird back to Earth with us, and after that I won’t need to make trouble at Fortuna. Klai can come too, if she wants. All we have to do is get the Firebird and get to Nethe with the transceiver. She opens the door for the four of us and we go through with the Firebird. All we have to worry about is getting to her before the Ceremony starts.”
Zatri asked a question. Klai did not translate, but Alper shrugged and said, “You can’t. You’ll have to trust me. I—here, wait!”
He pulled the mask from his face and thrust it at Sawyer.
“You put it on. He trusts you. Persuade him, Sawyer. What if the Temple is dangerous? Is it any safer here? Tell him he’s got to get us to Nethe.”
Sawyer looked dubiously at the mask.
“The last time I wore something you gave me, I got the transceiver,” he said. “Somehow I don’t like the idea of putting this thing over my face. It might turn me into a horned toad, for all I know.”
Alper snorted with impatience. “It’s perfectly safe. I wore it, didn’t I? It’s a communication prosthesis. You’ll see—the masks convey form, the way I’ve figured it, plus impinging form to give it meaning. Between the Isier it’s practically telepathy, but between you and the Khom, there wouldn’t be enough m
emories in common. The masks convey a series of impressions. The human mind’s built like a telegraph type of repeater; it triggers kappa wave relays that create new, sharpened, screened impressions. The brain’s alpha rhythm may be the carrier wave, using its sweep like a scanning process. I don’t know—I’m guessing. But communication’s a cortical process, like sight, dependent on form perception, and if necessary an interpreter, like these masks. Language isn’t the only form of communication, you know. What about animal communication by scent, a chemical sense? The atomic structure of a chemical scent can be rearranged very easily into a hormone structure, which is simply another language of communication within the body itself. You see?”
“No.” Sawyer grinned suddenly. “That’s why I’m convinced, maybe.”
He ducked his head and fitted the mask over his face. It was smooth and cool, and it clung firmly once he had got it seated well back over his ears. He opened his eyes, looked out through the oval holes…
And instantly something very strange happened. The stable around him leaped into sharp, glorious vividness. He had not seen such clear colors since he was a child. And odors—the smell of hay was a pungent ecstacy, the oil of the swinging lamp sweeter than any incense he had ever smelled. He felt an extraordinary sense of Tightness, of location and position—super-orientation, so to speak. Wave motions? The mask must be a booster too, then, a transformer, heightening the impressions it conveyed to the wearer. Naturally, he thought. The faint kappa waves of the brain, the wave-motions of thought, far beyond sensory perception, would have to be transformed to a higher voltage. No wonder Zatri had started and gone rigid when he put on the mask!
And no wonder the Isier thought themselves gods!
He saw Zatri’s keen blue eyes looking at him through the opposite mask, out of the white, smirking Isier face.
“Do you understand me?” he asked the old man.
Zatri spoke through his mask. The words were Khom. But what Sawyer heard, felt, sensed was quite different. It was like perceiving an instantaneous building up of shades and patterns, light and sound and meaning, form and scent, indescribable things gradually fading off into peripheral distances where—snap—a gap was leaped, a familiar form took shape in emptiness, and gradually clarified, defined, became more understandable as the semantic periphery of form shaped into—communication. Not gradually. Zatri’s echoed words still hung on the air; he had said in perfectly understandable Khom:
“Klai has told me about this man Alper. Do you trust him?”
“Certainly not,” Sawyer said. “The question is, how much choice do we have?” He nodded toward the noise of howling outside. “It isn’t safe anywhere. If the Isier don’t break in on us and arrest Klai, the Sselli may break in and kill us all. You have no weapons against them? No explosives, for instance?” He wondered how clearly the words got through to Zatri, how the mask was translating them into the thought-images of the Khom.
“We have a few hoarded explosives,” Zatri said. “Illegal, of course. What they would do against the Sselli I don’t know. But can you imagine the Isier letting any weapons exist that would harm the Sselli, when they are equally vulnerable? There is one weapon the Isier could use, however, and I think they’ll have to, very soon. But it means danger to the Isier too, so naturally they hesitate. They—”
He broke off at the sound of tapping on the door. A Khom put his head in, murmured something and withdrew. Zatri glanced away and then back to Sawyer.
“The Temple towers are beginning to glow,” he said. “That means the Ceremony is starting. It must mean Nethe has already entered the Hall of the Worlds and will never come out again—as Nethe. The Goddess will kill her or die. If Nethe wins, the Mask and Robe will be sealed on her, and she’ll be the Goddess herself. So you see your friend’s plan is useless. Only as a sacrifice could a human being enter the Hall of the Worlds now.”
He glanced uneasily at Klai. Sawyer glanced too, and was half stunned by the incredible loveliness the mask lent her pretty face. He looked at Alper, and was relieved to notice that the old man’s beauty was not noticeably enhanced. He relayed what Zatri had just said. Alper snorted impatiently.
“Nethe needs the Firebird,” he said. “There must be some way to get within sight of her and hold it up where she can see it. Once that happens, I guarantee she’ll break up any ceremony and jump for the Firebird. Without it she’s bound to lose the contest with the Goddess. Just get me to Nethe, with the Firebird. She’ll do as she’s told. She’ll open the Gateway and we’ll all go through, back to Earth.”
Klai had been translating this in a murmur to her grandfather, he eyes watchful on Alper’s face. Zatri said irresolutely, “The Gateway you speak of is too dangerous. Too uncertain. I don’t—”
“Klai went through it, didn’t she?” Alper demanded angrily when this was translated to him.
Zatri said, speaking to Sawyer, “I sent Klai after Nethe through the Gateway. It was a terribly dangerous thing, but the only way I knew. I hid her deep down underground, waiting for Nethe to come to a place where I knew she went sometimes to work her—magic.”
“And what happened?” Sawyer asked.
“I wish I knew. I’ve watched Nethe many times when she didn’t know. I’ve seen her make fire spring out between her fingers and open a—a whirling spiral in the air. I didn’t know about the Firebird then. But I knew she went through the spiral and out of the world. Sometimes she was gone a long time. I thought there might be hope for Klai elsewhere, for I knew there was none here.”
“I remember—a little,” Klai put in. “I remember Grandfather pushing me through, and how fast Nethe went, and how I fell on the ground in a strange, dark place. Then Nethe made fire spring out again in her fingers—that was the Firebird, I know now—and another spiral opened, and—” She shook her head. “I woke in the uranium mine, not knowing anything except my own name.”
She had spoken in English, and Alper said quickly, “I’ve got a hunch that the dark place you mention was the Under-Shell. The Goddess told me a good deal, you know. She was desperate to find out all she could about Nethe, and I pumped her. I think the Gateway’s a circular process, which may—”
“How about the Goddess?” Sawyer asked. “If she’s that desperate, couldn’t we do business with her, somehow?”
“No. Why should she bother? I sounded her out on that, and I know. Remember, to the Isier we’re so many uninteresting animals. They’re immortals. But the Firebird is the—the keystone of their immortality. Don’t you know what it must be, Sawyer? I’ll give you a hint. You can buy variations of the Firebird for three for a dime, back on Earth. But—not the Firebird.”
He drew a long breath.
“The Well of the Worlds is miraculous enough,” he said, “and I have no idea how that works, though I’ve guessed a little. It’s a link between Khom’ad and Earth now, bonding the two worlds together—but it was also the channel through which the Isier got their energy from other dimensions, other continua. It’s a—a tube that must be made of a form of matter that isn’t really matter at all. Unstable, dynamic matter. Here at this end, in Khom’ad, it’s Khom’ad matter, but the other end of the Well—that’s Earth-matter, right now. The other end of the Well can flux into whatever type of matter it touches in the non-Khom’ad plenum. It must be simply an absolutely adaptable form of matter, capable of instant adaptation to whatever type of matter exists in whatever other-space Khom’ad drifts through. How else could the contact be made at all and the channel for the energy maintained? That’s half of it, Sawyer—only half, the material half, the oil-bath in an ordinary fluid clutch. But the other half is the matrix of magnetic particles that saturates the oil, the vital other half that makes a fluid clutch work.
“The Well of the Worlds is a perfectly adaptable type of matter. But the Firebird is simply this.
“It is the perfect conductor.
“It must be. What else fits? It gave me energy—life—and that energy had to come from some
where. And it could have come from anywhere at all, from space itself, from the uranium in the mine, from—anything. What the Firebird does is form perfect conductivity between whatever it touches and whatever energy-source is nearest. That’s how it opens the Gateways between worlds, I suppose. Conductivity—matter to energy—how can I tell? Perhaps it acts as conductor, under certain circumstances, to the wave-motions of Khom’ad when you’re on Earth, so that your physical body—made up of wave-motions—is altered to the Khom’ad wave-motion, and we see that alteration as a Gateway, whereas the metamorphosis is simply in us.
“Perhaps that’s why only an Isier can open the Gateway. The Isier aren’t entirely matter, as we know it, any more than the Well is. Didn’t Nethe say they’d made themselves into isotopes? What they did, of course, was to alter the wave-motion of their physical bodies, so that they changed into a form of matter which could receive energy directly from the Well, as the new dry batteries can use oxygen from the air instead of depending on their own chemicals.”
Alper smiled a little. “Back on Earth, every house wired for electricity uses something like the Firebird. Remember, the Firebird’s built to open and close. It’s a safety fuse, Sawyer. A perfect conductor that’s also a safety fuse. That’s why it was able to shut itself off when Khom’ad drifted in contact with the Earth and the uranium mine. The other end of the Well adapted to Earth-matter, and all the tremendous energies of the uranium would have come pouring through into Khom’ad if the Well had been able to conduct it. But when the Firebird closed, the Well became inert, as far as energy-conductivity went. The physical bond between Khom’ad and Earth still exists, but that’s all. I suppose that’s why the Firebirds don’t appear in Khom’ad, though they’re glimpsed down in the Well sometimes. If they’re energy-forms, how can they pass through a nonconductor?
The Well of The Worlds Page 11