The World of Tiers, Volume 2

by Philip José Farmer

  Orc did not want to dwell on the gate. Dingsteth might get the idea that it would be a good thing to remove it because of the possible danger for itself. Another possibility was that Dingsteth might lack the means to dismantle it. Also, Los would have set up the gate so that anybody trying to dismantle it would be killed.

  Dingsteth looked as if it had been encoiled in thought, too. Suddenly, it said, “I’ll go with you!”

  Orc was surprised. After a long silence, he said, “Why?”

  “I know everything about this world. I am bored with it. Zazel did not set me up to be invulnerable against that. As for loneliness, I do not know what that means. Zazel made me so that that feeling, which afflicts all humans, is absent from me. I only know that because the world told me, and I’ve no idea what loneliness feels like.

  “I do have an intense curiosity. I need other worlds to feed that. Therefore, I will go with you. You can be my guide and instructor until I am able to proceed on my own. In return for your services, I will let you pass through the gate and I’ll go with you and provide you with much data.”

  How naive it was! Orc thought. No matter how much knowledge the being had, it was, in many respects, ignorant. It did not know that, once Orc got to his native world, it would be a burden. He could not afford to have it wandering around and perhaps telling the natives that Los’s son was back and seeking revenge. Also, Dingsteth should, for Orc’s purposes, remain in the Caverned World. It could open the gate for him when he returned to get a creation engine. Which, Orc now remembered, could be reversed to become an engine of destruction. Or so the historians said.

  He would have to string Dingsteth along until the moment of departure. Perhaps he could get it to stay here but also promise to let him back in when next he showed up.

  Dingsteth said, “Wait here.”

  It returned ten minutes later. Orc had thought of following it to watch it, but he decided against that. From the little information he had gotten, he thought that the walls were in league with the being. Their monitors would see him following Dingsteth and report that to it.

  “I gave some blood, and the world agreed to open the gate for us,” it said. Its upper lip bore a small wound. “Let us go now.”

  Orc walked with it to the other end of the cavern and down a tunnel. At the end of approximately thirty minutes, the being stopped. Orc looked around. There was nothing to differentiate this area from any other. Dingsteth placed its hand on the near wall. The wall here was free of the omuthid. After several seconds, it said, “The gate is now open.”

  There still seemed to be nothing except glittering crystalline stone before them. Orc was about to say something when Dingsteth plunged its hand through the stone up to his ring-shaped wrist. “See?”

  “You may go first,” Orc said. His politeness was actually caution. He still did not trust the being; it might be asking him to step into a fatal trap.

  “Very well,” Dingsteth said. Its voice seemed very tight, and its face was set in an unreadable expression.

  It walked forward but stopped just before its nose encountered the wall. For a long time, while Orc, puzzled, watched it, it stood still. Then it stepped back, hesitated, and advanced again. Only to halt a half-inch from the wall.

  Finally, Dingsteth turned toward Orc. “I can’t do it!” it said, and it groaned.

  “Why?” Orc said. His distrust might be well-founded. A trap could be, probably was, on the other side.

  “For the first time in my life,” it said, “I am afraid. Until now, I’ve never known what apprehension and fear meant, though I’ve read those words in the records. Zazel must have put those states in me because a being without fear and caution eventually perishes.

  “The moment we started out toward the gate, I began feeling very strange emotions. My heart began pounding, my stomach seemed to grab itself and try to fold itself into itself, and I began shaking. The closer we got, the worse the symptoms were. At this moment …”

  Its teeth began chattering. The sound of diamonds clicking against diamonds was one which Orc would never forget. Finally, Dingsteth mastered itself enough to stop shivering.

  “I can’t!” it wailed. “I feel as if something on the other side will destroy me if I go there! I feel … I feel as if a great void will be waiting for me! I’ll step through the gate and fall into an immense space and fall and fall! Then I’ll hit the bottom and be broken, smashed, into a thousand pieces! And that’s very peculiar, you know! I don’t even know what a vast space would look like! I’ve lived in this enclosed and straitened world all my life and have no idea what a really large space would be!”

  “You’re suffering from intense cases of agoraphobia and acrophobia,” Orc said. He was, however, wondering if Dingsteth was putting on an act to get him to go through the gate first.

  “I know those words, but, until now, I never knew what their true meaning was! What it is, it’s fear of the unknown! I am unable to leave this world! I just can’t, I just can’t!”

  Orc was not going to coax it through the gate. And he might as well take advantage of it while its wits whirled around as if in a centrifuge.

  “Listen, Dingsteth! Your curiosity and desire for new knowledge drive you to leave this place. These are valuable factors. Your excessive fear of the unknown is a crippling aspect of your persona. It’s a mental sickness, and I know you cannot conquer it by yourself. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. When I return, I promise I will, I’ll bring a drug that will suppress that fear. Then you’ll be able to venture forth and do what you want to do.”

  “That would be thoughtful of you,” Dingsteth said. “Only … I’m not sure that any drug could overcome this great fear.”

  “I promise you it will.”

  “But I’m not sure that I want to take any such drug. It could make me do something that would kill me!”

  “I’ll bring it, and you can take it or not, depending on how you feel about it.”

  Orc did not care whether or not Dingsteth used the drug. All he wanted was for the being to let him back through the gate. He would have to test its existence himself. To throw Dingsteth through the gate to activate a trap was to put Orc in a losing position, whatever happened. If the being died, it could not admit him when he returned. If there was no trap, Dingsteth would be horrified and forever offended. It would never allow him in after that.

  “I will bring back the drug,” Orc said.

  “I’ll admit you so I can try it,” the being said. “At least, I think I will. Good concatenation of events for you, Orc, son of Los and Enitharmon!”

  “For you, too,” Orc said.

  He stepped through the gate that was also a crystalline wall.

  CHAPTER 24

  Orc was not in Los’s world. His father had not told him the truth about the gate on Anthema leading back to his native universe. Or had Los lied or just been misleading?

  Orc had gone from Zazel’s Caverned World to one which the local natives called Lakter. After a while, Orc realized that the Thoan knew it as Jakadawin Tar. That is, Jadawin’s World. It had once been Thulloh’s World, that is, Thulkaloh Tar. But Jadawin had gotten through the gate-traps, and Thulloh had been forced to gate out to save his life.

  Lakter was a planet where the stars “seemed” to swarm through the night sky like fireflies. Orc thought “seemed” because so many things in the pocket universes were illusions. The gate was in a cave at the foot of a mountain on a large tropical island. Orc had gone down through the jungle to the seashore. After watching the natives for some days, he had revealed himself to them. They were peaceful and friendly, though they had some customs that Orc thought were bizarre and sometimes brutal.

  The Poashenk language was not derived from Thoan. He learned it quickly enough despite encountering some sounds unknown to him until then. He lived in a hut made of bamboolike wood and grass with a good-looking woman, hunted and fished, ate well, slept much, and healed his body. His soul was not so quickly repaired. Desp
ite his seeming patience, he burned to find the next gate. After he became fluent in Poashenk, he questioned all who claimed to know something about the world outside the island. That was little and was mostly half-legend.

  Meanwhile, his brown-skinned hosts gave him a drug, aflatuk, made from the juices of three plants. Orc drank it and also smoked the shredded bark of the somakatin plant. Both put him in a pleasant and dreamy state where he moved and thought in slow motion. The taste of a fruit or of roasted meat lasted for hours, or seemed to. Orgasms seemed to span both ends of eternity. Eternity, of course, in reality had no beginning or end—unless you had taken in aflatuk juice and somakatin smoke. Then you saw the start and the finish of what could not be begun or finished.

  Orc might have tried the drugs just once or perhaps several times and then quit. But these two had no bad aftereffects, and he was told that they did not hook the user.

  It was some time before he observed that the tribe’s adults did not have good memories. Then Orc’s wife had a miscarriage, and he found out that miscarriages were rather frequent. Though he noted these facts, he was not disturbed much by them. However, when he began missing his aim while hunting—he had always been a superb archer—he did get alarmed. And when he began to forget significant items, he was even more perturbed. But these mental upsets passed with time.

  On certain days, the Poashenks traveled to other villages of the supertribe of Skwamapenk for ritual festivals or just to have a good time. Orc saw that the five tribes meeting for these occasions were equally hooked on aflatuk and somakatin.

  It was not until the fifth festival that he felt a vague alarm. The revelation was slow in coming, but, when it did, it jolted him, though not strongly. Hooked. All the users of the drugs were hooked, and that included himself!

  That night, despite the painful urgings to drink the juice and smoke the bark, he resisted. Without saying good-bye to anybody, he put out to sea in his dugout. Though he had food and water, he did not take any of the drugs.

  The next day, he regretted leaving the aflatuk and somakatin behind. Why had he been so stupid? Before nightfall, the craving was twisting his body with agony, and his cries were swept away by the wind, heard only by himself and a few seabirds. He was being carried away from the island, and he had no idea where other land was. Willingly or not, he was taking the cold turkey cure.

  Jim Grimson also suffered, agonized, and, figuratively, bit his own wrists and tore at his flesh with his fingers. He, with Orc, screamed, saw demons rising from the sea and vast menacing ghostly figures looking down from the clouds, and felt as if his flesh was gnawing into his bones and spitting pieces out and the bones were trying to eat their way through the flesh to his skin while being eaten by the flesh.

  Between these tortures, Orc, hence Jim, plunged into abysmal depressions. Orc saw himself sitting on the dugout bow and grinning at him. The strange thing about this vision was that it told him that, in some perverted way, he was enjoying his depressions.

  He came close to leaping into the sea to end it all.

  Then, suddenly, he suffered no more. The drugs had fled his body. He was weak, gaunt, and thirsty from not eating and drinking, but he had won one battle. No. He had won the war. He swore that never again would he take any drugs.

  Unfortunately, during his deliriums, he had thrown the food and water supplies overboard. He now had a war against thirst and starvation to wage. He would have lost this if a ship had not rescued him. This, however, was manned by slavers. He was shoved into the hold and manacled along with several hundred other unfortunates.

  His captors were very tall men from the far east of the large landmass reported by the Poashenks. They were lighter-skinned than the islanders and armed with steel weapons. Their vessel was equipped with sails and with oars to be used when the wind was light or nonexistent.

  The slaver-pirates made two raids on a large island. With the ship packed to overcapacity with slaves, they sailed for three weeks northward. Orc survived the horrors of the hold. He was not sure that he would live through the slavehood itself. He was sold to a grower of a hemplike plant and put to work in the fields. The labor from dawn to dusk under the killer sun, the bad food, the unremitting humiliation, and the busy whips of the overseers put a heavy strain on his patience and toleration.

  He knew what the penalty was for not obeying orders completely and industriously. He realized what talking back to the overseers or even being slightly surly would bring on him. He still had to control himself with great effort. He observed everything carefully, and he looked for ways and means to escape.

  Jim Grimson not only shared Orc’s sufferings, he had his own. He had stuck to Orc no matter what ordeals and dangers the Lord went through. When the agonies of withdrawal came, they were too much for Jim. He chanted the release phrase. He remained in Orc’s mind. Horrified, he tried again and again. He could not get loose. Then he was swallowed up in the self-rending and the brain-fever nightmare visions and deliriums. He was too much Orc to be Jim Grimson.

  After the withdrawal agonies were gone, Jim thought that he could now spring himself and return to Earth. But he decided that he could hang on and in a little longer. He endured the slave ship because Orc did not find the ordeal unendurable. For the same reason, Jim stayed while Orc was a plantation slave.

  One day, he concluded that he had had too much too long. He would leave. When enough time had passed for the situation to change, he would return.

  Again, he was horrified because he could not tear himself away. Now, though, the ghostbrain was holding him. It had moved closer and had “seized” Jim with phantom pincers. Somehow, Jim knew that it had put forth something similar to a crab’s claws and clamped them down on him.

  After that, the ghostbrain did nothing. It seemed content, for a while, anyway, just to hold on to him. Jim was anything but content. He struggled. He chanted. He cried aloud, figuratively, to a God he did not believe in. All was in vain.

  Shortly after this, Orc rebelled. He had not planned to do so; he just stepped over, or was forced to step over, his limit of endurance. His overseer, Nager, did not like any slave in his gang, and he particularly disliked Orc. He made fun of Orc’s white skin, spat on him, lashed him more than he did the other slaves and for lesser offenses, and always put Orc on double duty when that was needed.

  That late afternoon, just after Nager had told the water bearer not to give Orc a drink because he did not look thirsty, Orc reached out and lifted the whole bucket to his mouth. The next second, he was knocked down. Nager’s foot drove into his stomach. Then he brought the whip down on Orc’s back. The young Lord took six lashes before he saw red. He jumped up through the scarlet cloud that seemed to envelop everything, and he kicked Nager in the crotch.

  Before the other overseers and some guards could get to him, Orc snapped Nager’s neck.

  Despite his struggles, during which he killed a guard and crippled an overseer, he was brought down to the ground. The chief overseer, pale under his dark pigment, almost frothing at the mouth, ordered that Orc be beheaded at once.

  The slaves, having abandoned their duties to watch, had formed a ring around Orc and the men who held him. They were a silent group, but their faces revealed their hatred. There was not one among them who would not have done what Orc did if they had been able to do it.

  Orc was on his knees, his trunk bent forward, his hands gripped behind him, his head pushed forward. The chief overseer had unsheathed his long sword and was approaching Orc. He was saying, “Hold him steady! One cut, and I’ll take his head to the master!”

  Jim was more than just terrified. If Orc died, he would die. He was convinced of that. He screamed out the releasing phrase and made the most violent mental effort of his life, which lately had been filled with such.

  He had the sensation of passing through a colorless void. Not black. Colorless. Cold burned him. And he was back in his room.

  Its lights were on. He was on his feet but bent over. His hands w
ere squeezing the neck of Bill Cranam, a security guard. Bill was on his knees, and he was bent backwards. His eyes were popping; his face was turning blue; his own hands were clamped on Jim’s wrists.

  Someone was screaming at Jim to let loose of Cranam.

  CHAPTER 25

  Two blows of a billy club on the backs of his elbows paralyzed Jim’s arms. His hands fell away from Cranam’s neck. An arm clamped down on his neck from behind. Choking, he was dragged from Cranam and thrown down onto the floor. The other guard, Dick McDonrach, stood over him, holding his billy club high.

  “Don’t move, damn you, don’t move!” McDonrach said hoarsely.

  Despite this warning, Jim sat up. He was naked. Before the last two entries, he had removed his clothes. He had had the idea, probably wrong, that they interfered with the ease of transition.

  “What’s going on?” Jim said hoarsely, looking up at McDonrach. He felt his neck.

  “We made a surprise drug sweep,” the guard said. “We found you sitting in that chair; you didn’t seem to hear us. We searched your room. We found this!”

  He reached into his pocket and brought out a plastic bag containing some black capsules. Triumphantly, he said, “Uppers!”

  Jim felt dazed and stupid. He said, “They’re not mine! I swear they’re not mine!”

  At the same time, he saw out of the corner of his eye faces in the doorway. He turned his head. The doorway was packed with patients in their pajamas and dressing gowns. Sandy Melton looked very sad. Gillman Sherwood was grinning.

  Bill Cranam, tenderly feeling his neck, staggered over to McDonrach’s side. His voice was hoarse and squeaky.

  “Jesus Christ, Grimson! What got into you? I had a hell of a time waking you up, and then you attacked me! Why? Haven’t we always been good buddies?”

  “I’m sorry, Bill,” Jim said. “I was still in … that other world. I mean, I wasn’t all here. I didn’t even know what I was doing.”