The World of Tiers, Volume 2

by Philip José Farmer

  They were so eager to talk that Doctor Scaevola, the group leader, had a hard time keeping order. Part of his difficulty sprang from their attitude toward him. Though he was enthusiastic about Tiersian therapy as an “as-if” or fantasy-using technique, he obviously did not believe that their trips were real. His tone of voice and facial and body language betrayed his incredulity.

  According to one patient, Monique Bragg, who had been filling in as an office clerk now and then, she had overheard Porsena and Scaevola arguing about the concept of parallel worlds. Porsena had not said that there were such things. But he had maintained that recent speculation in theoretical physics indicated that parallel worlds were possible. Scaevola had been outright scornful of this.

  Scaevola also had some trouble relating to juveniles, or anyone else, addicted to rock music. He liked only Italian opera and classical composers.

  Scaevola finally quieted the group down. Brooks Epstein, eighteen years old, spoke first. He was tall and rangy and had a Lincolnesque face. His voice embarrassed him because it was so thin and shrill. It was not fitting for a lawyer or surgeon. Despite this, his parents wanted him to be one or the other. Brooks admitted that these professions were reasonable and desirable—if you cared for them. But he passionately desired to be a baseball player. He had told his parents that he would go to college and then Harvard if he failed to become a major league player. That had not satisfied them. But he had held out against them and also against his fiancée, who was wholly on their side.

  While the argument was raging and Brooks was becoming more despondent but increasingly stubborn, his father had killed himself. Though the cause seemed to be the failure of his hardware store chain and an inevitably fatal case of myeloma cancer, Brooks was devastated with guilt. His abandonment of the Jewish faith had enraged and hurt his parents and deeply shaken his fiancée. His mother had never said openly that his father’s worry about this had brought on his bankruptcy and cancer, but it was evident that she believed it.

  Attending Harvard had then become an impossibility. Brooks was happy about this, though at the same time he felt guiltier. Then a rich uncle in Chicago had offered to finance his studies in whatever university Brooks selected. The catch was that he return to his faith and get either a legal or medical degree. His mother and fiancée had pressed him hard to accept the offer. They were as relentless as hungry wolves circling an elk floundering in deep snow.

  One night, Brooks went ape, as he put it. Using his baseball bats, he had broken furniture, expensive art objects, and windows. Worse, he had threatened to bash in the skulls of his mother and fiancée. The police had hauled him away. After failure with Freudian, Jungian, and Sullivanian therapists and a stint at Est in California, he had ended up in the care of Doctor Porsena.

  The persona he had chosen was that of the Yidshe knight, Baron funem Laksfalk. The baron was a character in the first book of the series. He lived in the Dracheland tier of the tower-of-Babel-shaped planet ruled by Lord Jadawin. Though this was inhabited by creatures Jadawin had made, it was also populated by the descendants of people from Earth. Jadawin, as conscienceless as any Thoan, had abducted some groups of medieval Germans and German Jews and gated them to his world. These had two separate feudal societies which Jadawin had encouraged to resemble those found in the Arthurian tales. In the first book of the series, the wandering knight, funem Laksfalk, had fallen in with Kickaha and Wolff after a joust. He had died fighting bravely by Wolff’s side against a band of savages. But Brooks chose to enact his adventures during the years before funem Laksfalk’s last stand.

  Brooks Epstein reported that, as of today, his heavy burden of guilt and anger seemed to be lighter. This was because he knew that the baron, should his father die, would not suffer guilt if he was not responsible for it. He, Brooks, had not caused his father’s bankruptcy, cancer, or suicide. Therefore, he should not suffer from guilt. Despite his rationalizing, he was still suffering. But he felt that he would get over that.

  As for his profession, he still intended to become a baseball pitcher. It was not a criminal line of work, which was more than you could say for that engaged in by many lawyers and doctors.

  After Brooks had narrated the previous night’s adventure, the group talked about how they felt about the Yidshe baron and how they would have altered his situation. Jim was aware that Doctor Porsena and his assistants were interpreting the remarks as they applied generally to the group. He guessed that, later in therapy, they would interpret these as they applied to the individuals uttering them.

  It seemed to him that the World of Tiers was being used as a sort of communion. The patients had very personal—idiosyncratic?—and uncontrollable delusions, unrealistic desires, and hallucinations of various degrees. But all now shared in this communion, the Tiers series. They were heading toward each other, converging, drawn together like flies scenting honey. And they were unconsciously modifying their views of the Lords’ worlds, shaping them into a dimly seen common world. Its shape would be realized when they were well advanced in therapy. They would know then that they had torn apart their own little boats and put the pieces together as a large ship.

  Maybe he was just allowing his imagination, not to mention his metaphors, to run away with him. In any event, he sensed that the therapy was working well for most of them. However, the world he entered, Orc’s world, was not fantasy. It was as real as this one. More real, in some respects.

  The next to speak was fourteen-year-old Ben Ligel. He had had some hallucinations when he was on drugs and just as many as when off. The primal loner, his main problem was his close-to-panic unease in unfamiliar situations or when with anybody but a few close friends. Now, he was not, most of the time, unbearably uncomfortable when with his fellows. But when the times came that he could not stand being too close to others, he escaped to the other worlds.

  To do this, he put a Tiers book on his head and used it as a “gravity gate.” Headfirst, he was pressed down into the pocket universe he had chosen. Simultaneously, gravity pulled the book downward on that part of his body still on Earth. When the cover of the book reached the floor, he would find himself in the other world.

  Ben stayed there until the “latent tug of gravity” pulled him back to Earth. He was always refreshed by the voyage, and he was able to endure the “social pressures” for some time.

  Third to speak was seventeen-year-old Kathy Maidanoff. She was not backward in telling the group that she had been diagnosed as having a borderline personality disorder, gender confusion, and nymphomania. Though she had, so far, been chaste while in the hospital, she did get sexual relief through erotic dreams. She would put a Tiers book close to her head and another on her crotch. Then, almost always, she would dream of sex with a male or female character. She had just entered a phase of therapy in which she was being taught how to control her dreams. Jim was astute enough to guess that the staff was not doing this just to enable her to enjoy the dreams better. The process had something to do with getting her to control her delusions. Then, these would gradually be stripped from her through other techniques.

  Jim had not mentioned that he was master of the controlled dream technique. He did not, however, require book aids. While in Orc, he had learned through him how to prefabricate dreams. Now, when Jim slept, he used these controlled wet dreams to relieve himself. They were much more satisfactory than masturbation. “Look, Ma, no hands!” Their danger was that the dreamer could become addicted to them. In time, he or she would regard flesh-and-blood lovers as cumbersome, time-wasting, and unnecessary.

  Jim had noted that Orc’s partners in the dreams were usually his aunt, Vala, and his mother, Enitharmon.

  Quite often, Jim also put the women, lovelier than Helen of Troy or Vivien Leigh, in his programmed night visions, sometimes at the same time. That it was incest, though secondhand, was the dressing on the salad.

  Early that night, Jim made a decision that he knew might ruin everything for him. He could not help it. His
own arguments against the idea did not help him resist it. He would be disobeying Porsena’s orders. He did not want to do that. Yet, he would.

  At ten minutes to eight, he passed through the black hole in the center of the tragil. Despite Porsena’s forbidding it, he planned to enter Orc. Not just once but many times during this night. And, since he dare not journey every night—too much danger of being caught—he would compress the many into a single night.

  From ten minutes to eight in the evening to six in the morning would give him time to hurl himself over spans of many years.

  What had he read when in Mr. Lum’s class? It was from the poet, William Blake.

  “Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour.”

  He would not go so far as to say that he would time-hop, via Orc, through eternity in one night. But he would try to squeeze into ten hours as many slices of eternity as he could.

  Just before he started chanting, he saw Porsena’s face. It was disapproving and sad. The chanting faltered and almost faded away into silence. But Jim felt a stronger pull. Orc and the exotic worlds behind the walls of Earth punched through the black hole and shattered Porsena’s face. Its fragments flew away and Jim flew through the fragments into the tragil like a World War II bomber through flak.

  Suddenly, he was in intense pain. He screamed voicelessly. Orc, however, was grinding his teeth together and was not even moaning softly. He would not give his father any satisfaction from hearing him cry out.

  Orc was stretched out against a cross. His feet rested on the ground, but his hands were nailed to the horizontal arms. He did not think he could endure the agony for another second. Yet, he did.

  CHAPTER 28

  Not so Jim. He had suffered enough with and through Orc. Enough was enough and more than enough. Despite this, he managed to hang on for a minute. Orc was high on the side of a mountain. Far far below, at the foot of the mountain, was a broad lake fed by a river. On the lakefront was Golgonooza, the new palace of Los, the City of Art. A river ran on its far side. The buildings were of varicolored metal, soft looking and all rising from the ground at a gentle angle and then becoming steeper, but never entirely vertical, until they got to perhaps a thousand feet. After that, they went straight up for many hundreds of feet, then leaned outward. They seemed to melt into each other at various levels. Green, scarlet, orange, and lemon-colored vegetation grew on many of these. Much of this consisted of trees, some of which grew at right angles to the vertical surfaces of the buildings.

  Los had been working on the city-palace, on and off, for several centuries. He planned it to be the most magnificent of Thoan structures, greater than Urizen’s Insubstantial Palace.

  Los had caught Orc just after he had entered a gate into this world. Yesterday, he had crucified his son despite Enitharmon’s desperate pleas. Los was about to drive in the second nail himself when he was attacked by her. Before she had been knocked out, she had clawed his face bloody. Now, Orc’s mother was imprisoned somewhere in Golgonooza.

  Unable to withstand the pain any longer, Jim changed the mantra, and he was back in his room. The time was still ten minutes to eight. The minor hand had moved an almost imperceptible degree. Shaking from the ordeal, he got a drink of water in the bathroom and rested in the chair for a while. Then, sharply aware that he was losing time and he had many trips to go, he began droning, “ATA MATUMA M’MATA!” This time, the chant did not have to go on so long. Seven repetitions hurled him through the black hole. The next time, he was sure, it would only take five. The trip after that would need only three. The remaining trips would continue to take three. He did not know why. It just was that way.

  His time target was a year later. He landed in Orc in a situation which would once have embarrassed him. But he had been in the young Lord in too many similar circumstances to be taken aback. Orc was making violent love to his aunt Vala. That, apparently, was how she desired it. A gentle lover was not for her. Jim was caught up in the raging maelstrom of lust and had no time or inclination to think about the surroundings. Not until both were spent was Jim able to do anything on his own. Though also suffering the effects of the “little death,” as some called postcoital lassitude, he was lively enough to note the immediate environment.

  The two Lords were in a magnificently furnished bedroom as large as a mansion. The walls and the pillars crawled with changing colors. The windows were twice the size of a football field. They, too, bore shifting colors, tints, and hues. Now and then, they became transparent. Then, Jim could see a black sky with many stars. Later, the top of a planet came into view. As Jim discovered after a while from Orc’s and Vala’s conversation, they were in a satellite with a figure-eight orbit.

  They had fled through various universes after Vala had rescued Orc from the cross. They did not go to the world of Luvah, Vala’s husband, because Luvah and Vala had split up. Unlike most Lords, Luvah had not killed his spouse but had allowed her to try her luck at dispossessing another Lord of another world.

  Los, like a hound of heaven, had dogged his son and sister-in-law as they passed through gate after gate. Then they had been separated—they did not say why—and Orc had gone on. But they had found each other after many adventures. This world was—had been—Ellayol’s. After getting through several gates set with many traps, Orc and Vala had killed Ellayol, his wife, and his children.

  This news deeply disturbed Jim. The Lords were so murderous, and Orc seemed to have lost whatever humane feelings he had once had.

  Vala and Orc had gated to this satellite to enjoy a lovers’ vacation. Shortly after learning this, Jim was on fire with the same flames burning in the two. There was another rest, and then they were at it again. This went on and on with not much talk between the bouts nor many thoughts about the past. When they started to gash each other with their fingernails and to lick each other’s blood, Jim loosed himself. Not, though, before “touching” the ghostbrain. Jim still did not know if the thing had distenanted Orc’s intelligence or was taking it over as slowly as some cancers ate up a body. What made him “shudder” when he touched it was that it touched him back. Something had definitely though briefly put its “finger” on him. Jim had been shot with loathing then. Yet, he had had the feeling that there was something vaguely familiar about it.

  After returning to his room, Jim rested a few minutes. Faintly through the wall on one side came the sound of a girl sobbing. Through the other wall Jim Morrison shrieked the words of “Horse Latitudes” while The Doors banged, twanged, and pounded. The lyric was one of Jim’s favorites, true poetry, he thought. He had not heard this 1967 hit for a long time, but Monique Bragg liked to tune in the “Golden Oldies” program.

  Jim sighed. He did not want to put off reentry. For the moment, he was too wrung out by the sexual frenzies to start chanting again. Though he had not exerted himself physically in a direct sense, his role as a not so innocent bystander had worn him out. He now knew all there was to know about tender love, learned while Orc was making love to the native woman. He also knew too much of violent love, as demonstrated by Vala and Orc. Though his erotic adventures had been few on Earth, he, as Orc, had had enough to make Casanova and Henry Miller look like bumbling lovers.

  More minutes passed. Finally, he shot himself through the black center. His target was six years later. Surely, this time, Orc would be in a relatively happy situation. Statistically, there were bound to be such.

  By Shambarimem’s Horn! Orc was back in a suite in his father’s original city-palace. No one else was in it, and no sound came through the heavily barred and open window. He had been captured again while trying to make his way through the city of Golgonooza, the killing of Los his goal. Vala had gated out to somewhere. That was seven months ago. And he, Orc, had been taken to his childhood home, the palace of the clouds, and imprisoned there.

  Jim was shocked to find out that that was not all Los had done to his son. Orc’s body felt peculiar. It had muscles it had never possessed, and its l
egs and feet were numbed past feeling, and it moved in a frightening and strange manner.

  Then Jim saw Orc’s reflection in a towering mirror. His surprise and horror were so intense that he came close to tearing loose and returning to Earth. The naked body of the Lord was, from the genitals upward, just as it had been. But the lower part was a serpent’s. Orc had no legs. He was joined to a gigantic snake’s body fifty feet long, its scales a bright green. At regular intervals, the green bore five-angled scarlet patches. Orc’s torso was held upright by the powerful forward part of the reptilian body. He moved across the floor as a python moved.

  He had become an ophidian centaur, half-man, half-snake.

  Jim knew enough of Thoan science and history to know who had brought about this metamorphosis. Los, instead of killing his son, was torturing him again. He had used the biological knowledge and means still available to the Lords to make this monster. His son’s legs had been lopped off, and he had been fleshily welded to a headless snake.

  Sometimes, Los came to this now-deserted palace to mock and to jeer at Orc. He had told his son that Enitharmon was back with him. After their reconciliation, they had had three more children. These were Vala, named after the aunt because Enitharmon desired it, Palamabron, and Theotormon. All had been borne by surrogate mothers. Orc had been the only one Enitharmon had carried. She had wanted to experience natural childbirth at least once. That one time had been enough to discourage her from having more.

  “However, I have learned my lesson,” Los had said. “From now on, as soon as the children become adults, I will send them on to other worlds. Some of these will be unoccupied by Lords, their masters or mistresses having been slain. On others, my children will have to test their wits and agility against the rulers.”