The World of Tiers, Volume 2

by Philip José Farmer

  CHAPTER 30

  “I know you’re anything but pleased with me, Doctor,” Jim Grimson said. “You ordered me not to reenter, but I couldn’t help it. Orc was as much a drug as angel dust. I swear I’ll never reenter again! Never! Not until you tell me to do it! And I won’t want to do that, I can tell you for sure! I got that compulsion out of my system!

  “I loathe Red Orc! I’ll admit, like I told you, that I got a very funny sensation when he bit into his father’s balls! I enjoyed it, just for a couple of seconds, though! That’s because I was so far into being Orc I almost was him! Then I got real sick! For a moment, the sickness made me become myself enough to get out of Orc! If that hadn’t happened, I might still be in him!”

  Porsena’s face was unreadable. Jim believed that he was really pissed off at him. He just wasn’t showing it. However, his words so far had been as sharp and as hard-driven as arrows.

  The psychiatrist now spoke more softly. “You’ve been told to call me or my staff at once if you feel your desire is getting too strong for you to resist it. You should have done that. I expect that, from now on, you will. You are, in a psychological sense, in shark-filled waters. To be precise, you’re at a turning point. When a person is at that stage, he can go ahead or go back. You understand?”

  Jim nodded. He said, “God knows I tried! I know now I can’t make it on my own. I’ll do everything exactly as you tell me to do.”

  “Not until the reason for the orders or suggestions has been explained to you. The patient should fully comprehend the why and wherefore of his therapy.”

  “I know. You tell me that every time we’re about ready to go into another therapy phase.”

  The doctor smiled. He said, “You’re astute, in some things, anyway. That’s one reason your therapy has progressed more swiftly and along somewhat different lines from the others. You’re ready, in my judgment, for the shedding phase.”

  Jim said, “But … but! I mean, there are some things I just have to know! Like, what about the ghostbrain? And I wanted to be there when Orc made the Earth-universe and its twin! God, what a sight that would’ve been, like watching God create the world! No, like being God because Orc would be doing it, and I’d be Orc!

  “And I wanted to find out how Orc got his complete human body back! And there’s Los! When I left, it looked like Los was dead and done with. But Farmer says Los was still living when Kickaha went into the Lords’ worlds!”

  “Farmer may write the sixth book in the series and enlighten you about all those. Whether he does or not, we have certain absolutely required procedures to follow. What if you were addicted to heroin and pleaded with me to allow you to keep taking it because you’d miss future highs if you kicked the habit? You do see the parallel?”

  “Well, OK,” Jim said slowly. “Easy for you to say, though.”

  “That’s because I am objective.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Think about Orc when he was on the island of the drug users, the lotus eaters. Do you want to be in his condition? He certainly had no craving to continue taking the drugs after he had gone through the agonies of quitting cold turkey. You went through his pain with him. Keep that torture in mind if you’re ever tempted to take drugs again.”

  Doctor Porsena leaned forward over his desk and church-steepled his hands.

  “I want you to think hard about the questions I’m going to throw at you. Consider all the angles you can think of. Orc was in Anthema, the Unwanted World. Orc’s father placed him there. What does that suggest and imply to you?”

  There was silence while Jim thought, his mouth twisted with the effort and his eyes rolling around. Finally, he said, “My father, I mean Orc’s father, put him there. I suppose you’re thinking I named Anthema the Unwanted World because my father did not want me? He sent me, I mean Orc, there because he was not wanted. That sounds good, but I didn’t make up the name of Anthema. It wasn’t just my unconscious mind working overtime.”

  For some reason, Jim’s heartbeat had stepped up. He was beginning to sweat a little, too.

  The doctor said, “Los loved Orc when Orc was a child or, at least, was very fond of him. He treated his son with kindness and care then. But, occasionally, he was very abusive, even then. When Orc became an adolescent and was no longer the cute and lovely infant, his father seemed to hate him.”

  “No ‘seemed,’” Jim said. “He did!”

  “That suggests?”

  “My relations with my father were sort of like Orc’s, weren’t they?”

  Porsena, instead of answering, said, “What about your visions when you were a child?”

  “Hallucinations, you mean?”

  “Let’s call them visions. Your first attack of stigmata occurred when you were five. You were in church with your mother. The statue of the crucified Christ fascinated you. You suddenly saw it as a real man, not a carved wooden figure who was suspended by nails from a cross and whose blood was merely paint. You screamed.”

  “I still don’t know what scared me.”

  “That’s not vitally important. Immediately after you screamed, blood welled from your hands and feet and on your forehead. You became hysterical, your mother, also. Then …”

  “Then there was the man I saw floating by my bedroom window when I was four!” Jim said. “And the naked green man I saw out in our garden six months later. He was eating the ears of corn! I yelled for Mom, but when she came, the green man was gone! I got whipped by my father for lying! But I did see that man! I did!”

  “How do you feel about the vision you had just before you passed out in your burning house?” the doctor said. “You were naked and chained to a tree and a giant sickle was about to castrate you. Also, what are your feelings about the vision you had of the man-serpent?”

  “They were prophetic. They predicted what was going to happen when I was in Orc. Sort of, anyway. They were mixed up, but their elements were true. They did happen.”

  “I didn’t ask you if you thought they were true or what their psychological explanation was. I asked you how you feel when you think of them.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Doctor!” Jim burst out. “I don’t feel anything at all about it! I can see what you’re getting at! You think I made up Orc being made into a half-snake thing because I’d dreamed about the man-serpent!”

  “I am not trying to invalidate your experiences. I am merely suggesting certain parallels. The interpretations will be yours. However, allow me to point out that you deny feeling anything about it. Yet you responded with more than a little anger. For the present, we’ll not go into that. You think about it, then tell me your conclusions.”

  Jim leaned forward, his hands holding tight to the arms of the chair. His heart was beating even harder than it had a moment ago, and he was sweating more heavily. What he felt was, he felt as if he’d like to get out of the office. Right now.

  “Look, Doc!” he said harshly. But even he could hear an underlying note of pleading. “Where I went and what I saw and did, I mean, what Orc did, was no fantasy! It was all true, and I don’t care what parallels there are to my life here on Earth and there in the Lords’ universes! Hell, I could find parallels between my life and a thousand others on Earth! There is such a thing as coincidence, you know! No matter how crazily I might fantasize, I can do things, know things, no fantasies could teach me! Like speaking Thoan, for instance! You want to hear fluent Thoan?

  “Samon-ke fath? Meaning, Where do I go from here? Orc-tam Orc man-kim. Yem tath Orc-tha. Meaning, Orc was once just called Orc. Now, he’s called Red Orc. If you want me to, I’ll rattle off a long story in Thoan. And I’ll give you the grammar, too!

  “And where would I learn how to work flint into knives, arrowheads, spearpoints, scrapers, chisels, you name it? Bring me a core of raw flint, I’ll shape from it any tool anybody can make from flint! How could I know how to do that unless I’d really been in Orc’s mind and had seen him and Ijim work flint and then brought back how to do it st
ored in my memory?

  “Then there’s the whiplashes I brought back from the time Orc got whipped by the slave driver! Yeah, I know I’ve had stigmata, and maybe that’s just psychosomatic stuff! But that time, I just didn’t bleed from my back! The cuts made by the whip were there, too! They hurt like hell, they were real!

  “Then there’s the controlled wet dreams I learned from Orc! You’re starting to control the dreams and delusions of the patients, but they can’t hold a candle to my controlled dreams for control or realism! How’d I learn to do that? On my own? No way! I learned it from Orc!

  “I could go on, but you got more than enough to make you wonder if maybe I’m not telling the truth, haven’t you? And I suppose you think just because Orc cut off his father’s balls I’d like to cut off my father’s?”

  Doctor Porsena said, “Would you?”

  “Yeah, there’re times when I’d’ve been glad to! But I swear, mad as I’ve been at him, I never once thought about doing that. Maybe stringing him up by them. But cutting them off and eating them—raw, for God’s sake—never! So how come, if I’m just imagining Orc and what he does, did he do something I’d never thought of?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Oh, sure, it was my unconscious mind did it!”

  “And …?”

  “And? What else? Oh, well, there’s my imagination. It’s a free-wheeling extrapolator, according to Mister Lum. Takes a basic premise or fact or idea and builds logically from that. Maybe you could be right about that. But not about the other stuff. Not my speaking Thoan and working flint and, I didn’t mention this before, my knowledge of biology and chemistry I couldn’t have learned unless I’d tapped into Orc’s mind. That can’t be explained.”

  Jim tried to lean back and relax.

  “Listen, Doctor! We can settle this! You can put me on the lie detector machine, question me all you want, and then you’ll see I’m not lying!”

  “You’re my patient, not a criminal. Besides, if you believe that you have actually gone into Orc’s universe, the lie detector would indicate that you’re not lying. But I’m not the inquisitor, and you’re not on the rack. The truth or falsity of the patient’s experiences are not my consideration or concern. I don’t care whether they really happened or not. I accept that they did happen inasmuch as they concern the therapy. That is, what is the relevance of the experiences to the therapy? What progress or regress derives from them? Those are the only significant questions. Do you read me?”

  “Sure! But … isn’t it important, needful to science, to everybody, to know that there might be other worlds out there? Parallel universes? And at least one person, me, maybe three, since Kickaha and Wolff went there, has been there! Aren’t you interested at all in that? If I can go, if they can, too, then everybody should be interested!”

  “That is true, given your premises. As I said, at the moment only your therapeutic progress concerns me. It’s all that should concern you. Now, Jim, I understand that your parents are coming here tomorrow to say good-bye to you. They’re leaving for Texas the day after. Your father has finally consented to face you. That meeting is very important as a test of how you’ll react to stress. Will you be so angry that you become violent and attack him? What will you do if he attacks you first? Will you avoid provocative behavior? And what will your reaction be after the meeting is over?”

  He and Jim talked about the possibilities and how Jim could handle the situation. The psychiatrist did not expect Jim not to be angry. He did want Jim’s display of rage, whatever form it took, to be appropriate.

  “As you know, shortly after you were admitted here, I advised both your father and your mother to go into therapy,” Doctor Porsena said. “When a patient enters treatment, his family should also enter. They refused. Their main plea was that they could not afford it. But …”

  “The real reason was that they thought I was the only crazy one in the family!” Jim burst out. “They thought they didn’t need therapy! Hah!”

  “Then you’ll have to learn how to handle all that appropriately and positively.”

  Doctor Porsena glanced at the clock.

  “Just one more question, Jim. It was put to you some time ago, but I want to hear your response as of this moment. What is the main thing that you have learned about Orc’s character?”

  Jim hunkered down in the chair, frowning. Then he sat up.

  “The night I took all those trips … it was a lifetime. I’d say that the main thing I learned was this.

  “Orc had a lot of good qualities, courage, endurance, ingenuity, and desire to learn. He was passionate about everything he did. Oh, he was passionate, all right! But his passion was separated from real love. I don’t think he really loved anybody but his mother and his aunt. And I’m not sure that that love wasn’t basically lust. Passion without love is no good.

  “Not bad for an eighteen-year-old blue-collar dummy, heh?”

  “Not bad,” the doctor said. “I don’t know if you mean it when you call yourself a dummy. But we’re not through working on your self-esteem.”

  “Another thing,” Jim said. “The Thoan. My God! They’re thousands of years old and like gods in many respects. But they’re locked into war and conquest and jealousy and murder and torture and all sorts of bad things. They haven’t progressed spiritually or emotionally in all those thousands of years. They’re stuck, and there’s no hope for them to get unstuck. That, I say, is like most people on Earth. They’re stuck!”

  The psychiatrist nodded. “I’ll point out another item,” he said. “Orc is to be admired for his ingenuity and wit in getting through the many obstacles in his way and in getting out of the many traps set for him. What Orc did, you can do. There are many obstacles on Earth and many traps, economic, social, psychological. You, like Orc, can use your ingenuity and wit to overcome the obstacles and spring yourself from the traps.

  “And you don’t have to be a dull conformist, as you have phrased it during previous sessions. You’re afraid you’ll be a square, part of the establishment, if you behave within certain moral and ethical bounds. But you can be a genuine individualist without being antisocial.”

  “Yeah,” Jim said, his tone indicating that he was not fully confident. “Still, there are things I’d like to know. The ghostbrain, for instance. What was it really? I don’t suppose it makes much difference if it takes over Orc. It’ll act just like he would. In a sense, it’ll be Orc. At least, that’s what I thought. Only …”

  “Only what?”

  “Well, just before I parted from Orc the last time, I was so sickened that I didn’t pay much attention to what the ghostbrain was doing just then. It seemed to have advanced on me. I mean, it had gotten a lot closer or a lot bigger, depending on the way you look at it. In fact, it seemed, somehow, to have surrounded me, half-surrounded, anyway. It was like a giant black amoeba getting ready to surround and ingest a smaller cell. If I hadn’t left Orc just then, well, I don’t know.

  “I was thinking about it the other day. How about this idea? I was wrong thinking it came from that blue stuff floating around on Anthema. Suppose it was—this’ll kill you—suppose the ghostbrain was not some alien thing menacing Orc? I mean, what if it was some kind of a shadow of Orc’s brain? What really happened was that I was sensing that Orc’s brain was about to take me over, and it looked like a sinister alien shadow to me? I scared myself into thinking it was a danger to Orc. But there really wasn’t any alien in Orc’s brain except me? And something in Orc sensed me and was going to absorb me? Orc was unconscious of this. But a mechanism in his neural system was automatically treating me as if I was an enemy?

  “If that’s true, then I was scared for nothing about it being a force ready to become Orc and throw him out. But I had good reason to be scared. I was going to be the victim, the possessed, or, I should say, the ingested! Only Orc was going to do the ingesting!”

  “An excellent hypothesis,” the psychiatrist said. “Quite possibly, perhaps most probably,
that was what it was all about. I congratulate you on a brilliant solution to that problem.”

  “Thanks. But what does that mean? You didn’t say it was the right solution.”

  “No,” the doctor said, “but it is very probably the correct one. If you think it is, then it is. You’re the person to know.”

  He smiled, and he rose from his chair. “Time’s up, Jim. See you next session.”

  He flipped the intercom switch. “Winnie. Send in Sandy Melton, please.”

  Reluctantly, feeling that there was so much more to discuss, Jim went into the waiting room, nodded at Winnie, and stepped into the hall. It was, for the moment, empty of people. Music came down the hall from a half-closed door. When he was closer to Sue Binker’s room, he recognized Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, issued by Tomato Music, a record company that dared take chances on unconventional stuff.

  As he strode by the door, he glanced through the opening. He saw Sue Binker’s mantra on her wall. It was a looped cross, the ancient Egyptian ankh, formed by the Tiers series covers. One illustration, that from the British edition of A Private Cosmos, caught and held his eye. The background was an eerie landscape. In the foreground were Kickaha, holding the Horn of Shambarimem, and the laboratory-made harpy, Podarge. She was either attacking Kickaha or about to screw him. It was hard to tell.

  Whoosh!

  Subaudio sound.

  Jim was hurtling through the eye of the loop on top of the cross.

  The eye expanded to admit him.

  Before he could scream, he was in Orc.

  Behind him, or seeming to be behind him, was another unheard sound. It was the clang of an iron door shutting.

  Jim knew instantly (without knowing how he knew) that the young Lord was now called Red Orc. His many slayings of Lords and leblabbiys had earned him that title. He was standing on the edge of a high plateau in a flickering crimson light which came from the horizon and stained the blue sky. Around him were warriors, all of them leblabbiy, clad in green armor and scarlet feathers, their faces heavily tattooed. They were firing with howitzer-sized beamers at the horde below. The purple rays were blowing up the forest, earth, and men; huge trees and men’s bodies were flying through the red-shot black smoke.