Even now, he might be attempting to seduce her. Or he might be forcing her to his bed. Kickaha tried shutting out the visions of her making love to Red Orc. But it was not as easy as pulling down a window blind.
Two months passed. On the third day of the third week of the third month (a good omen, if you believed in omens) Khruuz told Kickaha and Clifton to come to the gates-display room. The vast chamber was unlit except for the light-points on the ceiling dome and the walls. They were much brighter than during the first visit. A single light illuminated Khruuz and the control panel before which he sat. When they entered, he rose with an expression that the two knew by now was intended for a smile.
He rubbed his hands together just as humans did to express their joy or high satisfaction. “Good news!” he said. “Very promising!”
He stabbed a finger at the ceiling. Bending his neck, Kickaha saw a huge point that had not been there when he was in the chamber. Many lines ran from it to many smaller points. He also saw that one bright point had changed from white to orange. Several lines leading to it were also orange. One of them ended at the big point.
“The orange point leads to Zazel’s World—if my calculations are correct.”
“Are you sure?” Kickaha said.
Khruuz sat down before the huge indicator-control panel. “I just said that I was not sure. If the computer is correct, I’m sure. But I don’t know if it is correct. The only way to know will be to gate someone to it.”
“How did you do it?” Kickaha said.
“I set the computer to tracing all the lines you see in this room. Since you were here last, many new points and lines have been added.”
“But you said that you had shut down all the gates leading to here because of Red Orc,” Clifton said.
“True. I had. But I took the chance that Red Orc would not detect the new gates I opened. These were opened for some microseconds before closing down. In that time, the computer did its tracing. The results of millions of tracings in the microsecond intervals are now displayed.”
Kickaha wondered what it was that made the Khringdiz believe that he had found the gate to the Caverned World. Before he could ask, Khruuz said, “Look at the point that is far larger than the others. Now, do you see the orange line leading from it to the smaller orange point? The large point is a cluster of points so close together they look to your eye as if they were one point.”
He looked up and smiled again. “The big point represents something I do not believe that the Thoan know about.”
“Is that the all-nodes gate you asked me about two months ago?” Kickaha said. “I wondered about that, but you didn’t say anything more when I said I’d never heard of it.”
“Your answer was enough, even though you are only an expert on gates by experience. But you are not a scientist. Also, if Red Orc knew of the revolving or all-nodes gate, he would have used it.”
He said something into the panel, and the screen before him showed a different display. In its center was a big light, the cluster of points that made up the all-nodes gate. Now Kickaha could see a small separation among the points.
Khruuz said one word in his harsh language. The screen zoomed in toward the point until the image almost filled it. By it appeared a word in small Khringdiz letters.
“That indicates the gate in the all-nodes cluster that leads to two places, what you call cracks, in the ‘wall’ of Zazel’s World. Note that the faults are much dimmer than the active gates. One fault is a once-active gate; the other, a weakness that was in the wall when that universe was made. The once-active gate was the gate that was closed, I believe, by the creature that rules the Caverned World. That being—you said his name is Dingsteth—not only closed the gate, he moved the fault. That implies great knowledge and a vast power source. Even my machines are not capable of doing that. But my machines can detect that the fault has been moved. Look closely. I’ll turn the power up so that it may be better seen.”
He spoke another word. A very faint line appeared. One end was at the dim point, and the other end was at an even dimmer point.
“Traces of the operation,” the scaly man said. “There are thousands of light-points on the chart. But this is the only one showing the path of a gate or fault that has been moved. Of course, what Dingsteth did was to shut down the shearing trap in the one-way gate that Red Orc had used to get into his world. Then he made it into a two-way gate just long enough to disintegrate the hexagonal structure. He would not have to leave his own world to do that since the beamer rays he used on the inner side of the metal hexagon would disintegrate it in his world and in the other.
“After doing this, he remade the gate into a one-way entrance. Having done that, he moved the fault to another location, a feat beyond the power of present-day Thoan technology. That’s why Red Orc could not find it on the Unwanted World. What you saw through Manathu Vorcyon’s device was, as you realized later, a false light.”
“That’s wonderful!” Kickaha said. “But what about the one-way gate through which Dingsteth let Red Orc out of the Caverned World?”
Khruuz held his opened hands palms up in another human gesture. “It’s been closed down, made into a no-way fault. I doubt that Red Orc has detectors sensitive enough to locate the fault. The lack of these also accounts for his failure to detect the entrance gate and the path it made when it was relocated. Even though the gate had been a two-way momentarily, the creature had means to cancel the trace of the two-way gate’s existence. But you’ll have to reopen the exit gate after you get in there.”
“I’ll handle it!” Kickaha said. “Let’s get going!”
“Not so fast. Here’s the machine that will open, or should open, the entrance point Dingsteth closed.”
Khruuz said something, and a drawer slid out from the wall below the control panel. From it, he took a black metallic cube, four inches across. An orange button was on its top; the bottom part was curved; a strap dangled from one side of it.
“The key to the gate to the Caverned World,” Khruuz said. “Your Horn of Shambarimen is the only other key.”
He held up the black box. “I inherited this from a friend, a great scientist, who was killed a few days after he gave it to me. As far as I know, it’s the only one in all the universes.”
“Strap this gate-opener onto your wrist. Without it, you might as well stay here.”
The preparations for the trip took two days. Eric Clifton argued that he should go with Kickaha. Khruuz said that the chances were high that Kickaha would fail in his mission. If Clifton went with Kickaha, he might die, too. Khruuz needed Clifton’s knowledge of the universes of the Lords if he was to be effective in the battle against them.
“Besides,” Khruuz confessed to Kickaha when Clifton was not present, “I would get very lonely, even if he is not a Khringdiz.”
Thus, though impatient, Kickaha had to wait until Khruuz told him when the correct time for entering the all-nodes gate arrived.
“The node does not really revolve,” the Khringdiz said. “But I use ‘revolve’ as a convenient term. Launching you requires exact timing. You have an interval of twenty seconds to get into the node and to take the gate that should lead you to the fault in Zazel’s World. If you are delayed by ten microseconds, you’ll enter another gate taking you to somewhere else.”
The Khringdiz had built a nine-angled metal structure to mark the place for Kickaha to enter. An hour before the time to go, Kickaha put on an oxygen mask, an oxygen bottle, a pair of dark goggles, weapons, a backpack filled with supplies, and, strapped to his left wrist, a watch containing the device for opening the fault. Kickaha called it “the can opener.” On top of it was an orange button.
Eric Clifton was there to see his fellow Earthman off. “God be with you,” he said, and he shook Kickaha’s hand. “This is a war against the Devil, so we are destined to win.”
“God may win against Satan,” Kickaha said. “But how about the casualties along the way?”
“W
e will not be among them.”
A display in Khringdiz numbers on the wall indicated the time. Kickaha had learned what these meant. When he had two minutes to go, he checked a Khringdiz watch on his right wrist. It was synchronized with the wall instrument. He stood before the nonagonal structure, and, when he had thirty seconds to go, made ready to enter the gate. Though Khruuz had told him that he would meet no else, Kickaha had unstrapped the beamer in his holster.
Khruuz said, “Get ready to go. I’ll give the word twenty seconds from now.”
It seemed that he had just quit talking when he shouted in Thoan, “Jump!”
Kickaha leaped. He passed through the nonagon and was momentarily bewildered. He seemed to be stretched far out. His legs and feet looked as if they were very elongated. His feet were at least twenty feet from his torso. His hands, at the ends of beanpole arms, were ten feet from his shoulders.
He felt, at the same time, a shock, as if he had fallen into a polar sea. His numbed senses began to fade. Khruuz had not told him that this would happen—but then, Khruuz did not know what would happen. It was up to him, Kickaha thought, to do what was required.
He was enveloped in a dim greenish light. His rapidly chilling feet felt as if they were on a floor, but he could not see it. Nor were there any walls around him. It was like being in an invisible fog.
Then a slightly brighter light glowed behind the dusk. He walked toward it, if “walking” was the right word. More like wading through molasses, he thought. He did not know how many seconds had passed since he had entered this place—if it was a place. But it was no use wasting time in looking at the wristwatch. Either he got there in time or he did not.
The greenish dusk brightened; the light on its other side—if there was any such thing as another side here—increased. That should be the node “revolving” there. The light should be the gate he wanted.
Then the light began to fade. He strove to step up his pace. By all the holies! He had thought that twenty seconds were more than enough time to get to the gate. But now it seemed an impossibly short time. And he was beginning to feel as if his stomach, lungs, and heart were as distorted as his limbs. He felt very sick.
If he vomited in the mask, he would be in a bad way indeed.
Then the light was around him. Very slowly, or so it seemed to him, he reached for the opening device given him by Khruuz. It, too, was distorted. His right hand missed it altogether. He felt close to panic, a cold panic sluggishly moving up from wherever panics came from. He did not have much time to press the button. At least, he thought he did not. But he was sure that if he did not activate the little machine very quickly, he would not be within his allotted time.
He reached across his chest and felt his left shoulder, though that, too, took time to find. How many seconds did he have left? Finally, his fingers touched his shirt. He slid them downward, at the same time seeing an arm bent in a zigzag course, as crooked as the cue stick W. C. Fields had used in a movie, the title of which Kickaha could not remember. Then his middle finger was on the button, which had a concavity on top of it that had not been there when he had leaped through the gate. But he pressed on it.
Now, he was in a tunnel illuminated with a first-flush-of-dawn light. He no longer felt sick; his legs and feet had snapped back to their normal size. The cold had given way to warmth. He breathed easily then. Maybe he had been holding his breath while he was in that awful space. His wristwatch told him that he had been in the half-space or no-space for eighteen seconds.
He turned off the oxygen and removed the mask and bottle. Immediately, he noticed that the air was not moving. It was hot and heavy and gave the impression of having died a long time ago. After putting the oxygen equipment down at his feet to mark the point of entrance, he looked around. The tunnel went through smooth crystalline stone and was wide enough for twenty men to march abreast. In the middle of the floor was a shallow and curved ditch filled with running water. Some sort of thick lichen grew on the walls and ceiling in large patches. The dim light was shed by greenish knobs on the ceiling, walls, and floor. Hanging from the ceiling or lying on the floor were the dried-out bodies of six-angled insectile creatures. He had no idea of their function or of what had killed them.
The strangest feature of this tunnel, though, the one giving him the most pause, was the characters moving slowly in a single-file parade along each wall. They were black and four inches high and slightly above his eye level. When they came to a lichen patch, they disappeared but emerged from beneath the patches on the bare spaces. They could be symbols or alphabet or ideogram characters. That some looked vaguely familiar, resembling some Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Chinese writing, did not mean anything. They were coincidences.
The still air continued to oppress him. He decided to scratch a big X on the wall as a starting point. Then he placed the oxygen mask and bottle in his backpack.
Now, which way should he go?
Upstream was as good a direction as any. That was also the way in which the characters were going.
For five hours, he walked steadily through the tunnel in a silence that filled his ears with a humming. The only living thing was the luciferous lichen. But it could be that the knobs were also live plants. Every half-hour, he stopped to scratch an X upon the wall. The air continued to be hot and thick, and he often was tempted to use the bottle. But he might need it for an emergency.
By now, he was convinced that he was in Zazel’s World. Though the Thoan legends were sketchy in their descriptions of it, they certainly sounded like the tunnel he was in. Jubilation at having done what Red Orc had found impossible to accomplish spurred him on. He’d show the bastard.
Near the beginning of the sixth hour of his walk, he came to a fork. A tunnel opening was on his left, and one was on his right. Without hesitation, he took the left one. He regarded the left as lucky—to hell with the superstitions concerning sinistrality—and he was betting that the chosen avenue would lead him to the heart of this planetary cavern. He found evidence for this when he came across the first of many animal skeletons. They strewed his path as he stepped past or over them. Some seemed to have died while locked in combat, so intertangled were their bones. Alarmed, he started to jog. Something bad had happened.
A few minutes later, he stepped over bones and through the tunnel exit into a gigantic cave. It was lit by the knobs, which were much more closely placed than those in the tunnels. But their illumination did not enable him to see very far into the cave.
He walked down a slope and onto the flat stone floor. Here, as in the tunnel, lay the bones of many different kinds of animals and birds. The plants once growing here had been eaten down to the soil on the stone floor. However, enough fronds and fragments were left for him to identify them as of vegetable origin. He supposed that the animals had devoured the dead or dying plants. But they had killed each other off before all the plant remnants could be eaten.
On the wall nearest him, the symbols moved in their arcane parade as far as he could see.
According to what he had heard, the entire world was a colossal computer. But Zazel had made fauna and flora to decorate his large caves and to amuse him. They and the computer had failed to preserve his desire to live, and he had committed suicide.
Where was the operator of this place, the sole sentient, the lonely king, the artificial being whom Zazel had left to watch over this dismal universe?
Kickaha called out several times to alert Dingsteth if he should be within hearing range. His voice echoed, and no one answered him. He shrugged and set out for the other end of the cavern. When he looked back, he could not see the entrance. The shadows had taken it. After another hour, he came to the end of the vast hollow and was confronted by six tunnel openings. He took the one on the extreme left. After thirty-five minutes, he came to another. The same spectacle as in the previous place was before him. The bones and shreds of plants lay together in the silence.
But the train of symbols still moved along the
walls and disappeared into the darkness ahead. The computer was still alive. Rather, it was still working.
Nowhere had he seen any controls or displays. To operate the computer, he figured, you had to speak to it. He did not have the slightest knowledge of how to ask it questions, and the strange symbols were unreadable. Probably, Zazel had made his own language to operate the machine. That meant that Kickaha’s mission was a failure. Worse, he was stuck in this godawful place with only enough food to last him twelve days. If, that is, he ate very lightly.
He thought, if I can find Dingsteth or he finds me, it’ll be fine. That is, it’ll be okay if he cooperates.
Dingsteth, however, was beyond helping anybody, including himself. Kickaha found what was left of him in a chair carved out of stone and on the floor in front of the chair. The bones had to be his. They were of a bipedal manlike being, but too different in many respects to be a genuine specimen of Homo sapiens. Among the bones were tiny plastic organs and wires attached to them. The skull, which had fallen into the lap, was definitely not a man’s.
I’m very lucky to have found this place so soon after I got here, Kickaha thought. After all, when I came to this world I was gambling that I’d find Dingsteth. I could have wandered through this maze, which probably goes for thousands of miles throughout this world of stone. But here I am in the place I was looking for. And in a relatively short time, too.
On the other hand, his luck hadn’t been so good. The only one who could tell him where the engine data was was no longer talking and never would.
Kickaha could find nothing to reveal how Dingsteth had died. The skull and skeleton bore no obvious marks of violence. Maybe he had become bored with his futile and purposeless life and had taken poison. Or it could be that Zazel had constructed Dingsteth so that he died after a certain span of time. Whatever had killed him, he had left behind a world that was running down.
Kickaha said loudly, “I just don’t know!” And then he howled with frustration and rage and seized the skull and hurled it far across the floor. That did not help his predicament any, but it did make him feel a little less angry. His voice and his cry were hurled back at him from the faraway walls. It was as if this world were determined to have the last word.
The World of Tiers, Volume 2 Page 85