“That those characters on the wall are moving again means that either Khruuz or Red Orc has started the computer up again,” Kickaha said. “Let’s find out who did it.”
This time, he was not going to walk the wearying and time-consuming tunnels. The four men had gated from Red Orc’s palace riding small foldable one-seater airboats weighing thirty pounds. They were more like motorcycles than the conventional airboats. But the oxygen and water tanks and the case of supplies and the “small cannon” beamers fixed to the fuselage nose put a strain on the tiny motor.
Their craft were cruising at thirty miles an hour. Nevertheless, in these close quarters, the boats seemed to be going very swiftly.
Through his goggles, the infrared light made the tunnels even more ghostly than in photonic light.
In less than an hour, he saw the two-tunneled fork ahead. He held up his hand and stopped the boat.
“What in hell!”
The entrance to the left-hand tunnel was blocked with a single stone. The symbols disappeared there. But those on the other wall kept marching into the right-hand tunnel.
He got off the craft to inspect the stone. It was smooth and contained many fluorescent chips. It also merged with the sides of the entrance as if it were stone grown from stone. Or as if a stone-welding instrument had been used.
He took from his backpack a square device with a depth indicator on its back. After pressing the front part against the stone, he said, “There’s thirty feet of solid stone there. Beyond that is empty space, the continuation of the tunnel, I suppose. Someone has set it up to make us go where he wants us to go.”
Kumas’s voice came over the tiny receiver stuck to Kickaha’s jaw. “I hope Khruuz did it.”
“Me, too. But we can’t do anything except follow the route so thoughtfully laid out for us. From now on, you and I, Kumas, will be as close to the ceiling as we can get. Ashatelon and Wemathol, you keep your boats several inches above the floor and about ten feet behind us. That way, we can have maximum firepower and yet not shoot each other. I’ll be slightly ahead of Kumas.”
Although he did not like having the Thoan at his back, he had to be the leader. Otherwise, they would believe he was a coward. He had told Kumas to stay at his side because he was not at all certain that Kumas would know what to do in a fight unless he had orders.
Five minutes later, they decelerated quickly and then stopped. The entrance to the cave was also blocked. But a new hole had been made in the wall by the mouth of the cave. It led at right angles to the tunnel they were in. The symbols had reappeared on the previously blank part of the wall.
“Onward and inward,” Kickaha said. “Keep your eyes peeled and your fingers on the firing button. But make sure you don’t shoot unless you have to.”
“If our father did this,” Kumas said, “we’re done for.”
“Many a Lord has thought that after setting a trap for me,” Kickaha replied. “Yet, here I am, as healthy and unscarred as a young colt. There my enemies are, dead as the lion who tackled the elephant.”
“A braggart is a gas balloon,” Wemathol said. “Prick him, and he collapses.”
Ashatelon spoke harshly. “This man is not called the Slayer of Lords, the man who won the war against the Bellers, for nothing. So why don’t you keep your sneering to yourself?”
“We’ll discuss this later with knives,” Wemathol said.
“Nothing so heartening as brotherly love,” Kickaha said. “You Thoan make me sick. You think you’re gods, but you haven’t graduated from the nursery. And you wipe your asses just like the lowest of leblabbiy, though you don’t do as good a job of it. From now on, no more squabbling! That’s an order! Keep your minds on our mission! Or I’ll send you back to your nurses to wipe your noses!”
They did not speak again for some time. The boats took them along a tunnel for a mile before another stone blocked their passage. But this was not stone-welded. The separation between it and the tunnel wall was obvious. Nevertheless, the men were stopped.
Either the symbols had ceased moving or they were somehow slipping through the blocking stone.
Again, Kickaha used the depth sounder. Looking at the indicator, he said, “It’s ten feet deep. Then, emptiness.”
“Do we turn back?” Kumas said.
“And wander around here until we run out of food?” Wemathol said.
“Maybe we should use the cannon to melt our ray through,” Ashatelon said. “That might use up much of the battery energy. But what else can we do?”
“We’ll blast our way in,” Kickaha said.
They did as he ordered and took turns in beaming the stone. Under the force of the rays, the stone melted swiftly and lava ran out on the floor below. Scraping the semiliquid away from the stone was hot and hard work. Their small shovels made the labor longer, but it had to be done. Sweating, making sure they did not come within range of the narrow beams, they succeeded in throwing the glowing stuff away from the tunnel entrance. When one craft had used up half of the battery, the second boat moved in. But a minute after the second boat had started its melting, the stone began to roll into a recess in the wall.
Kickaha told Ashatelon to turn off his beamer.
“It’s a wheel!” Kumas cried.
“Tell us what we don’t know, stupid,” Wemathol said.
They backed the boats away and then waited. The craft noses were pointed at the opening, and the pilots had their fingers on the FIRE button.
“Be ready to shoot,” Kickaha said. “But don’t be trigger-happy.”
“Why would anybody except Red Orc have closed the entrances?” Wemathol said.
“I don’t know. Maybe Khruuz did it, though I don’t know why. Just don’t assume anything.”
The huge wheel had completely moved within the wall recess. Beyond that was a cave.
Kumas had removed his goggles at Kickaha’s order. He was to determine if photonic light was present. He said loudly, “The cave is lit up!”
The others now took their goggles off. The brightness from the cavern was much stronger than could be given by luminiferous plants. There were no shadows, so the illumination seemed to have no source. That meant that a Thoan was providing it. Maybe.
Now, they could see that the cave was gigantic. Cool air brushed their bodies. To test it, Kickaha took off his oxygen mask and breathed deeply. Though the air was delightfully fresh, he said, “We’ll keep our masks on for a while.”
He could not see the distant walls and ceiling of the cave, so vast was it. But he could see strange-looking plants, some of them tree-tall, growing from the soil on the floor.
Kumas said, “Red Orc is waiting for us in there.”
“Somebody is,” Kickaha said.
“You go first,” Kumas said.
“Of course!” Kickaha said loudly. “If I waited for one of you to lead, we’d sit here until we starved!”
“No man calls me a coward!” Ashatelon said.
Before Kickaha could stop him, Ashatelon had shot his boat forward and through the opening. But he did not stop at once. Instead, he accelerated until he seemed to be going at the maximum speed of the craft, fifty miles an hour. The boat rose. For a moment, it was out of sight. Then it appeared and, a moment later, hovered a few inches above the floor and ten feet in from the entrance. Its nose was pointed toward them.
“Now you may know who’s a coward!” Ashatelon bellowed.
His words echoed from the distant walls.
Kickaha’s boat moved into the cave. He looked around. A green lichenous stuff covered most of the wall behind him. Somehow, the plants had been given a new life. Or else they had never been dead in this cave. The walls near them were about two miles apart, and the ceiling was about a hundred feet high. The other end was so far away that it shrank to a point. The symbols paraded on both walls and toward the end of the cave until they were too small to see.
The other two Thoan entered. “No one here,” Kumas said. He sounded very relieved.
“Someone rolled that wheel aside,” Kickaha said. “We’ll go on.”
He started to press his foot down on the acceleration pedal. Then, he felt wet drops on his bare skin and a fine mist was around him.
When he woke up, he was inside a square cage made of bars. Above him were bars through which he could see the cave ceiling. High above these was the cave ceiling. Or of some cave somewhere. He got slowly to his feet, becoming aware that they were unshod while he did so. His clothes had been removed and were nowhere in sight. The cage floor was solid metal. In a corner was a pile of blankets. In another was a metal box, and the third corner held another box, the top of which had a toilet seat hole. In the center of the metal floor was a painted orange-lined circle with a diameter of three feet.
And there were other cages, widely separated, arranged in a circle. Six, including his. Inside each one was a man. One of them, however, was not a member of Homo sapiens.
“Khruuz!” he said hoarsely. He gripped the bars facing the inner part of the circle. For a moment, he was weak and dizzy. Despite wearing oxygen masks, he and the Thoan had been gassed. The gas must have been of the kind that did its dirty work through the skin.
“Must’ve been sprayed through holes in the wall behind us,” he murmured to himself. “It doesn’t matter how it was done. We’re here.”
Red Orc wasn’t the one responsible for their captivity. He was in the cage directly across from Kickaha’s. Like the others, he was unclothed. His face pressed against the bars, he was smiling at his archenemy. Did that mean that he was pleased that, at least, the others were also caged? Or did it mean that he was enjoying a secret? Such as that he had brought them here and was now posing as a prisoner? But why would he do that? Time would reveal the truth.
The three clones of Red Orc were in the other cages. Wemathol called out, “So much for your brags, Kickaha!”
He spat through the bars.
Kickaha ignored him. He was about to speak to Khruuz when a … creature? thing? semihuman? walked slowly and dignifiedly into the center of the circle. A second before, it had not been present. Where had it come from? A gate, probably.
Though he had never seen it before this, Kickaha knew that it had to be the thing he had thought was dead.
He cried out, “Dingsteth!”
It faced Kickaha, and it said, “Neth thruth,” Thoan for “I am it.” Carved jewels, not teeth, flashed in its mouth.
Kickaha had heard about Dingsteth from Anana and Manathu Vorcyon. According to them, Dingsteth was an artificial creature made by Zazel as a sort of companion and manager. Before Zazel had killed himself, he had charged his creation to stand guard on and to preserve his world. Just why he would want to keep the dreary universe going, no one knew.
Now, the fabled being was standing before Kickaha. It was bipedal and six feet tall. Its skin was lightly pigmented, a Scandinavian pink. It walked slowly because it had to. The shiny flesh rings around its shoulders, hips, elbows, knees, and wrists did not allow the free movement humans had. Its head, neck, and trunk were proportionally larger than those of a man. The skull was almost square, and the lips were very thin.
Where a man’s genitals would have been was smooth skin.
The thing said, “You know my name. What is yours?”
“Kickaha. But I thought this world had died and you with it.”
“You were meant to think that,” it said, pronouncing its words in a somewhat archaic manner. “But you and the others were too persistent. So, I was forced to take appropriate action.”
It paused, then said, “I thought the gate was closed.”
“This thing intends to keep all of us here forever!” Red Orc shouted. “Dingsteth! I came here in peace!”
Without turning around, the thing spoke to the Thoan. “You may have, and you may not have. The being who calls himself Khruuz says that you are very cruel and violent and obsessed with the desire to have the data for my master’s creation-destruction engine. He says that you will destroy all the universes, including Zazel’s, to have the energy to make a new world for yourself only.”
“He lies!” Red Orc said.
Dingsteth continued to look at Kickaha.
“The semihuman calling himself Khruuz may be lying, and he may be telling the truth. He says that he can bring me proof of his words if I let him return to his own world. But you, Orc, promised to come back soon after I gated you out of here so long ago. You did not. Therefore, you lied to me.
“How do I know that this Khruuz is also not a liar? How can I be sure that you are not all liars? You, for instance, Kickaha. You and Khruuz and the others may never return if I let you leave this world. Or you may come back intending to force me to reveal data that you should not have. I do not know if you are a liar, but you are certainly capable of senseless violence. I saw you throw away the facsimile of my skull. And I saw you kill a man, though that act was in self-defense. Or appeared to be.”
Dingsteth walked away from the circle of cages. Kickaha watched him go to a place twenty yards away. It stopped near a “tree,” a scarlet plant the branches of which grew closely together and extended to an equal distance from the trunk. Near this cylindrical tree was a large round stone. The keeper of this world was equidistant from the tree and stone. It turned its back to the prisoners. It must have spoken a code word because it vanished suddenly.
He called to Khruuz, who was two cages away from his, “How did it catch you?”
“Gas. Your question should have been, ‘How do we get out of these cages?’”
“Working on it now,” Kickaha said. “But I admit that this is one of the toughest problems I’ve ever had to solve.”
“You mean that we have ever had,” Khruuz said.
Red Orc said, “Yes, we! I propose that, until we do escape, we put aside our hatreds and cooperate fully.”
“I won’t put them aside,” Kickaha said. “I won’t allow them, however, to keep me from working with you.”
Kumas said, “We’re doomed.”
“Weakling!” Ashatelon said. “I am ashamed to be your brother. I have been since we played together as children.”
Wemathol called, “You’re really cooperating, Ashatelon!”
Khruuz’s deep and rough voice stopped the snarling and snapping. “Hearing you Thoan makes me wonder how you ever succeeded in conquering my people. I do not believe that the Thoan who killed all of us except myself could be your ancestors.
“I suggest that we act as a harmonious whole until we have dealt with Dingsteth—nonviolently, I hope.”
“Don’t ask them to give their word they won’t stab you in the back before that’s done,” Kickaha said. “Their word is as worthless as a burning piece of paper.”
“I know that,” Khruuz said. “But our common danger should be the cement binding us together.”
“Ha!”
Red Orc said, “Does anyone have any ideas?”
“Dingsteth may be listening, probably is right now,” Kickaha said. “So, how do we share ideas if it’s going to know what we plan to do? We have no paper to write on, and we couldn’t throw notes from cage to cage even if we did have paper. They’re too far apart. Besides, Dingsteth’ll be watching us.”
“Sign language?” Kumas said. The others laughed.
“Think about it, dummy,” Wemathol said. “How many of us know sign language? It’d have to taught by one who knows, if any of us do. And we can’t do that unless we shout at each other. Dingsteth would hear us and learn along with the rest of us. Thus …”
“I get the idea,” Kumas said. “I was just thinking out loud, you worthless, do-nothing, gasbag lout. What’s your ingenious idea?”
Wemathol did not reply.
Very little was said for the rest of the day. Night came when the sourceless light was turned off, and the only illumination was from the plants. Kickaha slept uneasily on his pile of blankets, not because he lacked a bed but because he could not stop thinking about how to g
et out of the cage and what he would do after that. Finally, sleep did come, laden with dreams of his life with Anana. Some of them were nightmares, fragments of desperate situations they had been in. On the whole, though, they were pleasant.
During one dream, he saw the faces of his parents. They were smiling at him and looked much younger than when they had died. Then they receded and were lost in mists. But his feeling about them was happy. He awoke for a while after that. There had been a time when he wondered if they were his biological mother and father. It had been hinted by some Thoan that he was adopted; his true parents were Thoan, possibly Red Orc himself. He had seriously considered questing for the truth when he had time for it. Now, he did not care. The biological parent was not necessarily the real parent. Loving and caring made the real father and mother. The poor but decent couple who had raised him from a baby on an Indiana farm were the ones he had known and loved. Thus, they were the only parents about whom he cared. Forget the quest.
Dawn, a less bright light than yesterday’s, sprang into being. No false dawn here for Dingsteth. An hour later, it appeared between the tree and the stone and walked into the circle. It was careful not to come close enough to be reached through the bars.
Without the preliminary of a greeting, it spoke. “I heard your talk about escape plans. I have run the possibilities of your succeeding in that through the world. It gives you more than a 99.999999999 percent chance of never doing that. It is trying now to locate what it is that you could do that so that the percentage will be 100 percent.”
“It has to have complete data from you to calculate that,” Kumas said. “You cannot ever know that.”
“Make it easier for us!” Wemathol howled. “Blab everything, you anus’s anus, king of the cretins!”
Kumas, looking chagrined, lay down on his blanket pile. He refused to say a word after that.
“Nevertheless, I am attempting to consider all factors,” Dingsteth said. “Unfortunately, my creator did not install a creator’s imagination in me.”
“We’ll be glad to help you find what you’re looking for!” Wemathol yelled.
The World of Tiers, Volume 2 Page 90