The Gate of Time

by Philip José Farmer

  “The Blodlandish don’t have a monopoly on stupidity, arrogance, or rigidity,” Kwasind said. “Have you heard the latest?”

  New Crete and Perkunisha were at war. The New Cretan forces in Ireland had depended largely upon their ally to supply them during the winter. But the Perkunishans had been very tight-fisted with the supplies. They gave the excuse that they were having enough trouble providing for their own troops. The Shofet of New Crete had seen the real reason behind his ally’s action. Although Perkunisha had pledged Ireland as a prize of war, it wanted the island for itself. If the New Cretans were defeated and Perkunisha had to take over, Perkunisha could claim Ireland by right of conquest.

  The Shofet had accused his ally of betrayal. The arrogant Perkunishans reacted violently and swiftly. Even now their Mediterranean fleet and troops in south Rasna were fighting their former allies.

  “They think they can take on the whole world,” Kwasind said. “Now, they go too far—I hope. That’s not all, you know. Perkunisha has demanded that Ikhwan hand back the African colonies it’s occupied. And it’s also told Ikhwan to stay out of western Dravidia. If Ikhwan doesn’t obey, Perkunisha will declare war on them.”

  “What’s the Blodlandish government doing about this? Ikhwan has a powerful navy, probably the most powerful, now that the Perkunisha had lost so many ships. If the Ikhwan would become allied to us...”

  “They won’t. Obviously, they plan to let Europe tear itself apart. Then they’ll move in. You watch.”

  “It’s Fimbulwinter,” Two Hawks said. “Gotterdammerung. The Twilight of the Gods.”

  But the winter passed without the end of the world. The snows melted; mud had its fun with the armies that tried to slog through it. The Blodlandish were well entrenched in strategic positions, their cannons in place. The Perkunishans had to haul their big artillery wherever they were needed. Since the few paved roads on the island had been blown up by the retreating Blodlandish, the invaders had to build new ones. This took time, and their armies bogged down.

  The Blodlandish Air Force had its first big engagement with the enemy planes, 20 miles south of Bammu. Although outnumbered by ten craft, the Blodlandish fought fiercely. They lost six planes and sent twelve enemy down in flames. Two Hawks was flying that day because he believed his men needed an experienced combat man with them.

  The fliers, based on the northern side of the capital city, flew ten sorties that day. Two Hawks went up a second time, leading fifty planes in an attack on the enemy field closest to the front lines. The twenty planes on the ground, all hangars, a bomb dump, and four anti-aircraft posts were destroyed. For two weeks, the Blodlandish flew from dusk to dawn. They lost heavily in the many dogfights over Bammu, since the Perkunishans were intent on destroying the islanders’ air effectiveness. Fortunately, the full weight of their enemy’s air arm was not brought to bear against them. Espionage said that Raske had wanted to use every plane he had in the campaign, but the High Command had vetoed this. Half went to fight against the New Cretans; only a fourth were being used on the island.

  Raske was in Berlin, probably afraid to leave it because of politics. He had many enemies among the nobility, who would take advantage of his absence to dislodge him if they could. The commander of the Perkunishan Air Force in Blodland was an ex-dirigible man who had not even learned to fly heavier-than-air craft. He did not understand the effective use of his craft. The officers who led their men into aerial combat were as inexperienced as those they led. Since the flight leader’s planes were always marked with a scarlet plumed helmet, they got a concentrated attack from the Blodlandish. Two Hawks had given the orders that the flight commanders should be dealt with first, if possible. It became almost certain death for a commander to engage in combat, yet, if he did not, he would have been regarded as a coward by the men under him. The rate of promotion in the invading air force became rapid.

  This was very satisfying to Two Hawks, but his successes seemed to have little effect upon the battling on the ground. The enemy took one fort after another, one town after another, losing three- to-one in the process but seemingly not caring. Suddenly, the capital was invaded. A fleet bombarded the forts at the mouth of the Tems river for a week, then landed troops. The

  Perkunishan air force provided a cover that day. Two Hawks led his complete force against them, and in one day the Perkunishan fliers were almost wiped out.

  It made no difference to the men on the ground. In seven days, the invaders were hammering at the gates of Bammu.

  Two days later, fifty of Raske’s new twin-engined bombers landed on a Perkunishan field. They refueled and took off to bomb Bammu, escorted by a hundred new fighter planes. Only half the bombers returned and 60 fighters. Two Hawks shot down ten enemy that day, bringing his score up to fifty-one. He returned with only thirty Blodlandish, all that remained of his pilots.

  15

  Despite the staggering losses, the bombing raid was a success. Four bombs struck the Witenayemot while the lords were in final session, before evacuating to the north. Old Lord Raedaesh was killed. Two Hawks thought that this was the best thing that could happen for the Blodlandish. But the bomb had also killed the Shofet, his two younger brothers, the queen, and the Shofet’s children. The entire royal family was wiped out, except for the Shofet’s uncle, who had been in a madhouse for twenty years. In the confusion that followed the announcement of the disaster, a young Kreion (General) named Erik Leonitha, a bastard son of the mad uncle, declared himself the protector of Blodland. He ordered the army out of Bammu to take a position to the north. He freed the slaves in a proclamation that declared that slavery was at an end forever in Blodland. This was not done out of democratic principle but to keep the slaves from revolting. The Perkunishan agents had been spreading disaffection among them since before the war.

  Erik Leonitha also promised that after the enemy had been driven out, more rights would be given the common people and they would have a chance to advance themselves in the military and in the big businesses. The nobility were strongly opposed to him, so he needed as much support as he could get from the masses.

  Two Hawks, acting on his own, had given orders to dismantle the aircraft factory and move the machinery to the north. He stayed in Bammu until the last piece of equipment had been loaded on a freight train. He and Kwasind boarded the final train out of the city. Even as he stepped onto his car, shells burst not more than a quarter-mile away. He went through several cars crowded with officers and high-born refugees. While going through an aisle, he heard his name called. He turned to look down into the blue eyes of Ilmika Thorrsstein.

  “It’s been a long time, Milady,” he said. “I heard about your mother and brothers. I sent a letter of condolence. Did you get it?”

  “No,” she said. “The mails are so bad now. But I thank you for your sympathy.”

  He tried to continue the conversation without much success. She seemed withdrawn. Perhaps, he thought, she was just too tired. Her face was pale, and she had large dark circles under her eyes. He excused himself, saying he hoped to be able to talk with her again before they reached their destination. After passing through two more jammed aisles, he found his compartment. It was a tiny room, but he was fortunate to get it. The army had reserved it for him and for another important man, a Kreion. The officer rose when Two Hawks entered and returned the salute. Then, to Two Hawks’ surprise, he held out his hand to be shaken.

  “I am Lord Humphrey Gilbert,” he said. “The fates have been good to me. I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time.”

  Two Hawks looked curiously at him. Gilbert was a name of French origin, or so he had always believed until now. There was neither a French nation nor language in this world, so he must have been mistaken. Yet he felt a warmth at coming across something that reminded him of his lost world, coincidence or not.

  Gilbert was a short and husky man, about fifty. His thick greying hair was curly, and he had thick black eyebrows, grey eyes, a broad face, and a do
uble chin. His moustache was dark and long and pointed. Gilbert invited Two Hawks to sit down, which Two Hawks would have done anyway, since he had no intention of standing. Gilbert began to talk to Two Hawks as if he had known him a long time. Two Hawks warmed up to him even more, since most of the aristocracy he had met had treated him somewhat coldly or over-politely. As it turned out, Gilbert had, in a way, known Two Hawks for a long time. He had been learning as much as he could about him.

  “I inherited my title from my father,” Gilbert said. “He came from a middle-class but very weathy merchant family, most of whose riches came from a large fleet of merchant ships. Now, I have lost all my lands, most of my ships, well, this is not relevant to my story, except that I want you to know my background. You see, my family was founded by my great-great-great, I forget how many greats, grandfather. He came to Blodland in the Year of Hemilka 560.”

  Two Hawks calculated the date, comparing it to the equivalent date of Earth 1. Hemilka 560 would be A.D. 1583.

  “My ancestor, also named Humphrey Gilbert, did not come from the mainland. He came out of the western ocean, the Okeanos, in a ship such as no man had ever seen before.”

  Gilbert paused as if waiting for a reaction of some sort. Two Hawks looked blank. Gilbert continued, “The ship was The Squirrel, sister ship to The Golden Hind.”

  Gilbert looked disappointed when Two Hawks merely looked politely interested. He said, “It’s apparent to me that the disappearance of my ancestor from your world made no more than a ripple in your history, if that. I had thought he might have been a man of note. Well, no matter. Humphrey Gilbert was an Englishman -- ah, I see your eyes light up now! He was one of the early sailors to the continent of America...”

  “How do you know all this, I mean, about Englishmen and America?” Two Hawks said.

  Gilbert raised a fat hand. “Patience! I’ll get to that presently. As I was saying, his ship had been in a storm which separated it from its sister ship. When the storm disappeared, Gilbert could not locate the other ship, so he sailed on back until he came to what he thought was England and home. He sailed into the port of Ent (Earth 1’s Bristol). There he and his men were regarded as madmen. But to Gilbert and his crew, the others were mad. What had happened? Here was a people who looked something like the English but were speaking a tongue that only distantly resembled it. Nothing that they had known was familiar. Where were they?

  ‘The Blodlandish locked up the whole crew in an insane asylum. Some of the sailors did go insane, but my ancestor must have been a very adaptable man. He finally convinced the authorities he was harmless. After he was released, he became a sailor and eventually a captain of a ship. He went into African slave-trading—Africa was just being opened up then—and became wealthy. He married well and died rich and highly respected.

  “He was intelligent enough not to insist on the truth of the story he had told when he’d first sailed into Ent. In fact, he never again mentioned it. But he did write down his story, plus a history of his native world. He titled it An Unpublished Romance, or Through the Ivory Gates of the Sea. The manuscript has been in the family library since his death. Most of his descendants have not read it, and those who did thought their ancestor had a rather feverish imagination.”

  Gilbert paused, then said, “I never thought so. There were too many consistent details in his history. He had tried to put down the whole of his world on paper. He even wrote an English- Blodlandish comparative grammar and dictionary. I became fascinated by the manuscript—which has more than 5,000 pages—and made the study of it my hobby. I investigated the tales of other strange appearances and became convinced that another Earth existed. And that, from time to time, men somehow passed from one world to another.

  “Are you sure you’ve never heard of Sir Humphrey Gilbert?”

  Two Hawks shook his head. “If I read anything about him, I’ve forgotten it. And I’m an omnivorous reader, too. I graze in all fields.”

  “Perhaps he was only one of many who perished during their explorations. It doesn’t matter. What does is that your presence here verifies his story. It is more than a fantasy. And my research has convinced me of one thing. The ‘gates’ are certain weak spots in the forces that separate the two universes. They only open at infrequent intervals, perhaps most of them never more than once.”

  He leaned towards Two Hawks, his eyes bright. “But I believe that I’ve located one gate that is more or less permanent. At least, it is in one place, and it has opened up more than once and may again.”

  Two Hawks became excited. “You know of such a place? Where?”

  “I’ve never actually seen it,” Gilbert replied. “I was planning to take a trip there to investigate, but the war stopped me. However, I came across a reference to something that sounds like a gate while I was reading a book on the sorcerers of Hivika.”

  Hivika, Two Hawks thought. That was the name of the chain of islands that was the only prominent feature of the sunken North American continent. He had seen their name on maps. From their location, they should be the upper part of the Rockies. The largest island was approximately where the state of Colorado was on Earth 1.

  Polynesians, immigrants from Hawaii, inhabited the mountainous islands. And, so far, Hivika had remained neutral and independent. The Hivikan inhabitants, like the Maori of Earth 1, had learned early how to make guns and gunpowder on their own and how to use them effectively. The first Old Worlders to make contact with the Hivikans had not been Europeans but the Arabic Ikhwani of South Africa. These had carried on trade with Hivika for a hundred years before the first Blodlandish ship had accidentally discovered the islands. The Europeans found a handsome and intelligent brown people who mined iron and gold, sailed ships armed with cannon, and were not awed by the white man’s technology. Moreover, the Hivikans had gone through several plagues brought to them by the Ikhwan. The descendants of the survivors were fairly resistant to European diseases.

  Gilbert said, “The Hivika still practice the old religion, you know. Their priests, who claim to be sorcerers, keep constant vigilance over certain tabu places. One of these is a cave high up on the loftiest mountain of the largest island. Not much is known about the cave, but a Perkunishan scholar found out some things. The priests call the cave The Hole Between The Worlds. Terrible sounds sometimes come from the rear of the cave, where the Hole sometimes appears. The back wall of the cave seems to dissolve, and the priests get glimpses into another world. Perhaps world is not the right translation for the word they use. It could mean the Place of the Gods. The priests dare not go near the ‘gate’, because they believe that the chief god, Ke Aku’a, lives in this world.”

  Two Hawks said, “This is too good to be true. I’m afraid to get too excited about it. It’ll probably turn out to be some natural phenomenon.”

  “The gates are natural phenomena.” Gilbert said. “It’s certainly worth investigating, don’t you agree?”

  “I intend to investigate,” Two Hawks said. “In fact, I’d like to leave for Hivika right now. Only, it’s impossible.”

  “When the war’s over, we might go together. If there is a gate through which we could pass, I’d like very much to see the Earth of my ancestor.”

  Two Hawks did not reply, but he was thinking that, for Gilbert, Earth 1 might be an interesting place to visit but not to live in. Gilbert would have the same sense of dislocation, of utter severance, that Two Hawks and O’Brien had had. Even now, despite an increasing familiarity with this planet, Two Hawks never felt quite at ease. He just did not belong.

  However, it was a feeling he could endure with no more than a little bit of discomfort and out- of-jointedness most of the time. The nights were the worse, when he was alone.

  Somebody knocked on the compartment door. Two Hawks opened it, a young officer saluted and said, “Beg your pardon, Koiran. The Lady Thorrsstein has taken ill, and she’s asked for you.”

  Two Hawks followed the officer into Ilmika’s car. He found her lying on the
seat, surrounded by solicitous men. She was very pale but had recovered from her faint. A doctor standing over her said to Two Hawks, “She’ll be all right as soon as she gets something to eat.”

  Two Hawks said, “Ilmika, why didn’t you ask...?” He stopped, then said, “No, you’d be too proud.”

  “Hers is not an uncommon story in these unhappy times,” the doctor said. “There are many high- born who have lost their lands—money, everything but their titles. And...”

  The doctor closed his mouth as if he had said too much. Two Hawks looked sharply at him. He seemed to be deriving some sort of satisfaction from Ilmika’s condition. Probably, he was a commoner, and, like many, shared the repressed but very keen resentment of the lower classes towards the privileged. Two Hawks understood their feeling, since the majority suffered hardships and injustices exceeding those of the lower classes of the early 18th century of his own planet. Nevertheless, he was angry at the doctor. Ilmika was a human being who had also gone through many privations and griefs. Her family was dead; her home and possessions were in the hands of the enemy. And, as he talked to her while he fed her hot soup, he discovered she did not have a coin to her name.

  She wept while she drank the soup. “I couldn’t help fainting. Now, everybody knows how destitute I am. I am a charity case. The name of Thorrsstein is disgraced.”

  “Disgraced?” he said quietly. “If you are, so is three-fourths of the nobility of Blodland. Why should you be so proud? It’s the fault of the war, not you. Besides, now is the time to show that nobility is made of stronger stuff than a mere name. You have to act noble to be noble.”

  She smiled weakly. He got a slice of ham from one officer and a piece of bread from another and fed them to her. When she had finished eating, she whispered to him, “If only I could get away from their stares.”

  “There’s room in my compartment for you,” he said. He lifted her up, and, supporting her, got her to his compartment. She lay down on one of the seats and was quickly asleep. When she awoke late that evening, he had supper with her in the compartment. Gilbert had gone to the dining car, and Kwasind was outside the door, so they were alone. Two Hawks waited until they had eaten the cold and coarse food. Then he asked her if she would work for him. He needed a secretary, he said. She turned so red that he thought he had angered her. But when he heard her stammer, he understood that she had mistaken the intent of the offer.