The Lavalite World

by Philip José Farmer

  "It would work in a dream," she said. "But in reality, there'd be no way to control the burning of the gunpowder. To get high enough, you'd have to stuff the barrel with powder to the muzzle. But when the fuel exploded, and it would, all of it at once, the sudden acceleration would tear the glider from the rocket, completely wreck the structure and wings of the glider, and also kill you."

  "Look, Anana," Kickaha said, his face even redder, "isn't there some way we could figure out to get controlled explosions?"

  "Not with the materials we have available. No, forget it. It was a nice dream, but... oh, hah, hah, hah!"

  "I'm glad your woman's got some sense," McKay said. "How'd you ever manage to live so long?"

  "I guess because I haven't followed through with all my wild ideas. I'm only half-crazy, not completely nuts. But we've got to get off of here. If we end up on the under side when it changes shape, we're done for. It's the big kissoff for us."

  There was a very long silence. Finally, Anana said, "You're right. We have to do something. We must look for materials to make gliders that could operate in the primary's field. But getting free of the moon's gravity is something else. I don't see how..."

  "A hot-air balloon!" Kickaha cried. "It could take us and the gliders up and away and out!"

  Kickaha thought that, if the proper materials could be found to make a balloon and gliders, the liftoff should take place after the moon changed its shape. It would be spread out then, the attenutation of the body making the local gravity even weaker. The balloon would thus have greater lifting power.

  Anana said that he had a good point there. But the dangers from the cataclysmic mutation were too high. They might not survive these. Or, if they did, their balloon might not. And they wouldn't have time after the shape-change to get more materials.

  Kickaha finally agreed with her.

  Another prolonged discussion was about the gliders. Anana, after some thought, said that they should make parawings instead. She explained that a parawing was a type of parachute, a semi-glider the flight of which could be controlled somewhat.

  "The main trouble is still the materials," she said. "A balloon of partially cured antelope hide might lift us enough, considering the far weaker gravity. But how would the panels be held together? We don't have any adhesive, and stitching them together might not, probably will not, work. The hot air would escape through the overlaps. Still..."

  McKay, who was standing nearby, shouted. They turned to look in the direction at which he was pointing.

  Coming from around a pagoda-shaped mountain, moving slowly towards them, was a gigantic object. Urthona's palace. It floated along across the plain at a majestic pace at an estimated altitude of two hundred feet.

  They waited for it, and after two hours it reached them. They had retreated to one side far enough for them to get a complete view of it from top to bottom. It seemed to be cut out of a single block of smooth stone on material which looked like stone. This changed color about every fifteen minutes, glowing brightly, running the spectrum, finishing it with a rainbow sheen of blue, white, green, and rose-red. Then the cycle started over again.

  There were towers, minarets, and bartizans on the walls, thousands of them, and these had windows and doors, square, round, diamond-shaped, hexagonal, octagonal. There were also windows on the flat bottom. Kickaha counted two hundred balconies, then gave up.

  Anana said, "I know we can't reach it. But I'm going to try the Horn anyway."

  The seven notes floated up. As they expected, no shimmering prelude to the opening of a gate appeared on its walls.

  Kickaha said, "We should've choked the codeword out of Urthona. Or cooked him over a fire."

  "That wouldn't help us in this situation," she said.

  "Hey!" McKay shouted. "Hey! Look!"

  Staring from a window on the bottom floor was a face. A man's.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The window was round and taller than the man. Even at that distance and though he was moving, they could see that he was not Urthona or Red Orc. It was impossible to tell without reference points how tall the young man was. His hair was brown and pulled tightly back as if it were tied in a pony tail. His features were handsome. He wore a suit of a cut which Kickaha had never seen before, but which Anana would tell him was of a style in fashion among the Lords a long time ago. The jacket glittered as if its threads were pulsing neon tubes. The shirt was ruffled and open at the neck.

  Presently the man had passed them, but he reappeared a minute later at another window. Then they saw him racing by the windows. Finally, out of breath, he stopped and put his face to the corner window. After a while, he was out of sight.

  "Did you recognize him?" Kickaha said.

  "No, but that doesn't mean anything," Anana said. "There were many Lords, and even if I'd known him for a little while, I might have forgotten him after all those years."

  "Not mean enough, heh?" Kickaha said. "Well then, if he isn't one of them, what's he doing in Urthona's palace? How'd he get there? And if he's interested in us, which he was from his actions, why didn't he change the controls to manual and stop the palace?"

  She shrugged. "How would I know?"

  "I didn't really expect you to. Maybe he doesn't know how to operate the controls. He may be trapped. I mean-he gated into the place and doesn't know how to get out."

  "Or he's found the control room but is afraid to enter because he knows it'll be trapped."

  McKay said, "Maybe he'll figure out a way to get in without getting caught."

  "By then he won't be able to find us even if he wants to," she said.

  "The palace'll be coming around again," Kick-aha said. "Maybe by then..."

  Anana shook her head. "I doubt the palace stays on the same orbit. It probably spirals around."

  On the primary, the palace was only a few feet above the ground. Here, for some reason, if floated about a hundred feet from the surface. Anana speculated that Urthona might've set the automatic controls for this altitude because the palace would accompany the moon when it fell.

  "He could go down with it and yet be distant enough so the palace wouldn't be disturbed by the impact."

  "If that's so, then the impact must not be too terrible. If it were, the ground could easily buckle to a hundred feet or more. But what about a mountain falling over on it?"

  "I don't know. But Urthona had a good reason for doing it. Unfortunately for us, it removes any chance for us to get to the palace while it's on the moon." They did not see the palace. Evidently, it did follow a spiral path.

  The days and sometimes the nights that succeeded the appearance of the building were busy.

  In addition to hunting, which took much time, they had to knock over and kill trees and skin the antelopes they slew. Branches were cut from the trees and shaped with axe and knife. The skins were scraped and dehaired, though not to Anana's satisfaction. She fashioned needles from wood and sewed the skins together. Then she cut away parts of these to make them the exact shape needed. After this, she sewed the triangular form onto the wooden structure.

  The result was a three-cornered kite-shape. The rawhide strips used as substitutes for wires were tied onto the glider.

  Anana had hoped to use a triangular trapeze bar for control. But their efforts to make one of three wooden pieces tied at the corners failed. It just wasn't structurally sound enough. It was likely to fall apart when subjected to stress of operation.

  Instead, she settled for the parallel bar arrangement. The pilot would place his armpits over the bars and grasp the uprights. Control would be effected, she hoped, through shifting of the pilot's weight.

  When the bars and uprights were installed, Anana frowned.

  "I don't know if it'll stand up under the stress. Well, only one way to find out."

  She got into position underneath the glider. Then, instead of running, as she would have had to do on the planet, she crouched down and leaped into the wind. She rose thirty-five feet, inclined the
nose upwards a little to catch the wind, and glided for a short distance. She stalled the machine just before landing and settled down.

  The others had bounded after her. She said, grinning, "The first antelope-hide glider in history has just made its first successful flight."

  She continued making the short glides, stopping when she had gone two miles. They walked back then, and Kickaha, after receiving instructions again-for the twentieth time-tried his skill. McKay succeeded him without mishap, and they called it a day.

  "Tomorrow we'll practice on the plain again," she said. "The day after, we'll go up a mountain a little ways and try our luck there. I want you two to get some practice in handling a glider in a fairly long glide. I don't expect you to become proficient. You just need to get the feel of handling it."

  On the fifth day of practice, they tried some turns. Anana had warned them to pick up plenty of speed when they did, since the lower wing in a bank lost velocity. If it slowed down too much, the glider could stall. They followed her prescription faithfully and landed safely.

  "It'd be nice if we could jump off a cliff and soar," she said. "That'd really give you practice. But there are no thermals. Still, you'd be able to glide higher. Maybe we should."

  The men said that they'd like to give it a go. But they had to wait until a nearby mountain would form just the right shape needed. That is, a mountain with a slope on one side up which they could walk and more or less right-angles verticality on the other side. By the time that happened, she had built her parawing. This was not to be folded for opening when the jump was made. The hide was too stiff for that. It was braced with lightweight wood to form a rigid structure.

  They climbed the mountain to the top. Anana, without any hesitation, grabbed the wing, holding it above her head but with its nose pointed down to keep the wind from catching in it. She leaped off the four thousand foot high projection, released her hold, dropped, was caught in the harness, and was off. The two men retreated from the outthrust of earth just in time. With only a slight sound, the ledge gave way and fell.

  They watched her descend, more swiftly than in the glider, pull the nose cords to dive faster, release them to allow the nose to lift, and then work the ropes so that she could bank somewhat.

  When they saw her land, they turned and went back down the mountain.

  The next day McKay jumped and the following day Kickaha went off the mountain. Both landed without accident.

  Anana was pleased with their successful jumps. But she said, "The wing is too heavy to use over the primary. We have to find a lighter wood and something that'll be much lighter than the antelope hides for a wing-covering."

  By then the covering was stinking badly. It was thrown away for the insects and the dogs to eat.

  She did, however, make another wing, installing this time steering slots and antistall nose flaps. They took it up another mountain, the cliffside of which was only a thousand feet high. Anana jumped again and seemed to be doing well when a roc dived out of the sky and fastened its claw in the wing. It lifted then, flapping its wings, which had a breadth of fifty feet, heading for the mountain on which it roosted.

  Anana threw her throwing axe upwards. Its point caught on the lower side of the bird's neck, then dropped. But the bird must have decided it had hold of a tough customer. It released the parawing, and she glided swiftly down. For a few minutes the bird followed her. If it had attacked her while she was on the ground, it could have had her in a defenseless situation. But it swooped over her, uttering a harsh cry, and then rose in search of less alien and dangerous prey.

  Anana spent an hour looking for the axe, failed to find it, and ran home because a moa had appeared in the distance. The next day the three went back to search for it. After half a day McKay found it behind a boulder that had popped out of the earth while they were looking.

  The next stage in the project was to make a small test balloon. First, though, they had to build a windbreak. The wind, created by the passage of the moon through the atmosphere at an estimated ten miles an hour, never stopped blowing. Which meant that they would never be able to finish the inflation of the balloon before it blew away.

  The work took four weeks. They dug up the ground with the knives, the axe, and pointed sticks. When they had a semicircle of earth sixteen feet high, they added a roof supported by the trunks of dead plants of a giant species.

  Then came the antelope hunting. At the end of two days' exhausting hunting and transportation of skins from widely scattered places, they had a large pile. But the hides were in varying stages of decomposition.

  There was no time to rest. They scraped off the fat and partially dehaired the skins. Then they cut them, and Anana and Kickaha sewed the panels together. McKay had cut strips and made a network of them.

  Dawn found them red-eyed and weary. But they started the fire on the earthen floor of the little basket. Using a gallows of wood, they hoisted the limp envelope up so that the heat from the fire would go directly into the open neck of the bag. Gradually it inflated. When it seemed on the brink of rising, they grabbed the cords hanging from the network around the bag and pulled it out from under the roof. The wind caught it, sent it scooting across the plain, the basket tilting to one side. Some of the fire was shifted off the earth, and the basket began to burn. But the balloon, the envelope steadily expanding, rose.

  Pale-blue smoke curled up from the seams.

  Anana shook her head. "I knew it wasn't tight enough."

  Nevertheless, the aerostat continued to rise. The basket hanging from the rawhide ropes burned and presently one end swung loose, spilling what remained of the fire. The balloon rose a few more feet, then began to sink, and shortly was falling. By then it was at least five miles away horizontally and perhaps a mile high. It passed beyond the shoulder of a mountain, no doubt to startle the animals there and to provide food for the dogs and the baboons and perhaps the lions.

  "I wish I'd had a camera," Kickaha said. "The only rawhide balloon in the history of mankind."

  "Even if we find a material suitable for the envelope covering," Anana said, "it'll be from an animal. And it'll rot too quickly."

  "The natives know how to partially cure rawhide," he said. "And they might know where we could get the wood and the covering we need. So, we'll find us some natives and interrogate them."

  Four weeks later, they were about to give up looking for human beings. They decided to try for three days more. The second day, from the side of a shrinking mountain, they saw a small tribe moving across a swelling plain. Behind them, perhaps a mile away, was a tiny figure sitting in the middle of the immensity.

  Several hours later, they came upon the figure. It was covered by a rawhide blanket. Kickaha walked up to it and removed the blanket. A very old woman had been sitting under it, her withered legs crossed, her arms upon her flabby breasts, one hand holding a flint scraper. Her eyes had been closed, but they opened when she felt the blanket move. They became huge. Her toothless mouth opened in horror. Then, to Kickaha's surprise, she smiled, and she closed her eyes again, and she began a high-pitched whining chant.

  Anana walked around her, looking at the curved back, the prominent ribs, the bloated stomach, the scanty white locks, and especially at one foot. This had all the appearance of having been chewed on by a lion long ago. Three toes were missing, it was scarred heavily, and it was bent at an unnatural angle.

  "She's too old to do any more work or to travel," Anana said.

  "So they just left her to starve or be eaten by the animals," Kickaha said. "But they left her this scraper. What do you suppose that's for? So she could cut her wrists?"

  Anana said, "Probably. That's why she smiled when she got over her fright. She figures we'll put her out of her misery at once."

  She fingered the rawhide. "But she's wrong. She can tell us how to cure skins and maybe tell us a lot more, too. If she isn't senile."

  Leaving McKay to guard the old woman, the others went off to hunt. They return
ed late that day, each bearing part of a gazelle carcass. They also carried a bag full of berries picked from a tree they'd cut out of a grove, though Kickaha's skin had a long red mark from a lashing tentacle. They offered water and berries to the crone, and after some hesitation she accepted. Kickaha pounded a piece of flank to make it more tender for her, and she gummed away on it. Later, he dug a hole in the ground, put water in it, heated some stones, dropped them in the water, and added tiny pieces of meat. The soup wasn't hot, and it wasn't good, but it was warm and thick, and she was able to drink that.

  While one stood guard that night, the others slept. In the morning, they made some more soup, adding berries for an experiment, and the old woman drank it all from the proferred gourd. Then the language lessons began. She was an eager teacher once she understood that they weren't just fattening her up so they could eat her.

  The next day Kickaha set out after the people who'd abandoned her. Two days later he returned with flint spear heads, axes, hand scrapers, and several war boomerangs.

  "It was easy. I sneaked in at night while they were snoring away after a feast of rotten elephant meat. I picked what I wanted and took off. Even the guards were sleeping."

  Learning the old woman's language proceeded swiftly. In three weeks Shoobam was telling them jokes. And she was a storehouse of information. A treasure trove, in fact.

  Primed with data, the three set to work. While one of the three guarded Shoobam, the others went out to get the materials needed. They killed the plants which she had told them were likely to contain gallotannin, or its equivalent, in certain pathological growths. Another type of tree which they caught and killed had an exceptionally lightweight wood yet was stress-resistant.

  Kickaha made a crutch for Shoobam so she could become mobile, and Anana spent some time every day massaging the old woman's semiparalyzed legs. She was not only able to get around better, she began to put on some weight. Still, though she enjoyed talking to the three and felt more important than she had for a long time, she wasn't happy. She missed the tribal life and especially her grandchildren. But she had the stoic toughness of all the natives, who could make a luxury out of what was to the three the barest necessity.