Part 7 (1/2)

By the time Anana awoke, she found that her companion had eaten, exercised vigorously to remove the stiffness from his muscles, and had dabbed water on his face and hands. He had bathed in the spring the evening before and so was presentable enough. He did not worry about shaving, since he had applied a chemical which r.e.t.a.r.ded beard growth for months Just before he left the Hrowakas' village. It was a gift from WolfF. It could be neutralized at any time by another chemical if he wished to have a beard, but this chemical was not available; it was in a cabin in the Hrowakas' village.

Anana had the ability to wake up looking as if she were getting ready to go to a party. She did complain, however, about a bad taste in her mouth. She also voiced dislike for the lack of privacy in excretion.

Kickaha shrugged and said that a ten thousand year old woman ought to be above such human inhibitions. She did not respond angrily, but merely said, ”Do we take off now? Or could we rest today?”

He was surprised that she seemed to give him authority. It was not what he would have expected from a Lord. But apparently she had a certain resiliency and flexibility, a realistic att.i.tude. She recognized that this was his world and that he knew it far better than she did. Also, it must be evident that he had a tremendous capacity for survival. Her true feelings about him were not apparent. She was probably going along with him for her own sake and would drop him if he became a liability rather than an a.s.set-which was an att.i.tude he approved, in some respects. At least, they were operating together smoothly enough.

Not too smoothly, since she had made it obvious that she would never think of letting him make love to her.

”I'm all for resting,” he said. ”But I think we'll be better off if we rest among the Hrowakas. We can hide this boat in a cave near their village. And while we're living there, we can talk to my people. I'm planning on using them against the Sellers, if they're willing. And they will be. They love a fight.”

Shortly afterward, Anana noticed a light flas.h.i.+ng on the instrument panel. She said, ”Another craft is trying to call this one or perhaps the headquarters in Jadawin's palace. They must be alarmed because it hasn't reported in.”

”I'd bluff by talking to them, but I'm not fluent enough in Lord-speech to fool them,” Kickaha said. ”And you could try, but I don't think they'd accept a woman's voice either. Let it flash. But one thing does bother me: do the Sellers have any means for tracking down this craft?”

”Only if we transmit a message for several minutes,” she said. ”Or if the craft is in a line-of-sight position. These are my machines and I had them equipped with some protection devices. But not many.”

”Yes, but they have the devices of four palaces to draw on, ”he said. ”Wolffs, yours, Nimstowl's, and Judubra's. They may have removed devices from these to equip their crafts.”

She pointed out that, if they had, they had not equipped this one. She yawned and got ready to take a catnap. Kickaha shouted that she had slept over twelve hours already, and she should get up off her beautiful rump. If they were to survive, they had better get in gear, stir their stumps, and so on with a number of earthier and more personal cliches.

She admitted he was right. This surprised him but did not put him off guard. She got into the pilot's seat, put on the stasis harness, and said that she was ready.

The machine slid parallel to the face of the mountain and then headed for the edge of the level, keeping a few feet above the surface of the jagged terrain. It took two hours to get out of the range, by which time they were on the lip of the monolith on which rested the Amerind level. The stone cliff dropped vertically-more or less-for over a hundred thousand feet. At its base was Okeanos, which was not an ocean but a sea shaped like a ring, girdling the monolith and never more than three hundred miles wide.

On the other side of Okeanos, entirely visible from this height, was the strip of land which ran around the bottom of this planet. The strip was actually fifty miles across, but from the edge of the monolith, it looked thread-thin. On its comparatively smooth, well-treed surface lived human beings and half-human creatures and fabulous beasts. Many of them were the products of Jadawin's biolab; all owed their longevity and unfading youth to him. There were mermen and mermaids, goat-hoofed and goat-horned satyrs, hairy-legged and horned fauns, small centaurs, and other creatures which Jadawin had made to resemble the beings of Greek mythology. The strip was a type of Paradeisos and Garden of Eden with, in addition, a number of extra-terrestrial, extra-universal touches.

On the other side of the Garden strip was the edge of the bottom of the world. Kickaha had been down there several times on what he called ”vacations” and once when he had been pursued by the horrible gworl, who wanted to kill him for the Horn of Shambarimen.* He had looked over the edge and been thrilled and scared. The green abyss below-nothing beneath the planet-nothing but-green sky and a sense that he would fall forever if he lost his hold.

Kickaha told her of this and said, ”We could hide down there for a long time. It's a great place-no wars, no bloodshed beyond an occasional b.l.o.o.d.y nose or two. It's strickly for sensual pleasure, no intellectualism, and it gets wearisome after a few weeks, unless you want to be an alcoholic or drug addict. But the Bellers'll be down there eventually. And by that time, they may be much stronger.”

”You can be sure of that,” shesaid. ”They have started making new Sellers. I suppose that one of the palaces has facilities for doing this. Mine hasn't, but ...”

”WolfTs has,” he replied. ”Even so, it'll take ten years for a Beller to mature and be educated enough to take its place in Beller society, right? Meantime, the Sellers are restricted to the original fifty. Forty-four, I mean.”

”Forty-four or four, they won't stop until we three Lords, and you, are captured or killed. I doubt they'll invade any more universes until then. They've got all of us cornered in this world, and they'll keep hunting until they've got us.”

”Or we've got them,” Kickaha said.

She smiled and said, ”That's what I like about *The Maker of Universes, Philip Jose Farmer, ACE. you. I wish that you were a Lord. Then ...”

He did not ask her to elaborate. He directed her to fly the machine down the monolith. As they descended, they saw that its seemingly smooth surface was broken, gnarled, and flattened in many places. There were ledges and projections which furnished roads for many familiar and many strange creatures. There were fissures which sometimes widened to become comparatively large valleys. There were streams in the valleys and cataracts hurled out of holes in the steep side and there was a half mile wide river which roared out of a large cave at the end of a valley-fissure and then fell over the edge and onto the sea seventy-five thousand feet below.

Kickaha explained that the surface area on all the levels of this planet, that is, the horizontal area on the tops of the monoliths, equaled the surface area of the watery bodies of Earth. This made the land area more than that of Earth's. In addition, the habitable areas on the verticalities of the monoliths were considerable. These alone probably equaled the land area of Earth's Africa. Moreover, there were immense subterranean territories, great caverns in vast networks that ran under the earth everywhere. And in these were, various peoples and beasts and plants adapted to underground life.

”And when you consider all this, plus the fact that there are no arid deserts or ice- and snow-covered areas, you can see that the inhabitable land of this planet is about four times that of Earth.”

Anana said that she had been on Earth briefly only and that she didn't remember its exact size. The planet in her own universe, however, was, if she remembered correctly, about the size of Earth.

Kickaha said, ”Take my word for it, this is a h.e.l.l of a big place. I've traveled a lot in the twenty-three years I've been here, but I've seen only a small part. I have a lot ahead of me to see. If I live, of course.”

The machine had descended swiftly and now hovered about ten feet above the rolling waves of Okeanos. The surf shattered with a white bellow against the reefs or directly against the b.u.t.t of the monolith. Kickaha wanted to make sure that the water was deep enough. He had Anana fly the craft two miles further out. Here he dumped the four caskets and bell-shaped contents into the sea. The water was pure and the angle of sunlight just right. He could see the caskets a long way before the darkness swallowed them. They fell through schools offish that glowed all hues of all colors and by a Brobdingnagian octopus, striped purple and white, that reached out a tentacle to touch a casket as it went by.

Dumping the bells here was not really necessary, since they were empty. But Anana would not feel easy until they were sunk out of reach of any sentients.

”Six down. Forty-four to go,” Kickaha said. ”Now to the village of the Hrowakas, the Bear People. My people,”

The craft followed the curve of the monolith base for about seven hundred miles. Then Kickaha took over the controls. He flew the craft up and in ten minutes had climbed a little over twelve miles of precipitousness to the edge of the Amerind level. Another hour of cautious threading through the valleys and pa.s.ses of the mountain ranges and half an hour of reconnoitering brought them to the little hill on top of which was the village of the Hrowakas.

Kickaha felt as if a warlance had driven into his skull. The tall sharp-pointed logs that formed the wall around the village were gone. Here and there, a blackened stump poked through the ashes.

The great V-roofed council hall, the lodge for bachelor warriors, the bear pens, the horse barns, the granary storage, the smokehouses, and the log-cabin family dwellings-all were gone. Burned into gray mounds.

It had rained the night before, but smoke rose weakly from a few piles.

On the hillside were a dozen widely scattered charred corpses of women and children and the burned carca.s.ses of a few bears and dogs. These had been fleeing when rayed down.

He had no doubt that the Black Bellers had done this. But how had they connected him with the Hrowakas?

His thoughts, wounded, moved slowly. Finally, he remembered that the Tishquetmoac knew that he came from the Hrowakas. However, they did not know even the approximate location of the village. The Hrowaka men always traveled at least two hundred miles from the village before stopping along the Great Trade Path. Here they waited for the Tishquetmoac caravan. And though the Bear People were talkers, they would not reveal the place of their village.

Of course, there were old enemies of the Bear People, and perhaps the Bellers had been informed by these. And there were also films of the village and of Kickaha, taken by Wolffand stored in his palace. The Bellers could have run these off and so found the Hrowakas, since the location was shown on a map in the film.

Why had they burned down the village and all in it? What could serve the h.e.l.lers by this act?

With a heavy halting voice, he asked Anana the same question. She replied in a sympathetic tone, and if he had not been so stunned, he would have been agreeably surprised at her reaction.

”The Sellers did not do this out of vindictive-ness,” she said. ”They are cold and alien to our way of thinking. You must remember that while they are products of human beings”-Kickaha was not so stunned that he did not notice her identification of Lords with human beings at this time-”and were raised and educated by human beings, they are, in essence, mechanical life. They have self-consciousness, to be sure, which makes them not mere machines. But they were born of metal and in metal. They are as cruel as any human. But the cruelty is cold and mechanical. Cruelty is used only when they can get something desired through it. They can know pa.s.sion, that is, s.e.xual desire, when they are in the brain of a man or woman, just as they get hungry because their host-body is hungry.

”But they don't take illogical vengeance as a human would. That is, they wouldn't destroy a tribe just because it happened to be loved by you. No, they must have had a good reason-to them, anyway-for doing this.”

”Perhaps they wanted to make sure I didn't take refuge here,” he said. ”They would have been smarter to have waited until I did and then move in.”

They could be hiding someplace up on the mountains where they could observe everything.

However, Kickaha insisted on scouting the area before he approached the village. If Bellers were spying on them, they were well concealed indeed. In fact, since the heat-and-ma.s.s detector on the craft indicated nothing except some small animals and birds, the Bellers would have to be behind something large. In which case, they couldn't see their quarry either.

It was more probably that the Seller machine, after destroying the village, had searched this area. Failing to find him, it had gone elsewhere.

”I'll take over the controls,” Anana said softly. ”You tell me how to get to Podarge.”

He was still too sluggish to react to her unusual solicitude. Later, he would think about it.

Now he told her to go to the edge of the level again and to descend about fifty thousand feet. Then she was to take the craft westward at 150 MPH until he told her to stop.

The trip was silent except for the howling of the wind at the open rear end. Not until the machine stopped below an enormous overhang of s.h.i.+ny black rock did he speak.

”I could have buried the bodies,” he said, ”but it would have taken too long. The Bellers might have checked back.”

”You're still thinking about them,” she said with a trace of incredulity. ” I mean, you' re worrying because you couldn't keep the carrion eaters off them? Don't! They' re dead; you can do nothing for them.”