Behind the Walls of Terra

  The three got into the carriage and drove off. Kickaha watched the oil-burning lamps on the cabriolet until they were out of sight on the road that wound down the mountain.

  This world, Kickaha thought, would be fascinating to investigate. Physically, it had been exactly like the other Earth when it had started. And its peoples, created fifteen thousand years ago, had been exactly like those of the other Earth. Twins, they had been placed in the same locations, given the same languages and the same rearing, and then were left to themselves, He supposed that the deviations of the humans here from those on his world had started almost immediately. Fifteen millennia had resulted in very different histories and cultures.

  He would like to stay here and wander over the face of this Earth. But now, he had to find Wolff and Chryseis and to do this he would have to find and capture Urthona. The only action available was to use the Horn, and to hope it would reveal the right gate to the Lord.

  This was not going to be easy, as he found out a few minutes later. The Horn, though not loud, attracted several servants. Kickaha fired the beamer once at a pillar near them. They saw the hole appear in the stone and, shouting and screaming, fled. Kickaha urged Anana to continue blowing the Horn, but the uproar from the interior convinced him that they could not remain here. This building was too huge for them to leisurely investigate the first story. The most likely places for gates were in the bedroom or office of the master, and these were probably on the second story.

  When they were halfway up the steps, a number of men with steel conical helmets, small round shields, and swords and spears appeared. There were, however, three men who carried big heavy clumsy-looking firearms with flared muzzles, wooden stocks, and flintlocks.

  Kickaha cut the end of one blunderbuss off with the beamer. The men scattered, but they regrouped before Kickaha and Anana had reached the top of the steps. Kickaha cut through the bottom of a marble pillar and then through the top. The pillar fell over with a crash that shook the house, and the armed men fled.

  It was a costly rout, because a little knob on the side of the beamer suddenly flashed a red light. There was not much charge left, and he did not have another powerpack.

  They found a bedroom that seemed to be that of the Lord. It was certainly magnificent enough, but everything in this mansion was magnificent. It contained a number of weapons, swords, axes, daggers, throwing knives, maces, rapiers, and-delight!-bows and a quiver of arrows. While Anana probed the walls and floors with the Horn, Kickaha chose a knife with a good balance for her and then strung a bow. He shouldered a quiver and felt much better. The beamer had enough left in it for several seconds of full piercing power or a dozen or so rays of burn power or several score rays of stun power. After that, he would have to depend on his primitive weapons.

  He also chose a light ax that seemed suitable for throwing for Anana. She was proficient in the use of all weapons and, while she was not as strong as he, she was as skillful.

  She stopped blowing the Horn. There was a bed which hung by golden chains from the ceiling, and beyond it on the wall was a spreading circle of light. The light dissolved to show delicate pillars supporting a frescoed ceiling and, beyond, many trees.

  Anana cried out with surprise in which was an anguished delight. She started forward but was held back by Kickaha.

  He said, "What's the hurry?"

  "It's home!" she said. "Home!"

  Her whole being seemed to radiate light.

  "Your world?" he said.

  "Oh, no! Home! Where I was born! The world where the Lords originated!"

  There did not seem to be any traps, but that meant nothing. However, the hubbub outside the room indicated that they had better move on or expect to fight. Since the beamer was so depleted, he could not fight them off for long, not if they were persistent.

  He said, "Here we go!" and leaped through. Anana had to bend low and scoot through swiftly, because the circle was closing. When she got up on her feet, she said, "Do you remember that tall building on Wilshire, near the tar pits? The big one with the sign, California Federal? It was always ablaze with lights at night?"

  He nodded and she said, "This summerhouse is exactly on that spot. I mean, on the place that corresponds to that spot."

  There was no sign of anything corresponding to Wilshire Boulevard, nothing resembling a road or even a foot path here. The number of trees here certainly did take away from the southern California lowlands look, but she explained that the Lords had created rivers and brooks here so that this forest could grow. The summerhouse was one of many built so that the family could stop for the night or retire for meditation or the doing of whatever virtue or vice they felt like. The main dwellings were all on the beach.

  There had never been many people in this valley, and, when Anana was born, only three families lived here. Later, at least as far as she knew, all the Lords had left this valley. In fact, they had left this world to occupy their own artificial universes and from thence to wage their wars upon each other.

  Kickaha allowed her to wander around while she exclaimed softly to herself or called to him to look at something that she suddenly remembered. He wondered that she remembered anything at all, since her last visit here had been three thousand and two hundred years ago. When he thought of this, he asked her where the gate was through which she had entered at that time.

  "It's on top of a boulder about a half mile from here," she said. "There are a number of gates, all disguised, of course. And nobody knows how many others here. I didn't know about the one under the stone floor of the summerhouse, of course. Urthona must have put it there long ago, maybe ten thousand years ago."

  "This summerhouse is that old?"

  "That old. It contains self-renewing and self-cleaning equipment, of course. And equipment to keep the forest and the land in its primeval state is under the surface. Erosion and buildup of land are compensated for."

  "Are there any weapons hidden here for your use?" he said.

  "There are a number just within the gate," she said. "But the charges will have trickled off to nothing by now, and, besides, I don't have an activator...."

  She stopped and said, "I forgot about the Horn. It can activate the gate, of course, but there's really nothing in it to help us."

  "Where does the gate lead to?"

  "It leads to a room which contains another gate, and this one opens directly to the interior of the palace of my own world. But it is trapped. I had to leave my deactivator behind when the Bellers invaded my world and I escaped through another gate into Jadawin's world."

  "Show me where the boulder is, anyway. If we have to, we could take refuge inside its gate and come back out later."

  First, they must eat and, if possible, take a nap. Anana took him into the house, although she first studied it for a long time for traps. The kitchen contained an exquisitely sculptured marble cabinet. This, in turn, housed a fabricator, the larger part of which was buried under the house. Anana opened it cautiously and set the controls, closed it, and a few minutes later opened it again. There were two trays with dishes and cups of delicious food and drink. The energy-matter converters below the earth had been waiting for thousands of years to serve this meal and would wait another hundred thousand years to serve the next one if events so proceeded.

  After eating, they stretched out on a bed which hung on chains from the ceiling. Kickaha questioned her about the layout of the land. She was about to go to sleep when he said, "I've had the feeling that we got here not entirely by accident. I think either Urthona or Red Orc set it up so that we'd get here if we were fast and clever enough. And he also set it up so that the other Lord, his enemy, would be here, if the other Lord is alive. I feel that this is the showdown, and that Urthona or Orc arranged to have it here for poetic or aesthetic reasons. It would be like a Lord to bring his enemies back to the home planet to kill them-if he could. This is just a feeling, but I'm going to act as if it were definite knowledge."

  "You'd act that w
ay, anyway," she said. "But I think you may be right."

  She fell asleep. He left the bed and went to the front room to watch. The sun started down from the zenith. Beautiful birds, most of whose ancestors must have been made in the biolabs of the Lords, gathered around the fountain and pool before the house. Once, a large brown bear ambled through the trees and near the house. Another time, he heard a sound that tingled his nerves and filled him with joy. It was the shrill trumpet of a mammoth. Its cry reminded him of the Amerind tier of Wolff's world, where mammoths and mastodons by the millions roamed the plains and the forests of an area larger than all of North and South America. He felt homesick and wondered when-if-he would ever see that world again. The Hrowakas, the Bear People, the beautiful and the great Amerinds who had adopted him, were dead now, murdered by the Bellers. But there were other tribes who would be eager to adopt him, even those who called him their greatest enemy and had been trying for years to lift his scalp or his head.

  He returned to the bedroom and awoke Anana, telling her to rouse him in about an hour. She did so, and though he would have liked to sleep for the rest of the day and half the night, he forced himself to get up.

  They ate some more food and packed more in a small basket. They set off through the woods, which were thick with trees but only moderately grown with underbrush. They came onto a trail which had been trampled by mammoths, as the tracks and droppings showed. They followed this, sensitive for the trumpetings or squealings of the big beasts. There were no flies or mosquitoes, but there was a variety of large beetles and other insects on which the birds fed.

  Once, they heard a savage yowl. They stopped, then continued after it was not repeated. Both recognized the cry of the sabertooth.

  "If this was the estate of your family, why did they keep the big dangerous beasts around?" he said.

  "You should know that. The Lords like danger; it is the only spice of eternity. Immortality is nothing unless it can be taken away from you at any moment."

  That was true. Only those who had immortality could appreciate that. But he wished, sometimes, that there were not so much spice. Lately, he did not seem to be getting enough rest, and his nerves were raw from the chafing of continuous peril.

  "Do you think that anybody else would know about the gate in the boulder?"

  "Nothing is sure," she replied. "But I do not think so. Why? Do you think that Urthona will know that we'll be going to the boulder?"

  "It seems highly probable. Otherwise, he would have set up a trap for us at the summerhouse. I think that he may expect and want us to go to the boulder because he is also leading another toward the same place. It's to be a trysting place for us and our two enemies."

  "You don't know that. It's just your highly suspicious mind believing that things are as you would arrange them if you were a Lord."

  "Look who's calling who paranoid," he said, smiling. "Maybe you're right. But I've been through so much that I can hear the tumblers of other people's minds clicking."

  He decided that Anana should handle the beamer and he would have his bow and arrows ready.

  Near the edge of the clearing, Kickaha noted a slight swelling in the earth. It was about a quarter inch high and two inches wide, and it ran for several feet, then disappeared. He moved in a zigzagging path for several yards and finally found another swelling which described a small part of a very large circle before it disappeared, too.

  He went back to Anana, who had been watching him with a puzzled expression.

  "Do you know of any underground work done around here?" he said.

  "No," she said. "Why?"

  "Maybe an earthquake did it," he said and did not comment any more on the swelling.

  The boulder was about the size of a one-bedroom bungalow and was set near the edge of a clearing. It was of red and black granite and had been transported here from the north along with thousands of other boulders to add variety to the landscape. It was about a hundred yards northeast of a tar pit. This pit, Kickaha realized, was the same size and in the same location as the tar pit in Hancock Park on Earth Number One.

  They got down on their bellies and snaked slowly toward the boulder. When they were within thirty yards of it, Kickaha crawled around until he was able to see all sides of the huge rock. Coming back, he said, "I didn't think he'd be dumb enough to hide behind it. But in it would be a good move. Or maybe he's out in the woods and waiting for us to open the gate because he's trapped it."

  "If you're right and he's waiting for a third party to show..." She stopped and clutched his arm and said, "I saw someone! There!" She pointed across the clearing at the thick woods where the Los Angeles County Art Museum would have been if this had been Earth Number One. He looked but could see nothing.

  "It was a man, I'm sure of that," she said. "A tall man. I think he was Red Orc!"

  "See any weapon? A beamer?"

  "No, I just got a glimpse, and then he was gone behind a tree." Kickaha began to get even more uneasy.

  He watched the birds and noticed that a raven was cawing madly near where Anana thought she had seen Red Orc. Suddenly, the bird fell off its branch and was seen and heard no more, Kickaha grinned. The Lord had realized it might be giving him away and had shot it.

  A hundred yards to their left near the edge of the tar pit, several bluejays screamed and swooped down again and again at something in the tall grass. Kickaha watched them, but in a minute a red fox trotted out of the grass and headed into the woods southward. The jays followed him.

  With their departure, a relative quiet arrived. It was hot in the tall saw-bladed grass. Occasionally, a large insect buzzed nearby. Once, a shadow flashed by them, and Kickaha, looking upward, saw a dragon fly, shimmering golden-green, transparent copper-veined wings at least two feet from tip to tip, zooming by.

  Now and then, a trumpeting floated to them and a wolf-like howl came from far beyond. And, once, a big bird high above screamed harshly.

  Neither saw a sign of the man Anana had thought was Red Orc. Yet, he must be out there somewhere. He might even have spotted them and be crawling toward their hiding place. This caused Kickaha to move away from their position near the boulder. They did this very slowly so they would shake the tall grasses as unviolently as possible. When they had gotten under the trees at the edge of the clearing, he said, "We shouldn't stay together. I'm going to go back into the woods about fifty feet or so. I can get a better view."

  He kissed her cheek and crawled off. After looking around, he decided to take a post behind a bush on a slight rise in the ground. There was a tree behind it which would hide him from anybody approaching in that direction. It also had the disadvantage that it could hide the approaching person from him, but he took the chance. And the small height gave him a better view while the bush hid him from those below. He could not see Anana even though he knew her exact position. Several times, the grasses moved just a little bit contrary to the direction of the breeze. If Orc or Urthona were watching, they would note this and perhaps...

  He froze. The grass was bending, very slightly and slowly and at irregular intervals, about twenty yards to the right of Anana. There was no movement for what seemed like ten minutes, and then the grass bent again. It pointed toward Anana and moved back up gently, as if somebody were slowly releasing it. A few minutes later, it moved again.

  Kickaha was absorbed in watching the progress of the person in the grass, but he did not allow it to distract him from observation elsewhere. During one of his many glances behind him, he saw a flash of white skin through the branches of a bush about sixty feet to his left. At first, he considered moving away from his position to another. But if he did so, he would very probably be seen by the newcomer. It was possible that he had been seen already. The best action just now was no action.

  The sun slid on down the sky, and the shadows lengthened. The person creeping toward Anana moved rarely and very slowly but within an hour he was about twelve feet from her. Whether or not she knew it, Kickaha could n
ot tell.

  He removed the Horn from its case. And he placed the nock of an arrow in the string of the bow and waited. Again, the grass bent down toward Anana, and the person moved a foot closer.

  Behind him, nothing showed except the flash of a bright blue-and-red bird swooping between two trees.

  Presently, on the other side of the clearing, keeping close to the trees on its edge, a huge black wolf trotted. It stood at least four and a half feet high at the shoulder, and it could remove the leg of a man at the ankle bone with one bite. It was a dire wolf, extinct on Earth some ten thousand years, but plentiful on Jadawin's world and recreated in the Lords' biolabs for restocking of this area. The giant he-wolf trotted along as stealthily and vibrantly as a tiger, its red tongue hanging out like a flag after a heavy rain. It trotted warily but confidently along for twenty yards and then froze. For a few seconds, it turned its head to scan a quarter of the compass, and then it moved ahead, but crouchingly. Kickaha watched it, while keeping tabs on the persons unknown before and behind him-or tried to do so. Thus, he almost missed the quick action of the wolf.

  It suddenly charged toward a spot inside the woods and just as suddenly abandoned its charge and fled yowling across the clearing toward Anana. The fur on its back and hind legs was aflame.

  Kickaha grasped immediately that a fifth person was in the game and that he had tried to scare the wolf away with a brief power-reduced shot from a beamer. But in his haste he had set the power too high and had burned the wolf instead of just stunning him.

  Or perhaps the burning was done deliberately. The newcomer might have set the beast on fire and be guiding him this way with stabs of beamer power to see what he could flush up.

  Whatever his intent, he had upset the plans of the person sneaking up on Anana. He had also upset Anana, who, hearing the frantic yowls approaching her with great speed, could not resist raising her head just high enough to see what was happening.