The Maker of Universes

III

One day Robert Wolff removed the silver horn from its hiding place in the hollow of a tree. Setting off through the forest, he walked toward the boulder from which the man who called himself Kickaha had thrown the horn. Kickaha and the bumpy creatures had dropped out of sight as if they never existed and no one to whom he had talked had ever seen or heard of them. He would re-enter his native world and give it another chance. If he thought its advantages outweighed those of the Garden planet, he would remain there. Or, perhaps, he could travel back and forth and so get the best of both. When tired of one, he would vacation in the other.

On the way, he stopped for a moment at an invitation from Elikopis to have a drink and to talk. Elikopis, whose name meant “Bright-eyed,” was a beautiful, magnificently rounded dryad. She was closer to being “normal” than anyone he had so far met. If her hair had not been a deep purple, she would, properly clothed, have attracted no more attention on Earth than was usually bestowed on a woman of surpassing fairness.

In addition, she was one of the very few who could carry on a worthwhile conversation. She did not think that conversation consisted of chattering away or laughing loudly without cause and ignoring the words of those who were supposed to be communicating with her. Wolff had been disgusted and depressed to find that most of the beach-crowd or the forest-crowd were monologists, however intensely they seemed to be speaking or however gregarious they were.

Elikopis was different, perhaps because she was not a member of any “crowd,” although it was more likely that the reverse was the cause. In this world along the sea, the natives, lacking even the technology of the Australian aborigine (and not needing even that) had developed an extremely complex social relationship. Each group had definite beach and forest territories with internal prestige levels. Each was able to recite to detail (and loved to) his/her horizontal/vertical position in comparison with each person of the group, which usually numbered about thirty. They could and would recite the arguments, reconciliations, character faults and virtues, athletic prowess or lack thereof, skill in their many childish games, and evaluate the sexual ability of each.

Elikopis had a sense of humor as bright as her eyes, but she also had some sensitivity. Today, she had an extra attraction, a mirror of glass set in a golden circle encrusted with diamonds. It was one of the few artifacts he had seen.

“Where did you get that?” he asked. “Oh, the Lord gave it to me,” Elikopis replied. “Once, a long time ago, I was one of his favorites. Whenever he came down from the top of the world to visit here, he would spend much time with me. Chryseis and I were the ones he loved the most. Would you believe it, the others still hate us for that?

That’s why I’m so lonely—not that being with the others is much help.”

“And what did the Lord look like?”

She laughed and said, “From the neck down, he looked much like any tall, well-built man such as you.”

She put her arm around his neck and began kissing him on his cheek, her lips slowly traveling toward his ear.

“His face?” Wolff said.

“I do not know. I could feel it, but I could not see it. A radiance from it blinded me. When he got close to me, I had to close my eyes, it was so bright.”

She shut his mouth with her kisses, and presently he forgot his questions. But when she was lying half-asleep on the soft grass by his side, he picked up the mirror and looked into it. His heart opened with delight. He looked like he had when he had been twenty-five. This he had known but had not been able to fully realize until now.

“And if I return to Earth, will I age as swiftly as I have regained my youth?”

He rose and stood for awhile in thought. Then he said, “Who do I think I’m kidding? I’m not going back.”

“If you’re leaving me now,” Elikopis said drowsily, “look for Chryseis. Something has happened to her; she runs away every time anybody gets close. Even I, her only friend, can’t approach her. Something dreadful has occurred, something she won’t talk about. You’ll love her. She’s not like the others; she’s like me.”

“All right,” Wolff replied absently. “I will.”

He walked until he was alone. Even if he did not intend to use the gate through which he had come, he did want to experiment with the horn. Perhaps there were other gates. It was possible that at any place where the horn was blown, a gate would open.

The tree under which he had stopped was one of the numerous cornucopias. It was two hundred feet tall, thirty feet thick, had a smooth, almost oily, azure bark, and branches as thick as his thigh and about sixty feet long. The branches were twigless and leafless. At the end of each was a hard-shelled flower, eight feet long and shaped exactly like a cornucopia.

Out of the cornucopias intermittent trickles of chocolatey stuff fell to the ground. The product tasted like honey with a very slight flavor of tobacco—a curious mixture, yet one he liked. Every creature of the forest ate it.

Under the cornucopia tree, he blew the horn. No “gate” appeared. He tried again a hundred yards away but without success. So, he decided, the horn worked only in certain areas, perhaps only in that place by the toadstool-shaped boulder.

Then he glimpsed the head of the girl who had come from around the tree that first time the gate had opened. She had the same heart-shaped face, enormous eyes, full crimson lips, and long tigerstripes of black and auburn hair.

He greeted her, but she fled. Her body was beautiful; her legs were the longest, in proportion to her body, that he had ever seen in a woman. Moreover, she was slimmer than the other too-curved and great-busted females of this world.

Wolff ran after her. The girl cast a look over her shoulder, gave a cry of despair, and continued to run.

He almost stopped then, for he had not gotten such a reaction from any of the natives. An initial withdrawal, yes, but not sheer panic and utter fright.

The girl ran until she could go no more. Sobbing for breath, she leaned against a moss-covered boulder near a small cataract. Ankle-high yellow flowers in the form of question-marks surrounded her. An owl-eyed bird with corkscrew feathers and long forward-bending legs stood on top of the boulder and blinked down at them. It uttered soft wee-wee-wee! cries.

Approaching slowly and smiling, Wolff said, “Don’t be afraid of me. I won’t harm you. I just want to talk to you.”

The girl pointed a shaking finger at the horn. In a quavery voice she said, “Where did you get that?”

“I got it from a man who called himself Kickaha. You saw him. Do you know him?”

The girl’s huge eyes were dark green; he thought them the most beautiful he had ever seen. This despite, or maybe because of, the catlike pupils.

She shook her head. “No. I did not know him. I first saw him when those”—she swallowed and turned pale and looked as if she were going to vomit—“things chased him to the boulder. And I saw them drag him off the boulder and take him away.”

“Then he wasn’t ended?” Wolff asked. He did not say killed or slain or dead, for these were taboo words.

“No. Perhaps those things meant to do something even worse than… ending him?”

“Why run from me?” Wolff said. “I am not one of those things.”

“I… I can’t talk about it.”

Wolff considered her reluctance to speak of unpleasantness. These people had so few repulsive or dangerous phenomena in their lives, yet they could not face even these. They were overly conditioned to the easy and the beautiful.

“I don’t care whether or not you want to talk about it.” he said. “You must. It’s very important.”

She turned her face away. “I won’t.”

“Which way did they go?”

“Who?”

“Those monsters. And Kickaha.”

“I heard him call them gworl,” she said. “I never heard that word before. They… the gworl. . . must come from somewhere else.” She pointed seawards and up. “They must come from the mountain. Up there, somewhere.”

Suddenly she turned to him and came close to him. Her huge eyes were raised to his, and even at this moment he could not help thinking how exquisite her features were and how smooth and creamy her skin was.

“Let’s get away from here!” she cried. “Far away! Those things are still here. Some of them may have taken Kickaha away, but all of them didn’t leave! I saw a couple a few days ago. They were hiding in the hollow of a tree. Their eyes shone like those of animals, and they have a horrible odor, like rotten fungus-covered fruit!”

She put her hand on the horn. “1 think they want this!”

Wolff said, “And I blew the horn. If they’re anywhere near, they must have heard it!”

He looked around through the trees. Something glittered behind a bush about a hundred yards away.

He kept his eyes on the bush, and presently he saw the bush tremble and the flash of sunlight again. He took the girl’s slender hand in his and said, “Let’s get going. But walk as if we’d seen nothing. Be nonchalant.”

She pulled back on his hand and said, “What’s wrong?”

“Don’t get hysterical. I think I saw something behind a bush. It might be nothing, then again it could be the gworl. Don’t look over there! You’ll give us away!”

He spoke too late, for she had jerked her head around. She gasped and moved close to him. “They… they!”

He looked in the direction of her pointing finger and saw two dark, squat figures shamble from behind the bush. Each carried a long, wide, curved blade of steel in its hand. They waved the knives and shouted something in hoarse rasping voices. They wore no clothes over their dark furry bodies, but broad belts around their waists supported by scabbards from which protruded knife-handles.

Wolff said, “Don’t panic. I don’t think they can run very fast on those short bent legs. Where’s a good place to get away from them, someplace they can’t follow us?”

“Across the sea,” she said in a shaking voice. “I don’t think they could find us if we got far enough ahead of them. We can go on a histoikhthys.”

She was referring to one of the huge molluscs that abounded in the sea. These had bodies covered with paper-thin but tough shells shaped like a racing yacht’s hull. A slender but strong rod of cartilage projected vertically from the back of each, and a triangular sail of flesh, so thin it was transparent, grew from the cartilage mast. The angle of the sail was controlled by muscular movement, and the force of the wind on the sail, plus expulsion of a jet of water, enabled the creature to move slightly in a wind or a calm. The merpeople and the sentients who lived on the beach often hitched rides on these creatures, steering them by pressure on exposed nerve centers.

“You think the gworl will have to use a boat?” he said. “If so, they’ll be out of luck unless they make one. I’ve never seen any kind of sea craft here.”

Wolff looked behind him frequently. The gworl were coming at a faster pace, their bodies rolling like those of drunken sailors at every step. Wolff and the girl came to a stream which was about seventy feet broad and, at the deepest, rose to their waists. The water was cool but not chilling, clear, with slivery fish darting back and forth in it. When they reached the other side, they hid behind a large cornucopia tree. The girl urged him to continue, but he said, “They’ll be at a disadvantage when they’re in the middle of the stream.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

He did not reply. After placing the horn behind the tree, he looked around until he found a stone. It was half the size of his head, round, and rough enough to be held firmly in his hand. He hefted one of the fallen cornucopias. Though huge, it was hollow and weighed no more than twenty pounds. By then, the two gworl were on the bank of the opposite side of the stream. It was then that he discovered a weakness of the hideous creatures. They walked back and forth along the bank, shook their knives in fury, and growled so loudly in their throaty language that he could hear them from his hiding place. Finally, one of them stuck a broad splayed foot in the water. He withdrew it almost immediately, shook it as a cat shakes a wet paw, and said something to the other gworl. That one rasped back, then screamed at him.

The gworl with the wet foot shouted back, but he stepped into the water and reluctantly waded through it. Wolff watched him and also noted that the other was going to hang back until the creature had passed the middle of the stream; then he picked up the cornucopia in one hand, the stone in the other, and ran toward the stream. Behind him, the girl screamed. Wolff cursed because it gave the gworl notice that he was coming.

The gworl paused, the water up to its waist, yelled at Wolff and brandished the knife. Wolff reserved his breath, for he did not want to waste his wind. He sped toward the edge of the water, while the gworl resumed his progress to the same bank. The gworl on the opposite edge had frozen at Wolff’s appearance; now he had plunged into the stream to help the other. This action fell in with Wolff’s plans. He only hoped that he could deal with the first before the second reached the middle.

The nearest gworl flipped his knife; Wolff lifted the cornucopia before him. The knife thudded into its thin but tough shell with a force that almost tore it from his grasp. The gworl began to draw another knife from its scabbard. Wolff did not stop to pull the first knife from the cornucopia; he kept on running. Just as the gworl raised the knife to slash at Wolff.

Wolff dropped the stone, lifted the great bell-shape high, and slammed it over the gworl.

A muffled squawk came from within the shell. The cornucopia tilted over, the gworl with it, and both began floating downstream. Wolff ran into the water, picked up the stone, and grabbed the gworl by one of its thrashing feet. He took a hurried glance at the other and saw it was raising its knife for a throw. Wolff grabbed the handle of the knife that was sticking in the shell, tore it out, and then threw himself down behind the shelter of the bell-shape. He was forced to release his hold on the gworl’s hairy foot, but he escaped the knife. It flew over the rim of the shell and buried itself to the hilt in the mud of the bank.

At the same time, the gworl within the cornucopia slid out, sputtering. Wolff stabbed at its side; the knife slid off one of the cartilaginous bumps. The gworl screamed and turned toward him. Wolff rose and thrust with all his strength at its belly. The knife went in to the hilt. The gworl grabbed at it; Wolff stepped back; the gworl fell into the water. The cornucopia floated away, leaving Wolff exposed, the knife gone, and only the stone in his hand. The remaining gworl was advancing on him, holding its knife across its breast. Evidently it did not intend to try for a second throw. It meant to close in on Wolff.

Wolff forced himself to delay until the thing was only ten feet from him. Meanwhile, he crouched down so that the water came to his chest and hid the stone, which he had shifted from his left to his right hand. Now he could see the gworl’s face clearly. It had a very low forehead, a double ridge of bone above the eyes, thick mossy eyebrows, close-set lemon-yellow eyes, a flat, single-nostriled nose, thin black animal lips, a prognathous jaw which curved far out and gave the mouth a froglike appearance, no chin, and the sharp, widely separated teeth of a carnivore. The head, face, and body were covered with long, thick, dark fur. The neck was very thick, and the shoulders were stooped. Its wet fur stank like rotten fungus-diseased fruit.

Wolff was scared at the thing’s hideousness, but he held his ground. If he broke and ran, he would go down with a knife in his back.

When the gworl, alternately hissing and rasping in its ugly speech, had come within six feet, Wolff stood up He raised his stone, and the gworl, seeing his intention, raised his knife to throw it. The stone flew straight and thudded into a bump on the forehead. The creature staggered backward, dropped the knife, and fell on its back in the water. Wolff waded toward it, groped in the water for the stone, found it, and came up from the water in time to face the gworl. Although it had a dazed expression and its eyes were slightly crossed, it was not out of the fight. And it held another knife.

Wolff raised the stone high and brought it down on top of the skull. There was a loud crack. The gworl fell back again, disappearing in the water, and appeared several yards away floating on its face.

Reaction took him. His heart was hammering so hard he thought it would rupture, he was shaking all over, and he was sick. But he remembered the knife stuck in the mud and retrieved it.

The girl was still behind the tree. She looked too horror-struck to speak. Wolff picked up the horn, took the girls arm with one hand, and shook her roughly.

“Snap out of it! Think how lucky you are! You could be dead instead of them!”

She burst into a long wailing, then began weeping. He waited until she seemed to have no more grief in her before speaking. “I don’t even know your name.”

Her enormous eyes were reddened, and her face looked older. Even so, he thought, he had not seen an Earthwoman who could compare with her. Her beauty made the terror of the fight thin away.

“I’m Chryseis,” she said. As if she were proud of it but at the same time shy of her proudness, she said, “I’m the only woman here who is allowed that name. The Lord forbade others to take it.”

He growled, “The Lord again. Always the Lord. Who in hell is the Lord?”

“You really don’t know?” she replied as if she could not believe him.

“No, I don’t.” He was silent for a moment, then said her name as if her were tasting it. “Chryseis, heh? It’s not unknown on Earth, although I fear that the university at which I was teaching is full of illiterates who’ve never heard the name. They know that Homer composed the Iliad, and that’s about it.

“Chryseis, the daughter of Chryses, a priest of Apollo. She was captured by the Greeks during the siege of Troy and given to Agamemnon. But Agamemnon was forced to restore her to her father because of the pestilence sent by Apollo.”

Chryseis was silent for so long that Wolff became impatient. He decided that they should move away from this area, but he was not certain which direction to take or how far to go.

Chryseis, frowning, said, “That was a long time ago. I can barely remember it. It’s all so vague now.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Me. My father. Agamemnon. The war.”

“Well, what about it?” He was thinking that he would like to go to the base of the mountains. There, he could get some idea of what a climb entailed.

“I am Chryseis,” she said. “The one you were talking about. You sound as if you had just come from Earth. Oh, tell me, is it true?”

He sighed. These people did not lie, but there was nothing to keep them from believing that their stories were true. He had heard enough incredible things to know that they were not only badly misinformed but likely to reconstruct the past to suit themselves. They did so in all sincerity, of course.

“I don’t want to shatter your little dream-world,” he said, “but this Chryseis, if she even existed, died at least 3000 years ago. Moreover, she was a human being. She did not have tiger-striped hair and eyes with feline pupils.”

“Nor did I... then. It was the Lord who abducted me, brought me to this universe, and changed my body. Just as it was he who abducted the others, changed them, or else inserted their brains in bodies he created.”

She gestured seaward and upward. “He lives up there now, and we don’t see him very often. Some say that he disappeared a long time ago, and a new Lord has taken his place.”

“Let’s get away from here,” he said. “We can talk about this later.”

They had gone only a quarter of a mile when Chryseis gestured at him to hide with her behind a thick purple-branched, gold-leaved bush. He crouched by her and, parting the branches a little, saw what had disturbed her. Several yards away was a hairy-legged man with heavy ram’s horns on top of his head. Sitting on a low branch at a level with the man’s eyes was a giant raven. It was as large as a golden eagle and had a high forehead. The skull looked as if it could house a brain the size of a fox terrier’s.

Wolff was not surprised at the bulk of the raven, for he had seen some rather enormous creatures. But he was shocked to find the bird and the man carrying on a conversation.

“The Eye of the Lord,” Chryseis whispered. She stabbed a finger at the raven in answer to his puzzled look. “That’s one of the Lord’s spies. They fly over the world and see what’s going on and then carry the news back to the Lord.”

Wolff thought of Chryseis’ apparently sincere remark about the insertion of brains into bodies by the Lord. To his question, she replied, “Yes, but I do not know if he put human brains into the ravens’ heads. He may have grown small brains with the larger human brains as models, then educated the ravens. Or he could have used just part of a human brain.”

Unfortunately, though they strained their ears, they could only catch a few words here and there. Several minutes passed. The raven, loudly croaking a goodbye in distorted but understandable Greek, launched himself from the branch. He dropped heavily, but his great wings beat fast, and they carried him upward before he touched ground. In a minute he was lost behind the heavy foliage of the trees. A little later, Wolff caught a glimpse of him through a break in the vegetation. The giant black bird was gaining altitude slowly, his point of flight the mountain across the sea.

He noticed that Chryseis was trembling. He said, “What could the raven tell the Lord that would scare you so?”

“I am not frightened so much for myself as I am for you. If the Lord discovers you are here, he will want to kill you. He does not like uninvited guests in his world.”

She placed her hand on the horn and shivered again. “I know that it was Kickaha who gave you this, and that you can’t help it that you have it. But the Lord might not know it isn’t your fault. Or, even if he did, he might not care. He would be terribly angry if he thought you’d had anything to do with stealing it. He would do awful things to you; you would be better off if you ended yourself now rather than have the Lord get his hands on you.”

“Kickaha stole the horn? How do you know?”

“Oh, believe me, I know. It is the Lord’s. And Kickaha must have stolen it, for the Lord would never give it to anyone.”

“I’m confused,” Wolff said. “But maybe we can straighten it all out someday. The thing that bothers me right now is, where’s Kickaha?”

Chryseis pointed toward the mountain and said, “The gworl took him there. But before they did…”

She covered her face with her hands; tears seeped through the fingers.

“They did something to him?” Wolff said.

She shook her head. “No. They did something to… to…”

Wolff took her hands from her face. “If you can’t talk about it, would you show it to me?”

“I can’t. It’s… too horrible. I get sick.”

“Show me anyway.”

“I’ll take you near there. But don’t ask me to look at… her… again.”

She began walking, and he followed her. Every now and then she would stop, but he would gently urge heron. After a zigzag course of over half a mile, she stopped. Ahead of them was a small forest of bushes twice as high as Wolff’s head. The leaves of the branches of one bush interlaced with those of its neighbors. The leaves were broad and elephant-earshaped, light green with broad red veins, and tipped with a rusty fleur-de-lys.

“She’s in there,” Chryseis said. “I saw the gworl… catch her and drag her into the bushes. I followed… I…” She could talk no more.

Wolff, knife in one hand, pushed the branches of the bushes aside. He found himself in a natural clearing. In the middle, on the short green grass, lay the scattered bones of a human female. The bones were gray and devoid of flesh, and bore little toothmarks, by which he knew that the bipedal vulpine scavengers had gotten to her.

He was not horrified, but he could imagine how Chryseis must have felt. She must have seen part of what had taken place, probably a rape, then murder in some gruesome fashion. She would have reacted like the other dwellers in the Garden. Death was something so horrible that the word for it had long ago become taboo and then dropped out of the language. Here, nothing but pleasant thoughts and acts were to be contemplated, and anything else was to be shut out.

He returned to Chryseis, who looked with her enormous eyes at him as if she wanted him to tell her that there was nothing within the clearing. He said, “She’s only bones now, and far past any suffering.”

“The gworl will pay for this!” she said savagely. “The Lord does not allow his creatures to be hurt! This Garden is his, and any intruders are punished!”

“Good for you,” he said. “I was beginning to think that you may have become frozen by the shock. Hate the gworl all you want; they deserve it. And you need to break loose.”

She screamed and leaped at him and beat on his chest with her fists. Then she began weeping, and presently he took her in his arms. He raised her face and kissed her. She kissed him back passionately, though the tears were still flowing.

Afterward, she said, “I ran to the beach to tell my people what I’d seen. But they wouldn’t listen. They turned their backs on me and pretended they hadn’t heard me. I kept trying to make them listen, but Owisandros”—the ram-horned man who had been talking with the raven—“Owisandros hit me with his fist and told me to go away. After that, none of them would have anything to do with me. And I… 1 needed friends and love.”

“You don’t get friends or love by telling people what they don’t want to hear,” he said. “Here or on Earth. But you have me, Chryseis, and I have you. I think I’m beginning to fall in love with you, although I may just be reacting to loneliness and to the most strange beauty I’ve ever seen. And to my new youth.”

He sat up and gestured at the mountain. “If the gworl are intruders here, where did they come from? Why were they after the horn? Why did they take Kickaha with them? And who is Kickaha?”

“He comes from up there, too. But I think he’s an Earthman.”

“What do you mean, Earthman? You say you’re from Earth.”

“I mean he’s a newcomer. I don’t know. I just had a feeling he was.”

He stood up and lifted her up by her hands. “Let’s go after him.”

Chryseis sucked in her breath and, one hand on her breast, backed away from him. “No!”

“Chryseis, I could stay here with you and be very happy. For awhile. But I’d always be wondering what all this is about the Lord and what happened to Kickaha. I only saw him for a few seconds, but I think I’d like him very much. Besides, he didn’t throw the horn to me just because I happened to be there. I have a hunch that he did it for a good reason, and that I should find out why. And I can’t rest while he’s in the hands of those things, the gworl.”

He took her hand from her breast and kissed the hand. “It’s about time you left this Paradise that is no Paradise. You can’t stay here forever, a child forever.”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t be any help to you. I’d just get in your way. And… leaving… leaving I’d, well, I’d just end.”

“You’re going to have to learn a new vocabulary,” he said. “Death will be just one of the many new words you’ll be able to speak without a second thought or a shiver. You will be a better woman for it. Refusing to say it doesn’t stop it from happening, you know. Your friend’s bones are there whether or not you can talk about them.”

“That’s horrible!”

“The truth often is.”

He turned away from her and started toward the beach. After a hundred yards, he stopped to look back. She had just started running after him. He waited for her, took her in his arms, kissed her, and said, “You may find it hard going, Chryseis, but you won’t be bored, won’t have to drink yourself into a stupor to endure life.”

“I hope so,” she said in a low voice. “But I’m scared.”

“So am I, but we’re going.”