The Other Side of Time

Chapter Eight

Daylight came after a long time. Ironel was asleep, her head on Roosevelt’s bed. When I woke her, she smiled at me.

“He still lives, Richard,” she said. I checked his pulse again. It was still there, but his breathing was shallow and ragged. I touched the depressed fracture over his eye.

“I’ve got to do something about this,” I said. “Do you have any way to make fire?”

“Ronizpel fears the fire,” she said. “But he will bring it to me.”

I examined the wound. There was one main bone splinter, with some smaller fragments. Ironel came back with a shallow brass tray with glowing embers in it. I didn’t ask questions, just added some wood to the coals and got a brisk fire going, and sterilized my knife blade in it.

I made an incision across the wound, crossed it with another, and folded back the flaps of skin. Ironel stepped in like a trained nurse, following every step, acting without even words from me. While she held the incision open, I used a hook bent from wire and heat-sterilized to lift the big splinter back into position, then probed for the others. After a while I was finished. I closed the wound and he was still breathing. Ironel used red silk thread to stitch up the cuts. She finished and then sat beside him, watching his face. I found a corner and went to sleep.

I woke up with light in my face; Ironel was beside me; her face was cameo-pale against the shadows.

“Richard—I am afraid for Pieter.”

I got up and went to him. He lay on his back on the bed. His eyes were closed and sunken, his face drawn into a tortured rictus. He snarled between his locked teeth, and his hands raked at the coverlet.

“No,” he ground out the words. “Never… bend the knee… better… eternal destruction…” His voice ran off into a mutter.

I put my fingers against his neck. He was hot as new-cast iron. The wound in his forehead was swollen and inflamed.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We need medicines we don’t have.”

“Richard,” the girl said. “Chazz says we must bring Pieter to him.”

I looked at her. Her eyes were big and dark, her hair red-black, a damp curl against her white skin.

“We shouldn’t move him.”

“But—Chazz cannot come here, Richard!”

I looked at Roosevelt. I didn’t know much about medicine, but I’d seen a dying man before. I lifted him and the girl led the way down through the dark halls among the black vines and the fallen statuary and out into the perfumed night.

Stone mermaids cavorted in a dry fountain at the center of a weed-choked garden. Ironel pulled aside the leafy branch of a twisted bush that grew up through a crack in the basin, exposing an opening. Stone steps led down at a steep angle into an odor of mushrooms and wet clay. Ironel led the way. In a room at the bottom, she flashed my handlight on sagging shelves loaded with dusty wine bottles. At the far side the wall was broken away by what looked like a giant rat-hole. The odor that came from it was like the ape-house at the zoo.

Ironel didn’t seem to notice. She went to the opening, called:

“Chazz—it’s I, Ironel—and Richard, my friend. We’ve brought Pieter!”

A sound came back, like boulders grinding together under the earth. Ironel turned to me.

“Chazz says we may bring him in.”

I went down through the opening; it was a smooth-walled tunnel cut through damp earth. It curved, dipped, ended at a complicated wall of lumpy wet leather that blocked the tunnel. Ironel put the light on the wall and I saw it was a face, six feet high, six feet wide, with a vast hooked nose, sunken eyelids that lifted to show the glint of eyes the size of basketballs. There was matted hair as coarse as mammoth fur on the cheeks and on the sloping, wrinkled forehead. Where there wasn’t hair, the skin was black, scaled, and creased like a rhino’s hide. The edges of broken teeth the size of bargain tombstones showed under the purple edge of the lip. The mouth opened and the voice rumbled forth.

“He says to put him down here,” Ironel relayed. I did as she asked. Roosevelt lay like a corpse, death-pale now. The big eyes roved over him. A tongue like a pink feather blanket peered out from the vast mouth, tested the air, went in again.

“This one made the rocks fall,” the big voice boomed out, clearer now—or maybe I was just getting used to hearing an earthquake talk.

“He didn’t know, Chazz dear,” Ironel said in a pleading tone. “He meant no harm.”

“A stone hurt me,” Chazz said. He rotated his huge skull, and the edge of a black-crusted cut big enough to lay an arm in came into view.

“Poor Chazz—did it hurt very much?”

“Not much, Ironel.” The face came back up and a tear that would have filed a teacup splashed down across the leather face. “Don’t feel bad for Chazz. Chazz is all right, Ironel.”

“And—can you help Pieter?”

Again the incredible eyeballs rotated, stared at the unconscious man. The lids came down, half-covering them like wrinkled leather blinds.

“I can try,” the monster rumbled. “I feel the hurt place… there. Bad, bad hurt—but it’s not that which is killing Pieter. No—it’s the things that pull—there and there! But I push… push against them…” his voice went into a mutter like a glacier breaking apart in a spring thaw. Roosevelt stirred, made vague sounds. Ironel put her hand on his forehead. I held the light and saw the color come slowly back into his face. He sighed and his hands moved restlessly, then lay still. His breathing eased.

“Ahhh,” Chazz groaned. “Bad things still there, Ironel! I fix him—but I feel bad things stir there still! Better I kill him now—”

“Chazz—no!” Ironel threw herself half across Roosevelt. “You mustn’t!”

“I feel things there, inside him,” Chazz said. “Things that make me afraid!”

“He’s only a man, Chazz—he said so himself. Like Richard! Tell him, Richard!” Ironel caught at my arm. “Tell Chazz that Pieter is our friend!”

“What kind of bad things do you feel inside him, Chazz?” I asked the big face. He rolled his whale’s eyes at me.

“When the stones fell, I felt them,” he said. “And when I reached into him—I felt them again. Black things prowl there, in the red caverns of his sleeping brain, Richard. He would, mold all the world to an image he keeps secret there.”

“Back home, he’s an important man,” I said. “He came here to try to save his world. He made a mistake, and it almost killed him. I don’t think there’s any harm in him now.”

Chazz groaned. “I have known him in my dreams, as I slept here under the earth. Why does he come, Richard? And why you? For of you, too, I have dreamed, moving across the bright, restless pattern of the world. A doom hangs about your head, and about his. But I cannot tell which doom is the stronger.” He groaned again. “I fear him, Richard. But for Ironel’s sake, I give him his destiny. Now take him from me. His mind stirs and the pain of that stirring cuts to my heart.”

I lifted Roosevelt and carried him back through the stinking tunnel and up to Ironel’s room.

She woke me with half a golden melon on a gold plate and a cluster of red grapes the size of plums. Roosevelt was better, now, she said. I went over and looked at him, lying there on his back, still unconscious. He didn’t look any different to me, but his temperature seemed to be normal, and his pulse and breathing too. Maybe I was a better brain surgeon than I thought.

Ironel took me for a tour of her kingdom: the lower floors of the building where she slept, the garden, what was left of the street the earthquake had shaken up. With the early morning light slanting down through the leaves that overgrew it, it had a sort of eerie, silent beauty. Ironel led me by the hand, showed me little clumps of flowers growing in hidden places, a clear pool in a basin that must have been a beautiful fountain once, led me to where there were pretty stones lying scattered in the rank grass—the fragments of an alabaster statue.

We went down chipped marble steps under huge old trees and bathed in a black pool, climbed up in a ruined tower, and looked out through a stone-filigreed window at the view of other towers thrusting up through the jungle. In the evening, we sat on a bench in the garden and listened to the hooting and screeching and hissing of night things that prowled just beyond the borders of the garden. Sometimes she talked, chattered away about her friends and her games; other times she sang strange little tuneless songs. And sometimes, she just smiled into the vague distance, like a flower, glad to be alive. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask, but I didn’t ask them. She was like a sleeping child; I didn’t want to wake her. That night she came to my bed and slept with me, like a child.

The second day passed, and Roosevelt woke up, gave us a faint smile, and went back to sleep. The next day he stayed awake. He seemed to be his old self, assurance and all—except for the hollow-cheeked look. He professed to have no recollection of anything from the time we’d met the girl.

He mended fast then. On the fourth day, he was up and walking. On the fifth day, on my way back from an expedition to the edge of the jungle to gather fruit, I heard an angry yowl from the direction of the park, followed by shots. I knew that yowl—it was Vrodelix, and he was mad. I dropped the red and yellow mangoes I had collected and ran for the gates. Ten feet inside the park, I found the griffin, stretched beside the dolphin fountain, with three holes in him. He moaned and tried to get up, and fell back, dead, his beak gaping. I ran on across the park, up the steps. I shouted for Ironel, but there was no answer. Something made a soft sound behind me, and I turned to see Roosevelt come out of shadows with his nerve-gun aimed at my head.

“I’m sorry, Curlon,” he said. “But there’s no other way.” He pulled the trigger and the world blew up in my face.

I was lying on my back, dreaming that Roosevelt was bending over me. His face was thin, hollow-cheeked, and the wound over his eye stood out like a big X marked in lipstick. His voice came from someplace as far away as the stars, but the words were clear enough.

“Get on your feet, Curlon. I’ve paralyzed your volitional centers, but you can hear me. We have a duty to perform.”

I felt myself climbing to my feet. They seemed to be miles below my head, which floated all alone in a rarified level high above the clouds that drifted just at the edge of vision. My hands were wired together in front of me.

“That way,” Roosevelt said. We went out across the garden, past the gentle, dead monster lying on the flagstones, into the ruined street. There was a high, humming noise inside my head, and the light was strange, as though there were an eclipse in progress. We entered the museum, went up the stairs littered with plaster and fragments of a skylight, into the big hall where the armored mannikins lay strewn around like disaster victims. In the chapel, the sun came through the broken window like a spotlight. The altar was still standing, with the ruins of the golden canopy around it. There was a feeling in the air as if the whole world was a bowstring, stretched to the breaking point.

“Go ahead of me,” Roosevelt ordered. I picked my way through the rubble, stepped over the broken sarcophagus, brushed away the rotted strands of a velvet cape, stopped in front of the altar.

“Take the box,” Roosevelt ordered. I picked it up awkwardly in my wired hands. It was heavy, and the surface tingled as though an electric current was running through it. I felt the current in my feet, too. The floor vibrated under me. There was a rumbling around, like distant thunder. Roosevelt’s face was strained in a tight, bared-teeth look that wasn’t a smile.

“Give it to me,” he said. I handed it over as the rumble grew louder.

“Lo, the very heavens attend our enterprise,” he said, sounding as though he meant it. “But we have what we want. Now we’ll go.”

He turned away and I followed. A section of carved stone toppled from up high, smashed down a few feet away from us. Other things fell, but none of them touched us. As we reached the door, the roof came down behind us. On the stair, I felt the stones breaking up under my feet, but they held until we were down in the big hall; then they came tumbling down.

Outside, the street was a sea of heaving rubble. The building across the way sagged and leaned and fell into the plaza.

We jumped across broken pavement slabs that tilted and ground together like an ice floe breaking up. A tree fell, trailing a snarl of vines, and back in the jungle something as massive as an apartment house loomed up, bellowing.

“The centroid of the probability storm is moving, following us,” Roosevelt called to me. “It’s success, Curlon—if we can reach the shuttle before this enclave of antiprobability collapses! Stay close to me!” He ran, and I ran with him, while~the world came apart around us.

In the clearing where we’d left the shuttle on half-phase, Roosevelt took the signaler from the pouch clipped to his belt. I saw something moving in the trees just above him, but I made no effort to say anything. It eased out from under a spray of tent-sized leaves, a spider with a body as big as a bathtub, thick, bristly legs, faceted eyes the size of dinner plates. It swung out on a clotted, grayish cord, a pair of pinchers at its fore end cocked and ready.

“No, Ronizpel!” Ironel’s voice cried out behind us, and the spider-thing checked just long enough for Roosevelt to draw his gun and fire a burst of mini-slugs into the swollen abdomen ten feet above him. The thing fell, thrashing its eight legs and Ironel screamed and rushed to it while Roosevelt pumped more rounds into the dying thing. He jumped past her, knocking her aside, pressed the recall button of the signaler. I felt the buzzing in the air around me, saw the light darken, taking on a tarnished tinge like the light before a thunderstorm. A gust of air whirled leaves up, and the shuttle phased into identity, low, black, deadly-looking. Its door slid open to spill white light out into the gloom.

“Curlon—get in!” Roosevelt shouted. The ground shook under me as I walked past the weeping girl and the gutted spider. To my left, the jungle crashed and burst open and the ground rose up and split and the head of Chazz rose up into view, squinting against the light. His eyes went to the girl, and his mouth opened in a howl of rage. Roosevelt brought the gun up and fired into the big face, and chunks of flesh flew and black blood welled out of the craters, and Chazz bellowed in agony; then I was inside, and Roosevelt was behind me, slamming the hatch. He produced handcuffs, chained me to the contoured seat. The screen glowed pink, then cleared to a view of the outside. Chazz had forced his shoulders up through the earth, and his hands, huge and gnarled with chipped black nails as big as coal scuttles, groped out toward the girl. He touched her with one finger, and then the giant head slumped, and Roosevelt threw the drive switch in and the scene flowed like wax in the sun, as the jungle closed in over the spot where Ironel’s garden had been.