More Than Fire

"However, the stories did describe the Thokina as somewhat like that creature there. But the Thokina were a different species from us. We were supposed to have invaded their universe and killed all but one. I don't know. There were conflicting legends about them."

In the middle of the room was a short, massive pillar on top of which was a large, transparent, and brightly lit cube. The being, its seemingly dead eyes open, was suspended inside the cube.

"One of the early tales was that the one Thokina who survived the war hid somewhere. He placed himself in an impenetrable tomb. Then he went into a sleep from which he will not be awakened until the worlds are in danger of destruction."

"Why should he care if the worlds are destroyed?"

"I'm just telling you the story as it was handed down for countless generations, she said. "But how do you explain him? Or this place? Part of the legend was that he was keeping an eye on the world. Look at all those images on the wall. They show many universes. Some of them look contemporary."

"How could he keep an eye on the worlds? He's unconscious or, for all we know, dead."

Anana spread her hands out. "How would I know?"

Kickaha did not reply. He was looking around the dome-shaped chamber, which was larger than a zeppelin hangar. In the sourceless light filling the room, the intensely blue ceiling dazzled him. Despite this, he could, by squinting his eyes, see that thousands of shifting forms were spaced along the curve of the ceiling. Most of them seemed to be letters of a strange alphabet or mathematical formulae. Sometimes, he glimpsed art forms that seemed to have been originated by an insane brain. But that was because of his own cultural mindset.

Horizontal bands of swiftly varying colors and hues sped around the wall. Set among the bands were seemingly three-dimensional scenes, thousands of them. These flashed on and were replaced by others. Kickaha had walked around the wall and looked at the scenes that were at eye level. Some were of landscapes and peoples of various worlds he had visited. One was a bird's-eye view of Manhattan. But at its lower end was a twin-towered skyscraper higher than the Empire State Building.

The images came and went so swiftly. His eyes ached after watching them for a few minutes. He closed them for a moment. When he opened them, he turned to look at the main attraction. The base of the tomb was round, and vertical bands of colors and hues raced up and down it. The creature inside the cube was naked and obviously male. Its testicles were enclosed in a globular sac of blue cartilage with air holes on its surface. Its penis was a thick cylinder with no glans or foreskin and bore thin, tightly coiled tentacles on each side.

Anana, first seeing these, had grunted and then said, "I wonder ... ?"

"What?" Kickaha had said.

"Its mate must have had an extra dimension of sex, of sexual pleasure, I mean. True, those tentacles could have just been used for purely reproductive purposes. But they may have titillated the female in some way I can't imagine."

"You'll never know," he had said.

"Maybe I won't. However, the unexpected happens as often as the expected. It certainly does when I'm in your neighborhood."

The creature was about seven feet long. Its body was very similar in structure to a man's, and the four-toed feet and five-fingered hands were humanoid enough. Its massive muscles were gorilloid. The skin was reptilian; the scales were green, red, black, blue, orange, purple, lemon-yellow, and pink.

The spine, ridged like a dinosaur's, curved at its top so that the very thick neck bent forward.

Seven greenish plates that could be of bone or cartilage covered the face. The eyes were dark green and arranged for stereoscopic vision, though much more widely apart than on a man's face.

A bony plate just below the jaw made it seem that the creature was chinless. Its lipless, slightly opened mouth was a lizard's. From it hung a tongue' looking like a pink worm.

The nose and the rest of the face above it formed a shallow curve. Halfway up the head, short, flat-lying, and reddish fronds began and proceeded down around the back of the head to its columnar neck. If there were bony plates under the mat, they did not show.

The tiny ears were manlike but set very far back on the head.

"You don't suppose," Anana said, "that that thing could actually be the last of the Thokina?"

She answered herself. "Of course not! It's just coincidence!"

They stood silently for a while and stared around. Then Kickaha said, "There's no way we can find answers to our questions here. Not unless we stay a long while, and we don't have the food, water, and instruments needed to do that. Yet, we should spend some time here."

"We have to get out of here," she said, "and we don't know we can do that. I suggest we find out how to do that now!"

"There's no danger. Not any we know about, anyway. I think we should stay here a while and see what we can find out. It might come in useful someday."

They had enough food and water to last four days if they were conserved. There was no place to get rid of their body wastes, but a corner in this immense chamber could serve. It seemed to Kickaha that doing that desecrated the place, but that was an irrational feeling.

"What if something happens here that makes it imperative we leave at once?" she said.

Kickaha thought for a moment, then said, "Okay. You're right."

He walked to the place near the wall where they had stepped through the gate, and he blew the Horn of Shambarimen. As it often did, the music evoked in him images of marvelous beasts, wondrous plants, and exotic people. It seldom failed to send shivers along the nerves of those who heard it and to summon up from the depths of their minds things and beings never imagined before.

The last note seemed to hover like a mayfly determined to have several more seconds of its short life. A shimmering area about five feet wide and ten feet high opened before Kickaha. The flashing wall of the chamber behind it disappeared. He was looking at a stone floor and stone walls. He had seen them before and not long ago. From the room they formed, he and Anana had gated through to this gigantic tomb. It was an escape avenue, but he preferred to take another gate, if it was available. This one would lock them into the circuit again.

The room faded away after five seconds. The walls of the chamber and the on-off bursts of light were views of parts of other universes. "Find another gate if you can," Anana said.

"Of course," he said, and he began walking slowly along the wall and blowing the Horn over and over again. Not until he had gotten halfway around the chamber did a gate open. He saw a large boulder twenty feet ahead of him. Around and beyond it was a flat desert and blue sky.

He did not know in what universe this landscape was located. For all he knew, it could be somewhere on the planet on which he now stood. Gates could also transport you only a few feet or halfway around the planet.

The rest of the walk along the wall found no more gates. He then began a circuit twenty feet out from the wall. But Anana, a few feet from him, called.

"Come here! I just saw something very interesting!"

He strode to her side. She was looking up at a spot where images seemingly shot out of the wall and then shot back into it. "It showed Red Orc!" she said. "Red Orc!"

"Recognize the background?"

"It could have been on any one of a thousand worlds. A body of water, could have been a large lake or a sea, was behind him. It looked as if he were standing on the edge of a cliff."

"Keep watching it," he said. "I'm going to work my way around the wall again in a smaller circle. But I'll be looking for other views of Orc. Or anything familiar. Oh, I did find another gate. But it led to a desert. We won't take it except as a last resort."