More Than Fire

4

"THAT SEEMS MOST PROBABLE," ANANA SAID. "HOWEVER, HE might've set up the circuit and the trap for one of his numerous enemies. And done so long before you and I appeared on the scene. Or it might've been his emergency escape route."

"Nothing is certain until it happens. To quote your Thoan philosopher, Manathu Vorcyon, `Order is composed of disorder, and disorder has its own order.' Whatever that means. In any case, I'm mighty suspicious."

"Whenever were you not?"

"When I was still living on Earth, though even there I was what you might call wary. The things that happened after I came here have made me trust very few people. And they've made me consider what might happen in every situation before it could happen. You look at all the angles or you don't live long. It's not paranoia. Paranoia is a state of mind in which you suspect or are certain about things that really don't exist. The dangers I've been suspicious of have existed or could exist."

"Almost every Lord is paranoiac. It's a deeply embedded part of our culture, such as it is. Most of them don't trust anybody, including themselves."

Kickaha laughed, and he said, "Well, let's go on into Paranoia Land."

They began walking across the plain. They were as constantly watchful as birds, glancing up often at the sky, at the grass just ahead of them, and at the vista beyond their feet. The grass could conceal snakes or large crouching predators. Something dangerous could suddenly appear in the sky. But for the first hour, they saw only insects in the grass and herds of large four-tusked elephantlike and four-horned antelopelike beasts in the distance.

Then a black speck emerged from the green sky. It was behind them, but Anana saw it during one of her frequent glances behind her. After a few minutes, it came low enough for them to see a bird with a ravenlike silhouette. It got no lower then but continued in the same direction as they.

When they saw it circle now and then before resuming the same path, they suspected that it was following them.

"It could be one of those giant language-using ravens that Va

He added, "Looks more and more like Red Orc is watching us."

"Or somebody is."

"My money's on Orc."

He and Anana stopped to rest a while in the knee-high, blue-stalked, and crimson-tipped grass.

"I suppose it could be a machine disguised as a bird," he said. "But if it's a machine, it's being controlled by a Lord. That doesn't seem likely."

"When did we ever come across anything but the unlikely?"

"Seems like it. But it's not always so by any means."

He was on his back, his hands behind his head, looking at the dark enigma in the sky. Anana was half lying down, leaning on one hand, her head tilted back to watch the bird or whatever it was.

"That figure eight the bird's now making in the sky," Kickaha said, "looks from here like it's on its side. That reminds me of the symbol for infinity, the flattened figure eight on its side. One of the few things I remember from my freshman mathematics class in college. Which I never finished. College, I mean."

"The Thoan symbol is a straight line with arrowheads at each end pointing outward," she said. "If the line has a corkscrew shape, it's the symbol for time."

"I know."

Visions of Earth slipped past in his mind like ghosts in coats of many colors. In 1946, he had been twenty-eight years old, a World War II veteran going to college on the G. I. Bill. Then he had been hurled into another universe, though not unwillingly. This was the Lord-created artificial universe that contained only the tiered planet, Alofmethbin.

This was, he had found, only one among thousands of universes made by the ancient Thoan, the humans who denied that they were human. Here was where he, Paul Janus Fi

And, since coming to the World of Tiers, he had seldom not been fleeing his enemies or attacking them, always on the move except for some rare periods of R&R. During these relatively infrequent times, he had usually gotten married to the daughters of a tribal chief on his favorite level, the second, which he called the Ameridian level.

Or he had become involved with the wife or daughter of a baron on the third level, which he called the Dracheland level.

He had left a trail of women who grieved for him for a while before inevitably falling in love with another man. He had also left a trail of corpses. The debris, you might say, of Fi

Not until 1970 did he return to Earth, and that was briefly. He had been born in A.D. 1918, which made him fifty-two or fifty-three Terrestrial years old now. But he was, thank whatever gods there be, only twenty-five in physiological age. If he'd stayed on Earth, what would he be there? Maybe he would have gotten a Ph.D. in anthropology and specialized in American Indian languages. But he would have had to be a teacher, too. Could he have endured the grind of study, the need to publish, the acadernic backbiting and throat-slitting, the i

He might've gone to Alaska, where there was, in 1946, a sort of frontier, and he might have been a bush pilot. But that life would eventually have become tedious.

Perhaps by now he would own a motorcycle sales-and-repair shop in Terre Haute or Indianapolis. No, he couldn't have stood the day-to-day routine, the worrying about paying bills, and the drabness.

Whatever he would have been on Earth, he would not have had the adventurous and exotic life, albeit hectic, he had experienced in the Thoan worlds.

The beautiful woman by his side-no, not a woman, a goddess, poetically speaking-was many thousands of years old. But the chemical "elixirs" of the Lords kept her at the physiological age of twenty-five.

She said, "We're assuming that the raven is on an evil mission, bad for us. Perhaps it's been sent to keep an eye on us, but by Wolff. He and Chryseis might have escaped from Red Orc's prison and gotten to this world and now be in the palace. And they may have ordered the Eye to watch over us.'

"I know."

She said, "It seems to me that we've been saying a lot of `I knows.'" "Maybe it's time we took a long vacation from each other."

"It wouldn't do any good," she said. Then, looking slyly sidewise at him, "I know."

She burst into laughter, fell on him, and kissed him passionately.

Kickaha kissed her back as enthusiastically. But he was thinking that they might have been isolated from other human beings too long. They needed lots of company, not all the time, but often enough so that they did not rub against each other, as it were.

Her comments about "knowing" probably indicated a sadness born out of expectation based on hindsight. Because she had lived for many mille

"That's about the limit for a faithful couple, if you don't age at all," she had said. "The Lords don't have the patience of you leblabbiy, a word I don't mean in a derogatory sense. But we are different in some respects."

"But many couples have lived together for thousands of years," he had said.

"Not continuously."

He was not tired or bored with her. Nor did she seem to be so with him. But being able to look backward on so many experiences, she was unable to keep from looking forward. She knew that a time would come when they must part. For a while, a long while, anyway.