Kenneth Bulmer - Keys to the Dimensions 03, page 4
“They Porteured us through to another dimension,” interrupted Tony, the venom in his voice overriding his pain. “We saw another sea, another shore. We were frightened.”
“Then, after a long time, we were Porteured through another Gate, and taken to a strange city. We saw… things. After that they took us through to Irunium.”
Redfern at once saw problems. “So you didn’t come straight here from Montrado? I mean to Irunium, of course. There must have been a reason for that.”
“Yes,” she said simply. “And I know. I had been studying to be a language philosopher—what you’d call, I believe, a philologist.” She pronounced the words perfectly and yet, like a strange tang to an unknown fruit, the English words she used all held that indefinable alienness. “I was dismayed to be told that I, too, possessed this horrible power of sending people through the dimensions; it had lain dormant in me, as it does in many people, unknown to them all their lives. So I was trained by the Contessa and her scientists. I learned that all dimensions are not interconnected; you have to go through one or two, sometimes more, before you can reach the one for which you are aiming.”
“Like a maze.”
She nodded unhappily. A little wind scudded over the sere plains. The mountains did not appear appreciably nearer. The afternoon wore on. Redfern’s feet began to ache.
“I was studying the philosophy of Arlan,” said Tony dully. “Gait—he is a great man!—he was our professor. Through the disciplines of Arlan one can attain perfect contentment and orientation so that no mundane influences can ever distress the inner personality.” He laughed bitterly. “Arlan seems a long way away now.”
“And these others?” Redfern asked.
“Some are our fellow students. Others we made friends with in the mines, or the workshops, or the slave-centers run by the Contessa. There were men from your world, too, Scobie; but none have survived with us now.”
Redfern couldn’t reply to that.
Tony went on: “We planned to break through into another dimension, set up a sanctuary, bring through others, then set out to find our way back to Montrado. Val was learning more and more of being a Porteur—”
“I was learning, all right!”
“When she knew enough to sense for a Portal, we thought we could make a break. We gathered in the old disused mines and waited. When Val escaped the training college—”
“Training college!” Redfern exclaimed, startled.
Val shivered. “The Contessa runs things very well, very highly organized. She catches people from many dimensions and when she comes across a potential Porteur, like me, she. sends them to her college. They are trained to work for her.”
Another thought occurred to him—rather, it shocked through his brain like a laser beam: everyone wanted to return to his own dimension. Now they trudged toward the mountains and water and shelter following Gait, striding out ahead, tough and commanding. And yet—and yet it was Val who was the important person. She, and she alone, possessed the power to transfer them back home. She was their key to the dimensions. Val for him was the key to Earth, and to herself and Tony and Gait she was the key to Montrado.
The thought of those bullets cracking about her head, of the perils of the snow and ice, of the unknown dangers that lay ahead, made him sweat. If anything happened to her they were all marooned!
There and then Scobie Redfern made up his mind to keep a very careful, a very paternal, a very comradely eye on Val. But yes.
A bright glitter as of the sun reflecting from a crystal facet winked from the base of the trees, blinked and vanished.
They moved on, exclaiming about the flash of light, wondering, watching for a recurrence of the phenomenon. Twice more the light flashed, like the sun shining on a moving polished surface.
Two men and a girl stopped moving forward. They formed a lonely trio, off to one side, staring dubiously ahead. Smaller than the average and with thick bodies and short stumpy legs, they came from some dimension unknown to the others. Their hair, black and lank, hung down in plaits tied with straw. None of them carried a rifle, but the men held long barbed spears; a thin dagger glinted at the girl’s waist. They spoke together in a thick gobbling language, then their leader, a man called Thusro, called across to Gait, who was impatiently motioning them forward.
“There are inimical powers there,” Thusro said in a strongly accented English. “Bad forces. We do not wish to go that way.”
“We’ve got to keep together!” Gait said determinedly.
“Then come with us,” said the girl, her thick lips shining, her eyes fearful.
A sense of unease spread among the group.
Tony held his wounded arm in the sling, his body heavy against Redfern. He said, “I can’t walk much further. We’ve got to go straight ahead, the shortest way. There will be water, shelter, food in the woods.”
“No!” shouted Thusro. He shook his spear. “Ahead lies danger and death!”
A thin woman with white hair and a fragile face, her eyes large and gray and filled with pain, swayed. “I cannot walk for long,” she sighed. “I need rest…”
The remaining man, a strong red-haired youngster with a broad-bladed sword at his side and a Springfield over his back, looked with concern on the white-haired woman and back again to Gait.
“Maybe we ought to rest now and talk—”
“If we split up, Carlo, how are we to get through the dimensions? Val must come with us.” Gait made it strong and confident.
Thusro and his two thick-bodied companions looked sullen. “Val could come with us. She would be safe.”
Gait’s woman, the one with the slight body and the lined face and the trembles, cried, “Val must stay with us! She is of Montrado, like us.”
“Let me do the talking, Mina!” snapped Gait.
The group formed a circle, talking, arguing, trying to reason with one another. Redfern experienced his usual frustration at the inability of men and women to communicate. The lack of understanding was bad enough between people who spoke the same language and lived in the same town; with different languages and different dimensions in conflict, the result was Babel magnified.
“For the sake of Arlan!” shouted Gait over the hubbub. “Listen! Thusro, unless you and your people from Thothtoreth can give us explicit reasons for not taking the shortest way, then we must go straight ahead! Speak up!”
Thusro shook his heavy head.
“I cannot give good reasons. Just that danger is there. We can sense it. We understand these things. We are not bound by the blinkers of science.”
“Science isn’t blinkered!” Redfern had to protest.
The three from Thothtoreth consulted among themselves. Their faces showed clearly the fear they sensed. Then the girl, Pathtee, said, “We cannot go on. We would rather stay and make our home here if Val will not come with us, rather than be disembodied—”
The red-haired youngster, Carlo, lost his color.
“Disembodied?”
Pathtee nodded vigorously. “There is danger ahead. Strange forces that can tear the psyche from the body—”
Gait boomed his laughter.
“Nonsense! We stick together and we rest up and we find another Portal and Val will see us home!”
He waved the party on.
The three from Thothtoreth rebelliously stood their ground. The two men held their long barbed spears loosely swinging forward in their hands. Unobtrusively, Redfern let his rifle slip down into his own hand, and got ready to disengage his left arm from Tony in a hurry. He didn’t like what he saw shaping up.
Imperiously, Val said loudly, “I cannot leave my friends from Montrado. I must stay with them. We welcome all of you. But if anyone wishes to go on alone, then I cannot stop them.”
“I’m sticking with you, Val,” said Redfern levelly.
The red-haired youngster swallowed. He looked at the woman with the white-hair and thin body and tragic eyes. “I don’t know…” he whispered.
She put a hand on his arm. “Carlo. You must not mind me. I must go the shortest way. You owe me no debt.”
As though that was the signal, the three from Thothtoreth began to move away, angling toward the forest, marching off so that they would reach the mountains and sanctuary many miles further along.
Nyllee, the girl with red hair and a doughy face, who carried a Springfield over her shoulder as though it were a broomstick, shouted, “I go with Val! I’ll help you, Mother Haapan. Let Carlo go!”
With a loud inarticulate cry Carlo bounded after the departing three from Thothtoreth. His arms waved. The rifle bounced on his back. The woman, Mother Haapan, set her face into a hard resigned grimace. Nyllee put an arm around her waist.
Gait looked personally offended.
“All right,” he said sturdily. “It’s their funeral. We’ve got time to make up. Let’s go!”
Marching on with the others and with his rifle now slung back over his shoulder, Redfern wondered just whose funeral it was. That guy Thusro, and his two friends, they’d seemed absolutely convinced. Nothing would have taken them any further toward that enigmatic flicker of light among the trees.
Now, three men and four women, the reduced party trekked on toward the promised haven ahead.
The sun sank ever more swiftly toward the horizon as they walked on, tired now and footsore. But they were approaching the woods. Now treetops interposed between them and the mountains, and the foothills were lost in the darkling woodlands.
And then Redfern saw how right the people from Thothtoreth had been and how disastrously wrong were these tired travelers staring on their own destruction.
V
There were two sorts of people: those who drink gin and those who drink whiskey.
Those who drink neither or both didn’t, Scobie Redfern decided soberly, come into this equation.
Gin drinkers tended to be morose, unhappy, put-upon individuals, by and large—and they were seldom by and large as a tribe. Whiskey drinkers tended to be open-handed, free-and-easy and happy, by and large—and they were usually too by and large for this mundane world.
Which was why Scobie Redfern wished he had a nice long Scotch in his hand right now.
The faceted crystals caught the last of the dying light and glowed with a crimson that reminded him of blood. They swung through the trees like Christmas lanterns animated by poltergeists. Quite clearly he caught their aura of hatred.
There could be no doubt about it.
Gait stood with his beard hanging; Val had a hand clapped across her mouth, white-faced and silent; Tony groaned and tried to move, a weak movement that meant nothing; the others watched with horror and loathing.
There could be no doubt about it: from the weaving, dancing crystals there clearly flowed a harsh breath of animosity. Each crystal was about two feet broad on a faceted side. They pirouetted and swung and poured forth the tangible breath of evil.
“Run!” shouted Gait, at last coming to life.
They all knew that running would be useless.
With a coarse epithet about frog’s bowels, Nyllee unslung her rifle and hauled back the bolt. She lifted the rifle to her shoulder. Before she could press the trigger a bolt of flame zigzagged from the nearest crystal and knocked the rifle from her hands in a smothering burst of eye-watering emerald fire.
The pressure of hate mounted. Like a psychic hose it swamped them in sheer ferocity, echoing in their brains, puddling their minds, deafening them to their own thoughts. Mother Haapan and Mina fell to the ground, screaming, their hands uselessly over their ears.
Nyllee stared in sick horror at the rifle and at her arms, which hung limply at her sides, traces of the green radiance still clinging to them like a leprous shroud.
“Who are they?” whispered Val shakily.
Gait’s tongue oozed away from him. He prostrated himself on the ground, among the tiny flowers and the thin grasses and drifted leaves from the forest. He bowed his head.
“If it be the will of Arlan…” he mumbled, and could not go on.
“Arlan!” screamed Tony, shaking himself free from Redfern. “Arlan would never agree to hate like this!”
About then the affair grew hazy to Redfern. His mind refused to accept the diabolical images and suggestions bombarding his brain. He felt fouled and despoiled. Just before he blanked out he saw Val standing proudly, her breasts straining the gray cloth of her tunic, shouting something he could not understand as the great crystals, glowing with the color of blood, sank between the trees toward them.
He awoke to an easy sense of comfort and lightness. The dark flow of passionate hatred no longer engulfed him. He lay for a moment sprawled out, as though just awakened from a good night’s sleep with all a pleasant day’s holiday before him and this moment in which to savor the coming delights.
Then he opened his eyes. He lay on a pallet beneath a high ivory-white roof; tall windows striped two walls, revealing an expanse of trees and high blue cloudless sky. The other walls were painted a restful green, and pictures of landscapes and seascapes were hung on them. In the room stood seven pallets. On each pallet lay one member of that little group which had set out so bravely toward the forest. All were stark naked.
Warm air wafted into the chamber from vents high in the angle of the two green walls; the windows were closed. Tony sat up and yawned and stretched and then, surprised, said, “Hey! My arm! It’s healed!”
Nyllee laughed at him, swinging sturdy limbs over the side of her pallet. She may have had a heavy doughy face, but her body was Junoesque and firmly rounded. Tony looked at her and made a sound that Redfern took to be the Montradon equivalent of a whistle.
Nyllee pushed Tony in the chest and jumped on him as he tumbled over backward. Redfern chuckled as they wrestled like puppies.
Gait was holding Mina and talking to her quietly. The lines of strain had vanished from the faded woman’s face. Her body showed its scrawny thinness; yet once she had been a great beauty. Gait had his bouncy, confident toughness back. His beard jutted.
Mother Haapan still slept, a fragile wisp of skin and bone on the pallet, her white hair a puffball of silver threads.
Val swung up lithely toward Redfern. As he looked at her he felt the blood jolt in him, the quick rising of his interest, the sudden fierce desire to crush her to him. Her saucy round face laughed at him. Her hazel eyes, no longer shadowed, sparked with devil glints of mischief.
“Hey, stay-abed! You’d never do for Montrado!”
He nodded toward Tony and Nyllee, who were thrashing about in a tangle of naked limbs.
“Watch it, my girl! Or you’ll be next!”
She laughed. About to reply cheekily, she turned away, still laughing. Redfern had the idea she knew what he was thinking.
Mina was saying fretfully but without worry, “We ought to have some clothes!”
“Why?” asked Val. “I feel wonderful! Free and light as air! I could dance—”
“There is this feeling of lightness and goodness in the air,” confirmed Gait. “I have always been very concerned about the proprieties. And yet, if Mina will forgive me, I take great joy in seeing Val and Mina and Nyllee as they are.”
“I’ll second that!” yelped Tony, coming up for air. Nyllee’s strongly muscled arm reached up, snagged around his neck and with a yelp he was pulled down again. Val laughed. Gait frowned and then, consciously relaxing, chuckled. Even Mina ventured a smile and put her other arm around Gait.
“And yet,” said Gait, stroking Mina’s hair. “This is not natural for us. We experienced hate from those dreadful crystals; now we are experiencing…” He hesitated.
“Love?” suggested Val.
Redfern said, “We’re being manipulated. But as long as it’s this kind of brainwashing and not that terrible psychic fear, then I won’t complain.” He found it difficult to take his eyes off Val.
“We’ve regained some of the innocence of childhood,” declared Val.
Part of the green wall valved open; a door formed like the iris of a camera, dilating to allow a woman to push a cart through. Like them, the woman was naked; a pleasant buxom person of middle-age with short dark hair and curved red lips, smiling now at sight of the people in the room. The cart contained kinds of food unfamiliar to Redfern but of unmistakable taste and quality. Everyone ate with relish, fat fruits dripping juice, flat pancakes that melted in the mouth, various drinks in crystal goblets inviting with aroma and taste.
“Eat all you want,” the woman said in perfect English.
“There is ample for everyone.” She touched her hair and Redfern caught the glint of a jeweled band. “I am speaking the language common to you all through the translator.” She smiled warmly on them. “You will soon be well enough to visit.”
Before they could ask the meaning of the last cryptic remark she left the room and the iris closed up.
Redfern puzzled. “Why didn’t we ask her where we were, what had happened? All we did was start to eat!”
Gait smiled. “We are in the power of Arlan, I feel sure.”
A breath of unease wafted through Redfern, to be lost in dreamy contentment as the food was digested. He looked again with great pleasure on Val. If they were being manipulated, why, then—and then that thought, too, faded. He liked it here.
All Redfern knew of Arlan was that he was the progenitor of a philosophical school of thought. Gait was an adept, a professor who taught students, among whom were Tony and Val. But they came from Montrado. Now they were in another dimension. As to whether or not the Montradons considered Arlan some sort of god or other cosmic or metaphysical force, he didn’t know. So how could the cult of Arlan exist across the dimensions, if Gait was right, without these entities, wherever they were now having access to Portals and Gates of their own?
Of the seven people in this room four believed in the philosophy of Arlan. Nyllee, almost inevitably, would have her own gods and beliefs. Mother Haapan, who had now woken up and quietly began to eat, would no doubt possess hers. As for Redfern, he had never been sure just what beliefs of the multitude of Terrestrial religions he should embrace; each had a nugget of truth.
