Cycle of Nemesis (15 page)

“He’s not wearing fancy dress!” Pomfret, too, fell in. “Oh, no!” Phoebe breathed. “He’s
real!”

“Around the back, fast!” snapped Brennan. We all began to run around to the rear of the house. The feeling we should stick together motivated our gregarious fear. At a back door Charlie went straight through. His sleek
metal anonymity would carry him through the best dressed costume party in the system. Only his ugly face told us he was our Charlie.

Inside the lobby I was all for pushing straight on through. A man and woman sitting on the floor indulging in the preliminaries to full-scale sex later on looked at us as though we’d crawled out of the sewer. Brennan did not share my viewpoint.

Quite calmly he hit the man on the head, knocking him out. The fellow wore a Samson costume and the girl a Delilah. With the speed of dream Brennan donned the leopard skin, Phoebe the diamonds and feathers. The girl’s astonished face stared at us.

“Don’t worry, doll,” said Brennan. “Stay here and you won’t get hurt. This is for real.”

They were about to leave when the door opened and a man wearing a blue and yellow checkerboard-painted helmet staggered in, waving a bottle, hiccoughing.

“Grab him, Bert!” snapped Brennan. “He’s yours. Follow as soon as you can. George—you and Lottie look enough in fancy dress. You can be a pair of big-game hunters who were mauled. Come on.”

I knew the urgency of the moment, but I let out a feeble protest as they raced through the far door into the interior of Gannets. The man wearing the helmet goggled at me. I took his helmet off—the classical Corinthian shape smooth beneath my hands—and knocked him out. He was happy to relapse into unconsciousness. Taking his blue cloak and fastening the golden chains I reflected that although we were jumping about in time what had to be done could only be done by Khamushkei the Undying in moments when we were not there to stop him. Every time he moved one of his agents to attack he moved us along with him.

That ironic thought made me clap the helmet on my head and dash through the door. If our party was split now one half would be left in this time, and the other would be forced to tackle the Time Beast alone. I ran.

Many people wandered the spacious halls and rooms of Gannets. The sound of laughter and music, the exotic tingles of expensive perfumes, the rustle of rich dresses and the electric atmosphere of party excitement uplifted the imagination. I could feel at home in a strange xenophobic way here, consciously aware that this atmosphere was a fraud and sham and yet relishing it for its lift.

At the entrance to the ballroom where a fanfare of music struck me on the final wild posturings of some local dance, Phoebe pushed toward me. She looked tense.

“They went toward the library. Hall couldn’t shoot in there.” She nodded her head at the ballroom’s crowd. The orchestra struck up the Gay Gordons. She took my hand and with a reciprocal movement from the floor we went away down the corridor. “The library’s down here, I think—” She looked at me and I saw how her lips trembled. “Oh, Bert
!
I keep thinking of that doll’s house and—and—”

“Did you tell Hall?”

“Yes. He couldn’t believe it was Lottie. But we know
!
”

“Let’s deal with this one as it comes up, Phoebe. We’re not dead yet.”

In the library Brennan and Pomfret were looking at the globe we had last seen in Pomfret’s own villa. Lottie stood by the door, nervously gnawing a thumb until she saw us. Of the winged genie there was no sign. There was a smell of charring on the air.

“We got him, Bert. But I can’t get over this globe, here, with the tablet in it—when all the time—”

“I know.” I cut Pomfret off. “Khamushkei the Undying must try again. He’s got to.”

The door opened again, catching us all unawares, and Assurbanipal strode in. He checked at once, looking at us with first a surprised air and then, as the gun appeared in his fist, with a hard cold look of hatred.

“Caught you at it, have I? At last
!
Good. We’ll just have the police in on this.” He went toward the phone.

Brennan took the initiative.

“Just a moment, Stannard
!
” I admired the amount of sheer authority Hall Brennan injected into his voice. “Don’t go off half-cocked. You don’t know what this is all about. We do.” He put a hand in his pocket and pulled out a package. “Look at this. Then look at your globe. Then start to think.”

Brennan unwrapped the parcel and showed the tablet to Stannard. The man lost his composure. Tough-faced, a disciplinarian, master of many men and much money, the ruler of a vast industrial empire, Vasil Stannard shook his head in disbelief.

“I only put it in there a week ago—and the globe is untouched. That’s obvious. It’s an old one—you couldn’t have got the tablet out—”

“Don’t babble man!” Brennan handled himself with fire and iron. “We know what this tablet is all about.” Then he explained, briefly, what had been going on. I was not surprised at the reaction of Stannard. He came alert. Like a shark sensing the dying struggles of its prey, he quivered into action.

“Then if we don’t shut this alien monster back into his Time Vault—”

“Yes.”

“Well, you can count on me.” Stannard’s rugged face showed now just how he had won success in life. “I haven’t had a good fight in years. But to have the luck to go up against an alien Time Beast! Oh, ho—”

Just then the floor shook, and the lights flared through a chiaroscuro of brilliance; although we still stood in Stannard’s library we knew we had time-jumped.

Stannard did not; but he guessed at once.

“The library! It’s—it’s changed! It’s as it was, oh, twenty years ago— We’ve gone back through time!”

The idea struck me that we were the ones who showed the wrong reactions; of course anyone should be amazed that they had traveled in time and only our familiarity with Khamushkei the Undying’s time-jumping prodigies made us so matter-of-fact. Stannard, although shaken, was much intrigued, running about and remembering various joys of twenty years ago.

"This means the ould divil’s having another go,” pointed out Phoebe. Her face lacked the animation that had so warmly attracted me and I felt an unwelcome fear that she was growing weary of this continual pressure of fear and action and suspense. If we lost this fight with Khamushkei’s agents, and the tablet was destroyed, all hope of restraining the Time Beast would be gone— and we, ourselves, would be marooned in time.

The library doorknob turned. At once we sprang into the shadows of the far end, half-concealed by a projecting bookcase. Charlie clanked and Pomfret cursed him: "Get some oil, Charlie!”

"Yes, boss-”

The door opened and Vasil Stannard walked in-twenty years younger than the man who stood open-mouthed and utterly smashed beside us. His jaw quivered. Then he managed to say in a frog-croak: “That’s me!”

Following this younger Stannard came the expected agent of destruction motivated by the distant Time Beast in his Vault of Time buried beneath the sands.

The young Stannard turned, falling back with up-flung arms, a cry of horror bursting from him. At once Brennan stepped forward and slogged a quick burst from his Creighton Eighty into the iron-booted monster. Before, almost at the same time, so quick was the transition, the room quivered and lights flickered in a time transition.

“I—” gulped Stannard. “I remember that!”

We stood in his library with the knowledge that Khamushkei the Undying was even now trying once more with another agent to smash the tablet. We tensed.

“He can’t slip a killer in, now, without dragging us along with it,” said Brennan. “My Godl This could go on for—"

“For a damn long time!” I said. “Knock it off, Halil We’ve got to think of a way to break the stalemate.”

Perhaps, I was thinking, looking covertly at Lottie and her red-gold hair and the white beauty of her, perhaps we could time-loop in some way, so that she would never be pursued down the picture gallery—perhaps there would never be discovered a headless girl’s body in a Bennet commode....

The iron-boots Brennan had shot lay disgustingly on the carpet having been dragged with us through the time-jump and now, with a single clean flare, Farley-power disposed of it. Only a charring hung in the air and a blackening of the carpet. “My housekeeper never did figure out what that was,” said Stannard. “We’re on about five years. If I’m right—”

Before he finished speaking we heard the hoarse panting of a man and the frenzied scrabbling at the door and then, the door opening with a bang, Stannard burst in to go at once to a drawer of his desk. The drawer was only half open and the gun within only half out, when an eagle-headed winged genie flapped heavily in.

Just whose gun vaporized the thing I couldn’t be sure. A cone of lethal radiations focused on it—and then it was gone.

“I never thought I was going to get to that gun in time,” Stannard said, looking at himself. The floor shook. “I suppose we’re off again!”

As we time-jumped I found the riddle growing more urgent. There just had to be a way to halt this, to crack through to Khamushkei. As Brennan had said, this attempt on the Time Beast’s part to smash the tablet and our automatic accompaniment could go on for a long time....

We had had enough of Khamushkei the Undying’s time-jumping. As the library once more steadied about us and Vasil Stannard began to exclaim about the date, I made for the door.

“Where away, Bert?” Brennan followed. “We know the tablet’s here. K the U has got to send his thing here—”

“Keep Lottie here. I think the whole house will carry me along in a time-change; the things are obviously outside somewhere, probably hanging around the smashed car from the future city.” I opened the door. “I’ll be quite all right if I stick to an iron-boots
!
”

Pomfret, quickly, said, “If that’s so I don’t think we ought to keep Lottie—or Phoebe—here!”

“Yes, yes, George.” I said with a flashing return to my normal irritability. “I just meant keep her out of the way of the iron-boots.”

“I’m inclined to agree they’re coming in from those who came with us in those futuristic cars,” said Brennan. “So you’ll stick with us in time fluctuations, Bert. But—”

“There’s no time for buts!” The floor shook and the lights flared. “See
!
”

I ran outside. A monster came at me along the corridor and I blasted it in a reflex action. The time had long since passed when qualms of killing these time-spawned agents of destruction had slowed my hand. Outside in the grounds a brilliant yellow moon cast warm light everywhere and I could see the smashed cars with the occupants of the second climbing out. For them—for us— this experience was a simple time-sequence, a linearly developed action. But for the real time of Gannets, we jumped in and out of the chronological flow like a shuttle in a loom.

The solution had become obvious. I ran over the grass toward the cars. The Farley Express blazed positronic incoherence before me. When that unpleasant task had been finished I turned back to the house.

Clearly against the lights in an upper room I saw framed the silhouette of a girl—a girl screaming in terror as an iron-booted monster lunged for her.

That
girl
could be
Lottie, she could be Phoebe,
she
could be a guest in the house, and unknown to me. Already I had lost Ishphru through my own stupidity; for the sake of George Pomfret and Hall Brennan I would not make the same mistake again.

Hardly aware of running I found myself shaken and blinded as a time-change deluged the area with distorted images. I went up a drainpipe like a professional burglar. A window had been smashed in, clear indication I was on the trail of a monster. I jumped to the floor of the room beyond, seeing the tumbled suits of armor, the piles and halberds fallen like mown com, the muskets and Lee Enfields strewn like a spilled box of matches. Beyond the far door, I thought, lay the picture gallery, and beyond that the long gallery. I ran through both seeing not a soul. The pictures hung all in place where last I had seen only empty spaces; the chests and commodes stood beneath their windows. The sensation was eerie.

A flickering insubstantiality took possession of the rooms and furnishings. A man appeared at the foot of the stairs and rushed up and past me with the speed of a demented satellite. I stopped to look back, astonished, and a woman and a robot carrying linen hurtled down the stairs to vanish into the serving quarters below.

A chair against which I halted, with one hand on the back,to support myself, suddenly vanished and was replaced with a mahogany table. The lights flickered on and off so rapidly that a half-light glow was maintained. Pictures changed. Chandeliers fell and were replaced. Wallpaper and furnishings altered.

The most frightening impression of all, like the earthquake at Borsuppak, remained the very insubstantial quality of experience. Nothing I saw remained itself.

More people rushed past me. I saw Vasil Stannard himself, often, and another man whose authoritative movements and the style of furnishings he adopted convinced me must be Lester Northrop, the last occupant of Gannets.

I realized what was happening, although understanding scarcely lessened my apprehension. Khamushkei the
Undying, balked in his attempts to smash the tablet by always finding one of us between the tablet and his agent, had now resorted to a blinding whirlwind chiaroscuro. Frenzied and panicked, he clashed his timelines. By the very speed and multiplicity of time-jumps, he would get a monster past us and smash the tablet.

I went down the stairs and toward the ballroom, understanding now that my comrades and I, and the remaining monsters, would travel through time in a straight line together. Around us chronological time corkscrewed into loops and knots. We went on. I crashed through the door and half stumbled over a table that disappeared even as I fell. I clawed up and scuttled to the side.

The iron-booted monsters slashing spike missed my stomach by a boot-sole.

It bore in, its red eyes piggy with hate.

I jerked up the Farley and a cunningly slashing spike knocked it from my hand. It fell to slide across the polished floor and disappear into the grille of an air-conditioning output set in the oak wainscoting.

The iron-boots had me at its mercy now!

I scrabbled away. I could taste the fear sickening in my mouth. Around us the ballroom changed, great occasions were held, routs and balls, funerals took place, ceremonies of all kinds. Then, as I danced away from another spiked rush, wondering how long I could hold out, with no chance of getting back to that tantalizing grille, the ballroom abruptly filled with all the objects brought in from other rooms of the house.

Rushing away from the beast I could understand how no one here could see us; for them we existed for only a heartbeat, then we would be gone along the vistas of time.

I stood behind an extended scroll of the stairway and panted for breath, seeing the iron-boots stalking toward me. It looked like a confident fat cat torturing a mouse.

About to break away to the side I was roughly thrown back by an abruptly appearing cavalry group. I whirled. On my other side a suit of Milanese armor hemmed me in. I could not escape. I backed up, seeing the monster advancing, feeling the blood bursting in my head.

I stared—and I stared at myself staring at myself!

Then the image of myself as I had been, carefree, casually visiting an auction with a friend, vanished.

I remembered—and I remembered what was to come!

The statues and the suit vanished. I ran, panting like a wounded stag. Up the stairs, four at a time, through the long gallery with the thing pounding at my heels. I had to get past it and back to my friends with their weapons.

Four times I did a quick duck back and four times the thing shot out a boot or a talon and nearly disconnected me.

In the armory room beyond the picture gallery the armor and weapons had been taken away. I slammed the door. The monster could break that down with ease, but at least I had respite to gulp a few lungfuls of air. The door shook. Then, instead of the beast’s continued attack, I heard its iron boots padding away, clanging dully on the old wooden floor. Cautiously I eased the door ajar.

This—this I had expected and winced from; this had haunted me.

Lottie screamed. She ran towards me, away from the long gallery and away from the iron-boots. I jumped out, knowing that I must help. Her mouth opened, gasping. Then the monster caught her, his talons and spiked boots slashing and ripping. Her clothes tore. Naked, yelling, she ducked under a raking claw and ran shrieking down the picture gallery.

I started after them, running fast.

At the third window I could see Phoebe and myself, staring with faces frozen in shock. As I urged myself to run more fleetly, Phoebe and I disappeared, leaving me to pursue the beast and Lottie out through the long gallery.

No time, now, to think back to that other moment of horror.

Tackling those crocodiles had scared me silly; and they would be small fry beside that iron-boots ahead. The knife that had dispatched the crocs felt .slick with sweat in my hand. I ran desperately, gulping air.

Click, click, click, went our progression through time. In moments agonizedly drawn-out for us, the people living in this house passed whole months, years. We would settle down for a heartbeat, seen as ghostly apparitions by the Gannets people, and then vanish. No wonder this house had drawn legends and horrible stories about itself 1

Lottie ran out onto the landing atop the stairs. The beast followed, slavering. To me, with thoughts of that headless torso rolling from the chest, every moment held the torturing impact of a white-hot iron.

Somewhere in this house on our timeline Brennan and Pomfret, Phoebe and Charlie, must be searching for Lottie. Why, I cursed luridly, why the hell hadn’t they found her?

Then I hurled myself on the iron-booted monsters back.

The thing stank.

I grasped knotted greasy hair in my left fist and plunged the knife again and again into the beast’s side, feeling the point scrape on bone, trying to strike deeply enough to finish this ghastly episode quickly. I felt no pride, no battle-joy, only disgust and nausea.

The thing screeched like a ruptured high-pressure steam boiler.

With enormous strength it twisted around, trying to claw at me. I felt white-hot pincers claw down my side. I hung on, sweat and blood clogging my grip, my eyes stinging, throat dry, a roaring from inside my head deafening me. The thing thrashed about. My grasp slipped, a great knot of furred hide ripped away. I was flung heavily to the floor.

A yard or so to the side of the head of the stairs lay a small, low door, paneled in rich mahogany the color of old blood. Sprawled on the floor, the knife lost, embedded in the monster’s side, I glared up at the thing as it lurched toward me. Blood clotted everything. Lottie fled screaming down the stairs, her hands clutching her hair. The beast struck.

Jerking back, I managed to ride some of the force of that iron-booted blow. The low mahogany doors opened and I fell through. My head hit rails. My helmet, forgotten until now, slipped off to roll in a mad amalgam of blue and yellow checks and crimson blood. Face twisted down, limp and breathless, I looked down on myself looking up.

From the musicians’ gallery I looked down on myself looking up at myself looking down.

I tried to speak, to answer the questions I put myself; but I could not Any second the monster would rake in like a fireman scraping out a boiler—like a lump of kebab meat I would be spiked out.

The flashing glitter, the pains, the lights, the supersonic booms and rocket exhaust roar clangored in my head. Everything shook and I, myself, shook as a central part of this transformation.

Something different about this time-change warned me not to expect what I might have expected.

Violet incrustations of light like writhing cornices of. fire confirmed that guess. Enclosed in a distorted time bubble I felt myself toppling helplessly over and over into oblivion.

The steel floor beneath my hands and knees struck cold.

As the violet intrusions of light dimmed and vanished I moved. My hand knocked against an object and I looked down to see a compact—a compact old and tarnished and caked with the hard rime of vanished powder.

Then I knew that I had at last reached the Time Vault of Khamushkei the Undying in the here and now.

I pushed up to stand, swaying, staring around in that colossal room. Everything looked exactly as it had done when I had visited here before—visited here—the stark metal, the brooding silence, the sensation of awful pent-up energies confined beyond that metal curtain.

The aged ruin of the compact spoke eloquently of the passage of time since Lottie had dropped it—so short a time ago. I turned around, slowly, to look for the two enigmatical flames, one yellow, one pink, that had glowed with such reassurance.

Shock took me. And I think that then I understood, even before final comprehension made me fully aware— the two flames, the rose and the yellow, had shrunk. Small, they moved as though painfully, undulating in an unfelt wind whose chill breath blew over the horizon of time itself.

From the union of Khamushkei the Undying and Anklo the Desired had sprung the twins Mummusu and Shoshusu, the most beautiful girl and boy the world had ever seen. Now, reduced by their seven thousand year vigil, worm and tired, exhausted by the continuing effort to maintain bonds upon their father, the Time Beast, they had reached almost the end of their strength.

The flames sighed.

Words I could not understand soughed like bending boughs in autumn’s gales. I stared at the two flames, their light low and pallid, with nothing left of that deep glow of serenity I had before found so comforting amid terrors.

A deep pity welled up in me. A feeling of profound indebtedness, of admiration and of guilt welded my own personal fate to that of the flame-twins. For I saw clearly now that if the twins failed, if the lights of Shoshusu and Mummusu were extinguished, then Khamushkei the Undying would have won and the world would have lost its identity and its life.

Like the rustling from inconceivably distant quasars across the womb of space and time the voices reached me, haunting, demanding, despairing.

The voices reached to me and into me without words; with the raw material of conceptual thought, a kind of empathic computer-code, I listened to the flame-twins.

Limited were their powers. They keened, fragile and easily thwarted, but they had tried, casting their nets of intrigue wide, subtly disturbing the time flows and in miniscule ways arranging the ticking of the universe contained within this world line. I was to understand much of our good fortune had been encompassed through their careful intervention. Now, when Khamushkei the Undying, their father, had in the present time dragged a time bubble back to this Time Vault to transfer more of his agents to Gannets, they had successfully and secretly arranged for me to become a stowaway.

For, I was to understand, a human being’s sacrifice and energy alone could restore their powers whose mystic fires could reforge the bonds chaining the Time Beast. I had sacrificed much, I caught the tendrils of conceptual thought entwining like art nouveau borders in my brain, much and much had my comrades suffered; but only through sacrifice and suffering could the great and enduring strengths of the world be created.

“What more do you wish to take from me?” I cried aloud. “My life?”

My words rang emptily in the great chamber and I became aware of the childish rhetoric of my words; my life would not weigh in the scales that had balanced for seven thousand years.

I thought-a trick of light, a change of angle—that the vast sheet of metal curtain hanging above the steps had moved. I turned to look. The curtain
had
moved
!

Millimeter by millimeter it began to rise.

I knew, without question, without doubt, what lay beyond that curtain. The metal mass rose with a smooth and barely perceptible motion and the manner of its rising conveyed stealth and furtiveness and a hideous desire of the thing beyond to spring out in surprise.

Irrational though my thoughts were, dominated as they must be by the impact of the thought patterns of the ancient flame-twins, nevertheless a stubbornness held me erect. A sheerly bloody obstinacy prized my chin up and in remembering the Flower People and the fall of their world I resolved with all the stupidity and bone-headedness in me—I was quite beyond fear by now— that this world would treat Khamushkei the Undying in a different and less acquiescent fashion.

Full squarely I faced the rising curtain. The flames, one pink, the other yellow, rose higher, thinning, waving in short panicky vibrations. Just how those flames represented Shoshusu and Mummusu I could not say, nor could I say what mortal shape those ancient beings possessed. The sensation of a vast weight oppressing me suffocated my senses in that cavernous chamber.

The thoughts traced concepts in my mind: all the locks placed on the Time Beast had gone down and now only this last metal curtain containing within itself the seventh and incomplete curse remained. Steadily the mass rose. Another voice, another mind, another heart— the thoughts roiled in my head.
We are old and feeble
,
we have played our part and given our strength to check this evil which spawned us—old, tired—we need fresh life, fresh energy, fresh enthusiasm....

Fumbling I took the paper from my pocket, uncreasing it, smoothing it from the crumplings it had suffered when I had thrust it away so hastily in that futuristic car from that alien futuristic dream city. Man or alien? Perhaps that city’s destiny would be decided now.

I began to read.

Even in English the curses rang rounded and full-bodied.

A shimmering seized the air. A clarion of gong-notes, diminishing, rippled the fabric of space about me. A mass of beast-shapes detached from the frieze, blindly began lumbering about, awakening, ready to rend and tear.

I read on, shaking, my hands trembling, and as I read I knew that it was not what I read that locked Khamushkei the Undying back into his Time Vault. No mere words of mine could do that. But by my very presence, as another life-force, representing all those other life-forces of my world, reading the words of power, Shoshusu and Mummusu, the true Guardians of the Vault, could once again perform their preordained function.

The tall solemn columns of flame, one yellow and one rose, grew and strengthened and took into themselves the sustenance of power with every syllable. Confidence grew in me, also. I read more boldly.

The metal moving mass halted.

The beasts, the lamassu and utukku, the griffins and the iron-boots from deepest inferno where Nergal and Ereshkigal reign in unholy deity, the slowly awakening mass of monsters from the frieze began to retrace their halting steps and once more to form part of a carved wall.

Strength and confidence returned once more to the world.

The metal curtain struck the topmost step with a dull and sullen clang like the lowermost gates of hell grinding shut on the devil himself.

The sour-sweet ozone-tasting air gushed back into the chamber. Emptied of reading, I let the paper fall to flutter and drop beside the corroded compact.

Like a fool, I thought we had won.

Then the thoughts of the flame-twins rode in again to my brain, strong now and wise with their acceptance of reality. The curse had not been completed by me, for had not the comer of the last curse been broken from the baked clay tablet? Had not the computer thus been unable to translate the ending of the final curse? And therefore was not Khamushkei the Undying once more only partially penned up?

As though in sarcastic confirmation the metal curtain shook, once, like a colossal gong reverberating through the chamber.