Masters of the Maze (16 page)

Nate looked at his guide. The rosy tint was fainter, the violet one deeper. He had never seen the disk of the Center fullface, of course, or even anything near it. But he had seen it grow from a line to a thin spindle. And now, now as he looked, there could be no doubt. The spindle had grown thinner.

He had somewhere taken a wrong turning. He was heading away from, not toward the Center.

He turned in his tracks. He stopped. If he turned his clothes inside out, or even if he didn’t, the stench didn’t matter — they’d serve as a pillow. He could rest a little. A little would suffice. It made no sense to think of “losing time.” There could be no question of that, not when
time
meant no more than
space.
There were no such constants. The only constants were the needs of his own body. It required food, it required rest. If he went on, he could not go on. This was the simplest equation.

But he had to go on!

He picked up his feet, took another reading, and started to start off again. Then he stopped. Ahead, far, far ahead, crossing his corridor at right angles, in steady single file, was a line of the tiny creatures he had seen in the cave in Red Fish Land. That is … no, of course: it was only the distance which made them appear tiny. If they were that tiny he would not be able to see them at all. Therefore, it followed that they must be full size.

Chulpex.

Part of an old proverb came into his mind. If
you can’t go across, you must go around …

Wearily, wearily, he turned and walked away again, in the wrong direction which was now and for the moment of the foreseeable present-future the right direction.

• • •

All the costumes were strange to his smarting eyes, but it was apparent that there was a wide variety of types, both of costumes and of people. Some glanced at him, but no one seemed more than mildly interested. Among those who were engaged to that degree at least, was a woman of white hair and erect carriage. She gave him a quizzical glance.

“ ‘How dear to my heart are the scenes of my childhood,’ ” she said; adding, “Not really, though … Still, if I may be of help? I come from your future, if you want to put it that way. You do stink,” she said, not offensively.

The pathway of the Maze seemed to shine faintly underneath the great stone slabs. Warm sun, blue sky.

“Match you, quote for quote,” he offered, wearily. “ ‘And I have promises to keep …’ Also, not that it matters, ‘Where am I?’ ”

Nodding, she gathered up the rich folds of her robe. “You’re in one of the several cities called Tarshish. Atlantis sank not very long ago. Almost everyone got away, though. Proto-Basques, for the greater part. That’s how I happened to come here. Linguist, you know. Glotto-chronology, to be precise. My paper would create the proverbial furor in academic circles, only of course I shan’t ever go back to write it I don’t intend to keep up with you,” she said, slowing her steps. “Your promises are not mine. But if you ever return, young man, and want to see me, ask for the House of the Golden Bull. It’s the biggest whorehouse on the coast, and I run it. A gift for languages and a firm grasp of double-entry bookkeeping are the secrets of my success. Bye-bye …”

• • •

The golden-glowing lines of the Mazeway led him straight into a grass-grown heap of slab near some old tin smelteries. He went on through and it was on an island in an oily sea, whose air reeked of iodine and sulphur and whose sky was smeared with the tail of a tremendous comet, that someone rose to bar his way.

Curiously, he felt much less tired now.

“Bigot,” said the other. “Chauvinist.”

“How so?” Nate asked.

“You come from a world racked with national and racial and religious and class hatreds. You cannot think these are good things.”

“I don’t,” said Nate. “So why do you call me those names?”

“You have condemned with almost no personal knowledge or experience a form of life different from your own, and on no better grounds than that it is a form of life different from your own. Therefore: bigot. Therefore: chauvinist.”

The rufous sky burned and smouldered. Something lay, half-in, half-out the oily sea, and beat its lacey pseudopods upon the argent gravel of the beach. The other who confronted and addressed him was in appearance and even sound infinitely less humanoid than the Chulpex were — squat and lowly and coarsely cellular, with external pouchings like honeycomb tripes — gruff and smacking in its tone — but he stopped and considered what the other said. “This isn’t quite true, you know,” said Nate. “I … ‘condemn’ … them just as I condemn their allies of my own species.”

The figure smacked its contempt for this defense. “It is quite true that you condemn on the evidence of members, no: one single member of your own species: the one called Flint: whom you also condemn. Is this logic? Is this rational thought?”

“You’ve got somewhat of a point there,” Nate admitted. “But don’t forget that there’s also the evidence of Et-dir-Mor and his family — ”

“That will not do!” Wetly, gruffly, the other brushed this defense aside. “Has Et-dir-Mor and his family met the entire race? Have they met most of that race? Could they, in the nature of things, have met more than a fraction of any entire race? They could not and you must know that they could not! Yet you condemn all. May it not be that they have met only those of that race who, for reasons of their own, have chosen to lie? It may be so, and, indeed, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, you ought to assume it is so.”

Nate considered this a while. Then, nodding, he said, “Very well. I will assume that it is so. I could say, then, I condemn only those whose actions appear at only one remove to be worthy of condemnation. And if condemnation ought not — and I am now ready to concede it ought not — ever to be done at even one remove, then I will say that I do not condemn any. I renounce any distaste which I have felt which may have been based either on physical dissimilarity or on ways and practices possibly based on things unknown to me, and which I ought not without much greater study to denounce.”

The other said, “This is well, the man. Then you will give over your project of enmity and return to your own time and place, ready to give fair consideration to any of another species who may appear among you.”

Nate said, “No.”

He said, “My project can no longer be said to be one of enmity. It is now one of inquiry, only. You may be right in all that you imply, as well as all that you say. On the plane of abstract logic, that is, you may be right. But life-forms do not and cannot exist for more than a moment on that plane; they must exist in and on the plane of life, and life and logic are not one. If you are indeed right, then I ought to go on in order to be convinced that you are right by those who are my superiors in knowledge and in wisdom. If you are wrong … then they, I hope, will tell me what is right.”

The other growled and gurgled its disapprobation. “You ‘hope!’ Suppose yours is a vain hope? Suppose you are deceived? Has any ever made this same journey and returned in peace to tell of it? May not this whole Maze be no more, indeed, than the web of some megamorphous spider, as it were?”

Nate sighed, looked at the great and burning comet spreading its tail like some celestial peacock all across the alien sky, amid which meteors like burning embers melted down from the alien heavens. “I do not know,” he said. “I am beset by uncertainties. There are no certainties at all which any longer seem of any use to me. But to turn in my tracks after a journey of such length and such dangers seems to me to be less sensible than to continue. And I bid you now farewell.”

• • •

And the disk blazed by now three-quarters full.

The living crystals of the Moons of Lor called out and sang to him in wonder. Great, striped marsupial dogs of a nameless, manless world howled and bayed as they tracked him down a narrow, golden gorge. He rose, slowly, wreathed in bubbles, through the warm, fresh waters of an inland, island-studded sea. Trilobites crawled about and nuzzled his tracks. The painted men of Morner hissed and nudged each other as he passed their way, and sent their armed and armored panderers padding after him, down the perfumed streets. But even these cried out in horror as he, following the ever-brighter golden tracks which glowed beneath his feet for him alone, escaped them by vaulting the bridge across the victim-pits and darting into the shallow dens where the paragryphons lounged and preened. The men in armor winced, fearing almost as much as they feared their masters, the screams and flurries which — to their bemusement forever after — never came.

He came out upon a vast plain of wider horizons than he had ever seen, its turf plucked smooth as velvet by great grazing flocks of squat and scarlet birds tended by dwarfs with staves. These clucked and muttered their amusement to see him suddenly stop and glance behind them; then they whistled shrilly and rounded up their flocks and fled with them to safety in the great rounded pens of silent stone dotting the plain. Behind him and to the right and to the left of him, in a vast and terrifying crescent, came the Chulpex in their hundreds of thousands, their clamor as they sighted him rising high and shrill. The crescent swept forward, closed in, swept closer. The massed, rank, raw stink of them struck him in the face. He choked, stumbled, crawled for a space upon his hands and knees. But when they had formed a circle and began to move in from the circumference, he was not to be found.

But, given a specific and limited area, and a large — a very, very large — number of intelligent beings under a discipline both instinctive and trained, a point within that area will sooner or later be found.

So, sooner or later, they found it.

But by then Nate was back in Red Fish Land.

• • •

He was, of course, in a way, happy to see Et-dir-Mor again. The High Physicist looked a decade older, and his surviving twin grandson had aged as well. But —

“I can’t be back here again!” Nate cried. “Am I out of my mind? I can’t have been going in the wrong direction all this time again. I left this place behind me — ”

He stopped, for a moment trembling on the verge of hysteria. And then, in a single second, it left him. Understanding took its place. He smiled. “Evidently,” he said, “paradox is a fundamental principle of the Maze.” He looked at Et-dir-Mor’s ward-stone. The Center was nowhere to be seen. He looked at his own ward-stone. The blazing circle of its sun was almost full. “Paradox,” he repeated. “A fundamental principle of the Maze …”

Et-dir-Mor nodded. In a low voice he said, “It may even be that the Et-dir-Mor and the Red Fish Land you see now are not the same as those you saw before. I said once to Nathaniel Gordon … perhaps, indeed, to you; perhaps to one who is now only at the start of his quest — I do not know — that the Maze crosses dimensions, times, sections, sectors, parallels and places, and things for which we have neither name nor conception nor capacity.”

“It crosses paradoxes, too.”

Someone struck with a staff the pillar of sounding wood at the outer gate, and was on his way in before the resonant echo of it had gone away. “I must be on my way, in any case,” Nate said, getting to his feet.

“Not so fast, young man,” said the newcomer.

Et-dir-Mor’s lined face brightened. “Am-bir-Ros!”

“Let a fellow countryman take a gander at you before you take off again,” the newly arrived old man said, smoothing his white mustachios. “Yes … You’re one of that ugly race of homo saps, all right. I can hardly stand looking at you; too much sugar for a penny. Ugh. Brr.” He shook his head like a dog. “Ambrose Bierce, late of the United States Army, the fourth estate, the State of California, and all the rest of that nasty nonsense. Tell me,” he haid, abruptly; “do you still have God back there?”

“Yes … I guess we do.”

Bierce made a noise in his throat. “The Old Testament one?”

“Some say so.”

“The great, mighty, and terrible God who made Heaven and earth? The God of wrath, the God of vengeance, the jealous God, ‘the Lord is a man of war, the Lord is His name?’
That
God?”

“Some say so,” said Nate.

“Only God that makes any sense,” Bierce said, reflectively, suddenly calm. “That’s where Mrs. Eddy’s soothing science made its first big mistake. She kept confusing Him with Lydia Pinkham … Good-bye, young fellow. Good luck. I’d ask you if there’s still a G.A.R. in your America, but I’m afraid of what the answer would be.”

• • •

The corridor sloped so steeply that he had to lean backward. It was so hot that he had discarded the last of his clothing. True, for all he knew, he might next find himself in the roaring middle of a Fimbul-blizzard. But … somehow … he did not think so. Nor was he altogether surprised when he came to the place whence issued the clanging and banging which had been growing stronger and louder. The ground leveled out, and he saw the giants ahead of him. Twenty feet tall and more, they towered, made of jointed iron in which their molded muscles stood out, and sweat like oil streamed down their faces, flanks, and limbs. Faces contorted with their effort, each in his turn raised far over iron head an iron flail … poised it there a moment … brought it down upon the ground. He was in the courtyard of the Castle of Vergil the Nigromancer.

They did not beat the floor in unison, though, or anything like it. Nate stood stock-still, admiring the spectacle, but all the while his brain was storing up information. He did not, as on an earlier and somewhat similar occasion, dash across. He walked. Flails crashed behind and before him, shaking the ground, shaking the air. He walked, now slowly, now swiftly, he never stopped, and presently the noise died away behind him. Vergil sat at his desk in wide-eyed sleep, leaning upon his book, and his visitor did not disturb him. Only the hound at the sorcerer’s feet twitched and growled a bit without awakening.

The great glowing sun filled almost all the ward-stone, with only a few lines left, like an aureole, around it.

It had been so long since he had heard any noise except the small sound of his feet, that his mind did not at first clearly register or clearly report what — suddenly, retroactively — he became aware of having been subliminally aware of for … how long? … he did not know. Nor did he know what it was. Only that there seemed to be and to have been a whispering. Looking around, looking back, he saw nothing. A sound increasing to the sound of a wind, perhaps, strong enough to rustle the leaves of a tree. But he felt no wind. There was no tree.