The Gates of Creation Read online

  Certainly, this was not the interior of Urizen's stronghold. Or, if it were, it was the most unconventional dwelling-place of a Lord that he had ever seen.

  He turned to see the hexaculum which had received him. It was not there. Instead, a tall wide hexagon of purplish metal rose from a broad flat boulder. He remembered now that something had pushed him out through it and that he had had to take several steps to keep from falling. The energy that had shoved him had caused him to pass out of it and a few paces from the boulder.

  Urizen had set another gate within his hexaculum and had shunted him off to this place, wherever it was. Why Urizen had done so would become apparent quickly enough.

  Wolff knew what would happen if he tried to walk back through the gate. Nevertheless, not being one to take things for granted, he did attempt it. With ease, he stepped out on the other side upon the boulder.

  It was a one-way gate, just as he had expected.

  Somebody coughed behind him, and he whirled, his beamer ready.

  II

  THE LAND ENDED ABRUPTLY AGAINST THE SEA WITH NO INTERVENING beach. The animal had just emerged from the sea and was only a few feet from him. It squatted like a toad on huge webbed feet, its columnar legs folded as if they were boneless. The torso was humanoid and sheathed in fat, with a belly that protruded like that of a Thanksgiving goose. The neck was long and supple. At its end was a human head, but the nose was flat and had long narrow nostrils. Tendrils of red flesh sprouted out around the mouth. The eyes were very large and moss-green. There were no ears. The pate was covered, like the face and body, with a dark-blue oily fur.

  "Jadawin!" the creature said. It spoke in the ancient language of the Lords. "Jadawin! Don't kill me! Don't you know me?"

  Wolff was shocked but not so much that he forgot to look behind him. This creature could be trying to distract him.

  "Jadawin! Don't you recognize your own brother!"

  Wolff did not know him. The frog-seal body, lack of ears, blue fur, and squashed long-slitted nose made identification too difficult. And there was Time. If he had really called this thing brother, it must have been millennia ago.

  That voice. It dug away at the layers of dusty memory, like a dog after an old bone. It scraped away level after level, it...

  He shook his head and glanced behind him and at the feathery vegetation. "Who are you?" he asked.

  The creature whined, and by this he knew that his brother-if it were his brother-must have been imprisoned in that body for a long long time. No Lord whined.

  "Are you going to deny me? Are you like the others? They'd have nothing to do with me. They mocked at me, they spat upon me, they drove me away with kicks and laughs. They said. . ."

  It clapped its flippers together and twisted its face and large tears ran from the moss-green eyes and down the blue cheeks. "Oh, Jadawin, don't be like the rest! You were always my favorite, my beloved! Don't be cruel like them!"

  The others, Wolff thought. There had been others. How long ago?

  Impatiently, he said, "Let's not play games-whoever you are. Your name!"

  The creature rose on its boneless legs, muscles raising the fat that coated them, and took a step forward. Wolff did not back away, but he held the beamer steady. "That's far enough. Your name."

  The creature stopped, but its tears kept on flowing. "You are as bad as the others. You think of nobody but yourself; you don't care what's happened to me. Doesn't my suffering and loneliness and agonies all this time-oh, this immeasurable time-touch you at all?"

  "It might if I knew who you were," Wolff said. "And what's happened to you."

  "Oh, Lord of the Lords! My own brother!"

  It advanced another giant splayfoot, the wetness squishing from out under the webs. It held out a flipper as if beseeching a tender hand. Then it stopped, and the eyes flicked at a spot just to one side of Wolff. He jumped to his left and whirled, the beamer pointing to cover both the creature and whoever might have been behind him. There was no one.

  And, as the thing had planned, it leaped for Wolff at the same time that Wolff jumped and turned. Its legs uncoiled like a catapult released and shot it forward. If Wolff had only turned, he would have been knocked down. Standing to one side, he escaped all but the tip of the thing's right flipper. Even that, striking his left shoulder and arm, was enough to send him staggering numbly to one side, making him drop the beamer. Wolff was enormously solid and powerful himself, with muscles and nerve impulses raised to twice their natural strength and speed by the Lords' science. If he had been a normal Earthman, he would have been crippled forever in his arm, and he would not have been able to escape the second leap of the creature.

  Squalling with fury and disappointment, it landed on the spot where Wolff had been, sank on its legs as if they were springs, spun, and launched itself at Wolff again. All this was done with such swiftness that the creature looked as if it were an actor in a speeded-up film.

  Wolff had succeeded in regaining his balance. He jumped.out for the beamer. The shadow of the creature passed over him; its shrieking was so loud it seemed as if its lips were pressed against his ear. Then he had the beamer in his hands, had rolled over and over, and was up on his feet. By then the thing had propelled itself again towards him. Wolff reversed the beamer, and using his right hand, brought the light but practically indestructible metal stock down on top of the creature's head. The impact of the huge body hurled him backward; he rolled away. The sea-thing was lying motionless on its face, blood welling from its seal-like scalp.

  Hands clapped, and he turned to see two human beings thirty yards away inland, under the shadow of a frond. They were male and female, dressed in the magnificent clothes of Lords. They walked towards him, their hands empty of weapons. Their only arms were swords in crude leather, or fish-skin, scabbards. Despite this seeming powerlessness, Wolff did not relax his guard. When they had approached within twenty yards of him, he told them to stop. The creature groaned and moved its head but made no effort to sit up. Wolff moved away from it to be outside its range of leap.

  "Jadawin!" the woman called. She had a lovely contralto voice which stirred his heart and his memory. Although he had not seen her in five hundred or more years, he knew her then.

  "Vala!" he said. "What are you doing here?" The question was rhetorical; he knew she must have also been trapped by their father. And now he recognized the man. He was Rintrah, one of his brothers. Vala, his sister, and Rintrah, his brother, had fallen into the same snare.

  Vala smiled at him, and his heart sprang again. She was of all women he had known the most beautiful, with two exceptions. His lovely Chryseis and his other sister, Anana the Bright, surpassed her. But he had never loved Anana as he had Vala. Just as he had never hated Anana as he had Vala.

  Vala applauded again, and said, "Well done, Jadawin! You have lost none of your skill or wits. That thing is dangerous, even if detestable. It cringes and whines and tries to gain your trust, and then, bang! It's at your throat! It almost killed Rintrah when he first came here and would have if I had not struck it unconscious with a rock. So, you see, I, too, have dealt with it."

  "And why did you not kill it then?" Wolff said.

  Rintrah smiled and said, "Don't you know your own little brother, Jadawin? That creature is your beloved, your cute little Theotormon."

  Wolff said, "God! Theotormon! Who did this to him?"

  Neither of the two answered, nor was an answer needed. This was Urizen's world; only he could have refashioned their brother thus.

  Theotormon groaned and sat up. One flipper placed over the bloody spot on his head, he rocked back and forth and moaned. His lichen-green eyes glared at Wolff, and he silently mouthed vituperation he did not dare voice.

  Wolff said, "You're not trying to tell me you spared his life because of fraternal sentiment? I know you better than that."

  Vala laughed and said, "Of course not! I thought he could be used later on. He knows this little planet well, since he has been here
such a long long time. He is a coward, brother Jadawin. He did not have the courage to test his life in the maze of Urizen; he stayed upon this island and became as one of the degenerate natives. Our father tired of waiting for him to summon up a nonexistent manhood. To punish him for his lack of bravery, he caught him and took him off to his stronghold, Appirmatzum. There he reshaped him, made him into this disgusting sea-thing. Even then, Theotormon did not dare to go through the gates into Urizen's palace. He stayed here and lived as a hermit, hating and despising himself, hating all other living beings, especially Lords.

  "He lives upon the fruit of the islands, the birds and fish and other sea-things he can catch. He eats them raw, and he kills the natives and eats them when he gets a chance. Not that they don't deserve their fate. They are the sons and daughters of other Lords who, like Theotormon, were craven. They lived out their miserable lives upon this planet, had babies, raised these, and then died.

  "Urizen did to them as he did to Theotormon. He took them to Appirmatzum, made them into loathsome shapes, and brought them back here. Our father thought that surely the monstering of them would make them hate him so much they would then test the trapdoor planets, try to get into Appirmatzum, and revenge themselves. But they were cowards all. They preferred to live on, even in their stomach-turning metamorphosis, rather than die as true Lords."

  Wolff said, "I have much to learn about this little arrangement of our father. But how do I know that I can trust you?"

  Again Vala laughed. "All of us who have fallen into Urizen's traps are upon this island. Most of us have been here only a few weeks, although Luvah has been here for half a year."

  "Who are the others?"

  "Some of your brothers and cousins. Besides Rintrah and Luvah, there are two other brothers, Enion and Ariston. And your cousins Tharmas and Palamabron."

  She laughed merrily and pointed at the red sky and said, "All, all snared by our father! All gathered together again after a heartrending absence of millennia. A happy family reunion such as mortals could not imagine."

  "I can imagine," Wolff said. "You still have not answered my question about trust."

  "We have all sworn to a common-front truce," Rintrah said. "We need each other, so we must put aside our natural enmity and work together. Only thus will it be possible to defeat Urizen."

  "There hasn't been a common-front truce for as long as I can remember," Wolff said. "I remember Mother telling me that there had been one once, four thousand years before I was born, when the Black Sellers threatened the Lords. Urizen has performed two miracles. He has trapped eight Lords all at once, and he has forced a truce. May this be his downfall."

  Wolff then said that he would swear to the truce. By the name of the Father of all Lords, the great Eponym Los, he swore to observe all the rules of the peace-agreement until such time as all agreed to abandon it or all were dead but one. He knew even as he took the oath that the others could not be relied upon not to betray him. He knew that Rintrah and Vala were aware of this and trusted him no more than he did them. But at least they would all be working together for a while. And it was not likely that any would lightly break truce. Only when a great opportunity and strong likelihood of escaping punishment coincided would any do so.

  Theotormon whined, "Jadawin. My own brother. My favorite brother, he who said he would always love me and protect me. You are like the others. You want to hurt me, to kill me. Your own little brother."

  Vala spat at him and said, "You filthy craven beast! You are no Lord nor brother of ours. Why do you not dive to the deeps and there drown yourself, take your fearfulness and treachery out of our sight and the sight of all beings that breathe air? Let the fish feed upon your fat carcass, though even they may vomit you forth."

  Crouching, extending a flipper, Theotormon shuffled towards Wolff. "Jadawin. You don't know how I've suffered. Is there no pity in you for me? I always thought you, at least, had what these others lacked. You had a warm heart, a compassion, that these soulless monsters lacked."

  "You tried to kill me," Wolff said. "And you would try again if you thought you had a good chance of doing it."

  "No, no," Theotormon said, attempting to smile. "You misunderstood me entirely. I thought you would hate me because I loved even a base life more than I did a death as a Lord. I wanted to take your weapons away so you couldn't hurt me. Then I would have explained what had happened to me, how I came to be this way. You would have understood then. You would have pitied me and loved me as you did when you were a boy in the palace of our father and I was your infant brother. That is all I wanted to do, explain to you and be loved again, not hated. I meant you no harm. By the name of Los, I swear it."

  "I will see you later," Wolff said. "Now, for the present, be gone."

  Theotormon walked away spraddle-legged. When he had reached the edge of the island, he turned and shouted obscenities and abuse at Wolff. Wolff raised his beamer, although he meant only to scare Theotormon. The thing squawked and leaped like a giant frog out over the water, his rubbery legs and webbed toes trailing behind him. He went into the water and did not come up again. Wolff asked Vala how long he could stay under the surface.

  "I do not know. Perhaps half an hour. But I doubt that he is holding his breath. He is probably in one of the caverns that exist in the roots and bladders that form the base of this island."

  She said that they must go to meet the others. While they walked through the frond-forest, she explained the physical facts of this world, as far as she knew them.

  "You must have noticed how close the horizon is. This planet has a diameter of about 2170 miles." (About the size of Earth's moon, Wolff thought.) "Yet the gravity is only a little less than that of our home-planet." (Not much stronger than Earth's, Wolff thought.)

  "The gravity fades off abruptly above the atmosphere," she said, "and extends weakly through this universe. All the other planets have similar fields."

  Wolff did not wonder at this. The Lords could do things with fields and gravitons that the terrestrials had never dreamed of as yet

  "This planet is entirely covered with water."

  "What about this island?" he said.

  "It floats. Its origin is a plant which grows on the bottom of the sea. When it's half-grown, its bladder starts to fill with gas, produced by a bacterium. It unroots itself and floats to the surface. There it extends roots or filaments, which meet with the filaments of others of its kind. Eventually, there's a solid mass of such plants. The upper part of the plant dies off, while the lower part continues to grow. The decaying upper part forms a soil. Birds add their excrement to it. They come to new islands from old islands, and bring seeds in their droppings. These produce the fronds you see and the other vegetation." She pointed at a clump of bamboo-like plants.

  He asked, "Where did those rocks come from?"

  There were several whitish boulders, with a diameter of about twelve feet, beyond the bamboos.

  "The gas bladder plants that form islands are only one of perhaps several thousand species. There's a type that attaches itself to sea-bottom rocks and that carries the rock to the surface when they're buoyant enough. The natives bring them in and place them on the islands if they're not too big. The white ones attract the garzhoo bird for some reason, and the natives kill the garzhoo or domesticate it."

  "What about the drinking water?"

  "It's a fresh-water ocean."

  Wolff, glancing through a break in the wilderness of purplish, yellow-streaked fronds and waist-high berry-burdened bushes, saw a tremendous black arc appear on the horizon. In sixty seconds, it had become a sphere and was climbing above the horizon.

  "Our moon," she said. "Here, things are reversed. There is no sun; the light comes from the sky. So the moon provides night or absence of light. It is a pale sort of night, but better than none.

  "Later, you will see the planet of Appirmatzum. It is in the center of this universe, and around it the five secondary planets revolve. You will see them, too, all
black and sky-filling like our moon."

  Wolff asked how she knew so much about the structure of Urizen's world. She answered that Theotormon had given the information, though not willingly. He had learned much while a prisoner of Urizen. He had not wanted to part with the information, since he was a surly and selfish beast. But when his brothers, cousins, and sister had caught him, they had forced him to talk.

  "Most of the scars are healed up," she said. She laughed.

  Wolff wondered if Theotormon did not have good reasons after all for wanting to kill them. And he wondered how much of her story of their dealings with him was true. He would have to have a talk with Theotormon some tune, at a safe distance from him, of course.

  Vala stopped talking and seized Wolff's arm. He started to jerk away, thinking that she meant to try some trick. But she was looking upwards with alarm and so was Rintrah.