Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (38 page)

Something swept past him in the mist. He couldn't tell what it was—a creature that dwelt in the eternal grayness of this place, to be sure. A bird or bat? Perhaps even some fishlike being that drew nourishment from the mist as fish did from water, and that swam through the attenuated medium as fish swam in the sea.

He continued on; something brushed against his leg. He reached to feel it, but whatever it was had fled at the first contact. He bent to see if he could determine the composition of the surface upon which he was walking, but the mist diffused his vision and the glow emanating from the ground dazzled his eyes when he leaned far over.

He walked on. There was no sense of fatigue, at least as yet, nor of hunger or thirst. He seemed to be trekking across a wasteland in which time as well as direction had lost their meaning.

He heard more sounds. Remote sounds, difficult to identify and impossible to locate. Something that might have been a whispered conversation, punctuated by titterings and hushing sounds. Something that might have been the growl of a large animal—or of an animal-like man.

The sound of running water, once more. A sound like that of a stream pouring over a cliff into a pool.

The ground rose, and before long he broke through the surface of the mist, and continued to climb and to climb until he realized that the ground itself had risen above the mist as well. It was of a distinct yellow color, with a surface more like smooth glass than of rock or soil, and it glowed from within, a glow that seemed to pulsate with a subtle, almost indistinguishable beat.

The gray tree trunks rose at irregular intervals from the yellow land. As Clive continued to climb he found that a stream flowed from higher on the hillside. After a while the land began to have a rougher, granular composition, closer to that of true earth. Rocks in the streambed bore coatings of yellowish lichen and slime; tiny bugs scuttled about, and small creatures swam in the water.

He lowered himself to his belly and tasted the stream. It was clean and he felt freshened and energized by the water.

He crossed the stream, letting it lap around the bottoms of his boots. He came to an opening in the hillside and without hesitation stepped into it. If some peril awaited, he would face that. He had grown at once more daring and more fatalistic; he had faced too many perils, gambled with his life too many times to be concerned with one more danger, one more risk.

A great machine whirred in the center of a cavernous room. A tiny man stepped from behind it, his hairless scalp shining pinkly in the diffuse light, his thick, rimless spectacles glinting. He was dressed entirely in white.

"Welcome to Gennine, Clive Folliot." He nodded in a friendly fashion.

"This is Gennine?"

"It is."

"And you are the mind behind all I have seen? The master of the Dungeon? Of the Chaffri and the Ren alike? It is you who have interfered with the lives of beings on a thousand worlds?"

The tiny man cackled. He could hardly have been taller than Clive's collarbone, and his voice and face indicated that he was very, very old.

"No, Clive Folliot. I am but a servant. A mechanician."

"Then tell me whom you serve!"

"Find out for yourself."

The old man gestured, and Clive saw that an archway beyond the great machine led on to a distant, cavernous gallery. Clive crossed the room of the machine, feeling a peculiar tug as he passed it, as if his whole being were somehow twisted in a direction he had never before imagined.

Through the archway he found himself face to face with a goliath who towered above Clive as Clive had towered above the wizened man who tended the machine.

The giant roared and swung a great club at Clive.

Clive stepped aside and the club struck the ground where he had stood a split-second before. "If you please," Clive murmured. He gestured at the giant and a bolt of blood-red energy leaped like a wavering thread of lightning from the tip of his finger to the giant.

The giant seemed bathed in electricity. His face bore a look not of pain but of startlement. He writhed, then collapsed to the ground, where he shriveled and shrank until there was only a pile of charred rags and the shattered remnants of a charred and splintered club where the giant had been.

Clive picked through the rags. There was no flesh or bone there. He rose and continued.

A centurion in Roman armor confronted him.

"Halt!" the centurion commanded.

"No," Clive responded softly. He repeated his gesture even as the Roman hefted a metal-tipped spear. The Roman glowed in the ruddy emanation for the count of a half-dozen heartbeats. Then he fell to the ground and shriveled until only armor and cloth and horsehair-crested helmet and shortsword and spear remained.

Clive confronted a Bwaka warrior from central Africa armed with an eccentrically shaped throwing knife.

A Frankish chief with a
francisca
flying axe.

A tribesman of Borneo with poisoned blowpipe.

A Naga with
dao
sword.

A German trooper with wheel-lock pistol.

A Maori with
toki
war-adz.

A fighting man with a Persian mace.

An Indian with a whirling flail.

A phalanx of Amazons.

He gestured and moved on.

A row of the writhing, tentacled beasts he had first encountered on Q'oorna. Ren.

A battalion of scarab-mantises. Chaffri.

Clive sighed, waved, moved on.

Another exit from the cavern and he stood on a cliff overlooking a desolate landscape of naked trees and drifting mist. He felt as if he had wandered into a purgatory—nay, a limbo—where he would face challenge after challenge, meet each in turn, triumph over every foe, and accomplish… nothing.

A mechanical voice grated in his ear. "You look disappointed, old friend."

He turned with a gasp. "Chang Guafe!"

The half-alien, half-mechanical being made the grating noise that passed for its laughter. "It pleases me to see you again, Clive Folliot."

"I was overjoyed to see you escape from beneath the polar sea, Chang Guafe—but how did you get here? From distant Earth to this remote edge of the cosmos?"

"Easily enough when one can control one's configuration as I can, Clive Folliot. And you? And our companions?"

"Most are well," Clive said. "Some are dead."

"In time we all die," Chang Guafe replied. "Sooner or later—it's only a matter of sooner… or later."

"But we have reached the center of the spiral of stars," Clive said. "I thought that this would be the grand headquarters of the Gennine. I thought that after all our travail, once here we would confront our ultimate foe. We, or… I. For I did not expect to see you here, Chang Guafe. For all that you are a welcome sight."

"This is not the ultimate headquarters of the Gennine, Clive."

"Is it not the center of the spiral?"

"It is the nature of the spiral to change. Stars make their way from the edge to the center… from the center to the edge. No, my old friend. The center has yet to be reached."

"Can we get there?"

Chang Guafe gestured upward with a metallic appliance. "There is the home of the Master of the Gennine, Clive Folliot. And you are the Master of the Ordolite. You are known throughout the universe. Beings uncounted—races uncounted—are watching you."

"I did not ask for this. I did not want it."

"You did not ask to be born. The same thing, Folliot."

Clive nodded.

"Watch this." Chang Guafe began to change his shape. Extrusions and devices appeared on his carapacelike exterior skin. Plates scraped and gears whirled. An eyestalk taller than a man popped from between two rollers, swung in a circle above Chang Guafe, and pointed back so he could observe his own work from the outside.

"Now, Folliot. You can travel in style."

Chang Guafe had transformed himself into a sleek vehicle surmounted by a transparent canopy and cockpit into which Clive gingerly climbed.

"Hold on."

Chang Guafe launched himself into the air.

Clive felt a surge as Chang Guafe accelerated away from the yellowish, mist-covered landscape. He peered back over his shoulder, wondering what ancient events had transpired on the star-world, who the aged man with the glittering spectacles could be. But there was no time to ponder.

A spectral figure loomed before them. It took Clive a moment to realize that the titanic being was of human form, so huge was it. It took him still longer to realize that despite its size—Chang Guafe and Clive could have fit into its fist like a toy—the figure was that of an infant in swaddling clothes.

"Turn aside! Turn aside, Chang Guafe!"

Instruments were extruded from the panel before Clive, as Chang Guafe adapted himself further to the role of aerial vehicle. The instruments were similar to those used by the pilot of a small boat, and Clive seized the steering device and swung away from the infant.

They confronted another gigantic figure. This time he adjusted his sight more quickly to it, and realized more quickly that it was a boy dressed in the fashion of his own childhood.

He swung away from it, tugging back at one control, swinging another to the side, guiding his host-craft above the boy, only to confront another giant figure, another youth, this one apparently of seventeen. Dark of hair, lanky of build, struggling manfully—Clive could not suppress a grin—to raise a straggly mustache.

Again and again Clive swerved, each time facing another figure, each older, each gigantic. A lad of nineteen years or so, dressed as for Cambridge. A bravo in his middle twenties, wearing the uniform of a lieutenant of Her Majesty's Horse Guards. A substantial figure in his thirties garbed in tropical pongee and pith helmet.

And others. One of forty-odd, putting on a small paunch, and one in his fifties, with graying hair and deeply lined face, and one in his sixties, bald of pate and sunken of eye.

They surrounded Clive, whichever way he swung the controls of his ship.

Clive undid a latch and swung back the glass canopy that covered his place. He climbed from the cockpit and closed the canopy behind him. The medium in which Chang Guafe drifted was strange—it seemed as if Clive were floating in it like a fly caught in a bowl of syrup; and yet he was able to move freely, like a diver beneath the sea.

As he watched, Chang Guafe reconfigured himself. "I have done all that I can for you, Clive. You are the Master of the Ordolite. It is now for you to triumph—or to fail."

A clawlike arm emerged from Chang Guafe. It made a peculiarly human gesture, shaking hands with Clive Folliot. Then it folded back into the alien cyborg. Panel after panel folded, then turned, then folded again. Chang Guafe became smaller and smaller until there was nothing left of him but a metallic cube the size of a small dispatch case. Then that folded in upon itself and, with a small popping sound, disappeared altogether.

Uncounted giant figures stood pointing at Clive Folliot. Pointing at him from above and beneath, from every side. And every one of them was himself, as infant or as youth or as wizened gaffer. Every one of them was himself. . "I am the Master of the Ordolite," he said to them softly.

"You are that," they chorused.

He began to drift toward the star-world that was the true center of the spiral.

His many other selves trailed behind him as if on single-file parade.

 

He stood on a glowing surface of pearl white, a surface that curved away and seemed to rise to a distant horizon. The appearance of this world was the same in whatever direction he faced. Left and right, above and below, there was nothing but glowing whiteness.

With a thought to find some feature or denizen of this world, he tried walking. A hundred yards or so in one direction. The only way he could measure distance was by counting paces, for there was neither object nor inhabitant by which to judge his location; the prospect at the end of his walk was identical to that at its inception.

"Are you here?" he called.

Surprisingly, his voice echoed. But there was no response. He searched his garment for an object with which to experiment, found a royal sovereign in his pocket, and threw it against the white surface that served here as earth. The glittering coin bounced back as high as his waist. He caught it with a sweep of his hand and returned it to his pocket.

He heard a distant buzzing sound, as of a single giant insect. Peering in all directions, hoping to locate the hornet or bee or whatever it was that had made the sound, he saw a distant speck against the featureless white sky. He squinted, shaded his eyes with one hand, strained to make out the speck.

It grew larger, accompanied by an increase in the loudness of the buzzing.

He recognized its shape—it was the Japanese machine which his descendant Annabelle Leigh had obtained at New Kwajalein Atoll. Even though there was no discernible source of illumination in this world, light glinted from the Nakajima as it tilted and turned in its aerial course.

Clive waved eagerly, and felt his heart leap with joy as the Nakajima waggled its wings. Annie had seen him! She was headed toward him! Based on the apparent size of the Nakajima and the pace at which it was growing, he knew that it would take a fair while to arrive, but he was overjoyed nonetheless.

He heard his name, called, and he whirled to find himself confronting a quartet of individuals.

There stood Amos Ransome, garbed in his dour clergyman's outfit of black frock-coat and white ecclesiastical collar. Beside him stood his sister or wife; her true identity had never been revealed. Lorena Ransome's hair was pulled back in a severe bun. Her dress was black, and covered her from neck to ground and from shoulder to wrist. But to Clive's astonishment, her face had been made up and painted like a hoyden's, with long, artificial eyelashes, unrealistic rosy spots on the cheeks, and lips the color of blood.

And the bodice of her dress had two circular cut-outs within which her tender skin was reddened with paint like that of an ancient Babylonian temple woman.