Stairway to Forever (14 page)

His mood was one of unbelievable exultation as he trundled down load on load of supplies to the sand world, knowing that he now must provide there for his other half, Danna. He could hardly wait to tell her of, then introduce her to the emptiness and freedom of this world of sand and surf and strange stars that he now considered his own.

He and Danna had spent much time in bed over the weekend, but not all that much of that time in sleeping, so he quickly drifted off to sleep on Sunday night, after she had phoned to let him know that she had arrived safely at her apartment. Then, sometime during the night, he found himself experiencing yet another of those vivid, incredibly real and utterly impossible dreams. As he lay there, he knew not whether he was truly awake or still asleep, but in either case, he knew without even opening his eyes that he was not alone in the big bed.

"Danna . . .?" he breathed, reaching out toward the other half of the bed. But his hand found not smooth, warm, delicate skin or silky hair. Instead, the fingers touched, sank into dense, plushy fur, their touch evoking a deep bass purring noise.

"Yes, my old and dear friend," he suddenly heard in a voice that he recalled from another fantastic dream, "enjoyment of one's mate is very pleasant, but there are other, even more important things that await your needed hand and powers, while you dawdle here or journey much of the length and all of the breadth of Pony Land, innocently unaware of the terrible dangers that dwell there, the horrible and most deadly creatures that stalk its flatnesses in search of meat. Here, make use of your paw and its so-useful extensions, and scratch my belly."

Fitz then thought that he opened his eyes to see his old pet cat, Tom, whose body he knew lay buried in the backyard, nearly a year dead, lying sprawled on the bed. Even as he watched, the big, blue-grey cat rolled onto his back and lay with his hind legs widely splayed and his forelegs folded down upon themselves on either side of his chest.

"Well, what are you waiting for? Scratch," said the

dead-alive cat. "Be helpful to me, at least, before you go down the gullet of Teeth and Legs, as you soon or late will, if you spend overmuch time on that fearsome plain."

"Tom," asked Fitz in bewilderment, "are . . . are you really talking to me?"

"No, not really," came the cat's caustic reply. "Actually, one of the chipmunks burrowed under this house is a ventriloquist. Of course I'm talking to you. I'm saying, 'Scratch my belly with your short, flat, blunt claws/ "

"I've seen nothing of a nature or size to threaten me on that plain," argued Fitz, while dutifully scratching the warm, living, furry belly of the cat he knew to be dead and moldering in a grass-grown grave marked by the statue of a sleeping cat carven from grey limestone. "Only the tracks of some beast that was, to judge by those tracks, the size of a leopard or a jaguar or, maybe, a puma."

"Those pad prints at the ponds at the verges of the lake were not those of any leopard or jaguar or puma, friend, they were mine. I have been watching you as you move about on that noisy, smelly, three-wheeled thing that you brought from this world. Someone has to try to keep you out of trouble until you come to the full knowledge of just who and what you are and to full realization of your inherent powers. But that will never happen if old Teeth and Legs eats you first, so cross that plain as fast as you can and come to the hills and forests, where you are needed, where your destiny awaits you."

Fitz left off scratching the cat now purring continuously, even as he somehow spoke words. The man took a forepaw between thumb and forefinger and eyed it, critically. "Yes, you're big enough, Tom. You weighed over twenty pounds. But whatever cat

left those prints by the water there, in the sand world, would dwarf a mere twenty-pound tomcat. Why, those prints were about as broad as my palm and so deep as to make me think that the owner of those feet weighed as much as ten times twenty pounds."

"You stopped scratching," the cat admonished. "Please start again. But yes, those tracks were mine. Your eyes see the Tom you remember, see me in the body that was mine in this world. But in that world, I am not so small and puny, though my color and my mind are unchanged."

"Your mind was as it now is in all the time before you . . . you died?" demanded Fitz. "Then why did you never talk to me like you now are doing?"

"Oh, but I did, and often," replied the purring cat. "It was just that then, before my old body died, you had had none of the experiences that resulted in the first dim beginnings of the reawakening of your mind and the vast powers it holds, so you could not hear my words, only the beast-noises that the powerless and savage strangers hear.

"You were overlong in awakening, my good old friend, for long and long, even in The Isle, where everything is conducive to the uses of powers, much time elapsed before you had gained—rather, regained—the abilities of seeing me, hearing me, even only as I was, as simple Strangers saw me in this world.

"But now, finally, your powers are beginning to manifest themselves. They are still slowed, however, slowed and stunted because you spend so much time in this world which is inimical to powers. You must be more in The Isle to become that which you can be, that which you must be, are you to fulfill your destiny. Stay as little as three moons in The Isle and

you will have it all back—your powers and, with them, the memories of all that was before, all that is now and all that is to be, with the help of you, the one you call Danna and others.

"But do not linger on the plain, old friend, else it is but a matter of time before a pair of Teeth and Legs finds you and deprives you of life and all those who depend upon you and your powers of a future. Come you, rather, directly to the hills and forests, where the Teeth and Legs never trespass."

Thinking of the toothiest beast he had seen in the sand world, Fitz asked. "This or these you call Teeth and Legs, are they like the huge crocodile that came after me on the beach?"

The cat's voice indicated a gentle amusement. "Old Kassandra? Of course not, she only eats sea creatures, like all her kind. It was just that she does not see too clearly, especially not on land. She took you at first for some robber after her eggs, but when I explained to her who and what you were, you notice, she stopped chasing you.

"No, the Teeth and Legs are much like you, in general shape, but much, much larger, covered in coarse hair and with long, wide, strong jaws filled with many big, long, sharp teeth. There are not and have never been many of them, else there would be no life at all upon the plain, and since they will feed upon anything that walks, swims, flies, hops or crawls, even others of their own kind, they seldom are seen in numbers, mostly alone. You will smell them, hopefully, before you see them. But beware, even ponies and the long-legs you think of as rat-tailed ostriches are hard-pressed to outrun one and I think that one might even outpace your noisy thing with three wheels. So cross the plain and come to the hills, where you will be safe from them. Much and many

depend upon you, so you must take care to preserve yourself for us."

When he arrived at the law offices in the city on Tuesday morning, just before the specified time of nine o'clock, a secretary came out and led him into the back of the suite, but not to Danna's office, rather to a much larger one, wherein stood a man about his own age, height and build, though he had silver-stippled black hair, vandyke and guardsman moustache.

The office itself looked much like a set from the movie El Cid —dark, heavy, intricately carved Spanish furnishings, Moorish rugs over highly polished hardwood flooring, drapes that resembled tapestries, arrangements of real-looking, medieval weapons and shields bedecking the walls, even a full suit of armor in one corner, its articulated gauntlets resting atop the pommel of a bastard-sword. Had Charlton Hes-ton suddenly burst into the room through one of the side doors, his dusty armor clanking, grasping a blood-streaked mate to that long, wide battle-brand, thought Fitz, he would not have looked in the least out of place or anachronistic.

The greying man, who rounded an oversized, dark-oaken desk and strode to meet him with outstretched hand, however, wore no period clothing and not one single piece of armor. He was dressed in an expensively tailored, very conservative three-piece suit, pin stripes of grey on a ground color of a blue so dark as to be almost black. His shirt was of a blue a few shades lighter than the suit, but still dark, and the tie alternated stripes of blue and burgundy. His gleaming black ankle boots were beautifully tooled and obviously of foreign cut and manufacture.

His grip was firm, though well-controlled as his

baritone voice. "Mister Fitzgilbert, I'm Pedro Goldfarb. You are most welcome, sir. Please come in and be seated, won't you. Danna Dardrey will be in shortly. It's a bit early in the day for me to take spirits, but if you would care to indulge, there's plenty here." He chuckled. "You name it, and I've most likely got it somewhere in this suite. Or would you rather join me in a cup of coffee?"

Fitz immediately liked the man, so he frowned and asked, "You're no bigger than me, true, but do you think we both could fit comfortably into just one cup?"

Goldfarb looked at him blankly for a split second, then he chuckled, and then he began to laugh and continued to do so until his dark-blue eyes were brimming with tears and his face had darkened until it almost matched the burgundy stripes of his tie. When he had wiped his eyes and stuffed the dark-blue linen handkerchief back in his pocket, he said, "Sorry, I wasn't ready for a bon mot that good so early. With your kind permission, I'll remember that one and use it. There's a judge I have in mind . . .

"But back to you. May I call you Fitz? Fine, you call me Pedro. Fitz, both Gus Tolliver and our own Danna told me that I'd like you and I do, no two ways about it. Besides," he grinned slyly, "I know up front you can afford our services, that we won't have to have your legs broken before we can collect our outrageous fees from you, and that last always warms the cockles of a hard-working ambulance chaser's heart toward a new client.

"Fitz, if I hadn't been so anxious to not put off meeting you, I'd have had you called and told to stay home today. For some strange reason," merriment twinkled from his eyes as he made a show of feigning complete innocence of any meaning behind his words,

"Mister Blutegel, his immediate supervisor and that man's supervisor, as well, were all summoned to the regional I.R.S. office this morning—some kind of consultation, one would assume—and the man in temporary charge of the local office is of the opinion that we should await the return of those three before we make the attempt to set up another appointment time, which suits my owti, somewhat-crowded schedule much better, I must say.

"I've looked over your files, accounts and tax returns, and I also had conversations yesterday with both Blutegel and Schabe. Yes, they can cause you trouble, Fitz. They most likely will cause you trouble and some amount of expense, barring a miracle from on high—and those seem to get rarer and rarer, in this old world of ours—but it's not anywhere nearly as bad as Blutegel and Schabe would have liked you to think it to be. Blutegel believes in and operates along the lines of pure terror tactics, figuring that a scared taxpayer will be a pliable taxpayer, far easier to manipulate and bamboozle with his normal thinking processes clouded by fear of notoriety and prison time. And the real sin of it all is that it often works, as well as that he and others like him have been allowed to get away with using Gestapo tactics in a supposedly free country."

He fell silent and opened an inlaid wooden box on his desk, then paused and asked, "You don't smoke at all? That's what I'm told."

"I used to," Fitz answered, "but I had to quit during a period when my circumstances were somewhat straitened, and I've never started it up again. But you feel free, if you wish, it doesn't bother me in the least, Pedro."

The attorney selected from out the box a medium-brown cheroot as long as a new pencil and just as

thin, removed one end with a clip from the box, then spent a few moments carefully lighting it with a golden lighter.

Twin streams of light-bluish smoke coming from the nostrils of his thin, high-bridged nose, he said, "I ask again, Fitz, do you want some hot coffee?"

Only moments after he had called on the intercom, the silver and fine-china coffee service was wheeled in on a serving cart by a young woman Fitz had not seen before, who wordlessly placed the tray atop the attorney's desk and wordlessly departed with the serving cart.

Savoring the fragrant steam arising from his cup, Fitz smiled and said, "You go first cabin all the way, don't you, Pedro? I'm beginning to wonder whether or not I really can afford your services."

The attorney laughed. "Oh, you can, you can, never fear. Remember, I'm Gus Tolliver's attorney, too, so I knew quite a good deal about you and your affairs, and especially your finances, long before you first set foot in this suite of offices, Fitz.

"But concerning your affairs, your finances, my new friend and client, it has been my sad experience with bureaucrats of any rank, stature or agency, that they do not take at all well being called to task by superiors when in the wrong; most especially, when in the wrong. For that reason, I think it might be wise if all of your dealings with these local bloodsuckers be through me or through Danna, for a while; otherwise, they will likely do everything within their scope to make you and keep you thoroughly miserable and very harried in pure retaliation for causing trouble for some of their staff."

Fitz shrugged. "Okay by me, Pedro, but I doubt 1*11 have much control over them; after all, they know my number and where I live, so if they decide

to harass me, there's damn-all I can do to stop them. Is there?"

"There certainly is," Goldfarb assured him confidently. "You can get beyond their reach for a while. Go on a trip—the farther, the better. You have holdings in South African gold, I recall, why not go there? It's beautiful country, you know. You could go on a safari, a long safari, come back with some zebra skins and stuffed antelope heads. Leave me or Danna power of attorney to handle your affairs and get going before they think to try to restrain your .movements . . . which those bastards do have the power to do, if they feel strongly enough to invoke it.