Maker of Universes (7 page)

Wolff jumped forward and thrust the end of his blade between two cartilaginous bosses and into the gworl’s thick neck. The muscles were thick and tough there, but not enough to stop the blade. Only when the steel severed the windpipe did it halt.

Wolff handed Chryseis the gworl’s knife. “Here, take it!”

She accepted it, but she seemed to be in shock. Wolff slapped her savagely until the glaze went from her eyes. “You did fine!” he said. “Which would you rather see dead, me or him?”

He removed the belt from the corpse and fastened it on himself. Now he had three knives. He scabbarded the bloody weapon, took the horn in one hand, Chryseis’ hand in the other, and began running again. Behind them, a howl arose as the first of the gworl came over the edge of the hill. However, Wolff and Chryseis had about thirty yards’ start, which they maintained until they reached the group of trees growing on the rim. Chryseis took the lead. She let herself face down on the rim and rolled over. Wolff looked over once before blindly following and saw a small ledge about six feet down from the rim. She had already let herself down the ledge and now was hanging by her hands. She dropped again, this time to a much more narrow ledge. But it did not end; it ran at a forty-five degree angle down the face of the cliff. They could use it if they faced inward against the stone cliff-wall and moved sideways, their hands spread to gain friction against the wall.

Wolff used both hands also; he had stuck the horn through the belt.

There was a howl from above. He looked up to see the first of the gworl dropping onto the ledge. Then he glanced back at Chryseis and almost fell off from shock. She was gone.

Slowly, he turned his head to see over his shoulder and down below. He fully expected to find her falling down the face of the cliff, if not already past it and plunging into the green abyss.

“Wolff!” she said. Her head was sticking out from the cliff itself. “There’s a cave here. Hurry.”

Trembling, sweating, he inched along the ledge to her and presently was inside an opening. The ceiling of the cave was several feet higher than his head; he could almost touch the walls on both sides when he stretched out his arms; the interior ran into the darkness.

“How far back does it go?”

“Not very far. But there’s a natural shaft, a fault in the rock, that leads down. It opens on the bottom of the world; there’s nothing below, nothing but air and sky.”

“This can’t be,” he said slowly. “But it is. A universe founded on physical principles completely different than those of my universe. A flat planet with edges. But I don’t understand how gravity works here. Where is its center?”

She shrugged and said, “The Lord may have told me a long time ago. But I’ve forgotten. I’d even forgotten he told me that Earth was round.”

Wolff took the leather belt off, slid the scabbards off it, and picked up an oval black rock weighing about ten pounds. He slipped the belt through the buckle and then placed the stone within the loop. After piercing a hole near the buckle with the point of his knife, he tightened the loop. He had only to buckle the belt, and he was armed with a thong at the end of which was a heavy stone.

“You get behind and to one side of me,” he said. “If I miss any, if one gets in past me, you push while he’s off-balance. But don’t go over yourself. Do you think you can do it?”

She nodded her head but evidently did not trust herself to speak.

“This is asking a lot of you. I’d understand if you cracked up completely. But, basically, you’re made of sturdy ancient-Hellenic stock. They were a pretty tough lot in those days; you can’t have lost your strength, even in this deadening pseudo-Paradise.”

“I wasn’t Achaean,” she said. “I was Sminthean. But you are, in a way, right. I don’t feel as badly as I thought I would. Only...”

“Only it takes getting used to,” he said. He was encouraged, for he had expected a different reaction. If she could keep it up, the two of them might make it through this. But if she fell apart and he had a hysterical woman to control, both might fall under the attack of the gworl.

“Speaking of which,” he muttered as he saw black, hairy, gnarled fingers slide around the corner of the cave. He swung the belt hard so that the stone at its end smashed the hand. There was a bellow of surprise and pain, then a long ululating scream as the gworl fell. Wolff did not wait for the next one to appear. He got as close to the lip of the cave ledge as he dared and swung the stone again. It whipped around the corner and thudded against something soft. Another scream came, and it, too, faded away into the nothingness of the green sky.

“Three down, seven to go! Provided that no more have joined them.”

He said to Chryseis, “They may not be able to get in here. But they can starve us out.”

“The horn?” He laughed. “They wouldn’t let us go now even if I did hand them the horn. And I don’t intend for them to get it. I’ll throw the horn into the sky rather than do that.”

A figure was silhouetted against the mouth of the cave as it dropped from above. The gworl, swinging in, landed on his feet and teetered for a second. But he threw himself forward, rolled in a hairy ball, and was up on his feet again. Wolff was so surprised that he failed to react immediately. He had not expected them to be able to climb above the cave and let themselves down, for the rock above the cave had looked smooth. Somehow, one had done it, and now he was inside, on his feet, a knife in hand.

Wolff whirled the stone at the belt-end and loosed it at the gworl. The creature flipped its knife at him; Wolff dodged but spoiled his aim of the stone. It flew over the furry bumpy head; the thrown knife brushed him lightly on his shoulder. He jumped for his own knife on the floor of the cave, saw another dark shape drop into the cave from above, and a third come around the corner of the mouth.

Something hit his head. His vision blurred, his senses grew dim, his knees buckled.

When he awoke, a pain in the side of his head, he had a frightening sensation. He seemed to be upside down and floating above a vast polished black disc. A rope was tied around his neck, and his hands were tied behind his back. He was hanging with his feet up in the empty air, yet there was only a slight tension of rope around his neck.

Bending his head back, he could see that the rope led upward into a shaft in the disc and that at the far end of the shaft was a pale light.

He groaned and closed his eyes, but opened them again. The world seemed to spin. Suddenly he was reoriented. Now he knew that he was not suspended upside down against all the laws of gravity. He was hanging by a rope from the bottom underside of the planet. The green below him was the sky.

He thought
, I should have strangled before now. But there is no gravity pulling me downward
.

He kicked his feet, and the reaction drove him upward. The mouth of the shaft came closer. His head entered it, but something resisted him. His motion slowed, stopped, and, as if there were an invisible and compressed spring against his head, he began to move back down. Not until the rope tightened again did he stop his flight.

The gworl had done this to him. After knocking him out, they had let him down the shaft, or more probably, had carried him down. The shaft was narrow enough for a man to get down it with his back to one wall and his feet braced against the other. The descent would scrape the skin off a man, but the hairy hide of the gworl had looked tough enough to withstand descent and ascent without injury. Then a rope had been lowered, placed around his neck, and he had been dropped through the hole in the bottom of the world.

There was no way of getting himself back up. He would starve to death. His body would dangle in the winds of space until the rope rotted. He would not then fall, but would drift about in the shadow cast by the disc. The gworl he had knocked off the ledge had fallen, but their acceleration had kept them going.

Though despairing because of his situation, he could not help speculating about the gravitational configuration of the flat planet. The center must be at the very bottom; all attraction was upward through the mass of the planet. On this side, there was none.

What had the gworl done to Chryseis? Had they killed her as they had her friend?

He knew then that however they had dealt with her, they had purposely not hung her with him. They had planned that part of his agony would be that of not knowing her fate. As long as he could live at the end of this rope, he would wonder what had happened to her. He would conjure a multitude of possibilities, all horrible.

For a long time he hung suspended at a slight degree from the perpendicular, since the wind held him steady. Here, where there was no gravity, he could not swing like a pendulum.

Although he remained in the shadow of the black disc, he could see the progress of the sun. The sun itself was invisible, hidden by the disc, but the light from it fell on the rim of the great curve and slowly marched along it. The green sky beneath the sun glowed brightly, while the unlit portions before and after became dark. Then a paler lighting along the edge of the disc came into his sight, and he knew that the moon was following the sun.

It must he midnight
, he thought.
If the gworl are taking her someplace, they could he some distance out on the sea. If they’ve been torturing her, she could he dead. If they’ve hurt her, I hope she’s dead.

Abruptly, while he hung in the gloom beneath the bottom of the world, he felt the rope at his neck jerk. The noose tightened, although not enough to choke him, and he was being drawn upward toward the shaft. He craned his neck to see who was hauling him up, but he could not penetrate the darkness of the mouth of the shaft. Then his head broke through the web of gravity-like surface tension on water, he thought—and he was hoisted clear of the abyss. Great strong hands and arms came around him to hug him against a hard, warm, furry chest. An alcoholic breath blew into his face. A leathery mouth scraped his cheek as the creature hugged him closer and began inching up the shaft with Wolff in its arms. Fur scraped on rock as the thing pushed with its legs. There was a jerk as the legs came up suddenly and took a new hold, followed by another scrape and lunge upward.

“Ipsewas?” Wolff said.

The zebrilla replied, “Ipsewas. Don’t talk now. I have to save my wind. This isn’t easy.”

Wolff obeyed, although he had a difficult time in not asking about Chryseis. When they reached the top of the shaft, Ipsewas removed the rope from his neck and tossed him onto the floor of the cave.

Now at last he dared to speak. “Where is Chryseis?”

Ipsewas landed on the cave floor softly, turned Wolff over, and began to untie the knots around his wrists. He was breathing heavily from the trip up the shaft, but he said, “The gworl took her with them to a big dugout and began to sail across the sea toward the mountain. She shouted at me, begged me to help her. Then a gworl hit her, knocked her unconscious, I suppose. I was sitting there, drunk as the Lord, half-unconscious myself with nut juice, having a good time with Autonoe—you know, the akowile with the big mouth.

“Before Chryseis was knocked out, she screamed something about you hanging from the Hole in the Bottom of the World. I didn’t know what she was talking about, because it’s been a long time since I was here. How long ago I hate to say. Matter of fact, I don’t really know. Everything’s pretty much of a haze anymore, you know.”

“No, I don’t,” Wolff said. He rose and rubbed his wrists. “But I’m afraid that if I stay here much longer, I might end up in an alcoholic fog, too.”

“I was thinking about going after her,” Ipsewas said. “But the gworl flashed those long knives at me and said they’d kill me. I watched them drag their boat out of the bushes, and about then I decided, what the hell, if they killed me, so what? I wasn’t going to let them get away with threatening me or taking poor little Chryseis off to only the Lord knows what. Chryseis and I were friends in the old days, in the Troad, you know, although we haven’t had too much to do with each other here for some time. I think it’s been a long time. Anyway, I suddenly craved some real adventure, some genuine excitement—and I loathed those monstrous bumpy creatures.

“I ran after them, but by then they’d launched the boat, with Chryseis in it. I looked around for a
histoikhthys
, thinking I could ram their boat with it. Once I had them in the water, they’d be mine, knives or not. The way they acted in the boat showed me that they felt far from confident on the sea. I doubt they can even swim.”

“I doubt it, too.” Wolff said.

“But there wasn’t a
histoikhthys
in reaching distance. And the wind was taking the boat away; it had a large lateen sail. I went back to Autonoe and took another drink. I might have forgotten about you, just as I was trying to forget about Chryseis. I was sure she was going to get hurt, and I couldn’t bear to think about it, so I wanted to drink myself into oblivion. But Autonoe, bless her poor boozed-up brain, reminded me of what Chryseis had said about you.”

“I took off fast, and looked around for awhile, because I couldn’t remember just where the ledges were that led to the cave. I almost gave up and started drinking again. But something kept me going. Maybe I wanted to do just one good thing in this eternity of doing nothing, good or evil.”

“If you hadn’t come, I’d have hung there until I died of thirst. Now, Chryseis has a chance, if I can find her. I’m going after her. Do you want to come along?”

Wolff expected Ipsewas to say yes, but he did not think that Ipsewas would stick to his determination once the trip across the sea faced him. He was surprised, however.

The zebrilla swam out, seized a projection of shell as a
histoikhthys
sailed by, and swung himself upon the back of the creature. He guided it back to the beach by pressing upon the great nerve spots, dark purple blotches visible on the exposed skin just back of the cone-shaped shell that formed the prow of the creature.

Wolff, under Ipsewas’ guidance, maintained pressure on a spot to hold the sailfish (for that was the literal translation of
histoikhthys
) on the beach. The zebrilla gathered several armloads of fruit and nuts and a large collection of the punchnuts.