Philip Farmer - The Maker of Universes

She placed her hand on the horn and shivered again. “I know that it was Kickaha who gave you this, and that you can’t help it that you have it. But the Lord might not know it isn’t your fault. Or, even if he did, he might not care. He would be terribly angry if he thought you’d had anything to do with stealing it. He would do awful things to you; you would be better off if you ended yourself now rather than have the Lord get his hands on you.”

“Kickaha stole the horn? How do you know?”

“Oh, believe me, I know. It is the Lord’s. And Kickaha must have stolen it, for the Lord would never give it to anyone.”

“I’m confused,” Wolff said. “But maybe we can straighten it all out someday. The thing that bothers me right now is, where’s Kickaha?”

Chryseis pointed toward the mountain and said, “The gworl took him there. But before they did…”

She covered her face with her hands; tears seeped through the fingers.

“They did something to him?” Wolff said.

She shook her head. “No. They did something to… to…”

Wolff took her hands from her face. “If you can’t talk about it, would you show it to me?”

“I can’t. It’s… too horrible. I get sick.”

“Show me anyway.”

“I’ll take you near there. But don’t ask me to look at… her… again.”

She began walking, and he followed her. Every now and then she would stop, but he would gently urge heron. After a zigzag course of over half a mile, she stopped. Ahead of them was a small forest of bushes twice as high as Wolff’s head. The leaves of the branches of one bush interlaced with those of its neighbors. The leaves were broad and elephant-earshaped, light green with broad red veins, and tipped with a rusty fleur-de-lys.

“She’s in there,” Chryseis said. “I saw the gworl… catch her and drag her into the bushes. I followed… I…” She could talk no more.

Wolff, knife in one hand, pushed the branches of the bushes aside. He found himself in a natural clearing. In the middle, on the short green grass, lay the scattered bones of a human female. The bones were gray and devoid of flesh, and bore little toothmarks, by which he knew that the bipedal vulpine scavengers had gotten to her.

He was not horrified, but he could imagine how Chryseis must have felt. She must have seen part of what had taken place, probably a rape, then murder in some gruesome fashion. She would have reacted like the other dwellers in the Garden. Death was something so horrible that the word for it had long ago become taboo and then dropped out of the language. Here, nothing but pleasant thoughts and acts were to be contemplated, and anything else was to be shut out.

He returned to Chryseis, who looked with her enormous eyes at him as if she wanted him to tell her that there was nothing within the clearing. He said, “She’s only bones now, and far past any suffering.”

“The gworl will pay for this!” she said savagely. “The Lord does not allow his creatures to be hurt! This Garden is his, and any intruders are punished!”

“Good for you,” he said. “I was beginning to think that you may have become frozen by the shock. Hate the gworl all you want; they deserve it. And you need to break loose.”

She screamed and leaped at him and beat on his chest with her fists. Then she began weeping, and presently he took her in his arms. He raised her face and kissed her. She kissed him back passionately, though the tears were still flowing.

Afterward, she said, “I ran to the beach to tell my people what I’d seen. But they wouldn’t listen. They turned their backs on me and pretended they hadn’t heard me. I kept trying to make them listen, but Owisandros”—the ram-horned man who had been talking with the raven—“Owisandros hit me with his fist and told me to go away. After that, none of them would have anything to do with me. And I… 1 needed friends and love.”

“You don’t get friends or love by telling people what they don’t want to hear,” he said. “Here or on Earth. But you have me, Chryseis, and I have you. I think I’m beginning to fall in love with you, although I may just be reacting to loneliness and to the most strange beauty I’ve ever seen. And to my new youth.”

He sat up and gestured at the mountain. “If the gworl are intruders here, where did they come from? Why were they after the horn? Why did they take Kickaha with them? And who is Kickaha?”

“He comes from up there, too. But I think he’s an Earthman.”

“What do you mean, Earthman? You say you’re from Earth.”

“I mean he’s a newcomer. I don’t know. I just had a feeling he was.”

He stood up and lifted her up by her hands. “Let’s go after him.”

Chryseis sucked in her breath and, one hand on her breast, backed away from him. “No!”

“Chryseis, I could stay here with you and be very happy. For awhile. But I’d always be wondering what all this is about the Lord and what happened to Kickaha. I only saw him for a few seconds, but I think I’d like him very much. Besides, he didn’t throw the horn to me just because I happened to be there. I have a hunch that he did it for a good reason, and that I should find out why. And I can’t rest while he’s in the hands of those things, the gworl.”

He took her hand from her breast and kissed the hand. “It’s about time you left this Paradise that is no Paradise. You can’t stay here forever, a child forever.”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t be any help to you. I’d just get in your way. And… leaving… leaving I’d, well, I’d just end.”

“You’re going to have to learn a new vocabulary,” he said. “Death will be just one of the many new words you’ll be able to speak without a second thought or a shiver. You will be a better woman for it. Refusing to say it doesn’t stop it from happening, you know. Your friend’s bones are there whether or not you can talk about them.”

“That’s horrible!”

“The truth often is.”

He turned away from her and started toward the beach. After a hundred yards, he stopped to look back. She had just started running after him. He waited for her, took her in his arms, kissed her, and said, “You may find it hard going, Chryseis, but you won’t be bored, won’t have to drink yourself into a stupor to endure life.”

“I hope so,” she said in a low voice. “But I’m scared.”

“So am I, but we’re going.”

He took her hand in his as they walked side by side toward the roar of the surf. They had traveled not more than a hundred yards when Wolff saw the first gworl. It stepped out from behind a tree and seemed to be as surprised as they. It shouted, snatched its knife out, then turned to yell at others behind it. In a few seconds, a party of seven had formed, each gworl with a long curved knife.

Wolff and Chryseis had a fifty-yard headstart. Still holding Chryseis’ hand, the horn in his other hand, Robert Wolff ran as fast as he could.

“I don’t know!” she said despairingly. “We could hide in a tree hollow, but we’d be trapped if they found us.”

They ran on. Now and then he looked back: the brush was thick hereabouts and hid some of the gworl, but there were always one or two in evidence.

“The boulder!” he said. “It’s just ahead. We’ll take that way out!”

Suddenly he knew how much he did not want to return to his native world. Even if it meant a route of escape and a temporary hiding place, he did not want to go back. The prospect of being trapped there and being unable to return here was so appalling that he almost decided not to blow the horn. But he had to do so. Where else could he go?

The decision was taken away from him a few seconds later. As he and Chryseis sped toward the boulder, he saw several dark figures hunched at its base. These rose and became gworl with flashing knives and long white canines.