Philip Farmer - The Gates of Creation

Wolff’s beamer was knocked out of his hand by the blow of a drop of quicksilver. He stooped and picked it up and resumed his run. For a moment, he could not get into the hatchway because of the Lords jammed before it. They fought each other, cursed, and cried to Los. Some even cried out for their father, Urizen, or their long-dead mother.

For one wild second, Wolff thought of clearing the way for himself with the beamer. It was exactly what any of them, with the possible exception of Luvah, would have done. To stay out here was to be dead. Every bit of time counted.

Then whoever was the cause of the pile-up got through, and the others clawed and bit and scratched their way in.

Wolff went through the hatch in a dive, headfirst. Something touched his pants. His calf burned. There was a splashing noise, and hot mercury clung to the back of his head. He fell past the shallow ladder and hit the floor with his two hands, dropping the beamer before he hit. He absorbed most of the shock with his bent arms and then rolled over. He brought up against Palamabron, who was just starting down the second ladder. Palamabron yelled and pitched forward. Wolff, looking down the well, saw Palamabron on top of a pile of Lords. All were shouting and cursing. None, however, seemed to be hurt badly.

At another time Wolff would have laughed. Now he was too concerned with scraping the globules of hot mercury from his hair. He examined his leg to make sure that the hit there had only been glancing. Then he went on down the steps. It was best to get as far below as possible. If this were a heavy and steady mercury-drop shower, the entire upper decks could be destroyed. If the big gas-bladders were penetrated, good-bye forever to all.

Vala greeted him in the twilight of a gangplank by a spheroid cell. She was laughing. Her laughter was not hysteria but genuine amusement. He was sure that if there were enough light, he would be able to see her eyes shining with mirth.

“I’m glad that you find this funny,” he said. He was covered with Nichiddor blood, which was rapidly being carried off by his heavy sweating, and he was shaking. “You were always a strange one, Vala. Even as a child, you loved teasing the rest of us and playing cruel jokes upon us. And as a woman, you loved blood and suffering—in others—more than you loved love.”

“So I am a true Lord,” she said. “My father’s daughter. And, I might add, my brother’s sister. You were just like me, dear Jadawin, before you became the namby-pamby human Wolff, the degenerate half-Earthling.”

She came closer, and, lowering her voice, said, “It has been a long time since I have had a man, Jadawin. And you have not touched a woman since you came through the gate. Yet I know that you are like a he-goat, brother, and that you begin to suffer when a day passes without taking a woman to bed. Can you put aside your so-evident loathing of me—which I do not understand—and go with me now? There are a hundred hiding places in this island, dark and warm and private places where no one will disturb us. I ask you, though my pride is great.”

She spoke truly. He was an exceedingly strong and vigorous man. Now he felt longing come upon him, a longing that he had put aside every day by constant activity. When night came and he went to bed, he had bent his mind to plots against his father, trying to foresee a thousand contingencies and the best way to dispose of them.

“First the blood-feast and then the lust-dessert,” he said. “It’s not I who rouses you but the thrust of the blade and the spurt of blood.”

“Both do,” she said. She held out her hand to him. “Come with me.”

He shook his head. “No. And I want to hear no more of this. The subject is forever dead.”

She snarled, “As you will soon be. No one can…”

Vala turned and walked away, and when he next saw her, she was talking earnestly to Palamabron. After a while, the two walked off into the dimness of a corridor.

He thought for a moment of ordering them back. They were in effect deserting their posts. The danger from the Nichiddor seemed to be over, but if the mercury shower became heavier, the island could be badly crippled or destroyed.

He shrugged and turned away. After all, he had no delegated authority. The cooperation among the Lords was only a spoken agreement; there was no formal agreement of organization with a system of punishments. Also, if he tried to interfere, he would be accused of doing so because of jealousy. The charge would not be entirely baseless. He did feel a pang at seeing Vala go off with another man. And this was a measure of what he had once felt for her, that after five hundred years and what she had tried to do to him, he should care even the fraction of a bit.

He said to Dugarnn, “How long does a shower last?”

“About a half-hour,” the chief replied. “The drops are carried along with the black comets. The laughter of Urizen, we call them, since he must have created them. Urizen is a cruel and bloody god who rejoices in the sufferings of his people.”

Dugarnn did not have exactly the same attitude towards Urizen that the Lords did. In the course of the many thousands of years that the descendants of the trapped Lords had been here, the name of Urizen had become that of the evil god in the abutal pantheon. Dugarnn had no true idea of the universe in which he was born. To him, this world was the world, the only one. The Lords were demigods, sons and daughters of Urizen by mortal women. The Lords were mortal, too, though extraordinarily powerful.

There was an explosion, and Wolff feared for a moment that one of the gas-bladders at the far end of the island had been penetrated. One of the abutal said that a Nichiddor nest had gone up. Less protected than the island, it had received a concentration of drops, one bladder had blown up another, and in the chain reaction the whole nest was hurled apart.

Wolff went over to where Theotormon crouched in a corner. His brother looked up at him with hate and misery. He turned his head away when Wolff spoke to him. After a while, as Wolff squatted quietly by him, Theotormon began to fidget. He finally looked at Wolff and said, “Father told me that there are four planets that revolve in orbit about a central fifth. This is Appirmatzum, the planet on which is his stronghold. Each planet is about the size of this one, and all are separated from Appirmatzuin by only twenty thousand miles. This universe is not a recent one. It was created as one of a series by our father at least fifteen thousand years ago. They were kept hidden, their gates only being activated when Father wished to enter or leave one. Thus, the scanners failed to detect them.”

“Then that is why I’ve seen only three of the planets,” Wolff said. “The outer ones are at the corners of an equilateral quadrangle. The planet opposite is always hidden by Appirmatzum.”

He did not wonder at the forces which enabled such large bodies to be so relatively close and yet stay in undeviating paths. The science of the Lords was beyond his comprehension—as a matter of fact, it was beyond the understanding of any of the Lords. They had inherited and used a power the principles of which they no longer understood. They did not care to understand. It was enough that they could use the powers.

This very lack of knowledge of principles made the Lords so vulnerable at times. Each only had so many weapons and machines. If any were destroyed, lost, or stolen, a Lord could only replace them by stealing them from other Lords—if there were any still in existence. And the defenses they set up against other Lords always had holes in them, no matter how impregnable the defenses seemed. The vital thing was to live long enough while attacking to find these holes. So, no matter how powerless the group seemed at the moment, Wolff had hopes that he could win.