Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (2 page)

That is all to the good because it plucks at the strings of our unconscious mind, that part of the collective unconscious which contains these primal stories. But the music brought forth from the plucking has notes which would be strange to the ears of the ancients. They knew nothing of time travel, of voyages to the distant stars, of the fearfully destructive weapons in this story, of other dimensions, of computers, of superstrings.

They did know about shape-changing. This concept must have been popular among the Old Stone Age people long before literature was invented. In fact, it was universal among the preliterates encountered in modern times. Such stories must have existed since humans began to speak.

I also suppose you could say that the concept of other dimensions was foreshadowed in the ideas of Heaven and Hell, of the underground afterlives of the ancient Egyptian and Greek religions, of the Tir na nOg, the other world of Irish myth. But these did not have a scientific or pseudo-scientific rationale. They belonged strictly to the supernatural.

The hero, Clive Folliot, is a man of whom I approve as a Ulysses or Parzival. He starts off with a quest for his lost brother and ends up being something he had not dreamed of when he began his long painful search. In fact, he could not have imagined such a quest because he did not know, could not have known, that such things could exist. Nor had he ever read about them in the wildest novel that had ever come his way.

Wildness of imagination is, I believe, one of my traits. The book at hand, the entire series, certainly reflects that aspect of my character and so displays the "spirit" of my writings.

Herein is a wild book in the best sense of the word. Like all wild things, its actions cannot be predicted. It is full of wonders and surprises.

 

Philip José Farmer

 

For a moment he was too dazzled by whiteness to notice anything else. Not the cold, not the wind, not the clouds that swirled and dived overhead like living things. All of these he would notice—but not yet.

Clive Folliot clasped his hands to his eyes.

It was as if he had been struck by a solid mass of light, a pure essence of undifferentiated color so overwhelming that it forced its way past the irises of his eyes and filled his whole skull. His brain reeled before the dazzling onslaught. He grew dizzy, felt himself stagger, folded onto his knees.

Instinctively, he dropped one hand, resting his knuckles on the hard surface to give himself a sense of balance, to assure himself that he would not fall prone. If he permitted himself to do that, he feared, he might slide, tumble, roll into nothingness.

His sense of direction had been snatched away from him.

He had no inkling of east or west, of up or down. He felt as if he might plunge into the earth itself, or into the sky.

He forced the fingers of his other hand apart. Between them the whiteness still smote at him, but he was able now to control it somewhat. And his eyes were adjusting. Recovered from the initial shock of unbearable lightness, they were beginning to provide him with a fuzzy image of the world into which he had fallen.

Whiteness in all directions. Whiteness above and below.

And now be began to notice other things. Now he noticed the cold, and now he noticed the wind that stung his cheeks and hands, and now' he threw back his head and squinted at the sky above him. Shards and fragments of cloud still swirled overhead, chasing one another like ferocious beasts in cannibalistic pursuit.

Was this the ninth level of the Dungeon? A wilderness of windswept, frigid whiteness? His mind returned to his first entry into the Dungeon, that strange world (or series of worlds—he could never be certain even of that) where he had wandered for he knew not how long.

His first entry into the Dungeon had occurred in the Sudd, that mystery-laden swamp north of the Equatorian lake country where he had sought the answer to his brother Neville's disappearance. Neville, who had set out to find the headwater of the White Nile and vanished from the continent of Africa and the face of the Earth.

Traveling with Quartermaster Sergeant Horace Hamilton Smythe and the ancient and wizened Sidi Bombay, Clive had found himself tumbling through a rock like a great shining diamond with a heart of pulsing ruby, into a world of blackness and mystery. The Sudd had been a place of prostrating heat, and the Dungeon…

The first level of the Dungeon, the World of Q'oorna, had been a world of blackness. Black earth, black vegetation, black landscapes through which black rivers wound beneath eternally black skies. Overhead the enigmatic spiral of brilliant stars.

Clive had made his way through eight levels of the Dungeon, and now he found himself in what seemed to be the ninth. The ninth: this world of blinding whiteness and numbing cold.

The wind keened in his ears, but somehow through that keening he heard another sound, a sound like the buzzing of an engine. He was able to scan the sky, by this time, without recoiling in pain from the sheer burning brilliance of its whiteness. He turned slowly on his heel, scanning the sky until he caught a glint.

It came again.

He was able to identify it with the source of the buzzing.

And now he was able to see it as a black speck against the grayish whiteness. A speck that grew and took shape.

It resembled a cross, and for a moment he feared that he was going mad, was experiencing a religious hallucination, but then as it grew larger he was able to make out a tail structure, and a whirring disk at its front end that he knew was an aerial screw. A propeller, his great-great-granddaughter Annabelle had called it.

It was an aeroplane, its configuration and painted markings identifying it as the same Nakajima 97 in which Annie had escaped the Japanese encampment at New Kwajalein Atoll back on level—He couldn't even remember which level of the Dungeon they had been on when they had encountered the Imperial Japanese marine detachment.

The Nakajima waggled its wings.

Clive waved his hand in response.

The aeroplane dipped lower. He could see Annie in its cockpit, her hands on the Nakajima's controls. He waved both arms frantically. Annie raised one hand and returned the greeting. Clive could actually make out her features, see her smiling at him.

And then the Nakajima disappeared.

There was little or no sound—possibly the faintest of
pops
that was drowned out by the keening polar wind. There was a wink of colored light, a lurid purple that faded to lavender and then disappeared.

And the Nakajima was gone. There remained a small, glowing spot in the sky, as if a seaman's distress flare had burned and died. Then that was gone, and there was a tiny fluff of cloud that accelerated, and faded, and then was totally gone with the wind.

Clive blinked and rubbed his eyes. Had the aeroplane been there? He had thought at first that he was experiencing a religious hallucination. Clearly, that was not the case. But had this been a hallucination of another sort? Had his tortured mind and half-blinded eyes conjured up the illusion of the aeroplane?

Or had the Dungeon added still another puzzle—and potentially, still another horror—to its long roll-call of mysteries?

Through the whirling wind a softer sound seemed to whisper, then to grow louder. It was a metallic clicking, a mechanical, almost metronomic clattering.

Clive spun and saw something that looked like a child's spring-driven toy moving across the ice toward him. At first glance it appeared tiny, but as it approached him more closely he realized that it was neither tiny nor toy-like, but was in fact larger than he. The clicking sounds had come from the contact of its metallic feet with the surface of the ice.

"Clive Folliot! Being Clive Folliot!"

The voice was mechanical and uninflected, but Clive recognized it at once and felt his heart leap with joy. "Chang Guafe!"

"It pleases me to see you still functioning, Being Clive!"

"And it pleases me to see you as well, old friend. I feared that I was alone, stranded here on the ninth level of the Dungeon. Chang Guafe, did you see the aeroplane with Annie in it?"

"Is that where we are—the ninth level? No, Being Clive, I saw no aeroplane."

Clive turned slowly, surveying the unbroken vista of whiteness. If only Chang Guafe had arrived minutes earlier, even seconds earlier, he could have verified Clive's sighting of the Nakajima. He might have been unable to prevent its subsequent disappearance, but at least he could have told Clive that he was not mad. "The ninth level," Clive muttered. "Where else could we be?"

Chang Guafe lifted his shoulders in a hideous parody of a shrug. When Clive had first encountered the alien cyborg, it had been able to change its shape almost at will, extruding new mechanical parts and reconfiguring its organic components to suit the needs of the moment. The Dungeonmasters, those enigmatic manipulators of the destinies of uncounted victims, had crippled Chang Guafe's ability. But perhaps Chang Guafe had overcome the handicap. A being of the immense will and intelligence of Chang Guafe might overcome almost anything. Almost anything. Almost, almost…

"A good question, Being Clive." Chang Guafe nodded his head, artificial sensors reflecting the whiteness. Although the sun was not clearly visible through the cloud cover, it could be seen as a glowing patch of brightness not far above the horizon. "We learned that the Dungeon is of nine levels, and we traveled together through eight of them. It would seem to follow, then, that we have reached the ninth and final level. Is it, then, a featureless wilderness of whiteness? That seems an unsuitable anticlimax to our long adventure."

"But if this is not the ninth level…" Clive swung one hand in a circle, taking in their white surroundings with the gesture. "If this is not the ninth level of the Dungeon," he resumed, "then what is it? Where can we be? Why were we brought here, and what can we do about it?"

A violent shiver ran through him, making him realize for the first time how very cold he was. He blew on his hands to warm them, then drew another breath and released it. The exhalation plumed away like a streamer of smoke. He wore only the clothes he had worn on the eighth level of the Dungeon—hardly an adequate costume for his present icy environment.

What ignominy, if he should die here, alone, of exposure to the cold. If he should die here of exposure after all the perils of the Dungeon, the battles with men and with monsters and at one point with the very demons of Hell…

But an idea struck him. "Chang, you are the possessor of senses varied and keen beyond the human. Do you think—"

"—that somewhere," Chang Guafe continued Clive's thought, "maybe even somewhere nearby, there is more to this world than featureless whiteness?"

"Exactly! Something, perhaps, hidden by the glare."

"Stand by, Being Clive. I will see what I can see!"

"Have you regained any of your ability to change yourself?"

Chang Guafe uttered a hideous grating sound. The portion of the alien that Clive thought was a mouth curved into what Clive thought was a smile. "You have seen Hell itself, Being Clive, and you know something of the torments of the damned. Compared to the pain of my recovery, my friend, the torments of the damned are the pleasures of a sprat's outing. But yes, Being Clive, I have overcome the affliction placed upon me. And I shall avenge every twinge of pain that my recovery cost! But for now—behold, my friend!"

Before Clive's eyes, Chang Guafe underwent an amazing transformation. He spread his mechanical limbs like a giant spider—like the alien Shriek, Clive realized with a pang of loss—and steadied himself on the ice. Like a telescope extending, Chang Guafe extended his neck up and up until it towered twice the height of a man and then some.

Strange devices were extruded from Chang Guafe's head, feathery filaments like the antennae of African moths, and glittering, multifaceted viewers like the astonishing eyes of a fly or a honeybee. Slowly Chang Guafe rotated his head, turning it in a manner that would have been impossible to any ordinary living creature but that seemed effortless and natural to this being who was as much machine as he was organism.

At last the head completed its rotation and came to a halt. The telescoping neck retracted until the strange configuration of organs and devices that passed for Chang Guafe's face was approximately level with Clive Folliot's eyes.

"You were right, Being Clive." Chang Guafe nodded solemnly. "Beneath our feet the ice extends far downward until it comes to water little warmer than itself. But yonder"—and he raised a limb, using a clawlike extrusion as if it were a pointing finger—"the ice rises as tall as a bungalow. It is as if an iceberg had been captured and held in place within this great ice floe. And within that iceberg—"

"Is what?" Clive could not contain his eagerness.

"I could not tell in detail, but my sensors indicate an irregularity of density."

Clive was crestfallen. "An irregularity of density, Chang Guafe. And what does that mean?" Clive clutched his fists in his armpits, trying to avoid frostbitten fingers. He stamped his feet to keep them from freezing. He could last a while longer here on the ice, but only a while. And then…

"I will put it another way," the cyborg grated mechanically. "If the iceberg were a solid block, there would be very little variation in its density. Instead, I detected great variation. It is my inference, then, that since this variation includes zones of greater density than ordinary frozen water, the iceberg contains objects, artifacts, or even creatures frozen within itself."

Chang Guafe drew his legs up beneath his body, raising his torso and head above the ice so that he glared down into Clive Folliot's haggard face.

"The iceberg also contains pockets of far lesser density than ordinary frozen water. Pockets of so little density, I infer that they actually contain air. They may be either caves or rooms."

Caves or rooms! The iceberg might contain a means of contact with humanity, with civilization. Perhaps with the Q'oornans or with the greater masters of the Dungeon, the Chaffri, the Ren, even the most powerful and mysterious of all, those beings known as the Gennine—said by some to be the actual creators of the Dungeon.