Masters of the Maze Read online

  The little wind danced across the field, and all the golden flowers briefly bowed their heads. Nate tried to speak, but his lips were dry and his throat was raw.

  “No, you shall not,” the third fair woman said. “You would not remain, you never remain. Besides, he shall not go with you. Nathaniel. Nathaniel. There is always a menace. There is always a war. It is futile to become engaged, as futile as to try the impossible escape of introspection. Leave them and come with me, Nathaniel, for I can take you to a point beyond the circle, to a time before time, a place only to be reached through me. We will be pre-Adam and pre-Eve, Nathaniel; god and goddess, Nathaniel; Shelomo and Shulamith, Solomon and Sulamite. On me, Nathaniel, you will beget a new race which need never fall into the errors of any of the old ones …

  “Come with me, Nathaniel — ”

  “Come with me — ”

  “Come with me — ”

  “Come …”

  He sat down on the fragrant ground and let the little wind ruffle his hair. When he looked up again, they were gone. He arose and trudged on and by and by he sighted the Lion Gate and he passed beneath its carven, stony lintel.

  • • •

  The next place was all black and white and something sniffed and snuffled and scuffled up ahead and made a noise of dragging fur and of scrabbling claws. Something very big. Something shadowy.

  Nate turned around and softly went past and beyond and behind the way he had come in; then he went around. He did not look back.

  • • •

  Now the arms of the Maze shuttled back and forth and in and out, like great flashings. He paused and listened intently, holding his breath. Everything stopped. He did not move. Six paces ahead of him, where he would have been had he moved, two surfaces came together in an annihilating crash. Then he moved. And passed through safely. Behind him, the wrack continued. Ahead all was serene.

  The man in the ragged turban addressed him in a French so odd and warbling that no Frenchman could have understood it. “Turn back,” he urged. “Turn back, O Ferenghi. For all that you must have embraced Al-Islam, or you would not dare to venture here, what will that avail you? There is cholera the length and breadth of the road to Mecca, hadji and ulema alike crawl upon their bellies like dogs in hopes of dying in the Sacred City. Turn back, O Ferenghi. There will be time enough for you to try the haj again. Has not the sultan’s capidan-pasha defeated the giaours at Lepanto? Turn back! Turn back!”

  The frightful sun beat down upon them. Nate shook his head, and staggered on. His overcoat upon his arm sank down as though filled with stones.

  The man in the ragged turban tottered on beside him. “Let not it be said that your death was on my head,” he pleaded. “Return at least to Jiddah, where there are other foreigners, and lodge there until the plague be stayed.”

  Nate said, “No …”

  “The brigand tribes are harrying the pilgrims like wolves. Those in the caravans are not safe; how then shall a single man on foot hope to escape?”

  Nate said nothing. He put his hand to his forehead. He went on.

  “Wellah!” cried the man. “There is water, the last for leagues and leagues. Will you not at least pause and drink and gain strength?”

  “No,” said Nate.

  The would-be guide threw up his hands. “This is caution thrice compounded,” he moaned. “Do you fear that the cholera has got into that little spring? It may be so. Stop — Stop for just a moment.” He fumbled in his robe, took out a leather bottle. “Here is water as pure as water ever was. I filled it at the Holy Well of Zam-Zam near the Kaaba, before leaving Mecca. The plague had not reached there. For the sake of the merit, I will share it with you. Drink, my brother. Drink, or you must die.”

  Nate shook his head. The man in the tattered turban grasped hold of him and thrust the wet, cool mouth of the water bottle to Nate’s parched and foul-tasting mouth. Nate shouldered him aside, the man stumbled, the bottle fell with gentle slowness so that at any moment he could have reached out and seized it, righted it. He went on. The bottle hit the sand with a thud. Water splashed, gurgled, was gone. By his side the man looked with sickened incredulity. The skin of his face stretched over an empty skull in which burned the two ghul-bright eyes of Shaitan the Accursed. And then he was gone, and the desert sands blew through his robe and rags.

  In the middle distance the sun of fire blazed up from the walls of long-hidden Iram, the City of Brass. That way Nate followed on his burning feet.

  • • •

  He passed on, from outside to outside, down endless corridors echoing with the witless whistlings of the mindless minotaurs, through gate after gate. He ceased to see places. He experienced conditions and states. Nausea that racked him without ceasing. Hunger which bit him in every sense and cell. Vertigo, making mockery of such illusions as up and down. Cold such as had never numbed man before, surely, without having killed him. He could barely hold the ward-stone, scarcely see through frozen eyes. But up from the meshy weave of pulsing lines shone the tiny not-yet disk of the Center. He was not really near it. But he was perceptibly less far away.

  The ward looked quite good on his table. The room was warm. He had dined well, there was a drink within reach, the manuscript in the typewriter was coming along just fine. He might have to tone it down a bit, but in general his description of the hashish-dream was calculated to convince any editor or reader who had never smoked or eaten hashish. It was, in fact, so vivid, that it almost for a moment had convinced Nate. Vast areas of it, blossoming like an evil flower, in the mind of his imagination, had not even reached the paper yet. Probably never would. There wasn’t room.

  He paused in his attack on the keyboard, stretched pleasurably. If some of the details escaped while he was doing so, never mind. He had plenty. There were just a few more pages. In fact, there were only a few more fictional-factual articles to go. And then, with his $4,000 in bank drafts, travelers checks, and plain old dirty cash money, he could kiss the local scene good-bye and take off for Coimbra, Calabria, Carpathia, Carniola, and all the rest of it, pausing a bit to kick a fallen leaf in Vallimbrosa. Some particular detail — as was so often the case — nagged and tugged against being forgotten. Piss on it. A writer had to be firm, when the spirit was upon him like this, not to stop and allow this to happen, or else he would be overwhelmed. Still, it could be annoying. He must be firm.

  Being firm, he got up to go to the bathroom. In the past he had found this often to be more helpful in forgetting than he could wish. Being firm, he knew that if he looked out the window he would forget important threads of his narrative.

  So he looked out the window and, by an immense effort of concentration, he recognized the two men casually coming up the street.

  Jack Pace and Major Flint.

  The apartment and street ceased to be. He was, like one of his own characters, on the face of a cliff. He turned and began to clamber up the rocky wall. The ping of a bullet sounded. Powdered rock spurted into his face. He shouldered his way into a cleft in the rocks. Outside, something swooped on leathery wings and breathed its rage at him out of a huge triangle of teethy, stinking mouth. He put his back to the rock behind him, pushed, inched up. And up. And up. Soon there was nothing behind to press and lever against. He had to grope and climb. A looming shadow warned him in time enough to squirm around and kick out. The claws at the wing tip ripped at him. The creature fell away below, eddied there a moment, flapped away. He had no doubt it would be back. Sping — ping!

  He turned his defenseless back and climbed with bleeding, splintered fingernails. The tiny pterodactyls bit and gibbered at him in their noisome nest. He kicked them aside and burrowed through the filthy, foul, unbelievably foul mass of clotted dung and bones and dirt. One hand reached free, reached through. Able to close his eyes, trying to breath through his mouth, he heard the parent-thing land on the ledge. He gave a great, desperate lunge. Behind him, the tunnel in the guano collapsed with a dusty thud. The pterodactyl clucked its discons
olate confusion.

  Nate looked at his guide. The rosy tint was fainter, the violet one deeper. He had never seen the disk of the Center fullface, of course, or even anything near it. But he had seen it grow from a line to a thin spindle. And now, now as he looked, there could be no doubt. The spindle had grown thinner.

  He had somewhere taken a wrong turning. He was heading away from, not toward the Center.

  He turned in his tracks. He stopped. If he turned his clothes inside out, or even if he didn’t, the stench didn’t matter — they’d serve as a pillow. He could rest a little. A little would suffice. It made no sense to think of “losing time.” There could be no question of that, not when time meant no more than space. There were no such constants. The only constants were the needs of his own body. It required food, it required rest. If he went on, he could not go on. This was the simplest equation.

  But he had to go on!

  He picked up his feet, took another reading, and started to start off again. Then he stopped. Ahead, far, far ahead, crossing his corridor at right angles, in steady single file, was a line of the tiny creatures he had seen in the cave in Red Fish Land. That is … no, of course: it was only the distance which made them appear tiny. If they were that tiny he would not be able to see them at all. Therefore, it followed that they must be full size.

  Chulpex.

  Part of an old proverb came into his mind. If you can’t go across, you must go around …

  Wearily, wearily, he turned and walked away again, in the wrong direction which was now and for the moment of the foreseeable present-future the right direction.

  • • •

  All the costumes were strange to his smarting eyes, but it was apparent that there was a wide variety of types, both of costumes and of people. Some glanced at him, but no one seemed more than mildly interested. Among those who were engaged to that degree at least, was a woman of white hair and erect carriage. She gave him a quizzical glance.

  “ ‘How dear to my heart are the scenes of my childhood,’ ” she said; adding, “Not really, though … Still, if I may be of help? I come from your future, if you want to put it that way. You do stink,” she said, not offensively.

  The pathway of the Maze seemed to shine faintly underneath the great stone slabs. Warm sun, blue sky.

  “Match you, quote for quote,” he offered, wearily. “ ‘And I have promises to keep …’ Also, not that it matters, ‘Where am I?’ ”

  Nodding, she gathered up the rich folds of her robe. “You’re in one of the several cities called Tarshish. Atlantis sank not very long ago. Almost everyone got away, though. Proto-Basques, for the greater part. That’s how I happened to come here. Linguist, you know. Glotto-chronology, to be precise. My paper would create the proverbial furor in academic circles, only of course I shan’t ever go back to write it I don’t intend to keep up with you,” she said, slowing her steps. “Your promises are not mine. But if you ever return, young man, and want to see me, ask for the House of the Golden Bull. It’s the biggest whorehouse on the coast, and I run it. A gift for languages and a firm grasp of double-entry bookkeeping are the secrets of my success. Bye-bye …”

  • • •

  The golden-glowing lines of the Mazeway led him straight into a grass-grown heap of slab near some old tin smelteries. He went on through and it was on an island in an oily sea, whose air reeked of iodine and sulphur and whose sky was smeared with the tail of a tremendous comet, that someone rose to bar his way.

  Curiously, he felt much less tired now.

  “Bigot,” said the other. “Chauvinist.”

  “How so?” Nate asked.

  “You come from a world racked with national and racial and religious and class hatreds. You cannot think these are good things.”

  “I don’t,” said Nate. “So why do you call me those names?”

  “You have condemned with almost no personal knowledge or experience a form of life different from your own, and on no better grounds than that it is a form of life different from your own. Therefore: bigot. Therefore: chauvinist.”

  The rufous sky burned and smouldered. Something lay, half-in, half-out the oily sea, and beat its lacey pseudopods upon the argent gravel of the beach. The other who confronted and addressed him was in appearance and even sound infinitely less humanoid than the Chulpex were — squat and lowly and coarsely cellular, with external pouchings like honeycomb tripes — gruff and smacking in its tone — but he stopped and considered what the other said. “This isn’t quite true, you know,” said Nate. “I … ‘condemn’ … them just as I condemn their allies of my own species.”

  The figure smacked its contempt for this defense. “It is quite true that you condemn on the evidence of members, no: one single member of your own species: the one called Flint: whom you also condemn. Is this logic? Is this rational thought?”

  “You’ve got somewhat of a point there,” Nate admitted. “But don’t forget that there’s also the evidence of Et-dir-Mor and his family — ”

  “That will not do!” Wetly, gruffly, the other brushed this defense aside. “Has Et-dir-Mor and his family met the entire race? Have they met most of that race? Could they, in the nature of things, have met more than a fraction of any entire race? They could not and you must know that they could not! Yet you condemn all. May it not be that they have met only those of that race who, for reasons of their own, have chosen to lie? It may be so, and, indeed, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, you ought to assume it is so.”

  Nate considered this a while. Then, nodding, he said, “Very well. I will assume that it is so. I could say, then, I condemn only those whose actions appear at only one remove to be worthy of condemnation. And if condemnation ought not — and I am now ready to concede it ought not — ever to be done at even one remove, then I will say that I do not condemn any. I renounce any distaste which I have felt which may have been based either on physical dissimilarity or on ways and practices possibly based on things unknown to me, and which I ought not without much greater study to denounce.”

  The other said, “This is well, the man. Then you will give over your project of enmity and return to your own time and place, ready to give fair consideration to any of another species who may appear among you.”

  Nate said, “No.”

  He said, “My project can no longer be said to be one of enmity. It is now one of inquiry, only. You may be right in all that you imply, as well as all that you say. On the plane of abstract logic, that is, you may be right. But life-forms do not and cannot exist for more than a moment on that plane; they must exist in and on the plane of life, and life and logic are not one. If you are indeed right, then I ought to go on in order to be convinced that you are right by those who are my superiors in knowledge and in wisdom. If you are wrong … then they, I hope, will tell me what is right.”

  The other growled and gurgled its disapprobation. “You ‘hope!’ Suppose yours is a vain hope? Suppose you are deceived? Has any ever made this same journey and returned in peace to tell of it? May not this whole Maze be no more, indeed, than the web of some megamorphous spider, as it were?”

  Nate sighed, looked at the great and burning comet spreading its tail like some celestial peacock all across the alien sky, amid which meteors like burning embers melted down from the alien heavens. “I do not know,” he said. “I am beset by uncertainties. There are no certainties at all which any longer seem of any use to me. But to turn in my tracks after a journey of such length and such dangers seems to me to be less sensible than to continue. And I bid you now farewell.”

  • • •

  And the disk blazed by now three-quarters full.

  The living crystals of the Moons of Lor called out and sang to him in wonder. Great, striped marsupial dogs of a nameless, manless world howled and bayed as they tracked him down a narrow, golden gorge. He rose, slowly, wreathed in bubbles, through the warm, fresh waters of an inland, island-studded sea. Trilobites crawled about and nuzzled his tracks. Th
e painted men of Morner hissed and nudged each other as he passed their way, and sent their armed and armored panderers padding after him, down the perfumed streets. But even these cried out in horror as he, following the ever-brighter golden tracks which glowed beneath his feet for him alone, escaped them by vaulting the bridge across the victim-pits and darting into the shallow dens where the paragryphons lounged and preened. The men in armor winced, fearing almost as much as they feared their masters, the screams and flurries which — to their bemusement forever after — never came.

  He came out upon a vast plain of wider horizons than he had ever seen, its turf plucked smooth as velvet by great grazing flocks of squat and scarlet birds tended by dwarfs with staves. These clucked and muttered their amusement to see him suddenly stop and glance behind them; then they whistled shrilly and rounded up their flocks and fled with them to safety in the great rounded pens of silent stone dotting the plain. Behind him and to the right and to the left of him, in a vast and terrifying crescent, came the Chulpex in their hundreds of thousands, their clamor as they sighted him rising high and shrill. The crescent swept forward, closed in, swept closer. The massed, rank, raw stink of them struck him in the face. He choked, stumbled, crawled for a space upon his hands and knees. But when they had formed a circle and began to move in from the circumference, he was not to be found.

  But, given a specific and limited area, and a large — a very, very large — number of intelligent beings under a discipline both instinctive and trained, a point within that area will sooner or later be found.

  So, sooner or later, they found it.

  But by then Nate was back in Red Fish Land.

  • • •

  He was, of course, in a way, happy to see Et-dir-Mor again. The High Physicist looked a decade older, and his surviving twin grandson had aged as well. But —

  “I can’t be back here again!” Nate cried. “Am I out of my mind? I can’t have been going in the wrong direction all this time again. I left this place behind me — ”