artists!" He knelt in fury, thumbing back the eyelids of the corpses.
There was little need for the test. They were too limp, too waxen to be
pretending.
The overseer cut them out of the chain and kicked at Hanson. "Move
along!" he bellowed. "Menes himself is here, and he's not as gentle as I
am."
Hanson joined the long line, wondering what they were going to do about
breakfast. How the devil did they expect the slaves to put in sixteen
hours of work without some kind of food? There had been nothing the
night before but a skin of water. There was not even that much this
morning. No wonder the two beside him had died from overwork, beatings
and plain starvation.
Menes was there, all right. Hanson saw him from the distance, a skinny
giant of a man in breechclout, cape and golden headdress. He bore a whip
like everyone else who seemed to have any authority at all, but he
wasn't using it. He was standing hawklike on a slight rise in the sandy
earth, motionless and silent. Beside him was a shorter figure: a pudgy
man with a thin mustache, on whom the Egyptian headdress looked
strangely out of place. It could only be Ser Perth!
Hanson's staring came to an end as the lash cut down across his
shoulders, biting through to the shoulder-bone. He stumbled forward,
heedless of the overseers' shouting voices. Someday, if he had the
chance, he'd flay his own overseer, but that could wait. Even the agony
of the cut couldn't take his mind from Ser Perth's presence. Had Bork
slipped up--did the Satheri know that Hanson was still alive, and had
they sent Ser Perth here to locate him? It seemed unlikely, however. The
man was paying no attention to the lines of slaves. It would be hard to
spot one among three million, anyhow. More likely, Hanson decided, Ser
Perth was supervising the supervisors, making an inspection tour of all
this.
Of all what? Apparently then this must be another of their frenzied
efforts to find a way to put back the sky. He'd heard that they had
called up the pyramid builder, but hadn't fully realized it would lead
to this type of activity.
He looked around him appraisingly. The long lines of slaves that had
been carrying rock and rubble the day before now were being formed into
hauling teams. Long ropes were looped around enormous slabs of quarried
rock. Rollers underneath them and slaves tugging and pushing at them
were the only means of moving them. The huge stones slid remorselessly
forward onto the prepared beds of rubble. Casting back in his memory,
Hanson could not recall seeing the rock slabs the night before. They had
appeared as if by magic--
Obviously, they had really been conjured up by magic. But if the rocks
could be conjured, what was the need of all the slaves and the sadistic
overseers? Why not simply magic the entire construction, whatever it was
to be?
The whip hit him again, and the raging voice of the overseer ranted in
his ears. "Get on, you blundering slacker. Menes himself is looking at
you. Ho there--what the devil?"
The overseer's hand spun Hanson around. The man's eyes, large and
opaque, stared at Hanson. He frowned cruelly. "Yeah, you're the same
one! Didn't I take the hide off your back twice already? And now you
stand there without a scar or a drop of blood!"
Hanson grunted feebly. He didn't want attention called to himself while
Ser Perth was around. "I--I heal quickly." It was no more than the
truth. Either the body they'd given him or the conjuring during the
right split second had enabled him to heal almost before a blow was
struck.
"Magic!" The overseer scowled and gave Hanson a shove that sent him
sprawling. "Blithering magic again! Magic stones that melt when you get
them in place--magic slaves that the whip won't touch! And they expect
us to do a job of work such as not even Thoth could dream up! They won't
take honest work. No, they have to come snooping and conjuring and
interfering. Wheels on rollers! Tools of steel and the gods know what
instead of honest stone. Magic to lift things instead of honest ropes
that shrink and wood that swells. Magic that fails, and rush, rush, rush
until I'm half ready to be tortured for falling behind, and--you! You
would, would you!" His voice trailed off into a fresh roar of rage as he
caught sight of other slaves taking advantage of his attention to Hanson
to relax. He raced off, brandishing the whip.
Hanson tried to make himself inconspicuous after that. The wounds would
heal, and the beatings could never kill him; but there had been no
provision in his new body for the suppression of pain. He hungered,
thirsted and suffered like anyone else. Maybe he was learning to take
it, here, but not to like it.
At the expense of a hundred slaves and considerable deterioration of the
whips, one block of stone was in place before the sun was high overhead
in the coppery, mottled sky. Then there was the blessing of a moment's
pause. Men were coming down the long lines, handing something to the
slaves. Food, Hanson anticipated.
He was wrong. When the slave with the wicker basket came closer he could
see that the contents were not food but some powdery stuff that was
dipped out with carved spoons into the eager hands of the slaves. Hanson
smelled his portion dubiously. It was cloying, sickly sweet.
Hashish! Or opium, heroin, hemp--Hanson was no expert. But it was
certainly some kind of drug. Judging by the avid way the other slaves
were gulping it down, each one of them had been exposed to it before.
Hanson cautiously made the pretense of swallowing his before he allowed
it to slip through his fingers to mingle with the sand. Drug addiction
was obviously a convenient way to make the slaves forget their aches and
fears, to keep them everlasting anxious to please whatever was necessary
to make sure the precious, deadly ration never stopped.
There was still no sign of food. The pause in the labor was only for the
length of time it took the drug-bearing slaves to complete their task.
Ten minutes, or fifteen at the outside; then the overseers were back
with the orders and the lashes.
The slaves regrouped on new jobs, and Hanson found himself in a bunch of
a dozen or so. They were lashing the hauling ropes around a twelve-foot
block of stone; the rollers were already in place, with the crudely
plaited ropes dangling loosely. Hanson found himself being lifted by a
couple of the other slaves to the shoulders of a third. His clawing
hands caught the top of the block and the slaves below heaved him
upward. He scrambled to the top and caught the ropes that were flung up
to him.
From his vantage point he saw what he had not seen before--the amazing
size of the construction project. This was no piffling little Gizeh
pyramid, no simple tomb for a king. Its base was measured in kilometers
instead of yards, and its top was going to be proportionally high,
apparently. It hardly seemed that there could be enough stone in the
whole world to finish the job. As far as Hanson could see, over the
level sand, the ground was black with the suffering millions of slaves
in their labor gangs.
The idiots must be trying to reach the sky with their pyramid. There
could be no other answer to the immense bulk planned for this structure.
Like the pride-maddened men of Babel, they were building a sky-high
thing of stone. It was obviously impossible, and even Menes must be
aware of that. Yet perhaps it was no more impossible than all the rest
of the things in this impossible world.
When the warlocks of this world had discovered that they could not solve
the problem of the sky, they must have gone into a state of pure
hysteria, like a chicken dashing back and forth in front of a car. They
had sought through other worlds and ages for anyone with a reputation as
a builder, engineer or construction genius, without screening the
probability of finding an answer. The size of the ancient pyramid must
have been enough to sway them. They had used Hanson, Menes, Einstein,
Cagliostro--for some reason of their own, since he'd never been a
builder--and probably a thousand more. And then they had half-supplied
all of them, rather than picking the most likely few and giving full
cooperation. Magic must have made solutions to most things so easy that
they no longer had the guts to try the impossible themselves. A pyramid
seemed like a ridiculous solution, but for an incredible task, an
impossible solution had to be tried.
And maybe, he thought, they'd overlooked the obvious in their own
system. The solution to a problem in magic should logically be found in
magic, not in the methods of other worlds. His mind groped for something
that almost came into his consciousness--some inkling of what should
have been done, or how they had failed. It was probably only an idle
fancy, but--
"Hey!" One of the slaves below was waving at him. While Hanson looked
down, the slave called to another, got a shoulder to lean on, and walked
his way up the side of the block, pushed from below and helped by
Hanson's hands above. He was panting when he reached the top, but he
could still talk. "Look, it's your skin, but you're going to be in
trouble if you don't get busy. Look out for that overseer up there.
Don't just stand around when he's in sight." He picked up a loop of rope
and passed it to Hanson, making a great show of hard work.
Hanson stared up at the overseer who was staring back at him. "Why is he
any worse than the rest of this crowd?"
The slave shuddered as the dour, slow-moving overseer began walking
stiffly toward them. "Don't let the fact that he's an overseer fool you.
He's smarter than most of his kind, but just as ugly. He's a mandrake,
and you can't afford to mess with him."
Hanson looked at the ancient, wrinkled face of the mandrake and
shuddered. There was the complete incarnation of inhumanity in the
thing's expression. He passed ropes around the corners until the
mandrake turned and rigidly marched away, the blows of his whip falling
metronome-like on the slaves he passed. "Thanks," Hanson said "I wonder
what it's like, being a true mandrake?"
"Depends," the slave said easily. He was obviously more intelligent than
most, and better at conserving himself. "Some mandrake-men are real. I
mean, the magicians want somebody whom they can't just call back--direct
translation of the body usually messes up the brain patterns enough to
make the thinkers hard to use, especially with the sky falling. So they
get his name and some hold on his soul and then rebuild his body around
a mandrake root. They bind his soul into that, and in some ways he's
almost human. Sometimes they even improve on what he was. But the true
mandrake--like that one--never was human. Just an ugly, filthy
simulacrum. It's bad business. I never liked it, even though I was in
training for sersa rating."
"You're from this world?" Hanson asked in surprise. He'd been assuming
that the man was one of the things called back.
"A lot of us are. They conscripted a lot of the people they didn't need
for these jobs. But I was a little special. All right, maybe you don't
believe me--you think they wouldn't send a student sersa here now. Look,
I can prove it. I managed to sneak one of the books I was studying back
with me. See?"
He drew a thin volume from his breechclout cautiously, then slipped it
back again. "You don't get such books unless you're at least of student
rating." He sighed, then shrugged. "My trouble is that I could never
keep my mouth shut. I was attendant at one of the revivatoria, and I got
drunk enough to let out some information about one of the important
revival cases. So here I am."
"Umm." Hanson worked silently for a minute, wondering how far
coincidence could go. It could go a long ways here, he decided. "You
wouldn't have been sentenced to twenty lifetimes here by the Sather
Karf, would you?"
The slave stared at him in surprise. "You guessed it. I've died only
fourteen times so far, so I've got six more lives to go. But--hey, you
can't be! They were counting on you to be the one who really fixed
things. Don't tell me my talking out of turn did this to you."
Hanson reassured him on that. He recognized the man now for another
reason. "Aren't you the one I saw dead on his back right next to me this
morning?"
"Probably. Name's Barg." He stood up to take a careful look at the net
of cording around the stone. "Looks sound enough. Yeah, I died this
morning, which is why I'm fairly fresh now. Those overseers won't feed
us because it takes time and wastes food; they let us die and then have
us dragged back for more work. It's a lot easier on the ones they
dragged back already dead; dying doesn't matter so much without a soul."
"Some of them seem to be Indians," Hanson noted. He hadn't paid too
much attention, but the slaves seemed to be from every possible
background.
Barg nodded. "Aztecs from a place called Tenochtitlan. Twenty thousand
of them got sacrificed in a bunch for some reason or other. Poor devils.
They think this is some kind of heaven. They tell me this is easy work
compared to the type they had to undergo. The Satheri like to get big
bunches through in one conjuration, like the haul they made from the
victims of somebody named Tamerlane." He tested a rope, then dropped to
a sitting position on the edge of the block. "I'll let you stay up to
call signals from here. Only watch it. That overseer has his eyes on
you. Make sure the ropes stay tight while we see if the thing can be
moved."
He started to slip over the side, hanging by his fingertips. Something
caught, and he swore. With one hand, he managed to free his breechclout
and drag out the thin volume that was lodged between his groin and the
block. "Here, hold this for me until we meet tonight. You've got more
room to hide it in your cloth than I have." He tossed it over quickly,
then dropped from sight to land on the ground below.
Hanson shoved the book out of sight and tried to act busy again. The
mandrake overseer had started ponderously toward him. But in a moment
the thing's attention was directed to some other object of torture.
Hanson braced himself as the lines of slaves beneath him settled
themselves to the ropes. There was a loud cracking of whips and a chorus
of groans. A small drum took up a beat, and the slaves strained and
tugged in unison. Ever so slowly, the enormous block of stone began to
move, while the ropes drew tighter.
Hanson checked the rigging with half his mind, while the other half
raced in a crazy circle of speculation. Mandrakes and mandrake-men,
zombie-men, from the past and multiple revivals! A sky that fell in
great chunks. What came next in this ridiculous world in which he seemed
to be trapped?
As if in answer to his question, there was a sudden, coruscating flare
from above.
Hanson's body reacted instinctively. His arm came up over his eyes,
cutting off the glare. But he managed to squint across it, upwards
toward what was happening in the cracked dome. For a split second, he
thought that the sun had gone nova.
He was wrong, but not by too much. Something had happened to the sun.
Now it was flickering and flaming, shooting enormous jets of fire from
its rim. It hovered at the edge of a great new hole and seemed to be
wobbling, careening and losing its balance.
There was a massive shriek of fear and panic from the horde of slaves.
They began bellowing like the collective death-agony of a world. Most of
them dropped their ropes and ran in blind panic, trampling over each
other in their random flight for safety. The human overseers were part
of the same panic-stricken riot. Only the mandrakes stood stolidly in
place, flicking each running man who passed them.
Hanson flung himself face down on the stone. There was a roar of
tortured air from overhead and a thundering sound that was unlike
anything except the tearing of an infinity of cloth combined with a
sustained explosion of atomic bombs. Then it seemed as if the
thunderbolt of Thor himself had blasted in Hanson's ears.
The sky had ripped again, and this time the entire dome shook with the
shock. But that wasn't the worst of it.
The sun had broken through the hole and was falling!
VII
The fall of the sun was seemingly endless. It teetered out of the hole
and seemed to hover, spitting great gouts of flame as it encountered the
phlogiston layer. Slowly, agonizingly, it picked up speed and began its
downward rush. Unlike the sky, it seemed to obey the normal laws of
inertia Hanson had known. It swelled bit by bit, raging as it drew
nearer. And it seemed to be heading straight for the pyramid.
The heat was already rising. It began to sear the skin long before the
sun struck the normal atmosphere. Hanson could feel that he was being
baked alive. The blood in his arteries seemed to bubble and boil, though
that must have been an illusion. But he could see his skin rise in giant
blisters and heal almost at once to blister again. He screamed in agony,
and heard a million screams around him. Then the other screams began to
decrease in numbers and weaken in volume, and he knew that the slaves
were dying.
Through a slit between two fingers, he watched the ponderous descent.
The light was enough to sear his retinas, but even they healed faster
than the damage. He estimated the course of the sun, amazed to find that
there was no panic in him, and doubly amazed that he could think at all
over the torture that wracked his body.
Finally, convinced that the sun would strike miles to the south, he
rolled across the scorching surface of the stone block and dropped to
the north side of it. The shock of landing must have broken bones, but
a moment later he could begin to breathe again. The heat was still
intense, even behind the stone block, but it was bearable--at least for
him.
Pieces were breaking off the sun as it fell, and already striking the
ground. One fell near, and its heat seared at him, giving him no place
of shelter. Then the sun struck, sending up earth tremors that knocked
him from his feet. He groped up and stared around the block.
The sun had struck near the horizon, throwing up huge masses of
material. Its hissing against the ground was a tumult in his ears, and
superheated ash and debris began to fall.
So far as he could see, there were no other survivors in the camp. Three
million slaves had died. Those who had found some shelter behind the
stonework had lived longer than the others, but that had only increased
their suffering. And even his body must have been close to its limits,
if it could be killed at all.
He was still in danger. If a salamander could destroy even such a body
as his, then the fragments of sun that were still roiling across the
landscape would be fatal. The only hope he had was to get as far away
from the place where the sun had struck as he could.
He braced himself to leave even the partial shelter. There was a pile of
water skins near the base of the block, held in the charred remains of
an attendant's body. The water was boiling, but there was still some
left. He poured several skins together and drank the stuff, forcing
himself to endure the agony of its passage down his throat. Without it,
he'd be dehydrated before he could get a safe distance away.
Then he ran. The desert was like molten iron under his bare feet, and
the savage radiation on his back was worse than any overseer's whip.
His mind threatened to blank out with each step, but he forced himself
on. And slowly, as the distance increased, the sun's pyre sank further
and further over the horizon. The heat should still have been enough to
kill any normal body in fifteen minutes, but he could endure it. He
stumbled on in a trot, guiding himself by the stars that shone in the
broken sky toward a section of this world where there had been life and
some measure of civilization before. After a few hours, the tongues of
flame no longer flared above the horizon, though the brilliant radiance
continued. And Hanson found that his strong and nearly indestructible
body still had limits. It could not go on without rest forever. He was
sobbing with fatigue at every step.
He managed to dig a small hollow in the sand before dropping off to
sleep. It was a sleep of total exhaustion, lacking even a sense of time.
It might have been minutes or hours that he slept, and he had no way of
knowing which. With the sun gone and the stars rocking into dizzy new
configurations, there was no night or day, nor any way to guess the
passage of time.
He woke to a roaring wind that sent cutting blasts of sand driving
against him. He staggered up and forced himself against it, away from
the place where the sun had fallen. Even through the lashing sandstorm,
he could see the glow near the horizon. Now a pillar of something that
looked like steam but was probably vapor from molten and evaporated
rocks was rising upwards, like the mushroom clouds of his own days. It
was spreading, apparently just under the phlogiston layer, reflecting
back the glare. And the wind was caused by the great rising column of
superheated gases over the sun.
He staggered on, while the sand gave way slowly to patches of green.
With the sun gone and the sky falling into complete shreds, this world
was certainly doomed. He'd assumed that the sun of this world must be
above the sky, but he'd been wrong; like the other heavenly bodies, it
had been embedded inside the shell. He had discovered that the sky
material resisted any sudden stroke, but that other matter could be
interpenetrated into it, as the stars were. He had even been able to
pass his hand and arm completely through the sample. Apparently the sun
had passed through the sky in a similar manner.
Then why hadn't the shell melted? He had no real answer. The sun must
have been moving fast enough so that no single spot became too hot, or
else the phlogiston layer somehow dissipated the heat.
The cloud of glowing stuff from the rising air column was spreading out
now, reflecting the light and heat back to the earth. There was a chance
that most of one hemisphere might retain some measure of warmth, then.
At least there was still light enough for him to travel safely.
By the time he was too tired to go on again, he had come to the
beginnings of fertile land. He passed a village, but it had been looted,
and he skirted around it rather than stare at the ghastly ghoul-work of
the looters. The world was ending, but civilization seemed to have ended
already. Beyond it, he came to a rude house, now abandoned. He staggered
in gratefully.
For a change, he had one piece of good luck. His first attempt at magic
produced food. At the sound of the snapping fingers and his
hoarse-voiced "abracadabra," a dirty pot of hot and greasy stew came
into existence. He had no cutlery, but his hands served well enough.
When it was gone, he felt better. He wiped his hands on the
breechclout. Whatever the material in the cloth, it had stood the sun's
heat almost as well as he had.
Then he paused as his hand found a lump under the cloth. He drew out the
apprentice magician's book. The poor devil had never achieved his twenty
lifetimes, and this was probably all that was left of him. Hanson stared
at it, reading the title in some surprise.
_Applied Semantics._
He propped himself up and began to scan it, wondering what it had to do
with magic. He'd had a course of semantics in college and could see no
relationship. But he soon found that there were differences.
This book began with the axiomatic statement that the symbol is the
thing. From that it developed in great detail the fact that any part of
a whole bearing similarity to the whole was also the whole; that each
seven was the class of all sevens; and other details of the science of
magical similarity followed quite logically from the single axiom.
Hanson was surprised to find that there was a highly developed logic to
it. Once he accepted the axiom--and he was no longer prepared to doubt
it here--he could follow the book far better than he'd been able to
follow his own course in semantics. Apparently this was supposed to be a
difficult subject, from the constant efforts of the writer to make his
point clear. But after learning to deal with electron holes in
transistors, this was elementary study for Hanson.