Philip Jose Farmer - Lord Of The Trees and The Mad Goblin

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EVEN THE APE-MAN HIMSELF HAS HIS

PRICE. . .

Thirty thousand or more years ago, some Old Stone Age peoples discovered something that

gave them an extremely extended youth. It also made them immune to any disease or breakdown

of the cells. Of course they could fall down and break their necks or slit their throats or get

clubbed to death. But if chance worked well for them, they could live for what must have

seemed forever . . . a man who took the elixir at the age of twenty-five would only look fifty at

the end of fifteen thousand years.

I don't know the history of what happened between 25,000 B.C. and 1913 when the agent of

the Nine first introduced himself. By then, the Nine consisted of Anana, a thirty-millennia old

Caucasian woman, XauXaz, Ing Iwaldi, a dwarf, a Hebrew born about 3 B.C., an ancient proto-

Bantu, two proto-Mongolians, and an Amerindian.

We "candidates," I estimate, numbered about five hundred. We were those who might be

chosen to replace one of the Nine if she or he died.

ETERNAL YOUTH

A Note From

Philip José Farmer:

Although the editors of Ace Books insist upon publishing this work as a novel under my

byline, it is actually Volume X of the Memoirs of Lord Grandrith, as edited by me for

publication. The British spellings and the anglicisms of Lord Grandrith have been changed by

me for an easier understanding by American readers.

The location of the caves of the Nine and several other places have purposely been made

inexact. This is for the benefit of any reader who might try to find these places.

LORD OF THE TREES

THE MAD GOBLIN

quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

An ACE Book

This Ace printing: May 1980

2 4 6 8 0 9 7 5 3

Manufactured in the United States of America

LORD OF

THE TREES

The Nine must have marked me off as dead beyond doubt.

I don't know whether or not the pilot of the fighter jet saw me fall into the ocean. If he did, he

probably did not fly down for a closer look. He would have assumed that, if the explosion of my

amphibian did not kill me, the fall surely would. After hurtling twelve hundred feet, I should have

been smashed flat against the surface of the Atlantic off the coast of the West African nation of

Gabon. The waters would be as hard as Sheffield steel when my body struck.

If the pilot had known that men had survived falls from airplanes at even greater heights, he

might have swooped low over the surface just to make certain that I was not alive. In 1942, a

Russian fell twenty-two thousand feet without a parachute into a snow-covered ravine and lived.

And other men have fallen two thousand feet or higher into water or snow and lived. These were

freak occurrences, of course.

The pilot would have reported that the twin engine propellered amphibian I was flying to the

Parc National du Petit Loango had gone up in a ball of flame at the first pass. The .50 caliber

machine guns or rockets or whatever he had used had hit the fuel tanks and burning bits of

wreckage had scattered everywhere. Among the bits, was my body.

I recovered consciousness a few seconds later. Blue was screaming around me. My half-naked

body was as cold as if the wind were rippin through my intestines. The explosion had ripped off

most of my clothing or else they had been torn off when I went through the nose of the craft. I

was falling toward the bright sea, though, at first I sometimes thought I was falling toward the

sky. I whirled over and over, seeing the rapidly dwindling silvery jet speeding inland and the

widely dispersed and flaming pieces describing smoky arcs.

I also saw the white rim of surf and flashing white beaches and, beyond, the green of the bush

jungle.

There was no time or desire to think ironic thoughts then, of course. But if there had been, I

would have thought how ironic it was that I was going to die only a few miles from my

birthplace. If I had thought I was going to die, that is. I was still living, and until the final moment

itself that is what I will always tell myself.

I live.

I must have fallen about two hundred feet when I succeeded in spreading out my legs and arms.

I have done much sky diving for fun and for survival value. It was this that enabled me to flatten

out and gain a stable attitude. I was slowing down my rate of descent somewhat by presenting as

wide an area as possible to the air, acting as my own parachute. And then I slipped into the

vertical position during the last fifty feet, and I entered the water like a knife with my hands

forming the knife's tip.

I struck exactly right. Even so, the impact knocked me out. I awoke coughing saltwater out of

my nose and mouth. But I was on the surface, and if I had any broken bones or torn muscles, I did

not feel them.

There was no sign of the killer plane or of my craft. The sky had swallowed one and the sea the

other.

The shore was about a mile away. Between it and me were the fins of at least two sharks.

There wasn't much use trying to swim around the sharks. They would hear and smell me even if

I made a wide detour. So I swam toward them, though not before I had assured myself that I had

a knife. Most of my clothing had been ripped off, but my belt with its sheathed knife was still

attached to me. This was an American knife with a five-inch blade, excellent for throwing. I left it

in the sheath until I saw one of the fins swerve and drive toward me. Then I drew it out and

placed it between my teeth.

The other fin continued to move southward.

The shark may have just happened to turn toward me in the beginning, but an increase of speed

showed that it had detected me. The fin stayed on the surface, however, and turned to my right to

circle me. I swam on, casting glances behind me. It was a great white shark, a species noted for

attacking men. This one was wary; it circled me three times before deciding to rush me. I turned

when it was about twenty feet from me. The surface water just ahead of it boiled, and it turned on

its side just before trying to seize my leg. Or perhaps it only intended to make a dry run to get a

closer look at what might be a dangerous prey.

I pulled my legs up and stabbed at it with both hands holding the hilt of the knife. The skin of

the shark is as tough as cured hippo hide and covered with little jags—placoid scales—that can

tear the skin off a man if he so much as rubs lightly against it. My only experience in fighting

sharks was during World War II when my boat was sunk in the waters of the East Indian Ocean.

The encounter with a freshwater shark in an African lake is fictional, the result of the sometimes

overromantic imagination of my biographer. Fortunately, my arms were out of the water and so

unimpeded by the fluid. I heaved myself up to my waist and drove down with the knife and

rammed it at least three inches into the corpse-colored eye. Blood spurted, and the shark raced

away so swiftly that it almost tore the knife loose from my hands.

Its tail did curve out enough to scrape across my belly, and my blood was mingling with its

blood.

I expected the shark to come back. Even if my knife had pierced that tiny brain, it would be far

from dead, and the odor of blood would drive it mad.

It came back as swiftly as a torpedo and as deadly. I dived this time and was enclosed in a

distorted world the visible radius of which was a few feet. Out of the distortion something fast as

death almost hit me, and went by, and I shoved the knife up into the belly. But the tip only pene-

trated about an inch, and this time the knife was pulled from my grip. I had to dive for it at once;

without it I was helpless. I caught it just before it sank out of reach of eye and hand, and I swam

to the surface. I looked both ways and saw a shadow speeding toward me. Then another shadow

caught up with it, and blood boiled out in a cloud that hid both sharks. I swam away with as little

splash as possible, hoping that other sharks would not be drawn in by the blood and the thrash of

the battle.

Before I had gone a half-mile, I saw three fins slicing the water to my left, but they were

intent on following their noses to where the blood was flowing, where, as the Yanks say, the

action was.

It was a few minutes to twelve P.M.. when my plane blew up. About sixteen minutes later, ac-

cording to my wristwatch, I reached the shore and staggered across the beach to the shade and a

hiding place in a bush. The fall, the fight with the shark, and the swimming for a mile at near top

speed, had taken some energy from me. I walked past thousands of sea gulls and pelicans and

storks, which moved away from me without too much alarm. These would be the great great-

great-grandchildren of the birds that I had known when I was young. The almost completely

landlocked lagoon on the beach was no longer there. It had been filled in and covered over years

ago by the deposit of sand and dirt from the little river nearby and by the action of the Benguela

Current. The original shore, where I had roamed as a boy, was almost two miles inland.

The jungle looked unchanged. No humans had settled down here. Gabon is still one of the least

populated countries of Africa.

Inland were the low hills where a broad tongue of the tall closed-canopy equatorial forest had

been home for me and The Folk and the myriad animals and insects I knew so well. Most of the

jungle in what is now the National Park of the Little Loango is really bush. The rain forest grows

only on the highlands many miles inland except for the freakish outthrust of high hill which

distinguishes this coastal area.

After resting an hour, I got up and walked inland. I was headed toward the place where the log

house of my human parents had once been, where I was born, where the Nine first interfered with

my life and started me on that unique road, the highlights of which my biographer has presented

in highly romanticized forms.

The jungle here looks like what the civilized person thinks of as jungle, when he thinks of it at

all. His idea, of course, is mostly based on those very unrealistic and very bad movies made about

me.

Knife in hand, I walked quietly through bush. Even if it wasn't the true jungle of my inland

home, I still felt about ten times as happy and at ease as I do in London or even in the com-

paratively unpopulated, plenty-of-elbow-room environs of my Cumberland estate. The trees and

bushes here were noisy with much monkey life, too many insects, and an abundance of snakes,

water shrews, mongooses, and small wild cats or longnecked servals. I saw a scale-armored ant-

eating pangolin scuttling ahead of me and glimpsed a tiny furry creature which might or might

not have been a so-called "bushbaby." The bird life made the trees colorful and the air raucous.

The salt air blowing in from the sea and the sight of the familiar plants made me tingle all over.

As I neared the site of the buildings my father had built. eighty-two years ago, I saw that the

mangrove swamp to the north had spread out. Its edge was only a quarter of a mile to my left.

I cast around, and within a few minutes found the slight mounds which marked the place where

I had been born. Once there had been a oneroom house of logs and, next to it, a log building just

as large, a storehouse. My biographer neglected to mention the storeroom, because he ignored

details if they did not contribute to the swift development of the story. But, since he did state that

an enormous amount of supplies was landed with my parents, it must have been obvious to the

reader that the one-room house could not have held more than a fraction of the materials.

Both buildings had fallen into a heap of dead wood and had been covered up by sand and dirt

blown by the sea winds and by mud pouring down from the low ridge inland of the buildings.

The ridge was no longer there; it had eroded years ago. A bush fire had taken away all the

vegetation on it and then the rains had cut it down before new vegetation could grow.

On one side, six feet under the surface, would be four graves, but in this water-soaked,

insect-infested soil the decayed bones had been eaten long ago.

I had known what to expect. The last time I'd been here, in 1947, the ravages of fifty-nine

years had almost completed the destruction. It was only sentiment that had brought me back

here. I may be infrahuman in many of my attitudes, but I am still human enough to feel some

sentiment toward my birthplace.

I had intended to stand there for a few minutes and think about my dead parents and the other

two buried beside them. But mostly about what I had done inside the cabin with the books and the

tools I had found in 1898, when I did not know what a book or a tool or a chronological date was,

let alone the words for them in English or in any human tongue. And I especially wanted to

recreate the day when I had first seen the long ash-blonde hair of Clio Jeanne de Carriol.

There were others with her, of course, and they were the first white-skinned males I had ever

seen, outside of the illustrated books I had found in the storehouse. But Clio was a woman, and I

was twenty, so my eyes. were mainly for her. I did not know nor would have cared that

she was the daughter of a retired college teacher. Nor that he had named his daughter Clio after

the Muse of History. Nor that they were descended from Huguenots who had fled France after the

Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and established plantations and horse farms in Georgia,

Virginia, and Maryland. All I knew about the word outside a fifty-mile square area was what I

had tried to understand in those books, and most of that I just could not grasp.

I suppose I was lost in thought for a little more than a minute. Then I turned a little to the east,

because I'd heard a very faint and unidentifiable noise, and I saw a flash up in a tree about fifty

yards away.

I dived into a bush and rolled into a slight depression. The report of the rifle and the bullet

striking about ten feet from me came a second later. Three heavy machine guns and a number of

automatic rifles raked through the bush. Somebody twenty yards to the north shouted, and a

grenade blew up the earth exactly over the site of the storehouse.

I had to get out, and swiftly, but I could not move without being cut down, the fire was so

heavy.

Leave it to the Nine to do a thorough job.

They had found out that I was flying a plane from Port-Gentil, ostensibly to Setté Cama. They

—their agents, rather—had figured that I might be stopping off at the Parc National du Petit

Loango for a sentimental pilgrimage. Actually, my main purpose was to leave the plane there and

set off on foot across the continent to the mountains in Uganda. It would take me a long time to

make the approach to the secret caves of the Nine, but it was better to travel through the jungle

across the central part of Africa than to fly anywhere near it. In the jungle, I am silent and unseen,

and even the Nine cannot distract me except by accident.

But the Nine had sent that outlaw fighter jet to shoot me out of the sky. And, as a backup for

Death, they had arranged an ambush at my birthplace. When the jet pilot had reported in, as he

surely must have, that I had gone down with my plane, the Nine had not pulled off their

ambushers at once. I suppose they may have had orders to wait there a week. The Nine always

were enthusiastic for overkill and overcaution, especially when one of their own—a traitor—was

to be taken care of.

Even so, they must have been surprised, they must not have really expected me to come along

so soon after being burned to death or smashed flat against the ocean and then eaten by sharks.

But they had maintained a very good silence. The wind was blowing from the sea, so I had not

heard or smelled them. I think I caught them by surprise; they may not have been sure that I was

the one for whom they were waiting.

The grenade was close enough to half-deafen me but I was not confused or immobilized. I

rolled away and then crawled toward the men shooting at me. Or shooting where they thought I

should be. Gouts of dirt fell over my naked back and on my head. Bushes bent, and leaves fell on

me. Another grenade exploded near the

first. Bullets screamed off, and pieces of bark fell before me. But I did not believe they could

see me. I would have been stitched with lead in a few seconds.

One thing, some of them must have seen that I was only armed with a knife, and that would

make them brave.

Suddenly, there was silence except for a man shouting in English. He was telling them to form

a ring, to advance slowly to contract the ring, and to fire downward if they saw me. They must

not fire into each other. They must shoot at my legs, bring me down, and then finish me off.

If I'd been in his place, I would have done the same. It was an admirable plan and seemed to

have a one hundred percent chance of success. I was as disgusted as I had time for. I should have

approached more cautiously and scouted the area. I had made the same mistake they did, in

essence, except that they were better equipped to rectify theirs.

I kept on going. I did not know how many men they had. I had determined that ten weapons

had been firing. But others might be withholding their fire. It would take them some time to form

a ring, since they had all been on one side of me. In this thick bush, they would have to proceed

slowly and keep locating each other by calling out.

Men circled around swiftly and noisily. I could smell them; there were ten men on that side. So

that meant there had to be as many or more ahead of me. Some had been holding back their fire.

I looked upward. I was close to the tree from which the flash had come as a sniper shifted his

rifle. He was still about twenty feet up on a branch and waiting for me to make a break for it. I

scrutinized the other trees around me for more snipers, but he seemed to be the only one.

I sprang out from under the broad leaves of the elephant's-ear and threw my knife upward. It

was a maneuver that had to be done without hesitation and which involved much danger, since it

meant I would be revealed, if only for a moment.

It was, however, unexpected. And the only one who saw me before I ducked back under the

plant was the sniper. His surprise did not last long. He saw me and the knife about the same time,

and then the knife caught him in the throat. The rifle fell out of his hands and onto the top of a

bush. He sagged forward but was held from falling by the rope around his waist, tied to the trunk.

The knife had made a chunking and the rifle a thrashing as it slid through the branches of the

bush. But the shouts of the men had covered it up.

The rifle was a Belgian FN light automatic rifle using the 7.62-mm cartridge. It could be set for

semiautomatic or automatic fire, and its magazine when full contained twenty rounds. I set it for

automatic fire, since I was likely to be needing a hose-like action in thick foliage. It was

regrettable that I did not have the knife, but, for the moment, I would have to do without it. I did

not want to climb up to the body and so expose myself to fire from below. At any moment one of

them might see the corpse and know that I was on the loose with the firearm.

The voices of the men to the east came closer. The ones behind me and on my sides were not

closing in so swiftly. One, or more, had grenades, and I especially had to watch out for them.

My heart was pumping hard, and I was quivering with the ecstasy of the hunt. Whether I am

the hunter or the hunted, I feel the same. There is a delicious sense of peril; the most precious

thing is at stake. You, a living being, may be dead very shortly. And since my life could last

forever, or, over thirty thousand years anyway, I have much more than most people to lose. But I

didn't think of that. I am as willing to risk it now as I will be thirty millennia from now, if I live

that long.

When the nearest man was within ten feet, he had a man on his right about twenty feet away

and a man on his left about thirty. He had turned his head to say something to the man behind

him. The butt of my rifle drove through the branches of a bush into his throat. He fell backward

and then I was on him and had squeezed his neck with my hands. I took his knife and a full

magazine, which I carried clamped under my left arm. But another man about twenty feet behind

him had noticed that his predecessor had disappeared.

He spoke in English with an Italian accent. "Hey, Brodie, where are you? You all right?"

I answered back in an imitation of Brodie's voice. "I fell down in this damned bush!"

The man advanced cautiously, then stopped and said, "Stand up so I can see you! "

I put on Brodie's green digger's hat—it was several sizes too small—and rose far enough so he

could see the hat and the upper part of my face. He said something and came toward me, and I

threw Brodie's knife into his solar plexus.

At the same, there was a yell from behind me. The dead sniper had been discovered.

The leader, bawling out in a Scots English, told everyone to stand still. They were not to start

firing in a panic, or they would be killing each other. And they were to call out, in order,

identifying themselves.

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摘要：

EVENTHEAPE-MANHIMSELFHASHISPRICE...Thirtythousandormoreyearsago,someOldStoneAgepeoplesdiscoveredsomethingthatgavethemanextremelyextendedyouth.Italsomadethemimmunetoanydiseaseorbreakdownofthecells.Ofcoursetheycouldfalldownandbreaktheirnecksorslittheirthroatsorgetclubbedtodeath.Butifchanceworkedwellfo...

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Philip Jose Farmer - Lord Of The Trees and The Mad Goblin

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