On the other side of Okeanos, entirely visible from this height, was the strip of land which ran around the bottom of this planet. The strip was actually fifty miles across, but from the edge of the monolith, it looked thread-thin. On its comparatively smooth, well-treed surface lived human beings and half-human creatures and fabulous beasts. Many of them were the products of Jadawin’s biolab; all owed their longevity and unfading youth to him. There were mermen and mermaids, goat-hoofed and goat-horned satyrs, hairy-legged and horned fauns, small centaurs, and other creatures which Jadawin had made to resemble the beings of Greek mythology. The strip was a type of Paradeisos and Garden of Eden with, in addition, a number of extra-terrestrial, extra-universal touches.
On the other side of the Garden strip was the edge of the bottom of the world. Kickaha had been
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down there several times on what he called “vacations” and once when he had been pursued by the horrible gworl, who wanted to kill him for the Horn of Shambarimen.* He had looked over the edge and been thrilled and scared. The green abyss below—nothing beneath the planet—nothing but-green sky and a sense that he would fall forever if he lost his hold.
Kickaha told her of this and said, “We could hide down there for a long time. It’s a great place—no wars, no bloodshed beyond an occasional bloody nose or two. It’s strickly for sensual pleasure, no intellectualism, and it gets wearisome after a few weeks, unless you want to be an alcoholic or drug addict. But the Bellers’ll be down there eventually. And by that time, they may be much stronger.”
“You can be sure of that,” shesaid. “They have started making new Sellers. I suppose that one of the palaces has facilities for doing this. Mine hasn’t, but …”
“WolfTs has,” he replied. “Even so, it’ll take ten years for a Beller to mature and be educated enough to take its place in Beller society, right? Meantime, the Sellers are restricted to the original fifty. Forty-four, I mean.”
“Forty-four or four, they won’t stop until we three Lords, and you, are captured or killed. I doubt they’ll invade any more universes until then. They’ve got all of us cornered in this world, and they’ll keep hunting until they’ve got us.”
“Or we’ve got them,” Kickaha said.
She smiled and said, “That’s what I like about
*The Maker of Universes, Philip Jose Farmer, ACE.
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you. I wish that you were a Lord. Then …”
He did not ask her to elaborate. He directed her to fly the machine down the monolith. As they descended, they saw that its seemingly smooth surface was broken, gnarled, and flattened in many places. There were ledges and projections which furnished roads for many familiar and many strange creatures. There were fissures which sometimes widened to become comparatively large valleys. There were streams in the valleys and cataracts hurled out of holes in the steep side and there was a half mile wide river which roared out of a large cave at the end of a valley-fissure and then fell over the edge and onto the sea seventy-five thousand feet below.
Kickaha explained that the surface area on all the levels of this planet, that is, the horizontal area on the tops of the monoliths, equaled the surface area of the watery bodies of Earth. This made the land area more than that of Earth’s. In addition, the habitable areas on the verticalities of the monoliths were considerable. These alone probably equaled the land area of Earth’s Africa. Moreover, there were immense subterranean territories, great caverns in vast networks that ran under the earth everywhere. And in these were, various peoples and beasts and plants adapted to underground life.
“And when you consider all this, plus the fact that there are no arid deserts or ice- and snow-covered areas, you can see that the inhabitable land of this planet is about four times that of Earth.”
Anana said that she had been on Earth briefly only and that she didn’t remember its exact size. The planet in her own universe, however, was, if