He said, “Here we go!” and leaped through. Anana had to bend low and scoot through swiftly, because the circle was closing. When she got up on her feet, she said, “Do you remember that tall building on Wilshire, near the tar pits? The big one with the sign, California Fe-eral? It was always ablaze with lights at night?”
He nodded and she said, “This summerhouse is exactly on that spot. I mean, on the place that corresponds to that spot.”
There was no sign of anything corresponding to Wilshire Boulevard, nothing resembling a road or even a foot path here. The number of trees here certainly did take away from the southern California lowlands look, but she explained that the Lords had created rivers and brooks here so that this forest could grow. The summerhouse was one of many built so that the family could stop for the night or retire for meditation or the doing of whatever virtue or vice they felt like. The main dwellings were all on the beach.
There had never been many people in this valley, and, when Anana was born, only three families lived here. Later, at least as far as she knew, all the Lords had left this valley. In fact, they had left this world to occupy their own artificial universes and from thence to wage their wars upon each other.
Kickaha allowed her to wander around while she exclaimed softly to herself or called to him to look at something that she suddenly remembered. He wondered that she remembered anything at all, since her last visit here had been three thousand and two hundred years ago. When he thought of this, he asked her where the gate was through which she had entered at that time.
“It’s on top of a boulder about a half mile from here,” she said. “There are a number of gates, all disguised, of course. And nobody knows how many others here. I didn’t know about the one under the stone floor of the summerhouse, of course. Urthona must have put it there long ago, maybe ten thousand years ago.”
“This summerhouse is that old?”
“That old. It contains self-renewing and self-cleaning equipment, of course. And equipment to keep the forest and the land in its primeval state is under the surface. Erosion and buildup of land are compensated for.”
“Are there any weapons hidden here for your use?” he said.
“There are a number just within the gate,” she said. “But the charges will have trickled off to nothing by now, and, besides, I don’t have an activator. . . .”
She stopped and said, “I forgot about the Horn. It can activate the gate, of course, but there’s really nothing in it to help us.”
“Where does the gate lead to?”
“It leads to a room which contains another gate, and this one opens directly to the interior of the palace of my own world. But it is trapped. I had to leave my deactivator behind when the Bellers invaded my world and I escaped through another gate into Jadawin’s world.”
“Show me where the boulder is, anyway. If we have to, we could take refuge inside its gate and come back out later.”
First, they must eat and, if possible, take a nap. Anana took him into the house, although she first studied it for a long time for traps. The kitchen contained an exquisitely sculptured marble cabinet. This, in turn, housed a fabricator, the larger part of which was buried under the house. Anana opened it cautiously and set the controls, closed it, and a few minutes later opened it again. There were two trays with dishes and cups of delicious food and drink. The energy-matter converters below the earth had been waiting for thousands of years to serve this meal and would wait another hundred thousand years to serve the next one if events so proceeded.
After eating, they stretched out on a bed which hung on chains from the ceiling. Kickaha questioned her about the layout of the land. She was about to go to sleep when he said, “I’ve had the feeling that we got here not entirely by accident. I think either Urthona or Red Orc set it up so that we’d get here if we were fast and clever enough. And he also set it up so that the other Lord, his enemy, would be here, if the other Lord is alive. I feel that this is the showdown, and that Urthona or Orc arranged to have it here for poetic or aesthetic reasons. It would be like a Lord to bring his enemies back to the home planet to kill them-if he could. This is just a feeling, but I’m going to act as if it were definite knowledge.”