To Rescue Tanelorn Read Free Page A

far-flung future, whichever way you look at it.
    —John Carnell, SCIENCE FANTASY No. 53, June 1962

THE ETERNAL CHAMPION
    (1962)
    They called for me, that is all I really know. They called for me and I went to them, for I could not do otherwise. The will of the whole of Humanity was a strong thing and it smashed through the ties of Time, the chains of Space and dragged me to it. Why me? I still do not know, though they thought they had told me. But I am here, shall always be here and if, as wise men tell me, time is cyclic, then I shall one day return to the Twentieth Century A.D.—for (it was no doing of mine) I am immortal.
C HAPTER O NE
    B ETWEEN WAKEFULNESS AND sleeping, we have most of us had the illusion of hearing voices, scraps of conversation, phrases spoken in unfamiliar tones. Sometimes we attempt to attune our minds so that we can hear more, but we are rarely successful. Between wakefulness and sleeping, I began, every night, to hear voices…
             
    Had I hung, for an eternity in limbo? Was I alive—dead? Was there a memory of a world which lay in the far past or the distant future? Of another world which seemed closer? And the names? Was I John Daker or Erekosë? Was I either of these? Many other names, Shaleen, Artos, Brian, Umpata, Roland, Ilanth, Ulysses, Alric, fled away down the ghostly rivers of my memory. I hung in darkness, bodiless. A man spoke. Where was he? I tried to look but had no eyes to see.

    “Erekosë the Champion, where are you?”
    Another voice, then: “Father…it is only a legend…”
    “No, Iolinda. I feel he is listening. Erekosë…”
    I tried to answer, but had no voice. Swirling half-dreams of a house in a great city of miracles, a swollen, grimy city of miracles, crammed with dull-coloured machines, many of which bore human passengers. Of buildings, beautiful beneath their coatings of dust and of other, brighter buildings not so beautiful, with austere lines and many glass windows. Of a troop of riders galloping over an undulating countryside, flamboyant in armour of lacquered gold, coloured pennants draped around their blood-encrusted lances. Their faces were heavy with weariness. Of more faces, many faces, some of which I half recognized, others which were unfamiliar, people clad in strange clothes. A picture of a white haired, middle-aged man who had a tall, spiked crown upon his head. His mouth moved, he was speaking…
    “Erekosë, it is I, King Rigenos, Defender of Humanity. You are needed again, Erekosë. The Hounds of Evil rule a third of the world and humankind is weary of the war against them. Come to us, Erekosë and lead us to victory. From the Plains of Melting Ice to the Mountains of Sorrow they have set up their corrupt standard and I fear they will advance yet further into our territories.”
    The woman’s voice: “Father, this is only an empty tomb. Not even the mummy of Erekosë remains—it became drifting dust long ago. Let us leave and return to Necranal to marshal the living peers.”
             
    I felt like a fainting man who strives to fight against dizzy oblivion but, however much he tries, cannot take control of his own brain. Again I tried to answer, but could not.
    It was as if I wavered backwards through time, while every atom of me wanted to go forwards. I had the sensation of vast size as if I were made of stone with eyelids of granite, measuring miles across—eyelids which I could not open. And then I was tiny—the most minute grain in the universe, and yet I felt I belonged to the whole far more than the stone giant.
    Memories came and went. The whole panorama of the twentieth century, its beauties and its bitternesses, its satisfactions, its strifing, rushed into my mind like air into a vacuum. But it was only momentary, for the next second my entire being was flung elsewhere—to a world which was Earth, but not the Earth of John Daker, not quite the world of dead Erekosë, either.
    There were three great