Echoes of the Well of Souls

Ambreza

She sensed the wrongness long before she came to full consciousness, a sense that something was missing or had been taken away. And yet she knew who she was. All the “pictures” were there in her mind: her mother, her father, friends and acquaintances, going to school, working, all that.

But she couldn’t articulate those mental snapshots or put labels on them. It was as if she had words, even in her mind, only for the things that could be expressed in the language of the People. No, not even that. It was even more primitive, more basic.

Even that thought had no words to it but was rather an assemblage of mental pictures and feelings. She was aware that her thought process was far different from what it had been before, as if all the rules for gathering, organizing, and interpreting information had been suddenly and radically changed. It was as bizarre and alien a way to think as anything she might have imagined, and it seemed slower and harder to assemble thoughts or ideas and, once assembled, impossible to express them. All of her old languages had gone from her mind; they just weren’t there anymore. Not even the People’s. She could call up a memory or scene in her mind and remember the gist of what was said, but could not recall saying it.

There was a language there, but it was a strange one, composed of a series of images and concepts that seemed to form as if by magic in her mind, conveying real messages, real thoughts and decisions, but with no words.

To even be able to think such complex concepts using such a method was amazing to her, but to be unable to express even the slightest sense of them was frustrating and likely to become more frustrating as time went on. And it was hard to think; she had to concentrate.

What was happening to her?

She sat up, opened her eyes, and looked down at herself and was shocked at what she saw—or, more accurately, what she didn’t see.

Her body, in fact, looked perfectly normal, but the cemented bones in both her nose and her ears were gone. It felt odd not to have them there after so long, but also it was something of a relief. The tattoos, too, were gone, and her body didn’t look all that different to her than it had before the People had done their stuff. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Her skin seemed, well, smoother and younger, and the scars were gone—even the appendix scar—and she seemed, well, maybe a little chubby, like she’d been when she was in her early teens. And she had long hair again, the same stringy jet black hair she’d always had, but it was down well below her shoulders, almost to her ass, and it seemed to have a slick, slightly wet feel to it although no residue came off on her hands. She knew that hair didn’t grow that fast; either she’d been unconscious a long time or something beyond her understanding had happened to her.

In fact, in spite of those differences, she felt great. She couldn’t remember when she’d felt this good, in top condition, no aches or pains or anything. She felt like a kid again, although her fair-sized but firm breasts and the rest of her body assured her that she wasn’t. If her mind were just working right, if she just had her language skills back, if it just weren’t so hard to think complicated thoughts, she would have felt vast relief.

She sprang to her feet and looked warily around. The weight and swing of the hair felt very odd; she’d never had it this long before. Still, it was the least of her problems, and for some reason it felt right for the hair to be there.

She was in a stand of trees, but it was no jungle or rain forest; rather, it was almost parklike. The trees were not quite familiar but were far less strange than the ones of the Amazon. She felt thirsty and a little hungry, which was natural, but she also suddenly felt a sense of danger and tension, of being too exposed. All her brooding, her attempts to think complex thoughts and sort things out, suddenly vanished, replaced by something else, something that required no thought, no deliberation, but seemed in retrospect almost instinctual.

Almost before she knew it, she was climbing up a very tall tree that rationality would have said could not have been climbed. It was tall and had a long regular trunk with few opportunities for handholds or footholds, yet she went up it as if it were a stairway. Before she knew it, she was perched on a heavy limb seven or more meters above the ground below. The uncertain perch, the sheer drop, the smoothness of the trunk going back down did not bother her at all. Her sense of balance was absolutely perfect, and she didn’t think the situation odd at all.

The upper parts of the tree bore a bananalike fruit; she walked over to a nearby bunch, picked one of them off, and began eating it, skin, stem, and all, all without conscious thought. The fruit had a banana’s consistency but was green and brown on the outside and a bright orange color inside. It was moist and sweet and went down so well, she picked another. Somehow she just knew which ones were ripe and which ones to leave alone.

She did, however, shrug off the immediate feeling of contentment a full belly gave her, because the sense of tension and danger still remained. Before she could relax, something impelled her to assess her location and the lay of the land. She climbed farther up, to where she could see out in all directions with little effort.

The immediate area was a sort of park with well-manicured trees and grassy areas filled with both sun and shade. The land beyond seemed to be gently rolling, with a number of rivers or streams and a road that came from off the horizon, made its way lazily around various stands of tilled and grooved farmland and across small bridges of stone or wood, and continued off to her right through more of the same sort of country. There was something odd about where the road vanished from sight; just before the horizon there was a sort of shimmering, like heat distortion but extending along the horizon as far as she could see. But the shimmering was too steady and regular for it to be caused by rising heat—it seemed substantial, almost solid, and an image of a giant window came into her mind.

To her left a side road seemed to wander up to a huge, elaborate building with many more outbuildings beyond. The mind-picture that most matched was of a farm, but that was mostly because of the surrounding fields and the layout of the buildings; neither the house nor the outbuildings looked like anything she’d seen before. It was a picturesque, almost idyllic scene nonetheless, and she knew it; why, then, did she have such a strong emotional reaction to it, bordering not on fear but on repulsion? Had she been in the jungle so long that what once would have seemed a pleasant, peaceful, even charming scene now looked and felt so wrong? By contrast, that shimmering skyline in the opposite direction felt equally right; it had an emotional attraction she could feel, as if it were a magnet softly pulling at her.

Recent events had been so strange and had moved so fast of late that she felt frightened and confused by almost everything. She tried to put her thoughts in order and found that she couldn’t. Putting the memory pictures together in some sort of context was hard. Worse, her experiences with the People felt more real, more understandable to her than anything she had experienced before. When she tried to recall her past life, all she got was confusion and conflicting feelings. It was all there, but it just wasn’t much use. And if she couldn’t think clearly and figure out what was happening to her, what was she going to do?

She went back down the tree partway until she found a thick branch that forked into two only slightly thinner ones. With a little shifting, she discovered it made a pretty solid and secure seat, shielded from the ground by branches. She was so tired; perhaps sleep would help. It never even occurred to her that even her second incarnation among the People would never have considered this sort of perch either safe or secure. She was too tired to mentally fight herself right now. It was best to clear the mind, relax, and sleep it off. Perhaps it would let her think more clearly.

Settling back, eyes closed, as relaxed as she could be, she felt a concept come to her by a process that was completely unfamiliar. It was hard not to have the words to use. It went against her entire cultural upbringing. Even the People were as linguistically sophisticated as they needed to be. This was completely different.

Words can obscure as well as clarify. With this way, there was never an error in understanding, if what she was trying to comprehend was understandable at all.

Was that it? Was there something she was missing here?

Was it better not to think, too?She was here, hunger quelled and safe, because of unthinking action.

No. That would make me nothing more than an animal.

Then what?

Just as you speak when you need to speak, think when you need to think. Know when to speak and when not to. Know when to think and when not to.

But didn’t she always need to think?

Learn to let go. Do not fight impulses, let it go. It is when nothing comes that thinking is required. Learn to trust yourself.

Her impulse just then was to go to sleep. She did not fight it.

It was almost dark when she awoke, but rather than feeling nervous about the setting sun, she felt less afraid, more confident. It was already becoming easier for her to not impose her own old mind-set on this weird situation and to embrace this new and different inner way of thought. It was as if thoughts and decisions were debated and assembled far away in her mind, out of consciousness, then the entire set of possibilities was almost magically laid before her as a series of picture-objects.

This place was not where she was supposed to be or she wouldn’t feel its wrongness. The direction toward the odd farm buildings felt even more wrong; so it was toward that shimmering wall that she must go, for only that way felt right. There was also a feeling of undefined danger in this area, so the quicker she got out of it, the better.

First she surveyed the area once again. There was an odd noise from the direction of the farm, and what she saw in the rapidly waning light made her gasp and brought on an intense feeling of danger and irrational distaste that was like nothing she had ever experienced.

Two creatures were in some sort of vehicle that was making a whining noise. It seemed to sway from side to side as it turned into the small road up to the farm. The vehicle was basically an open cabin mounted to a thick oval slab, but while it bounced along, it seemed to be hovering an elbow’s length above the road, with nothing touching the road itself. It was the sight of the two creatures that caused her overpowering sense of dislike.

They looked like two giant beavers, each the size of a man; one was dressed in some sort of waistcoat, and the other wore a flowered bib and a silly-looking hat with a big flower sticking out of it.

The hovercar pulled up finally in front of the house and settled to the ground, its whine now cut off. The driver with the waistcoat got out, stretched, and walked around to open the door for its companion with the hat.

Standing and walking, they looked less like beavers than like something entirely new. It was just the rodentlike head and prominent buckteeth that gave the initial impression. They were covered with thick brown hair, they walked upright on thick bowed legs extending from wide hips, and they were like nothing human.

She wanted to meet them even less than she had wanted to meet that purple polka-dotted dragon. Just as curious was her nearly instant reaction to the vehicle, the bright clothing the creatures wore, even the buildings. Somehow all of them were wrong. This was far more than the aversion the People had to things they did not make themselves; it was more general, as if anything artificial or manufactured by anyone was wrong. She did not even wish she had some sort of weapon; that would be wrong as well.

It was time to eat and run.

It was getting easier all the time to process information and think in this new way, which didn’t seem like thinking at all but was in fact as complex a method of reasoning as the one she’d been raised on. The trick wasn’t not to think, after all; it was not to fight doing things in your head in a whole new way.

She came down the tree almost as easily as she’d gone up it, jumping the last couple of meters and landing expertly on her feet. For someone who had no idea where she was, her sense of direction seemed absolute. She headed toward the edge of the trees, paused to take stock of all her wide-open senses, and, perceiving nothing nearby, darted out into the open and across the road to the rows of thick bushes beyond. The bushes bore some large pear-shaped, cream-colored fruits, but she never gave them a second glance. Something, more of that new inner knowledge, told her that none of the strange-looking fruits were ripe and ready to eat yet.

She began to make her way through the groves at a steady pace, pausing only now and again to check the smells, sounds, and other bits of information that the gentle breeze might bring. Darkness was falling quickly now, yet she proceeded on, drawn by some inner road map of the region. She had no idea where she was or where she was going, but somehow she knew how to get there.

Finally she came to a shallow stream that burbled over a bed of rocks. She paused, crouched, and took some water in her cupped hands and sniffed it. It smelled right, so she drank deeply, discovering a fierce but previously suppressed thirst. After she drank, she relaxed for the first time since leaving her tree, and, seeing very little around in the darkness, she looked up—and gasped.

There were countless stars up there, in some places so thick that they seemed to be a single burning mass, and parts of the sky were bathed in clouds of gold and magenta and deep royal purple, all seemingly frozen in midswirl. There were more stars than she’d ever seen before, and features out of deep space astronomical photographs right there, sitting in the night sky.

She did not have to gaze but an instant upon the incredible beauty of that vast fairyland starfield to know that there was nowhere on Earth from which it might be seen. The sight and that knowledge fell upon her instantly, generating a sense of awe, excitement, and some fear.

Alama had not lied. This was another world, far, far away from the one she had known.

And still there was that inner urge to press on, to proceed as quickly as possible to wherever it was that was calling her. Tearing her eyes away from the spectral scene, she waded across the creek and went on through the brush on the other side.

Even pushing her pace as much as she dared, it took hours to reach that shimmering boundary glimpsed much earlier from the top of the tree. It wasn’t easy to see even in the bright starlight, but she could sense it, almost feel it. And yet it could be seen, for on this side of the barrier things had a brighter, more orderly look, while beyond it things seemed much darker. She had no sense of it as something dangerous or even unusual, but it was unique in her experience, and she could not be absolutely certain that it was safe.

She approached it cautiously, then stood right up to it, finally putting out a hand to touch it. It radiated warmth and a sense of thicker air, and after hesitating a moment, she thrust her right hand into it.

It passed through with no resistance, but the feeling on the other side was quite different. Hot and wet were the two impressions that came to mind, and the sense of something striking and tickling her caused her to withdraw the hand. It seemed all right, and when she touched it, the hand was wet; what she’d felt were raindrops.

Her new self did not react, but her old self caught the immediate sense of incongruity. She looked up—and, to the very boundary itself, the starfield shone in a cloudless sky. Rain? From where?

Taking in a deep breath, she walked straight through the barrier—feeling a change in environment but no resistance—and into a pitch-dark land of steady, gentle warm rain. The temperature was considerably warmer than it had been on the other side, almost steamy and very reminiscent of the Amazon jungle. The rain, however, was more subdued, which was actually a welcome change from what she’d been used to.

She turned and stuck her head back through the “barrier.” Although it hadn’t seemed cold to her, the shock of suddenly going, wet-faced, from a steam bath to a spring night made it feel almost frigid. It was fascinating, as if the whole world were one huge house and each “room” in the place had its own weather and climate.

She withdrew her head. It felt somehow better to be over here, even with the extreme darkness and the rain. She wasn’t certain if this was because of her newfound instincts or because this region was more like the northwest Amazon, but it felt more like, well, home.

She walked away from the boundary slowly and carefully, almost tripping on wild, junglelike vegetation, until the soft glow coming through from the other side of the barrier was no longer visible. Suppressing as much as possible her feelings of disorientation and fear, she tried to empty her mind, relax, and let that new set of senses take over.

And slowly, strangely, she began to see her surroundings in a way she’d never seen anything before.

Ancient trees rose all around her; she saw them as a throbbing, pulsing reddish color, the leaves almost black in the inky darkness. Variations of the same red color also appeared in the bushes, other plants, even mosses, everything alive that was organic, all glowing with the energy of life.

Other spots glowed yellow and purple and orange. Smaller things mostly, but brighter, often moving either in or on the vegetation or occasionally on the ground or even in the air. The yellows were some form of reptile, perhaps many forms; the purples were small warm-blooded creatures; and the oranges were flitting insects of the night.

The ground seemed mostly to remain black close by, but not too far off it seemed to shimmer as if something transparent and yet also reflective were on top of it, distorting the colors or auras that she saw clearly above it.

Water, she realized. Mostly standing water, except for the effect of the raindrops. The vegetation was dense, but it was no jungle, and there were openings among the trees that were not overgrown. Neither was it any sort of farm or orchard as on the other side; it was random, natural… as it should be. It was, she realized, some sort of vast swamp.

Curious, she closed her eyes for a moment and found that the scene was still there. She moved a little, cautiously, keeping to the “black” areas, and saw that the scene moved with her, changing point of view as if all this were the same as the vision her eyes brought.

But she was not seeing with her eyes; rather, she was somehow seeing the essence of life in the wild and its reflections in her mind.

She began to walk slowly but confidently, using the black areas as her guide. Some points were quite small, but overall they seemed to almost form a network of paths through the wilderness, paths taking her through great beauty in a direction that seemed to draw her.

Navigating by this new second sight also became easier the longer she did it. While it hardly gave full circular vision, it was far superior in some ways to normal sight because it covered a wider area. Several times she was aware of large creatures she took to be snakes of some kind lurking high in the trees; when they watched her, they burned exceptionally bright, and she avoided them. The water was mostly just the reflective sort, but occasionally it, too, would have brightly glowing forms in it. Most of these had pale greenish tinges—fish, perhaps? That was what came to mind. Here and there would be large orange masses, sometimes in the water, sometimes out, and these, too, she quietly avoided while always looking for an unoccupied nearby tree just in case those orange shapes became a bit too interested in her. Once or twice one seemed to do just that, but none of them ever really approached her with any speed, and she never felt in real danger from them.

It was also getting easier to isolate sounds and smells and associate colors with them. As the night wore on and her journey continued, these supplemental senses and her discriminatory abilities concerning them increased greatly, the data fed and either filed or rejected automatically as it rushed in.

Crocodiles to the left, thirty feet, floating lazily… Two big snakes above and to the right, neither hungry… Colony of strange birds roosting in the tree to the left…

At a junction of “paths” she stopped suddenly, catching an odd scent from the ground. She realized suddenly that it was fecal matter of the sort whose smell would have repulsed her even days earlier. Now it was just information. It wasn’t all that fresh, but the odor put a picture in her mind that excited her.

People!

Was it just a random dropping, or did it also have another purpose? A territory marker, perhaps, like animals used? Or an indicator of a trail to follow? But if the latter, which direction did it mark to go? Surely, if it was some sort of message as well as a simple call of nature, it meant to go up the path it was on. Having no other road signs to guide her, she went up that path.

There were more at other junctions, each having a different scent. That meant that these were trail markers, laid out by intelligence, not mere territorial boundaries that would involve the same few people—or so she hoped. Such a system, however primitive or however revolting it might have seemed to “civilized” people, made a lot of sense. Only those who could sense and figure them out would understand their meaning.

Was this something new, a function of this strange place, or were things like her new mind-sight and such finely honed senses of smell and hearing something all people had once possessed but had somehow lost? The latter seemed more likely; she, after all, was using them, and that meant that they were a natural part of her, perhaps sealed off in that unused part of the brain. Were those untapped parts of the human brain really unused excess capacity, or were they vestigial remains of senses civilization had made unnecessary?

What other powers might these people possess, these people who were clearly up ahead, clearly at the place where she felt driven to go?

There was only one good way to find out.

The Ambrezan came out on the porch and said, “We have just had a report from the capital that a second party has come through the Well.”

Nathan Brazil took his feet down from the porch railing, slowed his idle rocking in the chair, and took the cigar out of his mouth. “All Glathrielians?” he asked.

“It seems so. Two males and two females in a single party, and then a third female later, who, it is said, evaded the alarms and security measures and went through without detection.”

Brazil stopped rocking and stood up. “That’s probably the one. No word from anywhere else that a Glathrielian female like myself came through here unaltered?”

“None, although it’s a big place. If she didn’t want to be found, it is entirely possible that she’s made some sort of deal. Not everyone might advertise as blatantly as you, you know.”

Nathan Brazil grinned. “You’re just trying to get rid of me. I make you uncomfortable.”

“No, not at all—”

“Oh, come on, Hsada! A civilized, talking, technologically sophisticated Glathrielian must awaken ancestral nightmares.”

The Ambrezan stared at the little man with its big brown eyes outlined by a slight frown. “I never know when you are joking.”

Brazil chuckled. “Don’t worry about it. As soon as I can link up with her, I’m out of here. Promise. I have friends that are a very long way from here that I promised I’d see, and I already feel guilty I haven’t done it yet.”

The truth was, he didn’t really want to see either Tony or Anne Marie, even though he wouldn’t mind a trip up that way. He really didn’t want the burden of getting the two of them together as they were now. Deep down, he was hoping that each, being now healthy and hearty, and both, to his relief, in rather comfortable hexes, would use these months to settle in and build new lives and new attachments. It wasn’t as if he’d forced either or both into coming, after all, or as if they wouldn’t be dead by now if they hadn’t chosen to come through, but if ever a match of love and devotion had been made in heaven before, he hadn’t seen it in all his long life. He could, ofcourse, fix them up if he went up to the Well, but he didn’t really want to do that just yet. He felt no sense of urgency, and he wanted to stay here a while and enjoy the difference.

The Ambreza had not initially been all that thrilled at his appearance, and he knew it—they hadn’t reacted much differently the last time or two, either. But they were civilized in the extreme, suckers for a good story, and, well, he’d been useful to them, working for a few months helping them redesign rather than merely repair and upgrade their failing irrigation system, saving them a lot of investment and foreign involvement. Now he had clothes specially made to his design, some local money, and chits for a decent supply of the prime Ambrezan export, tobacco, with which to make his way anywhere he wanted to go. He lacked only Mavra, and he very much wanted to find her, see her, have things explained to him. It would be like old times, and this time he’d teach her the full operational details of the Well—as soon as he got there and could remember them again—so he might not ever have to carry this burden again.

He knew that last was selfish, but damn it, it was hard to be all that sentimental toward somebody he could hardly remember and last saw maybe twenty-five hundred years ago.

Maybe now it was time for a reunion.

He walked into the house and back to the communications room. The Ambreza had quite a sophisticated setup, able to call just about anywhere they had people in what was now Ambreza, the high-tech hex that very long ago had been the common ancestral home of the Terran races.

The furniture in an Ambrezan house was not made for his anatomy, but he could make do. He sat at the console and dialed in the communications ministry in the capital city of Khor.

“Oh, Solomon—yes. The group that came through. We had the ambassador run a systems check for placements, but it was inconclusive. However, we are certain that the last one, the female who didn’t clear entry, came to Glathriel. We registered a surge in section—um—B-14. Yes. Agricultural district up north not far from the border with Glathriel, which is where you’d expect a deposit, matching exactly the time of Zone entry. It’s always easier to track an individual than a group, although this is hardly an everyday thing. In fact, counting you, I can remember no other but this one even in the records.”

“All right. But she made no contact with the locals?”

“Not that we can determine. A search of the area using the local manager’s dogs indicated that she went south into Glathriel. Beyond that we can’t say, since it’s too much of a mess in that district to do decent tracking, and frankly, it’s far too much trouble for something that is your business, not ours. As long as she’s gone to Glathriel, she’s not our problem.”

He frowned. “Gone to Glathriel… Well, I suppose that if she didn’t want a lot of immediate attention, she might head for the coast strip there. I don’t suppose that there’s any word from them.”

The technician was not terribly patient with this imposition. “Look, Glathriel is a nontech hex. No communication works except the direct kind, and no vehicles work except animal power. The people along there are mostly a religious sect that’s antiprogress, and we and they don’t talk much to one another except when they come south twice a year to sell their crops. It might be weeks, even months before we hear any news from them. I admit that a talking, civilized, and sophisticated Glathrielian might cause quite a stir, even some sort of religious crisis among them, but it’s still not something we’d hear anytime soon.”

Brazil scratched his chin and thought about it. “I don’t know. If she’s heading toward them, it’ll almost certainly be ones near the border. I suspect we’d hear pretty fast for those very same reasons.” He sighed. “Okay, that’s all you can do now. I’ll take it from here. Thank you very much.”

“Very well. Out,” the comm tech responded curtly, and switched off.

Nathan Brazil sat there a moment trying to decide what to do. Finally he got up and went over to a far wall where a map of Ambreza and part of Glathriel was tacked to a cork board.

B-14… There it was. Not that far from the Ambrezan strip in Glathriel. A country road was marked as heading through the district toward that point, so that was the logical place to start. It looked to be maybe three, four hours drive if he could bum one or a day on horseback if he couldn’t. It was certainly worth getting off his duff and going after her. He had no doubt that it was Mavra Chang; it was inconceivable to him that any of the new entries would wind up Glathrielians. He’d pretty much seen to that long ago.

He turned and saw Hsada standing there looking sternly at him from the doorway.

“No, you cannot borrow the car,” the Ambrezan told him flatly. “You will be going into Glathriel, and I would have to send somebody down there and lose a day getting it back. However, delivery trucks go through town all the time, and some may have stops at or near there. I will get someone to drive you in, and from there you can make your own arrangements.”

Brazil grinned and shrugged. “Good enough. What can I say?”

“Say good-bye,” responded Hsada. “And don’t forget to settle your rent through today before you leave.”

It turned out that settling the rent was more of a problem than finding a ride to near the border. Hsada was a very hard bargainer and was more creative in finding extra charges to spring on him than anybody since that lowland Scotswoman at a bed and breakfast about a hundred years ago. Extra sheet charge, indeed.

There were only five cities plus the capital worth the name in Ambreza, and maybe forty small towns spread all over, but the two basic occupations of those in the country were raising crops for export and truck farming. Over the centuries truck farming had become quite sophisticated, with regular routes and a whole guild of middlemen doing the shipping to and from the markets on a daily basis. Tobacco was grown best in the southeast; the southwest was better suited to longer-growing but high-demand produce like subtropical fruits due not to location but to a strong warm current off the Gulf of Zinjin that came in very close to shore and created a more or less subtropical pocket. This, of course, had been allowed by those who had created the hex; weather and climate were not of the natural sort on this world, but when they saw that the water hex of Flotish had such currents designed in, they simply made use of them.

By that evening he was within a few kilometers of the plantation nearest the designated spot, and he stayed over with some very surprised and curious farm supervisors that night so he’d have the full next day for the quest. While the field bosses were somewhat taken aback at a glib Glathrielian wearing clothes and speaking like them, they were suckers for a good set of stories and even worse suckers at cards and dice.

The next morning he saw the first Glathrielians he’d seen since—well, a very long time ago. He had forgotten their rather exotic “look,” a unique yet homogenized blend of just about every racial type on Earth. Being of a near uniformly brown skin, with a variety of Oriental features yet with brown, black, and reddish hair was only the beginning of it. One could look at anyone and see suggestions of somebody one thought was familiar, yet the entire amalgam was something totally unique.

This time, though, they also seemed decidedly, well, odd. There was no other way to explain it. True, their tropical hex didn’t really require clothing, but these people wore nothing. Not amulets or paint or markings of any kind, nor earrings, nose rings, bracelets, anklets—nothing at all, men or women. They also seemed to let their hair and, on the men, facial hair as well simply grow. He couldn’t understand why some of them didn’t trip over all that hair or strangle on it. Some of the shorter women seemed to have to wrap it around themselves to keep it from dragging on the ground, and he had never seen men with hair that long. Hair that, oddly, didn’t seem to tangle or get matted. Had he done that? He didn’t remember doing it, but if he’d altered them significantly, the computer would have filled in the logical items which he’d left out but which might be required for some reason.

Other things also bothered him. Their remarkable silence for one thing. Watching them, it seemed at times as if there was some kind of communication going on, judging from the gestures, the playful actions, the coordination they exhibited, but aside from some grunts and occasional laughter they said nothing.

He wondered if they were at all aware that they now worked the fields that their distant ancestors had once owned. He watched as they seemed to have some kind of silent prayer vigil before starting to work, then they went to it, picking fruit and stacking it in neat piles every few bushes.

“They have an almost unnatural ability to figure out just which fruit is ready to be picked,” one of the Ambrezan supervisors commented to him.

“But they don’t fill baskets or containers,” Brazil noted. “They just pile it all neatly.”

“They won’t touch them. No Glathrielian will touch anything manufactured, even a box. They even make several trips carrying their ‘pay,’ which is a small percentage of the crop, back to their home in Glathriel in their arms.”

“What about that home? Don’t they have some sort of village or whatever with shelter?”

“No, they don’t. Not as we understand it, anyway. They do have tribal lands that they consider their home, but the few structures are very crude and very basic and formed entirely from gathered dead wood and dropped leaves. They don’t build as such. The few crude structures tend to be shelters for the babies and for bad weather. Mostly they sleep either out in the open or in hollow trees, some caves, and shelters formed from fallen logs and the like. They don’t even build or keep fires, although if a thunderstorm comes along and sets something off, they might use it until it goes out. They don’t kill unless something is trying to kill them and there is no other choice—and whatever that unfortunate animal is, they then eat it raw that same day.”

“They seem to eat okay from what I can see,” Brazil noted. “The women seem to range from chubby to fat, and the men are built like bricks.”

“They eat a complex variety of things, some of which we, and perhaps you, would find disgusting, but it seems the perfect balance for them. They make great workers, though. No complaints, virtually no mistakes, and they won’t touch, let alone eat, anything they haven’t picked themselves. They’re always good-humored in a childlike sort of way, and they’re so placid, they don’t even swat flies that land on them.”

“How’d you ever get them to work for you?”

“It’s been this way since long before my time or my grandfather’s time, too,” the Ambrezan supervisor replied. “Only a few tribes will do it, but they’ve been doing it forever on the border plantations and, I think, along the Zinjin Coast strip. The vast majority live way in the interior, which is mostly swamp and jungle with some volcanic areas. We used to try and survey them once upon a time, I’m told, but they can vanish like magic, and it just wasn’t worth the time and trouble. The fact is, we know very little about them beyond these border tribes.”

“I know about that,” Brazil told him. “They asked me to do a report on them if I went in, figuring that since I’m related in a way to them, I might be taken as one of them if I went in.”

“Well, that figures. You gonna go?”

“Looks like it. I’m after another like myself. A female. Very small and very thin—even smaller and thinner than me. You haven’t seen or heard much about somebody like that, have you?”

“Heard they was looking for somebody like that down the road apiece, but haven’t seen or heard a thing myself, no. Of course, I can’t tell any of you apart much, frankly, but I think I’d have noticed a female smaller and thinner than you, that’s for sure.” He sighed. “Well, if you’re gonna find her, you got maybe two weeks.”

“Huh? Why’s that?”

“Oh, they haven’t got any families as such. You can see the same kid with a different parent most any day. It’s all communal. That’s ‘cause, I think, they have one short period of a couple of days when all the women get fertile all at once and all the men can think of nothing else and they go at it, breaking only for sleep, for up to four days. Then they don’t do it anymore until the next month. Lots of animals like that, but I know of only a few races here that still have that old mechanism. They say we did back in prehistoric times or whatever, but not since.”

The idea shook him. Just what did I do to you, people?

It was coming back to him now in bits and pieces. When he’d come through that time off the spaceship, he’d discovered that the Ambreza had literally reduced the Glathrielians to animallike status. When he’d done his work in the Well, he’d fixed that so there’d be a slow but steady generational rise back to normality through providing immunity to the Ambreza gas—but in a nontech hex, which, he’d guessed, wouldn’t threaten the Ambreza.

He’d been wrong. The next time through, he’d caught wind that the Glathrielians had gotten to a point where they knew the legends and stories about how they’d been kicked out of their ancestral home and brought low and were getting very curious about Ambrezan technology and doing a lot of work on natural chemicals themselves. The Ambreza leadership had been getting nervous even then; the seeds of potential genocide were being sown even then as the Ambreza’s imaginations started coming up with potential attacks far worse than the Glathrielians could have managed on their own.

So while he and Mavra had reset and checked out the system, he’d made other changes to ensure that this would all die down. He’d removed the translation abilities from the Glathrielians so that they could only communicate among themselves, and he’d put a blocker in there so that no other language but theirs could get through. If they couldn’t reconnoiter and spy on their hated enemy, they wouldn’t be much of a threat. And he’d made what he thought then were some minor physiological changes to ensure that they adapted nearly perfectly to their present hex and would not be as comfortable in the one that was now Ambreza or lust for it so much.

But this —these people, this totally primitive way—was not what he’d had in mind at all. He’d sought only to protect them from slaughter, not to reduce them to pre-Stone Age levels. What had the computer imposed logically on them that flowed from his premises? Just how badly had he goofed?

What have I done?he wondered again, watching them. This was all he needed, he thought sourly. A hyperdose of pure guilt right now. I’m not going to keep ying-yanging these people around forever for some sin of ancestors even I can’t remember, he vowed. If I made a mistake, this time I’ll correct it, but, beyond that, from this point on, as much as I like the Ambreza, I’m not going to keep these people down again. If any new adjustments need to be done, by damn, I’ll do ‘em on the Ambreza for a change!

He stared at them as they worked, trying to figure them out, and over a period of time he got a sense that he wasn’t seeing the whole picture, but he couldn’t put his finger on what was disturbing him that he hadn’t already quantified.

And then he had it.

There were no lame, no crippled, not so much as a limper among them. Well, they might leave all of those home. But no, it was more than that. In the kind of rough environment and natural way they lived, their creamy brown skins should have the signs of all sorts of incidental injuries, scars, and whatnot. There were none. Every one of their hides looked as smooth and untouched as a baby’s bottom. Not a scar or a scab among them, and some of them weren’t young.

And that was impossible. It was something that just might not occur to the Ambreza, thankfully, but it was damned impossible. Something that they hid from everyone except themselves was definitely not kosher about the Glathrielians. Now he had to go in. Mavra was still the object, but he very much wanted to know just what the hell was going on there.

His strange appearance, so like them and yet so different both in features and in the fact that he was clothed and having a conversation with Ambrezans, naturally drew curious looks from the Glathrielians. No, it was worse than that. They looked puzzled as all hell.

Finally, one young woman came over to him a bit shyly but with definite purpose, a big smile of friendliness on her face. He smiled back at her, and she put out her hands, and after a moment of trying to figure out what she wanted, he put out his and they clasped hands.

Suddenly he felt a strange, slightly dizzy sensation, and at the same time she gasped, let go forcefully, and backed away from him, a look of near terror in her eyes. As he followed her with his gaze, she broke and ran not toward the other tribespeople but away, at top speed, in the direction of the border.

Now what the hell?was all he could manage.

The others were now also staring at him rather warily but just keeping their distance and working the grove. He decided to press on down the road and pick up the trail.

The old Ambrezan couple who owned the plantation square in the middle of section B-14 hadn’t seen or heard much of anything, and they’d been very surprised when they’d gotten the call from the government, but they’d let the dogs out and had them sniff around, and sure enough, they had picked up some odd kind of trail in a grove of trees and followed it all the way to the border. It was quite puzzling to them; there were so many Glathrielian scents around that it would have to be something outside the dogs’ normal experience to have them take off like that.

Nathan Brazil nodded but did not explain. If it were Mavra, and it certainly looked like there was no other possibility, she would smell of many alien things but little or nothing of the Well World.

“You ain’t gonna track her with no dogs in there, no, sir,” the old Ambrezan told him. “They get in Glathriel a ways, and they go nuts. Can’t pick up anything—take you around in circles, they will. Horses and mules might work in some parts, but if you’re goin’ inhere, you’re goin’ right into the Great Swamp. Runs for half the hex, it does. Lots of water, killer snakes, vicious swamp lizards, and a lot worse.”

He shrugged. “The Glathrielians seem to do all right in there.”

“Well, maybe. Maybe it’s just ‘cause they have enough young to keep pace, too. Ever think of that? You don’t see no old ones, that’s for sure, and as peaceful as they are, they might just figure the thing’s got a right to eat ‘em. Or maybe they smell as bad to the animals there as they do to us—no offense, son. But you take a riding or pack animal in there, all you’ll do is give them vicious brutes a real feast and waste a good animal.”

“I’ll walk,” he told them. “Been a while since I carried a full pack, but it won’t be the first time. She walked in there with nothing at all, and it’s only been two days or so. I might be able to pick up something. I was a pretty fair tracker once.”

“Well, if she ain’t got eaten, you might have a chance,” the old gent admitted. “But I still wouldn’t like to go in there far. That place like that other world they say you come from? Might make a difference.”

“No, not much. Parts of it are like that, but not the parts I like. Actually, my home’s more like, well, here .”

And it was, too, he realized with a start. Maybe that was why he liked Ambreza and the Ambrezans so much. Given the same hex and a jump start, they’d either managed to develop a very Terranlike society and culture or, more likely, had co-opted parts of it, copied from those they had overthrown. Designed and bred for the hex they now found loathsome, the ones who’d been forced to take their place had come up very differently indeed, while the Ambrezan culture was, after all these thousands of years, virtually unchanged. Static. And they liked it that way.

The Ambreza of their original hex had been creative, aggressive, clever enough to meet a threat when they were woefully mismatched. Moving here, they’d done almost certainly a far better job of managing the hex, but they’d grown soft, stagnant, and complacent, devoid of the daring and creativity that their remote ancestors had had in abundance. They just weren’t really in their element here, and they’d spent thousands upon thousands of generations treading water, never changing or adapting beyond what they had to do. Even he felt that comfortable sense of time standing still here, and in ways easy to take, with their horses and cows and hunting dogs and country manners.

What had the Glathrielians become in the Ambrezan hex? A tropical swamp and jungle was also an invitation to stagnancy for Terrans, and on a much more primitive scale. Even when the magic of technology was allowed to work, the regions of Earth covered by such unlivable areas had tended to keep the inhabitants in the Stone Age. He’d seen it in the Congo, the Philippines, the Amazon interior again and again, just as they’d remained rather primitive in the arctic regions, too busy surviving to go any further until technology came to them or, in more cases than not, was forced upon them.

And yet, even there they’d done the best they could with what they’d had. They’d become farmers where it was possible; fishers near seas, lakes, and oceans; hunters and managers of game, with social organizations of varying degrees as geography allowed. From the spear and blowgun to the igloo to vast irrigation channels, they’d adapted and innovated their way to some sort of culture.

Glathriel looked all the more an enigma because of it. Even the last time Terran types had managed all this, until they’d become a threat to others and he’d set them back a bit. Had they lost once too often? Had they given up as a people?

Or had they adapted and innovated in ways none on Earth had ever done?

What had the girl seen by holding his hands, and how had she seen it?

Had he perhaps set up the evolutionary mechanism and now forgotten that he had done so or, even more disturbing, done it without realizing it?

He allowed the old man to take him all the way, down to the stake in the ground just before the hex boundary where they’d stopped the dogs. Bidding the old Ambrezan farewell with thanks, he adjusted the backpack and walked into the new Glathriel.

It was, he thought, a nearly unimaginable feeling to enter a hex populated by people who looked very much like him and somehow feel that he was going into territory more alien than some of the strangest hexes on the Well World.