Shadow of the Well of Souls

Dlubine, Moving Toward the Fahomma Border

there was a dramatic scene anywhere one looked afterdark in Dlubine. All around, at different very specific locations, one could see lightning illuminate large cloud masses or occasionally but spectacularly snake down to the sea and play along it, often for several seconds, looking like some mad scientist’s laboratory experiment. Yet overhead there would be frequent breaks in the clouds, giving windows into the magnificent and colorful night sky of the Well World, while below varicolored lights crisscrossed and weaved intricate patterns, sometimes exploding into huge complex patterns for a while, although nothing on the scale of what they’d seen the first night. And now and then the winds would bring whiffs of sulfur or the rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide. At least once they’d sailed past an island perhaps two or three kilometers distant that, while invisible in the darkness, betrayed itself by showing streams of red running tendrillike down dark self-made mountains to the sea and ending in great plumes of steam. Where hot lava met the sea, the combination created its own very local thunderstorms.

“You could make a million bucks selling cruises through here,” Gus noted, just staring out at the amazing sights.

“Well, I suppose the inhabitants would have something to say about that,” Brazil responded, taking advantage of the conflicting winds from the surrounding turbulence and making reasonably good time. “Still, what would you do with the money, Gus? What’s the top of the real estate market in Dahir?”

Gus laughed. “Not that great. Oh, it’s comfortable enough, but, well, this might sound funny, but they’re just too much like the small town in northern Minnesota that I got out of.”

“Like what?” Brazil chuckled. ” This I got to hear.”

“Well, the place is pretty damned dull, frankly, just like home. Nothin’ much happens, and what little that does isn’t important but it becomes the biggest thing around ’cause it’s something. Everybody’s into everybody else’s business ’cause they don’t have much else to do, the life’s routine, and the pleasure for them is simple. On top of it all it’s dominated by a straitlaced church that’s gonna make sure you behave and go to heaven, or wherever they think Dahirs go. No imagination, no curiosity. Even the weather’s borin’. And I mean, think about this kinda invisibility thing. Even that’s a drag there. I mean, so you decide to rough it and hunt your own food down ’cause it’s fun, right? Only nothin’ can see you comin’, so where’s the sport? Even back home the deer could see you and make a break for it or hide out, and even the fish had a little bit of a chance. Nothing’s even really wild in Dahir. It’s all carefully managed. I couldn’t stand it no longer than I did.”

“Urn, I see what you mean. You couldn’t just find an attractive female and go off and buy your own swamp or something?”

“Not likely. Hell, it’s the women who run the damn place. They’re the bigger ones, they got the muscles, and they’re all kinda muddy brown. It’s us guys who have all the color and are supposed to attract a female. They lay the eggs, but the guys hatch ’em. I know I’m supposed to have been made comfortable with bein’ a Dahir and all that, but that’s just the physical part. I mean, the swimmin’, the eatin’ the way I eat and what I eat, stuff like that, no problem, but in my head I’m still the same guy. I been him too long to be somebody else. And that arrangement just don’t seem natural to me.”

“I know some women who’d like that arrangement just fine.” Brazil laughed. “It’s not as uncommon among either animals or sentient species as you think, but I can see your point. Some people handle the cultural differences fine, but others find things just too topsy-turvy to adjust in that department. Tell me, what would you do if you had your pick? You’ve seen a bit of this world and its denizens. Would you be something else? Or would you go back if you could?”

Gus thought about it. “I dunno. I guess I ain’t seen enough of this place to really decide if there’s somethin’ neat to be. I sure wouldn’t be no Earth-human type, not if it meant havin’ done to me what was done to Terry. Go back? Yeah, maybe. I loved the job, no question. That’s what I miss most. But I also had started thinkin’ that I was gettin’ older too fast and slowin’ down and the odds were gonna catch up to me sooner or later. You know the worst thing, though? The one thing I dreaded, really hated? And it wasn’t bein’ shot at or bombed or nothin’ like that.”

“I couldn’t guess.”

“Comin’ home. Thing was, I didn’t really have one. My folks are dead; the rest of my family’s as happy not to see me as I am not to see them. Got one sister who married a career navy guy and she’s got a couple of neat kids, but I always felt like a stranger when I visited, like I didn’t really belong there no matter how much she said she liked me visitin’ her. I dunno. You get to a point in life, you don’t want to stop what you love doin’, but you also want something else, something more… permanent, I guess. And I just wouldn’t feel right keepin’ on doin’ what I’m doin’ if I had a wife and kids, particularly kids. Be worse than bein’ a navy wife. Sort of like bein’ a cop’s wife, wonderin’ if I was gettin’ my ass blown off someplace and only coming home between revolutions and massacres. There’s some that do it, but I couldn’t, and takin’ a job runnin’ around to the latest drug bust or bank heist or whatever isn’t the same thing.”

“Permanence but with a lot of action and variety—that’s a pretty tall order,” Brazil commented.

“Yeah, I know. I guess I’ll never find what I’m lookin’ for. Kinda like the sign I once saw in a shop. ‘Quality! Service! Price!’ it read. Then underneath it added, ‘Pick any two.’ Still, I’d love to go back if I could keep this invisibility or whatever it is. You could still get caught by a random bullet and nobody’d notice you sinkin’ in the quicksand, but you could walk right into the rebel camp and film away. Speaking of which, how come you ain’t been spooked once since I got back? I really didn’t think about it until just now, but you’ve had no problems seem’ me, have you?”

“No,” Brazil admitted. He hadn’t told Gus about all that had transpired, and he wanted to keep most of it that way. What Gus didn’t know he couldn’t reveal if he really got captured later on. Besides, who knew how he’d feel about Brazil having that kind of bond with Terry? But a few things had to be addressed.

“I picked up her second sight, sort of,” he told the Dahir. “I don’t know how, but somehow she gave it to me. At least, when I woke up, I had no more problems seeing you or her just like I’d expect to.”

“Yeah? You also got the power to blank out other folks?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Brazil replied honestly. “Unfortunately, at some point in this trip I’m almost sure to find out. I wouldn’t be surprised, though. After all this time I tend not to be surprised at very amazing things happening when I need them.”

“You sure got the luck, all right,” Gus noted. “I mean, bad as it is for Terry, she’s been a real plus for you this trip, right? Then I’m here as a Dahir with this crazy, built-in disappearin’ act, and she figures it out and then gives it to you when they got your picture splattered all over creation. What are the odds of that?”

“Very low, Gus, but that’s my point. It’s not luck. It’s the Well—the master computer. I’m just a glorified serviceman, like I said, but I have to be able to be there at the very infrequent times it needs me. So it kind of watches over me, like a guardian angel. It can manipulate probability, make a chain of events happen that serve its interests, although it doesn’t do that for much of anything or anybody except me—and Mavra Chang. That doesn’t mean that bad things don’t happen to me. Sometimes nasty things happen in spades. I got sloppy this time around, didn’t remember everything, and wound up spending a year and a half in Auschwitz for my trouble during World War II. It just means that nothing permanent happens. I suffered, I starved, I was treated lower than an animal there, but I survived. Barely, but I survived. That’s what it does, Gus. It makes sure I survive.”

“Jeez! I keep forgettin’ you don’t age. But what did you mean by gettin’ sloppy ‘this time around’? You talk like you lived through the Nazis before.”

“I did—but in Ireland last time, I think. That’s the scary part of it all, Gus. Inside there, inside the Well, among other routine things, is something I can’t really explain but which is, for all intents and purposes, a reset button. It’s a last gasp thing, something only I, not the Well, can decide to push. What it does is—complicated. Now there’s an understatement for you! But anyway, it resets. Not completely, of course. The universe still continues to expand, the basics don’t change, but all life out there is essentially canceled out. All people, all history, everything pretty much. Time and space become objects of manipulation. In some cases it can use the same planet and solar system again; in other times it has to find material from somewhere else that pretty well matches what existed before and re-create from scratch. Each of the worlds goes through the whole process of development, of evolution, you name it. From the vantage point of the Well World, it happens in the wink of an eye, but it can be a few billion years or more out there. Don’t ask me how that’s possible. I’m just the guy who has to push the button sometimes, not the ones who built or designed it or the computer capable of such godlike things.”

“Jesus! And you’ve actually done this?”

“Twice. The memory of doing that is something that’s always stored somewhere inside me. I might forget it for a while, but when I get here, I remember. Hitler, Stalin, all the mass murderers of Earth history are pikers compared to me, Gus. I’ve killed trillions with one decision, and worse, I erased all signs of their existence. All their history, culture, everything. Gone. But then I brought them back, in real time. The Well is a master of matching probabilities. Everything repeats as closely as possible. Maybe not an absolute one hundred percent, but it repeats so eerily that you wind up seeing the same people, the same empires, the same dreams, the same wars, the same nations and ideologies.”

“Jeez! You mean you killed me at some time in the past? Or another me? And another Terry, and all the rest?”

“Well, no. You two were long dead by the time I did it the last time. The time before—I only remember that I did it, that’s all. But I was still a captain both times, I’m pretty sure of that. Not of some ship like this, though, or even the big supertanker I was skippering back on Earth. Spaceships, Gus. Mavra, too. She had her own ship. She wasn’t even born on Earth and might not even have heard of it until she fell in with me here. We moved a lot of cargo and occasional passengers between stars over a third of the Milky Way galaxy. God! How I loved that job! That’s my equivalent of your photojournalism, Gus.”

“Spaceships. Wow, that’s neat!”

“Yeah, only the Well never inserts me at a point where I can do my job. This last time it inserted us, oh, I think maybe 50,000b.c. or so. Since that time Mavra and I have both been, well, surviving, waiting until Earth once again headed for the stars. This time we didn’t make it.”

“Holy smoke! You mean you got to reset that thing again? That’s what this is all about?”

“Maybe. I hope not. I don’t know if I can do it again. I can’t imagine why I’m here, but I’ve been here in between for other things. Somebody once was actually smart enough to figure out the mechanics of the Well and some Markovian mathematics. The Well was alarmed, not because he could do anything major but because he had the potential to do some damage right here. Events got manipulated so I fell through a Well Gate shortly after, and it was up to me to solve the problem. No damage done in the end, and I just went back to doing what I’d been doing. The Well doesn’t let you stick around to get the universe into real trouble when it doesn’t need you anymore. I can tell you that something’s off kilter and may need adjustment. Something happened, maybe recently, maybe back as far as the last reset, but the tiny differences have accumulated to the point where, over thousands of years, they made a big change or a series of big changes. I noticed that when the Soviet Union collapsed so suddenly. I knew the consequences were terrible for later history that it did, but I kind of hoped it was just the result of a local aberration, just Earth, in other words. There’re a lot more worlds and races than that out there.”

“Hey! Hold it! That was great news, not bad news!’’

“Was it? Yeah, I suppose, from your local point of view. From my point of view it was awful. Without the tension, the pressure, the competition, discoveries that would eventually spread humanity to the stars were set back by centuries at the very least, maybe even forever unless another such power arose.”

“Huh? What? We was sendin’ up space shuttles all the time!”

Nathan Brazil sighed. “Gus, you come from the most bizarre nation on Earth. It looks and feels like a European culture or cultures, but its root culture is more alien to the rest of the world than the Chinese or anybody else Westerners think are inscrutable. You invented violent anticolonialist revolution and sponsored it for decades, then you turned around and acted like an imperial power and couldn’t figure out why everybody else didn’t do the same. A bunch of your people, half of them devoted slaveholders and at least half virulent racists, wrote the world’s greatest statement on individual liberty and protecting minority rights. You continue to create and dream up most of the vital inventions and scientific principles of the industrial revolution, and then you let everybody else put them into practice better than you do, so that the only thing you wind up being absolute masters of is varying ways to destroy all life on Earth. One of your people invented the principles of rocketry and couldn’t give it away, so the Germans copied his patents and used it to bomb London. Then you import the same Germans to make rockets for you, but you don’t care even about them until the Russians use their captured Germans and create the first satellite. Then you decide you got to go to the moon before them to show them up, and you do. But they don’t go, and you lose interest, and thirty years later, nobody’s close to going back.”

“Jeez! You’re sure not givin’ us credit for much, are you?”

“Well, I credit you with an awful lot, Gus, but you Americans were only masters of one specialty, and that was war. The rest you let go, and when you let the rest go, like space, you become a hollow nation without ideals, a bunch of folks doing research and development for other nations, and you lose that restless creativity that made all those advancements possible. You were rotting, Gus. Drugs, crime, poverty, and an economy mostly based on exporting raw materials and importing finished goods—right back where you started from before the revolution. A service economy isn’t an energetic, growing one, it’s a nation doing each other’s cooking and dry cleaning.”

“And the Russians stayin’ whole would have changed that?”

“Well, it did the last time. Your people need an enemy they think is an equal, Gus. They see the world as a sports contest. Not much fun playing soccer when you’re the only team on the field. The Soviets were going to assemble a big, grand space station, Gus. One hell of a platform up there, under the control of the Red Army. You know what would happen in your country if that became real. And then they were going to the moon and eventually Mars. Things would turn around. The game would be on again. Instead, their totalitarian regime collapsed, they fragmented, discovered the rest of us weren’t so bad and that they really lived at a Third World level, and all the grandiose dreams fell apart as the money and resources got diverted to doing things like producing toilet paper and decent indoor plumbing. Fine for them, but it keeps humanity pretty much stuck on its ball with the only question being whether it’ll run out of resources, choke to death on pollution, destroy its atmosphere, or just fall apart in food riots and general anarchy. Don’t blame me. It was your people who couldn’t do a thing without an archenemy. And don’t look so downcast. We came from a great era for bang-bang on-the-spot news, didn’t we?”

“If you think I’m gonna argue about how shitty the situation on Earth is, you’re nuts,” Gus responded. “You said it—you remember what I did for a livin’. But you know, I bet you saw worse, experienced worse, during all that time. Kids dyin’ of no reason but ignorance or maybe sacrificed to some sun god someplace. You said you was in that concentration camp, saw the worst people can do to each other. Did you ever look up the survivors? Did you ever cry for the ones that went into the ovens? Or did you just sit there, like you was in purgatory, endurin’ the hunger and the punishment and the pain and maybe feelin’ sorry and disgusted that you got yourself into that fix, but unlike all them other people, them millions, you knew you was gonna walk out. You knew the Nazis would lose. Hell, you knew that even if they whipped you, even if they pulled out your toenails, cut your fingers off, tore out your tongue, you’d not only pull through, somehow, but all that would grow back. In the end it’d be just one more bad experience and the nightmares would stop and you’d do okay. Not like all them others. You like to pretend that you care, and maybe you do for one person or another right here and now, but you don’t really. Not deep down. And the only thing you’re really pissed off about is the wrong people got a good break and even though it might be better for everybody else, it slowed down what you wanted. Slowed it down! What the hell’s a hundred years to you, anyway? Don’t lecture me about my people and my world, good, bad, or whatever. You push a button and we all go away, but while we’re here, we’re alive. You didn’t need to see a Dahir’s invisible tricks. You ain’t noticed the whole course of human civilization except when one comes up and shouts in your face!”

Brazil didn’t respond immediately. He felt bad about what he’d said about Gus’s native country and history; really, in the long course of things, it was far better than most. But Gus’s accusations had hit a bit too close to him at his drifting best to remain totally unchallenged.

“You’re right, Gus,” he said at last. “About some of it, anyway. The cause, though, is one you should understand as well as anybody. How many people have you seen die? How many corpses have you counted on bloody streets and in killing fields? How many starving kids in some revolution or drought-stricken land have you walked past? A lot, I’d guess, in your short life.”

“Yeah? So?”

“What was your reaction the first time you saw kids you liked getting blown away or lying in agony? The first time you saw a whole village die of starvation, a living death? I think you cried, Gus. If not outside, then inside. I think after you saw a village of kids who looked like walking skeletons and could barely raise their heads, you got so upset, so sick to your stomach, you puked your guts out someplace and maybe cried again. But you had a job to do. Without your pictures, nobody else would know. Nobody who could help would know where to help. A few news-reels of Auschwitz and it would have ceased to exist. The whole rest of the world would have fought like demons. Nobody made it into those camps and back out with those pictures then. That’s your job, Gus, and that’s part of why you do it. Part of it is a thrill ride, living on the edge, but nobody walks through the starvation in east Africa, say, because they want to see the world.”

“I still don’t see your point.”

“The point’s simple. After a while you still believe in the job, but you don’t puke anymore. The ten-thousandth kid dying before your eyes of starvation isn’t like the first one or even the first ten. The hundredth soldier you capture on film falling in battle isn’t like the first one, either. Ask any soldier. Ask any survivor of those camps. You never like it, but you get hardened, you get immunized to a degree, because you have to survive and live with yourself. Pretty soon you don’t have nightmares about it, either. You just get—detached. Not only to save your sanity but also because you accept that you can’t feed those starving people yourself, you can’t save the kid looking up at you, you can’t call back that bullet to that young soldier’s heart. You know it happened to you; otherwise you couldn’t still do it. Some people can’t. They go nuts or they quit and do something else. You can and you did. I think they call that being ‘tough,’ or maybe just being a ‘professional.’ Terry was a tough professional. You admired that a lot in her.”

“Well…”

“So why condemn me for being the same way? When the ice sheets came down and killed off the crops and moved the people in great migrations southward, I was there. When the first temples were built to long-forgotten gods, I was in the crowd that watched the sacrifice of the children to them. When the Persians and Medes and Babylonians and Greeks marched and leveled whole cities and sowed their enemies’ lands with salt, I was there. When Roman emperors threw people to the lions to the cheers of the crowd in the coliseums of the world, I was selling tickets and souvenirs or picking the spectators’ purses. When they crucified thousands every few meters of the Appian Way as examples, I ran the dice game for their effects. When the Vandals vandalized and the Goths and Visigoths crushed the Romans, I sold them street maps. Then the Celts, then the Germans, then the Slavs, then the Moslem hordes, as they were called by the Christians. The Children’s Crusade—that was a good one! All those kids, some not even in their teens, slaughtered as they made their way to the Holy Land singing hymns only to be finished off facing a professional army also convinced that God was on their side. The Inquisition—they actually felt horrible after they tortured you to death in the name of God. Wept for your lost soul. Want me to go on?”

“I get your point. But you knew better. Couldn’t you have done something more than be an audience?”

“What? One guy? You can’t buck the worst in humanity because sometimes you throw out the best, too. See, you have an advantage I don’t have. I could at least hide out from the worst of that, I suppose, but I can’t quit, I can’t go home. I can’t even go permanently nuts. I can’t even die with them. After a while you just get too frustrated. After a while you just stop fighting the tide of history and just survive as best you can.”

“Yeah, I guess I see, sorta. I still ain’t sure how we got on this track. Maybe boredom or tiredness or somethin’. Can you answer me one thing, though?”

“If I can.”

“What were you in the last go-round? I mean, maybe this machine god won’t let you play really funny stuff, but you got some choice over you, don’t you?”

The question actually surprised him. “I—well, yeah, I do. I have a good deal of local power over what happens here, on the Well World, while I’m in there, even if I can’t mess with the Earth’s program. I never really did much with myself, though. Every time I’m in there, I say at least I’m gonna make myself 185 centimeters tall with a face and body to die for, and I never do. It’s not a Well prohibition, it’s just, well, I’m generally so preoccupied with other folks and other things when I’m there, I never really think of myself. Maybe I’m just so used to being me now, I can’t think of myself any other way.”

“Jeez! So you’re kinda the master of this world of all these races and forms and stuff and you never wind up anything or anybody else? You got all them other planets out there and you stick with relivin’ Earth history over and over? You’re right about not bein’ able to go nuts. You are nuts!”

This new point struck him even harder than the earlier argument had because there really was no defense. He’d always been Nathan Brazil since—well, since this job had begun, anyway. At least he hadn’t the slightest, vaguest memory of not being just this way. He alone knew why he’d stuck with Earth, or at least Earth humans, but even there he didn’t really have to. It made no difference in the end to damned near anything.

Sure, he’d been—memory somewhere vaguely said a deer at one time in the past and a Pegasus for a brief time—but those had been here and for emergency purposes. He’d become himself again as quickly as he could.

He’d always loved the Dillians, also for good reason, but he’d never considered becoming one of them, living as one of them through their history, which was something of a mystery to him. They were fighters, too, and even with far more limited resources they’d managed, as he knew, to attain space consistently ahead of Earth. There were others, too, equally attractive and advanced, yet he’d ignored them all. It seemed stupid on the face of it. No rerun of history and events, new experiences, new people and capabilities… Even Mavra, with her own personal traveling version of the Markovian computer, had gone to many other worlds and become many other creatures, he remembered now.

“I’ve got no answer or explanation, Gus,” he told the Dahir. “The only thing I can think of, and I’m not at all sure if it’s the real reason or not, is that maybe I needed something that was absolutely fixed, unchanging, always comfortable and familiar, that couldn’t be taken away from me.”

Gus stared back out at the colorful scenes in the darkness and tried to imagine what it would be like to be Nathan Brazil. Maybe he’d be just as loopy after all this time, he thought, but he wouldn’t mind giving it a try.

They were passing another area of active volcanic activity in the distance, and it was a sight he found impossible to tire of. Suddenly his two huge eyes focused on a single spot in the distance, off to the left of the lava flow. At first he thought they were just reflections of some of the lights from under the sea or perhaps lights or markers on the islands, but now, as he stared fixedly at the spot, he saw what had drawn his attention to the spot.

“Cap! Off here, just left of the lava. Those lights moved!”

“Could be just an illusion with all the heat and distance,” Brazil responded, not terribly concerned. “Or it might well be another ship. There’s a lot out here, you know.”

“Yeah, well, I been lookin’ at it, and those lights are sure not illusions and they’re on somethin’ pretty big movin’ our way.”

Brazil looked over at where Gus was already staring, and after a minute or so he saw them, too. “Yeah, Gus. They’re running lights for sure. Something pretty big, I’d say. I can’t make out much in the dark, though. There’s a storm moving almost parallel over there. If it kicks up some lightning, you might be able to tell what it is.”

“You want me to douse our running lights?” Gus asked him worriedly. “You never know.”

“Maybe. Hold on a minute and try to make sure it’s heading for us and not just coming out and going somewhere else. The sea-lanes we’re on here run mostly southeast to northwest. If he’s legitimate and coming from that direction, he should turn parallel to us in a little bit and head off in the opposite direction. I don’t like it, though. What’s a ship doing that close to those islands? They’re marked as too active and dangerous for landings on the charts.”

“He’s comin’ on toward us! Whoops! There was a big flash. Couldn’t make out much, though, but it sure looked like a big bunch of smoke. Man! He’s comin’ on fast and steady! He can’t be a sailboat and move like that, can he? I mean, the wind’s against him, right? Yeah! There’s another flash. Still can’t make out the ship, but that’s a steamer all right!”

“Douse the running lights, Gus, quick as you can! I think we’re in trouble!”

The sudden rise in Brazil’s adrenaline roused Terry, who got up, watched Gus put out the lights so that the ship fell into total darkness, and immediately looked around for the danger she was already directly sensing.

She went through a whole series of spectrum shifts until she spotted the oncoming vessel, and inside of it she sensed danger in numbers beyond theirs by quite a bit. There were a lot of creatures on that ship, and all seemed to be of one mind, to catch and board this ship and take them.

A whole range of actions came into her mind, but none of them were useful. She could make it very hard for them to see, or notice, both her mate and herself, but they would still take the ship and sooner or later they would certainly have a means of detecting them. And there were so many of them.

There was a sound like thunder off toward the oncoming lights, and suddenly the sea seemed to explode just forward and off to the left of the tiny sailing ship.

Brazil spun the wheel and then began taking down sail, using the levers and pulleys nearby.

“What the hell you doin’, Cap! You’re headin’ right for ’em!” Gus cried.

“We won’t be for long, but they had our course and speed damned good there, and I needed to throw them off in the dark. They’ve got no radar here.”

“Yeah, well, they don’t need radar at this distance! I mean, we must be blockin’ off the undersea light show just like they are to us by now!”

Brazil cursed under his breath. He hadn’t thought of that! And those guys were surely using just that technique on them. They were used to these waters; he was not.

He took a deep breath, then shouted, “Okay, then, we’re gonna have to open range and sail where they can’t do that!” as he put out full sail and turned for maximum wind.

“Hey! Them dark places could be islands, Cap!” Gus pointed out. “And you’re gonna go right into the edge of that storm, too!”

“Just what I want to do!” he yelled back as a second shot landed forward and just to the right. “Damn! Straddled us with two shots at two kilometers! Those boys are good!”

They were making very good speed, getting up to fifteen, maybe twenty knots, but they were no match for the steamer still closing on them, particularly considering the angle.

A third shot landed perhaps twenty meters ahead of their bow, and its message was very, very clear. They could hit them any time they felt like it.

They were past the undersea fairyland lights, though, at least, and it was still water at this point. Suddenly, with very loud splats like buckshot falling on the deck, the rain swept over them.

The captain of the patrol boat knew exactly what his quarry was doing, and, worse, with the storm and the darkness, he actually risked losing them now that he had them cold. He couldn’t wait and take that chance; there were too many reefs and shallows in there for him to follow closely with his craft. “If you can still get it, fire to hit!” he commanded, and the gun crew, also very experienced, made mental calculations, slightly adjusted the forward cannon, waited for a possible last sighting with a lightning flash, and fired a blast.

The shot struck the little sailing ship almost in the stern, and all three aboard were thrown to the deck as their world lurched and shook. One of the smaller masts came loose and dangled, caught in its own rigging.

“Everybody okay?” Brazil shouted in the fury of the wind and rain and thunder.

“Yeah! Terry almost fell on top of me!” Gus called back. “You?”

Brazil got back up, grabbed the madly spinning wheel, and found that it was spinning freely. “Damn! They took out my rudder!” He looked up at the sails and saw the dangling mast hanging precariously, fouling lines, heard the slow rip of canvas, and knew instantly that there was no hope of steering by sail alone.

He made his way to the other two. “I hear breakers not far off, that way!” he pointed, a position perhaps half a kilometer away in the darkness from their current position and what looked to be a good three or more kilometers from where the lava flow should be. “We’re gonna have to abandon ship and swim for it! The quicker the better, too! We could go down like a shot in this sea if enough water gets in the hole in the stern or we hit a reef!”

“Okay! I’ll make it! How about if we split up, we rendezvous this side of the lava near the beach?” Gus suggested. “Hey! You want to throw over the raft?”

At that point the ship seemed to almost stop, and Brazil could feel the bow coming up.

“No time! Just go! Now! If she goes down when any of us are close, she could take us with her!”

Gus hesitated, then leapt into the dark waves. Brazil, knowing at least that he and Terry would not be separated but nonetheless concerned for her life, had no choice but to follow. Terry did not hesitate.

Terry had been a fair swimmer in swimming pools and such, but she had never had to swim in seas like this and for a very long moment she was convinced that she was going under for good and was certain to drown.

Then the discipline and control of the Glathrielian mind snapped fully in, and she calmed down, sensed Brazil and what he was doing, and made her way to the surface and toward her mate. Brazil had recovered as best he could but was acting instinctively; later there would be time to think about how much worse he’d been through and reflect on it.

He struggled against the waves to make his way to Terry and finally reached her. Now she would have to pretty well stay with him and trust him absolutely with her life. Her Glathrielian mind understood that sort of logic and did not resist, having no better plan itself.

Using the waves, letting them carry the pair where they willed, Brazil managed to get them both relatively stabilized in the rough sea. At least it was no longer raining, although they could hardly tell, but Brazil was able to get at least a gut-level feeling of where they were headed and even got something of a look in that direction.

They appeared to be heading toward the lava flow and the huge plume of steam offshore.

He doubted if even Terry’s bag of tricks could protect her from molten lava, but the Well would protect him from it somehow. If he could just stay close to her, linked to her, he might well be able to have her share his unique protection for a change. He felt her absolute trust in him and felt that she had accepted dependence for this period. She was not doing so well against the waves, though, and that terrified him. In a move as instinctive as his swimming actions, he reached out to her, first grasping her hand, then mind to mind, soul to soul. She did not resist, and now he was part of her and partly still within himself, as was she. They became as one mind, one organism, with Terry surrendering almost total control to him.

They managed for what seemed like a very long time, then, suddenly, there was a large wave that came along and picked them both up and almost threw them against a beach.

It was a granular black sand beach of the sort that new volcanoes built; it hurt when they hit it, but it didn’t knock them out. Dizzy, disoriented, unable to stand, waves still crashing over them, they crawled as one on hands and knees back beyond the breakers, the black sand sticking to and covering their wet bodies. It took a tremendous force of his will to get them back far enough that there was relative safety. Then, with his inner voice telling him that he was safe at least for the moment, both bodies turned, gasped for air, then passed out cold on the beach.

The sun was high in the sky when Nathan Brazil awoke in a bizarre and yet beautiful landscape.

Terry awoke at the same time, the linkage between them as strong as or stronger than ever, and together the two of them got up on their feet and looked around. Both were battered and bruised and covered in thick black sand that seemed to be stuck everywhere. Brazil, seeing nothing on the horizon, decided that they could risk getting into the much calmer surf and wash it off, and Terry followed. In spite of the energy shell, it was almost like bathing in a Jacuzzi, but it woke them completely and cleaned off the sand.

The bruises were par for the course of what they had gone through, and muscles and joints seemed extraordinarily achy, but both were basically all right considering what they had survived, and that was enough. When you could notice the tangles in your hair and be irritated by them, you weren’t in that bad shape.

There was no sign of the ship, not even wreckage, but it was impossible to say how long they’d been in the water or just where they’d gone down compared to where they’d come ashore. There were no other ships to be seen on the horizon, either; if the cutter had searched for survivors, it hadn’t found them, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still in the area.

Even so, that left the two of them stark naked with no tools, supplies, or anything else, standing on the beach, essentially marooned very much as in his personal fantasy. The trouble was, in a fantasy it was easy to conjure up what you needed, while in reality you had to find it, if anything was available.

The black sand beach stretched in both directions as far as the eye could see. About a hundred meters beyond where they’d come ashore there was a slight rise, and not far beyond that he could see nearly constant plumes of white smoke. While the lava flow itself was invisible to him in the daylight, the lava having hardened a bit on top and flowing downhill in its own thin self-made cocoon, it was clearly still expanding the island from beneath the waves. The muffled sounds of explosions could be heard from the direction of the steam as the molten rock continued to flow into the sea and react with the cooler waters.

Looking inland, it was a long way to anything interesting. The beach extended back for a kilometer or so, then turned into cracked and jagged rock in a fairyland of shapes formed when molten rock had cooled, solidified, and fragmented. It was easily another kilometer or more beyond that to where the older island missed by the most recent flows remained, with thick junglelike vegetation starting abruptly from where the flow stopped.

In back of it all and dominating the entire scene was the massive volcano itself, rising up like a huge lump several kilometers above the water, its top masked by a ring of clouds.

There was no getting around it; they would have to make their way back into the jungle and see whether the island contained enough to sustain them for now. Food and water were the first priorities.

He thought about Gus. He hadn’t seen the Dahir since he’d gone overboard, and he wondered how well this kind of place could sustain such a creature. Large animals were unlikely in this isolated environment, fresh water would be more likely inland than anywhere along the coast, and that body wasn’t really built for walking or even slithering over this kind of terrain.

Still, Gus had shouted to meet near the lava flow and on this side of it, fortunately, and he owed it to the creature to check before heading inland. He set off across the sands toward the billowing steam, Terry following.

The sight from the top of the rise was spectacular, probably even more so at night, with the lava steaming just below the surface in front of him and then the monstrous, churning, seething, bubbling region creating the steam just beyond.

There was no sign of Gus, nor had he expected any, but he’d done his duty. They could hardly stay there and wait in the expectation that the Dahir would suddenly appear; they’d need the daylight to explore the island. Brazil also didn’t have anything he could leave to indicate their survival and presence, nor was there much he could use to create anything. The black sand wasn’t even conducive to writing a message in English that only Gus would understand, and even if he could haul some rocks from the lava field inland and build something, a feat hardly possible considering how much he ached, anything small enough to escape the notice of pursuers would be overlooked by Gus and anything conspicuous enough to get noticed might well attract the wrong people.

It was Terry, either by chance or by design, who came up with the somewhat gross but only logical means of leaving Gus any sort of message.

She took a crap in the sand.

Hardly permanent, but a hunter species might well notice such a thing and Gus would recognize the species of origin, possibly the specific scent. Others might do the same, but they would first have to know to come to this specific area of the beach.

That taken care of, it was time to make their way inland to the jungle. If possible, they’d check back at this spot on a regular basis, if only to see if anything had either been disturbed or something else had been left to give them a sign.

I feel like Tarzan playing Robinson Crusoe,he thought. Friday was even the silent type, as always, although he suspected that the old shipwrecked sailor would have preferred this kind of Friday to the one he’d gotten.

Walking through the sand wasn’t much of a problem, but the sand ended well short of the jungle, and it was a dangerous and slow journey through masses of rock that had flowed, cooled, and frozen, often shattering into huge lumps or collapsing into deep holes. It was a boulder field, but of black rock that was twisted into bizarre forms, some looking like taffy, others looking like frozen rippling rivers. It wouldn’t take much of a misstep in that field to twist or even break an ankle, and so it was a slow process of trial and error to get through it, and it took them several precious hours to reach the edge of the jungle.

Volcanic areas were always fascinating for their contrasts. Where they had come ashore had probably been ocean only weeks earlier; now, here, where not much older flows had come, it might have been anything from beach to jungle, but the lava had burned and scoured all in its path, leaving no sign of anything. Yet the wet green jungle had resisted where it could, and just meters from where the flow ended it was as if nothing had happened at all.

There appeared to be no birds or animals, large or small, but somehow insects, or the equivalent of insects, had made their way here on air currents and were the dominant species. Some looked pretty fearsome, huge creatures that flew on multiple wings and were the size of hummingbirds and strange translucent creatures the size of a man’s head that made their way up and down trees and vines shooting out long, creamy white tendrils.

To Terry, the jungle gave a sense not of real danger or strangeness but of an odd familiarity. She had spent some time in jungles like this, and while the individual plant and insect life was different, this jungle was no more bizarre than the Amazon had been. She felt almost as if she were in her own element, a cross between the swampy jungle of Glathriel and the dense yet protective Amazon rain forest. Terry the American television producer would have found the region creepy and threatening, but somehow that Terry seemed like another person, someone she barely knew. That Terry would have found the comforts of Hakazit to her liking, while the new Terry had felt only its sense of wrongness and had been relieved when they’d left it.

For all intents and purposes Theresa Perez was dead and had been for quite some time, save for some of the knowledge from her past that might be useful. She hadn’t realized it and did not do so now; the Glathrielian way did not allow for reflection and introspection on that level, but that did not change the truth of it. She hadn’t even been conscious of when it had happened; it had been quite late, though, when she’d made the decision to be the diversion for the others to get through the Well Gate. Even when she’d told Lori that she would remain in the Amazon until finally she could make her way to civilization, she’d known that she had no intention of doing so. She hadn’t known until it was snatched away how much she really had hated her life or how much pressure she’d been under until it had been removed. It had long ago ceased to be anything more than a job, and that job had been the only thing she’d had, the only reason to wake up and exist every morning. She had no personal life, no friends outside the business, and she hadn’t even had the glamour of being on camera. It had been over since that horror on the Congo, but she’d had no place else to go and her work was the only thing that she did better than almost anybody else.

She had hid it well, but the rock-hard woman Gus so admired had been terrified to walk alone to her car in an Atlanta parking lot.

Overcoming the initial fear, shock, and terror of the jungle and having been accepted into the Amazon tribe, she’d found a closeness and a sense of herself she’d never been aware of before. She had not thought twice about seducing those guards or felt guilt or recrimination. It had, rather, been the culmination of her transformation before she’d ever seen the Well World; it had been the act of someone who had found an element where life, where action, was a challenge rather than a reaction to fear. Even then, on some subconscious level, she knew she didn’t want to be Terry again.

She had followed the others into the Well Gate almost on impulse but partly because she knew that the restrictions on the life of the People were not for her and that her friends, those she had felt closest to of any for a long time, had gone through the Gate. It had been Teysi’s impulse, not Terry’s. Nor could Terry have walked naked and alone into that alien swamp that was Glathriel, but Teysi could and did. And the Glathrielians, for whatever purpose, had given her the last required links to make the change complete.

They had given her the freedom from all dependency on things, leaving the focus only on what really counted—people—and with that the power to survive almost any conditions. They had given her protection against most of the forces of civilization and nature. And in a sense they had given her the ability to accept herself just the way she was, with no pretense or artifice.

So now it was Teysi’s persona who was in this strange new jungle with her mate, and Teysi was far better qualified to be there than either Terry Perez or Nathan Brazil.

Brazil was content to let her take the lead, sensing her confidence. Food and water were the first priority, and somehow he was confident she could find them even though he wasn’t sure how. On Earth a good although not totally infallible rule of thumb was to watch what the animals ate. Here the only animals were insects of a different evolution.

He watched her examine trees, vines, shrubs, and growths of all sorts and was not even aware that she was comparing them not to anything she knew directly but to elements in the vast Well database she could slightly access through her links to him. Finally, she picked up a thing that looked to him like a purple cabbage, peeled away the outer leaves to reveal a smooth oval inside skin, and bit into it. The deep red pulpy interior was kind of messy, but she kept eating rather than falling down in fits. He shrugged, picked up another—they must be falling from some of the higher trees, he decided—and did the same.

The stuff was disappointingly tasteless, with just a hint of a grapelike flavor, and the inside proved to have the consistency more of mashed potatoes than of oranges or grapefruit, but it went down easy, was filling, and had a high water content to boot.

He hoped they’d find something better and tastier, but unless they both came down with galloping stomachaches later, it was proof that they wouldn’t starve here. They could at least survive.

Farther in they found a number of shallow streams that provided welcome fresh water. It tasted strongly of minerals with just a hint of sulfur, but it would do.

They did find a few more palatable things to eat as well, including something that resembled a pink tennis-ball size grape, both in looks and taste, and a thick green vine that tasted a lot like celery with a slight onionlike tang, before the light began to fail. By that time the aches and pains had gotten a bit too much for him, anyway, and she found an area near a huge tree carpeted with a light brown, spongy moss and lay down on it. It would soon be dark as pitch in the volcanic jungle, anyway; not the sort of conditions for exploring.

He lay down next to her on the soft natural matting and found it surprisingly comfortable. Still, as the last light faded and the world was enveloped in total darkness, he couldn’t help but feel every ache and pain and consider the absurdity of the situation. There was no way around the fact that they were now shipwrecked on a small island in the middle of nowhere, alone, cut off from continental land by 190 kilometers or more of open sea they had no way to cross, with no means to get off and little hope of rescue by anyone save perhaps their enemies and the final objective, the equatorial barrier and its gateway into the Well of Souls, more unobtainable than ever.

She felt his pain, both physical and mental, and all she wanted to do was help him as he had helped her in the surf. To Terry, the current situation was not bad at all but almost her own concept of how life should be. All that they needed was here, and there seemed little that could threaten them in any way. It seemed as if all the fates had conspired to bring them here, and she could not conceive of it being more ideal. It was his old ways, old life thinking that kept him unhappy, forever searching for what he did not know. He had helped her when she had needed help; now it was her duty to do it for him.

She began by easing his physical pain, both by damping down the pain centers and by applying healing energies to those parts that were badly bruised. She began by massaging him, and as he felt the effects, he did not protest but rather relaxed and enjoyed it. With his pain substantially eased or gone, the massage turned slowly into far more than that, and as passion took control, she offered a unique new experience, a sharing of bodily pleasures that subtly became a sharing of minds and souls as well, in which her own will became dominant. Now, in rhythm with the passion, waves of conceptual objects of her will washed through them, through him, and as they had no words, their significance and purpose could not be divined by him, yet they were unresistingly accepted and understood by his mind as seductive, hypnotic commands in a way quite similar to what the Glathrielians had done to her, but in this case entirely of her own origin and out of her own desires.

Forget the past… Wall it off… The past does not exist… There is no past, there is no future, there is only now…

Enter my mind, my body… Within is all that you require, all that you will ever need… Take from my body, my mind all that you need… Leave all else behind… See, know, that there is only good inside me, take it as your own, renounce all else…

He reached out for what was promised and found within her a shining kernel of something overwhelming, something beyond anything he had ever experienced before. Pure, undiluted, unconditional love; total, absolute, unconditional trust. There, inside her, was what he had never been able to witness or feel, that which he’d been incapable of believing even existed anywhere, at any time, on any plane.

Let it in, let it in… Let it displace all the darkness…

A moment he knew at some deep level would never come again had arrived, and he could not turn it away. His resistance melted; he let it flood into him, not displacing that which could not be displaced but pushing it away, sealing it off from consciousness, not permitting it to interfere…

The waves washed through him, overwhelming, sealing off all those things that could intrude or interfere, and once that was done, he returned them until what remained active in his own mind matched the pattern in her mind. The yin and yang merged, the puzzle pieces, shorn of all that was not relevant, fit perfectly and without flaw…

They awoke before dawn, the jungle no longer dark to them but seething with the varying colors and patterns of life. They took care of bodily functions, washed in a nearby stream, then started through the jungle, not with any real purpose but because it was so pretty and so alive and was to be enjoyed. Along the way to nowhere in particular they found some of the fruits and vegetables that were good to eat and they ate, feeding themselves and each other and giggling like two young people in the dawn of first love.

After a while they started off again, going deeper, following the trails of some of the larger insects just to see what made them and where they were going. They were hardly aware of the fact that they were also moving uphill, nor did they care, all places and destinations being the same to them. They were Adam and Eve in the Garden before the Fall, and they were more than that. They did not speak because such an act was totally unnecessary. Each felt what the other felt, each knew what the other knew, both thought the same thoughts at the same moment because they were as one. Each existed solely for the other and for the moment.

When they broke clear of the jungle, they were amazed and thrilled at the great sight that was before them. Still relatively far down on the great mountainside, they could still look out from its slope and see the vast colorful seascape beyond, even more beautiful when blended as it was with all the colors of life below.

Then they watched the sun come up and dramatically change the view, not to one of ugliness but to one almost completely different from the night scene. They stayed there for some time, until the sun was well up in the sky, then made their way back down into the jungle for some more to eat and drink.

He found a vine filled with pretty multicolored flowers that had become broken, possibly in the wind or by insects, and picked it up and made a flower garland out of it for her hair. She wanted to see it and so saw it through his eyes, then decided to take the flowers and place them on him, and he looked at himself through her eyes. And when they were done, they put the flowers back where they’d been found and went off in search of more wonders.

And when the thunderstorms came after dark, they did not seek cover but rather stood in the rain and the mud and watched, as if the sound and light show were being put on just for them. Everything was a wonder of a game, and everything was eternally new.

He remembered nothing of his past, his origins, or his unique nature, but he neither wondered about such things nor let them enter his mind. There was only here, and now, and her, and that was more than enough. She felt exactly the same, experiencing only the here and now and him. Neither remembered or bothered to consider that this had come about only the previous night. There was no concept of time, only the now and the other. So closely linked were they that he was not even certain that he was the he and she was the she; either could effortlessly become the other, and so such a question was without meaning and thus not even asked.

The food and water were ample for the two of them for an indefinite time. The ship had gone down without a trace, and there was no real sign that they had ever made this or any other island. All their defenses were permanently on; any searchers or landing parties would not even notice their existence, and since they built nothing, created nothing outside of themselves, there were no signs of their existence for anyone to find.

It had not been the intention of the Glathrielian elders, but Nathan Brazil, for all appearances, had been taken out of the game. Terry had allowed for all external factors, it seemed.

All but one, and she could not know about that, even though it was everywhere, not many kilometers beneath their feet.