Shadow of the Well of Souls

Hakazit

Although in many ways the well world felt familiar, even comfortable to him, in other ways, Nathan Brazil reflected, he always had a sense of wrongness when on it.

It wasn’t the bizarre variety of creatures and cultures, the things that made new entrants so uneasy; rather, it was the common things. Some things might be expected to change when crossing a national boundary, but not the climate, and absolutely not the gravity, yet one could cross from the tropics to snow in a few footsteps or have gravitational fluctuation of up to twenty percent in the same distance if one were near one of those borders. And of course it should be cold at the poles and grow warmer toward the equator, even more so than on Earth, as the Well World had no appreciable axial tilt and thus no natural seasons. The days, and nights, a bit longer than back on Earth, were nonetheless always pretty close to equal.

But Glathriel, near the south polar region, was tropical; Hakazit, a thousand kilometers or so west of Glathriel yet only a bit north, was raw and cold, the winds off the Ocean of Shadows brisk and biting, carrying small droplets of ice and snow and swirling them around, not in the sense of a storm but rather as persistent irritants, felt but not really seen.

He pulled his fur-lined jacket tightly about him, hoping to ward off some of the wintry chill, his breath causing huge puffs of steam as it came from his warm interior and struck the frigid air with every exhalation. He looked over at the girl standing atop the rocky cliff looking out at the pounding surf. Although as Earth-human, in some ways more Earth-human, than he was, she was wearing not a stitch of clothing, and Brazil marveled again at her total insulation.

He would have liked to know how they had pulled it off. Some sort of internally generated energy field, certainly, a true cosmic aura fueled from within by some autonomic source he couldn’t imagine. Certainly she didn’t do it consciously; it was simply too perfect for that. But even if he granted the unlikely and heretofore unsuspected power to Type 41 humans to do this sort of thing, he couldn’t imagine why it would evolve in a primitive and totally tropical hex where only “wet” and “dry” had much meaning. Nor did it account for the selectivity. She was standing there in temperatures well below freezing on rock that itself was cold enough to freeze any water it had, but the cold didn’t affect her. She was warm to the touch even on the surface of her skin, and the icy droplets that were turning his own hair into a miniature ice field were hitting her as well, as warm and liquid as a summer drizzle. Yet her long black hair blew free in the wind, a wind that made the chill factor almost Arctic on bare skin but that, in that incredibly small fraction of a millimeter before it struck any part of her, was suddenly turned as warm as a tropical breeze.

Clearly the talent had not been evolved for situations like this; it merely served this function as well. What was it, then? What was this mysterious inner-produced energy field’s primary function?

Clearly it required a lot of energy. The photo he’d received here of her in the Zone Gate corridor, taken off the monitor recording, had shown her very lean and somewhat muscular; now she was, well, fat. Not obese—nobody who could move like she did could be considered that—but the thighs were very large, the ass ample, the breasts enlarged to substantial proportions and resting on an ample tummy.

She ate a lot, yet it never seemed to slow her down, and he’d never seen her pant for breath once, even while running. That surplus wasn’t there for the usual reasons; most of the Glathrielians he had seen were at the least chubby. It was there as fuel for whatever additional engine they had within themselves.

She was more than merely another of the Well World’s many mysteries, though. The Well World left no one unchanged who entered through its Zone Gate save Mavra and himself, yet she was clearly not of Glathriel, the only Earth-human hex here. Her west African heritage showed clearly in her skin and lips, yet her naturally straight, lush, long black hair and general facial features betrayed an equally obvious Hispanic ancestry. She had been made by no Well computer; she had been born and had grown up like this. Whatever changes had been made, they had been inside, in the adaptation stage, in which the brain was slightly reprogrammed to accept a new situation.

But the Well World wouldn’t have programmed in an evolutionary change made after the last reset. It would use the basic template.

Conclusion: She had not been changed inside by the Well at all, but by some other force, and that force could only be the Glathrielians themselves.

And that disturbed him most of all, because the last time Glathriel’s template had been examined and revised, he had done it himself, and while he might well have expected some sort of tropical tribal primitive society or some other variation of it, he’d given them nothing with which to develop the society, if it could be called that, and the powers that they now possessed. A society that used no tools, built no structures, altered its environment not a whit, had no apparent spoken language or even the concept or need for one, consuming only what it found day by day, and not even using fire. Yet somehow they presented the sensation of a tightly knit and intelligent tribal society.

He had no idea who this girl was, or what she had been, or where other than Earth she’d come from. She’d almost snuck into Zone on her own and crept past the officious and preoccupied duty personnel there. The recordings of her from South Zone, discovered too late, showed a picture of a primitive savage, painted and dressed in little but bones, but she didn’t look like any Amazonian Indian he’d ever heard of. The group she had followed in, Mavra’s group, had entered similarly primitive-looking, yet had proved to be from a modern and articulate educated society. He’d like to know that story one of these days; it was probably a hell of a saga.

Was she from one of the primitive tribes of the Amazon, a native who had been caught in the hex gate, perhaps after seeing the others go through? Some orphan, perhaps, or a captive raised by them, which would explain her different look? She was tough and had guts; she’d taken on an Ecundo whose body was armored and whose tail meant death without a second thought—and with her bare hands. Yet even as she rejected all the fruits of technology as a Glathrielian would, she’d not been surprised or even curious about them. She seemed to know exactly what was dangerous to touch and what was safe, and she seemed to understand the setup of a developed society even if she did not join in on any of its activities.

Despite this, and for no logical reason he could determine, he found her attractive in ways he couldn’t really explain. He hadn’t remembered feeling this way about anybody, possibly ever, certainly not in countless thousands of years. It was oddly sexual, stirring in him feelings he’d believed dead so long that they’d ceased to be more than abstractions to him. He had of course felt closeness, friendship, even a sort of love for individuals over time, as much as he’d tried to repress such feelings, knowing the brief time they had compared to him, but not on this level. It was also clear that she sensed this and, in what ways she could, reciprocated. She was anything but naive and unsophisticated in the art of making love, and while nobody had longer experience than he in that sort of thing, she made him feel things, physical things, to a degree he knew he’d never reached before. It was as if she were some powerful and addictive drug, one that, once taken, he could never again be without. It was the first new experience he’d had since… since… since before he’d re-created the universe.

Of course, he suspected that it wasn’t entirely natural. Glathriel’s revenge, he thought with a trace of genuine irony. Take us out of our nice, comfortable high-tech little worldlet and stick us in a nontech swamp designed for a race of giant beavers, will you? Well, it took us a million years, but we finally figured out a way to get back at you! Then, through her, it is we who will control you!

He considered that a distinct possibility, although he wasn’t certain how sophisticated the Glathrielians were along those lines. It did not, however, overly concern him. For one thing, she was at least partly Earth-human, no matter how changed she might be, and he’d had a very long time to learn to read beyond the surface of Earth people, to detect even slightly corrupt attitudes or motives as well as pure ones. He’d never sensed any deception in her. If it was something Glathrielian women did to snare men, it worked both ways, of that he was positive. If she was the only girl in his world—pretty well true at the moment, come to think of it—then he was her only boy. He was absolutely convinced that she would not, could not act against him. Whatever unsuspected potential lurked in the Type 41 brain, the link that bound the two of them together was empathic in nature, and that was the most revealing sense of all. Even telepaths learned how to cheat each other just to survive; an empath seldom could, since the very power dealt in emotions which no one could ever fully control.

Within their own subjective limits, he felt what she felt, and she felt what he felt. That was what made physical intimacy so intense, but it also left him convinced that she could not knowingly play false with him.

“Knowingly,” of course, was an important distinction, but even if there was something sinister at work and he was deluding himself, he knew in the end that it didn’t matter.

Once inside the Well, he was invulnerable to anything the universe could throw at him, even betrayal. And once inside, he would be able to find out what the hell was going on.

In the meantime something deep within his own psyche, his own deep chasm of loneliness, despair, and alienation from others, assuaged over long years only with tiny morsels of hope and self-delusion, had been, however temporarily, partially filled, and for the moment that was enough.

Still, it was too damned cold for him, even if not for her, and the kind of warmth she could give him was not the sort he now required. He went over to her and put his hand on her shoulder. She turned and smiled at him, and he made an exaggerated shiver and gestured back toward the town. She nodded and looked sympathetic; clearly she was also no stranger to a cold environment, even if she couldn’t feel it herself.

All seaport towns had a certain basic similarity to them. Although the towns themselves and their urban layouts tended to vary in wild and bizarre ways, reflecting the very different races that lived in them, there was always a section by the docks generally known as the International Quarter, even though it was a far smaller piece of the town than that. Where ocean ships crewed by a polyglot of races made ports of call like spaceships docking in new tiny worlds, a level of comfort, convenience, and service was necessary to cater to alien needs. Some were far better than others at this, of course, but Hakazit was a high-tech hex with a huge automated port, and its facilities, were first-rate. The Hakazitians were a bit harder to take, if only because they resembled, to Brazil’s mind at least, human-sized mosquitoes with a proboscis that looked like a giant version of one of those Happy New Year whistles that unrolled when blown. But the Hakazitians’ “nose,” when extended, proved to be not one but six sticky tendrils capable not only of feeding but also of doing almost any task hands could do and a few they could not. Their huge hivelike structures dominated the landscape as far back as anyone could see.

The girl—she’d never taken to or responded to any name he’d tried, so she’d just become the girl—never liked being inside a structure. Glathrielians, it seemed, were a bit claustrophobic even in fairly large rooms. It was a measure of how attached they’d become that she was willing to enter most buildings, even sleep where he did, although she was always clearly uncomfortable and still preferred floors to beds, at least for sleeping. She almost seemed to get a charge, though, out of walking unconcerned and unafraid stark naked down bustling streets and in crowded hotel lobbies, something unthinkable on Earth. But since the only other one of her species was her companion and lover, it gave her a rush of liberation that was as unique to her as his feelings for her were to him.

Vagt Damstrl, which meant “the Hotel Grand” in Hakazit, or so they said, was an imposing structure that dominated the skyline in a way only the huge port cranes could match, and its management prided itself on being able to provide both accommodations and necessaries for any race of the Well World that might be a guest. As usual, considering the state of Glathriel and its people, it had nothing precisely the way he’d want it, but many races liked carpeting on the floors and many others liked soft beds and many bathed in pools or tublike creations, so that they were able to assemble a spacious room for him that not only was to his standards but went beyond them. Nor was food a problem; a fair number of races who traveled for various reasons ate things close to or even the same as Type 41’s, and a short scan by a clever little device he’d never seen before resulted in room service deliveries of meals, even some sort of meat and fish, that were tasty and had no unusual side effects. Even silverware was provided to his specifications.

The girl ate no meat, nor would she use tableware. Still, she could and did pack away an enormous amount of fruits, grains, nuts, and starchy vegetables, all raw, all completely consumed, including rinds, skins, and seeds. She also ate whole sticks of whatever butter they provided and large squares of what appeared to be lard. It was fascinating to see the lengths she would go to to avoid using tools or utensils, though. Milk—he wasn’t sure what kind and didn’t want to know, but it had a distinct buttery taste and a kind of goatlike aroma—was fine, but not in a glass. Put it in a large bowl, and she would not touch the bowl but would put her face into it and drink or, if it was ample enough, cup it in her hands. But just about everything she could eat she did eat.

The aversion to using tools or mechanical devices wasn’t absolute, but it was as absolute as she could make it. She would not take the elevator; she walked up and down the stairs or often ran. Neither would she open a door or even indicate that she wanted it open; she would simply stand there until it was open for her. Somehow, though, she always knew the right floor to stop at and wait for him.

Even dicier was when she had to go to the toilet. Although the one in the room wasn’t built for Earth humans, it was close enough to be useful, but she would not sit on it or even touch it. She squatted, and that was that. But she had no aversion to the large oval-shaped sunken tub that filled and drained automatically. She had no problems adapting the tub to her bodily needs, which was okay, but it kept him from enjoying it. She, however, immersed herself in it with no compunctions. Overall, until he arranged with the management for an alternative shower, she smelled better than he did.

That night, feeling finally warm and comfortable, Nathan Brazil sat in the room and looked over some maps. The shortest route to the Well was over the Straight of Sagath to Agon, just three hexes away via the water route, then north through Lilblod, through Mixtim or Clopta, and across Quilst to the Avenue. It wasn’t an area he knew from the past, being well off his normal track, but it was direct and didn’t require too much travel in nontech hexes. Indeed, if he went via Clopta, Betared, up to Lieveru, and approached the Avenue from the west in Ellerbanta, although it would be a bit farther, he could limit the nontech part to Lilblod alone. That didn’t ensure friendly receptions, of course, but high- and semitech hexes had means of transportation other than muscle power, and that meant speed. By getting on the ship the girl had shown that she would ride in such things even if she didn’t like it, adjusting as best she could, as she was doing just being inside the hotel and the room.

The other alternative was to head northeast, but in addition to being longer, that route had the almost equal problem of being partly in areas well known to him. He wasn’t at all certain he wanted to put himself under the authority of the Yaxa, whose high-tech devices might well contain some vestigial residue of suspicion or identification of one Nathan Brazil even after so very long a time. He didn’t trust them much in any event.

Getting to Agon, however, was proving to be harder than he’d been led to believe. No matter what shipping company or booking agent he tried, nothing was going there. Coming from there, yes, but even when he found two ships on the schedule, he was informed that one had developed hull problems and would be in drydock for months and that the other was skipping the port because of scheduling problems and lack of business there. It almost seemed as if nothing was crossing the relatively short strait. Somehow some new natural law had been passed, or so evidence suggested, that ships traveled only east and west. It was almost making him paranoid.

If it wasn’t so ridiculous,he thought, I’d swear I was the victim of some massive conspiracy to keep me here.

Well, he had to decide on something, however unsatisfactory, fairly quickly. At the rates charged by the Grand, they’d be on the street in two more weeks. In a way he envied the girl—that wouldn’t bother her a bit, and he knew it. While she was mortal and he was not, the inseparable gulf between them that even empathic linkage couldn’t get around, he felt the cold and hunger and was subject to many of the infirmities that she was somehow shielded against. He had no intention of being frozen stiff in some cliffside hideaway until somebody found him and thawed him out in years to come.

It was while coming out from yet another fruitless encounter with a shipping agent that he met the colonel.

“Of all the sights I have seen in this beautiful but accursed world, that has to be the most amazing,” said a voice behind him, a voice that sounded both eerie and menacing, the kind of voice that would give the same impression if it just said “Good morning.” It was Sydney Greenstreet, but on steroids and in a mild echo chamber.

Brazil and the girl both stopped dead at the sound and turned. Brazil felt her sudden reaction to the speaker and understood it. She never reacted to the outward appearance of anybody; he wasn’t even sure she considered it relevant. But the inside, the important part of an individual, that she got immediately and with unerring accuracy. Not that he needed the loan of her talent for this case. The voice kind of oozed with a silky sliminess that would put anyone on guard. The fact that the figure who spoke matched the impression only reinforced the sense of menace.

“I beg your pardon,” Brazil responded politely. “Were you speaking to me?”

The creature they faced was less a form than a mass; it seemed almost made of liquid, an unsettling, pulsating thing that had no clearly defined shape, its “skin,” or outer membrane, a glistening obsidianlike shiny brown that reflected and distorted all the light that struck it. He couldn’t imagine how it spoke aloud at all.

“Pardon,” it said, revealing a nearly invisible slitlike mouth in the midst of the mass. “I had not even the slightest suspicion that there might be Earthlike humans on this planet, although God knows there is certainly every other nightmare creature.”

Brazil frowned. “You know Earth?”

“Of course. I was born there and once looked much as you.” The mass changed, writhed, and took on an increasingly humanoid shape, until, standing before them, it became what looked for all the world like a life-sized animated carving in obsidian or jade of an Earth-human man, middle-aged but ramrod straight. There was even a suggestion of a bushy mustache and the semblance of, yes, some sort of uniform. “Colonel Jorge Lunderman, late of the Air Force of the Republic of Brazil, rather abruptly retired but at your service.”

“So you’re one of the two officers that they told me about! I wondered who you were and how you wound up coming through. Oh—sorry. Captain Solomon is my name. David Solomon.”

“Captain? In the service of what nation?”

“None, really. Merchant marine. Countless ships under the usual flags of convenience.”

“You were in port, then, in Rio?”

“No, just on holiday there. I hadn’t been in Brazil in—a very long time.”

“I was commandant of the Northwestern Defense Sector—the area mostly of jungle and isolated settlements between Manaus and the western and northern national borders. A very large meteor struck, harmlessly, in the middle of the jungle, but a mostly American television news crew who went in to investigate and report on it vanished completely. There was quite a search using every resource at our command, but it was as if they had vanished into nothingness.”

Brazil nodded. “I understand. Somehow they must all have fallen through to here.”

“Well, some Peruvian revolutionaries had camps just along the border, and they were in alliance with some very powerful drug barons, one of whom had guaranteed the newspeople’s safety. We had fears that the crew had been disposed of for some reason, but we found only cooperation from the Peruvians. It seems one of Don Campos’s sons was among the group that vanished. We searched for weeks before giving up. Nothing. But this meteor, it was so strange that they were flying in scientists from all over to test and check and measure it. There seemed no harm there, though. They’d poked it and probed it and tried to drill into it, and nothing much had changed. The Americans sent a liaison, a NASA astronaut who was a geologist, to help coordinate. The two of us stupidly agreed to pose atop the meteor for the news media. It seemed harmless enough. The next thing we knew, we were here.”

Brazil listened carefully to the account, musing over the implications he couldn’t fully discuss with the colonel or anybody else. Why had a huge chunk of meteor with a fully operative Well Gate fallen so far inland? Hell, that was a thousand miles from Rio, where he was, and the Well computer hadn’t had any trouble almost hitting him on the head with one. Had Mavra been in Brazil as well? Maneuvered there by the subtle shifts of probability the Well was capable of when it concerned a Watcher? That still didn’t make sense. One didn’t go to the upper Amazon for a casual trip, but he couldn’t see her either in the drug trade or playing local revolutionary. Not unless she was leading the rebels, anyway. Or…

Just why had he decided to take his holiday in Brazil? Maybe it was he who’d been manipulated. The savage looks of the other party, the accounts of how primitive they and the girl had seemed… Mavra living with a tribe of Stone Age Indians deep in the jungle? That had to be the answer. How and why would have to remain a mystery, at least for now, but it explained a lot. But the colonel and the astronaut had come through weeks, maybe longer, before Mavra’s group.

Maybe the colonel’s initial search and, afterward, the colonel’s and the astronaut’s apparent on-camera disintegration would have made it hard as hell to reach the Gate. That had to be it. But then, who did come through with Mavra when she finally managed it? Others of her tribe? And if that was the case, where was that news crew?

“Captain? Are you all right?” the colonel asked.

“Oh, yes, sorry. I was just trying to fit events together. What brings you to Hakazit now, Colonel?”

“Why, I thought that would be obvious. You do. Both of you, in fact. I mean, it is still something of a shock to me to find myself here in this form and situation, but I accepted what had happened out of necessity. But I had not seen or heard of a race here that was like the one into which I was born, and suddenly there is news that at least two and perhaps more of what I still think of as ‘humans’ were around and apparently unchanged. I had to find out who you were and what you were doing and, of course, how the both of you manage to remain as you were. I assume she is as she looked before and is not some native human stock unknown to me. Your pardon, but the only surprise greater than seeing someone like you here is seeing her, standing there, stark naked, on a cold and windswept coast, apparently feeling no discomfort.”

“You’re right; both of us are from Earth. I suspect she came through the same gate you did. I came through in the hills behind Rio with two others I haven’t located as yet. She’s a mystery girl—arrived naked, painted up, bone jewelry and the like, and snuck right past everybody and entered the Well World without being noticed until too late. I have no idea why the computer they say controls things here decided to keep us both as we were, but I can hazard a guess as to why she’s more changed in other ways, including the ones that are obvious, than I am. There is a human hex here, but the people don’t quite look like any race or nationality we know and they’re primitive, mysterious, and very un-Earthlike in their ways. They took a different path somehow. Seems that long ago their ancestors plotted to take over an adjoining nontech hex, Ambreza, and forgot that lack of machines doesn’t equal lack of intelligence. The Ambrezians bred some kind of gas-producing plant that grew like weeds in the human hex and basically knocked their brains all to hell. Then they switched hexes, so now the humans are nontech and apparently have been ever since. It changed them. There was some sort of mutation. Had they remained high-tech, they’d have been fairly familiar, I think, but being nontech, they went to the ultimate nontech system. Because the computer still has them in their original hex, however, that’s where both the girl and I came in. I stayed and made myself useful to the Ambrezians—they look like giant beavers—while she fled to the human hex and fell in with them. It was they, I’m sure, that made her this way, not the computer.”

“Does she not speak?”

“I don’t think she speaks or understands a word anybody says. Sometimes I’m not even sure she thinks the way most of us think. The Ambreza said that they did have a small number of sounds that were consistent, but not enough to be considered a language. I’m not so sure it’s more than the equivalent of the sound codes used by many animal species. You know—warning the tribe of danger, warning enemies off, sounds that relate to fear, and things like that. A scream, a warning cry, a sigh, a purringlike hum—that’s about the range of it. If they communicate more complex information, and I’m convinced that they do, it’s by means other than what we think of as language. I hope she was one of the Stone Age Amazonians. I’d hate to think of the frustration I would have, let alone anyone from a more civilized and technological culture, under those limitations imposed on her.”

“She is definitely not a native,” the colonel noted. “However, she looks like many people in my old native land for all that. It is not unheard of for such tribes to find or adopt lost children of outsiders and raise them as their own. I pray that it is so, for then she is probably better off and will live longer by coming here. It would be terrible if, say, she was one of the missing television crew. I mean, I may look, even be very different but inside, in my mind, I am still Jorge Lunderman. But like that, not even as you say thinking as we were raised to think, how much of either of us would be truly left after a period of living that way? I am the same man that I was, living a different life in a very different place and as, frankly, something very different than what I was. Still, there is continuity, is there not? The mind and soul are my own. I would much prefer that to retaining my body and losing my mind, my memories, my very way of thinking. I would not be me anymore. I would be someone entirely different, but perhaps with just that lurking suspicion somewhere telling me that I was once someone else. Terrible, sir! Terrible!”

Brazil glanced at the girl, who was still looking at the creature with some disdain on her face but with no hint that she’d comprehended, or even tried to comprehend, any of the discussion.

“Well, she seems neither tortured nor unhappy,” the captain noted, “so I will continue to just accept her as she is.”

The colonel shifted a bit, the human statue distorting a bit eerily. “You must tell me what you are doing and why she is with you instead of remaining back there!” he said enthusiastically. “And about all the rest of what you know as well. It seems like ages since I was able to speak to anyone with a common frame of reference to my past! But sir, I apologize! While the cold is of some little discomfort to me and apparently none to her, you must be freezing! Forgive my manners. Have you a hotel?”

“Yes, I’m at the Grand. You?”

“I am currently living out of my cabin aboard the ship I used to get here. It will be in port here for three days, so there is little reason to consider my course of action beyond that until then. My cabin is, of course, at your service, but I’m afraid it would be neither spacious nor comfortable to one not of my new kind. Shall we go to your hotel, then?”

“Might as well,” Brazil sighed. “It doesn’t look as if I’m ever going to get out of here.”

They begin walking, or, rather, Brazil began walking, as did the girl, a bit behind, while the colonel sort of oozed along next to him.

“That is a good question to begin with as we walk,” the colonel noted. “Why are you in this inhospitable and out-of-the-way place?”

“Well, if you must know, I’m in a far worse position than either you or the girl there. I can’t set up anything permanent in Glathriel—the human hex—unless I want to take on her ways and life style. The Ambreza could be strung along just so much, but they’re still paranoid about humans, particularly the kind who can talk and know technology like me, and they’ve basically barred me from returning. I’m the man without a country. I am not, however, without a good deal of experience and skills that even the Ambreza found useful, which is how I have any cash at all. By the time you can command the kind of ships I did, you became something of an expert in almost everything practical and useful. Way up north around the equator there are two high-tech hexes separated by a narrow strait, neither of which has ever seen or heard of the likes of Glathriel, and both are highly dependent on shipping and import-export trade at this stage. They’ve both been looking for qualified ship’s officers and as usual aren’t particular about the race or nationality involved. They also serve as flags of convenience for hundreds of coastal hexes, particularly the nontech and semitech ones that have to get ships and crews from high-tech places. It’s my best shot at a life here.”

“Yes, I understand,” the colonel said. “But you have been frustrated?”

“I can’t get a ship north for love or money. It’s driving me crazy—not to mention quickly broke before I’ve started.”

The colonel thought a moment. “Tell me, Captain, do you think you could handle the sort of ship they must use here?”

The Well World did require rather bizarre ships, since there were water hexes as well as land ones and those water hexes had the same technological limitations as their dry counterparts. Thus, a large ship had to be able to move entirely by sail through nontech waters, switch to basic steam fed by manual labor or ingenious cog-drive mechanisms for the semitech, but could use an efficient fusion plant for the high-tech regions.

“I began in sail, if that’s what you mean,” Brazil told him. “And I’ve got—had—a master’s license for steam as well. My latest ships were big diesels, but the power source of a modern plant isn’t relevant if the power’s fed to the engines in the amount the bridge demands. I’m a little out of shape to climb rigging myself, but I could handle most anything else.”

“Then why do you not sail there yourself?”

“For the same reason you, as an air force colonel, didn’t have your own personal supersonic transport. That would take an incredible amount of money, and I’m afraid I’m still a wee bit short.”

The colonel chuckled, a very eerie sound. “Yes, I see. But there are much smaller craft making the runs. Private and government yachts, ferries that are built in one place and must be sailed to where they are needed, smaller fishing boats or their equivalents, that sort of thing. Like many other high-tech coastal hexes, Hakazit has a very competitive shipbuilding industry, you know, and they often have only skeleton crews to take those ships to their customers, as most experienced crew live on and have a share in their own ships. Forget shipping agencies, sir! Try the shipwrights! Why, I managed to finagle passage here because they needed someone familiar with government-type contracts to check on an overdue naval vessel my nation has on order. Permit me to ask around when I go down there tomorrow morning. Perhaps I can find something for you. One-way, of course, and probably not precisely to where you wish to go, but sufficient, I would expect.”

“I have no papers for this world,” Brazil reminded him, “so I never even thought of that route. But, if you can find somebody who’ll take me north, I’ll be glad to sign on.”

“Done, sir!”

“You sound very confident,” Brazil noted dryly.

“Why, sir, I am first and foremost a Brazilian! In my country you learn very quickly how to deal with mosquitoes, however large they are!”

In point of fact, Theresa “Terry” Perez did remember who she had been and where she had come from, but that only accentuated the change within her. What was different was that it no longer mattered to her, nor even did it disturb any part of her in the slightest that it no longer mattered to her. Nothing that mattered to virtually all the others in the hotel and in the city really mattered to her, except for a few basics. That was at the root of this new, nonlinear way of thinking that the Glathrielian group will imposed upon her, and not unwillingly on her part although she hadn’t known at the time what it would mean and the old Terry might well have fled instead. In point of fact, the Glathrielians had not imposed a great deal; rather, they had in effect rewired her brain so that it processed information in a way more alien to Earth standards than most of the cultures of the wildly varying races of the Well World. It created a new Terry, one who automatically saw the world in a new and very different way.

The Glathrielian imperative was essentially quite simple: At all times, consider only all the things that are relevant to you, and miss not a one of those. Anything irrelevant or unnecessary was a distraction; distraction was the way to destruction, so anything unimportant must be literally factored out of the mind and not even allowed to register. It would take years of self-training to master it completely, but Terry, helped by the experience and self-training of the Glathrielian elders, had achieved an amazingly high level of mastery in so short a time.

If she could filter out all distractions, all things not directly relevant to her existence and what was of true importance to her, and automatically observe only what she needed, the amount of information that simply came to her was enormous, far beyond the sort of knowledge others might possess. Thoughts, actions, and processes that did not require decisions should be automated so that they, too, ceased to exist as a factor. The energy field that her brain could generate and her body could use for so many things was one such process she had already relegated to that status. Although she didn’t know or care exactly what it was doing, or how, it protected her from the elements that might cause distraction—extremes of heat and cold, for example, or even adjusting gravitation or filtering out any impurities from an atmosphere so that if the chemicals needed to breathe were present in any mixture, it would extract only those and allow them into her lungs.

Of course, it was also useful both as a defense and as an offense, if needed, and those functions, too, were automated.

Without even realizing she had done so, she had reordered much of her digestive system and metabolism for maximum efficiency and maximum reserves of power.

Whatshe ate, so long as it was not poisonous to her system and was not of flesh, was irrelevant to her, and even much that might have made her ill or killed her was now separated out and isolated and passed through without harm. The body maintained its own vitamin, mineral, fat, and sugar requirements as best it could with whatever was at hand; it basically controlled what and how much she ate. She didn’t even think of it.

All the knowledge of her past and the person she’d been was not gone, but it had been reordered and placed in an out-of-the-way, protected area of the brain. The sight of an object or an assemblage of objects brought forth an instant reaction based on that knowledge but only what was needed to deal with it. Thus, the sight of electrical cables or sockets might evoke a warning of danger rather than a definition or a picture of what they were. By simply obeying those impulses automatically, she did not have to deal with them, either. The standard senses—sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch—were processed on a wholly subconscious level, almost as if she had a second parallel mind with access to all the same data whose sole function was to evaluate each and every “frame” of information, sixty or more per second, calculate if an action was necessary, and send the irresistible order to her consciousness.

This alone gave her enormous abilities of which she was as yet not completely aware that when used would not be thought about or reflected upon but merely accepted.

She was totally unaware that she was in a city, let alone a strange city on another planet peopled almost entirely by creatures alien to her. Yet her senses and her past knowledge of cities allowed her to cross busy streets at peak hours safely and, quite literally, without thinking about it. That was knowledge the Glathrielians themselves would have lacked, and they would have been easy targets for the first speeding truck. That was why she was unique even for Glathriel. She could survive in wildly unfamiliar places because her previous knowledge base gave her sufficient information for her to do so.

She felt uncomfortable inside because walls and barriers blocked not only the irrelevant but the important as well. Enclosures distracted and had to be dealt with. Still, the knowledge base informed her that the object: Mate was subject to environmental weaknesses that no longer plagued her, and it was unthinkable that she would keep him in discomfort when it was possible to do otherwise. The concept of separating from him any more than necessary was simply not allowable. She and he were linked in biophysical and biochemical ways that neither understood but that she realized and accepted. That she had in fact induced the linkage to ensure that he took her with him she no longer even remembered; it was irrelevant. Is mattered; was did not matter and was thus dismissed from the mind unless was was absolutely required for a current action.

And all of is was composed of objects. Mate is. Interactor with Mate is. At that moment those two objects were the only things in her mind. All else was filtered out as irrelevant. She understood nothing that was said; indeed, those very sounds were filtered out as irrelevant. But she felt what Mate felt; every little nuance of feeling was input, to a level he could not have comprehended. These were assimilated and appended to the Mate object’s is, which in turn formed a complete and constantly changing whole object picture in her mind.

The Glathrielian way saw life as a series of assembled objects leading to clearly pictured objectives, the latter simplified to the most basic form. Situation: hunger. Objective: find, consume sufficient food. Her one larger objective since turning Glathrielian had been to accompany now-mate. Having achieved that objective, she’d had no need for another. She understood, however, that Mate had his own objective. Because she lacked any data that the objective affected her in any way she would consider important and lacked any overall further objective of her own, Mate’s objective was in control and she would support him as he required. Just what Mate’s objective was she neither knew nor cared, nor would she care until and unless it affected what she considered important.

Her conscious mind saw no irrelevant external details; it saw other life as a seemingly infinite variety of colors and color mixes and patterns. She saw what was inside rather than what was outside in this circumstance.

Mate’s is was warmth, comfort, interaction with Other; interaction produced in him a range of sensations, none of which were unpleasurable and which included some hope and optimism, which meant that Mate was interacting with Other in pursuit of Mate’s objective. The Other, however, was radiating a very different is that Mate seemed oblivious to.Deceit, dishonesty, coldness, cruelty—danger! These impressions all came to her as they could only when her mind was freed of distractions. She could not interact with the Other, but she could with Mate, both empathically and physically. She knew that Mate was getting the information in the same manner as she was sending it, but while he did not reject it, it seemed only to reinforce his own instinct about the Other; neither did Mate act upon it as she would have.

If she still could think in the old ways, she would have thought to herself, He knows the colonel is a lying, two-faced bastard with ulterior motives, but for now he’s stringing the creature along.

She was uneasy about this only because she lacked any knowledge of what the creature was and how it might be dealt with. With the creatures she’d taken on in the past, she’d been able to absorb sufficient data from Mate to formulate a course of action; in this case, however, Mate didn’t seem to know anything about the damned creature, either, meaning that the only course open if the thing turned dangerous was to run like hell.

For his part, Nathan Brazil was getting a little irritated by the waves of warning coming from the girl. He fervently wished there was some way to tell her, ” Iknow, the guy’s a slimy, dangerous son of a bitch, but I need to know what he’s up to.” Still, she seemed to actually be making an important point. If this creature were to try anything now, he hadn’t the slightest idea how to hurt it or just what it could do to him. He was suddenly so astonished that she had actually managed relevant and intelligent communication with him that he almost fumbled acting on it. Repressing his excitement, at least for the moment, he got control and asked, “By the way, Colonel, I don’t want to sound insulting, but just what the devil are you, anyway? Your race and nationality, I mean. You’re a new species to me.”

That wasn’t quite true, but it must have been eons ago when he’d last encountered such a creature as this, and he just didn’t have anything to go on.

“The nation is called Leeming, sir,” the colonel told him. “At least, that is the way the translators spit it out, and that’s acceptable. And our kind are called Leems, not Leemingites or whatever, which is very close to the actual sound.”

The name, pronounced a bit differently but still close enough, did indeed ring a distant bell. They had no skeletal structure, and the brain case was a rock-hard ball that could move to any part of the fluid body. The outer membrane was thick enough to stop most projectiles, and yet they could control their skin and fluid interior almost down to the cellular level. What they needed, they could quickly create the internal musculature to make. Arm, hand, tentacles, functional eyes, functional mouths and voice mechanisms, ears, even the semblance of a former Brazilian Air Force colonel. They could maintain simple shapes or appendages almost forever but were unable to sustain complex forms for very long, especially when under stress. The Leem were asexual, but two were required to reproduce, each consuming a massive quantity of food and growing to almost one and a half times its normal size, then splitting off that new half, which then joined with a half from the other to produce a whole new being. They ate by secreting an acidic poison that could dissolve virtually any organic life to a puddle of warm goo, which was then absorbed directly through the skin.

Now where the hell did allthat come from? Brazil wondered. From the Well data bank was the obvious answer, but it still startled him. The Well had never been so generous or so obvious or so detailed with him before.

The data flowed into Terry from him and were added to her own internal knowledge base. This in turn changed the conscious picture of the Other dramatically, and it startled her. Mate had not known; then, suddenly, there had been a tiny burst of energy and a data stream had come from no specific point into his mind and then secondarily from his mind to hers.

She felt his surprise and initial puzzlement at it, then his comfort of recognition and his surprised pleasure rather than continued bafflement. It was something unexpected, new data that could not now be correlated.

Like her, Mate had a knowledge base that gave important data, but unlike her, the source was external. And while he knew the source, he had not expected the data to be given. There was something very important about that fact beyond its obvious comforting factors and its convenience to Mate, but as yet she could relate it to no objective of hers. But if it was not important to his objective beyond the obvious, and not relevant to hers, but was relevant and important beyond a doubt, then to whose objective did it relate? The priorities were clear:self ‹family ‹tribe. Mate + external knowledge base = great power. Family + external knowledge base = great power². Tribe + external knowledge base = ? 8 ?

Such speculation was fruitless and irrelevant to her now and was immediately wiped from her conscious mind as if it had never been considered. What remained was the relevant part: that she had a tribal objective that overruled all other actions, and that was for her and Mate to reach Mate’s objective. Until that was attained, reaching Mate’s objective was the sole motivator of all subsequent actions. And any actions on her part to further that objective were justified.

Without exception.