Shadow of the Well of Souls

Gekir

Even in the nearly total darkness it was easy to know when they had crossed the border from Itus into Gekir.

The dense jungle ended abruptly, as if cut off, and in its place was a wide, flat expanse of grasslands punctuated with groves of trees. The nearly omnipresent clouds were gone as well; the sky blazed brightly from the dense stars in the Well World’s spectacular sky.

Walking through the hex barrier instantly lowered the humidity to a small percentage of what it had been, and instead of feeling heavy, tired, and dragged down by the earth underfoot, all of them felt a sudden sense of relief as if a very heavy pack had been lifted from each of their backs.

“Now, is this gravity back to normal, or is this place actually below normal as the last one was above it?” Julian asked quizzically, as much of herself as of the others.

“Impossible to say,” a weary Mavra replied. “It would make sense to have a fairly large disparity, though, simply because it would keep Ituns from being interested in spreading out over here and probably the other way around, too. To tell you the truth, it hadn’t been so dramatic in the places I was last time, at least so I could notice.”

“Now what?” one of the centauresses—Tony, from the accent—asked. “Is anybody around here we should worry about?”

“You worry about everything on this world,” Mavra warned. “Even the friendly places. There’s not much chance of diseases—all but a very few don’t even travel well between species on Earth, and they’re all much closer than the ones here—but meat eaters will eat the meat of carbon-based forms and many plants and animals are potentially poisonous. Even potentially friendly tribes tend sometimes to shoot first and ask questions later. Julian?”

The Erdomese shifted to the infrared spectrum and scanned the relatively flat grasslands. “There are whole herds of creatures out there, most bunched close together and showing little signs of activity. Asleep, probably.”

“You think they’re natives?” Anne Marie asked, suddenly feeling a little bit refreshed by the lowered gravity and humidity but still feeling sore from the burdens of Itus.

“Who can say? But I tend to doubt it. I’ve seen the same sort of patterns with cows out on the western ranges and such, and you’d figure that a race would have some kind of night watch and probably fires or the remains of fires that I could easily see. If Earth is any example, and it seems to be to at least some extent, then this is a savanna, much like east Africa. That means lots of herd-type animals, which is what the patterns here suggest. Like the antelope. There are probably a lot of other creatures who are also grass eaters here.”

Lori had slept for a while and had finally awakened just before the crossing when he’d shifted a bit and his horn had jabbed Tony in the back.

“Where there’s a lot of herbivores,” he noted, “there are also carnivores. Probably not all intelligent, either. You’ve got a finite space here, no matter how large a hex is, so something, usually a combination of things, has to keep the population managed. The gravity barrier and maybe incompatible vegetation would keep the animals on this side of the line, but what keeps them in balance?”

Mavra nodded. “We’ve got to make a camp. Tromping through this meter-high grass for any length of time at night, we’re likely to start a stampede, and that’s the last thing we want. Who knows what this stuff could conceal, too?”

“There is a large stand of trees just about two kilometers in,” Julian noted. “It would afford some shelter and protection.”

Mavra was dubious. “That’s your Erdomese instincts talking. In the desert you head for the trees and the oasis. Think more like the Africa you talked about. I remember a part of it much like this, going on almost forever. It was huge, with vast herds of game and great cities and civilizations, until the coastal folks chopped down all the trees and the rains were able to erode and undermine the soft rock and good soil and the whole thing turned into a desert. The last time I was there, it was desert wasteland from almost the Mediterranean shore as far in as I knew. When I saw what had happened and what greatness had been lost, I cried, and I don’t do that much.”

She paused a moment, remembering the devastation, the eternity of baking hot sand, then regained control.

“Well,” she continued, “the point is that when you had thick areas of trees like the ones you describe, it meant a water hole, maybe a spring at the surface, just as in the desert, but it also was where all the nastiest predators went and spent the night. Wouldn’t you? They sure don’t sleep out here in the grass. Otherwise the herds of prey would be somewhere else. You don’t see any signs of some kind of camp, some kind of civilization in that grove, do you?”

Both Julian and Lori looked hard, using magnification as well. “No,” Lori answered after a bit. “But you’re right; there are some pretty large creatures in those trees.”

Julian pointed to their left a bit. “The grass seems to get lower over there. It is possible that there is some surface rock. I do not see anything much right in that area, either. Lori?”

“No, I don’t, either. It’s a good bet, although it won’t give us a lot of cover.”

“Better than nothing,” Mavra said at last. “We’re not exactly inconspicuous anywhere in these parts, you know.”

“Or anywhere else, as a group,” Lori agreed.

“Well, I for one think we all look just splendid!” Anne Marie announced, missing the point.

The area was a rocky outcropping that wind and rain had worn clean of soil. It was a large tabular rock, cracked in a few places, that ran about twelve meters by nine. There were some raised sections of what looked like the same material along two sides, although nothing that would really conceal them from an interested onlooker. It was, however, barren of grass and didn’t seem to have been staked out by anything else alive, and that was good enough.

“It’s basically a form of sandstone,” Julian noted, “not unlike on Earth. It’s a common pattern. The stuff will eventually erode back to sand—and you can see some of that along the back side there—and probably underlies the whole plain. Basically, this isn’t much different than Erdom, except that this region gets an adequate rainfall that allows the grass to grow and stabilize the rock.”

Mavra nodded. “That’s right. You were a geologist, weren’t you? Okay, let’s get the bedrolls down for us three bipeds. Anne Marie, do you still have the firestarter? I want to check on something.”

“Yes, yes. I believe… Half a moment!” With that the centauress turned on her forward hips almost all the way around and fumbled in one of the large packs, then said, “Aha!” She pulled out a long, thin metallic rod and handed it to Mavra.

As the supplies were taken off and the three bedrolls were spread out in the middle of the slab, Mavra went over, picked a strand of the grass, and brought it back to the center of the rock, well away from anything else. She pressed a button on the end of the stick, and from the other end came a tiny jet of flame, which she applied to the grass.

It caught fire but went out as soon as she removed the source of the flame. She tried it two or three times, and each time the result was the same. Satisfied, she tossed the remains of the grass stalk away and put the lighter back in the pack.

“If you don’t mind, what was that about?” Tony asked her.

“Testing fire hazard. Either it’s not long after the rainy season or this soil really holds water well. Maybe both,” Mavra explained. “It also means that the grass is probably just grass. Plus, it shows that the reason for not seeing any sort of fires or fire remains isn’t because it’s too dangerous to build one. And that probably means there aren’t any Gekirs around at the moment, whatever they are.”

“Either that or they just don’t use fire,” Lori noted.

Mavra gave her a look she hoped the Erdomese could see in the darkness. “Don’t kill my optimism too quickly! I was enjoying this,” she said grumpily.

Lori looked around with his night vision from atop the centaur’s back. “I wonder what would be the most logical life-form for a place like this?”

“Either carnivores or omnivores,” Tony guessed. “Probably carnivores. They would have the most stake in managing such a place, and it would explain the lack of any sort of groves or cultivation in such a desirable spot. I would wager that they eat a lot of meat, anyway.”

Lori frowned. “Um, I hate to bring this up, but you Dillians are herbivores, aren’t you? And Erdomese are basically herbivores, too.” He decided not to mention that another staple of the Erdomese diet was almost any form of insect. He realized that that might well put the others off.

“That, I think, was the point,” Mavra commented dryly, deciding not to remind them that she was the only true omnivore there. She looked around. “We could risk a fire, though, either to ward off our theoretical predators or even to cook something. I’m not going hunting out there, though.”

“Get me down first,” Lori asked. “I’m feeling a little better. Julian—help support me and I’ll see how the ankle is doing.”

She came over as Anne Marie lifted Lori off Tony’s back and gently to the ground, where Julian braced him.

He tried a few steps, and although he continued to put a hand on her shoulder, it was more as a stabilizer than as a full support. “Not too bad,” he said. “It’s still sore, but it feels a lot better. At least I know now that it’s not broken.” He took his hand away from Julian and tried an uncertain step, then reached out with his right hand and pushed on Tony’s side. ” Ow! Damn! I think the leg’s going to be fine, but my wrist feels terrible! Shit! And I’m right-handed!”

Julian looked first at his leg, then at his wrist. “There is very slight swelling in the leg, my husband, but as you say, it does not look like much. Perhaps one more day of riding and then you should be able to walk. The wrist, though, looks very bad. It should be in a splint and bandaged.”

Mavra came over to them. “Trouble?”

“His wrist,” Julian told her. “It is bad, and I do not know how bad.”

“Can’t you feel along it for a break?”

“No, she can’t,” Lori told her. “Because our females carry children to term on all fours, they need forelegs, and the way that’s done makes their hand basically a hard, fixed surface and a thick separate segment for grasping. But no fingers as such.”

It disturbed Mavra that she’d barely noticed. “Let me see. Give me your hand, Julian.” She took it and felt it. It was hard and resembled a hoof, but unlike a true hoof, the hand was segmented in two parts, one tapered and rounded and a bit softer inside so that it could be used as a giant thumb against the other, slightly flexible part. When closed, it made a nearly perfect hoof. “That’s awful!” she exclaimed, then immediately felt terrible because she’d said it.

“Oh, it’s not bad once you get used to it,” Julian replied sympathetically, remembering how she had felt when she’d first awakened and seen those strange hands. “You would be surprised what I can do with them. Not as much as true hands, but about as much as, say, mittens would allow. No, the real problem is, since I can use them as forelegs, I have no feeling in them. Having no sense of touch in my hands, I have to be looking at them whenever I am using them. That’s all right for many things, but there is no way I can feel Lori’s wrists.”

“You’d be surprised how much she can do with them,” Lori assured Mavra. “But not this.”

“Well, then, big man, grit those teeth, because I sure can,” the tiny woman replied. She took his right hand, noting how squared off and hard his hands were, even with three distinct and bendable fingers and a fairly prehensile thumb, then felt back to the wrist.

“Augh!” Lori grunted in obvious pain.

Mavra let go and shook her head. “I think you might well have some kind of a fracture there. I didn’t feel any protrusions, though, so it’s not a clean break we can set. Probably some hairline thing or chip. That swelling is pretty bad, though. It’s hard to say how it would heal—I don’t know enough about Erdomese, obviously, to make a guess—but Julian’s right. We’re gonna have to bind it in some kind of splint so it’s immobile and then bandage it. Bandages we got in the pack, and tape, so if we can find something to use as a splint, we’ll be okay. I don’t know what I can give you to treat the inflammation, though. The stuff that would help me might kill you or burn a hole through your stomach.”

“Believe it or not, aspirin,” Lori told her. “It seems aspirin is the number one miracle drug of Erdom. We don’t make it, but I ran into a drug trader on the ship to Itus. One of our biggest imports.”

Mavra sighed. “Well, I have a small tube of aspirin tablets in the pack for my own use. I wish I’d known—or thought to ask. It sure explains why I was able to buy it in the dockside shops! I doubt if there’s more than sixty tablets, though, and you, with your large size and particularly with that break, will need all of it and more. Lie down on the bedroll and I’ll get them.”

With Julian’s help, he managed to get over to the bedroll and sink down on top of it. Mavra came back with the small vial of aspirin and a canteen. “I’d take four of them now if I were you. Damn it! We should have started this as soon as we started out!”

They pried apart the plastic box Mavra had used as a medical kit and were able to form, with the aid of a large knife, a pretty rigid set of splints that were tightly taped to the wrist, lower arm, and hand, then wrapped with a green-colored plastic bandage. When it was done, Lori could not move the wrist at all, and after an initial, intense period of pain, it subsided and he felt some relief. Then it was a matter of waiting for the aspirin to kick in.

Anne Marie came over to them. “I do so hope that does it,” she said, concerned. “I know how it feels.”

Mavra nodded. “What do you want to do about something to eat?”

“Well, the grass smelled all right, so we tried some and it will do. We have to eat an awful lot, you know. While I’d much rather have it processed, baked in breads and cakes and pastries, or steamed with veggies and spices, that seems a teeny bit impractical here. We’ll just graze nearby until we’ve had our fill. As basic as it is, it is ever so much better than those horrid jungle leaves!”

“Okay, but don’t stray too far from camp,” Mavra warned. “You don’t know what’s out there.”

“We’ll be careful. We drank our fill in that stream back in Itus, so water is not a problem. Back as soon as we can. Ta!”

“Are they safe out there alone and unarmed?” Julian asked worriedly.

“Dillians are tougher than they seem, or at least they used to be,” Mavra assured her. “Those hooves can give a hell of a nasty kick, and while their arm strength isn’t close to a male Dillian’s, they’re pretty damned strong compared to us or most others, and I have a feeling that they can twist and move those bodies in ways we can only imagine. And they’re not unarmed, really. They both have the big knives we used on the jungle vines.”

“You have other weapons, I assume?” Lori asked.

“Some. The absolute best weapons for the Well World are knives for close in and crossbows for long shots.”

“Crossbows?”

“Sure. They’re accurate and powerful, and they work anywhere: nontech, semitech, or high-tech. I have some other items, too, but they’re for various special circumstances.”

“I have a saber and scabbard in my pack,” Lori told her. “I was pretty good with it, too, but I’m not sure how well I’d do left-handed.”

“Well, we won’t have to fight a duel with it—1 hope. So long as you can stab something with it, I think it’s better than nothing. You sure aren’t gonna be winning any fist-fights any time soon!” She paused a moment. “What about food for you two? I have a small kerosene-type cooker that’ll work here, or there are loaves in the emergency rations that supposedly give any of us what we need. They taste lousy, but they’re better than raw grass.”

“I could prepare something from the supplies,” Julian suggested, but Lori shook his head.

“No, not tonight. Tonight’s for resting and taking it easy. If Mavra can stand one of those loaves, so can I. I might like it a lot more than she does.”

“Or less. Still, very well, if that is your wish. I could try that grass, but I do not want to leave you alone here.”

“No! Eat one of the loaves, too. We’re heading for the coast, which shouldn’t be that far, right, Mavra?”

“Shouldn’t be. Certainly not a day’s walk.”

“When we are hard up, we will eat grass. Until then we will do what is easiest and most convenient,” he pronounced.

“As you say,” Julian responded, and went to get the rations.

Mavra was a little irritated. Julian had talked about the confusion over Tony and Anne Marie, but at least there were two of them. She began to wonder if there weren’t two Julians as well—the one that led them through a dark jungle safely, reconnoitered the area, and located and approved the campsite and the other one that she now was, subservient, obedient… somewhat sickening.

On the other hand, if she had four big tits, hands like claws, arms useless for much lifting and better designed as legs, and if the only hope she had of not being cast adrift as some kind of chattel slave was to keep the one husband who understood her happy enough to keep her around, then maybe she’d be two people, too, no matter how difficult it might be.

She had, after all, been in situations not any better than Julian’s. Ancient Earth wasn’t kind to most women. The way Tony, Anne Marie, and Julian had talked, that was true even now on much of the planet. Chinese peasant women still toiled in the rice paddies; the women in theocracies like the Islamic fundamentalist cultures were kept without rights, voices, or free movement. It was little better in much of sub-Saharan Africa, India, or even a lot of Latin America. In what they called the Third World, eighty percent or more of humankind was largely forgotten or ignored by the feminist crusaders in the industrialized West, most of whom also forgot or never knew that revolutions were often followed by reactions that could leave them worse off than ever. She had seen it happen.

She had lived it.

Time after time the great civilizations, the great ideas, the progress of whole masses of humanity were stopped dead and thrown back, often for longer than generations. Sometimes the darkness lasted many long centuries. Two steps forward and then one back was the norm, or so it seemed, but the darkness could rise and force one back even farther. If, as she’d been told, the status of women in some parts of Earth, let alone so much of it, was different from that in Erdom only by degrees, then the darkness still loomed, waiting to engulf the rest. And that darkness, the darkness of ignorance and slavery that was the dark side of humanity, would be replayed again and again if Nathan Brazil triumphed, even though he himself would have been appalled at that interpretation.

It didn’t have to happen. It certainly didn’t have to happen the same way and to the same people again. The Markovians—she still thought of the Ancient Ones by that name although Jared Markov, after whom they were named, had not yet been born this time around—were wrong in believing that there was a level of perfection attainable by races fighting their way up the evolutionary ladder. They were right to try to understand and fight the flaws, but the result was that the flaws were simply perpetuated.

That,at least, she could change. She might change. But if, and only if, she got into the Well first.

“I’ll take the first watch,” Lori said, breaking Mavra’s reverie. “I slept most of the way here, and I’m fine now.”

Mavra nodded. “All right. Julian and I will try to get some sleep. If the Dillians don’t come back in an hour or so, wake me. If they do, then give me at least four hours. I’ve functioned on that little for days at a time.” She thought a moment. “I don’t want to give you a loaded crossbow with that pair still out there if you’re not experienced in using one. I’ll get your saber so at least you can hit something over the head if it jumps on you, but what I really want is a loud yell. I’ll give you my watch. It’s a windup type, so it works anywhere, too.”

He grinned. “Don’t worry so much. I can see in the dark, remember? I’ve even been keeping track of the centaurs. I’ll be okay.”

“In fact, I should take the next watch, not you, for the same reason,” Julian pointed out. “The nights are long on this world, and it is best that the night guard be those to whom the dark is no barrier.”

“I won’t argue, but are you sure you’re up to it on so little sleep?” Mavra asked her.

“Yes. I do not need a lot of sleep, either. I make it up when I can.”

“Okay, it makes sense to me. If all else fails, we can let you sleep and ride as well.” Mavra yawned. “Me, I’m gonna take advantage of your kind offer.”

“You get to sleep, too,” Lori told Julian. “I’ll be all right.”

“Yes, my husband,” she responded, and lay down on the unoccupied bedroll.

Tony and Anne Marie came back a half hour later. By that time Mavra and Julian were both asleep, and the Dillians tried to make as little noise as possible. They didn’t need bedrolls or much else; like horses, they lay down only when crippled or very ill. Instead, they simply stood, their legs locked and the humanoid torsos bent back somewhat, and went to sleep.

Except for the occasional heavy breathing of the centauresses, it was soon deadly still.

Lori, too, wondered about Julian’s dual nature. He himself felt pretty well adjusted to the Erdomese form and now even to being male. Maybe too adjusted, he had to admit, considering some of his behavior of late, but he felt that he was being pragmatic about things. By Erdomese standards, he thought, he would always be a liberal, always remembering that the females had minds and thoughts and feelings and capabilities most of that society rejected and, hopefully, treating them better than most men there did. On the other hand, in that society any outspoken advocacy was a sure route to losing everything and to punishments including cutting out his tongue, castration, and beheading. For Julian it would mean instant death. With the church and its omnipresent spies and true believers programmed from childhood to believe in it and with the enforced insularity of most of the population from real knowledge of much of the rest of this world, nothing could or would change in Erdom’s society until and unless there was violent mass revolution.

It might well come eventually, but considering how things there were now, it most assuredly would not be in his or Julian’s lifetime. It wasn’t until experiencing a real totalitarian theocracy that he had realized just how hard a revolution could be, battling not only minds but genuine power. Technology, discovery, enlightenment, the scientific revolution—that had started things on Earth, or restarted them. But what kind of science could one develop when a battery would not hold a charge and tended to dissipate in even short transmission? When technology was rigidly and forever limited to water, and wind, and animal and human power? Without mass communication how could anything be organized? When even writing was limited primarily to the church and the hideously complex ideographic language was so complex that even priests were middle-aged before they fully mastered it, how could knowledge be disseminated?”

“Some men do in fact run the world—and you’re not one of them.”

And the price for having a crack at being one of those men who did run Erdom was just too damned high.

Still, he had to admit, it was different being a man in a male-dominated society. The fact was, he was beginning to like this form, even if he didn’t like the culture and chafed at the hex’s technological restrictions. This form was beginning to—no, it did feel natural, normal, comfortable. He never even thought about it anymore. Funny. He’d been born and raised an Earth-human female and had spent almost forty years as one; he’d been an Erdomese male for a matter of a few months, no more. Yet Mavra Chang seemed an ugly, colorless, unattractive… alien to him, while Julian was beautiful, desirable. Lori Ann had never been sexually attracted to women no matter how much she fought the male system. Lori the Erdomese couldn’t remember what turned Lori Ann on in a man or see the least attraction there.

Each day it was getting harder and harder to remember what it had been like to be an Earth-human woman. Not the past, not the events of a life, or the people, or the learning and accomplishments, the struggles, losses, and gains, but remembering being the one who had lived it. That person seemed more and more to be someone else, like a character from a movie she’d watched, a movie spanning forty years of a woman’s life.

Was that how it worked? First one got the new body, along with sufficient programming on the brain’s subconscious level to use it without serious trouble, and a bit of suggestion so that one was not frightened or revolted by what one saw or what one might need to eat, but it was still the original person, superimposed on an alien form.

But that form’s brain had to be different from an Earth human’s, if only in subtle but important details. Neural pathways would be wired differently; thoughts would need to be rerouted so that action produced the desired results. If there were subtle differences in the wiring of the hemispheres in male and female human brains, how much more dramatic would that wiring difference be in a totally different species? Add hormones and other chemical differences that would eventually influence development as the mind “settled in,” and one’s old self, one’s memories, one’s very soul, would be reshaped day by day so slowly and subtly that a person might not even notice. But one day that person would be wholly of the other species, as if born to it.

Lori Ann had been playing at being a man, enjoying fooling with the very concept as if it were some kind of masquerade gender-switch game. He wasn’t playing anymore, and he wasn’t even sure when he had stopped. He was a male now. It was one of the basic things that defined him. What flowed from that sense of identity defined his actions and reactions to a host of things both internal and external.

If it had happened to him like this, it almost certainly had happened to Julian. She’d come in months earlier than he had, but her own situation had been so radical a cultural loss that she’d fought like hell against it, while overall, he had to admit to himself that he’d not really fought it in himself at all. Still, by the time he’d met her, she already admitted that she had accepted being female, that it was something that no longer disturbed her. She’d fought not that but the concept that she was property, that she was to be consigned to a base role as if in a medieval harem. It was something Lori Ann would have fought just as hard against.

Maybe those drugs and hypnotic sessions had accelerated the process for both of them; maybe not. But if Julian now felt as normal and natural as an Erdomese female as he did as an Erdomese male, she might also, away from Erdom but still with him, have stopped fighting the rest.

It made sense. He thought of the two Dillians, who seemed so alike outside and so different inside, and knew that they really weren’t. Anne Marie really hadn’t been required to adjust much, but to Tony it must have been as much of a shock to be a female as it had been for Julian initially—although Julian also had the restrictive Erdomese culture to deal with. They’d been here the longest of any of this party. They’d come through the night the meteors fell.

Tony still thought he hadn’t changed inside, partly, Lori suspected, because Anne Marie still saw the old Tony inside the new body because she wanted to see him there. But he had changed. He was different. They had talked for a bit, being so, well, close, during the walk, and since he had the translator Tony could speak Dillian, which was easier. And when she spoke Dillian rather than English, there were only slight differences between her and Anne Marie’s speech patterns. In her normal speech, in her manner, her movements, even many of the things she spoke about, Tony was as feminine as Lori Ann Sutton had ever been. Tony admitted that she’d stopped fighting when she had realized that Anne Marie never noticed any difference. In any event, Tony knew she couldn’t stave it off forever and would have to let go sooner or later. Now she was just playacting being the old Tony; he was as past tense as the old Lori Ann was.

“I feel real pity for your Julian,” Tony had told him. “I would not accept that life. But in Dillia it is different; the practical day-to-day differences in the lives of men and women there are not radical enough to cause alarm, and in the few areas where they are, the benefits of being male are balanced against the benefits of being female. It is not at all like my old culture, nor, perhaps, your old one, either. It would have been nicer, perhaps, and more romantic to have been Anne Marie’s husband rather than her twin sister, but we can no more change that now than we could change ourselves before. This is second best, and we will take it.”

In truth, the old Tony still existed only when she was required to speak English. Other than that, Tony and Anne Marie had each drawn from the other what they had found most valuable and had become, in Dillian terms, very much alike indeed. It was as if they had been born twin sisters, with the exception that Tony would never be able to grow proper roses or be half the cook Anne Marie could be, and Anne Marie would never be able to pilot a jet aircraft and would never be that good at repairing even simple mechanical things. That difference was enough to allow each of them to retain a sense of individuality and a connection with their pasts, and it really was enough.

Lori had asked Tony why, if things were working out so well for them, they’d agreed to undertake a very long and difficult journey over land and sea to meet a strange and mysterious woman they didn’t know.

“Curiosity most of all,” Tony had replied. “A way to see more of this strange and mysterious world than we could any other way. Our passage had, after all, been prepaid, and we verified that every hex had a Zone Gate and from Zone we could be instantly back in Dillia no matter how far in the world we roamed, so return tickets were not a worry, either. And, I admit, timing played some part in our motivation.”

“Timing?”

“Yes. You see, Dillian women ovulate only twice a year, for about a three-week period each time. It is not that they do not do things recreationally, as it were, but it only counts during each of those three-week periods. While we have more control than an animal would, we were told that during that time women of childbearing age get ‘turned on,’ one might say, and stay that way for the duration. I can now tell you that it is indeed true and that it is a whole-body experience, and further that much willpower is required to function even close to normally at that time. Dillians grow up with it and learn to cope with their parents’ help. In Dillia it is the females who almost always seduce the males. We, neither of us, were quite ready for that as yet, I fear, and if we had done it and even one of us had gotten pregnant—no sure thing, because the Well governs population—we would have wound up never traveling.”

Lori could well understand. “Um—do you get periods, too?”

“Twice a year as well, and about ten days long. They are most unpleasant, but we can function feeling awful a lot better than we can function during the arousal stage, I can tell you.”

“I know,” Lori sighed. That was the experience that defined growing up female more than any other, and the lack of it now was one of the best things about being male. He looked back at Anne Marie, the twin of the creature he was riding, and commented, “Too bad you and Julian will both miss shopping for shoes, though.”

Now, as he sat there in the darkness, he tried putting a little weight on the ankle and was pleased to notice that the pain was very mild now. In an emergency he would have no compunctions about getting up and running on it, even if he might still pay for that later. The hand, though, was another story. If anything, he was more right-handed than Lori Ann had ever been; his left hand was useful mostly for support of whatever the right hand was doing. The aspirin had helped; he never remembered it doing this good a job on a human headache and suspected that there was a different biochemistry at work here, for once in his favor.

Not enough, though. It still hurt, and the fingers felt numb, a lot more than could be explained by the splint and bandages. The automated clinic back on the east coast of Itus was a long way away now. He had no idea how far away the next high-tech hex they might reach was or whether they would know how to repair a broken Erdomese there. What if the hand had to come off? There weren’t many prospects for one-handed men in Erdom. He began to feel panic at the thought, and that just made the awareness of the pain worse. He fought it, tried to push it back down, and finally got some self-control back, but he was feeling dizzy and nauseous. Scared, he reached over and shook Julian, who stirred, shook herself awake, then frowned and immediately was up and at his side.

“You have a fever,” she told him in a concerned whisper.

“A very bad one. You are glowing like a camp fire. How long did you let me sleep?” She reached over and picked up the watch. “Five hours.” The remains of the medical kit were on a blanket near them, and she went over and picked up the small vial of aspirin. “Here. Curse these hands!” She managed to get the top off but couldn’t get the pills out. “Give me your hand and I will try and shake them into it.”

Lori nodded, shaking now, and put out his left hand. She shook out a half dozen pills, then scooped up two with the lip of the vial and got him a canteen. He got the pills down, but it would take some time for them to have any effect.

“Lie here beside me, husband,” she told him, “and try to sleep if you can. I will be here and keep watch upon both the camp and you.”

He moaned and shook and thrashed around for the better part of an hour before finally passing into sleep. Julian wasn’t all that certain if he was just sleeping or if the fever had finally put him out, but there was nothing more that could be done.

Julian’s thoughts were mixed but all bad. For one thing, she felt almost helpless in the situation. She could comfort him and check on him and see that he got aspirin until that was gone, and she could cover him, but she could do little more. The biggest frustration was that she knew nothing of Erdomese infections or even whether this kind of fever reaction was normal or terminal. She did assume that if it didn’t break within a day, it was very bad indeed, but then what? Should he be kept cool or, as she’d automatically done, warm under a blanket?

She assumed that growing up Erdomese tended to give one at least a rough idea of these things just as Earth people had a rough idea of human reactions and illnesses simply by growing up human. Maybe they shouldn’t have bandaged the hand. Maybe that cut off air flow or something, although there was no open wound and the bandages were mostly to keep the splint on.

I’m not even a good First Wife here,she thought miserably. A first wife should know what to do.

Of course, if they were back in Erdom, help could have been called. Not here. All that education, that sophisticated background, and what’s it worth? she asked herself.

Nothing. Nothing at all. The revelation struck to the core of her ego and identity. All that Julian Beard had been, all that he’d learned, every scrap of sophisticated knowledge and the numerous skills he’d mastered, were not merely useless now, they were useless period. Sure, in training he’d learned probably the ultimate in first aid, but how much of that applied to Erdomese biology and what good was most of it without the proper instruments and medications on hand? What could she do if she had a decent kit, anyway? Even if she could put a thermometer in his mouth, for how long should it be in and what would be the correct reading? Useless, all useless. Julian Beard was someone trained for other conditions, another time, another world, another life.

Julian of Erdom was furious at Julian Beard for being worse than useless. Incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial. She had clung to him desperately for so long, even decided at one point to die for him, and he was worthless. She rejected him in her fury. She understood now: this was totally new, a start from scratch, from less than scratch. All the feelings, impulses, inclinations that she’d pushed back for the sake of that precious ego had been not a personal victory but a brick wall. Her past was the wall, a useless thing that had kept her unhappily tied to a world and life and viewpoint no longer relevant. But the old Julian Beard wasn’t there anymore. He was a ghost, an evil spirit that had led her only to this helpless situation.

It was probably too late, but she hated him now, rejected him, cast him out. She felt him go, like something solid and tangible that had been inside her head and heart and now was removed. It felt good, but—what was left?

Erdomese women served their husbands and families and extended families. She had a husband, but neither he nor she had anyone else, even in Erdom. He was all she had, and she felt that she had failed him. She looked down at him as he slept fitfully, and for the first time she looked at him entirely as an Erdomese female. She looked at his cute horn, the gentle strength of his face, and a flood of emotions and self-realizations swept through her, this time unchecked, unfiltered, without thought or inhibition.

She bent down to his face and whispered in his ear, “I love you, Lori. I love you and I need you.”

He didn’t come fully awake, but he seemed to hear, and there was a gentle smile on his face all of a sudden, as if he had banished nightmares for a more pleasant dream.

Julian was not really thinking, just letting her Erdomese body and brain act as they willed, performing actions that she neither knew nor cared made any sense or not. She bent over, raised his head gently, and offered him her lower right breast, one of the water carriers in a nonpregnant female’s anatomy. He took it and began to drink. At first it was a little, as in foreplay, but after a bit he began really sucking and taking it in, even as she was licking his face with her long, thick tongue.

She had no idea how long she kept it up, but it was probably an hour or two before she noticed a dramatic change in him. The fierce glow was gone; there was only a slight residual shimmer, the natural aftereffect of the dangerous condition he’d had.

Lori’s fever had broken.

Julian pulled back, exhausted, dehydrated, but also very, very happy to see and sense the change in him. He was going to be all right!

“We might light a small torch and take at look at that dressing,” said a deep woman’s voice behind her.

She started, turned, and saw Mavra Chang standing there.

“How—how long…?” Julian managed, her voice raspy and dry.

“Pretty much since you started. Somebody had to guard the camp.”

Julian felt suddenly ashamed, as if she’d done something else wrong. “I—I’m sorry. But—he was burning up with fever. I felt his life burning up inside him. I had to do something.” She paused. “I just wish I knew what I did.”

“Don’t apologize. I heard him crying out and thrashing around and knew he had to have something nasty—I don’t think I’ve actually slept soundly since I was aboard a ship in space, and you can’t believe how long ago that was, nor can I. At first I couldn’t figure out what you were doing, though,” she admitted. In fact, although she didn’t say it, what she had first made out in the bright starlight and then watched for a bit seemed pretty damned sick, a kind of prenecrophilia in which one made love to the dying. It took her experience with many alien species and her analytic mind to finally see a method in the apparent madness.

Julian still couldn’t. “Uh—what was I doing?” she asked hesitantly. She felt really rotten herself at the moment.

Mavra smiled. “A long time ago—it seems like I use that term a lot these days—when I was just pushing puberty, I pondered the Universal Sexual Design Question like most everybody else I knew. If most every mother had one baby at a time and multiple births were rare, why did girls get two tits? The answer, of course, is redundancy. Then I saw that Erdomese women had quads, yet Erdomese births are not all that much different in number than Earth-human births. So why four breasts? Wasn’t that taking redundancy to an extreme? Then I was told that the bottom two were water jugs when the system allowed it, and, probably like you, I accepted it as some sort of desert survival thing. I mean, you only need one guy to knock up a lot of females, but a lot of guys can’t produce any more babies with one female than one guy. Made sense. You probably thought the same thing. Probably most Erdomese think that way.”

“Yes? So?”

“I don’t think so anymore. Oh, maybe that’s one reason, but it’s not the main one. I have nothing but the evidence of my own eyes here and the results, but I’ll bet you what you did is done whenever a male is seriously ill. The face licking cools down the head in the only area of the body where your race can perspire to exchange heat. But that water—I don’t think that’s water at all. It’s at body temperature, and the cooling effect is minimal, so what purpose does it serve? Then I remembered the female Uliks from a long time ago. Big, ugly suckers, cross between walruses and giant snakes, with six arms and three pair of breasts. That was bad enough, except that they laid eggs and the young were born with developed stomachs and teeth and were fed dead meat. Which of course brought up the question of why they had any tits, let alone six, when they didn’t nurse their young.’”

“Yes? And?” Julian was exhausted, but she really wanted to know the point of this.

Mavra handed her a canteen. “Drink all of it. I know there’s water over there, and we’ll get some in a few hours. We have several more canteens, anyway.”

Julian took it gratefully and found herself draining the whole canteen in almost a continuous series of gulps. When she was done, Mavra continued.

“See, the only thing you and a Ulik woman have in common is desert. I didn’t think about it, but these ancient farts playing God here long ago weren’t all creative geniuses. They stole a lot from one another. That’s why there are so many humanlike life-forms, and why most races here seem to be themes and variations on other races, plants, animals, birds, bugs—you name it. It’s obvious to me now that the ones working on desert races would peek at each other’s work, steal from each other, even critique one another’s work.”

“The Ulik…?” Julian prompted.

“The Ulik female takes in enough water to float a ship. Once inside her, the amount she doesn’t use, and that’s most of it, is stored in a series of sacs that have what look like breasts as outlets. But each ‘breast’ produces different stuff. There’s a salt and mineral solution in a form that can be handled by the body to replenish what’s lost. Another takes vitamins from food and creates a vitamin solution of sorts. But the bottom pair have a solution that contains universal antibodies of some kind of supercharged type. Viruses, germs, inflammation, you name it. They attack, destroy, then work to help heal what was damaged. The Ulik males are big; the females are enormous, and they don’t travel much, but I tell you the males really treat them right and bring them whatever they want. I thought it wasn’t a bad system, myself.”

Julian gasped. “You mean—my lower set—they’re like those super illness fighters?”

Mavra nodded. “I think so now. No way to be sure, of course. I sure wouldn’t bet my life on it being fact, but I’d bet a good amount of money it was the answer. I think you shot him up with the equivalent of megavitamins, minerals, body salts, antibiotics, you name it. He can’t make that amount on his own, like the male Uliks. In fact, I’ll bet the whole harem thing grew out of that. You’re basically mammals. When you’re pregnant, the body devotes itself entirely to one thing and one thing only, and all this good stuff gets shot into the nursing baby just like Earth-human breast milk transfers antibodies and nutrients well beyond mere food. Tell me—you ever cut yourself? Or had a bad bruise?”

“Yes. When I was being imprisoned, I was chafed and bruised by the chains, and I cut myself once trying to get away.”

“Uh huh. And how long did it take you to recover?”

“I—I hadn’t thought about it. Once I was freed and out of there, I never noticed.”

“Lori injures a lot more easily and heals more slowly. He had some minor cuts and abrasions on him that were scabbed over. You have none, yet you’ve been here longer than he has and have been treated more roughly. Ever know a sick Erdomese female? Or see one scarred and bruised?”

Julian thought a moment. “No, now that I think of it. Oh, some of the old ones showed the wear and tear of their age, but among the younger ones, no. The men, however, all had some kind of cut or bruise, and a lot of them had dueling scars.” The evidence of Mavra’s suppositions was sinking in. “Many of the older women were fat and frumpy and didn’t take great care of themselves, but I don’t remember even one with stretch marks!”

Mavra nodded. “So you see, if this secret really got out and was understood, if they weren’t kept so ignorant that they didn’t even know what caused diseases and infections, the women of Erdom would have a hell of a lot of power over their men. If he tells you he needs you, he means it. I wouldn’t push it too far—I doubt if you’ll grow back a hand if it’s chopped off—but for most basic illnesses and injuries, you women are immune. The men are patsies without your defenses.”

“I—I want to believe that it’s true. But—how did 1 know?”

Mavra shrugged. “When the Well processes somebody, it has to deal with him as an adult. An adult used to being something else. By definition, you can’t have the same lifetime of accumulated experience as somebody who grew up in the new race, so the Well compensates. Biochemically, attitudinally, you name it. The most important parts of what Mama Erdoma teaches her girls, you receive as one-time knowledge, available when needed, like instinct. It was needed. It came out.”

Julian shook her head a little from side to side. “I think you may be right—to a point. That, however, was not all that was needed to bring it forward. Somebody I once was and clung to fiercely and needlessly got in the way, too, and he proved useless. Looking at Lori, I knew that. At that moment, feeling so helpless, something snapped inside me. That old self died completely. Died or was killed. It is strange. I know it was there, was the driving force of my life for so long, but I cannot remember much about it. Tomorrow, when my husband awakens, I will ask him to give me a new name. It is all that is left of my past, and I do not want even the reminder.”

Mavra had seen this before. Going native was the old term for it, one means by which the mind coped with what to many was an impossible situation.

“If I get into the Well first, you aren’t necessarily stuck in that body and role,” Mavra pointed out. “You can be anything, any race, any sex you want, here or on a world out there.”

“No, no,” Julian responded, shaking her head. She knew what Mavra was saying and why, but she did not, could not, understand. “I am an Erdomese woman, I am Lori’sFirst Wife, and I wish nothing else. If you can do what you say, and have the opportunity, then his decision will tell me my own. Until then there is no decision. Not until Lori decides.”

Mavra shrugged. “Fair enough.” She halted suddenly and looked out beyond Julian to the west. “Dawn is coming. At least we’ll be able to see what we’re dealing with. It may sound crazy, but I’ve had the damnedest feeling that some pretty big and possibly dangerous creatures are out there. They have moved in the dark here, both on the ground and in the air, although they haven’t come near us. That may be caution or fear, or we might just smell awful. I wouldn’t take it at all personally if that last is true. In any event, so far there hasn’t been anything that kills first and sniffs later. In daylight, who knows?”

They let Lori sleep, and Julian was out pretty quickly, too, but the centauresses were up quickly, bright and alert.

Mavra had some coffee brewing atop a small oil-lit stove. Although she still hadn’t reacquired a taste for it after so long, she had decided that caffeine, particularly at the start of a day, was a safety measure.

“Sorry about the lack of tea, but there’s only one pot and the amount of rations was limited,” she told Anne Marie.

“Oh, no bother, dear. When you live with a Brazilian for several years, you really start getting into the habit. A pity we have no milk, though.”

“This is not exactly roughing it,” Mavra warned her. “Not yet.” She looked across at the other centauress. “Where’s Tony going?”

“Where I’ve been, dear. I mean, after all, we did eat rather a lot last night, bland though it was.”

“Oh. Never mind.”

With a mug of coffee in hand and some of the pasty loaf inside her, Mavra got out the field glasses and began to take a look around.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” she said at last. “Those are the weirdest things I’ve seen in a life of seeing weird things. Whoever dreamed up this place wasn’t all that original, but he, she, or it was certainly creative.” She handed the binoculars to Tony. “Take a look.”

Tony did look and had much the same reaction. The fields seemed covered with dense herds of a creature that looked like… well, everything.

“These Ancient Ones. I think they drank,” Tony remarked, and handed the glasses to Anne Marie.

What they all saw was a creature about 120 centimeters tall with a head not unlike a giant beaver or great hare. Its ears, however, were two almost circular extensions that stuck out on both sides of the head like flapping plates. From the forehead, two pronglike horns extended either a mere fifteen or twenty centimeters or, on some of the larger ones, a good forty to fifty centimeters.

“Ten to one the short horns are females and the long horns males,” Tony remarked. “Notice how there are far fewer long horns and that they’re rather well spaced in the fields. Each oldster watching out for his wives, most likely, with the shorter ones inside probably sons. Oh, my! Look at them jump!”

Mavra took the glasses and saw immediately what she meant. They did not run, not exactly; they leapt, the larger ones springing free of the tall grass cover. The bodies seemed to be covered in a light, short beige fur, and for a moment they looked like yellowish kangaroos, but in addition to short, tiny arms they had two rather small hoofed front feet and two enormous rear feet that powered the leap and seemed all out of proportion to the rest of the creature. They had short, stubby fanlike tails that, unlike a kangaroo or wallaby, could not support them standing on the rear legs alone, so when still, they were on all fours with the long neck craning their heads up.

“Six limbs,” Annie Marie noted. “Like us!”

Something panicked a gathering not far from the shimmering border wall—some large reptilian birdlike thing swooping overhead, it looked like. In any event, it almost started a stampede of the creatures, who leapt out of the grass as if one and then came down again, apparently on their front hooves, then launched using their gigantic rear legs once more. The movement of one group startled some of the others, but Tony noted that the larger long-horned ones he’d thought of as males turned and looked up at the threat above them and seemed to act almost in a coordinated fashion to track and if need be fight the predator.

The attacker, an ugly dark-looking thing with an impossibly long snakelike neck and a head that seemed to be all eyes and mouth, swooped down and found itself confronted by a series of male defenders who would leap, horns out, in an attempt to gore or at least scare the creature when it came too close.

It was quite an impressive bit of teamwork and was quite effective; every time the attacker would come down for some wee one in the still-fleeing herd, it would meet one or more of the males. Still, the herd was too large to guard against air attack. Eventually the thing outmaneuvered the defenders, swooped into the madly fleeing and scattering herd, and came up with something small and wiggling. Then the thing flew off toward the nearby grove of trees with its prize.

“Disgusting,” Anne Marie snorted.

“Nature, that is all, my dear,” Tony responded pragmatically. “One overpopulates; the other manages it. It is the same way on Earth.”

“Not in England!” she responded, as if it made sense.

Tony turned to Mavra. “You know, I have been thinking. Do you suppose those herds are the Gekir? They have hands of a sort, or so it appears, and they have some sort of logical defense organizations.”

“I doubt it,” Mavra replied. “Too basic. After all this time they’d be about as sophisticated here as a nontech civilization can get, I’d say. No, you were right. That’s instinct and nature. No tools and no weapons that are built with tools. I can’t say I’m too thrilled by that thing that attacked them, though. I wish it had gone anywhere but in that grove.”

“We can bypass it.”

“Yeah, but how many more will we have to bypass if we do? And Julian needs a real long drink or we’ll have to let her empty all our canteens.” Briefly, and skipping the details, she explained what had taken place in the night.

“Poor dear! But she should ride today! I’m certain that either of us could take both of them,” Anne Marie responded.

“Yes, particularly if she’s the one against my back this time,” Tony added, rubbing a bruise where Lori’s horn had stuck her. “How far do you think it is to the coast?”

“Not far. Half a day at the most,” Mavra told them. “An hour or less if it was just the two of us.”

“Perhaps we can repack this differently,” Tony suggested. “I think I could take both Julian and you and half the supplies, and Anne Marie could take Lori and the remaining supplies. He’s the only one that weighs much of anything among the three of you.”

“How sweet,” Anne Marie remarked. “You want to ensure that we have matching bruises, too.” She sighed. “Very well. Then we can avoid that horrid creature over there altogether.”

“I’ll go that far with you, about riding, that is,” Mavra told them, “but I don’t think we can skip water. No, if we run every time there’s a predator around, we’ll be running all the time. We’ll give that pair another hour or two while we re-sort out this stuff. If that thing hasn’t decided to leave and find somebody new to play with, we’ll see if it cares if we show up or not. It might be too full to care.”