Shadow of the Well of Souls

Dlubine

Things had been going well in the sailing department. The oceans had remained generally clear of other ships, although one or two had been sighted either as distant wisps on the horizon or as sets of far-off running lights in the night, but no one had come near, no one had challenged.

They had also managed to steer a northerly course with a good wind at their backs, and thanks to clear skies both day and night, Nathan Brazil now had a relatively decent idea of where they were.

The shortest distance to the north coast would have been straight through Mowry, but the hue and cry for him had to be all over the Well World by now and certainly would have reached a nearby high-tech water hex via Zone long before they got there. He had no desire to face all the locating devices, let alone the speed and weaponry, of a fast, well-armed naval corvette such as the one the colonel had allegedly been waiting to pick up.

They would also probably have come from Mowry to Dlubine with the news, including a halfway decent description of the stolen vessel and her rather distinctive crew, and they would certainly be waiting for him at all the island harbors.

Still, in order to give Mowry a wide berth and make the long crossing to nontech Fahomma—where they’d have a chance of either slipping ashore on the coast of Lilblod or perhaps skirting the coast all the way up to Betared—they would need supplies, and those tiny islands were the best sources. Any searchers would be looking for the ship and for two Glathrielians, male and female, in a hex limited to kinetic forms of energy. They could generate power here, but they could not store it.

Most important to their needs, though, was that those looking for the ship probably did not know about Gus.

Gus had accepted the relative technology levels at face value, as products of the culture. It wasn’t until talking with Nathan Brazil that he had realized that the limits were imposed by the Well, hex by hex.

“The idea,” Brazil explained, “was to approximate as closely as possible what the mother world of the race would provide. Of course, these are only rough limits, approximations, but the general idea holds. The world of the Dahir, for example, is probably mineral-poor, with all the heavy stuff too far down to use and not much surface volcanism—not a lot with which to develop a sophisticated technologically based culture. You’re probably more limited here than the Dahir are on their own world, but I wouldn’t expect television or trains or a lot of other stuff even after a very long period of development. They’d develop a different way. When resources are there but much harder to get at, and the land and water areas are conducive to some technological development but not on the scale of advanced electronics like computers and satellites, the Well imposes the semitech limit approximation here, too. Planets like Earth, with creatures like the ones we grew up as and with all those resources and conditions, get the high-tech treatment. No limits.”

“Yeah? You mean there’s an actual Dahir planet someplace? With Dahirs the boss civilization like humans are on Earth? Ain’t that a kick in the pants!”

“There definitely is, and don’t think that because you’re nontech here that they haven’t somehow developed a lot more than your people could. It would just be a lot harder than it was for us, and you know how long it took us. Who knows how it turned out? Or is still turning out, more likely. Your group here was just the prototype, to see if they could survive and prosper under conditions stricter than they would find out there. There’s a huge number of races out there, far more than the 1,560 here. These are just the leftovers. The last batch, as it were. Why they stayed, or were stuck here more likely, I couldn’t guess. At any rate, they’ve been here ever since.”

“Huh! Talk about not havin’ no future! Jeez… Just here, huh? Kinda depressing, really.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Well, jeez, I mean, all these people—and all of ’em are people, no matter what they look like—bein’ born and livin’ and dyin’ and it just goes on and on. No population explosions, no Tom Edisons or Philo T. Farnsworths or nothin’ in most of ’em, at least none that can actually invent things and change everybody’s lives, and the high-techs either gettin’ fat and lazy or turnin’ into ant colonies with traffic jams, seems like. I mean, you talk about havin’ nothin’ to look forward to! No big changes or revolutions or nothin’. The most you can hope is that your kids grow up to have just what you have. Now, that’s depressing—to me, anyway.”

Brazil thought about it. “I guess my viewpoint’s different. To me, this is a place where maybe folks can find out what’s really important.”

“Well, that’s ’cause you’re the audience, not an actor in the play. Even so, I notice you went back and lived through all the shit in Earth history. You didn’t stick around here watchin’ folks contemplate their navels.”

The captain sighed. “I don’t know, Gus. Maybe you’re right. Your whole life was trying to be where the action was, and I guess mine is, too. Don’t exempt yourself, though, from that audience. We’re both a couple of ambulance chasers, rushing off to see where the siren’s going. Maybe that’s the trouble with us. You didn’t rush to rescue the child from the burning building or catch the robber or put your life on the line for a cause. You went there to film it. I didn’t really have any cause, either. I might have tackled the robber or tried to save the kid, but it was just because it was something to do. Now it’s us who are the story. This time we’re the reason for everything that’s going on. I doubt if either of us is comfortable in that role.”

“Maybe. Maybe I just would rather have been one of them high-tech types here to tape all this for the eleven o’clock news. Maybe that’s my problem. Or maybe it’s just that this is the only game in town right now, and when it’s over, it’s gonna be boring as hell.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Things do happen here, although on a smaller scale. There were some wars here once and might be again sometime, and revolutions do happen, cultures do get turned. Look at the ancestral home of Earth. Conquered by a nontech hex that forced it to switch places.”

Gus looked out over the wheel at Terry, who still relaxed on the deck, seemingly oblivious to everything. “Yeah, and look at what we did with it. What the hell did they do to her, anyway? You can’t know what a difference there is. You can’t imagine it.”

“I don’t know, Gus,” Nathan Brazil admitted, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “I don’t know what happened at all. They weren’t like that the last time I was here, and that was long after the switch. She—they—are the best example that things do change on the Well World. There are other things, too. I don’t remember the Dahir being as sleek and streamlined as you are, and I sure don’t remember ever hearing about this vanishing trick you do. I’ve seen some other races, too, races I knew, and they’re different as well. A lot has changed here, for all the look of it. An awful lot. I haven’t figured it out yet, and I doubt if I can get a real handle on any of it until I’m inside the Well, in that incredible form, able to digest all this and figure it out.” He sighed. “And that is the only real priority.”

And if I fail, I could die here…Brazil was still having trouble with that, still fighting against the idea, but it wouldn’t get out of his mind. It scared him, and he hadn’t expected that, but there was also a bit more zest to this race because it was there.

For the first time his very existence was at stake. The sense of risk was both uncomfortable and oddly exhilarating. It was something totally new to him, and anything totally new was attractive, even in so perverse a fashion as this.

But then again, the girl was something new and unexpected as well, and for all Nathan Brazil felt for her, he still wasn’t at all certain if she represented a true asset or yet another threat.

Why had she joined him in the first place, and stuck with him, considering the vast gulf between them? Why was she so intent on using her powers to help him clear obstacles from his path? Did she want to be put back, become Terry once again? He could do it, inside the Well, but how could she know that or anything else about his true nature? Was she perhaps fleeing from whatever had made her the way she was, or had that hidden intellect directed her to join him?

Gus went over to her as she ate some of the hard bread and tried to make her see him. He just couldn’t believe that somehow, somewhere, deep inside her, he couldn’t make her understand who he was.

She did see him when he put his huge reptilian face in front of her and stared into her eyes and began to talk. For a moment she was visibly startled to see this huge creature apparently materialize so close, but then she just frowned a bit and went back to the bread.

He had no way of knowing that at that moment she had looked beyond his surface appearance, looked deep inside him, and sensed only friendliness and a total absence of threat either to her or to Brazil. That had placed him in the category of factors not to worry about, and there seemed little point to anything more until and unless some concerted action was required.

He didn’t accept that. “Terry! It’s Gus! Gus! Do you understand me? It’s Gus, at your side like always! You’ve just gotta be in there somewhere, damn it! We went through too much together!”

But Gus’s words registered only as random sounds, and she could read or infer nothing at all from his features or form. She was aware that it was almost frantically trying to communicate with her, but she saw no possible point to the communication even if there had been a way. It seemed to feel some actual affection for her, which seemed odd, but that, too, wasn’t relevant to her, nor was it a problem worth pursuing at this time.

She would, of course, have recognized Gus if he had looked as she had known him; those memories were still there, still accessible when needed. But she had not had the briefing for new entries in Zone. She had gone through the Zone Gate and emerged still human. All her experience told her that the Zone Gate was nothing more than another variation of the gate that had brought her to the Well World; she had no information at all on its transformation and adaptation abilities and functions. There was therefore no way for her to know that her companions of the past now looked remarkably different.

She did consider the problem of why she hadn’t been able to see the creature until now. She had sensed it, even back on land, and knew it was the same one, but because it radiated only friendship and no sense of danger, it had been ignored.

She heard its heavy steps on the wooden deck going away from her, back toward the Mate, and looked up and was again startled to see nothing. That should not be. She could feel it, sense it, but only in general terms, enough to know it was there.

But where? It was so big, so colorful… She tried shifting through all the bands, but nothing showed up. Now, suddenly, Gus interested her a great deal. It was an unacceptable situation not to be able to see other creatures.

She sat statuelike, virtually all her mental resources suddenly fixed on this one problem, scanning every single energy band, mental and physical, one by one, examining and going through all sorts of tests on each, trying to find one that somehow wasn’t right.

Busy with running the ship and with making plans, the two men hardly noticed that she sat there hour after hour, not moving, hardly breathing, all resources concentrated on this one problem.

And eventually she found it. One tiny, thin wave of medium power. She tried to block it off but found that impossible to do without also blocking off needed brain processing power. It was so perfectly located on the mental spectrum that it couldn’t be jammed, couldn’t be neutralized, without causing more harm than good. The best she could do finally was to narrow it down, localize it, pinpoint its source, then file it away.

She still couldn’t see Gus unless he wanted to be seen, but from that point on she knew exactly where he was, which was more than sufficient. It was, however, an interesting capability for all that. The band was a common one, and the broadcast was strictly one-note, designed to do just one specific thing and to do that very well indeed. Given sufficient energy, it might be possible to duplicate the effect from the human brain. Almost casually, without even thinking about, let alone grasping, how she did it, she just did it.

Gus immediately popped into full visibility up there next to the Mate. One single narrow frequency; two broadcasts canceled out the effect on sender and receiver. Obvious and simple. Otherwise the creatures could never see one another, either. Once satisfied that she could turn it on or off at will, she filed the information away and finally turned her attention again to the now very old bread.

While all this was going on, late enough in the day to be nearing dusk and only a few minutes later than Brazil had predicted, they reached the hex barrier with Dlubine.

“Looks pretty peaceful,” Gus noted. “Big fluffy clouds but not much else. Even the whitecaps don’t seem real big.”

Brazil nodded. “I’d hoped we’d reach it while we still had some light. I think we’re pretty much dead on where I thought we were from the charts, too. I just hope it isn’t freezing cold or something over there, although I doubt it. There’d be something of a permanent storm front at the barrier if it was, and while the sky looks a bit different, it’s not enough to worry me. Still… I gather you’re warmblooded, Gus, or you wouldn’t have done so well back in that snowstorm. What’s your range of comfort?”

“Can’t say for sure,” the Dahir responded. “I guess I’m pretty well insulated, since I haven’t really felt uncomfortable in any extreme weather. Oh, I knew it was cold back in Hakazit, but it felt like I was wearin’ a full set of winter clothes, if you know what I mean. Dahir’s kinda high up, sort of a rain forest swamp like you find in northwest Washington, where it rains half the time and can get kinda chilly but not freezin’. I hope I don’t need no clothes for any of this! I mean, jeez! Where would I get somethin’ to fit me?”

“Well, we’ll soon know. Here we go.”

Pulcinell had been warm and comfortable for Brazil, with both water and air temperatures somewhere in the high twenties Celsius, very much like Rio had been in its spring. He felt the tingle as they passed through the barrier and was suddenly aware that the problem in Dlubine would not be freezing.

It was hot. It was a steambath of major proportions, and the sun was almost on the horizon! It had to be close to forty degrees Celsius. Even Gus wasn’t unaffected.

“Wow! Feels like somebody just threw a hot blanket over me!”

“Me, too,” Brazil responded. “This one’s a hotbox, that’s for sure. With heat like this near dusk, I’m not sure what midday might bring and I don’t like to think about it. No wonder they had major storm warnings on the chart all over this hex! With this kind of heat and humidity you can get a hurricane between dusk and midnight! Evaporation here has got to be nuts!”

“Yeah, and when it’s clear, it’ll be Sunstroke City, definitely for you, maybe for me. I dunno. Maybe we oughta figure on riggin’ up some kind of roof or sunshade or somethin’ for tomorrow, though.”

Brazil nodded. “At least it’s calm right now, and we’re in very deep water here with no shoals or reefs. I can pretty well lock the wheel down and the both of us can look for something to use. Otherwise we’ll have to just drift through the day or find some shallows and anchor. Might not be a bad idea to do that, anyway. I can use some decent rest, and I get the bad feeling that there isn’t a night in this land that isn’t filled with thunder and lightning.”

Gus looked out at the darkening horizon. “I’m not too thrilled to look forward to that experience, considerin’ the storm we started with, but I’m just as worried at what I see out there.” A tiny finger gestured to the northeast, and Brazil’s gaze followed it.

“Well,” the captain said with a sigh, “we couldn’t exactly expect to travel even an ocean without company.” He fumbled and came up with the binoculars from his pack and examined the horizon more closely. “Looks like all commercial traffic, anyway, just from the look of the sails. All heading pretty much the same way, too.”

He made an estimate of the common heading of the three sets of sails still far off on the northeastern horizon and looked at the charts. “There,” he said finally, pointing to a dot on the map with his finger. “Five will get you ten that they’re all making for that island.” He looked up at the sail. “Not much of a wind, but they should make it in, oh, two hours, I’d say. Maybe less if the wind picks up like I expect once things start to cool—and I say that in a relative sense. They cut it close, but they should be in the harbor there before any big blow comes up.”

“What about us?” Gus asked him. “Shouldn’t we put in someplace, too?”

“Well, the island, which is called Mahguul on the chart, is the only thing within our reach, too. Pretty small—only a few kilometers across by the look of it here, but with some elevation. I’d rather not risk getting bottled up in there if the word’s out on us. It would only take somebody from Mowry to come over and post the gory details. A consortium could post a decent reward, but if they just posted that we’d stolen a fellow sailor’s ship, it wouldn’t take much of a reward.” He thought for a moment. “Still, I don’t want to battle storms all night even if I’m gonna fry tomorrow. I’m gonna head for it even in the dark. If we can just find some shelter off it, we might be able to get what we need.”

“Sounds about as dangerous as takin’ on the storms,” Gus noted worriedly. “Still, you know the business.”

“Yeah.” Ihope.

The night brought a stunning surprise. The ocean was alive with light; greens and blues and reds and yellows and all sorts of in-between shades were all over the place, forming patterns just beneath the surface and giving the whole sea an almost fairy-tale glow.

“Damn! Will you look at that!” Gus exclaimed at the unending parade of lights. “What do you suppose causes it? Could it be the lights of the people who live under the water here?”

“Unlikely,” Brazil responded, fascinated himself by the beauty of it. “If it was coming from intelligent creatures, we’d see more movement in the patterns, and this is a semitech hex, so there wouldn’t be any real power source. The water here is fairly deep, too, so it’s not something pasted on or painted on bottom structures. That range of colors means they’re not too deep. My guess would be some kind of marine life that forms large colonies that float or swim a few meters below the surface, but around here you can never take anything at face value.”

“Terry seems to like it. It’s the first really human reaction I’ve seen her have.”

“She’s probably analyzing its atomic structure or something equally absurd,” Brazil responded grumpily. “Where is she, anyway? I can’t see much in the dark, even with the glow lighting things up.”

“Right there by the side rail, on the left. Easy to spot her with this light show. You’ve got to be able to see her. Nobody who can grow a new eyeball can have vision that bad.”

“No, I—Oh, wait a minute! Hold on! Damn it! Son of a bitch!”

“What?”

“She’s solved your damned trick! Now I can’t see either of you!”

“You’re kiddin’! ’Course, how would I be able to tell? So I can see her and she can see me, but you can’t see neither of us unless we’re talkin’ to you or in your face! Ain’t that a kick in the head!”

“Yeah, for me,” Brazil sighed. “And I’m the one that could use it best right about now! More than either of you, since I’m the target.”

“Yeah, well, I can’t do much about that, but at least you don’t exactly fit the wanted poster no more. I mean, they’re bound to have the both of you on it, right? They won’t expect you alone, particularly when she was clearly aboard when you stole this skiff.”

“Yeah, but that won’t mean much. She’s just an identifier, like me having a beard or black hair. You can lose people all sorts of ways, but my description’s pretty well fixed. Still, I wish I could really get through to her, make her understand what we need and persuade her to go get it. You can carry more, but she can climb and get in and out of a lot of places that you can’t.”

“Tried just about every which way, huh?”

“Just about. The only thing I didn’t try, and I’m not sure it would do anything or not, was to try and connect on her level, body to body, mind to mind.”

“Jeez! You can do that?”

“Of course not. But I have a suspicion that she could, if the will to do it was within me and if I could put myself into a trancelike state where I would not resist.”

“I don’t think I could do that.”

“Yeah, well, I had some practice with such things while I was in the Orient. In a way, the state she’s in and the power she has are very reminiscent of the goals of various schools of Eastern mysticism. Thing is, what I’ve seen ordinary Earth humans do with their minds once they were in a mental state totally removed from the material world awed and scared even me. I think, maybe, deep down it’s everybody’s inheritance from the folks who built all this. The potential is there, anyway, to some degree.”

“Well, why didn’t you try that, then?”

He gave a wry smile. “For the same reason I stopped short in the lamasery. Because I’m not so sure if I entered that mental realm that I could get back any more than she can. What if whatever force that has this metaphysical, mental, symbiotic relationship with her were to get that same degree of control inside me? With that kind of power and lack of dependence on most things physical, I could make it to the Well easily. The question is, what sort of mind would I be bringing into it? Could I shake it off when I had to, or would I be bringing a force I don’t understand into direct contact and connection with the Well and all its powers?”

“You think this thing is evil, then?”

“Not in the absolute sense, no. It would be evil to some, good to others, I think. But it, itself, is, I think, beyond that sort of definition in the same way that the Markovians, the founding race, were beyond it. I don’t know, Gus, but I would have to be in a very desperate situation before I could open myself up to that kind of threat.”

“I think I might take the chance at some point if I thought I might be able to become one of them good guys myself. I could stand a billion years before gettin’ bored.”

“Well, I don’t know. I don’t know if I would want that or not. God knows I’ve thought about it enough. And it might not be the kind of godhood anybody would want, anyway.” He chuckled. “Besides, I’ve spent half an eternity as a crook, con man, scoundrel, rogue, and pirate. To be able to do anything you wanted or have anything you wanted by wishing for it would take all the fun out of life. And you’ve got to ask yourself, What would the Glathrielians want to do? And what would a race of mystics that has sworn off all material desires want, anyway?”

“Urn, yeah. I see your point.”

They were silent for a while as the wind picked up and they began making some speed again. Off to the west the sky began a dramatic display of lightning, but it was still far enough away that they couldn’t hear the thunder.

“Gus?”

“Yeah, Cap? I’m still here, watchin’ the fireworks.”

“Don’t worry about that. It’s not heading toward us. I’ve been looking at the lights, though, and I think maybe I was wrong. I think those are some kind of intelligent lighting system. The patterns… Well, don’t they remind you of something? A bit more color, but don’t they kind of look like what a great city might look like when you’re passing over it two kilometers high in an aircraft?”

“Yeah! Now that you say it, I do see that. I’ll be damned! I thought there was somethin’ familiar about ’em. But I thought you said this was deep water.”

“It is. The first impression, I think, is an optical illusion based partly on the knowledge that this is a semitech hex and they can’t have an elaborate electrical grid, even water-insulated somehow.”

“Yeah, so?”

“It’s the fact that they live so very deep that gives us this overall impression and view. They do have some kind of light source, probably organic, arising from chemical means. They’ve lit their city, their civilization, their little world with it. And to them, we’re doing exactly what the vista suggests—we’re ‘flying,’ as it were, on the very top of their atmosphere, looking down. Now that, to me, is impressive.”

“Yeah.” Gus breathed deeply and continued to look at the vast rippling field of lights. He wondered what the people were like down there and whether this was a city asleep or a city alive at night, bustling with traffic and commerce and all the things a great city might offer.

There was lightning all around after a while, and some distant claps of thunder could be heard rolling hollowly over the waves. Slowly, too, the vast undersea city, if that indeed was what it was, began to trail off, the lights becoming fewer, and great dark patches began appearing. Still, a few lines of light continued on almost beneath their ship, as if they were lonely highways stretching out from the metropolis to others far distant.

Suddenly Gus realized that this was exactly what they were or at least what Brazil thought they were, and in fact their ship was following the broadest twin line of lights just as an airline pilot might follow a great road.

“It’s going where we’re going,” Brazil assured him. “It’s too bad it’s so damned hot here that we get all these night storms. Otherwise this would be a dream stretch of ocean to navigate by eye alone. All you’d need would be a general destination or maybe a road map.”

The captain had finally shed the last of his persona] dignity in reaction to the steam bath heat. His clothes were designed for a cold climate, and Dlubine was anything but that. He was a little, bony sort of guy, Gus noted, although quite hairy, and it was easy to see why he’d be a hit with the women even though the rest of him was small.

Brazil himself would have preferred at least a pair of briefs, even though he was the only Earth-human male in a vast stretch of the world and the only Earth-human female around had seen him like this many times and indeed seemed to prefer him this way. It was just part of his nature. He had not, however, ever found any nonhuman on the Well World who could get the crotch right.

Yet, it felt better, even if he was still sweating like a pig.

“Lights ahead. On—maybe above-—the surface,” Gus warned suddenly.

Brazil nodded. “I see them. That looks to be a lighthouse to the left, and the lanterns just right of dead ahead—see? Two on the right side, one on the left—they’re channel markers. Being northbound, I’ve got to lay just inside the double lights to remain both in the channel and in the lane.”

“Must be coming in to that island, then. Can’t see nothin’, though.”

“You can interpolate it, Gus. Look at the underground highway. The main drag continues right along the markers, but another goes off in a Y to the left, toward the light. I’ll probably swing wide before it gets there, though, since the lighthouse is almost certainly marking reefs or shoals.”

“You gonna take a chance on the harbor?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to follow the markers around to it, that’s for sure, and we’ll take a look at it. If it’s wide and deep enough, we might just slip in, do what we have to do, and slip out before morning. If it’s small, active, and threatening, I might just do a go-round and see if we can find some kind of temporary anchorage well away from it. I’m going to get in, since the only thing I would like less than climbing over volcanic rocks in pitch darkness is climbing over them when they’re hot enough to fry eggs.”

The mountain itself, the top of which was the island, could not be seen in the darkness, only inferred, but the channel markers above and the glowing road below made it a simple matter to avoid any nastiness and move slowly around the mass toward the harbor area. Brazil couldn’t help thinking, but didn’t say, that it would also be simple defense by the Dlubinians to shift that road, extinguish a marker lantern or two, and pile everybody up nicely on the rocks he could hear the water slapping against all around the boat.

Damn it, though, he wished he had a cigar to calm his nerves.

“There it is!” Gus shouted. “Pretty damned small-looking, if you ask me.”

“Well, the locals don’t breathe air, so they’ve got little use for the place except as a trading center, and anybody hired to run the place would prefer it nice and compact and manageable, I’d think,” the captain replied. “It’s probably run by some international outfit. There’s bound to be several offering services like this. Hard to say who or what might be running it, let alone what’s in there.”

“I make seven… no, eight ships, all pretty much like ours,” Gus noted. “And one medium-sized thing with a smokestack parked off by itself over there.”

Brazil nodded. “That’s the one to worry about. Those are the cops, Gus. I’m giving the entrance a pass.”

“Cops? Here? Whose?’

“Just like the trading companies and maintenance companies. All the hexes that have some concern with the sea or coastal security get together and maintain a multinational force run by a professional, multiracial naval authority. They didn’t have anything like that the last time I was here, but I got an earful about them back in Hakazit. They’ve got a mean reputation. Discipline’s about as ugly as a navy gets, but each crew gets a percentage of any seized contraband or reward money. You can get rich at it if you’re good, and since it’s an all-or-nothing share for the whole crew, if you’re not good, you’re history, anyway. We can’t totally avoid them, but I’d just as soon not tangle with them or answer any nasty questions. You can challenge them if they’re wrong, but we’re a long way from a Zone court here—not that I would particularly want to see what a Zone court was, either, right about now.”

Gus nodded, watching as they passed the harbor entrance and continued on past the island. “I see. But you said they only had volunteers from coastal hexes and those doing trade with the water hexes.”

“So I was told.”

“Then there ain’t likely to be no Dahirs among ’em, and in this hex there’s also not likely to be any automatic surveillance cameras or electric eyes, right?”

“I see what you mean. No, I’d expect you’d be invisible to them, since they wouldn’t have much call to counter crooked Dahirs around here. Don’t take them or the locals for stupid or ignorant types, though. You can trip a wire or any one of a thousand other traps that don’t require any high-tech stuff and be just as caught. I’m also not so sure you’re going to do any better over this terrain in the dark than I would.”

“I wasn’t thinkin’ of that. I was thinkin’ it wouldn’t be much of a problem to swim this distance. Even if you anchor on the other side of the island, it’s only gonna be a mile or so back, right? I figure I could manage a fair-sized sack and a keg or two for that distance, and I know what you two can eat and drink, havin’ had some experience along them lines myself. As for findin’ my way, hell, even I can follow these lights.”

“You sure you’re up to this?” Brazil pressed. “I have to tell you I’d rather not go in there at all if I don’t have to, but it could be tricky.”

“Jeez! This is a piece of cake! I mean, I got along in Hakazit for weeks, and they got all that electronic shit. Of course, I’m pretty fair with that kind of stuff myself, but I never saw cameras like they had or as tiny as they used, and I still never got tripped up. Man, I remember one time we was in the Congo when this riot broke out and turned into a kinda little revolution. They were shootin’ anything that moved and had all the exits blocked. Me and Terry, we—”

He stopped a moment, suddenly struck once again by what Terry had become, and Brazil, realizing it, didn’t press.

Finally Gus continued, but his tone was more distant, almost sad. “We… well, we not only got out of there, we got out with the pictures. She told me we had to get the story out and sent me back with it. She insisted on staying to report the end of it. I spent four days in that muddy, crocodile-infested river in a cross between a too-old row-boat and a raft, dodgin’ crocs and patrols. But I made it. She wasn’t so lucky that time.”

Brazil was curious now both for the story’s own sake and for his own information about the girl and what she’d been like. “What happened, Gus?”

“She never said for sure, but she was a mess. I think they caught her and raped the shit out of her, the bastards. I’m not even sure they knew she wasn’t just one of the locals or cared. And yet she still managed to get out, somehow, in a few days. Spent ten weeks in and out of hospitals and all. You know what was really weird about what happened?”

“No, Gus.”

“When she come back, she still volunteered for the same nasty jobs, and she meant it. It didn’t even slow her down. It was almost like, well, she’d survived the worst that could happen, and if anything, she seemed to have less fear than she had had before, which wasn’t much. That Campos guy I mentioned, the gangster who come to the meteor site with us? He tried to get in her, too. I ain’t ever been sure, but I think your old girlfriend did him a favor. He’da got away with it then, more or less, but some way or another she’da killed him—after we had the story and after the rest of the crew was safe. If Campos turns up somewhere here, no matter if he’s a poisonous spider twenty feet tall, if she realizes that it’s him and there’s any of her old self left inside there, I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for his survival.”

Brazil didn’t say anything for a moment but finally managed, “Okay, Gus. You’ve convinced me. You see that set of markers there? That’s an inlet, a sheltered cove. It’s marked so a ship that might not be able to make it into the harbor can get some protection in bad weather. Ten to one it’s surrounded by sheer cliffs, but we don’t need to walk if you can get there by sea. I don’t see any lights in there, and I didn’t expect any with the weather okay—no reason not to make the harbor—so I’m going to lower sail and anchor inside there. Then you can go for a swim.”

“Suits me.”

The craft followed the small oil lanterns into the cove, and they were suddenly aware of high rock walls not just ahead but on both sides of the ship. It was a narrow channel, and it ended in a marked area that was all red-colored little lights.

“Who lights these and turns ’em off?” Gus asked worriedly, pointing to all the small marker lanterns around them.

Brazil was grunting and busily maneuvering several ways at once, hitting levers and turning small deck winches, but when he at last let go of the anchor and felt the ship lurch, then drift a bit to one side and stop, he relaxed.

“To answer your question,” he said at last, “if you look closely, you’ll see that they aren’t oil lamps but gas. Semitech. With the volcano, they probably have some tap on a flammable gas supply, either natural or in a tank. They’ll check them in some kind of routine, but only for maintenance. I wouldn’t worry about anybody showing up at dawn to put them out, if that’s what you mean.”

“Yeah, that was what I was thinkin’.” Gus sighed, a sound that was more like a soft, hollow roar. “Okay, I guess I’m ready. Anything waterproof that’s likely to float that maybe I can use as a stash?”

“Yeah, here in the boat locker. This thing’s got a pretty large emergency kit inside it, but if we take it out, it should give you plenty of room for what we need, and it’s designed to be both floatable and waterproof at these seals. I won’t worry about the beer supply, but we need food. Trust to the grains and veggies. They’re pretty well universal among warm-blooded mammals, while meats are, well, questionable at best. Besides, she won’t eat meat. She’ll starve first.”

“Okeydokey. Look, you may as well get some sleep while I’m gone. If anybody else comes in here, you’re a sittin’ duck before you can weigh anchor, turn around, and get out that narrow passage anyway, and if they take you, they’ll probably bring you by the harbor, so I’ll have a chance to spring you. Besides, no matter what else she is these days, I get the idea that Terry’s one hell of a guard dog.”

“You got that right,” Brazil agreed. “Good luck!”

“Yeah, I’ll do my best, like always,” Gus responded, and tossed the emergency case into the water, then slid overboard himself.

Nathan Brazil sighed and sat down on the makeshift bed of spare sailcloth he’d set up for himself. He was too tired, too tense, and too worried to sleep even though he knew he was exhausted.

One of the storms was growing near, and while it didn’t bother him in this sheltered area and was still distant in any event, the lightning lit up the sky and played against the rock walls, revealing the shelter in intermittent bursts of reflected light.

It was an eerie landscape, as all volcanic areas tended to be, with no discernible vegetation. The outer rock wall, the eroded remnants of some great eruption, was at least ten meters high, almost sheer on this side but terminating in a series of jagged spires almost like the teeth of some gigantic beast.

He was actually comforted by the wall. It was taller than the mainmast, and thus it meant that he was virtually invisible to any ship passing via the channel outside as well as extremely well protected against any violent blow.

The rest of the area was much like a bowl, perhaps a hundred meters across, ending in sheer dark brown or black rock cliffs that seemed to go up forever. Here and there all along the sheer rock walls, though, were cracks and holes from which spewed steam and other gases, showing that this was still a very active place.

When it was dark between the lightning flashes, only the sky straight overhead showed, revealing the whole upper part of the fog- and mist-shrouded mountain. It helped reflect the lightning better, but it gave the distinct impression that one was in a room with a roof on it.

He felt a little better about the trip now that he had Gus, even if he couldn’t see him half the time. At least, finally, there was somebody to talk to! Somebody who could speak with a frame of reference comfortable for both of them.

But, too, it was somebody else, somebody extra on the team, and in other ways he felt the Dahir a burden despite all that he was doing tonight. Maybe it was the girl, he thought. From knowing very little about her, he now knew quite a bit, perhaps more than she would have told him had she been able to do so. As much as he’d wanted, needed to know all that, he wasn’t at all sure he liked knowing it. It was nothing about her; all the information Gus had provided had shown her to be more of a strong, gutsy woman than he’d have thought. It was rather that she was becoming, well, distinct in his mind. Now that he knew about her past, she seemed even more a tragic figure, a real person, not a cipher, and in a crazy way ciphers were often more comfortable to live with.

He wondered if he wasn’t also a little jealous of Gus. That was funny in a way—having a two-and-a-half-meter-long snakelike creature as a rival. But Gus had earned her respect and devotion, as she had earned his. Even if they weren’t lovers, there was definitely a kind of relationship there that he could not have even now and never could have, or dared have, with anyone else. That was what he envied.

And suddenly she was with him, kneeling down, then lying beside him, stroking him gently, as if she knew and understood what he was feeling.

Maybe she did, at least on that empathic level. Maybe more. That much he wished he knew.

Gently, he returned her affection and then embraced her and held her to him, as if trying to capture this one brief moment—just the two of them, with no other problems and no other questions, reaching together for the one thing which he wanted most and which had always been denied him because life was so short for everybody else, everybody but him.

The emotions then were real, not induced, not manufactured or manipulated, and not just on his part but on hers as well. The energy field inside her grew bright and enveloped them both, probing deep inside him and through every part of his being. He did not resist.

And when it hit his core, his soul, his true self, a center so strange, so alien that there were no terms of reference for it anywhere, it recoiled, unable to deal with it, powerless to go that last bit and totally absorb him.

Finally Nathan Brazil slept, a deep, intensely pleasurable sleep, the kind of sleep he needed most and rarely if ever could afford.