02. Shadows of the Well of Souls (22 page)

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's
First 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."

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."