02. Shadows of the Well of Souls (6 page)

"I guessed as much, considering your responses. And that's the downside of my change. I can turn on like a light switch, but everything's concentrated in just one spot. It explains a lot about my previous lovers. I feel a lot less guilt now."

They had a laugh at that and then went on to more immediate worries.

"What do you know about this Chang woman, anyway?" Julian asked.

"Not a lot. As far as I was concerned, she was the leader and demigoddess of a tribe of primitive rain forest Amazons—literally. Though, mean, and ruthless; that was her reputation among the tribe. Then, suddenly, all
this
comes about and suddenly she's claiming to be some immortal from this world. I would have sworn she'd have barely recognized anything beyond Stone Age technology as anything but magic and that she had no experience beyond the jungles, yet here she is, suddenly a different sort of person, comfortable with technology well in advance of our own and writing notes to me in ancient Greek!"

"Yeah, how'd she know you knew Greek?"

"I don't even know how she'd know I knew German, let alone Greek. Our only common language was that of a Stone Age tribe. I don't count it because I can't speak it, and I was surprised that I could read the note at all. She made it pretty basic, though, and it all came back to me. She certainly knows no English, and if she did, it would probably sound more like Shakespeare's or even Chaucer's. She'd been in that jungle an awfully long time. It was almost like she was hiding out from the world."

"From that other fellow with the appropriate name, perhaps. Brazil."

"Maybe. But I get the feeling it's not that simple. She's not just a small woman, she's
tiny.
Under five feet, skinny, wiry, but moves like a cat. She also has a confident, brassy voice and manner, but I wonder if that's just a mask for what we were talking about."

"Huh?"

"The fear factor."

"But—she's immortal, or she says she is. And according to you, the tribe at least believed that any injuries to her, no matter how severe, would heal without scars and that she could even regrow limbs."

"Yes, she's beyond some of our most common fears—if it's all true, anyway. But she still can be badly hurt, and she feels the same pain. I wonder if she also feels the same kind of psychological pain. She's strong for her size but no match for an average man. Suppose she is immortal and started life on Earth thousands of years ago? The way the Erdomese look at women and women's rights is about standard for most cultures in human history until fairly recently. I wonder . . . After a few thousand years of being a victim with no end in sight,
I
might run off to a rain forest and surround myself with cast-off and runaway tribal women, too. I sort of ran away socially for years from just one incident. And this Brazil person—I
assume
they started out together and they got separated centuries or longer ago. I wonder if that's not part of the problem."

"What? That she lost her protection?"

"That she needed his protection in the first place. Her ego is pretty damned strong. There would be only so much protection she could stand before cracking."

"You think he was abusing her or something?"

"No, I don't think so. Even in Zone she described him as basically a good person. She would have cast him as the epitome of evil if he'd done anything to her. No, I think it's more basic than that. Thousands of years in a series of what must have seemed
very
primitive societies to her, always with that fear factor . . . Suppose he simply never noticed? Suppose he, the immortal
male,
just couldn't comprehend it?"

It was something to think about but not something that could be proved one way or the other, not until they actually met this mysterious Brazil—if, indeed, they ever did. This and their mental hangover and associated guilt produced a minute or two of silence.

Finally Julian spoke. "I really don't understand a lot of this at all. If what we're being told is correct, much of what I learned about creation, evolution, the birth and death of the universe—it's all wrong. Yet everything, all the laws of science, seem to be more or less holding in spite of all that, and it doesn't make any sense. We've gone from a solid foundation down through the rabbit hole to Wonderland."

"Not exactly," Lori responded. "We don't know enough to draw any conclusions about the universe at large. There were a lot of theorists in physics who postulated bizarre theories that were at least mathematically possible. White holes, parallel universes, and much more. Even in the Ein-steinian sense we casually accepted gravity bending time itself. This doesn't show that what we knew was wrong, only that we knew far less than we thought we did. You know the old saw—I believe it was Arthur C. Clarke—that says that a civilization separated by countless years of development from our own would discover and know so much more that its technology would seem like magic to us. I think that's what's bugging you—all that work, all that knowledge, and we're as ignorant of this sort of stuff as the most primitive tribes of Earth are ignorant of our science."

"It's that," Julian admitted, "but it's more than that, too. We're not talking here about centuries ahead, or even thousands of years, but
millions
of years—maybe even more than that. All that time, and look at what they've come up with! Stagnant fundamentalism, ignorance, sexism, racism, violence—all the things
we
were trying to beat. All that knowledge, all that experience—and look at it! It's not the science that they know, it's what they
don't
have, or don't use!"

Lori sighed. "I know. Still, I keep telling myself that this
isn't
the future, it's an experimental slide. This is an artificial place, maintained by a computer. The civilizations here aren't futuristic, they're by definition stagnant, limited, leftovers after the experiment's done, left over and forgotten. Their populations are fixed, their capabilities are fixed, they can't grow, they can't progress, and they can't leave. Long ago—
very
long ago—they adapted to the situation. Some of them went mad, I suspect; some developed religious justifications for all that they had. Others went savage; still others just settled into a static condition where there's no future beyond the individual's. A few may have wound up like the People in the Amazon or some of the tribes of Papua New Guinea, where they repudiated all that had been learned, rejected all progress in the same way that we were told that the makers of this world rejected and turned their back on near godhood, equating progress with evil. In many ways this is less a romantic world than a tragic one."

"Maybe," Julian said thoughtfully. "But that brings up a nasty little thought for the immediate future. This Mavra Chang is from another age, another time, no matter what her name and appearance. I think we can take that much for granted."

"She sure knows her way around. And if she's been here before, and the only way out is through this Well, this control room, then we can assume she has even more knowledge."

"But knowledge isn't wisdom," Julian pointed out. "That's exactly what we were talking about. If she's been here before, she's very, very old. Maybe 'ancient' isn't even a good enough term for her. Never changing, never able to have a decent relationship with other human beings—they age and die in what for her would be a very short time— she's pretty much an individual example of what these hexes have gone through."

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"Well, if these hexes, trapped as they are, turned into the kind of things we're seeing, what must the effect be on an individual isolated from all around her? Maybe there's another explanation for why she might have shut herself off from the world, from all progress, in a never-ending primitive tribal group in the middle of nowhere for all those centuries. She
created
her own hex, a stagnant, never-changing one, just to cope. That doesn't make her sound very sane, either, does it?"

Lori didn't like the logic of that. "And if
she's
insane, in some sense, anyway, then what does that make this much more ancient Nathan Brazil? Thanks a lot. What you're saying is that we're on our way to help an ancient, probably insane demigoddess do battle with an even older and probably madder demigod. Now,
that
is a way to cheer me up!"

Julian shrugged. "At least it makes the whole problem of Erdom and the monks seem rather trivial, doesn't it?"

Itus was, if anything, as hot as Erdom but additionally was as humid as Erdom was dry. The air seemed a solid thing, a thick woolen blanket that enveloped one and made one slow, groggy, and exhausted from fighting against it. The gravitation, too, seemed greater; they felt heavy, leaden, and it took effort just to walk. Julian, particularly with the added dead weight of the four breasts, found it next to impossible to walk without support on just her thin equine legs, and dropped to walking on all fours, something that didn't seem at all unnatural. Lori almost envied her after walking a couple of blocks. Julian did not seem as pleased, but the alternative was next to impossible. And frankly, even standing on all fours, bringing her height down to about a meter plus, she was still on a reasonable level for the natives of this place.

The Ituns were insectoids, large, low, caterpillarlike creatures with dozens of spindly legs emerging from thick hairy coats and faces that seemed to be two huge, bulging oval eyes, and a nasty-looking mouth flanked by intimidating, curved tusks. They seemed to be able to bend and then lock themselves into just about any position they required and, supported by the hind rows of legs, use their many forelegs as individual hands, fingers, or tentacles. Far worse for the newcomers than the eternally nasty faces and fixed vicious expressions, though, was the sight of all that thick hair in the constant heat and humidity. It made them feel even hotter just watching.

The Itun behind the front desk of the transients' hotel seemed a bit larger and older and perhaps a bit more shopworn than the average denizen of the hex but was accustomed to dealing with alien types on a daily basis. Unable to form the kind of sounds that Common Speech required, it relied on one of the benefits of a high-tech hex: a small transmitter attached to the top of its head right above and between the eyes.

"Lori of Alkhaz," he told the desk clerk. "Party of two Erdomese. I was told that we would be expected."

Lower feet were already tapping something into an Itun terminal. The head cocked and looked down and read something on a screen.

"Yes," the clerk responded in a toneless electronic-sounding voice. "An Erdomese suite was prepaid for you. Do you have much baggage?"

"Very little," Lori responded. All that they owned was in one small pack.

"Very well," the clerk said, and pushed a small plastic card over to him.

"Um—are there any messages for me?"

"No, nothing. It would have shown on the console."

That was disappointing. "Uh, then—how do I find the room?"

"Follow the key, of course," replied the clerk, and turned to take care of someone else.

Lori picked up the plastic card, which seemed a plain ivory white in color, turned it over, and shrugged. There was nothing imprinted on it at all, not even an arrow or a magnetic stripe.

He was about to ask how the thing worked when he noticed that a tiny spot was pulsing a brighter white along one of the edges of the card. As he turned to face the lobby, holding the card out, the spot moved. He turned the card in his hand, but the spot moved to always keep the same relative position.

"Come on, Julian. I think I have this thing figured out," he said, and moved toward the rear corridor in the direction of the blinking light.

"Moo!" Julian snorted. "I feel like a damned
cow
like this!"

You
are
a cow,
Lori thought, but checked himself before he said it. Damn it! It was
tough
not to reflexively say something that sounded patronizing or offensive! And the truth was, Erdomese, for all their resemblance to equine forms, really were biologically closer to the bovine family with perhaps a bit of camel. Even their sexual temperament was more bovine, with the male overly dominant, competitive, territorial, and violent, the female by nature passive. Even the native language was divided and reinforced the differing natures; there were strict masculine and feminine forms of every part of speech, without exception. They were in a sense speaking two complementary but different languages in which every word form had two variants. In this dual track of Erdomese, the male spoke Erdomo, which was what
he
thought in, and the female Erdoma, which was what Julian naturally used.

It was why they tried so hard to converse in English; to even
think
in Erdomese was to impose and reinforce the expected roles of attitude and behavior. It was, however, tough to get around without constant effort because the Well acclimation process imposed the native language as the primary one, since language defined a culture and the system was designed to ease the transition, not to fight it. Both of them lapsed into it more often than not; they thought in it, even dreamed in it, and it gave a heavy accent to and put a cast upon even their translations into their former native tongue.

Living in a high-tech cosmopolitan hex, however, the Ituns were well aware of the burdens their comfortable home placed on most other races and did what they could. Corridors back into the hotel were wide moving walkways, and there were very large elevators at regular intervals. The key, however, kept telling them to go straight back, until they were at the back of the building itself. It then indicated a turn to the right, and they walked slowly down a long, wide corridor until the key suddenly stopped blinking and became a bright white in front of an extratall, extrawide door. Lori saw the slot and inserted the key, and the door slid open.

"Air-conditioning!" Julian gasped in English, there being no term for it in Erdomese, but she quickly lapsed into the normal tongue, too tired to think straight. "I beg you please to shut the door, my husband, so that its coolness might not flee." She plopped down on the cushions, still wearing the pack, obviously exhausted.