“I—I don’t know,” she managed. “I have no memory at all before waking up on a cliff knob a couple of hours ago. I was hoping that someone here would know me.”
The woman was startled. “No memory? You recall nothing?”
“I didn’t even know what I was, and I still do not know where I am,” she responded honestly.
The woman frowned and thought for a moment, then said, “We will have to take you to the High Priestess and see what she can make of all this. I have heard of this happening with potions and with curses and in some cases blows to the head, but you do not show any signs of a head injury. Your accent is neutral, so it does not help place you. Come. This is the village of the Clan of the Grand Falcon. You are Ambora, as are we all. I am called Lema. Do you have a name?”
“I must have, but as I said, I remember nothing.”
“That would be a great terror to me. So, come! You must be hungry. Please come to my home and eat, and then after the Prayer for the Next Light, we will go down and see what the Holy One thinks of this.”
“I thank you. You are most kind to a stranger,” she managed, and followed the woman toward the forest with the huts. Abruptly, Lema flew into the air, and she followed, as routinely as if this was indeed how she had always been. They rose about halfway up, then landed on a thick branch at the opening to one of the wood and grass huts.
Moving up and down in this manner brought home to her a fact that hadn’t been evident before: she didn’t weigh an awful lot. Oh, she was heavier than air, just like a bird, and probably hollow-boned as well, but in spite of the shape and height of the body, the wings and tail were probably half or more of her total weight. It made lift easy, but it also meant that they were probably fragile. She had to remember that.
Lema looked in and sighed. “I see that Jocomo hasn’t brought the kids back yet. Oh, well, I am certain that I can find you something.”
“You have children?”
“Yes, two, both daughters.”
The inside of the hut wasn’t that large, but was serviceable enough if you only slept there and wanted a place to keep your belongings. There was a long area in the rear built up with straw over which a rough-hewn log stretched from wall to wall. If that was the bed, and it most certainly was, then the Ambora slept standing up and stuck to wood. They could sit, but rolling over on those wings wasn’t something that should be chanced if it didn’t have to be.
There was a mirror there as well. Not a fancy cut piece of coated glass, but a reflective volcanic rock polished to a fine flatness that served reasonably well. It was the first time she could see her face and body as one, and it was in one sense a fascinating revelation. She really was as beautiful as the others, as the singers and Lema. The “hair” was a mess, but it was a yellow-gold color, almost metallic in appearance, and the color patterns on her body and feathers, while not spectacularly colorful, were certainly a pleasing combination. The nose was a bit broad and slightly flat, the lips dark red, thick and wide, the neck quite long and yet thick, and, like the rest of her, lean and tough-looking. Her unfeathered frontal view showed skin that was shiny, like well-treated leather. She had hoped that the face, at least, would jog something in her memory, but while it was a sensual face, a pretty face, it wasn’t the face of anyone she felt she’d ever seen before.
The “quick dinner” offered was yet another education, both in the culture of the Ambora and in her own unsuspected nature. It consisted of live prey; specifically small rodents, large insects and grubs, and, frankly, she found herself picking them up, doing a quick twisting kill or simply biting off the head in the case of the rodents, and then eating them in quick chomps. The first one, which she’d done following Lema’s lead, bothered that hidden part of her that wanted to kill nothing at all, but once she got past that, the rest seemed automatic and she thought no more of it. There was no question that the Ambora were messy eaters, but the blood and juices seemed particularly rich to her, and she had no problems consuming spillage. Everything was eventually eaten—bones, shells, whatever. They did not waste.
All of the warm-blooded creatures had six limbs; some had a practical four and a decorative or vestigial two, others used all six. The bugs had considerably more legs than that.
It was a primitive culture in some respects, but it had to keep its food live in reserve since there was no way to preserve dead tissue.
When done, they flew down to one of the lower falls, stepped into the dark pool and washed themselves off, and she drank a fair amount of the water to wash everything down and to replace lost fluids. She hadn’t been aware of how dehydrated she’d been until she started to drink.
“I am going to have to find my children,” Lema told her. “You would think that spending most of the day with children, Jocomo would want to be free of them, but he dotes.”
She had nothing else to do; she tagged along, and in the process saw her first Ambora male. He was not impressive.
For one thing, they were short. Very powerful-looking, with thick-muscled arms and torsos, but a good head shorter on average than adult females. They were also somewhat bow-legged, the hands and feet overly large and virtually identical, the limbs of a tree climber and dweller, and in many ways they looked more like feathered apes than bird-people. None had any really interesting color; they were light brown on the unfeathered front and a darker mottled brown on their feathered backsides. The wings were stubby little things that looked almost like growths and were flush against the body. About the only thing they had that was large and impressive was their male sexual organ, and that was in fact the only thing at all interesting about them. They must have great personalities, she thought whimsically.
In this culture the women were the hunters and in most ways the protectors; the men were in charge of their territories and saw to the early raising and education of the children as well as being builders. It was the men who built the huts in the air, and it was basically one adult male per tree at any one time. There was no marriage as such, but a social code and a code of honor. Jocomo was not only the father of Lema’s two children, he was the father of all the other children by the other women who lived in the other huts in his tree.
Nor were the males either effeminate or as bestial as they looked; in fact, they seemed as intelligent and articulate as the females. As a group, they did a lot of education and training of the young, and sometimes they just had too much to do and didn’t escort their children back before the mothers got home, as now.
Still, she would discover, to her surprise, that Jocomo and the other males didn’t try to push their “wives” around and use their obvious muscles, if only to make up for the fact that the women had the figures, the looks, and the wings. The women, for their part seemed to regard the males as a combination baby-sitter and building superintendent, not as a boss. It wasn’t a matriarchy, but each had clearly defined roles and they stuck to them. Only later did she learn that the males did in fact crave a large amount of sex, but that the consummation of any union was done in the air. When you were the one who needed it bad but had no wings, you had a lot of practical reasons for keeping your women happy, and, under those circumstances, rape wasn’t even a power option.
It was a balanced situation, but to some extent she did feel sorry for the men. It looked like all the weight of keeping everything operating and together was on them, but they had to work twice as hard to attract any woman, considering their ugly looks and inability to fly. Had the Ambora been an animal rather than sentient society, the males would have been reduced to strictly a reproductive role at the whim of the women, and both sexes knew it.
Lema’s two daughters had their mother’s blue-green metallic hair color, but their feathers seemed very soft and snow-white, and their wings appeared overly large for their still-small bodies. They looked almost like angels. One was perhaps six or seven, the other even younger, and there was no mistaking their mother from their faces.
They were happy to see Mom and were fascinated to be introduced to a stranger—it appeared that there were few strangers in a clan village—but, though protesting a bit, they soon marched off to their hut for the night, with their mother promising to come to them as soon as things were squared away with the newcomer.
“Can they fly with those?” she asked Lema.
The woman stared at her. “You really remember nothing! No, they can’t, not yet. They will be walkers until they are of age. At that time, when the first blood is passed, they will molt and for a short while be without feathers on their wings or tails. It is a serious time for young girls about to be women, and they usually go into a retreat with the priestesses until the first true feathers come in. It is a natural thing, but when you are that age you feel ugly and as if everyone is laughing at you. Then there is the ceremony of adulthood before the whole of the clan. They will be sent out on their first hunt, making nervous wrecks of both their parents, but it usually works out. After that, they are presented with their ceremonial daggers and then will see what the young men their age have built and choose a home and thus a mate. Then it begins again.”
It was getting quite late now, and a lot of the lamps had been extinguished, while others were replaced with smaller, subtler flames. Lema, however, took her across the flat stone with the pit in it and to the opening of the great lava tube between the two carved creatures.
She was surprised to see cauldrons over slow fires inside the large cave; since the Ambora did not cook their food, there seemed little use for such things.
A tall, looming shape came out of the depths of the cave, and she found herself looking at the tallest and most awesome-looking Ambora woman she’d seen so far. It was not just that she was tall, taller than any of the females outside, but that she also had her wings partly opened and curving around, projecting the effect of a great feather cape. She had jewelry of what might have been gold all over, and, most telling, she was tattooed on the front with those same bizarre designs as on the sculptures and totems; and she glowed, not with phosphorescent paint, but all over. It was a weird, yellowish aura that outlined her form several centimeters beyond her body.
Lema brought her head down almost to between her legs, and, after seeing this and the awesome priestess, she did as well.
“I was wondering how long it would take you to bring this one to us,” the priestess said in a deep, nasal voice that was at once commanding and irritating.
“I humbly beg the gods’ and spirits’ pardons, Holy One. She was lost, hungry, and confused, and seemed no threat to the clan.”
“No threat? And just who gave you the authority to decide this? Did the heavens open and one of the gods point to you thus? Or did the spirits of the clouds whisper this authority? Does the safety and integrity of the clan mean so little to you, or did you have so poor a training . . . ? Well?”
“Please, Holy One, accept my repentance! I did bring her, and she has as yet shown nothing but good—”
“Silence! Go now. By the end of daylight tomorrow you shall bring me sacrifice worthy to submit to the gods, and then you will receive their judgment in public trial! Say no more! Go!”
She felt sorry for Lema, and wanted to explain. “Please, Holy One! She meant no—”
“Shut up! At the moment I am trying to determine if there is some way I can keep from sacrificing you. Rise! Look at me! I want to look into your eyes and see your markings and your stance!”
The high priestess was the kind of person who always spoke in sharp exclamations, but hers was also the voice of somebody who expected to be obeyed. Feeling suddenly very alone, she stood erect again and looked up at the obvious leader of the clan.
“What is your name?” the priestess snapped.
“Honestly, Your Holiness, I don’t know it. I have no memory at all.”
The priestess frowned, having heard this before, and began asking a series of quick, sharp, probing questions, to which her hapless subject was expected to respond instantly, unthinkingly. The problem was, much of it was in the form of “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember.”
After a while this stopped, and the priestess approached very near and began an extremely close examination of the newcomer, not just with her eyes but with her nose and, at times, tongue as well. Finally, she straightened up, stood back, then spoke, and for the first time seemed less inclined to eat her alive.
“This is most strange,” the priestess said, as much to herself as to her subject. “You have a unique scent but it does not specifically relate to the scent of any clan I know. You have no markings, no tattoos, and, most strangely of all, absolutely no scars. It is nearly impossible for anyone to grow up here and have no scars at all. You are young, certainly, but definitely past the Age, yet you are still a virgin, and your ignorance of even some of the most basic facts of Amborean life and culture seems genuine. This suggests you are of a type we know from stories but hasn’t been seen, to my knowledge, in this land or among the People for a very long time.” She sighed. “I will have to send someone to Zone to confirm this. Until then, you will remain here, but you will not again go out and mix with the clan, nor converse with any members save those who enter here. You will not need to hunt; I believe it is in our interest to instruct you. I do find it astonishing that you have no memory at all of your past, but in a way that will make it easier. Do you accept these terms?”
“It does not appear I have any choice, Holiness,” she responded, not liking the woman at all.
“You have a choice. The choice is to accept a brand and leave now, the brand forever marking you as one who is forbidden in our territory and who is to be killed on sight if she returns. Since the landforms, native animals, and guiding spirits and sponsoring god are the only major differences between clans, you will doubtless wind up in this situation again, and eventually you will either have to leave the land or die in it, but that is your choice. You may remain here under our direction and accept instruction. Once you do so, you will be committed. Any attempt to leave after that without our permission will raise the hue and cry, and you will be the object of a full clan hunt. But there are always choices in life. Living or dying, submitting or rebelling, these choices we all make. Well?”
“I—I have nowhere else to go, and I really liked the people I met here so far,” with one exception, she added to herself. “I should like to remain, although it is difficult to imagine being cooped up inside, forbidden to fly.”
“That is a sacrifice you will have to learn to live with until you are initiated into the clan. The reason for this is for you to learn the ways of our clan, our culture, our people, their beliefs and the reasons for them, and to so immerse yourself that you will acquire the faith to believe and the inner knowledge of the spirit. It will not be an easy test, and it can take a short time or a long time depending on you. In the end you must become one with us. You must truly believe as we believe, you must act as we would act, truly place clan above self. The path is not easy and the tests are true tests of all that we value. In the end you alone will prove your worthiness. Now, in the meantime, we will find a place for you to rest, and nourishment if it is needed. Tomorrow we will begin the instruction. Assuming, that is, that you will not leave now.”
She didn’t hesitate, knowing the truth of the priestess’s claims that she would find the same elsewhere. It was beautiful here and the people were nice. If she tried another clan, who was to say that the next priestess might have her sacrificed for violating their territory, particularly since there would be evidence that they weren’t the first choice?
They named her Jaysu, which in context would mean Empty One, or Empty Jar. All Ambora names were flowery because the language was, and depended much on tone and context for meaning. It appeared there were also both sacrificial omens and numerology involved in which name went to whom.
She took well to the monastic life, almost as if it were an echo of something in her unknown past. She did think she might have once been a priestess, but no images came, and she’d already stopped trying to coax anything familiar out.
There were dreams, but they made little sense, and gave off feelings she’d rather not have again.
One feeling she had occasionally, which did not require sleep, was an odd sense of being looked at deep inside her mind; the sensation was indescribable, and it came and went for no apparent reason. The priestesses training her were excited by this rather than distressed; they said it meant she had the rare spirituality to connect to the gods and spirits, and that one day she might resolve these into true communication.
The Ambora saw spirits everywhere. There were spirits for rain, spirits for fire, spirits for volcanoes—and one volcano god over all of them—a spirit in each tree, rock, whatever. The carvings they made in living trees and what they considered living rock represented the greater spirits there, and atop them all the supreme god of the clan, protector of the clan from all other gods. Theirs was a world in which literally everything was not only alive, but, to a series of degrees, had power and thought and used it. There were also, of course, prayers, rituals, sacrifices, mystic signs and symbols, talismans, and the like to protect you from the various spirits—if you had sufficient faith.
Although it was not brought out immediately, the priestesses did know of the wider world and at least neighboring civilizations. They knew about the technology available there, and abhorred it as corrupting and evil, although they were not above trading for a few things they needed, such as bronze ingots of a certain purity and, occasionally, silver and gold. Sometimes others were allowed in, for brief periods, to harvest the enormously rich and bountiful crops that could be grown in Amboran soil, and for which the carnivorous Ambora had little use except as food for their own food. The few vegetable products they consumed were not exactly delicacies: a thick gruel used to relieve constipation, acidic leaves chewed to cure upset stomachs, and so on, and some used in the potions that were in the cauldrons she’d seen when first entering the cave.
One was a mild narcotic that induced a kind of waking trance; it wasn’t debilitating, but you tended to focus single-mindedly on whatever was being taught and happily go along with whoever the teachers were, no matter what they said. Since much of the teaching was by repetition, using chants and prayers and rituals over and over, you tended, with this aid, to learn things quickly, and they stayed with you. In fact, the more she began to accept and think along their lines, the more she felt at home, that she was fitting in with the others.
The belief system and procedure seemed very comfortable, very true to her. They saw the world as ruled by a huge number of gods, each of whom had created a race and land in its own image and now presided over each. There was a chief god who lived not in the heavens but in the center of the planet, called simply the Judge, who watched over all the other gods and their equal places, and by the performance and fidelity of the people living in each would reward or punish. The Judge also decided whether you would simply be extinguished or find eternal punishment when you died, or if you would be sent to a paradise, a world that was all Ambora and where the Amboran people lived in perfect harmony, serving and worshiping the god they could see and hear and know.
There were no ranks in Amboran society. By training and piety and testing you might become one of many levels of priestesses and be absolute in religious authority, while the men constituted civil authority, such as education and a kind of primitive zoning that allowed the forest to thrive even with their density while also managing any building. The women provided food and defense as well as priestesses as needed; the men provided the rest, including sitting on the enormous egg that the women laid, for the week or two until it hatched, which more than anything explained the bow-leggedness of the males and the softness of their feathers.
Defense was necessary, although not day-to-day. Clans not well-managed or subject to volcanic or other natural disasters, usually taken as punishments by the gods, could face starvation or worse. One clan once had a steam vent explode and kill most of the men and children at midday; the only way to reestablish the clan and village was to kidnap some men from other villages. Beyond this, there were always fights of honor or for pride between individuals of different clans who might meet and clash in the air, as well as the constant marking of clan boundaries, which were often disputed by adjacent clans.
Whether her gods and spirits were real or not, the high priestess really did possess powers. Raised and trained to the job, only one priestess would attain her levels and her powers; no other was possible until she died, but that one would come from the ranks of the priestesses around her. There were costs to go with the power, though. The high priestess had to be a lifelong virgin; while there was no requirement that a priestess be celibate, most were as a matter of course, since all wanted to attain the highest spiritual level possible in this life. Most of the priestesses were sterile anyway, thanks to all the drugs and potions they used as a daily part of their lives. The high priestess gained in physical size, and the wings and feathering became incredibly dense, yet once she attained her rank, she could no longer fly.
It was clear that Her Holiness was pleased with Jaysu’s rapid spiritual progress, and that she very much wanted the newcomer to enter the priesthood. It would be a waste for someone so bright to just be another warrior and mother, particularly when the girl definitely could feel the gods talking and at times even the Great Judge below.
She had punished Lema for the lapse in security, although not heavily, but Lema’s last act of penance was to fly to the Great Pit that was the one unifying holy shrine of all clans and Amboran peoples, and there present credentials from the High Priestess and thus fly into the center of the Pit and be transported to South Zone. The act of doing so and also then encountering so many fearsome-looking creatures at close quarters was generally enough to make any warrior believe in miracles and the power of the priesthood, as well as scaring the living crap out of them. Lema had wasted no time seeing the Grand High Priestess who staffed the Amboran embassy in South Zone alone, and sat terrified while this highest of all clerics used exotic magic involving a magic tablet with lots of little dots on it and magic screens, and ultimately printed out a packet of information that was then placed in a pouch, sealed, and given to Lema for the return trip. There was no danger of Lema reading this, since only priestesses and male educators were literate, or needed to be.
When the High Priestess got the papers, she was more shocked than surprised by the data. She well understood the process of conditioning and programming of the mind—that was part of the job here—but this! This was as pure evil as she’d seen in a long time. Slavery was an abhorrent concept to her, and, even worse, slavery done by someone just for ego and sadistic pleasures and for no true need—horrible. The photos of the entries wouldn’t and didn’t correlate to present appearance, but faces always told something, and those two were blanks. They’d had all the humanity just squeezed out of them. Had she not seen Jaysu, she would have said flatly that the evil one had left their bodies alive but murdered their souls. It was little wonder that the woman had lost her memory; it would have been intolerable to remember that period, the High Priestess suspected.
But which one was she? Or did it matter? The real question was, would she remember? If so, this could present problems, since she might well revive old conditioning and become subject to other wills in a world that was growing more dangerous as the forces of darkness gathered and moved in the west. What could they do against an army of monsters who might overrun all the land by sheer force of numbers and had no worry about how many lives they sacrificed?
If only she could gain this one’s knowledge without risking her mind and her soul!
For now it would have to suffice just to train her and indoctrinate her so completely in the Amboran mindset that she might be an asset in the inevitable dark times to come.
The Overdark, the ocean had always been called. It was a fitting, perhaps prophetic, name.
She would send not Lema back to Zone, but an acolyte priestess with more requests. The Grand High Priestess was already supplying weekly updates to the clans on the state of the coming darkness, and everyone who was knowledgeable in any clan understood the gravity of it. But even getting the clans to agree on whether or not it was raining (or if females flew) was impossible. Getting them to band together in concert on a truly national scale was the Grand High Priestess’s aim, and perhaps the only hope Ambora, as a coastal nation, had.
For they would come one day. Perhaps not today, or tomorrow, or even next week or next year, but they would come. If they faced three million individualists, as she feared they would, then none of the gods and spirits of Ambora could save them.
Mahakor, Kalinda
it wasn’t supposed to hurt, but it had, and a lot. Neither of them understood that it was because of their own telepathic links, suddenly severed when all of their beings were broken down into nothing more than impossibly complex and detailed code, analyzed, rearranged, and reformed on the surface by the great machine that operated and maintained the Well. The Well of Souls was not so much a creator as a processor, although only those long dead and gone could understand its logic.
Angel/Alpha, Ming/Beta, and Ari had all tried to enter at once, although they were assured it wouldn’t matter in terms of final placement. Alpha had winked out first, and Beta hesitated, feeling lost, and then the pain and jamming of the mental signals and implanted receptors kicked in and, for very different reasons, Beta and Ari clung to one another as their transformations began.
Beta clung to Ari because she had been using an unused part of his brain for hot swappable storage, and because she had made him subject to her. Ari clung to her out of fear, out of remorse, and because more than being controlled, he feared being alone.
He awoke, still with the echo of that searing pain, when somebody threw a huge bucket of water at him with enormous force, knocking him backward and almost out cold again.
He was disoriented and panicked, then saw that what had thrown the water at him was in fact a very angry looking ocean, and that he was on a rocky outcrop being pounded by tall waves and churning surf. He tried to get up and run inland to escape the next big one, but couldn’t get to his feet before it smacked him again. Then, without thinking, his survival instincts took over and he crawled, hand over hand, to the edge of the rocks and slid down into the ocean head first.
Instantly he was in a different world. A shiver went through him from head to—tail?—and he opened his mouth and took in water, starting a rhythmic motion. He felt it pass through the mouth, down through the neck, and then kind of ooze back into the surrounding water again. It was an interesting feeling, one he’d not had before, nor was it something he’d have tried on his own, but thankfully, the instincts worked.
Okay, he was breathing water. It still seemed odd, but only because, topside, he was certain he’d been breathing air. What kind of creature could breathe both so effortlessly?
He brought what proved to be a webbed hand with very long, sharp, curved nails to his face and felt it. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth, chin, even two ears, although they felt like soft seashells. But the nose wasn’t a nose; no water was going in and out, and he didn’t think air had before, on the rocks. It seemed to be a nice little nose, but in fact the two indentations in the nostrils weren’t cavities at all, but ended just inside, at a pulsing fleshy tissue.
There was hair, too, thick and long, but it didn’t quite feel like hair, and when he reached up and took a little of it and brought it in front of his eyes, it looked colorless, not quite transparent but certainly translucent, and felt warm to the touch.
Continuing his self-examination, he noted gill-like organs in the neck, which accepted water as he swam and extracted the oxygen and expelled the rest in a simple series of automatic motions. His color was light brown on the underside; from what he could tell about his back, it appeared a much darker brown, and there seemed to be a fin, like the dorsal of a shark, just below the shoulder blades. If that was what he’d fallen against the second time, it was a wonder he hadn’t impaled himself. Reaching around and touching it, which was all he could manage, he could feel it was very hard, and with sharp edges that probably led to a knifelike point.
Now it was clear that he hadn’t been able to run because he had no legs. Instead, the humanoid torso blended into one more reminiscent of a sea lion or a porpoise; the large steering fins were parallel to his body, much like a mammal, rather than like great fish.
A hybrid of some kind, he thought with some sense of wonder, one so much of the sea that it probably lived there most of the time and breathed the water easily, yet able to breathe air if need be and operate on the surface, or even, to the limited extent his body permitted, on land. Part fish, part mammal? There were small, very tight, very firm breasts with nipples, but they looked and felt more like pectorals and he felt comfortably male, except . . .
If there s no crotch, how do I.. . ? He brought his tail around and angled his neck down until he could see a small area where something bony barely protruded. That was it? Jeez, maybe they just laid eggs and then the guys swam over them and got off or something. Wouldn’t that be a disappointment!
There was a sense of warmer and cooler currents; he could actually see them as well as feel them. But though he was now in what was certainly a cold current, it was a matter of fact rather than a matter of concern. Fatty tissue, or something even better, was insulating him as needed.
Underwater, the colors he saw were vanishing with depth. Still, when he examined his hands or other parts of his body, the image looked crisp and sharp. He wondered about that. It seemed that his eyes were flattening, compensating for the distortion of light in the water.
Once his initial mental qualms were out of the way and he had experimented with how much turn or twist did what, moving in this element was like flying without wings. While you were aware of the water, it was a friend, and you could hold yourself at a given depth, go up or down with minor gestures, and go forward with only slight expenditures of energy. It was better than flying; it was a fully three-dimensional environment, and the more he swam in it, the more of a rush he got. Damn if this wasn’t fun!
As he descended still farther, he became aware of other senses that he was using. Sound . . . Echoes back to his ears and then to his brain were painting pictures for him. Down about a hundred meters he pictured a school of average-sized fish, and a bit farther down there were more. But sonar couldn’t give the level of detail he was perceiving; no, he was picking out each individual living thing and categorizing it by size and attributes. He realized that this ability had something to do with whatever it was that he’d thought was his nose.
But where in this wet place was he headed?
As it turned out, at about fifty meters depth an entire network appeared to him out of the gloom at the bottom—not in sight, but in that sixth sense he didn’t quite understand. But what did they mean, these straight lines going in various directions like some grand highway as seen from very high up? Each, when probed by sonar, had a different and distinct single tone. Once he tried it, the tone persisted until he changed to a different line.
They were roads! Not actual, physical roads, but grids laid out on the floor and perhaps broadcasting as well. Anyone swimming along who had his powers would see it, and if they knew what each tone meant, they would know which road went where, and maybe more.
He wasted no time choosing a road. They were all the same to him, and they all had to lead somewhere, or else somebody had gone to a tremendous amount of bother just for art.
As he followed it, he tried to remember back. He had fragments of memories; in fact, he had memories from all sorts of sources, but none took precedence and many were confusing. He thought he was somebody named Aristotle Martinez, since that was the only male memories he had and he felt that he was a male. But it was an incomplete set of memories, with more gaps than whole parts, and he seemed very distant, like looking at a character in a play rather than at one’s own self.
And then there was Ming Dawn Palavri. He had at least as many memories of hers as of Ari’s, and in some cases it seemed that the Ming memories, while also distant, were more complete than much of Ari’s. Talk about your hybrids! He could tap either life, male or female, and think very much along those lines. Considering what a skunk Ari was, he suspected that he’d rather have been Ming, which explained the memory jostling. Split personalities, split nature, dual sexuality, part fish and part mammal, water breather and air breather—this was some mixed-up existence he was headed into!
But there were others in his head, too. Less so, less fully formed and detailed, but very much there. Some of Angel was there, oddly, and so were Alpha and Beta, although they were so synched that they seemed to have no separate identity. Alpha and Beta gave him the shivers; he could follow their single-minded logic and their view of the universe, but who would want to? Angel was a different story. He didn’t have her clearly at all, but those snippets he could make out were as bizarre a view of the universe as the Alpha-Beta concept, if different. Or were they? Alpha and Beta knew who their god was and joyfully lived to serve him and him alone. Angel believed in a different, more grandiose God of the cosmos that she could not see yet felt was with her seeing and hearing all and guiding her, and she joyfully lived to serve Him and Him alone. Hmmm . . . That didn’t sound like much of a choice.
The worst part was, none of them were him. They were all there, along with a lot of data, a lot of shared experiences, and some pretty nasty memories as well, but not a one of them fit like an old suit and comfortable chair. Ari didn’t really fit because he didn’t like him very much and didn’t want to be him. He had the fullest picture of Ming, yet he didn’t want to be Ming, either, because he wanted the real Ming back. He wanted to make it up to her, even make love to her. Hell, maybe mate with her.
The others he wanted to forget, although he knew they’d probably be a part of his nightmares. Still, he had the impression that it wasn’t supposed to work like this. They said he should be mentally intact; instead, he seemed a whole new person. Damn. Being yanked around was one thing, but at least he’d known who he was and had an intact ego and personality; now he felt like two very different people, with several others around as onlookers. He’d heard of people with multiple personalities, and perhaps that was what he was experiencing.
He was coming to a junction, but didn’t have to choose which branch to take. It was immediately obvious; if he’d been breathing air instead of water, it would have been breathtaking.
It was a city! And not just caves and kelp and coral, although it did look like a vast coral reef. The lifesigns to his sixth sense were so strong that he had to dampen it; there were a lot of beings over there, hopefully beings like him.
And if it wasn’t electrified and lighting up the sea bottom, then it was doing a pretty fair imitation.
In less than five minutes he encountered the first denizens of this new world, and had the mermaid vision reinforced, although the bodies were not like the classical mermaids of old, appearing more alien. Still, the ears, like clamshells set into each side of the head, the quite Terran-looking faces that seemed to be those of women, even though they might not all have been, and the long, translucent, and slightly glowing “hair,” were very much as he’d suspected.
In less than ten minutes two such creatures wearing armbands with some kind of symbol and carrying what appeared to be ray guns had placed him under arrest.