The next morning he saw the first Glathrielians he’d seen since—-well, a very long time ago. He had forgotten their rather exotic “look,” a unique yet homogenized blend of just about every racial type on Earth. Being of a near uniformly brown skin, with a variety of Oriental features yet with brown, black, and reddish hair was only the beginning of it. One could look at anyone and see suggestions of somebody one thought was familiar, yet the entire amalgam was something totally unique.
This time, though, they also seemed decidedly, well, odd. There was no other way to explain it. True, their tropical hex didn’t really require clothing, but these people wore nothing. Not amulets or paint or markings of any kind, nor earrings, nose rings, bracelets, anklets—nothing at all, men or women. They also seemed to let their hair and, on the men, facial hair as well simply grow. He couldn’t understand why some of them didn’t trip over all that hair or strangle on it. Some of the shorter women seemed to have to wrap it around themselves to keep it from dragging on the ground, and he had never seen men with hair that long. Hair that, oddly, didn’t seem to tangle or get matted. Had he done that? He didn’t remember doing it, but if he’d altered them significantly, the computer would have filled in the logical items which he’d left out but which might be required for some reason.
Other things also bothered him. Their remarkable silence for one thing. Watching them, it seemed at times as if there was some kind of communication going on, judging from the gestures, the playful actions, the coordination they exhibited, but aside from some grunts and occasional laughter they said nothing.
He wondered if they were at all aware that they now worked the fields that their distant ancestors had once owned. He watched as they seemed to have some kind of silent prayer vigil before starting to work, then they went to it, picking fruit and stacking it in neat piles every few bushes.
“They have an almost unnatural ability to figure out just which fruit is ready to be picked,” one of the Ambrezan supervisors commented to him.
“But they don’t fill baskets or containers,” Brazil noted. “They just pile it all neatly.”
“They won’t touch them. No Glathrielian will touch anything manufactured, even a box. They even make several trips carrying their ‘pay,’ which is a small percentage of the crop, back to their home in Glathriel in their arms.”
“What about that home? Don’t they have some sort of village or whatever with shelter?”
“No, they don’t. Not as we understand it, anyway. They do have tribal lands that they consider their home, but the few structures are very crude and very basic and formed entirely from gathered dead wood and dropped leaves. They don’t build as such. The few crude structures tend to be shelters for the babies and for bad weather. Mostly they sleep either out in the open or in hollow trees, some caves, and shelters formed from fallen logs and the like. They don’t even build or keep fires, although if a thunderstorm comes along and sets something off, they might use it until it goes out. They don’t kill unless something is trying to kill them and there is no other choice—and whatever that unfortunate animal is, they then eat it raw that same day.”
“They seem to eat okay from what I can see,” Brazil noted. “The women seem to range from chubby to fat, and the men are built like bricks.”
“They eat a complex variety of things, some of which we, and perhaps you, would find disgusting, but it seems the perfect balance for them. They make great workers, though. No complaints, virtually no mistakes, and they won’t touch, let alone eat, anything they haven’t picked themselves. They’re always good-humored in a childlike sort of way, and they’re so placid, they don’t even swat flies that land on them.”
“How’d you ever get them to work for you?”
“It’s been this way since long before my time or my grandfather’s time, too,” the Ambrezan supervisor replied. “Only a few tribes will do it, but they’ve been doing it forever on the border plantations and, I think, along the Zinjin Coast strip. The vast majority live way in the interior, which is mostly swamp and jungle with some volcanic areas. We used to try and survey them once upon a time, I’m told, but they can vanish like magic, and it just wasn’t worth the time and trouble. The fact is, we know very little about them beyond these border tribes.”
“I know about that,” Brazil told him. “They asked me to do a report on them if I went in, figuring that since I’m related in a way to them, I might be taken as one of them if I went in.”
“Well, that figures. You gonna go?”
“Looks like it. I’m after another like myself. A female. Very small and very thin—even smaller and thinner than me. You haven’t seen or heard much about somebody like that, have you?”
“Heard they was looking for somebody like that down the road apiece, but haven’t seen or heard a thing myself, no. Of course, I can’t tell any of you apart much, frankly, but I think I’d have noticed a female smaller and thinner than you, that’s for sure.” He sighed. “Well, if you’re gonna find her, you got maybe two weeks.”
“Huh? Why’s that?”
“Oh, they haven’t got any families as such. You can see the same kid with a different parent most any day. It’s all communal. That’s ’cause, I think, they have one short period of a couple of days when all the women get fertile all at once and all the men can think of nothing else and they go at it, breaking only for sleep, for up to four days. Then they don’t do it anymore until the next month. Lots of animals like that, but I know of only a few races here that still have that old mechanism. They say we did back in prehistoric times or whatever, but not since.”
The idea shook him. Just what did I do to you, people?
It was coming back to him now in bits and pieces. When he’d come through that time off the spaceship, he’d discovered that the Ambreza had literally reduced the Glathrielians to animallike status. When he’d done his work in the Well, he’d fixed that so there’d be a slow but steady generational rise back to normality through providing immunity to the Ambreza gas—but in a nontech hex, which, he’d guessed, wouldn’t threaten the Ambreza.
He’d been wrong. The next time through, he’d caught wind that the Glathrielians had gotten to a point where they knew the legends and stories about how they’d been kicked out of their ancestral home and brought low and were getting very curious about Ambrezan technology and doing a lot of work on natural chemicals themselves. The Ambreza leadership had been getting nervous even then; the seeds of potential genocide were being sown even then as the Ambreza’s imaginations started coming up with potential attacks far worse than the Glathrielians could have managed on their own.
So while he and Mavra had reset and checked out the system, he’d made other changes to ensure that this would all die down. He’d removed the translation abilities from the Glathrielians so that they could only communicate among themselves, and he’d put a blocker in there so that no other language but theirs could get through. If they couldn’t reconnoiter and spy on their hated enemy, they wouldn’t be much of a threat. And he’d made what he thought then were some minor physiological changes to ensure that they adapted nearly perfectly to their present hex and would not be as comfortable in the one that was now Ambreza or lust for it so much.
But this—these people, this totally primitive way—was not what he’d had in mind at all. He’d sought only to protect them from slaughter, not to reduce them to pre-Stone Age levels. What had the computer imposed logically on them that flowed from his premises? Just how badly had he goofed?
What have I done? he wondered again, watching them. This was all he needed, he thought sourly. A hyperdose of pure guilt right now. I’m not going to keep ying-yanging these people around forever for some sin of ancestors even I can’t remember, he vowed. If I made a mistake, this time I’ll correct it, but, beyond that, from this point on, as much as I like the Ambreza, I’m not going to keep these people down again. If any new adjustments need to be done, by damn, I’ll do ’em on the Ambreza for a change!
He stared at them as they worked, trying to figure them out, and over a period of time he got a sense that he wasn’t seeing the whole picture, but he couldn’t put his finger on what was disturbing him that he hadn’t already quantified.
And then he had it.
There were no lame, no crippled, not so much as a limper among them. Well, they might leave all of those home. But no, it was more than that. In the kind of rough environment and natural way they lived, their creamy brown skins should have the signs of all sorts of incidental injuries, scars, and whatnot. There were none. Every one of their hides looked as smooth and untouched as a baby’s bottom. Not a scar or a scab among them, and some of them weren’t young.
And that was impossible. It was something that just might not occur to the Ambreza, thankfully, but it was damned impossible. Something that they hid from everyone except themselves was definitely not kosher about the Glathrielians. Now he had to go in. Mavra was still the object, but he very much wanted to know just what the hell was going on there.
His strange appearance, so like them and yet so different both in features and in the fact that he was clothed and having a conversation with Ambrezans, naturally drew curious looks from the Glathrielians. No, it was worse than that. They looked puzzled as all hell.
Finally, one young woman came over to him a bit shyly but with definite purpose, a big smile of friendliness on her face. He smiled back at her, and she put out her hands, and after a moment of trying to figure out what she wanted, he put out his and they clasped hands.
Suddenly he felt a strange, slightly dizzy sensation, and at the same time she gasped, let go forcefully, and backed away from him, a look of near terror in her eyes. As he followed her with his gaze, she broke and ran not toward the other tribespeople but away, at top speed, in the direction of the border.
Now what the hell? was all he could manage.
The others were now also staring at him rather warily but just keeping their distance and working the grove. He decided to press on down the road and pick up the trail.
The old Ambrezan couple who owned the plantation square in the middle of section B-14 hadn’t seen or heard much of anything, and they’d been very surprised when they’d gotten the call from the government, but they’d let the dogs out and had them sniff around, and sure enough, they had picked up some odd kind of trail in a grove of trees and followed it all the way to the border. It was quite puzzling to them; there were so many Glathrielian scents around that it would have to be something outside the dogs’ normal experience to have them take off like that.
Nathan Brazil nodded but did not explain. If it were Mavra, and it certainly looked like there was no other possibility, she would smell of many alien things but little or nothing of the Well World.
“You ain’t gonna track her with no dogs in there, no, sir,” the old Ambrezan told him. “They get in Glathriel a ways, and they go nuts. Can’t pick up anything—take you around in circles, they will. Horses and mules might work in some parts, but if you’re goin’ in here, you’re goin’ right into the Great Swamp. Runs for half the hex, it does. Lots of water, killer snakes, vicious swamp lizards, and a lot worse.”
He shrugged. “The Glathrielians seem to do all right in there.”
“Well, maybe. Maybe it’s just ’cause they have enough young to keep pace, too. Ever think of that? You don’t see no old ones, that’s for sure, and as peaceful as they are, they might just figure the thing’s got a right to eat ’em. Or maybe they smell as bad to the animals there as they do to us—no offense, son. But you take a riding or pack animal in there, all you’ll do is give them vicious brutes a real feast and waste a good animal.”
“I’ll walk,” he told them. “Been a while since I carried a full pack, but it won’t be the first time. She walked in there with nothing at all, and it’s only been two days or so. I might be able to pick up something. I was a pretty fair tracker once.”
“Well, if she ain’t got eaten, you might have a chance,” the old gent admitted. “But I still wouldn’t like to go in there far. That place like that other world they say you come from? Might make a difference.”
“No, not much. Parts of it are like that, but not the parts I like. Actually, my home’s more like, well, here.”
And it was, too, he realized with a start. Maybe that was why he liked Ambreza and the Ambrezans so much. Given the same hex and a jump start, they’d either managed to develop a very Terranlike society and culture or, more likely, had co-opted parts of it, copied from those they had overthrown. Designed and bred for the hex they now found loathsome, the ones who’d been forced to take their place had come up very differently indeed, while the Ambrezan culture was, after all these thousands of years, virtually unchanged. Static. And they liked it that way.
The Ambreza of their original hex had been creative, aggressive, clever enough to meet a threat when they were woefully mismatched. Moving here, they’d done almost certainly a far better job of managing the hex, but they’d grown soft, stagnant, and complacent, devoid of the daring and creativity that their remote ancestors had had in abundance. They just weren’t really in their element here, and they’d spent thousands upon thousands of generations treading water, never changing or adapting beyond what they had to do. Even he felt that comfortable sense of time standing still here, and in ways easy to take, with their horses and cows and hunting dogs and country manners.
What had the Glathrielians become in the Ambrezan hex? A tropical swamp and jungle was also an invitation to stagnancy for Terrans, and on a much more primitive scale. Even when the magic of technology was allowed to work, the regions of Earth covered by such unlivable areas had tended to keep the inhabitants in the Stone Age. He’d seen it in the Congo, the Philippines, the Amazon interior again and again, just as they’d remained rather primitive in the arctic regions, too busy surviving to go any further until technology came to them or, in more cases than not, was forced upon them.
And yet, even there they’d done the best they could with what they’d had. They’d become farmers where it was possible; fishers near seas, lakes, and oceans; hunters and managers of game, with social organizations of varying degrees as geography allowed. From the spear and blowgun to the igloo to vast irrigation channels, they’d adapted and innovated their way to some sort of culture.
Glathriel looked all the more an enigma because of it. Even the last time Terran types had managed all this, until they’d become a threat to others and he’d set them back a bit. Had they lost once too often? Had they given up as a people?
Or had they adapted and innovated in ways none on Earth had ever done?
What had the girl seen by holding his hands, and how had she seen it?
Had he perhaps set up the evolutionary mechanism and now forgotten that he had done so or, even more disturbing, done it without realizing it?
He allowed the old man to take him all the way, down to the stake in the ground just before the hex boundary where they’d stopped the dogs. Bidding the old Ambrezan farewell with thanks, he adjusted the backpack and walked into the new Glathriel.
It was, he thought, a nearly unimaginable feeling to enter a hex populated by people who looked very much like him and somehow feel that he was going into territory more alien than some of the strangest hexes on the Well World.