She came over, looked at it, then nodded and put a finger at a point on the left and a bit up from the center of the picture.
It was a crude map of Brazil.
He turned and looked at her, then put his right hand up in the air, made a fist, and brought it down with a whistling sound to a boom! in the dirt.
She smiled and nodded, then repeated his pantomime and sound effects, this time taking her own fist into the crude map just where she’d made the dot.
His jaw dropped just a bit. Maybe that was a television! If so, she’s not just some native girl with bad luck, either. He decided to get more ambitious and do a little signing. He’d been pretty good at signing once. It was the only thing that had saved his ass during the sack of Rome.
He traced a circle in the air, then slowly outlined a hex shape, then, with his hand, portrayed his arm going from the circle through the hex to here. She watched and nodded, smiling.
He shrugged to, he hoped, indicate total puzzlement as to how she’d wound up here. It wasn’t supposed to work this way. Nobody was supposed to become a Glathrielian unless the race was in danger of dying out, and at least it hardly looked like that.
She waved a finger in the air, had it go to ground, had two fingers walk out, then made as if she were operating a very old-time camera, then mouthing into something she was holding. A helicopter! She ‘d been pan of a TV crew covering the impact! That had to be it and would easily explain her appearance.
It still didn’t answer why she was here, why she wasn’t one of the other 779 races of the South, but it told him basically who she was and how she’d gotten here.
He had an awful thought. He pointed to her foot and then to the drawing area. With his own foot he mocked putting it down on the drawing. She didn’t get it right away but eventually figured out what he wanted, although maybe not why, and stepped on the place, making a half footprint.
It was, of course, a standing rather than walking print, but he’d been following enough of a certain set of prints for his experienced tracker’s eyes to relate the two.
He hadn’t been following Mavra, after all. He’d been following this girl! And that meant that she, not Mavra, was the source of the pulse—and the source of the track the hounds had followed.
Well, some of the mystery was at least explained, why she’d gone pretty much straight into Glathriel and why she hadn’t contacted the Ambreza. In one sense he was relieved, although he felt frustrated by still not finding who he was really looking for.
Now all he had to do was try to figure out why this girl was here. Not only shouldn’t she have become a Glathrielian, she hadn’t—not totally. The Well had done some of its work but had left her original form pretty much intact. Oh, he suspected she was a good deal older than she looked now—that was a fairly simple procedure for the Well program—and any diseases or infirmities or other problems, right down to fillings in her teeth, would have been repaired, but it had left her genetic code mostly untouched. It shouldn’t have done that. As far as he knew, it couldn’t have done that.
But it had.
It had also done its adaptation work internally in a way he’d never intended. She couldn’t understand him because the program now specified that Type 41 ‘s could understand no language but their own. She couldn’t speak even in that language because, as far as he could see, they didn’t have a spoken language as such. She would have been given any attributes and abilities necessary to survive and integrate with the locals here, even ones developed independently, since that, too, was part of the program, but at the cost of being able to verbalize, and perhaps even use, what her education and training had prepared her to do. Hell, if she’d been some sort of TV personality, then she had to be going nuts with these limits!
“I didn’t mean to do it,” he told her sincerely, although he knew she couldn’t understand and wouldn’t have understood the comment even if she had comprehended the words. “I honestly didn’t. It’s not supposed to work this way.” Maybe, just maybe, the Well was broken, after all.
And, he thought, if she was a reporter, why not take the coffee? He knew few of them who could resist coffee, and it would have immediately established her as someone more than Glathrielian if she’d taken it. Hell, it’d only been what? Two, three days tops. She couldn’t have totally assimilated into their culture in that short a time, could she? Had, somehow, the Well imposed the culture upon her as well?
It wasn’t designed to do that, either. Some stuff one had to learn.
More interesting was what he wasn’t able to communicate to her. Some simple things, like “others” versus “alone,” as in “Did you come with others or alone?” he could not seem to put over. She, too, tried a few times to communicate, but her attempts seemed random and confused. It wasn’t an entirely new phenomenon to him; some of the other races of the Well World, most in the North but even a few in the South, simply did not fully follow the logical thought patterns that he and most of the southern races adhered to in one degree or another. A nonverbal society might develop along the same logic paths, and certainly in the case of the same race with the same brain structure, but even on Earth there were societies that saw things too differently to ever fully understand one another. This was a step further. In some ways it was like the card games at which he excelled. At one time, eons ago, he’d learned the basics of those games and played them so often that now he rarely thought about how or what to play and when; a part of his brain that he couldn’t even consciously touch, let alone access deliberately, processed all the information according to experience, and he simply played automatically—and won. Writers, painters, other creators had the same experience; they didn’t know where the words or visions had come from—they just were there and came from some unapproachable recess of the mind that they neither understood nor consciously used but that nonetheless they simply took for granted and used.
None of them could ever explain the process. “God-given talent” was an oft-quoted phrase for it, but talent came from somewhere, and it was called up from a mystery region of consciousness in a manner they could neither comprehend nor control.
Could a whole race operate entirely on that sort of processing? Could an entire culture somehow evolve that required no front-brained verbalizations? How could it work? Where was the shared experience, the teaching, the communication that would give such a people the tools with which to work? And to what end? To some animallike equilibrium in which survival was enough?
It was a real puzzle, and he didn’t know the answer. There was only one place where he could get those answers, he knew, and that place was a long and hard journey from here.
He could help this girl there, too. Get her out of the trap she’d fallen into.
It never occurred to him to take her along, though. If she was so bound by the Glathrielian way, she’d never survive the trip, and she’d be more in the way than useful, anyway. Still, he wanted to try to tell her, to get through to her, that he could help her—and would.
That, however, proved impossible to get over.
After a while fatigue and frustration overcame him, and he managed to get her to understand that he had to sleep. She nodded but continued to sit as he went into the tent, zipped it shut, and, after a much longer time than he thought it would take, managed to get to sleep.
In the morning she was still there.
He wasn’t actually fooled into thinking that she’d sat there all night, but she and the others he hadn’t seen might think he was. Certainly there had been a lot of traffic through his camp during the night, all without disturbing him. The signs were quite clear that nothing short of a mob scene had occurred, yet none of his equipment had been touched, not even the now-cold cup of coffee still sitting there in the grass.
Well, regardless of the games they might think they were playing, he’d wasted a couple of days coming here, and he’d probably waste another two or more getting back to anyplace useful. At least now it was time to move on, time to actually do something other than sit. He’d appreciated the rest, but he was out of place both here and in Ambreza, and he now had a better reason to enter the Well than he’d had before.
After he had packed his gear, she got up, beckoned him, and started off back toward Ambreza with a surefootedness and confidence he certainly didn’t feel. He did not argue, however—what good would that have done, anyway? And hell, maybe she knew a shortcut.
The paths she took were shorter, although it was still better than seven hours walking, not counting the breaks, until he once again saw the border. She stood there, letting him pass through, and then passed through herself. Now she was following him, but she seemed determined to stick with him.
He stopped, turned, looked her in the eye, and shook his head “no,” but she had no reaction to that, although she must have understood it and continued to follow him.
Well, as much as he’d have liked to take her along, it was impossible. What would she eat? How could she withstand the climatic extremes of the journey in the nude? What would happen when he got on a truck or some other automatic device her people wouldn’t touch?
Still, she followed him right up to the farm buildings and waited while he knocked.
The old Ambrezan male was there, apparently doing accounts. He stared out at the girl in the front yard and gave a typical Ambrezan “Chi chi chi!” which was basically an expression of thoughtfulness. “So she’s the one you went in to get?”
“No, she’s another. Somebody totally different.”
“Yeah, I figured if you come back, it’d be empty-handed. I no sooner got back to the house than the wife called for me to go after you. Seems another female much like you showed up in the capital just about that time.”
Brazil was delighted at the news. “Did they give a name?”
“Dunno. Got the note here someplace.”
“Well, more important, is she still there?”
“Maybe, but I got the impression she was there to go to Zone. The gate’s right in the city center, you know. Wanted to find out about her friends, I think they said. Chi chi chi! Now where in—ah! Here!”
“You’ll have to read it for me,” Brazil told him. “I’m all right with the translator at languages, but reading is something else again.”
“Oh. All right. Let’s see . . . ‘Female Type 41 arrested near the city border at ten-fourteen this morning for being illegally out of a Glathrielian-allowed district. Proved to be alien of same origin as you. Received clothing, passage to Zone tomorrow for locating rest of her party.”
“Hmmm . . . Wonder if she’s still in Zone or the city? She’d have to come back there through the gate, anyway. May I use your communicator and call in and see?”
“Sure. No problem. What about the female there?”
“She’ll wait.” He went inside and placed a call to the comm center.
“Yes, her name was registered as a Mavra Chang,” the comm tech informed him. “Went down to Zone yesterday, returned in the evening. Got provisions and left this morning. The law prevents any Type 41 from being in the city for more than two days, anyway.”
“That’s the one. How did she leave? And where did they take her?”
“She left by air shuttle. She was going south to the border with Erdom. I assume one of her party is down there someplace or she’s going to try and make a boat connection of some sort. At any rate, she said she would probably not be back unless she needed to use a Zone gate as an escape route.”
“Damn!” Brazil swore. “No chance I could get an airdrop to the same spot?”
“Maybe in a couple of days or so. Not right now. We don’t run those for the convenience of aliens, you know.”
The Ambreza had a small air fleet, operating, as it had to, totally within the hex, that basically consisted of a few dozen helicopterlike vehicles which were used for emergencies and for big shots to move around. How she’d talked herself into a ride down there was a mystery, but that she’d been able to do so sounded like the old Mavra.
“Was she informed that I was here and looking for her?”
There was an embarrassed silence for a moment, then the comm tech answered, “Yes, she was informed.”
“And?”
“She said that she’d have to move fast or you might catch up to her.”
He sighed. “All right. Thank you,” and signed off.
The old Ambrezan chuckled. “Ain’t it always the damnedest thing, son?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”