It was a long way yet in the dark to the border.
Pulcinell
the sight of nathan brazil’s broad-brimmed hat, soggy and crumpled though it was, atop the top spoke of the ship’s wheel made everything else, from the escape to the weather to the girl’s extraordinary powers, seem distant and pale. More, his empathic link with the girl told him that not only had she not done it, she was unaware of anyone else around to do it, either.
Either I’m losing my mind or there’s somebody else here, he told himself.
The girl, riding out the storm just behind the mainmast, instantly sensed his feelings of danger and confusion and turned to look back at him, all her vast array of senses and powers deployed against a threat.
There was nothing. No threat at all. She frowned. No threat, but there was something else, something different here. Something that had not been there before, not until that odd lurch the ship had taken. Whatever it was, it was no enemy, but why couldn’t she see it or find it? There was only something vague, and that something, like a fuzzy, friendly ghostlike presence, was back there with Nathan Brazil.
Brazil had no choice but to retake the wheel, removing the hat first and throwing it forward. The wind caught it, but it was too soggy to blow away; it skidded across the deck and stuck against the side. He unlocked the wheel and began to try to think of ways to use this wind rather than fight it. It was no use, though. Somebody—or something— had put that hat on the wheel. Something that was there with him now. Something that even the girl could only dimly perceive.
“What are you? Who are you?” he yelled against the howling gale. “Stop playing children’s games and show yourself! Where the hell are you?”
“Right here at your side, Captain Brazil,” responded a low, deep, resonant voice that nonetheless was not formed by humanlike lips.
Nathan Brazil almost jumped out of his skin. He whirled around, letting go of the wheel.
“Right here,” said the voice, and when it spoke, he could suddenly see it, if only vaguely.
It was big, big enough to tower the better part of a meter over him, and broad and strong of body. It had a head much like a snake’s or a giant lizard’s, long and flattened with two big, yellow catlike eyes that popped up from its surface, and a large, thick serpentine body that was balanced on two thick legs that ended in clawed, webbed feet but started too far down the torso to be a main support for the rest of it. It balanced now on those two feet and on the remainder of that body, which ended in a broad, almost shovellike tail. Extruding from either side of the torso, a bit below where the shoulders ought to have been, were two very thin, frail-looking arms terminating in four clawed, long webbed fingers and an opposable thumb. Like the legs, they extended out from the torso, more like a reptile than a mammal. The whole thing was covered in silvery scales that seemed to give off a rainbow of colors as the swirling clouds varied the available light and which were probably spectacular in direct sunlight.
“Don’t you think you’d better tend to the wheel first?” the creature asked him in a calm, pleasant voice. “I just had the very devil of a swim just to catch up with you. I’d rather not go back in the water again for a while.”
“Uh, yeah, sure,” Brazil commented, turning back to the wheel and, with some difficulty, wrestling it back under control. It was a miracle that the lone sail, even deployed as little as it was, hadn’t been torn to shreds. Whoever had built this boat had really known how to build.
“Uh, if you don’t mind,” Brazil said, trying not to look around or away but keep his eyes on steering, “just who the hell are you and why did you go to all the trouble of swimming after us in the first place? And why couldn’t we see you?”
“Survival trait, they tell me. The arms, as you might have noticed, are very limber, but they ain’t real big or real muscular, and the legs, while strong, don’t let you move real fast. That would’ve made us sittin’ ducks in our own land, let alone from outside threats. Dahir’s a nontech hex, you know.”
“So you’re a Dahir!” Another one 1 don’t quite remember looking like this, let alone with this trick, he thought. “A very long way from home, aren’t you? And a damned good swimmer for an inland race.”
“It was another thing that just came naturally, sort of. Dahir’s inland, true, but it’s real swampy. Lowlands, wetter than the Everglades. The routine’s to swim along pretty much like a snake and stand up to feed or do whatever else you feel like doin’. Of course, we walk around the houses and lodges and the like, but for any kind of travel, well, it’s kinda like takin’ the car even though the grocery store’s only two blocks away. You know you should walk, but it’s so much easier to ride. Even though this is ocean, to tell you the truth I never even thought about not bein’ able to swim in it. I gotta admit, though, I almost lost it when it got so rough all of a sudden. I’d actually missed you and was gettin’ dragged away to the side and then forward a little when one of them waves just picked me up and dropped me kerplang on the deck.”
“So that’s what shook the ship! You’re another one of the people who came in through the gate from Earth, I gather. You’re a long way from the Everglades and corner grocer’s here.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter, neither. I was dropped, drugged, dragged around a jungle for I don’t know how long, then carried through to here and more or less thrown in. I really don’t remember a lot of it, except that I knew I was dyin’.”
“You’re from Mavra’s group, then.”
“I guess. I know who she is, but only by hearin’ about it. I understand she was the leader of that group of nutty Amazons who grabbed us. As I said, I was drugged and sick most of the time, and it’s all a daze. Not nearly as much of a shock as wakin’ up like this, I gotta say, but the in between’s a little fuzzy. For the record, I’m Gus Olafsson. Everybody just calls me Gus, even in Dahir.”
“A Swede?”
“Minnesota. United States. To tell the truth, though, the area’s kind of Scandinavia west, with the Swedes there, the Norwegians, and even the Finns up in the Iron Mountain district. You know the place?”
“No, sorry. I’ve actually spent very little time in the States, and I don’t know much about the interior at all. I heard much of it was flat, dull, and cold.”
“Well, not all of it, but that describes where I come from pretty well. Pretty area, though, up around the lake district. It was a nice place to grow up but not a great place to make a livin’ in if you didn’t want to do the same old things. I didn’t. Instead, I picked a way to see the world, all right. More than one, as it’s turned out. In fact, the things you can do as a Dahir woulda been real handy for my profession, except, of course, when somebody would have to see me, which would cause a right good monster movie-style panic, I’d say. Shame, though. It’d be a real advantage not to be seen in most cases. I coulda done great investigative work right in plain sight.”
“You were some sort of reporter?”
“News photographer. Television, actually. Started at small stations, worked my way up until I got some really good footage, then went freelance, gettin’ work from the networks and local stations. Finally impressed folks enough, I guess, that I got an offer from the news network, and I’ve been doin’ that, well, until them Amazons more or less killed me and I wound up here like this.”
“You’re the one who’s been following us for the last week or so, then.”
“Yeah, pretty much. You only gave me the slip once, out on the dock that one time. Pretty slick, but I figured it out. I also figured when I heard you talkin’ to that bastard blob of Jell-O that you wouldn’t’ve been so straight with him if you hadn’ta finally figured you’d been had and was already fixin’ to light out. I got to admit you picked a lousy day in particular to do it, but I just had this feelin’ you would.”
“Yeah, but how’d you track us from the hotel? We climbed down a sheer wall on a rope.”
“Hey! I was a news photographer, right? I mean, the only way to get the picture nobody else gets is to think like the guy you’re shadowin’. The rubes and the lazy ones, they’d stake out the lobby just like the colonel’s boys and wait for you to come through, figuring you would try to shake ’em. Me, I decided you was smarter than that, even if you did take a long time to catch on to the colonel’s game, and then it was just figurin’ how I would do it if I was you.”
“I was able to at least sense your presence most of the time,” he noted. “How come I didn’t sense you back there?”
“Because a good stakeout depends on not bein’ made, right? I mean, if you hadn’t given me the slip back on that dock last week, I would never have guessed you’d figured I was there at all, but since you did, I thought you or maybe Terry might be feelin’ me, and I hung back. I mean, you made tracks all through the snow, right? The only thing was, hangin’ back and not knowin’ how they launched these things, I couldn’t get close enough to jump on the boat. When you had your problems, I wasn’t in the right spot, so I couldn’t jump on like that other fella, but I figured I was close enough to swim out to you. Almost caught up when you got over near the barges, but then that guy came overboard almost into my face, and by the time I got my bearin’s back, you was headin’ through the hex boundary. I hadta swim like the very devil to get even close after that.”
Brazil frowned. “But, if you’re not part of the colonel’s crowd, then what are you doing here in the first place?”
“Lookin’ for you, and Terry. She and I go back a long way. I was the only cameraman she worked with if she could manage it.”
“Terry?”
“Her,” responded Gus, and a small finger pointed out at the girl on deck.
Brazil was suddenly excited. “You know her? Know who she is?”
“Sure. Theresa Perez. Hotshot producer for the news channel. It was her I was workin’ for when we come down to Brazil for the meteor coverage. Had an exclusive, too. Pretty good pictures, if I do say so myself. Hope they got ’em okay.”
Theresa Perez. Terry . . . At last, at least, she had a name and a past.
“But—she can’t see you, either? Even now?”
“I guess she could. She should if I was talkin’ to her or tried to make her, I guess. It ain’t somethin’ I can turn on and off, you know. I don’t even know how it’s done. All I know is that we’re like just about invisible to anybody except another Dahir. Works on every race I ever saw or met. Kinda handy, really, when you’re off on your own with nothin’ like I was. Just walk on any handy ship. They don’t even notice you. Need some food? Just take it. Gets to be kinda fun after a while. The Dahir, they got somethin’ of a religion about how not to abuse the power, but I didn’t stay for the lectures. Hell, I wasn’t a good Lutheran; why should I be a good and loyal follower of a religion I wasn’t even born to?”
Nathan Brazil laughed at that. “You’ll do fine around here, Gus. That’s just the attitude to survive.”
“Yeah, well, maybe. I dunno. It ain’t foolproof. I found that out a couple of times. You can’t fool a camera, or an electric eye, or any number of security devices. Recorders record your sounds even if the folks around don’t notice them when they’re made. I almost got picked up more than once back there in Hakazit, and I knew they’d just send me back home by the Zone Express, and with the kind of stuff I was charged with, that damned system woulda throwed the book at me. I guess I’m kinda on the lam myself now.”
“Well, I won’t turn you in, and I’m going to try as hard as I can to keep away from any more high-tech hexes for a while myself. The way you talk, though, everybody everywhere already knows who I am.”
“Well, not everybody believes it, or at least all the stories and legends, but it’s kinda the talk of government and official types, anyway. That’s how I heard about it. They had me in the capital, in what you might call a school on how to be a good Dahir and love it. They was also tryin’ to pump me for what I knew about the others, which wasn’t all that much. I doubt if most folks in the country, most places, have heard of you, but the big shots all have. They’re kinda in a whole set of arguments with each other, too. Some don’t believe you’re the guy in their legends; some believe you are, and it scares hell out of ’em. Some of the believers want to nab you; others want to just make sure you don’t do whatever they’re scared of you doin’ without first makin’ deals with them. Those who don’t believe you’re anybody special want to knock you off just to show the true believers they’re right, and so on. No matter how you look at it, though, Cap, you’re as made as me and twice as wanted.”
Nathan Brazil sighed. “So that’s the way it is. I’d kind of hoped nobody would spot me and I could be kindly Captain Solomon. So even the colonel knew all the time.”
“Oh, he knew, all right. Kept givin’ them regular reports on you. I stood there and listened to him give ’em. For now he was just gettin’ orders to stall, stall, stall, so I guess they still ain’t made up their minds. The guy was a perfect toady, I bet, back home, and he might have changed race, form, and loyalties, but he’s right at home doin’ just the same here. Uh—just out of curiosity, are you the guy they’re scared of?”
Brazil shrugged. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to admit what most of the leadership already half believes. Yeah, I’m the same guy. And yes, they have some reason to be scared of me, too. More reason now than before, if they get me too pissed off.”
“They say you’re some kind of like, well, god or something. That you’re really one of them guys who built this nutty place.”
“Well, that’s a bit exaggerated. Right now I’ve only got one important power they don’t, pretty much like your one big power. The Well—the master computer that keeps things running here—won’t let them or anything else kill me.”
“Huh! I’ll trade you!”
“Don’t tempt me! But still, it’s not as big a deal when you think of it. I can be hurt, hurt bad. If it’s really bad, I can take a very long time to heal. I can be kept prisoner, drugged, you name it. In other words, they might not be able to kill me but they can sure stop me, and if everybody and their sister knows about me, then I’ve got real trouble. I had this kind of situation once before, but then I had a number of friends and allies. Now—I don’t know. And Mavra Chang’s just like me, Gus. She’s heading where I’m heading, too. If she gets there before I do, all bets are off, including on me. She doesn’t really know how complicated this business is, but she can get me out of the loop, anyway. She could even . . .” He paused a moment, as if the very concept were hitting him for the first time. “She could even kill me.”
“Yeah? Would she do that?”
“She might. I don’t know, Gus. I haven’t seen her in . . . well, a very long time. We’re strangers, really, at this point. And you say she was leading a band of Amazons in the Brazilian jungle?”
“Yep. The Stone Age type, too. Naked and painted and little poison darts and all that. I wouldn’t worry as much about her as you are, though.”
“No? Why not?”
“Well, they like got the same idea about her as about you. She’s not in their legends and stuff, but the ones that believe the stories about you also believe she’s another one like you. They’re doin’ the exact same thing to her. You can bet on it.”
That made him feel a little better, but not much. “So they have us both running on treadmills, pushing hard and hardly moving.”
“You’re movin’ now,” Gus pointed out.
“Yeah, I guess. But sooner or later I have to land this thing. Hell, maybe sooner than later. I haven’t exactly had a chance to check below and see if we have any usable provisions. If not, we’re all gonna get very hungry and very thirsty very fast.”
“Well, that’s a point. Is there anything I can do?”
Brazil thought a moment. “Yeah. I don’t want to try you at the wheel in this weather, not unless you have some experience with these kind of ships.”
“Canoes are my speed. Canoes and speedboats.”
“I thought so. But you know what we need and you know what you need. You could look below and give me an inventory.”
“No problem.”
“Gus? Also look for charts. I know you probably can’t read the stuff here, but you know what I mean by nautical charts. They have to have them somewhere. We’re going to have to get our bearings when we get out of this blow and then decide where we have to go.”
“Will do. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Uh—Gus?”
“Yeah, Cap?”
“One more thing. You never answered my question as to why you didn’t contact me before.”
“Well, I started to, but then I saw Terry, and I didn’t know what to do. I mean, you didn’t know her before, Cap. She was bright and educated, spoke a half dozen languages, damned brave and good at her job, and real pretty, too. But more important, she was a talker, a real extrovert. I wasn’t so sure I’d seen her lookin’ anything like she did before, considerin’ what happened to me and the colonel and all, but I didn’t figure she’d be any more changed, you know, inside, than I was. Then I see her, and she don’t notice me—it’s not invisibility, Cap, it’s just that folks don’t notice me unless I wanta get noticed. And then she’s stark naked, which is weird under most conditions but particularly weird in a climate like that one, she don’t say a word, and she’s got this weird blankness about her, even in her eyes. I mean, it didn’t take no Einstein to know that somethin’ far worse than what happened to me happened to her. Thing was, Cap, I didn’t know how or why it happened, see? I mean, for all I knew, particularly with what they was sayin’ about you, I mean, you coulda done it to her. I couldn’t do nothin’, see, until I was sure which side I wanted to be on.”
Brazil didn’t immediately look around, dealing as he was with keeping the ship righted, but finally he said, “Okay, fair enough. Let me know what you find!”
There was no response, and he looked around and saw nothing at all. For a moment he wasn’t sure he’d seen the creature at all, but then he spotted the open hatch to the main cabin below and realized that the Dahir hadn’t waited but had gone on down after their last words. Gone on down, and he hadn’t seen him!
In a way, though, it was reassuring. The girl—Terry— hadn’t seen him, either. Hadn’t in fact seen him yet. There were limits on her as there were on him, after all.
He wondered just what the trick was about something that big being so invisible to others. Gus said it didn’t work with cameras, so that meant it wasn’t some kind of blending in, no chameleonlike attribute that somehow masked even so large a creature against a background. Sounds, too, seemed to be masked somewhat, maybe totally. He’d heard the creak of the timbers in that warehouse, and that had brought a sensation of footsteps, but had he really heard them? He certainly hadn’t seen a damned thing when Gus hadn’t wanted to be seen.
He also wasn’t sure what Dahirs ate, but he certainly had sympathy for any of their menu items.
His thoughts drifted back to the girl. It was impossible to even imagine her as a worldly, vibrant mistress of technology and show business, a producer of highly visible news who’d probably been in a hundred danger spots all on her own and managed to survive and even thrive on that kind of thing. He had no reason to feel that Gus was putting him on; both he and the girl had, after all, been completely at the Dahir’s mercy over the long haul, and Gus’s own explanation of his actions rang true. But squaring the Terry that Gus had known, worked with, perhaps even loved, considering his devotion to finding her, with the eerie wordless mystic with the icy heart and strange and terrible powers who was back sitting behind the mast was next to impossible.
How much of that old Terry was still somewhere inside her? Had her essence simply walled off, or had she been reprogrammed beyond any hope of recall? Or was Terry the newswoman somehow still all there and along for the ride? Was her old personality erased or suppressed? Were her old memories gone or modified or merely filed under “old business” somewhere?
There was a real human being in there somewhere, he was sure of that. The girl who’d made love to him and fought alongside him and who had sent him signals on all those others with whom he’d come into contact was certainly no monster, and even if she had rejected or hadn’t been able to use the sophistication of Ambreza or Hakazit, she’d understood it and coped with it. A savage would have been awed, amazed, confused by high-tech life; a savage would have had to be protected from being run over at the first busy street. She was neither ignorant nor stupid. What she did and what she would not do were conscious decisions to accept or reject, not the products of either upbringing or lack of understanding.
She manipulated that sailor as coldly as if he were a puppet . . . And with a coldness he’d never felt inside her before, not really. It was almost as if . . . as if she were two creatures, both Terry the human and something else. That something else, the coldness, had the power and made the rules, but in exchange it protected her against everything from the elements to sailors with guns, and so long as she followed its rules, then it was the passenger, emerging only as needed. Its control over her was not absolute; she, Terry, had overruled it and opted for his plea for mercy for the man over the other’s computerlike direct and deadly course.
Not parasitism, then, but symbiosis of some sort. Terry had not been infected; rather, she had made a bargain and now had to live with the consequences.
If what he’d been told was true, if her news crew had been kidnapped out in the middle of the jungle by some Stone Age tribe of women, then the way Gus said he was treated made one kind of sense. But how did they treat the women they also took? From the pictures and data he’d gotten from Zone, they all looked like they’d walked in out of some cave in the distant past.
As with most primitive tribes who captured people, the prisoners were given a choice: join, assimilate, or die. All things considered, he’d have signed up if they’d have let him under those circumstances.
So they had been lost, taken captive, forced to live a Stone Age existence in a hostile jungle they didn’t quite know and thus had become dependent on the tribe for survival—and then they had been translated here.
Terry hadn’t come with the initial group, and that was a story only she could know. But she’d come before the gate had closed, alone, sneaking in past the monitors, seeing bizarre places and even more bizarre creatures. She’d followed to the Zone Gate and gone through, probably trying to catch her friends, and had wound up in Ambreza stark naked, defenseless, and scared to death. Why she went to Glathriel was another unknowable, but it was not hard to figure. Maybe she just saw some recognizable humans working for the Ambreza and followed them. It would be the natural, cautious choice of a survivor in a horrendous situation ignorant of where she was or what the hell was going on. So she’d gone in, made contact . . . and then what?
A bargain. Under the circumstances and considering what she’d just been through, who wouldn’t take such a bargain? As in the jungle, what was the alternative?
It explained everything—and nothing. A bargain with whom? Or, more properly, what! There weren’t any creatures like that on the Well World. At least no creatures designed and created here. The Well protected them from external influences, anything that would be a contaminant. It couldn’t be an external force; even if it somehow got by the Well, such a thing would have caused the system to summon him long before it got this firmly established. Whatever it was, whatever had happened to the Glathrielians that had made them what they were, was homegrown, of that he was certain.
“There’s what looks and smells like several kegs of beer, some fresh water, and those charts you wanted,” Gus’s voice suddenly said next to him.
Brazil jumped and lost the wheel again for a second. Wrestling it back, he yelled, “Now cut that out! You do that one time too often and we are going to capsize!”
“Hey, sorry! I told you I couldn’t exactly turn it on or off.”
“Well, make some noise, then! Yell at me as you’re coming up! Something! At least when we’re not in dangerous territory.”
“Hey, I’ll try, but it’s always turned on. I practically have to shout in your face for you to consciously notice me.”
And that, of course, was it. Somehow, something inside the Dahir broadcast something that could be received on some mental level by just about every other organic race. Something that made other beings simply not notice them. That was why he’d almost always been able to tell that somebody was there, following him. He could see Gus, would even give way for him, maybe with a “Beg your pardon.” So could the girl; so could everybody else.