“Okeydokey. Look, you may as well get some sleep while I’m gone. If anybody else comes in here, you’re a sittin’ duck before you can weigh anchor, turn around, and get out that narrow passage anyway, and if they take you, they’ll probably bring you by the harbor, so I’ll have a chance to spring you. Besides, no matter what else she is these days, I get the idea that Terry’s one hell of a guard dog.”
“You got that right,” Brazil agreed. “Good luck!”
“Yeah, I’ll do my best, like always,” Gus responded, and tossed the emergency case into the water, then slid overboard himself.
Nathan Brazil sighed and sat down on the makeshift bed of spare sailcloth he’d set up for himself. He was too tired, too tense, and too worried to sleep even though he knew he was exhausted.
One of the storms was growing near, and while it didn’t bother him in this sheltered area and was still distant in any event, the lightning lit up the sky and played against the rock walls, revealing the shelter in intermittent bursts of reflected light.
It was an eerie landscape, as all volcanic areas tended to be, with no discernible vegetation. The outer rock wall, the eroded remnants of some great eruption, was at least ten meters high, almost sheer on this side but terminating in a series of jagged spires almost like the teeth of some gigantic beast.
He was actually comforted by the wall. It was taller than the mainmast, and thus it meant that he was virtually invisible to any ship passing via the channel outside as well as extremely well protected against any violent blow.
The rest of the area was much like a bowl, perhaps a hundred meters across, ending in sheer dark brown or black rock cliffs that seemed to go up forever. Here and there all along the sheer rock walls, though, were cracks and holes from which spewed steam and other gases, showing that this was still a very active place.
When it was dark between the lightning flashes, only the sky straight overhead showed, revealing the whole upper part of the fog- and mist-shrouded mountain. It helped reflect the lightning better, but it gave the distinct impression that one was in a room with a roof on it.
He felt a little better about the trip now that he had Gus, even if he couldn’t see him half the time. At least, finally, there was somebody to talk to! Somebody who could speak with a frame of reference comfortable for both of them.
But, too, it was somebody else, somebody extra on the team, and in other ways he felt the Dahir a burden despite all that he was doing tonight. Maybe it was the girl, he thought. From knowing very little about her, he now knew quite a bit, perhaps more than she would have told him had she been able to do so. As much as he’d wanted, needed to know all that, he wasn’t at all sure he liked knowing it. It was nothing about her; all the information Gus had provided had shown her to be more of a strong, gutsy woman than he’d have thought. It was rather that she was becoming, well, distinct in his mind. Now that he knew about her past, she seemed even more a tragic figure, a real person, not a cipher, and in a crazy way ciphers were often more comfortable to live with.
He wondered if he wasn’t also a little jealous of Gus. That was funny in a way—having a two-and-a-half-meter-long snakelike creature as a rival. But Gus had earned her respect and devotion, as she had earned his. Even if they weren’t lovers, there was definitely a kind of relationship there that he could not have even now and never could have, or dared have, with anyone else. That was what he envied.
And suddenly she was with him, kneeling down, then lying beside him, stroking him gently, as if she knew and understood what he was feeling.
Maybe she did, at least on that empathic level. Maybe more. That much he wished he knew.
Gently, he returned her affection and then embraced her and held her to him, as if trying to capture this one brief moment—just the two of them, with no other problems and no other questions, reaching together for the one thing which he wanted most and which had always been denied him because life was so short for everybody else, everybody but him.
The emotions then were real, not induced, not manufactured or manipulated, and not just on his part but on hers as well. The energy field inside her grew bright and enveloped them both, probing deep inside him and through every part of his being. He did not resist.
And when it hit his core, his soul, his true self, a center so strange, so alien that there were no terms of reference for it anywhere, it recoiled, unable to deal with it, powerless to go that last bit and totally absorb him.
Finally Nathan Brazil slept, a deep, intensely pleasurable sleep, the kind of sleep he needed most and rarely if ever could afford.
Gekir
the changes in julian were both subtle and dramatic, but Lori, whose high fever had been the precipitator of those changes, wasn’t at all certain he liked it. One thing was clear: while she was as smart and capable as she ever had been, Julian seemed to have lost much of her past life, even though she knew that it had existed. It would probably take about ten seconds for an Earth psychiatrist to come up with a term to cover it, but to Lori it just didn’t seem normal. Not for Julian, anyway. It was as if something was missing from her, some fire or intellect that wasn’t really noticed and certainly not appreciated until it was no longer there.
Lori was feeling a great deal better. The inflammation in the wrist was down, although for a while it meant that the damned thing hurt more as it was no longer quite so rigidly bound, but his leg seemed completely normal. He tested it out, even ran on it for a short distance, and aside from a little stiffness it was fine. At least one thing was going his way, he decided.
Julian was in far worse shape. She was wan, worn out, and badly dehydrated. They put her, only half-awake, on Tony’s back, tied her with the strap that had held Lori, packed up the rest of the camp, and started off toward the thick grove of tall trees about one and a half kilometers away.
There was no sign of the flying monster that had carried off the young “jackalope,” as Lori had dubbed them, after a whimsical creature of the American Southwest. But it might well have a nest or den in the grove or be still feeding there, so Mavra broke out the crossbows, handing one to Tony and keeping one for herself. Anne Marie quickly but expertly assembled an obviously handmade, customized bow of great size and exotic design and removed a quiver of professionally manufactured but oversized steel-tipped arrows.
“Archery was one of the few varieties of sport a weak little woman could manage just for fun from a wheelchair,” she explained, “and of course the classical favorite of centaurs from time immemorial. It is, too, even though the authorities have guns for serious sorts of things. This is the hunter’s weapon of choice, though, even in Dillia. I’m afraid I’m still not very good at it, though. I have the eye and hold just fine, but I just can’t get used to having this much strength.”
Tony examined the crossbow. “Rather odd design, although I’m no expert on these things.”
“You aim it just like a rifle,” Mavra told him. “Align the rear notch with the front sight.”
“No, no. The use is obvious. I meant this chamber in the rear behind the bolt. I’d almost swear it was for bullets.”
Mavra chuckled. “Not bullets. Small compressed-gas canisters. When you pull the trigger, it works in the normal way, but if you have one of these little things in there, it gives a tremendous extra shove to the bolt, and a bit of a twist, at virtually no cost in weight or balance. Use it normally for defense; use the canister if you want to be sure you kill whatever you’re firing at. It’ll drill a hole through a tree thicker than your middle.”
“Not very sporting.”
“No, but it’s damned effective even against somebody who thinks crossbows are no real threat.”
Tony looked down at her. “I see that you are inserting one, but I have none.”
“Double insurance. You make the first shot. If need be, I’ll make the last one.”
“Fair enough,” the centauress agreed. “Still, it is almost disappointing somehow that even the crossbow should be turned into something so devastating.”
Anne Marie nodded. “Doesn’t seem sporting somehow,” she agreed.
“When it’s a sport, you’re playing a game,” Mavra responded. “On this sort of expedition I don’t play games.” She turned to Lori. “Can you scan that grove in the infrared?”
He nodded. “I’ve been doing it. Lots of little stuff, nothing major. It looks normal to me. I smell water, though. Possibly a big watering hole. If it is, that means we can expect most anything and everything around it.”
Mavra nodded back. “I know. I haven’t lost three hundred years of knowledge and experience in wild terrains,” she reminded him.
“Yeah.” The fact was, however, that the woman beside him was so different in so many ways from even the image of the savage jungle goddess of the Amazon that he had to remind himself that it was the same person. The conversation and the sophistication were large differences, of course, but it was also other factors not so easily nailed down. She had been so dominating, so commanding back on Earth, she’d seemed far larger than her size; now she was such a very tiny creature, he had to crane his neck just to see her. Even her form no longer seemed normal and familiar somehow but rather, well, alien. More alien than the Dillians, whose equine parts were more like the Erdomese and whose rears seemed, well, sexy.
Sexier than their torsos, in fact.
He began to wonder if what had changed in Julian was changing in him, too. Wouldn’t that please the priests! But he had no desire to forget his former life and hoped that he could remember some of the lessons from it, as distant as they now seemed to him. Still, it was Julian who looked normal and pretty and sexy to him, as did his own reflection. Maybe it was crazy, but he realized that somehow, at some point, his own definition of “human” had flipped. He and Julian were “human”; the twins were, well, not human but kind of distant relatives. Mavra was not human. She was something else.
The grove was large and not at all like an Erdomese oasis, no matter what its geologic and ecological similarities. The foliage was far denser than it had looked from afar and heavy with life. There were hordes of brightly colored and cleverly camouflaged insects and insectlike creatures here, more, it seemed, than in the Itun jungle. Small animals were in the trees as well, some screeching or chattering at them and others just staring, often with huge eyes. There were things like birds, too, in that they had wings and flew, but they were more reptilian than avian, with often brightly colored but leathery skin and beaklike snouts. Even the small, pretty ones looked mean.
The group intersected a wide, well-worn trail that came in from the south, one that was adequate not just for the creatures they’d seen on the plains but for the two Dillians to walk side by side if they wanted to.
“Someone cut this wider,” Tony noted, pointing a long finger at a lopped-off tree branch and to other obviously cut limbs and bushes elsewhere.
“Yeah, but why this wide?” Lori wondered. “I’ve got too many weird scents here to decide what might be odd, but I’ve sure not seen anything this big so far.”
“Well, whatever it is, it’s very large indeed,” Anne Marie noted, gesturing toward the ground. “Those are not the droppings of a chipmunk, dog, horse, or anything else so tiny.”
“Holy shit!” Mavra exclaimed, not realizing she’d made something of a joke. “I haven’t seen turds that size since . . .”
Since where?
Lori stared at the droppings. “Since perhaps some sort of zoo or preserve? Or maybe a circus? Those look like elephant turds to me.”
Mavra nodded. “That’s it! But not a zoo or preserve or a circus, no. I saw them with soldiers on top of them in both military parades and in fierce battles.”
“They’re not that fresh—thank goodness,” Anne Marie commented.
“And the cuttings aren’t recent. Maybe a week or so old, maybe more,” Tony added.
Lori looked over and down at Mavra. “Could the locals here be elephantlike? I mean, like Dillians are horselike and so on?”
“There are a couple that I know of who might qualify in that area,” Mavra replied, “but none who’d mess up their own trail like that. You have to remember that we’re talking intelligent races here. Out in the wild, thinking beings crap off their roads, not all over them. On the other hand, intelligent races ride elephants and use them as work animals as well. And if you ride in on something like that, there’s nothing in this grove that’s gonna argue with you, is there?”
“We’re not atop elephants,” Tony reminded them. “And there is the watering hole. The watering hole and something very much more.”
It was indeed. The “hole” was a large pool or basin perhaps fifty meters across. It seemed natural, and the continuous rippling on the surface suggested that it was fed by an underground stream. Someone, however, had taken the natural pool and carved and shaped it until it was an egg-shaped oval with a two-meter-thick lip of mortared stones around it on all but its back side. That ended in a curved wall, with stairs of stone that went up on both sides to a flat stone platform above the pool. In back of it was a cone-shaped structure that seemed twisted, creating a spiral to its point.
The building, stairs, wall, and pool itself were partly overgrown with vines and creepers. A number of creatures from both the jungle grove and the vast plains were moving about the whole area. Still, it didn’t seem like a ruin but rather like a place that was only seldom used but was still carefully kept intact.
“Temple?” Tony guessed.
“Maybe. Who knows?” Mavra replied. “Considering that there’s something that looks a lot like a boa constrictor covered with peacock feathers and with a mouth showing more teeth than a shark snoozing on that platform, though, I don’t think I’m curious enough to find out.”
“I thought you were immortal,” Lori noted a bit sarcastically.
“I wouldn’t die, but I’d hate to waste months growing a new pair of legs.”
The current rulers of the pool were two dozen small creatures whose appearance was unsettling. The largest male was only a meter high, and they all looked to be a sort of tailless ape, with thinly spread, soft, downlike hair covering their bodies except the chests, rear ends, and parts of the faces. They walked stooped over but were definitely bipeds, and for all their smallness and crudeness they looked very, very much like humans, even to the long hair on the heads. But there was just enough of the ape in their features to make them seem slightly more of an anthropological speculator’s exhibit than small humans.
When the apes spotted the travelers, they didn’t immediately run. Instead, the females let out loud, humanlike screams that panicked all the flying things and many of the smaller land creatures as well; the males stared at them, bared their teeth, and growled menacingly.
“Good heavens! They’re Lucy’s cousins!” Anne Marie exclaimed.
“Lucy?” Mavra asked.
“Doctor Leakey’s fossils from Kenya. The spitting image! Claimed they were some sort of ancestor of Earth humans or some such rot.”
Lori, in spite of his feelings of alienation from the race of his birth, nonetheless had that primal feeling inside and didn’t much like it. “My lord! You don’t suppose . . . ?”
“Prototypes or more idea stealing by the makers,” Mavra reassured him, although she didn’t like how familiar they looked, either. “Odd, though. The mammals we’ve seen are all six-limbed. They’re bipeds. They don’t seem to fit in here at all.”
“Well, I don’t care about mysteries, but some of those creatures best left sleeping are awake now. Whatever these tilings are, they don’t want to move away for us.”
“Oh, pooh!” Anne Marie said, and with barely a glance, both she and Tony reared up on hind legs, then kicked off and charged right toward the little apelike creatures.
They could see the panic in the creatures’ eyes. A couple of the males gave hysterical gasps, then they all ran back into the jungle and vanished as if they’d never been there.
The centaurs pulled up, turned, and looked back at the other three.
“Poor little things!” Anne Marie commented. “I do hope we didn’t scare them all that badly.” There was a trace of a smile on her lips, though, and she added, “That was rather fun, though, I do admit.”
They moved in, Lori and Mavra well aware that the feathered snake with the hundreds of teeth was now awake and looking at them from the top of the balcony platform, although it showed no intention of moving from its spot.
Even Julian was awake, looking weak and pale. Tony had forgotten that she was strapped down on her back when they’d reared and charged. Now the centauress’s look changed from playful triumph to embarrassment, and Anne Marie quickly rushed over and untied the Erdomese.
“Oh, my dear! We’re so sorry! Are you all right?” Anne Marie asked in English.
Julian stared back blankly, and Lori ran over to her. “Are you all right? Julian! Can you hear me?”
“Yes, my husband,” she answered rather weakly and a bit uncertainly. “I—I think so. But I am so thirsty and weak . . .”
She seemed as good as she’d been, anyway. “Come, we’ll get you down. When you didn’t answer Anne Marie, I got very worried.”
“I am gladdened that you were concerned, but I did not answer because I did not understand the speech.”
Tony frowned and looked up at Anne Marie. “You did ask in English, didn’t you? With the translator it’s hard to tell.”
“Oh, of course. I’d never expect any of you to speak Dillian.”
Lori steadied Julian and asked. “Do you understand her now?”
Julian looked blank. “I know nothing but Erdoma. Why should I understand the speech of an alien?”
Mavra looked up at Lori. “You better get her a fill-up. I think you bled her dry last night.”
The water in the pool seemed remarkably clear and appeared safe. Mavra risked a left little finger and decided that it felt just like lukewarm water. Still, she got out a small test tube device from the pack, added some powder, then stooped and carefully let the tube fill with water. After she brought it up and looked at it, all the powder stayed on the bottom and the water remained clear.
“Unless I miss my guess, it’s plain fresh water,” she told them. “Actually, it’s cleaner than it should be, all things considered. I don’t think anybody should get in it, but we’ll fill the canteens and Julian can drink all she wants.”
“Fair enough,” replied Lori, still concerned about Julian’s dazed mental state. They began filling canteens and handing them to the Erdomese woman, who drank them down as if she’d been in the desert for months without a drop. The amount of water she finally consumed, particularly considering her size, was nothing short of astonishing. Each canteen held a little over a liter, and she easily and quickly downed a dozen or more canteens full of water before pausing, and she wasn’t through. Even with the Dillians guarding, Mavra kept checking the surroundings for anything dangerous and soon lost count of just how much water Julian finally took in.
When she was finally, truly done, she looked quite different. The color was slowly coming back into her, and as the sacs in front of and just below her rib cage filled, they actually stretched the skin, pushing out the breasts and making them appear inflated and giving her the appearance of being slightly overweight. She was, too, Mavra thought. At the very least, she’d taken in fifteen to twenty liters of water, enough to add quite a bit of weight. Idly, the lone Earth human wondered if the Erdomese would slosh when she walked.
“I am much better, husband. Now you, too, should drink, for what you drew from me was not used in ordinary ways and the fever must have drained you.”
Lori had passed a lot of particularly smelly and discolored urine already, but he knew what she meant. While by no means in the kind of shape Julian had been, he did feel a real thirst. On the other hand, he couldn’t down more than five canteens full, and that was about as much as he’d ever taken in or needed.
While the others took turns, Julian asked him to sit so that she could clean off some of the muck still on him from falling in the muddy ditch when jumping from the train days earlier. Using her hands opened as fully as they could get, she began methodically rubbing and then brushing away the dried mud as if it were something she did all the time.
Since she seemed so much better, Lori asked her, “Julian, can you understand any of what the Dillians say? Have you remembered English?”
“I cannot understand their speech, my husband, if that is what you mean. I know only Erdoma. I do not know what the last word you spoke means, so I cannot answer that.”
He lay down so she could work on his side and front, and this allowed him to see her face. “Have you lost all memory of the past?” This is crazy, he thought. If anything, it’s me who should be having memory problems after a fever like that.
She shook her head. “I remember only that I was possessed of an evil spirit and that now that spirit has fled with your sickness. It would please me if you would give me another name, one of your choosing.”
“But I like your name. I’m used to it.”
“It is the name of the spirit, not me. It makes me feel bad, and I cannot even pronounce it as you do. Please, I beg you to use the name chosen at our wedding or any other that pleases you.”
He didn’t like this change one bit. Not any of it. Even if, damn it, it was the fantasy he’d had since they’d left Aqomb. Now that he had it, he didn’t like it at all. She was too much like she’d been when they’d both been under the influence of that hypnotic drug. Too much like, well, all the other young Erdomese women. Still, it wasn’t something he could do much about right now.