In a moment they were free of it. He grabbed the wheel, straightened it out, and let momentum take him several meters beyond the splash zone of the falls. He locked the wheel and moved forward to drop the anchor. He would remain in the center of the cove if he could this time.
He did an immediate visual check to see how badly they’d been flooded. The only pumps below were hand pumps, and they weren’t the sort one handled one at a time but only in pairs.
It didn’t seem all that bad, so he went forward to the cabin and went below. There was maybe 150 millimeters of water below, but it didn’t look bad and certainly not enough to use pumps on. It had been a close thing, though; a few minutes more under that stream and there would have been a couple of meters in there, and that would have made it very difficult indeed.
Relieved, he went back topside, then aft to the wheel. He sank down on the deck and gasped for air, shaking himself as the tension inside him was released. It was several minutes before he recovered enough to think about all that had just happened.
My God! Did she really draw me out of my body and into hers? How was that possible?
He knew somehow that it indeed had happened, though, and it was another example of power that scared him. She had the power, with no training and no background, to do at least as much as if not more than the greatest of those Oriental mystics he’d told Gus about. If all Glathrielians had this kind of power . . .
Worse, she’d made a decision and split hairs like a theologian. Rather than compromise and operate that winch, she’d worked nothing short of a miracle so that he, not she, could use her body to raise that anchor for him.
And then, having gotten him to go along with her idea before he’d had a chance to think it out, she’d used some of that same power to push a ship that had to weigh more than a stegosaurus back away from the falls and all the way to the center of the channel. The total consequence of what she’d done was that she now felt a little dizzy and lightheaded.
Where did that energy come from? How was it stored? It wasn’t from the Well, or anything to do with the Well, that was for sure. Somehow it came from inside her and was stored . . . as body fat? It seemed ridiculous, but it was the only explanation that made sense.
It sure beat the hell out of any diet plan he could think of, and it made diets anathema for all that.
She was paying a price, perhaps for using two such blasts so close together, possibly because they hadn’t eaten very much in several days; she lay down on the wet deck forward and just passed out.
This is really weird, he thought once more. For the first time I almost think I have a crack at making it before Mavra. I’ve never had this kind of power on my side before, not until I was inside.
But she controlled the power, he didn’t.
Or did she?
He lay down, suddenly struck by an idea. If he was now connected to her so tightly, this energy must be the bond. There had to be some sort of energy field, automatically emanating from her to him, or the bond would be broken at times like this. Surely such abilities, in many ways like what the Gedemondans had been after, at least the last time he’d been there, had to be learned, suffered for, studied, and experimented with for countless years, perhaps countless generations, depriving those who sought such power of almost everything that might provide as the slightest distraction.
At least they hadn’t also taken on celibacy, although that would hardly be practical in a grand experiment involving an entire population over thousands of generations.
Maybe that was where the lamas had gone wrong back in the Himalayas. They had brought themselves to the limits of individual higher mental attainments, but the emphasis had still always been on individual attainment, and although their belief in reincarnation gave them ample time in their own minds, in reality death had cut them off short. Even without that limitation Brazil had eventually abandoned that life when he’d suddenly realized that the attainment of the absolute, the joining with the That Which Is Behind All That, was oblivion. It was too much like being at the end of the line with the Markovians but not having had any fun getting there. It was, however, a god-awful amount of work, whether it was that traditional system of Earth’s or the Glathrielian grand project.
The fact that the Glathrielians had given her the end results of this work, much as one would stick a bunch of programs on a computer mass storage device for easy access, didn’t really matter. Everything he’d seen of Glathrielians indicated a total rejection of the physical ways of the world. The most they did was pick some fruit off trees. Even when doing that, he’d observed how their actions were almost hivelike, almost as if they were a collective organism even though on the surface they seemed like individuals. They condescended to the body only in the sense of its need to eat, drink, sleep, and reproduce.
They had given Terry those powers and imposed that overculture as a kind of control program, but she’d not been born into it or brought up with it. It wasn’t a natural state to her. Like him or Gus, she had more in common in her background with the Ambrezans than with the Gedemondan mystics, but she had no way of really understanding it. She had been surprised to get any sort of a linkage with him after being together so long. That was the group mind part, the impulse to co-opt those of one’s own kind into the greater consciousness. But she was still too much the individual inside, and when she’d absolutely had to, she had compromised the Glathrielian programming in a way that the group mind part of the Gedemondan whole would never have even considered.
Faced with Terry’s very appearance, they had done the one thing with her that such a community, insular as it was, wasn’t all that used to doing.
They had improvised.
He thought he had them now, although not by any means all their powers and strengths. He doubted that she knew what she could do, except it was inside her, like individual programs on disks, waiting to be accessed if demanded by circumstance. A Glathrielian would know. A true Glathrielian child would know, would probably have fun switching bodies and moving stones and doing who knew what else. They had the experience of the group mind and were raised and trained to know. But they’d had Terry for only the shortest time. Days or weeks, perhaps.
A television professional would think of things first in visual terms. They must have seized on that as something simpatico with their own way of thinking. Whole chunks that made a picture, an object rather than a linear assemblage of cross-referenced information. The holographic mind with no intermediate steps, no aids, not even a linear language to slow down the process. Need? Bang! Entire solution. Just like that.
He could see them now, considering him before they had her. He’d been living very close to them for a while. They sensed his difference, sensed, perhaps, his connection to the Well. They couldn’t tap or access that connection, but they understood it on their level, and they understood the potential. But what to do? Problem, even opportunity, but no solution.
Then, suddenly, Terry walks in. She’s in shock, she’s scared, and she’s Earth-human, or close enough to Glathrielian that they recognize her as one of their own. Possibly their communal field was strong enough and she was still shocked enough from her arrival that she sensed and was perhaps even guided by the permeating group mind. They had taken her in, and they had made her one of them, or so it seemed. Compromise was necessary. In them, everything was to a purpose; in her, it had to run on automatic.
Then they sent her back with an absolute command to remain with him at all costs. Sooner or later he might let his guard down. When it happened, she was to copy everything from her mind to his. Make him Glathrielian. Then, when he entered the Well, he would be one of them. The whole of Glathriel could then be connected to the Well itself.
That was how they differed from the Gedemondans. The Gedemondans were seeking a third way, as the founding race had intended, a new way to attain power and an even greater godhood on their own.
The Glathrielians wanted to take over the damned controls!
Well, they couldn’t do it, but how would they know that? It was certainly worth a shot. Worth risking one strange girl.
So last night she had made the link, made the attempt, automatically. Not even the whole of Glathriel could do it even with his cooperation, but she’d made the attempt. She’d transferred the programs and linked the two of them so that the energy that was her only tool was shared. His Earth-human body and physical brain and nervous system were still human enough for that. What they could not do, could never do, was get down to the core of his being, his “soul” for want of any better concept, and reprogram at that level. They could control every aspect of his body but not his core ego.
But the programs were still there. Perhaps not in his mind, because of their ultimate failure, but accessible from hers over the energy linkage. That linkage had to be physiological to some degree; she’d tapped into something inside him, perhaps inside all Earth-human brains, and activated it. Whether necessary for their plans or not, he would have to accept and accommodate the control program requirements as much as possible, but some of it could be bypassed either by force of will, as when she’d compromised for expediency, or because it was designed to filter her input/output, not his. He might not be able to run the whole suite of programs concurrently because of this, but maybe, just maybe, because they’d been designed to be run by someone who didn’t have the owner’s manual, he might run them one at a time.
He was wide-awake, even a little excited, but he remembered his own long lessons in mental discipline from long ago and relaxed, closing his eyes, clearing his mind, breathing deeply, rhythmically, letting his consciousness roam, but not without a sense of purpose. He felt her, felt everything about her, matched her own deep breathing, thought only of the secondhand but very real existence of her own body, not his own.
This time it was very gentle, very slow. There was no rushing force, no fast-forward pull, not even disorientation. He moved toward her, into her and gently displaced her, sending her, still in a deep, deep sleep, back along the path and inserting himself fully into her body.
He opened his eyes—her eyes, knowing that his own body still reclined aft, now sound asleep. Carefully he sat up, then discovered that he was partly sitting on long hair and pulled it free.
He felt the body’s fatigue, and there were a few aches and pains where muscles and joints pleaded for more rest, but he wasn’t going to do this for very long. He got up on her feet, feeling a bit dizzy, even a little sick, but nothing he couldn’t manage. A smile played across her lips.
The old adage holds true again, as always, he thought with some glee. Never try to con a con num. He’ll pick your pockets while letting you believe you’re stealing him blind
He began to walk forward, keeping one hand on something to steady her body, and considered that it wasn’t quite as similar as he’d imagined. The center of gravity was different and took a little getting used to; he was more aware of the large breasts and equally aware of the lack of male gen-italia than he’d considered. Still, it was basically the same: two legs, two arms, eyes, and ears. Things did look a bit different, and he wondered for a moment if that was something new he was tapping. After all, he was also using her brain, even if his memories and personality were being scrolled off his own sleeping form. Then he realized that it was just that there were subtle shifts in the colors. So it was true—for purely physical reasons no two people probably saw colors exactly the same. But they weren’t all that different—green still looked green, red looked red. They were just slightly different, often in brightness or degree, although he thought he saw more gradations of each color than he’d been aware of before. There also seemed to be a vastly wider array of smells, both good and bad, indicating that the biochemists had been right in saying that women really could smell a greater variety of scents than men. That explained why there were so many varieties of perfume even though most men, himself included, could barely tell the difference.
He tried to speak. “Hello, I am not Terry,” he croaked. Her voice was raspy and it was almost painful to awaken those throat muscles so long silent, but it sounded like a decent voice, a nice voice, although he knew it would sound different to her, or to him as her, than it would to him as himself.
This was already more than enough for now, but he couldn’t resist making his way slowly and carefully aft, then climbing the stairs and looking down at his own sleeping body.
Good lord! I really am an ugly SOB, he thought. As many times as he’d seen himself in a mirror, it was different to look upon his body through another’s eyes.
Still, he’d proved his point and gotten something of a charge out of it at that. Hell, he vaguely remembered being an animal once, for some reason, the details of which totally escaped him. But he’d never been a woman.
In the distance he heard the sound of a steam whistle. Something was leaving the harbor, something with power, and that meant the naval corvette unless somebody new had shown up. Instantly he felt a pang of fear at the thought that they might have caught Gus and were now going hunting.
He had to get back in his own body and quickly. Not only would this be embarrassing, her body was too worn out to be of any real use in a fight right now, even if he could get used to it fast enough to do the quick, automatic moves that might be required.
He suddenly panicked at the thought that he might well be stuck in her body; he had not, after all, quite done it her way even if he’d used her inner knowledge and power to do it. And with thoughts suddenly coming to him about the possible implications of that steam whistle, how could he clear his mind enough to do it, anyway?
He had to, he decided. He just had to. There was no other choice.
Carefully, he lay down alongside his body, stretched out, and closed his eyes, resisting the body’s impulse to lapse back into deep slumber. Not yet, he thought, and tried to recreate the conditions he’d established when he had started the stunt, putting all sounds, all worries, out of the way, concentrating only on doing the one thing.
Although he’d done it more gently, there still was a tiny bit of that tension there, and he was able to use it. He naturally belonged over there, and she naturally belonged here. There was a better fit, for want of a more appropriate term, when each was in the body he or she had been born to. It wasn’t like what the Well did, not a bit.
A hand slid over a little and touched his, and he felt himself flow back into his body and her back into her own without any real effort or direction.
He opened his eyes, sat up, and shook his head as if to clear it, then looked down and actually felt around himself just to make sure he was in the form he wanted to be in.
He could hear the sound of engines now, coming closer, coming their way. Thank God they didn’t let go that whistle when I was trying to get back inside, he thought, quickly running through his options.
There wasn’t any real wind; the heat and the high rock walls had created a nearly dead calm inside the cove. His mind raced through all possible combinations of sail, anything that might get him moving if he had to, but he finally realized that it wouldn’t matter if he had an atomic engine.
If that cutter came in the passage, its cannon and small arms would be on him no matter what he tried, and it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
There was only one possible way to escape, and he didn’t like it a bit. They’d have to go over the side opposite where the cutter would come in and swim for it to the rock formations beyond. Most of the cliff was sheer, but there was a small break in the outer rocks that might provide a way out through an eroded, irregular crack in the wall. If they could make it through there, they might be able to get up a bit and inland enough so that the cutter wouldn’t be able to find them.
They’d be stuck on a speck of volcanic rock with the navy searching for them, but it would be a chance. At least, with the protection he now had from her energy shell, it wouldn’t be immediately life-threatening and would give him a chance to figure out something.
The cutter was coming very close now, very close. It would be at the mouth of the narrow passage in perhaps a minute or two.
Terry was suddenly up, and he felt her momentary confusion at waking up somewhere far removed from where she’d thought she’d gone to sleep, but she dismissed it immediately. She had slept through all his clever tricks, but she’d come instantly awake when she’d felt his sense of peril.
Using sign language, he pointed in the direction of the passage, then at the water, and made swimming motions, pointing to the far end of the cove where the crack was. He had no idea if that crack was big enough for either of them, having only noted it in passing, but it was better than nothing.
She nodded, and he felt her draw on some reserve of strength and become suddenly energized in the physical sense, tense and ready to jump into the water.
The engine sounds echoed down the passage and into the cove itself; Brazil was certain that the ship would be coming down the passage, was perhaps coming down even now, and that they should wait no longer.
Still, something stopped him. Something subtle, a very slight diminution of the sound, perhaps, that rapidly grew more noticeable. He looked up over the jagged rock wall and saw a plume of white smoke proceed in an orderly fashion down the misshapen spires at the top.
The damned thing wasn’t coming in! It had passed them by!
He laughed out loud in relief, grabbed Terry, and kissed her. She was somewhat startled by the action but felt his joy and relief and knew what it meant.
For a moment at least they were safe once again, and, he reflected, it was the perfect end to the business he’d been playing at. Being able to tap all that power, to do all these new things, hadn’t changed the fact that he was a fugitive hiding out from the closest thing to a government this world had, stuck inside a bunch of barren and smoky rocks on a fly speck of an island in the middle of an indifferent ocean.
He signed to the girl to go back to sleep. She needed the rest almost as much as they both needed food. At least he was no longer overanxious to get under way; he wanted the navy to be well on its way to wherever it was going and well over the horizon before he ventured out. But more than ever he was determined to leave and to weather whatever the nights in this hotbox hex might bring.
There was no more game playing. While Terry slept, he pored over the charts, seeking some sort of alternative source for food. There were other islands, certainly; this was the start of a crescent-shaped chain of island volcanoes, many quite a bit larger above the surface than this little dot. The question was what, if anything, the Well would allow to take root in the rich soil. Whatever it would be would have to be consistent with the fixed ecology of the hex and not injurious to it or vegetation that would be expected to evolve on the actual planet this place represented.
He examined the topographic information, sparse as it was, on the various charts and guessed by knowing something of volcanic islands and checking elevations that one larger island about forty-five kilometers northwest was the most likely. It was kind of peanut-shaped, two volcanoes that had risen large and whose flows had merged into each other at the center, creating a single unit that appeared to be a lowland plain. He wondered for a moment why the service company hadn’t put an anchorage there, but a reference to the island on the chart legend showed that flows were irregular, were not far below the surface all along both sides, and tapered off at an extremely shallow slope for a fair distance. There simply was no decent sheltered harbor available, and the only anchorage spots were marked at four or five hundred meters out even for a ship with this draft. From that distance one would be expected to come ashore in a small boat or raft. It was marked emergency provisions only, and the only indication that there was anything there was the note of the locations along both coasts of the flat region—the sort of place one made for if one was shipwrecked or at least too damaged to get anywhere else. There were no habitation markers, but its position and the stations indicated that it would probably be checked on a regular basis by the company, the navy, or both.
It also would take them even closer to the Mowry border instead of toward the northern coast, but without food it would be touch and go.
Unless Gus came back, and with enough to eat, they had no choice but to try it.
The next problem was how the hell to get out of this cul-de-sac. There was a very slight gravitational tide, but without a clock or a means of recording it he couldn’t even use that, meager as it was, nor did he know if it would be enough. He looked up at the rock cliff and the forbidding terrain beyond. He had used a slight wind to get in, essentially a land breeze or one created by the nearby storms. It would be enough to get out if it was an every-evening thing. He’d just have to wait and see. He couldn’t count on the girl to move the ship again, and they sure as hell couldn’t push or pull it.
If there was a breeze, anything at all he could use, he’d have to take it, whether Gus was back or not. He realized that now. Whether it came in two minutes or ten hours, that was the way it was.
For the time being there was nothing to do but lie down, stretch out, and rest. After a while he looked over at the girl and studied her features. For all the extra weight, whose purpose he now knew, she had a good body and a very pretty face. It was hard to imagine her as a hard-driving career newswoman.
That was the problem, of course, and he knew it. He didn’t really want her to be any different—he wanted what they had now on the gut level to continue on and on. If he got to the Well before Mavra, or even if Mavra got there first but left his own connection intact, he would have to undo much of what had been done to her. Her future had to be her own choice, not his. He owed her that much.
But if she were restored, even with the memory of all this, what would that other woman, Terry, whom he’d never known, think of him? And what sort of reaction might she have seeing him not this way but as something of a monster?
As usual, he was racing to the inevitable ending of a situation that had filled him, for all that, with a sense of participation, care, even . . . love. He was more happy and content with her than he’d been or felt in his long memory, and the only thing he and fate as personified by the authorities and the Well could do was shove him toward ending it.
He wanted the situation, and her, to remain as it was now. The only woman around with no interest in a wardrobe, jewels, makeup, or perfumes and one who never nagged or complained about anything—the perfect mate, he thought sardonically, using his usual defensive humor to mask his inner pain.
Maybe he was just being a sucker again, he thought, unable to dispel his dark mood. He didn’t want to get to the Well, which represented only a return to that endless existence he so hated. Why not just find one of these tropical islands with abundant food and water to support two people, sink the damned ship, and retire, just the two of them? Let Mavra fix whatever was broken and go back through. If she disconnected him, then he’d just grow old with Terry and finally die—and find the peace in that he’d never known.