He was angry at them, but clearly they hadn’t found anybody, either, or they wouldn’t be poking around like that. In any event, with this black volcanic sand not taking much in the way of footprints or other signs, they had the same sort of problem he did and had to send a few of the crew over in small rowboats to look around and check for any signs of anything.
It was a pretty clear way out. If they continued searching and found them, he’d be there to help them out. If they failed, at least they’d head for some place to resupply, and that was the kind of place that might well have decent Dahir eating and he could figure out what to do next.
Besides, the idea of sitting right on the deck of a police launch and having nobody notice him was irresistible.
He worked his way up the island just beyond the beach, then out across some fresh lava rock that extended right down almost to the water, and slid in, swimming to the launch before the men were back. He waited there until the shore party did return so that they’d discount any extra weight or water when he came aboard on the same side.
They went from island to island, beach to beach, looking for any signs of wreckage or of anyone coming ashore, but found nothing. One time they did in fact come right around to a daylight version of what Gus thought he’d seen at night, only there wasn’t any lava visible. It was only when he realized that the stuff was in fact coming down and dumping into the ocean and that this was what was causing the massive steam eruption over to one side that he understood his mistake. The lava hadn’t been out in the open but had formed lava tubes, the rock hitting the air getting solid and forming a kind of roof for the rest. At night it looked like red-hot streams of the stuff, but by day it was a lot less obvious.
And that presented a real problem. If they had gotten on the beach and were on that island, what help would he be? No food, and instead of two of them being stuck, all three of them would be stuck. If it was the same as the island he’d been on, and he had no reason to think it wasn’t, they could eat some of the fruit even if he could not, and there’d been water on the other island, which was much smaller, so there was likely to be water here. The way he’d seen Terry’s powers in action, too, he knew they could hold out there a damned long time.
He would do more good to try to find the location somewhere and then come back for them when he could. It wasn’t what his heart told him to do, but him dead and them alive and stranded didn’t equal all three alive in any reasonable book. He just wished he’d realized his mistake on the volcano, when there had been time to get ashore, look by himself, and still catch the boat.
That night, after the last methodical search, near dusk, the launch gave up and headed out toward open sea. Gus just relaxed and snoozed on the bow and hoped that they were headed some place useful.
Within a few hours they were approaching land, and from the darkness Gus saw that wherever it was was definitely more civilized than he’d like. It looked like the coastline of Oregon or northern California, densely populated and brightly and artificially lit.
After they had slipped into an official naval dock facility and tied up, he waited until all but the watch and maintenance personnel were off and then just walked ashore.
Beyond the buildings, piers, and guards, though, was a kind of lunatic’s seaside resort, at least to his mind. All the houses, hell, all the buildings, big and small, seemed like they’d been poured by a five-year-old out of some play-dough set. They looked, well, kind of weird, not at all symmetrical or standard but solid, colorful, and well built out of some synthetic material.
And by bright streetlights he found himself in what he thought of as the Land of the Ninja Turtles.
Well, not exactly, but they did sort of remind him of the cartoon characters. No shells, though, and no Ninja gear. And some of them had beards, of all things, and some of them wore what looked like Scotch plaid kilts, but most of them wore ugly, serviceable form-fitting plastic-type clothing.
There were big bipedal turtles and little ones and in-between ones, and except for the occasional oddball in kilts or other nonstandard clothing and the few with little goatees, they all looked just exactly alike to him.
Well, they seemed warm-blooded by their actions, in spite of looking like reptiles, and that made them somewhat akin to him, however different they really were. Maybe, just maybe, what they ate he could eat.
For a while he feared they were all herbivores, but then he discovered the refrigerated warehouses and lots and lots of meat. It was all dead, of course, and some of it might take a while to thaw out, although he wondered how long it would take anything to thaw in the waters just beyond the breakwater in superhot Dlubine. Rather than be piggy, he picked a half dozen smaller cuts, a mere six or seven pounds of meat of some kind, went down to the shore just beyond the town and waded, then floated out until he was in the warmest water he’d ever known.
The answer was about an hour a pound.
It didn’t taste the same, not without the warm blood and all the nice mushy insides and skin and all, but it wasn’t the time to be a gourmet or look gift horses in the mouth. He’d eaten a lot worse on this trip, and natural taste and instinct didn’t fill an empty gullet. All in all, it was a quite satisfactory beach picnic, even if the company didn’t show up.
The next day he tried to find out a little information about where the hell he was and what he might be able to do next.
This, it appeared, was a seaside resort in Agon, so even if the other two had failed to make the northern continent, he had, and he was the only one who didn’t give a damn if he ever saw the place or not.
He knew he didn’t like the place. It wasn’t the locals, or the climate, or even the food so much as it was the fact that it was a high-tech hex. He’d had to bypass several security systems the previous night, and even so, he knew they knew somebody had broken in. In fact, a whole damned busload of uniformed turtle cops had shown up by dawn and were busily going over the place. He decided that they must have found something, because one of the cops lit out for the naval station on a crazy kind of vehicle that seemed to float just off the ground on nothing in particular but had handlebars and a hand accelerator and a hand brake kind of like a motorbike’s. He decided to follow, mostly to see if there was any suspicion of a Dahir being involved.
The little fellow on the flying surfboard beat him there by a bit, of course, but he was there with several navy types of various races spouting off a storm. Gus moved closer to overhear.
“. . . definitely no race on our local registry. It has to be something from one of your crews! You had a patrol come in just last night!”
One of the crew, who looked like a five-foot-tall version of Rocky the Flying Squirrel sans goggles to Gus, who was, after all, a television person, responded, “Now, calm down. What did you say was stolen again?”
“Zlabruk! Eight prime filets! Highest quality, too!”
“I assure you we feed our men well,” responded another, who looked like a giant frog in full uniform. “And they earn more than enough to not go off after a very hot and difficult mission, break into a place, and steal a bunch of— steaks.”
“Zlabruk! That’s imported, you know! Expensive!”
“Well, I don’t think—” began the squirrel, then stopped and thought a moment. “Steaks . . . Who in the world would break in and steal slabs of meat? I wonder . . . Wait here a moment. I want you to speak to someone else.”
The giant walking squirrel vanished into a nearby building and was gone for two or three minutes while the others fiddled around and the Agonite cop kept muttering about imported filets. Finally the big gray lump of fur emerged, but he was not alone. Following him was a much more amorphous creature, a creature Gus had seen before, and when it spoke through an orifice it formed within itself, it was unmistakably the same one as well.
“I am Colonel Lunderman,” said the Leeming. “Now, what’s this about someone coming in and stealing a bunch of steaks?”
Gus wasn’t at all sure whether to be relieved or fearful at the colonel’s appearance on this side of the ocean. As much as he needed an ally, he felt he could trust this character about as far as he could throw him.
Just great! he thought to himself. So now what the hell do I do?
Agon
they awoke, chained to a wall by efficient shackles, unable to move any of their limbs more than a very short way.
It was a surprisingly modern room with a glowing ultra-modern ceiling providing more than enough light and vents feeding in air-conditioning at a reasonable level of comfort. Lori hung to the right of the entrance, Mavra to his left. Along the other walls were built-in work tables and fancy computer screens, and in the center were a number of benches with all sorts of science equipment on them, giving the place the look of a college chemistry lab.
Mavra groaned and looked around. “Lori? Are you all right?”
“I—well, if you call this all right, I guess so,” Lori groaned, then looked around and tested the chains. “Now what happens?”
“Nothing good,” Mavra responded. “You remember that I said you’d never really come face-to-face with what future technology could and would do for criminals? Well, welcome to the future. I’m just devastated to see this kind of setup here.”
“Yeah, but I thought the equivalent of the UN or something wanted you. This sure isn’t them—and why us, too?”
“Well, why don’t you just hang around and find out?” Mavra snapped with heavy irony.
Lori sighed, “I guess it doesn’t really matter much, for me, anyway. Without Alowi I’m a dead man, anyway.”
They did not have long to wait, but the creature who walked through the door was beyond anything they expected.
My god! Lori thought. It’s Daisy Duck with tits!
In fact, the body appeared more humanoid than duck-like, although it was completely covered by tiny white feathers wherever it was exposed, and the legs, slightly bowed, were of a tough-looking ribbed yellow-orange texture, and while the feet could not be seen, it was not beyond the bounds of imagination to think of two thick webbed feet somehow crammed into a pair of vastly oversized black pumps.
The arms seemed extremely thin, extending a bit out from the shoulders, with a ball-like elbow joint in the middle and ending in two huge mittlike hands, each with three nearly equal-sized webbed fingers and an opposing thumb, without any sign of nails, claws, or whatever. Extending from the underside of the impossibly thin arms was a row of feathers that might have been what remained of vestigial wings but that were now nothing more than decoration. The entire body, which stood perhaps 165 centimeters discounting the heels, was curvaceous and sported two rather ample mammallike breasts that were easily seen thanks to the rather slinky black dress the creature wore.
The head sat atop what appeared to be a very thin, short neck; it was large enough to match the body and began with long, straight black hair parted in the middle and going down to the shoulders on either side; the eyes were huge and oval-shaped, with the longest points vertical rather than horizontal as on Earth-human eyes, and contained large, round jet black pupils. These sat atop a long, curved ducklike orange-colored bill that extended a good twenty centimeters out from the head and was wide enough to be hinged on the sides of the lower face. Two small black slits atop the bill served as the nostrils; no ears were obvious.
Not Daisy Duck, Lori decided. More like Donald’s wet dream. Even so, the effect was comical enough that somehow the figure did not seem threatening.
The bill proved amazingly malleable, almost like a human mouth at its front, and helped the creature shape its words. These words, however, came after it stood there for a very long time and just stared at each of them in turn, but particularly at Mavra, to whom the huge black eyes kept coming back.
Finally it said in a deep, throaty feminine voice that seemed to come from somewhere far back in the head, “This is a surprise I hoped for but one that I did not really expect to catch. In fact, I was actually not expecting to catch up with you at all. The net was basically out for Brazil and still is, but you will do nicely. Very nicely.” That last was said with just enough menace to chill them.
“Who are you?” Mavra asked in as confident a voice as she could muster. “What is this place, and what do you want with us?”
One of the oversized fingers came up and gently stroked under the beak. “Who am I? I am hurt at the question, but I will answer it in due course. What I am is a Cloptan. It is not far. Right now you are in an underground laboratory on the border with Lilblod. It is in Agon, but above there is something more—ordinary. To get in and out one must go through a tunnel into Lilblod. It solves not only the technical but the jurisdictional problems rather nicely. You might have guessed that what is processed and packaged here is not exactly popular among most of the world’s governments.”
“Drugs,” Lori sniffed.
“Yes, drugs. Specifically, two types. One is of little interest to you, but the other is the one you knew was in those containers aboard the ship that brought you to us. It has many names, but in the form we process it here we call it ‘rhapsody.’ It has different effects on different species. In fact, for a number it is lethal, for others it causes brain and nervous system damage, while to yet others it is simply a tasty spice. When processed into slightly different forms, however, for those races that are similar enough in brain chemistry and share some common enzymes in the cells, it is a drug. A wonderful drug, in fact. You take it, and all of your pain goes away. All of your physical pain, if any, and much of your mental pain as well. All the bad, negative things, the psychological scars of a lifetime, they all have little effect on you. It’s all there, but it can’t hurt you. I am told that the initial effects are like nothing else imaginable, but as your body gets used to it, you just sort of settle down into a situation where life is—simpler. The effects last for varying periods, the average being eight to ten hours before it gets down to where you’ll need some more—but slowly, very slowly.”
“I’m sure you’ll spell it out in excruciating detail for us,” Mavra commented dryly.
The Cloptan ignored the comment. “First the little aches and pains start returning, then full physical awareness, and looming on the horizon is every single horrible thing in your mind, all your worst fears and nightmares. You can feel them, almost see them coming. Fear turns to desperation, desperation to terror. There is nothing at all you can do. The only way is, of course, to take more rhapsody. Eventually, of course, your system gets used to it, and you level out, becoming more normal on a regular basis and with only one big overriding fear—that the supply will stop and you will face the horrors of your own mind.”
“How horrible,” Lori muttered. The bitch was enjoying this!
“Even the strongest minds cannot withstand it forever. Some can fight it off for hours, a few for days, but they tell me no one succeeds in breaking it completely. The depression becomes so absolute, you will kill yourself first. It keeps the business—profitable.” She walked over and stood right in front of Mavra.
“They say you are possibly immortal, that you cannot be killed. I am not certain I believe that anyone can’t be killed, but I think it will not make much difference. It would be a nice experiment, though, to see just how long you could go without it. If you could not even kill yourself, would your mind crack? What form would the insanity take? I wonder . . . It is tempting, but I think I have other plans in the end. Oh, yes, the blood tests say that one form of it will work quite nicely on you. Sutton, on the other hand, is sufficiently different from you to require a different formulation, but the science folks say that it will work on him as well.”
“For God’s sake!” Lori cried. “What do you want! What are you doing this to us for? We’re thousands of miles from home and surely can’t be of any use to you here!”
“I should think it would be obvious to you by now,” the Cloptan replied. “Because of this,” she said, gesturing down her body with her hands. “She made me like this!” she snapped, pointing to Mavra. “And you—you went along, Doctor Lori Sutton. And you—you became the man! The big macho hunter with his little devoted four-titted bitch! I do this for revenge! Venganza! Revenge for daring to drag into hell Juan Alfonso Campos de la Montoya!”
“Oh, God!” Lori sighed, feeling all hope vanish.
“So that’s why they wanted only the two of us,” Mavra said.
‘The Dillians are nothing to me and too large to have handled in any case. What are they going to do? It will take them days just to find their way out of Lilblod. Then what? Report to the authorities? They are already looking for you and would find you now if they could. As for Sutton’s crazy little bitch, she, too, was nothing to me and just so much excess baggage. Do not worry, Doctor Sutton. The computers here are excellent. We know of the deficiency in your system, and we have the means to fix it. If I had wanted you dead, I would have just had them kill you.”
Lori shook his head in wonder, unable to understand this kind of thinking. “What is it with you? I didn’t pick this body any more than you picked that one. I’d trade you if I could. There are times I would have killed for a shape like that. But look at you! Is it so awful being a woman? You’re young, probably very pretty by the standards of your race, and in an incredibly short time you’ve managed to get this far up in the drug trade. Some new start, but I guess it’s what you know. I’m broke and helpless in a backward medieval desert, for god’s sake!”
“Being a woman is bad enough,” Campos responded angrily. “It is hell to me! And yes, I am very beautiful by Cloptan standards. Do you know how hard it was to adjust to that? To have every lecherous Cloptan man pawing you? Do you know what I had to lower myself to do to get to this? I do not own this lab, nor do I control it. Finding the Cloptan underworld was not difficult, and they were interested in me because I came from the same business but on a different world. No, getting inside was not difficult, but once there I was just another girl, just another piece of furniture to them! Me! The son of the greatest patriot of modern Peru, the man who could strike and corrupt and bring down the most evil and powerful oppressor of all Latin peoples with a weapon as simple and impossible to fight as common coca! I had to defile myself! To swallow all pride and self-respect and put myself in the gutter! I am nothing in this organization except a powerful man’s current favorite toy! But now, now, it is all worthwhile. Here you are. If I can get the others, too, it will be complete. Brazil and that other bitch. Even if fortune does not smile, however, it has smiled enough. For a while yet we will play games so that I may have the satisfaction to repay my humiliation! Then, when the time is right, you, ‘goddess of the trees,’ will willingly and cheerfully beg to let me let you put things right. It may take weeks or months yet, I hope not years, but one day you will put things right for me and repay all the suffering that you have caused! Once you are under the drug’s spell, you will willingly tell me anything and everything. If you are what some say you are, then one day we will take a trip, just us girls, and you will go inside this world and put me right!”
So that was it, Mavra thought. One more horror to endure, one more long torment, but the direction that damned Machiavellian Well was taking was now clear. It was sad that Lori yet again had been dragged into this. Mavra had mostly wanted to help them. Well, if he stayed alive, maybe someday she still could. There was certainly nothing to be done now. She just wished she’d listened to them and left Juan Campos back on Earth or finished him off. Damn her sense of fair play! One could totally change such as him, but he remained as evil as ever. He had already changed more than he knew or wanted to recognize, judging from what he’d done as a female and even how she now spoke and moved. But the Well did nothing to change that inner self, and Juan Campos had been an insane, evil, power-mad egomaniac in his former life, and the new persona had done nothing to change that but had reinforced it.
Sooner or later, though, no matter what was to come, she’d be taken to the Well. There was no question that such a sophisticated operation could get the truth out of her. It could only be hoped that Campos was so insane she believed that inside the Well, in a Markovian body, she could still dictate to Mavra Chang.