“A collapsed volcano,” she replied. “A huge crater of some kind, high up, surrounded by high mountains.”
“Most of Gedemondas is volcanic,” he noted. “Active, too, a lot of ’em. Not very dangerous, for the most part—you could outrun a lava flow if you had to. Some of the big ones puff a lot, though.”
She nodded. “The Gedemondans live in volcanic chambers and use interconnecting lava tubes to get around beneath the surface. The network is fantastic and complex. They also use the volcanic steam for heat and primitive power—even though this is a non-tech hex, they have natural, rather than machine-generated, steam combustion. It’s comfortably warm in there, too.”
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Steam power? And what do they use it for?”
“I have no idea,” she told him honestly. “We heard what could have been the turning of gears and levers for some great machine, and we got the idea that there were lots of things going on there we never knew about, but we saw only what they showed us—and I was in a worse position than most to be observant. I think all the entrances are farther in, though, in the high country.”
“On some of the old and little-used trails, maybe?”
She shook her head negatively. “Uh uh. It doesn’t matter where—might as well be comfortable. We just need to be higher. . . .” Her voice trailed off as she continued to look at the map, settling on an odd set of concentric rings, like tree rings, and an open area in the middle. “In that direction,” she told him, pointing to it. “I know they have openings into that crater from their main complex.”
He looked at the spot. “Or did have, centuries ago,” he half-muttered, worriedly.
“We go there. Easy stages. You game?”
He grinned. “You know I am. But, like it or not, I think we ought to leave tomorrow morning, not right now. We need the extra rest and healing”—she knew he referred to her—”and we ought to make sure these folks get back—at least wait for the rescue party.”
She didn’t really want to, but her head was throbbing and she felt very weak and tired. “All right, Asam. In the morning.”
Although the trail was firm and well-marked, it was not easy going for either of them. The wind cut into them, and even the reduced packs seemed to shift onto every cut and bruise. Asam, as befitted his character in more ways than one, grimaced occasionally but never complained, nor did she. Still, dark thoughts pervaded their climb, mostly her own self-doubts about what she was doing. Was she, in fact, on the right side? Not that she should be on the Well’s side, but why should she be on any side?
She knew the answer to that, of course. Brazil had refused to fix the Well unless she was there, unless she specifically ordered it. She wondered who would give the order if she were killed in this crazy battle of wits. Maybe nobody. Maybe he would just go into the Well, put himself back in the regular universe in whatever place he liked, and sit back and wait for eventual destruction. The responsibility was hers, not his. He had as much as said so.
Well, she hadn’t asked for that responsibility, she told herself, and didn’t want it. It wasn’t fair. Nothing in her whole damned life had ever been fair, but at least she had been the mistress of it. Now they had even taken that away from her.
There were doubts, too, about her part in it all. She was to establish herself in her hex and wait for instructions. That had been all they had told her—that and the fact that the Entries would eventually rally around her, form up into a multiracial fighting force, one of several that would, on signal, converge on a single spot and combine into a mighty army, perhaps the greatest the Well World had ever seen: an army fed and supplied by other hexes as it marched, by other Entries and diplomatic friends who would, it was presumed, be there always with whatever was needed. It sounded pretty damned chancy.
And yet, if Asam were right, Dillia would follow her. Right now they would follow—not all, of course, but enough for a substantial force. That was all she had been asked to do. Why was she in Gedemondas? A hunch? Or was it, she wondered, her subconscious self’s desire to throw enough of a joker into the deck that she could, as usual, be more in command?
Another night, another cabin. They felt better, slept better, as the journey wore on, and out of the comradeship of the first day’s battle had grown a true affinity.
That, too, worried her. He was Asam, a great man and good friend, it was true. But he was Asam, a Dillian centaur born on the Well World who, because of that, would never leave it. She was Dillian only superficially; inside she was still the same Mavra Chang, still the same woman of a very different race and, beyond that, a very different time and culture. At the end of this was the unknown and unknowable. Perhaps Brazil knew, but where was he?
And so she rejected Asam’s affection, kindly but firmly. She saw that it hurt him and because of that it hurt her, too. But anything else just wasn’t fair, not to him, not to her.
On the fourth day out, they were close to exhaustion. The going had been very rough on the icy slopes where melt never happened, and the peaks had few and difficult passes. Neither of them, she knew, could take much more of this. They got into the cabin, a much smaller affair than the usual since this was a relay point to other valleys and not a base camp. As dark closed in, they settled down with a good fire going, and both were so damned tired they hardly said a word to each other. A stillness fell with the night, a stillness so absolute it seemed unnatural, unbroken even by word. There was nothing but the crackling fire and their own slow breathing as they slipped into sleep.
She dozed fitfully, for she was so tired she was having trouble sleeping, and so the crunching sound, as if some heavy, large animal were trudging through the snow, only half-registered on her. Was it truly something, or was it dream? Or was it, perhaps, an echo of her hopes? She didn’t know, and felt too far gone to give it much thought.
The door opened, creakily, noisily, but neither of them stirred. In Gedemondas, you stirred if they wanted you to stir.
The Gedemondan stood upright, like a human or ape, but at almost three meters it almost touched the ceiling. Its face was doglike, with a long, thin snout and a black button nose, but its eyes were very much like a human’s or Dillian’s eyes, large and a misty, pale blue. It was covered in snow-white, almost brilliant-white fur, fairly woolly, like a sheep’s, and two earflaps dangled down on either side of its head.
The Gedemondan gave the sleepers little attention at first, going over to the packs and looking casually through them. It came upon Asam’s cigars, pulled one out, and looked it over carefully, as if trying to figure out what it was. It ran a thin, pink tongue over the wrapper, cocked its head as if in contemplation, then shrugged slightly and stuck the cigar in an invisible marsupiallike pouch just above its crotch.
Finally it seemed satisfied, then noticed the map of Gedemondas. It unrolled the map and looked at it for a few moments, and from deep inside it came an odd sort of rapid clicking sound that might have been chuckling. Using its odd, flexible three-finger-and-thumb hands, it rolled the chart back up and replaced it. At rest, the hands formed an almost rounded pad that hardly looked like hands at all.
It turned now and went to the rear, where the stalls were, and looked briefly at Asam, slumbering peacefully. Then it moved to the next, where Mavra slept, deeply, now, as if drugged.
The two pads went first to her head, where they seemed to stroke it. A hand uncoiled and gently moved the long blond hair so that the ugly-looking bump on her head was clear and exposed. Hoping it would drain and subside on its own, Dillian Healers hadn’t bandaged it.
The hand formed again into a pad, and from the odd-looking hairy pinkish palm came a sticky-looking secretion. The Gedemondan, holding back the hair with its other hand, applied the pad with the secretion like a compress on the swelling.
Now, for the first time, it seemed to realize the bruises were bruises and the bandages covered other wounds. Carefully it removed the bandages and looked at the wounds. It had some difficulty getting to her hindquarters, and at one point actually pulled her gently out of the stall, but neither she nor Asam awakened.
A second Gedemondan entered now and looked at the two sleepers, then nodded to the first who was with Mavra. It seemed to sense immediately that the two were injured and went to work on Asam, whose injuries, deeper and nastier than he had led Mavra or the others to believe, were consequently much more painful.
In the course of their mysterious treatment, the second Gedemondan made a slight grumbling sound and pointed to Asam’s throat. The first nodded, then gestured back at Mavra and shook his own head negatively. The meaning was clear. Asam had a translator; they could talk to him, but not to Mavra, and not to these two. It was clearly Mavra they wished to speak with.
They had a problem, they understood. They needed a language specialist, and there was not one here. They needed to take these two elsewhere, but won-dred how far they could be moved. But they were in a public cabin on a public trail in hunting season. Neither wanted to wait it out here, risking discovery.
Both mulled it over. The debate had been entirely silent, not even telepathic. They had simply known the words that needed to be said, the facts that needed pointing out, and with an occasional gesture an entire conversation had been boiled down to almost nothing at all.
One made a decision and went over to Asam, still asleep, and started making noises at him, noises like the yipping of some small dog. Still held by whatever power these two used and therefore still hypnotically asleep, Asam spoke.
“Mavra Chang, hear us.”
“I hear you,” she replied as if drugged, eyes still closed, breathing evenly, and as she said it Asam repeated it.
The Gedemondan nodded to itself, seeming satisfied. The other understood intuitively its feelings: it wasn’t perfect, but you made do with what you had at the time.
“The Well is damaged,” the Gedemondan said through Asam. “We know it. We felt it as it happened. It is a machine, but it is also in many ways like a living organism. It is in agony. We gave you medical help, and this was easy to do. The Well, too, needs this help, but it cannot help itself. This, too, we understand. We will help you to do this, for our own vision is cloudy, our own minds affected, for we are attuned to the Well.” It paused. “Speak to us now.”
“Brazil seeks to fix the Well,” she told them. “The nations combine to stop him. There will be war. Any and all help is desperately needed.”
“We understand the plan,” the Gedemondan told her. “We have had our share of Entries, too, but, unlike most other hexes, the Entries are of little help to you. They are us physically, certainly, but our powers are through training, study, intensive concentration from even before birth, even selective breeding for certain things. These are not things one can learn overnight, only over a lifetime. Speak now.”
“Your powers are needed by us, though,” she told them. “Desperately needed.”
“We understand. Now you must understand that we are only messengers here. We learned of your presence only when we sensed the violence of the attack upon you. The two of us were closest to you and we hurried as best we could. But we are not the ones you need, nor the ones to decide. We may only take the data from you and pass it back to wiser heads. Speak now.”
“Then we must go with you to where those who can help are,” she told them.
“It is not possible,” the Gedemondan told her. “There is not enough time. A meeting is being called. It is necessary for you to attend. Speak now.”
“I know of no such meeting,” she responded. “Who has called it, and for what purpose?”
“Your own people have called it, to plan greater strategy. It is to be in the place called Zone, in the place reserved for us for which we have no need. Speak now.”
“The Gedemondan Embassy?” she murmured, managing some surprise even in her state of light hypnosis. “Then I must get to a Zone Gate.”
“Your Zone Gate is far from here,” the Gedemondan told her. “You must go to it as quickly as possible.
After the meeting we might be ready to contact you again. Speak now.”
“Your own Zone Gate would be closer,” she pointed out. “We should be taken there.”
The creature stared at her a moment, seemingly thunderstruck. It was obvious that this had never occurred to the great white thing; their Zone Gate had never been used in recent memory and so was irrelevant to them.
“You could use our Gate?” it asked.
Even through the thin fog they had placed upon her, Mavra sensed the creature’s amazement and felt some satisfaction. Deep down, even if buried in her subconscious and not readily available, would be the new knowledge that Gedemondans were neither all-knowing nor all-powerful.
The first Gedemondan stalked over to Asam’s pack and withdrew the map once again, unrolled it, and looked at it carefully, then nodded to his companion. She was right. Their Gate was much closer, particularly through the tunnels of Gedemondas only the natives knew.
The decision was made then and there. The two were put under much more deeply and called out. They were helped into their heavy cold-weather clothing, but the packs were ignored. Then, slowly, deliberately, the two Gedemondans walked out the door and the two spellbound aliens followed meekly.
Hours had passed as they went deeper into Gedemondas. Then a rocky wall had parted, and they had entered the warm interior tunnels of the strange, unknown hex, and now they walked in its mazes, hour after hour, without pause or complaint. The two were more securely bound than if they’d been tied with ropes and had guns to their heads. They knew absolutely nothing of the journey, of the passing through many busy arteries and through centers of Gedemondan activity. More than once their keepers changed, but they continued onward.
Finally, they reached an old dust-ladened hallway that clearly hadn’t been entered in a very long time. Just off a main tunnel, it didn’t go far before widening into a smooth chamber. The evidence was such that the single Gedemondan and the two centaurs were the first in known history to be there. At the far end of the chamber was a hexagonal shape of deepest, impenetrable black. It seemed unnatural there, out of phase somehow with the reality of the rock walls and floor.
Mavra Chang awoke, and, seeing the Gedemondan ahead of her and the looming dark shape in back of them, she smiled. She had no memory of how they had gotten there, nor of any of the previous conversation, but she knew she had gotten through. More interestingly, the hurt was gone. She felt clear-headed and without any pain for the first time since the battle, although she also felt ravenously hungry. She glanced over at Asam and realized immediately that he was in some sort of artificial sleep.
“My apologies for not being able to provide food,” the Gedemondan said in a clear, pleasant voice. “I’m afraid all this was put together at the last minute, so to speak.”
She realized with a start that he was not wearing a translator and was somehow synthesizing a normal tone in a throat that couldn’t possibly handle those sounds or shape the words. She wondered how he did it. More interesting yet, he was not speaking Dillian but rather the far more sophisticated and complex language of the Com.
“Yes, it’s Com speech,” he admitted, seeming to read her mind. “We are getting a pretty large number of Entries from there right now for reasons we both understand, and a number of us have taken up studying the speech. I hope it’s all right.”
“Yes, perfect,” she replied, noting that she was speaking Dillian. She tried to concentrate on her old tongue.
“Don’t bother,” the Gedemondan told her. “It’s too much of a strain. You talk Dillian, I’ll talk Com, and if there are any concepts your old language can handle better, I’ll understand.” He looked around. “Sorry for the housekeeping, too, but we don’t use this very much. I suppose we will have to clean it out, though. Your Entries are no good to us, but they and some volunteers from our side will be necessary if we are to reintroduce our species into the universe.” He paused and looked almost wistful. “We aren’t there now, you know. We died out on the last try.”
She nodded. “That’s one reason I thought of you.”
“We’re well aware of what you thought. Perhaps better than you. And, yes, we’ll help, certainly. We would have in any case, even if you had not come— but that unwarranted attack within our borders, that is intolerable. It will not happen again.”
She looked at Asam, noting his bandages were off but there was little sign of old injury. Even his face had regained much of its original look and color. Her hand instinctively went to the back of her head, where she could feel a slight tenderness, nothing else.
“Thank you for whatever medical help you gave,” she said sincerely, then glanced over at Asam. “You know, he has dreamed his whole life of just meeting and talking with you. It’s a shame you can’t bring yourself to wake him up, at least for a moment.”
The Gedemondan shrugged. “Against the rules, really. Wiping a mind is a lot harder than this, and is for the same purpose. The fact is, you’ll have to get to Zone as quickly as possible anyway—your people are meeting shortly, using our own empty embassy there. We haven’t completed our analysis of your information and ours to decide what ways we can help as yet. You understand that, while we have great powers, we are actually pretty vulnerable, nocturnal, and hardly inconspicuous. These things have to be weighed. In these mountains we’re invulnerable, but out there, in the rest of the world, we’re not nearly as effective. I seriously doubt if any Gedemondan could wage the type of fight you think of. We’ll decide and be in touch shortly, wherever you are. The only thing I can promise is that we will do what we can to aid you.”
“That’s all I wanted,” she replied earnestly. “And I thank you for it.”
The Gedemondan just stood there a moment, looking at her with a puzzled expression and slightly cocked head. “You are troubled. You are in pain,” he said, concerned.
She shook her head slowly. “No. I feel fine. Nervous about the future, yes, but nothing more than that.” The Gedemondan gestured at the still-sleeping Asam. “He is in love with you, you know that.”
She sighed. “I suspected as much.”
“And yet you reject him. Why?”
She was puzzled, too. But she didn’t like the Gedemondan’s sudden change in direction toward the more personal. It was none of this creature’s business.
“You feel an equal attraction to him,” the Gedemondan said flatly. “I can sense this.”
“It’s . . . it’s a little complicated to go into now,” she responded, trying to get him away from the topic.
“You are wrong,” the creature told her. “You think of him as you would an alien creature, but he is not. He is of your own kind.”
“He is a Dillian,” she noted, growing more irritated. “You are a Dillian, too,” the Gedemondan responded. “No matter what you once might have been, you are a Dillian now. If you die on this world, you die a Dillian. If you live on this world, you live as a Dillian. You can not alter that. Even if you were to undergo the Well of Souls in the recreation, you would still be what you are now. You are this, now and forever.” He reached out the padlike hands, took her head in them, and held it, gently, for a moment.
“Ah,” he said. “Apprehension. Insecurity. Again you are wrong. If you should die tomorrow, there is still today. If you or he should die at any time, that would not negate the time you spend together. You still mourn your husband’s death, he a thousand years dead. Why?”
She felt held, compelled to look at the Gedemondan’s eyes, compelled to answer. “I loved him very much.”
He nodded. “And did you love him because he died?”