She kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Go get to sleep and don’t worry so much. I haven’t lost yet—and if I haven’t, you haven’t either.”
She wished she believed that.
Uchjin, Northern Hemisphere
“A hell of a mess,” Ben Yulin said, looking over the landscape. With no power to the air-renewal system on the ship, they had been forced to don their spacesuits. The largest aboard was almost too small for Zinder in the body of his rotund daughter, but the things were made to form-fit a variety of sizes. You got into them and they were all tremendous, loose, and baggy. But when you hooked up the air supply, which was, fortunately, a manual rebreather type, the material acted like something alive, constricting until it became almost a second, very tough white skin.
“How much air do we have?” Trelig asked, looking around at the barren rocky desert in which no sign of life appeared anywhere.
Yulin shrugged. “Not more than a half-day’s supply at best without the special electrical system in the rebreather.”
“We aren’t far from that next hex, where there appeared to be some water,” Trelig noted hopefully. “Let’s try for it. What have we got to lose?”
They started off, following the marks of the giant skid the courier ship had made in its belly-landing.
They hadn’t gone far before twilight set in. Yulin felt that something was wrong, and he tried to put his finger on it. There seemed to be shapes around, kind of half-shapes, really, that appeared at the corner of your eye but weren’t there when you turned around.
“Trelig?” he called.
“What?” the other snapped.
“Do either you or Zinder notice anything odd going on? I’d swear we have company of some kind.”
Trelig and Zinder both came to a halt, although they didn’t want to, and looked around. Yulin found they were easier to see the darker it got.
They seemed to exist in only two dimensions—length and width—and even that was variable. From the side, they seemed to vanish. They were flying, or floating—it was hard to tell which—all around them. Yulin was reminded of paint spilled on a sheet of clear plastic. There was a thick leading edge, and it flowed—not necessarily down, but up and along as well. As it did, the edge seemed to spread out so that it was sometimes a meter wide and almost two meters long. That was the limit for them—when they were fully extended, the rear edge seemed to slowly flow back into the leading edge until it was just a meter-wide lump of paint, only to start spreading out again.
They were different colors, too. Almost every color they could think of, although never more than one. Blues, reds, yellows, greens—of every possible shade and hue.
“Are they intelligent?” Yulin wondered aloud.
Trelig had been thinking the same thing. “They sure seem to be clustering around us, like a crowd of curious onlookers at an accident,” the syndicate boss noted. “I don’t see how, but I’d bet money that these are the people who live here.”
“People” was too strong a word, Yulin thought. These creatures were the stuff of artists’ dreams, not real, tangible things.
“I’m going to try and touch one,” Trelig said.
“Hey! Wait! You might—” Yulin protested, but got only a laugh in reply.
“So I do something bad,” the boss responded. “We’re dead anyway, you know.” With that he reached out and tried to grab the one nearest him. Nothing he’d ever seen had ever reacted that fast. One moment it was there, all stretched out, the next it just seemed to be somewhere else, a meter or two out of reach.
“Wow!” Trelig exclaimed. “They sure can move if they want to!”
Yulin nodded. “Maybe, if they’re intelligent in any way, we can talk to them,” he suggested.
Trelig wasn’t so sure. “So what do you say to a two-meter living paint smear, and how?” he asked sarcastically.
“Maybe they can see somehow,” Yulin suggested. “Let’s try some gestures.”
He made sure of his audience—and he did have the funny feeling that they were looking at him—and pointed to Zinder’s air tanks. Then he put his hands to his throat, made choking motions, and fell to the ground.
The flowing streaks seemed to like that. More of them arrived, and they seemed to become much more agitated. Yulin repeated the act several times, and they became increasingly agitated, sometimes almost touching one another in their eagerness to get a better view.
Enough acting, Yulin decided. It used up air. He got up, faced them, and put out his hands in what he hoped would be a gesture of friendship and supplication.
This action seemed to excite them even more. He had the strange feeling that he was the subject of a furious debate that none but these strange creatures could hear.
But were they debating whether to help, how to help, or what was the meaning of this strange creature’s actions? That last was definitely the most unsettling—and the most likely.
A couple of the creatures floated over, seemed to examine his air pack from a distance of fifty centimeters or so. He remained still, letting them. That was a good start. They might be getting the idea. Or they might be wondering why he was pointing at that funny thing.
More and more appeared as darkness fell. They were coming out of cracks in the ground, they observed—small cracks they would never have noticed otherwise. The natives seemed to rise like wraiths, fully extended, then curl up or flow or whatever, pulling out in a different direction and heading, mostly, their way. There was a regular assembly now, a rainbow of weird flowing and undulating shapes.
Finally, they seemed to reach some sort of decision or consensus. They crowded around the humans, so thick it was impossible to see. Then, very deliberately, a narrow opening appeared to one side. They waited.
“I think we’re being directed someplace,” Trelig noted. “Shall we go?”
“Better than collapsing here and dying in another hour or two,” Yulin replied. “You lead, or shall I?”
Trelig started walking, then Zinder, and finally Yulin. That they were being led somewhere was quickly apparent—the opening continued, but the area they vacated was closed in by the strange creatures.
Yulin checked his air supply. About two hours, he noted. He hoped wherever they were going wasn’t far off.
That thought was in all their minds, along with the last shreds of doubt, when, a little over an hour later, they reached a rock outcrop. A huge number of the creatures was there—perhaps many thousands. Some had obviously assembled there because of them, but others seemed to be carrying on all sorts of deliberate but unfathomable business.
“Yulin! Look!” Trelig called excitedly.
Ben Yulin peered into the star-lit darkness at the cliff’s face, and, for a moment, didn’t see what had attracted the other man. Finally he could make out a deeper blackness against the cliff.
“A cave?” he asked, feeling disappointed. “Hell, we’ve been taken to their leader or something.”
“No! No!” Trelig protested. “My Renard eyes must be better than your Mavra Chang’s. Look at the shape of the hole!”
Yulin peered again, approaching closer. It was large—perhaps two meters on each of its six sides. Six sides?
“A hexagon!” Yulin exclaimed, hardly able to contain himself. “They got the message!”
“We’ll see,” Trelig responded. “Obviously they mean for us to enter the thing, and we might as well. Air’s running out anyway. All set?”
“Okay, let’s go,” Yulin replied, praying again that they would not enter a cave that was just the seat of government of these folks.
Trelig went first. He didn’t seem to enter a cave or hole—he just stepped forward, seemed frozen for an instant, then vanished. Yulin prodded Zinder next, but the scientist knew the air situation as well as they did. He stepped in, and to the same effect. Ben Yulin took an expensive deep breath, held it, and stepped in, too.
* * *
It was a strange sensation, like falling down a great, endless hol
e. It was nasty and unpleasant, but they had to endure it.
The sensation ended as suddenly as it began, bringing them out in a strange sort of cave inhabited by more of the flowing creatures.
The other two were already there.
“Oh, no!” Yulin swore, heart sinking. “Just a shuttle system!”
Trelig was just about to reply when a ghostly figure quite unlike any of them, humans or creatures, appeared. It was huge—three meters at least, and almost as big around. It had nasty-looking claws and sets of insectlike legs, and it was encased in some kind of protective artificial shell.
“What the hell?” Trelig managed, but then he saw the figure make a very recognizable “follow me” gesture with its great claws, turn, and start down the cave.
“Our new guide,” speculated Yulin. “I think I like the paint smears better. Well, let’s get going. Air’s getting low.”
They went through a passage, then a doorway slid out, and they found it was some kind of air lock. It closed behind them, then opened ahead after a few moments. The creature had gone ahead but, they saw, it waited for them outside.
Outside proved to be a long, broad hallway made of some orange-white crystalline material that sparkled. The whole area was lit up, and Yulin wasn’t the only one that noticed the rows of doorways in hexagonal shapes. The hallways, however, were almost rounded, with no sharp corners.
The large insectlike creature walked slowly down the corridor, and they followed. It seemed like a long journey, and it took more than twenty minutes by Ben Yulin’s air timer.
Suddenly the hall opened onto a huge chamber. Huge was hardly the word for it. The chamber had six sides, which seemed almost natural by now; but the enclosure was so enormous that it took some time to establish that fact. The center area was in the shape of an enormous glassy hexagon, too, and around the sides stretched a railing and what appeared to be a walkway. A single great six-sided light, like a great jewel, was suspended from the center of the mammoth ceiling, providing all the light.
The walkway was just that, and more. The big creature got on it, walked down so they could also step onto the vinyllike, spongy surface, then it pressed some indistinguishable area on the wall.
They almost tumbled over as the walkway started to move.
It took about ten minutes to go halfway around to another break in the wall. There were openings in the rail to go down to the glassy surface, but they passed them up. Eventually they stopped, and the weird creature, which seemed to them to be much like a lobster made of transparent glass, went slowly down a new hallway.
They reached a room, much smaller than either the big chamber or the cave. It had an air lock, too, but it was an almost perfect square. The ceiling and three of the walls looked normal, including the door area.
The fourth was blackness absolute.
“Looks like another transfer,” Trelig noted. “I hope we get to our kind of air in the next forty minutes.”
“Thirty-six,” Yulin replied glumly. He’d been checking it every half-minute.
“They’re not going to let us die,” said Trelig confidently. “They’ve gone to too much trouble.” He stepped unhesitatingly into the blackness, followed by Zinder, and then Yulin.
Again they experienced that falling sensation, longer this time. Yulin worried about how long it might be and wanted to check the timer, but vision was impossible.
They emerged in an identical room. In fact, all three could have sworn that they’d gone no place. That puzzled and disturbed them. Yulin’s timer still read close to thirty-six, which meant that the long fall they’d just taken had consumed no time. That was impossible, he told himself. And then he noticed—a slight humming sound, a tiny whine.
And the timer was going up.
“Trelig! We’ve got power! The electrical system is processing again!” he almost screamed.
The excitement and relief swept over them. Trelig, ever practical, broke the mood.
“Remember that we’re being manipulated by someone,” he cautioned. “They may know more than we think. Remember, you, that you’re Mavra Chang, pilot, and no one else, and that I’m Renard. Don’t ever use any other name again!” The words were icy, nasty, cutting. “If they question us together, let me do most of the talking. If separately, tell the truth up to the point where we changed it. You don’t know who was in the other ship! Understand?”
Yulin calmed down.
Suddenly the door slid open, and a third kind of creature entered.
They all stared at it, still not used to the changing wonders of the races of the Well World. It was a little under two meters tall with a thick, smooth, green-skinned body ending in two round, thick legs without apparent joint, supported by broad, flat-bottomed round cuplike feet. Two spindly arms grew from a point just above its midsection and seemed to have smaller divisions at the tips. The head, which sat atop an impossibly thin neck, looked like a green jack-o’-lantern, with its mouth in a permanent expression of surprise, and two nonblinking, almost luminous saucers for eyes. No sign of a nose or ears, Yulin noted. Atop it all grew a single huge, broad leaf that seemed to have a life of its own, slowly moving toward the strongest light source.
The creature held a piece of cardboard or something similar in its left tentacles, then lifted the board in front of it, angling it so they could read. The message was in standard Confederation plain talk, bearing out Trelig’s suspicion that the denizens of this world were far from ignorant of them or their nature. It said, in block-printed crayon:
YOU MAY REMOVE YOUR SUITS. THE AIR IS BREATHABLE. WHEN YOU HAVE FINISHED, FOLLOW ME TO BRIEFING.
Trelig accepted the guarantee and pressed the releases to flip back his helmet bubble. He took a breath, and the air was good. Satisfied, he switched off the backpack. The suit collapsed, seemed to grow and melt into a puddle of synthetic cloth at his feet. He helped Zinder do the same. Yulin started to, but suddenly fell horribly nauseous; blood suddenly clogged in his throat, and pain wracked him everywhere.
He collapsed and passed out.
Teliagin
In the early afternoon of the third day, the one thing Mavra Chang feared more than the rain happened.
They ran out of woods.
Not much, of course. This was pastoral country, and the woods picked up about a kilometer away. But here was a broad plain, grassy and lumpy, and crisscrossed by several of the dirt roads, on which there was a great deal of traffic. They watched from the edges of the clearing as great cyclopses went back and forth, to and fro, some alone, some carrying large sheepskin bags, some pulling large wooden carts with hand-carved wooden wheels, laden with all sorts of things.
“Look on the bright side,” Mavra told them. “At least we know now we haven’t been going in circles.”
Renard nodded. “Yes, we’re a long ways from where we landed. But are we going the right way?”
Mavra shrugged. What was the wrong way? The one that got you caught. In that case, this might definitely be the wrong way.
“We could follow the woods to the left for a while,” she suggested. “Maybe it connects someplace down that road. We’ve crossed roads before.”
“Don’t look like it,” Renard observed. He was talking more normally today, but his sentences were shorter and less complex, and he wasn’t even thinking in those big words any more.
Mavra Chang sighed. “Then we’ll have to stay here until nightfall. We sure can’t cross now with all those creatures there.” She didn’t like that; although the hypno conditioning, renewed the night before, kept the two unaware of their condition, the mental deterioration was becoming evident in Renard and more so in Nikki. Precious hours would mean that much more lost.
“I don’t wanna get eaten,” Nikki Zinder proclaimed. “You remember that one we saw? Ate that sheep in three big gulps.”
Mavra remembered. They would stay hidden until after nightfall, when the traffic thinned out. She had no idea whether any of her lethal defenses she’d bragged so much
to Renard about would work on those behemoths—and she had no desire to try. She wasn’t as much of a mouthful as that sheep had been.
They settled down, and all started to doze on and off. They were tired and worn; the sponge effect was also body-wide, although more apparent in the thought processes. The other two tired more quickly, and their coordination was shot. As for Mavra, she’d gotten very little sleep since before landing on New Pompeii, and fatigue was starting to tell on her. Will power could only sustain so far, and she knew it, even though she wouldn’t admit that to herself. She slept.
Renard awoke first. He’d only been slightly asleep anyway, thanks to Mavra’s rest-inducing hypno of the past nights. He crawled to the edge of the plain. Still a lot of traffic, maybe not as much as before, but it would be sure capture to go out there now.
He crawled back. Mavra was so sound asleep she didn’t hear him, but Nikki stirred, opened her eyes, and looked at him.
“Hi!” she whispered.
“Shhh!” he cautioned, putting his finger to his lips. He ambled over to her.
She looked up at him with slightly dulled large brown eyes. “Do you think we can croth it?” she asked. The lisp had appeared as time had worn on.
“Yes, later on,” he soothed, and she shifted next to him.
“Renard?”
“Yes, Nikki?”
“I’m thscared.”
“We all are,” he told her honestly. “We just have to keep going.”
“Not her,” the girl replied, pointing to Mavra. “I don’t think anything could thscare her.”
“She’s just learned to live with fear,” he soothed. “She knows how to be scared without letting it get to her. You have to do that, too, Nikki.”
She shook her head. “Ith’s more than that. I don’ wanna die, sure, but—if I gotta—I…” She trailed off, searching for the words.
He didn’t understand, and said so. She was quiet for a moment, then finally said, “Rennie? Will you make love to me?”
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