The Sea is Full of Stars wos-6

by Jack L. Chalker

  The high priestess was the kind of person who always spoke in sharp exclamations, but hers was also the voice of somebody who expected to be obeyed. Feeling suddenly very alone, she stood erect again and looked up at the obvious leader of the clan.

  “What is your name?” the priestess snapped.

  “Honestly, Your Holiness, I don’t know it. I have no memory at all.”

  The priestess frowned, having heard this before, and began asking a series of quick, sharp, probing questions, to which her hapless subject was expected to respond instantly, unthinkingly. The problem was, much of it was in the form of “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember.”

  After a while this stopped, and the priestess approached very near and began an extremely close examination of the newcomer, not just with her eyes but with her nose and, at times, tongue as well. Finally, she straightened up, stood back, then spoke, and for the first time seemed less inclined to eat her alive.

  “This is most strange,” the priestess said, as much to herself as to her subject. “You have a unique scent but it does not specifically relate to the scent of any clan I know. You have no markings, no tattoos, and, most strangely of all, absolutely no scars. It is nearly impossible for anyone to grow up here and have no scars at all. You are young, certainly, but definitely past the Age, yet you are still a virgin, and your ignorance of even some of the most basic facts of Amborean life and culture seems genuine. This suggests you are of a type we know from stories but hasn’t been seen, to my knowledge, in this land or among the People for a very long time.” She sighed. “I will have to send someone to Zone to confirm this. Until then, you will remain here, but you will not again go out and mix with the clan, nor converse with any members save those who enter here. You will not need to hunt; I believe it is in our interest to instruct you. I do find it astonishing that you have no memory at all of your past, but in a way that will make it easier. Do you accept these terms?”

  “It does not appear I have any choice, Holiness,” she responded, not liking the woman at all.

  “You have a choice. The choice is to accept a brand and leave now, the brand forever marking you as one who is forbidden in our territory and who is to be killed on sight if she returns. Since the landforms, native animals, and guiding spirits and sponsoring god are the only major differences between clans, you will doubtless wind up in this situation again, and eventually you will either have to leave the land or die in it, but that is your choice. You may remain here under our direction and accept instruction. Once you do so, you will be committed. Any attempt to leave after that without our permission will raise the hue and cry, and you will be the object of a full clan hunt. But there are always choices in life. Living or dying, submitting or rebelling, these choices we all make. Well?”

  “I—I have nowhere else to go, and I really liked the people I met here so far,” with one exception, she added to herself. “I should like to remain, although it is difficult to imagine being cooped up inside, forbidden to fly.”

  “That is a sacrifice you will have to learn to live with until you are initiated into the clan. The reason for this is for you to learn the ways of our clan, our culture, our people, their beliefs and the reasons for them, and to so immerse yourself that you will acquire the faith to believe and the inner knowledge of the spirit. It will not be an easy test, and it can take a short time or a long time depending on you. In the end you must become one with us. You must truly believe as we believe, you must act as we would act, truly place clan above self. The path is not easy and the tests are true tests of all that we value. In the end you alone will prove your worthiness. Now, in the meantime, we will find a place for you to rest, and nourishment if it is needed. Tomorrow we will begin the instruction. Assuming, that is, that you will not leave now.”

  She didn’t hesitate, knowing the truth of the priestess’s claims that she would find the same elsewhere. It was beautiful here and the people were nice. If she tried another clan, who was to say that the next priestess might have her sacrificed for violating their territory, particularly since there would be evidence that they weren’t the first choice?

  They named her Jaysu, which in context would mean Empty One, or Empty Jar. All Ambora names were flowery because the language was, and depended much on tone and context for meaning. It appeared there were also both sacrificial omens and numerology involved in which name went to whom.

  She took well to the monastic life, almost as if it were an echo of something in her unknown past. She did think she might have once been a priestess, but no images came, and she’d already stopped trying to coax anything familiar out.

  There were dreams, but they made little sense, and gave off feelings she’d rather not have again.

  One feeling she had occasionally, which did not require sleep, was an odd sense of being looked at deep inside her mind; the sensation was indescribable, and it came and went for no apparent reason. The priestesses training her were excited by this rather than distressed; they said it meant she had the rare spirituality to connect to the gods and spirits, and that one day she might resolve these into true communication.

  The Ambora saw spirits everywhere. There were spirits for rain, spirits for fire, spirits for volcanoes—and one volcano god over all of them—a spirit in each tree, rock, whatever. The carvings they made in living trees and what they considered living rock represented the greater spirits there, and atop them all the supreme god of the clan, protector of the clan from all other gods. Theirs was a world in which literally everything was not only alive, but, to a series of degrees, had power and thought and used it. There were also, of course, prayers, rituals, sacrifices, mystic signs and symbols, talismans, and the like to protect you from the various spirits—if you had sufficient faith.

  Although it was not brought out immediately, the priestesses did know of the wider world and at least neighboring civilizations. They knew about the technology available there, and abhorred it as corrupting and evil, although they were not above trading for a few things they needed, such as bronze ingots of a certain purity and, occasionally, silver and gold. Sometimes others were allowed in, for brief periods, to harvest the enormously rich and bountiful crops that could be grown in Amboran soil, and for which the carnivorous Ambora had little use except as food for their own food. The few vegetable products they consumed were not exactly delicacies: a thick gruel used to relieve constipation, acidic leaves chewed to cure upset stomachs, and so on, and some used in the potions that were in the cauldrons she’d seen when first entering the cave.

  One was a mild narcotic that induced a kind of waking trance; it wasn’t debilitating, but you tended to focus single-mindedly on whatever was being taught and happily go along with whoever the teachers were, no matter what they said. Since much of the teaching was by repetition, using chants and prayers and rituals over and over, you tended, with this aid, to learn things quickly, and they stayed with you. In fact, the more she began to accept and think along their lines, the more she felt at home, that she was fitting in with the others.

  The belief system and procedure seemed very comfortable, very true to her. They saw the world as ruled by a huge number of gods, each of whom had created a race and land in its own image and now presided over each. There was a chief god who lived not in the heavens but in the center of the planet, called simply the Judge, who watched over all the other gods and their equal places, and by the performance and fidelity of the people living in each would reward or punish. The Judge also decided whether you would simply be extinguished or find eternal punishment when you died, or if you would be sent to a paradise, a world that was all Ambora and where the Amboran people lived in perfect harmony, serving and worshiping the god they could see and hear and know.

  There were no ranks in Amboran society. By training and piety and testing you might become one of many levels of priestesses and be absolute in religious authority, while the men constituted civil authority, such as education and a kind of primitive zoning
that allowed the forest to thrive even with their density while also managing any building. The women provided food and defense as well as priestesses as needed; the men provided the rest, including sitting on the enormous egg that the women laid, for the week or two until it hatched, which more than anything explained the bow-leggedness of the males and the softness of their feathers.

  Defense was necessary, although not day-to-day. Clans not well-managed or subject to volcanic or other natural disasters, usually taken as punishments by the gods, could face starvation or worse. One clan once had a steam vent explode and kill most of the men and children at midday; the only way to reestablish the clan and village was to kidnap some men from other villages. Beyond this, there were always fights of honor or for pride between individuals of different clans who might meet and clash in the air, as well as the constant marking of clan boundaries, which were often disputed by adjacent clans.

  Whether her gods and spirits were real or not, the high priestess really did possess powers. Raised and trained to the job, only one priestess would attain her levels and her powers; no other was possible until she died, but that one would come from the ranks of the priestesses around her. There were costs to go with the power, though. The high priestess had to be a lifelong virgin; while there was no requirement that a priestess be celibate, most were as a matter of course, since all wanted to attain the highest spiritual level possible in this life. Most of the priestesses were sterile anyway, thanks to all the drugs and potions they used as a daily part of their lives. The high priestess gained in physical size, and the wings and feathering became incredibly dense, yet once she attained her rank, she could no longer fly.

  It was clear that Her Holiness was pleased with Jaysu’s rapid spiritual progress, and that she very much wanted the newcomer to enter the priesthood. It would be a waste for someone so bright to just be another warrior and mother, particularly when the girl definitely could feel the gods talking and at times even the Great Judge below.

  She had punished Lema for the lapse in security, although not heavily, but Lema’s last act of penance was to fly to the Great Pit that was the one unifying holy shrine of all clans and Amboran peoples, and there present credentials from the High Priestess and thus fly into the center of the Pit and be transported to South Zone. The act of doing so and also then encountering so many fearsome-looking creatures at close quarters was generally enough to make any warrior believe in miracles and the power of the priesthood, as well as scaring the living crap out of them. Lema had wasted no time seeing the Grand High Priestess who staffed the Amboran embassy in South Zone alone, and sat terrified while this highest of all clerics used exotic magic involving a magic tablet with lots of little dots on it and magic screens, and ultimately printed out a packet of information that was then placed in a pouch, sealed, and given to Lema for the return trip. There was no danger of Lema reading this, since only priestesses and male educators were literate, or needed to be.

  When the High Priestess got the papers, she was more shocked than surprised by the data. She well understood the process of conditioning and programming of the mind—that was part of the job here—but this! This was as pure evil as she’d seen in a long time. Slavery was an abhorrent concept to her, and, even worse, slavery done by someone just for ego and sadistic pleasures and for no true need—horrible. The photos of the entries wouldn’t and didn’t correlate to present appearance, but faces always told something, and those two were blanks. They’d had all the humanity just squeezed out of them. Had she not seen Jaysu, she would have said flatly that the evil one had left their bodies alive but murdered their souls. It was little wonder that the woman had lost her memory; it would have been intolerable to remember that period, the High Priestess suspected.

  But which one was she? Or did it matter? The real question was, would she remember? If so, this could present problems, since she might well revive old conditioning and become subject to other wills in a world that was growing more dangerous as the forces of darkness gathered and moved in the west. What could they do against an army of monsters who might overrun all the land by sheer force of numbers and had no worry about how many lives they sacrificed?

  If only she could gain this one’s knowledge without risking her mind and her soul!

  For now it would have to suffice just to train her and indoctrinate her so completely in the Amboran mindset that she might be an asset in the inevitable dark times to come.

  The Overdark, the ocean had always been called. It was a fitting, perhaps prophetic, name.

  She would send not Lema back to Zone, but an acolyte priestess with more requests. The Grand High Priestess was already supplying weekly updates to the clans on the state of the coming darkness, and everyone who was knowledgeable in any clan understood the gravity of it. But even getting the clans to agree on whether or not it was raining (or if females flew) was impossible. Getting them to band together in concert on a truly national scale was the Grand High Priestess’s aim, and perhaps the only hope Ambora, as a coastal nation, had.

  For they would come one day. Perhaps not today, or tomorrow, or even next week or next year, but they would come. If they faced three million individualists, as she feared they would, then none of the gods and spirits of Ambora could save them.

  Mahakor, Kalinda

  It wasn’t supposed to hurt, but it had, and a lot. Neither of them understood that it was because of their own telepathic links, suddenly severed when all of their beings were broken down into nothing more than impossibly complex and detailed code, analyzed, rearranged, and reformed on the surface by the great machine that operated and maintained the Well. The Well of Souls was not so much a creator as a processor, although only those long dead and gone could understand its logic.

  Angel/Alpha, Ming/Beta, and Ari had all tried to enter at once, although they were assured it wouldn’t matter in terms of final placement. Alpha had winked out first, and Beta hesitated, feeling lost, and then the pain and jamming of the mental signals and implanted receptors kicked in and, for very different reasons, Beta and Ari clung to one another as their transformations began.

  Beta clung to Ari because she had been using an unused part of his brain for hot swappable storage, and because she had made him subject to her. Ari clung to her out of fear, out of remorse, and because more than being controlled, he feared being alone.

  He awoke, still with the echo of that searing pain, when somebody threw a huge bucket of water at him with enormous force, knocking him backward and almost out cold again.

  He was disoriented and panicked, then saw that what had thrown the water at him was in fact a very angry looking ocean, and that he was on a rocky outcrop being pounded by tall waves and churning surf. He tried to get up and run inland to escape the next big one, but couldn’t get to his feet before it smacked him again. Then, without thinking, his survival instincts took over and he crawled, hand over hand, to the edge of the rocks and slid down into the ocean head first.

  Instantly he was in a different world. A shiver went through him from head to—tail?—and he opened his mouth and took in water, starting a rhythmic motion. He felt it pass through the mouth, down through the neck, and then kind of ooze back into the surrounding water again. It was an interesting feeling, one he’d not had before, nor was it something he’d have tried on his own, but thankfully, the instincts worked.

  Okay, he was breathing water. It still seemed odd, but only because, topside, he was certain he’d been breathing air. What kind of creature could breathe both so effortlessly?

  He brought what proved to be a webbed hand with very long, sharp, curved nails to his face and felt it. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth, chin, even two ears, although they felt like soft seashells. But the nose wasn’t a nose; no water was going in and out, and he didn’t think air had before, on the rocks. It seemed to be a nice little nose, but in fact the two indentations in the nostrils weren’t cavities at all, but ended just inside, at a pulsing fleshy tissue.

  Ther
e was hair, too, thick and long, but it didn’t quite feel like hair, and when he reached up and took a little of it and brought it in front of his eyes, it looked colorless, not quite transparent but certainly translucent, and felt warm to the touch.

  Continuing his self-examination, he noted gill-like organs in the neck, which accepted water as he swam and extracted the oxygen and expelled the rest in a simple series of automatic motions. His color was light brown on the underside; from what he could tell about his back, it appeared a much darker brown, and there seemed to be a fin, like the dorsal of a shark, just below the shoulder blades. If that was what he’d fallen against the second time, it was a wonder he hadn’t impaled himself. Reaching around and touching it, which was all he could manage, he could feel it was very hard, and with sharp edges that probably led to a knifelike point.

  Now it was clear that he hadn’t been able to run because he had no legs. Instead, the humanoid torso blended into one more reminiscent of a sea lion or a porpoise; the large steering fins were parallel to his body, much like a mammal, rather than like great fish.

  A hybrid of some kind, he thought with some sense of wonder, one so much of the sea that it probably lived there most of the time and breathed the water easily, yet able to breathe air if need be and operate on the surface, or even, to the limited extent his body permitted, on land. Part fish, part mammal? There were small, very tight, very firm breasts with nipples, but they looked and felt more like pectorals and he felt comfortably male, except…

  If there s no crotch, how do I…? He brought his tail around and angled his neck down until he could see a small area where something bony barely protruded. That was it? Jeez, maybe they just laid eggs and then the guys swam over them and got off or something. Wouldn’t that be a disappointment!