Vagt Damstrl, which meant “the Hotel Grand” in Hakazit, or so they said, was an imposing structure that dominated the skyline in a way only the huge port cranes could match, and its management prided itself on being able to provide both accommodations and necessaries for any race of the Well World that might be a guest. As usual, considering the state of Glathriel and its people, it had nothing precisely the way he’d want it, but many races liked carpeting on the floors and many others liked soft beds and many bathed in pools or tublike creations, so that they were able to assemble a spacious room for him that not only was to his standards but went beyond them. Nor was food a problem; a fair number of races who traveled for various reasons ate things close to or even the same as Type 41’s, and a short scan by a clever little device he’d never seen before resulted in room service deliveries of meals, even some sort of meat and fish, that were tasty and had no unusual side effects. Even silverware was provided to his specifications.
The girl ate no meat, nor would she use tableware. Still, she could and did pack away an enormous amount of fruits, grains, nuts, and starchy vegetables, all raw, all completely consumed, including rinds, skins, and seeds. She also ate whole sticks of whatever butter they provided and large squares of what appeared to be lard. It was fascinating to see the lengths she would go to to avoid using tools or utensils, though. Milk—he wasn’t sure what kind and didn’t want to know, but it had a distinct buttery taste and a kind of goatlike aroma—was fine, but not in a glass. Put it in a large bowl, and she would not touch the bowl but would put her face into it and drink or, if it was ample enough, cup it in her hands. But just about everything she could eat she did eat.
The aversion to using tools or mechanical devices wasn’t absolute, but it was as absolute as she could make it. She would not take the elevator; she walked up and down the stairs or often ran. Neither would she open a door or even indicate that she wanted it open; she would simply stand there until it was open for her. Somehow, though, she always knew the right floor to stop at and wait for him.
Even dicier was when she had to go to the toilet. Although the one in the room wasn’t built for Earth humans, it was close enough to be useful, but she would not sit on it or even touch it. She squatted, and that was that. But she had no aversion to the large oval-shaped sunken tub that filled and drained automatically. She had no problems adapting the tub to her bodily needs, which was okay, but it kept him from enjoying it. She, however, immersed herself in it with no compunctions. Overall, until he arranged with the management for an alternative shower, she smelled better than he did.
That night, feeling finally warm and comfortable, Nathan Brazil sat in the room and looked over some maps. The shortest route to the Well was over the Straight of Sagath to Agon, just three hexes away via the water route, then north through Lilblod, through Mixtim or Clopta, and across Quilst to the Avenue. It wasn’t an area he knew from the past, being well off his normal track, but it was direct and didn’t require too much travel in nontech hexes. Indeed, if he went via Clopta, Betared, up to Lieveru, and approached the Avenue from the west in Ellerbanta, although it would be a bit farther, he could limit the nontech part to Lilblod alone. That didn’t ensure friendly receptions, of course, but high- and semitech hexes had means of transportation other than muscle power, and that meant speed. By getting on the ship the girl had shown that she would ride in such things even if she didn’t like it, adjusting as best she could, as she was doing just being inside the hotel and the room.
The other alternative was to head northeast, but in addition to being longer, that route had the almost equal problem of being partly in areas well known to him. He wasn’t at all certain he wanted to put himself under the authority of the Yaxa, whose high-tech devices might well contain some vestigial residue of suspicion or identification of one Nathan Brazil even after so very long a time. He didn’t trust them much in any event.
Getting to Agon, however, was proving to be harder than he’d been led to believe. No matter what shipping company or booking agent he tried, nothing was going there. Coming from there, yes, but even when he found two ships on the schedule, he was informed that one had developed hull problems and would be in drydock for months and that the other was skipping the port because of scheduling problems and lack of business there. It almost seemed as if nothing was crossing the relatively short strait. Somehow some new natural law had been passed, or so evidence suggested, that ships traveled only east and west. It was almost making him paranoid.
If it wasn’t so ridiculous,he thought, I’d swear I was the victim of some massive conspiracy to keep me here.
Well, he had to decide on something, however unsatisfactory, fairly quickly. At the rates charged by the Grand, they’d be on the street in two more weeks. In a way he envied the girl—that wouldn’t bother her a bit, and he knew it. While she was mortal and he was not, the inseparable gulf between them that even empathic linkage couldn’t get around, he felt the cold and hunger and was subject to many of the infirmities that she was somehow shielded against. He had no intention of being frozen stiff in some cliffside hideaway until somebody found him and thawed him out in years to come.
It was while coming out from yet another fruitless encounter with a shipping agent that he met the colonel.
“Of all the sights I have seen in this beautiful but accursed world, that has to be the most amazing,” said a voice behind him, a voice that sounded both eerie and menacing, the kind of voice that would give the same impression if it just said “Good morning.” It was Sydney Greenstreet, but on steroids and in a mild echo chamber.
Brazil and the girl both stopped dead at the sound and turned. Brazil felt her sudden reaction to the speaker and understood it. She never reacted to the outward appearance of anybody; he wasn’t even sure she considered it relevant. But the inside, the important part of an individual, that she got immediately and with unerring accuracy. Not that he needed the loan of her talent for this case. The voice kind of oozed with a silky sliminess that would put anyone on guard. The fact that the figure who spoke matched the impression only reinforced the sense of menace.
“I beg your pardon,” Brazil responded politely. “Were you speaking to me?”
The creature they faced was less a form than a mass; it seemed almost made of liquid, an unsettling, pulsating thing that had no clearly defined shape, its “skin,” or outer membrane, a glistening obsidianlike shiny brown that reflected and distorted all the light that struck it. He couldn’t imagine how it spoke aloud at all.
“Pardon,” it said, revealing a nearly invisible slitlike mouth in the midst of the mass. “I had not even the slightest suspicion that there might be Earthlike humans on this planet, although God knows there is certainly every other nightmare creature.”
Brazil frowned. “You know Earth?”
“Of course. I was born there and once looked much as you.” The mass changed, writhed, and took on an increasingly humanoid shape, until, standing before them, it became what looked for all the world like a life-sized animated carving in obsidian or jade of an Earth-human man, middle-aged but ramrod straight. There was even a suggestion of a bushy mustache and the semblance of, yes, some sort of uniform. “Colonel Jorge Lunderman, late of the Air Force of the Republic of Brazil, rather abruptly retired but at your service.”
“So you’re one of the two officers that they told me about! I wondered who you were and how you wound up coming through. Oh—sorry. Captain Solomon is my name. David Solomon.”
“Captain? In the service of what nation?”
“None, really. Merchant marine. Countless ships under the usual flags of convenience.”
“You were in port, then, in Rio?”
“No, just on holiday there. I hadn’t been in Brazil in—a very long time.”
“I was commandant of the Northwestern Defense Sector—the area mostly of jungle and isolated settlements between Manaus and the western and northern national borders. A very large meteor struck, harmless
ly, in the middle of the jungle, but a mostly American television news crew who went in to investigate and report on it vanished completely. There was quite a search using every resource at our command, but it was as if they had vanished into nothingness.”
Brazil nodded. “I understand. Somehow they must all have fallen through to here.”
“Well, some Peruvian revolutionaries had camps just along the border, and they were in alliance with some very powerful drug barons, one of whom had guaranteed the newspeople’s safety. We had fears that the crew had been disposed of for some reason, but we found only cooperation from the Peruvians. It seems one of Don Campos’s sons was among the group that vanished. We searched for weeks before giving up. Nothing. But this meteor, it was so strange that they were flying in scientists from all over to test and check and measure it. There seemed no harm there, though. They’d poked it and probed it and tried to drill into it, and nothing much had changed. The Americans sent a liaison, a NASA astronaut who was a geologist, to help coordinate. The two of us stupidly agreed to pose atop the meteor for the news media. It seemed harmless enough. The next thing we knew, we were here.”
Brazil listened carefully to the account, musing over the implications he couldn’t fully discuss with the colonel or anybody else. Why had a huge chunk of meteor with a fully operative Well Gate fallen so far inland? Hell, that was a thousand miles from Rio, where he was, and the Well computer hadn’t had any trouble almost hitting him on the head with one. Had Mavra been in Brazil as well? Maneuvered there by the subtle shifts of probability the Well was capable of when it concerned a Watcher? That still didn’t make sense. One didn’t go to the upper Amazon for a casual trip, but he couldn’t see her either in the drug trade or playing local revolutionary. Not unless she was leading the rebels, anyway. Or…
Just why had he decided to take his holiday in Brazil? Maybe it was he who’d been manipulated. The savage looks of the other party, the accounts of how primitive they and the girl had seemed… Mavra living with a tribe of Stone Age Indians deep in the jungle? That had to be the answer. How and why would have to remain a mystery, at least for now, but it explained a lot. But the colonel and the astronaut had come through weeks, maybe longer, before Mavra’s group.
Maybe the colonel’s initial search and, afterward, the colonel’s and the astronaut’s apparent on-camera disintegration would have made it hard as hell to reach the Gate. That had to be it. But then, who did come through with Mavra when she finally managed it? Others of her tribe? And if that was the case, where was that news crew?
“Captain? Are you all right?” the colonel asked.
“Oh, yes, sorry. I was just trying to fit events together. What brings you to Hakazit now, Colonel?”
“Why, I thought that would be obvious. You do. Both of you, in fact. I mean, it is still something of a shock to me to find myself here in this form and situation, but I accepted what had happened out of necessity. But I had not seen or heard of a race here that was like the one into which I was born, and suddenly there is news that at least two and perhaps more of what I still think of as ‘humans’ were around and apparently unchanged. I had to find out who you were and what you were doing and, of course, how the both of you manage to remain as you were. I assume she is as she looked before and is not some native human stock unknown to me. Your pardon, but the only surprise greater than seeing someone like you here is seeing her, standing there, stark naked, on a cold and windswept coast, apparently feeling no discomfort.”
“You’re right; both of us are from Earth. I suspect she came through the same gate you did. I came through in the hills behind Rio with two others I haven’t located as yet. She’s a mystery girl—arrived naked, painted up, bone jewelry and the like, and snuck right past everybody and entered the Well World without being noticed until too late. I have no idea why the computer they say controls things here decided to keep us both as we were, but I can hazard a guess as to why she’s more changed in other ways, including the ones that are obvious, than I am. There is a human hex here, but the people don’t quite look like any race or nationality we know and they’re primitive, mysterious, and very un-Earthlike in their ways. They took a different path somehow. Seems that long ago their ancestors plotted to take over an adjoining nontech hex, Ambreza, and forgot that lack of machines doesn’t equal lack of intelligence. The Ambrezians bred some kind of gas-producing plant that grew like weeds in the human hex and basically knocked their brains all to hell. Then they switched hexes, so now the humans are nontech and apparently have been ever since. It changed them. There was some sort of mutation. Had they remained high-tech, they’d have been fairly familiar, I think, but being nontech, they went to the ultimate nontech system. Because the computer still has them in their original hex, however, that’s where both the girl and I came in. I stayed and made myself useful to the Ambrezians—they look like giant beavers—while she fled to the human hex and fell in with them. It was they, I’m sure, that made her this way, not the computer.”
“Does she not speak?”
“I don’t think she speaks or understands a word anybody says. Sometimes I’m not even sure she thinks the way most of us think. The Ambreza said that they did have a small number of sounds that were consistent, but not enough to be considered a language. I’m not so sure it’s more than the equivalent of the sound codes used by many animal species. You know—warning the tribe of danger, warning enemies off, sounds that relate to fear, and things like that. A scream, a warning cry, a sigh, a purringlike hum—that’s about the range of it. If they communicate more complex information, and I’m convinced that they do, it’s by means other than what we think of as language. I hope she was one of the Stone Age Amazonians. I’d hate to think of the frustration I would have, let alone anyone from a more civilized and technological culture, under those limitations imposed on her.”
“She is definitely not a native,” the colonel noted. “However, she looks like many people in my old native land for all that. It is not unheard of for such tribes to find or adopt lost children of outsiders and raise them as their own. I pray that it is so, for then she is probably better off and will live longer by coming here. It would be terrible if, say, she was one of the missing television crew. I mean, I may look, even be very different but inside, in my mind, I am still Jorge Lunderman. But like that, not even as you say thinking as we were raised to think, how much of either of us would be truly left after a period of living that way? I am the same man that I was, living a different life in a very different place and as, frankly, something very different than what I was. Still, there is continuity, is there not? The mind and soul are my own. I would much prefer that to retaining my body and losing my mind, my memories, my very way of thinking. I would not be me anymore. I would be someone entirely different, but perhaps with just that lurking suspicion somewhere telling me that I was once someone else. Terrible, sir! Terrible!”
Brazil glanced at the girl, who was still looking at the creature with some disdain on her face but with no hint that she’d comprehended, or even tried to comprehend, any of the discussion.
“Well, she seems neither tortured nor unhappy,” the captain noted, “so I will continue to just accept her as she is.”
The colonel shifted a bit, the human statue distorting a bit eerily. “You must tell me what you are doing and why she is with you instead of remaining back there!” he said enthusiastically. “And about all the rest of what you know as well. It seems like ages since I was able to speak to anyone with a common frame of reference to my past! But sir, I apologize! While the cold is of some little discomfort to me and apparently none to her, you must be freezing! Forgive my manners. Have you a hotel?”
“Yes, I’m at the Grand. You?”
“I am currently living out of my cabin aboard the ship I used to get here. It will be in port here for three days, so there is little reason to consider my course of action beyond that until then. My cabin is, of course, at your service, but I’m afraid it wou
ld be neither spacious nor comfortable to one not of my new kind. Shall we go to your hotel, then?”
“Might as well,” Brazil sighed. “It doesn’t look as if I’m ever going to get out of here.”
They begin walking, or, rather, Brazil began walking, as did the girl, a bit behind, while the colonel sort of oozed along next to him.
“That is a good question to begin with as we walk,” the colonel noted. “Why are you in this inhospitable and out-of-the-way place?”
“Well, if you must know, I’m in a far worse position than either you or the girl there. I can’t set up anything permanent in Glathriel—the human hex—unless I want to take on her ways and life style. The Ambreza could be strung along just so much, but they’re still paranoid about humans, particularly the kind who can talk and know technology like me, and they’ve basically barred me from returning. I’m the man without a country. I am not, however, without a good deal of experience and skills that even the Ambreza found useful, which is how I have any cash at all. By the time you can command the kind of ships I did, you became something of an expert in almost everything practical and useful. Way up north around the equator there are two high-tech hexes separated by a narrow strait, neither of which has ever seen or heard of the likes of Glathriel, and both are highly dependent on shipping and import-export trade at this stage. They’ve both been looking for qualified ship’s officers and as usual aren’t particular about the race or nationality involved. They also serve as flags of convenience for hundreds of coastal hexes, particularly the nontech and semitech ones that have to get ships and crews from high-tech places. It’s my best shot at a life here.”
“Yes, I understand,” the colonel said. “But you have been frustrated?”
“I can’t get a ship north for love or money. It’s driving me crazy—not to mention quickly broke before I’ve started.”
The colonel thought a moment. “Tell me, Captain, do you think you could handle the sort of ship they must use here?”
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