“With this ancient world-computer still functioning, could you not find out?” Alpha asked the ambassador.
“Well, the answer is probably there, of course, but I’m afraid that the great machine—the Well of Souls, it is called, and always has been—doesn’t talk to us or give up its secrets. It is set up for the benefit of creatures who are no longer around, for whatever the reason.”
Tann Nakitt looked over the map. “You say 1,560 races? For the whole galaxy!”
“Well, technically, for the whole universe,” Doroch noted. “From some of your sorts of people we’ve had in the past, I’m pretty certain we’re not in your galaxy, nor anywhere near it. However, we know, of course, that there are more races than that, because we’ve had some come through here that match nothing we know. Remember, I said this was a laboratory, or rather, a scientific experimental complex with 1,560 laboratories. There is no reason why the current crop is all there ever was. The ones that worked out were then created, superimposed, whatever, on a world somewhere that either was prepared to develop them naturally or that already met the criteria. Once that was done, the large transport station you arrived in was used to send the people there, and then an entirely new ecosystem and race could be created where they’d been. We know we are not unique; what is most logical is that this world represents the last ones. Either something happened to prevent our ancestors from going out, or the Ancient Ones now lacked sufficient numbers to do it, or perhaps some just didn’t want to go. Whichever, we remain here. The Well regulates the population so that it is stable for each nation, or hex, as we call them. Under-population nets a baby boom, overpopulation a drop. The numbers tend to stay the same, plus or minus ten percent. And there is another artifice as well.”
“But surely there are corruptions!” Kincaid put in. “You’d have worldwide weather patterns, air and water would have to flow, that sort of thing.”
“It is true that some things do in fact pass between, but they tend to be processed. You’ll see. The first time you see billowing industrial smoke essentially vanish as it goes across a border, or watch a rainstorm with a flat side, well, you will see. The Well does not interfere with how we live our lives, but it does maintain discipline of a sort for the ecosystems, within reason. When literally anything can be converted to anything else as needed, and you are powered most likely by a singularity deep within the core, perhaps tapped from a parallel universe so as to not suck us in, well—godlike is a more than apt description. We believe that they deliberately limited the Well so that it is not self-aware in the sense we would think of it. Otherwise it could easily become God, and not only here.”
“It is of supreme power and intelligence but programmed to serve only its master,” Alpha commented. “This is easy to comprehend.”
The ambassador didn’t seem to know how to take that. He wasn’t quite sure what these two women were, and was even less sure about Kincaid. He decided it was best to just continue the stock lecture.
“As I was saying, as part of the experiments, certain shortcuts had to be taken to create what was required in such a small space. The hexes are roughly 420 kilometers across, any point to any point. Travel between is possible, as well as trade and commerce. To reduce cross-cultural pollution, and also to simulate conditions on the true worlds they were being designed for, restrictions were placed on some of the hexes in about equal proportions. Some are very like your own homes, with a good deal of inventiveness and technological comfort. Some are limited in the level of technology available, generally to the age of the steam engine and the percussive projectile-based weapon. A third category allows no true storage of energy for use nor its transmission. Oh, you can use a waterwheel, that sort of thing, but otherwise nothing not done by muscle is allowed. These tend to be agrarian societies, with direct subsistence farming and hunting by spear and arrow.”
“Who enforces that kind of thing? Is there some sort of global police?” Genghis O’Leary asked. “Or some kind of force that ensures conformity to those rules?”
“It is not necessary,” Doroch told him. “The Well sets it. You may take a portable fusion generator into a semitech or nontech hex, but it simply will not work. It will be an inert lump. You can take a gunpowder-type rifle into a nontech hex and shoot it, and it simply will not fire. Every round will be a dud. Needless to say, the reverse is not true. If you take that rifle into a high-tech hex you can shoot it, even if everyone who lives there carries particle beam pistols. An arrow will kill anywhere. In that sense, the nontech folk have an advantage. They can hide out in their element and use it well, while even the semitech civilizations are too dependent on their engines and gunpowder to be able to come in and bully their way around in a nontech hex. My own is a semi, and while I feel quite comfortable here in South Zone with all its high-tech amenities, I daresay I could survive in a reasonable environment given good soil and seed and some hand tools. Could any of you do it? Any of you?”
“I could,” Alpha told him firmly. “I have data from the experience of living on a subsistence world.”
“Indeed? I wonder if it’s quite the equivalent you think. At any rate, you may well be put to the test soon. You see, there is no way out of here to anyplace that will not kill you. There is no way to send any of you back. That command is reserved for the Ancient Ones, and I’m afraid we haven’t seen any of them here for, oh, a few tens of millions of years or so. There are two exits, however. One simply teleports you to North Zone, but that will not help you much. Beyond the small area where you’ll arrive that is set aside for carbon-based life, virtually anything up there would kill you in moments. Even you, mechanical man.” He was looking at Kincaid.
“And the other exit?” Tann Nakitt prompted, getting nervous.
“The other is a general gate that, for me, would take me home to my hex and nowhere else. For the Yaxa, which you’ve met, it would take them to Yaxa. A corresponding gate in each capital, essentially in the center of each hex, will take you here, but that’s it. I cannot use it to go to Yaxa if I wanted; I’d have to travel in a conventional manner from my own home. It is, however, something of a convenient shortcut back.”
“And it will transport us to where our races have hexes?” O’Leary asked.
“Um, no, not exactly. Oh, you have a one in 780 chance of it, but it’s unlikely. I don’t remember it happening. When you go through the first time, you will be processed by the Well, assigned a race and hex where an added one would be of no consequence to the balance, which is almost any one, and then you will be reconstituted as one of them. The process is not quite random; the Well does do some sort of analysis of your mind, your personality, and does some rather odd things on occasion. One almost suspects sometime that it has a sense of humor. All that can be predicted is that you will come out young but generally postpubescent, although we’ve had a child or two through and they remain children and with their parents, if those parents are here; that you will emerge in absolutely perfect health, and that, while your memories and personality will be basically untouched, that autonomic part of everyone’s brain will be suited to and comfortable with the new form. You’ll know how to use the body, in other words. That’s not the same as saying you will feel like a native, but it is sufficient to get you started.”
Kincaid picked up on this right away. “Now, hold it, sir. You are saying that Josich and the other Hadun who came through before us are no longer racially Ghomas? That they are now something else?”
“They are not what they were, certainly.”
“What are they, then? Where is Josich, and what does the monster breathe?”
The ambassador’s tone grew a bit dark. “Josich is a Chalidang. That is here, in the north-central region of the Overdark, one of our great oceans. A high-tech hex that adjoins a large island. Another of that race is in Jocir, yet another high-tech hex only two away from Chalidang and adjoining the continent, and another is down here, at Imtre. That was the curse, really. Two in high-tech hexes not
far from one another, and a third in what was nontech but in a formidable form. The other two of their kind arrived on land, one on the far eastern edge of the Overdark, the other on an island to the south, Cromlin and Becuhl, one high-tech, the other a semitech. They were all quickly in the hands of ambitious and ruthless rulers open to their own brand of ambition. Beyond that, you had best learn once you have been processed. Still, sir, if you wish to kill the one called Josich, many would count you a hero, but you will have to go to Chalidang.”
“Still a water breather, though,” Kincaid said wistfully. “But two out of five weren’t reconstituted as water breathers. I’ll bet that has them unbalanced. But this means that I might well be reprocessed as a water breather?”
“You might. The odds are against it, but it happens.” The ambassador turned and looked them all over. “And now, you must proceed to processing. It is a standing rule of all the races here that anyone entering Zone must be processed by the end of the day they emerge, and preferably as soon as they are briefed. We have no way to take care of you as you are, and until you are processed you are in all ways aliens.”
“Wait! Where is our master that the flying ones took with them?” Alpha demanded to know.
“Oh—him. He was taken immediately to the Well Gate because, of course, all this would be of no use to him. The Yaxa state that he had some sort of seizure and that they were not at all certain if he was alive when they put him through. If he was, he is already somewhere, and something, else. I may find out in time, but nothing would be learned as yet. If he was dead, then he is gone. They followed the only course that might have saved him. Only time will tell if it did.”
“Then we will stay here until we know!” Alpha maintained adamantly.
The Ambassador looked at her, its big eyes then moving to the others, and then he said, quietly, “No, I’m afraid you won’t.”
The Yaxa and their nasty rifles were back, standing in the back of the room and aiming at the two women.
“If those two, or any of the others, make the slightest move to do anything but go to and through processing, you have my leave to shoot them,” the Ambassador told them. “If it’s around here, kill is authorized. If near the gate, simply stun them into unconscious oblivion if you can and throw them in.”
Their briefing, and their welcome, was over.
Ambora
It wasn’t supposed to hurt.
They said it would be no different than the teleportation to the Well World itself; a sense of darkness, unconsciousness, and then you’d wake up somewhere else in a new native habitat with the basics necessary to survive. From that point, you’d be on your own.
The pain had been enormous. She remembered the pain, as if her head were under horrible attack and all its blood vessels exploded. It was the kind of pain whose memory lasted a lifetime in nightmares, and for some time its echoes would cause nervous caution or even possible panic.
And then she’d come to with those echoes surrounding her, come to and find only questions.
Who had said that there would be no pain? Tele— The very term confused her. It was gibberish, meaningless, and even those fragments of memory faded as a dream fades upon awakening from the deepest of sleeps, leaving her with only the memory of that pain and total confusion.
She awoke high on a cliff overlooking a vast saltwater ocean that seemed to have no end. The cliffs were as sheer as might be imagined from nature, and they rose perhaps a kilometer above her and even more below her to a flat volcanic outcrop of rock and vegetation that jutted out into the sea.
She was on a small outcrop from that cliff barely large enough for her reclining body, with no ladder or trail or any other indication of how she’d gotten there, or, more to the point, how she’d get off.
Who was she? What was she? She wasn’t sure what frightened her more, the situation she found herself in or the fact that she had no memories of her past, not one single personal memory.
She got to her feet, nervous about the drop, then did a self-examination. The discovery that she was, in fact, female was a surprise, although had she found herself a male it would have made an equal impact. Whatever sense of self she had, it contained none of those rocks that others might take for granted. The breasts were large and firm, but something in her subconscious said that they weren’t quite right, although she had no idea why. If she leaned forward, they did not hang at all; it was as if they were attached all the way, which, in fact, they were, with some kind of connective tissue. This created an extremely streamlined figure that tapered down to an impossibly small waist flanked by long, muscular legs that provided sure balance and were attached at a hip that allowed her to not only bring her face down close to the ground if she wanted, but also to swivel the torso effortlessly almost sideways. Her natural sense of balance was startling to her; whatever fear she’d felt at the height or standing up had already fled.
The arms were thin and ended in hands with extremely long fingers, three of them, and an opposable thumb almost as long as the rest, all of which ended in sharp clawlike nails that retracted when the fingers were straight out and emerged when the fingers were curved. Her feet were almost mirror images of her hands, with the fingerlike toes perhaps longer, and the claws much longer when extended. The skin on both the inside of the hands and the bottom of her feet was abnormally tough, yet flexible, and the fingers and toes were webbed with a supple yet leathery connector that didn’t seem to limit movement. In fact, when the digits were closed in, it emerged at the bottom of the foot and seemed to stick to the rock, adding some stability.
And then there was the matter of the wings and the tail.
Not merely wings, but great wings, white, but tinged with brown at the edges and near the base where they met her back. She could feel the enormous muscles there that propelled them, and, as an experiment, she extended the wings and was startled to see just how enormous was the wingspan when they were fully extended. At the base of her spine emerged the tail, which she only became aware of when she stretched the wings, since it made the tail extend and open, almost fanlike. Bringing the wings back in caused the tail to retract, although it still extended beyond her rump. She had what seemed to be a head of hair but proved to be hairlike feathers, and quite oily at that; beyond it, though, her whole backside save the rump and legs was covered by the same sort of birdlike feathers as composed the wings and tail.
Out of curiosity, she picked up a small rock with her right-hand-like foot and brought it up to her face. The leg had no trouble with this at all, and the other leg kept her as solid and balanced as if she were standing on both.
She was a woman, and a bird. No beak, though. Those were lips, and a nose that seemed “normal,” although she had no idea what was being used as the norm for comparative purposes. Birds had cavities for ears; she had ears, but they didn’t feel quite “right,” again not understanding what “right” would feel like, but they were close in and held to the side of the head in much the same way the breasts were held tight. Aerodynamic design. She had teeth, too, but again they didn’t quite compare to that mysterious norm. The front ones did, but it seemed for some reason that the back teeth should be wide and flat; these were needle sharp. The teeth of a carnivore.
This troubled that part of her that sat there, just out of sight and reach, coaching and reproaching, but she couldn’t understand why it did.
She looked out at the sea and was startled to see not just the scene, but differences in the moving air, like a transparent layer cake where the layers flowed and you could see them and how they flowed.
How did baby birds learn to fly?
Oh, God! she thought. There was only one way she could have gotten where she was, and barring some miraculous rescue, there was only one way to get somewhere else. There had to be others like her; she couldn’t be in this strange place totally alone. But she didn’t know what to do! Just launch herself off the cliff and trust to some instinct she didn’t feel at all?
Some
thing large flew by a bit above her. For a moment she hoped it was another of her kind, but it wasn’t. Just focusing on it revealed it as if she were using a telescope with amazing detail, while somewhere in her mind she had instantly calculated just how far away it actually was and how fast it was going.
It was a big, ugly bird with a twisted beak and black wings and body. In addition to its dark orange feet, it also had two tiny, odd-looking forelimbs that were curled under and seemed to end in tingle-nasty claws, the better to tear into flesh. She watched it, noticing how effortlessly it was flying, how using the thermals it clearly could see and feel the same as she could. At this height, and with these winds, it was almost like gliding.
The sun was getting low; the shadows had been lengthening as she’d stood there. She had no idea if she could see at night, but it was clear that if she didn’t get up the nerve to try and fly, she’d spend the night there, hungry and thirsty and exposed.
It wasn’t fair, she reflected. Everybody else would be born and raised this way and taught the basics. She was going to have to try it cold turkey.
Turkey? What was a turkey? Where had that come from?
A mental picture of a big, fat, ugly flightless bird came to her. That was not encouraging.
Time was against her, she knew, and nobody remotely like her had shown up or flown by, and there were no sounds of talking or yelling or even squawking around, just the distant pounding surf and the sounds of two waterfalls emerging from the cliffs about a hundred meters to the left of her and two hundred or so to the right.
The devil with it! she thought, and jumped.
She fell faster than she’d thought, but then the wings and tail fully extended and the great things that emerged from her back began to beat as needed. Almost at the last moment she realized that all that was missing was a conscious will to direct her, and she pulled up just a few meters before the water and began a slow, steady climb as she went along the cliffs.
The Sea is Full of Stars wos-6 Page 20
