“If you and they was neighbors, why was that a problem?” Jol asked.
The sadness crept back. “Well—a very long time ago, there was a war. My people were from a high-tech hex, and they built an extremely comfortable civilization, judging from the artifacts I saw. But the lifestyle was extremely wasteful—it required enormous natural resources to sustain—and they were running out, while the by-products curtailed good soil to the point where they were importing eight percent of their food. Unwilling to compromise their life-style, they looked to their neighbors to sustain their culture. Two hexes were ocean, one’s temperature was so cold it would kill us, two more weren’t worth taking for what they had or could be turned into. Only the Ambreza Hex was compatible, even though it was totally nontechnological. No steam engines, no machines of any kind not powered by muscle. The Ambreza were quiet, primitive farmers and fishermen, and they looked like easy prey.”
“Attacked ’em, eh?” Yomax put in.
“Well, they were about to,” Brazil replied. “They geared up with swords and spears, bows and catapults—whatever would work in Ambreza Hex—with computers from home telling them the best effective use. But my people made one mistake, so very old in the history of many races, and they paid the price for it.”
“What mistake was that?” asked Jol, fascinated.
“They confused ignorance with stupidity,” the man explained. “The Ambreza were what they appeared to be, but they were not dumb. They saw what was coming and saw what they had to lose. Their diplomats tried to negotiate a settlement, but at the same time they scoured other hexes for effective countermeasures—and they found one!”
“Yes? Yes? And that was…?” Yomax prompted.
“A gas,” Brazil said softly. “A Northern Hemisphere hex used it for refrigeration, but on my people it had a far different effect. They kidnapped a few people, and the gas worked on them just as the Northerners said it would. Meanwhile the only effect on the Ambreza was to make them itch and sneeze for a while.”
“It killed all your people?” asked Yomax, appalled.
“Not killed, no—not exactly,” the small man replied. “It made, well chemical changes in the brain. You see, just about every race is loosely based on, or related to, some animal past or present.”
“Yup,” Yomax agreed. “I once tried to talk to a horse in Hex Eighty-three.”
“Exactly!” Brazil exclaimed. “Well, we came from—were a refinement of, really—the great apes. You know about them?”
“Saw a few pictures once in a magazine,” Jol said. “Two or three hexes got kinds of ’em.”
“That’s right. Even the Ambreza are related to several animals in other hexes—including this one, if I recall,” Brazil continued. “Well, the gas simply mentally reverted everyone back to his ancestral animalism. They all lost their power to reason and became great apes.”
“Wow!” Jol exclaimed. “Didn’t they all die?”
“No,” Brazil replied. “The climate’s moderate, and while many of them—probably most of them—did perish, a few seemed to adapt. The Ambreza moved in and cleared out the area afterward. They let them run free in small packs. They even keep a few as pets.”
“I ain’t much on science,” the old man put in, “but I do remember that stuff like chemical changes can’t be passed on. Surely their children didn’t breed true as animals.”
“The Ambreza say that there has been slow improvement,” answered the small man. “But while the gas has to be extremely potent to affect anybody else, it appears that the stuff got absorbed by just about everything—rocks, dirt, and everything that grows in it or lived in it. For my people, the big dose caused initial reversion, but about one part per trillion keeps it alive. The effect is slowly wearing out. The Ambreza figure that they’ll be up to the level of basic primitive people in another six or seven generations, maybe even start a language within five hundred years. Their—the Ambreza’s, that is—master plan is to move the packs over into their old land when they start to improve. That way they’ll develop in a non-technological hex and will probably remain rather primitive.”
“I’m not sure I like that gas,” Yomax commented. “What worked on them might work on us.” He shivered.
“I don’t think so,” Brazil replied. “After the attack, the Well refused to transport the stuff anymore. I think our planetary brain’s had enough of such things.”
“I still don’t like the idea,” Yomax maintained. “If not that, then somethin’ else could get us.”
“Life’s a risk anyway, without worrying about everything that might happen,” Brazil pointed out. “After all, you could slip on the dock and fall in the lake and freeze to death before you got to shore. A tree could fall over on you. Lightning could strike. But if you let such things dominate your life, you’ll be as good as dead anyway. That’s what’s wrong with Wu Julee.”
“What do you mean?” Jol asked sharply.
“She’s had a horrible life,” Nathan Brazil replied evenly. “Born on a Comworld; bred to do farm labor, looking and thinking just like everybody else, no sex, no fun, no nothing. Then, suddenly, she was plucked up by the hierarchy, given shots to develop sexually, and used as a prostitute for minor visitors, one of whom was a foreign pig named Datham Hain.”
He was interrupted at this point and had to try to explain what a prostitute was to two members of a culture that didn’t have marriage, paternity suits, or money. It took some doing.
“Anyway,” he continued, “this Hain was a representative of a group of nasties who get important people on various worlds hooked on a particularly nasty kind of drug, the better to rule them. To demonstrate what it did if you didn’t get the treatment, he infected Wu Julee first and then let the stuff start to destroy her. There’s no cure, and on most worlds they just put such people to death. Most of those infected, finding their blood samples matching Wu Julee’s blood, played Hain’s game, taking orders from him and his masters.
“The stuff kind of does to you, but very painfully, what that gas did to my Hex Forty-one, only it also depresses the appetite to nonexistence. You eventually mindlessly starve to death.”
“And poor Wuju was already pretty far gone,” Jol interpolated. “In pain, practically an animal, with all that behind her. No wonder she blotted all memories out! And no wonder she had nightmares!”
“Life’s been a nightmare to her,” Brazil said quietly. “Her physical nightmare is over, but until she faces that fact, it still lives in her mind.”
They just stood there for several minutes, there seeming to be nothing left to say. Finally, Yomax said, “Captain, one thing bothers me about your gas story.”
“Fire away,” the man invited, sipping more of the ale.
“If that gas stuff was still active, why didn’t it affect you, at least slightly?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Brazil responded. “Everything says I should have been reduced to the level of the hex, including Ambreza chemistry. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t even physically changed to conform to the larger, darker version of humanity there. I couldn’t explain that—and neither can the Ambreza.”
* * *
The Healer stuck her head in the door, and they turned expectantly.
“She’s sleeping now,” she reported. “Really sleeping, for the first time in more than a month. I’ll stay with her and see her through.”
They nodded and settled back for a long wait.
Wu Julee slept for almost two days.
Brazil used the time to tour the village and look at some of the trails. He liked these people, he decided, and he liked this isolated place, cut off from everything civilized except for the one daily boat run. Standing on a ledge partway up a well-maintained cross-country trail, he was oblivious to the cold and the wind as he looked out at the mass of snow-covered mountains. He realized suddenly that almost the whole mountain range was in the next hex, and he speculated idly on what sort of denizens lived in that kind of terrain.
After spending most of a day out there, he made his way back to the village to check on Wu Julee’s progress.
“She came around,” the Healer informed him. “I got her to eat a little something and it stayed down. You can see her, if you want.”
Brazil did want, and went in.
She looked a little weak but managed a smile when she saw him.
She hasn’t really changed radically, he thought, at least not from the waist up. He would have known her anywhere—despite the different coloration and the lower body, the pointy ears, and all. She actually looked healthier than she had under the influence of that vicious drug, the product of eating better and of exercising.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, idly wondering why that stupid question was always the first asked of obviously sick people.
“Weak,” she replied, “but I’ll manage.” She let out a small giggle. “The last time we saw each other I had to look up to you.”
Brazil took on a pained expression. “It never fails!” he wailed. “Everybody always picks on a little man!”
She laughed and so did he. “It’s good to see you laugh,” he said.
“There’s never been much to laugh about, before,” she replied.
“I told you I’d find you.”
“I remember—that was the worst part of the sponge. You know, you are aware of all that’s happening to you.”
He nodded gravely. “Throughout the history of man there’s always been some kind of drug, and people stuck on it. The people who push the stuff are on a different kind of drug, one so powerful that they are not aware of its own, ravaging, animalistic effect on them.”
“What’s that?”
“Power and greed,” he told her. “The ugliest—no, the second ugliest ravager of people ever known.”
“What’s the ugliest, then?” she asked him.
“Fear,” he replied seriously. “It destroys, rots, and touches everyone around.”
She was silent for a moment. “I’ve been afraid most of my life,” she said so softly he almost couldn’t make out the words.
“I know,” he replied gently. “But there’s nothing to fear now, you know. These are good people here, and this is a spot I could cheerfully spend the rest of my life in.”
She looked straight at him, and her youthful looks were betrayed by the eyes of someone incredibly old.
“They are wonderful,” she admitted, “but it’s their paradise. They were born here, and they know nothing of the horrors around them. It must be wonderful to be that way, but I’m not one of them. My scars seem huge and painful just because of their goodness and simplicity. Can you understand that?”
He nodded slowly. “I have scars, too, you know. And some of them are more than I can take at times. My memory’s coming back—slowly, but in extreme detail. And, like Serge said, they’re mostly things I don’t want to remember. Some good times, some wonderful things, certainly—but some horrors and a lot of pain, too. Like you, I blotted them out, more successfully it seems, but they’re coming back now—more and more each day.”
“Those rejuve treatments must have done a lot to your memory,” she suggested.
“No, nothing,” he said slowly. “I’ve never had a rejuve treatment, Wu Julee. Never. I knew that when I blamed them for such things.”
“Never—but that’s impossible! I remember Hain reading your license. It said you were over five hundred years old!”
“I am,” he replied slowly. “And a lot more. I’ve had a hundred names, a thousand lives, all the same. I’ve been around since Old Earth, and before.”
“But that was bombed out centuries ago! Why, that was back almost before history!”
His tone was casual, but there was no doubting his sincerity. “It’s been dropping like a series of veils, little by little. Just today, up in the mountains, I suddenly remembered a funny, little, Old Earth dictator who liked me because I wasn’t any taller than he was.
“Napoleon Bonaparte was his name…”
* * *
He slept on furs in Yomax’s office for several days, seeing Wu Julee gain some strength and confidence with every visit.
But those eyes—the scars in her eyes were still there.
One day the steamboat came in, and Klamath almost fell in the lake rushing out to meet him.
“Nate! Nate!” the ferry captain called. “Incredible news!” From his expression it was nothing good.
“Calm down, Klammy, and tell me about it.” He spied a block-printed newspaper in the waterman’s hand, but couldn’t read a word of the language.
“Somebody just busted into that university in Czill and kidnapped a couple of people!”
Brazil frowned, a funny feeling in his stomach. That was where Vardia was, where he was going next.
“Who’d they snatch?” he asked.
“One of yours, Vardia or something like that. And a Umiau—they’re sorta mermaids, Nate—named Cannot.”
The little man shifted uneasily, chewing on his lower lip.
“Anybody know who?”
“Got a good idea, though they deny it. Bunch o’ giant cockroaches with some unpronounceable name. Some of the Umiau spotted them in the dark when they shorted out the power at the Center.”
Slowly the story came out. Two large creatures resembling giant flying bugs blew the main power plant, causing the artificial sunlight to fail in one wing of the Center. Then they crashed through the windows of the lab, grabbed Vardia and Cannot, and took them away. The leaders of the culprit’s race were confronted at Zone, but pointed out that there were almost a hundred insectival races on the planet and denied they were the ones. Their tight monarchy, resembling a Comworld with fancy titles, was leakproof—so nobody was sure.
“But that’s not the most sensational part!” Klamath continued, his voice rising again. “These Umiau got superupset at all this, and one of them let slip the truth about Cannot.
“Seems they and the top dogs of the Center had a real secret to keep. Cannot was Elkinos Skander, Nate!”
Brazil just stood there, digesting the information. It made sense, of course. Skander would use the great computers of the Center to answer his big questions, getting everything he needed so that, when he was ready, he could mount an expedition under his direction to the interior of the Well World. Power and greed, Brazil thought sourly. Corrupting two of the more peaceful and productive races on the planet.
Well, they wanted it all, and now all they’ve got left is their fear, he reflected.
“I’ll have to go to Czill now,” he told the ferry captain. “It looks as if my job is starting.”
Klamath didn’t understand, but agreed to hold the boat until Nathan could say good-bye to Wu Julee.
She was standing unsupported and looking through a book of landscape paintings by local artists when he entered. His expression telegraphed his disquiet.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“They’ve broken into a place a couple of hexes over and kidnapped Vardia and Skander, the man who might be the killer of those seven people back on Dalgonia,” he told her gravely. “I have to go, I’m afraid.”
“Take me with you,” she said evenly.
The thought had never occurred to him. “But you’re still weak!” he protested. “And here is where you belong. These are your people, now. Out there is nothing but worse and worse. It’s no place for you!”
She walked over to him and looked down with those old, old eyes.
“I have to,” she told him. “I have to heal the scars.”
“But there’re only more scars out there,” he countered. “There’s fear out there, Wu Julee.”
“No, Nathan,” she replied sternly, using his first name for the first time. She tapped her forehead. “The fear is in here. Until I face it, I’ll die by inches here.”
He was silent for a while, and she thought he still wouldn’t take her.
“I’m easier to care for than you are,” she pointed
out. “I’m tougher of skin, more tolerant of weather, and I need only some kind of grass and water.”
“All right,” he said slowly. “Come if you must. You can get back to Dillia through a gate from anywhere, anyway.”
“That’s what I’ve got to know, Nathan,” she explained. “I’m cured of sponge, but I’m still hooked on that ugliest drug, fear.”
“You sure you’re well enough?”
“I’m sure,” she replied firmly. “This will give me what I need.”
She put on a coat and they went outside. When they told Yomax and the others that she was going along, the same round of protests started all over again, but her mind was made up.
“I’ll tell Dal and Jol,” Yomax said, tears welling in his eyes. “But they won’t understand, neither.”
“I’ll be back, old man,” she replied, her voice breaking. She kissed him lightly on the cheek.
Klamath sounded the steam whistle.
They stepped on board the first floor of the steamship and entered the partially closed cargo door that enclosed the lower deck from the colder weather.
Five hours later they landed in the much larger village of Donmin downlake. Compared to the uplake community, it was a bustling metropolis of fifteen or twenty thousand, stretching out across broad, cleared plains. The streets were lit with oil lamps, although Brazil had no idea what sort of unrefined, natural oil they used. It smelled like fish, anyway.
He reclaimed a well-made but crude backpack from the shipping office and said good-bye to Klamath, who wished them luck.
The packs, Wu Julee found, were largely filled with tobacco, a good trade commodity. One pouch had some clothing and toiletries.
Using the tobacco, Brazil managed to trade for some small items he thought they would need, then got a room for them at a waterfront inn, where they spent the night.
The next day they set out early across the trails of Dillia toward the northeast. She had trouble staying back with him, having to walk in almost uncomfortable slow motion. After several kilometers of particularly slow going, she suggested, “Why don’t you ride me?”
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