Echoes of the Well of Souls watw-1

by Jack L. Chalker

  From above there came a crackling sound and a series of booms like thunder yet unlike any thunder she or the People knew. The night flared suddenly into day, and a great sun came almost upon them and vanished in a horrible explosion, beyond anything they could have imagined, powerful enough to shake the earth, collapse the lean-tos, throw the guards to the ground, and even topple some of the great trees.

  Then, for a moment, there was a stillness almost as terrible as the crash, and suddenly, a searing wave of heat that burned and blackened whatever it touched swept over them. Women and children screamed both in terror and in pain, and there was fire, awful fire, all around.

  Although in shock, she realized that somehow she’d received only a minor burn on one side and was otherwise all right. But others had been badly hurt and needed immediate attention. She got up on her feet and ran to the center of the camp, calling loudly, “Keep calm! Keep calm! We must help those who are hurt, and quickly!”

  The sight of her and the sound of her commanding voice rallied those who were no more injured than she was, and the entire tribe went into immediate action.

  Those who had been caught out in the open in the firestorm had suffered. Two were dead, struck full in the face by the heat, and another had been crushed to death by a falling tree. There were several broken limbs to be set, some seared hair that smelled and looked ugly but wasn’t serious, and three or four serious burns.

  “Susha! The healing herbs!” the Spirit Mother snapped, examining the badly burned side of Mahtra’s face. There was a virtual pharmacy in the oils, balms, herbs, saps, and leaves of the great forest, and she had made certain that a kit of such things was always available. “Utra! Bhru! We will need water, both cold and very hot. Get urns! Bhru, fix the fire pit! The rest of you—if you are uninjured, help carry the hurt to the mats over there so they will be seen to quickly! Get any burning limbs out of the camp! Quickly! Time is all for the living! We will mourn and tend to the dead when we can!”

  It was a frantic time, but in a way that was good, for the practical needs of their tribe, their family, drove out the terror that would have otherwise consumed them, and within an hour or two they were too weary to clearly remember their panic and fright. But though they were tired, they were not without curiosity. Something had blown up; something had exploded with enormous force very near to them. If it was something made by the Outside, what their tongue called “not forest,” it might bring other Outsiders. If it was something run by the men of violence, that would be important to know, too. And if it was some kind of evil spirit come from the night sky to Earth, then that needed to be known most of all.

  Alama, however, could not go. As she was the religious as well as temporal leader, her duty was to remain with the injured and to see that the ceremonies of the dead were performed, lest their spirits, deprived of a return to the bosom of the Earth Mother, be doomed to wander eternally without rest.

  “Susha will remain and see to those who are burned,” she ordered. “The guards must also remain, for none can travel until healed. Bhru, as Fire Keeper you will help me in the preparation of burial. The others, those who can, will go and see what has happened. Then you will come back and tell us what you see. Two groups, one under Bhama, the other under Utra, will go, one toward the great fire, the other below it here. Take care. The fire still burns at the tops of the trees, and there is much danger.” She stopped, feeling a sudden drop in air pressure. “Rain comes. Rain will help with the fires and will make your journey better. Go now. Come back and tell us what you see, but do not be seen yourselves. Those too hurt for such a thing but able to help here, stay. There is much to do. All must be back before first light. Go!”

  The long and exhausting night wore on. The graves were quickly and expertly dug, and the victims were wrapped in leaves, in spite of the driving rain. Most of the trees in and around the camp still stood, and Alama was proud of that. She always seemed to pick just the right spot when unforeseen danger lurked.

  The rain continued intermittently. Finished with all but the ceremonies and the actual laying in the earth, Alama and Bhru came wearily back into the camp and stopped dead in their tracks. Two naked strangers, Outsider women, were being kept by the fire under guard, and two others, naked Outsider men, were lying unconscious on the side of the camp opposite the wounded tribes women. The women knew that the men were not dead, for why bring dead men into camp and defile it?

  “Bhama! Utra!” Alama snapped angrily. “What is this?”

  The two squad leaders, as weary as their chief, jumped to her call.

  “They all hiding in the trees,” Utra tried to explain. “One of the men, that one,” she added, pointing to Juan Campos, “attack the dark woman. We put darts in him to stop him. Mother, we cannot just sit and watch such a thing! She sees us. It is not a time for deciding but just doing. If others come, she will say that she sees us and how many we are. Then they come try and find us. You say the wounded cannot travel, so we take them with us.”

  Alama sighed. She wished she’d been with them. Sometimes direct, pragmatic logic wasn’t always the best course, particularly when dealing with Outsiders. “And the other two?”

  “Mother, it rains hard then,” Bhama told her. “We come up to the burning place from below. All at once we see this man there, under the trees. It was so sudden, we do not expect it. We are in the open to his eyes, and he sees us. Then he smiles. He reaches for something and holds it up to his face. We think it is some kind of weapon, and so we shoot him with darts. We still trying to decide what to do next, when the rain stops. Then this white woman comes toward us. She seems afraid of us when she sees us, but she does not try and run from us but runs to the man. We stop her. Then we hear our sisters nearby. We see that they have the others. We know there are no more. So we agree, all of us, to purify them. We bury their unclean things as the law commands. Then we bring them back with us for you to decide.”

  In a direct sense, what they had done was exactly right, if the facts were true. “How do you know that it is only these? That no others are here?”

  “We see them come,” Bhama assured her. “They come on a big, terrible bird that roars like thunder. They and their things get off, nobody else. Then the bird fly away.”

  This was not good, not good at all. There were certain to be others coming, and they would look for the missing foursome. Still, they couldn’t just be released, not now. She looked up and sensed the wind through the charred and smoky atmosphere. It was raining again over there, and here soon as well. The sensible thing would be to destroy the camp, disguise the wounded, leave a few volunteer guards to watch over them, and move everyone away as far and fast as possible until they could find a place to hide. There would be a search, yes, but it would not be a major one, not in this jungle. But what then? The men couldn’t be kept, nor could they be left bound and drugged forever. Even now they would slow everyone down. If these two women were their wives, they’d never give up searching, and the places where they could continue to hide out from the encroaching Outside were becoming more limited each day.

  But if they killed the two men, what reaction would that bring in the women? They both already seemed too old to ever accept and adjust to the life of the People; there were potions, of course, drugs that would dull the mind and control it so that one could never disobey. Still, it was a distasteful business, and she didn’t like it at all. In all these years she’d not faced a problem this complicated.

  She looked at the two warriors. “And the thing that burns? What of it? Did any see it close?”

  Utra nodded. “Yes, Mother. We see it. It is the heart of the Moon Goddess come to Earth. It is all black and burned around where it sits, and it is in a great hole that it makes for itself. It is bright and yellow, and it look like a great jewel the size of the full moon in the sky. And it beats, like the heart.”

  Alama frowned. A big jewel? Beating like a heart? That made no sense at all in any traditional lore, nor did anything from
that buried past come to explain it, either. This was something totally new. Like the horrible feeling that had awakened her and still made her shiver when she thought about it.

  Still, her past of fog and mist did not totally desert her. Meteor, it said, and she had an instant vision of a great rock in space coming down toward the Earth and striking with enormous force. But meteors didn’t glow yellow and beat like hearts.

  Now another concept came, like meteor without a true word but rather as an idea and picture: Satellite. In a world as primitive as this? Or had it been longer than she thought since she’d entered the forest? Far longer…

  Bomb.The most worrying concept to come from that mental unknown and the most likely to be something that throbbed. How advanced might portions of Earth now be, anyway?

  Spaceship.No, surely not that advanced. She was certain of that. But what if it wasn’t a human spaceship? What if it was from something or someone really Outside?

  “I must see it, and soon,” she told them.

  “But what of the ceremonies?” Bhru asked worriedly. “It is almost first light now.”

  Yes, that was the trouble. It was almost first light, and at some point, perhaps even now, certainly within hours, others would come to search for these missing four. Others would come to see what had fallen here, as the four captives probably had, for why else would they be here? There just wasn’t enough time! And only a few hours earlier she had felt the luxury of timelessness.

  There was no way around it, though. They had to break camp and play for time, no matter what. She gave the orders, and the two exhausted Outsider women watched as the camp became a frenzy of activity, turning a primitive campsite back into wild jungle.

  “They’re covering up to run!” Lori hissed. “And taking us with them!”

  “Nothing we can do now,” Terry whispered back. “At least Gus isn’t dead. I wish they’d used more of that stuff on Campos, though.”

  “But we can’t go like this!”

  “I don’t even want to go if I had on a safari suit, but we’re gonna go, that’s for sure. Either walking or carried like them.”

  They heard rather than saw the burial ceremony. It was done quietly, with the sound of chanting coming from somewhere out of sight, and it was Terry who guessed the meaning of the sound, not from any experience but from the sadness on the faces of their guards and the workers who paused, many with tears in their eyes.

  But when the burial party returned, it was all business. It was no longer dark, but the mist from the ground still obscured even the tops of the trees. Alama was counting on that heavy mist not only to keep the investigators away a little bit longer but also to allow them to cross the open patches of jungle caused by the impact. A last, unpleasant touch was to be smeared, almost covered, with a thin paste made of herbs and clay that dried a sickly pea green. The whole tribe did it, and one of the tough warrior women supervised treating Terry and Lori.

  Camouflage. Primitive but effective.

  And just as primitive and effective was the simple pantomime the warrior woman did for their benefit, taking an ax with a stone blade that was polished razor sharp and showing how easy it was to cut things with it using a large leaf. She then pointed to their mouths and put a hand over each in an unmistakable warning message. Then she stuck out her own tongue and pretended to cut it out. It was amazing how easy it was to get some concepts across.

  They trussed up Campos and Gus Olafsson with rope made of tough vines and slid logs through so that they could be carried on poles. Clearly, they were being kept drugged.

  Although Lori was taller than any of the tribe and felt she could hardly lift herself, it took only two of the tribes-women, one on each end of the pole, to carry each of the men with ease. All these women were muscular, many as well muscled as body builders. It was in its own way as intimidating as the blowguns and stone-tipped spears. And none of them was more intimidating than their leader, although she was perhaps the smallest of all the women there, certainly under five feet and thin and limber as an acrobat. It was her manner, her fire, her arrogance that commanded instant respect and obedience. She had the kind of personality and confident manner that a Napoleon probably had possessed.

  There was something decidedly odd about her, though. She simply didn’t look like any of the others. Rather, it was like a Chinese or Japanese woman amid a group of Mongols. She even had the almond “slanted” eyes that had vanished, if they were ever there, from the Amerind over the millennia.

  The trek was arduous, though they would break for short periods every once in a while, mostly for their captives’ benefit. Gourds were offered, one containing a fruit juice of some kind, another some sort of thick and nearly tasteless cold porridge with the consistency of library paste. Terry and Lori took it and managed to get some of it down, mainly because at this point anything seemed good. How the two trussed-up men were managing wasn’t clear, but they at least were barely, if at all, aware of their circumstances, and as terribly uncomfortable as they were bound and carried, they at least hadn’t had to walk.

  Mercifully, they stopped for the day after what seemed like an eternity, deep within the thickest part of the jungle. Other than the occasional glimpses of the sun high above the nearly unbroken canopy indicating they were heading north, it was impossible to tell where they were. It was also incredible that so many of them—there must have been fifty or more, plus small children and supplies—could move through such dense jungle with confidence and leave no apparent trace.

  Lori had not thought that she’d make it to the end of the journey, though when the day’s march ended, she wasn’t certain that it was such a good thing, after all. Too exhausted even to sleep, too uncomfortable even to relax, she could only think, and that was the last thing Lori Sutton wanted to do.

  Just a few days before she’d been in a funk over her personal problems, which now seemed so trivial. The speed at which she had been plucked from obscurity and plunged into a dangerous but romantic adventure culminating in the professional event of a lifetime for an astronomer left her mind spinning. Now, naked, hot, exhausted, and in pain, she was trapped in the Stone Age, where virtually all her hard-won knowledge was totally useless.

  She had to admit that she felt a little better that her captors were women. At least she would be spared the horrors that she imagined she’d be subjected to by a tribe of primitive men. Still, there were children here—all female, she’d noted—and that meant these women had to have mates somewhere. Had the meteor wiped out the men? Were they all away? It seemed unlikely, but it only made the puzzle deeper.

  Terry looked only slightly better for the experience than did Lori, but Terry was younger and in better condition and was the kind of person who never gave up hope. She, at least, lay in a deep sleep on the forest floor, oblivious to the world.

  They were probably the story now, Lori thought. Maybe the hunt for them would be massive, but it wouldn’t last forever. Not in this jungle—and these primitive women knew the forest as no one else did; it was their entire world. Where was all this massive deforestation the environmentalists were always protesting about? She could use a little open clear-cut land right now.

  Alama checked on her people, then saw that the white woman was still awake and made her way over to her. It would take a while for these soft Outsiders to build up their strength and become wise in the ways of the forest; until then they would be both captives and liabilities, a fact on Lori’s mind as well as she eyed the leader nervously and wondered what was next.

  The tiny but tough woman knelt, and black almond eyes looked deeply into the scientist’s own. After a moment the leader pointed to herself and said, “Alama.”

  Lori realized that the woman was at least attempting to communicate. Alama was probably a name, possibly a title. It didn’t matter. She pointed to herself and said, “Lori.”

  “Lo-ree,” the small woman repeated, nodding.

  Sutton pointed to her sleeping companion. “Terry,” s
he said.

  Alama looked over at the newswoman. “Teh-ree,” she said.

  Lori sighed. She was now convinced that this woman, so different in appearance and manner, could not have been a member of the tribe originally. She wished she knew some Portuguese or even Japanese, but her languages had been German and Russian. Not much practical help here. Terry’s Spanish might do, but Terry was going to be out for some time.

  Still, Alama seemed adept at this sort of communication and appeared to want to teach some basics of the tribe’s language.

  She pointed to her breasts and genitals. “Seku” She pointed at Lori. “Seku.” Pointing to others of the tribe, she said, “Seku, seku, seku,” and to the two bound and drugged men, “Fatah. Fatah.” Then to the guard next to them, “Seku.”

  Seku. Woman. Fatah. Man.

  Walk in place. Kaas. Run in place. Koos. The lesson proceeded slowly, with much repetition when a new word was added. Alama knew what she was doing.

  At the end of perhaps an hour Lori thought she understood the bare basics. Of course, when any one of the others talked, it still sounded mostly like gibberish, but that was to be expected. Attempts to return the teaching by matching words in English were abruptly rejected. This was not a lesson for mutual benefit and understanding so much as for the benefit of the tribe. The better to give orders, my dear, Lori thought.

  Finally, Alama said, “Lo-ree sleep,” and it was understood. On the other hand, there was still no way to be as sophisticated as to convey “I want to sleep but I just can’t.” Alama, however, seemed to understand. She went away for a moment, then came back with a small gourd and taught another word. Kao. Drink.

  Lori was still dehydrated, and she took it and drank. It was some sort of fruit juice again, with a slightly bitter aftertaste. Still, after a few minutes, the pain seemed to fade away and the inner turmoil quieted. She went over her new twenty- or thirty-word vocabulary in her mind, settled down, and was suddenly as deeply asleep as she had ever been.