“I get your point. But you knew better. Couldn’t you have done something more than be an audience?”
“What? One guy? You can’t buck the worst in humanity because sometimes you throw out the best, too. See, you have an advantage I don’t have. I could at least hide out from the worst of that, I suppose, but I can’t quit, I can’t go home. I can’t even go permanently nuts. I can’t even die with them. After a while you just get too frustrated. After a while you just stop fighting the tide of history and just survive as best you can.”
“Yeah, I guess I see, sorta. I still ain’t sure how we got on this track. Maybe boredom or tiredness or somethin’. Can you answer me one thing, though?”
“If I can.”
“What were you in the last go-round? I mean, maybe this machine god won’t let you play really funny stuff, but you got some choice over you, don’t you?”
The question actually surprised him. “I—well, yeah, I do. I have a good deal of local power over what happens here, on the Well World, while I’m in there, even if I can’t mess with the Earth’s program. I never really did much with myself, though. Every time I’m in there, I say at least I’m gonna make myself 185 centimeters tall with a face and body to die for, and I never do. It’s not a Well prohibition, it’s just, well, I’m generally so preoccupied with other folks and other things when I’m there, I never really think of myself. Maybe I’m just so used to being me now, I can’t think of myself any other way.”
“Jeez! So you’re kinda the master of this world of all these races and forms and stuff and you never wind up anything or anybody else? You got all them other planets out there and you stick with relivin’ Earth history over and over? You’re right about not bein’ able to go nuts. You are nuts!”
This new point struck him even harder than the earlier argument had because there really was no defense. He’d always been Nathan Brazil since—well, since this job had begun, anyway. At least he hadn’t the slightest, vaguest memory of not being just this way. He alone knew why he’d stuck with Earth, or at least Earth humans, but even there he didn’t really have to. It made no difference in the end to damned near anything.
Sure, he’d been—memory somewhere vaguely said a deer at one time in the past and a Pegasus for a brief time—but those had been here and for emergency purposes. He’d become himself again as quickly as he could.
He’d always loved the Dillians, also for good reason, but he’d never considered becoming one of them, living as one of them through their history, which was something of a mystery to him. They were fighters, too, and even with far more limited resources they’d managed, as he knew, to attain space consistently ahead of Earth. There were others, too, equally attractive and advanced, yet he’d ignored them all. It seemed stupid on the face of it. No rerun of history and events, new experiences, new people and capabilities… Even Mavra, with her own personal traveling version of the Markovian computer, had gone to many other worlds and become many other creatures, he remembered now.
“I’ve got no answer or explanation, Gus,” he told the Dahir. “The only thing I can think of, and I’m not at all sure if it’s the real reason or not, is that maybe I needed something that was absolutely fixed, unchanging, always comfortable and familiar, that couldn’t be taken away from me.”
Gus stared back out at the colorful scenes in the darkness and tried to imagine what it would be like to be Nathan Brazil. Maybe he’d be just as loopy after all this time, he thought, but he wouldn’t mind giving it a try.
They were passing another area of active volcanic activity in the distance, and it was a sight he found impossible to tire of. Suddenly his two huge eyes focused on a single spot in the distance, off to the left of the lava flow. At first he thought they were just reflections of some of the lights from under the sea or perhaps lights or markers on the islands, but now, as he stared fixedly at the spot, he saw what had drawn his attention to the spot.
“Cap! Off here, just left of the lava. Those lights moved!”
“Could be just an illusion with all the heat and distance,” Brazil responded, not terribly concerned. “Or it might well be another ship. There’s a lot out here, you know.”
“Yeah, well, I been lookin’ at it, and those lights are sure not illusions and they’re on somethin’ pretty big movin’ our way.”
Brazil looked over at where Gus was already staring, and after a minute or so he saw them, too. “Yeah, Gus. They’re running lights for sure. Something pretty big, I’d say. I can’t make out much in the dark, though. There’s a storm moving almost parallel over there. If it kicks up some lightning, you might be able to tell what it is.”
“You want me to douse our running lights?” Gus asked him worriedly. “You never know.”
“Maybe. Hold on a minute and try to make sure it’s heading for us and not just coming out and going somewhere else. The sea-lanes we’re on here run mostly southeast to northwest. If he’s legitimate and coming from that direction, he should turn parallel to us in a little bit and head off in the opposite direction. I don’t like it, though. What’s a ship doing that close to those islands? They’re marked as too active and dangerous for landings on the charts.”
“He’s comin’ on toward us! Whoops! There was a big flash. Couldn’t make out much, though, but it sure looked like a big bunch of smoke. Man! He’s comin’ on fast and steady! He can’t be a sailboat and move like that, can he? I mean, the wind’s against him, right? Yeah! There’s another flash. Still can’t make out the ship, but that’s a steamer all right!”
“Douse the running lights, Gus, quick as you can! I think we’re in trouble!”
The sudden rise in Brazil’s adrenaline roused Terry, who got up, watched Gus put out the lights so that the ship fell into total darkness, and immediately looked around for the danger she was already directly sensing.
She went through a whole series of spectrum shifts until she spotted the oncoming vessel, and inside of it she sensed danger in numbers beyond theirs by quite a bit. There were a lot of creatures on that ship, and all seemed to be of one mind, to catch and board this ship and take them.
A whole range of actions came into her mind, but none of them were useful. She could make it very hard for them to see, or notice, both her mate and herself, but they would still take the ship and sooner or later they would certainly have a means of detecting them. And there were so many of them.
There was a sound like thunder off toward the oncoming lights, and suddenly the sea seemed to explode just forward and off to the left of the tiny sailing ship.
Brazil spun the wheel and then began taking down sail, using the levers and pulleys nearby.
“What the hell you doin’, Cap! You’re headin’ right for ’em!” Gus cried.
“We won’t be for long, but they had our course and speed damned good there, and I needed to throw them off in the dark. They’ve got no radar here.”
“Yeah, well, they don’t need radar at this distance! I mean, we must be blockin’ off the undersea light show just like they are to us by now!”
Brazil cursed under his breath. He hadn’t thought of that! And those guys were surely using just that technique on them. They were used to these waters; he was not.
He took a deep breath, then shouted, “Okay, then, we’re gonna have to open range and sail where they can’t do that!” as he put out full sail and turned for maximum wind.
“Hey! Them dark places could be islands, Cap!” Gus pointed out. “And you’re gonna go right into the edge of that storm, too!”
“Just what I want to do!” he yelled back as a second shot landed forward and just to the right. “Damn! Straddled us with two shots at two kilometers! Those boys are good!”
They were making very good speed, getting up to fifteen, maybe twenty knots, but they were no match for the steamer still closing on them, particularly considering the angle.
A third shot landed perhaps twenty meters ahead of their bow, and its message was very, very cle
ar. They could hit them any time they felt like it.
They were past the undersea fairyland lights, though, at least, and it was still water at this point. Suddenly, with very loud splats like buckshot falling on the deck, the rain swept over them.
The captain of the patrol boat knew exactly what his quarry was doing, and, worse, with the storm and the darkness, he actually risked losing them now that he had them cold. He couldn’t wait and take that chance; there were too many reefs and shallows in there for him to follow closely with his craft. “If you can still get it, fire to hit!” he commanded, and the gun crew, also very experienced, made mental calculations, slightly adjusted the forward cannon, waited for a possible last sighting with a lightning flash, and fired a blast.
The shot struck the little sailing ship almost in the stern, and all three aboard were thrown to the deck as their world lurched and shook. One of the smaller masts came loose and dangled, caught in its own rigging.
“Everybody okay?” Brazil shouted in the fury of the wind and rain and thunder.
“Yeah! Terry almost fell on top of me!” Gus called back. “You?”
Brazil got back up, grabbed the madly spinning wheel, and found that it was spinning freely. “Damn! They took out my rudder!” He looked up at the sails and saw the dangling mast hanging precariously, fouling lines, heard the slow rip of canvas, and knew instantly that there was no hope of steering by sail alone.
He made his way to the other two. “I hear breakers not far off, that way!” he pointed, a position perhaps half a kilometer away in the darkness from their current position and what looked to be a good three or more kilometers from where the lava flow should be. “We’re gonna have to abandon ship and swim for it! The quicker the better, too! We could go down like a shot in this sea if enough water gets in the hole in the stern or we hit a reef!”
“Okay! I’ll make it! How about if we split up, we rendezvous this side of the lava near the beach?” Gus suggested. “Hey! You want to throw over the raft?”
At that point the ship seemed to almost stop, and Brazil could feel the bow coming up.
“No time! Just go! Now! If she goes down when any of us are close, she could take us with her!”
Gus hesitated, then leapt into the dark waves. Brazil, knowing at least that he and Terry would not be separated but nonetheless concerned for her life, had no choice but to follow. Terry did not hesitate.
Terry had been a fair swimmer in swimming pools and such, but she had never had to swim in seas like this and for a very long moment she was convinced that she was going under for good and was certain to drown.
Then the discipline and control of the Glathrielian mind snapped fully in, and she calmed down, sensed Brazil and what he was doing, and made her way to the surface and toward her mate. Brazil had recovered as best he could but was acting instinctively; later there would be time to think about how much worse he’d been through and reflect on it.
He struggled against the waves to make his way to Terry and finally reached her. Now she would have to pretty well stay with him and trust him absolutely with her life. Her Glathrielian mind understood that sort of logic and did not resist, having no better plan itself.
Using the waves, letting them carry the pair where they willed, Brazil managed to get them both relatively stabilized in the rough sea. At least it was no longer raining, although they could hardly tell, but Brazil was able to get at least a gut-level feeling of where they were headed and even got something of a look in that direction.
They appeared to be heading toward the lava flow and the huge plume of steam offshore.
He doubted if even Terry’s bag of tricks could protect her from molten lava, but the Well would protect him from it somehow. If he could just stay close to her, linked to her, he might well be able to have her share his unique protection for a change. He felt her absolute trust in him and felt that she had accepted dependence for this period. She was not doing so well against the waves, though, and that terrified him. In a move as instinctive as his swimming actions, he reached out to her, first grasping her hand, then mind to mind, soul to soul. She did not resist, and now he was part of her and partly still within himself, as was she. They became as one mind, one organism, with Terry surrendering almost total control to him.
They managed for what seemed like a very long time, then, suddenly, there was a large wave that came along and picked them both up and almost threw them against a beach.
It was a granular black sand beach of the sort that new volcanoes built; it hurt when they hit it, but it didn’t knock them out. Dizzy, disoriented, unable to stand, waves still crashing over them, they crawled as one on hands and knees back beyond the breakers, the black sand sticking to and covering their wet bodies. It took a tremendous force of his will to get them back far enough that there was relative safety. Then, with his inner voice telling him that he was safe at least for the moment, both bodies turned, gasped for air, then passed out cold on the beach.
The sun was high in the sky when Nathan Brazil awoke in a bizarre and yet beautiful landscape.
Terry awoke at the same time, the linkage between them as strong as or stronger than ever, and together the two of them got up on their feet and looked around. Both were battered and bruised and covered in thick black sand that seemed to be stuck everywhere. Brazil, seeing nothing on the horizon, decided that they could risk getting into the much calmer surf and wash it off, and Terry followed. In spite of the energy shell, it was almost like bathing in a Jacuzzi, but it woke them completely and cleaned off the sand.
The bruises were par for the course of what they had gone through, and muscles and joints seemed extraordinarily achy, but both were basically all right considering what they had survived, and that was enough. When you could notice the tangles in your hair and be irritated by them, you weren’t in that bad shape.
There was no sign of the ship, not even wreckage, but it was impossible to say how long they’d been in the water or just where they’d gone down compared to where they’d come ashore. There were no other ships to be seen on the horizon, either; if the cutter had searched for survivors, it hadn’t found them, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still in the area.
Even so, that left the two of them stark naked with no tools, supplies, or anything else, standing on the beach, essentially marooned very much as in his personal fantasy. The trouble was, in a fantasy it was easy to conjure up what you needed, while in reality you had to find it, if anything was available.
The black sand beach stretched in both directions as far as the eye could see. About a hundred meters beyond where they’d come ashore there was a slight rise, and not far beyond that he could see nearly constant plumes of white smoke. While the lava flow itself was invisible to him in the daylight, the lava having hardened a bit on top and flowing downhill in its own thin self-made cocoon, it was clearly still expanding the island from beneath the waves. The muffled sounds of explosions could be heard from the direction of the steam as the molten rock continued to flow into the sea and react with the cooler waters.
Looking inland, it was a long way to anything interesting. The beach extended back for a kilometer or so, then turned into cracked and jagged rock in a fairyland of shapes formed when molten rock had cooled, solidified, and fragmented. It was easily another kilometer or more beyond that to where the older island missed by the most recent flows remained, with thick junglelike vegetation starting abruptly from where the flow stopped.
In back of it all and dominating the entire scene was the massive volcano itself, rising up like a huge lump several kilometers above the water, its top masked by a ring of clouds.
There was no getting around it; they would have to make their way back into the jungle and see whether the island contained enough to sustain them for now. Food and water were the first priorities.
He thought about Gus. He hadn’t seen the Dahir since he’d gone overboard, and he wondered how well this kind of place could sustain such a creature. Large
animals were unlikely in this isolated environment, fresh water would be more likely inland than anywhere along the coast, and that body wasn’t really built for walking or even slithering over this kind of terrain.
Still, Gus had shouted to meet near the lava flow and on this side of it, fortunately, and he owed it to the creature to check before heading inland. He set off across the sands toward the billowing steam, Terry following.
The sight from the top of the rise was spectacular, probably even more so at night, with the lava steaming just below the surface in front of him and then the monstrous, churning, seething, bubbling region creating the steam just beyond.
There was no sign of Gus, nor had he expected any, but he’d done his duty. They could hardly stay there and wait in the expectation that the Dahir would suddenly appear; they’d need the daylight to explore the island. Brazil also didn’t have anything he could leave to indicate their survival and presence, nor was there much he could use to create anything. The black sand wasn’t even conducive to writing a message in English that only Gus would understand, and even if he could haul some rocks from the lava field inland and build something, a feat hardly possible considering how much he ached, anything small enough to escape the notice of pursuers would be overlooked by Gus and anything conspicuous enough to get noticed might well attract the wrong people.
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