It was Terry, either by chance or by design, who came up with the somewhat gross but only logical means of leaving Gus any sort of message.
She took a crap in the sand.
Hardly permanent, but a hunter species might well notice such a thing and Gus would recognize the species of origin, possibly the specific scent. Others might do the same, but they would first have to know to come to this specific area of the beach.
That taken care of, it was time to make their way inland to the jungle. If possible, they’d check back at this spot on a regular basis, if only to see if anything had either been disturbed or something else had been left to give them a sign.
I feel like Tarzan playing Robinson Crusoe,he thought. Friday was even the silent type, as always, although he suspected that the old shipwrecked sailor would have preferred this kind of Friday to the one he’d gotten.
Walking through the sand wasn’t much of a problem, but the sand ended well short of the jungle, and it was a dangerous and slow journey through masses of rock that had flowed, cooled, and frozen, often shattering into huge lumps or collapsing into deep holes. It was a boulder field, but of black rock that was twisted into bizarre forms, some looking like taffy, others looking like frozen rippling rivers. It wouldn’t take much of a misstep in that field to twist or even break an ankle, and so it was a slow process of trial and error to get through it, and it took them several precious hours to reach the edge of the jungle.
Volcanic areas were always fascinating for their contrasts. Where they had come ashore had probably been ocean only weeks earlier; now, here, where not much older flows had come, it might have been anything from beach to jungle, but the lava had burned and scoured all in its path, leaving no sign of anything. Yet the wet green jungle had resisted where it could, and just meters from where the flow ended it was as if nothing had happened at all.
There appeared to be no birds or animals, large or small, but somehow insects, or the equivalent of insects, had made their way here on air currents and were the dominant species. Some looked pretty fearsome, huge creatures that flew on multiple wings and were the size of hummingbirds and strange translucent creatures the size of a man’s head that made their way up and down trees and vines shooting out long, creamy white tendrils.
To Terry, the jungle gave a sense not of real danger or strangeness but of an odd familiarity. She had spent some time in jungles like this, and while the individual plant and insect life was different, this jungle was no more bizarre than the Amazon had been. She felt almost as if she were in her own element, a cross between the swampy jungle of Glathriel and the dense yet protective Amazon rain forest. Terry the American television producer would have found the region creepy and threatening, but somehow that Terry seemed like another person, someone she barely knew. That Terry would have found the comforts of Hakazit to her liking, while the new Terry had felt only its sense of wrongness and had been relieved when they’d left it.
For all intents and purposes Theresa Perez was dead and had been for quite some time, save for some of the knowledge from her past that might be useful. She hadn’t realized it and did not do so now; the Glathrielian way did not allow for reflection and introspection on that level, but that did not change the truth of it. She hadn’t even been conscious of when it had happened; it had been quite late, though, when she’d made the decision to be the diversion for the others to get through the Well Gate. Even when she’d told Lori that she would remain in the Amazon until finally she could make her way to civilization, she’d known that she had no intention of doing so. She hadn’t known until it was snatched away how much she really had hated her life or how much pressure she’d been under until it had been removed. It had long ago ceased to be anything more than a job, and that job had been the only thing she’d had, the only reason to wake up and exist every morning. She had no personal life, no friends outside the business, and she hadn’t even had the glamour of being on camera. It had been over since that horror on the Congo, but she’d had no place else to go and her work was the only thing that she did better than almost anybody else.
She had hid it well, but the rock-hard woman Gus so admired had been terrified to walk alone to her car in an Atlanta parking lot.
Overcoming the initial fear, shock, and terror of the jungle and having been accepted into the Amazon tribe, she’d found a closeness and a sense of herself she’d never been aware of before. She had not thought twice about seducing those guards or felt guilt or recrimination. It had, rather, been the culmination of her transformation before she’d ever seen the Well World; it had been the act of someone who had found an element where life, where action, was a challenge rather than a reaction to fear. Even then, on some subconscious level, she knew she didn’t want to be Terry again.
She had followed the others into the Well Gate almost on impulse but partly because she knew that the restrictions on the life of the People were not for her and that her friends, those she had felt closest to of any for a long time, had gone through the Gate. It had been Teysi’s impulse, not Terry’s. Nor could Terry have walked naked and alone into that alien swamp that was Glathriel, but Teysi could and did. And the Glathrielians, for whatever purpose, had given her the last required links to make the change complete.
They had given her the freedom from all dependency on things, leaving the focus only on what really counted—people—and with that the power to survive almost any conditions. They had given her protection against most of the forces of civilization and nature. And in a sense they had given her the ability to accept herself just the way she was, with no pretense or artifice.
So now it was Teysi’s persona who was in this strange new jungle with her mate, and Teysi was far better qualified to be there than either Terry Perez or Nathan Brazil.
Brazil was content to let her take the lead, sensing her confidence. Food and water were the first priority, and somehow he was confident she could find them even though he wasn’t sure how. On Earth a good although not totally infallible rule of thumb was to watch what the animals ate. Here the only animals were insects of a different evolution.
He watched her examine trees, vines, shrubs, and growths of all sorts and was not even aware that she was comparing them not to anything she knew directly but to elements in the vast Well database she could slightly access through her links to him. Finally, she picked up a thing that looked to him like a purple cabbage, peeled away the outer leaves to reveal a smooth oval inside skin, and bit into it. The deep red pulpy interior was kind of messy, but she kept eating rather than falling down in fits. He shrugged, picked up another—they must be falling from some of the higher trees, he decided—and did the same.
The stuff was disappointingly tasteless, with just a hint of a grapelike flavor, and the inside proved to have the consistency more of mashed potatoes than of oranges or grapefruit, but it went down easy, was filling, and had a high water content to boot.
He hoped they’d find something better and tastier, but unless they both came down with galloping stomachaches later, it was proof that they wouldn’t starve here. They could at least survive.
Farther in they found a number of shallow streams that provided welcome fresh water. It tasted strongly of minerals with just a hint of sulfur, but it would do.
They did find a few more palatable things to eat as well, including something that resembled a pink tennis-ball size grape, both in looks and taste, and a thick green vine that tasted a lot like celery with a slight onionlike tang, before the light began to fail. By that time the aches and pains had gotten a bit too much for him, anyway, and she found an area near a huge tree carpeted with a light brown, spongy moss and lay down on it. It would soon be dark as pitch in the volcanic jungle, anyway; not the sort of conditions for exploring.
He lay down next to her on the soft natural matting and found it surprisingly comfortable. Still, as the last light faded and the world was enveloped in total darkness, he couldn’t help but feel every ache and pain and consider
the absurdity of the situation. There was no way around the fact that they were now shipwrecked on a small island in the middle of nowhere, alone, cut off from continental land by 190 kilometers or more of open sea they had no way to cross, with no means to get off and little hope of rescue by anyone save perhaps their enemies and the final objective, the equatorial barrier and its gateway into the Well of Souls, more unobtainable than ever.
She felt his pain, both physical and mental, and all she wanted to do was help him as he had helped her in the surf. To Terry, the current situation was not bad at all but almost her own concept of how life should be. All that they needed was here, and there seemed little that could threaten them in any way. It seemed as if all the fates had conspired to bring them here, and she could not conceive of it being more ideal. It was his old ways, old life thinking that kept him unhappy, forever searching for what he did not know. He had helped her when she had needed help; now it was her duty to do it for him.
She began by easing his physical pain, both by damping down the pain centers and by applying healing energies to those parts that were badly bruised. She began by massaging him, and as he felt the effects, he did not protest but rather relaxed and enjoyed it. With his pain substantially eased or gone, the massage turned slowly into far more than that, and as passion took control, she offered a unique new experience, a sharing of bodily pleasures that subtly became a sharing of minds and souls as well, in which her own will became dominant. Now, in rhythm with the passion, waves of conceptual objects of her will washed through them, through him, and as they had no words, their significance and purpose could not be divined by him, yet they were unresistingly accepted and understood by his mind as seductive, hypnotic commands in a way quite similar to what the Glathrielians had done to her, but in this case entirely of her own origin and out of her own desires.
Forget the past… Wall it off… The past does not exist… There is no past, there is no future, there is only now…
Enter my mind, my body… Within is all that you require, all that you will ever need… Take from my body, my mind all that you need… Leave all else behind… See, know, that there is only good inside me, take it as your own, renounce all else…
He reached out for what was promised and found within her a shining kernel of something overwhelming, something beyond anything he had ever experienced before. Pure, undiluted, unconditional love; total, absolute, unconditional trust. There, inside her, was what he had never been able to witness or feel, that which he’d been incapable of believing even existed anywhere, at any time, on any plane.
Let it in, let it in… Let it displace all the darkness…
A moment he knew at some deep level would never come again had arrived, and he could not turn it away. His resistance melted; he let it flood into him, not displacing that which could not be displaced but pushing it away, sealing it off from consciousness, not permitting it to interfere…
The waves washed through him, overwhelming, sealing off all those things that could intrude or interfere, and once that was done, he returned them until what remained active in his own mind matched the pattern in her mind. The yin and yang merged, the puzzle pieces, shorn of all that was not relevant, fit perfectly and without flaw…
They awoke before dawn, the jungle no longer dark to them but seething with the varying colors and patterns of life. They took care of bodily functions, washed in a nearby stream, then started through the jungle, not with any real purpose but because it was so pretty and so alive and was to be enjoyed. Along the way to nowhere in particular they found some of the fruits and vegetables that were good to eat and they ate, feeding themselves and each other and giggling like two young people in the dawn of first love.
After a while they started off again, going deeper, following the trails of some of the larger insects just to see what made them and where they were going. They were hardly aware of the fact that they were also moving uphill, nor did they care, all places and destinations being the same to them. They were Adam and Eve in the Garden before the Fall, and they were more than that. They did not speak because such an act was totally unnecessary. Each felt what the other felt, each knew what the other knew, both thought the same thoughts at the same moment because they were as one. Each existed solely for the other and for the moment.
When they broke clear of the jungle, they were amazed and thrilled at the great sight that was before them. Still relatively far down on the great mountainside, they could still look out from its slope and see the vast colorful seascape beyond, even more beautiful when blended as it was with all the colors of life below.
Then they watched the sun come up and dramatically change the view, not to one of ugliness but to one almost completely different from the night scene. They stayed there for some time, until the sun was well up in the sky, then made their way back down into the jungle for some more to eat and drink.
He found a vine filled with pretty multicolored flowers that had become broken, possibly in the wind or by insects, and picked it up and made a flower garland out of it for her hair. She wanted to see it and so saw it through his eyes, then decided to take the flowers and place them on him, and he looked at himself through her eyes. And when they were done, they put the flowers back where they’d been found and went off in search of more wonders.
And when the thunderstorms came after dark, they did not seek cover but rather stood in the rain and the mud and watched, as if the sound and light show were being put on just for them. Everything was a wonder of a game, and everything was eternally new.
He remembered nothing of his past, his origins, or his unique nature, but he neither wondered about such things nor let them enter his mind. There was only here, and now, and her, and that was more than enough. She felt exactly the same, experiencing only the here and now and him. Neither remembered or bothered to consider that this had come about only the previous night. There was no concept of time, only the now and the other. So closely linked were they that he was not even certain that he was the he and she was the she; either could effortlessly become the other, and so such a question was without meaning and thus not even asked.
The food and water were ample for the two of them for an indefinite time. The ship had gone down without a trace, and there was no real sign that they had ever made this or any other island. All their defenses were permanently on; any searchers or landing parties would not even notice their existence, and since they built nothing, created nothing outside of themselves, there were no signs of their existence for anyone to find.
It had not been the intention of the Glathrielian elders, but Nathan Brazil, for all appearances, had been taken out of the game. Terry had allowed for all external factors, it seemed.
All but one, and she could not know about that, even though it was everywhere, not many kilometers beneath their feet.
Kzuco
Three day out from Gekir, while still inside Ogadon waters, the small ship its passengers discovered was called the Star Runner met up with its transfer ship.
Whatever illegal cargoes were involved in this mysterious underworld, they were both valuable and dangerous, and it was nearly impossible for those paid to find out about such shipments that were in fact taking place. Even deep beneath the ocean waters in Ogadon, where this particular trade originated, there were civilization, law, and effective agencies trying to stay on top of things. The one thing the authorities could not do was fully determine the when and the where across a hex that was, after all, almost four hundred kilometers wide, such activity took place, but it was always a battle of wits.
Even though it would be sheer luck to locate and stop a transfer in progress, once it had been passed off to a surface vessel, the fact became known. The Star Runner’s job wasn’t to pick up the cargo but rather to meet the pickup boat, which was a relatively local one well known as legitimate to the authorities, and then take aboard the contraband at sea. Ships like the Runner were built to all the latest specifications but were particularly
intended for speed, speed, speed. As a vessel legally registered to handle charter and consignment jobs, it always had some specific legal mission of its own, although nobody was particularly fooled about its true purpose.
The smugglers’ defense was a variation on the shell game; several ships like the Runner would take off from various ports on seemingly legitimate missions at roughly the same time. Each would head for a different place, but only one or possibly two would actually pick up transfer loads of contraband. Consistently stopping and boarding the wrong ones could prove embarrassing for the interhex authorities, who were in many ways privateers not much different from the crooks they chased except that they’d chosen a lesser return in exchange for doing things the legal way.
Several large waterproof containers had been taken aboard by the Runner from what appeared to be a small and seedy trawler, although it was hard to say just what the other ship really looked like in the nearly total darkness in which it was done. It was now the Runner’s job to get those containers to another ordinary and familiar coastal vessel that would take a detour at some secluded part of the coast and transfer them once more to small boats to go into shore and from there to a distribution point.
Mavra Chang was fascinated by the process. Once they were under way under full steam, she went over to Zitz, the friendly mate who’d always liked to chat, and commented, “I don’t see how you manage it.”
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