Echoes of the Well of Souls (27 page)

"All right. But she made no contact with the locals?"

"Not that we can determine. A search of the area using the local manager's dogs indicated that she went south into Glathriel. Beyond that we can't say, since it's too much of a mess in that district to do decent tracking, and frankly, it's far too much trouble for something that is your business, not ours. As long as she's gone to Glathriel, she's not our problem."

He frowned. "Gone to Glathriel . . . Well, I suppose that if she didn't want a lot of immediate attention, she might head for the coast strip there. I don't suppose that there's any word from them."

The technician was not terribly patient with this imposition. "Look, Glathriel is a nontech hex. No communication works except the direct kind, and no vehicles work except animal power. The people along there are mostly a religious sect that's antiprogress, and we and they don't talk much to one another except when they come south twice a year to sell their crops. It might be weeks, even
months
before we hear any news from them. I admit that a talking, civilized, and sophisticated Glathrielian might cause quite a stir, even some sort of religious crisis among them, but it's still not something we'd hear anytime soon."

Brazil scratched his chin and thought about it. "I don't know. If she's heading toward them, it'll almost certainly be ones near the border. I suspect we'd hear pretty fast for those very same reasons." He sighed. "Okay, that's all you can do now. I'll take it from here. Thank you very much."

"Very well. Out," the comm tech responded curtly, and switched off.

Nathan Brazil sat there a moment trying to decide what to do. Finally he got up and went over to a far wall where a map of Ambreza and part of Glathriel was tacked to a cork board.

B-14 . . . There it was. Not that far from the Ambrezan strip in Glathriel. A country road was marked as heading through the district toward that point, so that was the logical place to start. It looked to be maybe three, four hours drive if he could bum one or a day on horseback if he couldn't. It was certainly worth getting off his duff and going after her. He had no doubt that it was Mavra Chang; it was inconceivable to him that any of the new entries would wind up Glathrielians. He'd pretty much seen to that long ago.

He turned and saw Hsada standing there looking sternly at him from the doorway.

"No, you cannot borrow the car," the Ambrezan told him flatly. "You will be going into Glathriel, and I would have to send somebody down there and lose a day getting it back. However, delivery trucks go through town all the time, and some may have stops at or near there. I
will
get someone to drive you in, and from there you can make your own arrangements."

Brazil grinned and shrugged. "Good enough. What can I say?"

"Say good-bye," responded Hsada. "And don't forget to settle your rent through today before you leave."

It turned out that settling the rent was more of a problem than finding a ride to near the border. Hsada was a very hard bargainer and was more creative in finding extra charges to spring on him than anybody since that lowland Scotswoman at a bed and breakfast about a hundred years ago. Extra sheet charge, indeed.

There were only five cities plus the capital worth the name in Ambreza, and maybe forty small towns spread all over, but the two basic occupations of those in the country were raising crops for export and truck farming. Over the centuries truck farming had become quite sophisticated, with regular routes and a whole guild of middlemen doing the shipping to and from the markets on a daily basis. Tobacco was grown best in the southeast; the southwest was better suited to longer-growing but high-demand produce like subtropical fruits due not to location but to a strong warm current off the Gulf of Zinjin that came in very close to shore and created a more or less subtropical pocket. This, of course, had been allowed by those who had created the hex; weather and climate were not of the natural sort on
this
world, but when they saw that the water hex of Flotish had such currents designed in, they simply made use of them.

By that evening he was within a few kilometers of the plantation nearest the designated spot, and he stayed over with some very surprised and curious farm supervisors that night so he'd have the full next day for the quest. While the field bosses were somewhat taken aback at a glib Glathrielian wearing clothes and speaking like them, they were suckers for a good set of stories and even worse suckers at cards and dice.

The next morning he saw the first Glathrielians he'd seen since—-well, a
very
long time ago. He had forgotten their rather exotic "look," a unique yet homogenized blend of just about every racial type on Earth. Being of a near uniformly brown skin, with a variety of Oriental features yet with brown, black, and reddish hair was only the beginning of it. One could look at anyone and see suggestions of somebody one thought was familiar, yet the entire amalgam was something totally unique.

This time, though, they also seemed decidedly, well,
odd.
There was no other way to explain it. True, their tropical hex didn't really require clothing, but these people wore
nothing.
Not amulets or paint or markings of any kind, nor earrings, nose rings, bracelets, anklets—nothing at all, men or women. They also seemed to let their hair and, on the men, facial hair as well simply
grow.
He couldn't understand why some of them didn't trip over all that hair or strangle on it. Some of the shorter women seemed to have to wrap it around themselves to keep it from dragging on the ground, and he had never seen men with hair that long. Hair that, oddly, didn't seem to tangle or get matted. Had
he
done that? He didn't remember doing it, but if he'd altered them significantly, the computer would have filled in the logical items which he'd left out but which might be required for some reason.

Other things also bothered him. Their remarkable silence for one thing. Watching them, it seemed at times as if there was some kind of communication going on, judging from the gestures, the playful actions, the coordination they exhibited, but aside from some grunts and occasional laughter they said nothing.

He wondered if they were at all aware that they now worked the fields that their distant ancestors had once owned. He watched as they seemed to have some kind of silent prayer vigil before starting to work, then they went to it, picking fruit and stacking it in neat piles every few bushes.

"They have an almost unnatural ability to figure out just which fruit is ready to be picked," one of the Ambrezan supervisors commented to him.

"But they don't fill baskets or containers," Brazil noted. "They just pile it all neatly."

"They won't touch them. No Glathrielian will touch
anything
manufactured, even a box. They even make several trips carrying their 'pay,' which is a small percentage of the crop, back to their home in Glathriel in their arms."

"What about that home? Don't they have some sort of village or whatever with shelter?"

"No, they don't. Not as we understand it, anyway. They
do
have tribal lands that they consider their home, but the few structures are very crude and very basic and formed entirely from gathered dead wood and dropped leaves. They don't build as such. The few crude structures tend to be shelters for the babies and for bad weather. Mostly they sleep either out in the open or in hollow trees, some caves, and shelters formed from fallen logs and the like. They don't even build or keep fires, although if a thunderstorm comes along and sets something off, they might use it until it goes out. They don't kill unless something is trying to kill them and there is no other choice—and whatever
that
unfortunate animal is, they then eat it raw that same day."

"They seem to eat okay from what I can see," Brazil noted. "The women seem to range from chubby to fat, and the men are built like bricks."

"They eat a complex variety of things, some of which we, and perhaps you, would find disgusting, but it seems the perfect balance for them. They make great workers, though. No complaints, virtually no mistakes, and they won't touch, let alone eat, anything they haven't picked themselves. They're always good-humored in a childlike sort of way, and they're so placid, they don't even swat flies that land on them."

"How'd you ever get them to work for you?"

"It's been this way since long before my time or my grandfather's time, too," the Ambrezan supervisor replied. "Only a few tribes will do it, but they've been doing it forever on the border plantations and, I think, along the Zinjin Coast strip. The vast majority live way in the interior, which is mostly swamp and jungle with some volcanic areas. We used to try and survey them once upon a time, I'm told, but they can vanish like magic, and it just wasn't worth the time and trouble. The fact is, we know very little about them beyond these border tribes."

"I know about that," Brazil told him. "They asked me to do a report on them if I went in, figuring that since I'm related in a way to them, I might be taken as one of them if I went in."

"Well, that figures. You gonna go?"

"Looks like it. I'm after another like myself. A female. Very small and very thin—even smaller and thinner than me. You haven't seen or heard much about somebody like that, have you?"

"Heard they was looking for somebody like that down the road apiece, but haven't seen or heard a thing myself, no. Of course, I can't tell any of you apart much, frankly, but I think I'd have noticed a female smaller and thinner than you, that's for sure." He sighed. "Well, if you're gonna find her, you got maybe two weeks."

"Huh? Why's that?"

"Oh, they haven't got any families as such. You can see the same kid with a different parent most any day. It's all communal. That's 'cause, I think, they have one short period of a couple of days when all the women get fertile all at once and all the men can think of nothing else and they go at it, breaking only for sleep, for up to four days. Then they don't do it anymore until the next month. Lots of animals like that, but I know of only a few races here that still have that old mechanism. They say we did back in prehistoric times or whatever, but not since."

The idea shook him.
Just what did I do to you, people?

It was coming back to him now in bits and pieces. When he'd come through that time off the spaceship, he'd discovered that the Ambreza had literally reduced the Glathrielians to animallike status. When he'd done his work in the Well, he'd fixed that so there'd be a slow but steady generational rise back to normality through providing immunity to the Ambreza gas—but in a nontech hex, which, he'd guessed, wouldn't threaten the Ambreza.

He'd been wrong. The next time through, he'd caught wind that the Glathrielians had gotten to a point where they knew the legends and stories about how they'd been kicked out of their ancestral home and brought low and were getting
very
curious about Ambrezan technology and doing a lot of work on natural chemicals themselves. The Ambreza leadership had been getting nervous even then; the seeds of potential genocide were being sown even then as the Ambreza's imaginations started coming up with potential attacks far worse than the Glathrielians could have managed on their own.

So while he and Mavra had reset and checked out the system, he'd made other changes to ensure that this would all die down. He'd removed the translation abilities from the Glathrielians so that they could only communicate among themselves, and he'd put a blocker in there so that no other language but theirs could get through. If they couldn't reconnoiter and spy on their hated enemy, they wouldn't be much of a threat. And he'd made what he thought then were some minor physiological changes to ensure that they adapted nearly perfectly to their present hex and would not be as comfortable in the one that was now Ambreza or lust for it so much.

But
this
—these people, this totally primitive way—was not what he'd had in mind at all. He'd sought only to protect them from slaughter, not to reduce them to pre-Stone Age levels. What had the computer imposed logically on them that flowed from his premises? Just how badly had he goofed?

What have I done?
he wondered again, watching them. This was all he needed, he thought sourly. A hyperdose of pure guilt right now. I'm not going to keep ying-yanging these people around forever for some sin of ancestors even I can't remember, he vowed. If I made a mistake, this time I'll correct it, but, beyond that, from this point on, as much as I like the Ambreza, I'm not going to keep these people down again. If any new adjustments need to be done, by damn, I'll do 'em on the Ambreza for a change!

He stared at them as they worked, trying to figure them out, and over a period of time he got a sense that he wasn't seeing the whole picture, but he couldn't put his finger on what was disturbing him that he hadn't already quantified.

And then he had it.

There were no lame, no crippled, not so much as a limper among them. Well, they might leave all of those home. But no, it was more than that. In the kind of rough environment and natural way they lived, their creamy brown skins should have the signs of all sorts of incidental injuries, scars, and whatnot. There were none. Every one of their hides looked as smooth and untouched as a baby's bottom. Not a scar or a scab among them, and some of them weren't young.