Echoes of the Well of Souls (29 page)

The idea that this place might be home to thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people wearing nothing at all and living and sleeping in the open was difficult to accept. It was pretty easy to see why the Ambreza never saw any old Glathrielians.

He made good time in spite of his reservations about the wildlife and the thick mud that formed the only safe path.

He realized that the paths seemed to follow a roughly logical plan and wondered if they had somehow been built up or maintained based on those ancient Ambrezan canal systems, but it seemed unlikely. They'd be many meters down by now.

It bothered him that he saw no signs of humanity other than the prints. All those Glathrielians who came and worked the plantations on the other side of the border had to come from
somewhere,
and that "somewhere" couldn't be all
that
far inside. He should see some signs of where they came from and where they went by now, he thought, but there was nothing.

He'd had a later start than he wanted, too, and he didn't relish bedding down in the pitch darkness in this region. Still, what else could he do?

As he moved in, though, he began to hear various sounds in the bush around him that were unlike the sounds of the creatures he'd been seeing and avoiding all afternoon. Once or twice he was certain he caught a brief glimpse of some man-sized shapes off in the foliage, but when he turned, they seemed to vanish. He wasn't really worried about the natives; hell, he
wanted
to find, or be found by, the natives. Rather, he was worried about far larger predators that might be around somewhere that had so far escaped his notice.

As the day wore on toward its end, though, he became more and more certain that he was being watched. There were too many such odd near encounters, and they were increasing—and, frankly, becoming more obvious. Through the swamp noises he occasionally heard what he was certain was a cough or perhaps a grunt. The third time he heard it, he knew that he was in the midst of a number of them and that they wanted him to know it.

What's the matter, boys? Afraid I'll touch you?

The worst concern he had was darkness at this point; there was simply no telling what they were waiting for, but darkness in their element would certainly make whatever it was much easier. He was deceptively dangerous for a little man in hand-to-hand combat, but even the biggest muscle man he'd ever seen wasn't a match for a horde of attackers unless those attackers were total incompetents, and he just didn't feel that these people were as dull or stupid as they wanted to appear to be to others. There was, after all, quite a good motive for cultivating just the sort of reputation they now had with the somewhat paranoid Ambreza. He couldn't have imagined that the furry race would have ever allowed Glathrielians free reign in the hex with no monitoring.

He had, however, deliberately placed himself in his current predicament, and he was getting pretty damned tired of it. He stopped at a fairly wide clearing that had some decent grass to hold it, removed his pack, then sat on it and looked around at the apparently silent wilderness.

"All right," he called out to them. "I don't know if you can understand me or not, but you sure as hell know you're being talked to. Now, I am tired and I am pissed off as all hell right now, and my purely mechanical watch here says that it's about a half hour to sundown. Now, I'm gonna wait here maybe five or ten minutes, and if you want to come out and talk, or fight, or whatever, that's fine. After that I'm gonna make camp, I'm gonna make a fire, I'm gonna eat something and have an Ambrezan beer with it and maybe then some coffee. If you want any, you're welcome. If you just want to watch, then piss on you!" He took out a cigar, bit off the end, then lit it with a safety match. More things worked in a nontech hex than most people thought.

He waited until the cigar was almost half-smoked. During that time he had the distinct impression that more and more natives were showing up and sitting out there staring at him. For a starkly lonely campsite in the middle of a jungle swamp, he had the oddest feeling that he was sitting alone on the field at Rio's largest soccer stadium and that the stands were full. Or was he, rather sitting alone in the center of the Roman Colosseum, the crowd waiting until the lions were ready?

Well, he wouldn't wait for them. He was as tired and hungry as he'd said he was, and he was going to be set up before dark.

Before too long he had his tent set up and his supplies organized and he'd started a fire. In a nontech hex it was impossible to manufacture a good compressed-gas system, but as long as the mechanism was totally mechanical, nothing stopped anyone from bringing premanufactured canisters in and having a clean fire. He knew how rough he might have to live if he started heading north to the equator, as he would have to do sooner or later. He was not about to sacrifice any comforts at this point if he could avoid it.

He had pre-prepared his own food and had it vacuum-sealed. The Arnbreza and he didn't really agree on what constituted a hearty, tasty meal, so these were his own creations, and he managed to use three containers to make a fairly decent simmering stew. The Glathrielians were allegedly all vegetarians or worse, but he had enough faith in his recipes that it would have to smell awfully good to humans no matter whether they'd actually eat the stuff or not. The beer was in small plastic containers that held in a cold gas that surrounded the inner bottles. The cap was released with a simple pull, and this, too, worked in a nontech hex. It was a most satisfying meal considering the conditions.

By the time he'd finished, it was dark. Darkness fell rapidly over the Well World almost anywhere, since its axial tilt was virtually nil, and by the time he'd put on the coffee, his fire was the only light. It was enough—for now. When he was done, he'd bring out his lantern and light it, filled as it was with an ingenious combination of small cylinders that fed a small amount of oil to a pan and allowed for a decent all-night light. They might come at him, but they wouldn't come in total darkness.

He poured the coffee and settled back comfortably, considering relighting the remaining half of his cigar, when he suddenly frowned and looked around by the glow of the fire.

She stood there, just at the edge of the fire, staring right at him. She looked to be maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, fully developed but very young, and she was stark naked and unblemished in any way.

He sat up and stared back at her big brown eyes and saw in them a great deal of intelligence and awareness. There was also something odd about her. She looked like a Glathrielian should look, and yet she didn't. That all-race exotic cast all the ones he'd seen exhibited wasn't there; this girl looked more like somebody on the beach at Ipanema. Her features were more classical—sort of an Afro-European mix found in the Caribbean or parts of Latin America—with none of the Asian about her, and she was a lighter, smoother brown.

"Hello," he said pleasantly. "Want some coffee? I have some paper cups here if you do."

She frowned, and he really got the feeling that she was honestly trying to make out his words but to no avail. That in itself was odd. It was as if she
expected
to be able to understand him and was puzzled that she could not.

He gestured for her to come closer and have a seat, and without any hesitancy she did just that, sitting cross-legged on the ground to his left but between him and the fire.

"Excuse me for not offering my hand, but as bad luck as I have with women, I don't want you to suddenly start screaming and running away in terror or something." He got up and went to the fire instead, and holding an empty cup, poured some coffee into it and took it over to her and set it down near her. She watched him all the time like a hawk, but there was no fear in her. She didn't touch the cup or look at it again, though, and he remembered that they rejected all such things.

She seemed to be thinking about something for a moment, then she leaned over, got on her knees, and cleared a place in the wet soil, making it free of grass. With her finger, she did something in the dirt, then backed away and resumed her seat.

Curious, he walked over and crouched down to look at what she'd scratched there. At first he couldn't make it out. Some kind of drawing. A box, another box inside of it, and a kind of V mark under it. Shaking his head, he got up, walked around, and looked at it from another angle.

My God, if I didn't know better, I'd swear it was a drawing of a television set,
he thought, wondering. He suddenly had an awful thought.

Crouching down again, he wiped out her drawing as best he could and traced a different, more irregular design.

She came over, looked at it, then nodded and put a finger at a point on the left and a bit up from the center of the picture.

It was a crude map of Brazil.

He turned and looked at her, then put his right hand up in the air, made a fist, and brought it down with a whistling sound to a
boom!
in the dirt.

She smiled and nodded, then repeated his pantomime and sound effects, this time taking her own fist into the crude map just where she'd made the dot.

His jaw dropped just a bit.
Maybe that
was
a television! If so, she's not just some native girl with bad luck, either.
He decided to get more ambitious and do a little signing. He'd been pretty good at signing once. It was the only thing that had saved his ass during the sack of Rome.

He traced a circle in the air, then slowly outlined a hex shape, then, with his hand, portrayed his arm going from the circle through the hex to here. She watched and nodded, smiling.

He shrugged to, he hoped, indicate total puzzlement as to how she'd wound up here. It wasn't supposed to work this way. Nobody was supposed to become a Glathrielian unless the race was in danger of dying out, and at least it hardly looked like
that.

She waved a finger in the air, had it go to ground, had two fingers walk out, then made as if she were operating a very old-time camera, then mouthing into something she was holding.
A helicopter! She 'd been pan of a TV crew covering the impact!
That
had
to be it and would easily explain her appearance.

It still didn't answer why she was
here,
why she wasn't one of the other 779 races of the South, but it told him basically who she was and how she'd gotten here.

He had an awful thought. He pointed to her foot and then to the drawing area. With his own foot he mocked putting it down on the drawing. She didn't get it right away but eventually figured out what he wanted, although maybe not why, and stepped on the place, making a half footprint.

It was, of course, a standing rather than walking print, but he'd been following enough of a certain set of prints for his experienced tracker's eyes to relate the two.

He hadn't been following Mavra, after all. He'd been following
this
girl! And that meant that
she,
not Mavra, was the source of the pulse—and the source of the track the hounds had followed.

Well, some of the mystery was at least explained, why she'd gone pretty much straight into Glathriel and why she hadn't contacted the Ambreza. In one sense he was relieved, although he felt frustrated by still not finding who he was really looking for.

Now all he had to do was try to figure out why this girl was here. Not only shouldn't she have become a Glathrielian, she hadn't—not totally. The Well had done some of its work but had left her original form pretty much intact. Oh, he suspected she was a good deal older than she looked now—that was a fairly simple procedure for the Well program—and any diseases or infirmities or other problems, right down to fillings in her teeth, would have been repaired, but it had left her genetic code mostly untouched. It shouldn't have done that. As far as he knew, it
couldn't
have done that.

But it had.

It had also done its adaptation work internally in a way he'd never intended. She couldn't understand him because the program now specified that Type 41 's could understand no language but their own. She couldn't speak even in
that
language because, as far as he could see, they didn't have a spoken language as such. She would have been given any attributes and abilities necessary to survive and integrate with the locals here, even ones developed independently, since that, too, was part of the program, but at the cost of being able to verbalize, and perhaps even use, what her education and training had prepared her to do. Hell, if she'd been some sort of TV personality, then she had to be going
nuts
with these limits!

"I didn't mean to do it," he told her sincerely, although he knew she couldn't understand and wouldn't have understood the comment even if she
had
comprehended the words. "I honestly didn't. It's not supposed to work this way." Maybe, just maybe, the Well was broken, after all.

And, he thought, if she was a reporter, why not take the coffee? He knew few of them who could resist coffee, and it would have immediately established her as someone more than Glathrielian if she'd taken it. Hell, it'd only been what? Two, three days tops. She couldn't have totally assimilated into their culture in that short a time, could she? Had, somehow, the Well imposed the culture upon her as well?