Watcher At The Well - Echoes Of The Well Of Souls Part 16

"Thank goodness forthat !"sighed the amba.s.sador, and began the walk back to his offices.

It had taken Terry some time to catch up with the others. She made several false turns, and though she had barely avoided some terrifying creatures, the place had been pretty deserted. She'd finally found them just as they were being led away by a pink dragon.

Hearing nothing of the briefing and knowing nothing of where they were, she made the instant a.s.sumption that her companions had been captured by the creature. She fol-lowed at a distance, hoping at least to see where they would be taken. Maybe, just maybe, she could get them out.

They went through a winding maze of corridors with so many twists and turns that she was not sure if she could find her way back.One problem at a time, she told herself.

She found that the last corridor ended in another of those black hexes. It figured, somehow. They were being sent someplace else. There was nothing to do but follow, she thought, but at least she had not been captured, and that might still come in handy.

From the corridor's far corner she watched them disappear into the hex, too far away to distinguish what they were saying. She suppressed a giggle when she saw Cam-pos being knocked in, though.

When Campos, too, had gone, she backed off, found an empty room, and hid there until the pink dragon returned back up another corridor.

She wasn't sure what was going on, where she was, or what lay on the other side of that black hex, but if Gus and Lori and Alama were there, then she had to follow before she got caught as well. It was sure better than staying here with those creepy monsters.

Allowing a good fifteen or twenty minutes to pa.s.s, hop-ing that whoever or whatever waiting on the other side of the black hex would be gone, she got up and made her way down the dead-end corridor where her companions had dis-appeared.

She was tempted to sleep first-she felt unimaginably tired as well as hungry and thirsty-but she knew she couldn't let the trail grow too cold, and while sleep might be possible, she couldn't chance discovery by any of the weird creatures she had glimpsed earlier.

Summoning up her last bit of willpower, she stepped into the blackness.

Ambreza

SHE SENSED THE WRONGNESS LONG BEFORE SHE CAME TO FULLconsciousness, a sense that something was missing or had been taken away. And yet she knew who she was. All the "pictures"

were there in her mind: her mother, her father, friends and acquaintances, going to school, working, all that.

But she couldn'tarticulate those mental snapshots or put labels on them. It was as if she had words, even in her mind, only for the things that could be expressed in the lan-guage of the People. No, not even that. It was even more primitive, more basic.

Even that thought had no words to it but was rather an a.s.semblage of mental pictures and feelings. She was aware that her thought process was far different from what it had been before, as if all the rules for gathering, organizing, and interpreting information had been suddenly and radically changed. It was as bizarre and alien a way to think as any-thing she might have imagined, and it seemed slower and harder to a.s.semble thoughts or ideas and, once a.s.sembled, impossible to express them. All of her old languages had gone from her mind; they just weren't there anymore. Not even the People's. She could call up a memory or scene in her mind and remember the gist of what was said, but could not recall saying it.

Therewas a language there, but it was a strange one, composed of a series of images and concepts that seemed to form as if by magic in her mind, conveying real mes-sages, real thoughts and decisions, but with no words.

To even be able to think such complex concepts using such a method was amazing to her, but to be unable to express even the slightest sense of them was frustrating and likely to become more frustrating as time went on. And it washard to think; she had to concentrate.

What was happening to her?

She sat up, opened her eyes, and looked down at herself and was shocked at what she saw-or, more accurately, what shedidn't see.

Her body, in fact, looked perfectly normal, but the ce-mented bones in both her nose and her ears were gone. It felt odd not to have them there after so long, but also it was something of a relief. The tattoos, too, were gone, and her body didn't look all that different to her than it had before the People had done their stuff. Well, that wasn'texactly true. Her skin seemed, well, smoother and younger, and the scars were gone-even the appendix scar-and she seemed, well, maybe a little chubby, like she'd been when she was in her early teens. And she had long hair again, the same stringy jet black hair she'd always had, but it was down well below her shoulders, almost to her a.s.s, and it seemed to have a slick, slightly wet feel to it although no residue came off on her hands. She knew that hair didn't growthat fast; either she'd been unconscious a long time or some-thing beyond her understanding had happened to her.

In fact, in spite of those differences, she feltgreat. She couldn't remember when she'd felt this good, in top condi-tion, no aches or pains oranything. She felt like a kid again, although her fair-sized but firm b.r.e.a.s.t.s and the rest of her body a.s.sured her that she wasn't. If her mind were just working right, if she just had her language skills back, if it just weren't so hard to think complicated thoughts, she would have felt vast relief.

She sprang to her feet and looked warily around. The weight and swing of the hair felt very odd; she'd never had it this long before. Still, it was the least of her problems, and for some reason it feltright for the hair to be there.

She was in a stand of trees, but it was no jungle or rain forest; rather, it was almost parklike. The trees were notquite familiar but were far less strange than the ones of the Amazon. She felt thirsty and a little hungry, which was nat-ural, but she also suddenly felt a sense of danger and tension, of being too exposed. All her brooding, her attempts to think complex thoughts and sort things out, suddenly vanished, replaced by something else, something that re-quired no thought, no deliberation, but seemed in retrospect almost instinctual.

Almost before she knew it, she was climbing up a very tall tree that rationality would have said could not have been climbed. It was tall and had a long regular trunk with few opportunities for handholds or footholds, yet she went up it as if it were a stairway. Before she knew it, she was perched on a heavy limb seven or more meters above the ground below. The uncertain perch, the sheer drop, the smoothness of the trunk going back down did not bother her at all. Her sense of balance was absolutely perfect, and she didn't think the situation odd at all.

The upper parts of the tree bore a bana.n.a.like fruit; she walked over to a nearby bunch, picked one of them off, and began eating it, skin, stem, and all, all without conscious thought. The fruit had a banana's consistency but was green and brown on the outside and a bright orange color inside. It was moist and sweet and went down so well, she picked another. Somehow she justknew which ones were ripe and which ones to leave alone.

She did, however, shrug off the immediate feeling of contentment a full belly gave her, because the sense of ten-sion and danger still remained. Before she could relax, something impelled her to a.s.sess her location and the lay of the land. She climbed farther up, to where she could see out in all directions with little effort.

The immediate area was a sort of park with well-manicured trees and gra.s.sy areas filled with both sun and shade. The land beyond seemed to be gently rolling, with a number of rivers or streams and a road that came from off the horizon, made its way lazily around various stands of tilled and grooved farmland and across small bridges of stone or wood, and continued off to her right through more of the same sort of country. There was something odd about where the road vanished from sight; just before the horizon there was a sort of shimmering, like heat distortion but ex-tending along the horizon as far as she could see. But the shimmering wastoo steady and regular for it to be caused by rising heat-it seemed substantial, almost solid, and an image of a giant window came into her mind.

To her left a side road seemed to wander up to a huge, elaborate building with many more outbuildings beyond. The mind-picture that most matched was of a farm, but that was mostly because of the surrounding fields and the layout of the buildings; neither the house nor the outbuildings looked like anything she'd seen before. It was a pictur-esque, almost idyllic scene nonetheless, and she knew it; why, then, did she have such a strong emotional reaction to it, bordering not on fear but on repulsion? Had she been in the jungle so long that what once would have seemed a pleasant, peaceful, even charming scene now looked and felt so wrong? By contrast, that shimmering skyline in the opposite direction felt equally right; it had an emotional at-traction she could feel, as if it were a magnet softly pulling at her.

Recent events had been so strange and had moved so fast of late that she felt frightened and confused by almost ev-erything. She tried to put her thoughts in order and found that she couldn't. Putting the memory pictures together in some sort of context was hard. Worse, her experiences with the People felt more real, more understandable to her than anything she had experienced before. When she tried to re-call her past life, all she got was confusion and conflicting feelings. It was all there, but it just wasn't much use.

And if she couldn't think clearly and figure out what was hap-pening to her, what was she going to do?

She went back down the tree partway until she found a thick branch that forked into two only slightly thinner ones. With a little shifting, she discovered it made a pretty solid and secure seat, shielded from the ground by branches. She was sotired; perhaps sleep would help. It never even occurred to her that even her second incarna-tion among the People would never have considered this sort of perch either safe or secure. She was too tired to mentally fight herself right now. It was best to clear the mind, relax, and sleep it off. Perhaps it would let her think more clearly.

Settling back, eyes closed, as relaxed as she could be, she felt a concept come to her by a process that was com-pletely unfamiliar. It was hard not to have the words to use. It went against her entire cultural upbringing. Even the Peo-ple were as linguistically sophisticated as they needed to be. This was completely different.

Words can obscure as well as clarify. With this way, there was never an error in understanding, if what she was trying to comprehend was understandable at all.

Was that it? Was there something she was missing here?

Was it better not to think, too?She was here, hunger quelled and safe, because of unthinking action.

No. That would make me nothing more than an animal.

Then what?

Just as you speak when you need to speak, think when you need to think. Know when to speak and when not to. Know when to think and when not to.

But didn't she always need to think?

Learn to let go. Do not fight impulses, let it go. It is when nothing comes that thinking is required. Learn to trust yourself.

Her impulse just then was to go to sleep. She did not fight it.

It was almost dark when she awoke, but rather than feeling nervous about the setting sun, she felt less afraid, more con-fident. It was already becoming easier for her to not impose her own old mind-set on this weird situation and to em-brace this new and different inner way of thought. It was as if thoughts and decisions were debated and a.s.sembled far away in her mind, out of consciousness, then the entire set of possibilities was almost magically laid before her as a series of picture-objects.

This place was not where she was supposed to be or she wouldn't feel its wrongness. The direction toward the odd farm buildings felt even more wrong; so it was toward that shimmering wall that she must go, for only that way felt right. There was also a feeling of undefined danger in this area, so the quicker she got out of it, the better.

First she surveyed the area once again. There was an odd noise from the direction of the farm, and what she saw in the rapidly waning light made her gasp and brought on an intense feeling of danger and irrational distaste that was like nothing she had ever experienced.

Two creatures were in some sort of vehicle that was making a whining noise. It seemed to sway from side to side as it turned into the small road up to the farm. The ve-hicle was basically an open cabin mounted to a thick oval slab, but while it bounced along, it seemed to be hovering an elbow's length above the road, with nothing touching the road itself. It was the sight of the two creatures that caused her overpowering sense of dislike.

They looked like two giant beavers, each the size of a man; one was dressed in some sort of waistcoat, and the other wore a flowered bib and a silly-looking hat with a big flower sticking out of it.

The hovercar pulled up finally in front of the house and settled to the ground, its whine now cut off. The driver with the waistcoat got out, stretched, and walked around to open the door for its companion with the hat.

Standing and walking, they looked less like beavers than like something entirely new. It was just the rodentlike head and prominent buckteeth that gave the initial impression. They were covered with thick brown hair, they walked up-right on thick bowed legs extending from wide hips, and they were like nothing human.

She wanted to meet them even less than she had wanted to meet that purple polka-dotted dragon. Just as curious was her nearly instant reaction to the vehicle, the bright clothing the creatures wore, even the buildings. Somehow all of them werewrong. This was far more than the aversion the People had to things they did not make themselves; it was more general, as if anything artificial or manufactured byanyone was wrong. She did not even wish she had some sort of weapon; that would be wrong as well.

It was time to eat and run.

It was getting easier all the time to process information and think in this new way, which didn'tseem like thinking at all but was in fact as complex a method of reasoning as the one she'd been raised on. The trickwasn't not to think, Jack L. Chalker after all; it was not to fight doing things in your head in a whole new way.

She came down the tree almost as easily as she'd gone up it, jumping the last couple of meters and landing ex-pertly on her feet. For someone who had no idea where she was, her sense of direction seemed absolute. She headed to-ward the edge of the trees, paused to take stock of all her wide-open senses, and, perceiving nothing nearby, darted out into the open and across the road to the rows of thick bushes beyond. The bushes bore some large pear-shaped, cream-colored fruits, but she never gave them a second glance. Something, more of that new inner knowledge, told her that none of the strange-looking fruits were ripe and ready to eat yet.

She began to make her way through the groves at a steady pace, pausing only now and again to check the smells, sounds, and other bits of information that the gentle breeze might bring. Darkness was falling quickly now, yet she proceeded on, drawn by some inner road map of the re-gion. She had no idea where she was or where she was go-ing, but somehow she knew how to get there.

Finally she came to a shallow stream that burbled over a bed of rocks. She paused, crouched, and took some water in her cupped hands and sniffed it. It smelled right, so she drank deeply, discovering a fierce but previously suppressed thirst. After she drank, she relaxed for the first time since leaving her tree, and, seeing very little around in the dark-ness, she looked up-and gasped.

There were countless stars up there, in some places so thick that they seemed to be a single burning ma.s.s, and parts of the sky were bathed in clouds of gold and magenta and deep royal purple, all seemingly frozen in midswirl. There were more stars than she'd ever seen before, and fea-tures out of deep s.p.a.ce astronomical photographs right there, sitting in the night sky.

She did not have to gaze but an instant upon the incred-ible beauty of that vast fairyland starfield to know that there was nowhere on Earth from which it might be seen. The sight and that knowledge fell upon her instantly, generating a sense of awe, excitement, and some fear.

Alama had not lied. This was another world, far, far away from the one she had known.

And still there was that inner urge to press on, to proceed as quickly as possible to wherever it was that was calling her. Tearing her eyes away from the spectral scene, she waded across the creek and went on through the brush on the other side.

Even pushing her pace as much as she dared, it took hours to reach that shimmering boundary glimpsed much earlier from the top of the tree. It wasn't easy to see even in the bright starlight, but she could sense it, almost feel it. And yet itcould be seen, for on this side of the barrier things had a brighter, more orderly look, while beyond it things seemed much darker. She had no sense of it as something dangerous or even unusual, but itwas unique in her experience, and she could not be absolutely certain that it was safe.

She approached it cautiously, then stood right up to it, fi-nally putting out a hand to touch it. It radiated warmth and a sense of thicker air, and after hesitating a moment, she thrust her right hand into it.

It pa.s.sed through with no resistance, but the feeling on the other side was quite different. Hot and wet were the two impressions that came to mind, and the sense of something striking and tickling her caused her to withdraw the hand. It seemed all right, and when she touched it, the hand was wet; what she'd felt were raindrops.

Her new self did not react, but her old self caught the immediate sense of incongruity. She looked up-and, to the very boundary itself, the starfield shone in a cloudless sky. Rain? From where?

Taking in a deep breath, she walked straight through the barrier-feeling a change in environment but no resist-ance-and into a pitch-dark land of steady, gentle warm rain. The temperature was considerably warmer than it had been on the other side, almost steamy and very reminiscent of the Amazon jungle. The rain, however, was more sub-dued, which was actually a welcome change from what she'd been used to.

She turned and stuck her head back through the "barrier." Although it hadn't seemed cold to her, the shock of suddenly going, wet-faced, from a steam bath to a spring night made it feel almost frigid. It was fascinating, as if the whole world were one huge house and each "room" in the place had its own weather and climate.

She withdrew her head. It felt somehow better to be over here, even with the extreme darkness and the rain. She wasn't certain if this was because of her newfound instincts or because this region was more like the northwest Ama-zon, but it felt more like, well,home.

She walked away from the boundary slowly and care-fully, almost tripping on wild, junglelike vegetation, until the soft glow coming through from the other side of the barrier was no longer visible. Suppressing as much as pos-sible her feelings of disorientation and fear, she tried to empty her mind, relax, and let that new set of senses take over.

And slowly, strangely, she began to see her surroundings in a way she'd never seen anything before.

Ancient trees rose all around her; she saw them as a throbbing, pulsing reddish color, the leaves almost black in the inky darkness. Variations of the same red color also ap-peared in the bushes, other plants, even mosses, everything alive that was organic, all glowing with the energy of life.

Other spots glowed yellow and purple and orange. Smaller things mostly, but brighter, often moving either in or on the vegetation or occasionally on the ground or even in the air. The yellows were some form of reptile, perhaps many forms; the purples were small warm-blooded crea-tures; and the oranges were flitting insects of the night.

The ground seemed mostly to remain black close by, but not too far off it seemed to shimmer as if something trans-parent and yet also reflective were on top of it, distorting the colors or auras that she saw clearly above it.

Water, she realized. Mostly standing water, except for the effect of the raindrops. The vegetation was dense, but it was no jungle, and there were openings among the trees that were not overgrown. Neither was it any sort of farm or orchard as on the other side; it was random, natural . . .as it should be. It was, she realized, some sort of vast swamp.

Curious, she closed her eyes for a moment and found that the scene was still there. She moved a little, cautiously, keeping to the "black" areas, and saw that the scene moved with her, changing point of view as if all this were the same as the vision her eyes brought.

But she was not seeing with her eyes; rather, she was somehow seeing the essence of life in the wild and its re-flections in her mind.

She began to walk slowly but confidently, using the black areas as her guide. Some points were quite small, but overall they seemed to almost form a network of paths through the wilderness, paths taking her through great beauty in a direction that seemed to draw her.

Navigating by this new second sight also became easier the longer she did it. While it hardly gave full circular vi-sion, it was far superior in some ways to normal sight be-cause it covered a wider area.

Several times she was aware of large creatures she took to be snakes of some kind lurk-ing high in the trees; when they watched her, they burned exceptionally bright, and she avoided them. The water was mostly just the reflective sort, but occasionally it, too, would have brightly glowing forms in it. Most of these had pale greenish tinges-fish, perhaps? That was what came to mind. Here and there would be large orange ma.s.ses, some-times in the water, sometimes out, and these, too, she qui-etly avoided while always looking for an unoccupied nearby tree just in case those orange shapes became a bit too interested in her. Once or twice one seemed to do just that, but none of them ever really approached her with any speed, and she never felt in real danger from them.

It was also getting easier to isolate sounds and smells and a.s.sociate colors with them. As the night wore on and her journey continued, these supplemental senses and her discriminatory abilities concerning them increased greatly, the data fed and either filed or rejected automatically as it rushed in.

Crocodiles to the left, thirty feet, floating lazily . . . Two big snakes above and to the right, neither hungry . . . Col-ony of strange birds roosting in the tree to the left . . .

At a junction of "paths" she stopped suddenly, catching an odd scent from the ground. She realized suddenly that it was fecal matter of the sort whose smell would have re-pulsed her even days earlier.

Now it was just information. It wasn't all that fresh, but the odor put a picture in her mind that excited her.

People!

Was it just a random dropping, or did it also have an-other purpose? A territory marker, perhaps, like animals used? Or an indicator of a trail to follow? But if the latter, which direction did it mark to go?

Surely, if itwas some sort of message as well as a simple call of nature, it meant to go up the path it was on. Having no other road signs to guide her, she went up that path.

There were more at other junctions, each having a differ-ent scent. That meant that thesewere trail markers, laid out by intelligence, not mere territorial boundaries that would involve the same few people-or so she hoped. Such a sys-tem, however primitive or however revolting it might have seemed to "civilized" people, made a lot of sense. Only those whocould sense and figure them out would under-stand their meaning.

Was this something new, a function of this strange place, or were things like her new mind-sight and such finely honed senses of smell and hearing something all people had once possessed but had somehow lost? The latter seemed more likely; she, after all, was using them, and that meant that they were a natural part of her, perhaps sealed off in that unused part of the brain. Were those untapped parts of the human brain really unused excess capacity, or were they vestigial remains of senses civilization had made unnecessary?

What other powers might these people possess, these people who were clearly up ahead, clearly at the place where she felt driven to go?

There was only one good way to find out.

The Ambrezan came out on the porch and said, "We have just had a report from the capital that a second party has come through the Well."

Nathan Brazil took his feet down from the porch railing, slowed his idle rocking in the chair, and took the cigar out of his mouth. "All Glathrielians?" he asked.

"It seems so. Two males and two females in a single party, and then a third female later, who, it is said, evaded the alarms and security measures and went through without detection."

Brazil stopped rocking and stood up. "That's probably the one. No word from anywhere else that a Glathrielian fe-male like myself came through here unaltered?"

"None, although it's a big place. If she didn't want to be found, it is entirely possible that she's made some sort of deal. Not everyone might advertise as blatantly as you, you know."

Nathan Brazil grinned. "You're just trying to get rid of me. I make you uncomfortable."

"No, not at all-"