state to which they’d reduced her was intolerable.
But her brain had compensated for most of that; if she lived long enough, one day it would redress the balance.
But it was only coping. Mentally and emotionally she had acclimated to her physical condition and limitations, but never had she abandoned the stars, the great swirling gulfs that shined so brightly all around her on nights like this that you could almost leap forward into them. So close, so visible—and yet, so far.
That was where she belonged, and she never gave up.
But hope was never gone, she thought to herself. Not while she lived. Not while the stars shined so.
Joshi turned his head upward a little, looking out at the northeastern horizon.
“Look!” he said. “You can see your moon!”
She lowered her gaze toward the horizon. It was there, a large silvery ball looking unreal and out of place, like a huge chunk of silver.
Surely they’re all long dead now, she told herself. All but Obie—poor, isolated Obie. The computer had been much more than any self-aware model she’d ever known. Obie was the son of Gil Zinder, and regarded himself that way. His own tragedy was that self-aware personality; how lonely he must be, she thought.
Lonely. That was an odd term for her to use, she thought. All her life it had been her normal condition, except for those few years of marriage. And yet, she was better off than Obie now. She had Joshi, and the tribe.
After a while the salt spray from the incoming tide started to reach them, and clouds obscured the view, so they got up and headed back to the compound.
“The
She nodded. “I hope they brought the bio references I asked for, and those books on seine fishing techniques, too.”
He sighed. “The fishing stuff I can see—for the tribe, anyway. Got to keep the faithful faithful and all that. But what’s all this interest in bio? You know we’re a race of two, sterile. If we weren’t, we’d have had some by now.”
She chuckled. The logistics of that had been a real tangle, since their sexual equipment was not in the best places, but it had been accomplished. She wondered whether her renewed appetite for sex after so many years of abstinence was due to middle age.
“Well, I’m sterile, anyway,” she responded. “Even if I weren’t, we’d have Glathriel children. But there may be ways, somewhere. I’ve seen crazier experiments in genetic manipulation. It might be too late for me, though; I’m getting too old for that sort of thing.”
He snuggled up to her. “You’re not too old for
She snorted mock-contemptuously. “You just say that because I’m the only woman you’ve got. Besides, I know about that sacrificial virgin bit you’ve been working on the tribe.”
He laughed. “I had a good teacher,” he pointed out. Then he grew serious. “But I’m not a Glathriel. Not any more. Not ever that I can remember. I’m a Chang and you’re a Chang and nothing can alter that.”
That pleased her. They went back into the sleeping compound together, and Mavra felt confident that, before she died, once again she would control her own destiny and manage her own fate.
But destiny had always controlled Mavra Chang.
Dasheen
Ben Yulin was nervous. Yaxa weren’t very welcome in Dasheen, not since the days of the wars, when peaceful, agrarian Dasheen had been dragged into the Northern campaign by his presence and the Yaxa’s insistence.
The Dasheen were minotaurs; they numbered about eight hundred thousand at the moment, only eighty thousand of whom were males. Their large, thick-bodied, muscular shapes were coated with fine fur; their heads, those of streamlined bulls: immense, almost neckless, with short snouts, broad pink noses, wide brown eyes, and tremendous curved horns.
From the males’ view, the only worm in Dasheen’s apple was the fact that Dasheen bulls lacked the ability to digest calcium directly, causing a deficiency that could only be counteracted by the milk of the females.
The Yaxa had arrived at the great farm unannounced, panicking the cows. Its great wings cast a tremendous shadow across the fields of oats and wheat, like some great, multicolored predator. It landed near the main house—a huge structure that included silos, storage facilities, quarters for Yulin’s 117 wives and daughters, and his own quarters.
It was not that he’d been totally out of contact with the Yaxa. But such meetings were usually carried out surreptitiously, with him going to a neutral high-tech hex to test his theories, or arranging a rendezvous in Zone.
Yulin calmed down his family and went to meet the Yaxa.
The great butterfly, impassive as always, seemed to bow slightly. Yulin motioned for it to enter his own living quarters, and it did, clearing the doorway with some difficulty. Yulin took his seat in a broad rocking chair and waited for the creature to speak.
“I am Racer,” the Yaxa said, using its nickname. Their names were untranslatable, so they generally adopted and stuck to translatable nicknames when dealing with others.
Ben Yulin nodded. “Well, welcome, Racer. But isn’t it a little risky coming here like this? I mean, I know the border’s not far from here, but I doubt if you could avoid being seen. There will be a lot of questions.”
“What I have to say is much too important to keep. Zone itself is far too risky for it, and there wasn’t time to get you out plausibly. The questions may not matter, anyway, when you hear what I have to say.”
“I’m listening,” he said, a growing feeling of unease mixed with the excitement rising within him. He suspected he knew why the Yaxa had come.
“We have placed Yaxa in a Northern hex. We can place anyone there now—with difficulty, but with complete certainty.”
A thrill shot through him, but it was tempered by his engineer’s mind. Like them, he’d worked on the problem for many years to no avail.
“How is it possible?” he asked.
“A Northern energy creature, the Yugash, grows crystalline creatures tailored to its needs and then operates them by entering the creatures’ bodies and controlling them,” Racer explained. “Finally a Yugash, who are high- tech, got together with us. They, like us, thought that the Well used mind-set rather than physical form to regulate transfer between Zone and hex gates. We allowed a Yugash called the Torshind to possess a Yaxa completely while the thought processes of the Yaxa were heavily sedated. The Yaxa body entered the Yaxa embassy Zone Gate—but walked out in Yugash!”
Yulin thought about it. “You mean these things can take over your body? And the Well switches them—and whatever body they’re in—to Yugash?”
“It is so. A bit unnerving, but, thankfully, they cannot enter hexes in the South. The Well is called the Well of Souls for good reason—it recognizes you by your mind, not your form. We firmly believe that we can now move a party of our choosing to Yugash, only three hexes, straight line, from where you crashed in Uchjin.”
The news was incredible. He could hardly believe it—there had to be a fly in the ointment somewhere, and he thought of one immediately.
“What’s to prevent these creatures from not just letting us go once they take us over?” he asked cautiously. “I’ve seen enough Well World life to know that my own people’s legends of centaurs and mermaids and ghosts were more than racial memory—some of those creatures must actually have gone to the home world of the
