The Sea is Full of Stars

societies, with direct subsistence farming and hunting by spear and arrow.”

“Who enforces that kind of thing? Is there some sort of global police?” Genghis O’Leary asked. “Or some kind of force that ensures conformity to those rules?”

“It is not necessary,” Doroch told him. “The Well sets it. You may take a portable fusion generator into a semitech or nontech hex, but it simply will not work. It will be an inert lump. You can take a gunpowder-type rifle into a nontech hex and shoot it, and it simply will not fire. Every round will be a dud. Needless to say, the reverse is not true. If you take that rifle into a high-tech hex you can shoot it, even if everyone who lives there carries particle beam pistols. An arrow will kill anywhere. In that sense, the nontech folk have an advantage. They can hide out in their element and use it well, while even the semitech civilizations are too dependent on their engines and gunpowder to be able to come in and bully their way around in a nontech hex. My own is a semi, and while I feel quite comfortable here in South Zone with all its high-tech amenities, I daresay I could survive in a reasonable environment given good soil and seed and some hand tools. Could any of you do it? Any of you?”

“I could,” Alpha told him firmly. “I have data from the experience of living on a subsistence world.”

“Indeed? I wonder if it’s quite the equivalent you think. At any rate, you may well be put to the test soon. You see, there is no way out of here to anyplace that will not kill you. There is no way to send any of you back. That command is reserved for the Ancient Ones, and I’m afraid we haven’t seen any of them here for, oh, a few tens of millions of years or so. There are two exits, however. One simply teleports you to North Zone, but that will not help you much. Beyond the small area where you’ll arrive that is set aside for carbon-based life, virtually anything up there would kill you in moments. Even you, mechanical man.” He was looking at Kincaid.

“And the other exit?” Tann Nakitt prompted, getting nervous.

“The other is a general gate that, for me, would take me home to my hex and nowhere else. For the Yaxa, which you’ve met, it would take them to Yaxa. A corresponding gate in each capital, essentially in the center of each hex, will take you here, but that’s it. I cannot use it to go to Yaxa if I wanted; I’d have to travel in a conventional manner from my own home. It is, however, something of a convenient shortcut back.”

“And it will transport us to where our races have hexes?” O’Leary asked.

“Um, no, not exactly. Oh, you have a one in 780 chance of it, but it’s unlikely. I don’t remember it happening. When you go through the first time, you will be processed by the Well, assigned a race and hex where an added one would be of no consequence to the balance, which is almost any one, and then you will be reconstituted as one of them. The process is not quite random; the Well does do some sort of analysis of your mind, your personality, and does some rather odd things on occasion. One almost suspects sometime that it has a sense of humor. All that can be predicted is that you will come out young but generally postpubescent, although we’ve had a child or two through and they remain children and with their parents, if those parents are here; that you will emerge in absolutely perfect health, and that, while your memories and personality will be basically untouched, that autonomic part of everyone’s brain will be suited to and comfortable with the new form. You’ll know how to use the body, in other words. That’s not the same as saying you will feel like a native, but it is sufficient to get you started.”

Kincaid picked up on this right away. “Now, hold it, sir. You are saying that Josich and the other Hadun who came through before us are no longer racially Ghomas? That they are now something else?”

“They are not what they were, certainly.”

“What are they, then? Where is Josich, and what does the monster breathe?”

The ambassador’s tone grew a bit dark. “Josich is a Chalidang. That is here, in the north-central region of the Overdark, one of our great oceans. A high-tech hex that adjoins a large island. Another of that race is in Jocir, yet another high-tech hex only two away from Chalidang and adjoining the continent, and another is down here, at Imtre. That was the curse, really. Two in high-tech hexes not far from one another, and a third in what was nontech but in a formidable form. The other two of their kind arrived on land, one on the far eastern edge of the Overdark, the other on an island to the south, Cromlin and Becuhl, one high-tech, the other a semitech. They were all quickly in the hands of ambitious and ruthless rulers open to their own brand of ambition. Beyond that, you had best learn once you have been processed. Still, sir, if you wish to kill the one called Josich, many would count you a hero, but you will have to go to Chalidang.”

“Still a water breather, though,” Kincaid said wistfully. “But two out of five weren’t reconstituted as water breathers. I’ll bet that has them unbalanced. But this means that I might well be reprocessed as a water breather?”

“You might. The odds are against it, but it happens.” The ambassador turned and looked them all over. “And now, you must proceed to processing. It is a standing rule of all the races here that anyone entering Zone must be processed by the end of the day they emerge, and preferably as soon as they are briefed. We have no way to take care of you as you are, and until you are processed you are in all ways aliens.”

“Wait! Where is our master that the flying ones took with them?” Alpha demanded to know.

“Oh—him. He was taken immediately to the Well Gate because, of course, all this would be of no use to him. The Yaxa state that he had some sort of seizure and that they were not at all certain if he was alive when they put him through. If he was, he is already somewhere, and something, else. I may find out in time, but nothing would be learned as yet. If he was dead, then he is gone. They followed the only course that might have saved him. Only time will tell if it did.”

“Then we will stay here until we know!” Alpha maintained adamantly.

The Ambassador looked at her, its big eyes then moving to the others, and then he said, quietly, “No, I’m afraid you won’t.”

The Yaxa and their nasty rifles were back, standing in the back of the room and aiming at the two women.

“If those two, or any of the others, make the slightest move to do anything but go to and through processing, you have my leave to shoot them,” the Ambassador told them. “If it’s around here, kill is authorized. If near the gate, simply stun them into unconscious oblivion if you can and throw them in.”

Their briefing, and their welcome, was over.

Ambora

It wasn’t supposed to hurt.

They said it would be no different than the teleportation to the Well World itself; a sense of darkness, unconsciousness, and then you’d wake up somewhere else in a new native habitat with the basics necessary to survive. From that point, you’d be on your own.

The pain had been enormous. She remembered the pain, as if her head were under horrible attack and all its blood vessels exploded. It was the kind of pain whose memory lasted a lifetime in nightmares, and for some time its echoes would cause nervous caution or even possible panic.

And then she’d come to with those echoes surrounding her, come to and find only questions.

Who had said that there would be no pain? Tele— The very term confused her. It was gibberish, meaningless, and even those fragments of memory faded as a dream fades upon awakening from the deepest of sleeps, leaving her with only the memory of that pain and total confusion.

She awoke high on a cliff overlooking a vast saltwater ocean that seemed to have no end. The cliffs were as sheer as might be imagined from nature, and they rose perhaps a kilometer above her and even more below her to a flat volcanic outcrop of rock and vegetation that jutted out into the sea.

She was on a small outcrop from that cliff barely large enough for her reclining body, with no ladder or trail or any other indication of how she’d gotten there, or, more to the point, how she’d get off.

Who was she? What was she? She wasn’t sure what frightened her more, the situation she found herself in or the fact that she had no memories of her past, not one single personal memory.

She got to her feet, nervous about the drop, then did a self-examination. The discovery that she was, in fact, female was a surprise, although had she found herself a male it would have made an equal impact. Whatever sense of self she had, it contained none of those rocks that others might take for granted. The breasts were large and