protection.”
“You can see the fireplaces and chimneys,” Jol pointed out. “In the fall the fronts are put back on and they become warm as today inside.”
Julee started to ask what happened when it rained, but she saw that the roofs and ledges were angled and the buildings so placed that it would take a really terrible storm to get much rain inside.
“It looks as if anyone dishonest could steal anything he wanted here,” Julee commented.
They both stopped and looked at her strangely. “That just isn’t done here—not by any Dillian,” he huffed.
His reaction startled her, and she apologized. “I—I’m sorry. I don’t know why I think like that.”
“We do get some alien traders from other hexes in once in a while and they’ve tried taking stuff,” Dal put in to defuse the issue. “Won’t do ’em no good here, though. Only way in is by the lake—forty kilometers, almost as deep as it is long. Nobody can beat us in the woods, and anybody who wants to climb six kilometers of mountain at steep grade and below zero temperatures would lose more than he could take.”
They reached a small building about two-thirds of the way down the thirty or so buildings of the town’s lone street. A wooden sign hung on a post, a hexagonal symbol of two small trees flanking a huge one, burned in with some sort of tool. Inside stood an elderly centaur with long, white hair and unkempt beard reaching down below his nipples. He had once been coal black, she realized, but now the body hair was flecked with silvery white.
He would look very officious standing there at his cluttered desk, she thought, amused, if he wasn’t sound asleep and snoring loudly.
“That’s Yomax,” Jol told her. “The closest thing we’ve got to a government in the village. He’s sort of the mayor, postmaster, chief forester, and game warden here. He always opens up at seven o’clock like the duty book says, but since the boat doesn’t get in until eleven-thirty, he usually goes back to sleep until just before then.” He yelled, “Hey! Yomax! Wake up! Official business!”
The old man stirred, then wiped his eyes and stretched, not only his arms but also his entire long body.
“Hmph! Whazzit?” he snorted. “Some damned brat’s always foolin’ with me,” he muttered, then turned to see who stood there.
His eyes fixed on Wu Julee, and he suddenly came fully awake.
“Well! Hello!” he greeted in a friendly but puzzled tone. “I don’t remember seein’ you around before.”
“She’s lost her memory, Yomax,” Jol explained. “We found her down by Three Falls.”
“She don’t know nothin’ about nothin’,” Dal put in. “Didn’t even know ’bout winter and coats and all.”
The old man frowned, and came up to her. Ignoring Jol’s protests that he had done it already, Yomax proceeded to go through the same examination Julee had had earlier—with similar negative results.
Yomax scratched his beard and thought. “And you don’t remember
“Mighty strange,” he said. Then, suddenly, he brightened. “Lift your right foreleg,” he instructed. She did, and he grasped the hoof firmly and turned it up.
“I think she’s been witched,” Dal maintained.
“Com’mere and lookit this,” Yomax said softly. The other two crowded in to see.
“She ain’t got no shoes!” Dal exclaimed.
“Not only that,” the old one pointed out, “there’s no sign that she ever had any.”
“Don’t prove nothin’,” Dal persisted. “I know lots’a folks what don’t wear shoes, particularly up-valley.”
“That’s true,” admitted Yomax, dropping the leg and straightening up, for which Julee was thankful. She felt circulation start to return. “But,” the old centaur continued, “that’s a virgin hoof. No deep stains, no imbedded stones, nothing. Hers are like a newborn’s.”
“Aw, that ain’t possible,” Jol said scornfully.
“I told ya she was witched,” Dal insisted.
“You two get along and do your chores or whatever,” Yomax told them, waving them away with his hands. “I think I know at least part of what this is about.”
They left reluctantly and then started to return. Yomax had to bellow at them several times.
“Now, then, young lady,” he began, satisfied of some privacy at last, “let me throw some names at you. Let’s see if any of ’em strike a bell.”
“Go ahead,” she urged him, intrigued.
“Nathun Brazzle,” he began, trying to make do with the strange names on a paper he had fished from a crowded drawer in his desk. “Vardya Dipla Twelve Sixty-one. Dayton Hain. Wo Jolie. Anythin’?”
She shook her head slowly from side to side. “I’ve never heard any of those names before,” she told him. “At least—I don’t think so.”
“Hmmm…” the old man mused. “I’m sure I’m right. Only possible explanation. Well, tell you what. Got one test when the boat comes in. Old Entry from the same neck of the woods as these folks—ten, fifteen years ago. He pilots the ferry now, since old Gletin refused to see how old he was and went overboard in a storm ’couple years back,” Yomax told her. “He’ll still remember the old language. I’ll git him to spout some of that alien gibberish at ya, and we’ll see if ya understand it.”
They passed the time talking until the ferry arrived, the old man telling about his land and people with pride and affection. During the course of his rambling but entertaining memoir/travelogue, which she was sure was almost half-true, a great many facts emerged. She learned about the Well World, and what the hexes were. She learned about Zone and gates, and the strange creatures that wandered around. She found that, although the Dillians lived to be well over a hundred Well World years on the average, the population was relatively small. Females went into heat only every other year, then only for a short period, and invariably bore but a single young—which had about an even chance of surviving its first year.
If you made it through puberty, about a twenty percent chance, then you would live a long life—because you would already be immune to most of what would kill you.
The various colors—Yomax said there were hundreds of combinations—of the people didn’t seem to meld with interbreeding, she was told, since all color genes were recessives.
“Rank comes with age,” Yomax told her. “When you get too old to plow, or build, or chop and haul wood, they put you in charge of things. Since nobody likes to admit they’re old when the job’s so little—you saw how much respect I got from the young ones—I wound up bein’ about everything the village needs.”
The mother was the ultimate authority in child-rearing, he explained, but the family group shared moral responsibility. Since customs like marriage and inheritances were unknown—everything was simplistically communal—people formed family groups with other people they liked, without much regard to sex. The groups were mostly traditional now, but occasionally new ones of three to six would be formed by the young after puberty.
The entire hex was a collection of small towns and villages, she learned, because of the low birthrate and also because of innate limits on technology here. Anything more ambitious than the most basic steam engine just wouldn’t work in Dillia.
That kept things extremely simple and pastoral, but also stable, peaceful, and uncluttered.
“In some hexes you can’t even tell what sort of place it once was,” Yomax told her. “All them machines and smelly stuff, everybody livin’ in air-conditioned bubbles. Then they want to come
With that impassioned statement, there came the long, deep sound of a steam whistle, its call echoing across the mountains.
Yomax grabbed a simple cloth sack tied with twine and invited her down to the lakefront about 150 meters from town. She saw a simple wooden wharf with several huge posts, nothing more. A few townspeople waited just off the dock, apparently having business downlake or awaiting passengers.
Coming up on the wharf was the strangest craft she had ever seen. A giant oval raft, it looked like, with another raft built on top of it and supported by solid log cross-bracing. In the middle was a single, huge, black boiler, with a stack going up through the second tier and several meters beyond, belching white smoke.
A single centaur, black and white striped all over, a crazy-looking broad-brimmed hat on his head, stood at a large wheel, which was flanked by two levers. The levers went down through to the boiler level and seemed to do nothing but signal a brown centaur-engineer to turn some control or other on the boiler. The boiler was
