stream and down along its course, the unconscious Brazil hanging from the folded litter. Cousin Bat did not believe in gods or prayers, yet he prayed as he struggled to keep up speed, height, and balance. Prayed he would make it to Czill and to modern medicine without killing Brazil, himself, or both.
With shock and dismay the medicine man watched Bat fly into the darkness.
“Ogenon!” he called in a deep, rough voice.
“Yes, Your Holiness?” a smaller, weaker voice replied.
“You saw?”
“The body of the honored warrior has been taken by the one who flies,” Ogenon responded in a tone that seemed to wonder why such a stupid question had been asked.
“The flying one is ignorant of us and our ways, or he would not have done this,” the medicine man said as much to himself as to his aide. “He flew east, so he’s taking the body to Czill. I’ll need a strong runner to get to the border. Now, don’t look at me like that! I know how foul the air is over there, but this has to be done. The Czillians must realize when they see the warrior’s body and hear the winged one’s story what has happened, but, if the body survives—not likely—they will not know of the survival of the essence. Go!”
Ogenon found a warrior willing to make the trip in short order, and the medicine man instructed him what to say and to whom, impressing on the runner the need for speed. “Do the message in relays,” the old one said. “Just make sure it is continuous and that it is not garbled.”
Once the instructions were given and the runner was off into the darkness, the large Murnie turned again to his aide, who was looking extremely bleary-eyed and was yawning repeatedly.
“Get awake, boy!” snapped the elder. “Now, locate the six-limbed creature and tell me where it is.”
“That’s simple, Your Holiness,” Ogenon responded sleepily. “The six-limbed one is under treatment at the Circle of Nine. I saw it being dragged there.”
“Good,” the old one replied. “Now, you’ll have to go to the Base Camp and bring an elder to me, Elder Grondel by name.”
“But that’s—” Ogenon started to protest, yawning again.
“I know how far it is!” the big one roared. “You can make it there and back before dawn!”
“But suppose the Revered Elder won’t come,” the aide wailed, trying to get out of the assignment and to get back to sleep.
“He’ll come,” the medicine man replied confidently. “Just describe to him the three alien creatures we’ve had here this night, and tell him particularly of the honored warrior and of what has happened. He’ll beat you here, I’ll wager, even though he’s eighty years old! Now, off with you!
Ogenon went, grumbling about how everybody kicked him around and he always had to do everything.
Once out of sight, the elder couldn’t hold back his own yawns anymore, yet he didn’t return to his tent and mat but sat down in the, for him, very chilly night air.
All he could do now was wait.
Wuju relived the nightmare run for hours, then, suddenly, woke up.
I must still be dreaming, she thought. Everything was fuzzy and she was feeling quite high. She couldn’t believe what she saw.
She was in a Murnie camp, in the earliest light of dawn, and there were horribly loud and grotesque snores all around her. Sitting in front of her, arms around its knees, was the biggest Murnie she had ever seen—taller than she, and she stood over two meters. It was also oddly colored, on the whole a deeper brown than she, laced only here and there with spots of the light green that was the usual color of these strange creatures.
From a distance they had looked like walking rectangular bushes. But here, up close, she saw that they had a rough skin that folded and sagged, like partially melted plastic, all over their body. They looked like a large trunk of a body with no head, she thought. The eyes, huge as dinner plates, were located where the breasts should be, and perhaps thirty centimeters below them was that enormous mouth, a huge slit that seemed almost to cleave the trunk in two. There was no sign of hair, genitals, or, for that matter, a nose and ears.
The drug or whatever it was seemed to be wearing off more and more. This isn’t a dream! she thought suddenly, as fear ran through her. She tried to move, but found her legs were all roped to stakes deep in the ground, and her hands were tied behind her. She struggled in panic to pull free, and the sound woke up the big brown Murnie. Its huge eyes opened, deep yellow with perfectly round, black irises that reflected the light almost like a cat’s.
“Do not struggle,” the creature said to her. The words were mushy, as if they were uttered in the midst of a roar, but they were understandable. It was speaking a language it knew but its mouth was not suited to its use.
“I said do not struggle!” the Murnie repeated, getting up and stretching in a very human fashion. “You are quite safe. No one will harm you. Can you understand me? Nod if you can.”
Wuju nodded fearfully, panic still all over her face.
“All right, now listen well. It is difficult for me to speak this tongue, and I must concentrate carefully to get the words out. You can understand me, but I cannot understand you, I don’t think. Say something.”
“What—what is all this?” she almost screamed.
The Murnie scratched his behind with his huge, wide hand. The arms were almost to the ground when drooping by his side. “I thought so. I could not understand a word. You have no translator. You must concentrate hard, like me. Think, then answer. What language am I using?”
She thought for a second, then suddenly realized the truth. “Confederacy!” she exclaimed, amazed. “You are an Entry!”
“All right. I got Confederacy but nothing else. That is because all Entries continue to think in their original tongue. What they say is automatically transformed in the neural passages to the language of the native hex. You can understand me, therefore you can speak it as I do if you think hard, make your mouth form the word you think. Take it slowly, one word at a time. Tell me your name and the name of your companions. Then try a simple phrase, one word at a time.”
Wuju concentrated, the fear and panic evaporating. Once this one had been one of her own kind! A potential friend she would need most of all here. As she started to speak she saw what he meant, and adjusted.
“I-ahm-Wuju,” she managed, and it almost sounded right. Her mouth and tongue wanted to make a different set of words. “Moy frandiz ahar Nathan Brazil ind Cooseen Baht.”
“Nathan Brazil!” the big Murnie exclaimed excitedly, suddenly very wide awake. The rest of what he said was unintelligible.
My god! she thought. Does everybody on this crazy planet know Nathan?
The Murnie suddenly frowned, and scratched the side of his head thoughtfully. “But the other was an old- culture man by description,” he mused, suddenly looking at her again with those huge yellow eyes. “You mean he still looked like his old self?” She nodded, and his great mouth opened in surprise. “I wonder why he wasn’t changed in the Well?”
“Whahr est Nathan?” she managed.
“Well, that’s really the problem,” the Murnie answered. “You see, he’s sort of in two places at once.”
He was a former freighter pilot like Brazil, the native told her, on the line for over two hundred years, facing his fourth rejuve and with all his family and friends dead, his world so changed he couldn’t go home. He had decided to commit suicide, to end the loneliness, when he got a funny distress signal in the middle of nowhere. He had veered to investigate, when suddenly his ship had seemed to cease to exist around him, and he had fallen into the Zone Well and wound up a Murnie.
“They are good people,” he told her. “Just very different. They can use nothing not found in nature or made
