together now.
Why? she wondered. Sex? That was something the animals did, she told herself. She had never understood it, or why people liked it; and if her own twinning was any indication, it was a most unpleasant experience. Why was a distinguished, high-ranking person of such a responsible position as Captain Brazil willing to jeopardize his career and his life for the sake of some wasted girl he never knew—didn’t know, in fact, even through Zone? Even if he had saved her, she wouldn’t have contributed anything. She was practically an animal then. More sense to get her to a Death Factory where her remains would help fertilize a field.
Perhaps this was why the Com philosophy was developing and spreading, she thought. It was rational, planned. Like being a plant, or one of these robots. Even Hain’s dirty crew couldn’t stop the march of such perfection of order, she felt sure. The sane hexes here proved it.
“We will have better service, and a shorter stay, at other hotels,” The Rel informed them, breaking Vardia’s reverie. “I think we will be out of this place where we are so unpopular in two days. Slelcron will be no faster but easier. No one communicates with the Slelcron. We will be ignored but unimpeded. As for Ekh’l—well, I have no information there, but I feel confident that, no matter what happens, we will not be beaten.”
“You seem pretty sure of yourself,” Vardia commented. “More prophecy from The Diviner?”
“Logic,” The Rel replied. “We were impeded for someone’s purpose. Why? To what end? So they can beat us to the equator? I doubt it. It would be easier to kill us than detain us so. No, they will have to come out to us at the equator. They want to be there when we arrive because they know who and where we are, but not what Dr. Skander knows—how to get to the Well. They want in with us—indeed, they may be allies, since they will assuredly take steps to see that no one else beats us to the goal. And make no mistake about it, there is another expedition. The Diviner has said that we will not enter until all the recent Entries combine. That is fine—as long as we are in charge.”
“We will be,” Hain suddenly said.
NEAR THE IVROM BORDER IN THE UMIAU NATION
They presented a sight unprecedented on the Well World: a broad raft of logs, pulled along by ten Umiau wearing harnesses. On the raft were a Dillian centaur, a giant stag, a two-meter-tall bat, and a Czillian, plus a well-depleted bale of hay and a box of dirt.
“Why can’t the Umiau just take us all the way up?” Vardia asked Brazil.
The stag turned his head. “I still can’t get used to the idea that you are in two places at once, so to speak,” he said through his radio speaker. The splashing and sound of the wind on the water made it hard to hear his little box if you weren’t positioned just right.
“I have a hard time thinking that the little captain I came here with is a huge deer,” she replied. “Now answer the question.”
“Too dangerous,” he told her. “We’re going as far up as possible, but you eventually start getting some nasty currents, whirlpools, and other stuff. They don’t get along too well with the inhabitants, either. The Umiau would make out, but those nasty fish with the twenty rows of teeth would chew up this raft and us before we could be properly introduced. No, we’ll take our chances with a hundred and sixty kilometers of Ivrom.”
“What is Ivrom, Nathan?” Wuju asked. She had gotten the translator, and overcome most of her reservations. He treated her gently, and said only the right things, and she had eased up. There was still that something different about him, that indefinable something they all sensed but couldn’t put their fingers on.
Wuju had talked it out with Cousin Bat. “How would you feel,” Bat had asked her, “if you’d awakened not a Dillian but a regular horse? And looked down at your own dead body? Would you still be the same?”
She had accepted that explanation, but Bat didn’t believe it himself. What had changed in Brazil was the added air of total command, of absolute confidence and certainty. And he had as much as admitted he knew the answer to the total puzzle. He could get in to the control center, control the world—or more.
Bat was more encouraged now, really. So much the better. The man with the answers had no hands, couldn’t even open a door by himself. Let him get in, Bat thought smugly. Let him show how to work things.
“Nathan!” Wuju said louder. “What is Ivrom? You haven’t told us!”
“Because I don’t know, love,” he replied casually. “Lots of forest, rolling hills, plenty of animals, most familiar. The atlas said there were horses and deer there. It’s a nontechnological hex, so it’s the sword-and-spear bit again, probably. The intelligent life form is some kind of insect, I think, but nobody’s sure. Those active volcanoes to our left—that’s Alisstl, and it’s a formidable barrier. The people there are thick-skinned reptiles who live in temperatures close to boiling and eat sulfur. Probably nice folks, but nobody drops in.”
She looked over at the range of volcanic mountains. Most were spouting steam, and one had a spectacular lava fountain along a side fissure. She shivered, although it wasn’t cold.
“This is the way to travel if you can!” Brazil said with enthusiasm, taking a deep breath of the salty air. “Fantastic! I used to sail oceans like this on big ships, back in the days of Old Earth. There was a romance to the sea, and those who sailed it. Not like the one-man space freighters with their computers and phony pictures of winking dots.”
“How soon will we land?” Wuju asked him, a bit ill at the rolling and tossing he liked so much. She was happy to see him obviously enjoying himself, talking like his old self again, but if it was at the cost of this kind of upset stomach, she would take land.
“Well, they’ve gone exceptionally fast,” he replied. “Strong devils, and amazing in their element. I’ll have to remember that strength. Wouldn’t do to underestimate our Dr. Skander.”
“Yes, but
“Tomorrow morning,” he replied. “Then it’ll be no more than a day or so to Ghlmon—we won’t have to cross the whole hex of Ivrom, just one facet—and another day to the top of the bay in Ghlmon.”
“Do you really think we’ll meet them—the others, that is—up there?” Vardia asked. “I’m most anxious to free my other self—my sister—from those creatures.”
“We’ll meet them,” Brazil assured her, “if we beat them—and we certainly should at this rate. I know where they have to go. When they get there, we’ll be ready for them.”
“Will I be able to scout this Ivrom tonight?” Cousin Bat called out to him. “I’m sick and tired of fish.”
“I’m counting on you, Bat,” Brazil replied laughing. “Eat up and tell us what’s what.”
“No more midnight rescues from the jaws of death, though,” Bat replied in the same light vein.
“You never know, Bat,” Brazil replied more seriously. “Maybe this time I’ll rescue
The Umiau had been remarkably uninformed about Ivrom, which wasn’t as strange on the face of it as it would seem. The Umiau were water creatures, and their need was for technological items they could not manufacture. An alliance with the Czillians was natural; their other neighbors they at least knew from watery experience, even if they didn’t get along too well with all of them, and Aisstl was too hot to handle. Ivrom, named from the old maps and not by the inhabitants, was peaceful forests and meadows, no major rivers, although it had hundreds of tiny creeks and streams. It was a nontechnological hex, so it wasn’t easy to get to, even harder to move around in, and probably not worth the trouble. Of course, the major problem was that no one who had ever set out for Ivrom—to study, for contact, or to go through it—had ever been seen or heard from again. For that reason the party stopped on a reef, over a submerged shoal in deep water, and anchored for the night even though there would still have been time when they arrived to have made camp on or near the beach.
It did look inviting, too. The air was sweet and fresh, about twenty degrees Celsius, surprisingly comfortable humidity for a shore area because of the inland breeze, a few light, fluffy clouds but nothing that looked threatening, and a deep blue sky.
The shoreline revealed a virgin sandy beach, flat and yellow and stretching down the coast. The breakers and some obvious storms had forced driftwood onto the shore, where it had built up near the beginning of the forest. It was a very dense forest, rather dark from the thickness of the underbrush and giant evergreens, but
