She did the same to Renard, noting with satisfaction that Nikki repeated her every movement, about a meter away.
This seemed to excite the Lata. They tinkled and chimed all over. Vistaru came up to her.
“How you do t’at?” she asked. “T’ey want to know if you have stingars in hands.”
“Sort of,” Mavra replied, and they started off.
The trip was fairly easy. Mavra discovered that the top of the mountain range was also the border between the cyclopses’ hex, which the Lata called Teliagin “becous’ t’at is its name,” and the hex called Kromm. The change was amazing. There was still a chill in the air from the rain, and the wind had picked up to unpleasant proportions when they reached the border. No lines, guards, or sentinels stood there; not even a sign to mark the spot, yet one knew it was the border. It was like passing through a curtain.
Suddenly the air was thick and muggy; it was so humid that Mavra was covered in perspiration in minutes. Insect sounds, vague and faint in Teliagin, were almost overpowering here, as if someone had suddenly cut on a giant loudspeaker. The air seemed thick, oddly scented, and slightly wrong somehow.
“Not worree,” Vistaru assured her. “Deeferent, yes, but t’at is all: It weel not hurt you.”
Maybe not, Mavra thought, but it was turning the caked mud back to real mud, and the ground itself got progressively moist, the vegetation almost jungle-like as they descended. At the bottom of the mountain was a swamp that seemed to stretch in all directions. The water didn’t appear very deep—perhaps fifty centimeters—but it was dark and dank and foul-smelling and almost certainly hid deep spots. The water seemed to be stagnant, and smelled it. Moss was everywhere.
“Do we have to walk far through this?” she asked the Lata. “
“Onlee short ways,” the pixie assured her. “Jost keep in back of me.”
With that the creature turned her light back on—she apparently didn’t like to have it on all the time, and they had all taken turns in lighting the way for them—and did a very nice imitation of walking on top the water. Mavra knew she was flying, somehow, but the effect was doubly eerie. She hovered so close to the surface that the Lata’s stinger occasionally made a wake in the water.
The mud became terrible, and the water did get deeper, deep enough so that it seeped into her boots and made them feel awful. Oh, well, what the hell, she thought philosophically. Back to your beginnings.
They walked through the stuff for about an hour, until Mavra began to think that she was becoming one with the swamp. She was even beginning to get used to the odor, and that worried her. The thick growths thinned out. Even so, there was one last indignity, an underwater vine that caught her, and she went face down into, fortunately, very shallow muck.
Dutifully, Renard and Nikki, who had not tripped on anything, fell face down, too, and it took a little effort to collect herself and get them up before they drowned.
She used some of the water to get the muck out of her eyes, nose, and mouth, and, with Lata help, cleaned off the other two. It wasn’t much of a cleaning, though. They all looked more monstrous than any creature they’d yet seen on the Well World. Even her gift from Trelig, her horse’s tail, was so mud-caked it felt like there was somebody sitting on her rear end.
Finally everything cleared. It was a strange transformation—from horrible swamp to calm sea. Vistaru told her to wait, and one Lata, probably Barissa, who seemed to be the leader, took off for what looked like a far-off clump of floating bushes.
The sea, if it was a sea, was strangely beautiful. The sky was clear despite the oppressive humidity, and the great sky of the Well World, with its great multicolored gas clouds and bright stars, reflected an eerie, and yet magical glow on the waters.
Suddenly she looked over to her left, sure she detected movement. She did. She stared in new wonder as one of the large clumps of bush seemed to break away and now head toward them, a bright-blue light shining atop it. The light, she knew, was Barissa.
The bush proved to be a giant flower. It looked like a huge rose, closed, flanked by a great, thick green membranous platform.
Barissa smiled and said something. She turned to Vistaru.
“He say ol’ Macham is sleepee and grumblee bot he know the pro-blem and he weel tak you and the othars.”
Mavra looked again at the creature. It was a bright orange, or would be if it were fully opened. From the center of the closed flower rose two stalks, like giant stalks of wheat. Following the Lata’s lead, she stepped up onto the green base of the creature. Nikki and Renard followed, and imitated her when she sat down, cross- legged, on the edge. Vistaru came over to her.
“We will balance and take a break too. You just sit and ride. I hope you not get easee dizzee.”
Mavra barely had time to wonder about that remark when she discovered its full force. The creature spun around slowly, then started moving out across the quiet lake. It seemed to move by this circular motion, and while the movement wasn’t tremendously fast, it was somewhat unsettling. Closing her eyes helped a little, but her inner-ear balance still conveyed the motion. She began feeling a little nauseated. After an hour or so she was simultaneously wishing she were dead and afraid she was dying. She was very seasick.
Dawn broke after what seemed like an eternity. She continued gagging occasionally and watched the two hypnoed people, whom by this time she envied, imitate her. Vistaru walked calmly around to her.
“You are steel sick?” she asked needlessly.
“You better believe it!” was all Mavra Chang could manage.
The Lata radiated concern. “Not worree much more. We are almos’ t’ere.”
By this point Mavra didn’t care if they ever got “t’ere,” wherever “t’ere” was, but she managed to look around her for the first time.
They were no longer alone.
All over, by the thousands, other flowers were moving, spinning, dancing in a great ballet on the waters. They created myriad colors and color combinations, graceful and particularly resplendent now that they opened to the brilliant rays of the sun. In other circumstances, Mavra might even have enjoyed the show.
The Krommian they rode was slowing now, to her considerable relief. It, too, had opened over them, forming a curtain of brilliant browns and oranges. The great stalks, she realized, were eyes—long, oval, curious brown eyes with black pupils that looked so strange it was as if a cartoonist had drawn them on. They were independent of one another and sometimes looked in different directions. Of the core, the “head” of the creature, little could be seen. A pulpy bright-yellow mass, it appeared, more like thick straight hair than the center of a flower. The spinning had slowed enough now that she actually managed to wonder if these creatures were really plants or some sort of exotic animal.
The creature finally stopped spinning entirely and drifted slowly toward something. This didn’t stop the rest of the world from spinning, but it helped a great deal. They had traveled a great distance, that was for certain. Whatever means of locomotion these—people?—used, it shot them in the direction they wanted to go at many times their rate of spin.
Mavra crawled around slightly, making sure that her imitators wouldn’t fall off doing the same, and looked in the direction they were drifting. She could see an island—a tall but not very large rock outcrop in the middle of the sea. There appeared to be an artificial cave of some sort in the face, jet-black and without perspective.
She suddenly realized it was a black hexagon.
Vistaru came around. “We dock up close to the Zone Gate,” she said enigmatically. “You most tell the othars to go in the Gate.” She pointed to the rapidly approaching blackness.
“Not me?” she asked.
The pixie shook her head. “No, not now. Latar. The Krommeen ambassadar say no to you for now.”
Mavra nodded toward the huge cave or hole or whatever it was—it looked curiously two-dimensional. “That thing will help my friends?”
Vistaru nodded. “It is a gate. It weel tak’ t’em to Zone. T’ey weel be put through the Well of Souls. T’ey will become people of t’is planet, like me.”
