“I’m still on the planet where I crashed?”
Slowly, they told him the story of the Well World, the hexes, and some of the problems his arrival had caused.
“You can’t pilot a spaceship, can you?” the interrogator asked hopefully.
“No,” he admitted. “I was a teacher of classics and a librarian and sometimes a guard for Trelig’s prisoners.”
The man thought for a minute. “You must understand our position in relation to you. Agitar is an advanced, technologically based hex. There is nothing electrical, I believe, closed to us, stemming from research on our own bodies. Science is king here. Now we prepare for a war, a war for those spaceship parts your party brought down. And here you are—totally illiterate, possessing absolutely no skills of use to us. Now you are an Agitar for the rest of your life. You’re young, strong, but little else. You must be fitted in here, and when we look at this compilation, the only usable quality you possess is a familiarity with weapons and the ability to shoot straight.”
“Where are the others who came in with me?” he asked, no liking the direction of the conversation. “I would like to get in contact with the woman, Mavra Chang—”
“Forget it,” the other told him. “She’s in the hands of the Lata, and, although they’ve stayed neutral so far, they are almost certainly philosophically, maybe actually, in opposition to us.” He sighed. “No, I think there’s only one place you would fit in now, and it’ll do you good, work you into Agitar society with discipline.”
They drafted him into the army.
They gave him two weeks of strict, intense basic training. There was little time to think, and that was as it had been planned. Still, barracks life made him some friends and filled him in on the rest of what was going on. For one thing, he found out that Agitar was allied with Makiem, a hex whose dominant race were giant frogs, and Cebu, a race of flying reptiles of some sort.
He also learned that Antor Trelig was a Makiem.
That depressed him. The ultimate irony. To escape from New Pompeii, beat the sponge on a new and alien planet, and wind up back serving Antor Trelig again. Was the Well computer laughing?
The training was tough but fascinating, though. In hand-to-hand, an Agitar male would simply electrocute his opponent. Although the average energy stored in an Agitar male was several thousand volts—still enough to be lethal—it could potentially store up to sixty thousand volts! An incredible figure. Overload was impossible, but if you were fully charged, any additional energy would be immediately released. The static electricity alone would never generate a terribly high voltage, but it was actually possible for an Agitar to absorb additional electricity from artificial sources or even things like lightning rods. They were totally immune to electrical shock; they could not electrocute one another, but they could actually transfer stored-up energy between themselves. There was a rather unpleasant class on how to absorb the energy from a dying or recently dead comrade.
Shooting was easy for him; the rifles were different from what he knew, as were the pistols, but all such weapons basically operate on the same principle: aim, push here, and the energy or projectile comes out there.
Somehow, one never unconsciously discharged, even while sleeping. He wondered about that, worried about the fact that the first time he
He also learned, indirectly from his barracks-mates, about the opposite sex. They were smart; on the average, a little smarter than the men, some said. Sex was common and frequent; the Agitar were a horny bunch. But there was effective birth control, plus the Well monitor of the population, so nobody felt inhibited. Marriage was unknown. If you wanted a child, you just found a female that wanted one, too—or vice versa—and had one. If it was male, it was the father’s total responsibility to raise it. The female might stay, might walk out. If it was female, the reverse was true.
There were women in the army, too. Because they could not hold a charge or discharge, they were never front-line troops, but they handled everything else. Most of the upper officers, including the bulk of the general staff, were women, as were most of the technicians.
The war was not popular. There was some childish enthusiasm born of never having actually seen what a war was like, yes; but most people didn’t get overly enthusiastic about it. They saw war as a necessity. A nasty couple of races—the Yaxa and the Lamotien—were even now moving to get the ship parts as well, and they had Ben Yulin under their control to fly it. Better a fully charged Agitar at Antor Trelig’s side walking into Obie than a bunch of terribly alien creeps under a not certainly controllable Ben Yulin.
After two weeks, they transferred him to Air. It wasn’t a promotion, really; Air went in first, and took the brunt of front-line casualties. Renard almost gasped when he saw what Air meant. Not planes or sleek ships, no. They were horses. Large, great horses with tremendous swanlike wings along both sides of their sleek bodies. As a classicist, Renard recognized them as the embodiment of the legendary Pegasus, and they were truly grand. They came in all colors—brown, white, pink, blue, green. There was no end to the variety.
And they flew—tremendously, gracefully, with an Agitar on a saddle, his legs strapped in, on soaring wings. They were somewhat fragile, since they had hollow bones, and he never did quite understand why they flew, but they did and that was enough. They were also much smarter than horses. They responded to verbal commands, slight kicks, pulls on the reins—and they were easy to train, considering their riders had their own shock prods.
He was assigned one immediately. A beautiful, intelligent animal, green in color. The first time he went up, he had an instructor in front and all sorts of fancy instruments. But, the animals were easy to fly, and by the third day Renard was doing loops and swirls on Doma, the horse’s name, as easily as if born to it. They were a natural pair, Agitar and pegasus; they blended together like one organism.
And there was the tast. It was a steel rod, about three meters long, coated with copper, with a sword-like copper hilt. With an Agitar male holding one, it was an electrical conductor of remarkable efficiency. It was also thin and fairly light for the well-muscled arms.
In a nontechnological hex, or even some others, the tast was an ultimate close-contact weapon, where pistol or rifle either could not be used or would not work.
At the end of three weeks they told his class that they weren’t really ready, should need six more weeks, but that this was all the training they were going to get. As it was, they would have to catch up to the war.
Renard decided one thing—had decided it long before, when he found out about Trelig.
He was not going to die in Trelig’s service.
Lata
Another dizzying ride on the Krommians had taken Mavra to Lata itself.
It was a fairyland come to life. The Lata had no cities as such; they were spread out along wooded hills and forest glades. Small shop groups permitted the necessary trade and services, and there was a number of universities, research facilities for those so minded, and places for the artisans, for Lata were an inherently artistic race.
It was also the only asexual bisexual race she had ever seen. They all looked identical to her except for the colors; all like meter-high girls of nine or ten, and all spoke in lyrical, musical bells. It was an eerie feeling for her, who had always been so small in a world of giants, to suddenly be the tallest person around.
They were all born without sex; they matured after fifteen to twenty years into biological females, each capable of laying just one egg, which hatched on its own in a few days. Then, over a two-year period, they changed. Female organs vanished, and male organs grew in their place. They were then male for the rest of their lives.
She asked Vistaru why there were so many females if that was the case. The girl—even though mature, it was impossible to think of the Lata as other than girls—had laughed. “When you change, you get older,” she’d
