Part 18 (1/2)

She understood perfectly what was going on and exactly what her role in it would be. She was content with that.

The region hadn't always been a swamp.

Sometime, in the times hidden by mists forever, it had been a far different sort of place. Not that its climate hadn't always been hot and muggy, but once these were actually agricultural districts in which the Ambreza raised rice and other grains, controlling the influx of water with a grand complex of locks, channels, dams, and movable dikes so in-tricate and so ingeniously perfect that under most circ.u.m-stances they operated themselves with almost clockwork precision, leaving the designers only to do maintenance and harvest the crops. The Ambreza were equally comfortable on land or water then and pushed the art of the purely me-chanical almost to its limits.

Now, after countless thousands of years of pure neglect, one could not see a sign of that once-great race of builders and innovators. What might yet be preserved was far down, under layers of rock-hard sediment, volcanic ash, plant spores, and the decomposed remains of innumerable ani-mals and insects.

It was a dismal place now, overrun with dirty water and fallen, moss-covered logs, hidden under a blanket of high trees reaching for the light under skies more gray than clear, leaving the areas below in a twilight of swirling mist that hovered below the branches like a living thing.

It was hard to believe that such a place could ever be tamed, yet the Ambreza had done it, and they were not alone; back on Earth the Kingdom of the Congo had con-quered just such a hot, steamy junglelike swamp ten times this size and had built a thriving civilization until slavery, disease, and finally a harsh colonial hand had reduced the population to a point where the control of the land could not be maintained and it had fallen rapidly back to this sort of state. In ancient Cambodia they had tamed such a place so thoroughly that they'd built great temples to their G.o.ds in the midst of it, not knowing that they were actually building those temples to their own genius.

The last time Nathan Brazil had been anywhere near Glathriel, the inhabitants had been slowly embarking on just such a taming project, and they were the distant ances-tors of the people who lived in this gunk now. What had happened to them? Certainly, this time he'd found nothing in the Ambrezan records or stories to indicate that the former natives had done anything. Nor had it been a quick change, even after his last intervention. All the evidence was that it had been slow, a turning inward, a rejection of what might be, a withdrawal into themselves that spread like some plague from border to border.

What had it been? What had changed them not only mentally and philosophically butphysically, as was clear, reverting them to some animal base for reproduction, sup-planting even the concept of family in their culture? What now clearly healed them so quickly, a necessity in such a harsh environment for survival, yet made them so pa.s.sive that they would not even build permanent shelters for them-selves or make much of anything with their own hands? What, in fact, had happened to their language, which, as was typical of Terran-evolved tongues, had been quite rich and colorful? He hadn't takenthat from them, just their ability to understandother tongues. Yet the Ambrezans were adamant that they barely had a language at all-a few dozen sounds, many imitative of native animals here, with very basic meaning, and rarely used even then?

Yet they held hands and silently prayed. To whom or what?

He refused to believe it. Something inside him told him that the impression was false. Terrans adapted.

They were among the best adapters in the universe. Why, just starting from the plains of Africa and the Fertile Crescent they'd settled the Arctic and the jungles and vast deserts and every kind of climate and unlivable place in between.

As he trudged into the wet jungle, Brazil kept at the puz-zle this place represented. Had they adaptedtoo well? No, no, that was unheard of, ridiculous. But the last time at the Well hehad done some design tinkering to make this hex their own, to become as if this, not the other place, were what they were originally designed to survive in.

That was what the Well World was, wasn't it? A gigantic set of laboratories, each with a race designed for the place or a place for the race, set together and wound up and al-lowed to run their course to see just how viable race and setting really were?

She had held his hands . . .

Wait a minute! He'd put them here last time to adapt, and they'd done just what the d.a.m.ned Well World was sup-posed to let them do.

They held hands in a circle and prayed . . .

They'd adapted.

They'd become something different, gone off in a whole new direction. Whether it was a good direction for people, or bad, or stagnant wasn't the point. But that was in fact what had happened; he was sure of it.

The human race had trotted off and become something else.

Now the job was to find out what the h.e.l.l that ”some-thing else” was.

That, of course, and find the ever-elusive and apparently deliberately evasive Mavra Chang.

It wasn't easy to find traces of her, but it could be done. The twin keys were in the eternally wet ground between the marshes that formed a set of complex trails. Some of those trails retained the impression of footprints for very long pe-riods, and one set of prints, appearing infrequently but often enough, was a bit different from the rest. The way this one person walked was different; the prints of the others showed that they walked in a more confident manner, em-phasizing the forward area of the foot, while hers showed the full foot coming down with a slight emphasis on the heel.

Clearly, she wasn't at all unfamiliar with this sort of cli-mate and terrain, but that, too, fit. a.s.suming that the meteor had finally struck where they'd said it would, it would have come down somewhere deep in the Amazon. What Mavra was doing there was a total mystery, but that was the way the master computer worked when it had to, and he knew that it had come for her as well as himself. The method had been a bit crude yet effective, but the meteor had come in only one way, and it had fragmented over Rio and then struck deep inside.

He wondered if she was doing smuggling or drugs or something or if she'd gone native. It didn't matter.

In fact, it explained why she had headed down here almost imme-diately if, as now seemed clear, she wanted to avoid quick discovery and, maybe, him. Shehad to know that he was here.

Or did she? He'd been pretty far gone when he'd fallen into a hex gate on some far-off world so many lifetimes back. h.e.l.l, he'd been through it more than once, and even now he couldn't remember her face.

Until quite recently he hadn't even remembered her name or anything about what she looked like.

Could it be that she no longer remembered who or what she was and had headed here because it was familiar?

If so, she was going to be in for a rude shock if what he now suspected had happened here actually had.

This hex was really going to h.e.l.l in a handbasket, that was for sure. His previous experiences here had been along the coast and once on the extreme southern savannas between the vol-canic ranges, b.u.t.this was a mess. The water had come in to great depths in some places but was shallow in most, and creatures either had managed to come in here or had evolved from more benign forms to some unpleasant types.

The big reptiles that floated in the water and sat along the banks, for example, were very close to alligators or crocodiles, but not quite. They had a leaner, smoother, more primitive look to them, and they seemed less like crocs than some dinosaur relative.

In fact, the whole area reminded him of the Age of the Reptiles before humans had developed. The trees, the giant ferns, the mean-looking fish all seemed from some ancient era. The insects looked pretty modern, the only difference being that some of them were pretty d.a.m.ned big. Mammals were around, but most were small, and it seemed like the smaller ones had tempers worse than the protocrocs while the bigger ones were constantly nervous.

Theredid seem to be several varieties of small monkeys, or maybe protomonkeys would be a better description, gathered in packs and hanging out in the trees, and there were other small tree dwellers that seemed squirrellike. There were birds of all shapes and sizes, many with very effective natural camouflage and others that would stand out against anything. Some of the creatures weren't birds or mammals or anything else, exactly. One of these looked like a medium-sized fish that had rows and rows of teeth and occasionally leapt from the water andflew on multiple wings.

Great. And unless I get lucky, I get to sleep with these critters tonight,Brazil thought glumly. He wasn't worried about being killed-thatwas never a worry-but being at-tacked was always a possibility, and he didn't like the thought of being savagely chewed up. It took up to two years to grow a new hand or arm or leg, even longer for scars to vanish, and he was not immune to pain.

The idea that this place might be home to thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people wearing nothing at all and living and sleeping in the open was difficult to accept. It was pretty easy to see why the Ambreza never saw any old Glathrielians.

He made good time in spite of his reservations about the wildlife and the thick mud that formed the only safe path.

He realized that the paths seemed to follow a roughly log-ical plan and wondered if they had somehow been built up or maintained based on those ancient Ambrezan ca.n.a.l sys-tems, but it seemed unlikely.

They'd be many meters down by now.

It bothered him that he saw no signs of humanity other than the prints. All those Glathrielians who came and worked the plantations on the other side of the border had to come fromsomewhere, and that ”somewhere” couldn't be allthat far inside. He should see some signs of where they came from and where they went by now, he thought, but there was nothing.

He'd had a later start than he wanted, too, and he didn't relish bedding down in the pitch darkness in this region. Still, what else could he do?

As he moved in, though, he began to hear various sounds in the bush around him that were unlike the sounds of the creatures he'd been seeing and avoiding all afternoon. Once or twice he was certain he caught a brief glimpse of some man-sized shapes off in the foliage, but when he turned, they seemed to vanish. He wasn't really worried about the natives; h.e.l.l, hewanted to find, or be found by, the natives.

Rather, he was worried about far larger predators that might be around somewhere that had so far escaped his notice.

As the day wore on toward its end, though, he became more and more certain that he was being watched. There were too many such odd near encounters, and they were increasing-and, frankly, becoming more obvious. Through the swamp noises he occasionally heard what he was cer-tain was a cough or perhaps a grunt. The third time he heard it, he knew that he was in the midst of a number of them and that they wanted him to know it.

What's the matter, boys? Afraid I'll touch you?

The worst concern he had was darkness at this point; there was simply no telling what they were waiting for, but darkness in their element would certainly make whatever it was much easier. He was deceptively dangerous for a little man in hand-to-hand combat, but even the biggest muscle man he'd ever seen wasn't a match for a horde of attackers unless those attackers were total incompetents, and he just didn't feel that these people were as dull or stupid as they wanted to appear to be to others. There was, after all, quite a good motive for cultivating just the sort of reputation they now had with the somewhat paranoid Ambreza. He couldn't have imagined that the furry race would have ever allowed Glathrielians free reign in the hex with no monitor-ing.

He had, however, deliberately placed himself in his cur-rent predicament, and he was getting pretty d.a.m.ned tired of it. He stopped at a fairly wide clearing that had some de-cent gra.s.s to hold it, removed his pack, then sat on it and looked around at the apparently silent wilderness.

”All right,” he called out to them. ”I don't know if you can understand me or not, but you sure as h.e.l.l know you're being talked to. Now, I am tired and I am p.i.s.sed off as all h.e.l.l right now, and my purely mechanical watch here says that it's about a half hour to sundown. Now, I'm gonna wait here maybe five or ten minutes, and if you want to come out and talk, or fight, or whatever, that's fine. After that I'm gonna make camp, I'm gonna make a fire, I'm gonna eat something and have an Ambrezan beer with it and maybe then some coffee. If you want any, you're welcome. If you just want to watch, then p.i.s.s on you!” He took out a cigar, bit off the end, then lit it with a safety match. More things worked in a nontech hex than most people thought.

He waited until the cigar was almost half-smoked. Dur-ing that time he had the distinct impression that more and more natives were showing up and sitting out there staring at him. For a starkly lonely campsite in the middle of a jun-gle swamp, he had the oddest feeling that he was sitting alone on the field at Rio's largest soccer stadium and that the stands were full. Or was he, rather sitting alone in the center of the Roman Colosseum, the crowd waiting until the lions were ready?

Well, he wouldn't wait for them. He was as tired and hungry as he'd said he was, and he was going to be set up before dark.

Before too long he had his tent set up and his supplies organized and he'd started a fire. In a nontech hex it was impossible to manufacture a good compressed-gas system, but as long as the mechanism was totally mechanical, noth-ing stopped anyone from bringing premanufactured canis-ters in and having a clean fire. He knew how rough he might have to live if he started heading north to the equa-tor, as he would have to do sooner or later. He was not about to sacrifice any comforts at this point if he could avoid it.