“Yup,” Yomax agreed. “I once tried to talk to a horse in Hex Eighty-three.”
“Exactly!” Brazil exclaimed. “Well, we came from—were a refinement of, really—the great apes. You know about them?”
“Saw a few pictures once in a magazine,” Jol said. “Two or three hexes got kinds of ’em.”
“That’s right. Even the Ambreza are related to several animals in other hexes—including this one, if I recall,” Brazil continued. “Well, the gas simply mentally reverted everyone back to his ancestral animalism. They all lost their power to reason and became great apes.”
“Wow!” Jol exclaimed. “Didn’t they all die?”
“No,” Brazil replied. “The climate’s moderate, and while many of them—probably most of them—did perish, a few seemed to adapt. The Ambreza moved in and cleared out the area afterward. They let them run free in small packs. They even keep a few as pets.”
“I ain’t much on science,” the old man put in, “but I do remember that stuff like chemical changes can’t be passed on. Surely their children didn’t breed true as animals.”
“The Ambreza say that there has been slow improvement,” answered the small man. “But while the gas has to be extremely potent to affect anybody else, it appears that the stuff got absorbed by just about everything—rocks, dirt, and everything that grows in it or lived in it. For my people, the big dose caused initial reversion, but about one part per trillion keeps it alive. The effect is slowly wearing out. The Ambreza figure that they’ll be up to the level of basic primitive people in another six or seven generations, maybe even start a language within five hundred years. Their—the Ambreza’s, that is—master plan is to move the packs over into their old land when they start to improve. That way they’ll develop in a non-technological hex and will probably remain rather primitive.”
“I’m not sure I like that gas,” Yomax commented. “What worked on them might work on us.” He shivered.
“I don’t think so,” Brazil replied. “After the attack, the Well refused to transport the stuff anymore. I think our planetary brain’s had enough of such things.”
“I still don’t like the idea,” Yomax maintained. “If not that, then somethin’ else could get us.”
“Life’s a risk anyway, without worrying about everything that might happen,” Brazil pointed out. “After all, you could slip on the dock and fall in the lake and freeze to death before you got to shore. A tree could fall over on you. Lightning could strike. But if you let such things dominate your life, you’ll be as good as dead anyway. That’s what’s wrong with Wu Julee.”
“What do you mean?” Jol asked sharply.
“She’s had a horrible life,” Nathan Brazil replied evenly. “Born on a Comworld; bred to do farm labor, looking and thinking just like everybody else, no sex, no fun, no nothing. Then, suddenly, she was plucked up by the hierarchy, given shots to develop sexually, and used as a prostitute for minor visitors, one of whom was a foreign pig named Datham Hain.”
He was interrupted at this point and had to try to explain what a prostitute was to two members of a culture that didn’t have marriage, paternity suits, or money. It took some doing.
“Anyway,” he continued, “this Hain was a representative of a group of nasties who get important people on various worlds hooked on a particularly nasty kind of drug, the better to rule them. To demonstrate what it did if you didn’t get the treatment, he infected Wu Julee first and then let the stuff start to destroy her. There’s no cure, and on most worlds they just put such people to death. Most of those infected, finding their blood samples matching Wu Julee’s blood, played Hain’s game, taking orders from him and his masters.
“The stuff kind of does to you, but very painfully, what that gas did to my Hex Forty-one, only it also depresses the appetite to nonexistence. You eventually mindlessly starve to death.”
“And poor Wuju was already pretty far gone,” Jol interpolated. “In pain, practically an animal, with all that behind her. No wonder she blotted all memories out! And no wonder she had nightmares!”
“Life’s been a nightmare to her,” Brazil said quietly. “Her physical nightmare is over, but until she faces that fact, it still lives in her mind.”
They just stood there for several minutes, there seeming to be nothing left to say. Finally, Yomax said, “Captain, one thing bothers me about your gas story.”
“Fire away,” the man invited, sipping more of the ale.
“If that gas stuff was still active, why didn’t it affect you, at least slightly?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Brazil responded. “Everything says I should have been reduced to the level of the hex, including Ambreza chemistry. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t even physically changed to conform to the larger, darker version of humanity there. I couldn’t explain that—and neither can the Ambreza.”
The Healer stuck her head in the door, and they turned expectantly.
“She’s sleeping now,” she reported. “Really sleeping, for the first time in more than a month. I’ll stay with her and see her through.”
They nodded and settled back for a long wait.
Wu Julee slept for almost two days.
Brazil used the time to tour the village and look at some of the trails. He liked these people, he decided, and he liked this isolated place, cut off from everything civilized except for the one daily boat run. Standing on a ledge partway up a well-maintained cross-country trail, he was oblivious to the cold and the wind as he looked out at the mass of snow-covered mountains. He realized suddenly that almost the whole mountain range was in the next hex, and he speculated idly on what sort of denizens lived in that kind of terrain.
After spending most of a day out there, he made his way back to the village to check on Wu Julee’s progress.
“She came around,” the Healer informed him. “I got her to eat a little something and it stayed down. You can see her, if you want.”
Brazil did want, and went in.
She looked a little weak but managed a smile when she saw him.
She hasn’t really changed radically, he thought, at least not from the waist up. He would have known her anywhere—despite the different coloration and the lower body, the pointy ears, and all. She actually looked healthier than she had under the influence of that vicious drug, the product of eating better and of exercising.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, idly wondering why that stupid question was always the first asked of obviously sick people.
“Weak,” she replied, “but I’ll manage.” She let out a small giggle. “The last time we saw each other I had to look up to you.”
Brazil took on a pained expression. “It never fails!” he wailed. “Everybody always picks on a little man!”
She laughed and so did he. “It’s good to see you laugh,” he said.
“There’s never been much to laugh about, before,” she replied.
“I told you I’d find you.”
“I remember—that was the worst part of the sponge. You know, you are aware of all that’s happening to you.”
He nodded gravely. “Throughout the history of man there’s always been some kind of drug, and people stuck on it. The people who push the stuff are on a different kind of drug, one so powerful that they are not aware of its own, ravaging, animalistic effect on them.”
“What’s that?”
“Power and greed,” he told her. “The ugliest—no, the second ugliest ravager of people ever known.”
“What’s the ugliest, then?” she asked him.
“Fear,” he replied seriously. “It destroys, rots, and touches everyone around.”