Skander surrendered, as movement returned. She still felt numb, but not merely of body. The Rel continued in control, and she had no doubt that she was trapped.
Hain returned in a little over two hours, and, after a short rest, was able to handle the two of them.
“We’re almost there,” the great insect told them. “You can see the damned place from the last stretch of beach. It looks like a piece of hell itself.”
Hain was tight. Ghlmon looked like a place one would run from, not to. The shoreline curved off to the northwest, and the land of Ghlmon started abruptly, the last of the Ekh’l mountains just slightly inching into the new hex. It was a land of blowing sand, dunes ranging in all directions right down to the sea. Outside of the ocean, there was no sign of water, vegetation, or any break in the oranges and purples of the swirling sand.
“You really would have to be crazy to go there willingly, wouldn’t you?” Hain said slowly, more to herself than to the others.
“No water at all,” Skander sighed.
“No soil, nothing but sand,” the Slelcronian added unhappily.
“The first truly pleasant place we’ve seen in the South,” said The Rel.
Skander turned to The Rel. “Well, O leader, how do we proceed?” she asked sarcastically.
“We keep to the coast,” the Northerner responded casually. “Hain can continue to catch fish. The Slelcronian will have to go without vitamins for a day or two, but it will get plenty of sun. Better water in that stream back there,” The Rel told the plant creature.
While the Slelcronian did so, Skander asked, “What about you, Rel? Or don’t you eat?”
“Of course we eat,” The Rel replied. “Silicon. What else?”
In a few minutes, they crossed the border.
The wind was close to forty kilometers per hour, the temperature around forty degrees Celsius. It was like going from midwinter into the worst day of summer, and the swirling sand bit deeply into all of them.
They were still within sight of the Ekh’l mountains when they had to stop for the day. Skander collapsed on the hot sand and shook her head exhaustedly. “What kind of creatures could possibly live in this hell?” she mused.
Almost as if to answer the question, a tiny head popped out of the sand near them. Suddenly, it leaped out of the sand, revealing a small, two-legged dinosaur, about a meter high, with short, stubby arms terminating in tiny but very human hands. It had a very long tail which seemed to balance it.
It was a darker green than the Czillian, but this was broken by what appeared to be a tiny, rust-colored vest and jacket. The creature came up to them and stopped. Its flat head and raised eyes set on each side of a spade-shaped mouth surveyed them with quick, darting motions. Suddenly it leaned back on its tail in a relaxed posture.
“I say, old fellows,” it said suddenly in a casual tenor that seemed to come from deep inside its throat—suggesting a translator in use—“Are you the good guys or the bad guys?”
IVROM
“This turning you all back into what we think of as human has some definite drawbacks,” Nathan Brazil, still a giant stag, complained as they walked up the beach. The packs were on him, since none of the other three could now manage the heavy load.
“You think you have problems,” Wu Julee responded. “We’re all stark naked and none of the clothing in the packs fits anymore.”
“Not to mention feeling hunger, and pain, and cold again,” Vardia put in. “I had forgotten these sensations, and I don’t like them. I was happier as a Czillian.”
“But how is it possible?” Wuju asked. “I mean, how could things done by the Markovian brain be so undone?”
“Why not ask Varnett?” Brazil suggested. “He’s the brain that got this mess started, anyway.”
“You all are yelling about trivialities,” Varnett sulked. “I could fly. And before I set out to catch you, Brazil, I experienced sex. For the first time, I experienced sex. Now I’m back in this retarded body again.”
“Not that retarded,” Brazil responded. “You were arrested chemically, but that’s all out of your body now. Just as the sponge is out of Wuju. You should mature normally, in a couple of years, depending on your genes and your diet. Good looking, too, if I remember rightly, since you’re based on Ian Varnett. I remember him as one hell of a womanizer—particularly for a mathematician.”
“You knew Ian Varnett?” the boy gasped. “But—he’s been dead some six hundred years!”
“I know,” said Nathan Brazil wistfully. “He got caught up in the great experiment on Mavrishnu. What a waste. You know it was a waste, Varnett—I saw your Zone interviews.”
“There has always been trouble with Varnetts on Mavrishnu,” the duplicate of the great mathematician, made from cells of the long-dead original’s frozen body, said with a gleam in his eye. “They tried three or four early on, but I’m the first one in more than a century. They needed him again, at least, his potential. I wasn’t the first to interrupt Skander at his real work and inquiries—a lot of skillful agents put everything together. They were raising me for a different, more local set of problems, but I was already proving to be, I think, too much of a problem.
They set me up on Dalgonia to see if I could crack Skander’s work, figuring that whether I did or didn’t they could get me when I returned.”
The group continued talking as they walked down the beach, unhampered—as the charge to the Faerie required—by any obstructions.
“How much do you know, Varnett? About all this, that is,” Brazil asked.
“When I saw the cellular sample of the Dalgonian brain in the computer storage, I recognized the mathematical relationship of the sequence and order of the energy pulses,” the boy remembered. “It took about three hours to get the sequence, and one or two more to nail it down with the camp’s computers. I only had to look at the thing to see that the energy waveforms represented there bore no resemblance to anything we knew, and the matter-to-energy-to-matter process within the cells was easily observed. I combined what I saw with what we theorized must be the reason the Markovians had no artifacts. The planetary brain created anything you wanted, stored anything you wanted, on demand, perhaps even by thought. That gave me what was going on in that relationship, although I still haven’t any idea how it’s done.”
Vardia was impressed. “You mean it was like the spells on us here—they just wished for something and it was there?”
“That’s how the magic works here,” Varnett affirmed. “The only way such a concept is possible is if, in fact, nothing is real. All of us, these woods, the ocean, the planet—even that sun—are merely constructs. There is nothing in the universe but a single energy field; everything else is taking that energy, transmuting it into matter or different forms of energy, and holding it stable. That’s reality—the stabilized, transmuted primal energy. But the mathematical constructs that are so stabilized are in constant tension, like a coiled spring. The energy would revert to its natural state if not kept in check. These creatures—the Faerie—have some control over that checking process. Not enough to make any huge changes, but enough to change the equation slightly, to vary reality. That’s magic.”