“It’s that,” Julian admitted, “but it’s more than that, too. We’re not talking here about centuries ahead, or even thousands of years, but millions of years—maybe even more than that. All that time, and look at what they’ve come up with! Stagnant fundamentalism, ignorance, sexism, racism, violence—all the things we were trying to beat. All that knowledge, all that experience—and look at it! It’s not the science that they know, it’s what they don’t have, or don’t use!”
Lori sighed. “I know. Still, I keep telling myself that this isn’t the future, it’s an experimental slide. This is an artificial place, maintained by a computer. The civilizations here aren’t futuristic, they’re by definition stagnant, limited, leftovers after the experiment’s done, left over and forgotten. Their populations are fixed, their capabilities are fixed, they can’t grow, they can’t progress, and they can’t leave. Long ago—very long ago—they adapted to the situation. Some of them went mad, I suspect; some developed religious justifications for all that they had. Others went savage; still others just settled into a static condition where there’s no future beyond the individual’s. A few may have wound up like the People in the Amazon or some of the tribes of Papua New Guinea, where they repudiated all that had been learned, rejected all progress in the same way that we were told that the makers of this world rejected and turned their back on near godhood, equating progress with evil. In many ways this is less a romantic world than a tragic one.”
“Maybe,” Julian said thoughtfully. “But that brings up a nasty little thought for the immediate future. This Mavra Chang is from another age, another time, no matter what her name and appearance. I think we can take that much for granted.”
“She sure knows her way around. And if she’s been here before, and the only way out is through this Well, this control room, then we can assume she has even more knowledge.”
“But knowledge isn’t wisdom,” Julian pointed out. “That’s exactly what we were talking about. If she’s been here before, she’s very, very old. Maybe ‘ancient’ isn’t even a good enough term for her. Never changing, never able to have a decent relationship with other human beings—they age and die in what for her would be a very short time—she’s pretty much an individual example of what these hexes have gone through.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“Well, if these hexes, trapped as they are, turned into the kind of things we’re seeing, what must the effect be on an individual isolated from all around her? Maybe there’s another explanation for why she might have shut herself off from the world, from all progress, in a never-ending primitive tribal group in the middle of nowhere for all those centuries. She created her own hex, a stagnant, never-changing one, just to cope. That doesn’t make her sound very sane, either, does it?”
Lori didn’t like the logic of that. “And if she’s insane, in some sense, anyway, then what does that make this much more ancient Nathan Brazil? Thanks a lot. What you’re saying is that we’re on our way to help an ancient, probably insane demigoddess do battle with an even older and probably madder demigod. Now, that is a way to cheer me up!”
Julian shrugged. “At least it makes the whole problem of Erdom and the monks seem rather trivial, doesn’t it?”
Itus was, if anything, as hot as Erdom but additionally was as humid as Erdom was dry. The air seemed a solid thing, a thick woolen blanket that enveloped one and made one slow, groggy, and exhausted from fighting against it. The gravitation, too, seemed greater; they felt heavy, leaden, and it took effort just to walk. Julian, particularly with the added dead weight of the four breasts, found it next to impossible to walk without support on just her thin equine legs, and dropped to walking on all fours, something that didn’t seem at all unnatural. Lori almost envied her after walking a couple of blocks. Julian did not seem as pleased, but the alternative was next to impossible. And frankly, even standing on all fours, bringing her height down to about a meter plus, she was still on a reasonable level for the natives of this place.
The Ituns were insectoids, large, low, caterpillarlike creatures with dozens of spindly legs emerging from thick hairy coats and faces that seemed to be two huge, bulging oval eyes, and a nasty-looking mouth flanked by intimidating, curved tusks. They seemed to be able to bend and then lock themselves into just about any position they required and, supported by the hind rows of legs, use their many forelegs as individual hands, fingers, or tentacles. Far worse for the newcomers than the eternally nasty faces and fixed vicious expressions, though, was the sight of all that thick hair in the constant heat and humidity. It made them feel even hotter just watching.
The Itun behind the front desk of the transients’ hotel seemed a bit larger and older and perhaps a bit more shopworn than the average denizen of the hex but was accustomed to dealing with alien types on a daily basis. Unable to form the kind of sounds that Common Speech required, it relied on one of the benefits of a high-tech hex: a small transmitter attached to the top of its head right above and between the eyes.
“Lori of Alkhaz,” he told the desk clerk. “Party of two Erdomese. I was told that we would be expected.”
Lower feet were already tapping something into an Itun terminal. The head cocked and looked down and read something on a screen.
“Yes,” the clerk responded in a toneless electronic-sounding voice. “An Erdomese suite was prepaid for you. Do you have much baggage?”
“Very little,” Lori responded. All that they owned was in one small pack.
“Very well,” the clerk said, and pushed a small plastic card over to him.
“Um—are there any messages for me?”
“No, nothing. It would have shown on the console.”
That was disappointing. “Uh, then—how do I find the room?”
“Follow the key, of course,” replied the clerk, and turned to take care of someone else.
Lori picked up the plastic card, which seemed a plain ivory white in color, turned it over, and shrugged. There was nothing imprinted on it at all, not even an arrow or a magnetic stripe.
He was about to ask how the thing worked when he noticed that a tiny spot was pulsing a brighter white along one of the edges of the card. As he turned to face the lobby, holding the card out, the spot moved. He turned the card in his hand, but the spot moved to always keep the same relative position.
“Come on, Julian. I think I have this thing figured out,” he said, and moved toward the rear corridor in the direction of the blinking light.
“Moo!” Julian snorted. “I feel like a damned cow like this!”
Youare a cow, Lori thought, but checked himself before he said it. Damn it! It was tough not to reflexively say something that sounded patronizing or offensive! And the truth was, Erdomese, for all their resemblance to equine forms, really were biologically closer to the bovine family with perhaps a bit of camel. Even their sexual temperament was more bovine, with the male overly dominant, competitive, territorial, and violent, the female by nature passive. Even the native language was divided and reinforced the differing natures; there were strict masculine and feminine forms of every part of speech, without exception. They were in a sense speaking two complementary but different languages in which every word form had two variants. In this dual track of Erdomese, the male spoke Erdomo, which was what he thought in, and the female Erdoma, which was what Julian naturally used.