And that brought up another point. It was only because of Chang’s call that they were in Itus, but what the hell did he owe Mavra Chang? It was Mavra Chang whose abduction of the whole crew had destroyed his life and led inevitably to Erdom and what he was now. Indirectly, even Julian was here because of her, since without her jungle adventures he’d have been nowhere near that damned meteor.
True, Julian Beard and Lori Anne Sutton had both been at low points in their “real” lives when all this had happened, but he doubted that either of them had wanted this.
But the question remained: Now that they were here, what did they owe that mysterious crazy woman?
Well, of course, it was a job of sorts, something definite to do, and it got the both of them out of Erdom and might allow them to see some of this strange world. Although if there were many more of these “hexes” as miserable as Itus, he wasn’t sure his curiosity and enthusiasm could stand it. But that was exactly what it was and would remain. A job. A job that could be quit. A job in which he would feel no outstanding loyalties or long-standing obligations to the employer.
Most of all, maybe it would be a chance to sort out, removed from cultural and church pressures, who and what they now were and what options there might be for the future.
Fine words, but the dual nature persisted. The intellectual half wanted to make this a totally new start, to prove that things didn’t have to be the way they were back home no matter who was on top. But the other half, that dark, primal part of the psyche, wanted to bury Lori Anne Sutton, her ivory-tower ideals and her guilt trips, and become the new Erdomese man that the monks wanted. Even her logical side couldn’t work out a point to fighting it, considering how much everything was stacked against change. Without even a hope of change, how could clinging to the old ideas result in anything more than a life of frustration and misery?
“Some men do run the world,” Julian had said. “The bad news is that you are not one of them.”
Damn it all! It was a hell of a lot harder to fight this nature when a person was the one on top!
He finally did begin to nod off when suddenly there was a series of steady beeps from a small room between the main one and the bath. He went in, anxious mostly to silence it lest Julian awaken, and discovered that while the small room was of a very odd look and design, it had all the earmarks of a telephone booth. There was a red bar that was beeping on the far wall, and above it a small speaker that could be detached if need be, and above it a small screen. Thinking fast, he did what seemed logical and pushed the bar.
The screen popped on, and he was looking at the face of Mavra Chang.
“Wait a minute,” he said, hoping he didn’t have to pick up or push anything to be heard. “I’m going to close the door.”
He peered out, but Julian seemed to have just shifted position and gone back to sleep. He pulled the sliding door closed and turned again to the screen.
“Holy shit!” Mavra Chang said, shaking her head. “Is that really you, Lori?”
Chang’s whole appearance had changed. She seemed younger, her skin smoother, her hair expertly cut very short, wearing some kind of black pullover outfit. Cleaned up and made over, she looked very Chinese indeed. Only her big, dark eyes were the same, those ancient, weary, yet penetrating eyes.
“Yes, it’s me. You knew how I wound up, surely. You were there.”
“Yeah, I know, but it takes seeing for it to sink in, I think. I don’t know what my mental picture of you was really, but it wasn’t that. Don’t get me wrong, but it’s just not the Lori I knew.”
“I—I’m not,” he admitted. “I’m just not sure exactly who I am now, that’s all.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a shame you had to undergo all this before we could talk normally, but we’ll need brawn as well as brains on this trip, so it might just work out. I gather everything went okay. God knows the bribes I had to spread around—with accompanying curses and threats of curses—to make sure you got at least one of my messages. I decided to take a gamble on Greek; my Greek’s rusty as all hell, but it seemed a better bet than Latin or Portuguese.”
“You picked one of the few I could handle,” he assured her. “Who would have guessed that we had something of a common language all along? We could have spoken back in the Amazon, at least by writing in the dirt.”
“No, no. I was pretty far gone back there; it took the shock of coming through the Well Gate to bring some useful things back to me. I’d been in that jungle, by my best guess, maybe three hundred years or even longer. I think I was right on the edge of losing all memory of anything but the jungle. But that’s a long story for another time. Things are different now, and in many ways I’m as different a person as you are from the life back then.”
Different, yes, but not in the same ways at all,he thought.
He noticed that her words, although they sounded like they were coming in her voice with normal intonation and expression, weren’t really matching what her lips were forming. He had seen this on the ship as well. In fact, it had been very strange to walk into a room filled with a number of races, and understand some plainly while others made just weird-sounding noises or spouted gibberish. “You have a translator now,” he said a bit enviously.
“Yeah, well, the one I had originally gave out long ago, and they’re only useful here, anyway. It was one of the first things I had done once I had the method and the means. It’s very quick, and there’s no more pain than the prick of a sharp needle. The trouble is, they’re not available at just any shop and they’re incredibly expensive. I’ve got quickly dwindling fortunes here and a very long way to go. And I assume that you have your wife with you—Jeez! That sounds funny to say!—and that she was some kind of soldier or pilot or something who came through ahead of us.”
“Yes. She, in fact, was once a he. An American, like me and the news crew, only sent down by the government to help with the investigation of the meteor. He was in fact a space shuttle pilot. An astrogeologist, I think. Got sucked in long before we entered while posing for a picture on top of the thing.”
“Huh! Think of that! And you thought you had a shock! Believe me, it’s not at all unheard of for the Well to switch sexes when it switches forms, but it’s very rare to have two from so small a sample wind up the same race, let alone both switching sexes. In fact, I know of only one other case, and at least I think I understand why that one happened.”
“I was thinking of that myself. She was so despondent in that culture that she was on the verge of suicide when I found her. Our marriage, I think, was the only thing that saved her life. It seems like amazing luck.”
“Yeah, well, there’s luck and then there’s the Well. I can tell you about luck. The Well doesn’t have any means of reversing its first random decision once you’re processed and incorporated into this strange big family, but it monitors everything that goes on. I can’t help but wonder if it somehow sensed your Julian was in danger of death by its actions and used you to correct that when it had the chance. Now, though, you’re both on your own. Don’t count on the Well to save you anymore, either of you.”
“Well, it might explain what happened, but I haven’t counted on the Well to save either of us from anything, anyway. In fact, you saved us from becoming good little loyal feudal types.” Quickly, he told her what had happened in the temple.
“Wow! Nick of time, sounds like! Well, look, as comfortable as this high-tech hex might be, I don’t want to be here or any other spot too long. I’m already sure I’m being watched, bugged, and monitored, and I’m not even sure by who.”