“My God! You mean I’ve done this before? Or someone exactly like me?”
“No. I have no doubt there was a Julian Beard who lived your life and did all the same things—up to the point where you were sent to investigate the meteor. And a Lori who remained the first female full professor of astronomy at wherever she taught, and a Tony and Anne Marie who probably died in a suicide pact, and the others as well. Your coming here changed that for you and for the others. I believe Nathan has at one point or another changed a number of individuals’ lives. It is difficult to say this, but most individual lives, if removed or altered, won’t change the fabric very much so long as the number of them is kept very small. It is said that the Well Gates react to people’s wills and that no one who would mess up the master plan is ever transported here. I don’t know. But I do know it can’t continue. Reset after reset, the same people, the same races, the same lives over and over… In the end, if that keeps happening, then nobody really matters. Nobody at all. And if I fail this time, that’s what is going to keep going on again and again. A continuous wheel, a perpetual replaying of the same damned recording over and over until the universe dies. That’s what this is all about. That’s why you’re all here.”
“Sweet Jesus!” Julian gasped, thinking of the implications of what she was saying.
“What are you two girls whispering about?” Lori called to them.
Mavra Chang gave a crooked smile. “Us women are talking woman talk,” she replied aloud.
It was a long way yet in the dark to the border.
Pulcinell
The sight of Nathan Brazil’s broad-brimmed hat, soggy and crumpled though it was, atop the top spoke of the ship’s wheel made everything else, from the escape to the weather to the girl’s extraordinary powers, seem distant and pale. More, his empathic link with the girl told him that not only had she not done it, she was unaware of anyone else around to do it, either.
Either I’m losing my mind or there’s somebody else here,he told himself.
The girl, riding out the storm just behind the mainmast, instantly sensed his feelings of danger and confusion and turned to look back at him, all her vast array of senses and powers deployed against a threat.
There was nothing. No threat at all. She frowned. No threat, but there was something else, something different here. Something that had not been there before, not until that odd lurch the ship had taken. Whatever it was, it was no enemy, but why couldn’t she see it or find it? There was only something vague, and that something, like a fuzzy, friendly ghostlike presence, was back there with Nathan Brazil.
Brazil had no choice but to retake the wheel, removing the hat first and throwing it forward. The wind caught it, but it was too soggy to blow away; it skidded across the deck and stuck against the side. He unlocked the wheel and began to try to think of ways to use this wind rather than fight it. It was no use, though. Somebody—or something—had put that hat on the wheel. Something that was there with him now. Something that even the girl could only dimly perceive.
“What are you? Who are you?” he yelled against the howling gale. “Stop playing children’s games and show yourself! Where the hell are you?”
“Right here at your side, Captain Brazil,” responded a low, deep, resonant voice that nonetheless was not formed by humanlike lips.
Nathan Brazil almost jumped out of his skin. He whirled around, letting go of the wheel.
“Right here,” said the voice, and when it spoke, he could suddenly see it, if only vaguely.
It was big, big enough to tower the better part of a meter over him, and broad and strong of body. It had a head much like a snake’s or a giant lizard’s, long and flattened with two big, yellow catlike eyes that popped up from its surface, and a large, thick serpentine body that was balanced on two thick legs that ended in clawed, webbed feet but started too far down the torso to be a main support for the rest of it. It balanced now on those two feet and on the remainder of that body, which ended in a broad, almost shovellike tail. Extruding from either side of the torso, a bit below where the shoulders ought to have been, were two very thin, frail-looking arms terminating in four clawed, long webbed fingers and an opposable thumb. Like the legs, they extended out from the torso, more like a reptile than a mammal. The whole thing was covered in silvery scales that seemed to give off a rainbow of colors as the swirling clouds varied the available light and which were probably spectacular in direct sunlight.
“Don’t you think you’d better tend to the wheel first?” the creature asked him in a calm, pleasant voice. “I just had the very devil of a swim just to catch up with you. I’d rather not go back in the water again for a while.”
“Uh, yeah, sure,” Brazil commented, turning back to the wheel and, with some difficulty, wrestling it back under control. It was a miracle that the lone sail, even deployed as little as it was, hadn’t been torn to shreds. Whoever had built this boat had really known how to build.
“Uh, if you don’t mind,” Brazil said, trying not to look around or away but keep his eyes on steering, “just who the hell are you and why did you go to all the trouble of swimming after us in the first place? And why couldn’t we see you?”
“Survival trait, they tell me. The arms, as you might have noticed, are very limber, but they ain’t real big or real muscular, and the legs, while strong, don’t let you move real fast. That would’ve made us sittin’ ducks in our own land, let alone from outside threats. Dahir’s a nontech hex, you know.”
“So you’re a Dahir!” Another one 1 don’t quite remember looking like this, let alone with this trick, he thought. “A very long way from home, aren’t you? And a damned good swimmer for an inland race.”
“It was another thing that just came naturally, sort of. Dahir’s inland, true, but it’s real swampy. Lowlands, wetter than the Everglades. The routine’s to swim along pretty much like a snake and stand up to feed or do whatever else you feel like doin’. Of course, we walk around the houses and lodges and the like, but for any kind of travel, well, it’s kinda like takin’ the car even though the grocery store’s only two blocks away. You know you should walk, but it’s so much easier to ride. Even though this is ocean, to tell you the truth I never even thought about not bein’ able to swim in it. I gotta admit, though, I almost lost it when it got so rough all of a sudden. I’d actually missed you and was gettin’ dragged away to the side and then forward a little when one of them waves just picked me up and dropped me kerplang on the deck.”