Still, the little man hadn’t gone down for a rest yet. He had taken the opportunity to inspect the ship from bow to stern and to inventory the supplies below, but he insisted on remaining near the wheel in case Gus should run into problems and need him in a hurry. Protesting that he was literally “too tired to sleep,” he now used an oil lamp and sat there going over the charts and navigational books about the region.
Although they were out of the rain, the sky was still completely overcast, and in the darkness the stars could give him no guidance. He knew the bearing they were now on and had a fair estimate of their speed, but the hours of battling the storm itself gave him no clue as to just where on the charts he’d started from. He particularly worried that they might have gone far enough west to cross the Mowry border, though he thought he would have felt the passage through the hex boundary. While that wasn’t in itself a problem, Mowry was a high-tech hex with all the sophisticated technology for locating almost anything on, above, or below its surface, and it was dotted with thousands of small volcanic islands, some of which were submerged and could easily wreck a ship.
Dlubine suited him far more. While he probably couldn’t outrun a sleek steamer without a wind at least this good if not better, both mass communications and navigation were far more basic. Before he could be caught, they would have to know that it was he and immediately engage the chase.
Dlubine, too, had a number of islands, both volcanic and coral, but they would be more handy than a threat, or so he hoped. He wasn’t at all sure what the Dlubine looked like, but the chart showed small harbors on some of the islands, indicating that they did a direct trade with surface ships. He was willing to take the risk.
If Gus could continue to bury his moral qualms, there should be little problem picking up what they needed on one of those. He hoped the natives were at least initially friendly, but that was a secondary concern. First, of course, he had to find them.
Finally, in spite of everything, he drifted off into a deep, deep sleep.
When he awoke groggily, feeling as if someone had beaten the hell out of him and he’d just recovered consciousness, he grew suddenly aware that the wind was down and there was direct sunlight hitting his skin. He opened his eyes, and for a moment sheer panic went through him as he saw no one at the wheel.
“Gus!” he called.
“Oh, you’re awake,” the gravel-voiced Dahir responded, and in the blink of an eye the huge, colorful snakelike form was there, less steering the ship than kind of leaning lazily on the wheel. “I was thinking of waking you up, considering I haven’t had much rest myself.”
Nathan Brazil nodded and got painfully to his feet. “God! I need an intravenous coffee transfusion,” he groaned.
“Sorry. Fresh out. Never touch the stuff myself. You’re stuck with water or beer for breakfast. I used to have a ‘Beer—Breakfast of Champions’ shirt once. Wouldn’t fit now, though, I suppose, and I don’t have much of a taste for beer anymore, either.”
“Well, let me get some water on my face and see if I can wake up,” the captain moaned. “Then, if you can hold on for another couple of minutes, I want to take some sightings of the sun and get a rough position.” He went over to the small jug that was just where he’d left it in the night and splashed some of the water on his face and neck. It felt warm, but it was better than nothing. “How long was I out?”
“Can’t say, not having a watch, but the sun’s been up quite a while.”
Nathan Brazil looked up and took a sight reading. “Um, yeah. Way up. Sun’s not quite over the yardarm, though, so I’ll pass on the beer. Uh, don’t take this personally, but just exactly what the hell do you eat, anyway?”
“Most anything that won’t eat me, really. Preferably live when I get it, but anything that’s reasonably fresh is okay. Strictly carnivore. These small vampire teeth inject a nasty venom into whatever I want that kind of kills it and then softens it up so it goes down. Not much in the taste business, but if the critter’s big enough, I don’t have to eat or even drink much for days. Don’t worry—I’d eaten just the night before we all scrammed out of Hakazit.”
Brazil wasn’t all that worried, but he decided for now not to ask what, in high-tech Hakazit, the Dahir had eaten.
“Have you ever heard of Dlubine?” Nathan Brazil asked the Dahir, changing the subject.
“No. Sounds like the noise you make when you throw up, sort of. Hell, I’m new here. You’re supposed to be the expert, right? The god of the Well World, or am I being too limited?”
Brazil chuckled. “No, that’s the reputation but hardly the truth. I’m the genuine handpicked successor to the equally genuine handpicked successor of the creatures that helped build this whole thing. We used to call them Markovians in the old days, a term without meaning now, but if I use it, you should know that’s who I mean. The highest race in all creation, at least as far as there’s any evidence. Got to the point where matter-to-energy and energy-to-matter conversions were old hat. Roamed the whole universe using interdimensional pathways; never needed to take a lot with them because they could have anything they needed by just willing it. They could become anything, too—so close, nobody could tell the difference. Just rearrange the atoms. They knew they were gods, too. And that’s what drove ’em nuts.”
“Huh?”
“Well, you ever consider the real problem of being a god? No surprises, nothing more to learn, nothing new to discover, everything you ever wanted or needed there at your whim. Not even time has any real meaning to a god, not in the sense that it does to most folks. After a billion years or so things are absolutely the same, nothing to look forward to, just an endless present. Of course, they built this world as the center—the center of the universe, more or less. All their roads led to here, and from here. A whole damned planet-sized master computer that coordinated all the zillions of lesser ones and was the true source of their power. It’s still here, still working, maybe thirty, thirty-five kilometers beneath us now. The whole damned ball except this surface shell is self-repairing, self-maintaining, just going on and on long after there was anybody around who could use its power.”
Gus was appalled. “You mean they died of boredom?”
“More or less, I guess. I wasn’t there, but I’ve kind of felt an affinity for them over time. But with me it’s strictly one-way, from the Well to me, not me to the Well. To get in real communication with it and have access to any of its power, I have to be inside, at the controls, in the form of one of the founding race. No other form I know can handle it. A big lump of rubbery brain case with six huge but remarkably sensitive tentacles. You don’t even need eyes or a nose or a mouth or any of that. You’re kind of beyond all that. You don’t just see an object in three dimensions, you see it in all dimensions, and you see it from all angles at once. Things you couldn’t even keep all in your head become so simple and obvious, they don’t even require thought. And what you don’t know, the Well does, and it’s all there and available to you. The powers of God almighty, almost.”
“I’m surprised that you change back,” the Dahir commented. “Seems to me it’d be kinda hard to give that up, at least until you had your own billion years or so to get bored in.”