Jack Chalker - The Sea is Full of Stars

Ming nodded. “On the Well World? Sure he is. We knew that.”

“No, I mean here. In this place. Not in this room, but not far. Who was the third?”

“His name is Jeremiah Wong Kincaid, and he is like nobody else,” Ming told her.

“He is here, too! He is the one! But—he does not see himself leading an army for good, but as an assassin. So long as he believes and acts that way, he will fail. If he cannot adapt and face evil out of something other than pure revenge, he will fail, and if he fails, then everyone fails. He is the key. The Avenger. I do not know how.”

At that moment the door behind her opened and another creature walked in and suddenly stopped dead at the sight of all of them, and particularly of the glowing Jaysu.

He had clearly never seen an angel before, and none of them had ever seen what looked for all the world like an enormous hooded snake with wings.

“Saints preserve me!” exclaimed Genghis O’Leary.

“Good to see you finally made it, O’Leary,” the High Commissioner said. “We are having quite a religious experience ourselves here. Come, join the crowd. I believe you will fit.”

“So where is Kincaid?” Ming wondered. “And what is Kincaid?”

“We’ve not had any real contact with him,” Dukla explained. “If he is here, he has not told us about it.”

“He is here,” Jaysu insisted. “I feel him. Not close, but here. He is filled with hatred and fury that he cannot control, but it makes him stand out in my mind. He is not here for us, although he should be. He is here to kill someone.”

That stopped them for a moment. Finally, Ari asked, “Commissioner, can’t you locate him, try and talk him in here?”

“Under normal circumstances, yes, but under the conditions imposed by this conference, with fifty times the normal complement here and all that to-and-fro traffic— impossible. We don’t even know what he is, and we have tried to discover it. It appears that everything about your entry seems to have caused the Well to do things it simply has never done. The results have been unprecedented. The Czillians—the plant people you have seen around the podium here with the leaf on their heads—are a race devoted to scholarship and analysis. They have a great computer complex of their own and created it as a gigantic resource, a university, if you will, with no restrictions as to nationality or use by anyone. They maintain the records that allow us to know our histories and not reinvent the wheel, as it were. You would think we would then use it to learn something about cooperation, but we never seem to.”

O’Leary moved as carefully as he could into the hall, and they saw that he was a large and powerful creature indeed. The eyes, the mouth with its nasty-looking fangs, its undulating movements—all screamed “giant snake.” But the large hood, which seemed ribbed on the underside, proved to be much more than that. The ribs in fact were small blue-white arms ending in soft, mittenlike claws, dozens on each side. They were certainly arms and not legs, but while it was easy to see that they could do a lot of tasks performed by more normal hands or even tentacles, it was impossible to figure out how those reptilian eyes could see what it was doing under there. The body was about four meters long and as thick as O’Leary had been as a Terran male, and it slithered slowly but quite firmly into place and curled itself up, leaving only the head and hood resting on top. Unlike a snake, its tongue did not go in and out constantly; there was a sense that it had both a keen sense of smell and ears buried somewhere in the head or hood.

Equally striking was the back of the creature, which was mottled and gave a false but clear impression of having feathers on a part of it, and, just below the hood, sported a bizarre set of upfolded wings that looked leathery, more like an Ochoan wing than an Amboran’s, but with the same multicolored, featherlike pattern. Its underside was bluish-white and quite uniform. If it weren’t for the wings and the extra length, it would have reminded some of the water types of a large land manta ray.

“I know, you’re all wondering what the devil I am,” O’Leary said conversationally. “Well, we’re called Pyron, it’s what’s called a nontech hex, we’re not reptiles but warmblooded, it’s a bisexual race, and I’m a man. Truth to tell, there are some real interesting qualities to this body and this race, although I wouldn’t have chosen it myself, and the thing I miss most is what I’ve been finding here—the comforts of technology.”

“Do those wings work ?” Nakitti asked, fascinated if a bit nervous, considering the relative size of the creature to herself.

O’Leary chuckled. “If you mean can I fly like a bird, no. Can I fly like an Ochoan, even? No. Can I push off from a rock and glide at a fair speed in any sort of headwind? Yes. It’s rather difficult to explain the other uses, but let us say I don’t float in the air.”

“How long have you been here, O’Leary?” Ari asked him.

“Since before the conference began. I’ve been in the offices here trying to trace you all down, truth be told, and see what became of you. Rather an odd lot compared to how we arrived, I’d say.”

“More important to us is where this Pyron is,” Nakitti noted. “If you’re on the other side of the world from the rest of us, you’re no help.”

“Yes, I thought of that,” he admitted. “In fact, I’m southeast of you all and one hex away from the Overdark, although the hex between is high tech and inhabited by giant dancing jack-o’-lanterns, and as we’re not partial to vegetables, we get along quite well, you see.”

They let that one pass. Those who understood the jack-o’-lantern reference simply didn’t want to know.

“Are you poisonous?” the Ochoan pressed.

“Of course! But of more importance, I can swallow a good-sized cuttlefish whole.” And, with that, he gave a huge yawn, revealing a mouth as much like a great cat’s as a snake’s, but clearly able to swallow a large animal. “I have a cuttlefish that slipped my net and I don’t like it. I think that’s why I’m here. I want to finish this job, and if that means goin’ fishin’, then so be it.”

Nakitti nodded and turned back to the High Commissioner. “Sir, what do you know about Josich? I don’t mean the gory details of her rapid rise, but beyond that?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Dukla replied. “Explain.”

“I think you do, to some extent. I think that’s why you called this gathering. You’ve seen the entry recordings that I have seen, and heard the comments. From the indoctrination lecture as well as what we’re told in the hexes we’re assigned to, we’ve been drilled with this system, this history, all of it. But we aren’t the only ones where some of us broke the rules. You said that it’s a one-way trip here, yet Josich clearly knew precisely where he was when he got here. That implies that either he was here before or that somebody left and told him. Now he appears with this knowledge and manages to wind up pretty much the same sort of creature he was when we knew him. About the only thing different is he’s a woman here, and that seems to have actually made it easier for him to rise quickly. His four half brothers haven’t been here but are still under some kind of orderly plan, and they wind up in key hexes very close to Chalidang. This is quite a coincidence when you consider what happened to us. Look around. Pyron, Kalinda, Ochoa—what was yours, dear?”

“Ambora,” Jaysu responded.

“Right. Very different, rather random, and with the hexes spread over Hell and gone. I think we’re all within reach of the Overdark, but the Overdark’s six thousand kilometers wide! Never mind the amnesia and the two-in-ones, it’s mostly as advertised anyway. Not Josich. His brothers wind up close, as an armored, semitech water civilization that’s almost a natural ally to Chalidang; another is a high-tech hex of those who live in water but breathe air. A third is land-based, somewhat like giant bugs, and can march right up rock walls. The fourth are the sea slugs that can hypnotize you into marching right into their bellies. The only thing he missed was a flying race, and you get the feeling he only missed that because either he was rushed or because not all the party he was transporting here made it, thanks to Inspector O’Leary and his friends. He stole that device to deliberately trigger the Gate. He just was a tad premature, or the gods know what we’d be facing now!”