Jack Chalker - Shadow of the Well of Souls

“Yep. The Stone Age type, too. Naked and painted and little poison darts and all that. I wouldn’t worry as much about her as you are, though.”

“No? Why not?”

“Well, they like got the same idea about her as about you. She’s not in their legends and stuff, but the ones that believe the stories about you also believe she’s another one like you. They’re doin’ the exact same thing to her. You can bet on it.”

That made him feel a little better, but not much. “So they have us both running on treadmills, pushing hard and hardly moving.”

“You’re movin’ now,” Gus pointed out.

“Yeah, I guess. But sooner or later I have to land this thing. Hell, maybe sooner than later. I haven’t exactly had a chance to check below and see if we have any usable provisions. If not, we’re all gonna get very hungry and very thirsty very fast.”

“Well, that’s a point. Is there anything I can do?”

Brazil thought a moment. “Yeah. I don’t want to try you at the wheel in this weather, not unless you have some experience with these kind of ships.”

“Canoes are my speed. Canoes and speedboats.”

“I thought so. But you know what we need and you know what you need. You could look below and give me an inventory.”

“No problem.”

“Gus? Also look for charts. I know you probably can’t read the stuff here, but you know what I mean by nautical charts. They have to have them somewhere. We’re going to have to get our bearings when we get out of this blow and then decide where we have to go.”

“Will do. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Uh—Gus?”

“Yeah, Cap?”

“One more thing. You never answered my question as to why you didn’t contact me before.”

“Well, I started to, but then I saw Terry, and I didn’t know what to do. I mean, you didn’t know her before, Cap. She was bright and educated, spoke a half dozen languages, damned brave and good at her job, and real pretty, too. But more important, she was a talker, a real extrovert. I wasn’t so sure I’d seen her lookin’ anything like she did before, considerin’ what happened to me and the colonel and all, but I didn’t figure she’d be any more changed, you know, inside, than I was. Then I see her, and she don’t notice me—it’s not invisibility, Cap, it’s just that folks don’t notice me unless I wanta get noticed. And then she’s stark naked, which is weird under most conditions but particularly weird in a climate like that one, she don’t say a word, and she’s got this weird blankness about her, even in her eyes. I mean, it didn’t take no Einstein to know that somethin’ far worse than what happened to me happened to her. Thing was, Cap, I didn’t know how or why it happened, see? I mean, for all I knew, particularly with what they was sayin’ about you, I mean, you coulda done it to her. I couldn’t do nothin’, see, until I was sure which side I wanted to be on.”

Brazil didn’t immediately look around, dealing as he was with keeping the ship righted, but finally he said, “Okay, fair enough. Let me know what you find!”

There was no response, and he looked around and saw nothing at all. For a moment he wasn’t sure he’d seen the creature at all, but then he spotted the open hatch to the main cabin below and realized that the Dahir hadn’t waited but had gone on down after their last words. Gone on down, and he hadn’t seen him!

In a way, though, it was reassuring. The girl—Terry—hadn’t seen him, either. Hadn’t in fact seen him yet. There were limits on her as there were on him, after all.

He wondered just what the trick was about something that big being so invisible to others. Gus said it didn’t work with cameras, so that meant it wasn’t some kind of blending in, no chameleonlike attribute that somehow masked even so large a creature against a background. Sounds, too, seemed to be masked somewhat, maybe totally. He’d heard the creak of the timbers in that warehouse, and that had brought a sensation of footsteps, but had he really heard them? He certainly hadn’t seen a damned thing when Gus hadn’t wanted to be seen.

He also wasn’t sure what Dahirs ate, but he certainly had sympathy for any of their menu items.

His thoughts drifted back to the girl. It was impossible to even imagine her as a worldly, vibrant mistress of technology and show business, a producer of highly visible news who’d probably been in a hundred danger spots all on her own and managed to survive and even thrive on that kind of thing. He had no reason to feel that Gus was putting him on; both he and the girl had, after all, been completely at the Dahir’s mercy over the long haul, and Gus’s own explanation of his actions rang true. But squaring the Terry that Gus had known, worked with, perhaps even loved, considering his devotion to finding her, with the eerie wordless mystic with the icy heart and strange and terrible powers who was back sitting behind the mast was next to impossible.

How much of that old Terry was still somewhere inside her? Had her essence simply walled off, or had she been reprogrammed beyond any hope of recall? Or was Terry the newswoman somehow still all there and along for the ride? Was her old personality erased or suppressed? Were her old memories gone or modified or merely filed under “old business” somewhere?

There was a real human being in there somewhere, he was sure of that. The girl who’d made love to him and fought alongside him and who had sent him signals on all those others with whom he’d come into contact was certainly no monster, and even if she had rejected or hadn’t been able to use the sophistication of Ambreza or Hakazit, she’d understood it and coped with it. A savage would have been awed, amazed, confused by high-tech life; a savage would have had to be protected from being run over at the first busy street. She was neither ignorant nor stupid. What she did and what she would not do were conscious decisions to accept or reject, not the products of either upbringing or lack of understanding.

She manipulated that sailor as coldly as if he were a puppet…And with a coldness he’d never felt inside her before, not really. It was almost as if… as if she were two creatures, both Terry the human and something else. That something else, the coldness, had the power and made the rules, but in exchange it protected her against everything from the elements to sailors with guns, and so long as she followed its rules, then it was the passenger, emerging only as needed. Its control over her was not absolute; she, Terry, had overruled it and opted for his plea for mercy for the man over the other’s computerlike direct and deadly course.

Not parasitism, then, but symbiosis of some sort. Terry had not been infected; rather, she had made a bargain and now had to live with the consequences.

If what he’d been told was true, if her news crew had been kidnapped out in the middle of the jungle by some Stone Age tribe of women, then the way Gus said he was treated made one kind of sense. But how did they treat the women they also took? From the pictures and data he’d gotten from Zone, they all looked like they’d walked in out of some cave in the distant past.

As with most primitive tribes who captured people, the prisoners were given a choice: join, assimilate, or die. All things considered, he’d have signed up if they’d have let him under those circumstances.

So they had been lost, taken captive, forced to live a Stone Age existence in a hostile jungle they didn’t quite know and thus had become dependent on the tribe for survival—and then they had been translated here.

Terry hadn’t come with the initial group, and that was a story only she could know. But she’d come before the gate had closed, alone, sneaking in past the monitors, seeing bizarre places and even more bizarre creatures. She’d followed to the Zone Gate and gone through, probably trying to catch her friends, and had wound up in Ambreza stark naked, defenseless, and scared to death. Why she went to Glathriel was another unknowable, but it was not hard to figure. Maybe she just saw some recognizable humans working for the Ambreza and followed them. It would be the natural, cautious choice of a survivor in a horrendous situation ignorant of where she was or what the hell was going on. So she’d gone in, made contact… and then what?