Jack Chalker - Shadow of the Well of Souls

There was a sudden, almost deathly quiet save for the noise of the sails being squeakily lowered and fixed into position.

“Rig full, no jibs,” the captain commanded, and first the topsails and then various subordinate sails sprouted, making the transformation to quiet sailing vessel almost complete. The boilers were not out, but since they had been disengaged from the drive shafts, there was a sudden cessation of the steady rhythmic vibration that the engines had sent through the ship.

Mavra went over to Lori and offered a hand. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I think so. Probably gonna have a hell of a bruise on my hip, but it’s no big deal. The hardest part is getting back on my feet.” He made it with her help but needed to lurch forward and hold on to something. “Great body for running, particularly in sand or gravel, but it’s just not good with the casual stuff.” He was calming down now and took stock of the surroundings. “Wow! Feels like home, only worse! This is really hot!”

“It’s at least as hot as Erdom,” Mavra agreed, “but with an ocean’s humidity. Will you be all right here? I want to check on the girls in the back.”

“Yeah, sure, I’ll be okay. I’m just trying to get steady enough to go down and check on Alowi.” He gave a long, relieved exhale. “At least we made it!”

“Don’t feel so confident yet,” Mavra warned him. “They’re still back there, and they’re close. If we don’t lose them, we’ll have to fight, and we’ll be well within their gun range here. This is semitech, remember, not nontech. Cannons do their usual nasty job here.”

He stared after Mavra as she went aft to check on the Dillians, then said aloud, under his breath, “Yeah, thanks for telling me that cheery set of facts.”

The air felt wet and sticky, and there seemed to be a light rain or mist falling that did nothing to cool things off. He looked to the right of the ship and thought he saw some kind of shimmering, a distortion even of the night fog and mist.

The captain was running directly down the hex barrier, just inside the Dlubine side.

He shook his head and decided ne’d better put his trust in the ones who knew what they were doing and tend to his own business, which was going below.

It was a mess there; the turn had spilled more down there than up on deck, but Alowi seemed all right and relieved to see him.

“I—I was afraid something happened to you up there,” she told him.

“I fell. Hip’s gonna feel like hell later, but I’m all right. What about you?”

“I rolled over, but once things straightened out, I was all right. Everything was flying or rolling around… I just did not know what was happening. Come—let me heal your pain.”

“I’m all right for now.”

“ Please! Now is the best time. The last time you almost died from a bad bruise. Let me give you what you need to keep it from happening again!”

It suddenly struck him. The key to the entire Erdomese way and why things were more dangerous for him than he’d realized.

The male Erdomese’s weakness, its Achilles’ heel, was that he and all the rest of them had a kind of hemophilia. The females, in that second set of breasts, carried more than spare water; they carried a clotting factor. The women’s nearly total dependence on the men for most things was counterbalanced by the men’s absolute need to have that which only the women could make readily available. They hadn’t told him or warned him about it. Why would they? Between their customs and their beliefs, and with such a huge proportion of females to males, they took it for granted. No wonder the men traveled with as many wives as they could afford to support!

For the first time he realized just how vulnerable he actually was to things that others took for granted. Even without cultural codes or his feelings for her, he would have to protect Alowi with every ounce of his strength and life. If anything happened to her, if they were even separated, out here, so many miles from Erdom, he was dead meat.

“My, that was positively thrilling,” Anne Marie gushed. “Almost like one of those James Bond thrillers.”

“I could do with a little less of that, particularly out here,” Tony responded. Although Dillians had a natural ability to swim, it took a lot of muscle power to do so, and they wouldn’t have much of a chance out here in the middle of the ocean, any more than a common horse might have. Sufficient to keep them from drowning in a river or enabling them to make a quick swim to shore or a raft, but considering their forward center of gravity, out here they’d be dead ducks.

“Well, I’m glad to see that you two are all right,” Mavra told them. “They’re slick, these guys. We’re outside any capability the gunboat might have to spot us electronically and out of range of any of his fancy weapons, too. Hugging this hex boundary, we’re in the natural mist and fog that’s usually at such a border, and under sail, there’s little noise.”

Tony didn’t feel as confident. “Wouldn’t they know that, too? And couldn’t they really bear down on us if it were steam against sail in this little wind?”

“They do, and yeah, they could overtake us, but they have 180 degrees of possibility. They’ll overshoot coming in and have to turn when they see they lost us, and they’ll do it gently. It takes time. Then they have to decide which way to turn. They’ll have to cut their engines and run silently to see if they can hear us, and when they don’t, they’ll know we’re under sail. From that point they’ll be farther behind and have a fifty-fifty chance of tracking us or missing us entirely. If they don’t fire up their boilers, they’ll be slower than we are in this slight wind, since they’re a heavier boat, and if they do, we’ll hear them and have a straight free shot at their bow from the stern gun. I don’t think they’ll risk that. They’ll pick a direction and run slowly along it until dawn, which is still many hours away. By that time the captain will have slipped away.”

The captain in fact was waiting until they ran into the edge of one of the local storms, and when the first one was spotted, not too far from the border position, he took a chance and eased out of the cover of the boundary mist and, when nothing was obviously in sight, headed for it.

It made for a rough introduction to Dlubine, but they were alive, the ship was in good shape, and they were free of pursuit by dawn and able to engage the boilers once more and proceed in the heat regardless of the wind.

By midday there was some debate among both passengers and crew as to whether it was worse up top or below. Most chose to be on deck and relaxed under whatever cover they could rig up. Ultimately, it became too hot for anyone to even handle the boilers, and they went to sail and more or less just drifted along, taking four-hour shifts at the wheel.

All five of the passengers remained under the makeshift canvas shelter of the centauresses on the afterdeck. All had removed whatever clothing they’d had on; it was too hot to be wearing anything if one didn’t have to.

It was a particular shock for the two Erdomese, who were used to extreme heat, but theirs had been basically a desert environment and their bodies were designed to retain and recycle moisture. Both were as miserable as could be.

“I got a reading from the wheelhouse thermometer when I went forward for some water,” Lori managed. “Doing a rough conversion, assuming that the top of the mark with the big line is boiling and the black line on the bottom is freezing, I’d say well over 50 degrees Celsius—somewhere over 120 Fahrenheit, Anne Marie.”

“Goodness! How do people survive here?” she responded. Dillians at least could perspire over most of their huge bodies, but they required a lot of water.