Jack Chalker - Horrors of the Dancing Gods

"What now?' Alvi asked the nymph.

"Overland, I think. If we can head west for a while, we should come to a secondary trail going pretty well south, which is where we want to go, and intersecting the great River Road. Come, my beautiful spider. Put your hand and hand and hand in mine and I'll lead you through the back country. No pain yet."

Alvi laughed. "Your what?"

"Beautiful spider. Eight limbs, all the colors of the world, a walking work of art!"

The halfling laughed again. "I like that! Why don't you call me that, then? It'll be a name between us."

"Huh? What?"

"Spider. You can't very well keep calling me Alvi, or what's the good of all this?"

"Hey! Why not? Joe and the spider lady off through the jungle! Sounds pretty good to me. Sounds like the start of another great adventure long after I'd decided that there'd be no more great adventures for the likes of me! Yes, indeed. This could very well be the start of a be-you-fi-ful friendship!"

The trail was just where Joe had said it would be and about the right distance. Alvi was impressed. "How do you know this area? Are you from here?'

"No, just a knack. You memorize all the main routes when you haul freight." But it was more than that, although the rest was beyond easy explanation. Somehow the trees always knew where they were in relation to every other growing thing on the planet, and if they knew, she could find out. Put that on top of the memorized routes, and she almost always knew where she was to a matter of a few yards.

Alvi was fine until they heard some traffic coming the other way. Then she suddenly froze, and Joe could see and feel the tension in her.

"Come on, let's break for a snack over there," she suggested, and Alvi put up no argument. It was, Joe thought, time to see if this stuff worked and test it out before they got into heavy traffic as they neared the great river.

There was no apparent effect, at least not in the few minutes after eating, and Joe wondered if she'd vastly underestimated the dose needed to do much of anything. However, when Alvi started to get up, she seemed suddenly dizzy and a little uncertain, then gave a silly laugh. "Must be tired, or my tummy's upset. Got a little dizzy."

"Come, Pretty Spider, let us be off. There's a fair amount of daylight yet today, and we want to get into a better area by nightfall."

"Pretty Schpider. I love it when you say that." More tittering, but they walked out side by side.

"You just tell yourself that's who and what you are, over and over," Joe prompted. "Just think like that and enjoy the walk."

And, interestingly, after some initial slight hesitancy, Alvi did manage actually to face and then pass a small party of humans heading north. It wasn't that hard to do; one look at her and they gave ground and just stared, and Alvi acted as if they were staring in admiration rather than being totally appalled.

Joe relaxed a bit. Maybe by the time something hypnotic was available, it wouldn't be needed.

Traffic was quite light most of the day on the trail, which was not one of the major mutes in any event and basically serviced some feudal estates and small plantations in the legion, linking them with the river. It was in fact what folks back in Joe's native world and land had once known as a "rolling road," designed to be fairly straight and basically downhill and just wide enough so that barrels or sledges could be transported from the places where they had been harvested to the river piers.

Alvi was a bit tipsy but somewhat emboldened; at least she didn't shrink when they met the occasional person or take offense at some of the muttered curses, exclamations, and religious exorcisms performed as she passed, either. She was basically oblivious, and there weren't enough people to really worry about.

Near the end of the day they emerged from the jungle and looked out over a vast floodplain and the monstrous meandering river that was the land's heart and soul as well, the River of Dancing Gods.

By that time Alvi's intoxication had pretty well worn off, and she gazed out at the tremendous display in front of her, set off in a combination of light and shadow from the low sun in the distance, and gasped. "Wow!" she breathed.

"You've seen the river before, surely," Joe commented.

"Not really. Not like this. I mean, we came in from the cast and went through these big cities on the ocean and along this dirty flat region. Nothing like this."

"Well, that 'dirty flat region' and that plain out there are the reason so many creatures can live here," Joe pointed out. "All the good stuff that makes things grow and all the fresh water from countless rivers and streams far off to the north all come together here, washed down and deposited. You can look out from here and see all the river traffic, all the faerie colonies and such, and all the human towns, cities, and settlements as well. The really big cities are still to the south, but even from here we're probably looking at between a half million and a million souls as well as many times that in plants and animals. Thousands of kilometers north to here — that river is Husaquahr."

She was surprised at her own feeling at the scene and the sense of the great river as somehow hers and a part of her as well. Maybe she was getting more assimilated than she thought.

"It's so wide! How are we going to get across it?"

"Too wide to swim or bridge," the nymph agreed. "We'll have to be ferried across. We've got money, and there are many such boats along here, almost all run by some sort of faerie. We'll have to go down to the Great River Road, then walk south until we find someone who will take us. Not today, though. We've done enough for today. I suggest we camp out right around here somewhere and wait until dawn."

"I–I admit I could use it," Alvi told her. "I'm not used to this much walking, and I have been feeling a little sick for some reason."

Joe looked at the sky. "Looks like we might have some rain coming in tonight, so pick a sheltered spot and we'll relax. I should be able to find you enough to eat around here, and I'm afraid drink won't be a problem."

"What about you?" the halfling asked. "Don't you ever eat?"

"Not really," Joe told her. "Long ago I did, and enjoyed it, too. Now — well, all I need is sunlight and water and/or some healthy trees. I can drink and occasionally enjoy it, but that's about all. Just call me very low maintenance."

Somehow, for some reason, it seemed more like a boast than a liability even to Joe. That was definitely a change.

The storm held off, if it was coming at all, but the spot under some large trees that Alvi had picked out and Joe had approved was pretty damned dark. Off in the distance there were lights — thousands of lights, like fireflies congregating in swarms — representing many of the inhabitants of the lower valley, and beyond, a strong glow on the horizon betrayed the even grander City-States built along the river's massive delta. But right on the hill it was dark, and only faerie sight would do.

"You know," Alvi said softly, "all those years growing up, basically imprisoned, all I could do was dream about just this: being out here, free, looking over the whole of the world."

"And now that it's happened, you're seeing that the velvet-lined prison wasn't all that bad?"

"Nope. I'm seeing that I was right. I was never meant to live a lie. Besides, what good is all that if you can't enjoy it? No, the only thing was, I never was sure if I could really make it out here. I'm still not, but today got me through a lot of it."

"Meeting other people without concealing anything about yourself," Joe prompted.