03. Gods at the Well of Souls (11 page)

She drank her fill and got up unsteadily and went on down the beach, feeling a  little better. After a few minutes more the beach ended, tapering to a stop  around a fair-sized cove. There was a large rectangular box where the last of  the sand vanished, clearly there to be accessible by land or sea, and she went  to it. It was the first artificial thing she could remember ever seeing. For a  moment she hesitated to get close to it, let alone touch it. When everything was  an unknown, then everything was a potential threat, if not directly then because  of her own ignorance of the world around her. It was such an odd feeling to have  a lot of facts in her head but not be able to relate them to anything until she  had some logical reason to do so. 

She realized on at least one level that this was the next step in defining  herself. She'd exercised caution and stayed out of the forest not out of fear  but for very practical reasons. She was afraid of this box, though, just as she  was afraid of the boats out there and the creatures on them. Now she had to  decide if she was going to let that fear rule her and hide out from everything  or if she had the guts to explore and discover new things. That really wasn't a  choice; she did not like being alone and without any memories in a place she had  no knowledge of. 

Cautiously, she approached the box until she stood right next to it, examining  it as much as she could in the starlight. It seemed featureless, colored some  kind of bright yellow except for a bunch of marks in a dark shade etched into  the front of it. Those marks made sense to somebody-what was it? Writing. Yes,  writing. But they might as well have been just marks to her. 

She reached out hesitantly and touched it, then immediately pulled away as if it  were some burning hot fire. Nothing happened. Emboldened, she ran her hands over  it and around it and found in the top a series of indentations with small marks  inside each one. Touching one didn't seem to do anything, so she ran her finger  along each in turn. 

There was a sudden, terrifying woosh! from the box that so startled her, she  fell over backward, then scrambled away on hands and knees, staring. The box lid rose up as if being opened by a giant hand until it was a bit more  than straight up; pulses of light began emanating from it, aimed toward the sea.  As suddenly as it started, the flashing stopped and the light burned steadily.  After perhaps a quarter of an hour of staring, waiting for some horror to climb  out, she finally felt bold enough to go back carefully and see what she'd done.  Curiosity was outweighing fear; if that light or whatever it was kept going,  somebody would see it and come anyway, so she might as well check it out before  they did. The box was a bit more than a meter high and deep and perhaps two  meters long. Conscious for the first time that she wasn't very tall, she stood  on tiptoe and peered in. 

It was full of more boxes. 

Big boxes, little boxes, square boxes, long thin boxes- boxes and boxes. She  wondered if she could pull herself up and stand inside and whether it was a good  idea to do so. That lid might well come back down ... 

The inside of the lid itself was a long, very shiny surface with a bar of bright  glittering lights along the top and both sides. The light was irritating, but  that shiny surface inside was very, very tempting. Angled just enough that it  showed no reflection of her head at ground level, it would certainly do so if  she were at or near its height. 

She looked back out at where the beacon was shining and scanned the area. Lots  of thoughts out there, as before, but no signs that anybody had yet seen, let  alone was coming toward, this new beacon. Not yet. 

She had to risk it. She just had to. She tried various ways of pulling herself  up and into the box, but while she'd get close, she just couldn't seem to manage  it. After a few minutes of frustration she remembered the driftwood nearby and  went and carried some thick loglike pieces over to the box and stacked them one  at a time. She was winded after a while, but she managed to build herself enough  of an unsteady pile to get high enough to pull herself the rest of the way into  the box. 

Standing on the smaller boxes in the center of the big one, she could see  herself from the thighs up in the smooth mirror of the lid's interior surface. Staring back at her was the unfamiliar face of a very young woman, perhaps no  more than midteens, with big brown eyes and finely wrought, attractive features,  the hair thick and black and curly, making a frame around her face. The face did  show definite chubbiness, although it did not detract from her overall pleasing  looks. The weight also showed in large fatty breasts and in a fat ass and  thighs, and there was a fair bulge of a tummy centered on the navel that didn't  seem as natural-looking as the rest of her and was clearly the cause for her  feeling ungainly when she walked. She stared and stared at the image in total  fascination as it was illuminated by the beacon lights around the lid. It was the face and body of a complete stranger. And yet it was her face, her  body without a doubt. Who are you, girl? she wondered. And how long will it be  before I am no longer surprised to see you staring back at me? Reluctantly she tore herself away from the image and concentrated on the boxes.  Most used the same system- one put a finger in some indentations one at a time  in a line, and it hissed and opened. Clearly the seals weren't designed as locks  but rather to keep them from being opened and unsealed by accident, waiting  until somebody needed them. 

Some of the stuff inside the boxes was weird, some of it was bizarre, and some  of it was downright disgusting. However, one box contained what smelled like  cake, and in fact, it tasted like plain yellow cake; another held hard biscuits,  and yet another had something that looked like a miniature loaf of baked bread  but turned out to have the taste and consistency of soda crackers. There was  also, in one larger container over in the corner, a deep box that contained a  liquid-one of the terms flying around in the back of her head leapt out at her:  "beer." After the cakes and biscuits and crackers, she drank a fair amount of  it. 

When she finished, she was feeling a little light-headed and had to pee again,  and she realized she had to get out. Piling up boxes got her to the top, but  turning around and getting down to the logs and from there to the sand proved  challenging. 

She slipped and fell back, landing on her rear in the sand, but she wasn't hurt  and the whole thing seemed somehow very funny. She tried to get up, but her body  responded even more awkwardly than usual, and she finally was forced to crawl on  hands and knees. She finally made it perhaps twenty or thirty meters away, back  onto the beach but up near the rocks and the start of the jungle. It was all she  could manage, and she picked a spot that seemed comfortable. She sank onto the  sand and lay there, awake for quite a while but not thinking of anything at all  except a vision reflected in a mirror by a glittering of light, of a face and  body that said, You don't know me, but I'm you. 

And, for a little while, until sleep took her, it didn't make any difference.   

It had been a typical Dlubine night; clear one minute, fast-moving thunderstorms  the next. In between the brief bursts of rain, fog and mist lay in patches all  over the open sea, some natural, some the result of activity below the waves,  lay where the people of the hex lived. For most of the evening visibility to the  west had been obscured by fog, but now it was lifting, dissipating as the first  signs of false dawn came upon the ocean. A lookout on the patrol corvette  Swiftwind Thunderer spotted a flashing light through the thin mist and called it  out to the watch. It was soon verified by other lookouts, and the watch officer  located it on the chart. Then it was time to notify the captain. "Sir! Emergency beacon activated on Atoll J6433!" 

Captain Haash, a Macphee, stirred from his sleep and opened his blowpipe,  cursing semitech hexes and their limitations. "Probably nothing-those things  malfunction all the time on their own, and when there are earthquakes and  eruptions ... Still, might be survivors from a ship that got swamped. What's the  weather like?" 

"Squall moving in, sir. Looks to be one of those short but nasty types." "Hmph! How soon?" 

'Ten, fifteen minutes, no more." 

'Too short to make a run in and send in a shore party safely. How long to  sunrise?" 

"About forty minutes, sir." 

"Well, we'll wait until full light and, when the storm clears, take her over and  investigate. No use in getting banged up or beached. I'll be on the bridge by  then. Make to other ships that we'll handle the beacon so they don't have to  bother." 

"Very well." 

The storm hit within minutes with the usual ferocity of small storms in the hex,  but it was no volcanic eruption or tidal wave, and the crew was used to this  kind of weather by now. 

While riding it out was routine, sleeping through it wasn't much of an option,  and it wasn't long before the captain was pulling himself up through the bridge  hatch. It wasn't easy to catch his mood at this moment, but then, it never  was-unless one was another Macphee. His huge eyes always looked as if they were  about to rip somebody apart, and beaked creatures always tended to have less  physical expression, even those which didn't also look like a large squid  covered from enormous head to halfway down his tentacles with thick brown hair. "What's that banging I hear?" the captain demanded. "Not sure, sir," the mate  responded. "We mink it might be debris and such from the explosion in the water  striking the hull. We can put somebody over to check if you like." All the  cutters had several air-breathing water species aboard for any such eventuality. "Absolutely not! I'll not have anybody brained by a tree checking to see if  we're being struck by a tree! That hull is tough; it'll take a few dings." It was one of the reasons his crew would go almost anywhere with and for the old  man. He was as tough as they came in a fight, but he cared about every member of  his crew. He'd willingly risk all their lives for good reason, but never for  nothing. It was a bargain he had with them, he liked to tell other captains. The  Macphee might have resembled squids, but they were not aquatic creatures and the  thick hair was not particularly coated. If he fell overboard and could find  nothing to hold on to, that waterlogged fur would cause him to sink like a  stone. That meant that he had to always sail with a crew that would be anxious  to throw him a line just in case ... 

In a little over a half hour the storm was over, and the captain immediately  ordered the crew to check the condition of the ship and see what, if anything,  was still in the water near them. Two Effiks, large green and yellow banded  insectoids whose legs could stick to just about anything, went over the side and  down it, walking around the hull as easily as if they were walking on the deck.  The one on the port side suddenly gave a yell. "Here it is! Big sucker of a  tree; looks almost like it got launched straight up, it's in such good shape!  Hey! Wait a minute! There's something stuck in it! An animal, perhaps. Hey!  Everybody here!" 

There was a general rush to the port side, and two otterlike Akkokeks slid off  into the still-choppy seas and approached the big tree cautiously from both  sides. Seeing what might have been a leg or some other appendage sticking out of  the still-green fronds near the former treetop, they turned upright in the  water, bouncing like corks, and hands carefully peeled away the greenery to get  a look at the whole creature. 

"Never saw anything like that before!" one exclaimed. "What the heck is that,  anyway?" 

"Looks like a sentient race," the other remarked. "Bipedal, hands with opposing  thumbs ... Definitely a male. My! That's so exposed! Let's see ..." It carefully  began poking and probing and was suddenly startled to see the jaw open, then  close. "Woof! Reflex action, or ... Hey! This thing might still be alive!" "Lower a stretcher on floats and send it out with Doc!" the captain ordered.  "Don't touch it until Doc gets there! If it's been stuck in a damned tree since  the explosion, it's probably beat up all to hell. Don't want to do anything  that'll kill it now, not after it came through all that!” 

It took some time to get the float to the far end of the tree and for the  bewildered medic, who had a lot of practice on dozens of races but knew nothing  about this one, to supervise extricating the body from the tree and moving it as  gently as possible onto the flotation device. 

'Take it easy!" Doc cautioned. The doctor, a birdlike Mosicranz, had little  strength in the long, spindly arms beneath her white wings and had to supervise  without directly manipulating the body. Once on board and in the clinic, she  might be able to do a bit more, since those same fragile limbs possessed an  incredible delicacy in control, although she would have preferred to be in a  high-tech hex where all the medical equipment that would easily answer her  questions would work. 

"How should we lay it out, Doc?" one of the Akkokeks asked her. "How should I know? I'm going by deduction here. Flat on the back, I should  think, face up. Keep the legs together and the arms against the body. Damn!  Whatever he is, he sure looks like he's been through the dominion of evil! Yes,  that's good. Fine. Make sure the arms don't drop off or out and let's get him  aboard as quickly as possible. I can see some respiration, although I look at  the rest of him and I can't understand why. I don't have to know anything at all  about his species to know that there's no rational reason in the world why he  isn't deader than a stone!" 

It took about ten minutes to get the new find aboard and below and another ten  or fifteen minutes before the doctor came back up to the bridge. "There's very little I can do except lay him out and hope for the best," she  told the captain. "Anything I do may finish him-if he doesn't die beforehand  anyway. There's been some loss of blood from all those gashes and tears,  impossible to tell how much, and probably some broken bones, although I can't  say without a full scan, which I can't do here. The gash in his head is  particularly deep and nasty, and there's some swelling in the skull. If we're  going to try and save him, we have to get him into a high-tech facility, and  fast. There is no such thing as fast enough."