The master computer that was the heart of the entire planet called the WellWorld was just a machine; its powers were far too vast to have ever trustedmaking it self-aware in the sense that it could act outside its makers'predetermined instructions. And while it was true that machines hadinfinite patience, they could also have very little if something requiredwas not getting done. Now, as the Kraang continued its assaults and madetiny slivers of inroads into the system, it calculated that the time tosolve this problem was no longer inconsequential. In that sense the Wellcould be said to have become impatient with the progress of events, andwhen the Well wanted something, it tended to be less than subtle about it.
To summon the two Watchers to see to repairs, it had sent huge meteorscrashing into the planet where the Watchers were living. Extricating MavraChang so that she had any reasonable chance of success appeared to be verydifficult and would require a great deal of subtlety and patience. Goingafter Nathan Brazil, on the other hand, would not. The fact that Brazilhad willingly taken himself out of worldly care was to the Well entirelyirrelevant.
Nathan Brazil had been on the Well World for over eleven months, havingcome in with Tony and Anne Marie. It had been almost seven months sinceTheresa "Terry" Perez had come through on her own, following Mavra, Lori,Gus, and Juan Campos by a mere hour or so and quickly coming under theinfluence of the bizarre Glathrielian Way that the race that shared commonancestry with Terry's had followed. Prepared by the Glathrielians, she hadattached herself to Brazil within only a week, and they had beeninseparable since. For four months they had been deliberately held up,stalled, far from the goal of the Well Avenue, and then for two weeks theyhad broken free and escaped across the sea, been reunited with Gus, andthen lost him again as they crashed on an undersea reef in a storm.
But on their tiny tropical volcanic island in the middle of a fairy-talesea, Nathan Brazil and Terry had no concept of the passage of time or anycares or thoughts beyond sheer childish fun. The tropical rain forest onthe windward side of the island provided enough wild fruits and vegetablesto feed them, and the frequent but brief storms always provided a supply offresh water. Brazil had opened himself to the Glathrielian Way but not tothe elders' master plan of co-opting him as he entered the Well. There hehad remained, happy and carefree, unaware of that nonhuman part of him,that deep alien nature that had thwarted the elders' control.
The tropical sun had browned him almost as dark as Terry's naturalcolor, and his hair and beard were long and unkempt, giving him almost awild man's appearance. His bare feet were hard and callused, toughenedfrom months of volcanic rock and soil; the day-to-day life of climbing fortreetop delicacies and over the craggy rocks had bulked out his muscles.
Terry had not been as active of late, for she'd developed a large, hardbelly and some considerable fat and felt unbalanced and odd, but sheaccepted it as the way things were. Part of the Glathrielian Way wasacceptance of whatever was and dealing with it as best one could.
This proved difficult suddenly, though, when they were awakened onemorning just at dawn by a series of severe tremors. The ground shook, andtrees swayed, and rocks fell from the high mountain. This went on for aday or more, and suddenly a huge piece of the mountain about halfway up theside seemed to collapse, opening a gaping wound from which belched forthsteam and black ash. Then beginning what seemed a wondrous light show, avolcanic fountain played against the sky. But the earthquakes continued inincreasing frequency and intensity, and from the masses of grainy rock laiddown by the fountain there came puffs and plumes of smoke and ash that setpart of the forest on fire.
They made their way around to the beach on the opposite side of themountain from the eruption, having to stop or risk falling down with eachtremor. Something inside them knew that they had to leave this place, andquickly.
But leave for where? And how? There was nothing on all sides but thewater.
There were other islands, of course, some of which could be seen acrossthe expanse of sea, but they were not as close as they appeared. Nonewould be a problem to reach with a boat or a raft, but they had nothing butthemselves. An inner sense of urgency told them that there was little timeto consider any alternatives. Reluctantly, they entered the water and madetheir way out past the reefs, Brazil using his strength to support Terryand keep her afloat.
They made it to perhaps a kilometer from the beach and found themselvessuddenly carried along on a warm current, able to pretty much just floatand let the water do the work, which was more than welcome. The currentcarried them at a steady pace away from the erupting island and toward thecalmer ones beyond.
Then a sudden, tremendous explosion hit them like something solid,deafening them both, and they could see the onrushing wall of water fromwhere the island, now a vast and dark mushroom-shaped cloud, had been, ahuge tidal wave coming straight for them. It was taller than the tallesttrees and with a roar that sounded like thousands of caged beasts roaringat once, and they stopped swimming and watched it come, knowing it wasdeath.
When it struck, their world became all water and whirling forces andthen oblivion.
The Well had issued its wake-up call to Nathan Brazil.The island exploding, the rushing wall of water, then ... What?
She awoke as if from some strange dream, much of which had been verynice yet only dimly remembered, like some great childhood treat now far inthe past and unrecoverable.
But watch that last step, she thought. It's a dilly.
She sat up painfully, groaning and stretching. She felt as if she'dbeen beaten to a pulp by some gigantic fist, but just as everything seemedbruised, nothing seemed broken.
The beach was warm and wet. It was made of yellow sand, the kind builtup from the discards of coral reefs over thousands upon thousands of years,but it was soft and somewhat comfortable.
She shook her head, trying to clear it, trying to think. She remembereda tremendous bang and a big wave but nothing afterward.
And nothing before.
It was as if she'd just suddenly come into existence here on this beach.A big bang and here she was.
It was quite dark, but out in the water she could see a million lightsunderneath the gentle waves, burning with a multitude of colors and shapesand patterns that she knew couldn't be anything from nature, although shedidn't know how she knew. And on the water, too, in the distance, thingsseemed to float, lights up upon the water rather than deep below it.
Boats, she understood at once, although again she had no idea wherethis information was coming from.
I've lost my memory, she realized. Something, some accident orshipwreck or something like that caused me to lose my memory. She had noidea who, or where, or even what she was.
She ran her hands over her body in the dark. It was a woman's body. Itwasn't that this was wrong so much as basic information about herself thatshe had had no sense of before. Somehow, she hadn't seen herself as awoman, and there was a sense of wrongness about it somewhere deep insideher.
She knew so many things! There were all sorts of facts and behaviors andother pieces of information swirling around in her head, yet about herselfshe had no information at all. No past, no memories of actually beinganywhere, doing anything, interacting with anything or anybody at all. Iam a woman became the first, and so far only, definition of herself as anindividual.
It seemed to her that there had been Another somewhere, somebody veryimportant. A girl ... Another girl? That didn't seem right. But who andwhat?
She cast about with her mind, never even considering speech, but therewas no response from the immediate area. She was alone on the beach,without memory, without anything at all, in a place she couldn't rememberfor reasons that were a total mystery.
Perhaps ... Perhaps out there, among the floating lights? She cast amental net and caught far more than she expected. Thoughts ... Lots ofthoughts from what seemed to be lots of different creatures. Their words,their very sounds would mean nothing to her--she knew that--but thoughtswere assembled from stored information into holographic concepts beforethey were translated as sounds, and those she could pick up if sheconcentrated.
The power came naturally to her, although something inside said that itwas a new thing, something she hadn't done before, yet something she haddone before. That didn't make sense. Nothing really did.
It seemed somehow indecent to peek into their thoughts, to see who wastired, who was bored, and who was thinking of killing the captain.Indecent but kind of fun, too. Some thoughts, though, were a lot harder tofigure out than others; some of those creatures out there weren't evenclose to her form, and their thinking wasn't much closer, either.
She cast about for others of her own kind but found none. Wherever shewas, she was more than merely unique in her own psyche; she was one of akind.
No, that wasn't true. There were others. Something told her that.Men, women, children ...But not here.
In the general casting about, though, she found spots where in fact notonly words but complete sentences came through to her as if spoken in hernative tonguethat was. But it took some mental fine-tuning until she couldfully understand those thoughts, kind of like tuning a radio.
Tuning a radio? Where had that come from? God! She sure knew a lot forsomebody who couldn't remember anything except what was discovered bydirect examination.
Maybe they knew. Maybe they were looking for her. If so, she'dbetter find out if it was in her best interest to want to be found.
"...Still getting reports from the Dlubinians that there is a greatdeal of damage and loss of life below ..."
Those underwater lights. There were people of some kind who liveddown there! If that explosion that seemed to start her existence wasn'tjust some metaphysical memory, then ... Oh, God!
"...No previous indication of volcanic activity in the area in anyrecent period, and it's monitored as closely as you can in a semitechhex ..."
Some of that made sense, some of it didn't. A volcano--that wouldaccount for the explosion and the big rush of water that had followed. Ifshe were anywhere in that area, she would have been hit with tremendousshock. That had to be it. But it didn't explain anything else.
She listened for quite some time, gathering details of what had happenedbut clearing up her own personal mystery not one bit. Had she been on aboat, or on an island, or what? Not alone, surely. Not out here in thisstrange and alien place. But if not alone, then with who? How? And why?
The aches and pains made it impossible to just sit there. She beganmassaging the stiffness and found herself somehow mentally surveying herphysical condition. Bruises, twists, all that, but nothing serious. Aseach region was surveyed, she dampened down the pain there and went on.Only one area stymied her, the area around her abdomen. It seemed odd, atonce detached and yet not detached, but certainly different. Well, itwasn't anything she could figure out now. She was aware that she wasusing, almost matter-of-factly, powers that were extremely unusual, powersthat even she hadn't realized were there. But she thought nothing aboutusing them.
She felt a strong urge to pee and then find something to eat and drink,if she didn't have to wander too far in the darkness. She certainly hopedthat there was some sort of food and water on the island; otherwise a lotof choices would be made for her right off.
Her body felt clumsy, unfamiliar, and it took some getting used tobefore she felt confident enough to really try much. She wished it werelight; there was nothing but darkness beyond the beach and no way oftelling what might be waiting for her there.
Almost at once, unbidden by any conscious thought, the darkness wasreplaced by endless colors, all soft pastels with occasional flashes ofbrightness, and without a lot of difficulty she began to make out whichwere trees, which bushes or flowers. She intuitively understood that othercolors represented living things great and small. It seemed magical, acounterpoint to the great lights beneath the waves in back of her, butafter a while she realized it didn't help. This new form of vision didn'tshow rocks or fallen dead timber or other hazards. Best to stay out of thejungle until she knew it better and was more comfortable with the way herbody moved.Instead of going inland, she walked along the beach, not quite sure what,if anything, she was looking for, but the terrain was at least manageableby the light of the spectacularly bright starry sky. Here and there weregreat rocks--perhaps spewed by volcanoes, perhaps eaten away by the sea--and all sorts of wood and shells and coral washed up and deposited on thesandy shore. Walking closer, she thought she heard something, a gurglingsound, almost drowned out by the sound of nearby breakers. In a couple ofminutes she found it--a tiny spring coming out of the rocks and jungle,cutting its way through the sand, and flowing into the great sea beyond.She got down on her knees, cupped her hands, and brought some to her lips.It was fresh! At least she would not die of thirst! It was lukewarm, butshe splashed some on her face to wash away the last of the cobwebs thatseemed to be lurking in her mind.
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 rectangularbox where the last of the sand vanished, clearly there to be accessible byland or sea, and she went to it. It was the first artificial thing shecould 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 apotential threat, if not directly then because of her own ignorance of theworld around her. It was such an odd feeling to have a lot of facts in herhead but not be able to relate them to anything until she had some logicalreason to do so.
She realized on at least one level that this was the next step indefining herself. She'd exercised caution and stayed out of the forest notout 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 onthem. Now she had to decide if she was going to let that fear rule her andhide out from everything or if she had the guts to explore and discover newthings. That really wasn't a choice; she did not like being alone andwithout 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 darkshade 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 justmarks to her.
She reached out hesitantly and touched it, then immediately pulled awayas if it were some burning hot fire. Nothing happened. Emboldened, sheran her hands over it and around it and found in the top a series ofindentations with small marks inside each one. Touching one didn't seem todo 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 abit more than straight up; pulses of light began emanating from it, aimedtoward the sea. As suddenly as it started, the flashing stopped and thelight burned steadily. After perhaps a quarter of an hour of staring,waiting for some horror to climb out, she finally felt bold enough to goback carefully and see what she'd done. Curiosity was outweighing fear; ifthat light or whatever it was kept going, somebody would see it and comeanyway, 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 meterslong. Conscious for the first time that she wasn't very tall, she stood ontiptoe and peered in.
It was full of more boxes.
Big boxes, little boxes, square boxes, long thin boxesand boxes. Shewondered if she could pull herself up and stand inside and whether it was agood 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 barof bright glittering lights along the top and both sides. The light wasirritating, but that shiny surface inside was very, very tempting. Angledjust enough that it showed no reflection of her head at ground level, itwould certainly do so if she were at or near its height.
She looked back out at where the beacon was shining and scanned thearea. Lots of thoughts out there, as before, but no signs that anybody hadyet 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 pullingherself up and into the box, but while she'd get close, she just couldn'tseem to manage it. After a few minutes of frustration she remembered thedriftwood nearby and went and carried some thick loglike pieces over to thebox and stacked them one at a time. She was winded after a while, but shemanaged to build herself enough of an unsteady pile to get high enough topull herself the rest of the way into the box.
Standing on the smaller boxes in the center of the big one, she couldsee herself from the thighs up in the smooth mirror of the lid's interiorsurface.
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 framearound her face. The face did show definite chubbiness, although it didnot detract from her overall pleasing looks.
The weight also showed inlarge fatty breasts and in a fat ass and thighs, and there was a fair bulgeof a tummy centered on the navel that didn't seem as natural-looking as therest of her and was clearly the cause for her feeling ungainly when shewalked. She stared and stared at the image in total fascination as it wasilluminated 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 amno longer surprised to see you staring back at me?
Reluctantly she tore herself away from the image and concentrated on theboxes. Most used the same system--one put a finger in some indentationsone at a time in a line, and it hissed and opened. Clearly the sealsweren't designed as locks but rather to keep them from being opened andunsealed 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 whatsmelled like cake, and in fact, it tasted like plain yellow cake; anotherheld hard biscuits, and yet another had something that looked like aminiature loaf of baked bread but turned out to have the taste andconsistency of soda crackers. There was also, in one larger container overin the corner, a deep box that contained a liquid--one of the terms flyingaround in the back of her head leapt out at her: "beer." After the cakesand biscuits and crackers, she drank a fair amount of it.
When she finished, she was feeling a little light-headed and had to peeagain, and she realized she had to get out. Piling up boxes got her to thetop, but turning around and getting down to the logs and from there to thesand proved challenging.
She slipped and fell back, landing on her rear in the sand, but shewasn't hurt and the whole thing seemed somehow very funny. She tried toget up, but her body responded even more awkwardly than usual, and shefinally was forced to crawl on hands and knees. She finally made itperhaps twenty or thirty meters away, back onto the beach but up near therocks and the start of the jungle. It was all she could manage, and shepicked a spot that seemed comfortable. She sank onto the sand and laythere, awake for quite a while but not thinking of anything at all except avision reflected in a mirror by a glittering of light, of a face and bodythat said, You don't know me, but I'm you.
And, for a little while, until sleep took her, it didn't make anydifference.It had been a typical Dlubine night; clear one minute, fast-movingthunderstorms the next. In between the brief bursts of rain, fog and mistlay in patches all over the open sea, some natural, some the result ofactivity below the waves, lay where the people of the hex lived. For mostof the evening visibility to the west had been obscured by fog, but now itwas lifting, dissipating as the first signs of false dawn came upon theocean. A lookout on the patrol corvette Swiftwind Thunderer spotted aflashing light through the thin mist and called it out to the watch. Itwas soon verified by other lookouts, and the watch officer located it onthe 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 hisblowpipe, cursing semitech hexes and their limitations. "Probablynothing--those things malfunction all the time on their own, and when thereare earthquakes and eruptions ... Still, might be survivors from a shipthat got swamped. What's the weather like?"
"Squall moving in, sir. Looks to be one of those short but nastytypes."
"Hmph! How soon?"
"Ten, fifteen minutes, no more."
"Too short to make a run in and send in a shore party safely. How longto sunrise?"
"About forty minutes, sir."
"Well, we'll wait until full light and, when the storm clears, take herover and investigate. No use in getting banged up or beached. I'll be onthe bridge by then. Make to other ships that we'll handle the beacon sothey don't have to bother."
"Very well."
The storm hit within minutes with the usual ferocity of small storms inthe hex, but it was no volcanic eruption or tidal wave, and the crew wasused to this kind of weather by now.
While riding it out was routine, sleeping through it wasn't much of anoption, and it wasn't long before the captain was pulling himself upthrough 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 eyesalways looked as if they were about to rip somebody apart, and beakedcreatures always tended to have less physical expression, even those whichdidn't also look like a large squid covered from enormous head to halfwaydown his tentacles with thick brown hair.
"What's that banging I hear?" the captain demanded.
"Not sure, sir," the mate responded. "We think it might be debris andsuch from the explosion in the water striking the hull. We can putsomebody 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 seeif we're being struck by a tree! That hull is tough; it'll take a fewdings."
It was one of the reasons his crew would go almost anywhere with and forthe old man. He was as tough as they came in a fight, but he cared aboutevery member of his crew. He'd willingly risk all their lives for goodreason, but never for nothing. It was a bargain he had with them, he likedto tell other captains. The Macphee might have resembled squids, but theywere not aquatic creatures and the thick hair was not particularly coated.If he fell overboard and could find nothing to hold on to, that waterloggedfur would cause him to sink like a stone. That meant that he had to alwayssail 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 captainimmediately ordered the crew to check the condition of the ship and seewhat, if anything, was still in the water near them. Two Effiks, largegreen and yellow banded insectoids whose legs could stick to just aboutanything, went over the side and down it, walking around the hull as easilyas if they were walking on the deck. The one on the port side suddenlygave a yell. "Here it is! Big sucker of a tree; looks almost like it gotlaunched straight up, it's in such good shape! Hey! Wait a minute! There'ssomething stuck in it! An animal, perhaps. Hey! Everybody here!"
There was a general rush to the port side, and two otterlike Akkokeksslid off into the still-choppy seas and approached the big tree cautiouslyfrom both sides. Seeing what might have been a leg or some other appendagesticking out of the still-green fronds near the former treetop, they turnedupright in the water, bouncing like corks, and hands carefully peeled awaythe greenery to get a look at the whole creature.
"Never saw anything like that before!" one exclaimed. "What the heckis that, anyway?"
"Looks like a sentient race," the other remarked. "Bipedal, hands withopposing thumbs ... Definitely a male. My! That's so exposed! Let'ssee ..." It carefully began poking and probing and was suddenly startled tosee the jaw open, then close. "Woof! Reflex action, or ... Hey! Thisthing might still be alive!"
"Lower a stretcher on floats and send it out with Doc!" the captainordered. "Don't touch it until Doc gets there! If it's been stuck in adamned tree since the explosion, it's probably beat up all to hell. Don'twant to do anything that'll kill it now, not after it came through allthat!"
It took some time to get the float to the far end of the tree and forthe bewildered medic, who had a lot of practice on dozens of races but knewnothing about this one, to supervise extricating the body from the tree andmoving it as gently as possible onto the flotation device.
"Take it easy!" Doc cautioned. The doctor, a birdlike Mosicranz, hadlittle strength in the long, spindly arms beneath her white wings and hadto supervise without directly manipulating the body. Once on board and inthe clinic, she might be able to do a bit more, since those same fragilelimbs possessed an incredible delicacy in control, although she would havepreferred to be in a high-tech hex where all the medical equipment thatwould 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, Ishould think, face up. Keep the legs together and the arms against thebody. Damn! Whatever he is, he sure looks like he's been through thedominion of evil! Yes, that's good. Fine. Make sure the arms don't dropoff or out and let's get him aboard as quickly as possible. I can see somerespiration, 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'sno 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 andanother ten or fifteen minutes before the doctor came back up to thebridge.
"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 diebeforehand anyway. There's been some loss of blood from all those gashesand 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 gashin his head is particularly deep and nasty, and there's some swelling inthe skull. If we're going to try and save him, we have to get him into ahigh-tech facility, and fast. There is no such thing as fast enough."
The captain thought a moment. "We could make Mowry in less than an hourand a half. That would activate your onboard equipment."
"Yes, but it might not be nearly enough. I need data. What goodis a full scan and examination if I don't know how much blood and fluid heneeds or its composition? In order to fix him, I have to know hisdefinition of 'normal.' That means a land hospital."
The captain thought a moment. "All right. The fact that we have asurvivor who is of no race known in the region is worth a risk. If we getup full steam, I can get us into Deslak in ..." The mean-looking eyes wentto the mate.
"About three hours, sir," the mate responded.
"That be good enough?"
The doctor sighed. "It will have to do. He's likely to die before weget there, but the gods only know how he managed to live this long. Maybehis will to live is so strong, he'll make it."
"Very well. Notify the company we are rushing an injured survivor toAgon and will be off station for eight hours," the captain said to thebridge staff. "Order the engine room to get up full steam and proceed toDeslak at flank speed as soon as practical."
"Aye, sir. Um--sir? What about the distress signal?"
The captain froze for a second. "Oh, yes. Totally forgot about that.Let me think ... All right, head for them now.
Do as quick a shore reconand pickup as you can. If nobody's there, don't hunt for them, but ifthere is another survivor there, they might even know who or what thisfellow below is and what he was doing out here. At the very least, they'dhave to be taken in somewhere, anyway."
"Captain, I really think we ought to head for Deslak straight away," thedoctor protested.
The captain gave a clicking sound that was more or less the equivalentof a sigh. "Doctor, I appreciate your concern, but he probably won'tsurvive to get there anyway, and if he does, he does. He's held out thislong. Another half hour to perhaps save somebody else probably isn't goingto make a whole lot of difference."On the beach, the girl had woken with the coming of dawn. With the morninglight, she had lost some of her fear and was beginning to wonder what to donext.
It was strange how clearly she could think and see things yet know solittle about herself or much else. There were a lot of terms that meantnothing, a lot of concepts that seemed more confusing than clear, andabsolutely nothing at all to anchor her own self upon. She did know thatas far as she could tell from the thoughts she could intercept, she seemedto be the only one of her kind.
The storm itself took her by surprise; she didn't run from it but ratherwas fascinated by it. All that energy, all that sound and fury and noiseand light, and all that rain.
The rain in particular fascinated her. Not that it fell in such greatquantities but that it seemed unable to quite touch her. It was like shehad some kind of second invisible skin that was keeping her and even herhair dry. She could feel it as a series of constant pulses against herskin, but it didn't penetrate. With a little effort she could see it, athin and transparent layer of energy that gave off a vague lavender glow.She reached out her hands and cupped them, and the glow receded to thewrists, allowing the torrent to strike and quickly overfill her hands. Theforce of the rain and its weight startled her, and the glow quickly shotback around the hands once more.
They couldn't do that, those creatures out there. None of them could.She didn't know that as much as sense it through the mind's eyes of theunlucky sailors who had to be on deck awash in wind and rain and crashingwaves. It wasn't merely that they didn't want to have it; they simplydidn't. That was clear.
So whoever and whatever she was, she had powers they did not. She wasnot, however, so naive as to think that those powers would give her morethan a slight advantage over the rest in some situations. They could hurther, even kill her, if they wanted to do so.
That knowledge brought things right back to the start once again. Whatwas she to do? Run into the forest here, hope that there was enough to eatand live on, and remain here alone, one of a kind? That didn't seem veryappealing. But what would those creatures out there do if they found her?Would they take her to more of her own kind, or would they put her in acage or, perhaps, eat her? It was impossible to get a handle on thatbecause they really didn't know she was here and didn't seem to have anyconcept of her kind in their heads.
It was lack of knowledge of the world out there that was so disturbing.Surely she must have a past. Those terms which kept popping up in her mindnow and then had to come from someplace. And yet, hard as she tried, therejust was nothing there. The only thing she knew for sure was that she washere and that somewhere out there there was another, one of her kind yetnot like her. She knew this not from memory, though, but because there wassome kind of link between them, something she felt. She tried reaching outthrough that link, but what she got back was unintelligible, confusing,like a thick fog.
Yet, reaching out, there were a few such sensations she coulddecipher. Water ... wetness, and something sharp and misshapen. Thensomething--some things, moving the other out of the water, up onto one ofthe boats ...
There was suddenly no choice on the course of action she had to take.One way or the other she had to get on that boat. The other was the onlylink to any existence beyond what she now knew, the only other one of herown kind. For her own safety she could rely only on instinct and on thestrange powers that came unbidden. Basic logic just wouldn't work here;she didn't know the rules. Best to go with feelings until she knew enoughto make decisions on her own.
They were coming for her now; the very boat on which the other had beentaken was approaching, apparently drawn by the lights she'd triggered. Sheleft her hiding place and went down toward the big box to meet them.