03. Gods at the Well of Souls (14 page)

And then there was the other downstairs. It didn't look at all like her, but it  looked more like her than anybody else on board. The doctor said he was badly  hurt, something that she hadn't needed to be told. The doctor also said that  while he might wake up and get better, he probably wouldn't. It was funny, but  that news hadn't really affected her. There was just something inside that said  that he'd be sick a long, long time but wouldn't die. That just meant that it  would be a real long time before he woke up and could tell her about herself, if  in fact he could and didn't have the same problem remembering things. She might  stick around until he got well, but she knew it would be very long, and what  could somebody like her do just staying around? Of course, she didn't have  anything else to do or anywhere else to go. 

She'd watched unobtrusively when the two boats had pulled up next to one  another. It was kind of neat how they could do that. They probably had to be  really smart to do something like that without crashing. The two new people  who'd come aboard had gone below, and she hadn't found out much about them yet,  but maybe she would. She didn't really like the big blob thing; she couldn't say  why. The other one almost seemed like, well, like somebody like her, but that  was silly. 

Gus found her on the afterdeck, just sitting there and seemingly oblivious to  the world. Her hair was a tangled mess, but otherwise she seemed unmarked and  remarkably the same. 

'Terry?" he said gently to her. "You understand me? If you do, nod your head up  and down." 

Terry. He acted as if he knew her, but the name was unfamiliar. Well, she didn't  have one, so maybe that was as good as any. She nodded and felt his glow of joy  at actually communicating with her. 

"Do you know who I am?" 

She looked blankly at the colorful dragonlike creature. Know him? Should she? "It's Gus, Terry. Gus. Do you remember me? Remember me at all? Even like this?  Shake your head up and down for yes, back and forth for no, like this." He  demonstrated as best he could. 

She thought it looked funny but shook her head no. 

"Well, I remember you," he told her, and in his head she could see a lot of  images, memories, right at the surface, where she could look at them. Memories  of her wearing stupid clothes and working all sorts of strange stuff and in a  whole lot of places she'd never seen before. It was like being a character in a  story. It was fascinating but bore no relationship to reality at all. The only  thing it said to her was, I was smart once. That was good to know. Maybe she  could get smart again someday. The doctor had almost said as much, although  without a lot of conviction that it would happen. 

The visions of her doing incomprehensible things in settings totally unfamiliar  soon bored her, but something else was interesting, too. It was the creature's  vision of himself at these places; he seemed to be of the same kind as she and  the other down below. A tall, thin man with a very pale skin and yellowish hair.  It confused her. For some reason this person thought of himself as that other  one as well as what he was now. He couldn't be both, could he? It was all too  mixed up. Like the rest, it was just something she wasn't smart enough to figure  out, she guessed. 

Still, she had an unmistakable feeling that the creature was important. He  wasn't trying to fool her or anything like that; in fact, he seemed to be  totally open to her. He had known her before she had lost her memory, and he  definitely had genuine affection for her from that period. The trouble was, she  wasn't that person anymore, even if she wanted to be. It was as if that person  were gone, dead, and somebody new had set up shop in the old body, somebody not  nearly as smart. She certainly would trust this Gus, but could Gus ever see her  as who she was now and not as who she might have been in some past life? There was little more that either of them could say to one another beyond what  had been done. For Gus's part, he began to understand that Terry had changed  again, from the mysterious girl of great power to this very childlike creature  who didn't even remember the second incarnation. This wasn't going to be easy,  but at least now he had a little bit of purpose to his life. She sure needed  somebody right now, and he was the only one she had. 

Glathrielians were in the medical references at all only because of the work of  some Ambrezan physicians and anthropologists, but the information was about as  complete on the physiological side as it was for most other races and certainly  more than adequate. In high-tech Agon, with a diagnostic computer set up and  armed with all those data, it was relatively easy to do a thorough checkup on  both patients. 

"By all rights Brazil should be dead," the doctor told them. "In fact, after  going through these data, I'm almost .inclined to believe your stories about the  mythological god. Virtually every rib is either cracked or broken. One punctured  the right lung and caused massive internal bleeding. Several of his organs are  in horrible shape, too, and he has lesions in the brain in areas that might well  control motor development. As far as I can see, he's been going on sheer will to  live. The aggregate of these injuries is enough to kill just about anything  carbon-based, but in all cases there is something like a one in a million chance  that it might not be fatal. I swear that instant death versus horrible injury  was a matter of microns one way or another in a few instances. A surgical team  has been on the case since he was brought in, and they're now working on him." "What you are saying is that he will survive," the colonel noted. "What I am saying is that he should not have survived and that there are very  poor odds that he will survive this massive level of surgery. Synthesizing that  quantity of blood alone was a monstrous job, and I have no doubt they will use  all of it. If he does survive, well, there is no way to know what areas of the  brain are affected, but there will almost certainly be some serious problems. In  addition, there is major damage to the spinal cord which is perhaps reparable  over a very long time, when he can stand the additional work, and assuming that  it is similar to other spinal cord injuries in the races that have similar  torsos. Then again, that is never an exact science. The odds are great that he's  going to remain in a coma, which will make him your ward and no longer our  problem. If he does come out, then he will probably be unable to move much of  anything below the neck. They tell me that they can do nothing on the spinal  cord injury at this time. They have to do the other repairs first, and it is  best if he cannot move anything down there, even involuntarily. The problem is,  the longer the spinal cord is left untreated, the less likely it is to respond  to treatment. I believe that at best, you will have a being who is totally  bedridden and will never be able to move anything beyond his head again. That's  the best estimate." 

The colonel thought it over. "Oddly enough, if that were true, it might be a  very convenient result. He could be questioned but would hardly be a threat. On  the other hand, we have information that leads us to believe that he is capable  of regeneration, perhaps total, over a long period of time. If he is the man of  the legends, then that is what will happen, but it is still a result that my  superiors will not find too terrible. It buys time, a lot of it, and no matter  what, leaves him in our official custody." 

The doctor shrugged. "Suit yourself. Sounds grotesque to me, but considering  that he is still alive after all that, I begin to think that I can believe  anything about him. What I cannot believe is that he is going to get up and walk  out of here, or even crawl out of here, in the next year or two, if ever." "A year might be most satisfactory if one remaining complication can be  resolved," the Leeming told her. "Unfortunate that he might remain comatose,  though. If we cannot resolve our problem, we might have to deal with him much  quicker." 

"You never can tell for sure, but I wouldn't bet on any conversations," the  doctor told him. "Whatever your complication is, you better resolve it." "What about the girl?" Gus asked her. "Did you run all the tests on her, too?" "We did. She's in remarkably good physical shape, all things considered.  Mentally I'm not so sure. From what we were able to get from the Ambrezans  through Zone, we have a theory but only a theory. That is one strange race there  in Glathriel." 

"Yes?" 

"We think she probably woke up in Ambreza near the border and, after seeing what  she could only perceive as monsters, made a run into Glathriel. There they've  developed some kind of deliberately primitive society that shuns all artifacts,  machines, tools, whatever. That doesn't mean they are savages, though. Like some  other races here, they went in the other direction, developing powers of the  mind, realizing what might be just a slight potential in most of them,  developing and honing it." 

"Back on Earth I've seen men walk barefoot over red hot coals and suspend  themselves on sharp nails," Gus told her. "And I've seen a lot of other strange  stuff, too. Is that what you mean? They went strictly that way?" "Well, I think it's a lot deeper than those types of things, but you get the  idea. Ambrezan anthropologists believe that the Glathrielians have developed  something of a group mind, a sort of insectlike social and mental organization  without any hierarchy in which all of them are connected to one another. They  convert their body fat into energy that can be used for things far beyond mere  physical work. I think you've seen examples of that in her." Gus nodded. The colonel gave a mock clearing of his nonexistent throat. "I believe I shall  go file my report. We have no interest in the girl, so I will leave her fate  entirely in friend Gus's hands." And with that, the Leeming oozed out of the  hospital lounge. 

"You were saying they used fat to do things with their mind?" Gus prompted the  doctor. 

"Yes. Fascinating, really. Still, it's only the background here. What is really  the point is that she walked straight into a place where the people were  organically the same as she was but mentally and socially were far more alien to  her than physically different races. She had no foreknowledge and no defenses.  They co-opted her into their mental net. She would have seen it as an offer of  friendship, security in her most vulnerable moment. She didn't resist, almost  certainly expecting communication. She got far more. We think they literally  rewired her brain. Not organically but electrically. The memories were still  there, but they were no longer relevant or needed because the whole frame of  reference was different. We can't say why, when she saw Brazil, she latched on  to him with such tenacity, but we can guess that she knew he was someone from  her old world and she wanted out. The problem was, she'd been rewired. She could leave, but she couldn't rewire herself. That would take the collective  knowledge and power of a pretty large Glathrielian group. That meant she was  suspended, neither here nor there. In our world she thought like and acted like  one of them. But in their world she couldn't completely wipe away a lifetime of  experience, memory, personality, and ambition to assimilate." 

Gus nodded sadly. "Poor Terry. She deserved better." 

"Then we get to the situation where you were present. She reached out somehow,  using what must have been instinctive Glathrielian mental methods, and hooked  into Captain Brazil's brain. Again, this is on an energy level, not physically.  It was probably out of fear he might abandon her, but the link, once  established, worked both ways. He gained access to some of her powers, and she  gained a connection that might as well have been steel chains. With only the two  of them, stuck for weeks on that island, more in her element than his. it's  difficult to say what happened or if anything did, but it might have. Then came  the eruption, probably a terrified leap into the sea and an attempt to get away,  the big explosion, and, in the course of it, Brazil was seriously, horribly  injured. The link between them, something like a telepathic bond, would have  carried through to her as well. The shocks and his own physical and mental  trauma, combined with what must have been sheer terror for her, overloaded her  system. Linked to his more 'normal' wiring, going through all that with her  Glathrielian wiring, the shock loosened and perhaps destroyed the careful  patterns they'd built inside her. We think-and this is mere theory and probably  can never be any more than that-the patterns were wiped out, as if the whole  brain were flooded with a massive electrical charge. The Glathrielian powers,  which are there now not because of wiring but because they'd been used so much,  probably saved her life." 

"I'm followin' about a tenth of this," Gus told her. "What is the bottom line?" "Sorry. It's just such a fascinating study that I tend to run away with myself.  The bottom line is that we haven't any 'normal' Glathrielian or Earth-type  patterns for comparison-Brazil is hardly a good sample right now- but there are  a dozen or more races here that share similar brain and nervous system  structures with the Glathrielian physiology. More important, they share a lot of  commonalities, so we can compare and at least build a theoretical model of what  a Glathrielian brain pattern should look like and how it works. Your bottom line  is that whatever was there was erased by the shock, and her brain then rebuilt  what it could based on what it had left-the link with Brazil. We've tried all  sorts of tests, always reliable on those others. Her memory isn't blocked by  shock or brain damage-it's gone. The Glathrielian protective powers she had were  constructed to be autonomic- automatic like a heartbeat. Those remained. So did  the other basic autonomic systems. The rest? A simple vocabulary based on what  little snippets of information were stored in areas closest to where memories  are combined into thoughts-possibly her thoughts, possibly his. This has built  up to more complex thinking by what she's able to get from the surface-level  thoughts of others so long as those thoughts create holographic images in the  thinker's mind. If you were to think of an image called 'boat,' for example, she  knows what a boat is. I do not, however, see any real evidence of abstract  thinking or much chance for it."