“Too bad,” Antor Trelig said sadly. “Looks like they’re still in front of us.”
Wohafa
Whether it was the promise, the fights, the threat, or other factors, the Pugeesh interfered no more. Both groups felt they were being watched, but as time passed and the truth of their claim that they were simply passing through became more obvious, they felt less threatened.
Wohafa was an eerie scene. A bleak, copper-colored landscape set against a deep-pink sky through which wisps of anhydrous white clouds drifted. Lightning was so frequent that often the land seemed to be lit by a stroboscope, with everything moving in a jerky slow motion.
The Wohafans themselves were odd creatures, balls of bright yellow light from which hundreds of lightninglike tendrils darted. A cross between creatures of matter and those of energy, they manipulated things with arms of energy, yet seemed to have mass and weight.
As a high-tech hex, Wohaja had a large number of machines and artifacts, but, for the most part, these, too, reflected the ambiguity of their makers’ nature and seemed odd lumps working from no apparent source and to no apparent purpose.
They became aware that building in Wohafa was accomplished by matter-to-energy-to-matter conversion, when they watched rock worked by a number of Wohafans dissolve and reform in new and obviously planned forms.
The Wohafans were a group neutral to them, though, which helped enormously. Having close contacts with the Bozog and a number of other hightech Northern civilizations, they had almost daily contact with the South, obtaining whatever a customer wanted by making it from the surrounding rock and rearranging its atomic structure. They accepted the waste of other civilizations and remade it to order, so they were a key economic link in the loose economy of the Well World as a whole.
They were also pragmatic. They understood the significance of the eerie silver moon that shined on the Southern horizon, and they appreciated its dangers, so they were willing to allow someone to reach it and remove the threat—for whatever purposes. As insurance, the Wohafans were willing to aid both sides so that, no matter who reached New Pompeii, they would bear the strange creatures no ill will.
Wohafans created huge platforms that stood atop a strange blue-white glowing energy field, and transported first the Yaxa group and then the Ortega group across the hex, scrupulously maintaining the time interval between the two groups as well. The six hundred kilometers or so they needed to cross were wiped out in less than a day by this rapid and cooperative transportation system.
A semitech hex, Uborsk was a bit more of a challenge but it bordered both Wohafa and Bozog and was partially dependent on them for some manufacturing. It could not afford to run afoul of the neighbors without causing long-range strains in which it had the most to lose.
The Uborsk were enormous blobs of jelly, perhaps four meters around, who lived in a sea of soft, granular material that twinkled in sunlight. It was obvious that the Uborsk civilization was almost entirely hidden from the Southerners’ sight.
Out of the translucent blobs, however, could emerge tentacles, arms, anything they needed when they needed it. In order to facilitate commerce between Wohafa and Bozog, the Uborsk had allowed the two high-tech hexes to build an efficient railroad causeway along the Slublika border. The trains were an almost unending series of flatcars rolling on a continuous rail and powered externally by internal combustion engines at regular points along the almost four hundred kilometer route, like an enormous escalator. For allowing the construction and running the system, the Uborsk received raw materials they needed from the versatile Wohafans, manufactured goods their own technology could not produce from the Bozog. It was a good compromise that surprised the Southerners; interhex cooperation on a long-term basis was rare in the South, and it was all the more remarkable in the North because the three hexes involved were so different in composition that long-term stays even with protection were uncomfortable.
The politics involved in the transportation systems were somewhat frustrating to the two groups, however; a five-and-a-quarter-hour interval had been established when the second group had crossed into Wohafa, and it was maintained absolutely. The trailing group was not permitted to close on the leaders, and the leaders were unable to prepare anything to eliminate their rivals.
And thus, much more rapidly than they had dreamed, the leading group under Wooley and Ben Yulin pulled in to a strangely surrealistic station in Bozog.
It was a surprisingly bright land; the pale-blue sky was reminiscent of the South, at least at the higher altitudes, and nearby mountains had what looked like snow. Spindly gnarled trees dotted the landscape, the fact that they were purple with orange leaves not in the least disconcerting. Only the midday temperature registering on the suit gauges offered any strong indication of difference: it was minus thirty degrees Celsius.
But the Bozog were no distant relatives of the South. The Bozog were, if anything, more alien and enigmatic than any creatures they had met to date.
A Bozog official rolled up to meet them on ballbearing feet. It was very thin, more or less round, and, except for the two orange circles on its back, rose no more than 30 or 40 centimeters from the ground.
“Welcome to Bozog,” it said in its most dignified voice, like a small-town Chamber of Commerce head greeting visiting dignitaries. “We are amazed and pleased at your rapid and safe arrival. If you will follow me across town, we will arrange for the final part of your journey.”
They followed it, noting the liquidity of its movements; the official seemed to flow rather than roll down broad streets, and almost oozed around corners.
The city itself was low, and furnished with an incredibly intricate network of broad ramps. There were vehicles, too, resembling mechanical copies of the Bozog—low, flat, with two storage humps in the middle. A Bozog driver lay on a forward platform and seemed to have no means of control, yet the driving was perfect.
Observing the odd people at work showed how they carried on the business of a civilization. Beneath each Bozog were what appeared to be millions of sticky cilia, so that a Bozog who lay over something could manipulate it quite well. For elaborate or problem work, the two orange spots proved singularly versatile. Out of each could rise a large orange tentacle or many smaller ones—the orange material seemed to be a viscous liquid that the Bozog formed into any shape and then held it under strain—to the limit of the amount of mass in the body containers.
Another, final train took them to the launch site. It was in some ways similar to the Uborsk railroad in that it was a continuous line of flatcars, but it seemed to roll on soft noiseless tires or treads through a U-shaped channel, like a moving walkway, and was powered by a system much more sophisticated than the one used in the semitech hex.
As they rode, Wooley signaled that they were to switch to low-power radio only. They were nearing the end of the journey, and it was time to discuss what would come next.
“It’s rather obvious that we haven’t faced, or been able to face, our chief remaining problem,” she pointed out.
Yulin nodded. “The others are only a few hours behind. There’s no way we’ll launch immediately. The Bozog said they’re still bringing the ship in from Uchjin. So we’ll still be there when they arrive.” He couldn’t help wondering how the Bozog were bringing the ship from the nontech hex where he’d crash-landed it over twenty-two years before, nor how this was being done against the wishes of the Uchjin themselves.
“You could always compromise,” Joshi suggested helpfully. “I mean, why don’t we all go?”
“Compromise with the Ghiskind is impossible,” the Torshind pointed out. “We represent totally conflicting views, goals, and philosophies. As for the rest—only Trelig counts there, of course. Would any of you like to reinstate him on the world that he designed? Yulin? Do you know everything there is to know about New Pompeii? Would you trust the rest of us there with Trelig around?”