Jack L. Chalker Watcher at the Well 01 Echoes of the Well of Souls

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at or near there. I
will get someone to drive you in, and from there you can make your own
arrangements.
Brazil grinned and shrugged. Good enough. What can I say?
Say good-bye, responded Hsada. And don t forget to settle your rent through
today before you leave.
It turned out that settling the rent was more of a problem than finding a ride
to near the border. Hsada was a very hard bargainer and was more creative in
finding extra char-ges to spring on him than anybody since that lowland
Scotswoman at a bed and breakfast about a hundred years ago. Extra sheet
charge, indeed.
There were only five cities plus the capital worth the name in Ambreza, and
maybe forty small towns spread all over, but the two basic occupations of
those in the country were raising crops for export and truck farming. Over the
centuries truck farming had become quite sophisticated, with regular routes
and a whole guild of middlemen doing the shipping to and from the markets on a
daily basis. To-bacco was grown best in the southeast; the southwest was
better suited to longer-growing but high-demand produce like subtropical
fruits due not to location but to a strong warm current off the Gulf of Zinjin
that came in very close to shore and created a more or less subtropical
pocket. This, of course, had been allowed by those who had created the hex;
weather and climate were not of the natural sort on this world, but when they
saw that the water hex of Flotish had such currents designed in, they simply
made use of them.
By that evening he was within a few kilometers of the plantation nearest the
designated spot, and he stayed over with some very surprised and curious farm
supervisors that night so he d have the full next day for the quest. While the
field bosses were somewhat taken aback at a glib Glathrielian wearing clothes
and speaking like them, they were suckers for a good set of stories and even
worse suck-ers at cards and dice.
The next morning he saw the first Glathrielians he d seen since well, a very
long time ago. He had forgotten their rather exotic look, a unique yet
homogenized blend of just about every racial type on
Earth. Being of a near uni-formly brown skin, with a variety of Oriental
features yet with brown, black, and reddish hair was only the beginning of it.
One could look at anyone and see suggestions of somebody one thought was
familiar, yet the entire amalgam was something totally unique.
This time, though, they also seemed decidedly, well, odd.
There was no other way to explain it. True,
their tropical hex didn t really require clothing, but these people wore
nothing.
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Not amulets or paint or markings of any kind, nor earrings, nose rings,
bracelets, anklets nothing at all, men or women. They also seemed to let their
hair and, on the men, facial hair as well simply grow.
He couldn t under-stand why some of them didn t trip over all that hair or
strangle on it. Some of the shorter women seemed to have to wrap it around
themselves to keep it from dragging on the ground, and he had never seen men
with hair that long. Hair that, oddly, didn t seem to tangle or get matted.
Had he done that? He didn t remember doing it, but if he d al-tered them
significantly, the computer would have filled in the logical items which he d
left out but which might be re-quired for some reason.
Other things also bothered him. Their remarkable silence for one thing.
Watching them, it seemed at times as if there was some kind of communication
going on, judging from the gestures, the playful actions, the coordination
they ex-hibited, but aside from some grunts and occasional laughter they said
nothing.
He wondered if they were at all aware that they now worked the fields that
their distant ancestors had once owned. He watched as they seemed to have some
kind of silent prayer vigil before starting to work, then they went to it,
picking fruit and stacking it in neat piles every few bushes.
They have an almost unnatural ability to figure out just which fruit is ready
to be picked, one of the
Ambrezan su-pervisors commented to him.
But they don t fill baskets or containers, Brazil noted. They just pile it
all neatly.
They won t touch them. No Glathrielian will touch any-thing manufactured,
even a box. They even make several trips carrying their pay, which is a
small percentage of the crop, back to their home in
Glathriel in their arms.
What about that home? Don t they have some sort of village or whatever with
shelter?
No, they don t. Not as we understand it, anyway. They do have tribal lands
that they consider their home, but the few structures are very crude and very
basic and formed entirely from gathered dead wood and dropped leaves. They
don t build as such. The few crude structures tend to be shelters for the
babies and for bad weather. Mostly they sleep either out in the open or in
hollow trees, some caves, and shelters formed from fallen logs and the like.
They don t even build or keep fires, although if a thunderstorm comes along
and sets something off, they might use it until it goes out. They don t kill
unless something is trying to kill them and there is no other choice and
whatever that unfortunate animal is, they then eat it raw that same day.
They seem to eat okay from what I can see, Brazil noted. The women seem to
range from chubby to fat, and the men are built like bricks.
They eat a complex variety of things, some of which we, and perhaps you,
would find disgusting, but it seems the perfect balance for them. They make
great workers, though. No complaints, virtually no mistakes, and they won t
touch, let alone eat, anything they haven t picked themselves. They re always
good-humored in a childlike sort of way, and they re so placid, they don t
even swat flies that land on them.
How d you ever get them to work for you?
It s been this way since long before my time or my grandfather s time, too,
the Ambrezan supervisor replied. Only a few tribes will do it, but they ve
been doing it for-ever on the border plantations and, I
think, along the Zinjin Coast strip. The vast majority live way in the
interior, which is mostly swamp and
jungle with some volcanic areas. We used to try and survey them once upon a
time, I m told, but they can vanish like magic, and it just wasn t worth the
time and trouble. The fact is, we know very little about them beyond these
border tribes.
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