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You're back, even if not quite as you were."
"I, uh-" Terry reached down and shook his head. "I'll be damned. I always
wondered what it felt like to have one of those."
Gus cleared his throat, which was a somewhat menacing sound although not
intended that way. "Um, Terry. You remember this?"
He went over and looked down at the baby and smiled. "Yeah, I do. Whose is it,
anyway? I'm not my own kid's father and mother, am I? That would be too much!"
"No, I'm sterile. I have to be," Brazil assured her. "Remember your diversion
at the meteor back in the Amazon?"
"Oh, him! Damn! Still, he is cute. Let me hold him!"
"Gladly," Gus responded, handing over the child. "Um-do you remember me,
Terry?" "Yeah. You could flip in and out, like, so folks couldn't see you. For
a while you were my only real friend."
"Terry, that's Gus," Mavra told her. "I'm Alama, and that tall furry creature
with the horn on his head is Lori."
Terry gasped. "Oh, my God! Gus? Lori?" He laughed, and it wasn't at all like
Brazil's laugh. If one knew both Terry and Nathan, one could see Terry in
every move and hear her in every spoken word. Finally, still gently cradling
the baby, he said, "So we're all kind of scrambled up here, and we're all
standing here before a talking turnip with tentacles and the queen of the
Amazons. If I ever got this story on the air, they'd lock me up in an
asylum."
"Well, that brings up our situation," Brazil said, finding even himself a bit
disconcerted talking to, well, himself. "We have four-actually, now
five-people left here, all of whom have problems. The child was born on the
Well World to a creature who'd been processed. Because of the laws and limits
of probability, the only way I could send you, Terry, and the baby back
without making a real mess of things would be to Earth at a point in time
after the gate closed. Nine months plus a few days, to be exact. As far as
reality was concerned, you'd have spent the whole time as you'd originally
planned, in the Amazon jungle with the People. That's the way the math runs
here. Terry alone I could deal with in any way I pleased, but the baby
complicates it beyond belief. From your standpoint, you wouldn't have made
that last jump. Instead, you would have stopped short. You wouldn't remember
anything that's happened here, and you would have spent nine months with the
People and had the baby with them."
"The baby's a boy, so you'd have to give it up to one of the regular tribes or
leave the People," Mavra pointed out. "I'd leave," Terry said flatly. "I
know." Brazil told her. "But you would never go back to civilization. You'd
join one of the tribes there, and both you and the boy would remain with them.
You know that if you ever went back to civilization, you'd be a freak, a
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ten-minute story for two or three days on your own old network, and then that
would be that. You'd stay, you'd have many more children, and you'd grow old
watching them grow up as members of the Amazonian tribe."
"That's not much of a future," Terry noted. "It's a choice. If you stay here,
you'll be racially Glathrielian, but you won't be rewired again. What limited
powers you can use without that, you will retain. Your baby will be safe, too.
I'll see to that. I'm going to keep tinkering with that bunch until I get them
right! But they've got a long way to go even to get beyond the Amazonian stage
themselves."
"You're saying it's jungle or swamp? My choice? Some choice!"
"Not necessarily. I'm going to attempt something that is very, very difficult
here. I've never done it before, but there's no reason it can't be done. In
fact, in theory it should be easier than most other things around here because
it's built into the old mechanism. When we started off here, the hex
attributes were symmetrical. High-tech to semitech to nontech in repeating
radial patterns. Over time, as races proved out, we moved them out to the
worlds and built new races that often required different limitations than the
previous tenants. Over time it became a jumbled mess like today. But the
mechanism for switching them around is still there, still accessible. The
effect will be so unnoticed in most places that it'll take some time to
discover it's been done. Only one of them will know right off, and it'll most
likely destroy their current civilization. As far as I'm concerned, it's
worth bringing them down a notch. Anyway, they're clever people. They'll
survive."
Mavra stared at him. "Nathan? What are you going to do?"
"After we make a few adjustments in the Glathrielian Way, ones that will start
them on a new track, I'm going to upgrade it from nontech to semitech. Since
doing this would cause the Ambrezans to contemplate genocide, I'm going to
downgrade the Ambrezan hex to semi-tech as well. By the time the Glathrielians
rise, the Ambrezans will have reworked their own system to adjust. They're
agriculturally based, anyway; they won't suffer in the long run from this." He
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