"I think you might term this the capital city," Thorvald answered. "In
relation to the mainland, we're on an island well out to sea--westward."
"How did we get here?" That climb in the slab, the stream underground....
Had it been an interior river running under the bed of the sea? But
Shann was not prepared for the other's reply.
"By wishing."
"By _what_?"
Thorvald nodded, his expression serious. "They wished us here. Listen,
Lantee, when you jumped down to mix it with that fork-tailed thing, did
you wish you had the wolverines with you?"
Shann thought back; his memories of what had occurred before that battle
were none too clear. But, yes, he had wished Taggi and Togi present at
that moment to distract the enraged beast.
"You mean I wished them?" The whole idea was probably a part of the
Wyvern jargon of dreaming and he added, "Or did I just dream
everything?" There was the bandage on his arm, the soreness under that
bandage. But also there had been Logally's lash brand back in the
cavern, which had bitten into his flesh with the pain of a real blow.
"No, you weren't dreaming. You happened to be tuned in one of those
handy little gadgets our lady friends here use. And, so tuned in, your
desire for the wolverines being pretty powerful just then, they came."
Shann grimaced. This was unbelievable. Yet there were his meetings with
Logally and Trav. How could anyone rationally explain them? And how had
he, in the beginning, been jumped from the top of the cliff on the
island of his marooning into the midst of an underground flood without
any conscious memory of an intermediate journey?
"How does it work?" he asked simply.
Thorvald laughed. "You tell me. They have these disks, one to a Wyvern,
and they control forces with them. Back there on the beach we
interrupted a class in such control; they were the novices learning
their trade. We've stumbled on something here which can't be defined or
understood by any of our previous standards of comparison. It's frankly
magic, judged by our terms."
"Are we prisoners?" Shann wanted to know.
"Ask me something I'm sure of. I've been free to come and go within
limits. No one's exhibited any signs of hostility; most of them simply
ignore me. I've had two interviews, via this mind-reading act of theirs,
with their rulers, or elders, or chief sorceresses--all three titles
seem to apply. They ask questions, I answer as best I can, but sometimes
we appear to have no common meeting ground. Then I ask some questions,
they evade gracefully, or reply in a kind of unintelligible double-talk,
and that's as far as our communication has progressed so far."
"Taggi and Togi?"
"Have a run of their own and as far as I can tell are better satisfied
with life than I am. Oddly enough, they respond more quickly and more
intelligently to orders. Perhaps this business of being shunted around
by the disks has conditioned them in some way."
"What about these Wyverns? Are they all female?"
"No, but their tribal system is strictly matriarchal, which follows a
pattern even Terra once knew: the fertile earth mother and her
priestesses, who became the witches when the gods overruled the
goddesses. The males are few in number and lack the power to activate
the disks. In fact," Thorvald laughed ruefully, "one gathers that in
this civilization our opposite numbers have, more or less, the status of
pets at the best, and necessary evils at the worst. Which put _us_ at a
disadvantage from the start."
"You think that they won't take us seriously because we are males?"
"Might just work out that way. I've tried to get through to them about
danger from the Throgs, telling them what it would mean to them to have
the beetle-heads settle in here for good. They just brush aside the
whole idea."
"Can't you argue that the Throgs are males, too? Or aren't they?"
The Survey officer shook his head. "That's a point no human can answer.
We've been sparring with Throgs for years and there have been libraries
of reports written about them and their behavior patterns, all of which
add up to about two paragraphs of proven facts and hundreds of surmises
beginning with the probable and skimming out into the wild fantastic.
You can claim anything about a Throg and find a lot of very intelligent
souls ready to believe you. But whether those beetle-heads squatting
over on the mainland are able to answer to 'he,' 'she,' or 'it,' your
solution is just as good as mine. We've always considered the ones we
fight to be males, but they might just as possibly be amazons. Frankly,
these Wyverns couldn't care less either; at least that's the impression
they give."
"But anyway," Shann observed, "it hasn't come to 'we're all girls
together' either."
Thorvald laughed again. "Not so you can notice. We're not the only
unwilling visitor in the vicinity."