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facilities, hope-fully to stabilize them for shipment to a high-tech land and
ward, and to speak with some of the refugees and the ship's captain, who
looked kind of like a giant scorpion with hair.
She knew Josich only by the incredible reputation and the stories and legends
back home, but they paled in com-parison to what had apparently taken place
here. In little more than one year
one year!
Josich had killed a ton of her new kind, married the perfect puppet, wiped
out the entire royal family, and co-mounted the throne. It hardly mattered
that Josich was now an Empress and not an Em-peror; hell, it probably was the
only variety the son of a bitch had in centuries of war and revolution.
Had anyone ever succeeded in a war of conquest here on the Well World? Without
access to history records, it was impossible to know, but it didn't seem as if
it could be sus-tained. Even if the Well allowed it, you'd need to be like
that ship out there able to operate in all three mediums of tech-nology and
both underwater and on the ground, and pref-erably the air as well, and in
climates probably ranging from desert to glacial, against races hell,
civilizations
born to those conditions and shaped by their original designers and by
subsequent evolution to do it even better.
Tann Nakitt wondered how you'd conquer enough of the Well World to say you'd
had it, and, when you did, how you'd hold it together over any measure of
time. What kind of intervention might this great Well computer do if
popula-tions started going down dramatically in a Josich-style war?
Josich was an insane genius, and his relatives were prob-ably much the same,
but sooner or later there would be some kind of method in the rage, some kind
of long-range objec-tives. She was already in top form; maybe it had already
begun. What would be the prize here? And what would she do with it once she
had it?
Still, it might well be all too easy for Josich the Emperor Hadun. These
people could conceive of local conflicts but never a war of conquest. They had
no officers, armies, joint commands, or training systems to hold back a tide
once it reached a certain point, and few from the stars who could even explain
to them what they lacked. Josich already had to have greater objectives in
mind, particularly if the Empress knew how hard it would be to hold such an
empire over time. Although it would cause untold suffering and loss
of pride and honor, the worst thing the other nations could do to her was not
to fight but to surrender.
So you conquer the island nearby and the immediate ocean, and then maybe you
spread out, and within a few years you have the whole ocean and maybe, just
maybe, a continent or two. Then what?
The only thing in the whole Well World that Josich needed to fear, the only
thing the old Emperor had feared back in the Realm, had at least followed him
here. Tann Nakitt wondered if Josich knew. Probably.
They would have those kind of records in Zone, although it wasn't clear how
Josich would have had the sheer time to think of that. Sooner or later the new
Empress would find out, though. Tann Nakitt didn't want to face down Josich,
but she'd love to have a little viewing camera there when Josich, now the
Empress
Hadun, found out that Jeremiah Wong Kincaid was somewhere here, too, as
single-minded in his dedicated objective as Josich was to hers . . .
By the gods, she just had to get into this damned war somehow!
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Kalinda
ARI LOOKED AT THE PAGES OF CUNEIFORM-STYLE CHARACTERS
and decided that he probably would never be able to learn it. Although it was
actually printed by some kind of electro-magnetic process on a stiff sheet
that obviously was imper-vious to cold saltwater, no two of the little
squiggles looked alike to him. How were you supposed to even start?
Not, of course, that he could read actual writing even back in the Realm, but
very few people could or needed to. You talked to the computer, the computer
talked to you. You wanted drama, it was performed holographically all around
you. You wanted information, the best research systems in the universe were at
your beck and call. There were even just readings, from fiction to news, with
no pictures if you were on the move or had some time to kill. For most people,
except historians, archaeologists, people like that, and others who might be
dealing with primitive new races, there simply wasn't any use for it. It was
like being skillful with a broad-sword. At one time that was a good way of
staying alive and not becoming a victim. In the Realm it had been, at best,
impractical, and at worse, highly messy.
This book, however, did have things of interest. For one thing, the numbers
for some reason had stuck in his head.
Interesting souvenir of that link, not nearly as odd as having Ming along for
the ride, but useful. He could look at the map and count and then check the
guide to the races of the Well against the numbers. Reading the descriptions
was out of the question, but there were some impressive photos on metal that
had a holographic look and feel, showing each race. A few questions of his
ever-present police "associates," as they preferred to be called, as opposed
to jailers which they were told him which race went with which number. He was
impressed that just about all of the cops could read this stuff.
By now he'd had the history and briefing of what Josich and his cronies had
already accomplished with the willing help of certain native rulers and races.
It impressed him as it had impressed them, and made him understand all the
more just why Kincaid had hunted them down for so long and so fanatically, and
also why he hadn't yet succeeded in pol-ishing the bastards off.
It had looked so simple when he had his first interview with Shissik. Debrief,
get him together with this "other," find out what could be found out, then
probably get them both jobs, although what jobs they could do without
be-coming literate that anybody from the Realm might enjoy doing wasn't clear.
In fact, those faceless superiors had kept him away from them and the other
and stuck in endless repetitive debriefings for months now, and basically
as-signing him menial tasks in and around the police build-ing, never without
escort. Finally they'd enrolled him in the equivalent of basic adult education
classes, intended for people who either hadn't had much due to circumstances
or who were still trying to figure out "big" and "little" in the flash cards.
He'd learned a lot, including how to write and recognize his name, as well as
day-to-day facts and even some history, but reading had so far completely
eluded him. It was damned frustrating.
Take this basic kid's anthropology book, kind of "The Peoples and Lands of the
World," local style. Gibberish. And it was supposedly at about a second grade
level. Still, it was useful when you had some help; and because, even though
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