06. The Sea is Full of Stars by Jack L. Chalker

Author:Jack L. Chalker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-01-31T23:22:59+00:00

Ambora

IT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO HURT.

They said it would be no different than the teleportation to the Well World itself; a sense of darkness, unconsciousness, and then you'd wake up somewhere else in a new native habitat with the basics necessary to survive. From that point, you'd be on your own.

The pain had been enormous. She remembered the pain, as if her head were under horrible attack and all its blood vessels exploded. It was the kind of pain whose memory lasted a lifetime in nightmares, and for some time its echoes would cause nervous caution or even possible panic.

And then she'd come to with those echoes surrounding her, come to and find only questions.

Who had said that there would be no pain? Tele— The very term confused her. It was gibberish, meaningless, and even those fragments of memory faded as a dream fades upon awakening from the deepest of sleeps, leaving her with only the memory of that pain and total confusion.

She awoke high on a cliff overlooking a vast saltwater ocean that seemed to have no end. The cliffs were as sheer as might be imagined from nature, and they rose perhaps a kilometer above her and even more below her to a flat volcanic outcrop of rock and vegetation that jutted out into the sea.

She was on a small outcrop from that cliff barely large enough for her reclining body, with no ladder or trail or any other indication of how she'd gotten there, or, more to the point, how she'd get off.

Who was she? What was she? She wasn't sure what frightened her more, the situation she found herself in or the fact that she had no memories of her past, not one single personal memory.

She got to her feet, nervous about the drop, then did a self-examination. The discovery that she was, in fact, female was a surprise, although had she found herself a male it would have made an equal impact. Whatever sense of self she had, it contained none of those rocks that others might take for granted. The breasts were large and firm, but something in her subconscious said that they weren't quite right, although she had no idea why. If she leaned forward, they did not hang at all; it was as if they were attached all the way, which, in fact, they were, with some kind of connective tissue. This created an extremely streamlined figure that tapered down to an impossibly small waist flanked by long, muscular legs that provided sure balance and were attached at a hip that allowed her to not only bring her face down close to the ground if she wanted, but also to swivel the torso effortlessly almost sideways. Her natural sense of balance was startling to her; whatever fear she'd felt at the height or standing up had already fled.

The arms were thin and ended in hands with extremely long fingers, three of them, and an opposable thumb almost as long as the rest, all

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