Quest for the Well of Souls

by Jack L. Chalker

  That thought didn't bother him. "I'd have once said what Chang did was impossible," he pointed out. "I'd have said the Well of Souls, the Well World, Makiem, and all the rest were impossible, too. Besides, I've been reading the histories. A little over two centuries ago a Northerner did make it to the South, here. If it can be done that way, the same thing can be done in reverse."

  She nodded. "I know, the Diviner and the Rel, or something. That whole story is so mucked up in distortion and legend, few believe it anyway. You know that. There was also supposed to be a Markovian then—still around a million or more years after the rest of his race died out—and the Well was supposedly opened, entered, and then sealed for all time. If you believe those kinds of fairy tales, you'll believe anything!"

  He considered what she said. "Well, back where I came from, there were myths about weird, intelligent creatures in the dim past—centaurs and mermaids and pixies and fairies and flying winged horses and minotaurs and more. I have seen every one of those here. This Markovian—this Nathan Brazil, as he was called, from my sector of space—was a real person. There are records and descriptions of him in places like that plant-research center, Czill. Those people are not likely to accept fairy tales. And Serge Ortega believes in him, even claims to have known him."

  "Ortega!" she sniffed. "A scoundrel. A prisoner in Zone because of his own quest for immortality, and centuries older than any Ulik has a right to be. He's a senile old man."

  "Ancient he is," Trelig agreed, "but senile he is not. Remember, he's the one who has kept Mavra Chang on ice and protected, until such time as he finds his own solution to this Northern mess. He's the one who brought up that Diviner and Rel business. He was there!"

  She tried to change the subject. "You know, it'll be our season in less than two weeks," she pointed out. "Have you cleared everything for it? I'm already starting to feel the urges."

  Trelig nodded absently. "We've got twenty brats now. The worst curse of the war—this extreme fertility the Well imposed to replace the dead." But he continued to look out into the night, even though New Pompeii was now obscured by the western mountains. "Mavra Chang," she heard him mutter under his breath.

  Burodir hissed in disgust. "Damn it! If she bothers you so much, why not do something about her? You're supposed to be a big plotter and dirty thinker. What would you do if some slip of a cripple was a threat to your power here?"

  His great reptilian head cocked slightly as he considered her challenge. "But killing her wouldn't be enough," he responded. "No, I have to know what sort of things that computer put into her, and how much of it she's revealed to anyone else." His mind raced now. "A kidnapping, though. She's helpless to resist, given the situation she is in, and she's even isolated from Ortega's meddling. A kidnapping and a thorough hypno job in some high-tech hex that could be bought or blackmailed. Of course!"

  "It took you all these years to figure that out?" his wife responded sarcastically.

  He didn't recognize the tone. "Nine years to get a position here, almost the same to get the diplomatic mess straight, to repair and rebuild," he replied seriously. "Plus all the work on the Northern problem. Priorities. But—why not?"

  "Want me to arrange it?" Burodir asked, thankful that, perhaps, this obsession could finally be cleared up. "Makiem will have to be well out of the affair on the surface, or we undo the diplomatic ties and bring Ortega and the rest down on us. But, it can be done."

  Trelig nodded idly. "Mavra Chang!" he breathed.

  South Zone

  There were 780 races in 780 hexes in the Well World's Southern Hemisphere. In each self-contained little world was at least one Zone Gate—a yawning hexagonal blackness that would instantly bring any of the hemisphere's creatures passing through it to an area around the South Pole known as Zone. Around a huge central Well—the input staging area for Markovians who had taken part in the great experiment to repopulate the stars by becoming lesser creatures of their own design, living, reproducing, dying so the children could go out again to a universe their parents had abandoned—were 780 small areas. Airlocks and atmospheric controls adapted each to one of the 780 life forms of the South; they were all connected by long corridors.

  Here and here alone, all the races of the South could meet. Here most technology worked—as did magic, too, for some of the races had powers given by the Well to simulate some condition on the real planets their races were designed to inhabit. However, high-tech pistols would not fire, a diplomatic nicety.

  Zone, too, was halved, with one half for the water races and the other for the land races. But high-tech hexes had long ago rigged intercoms among them all, and it was here that senior ambassadors with translators could conduct interhex business, try and keep the peace, deal with common problems, work out trade negotiations and the like.

  Not all the embassies were manned, or had ever been. Some hexes remained complete mysteries, trafficking in nothing to no one. One such was the snowbound, mountainous hex of Gedemondas, where the war had ended in a fiery display as the spaceship's engine module plunged into a valley in full sight of the warring parties. It exploded as it pierced a thin floor of solidified lava masking volcanic magma. Other creatures, such as those Antor Trelig would once have called "human," also went unrepresented. The Glathriel, for instance, lost a war with their nontech neighbors, the Ambreza, who had secured a Northern Hemisphere gas that reduced the humans to the most basic primitive tribalism and then took their hex. The Ambreza controlled both Zone Gates, and made certain that, if humanity rose again, it would do so in ways they, not the humans, chose.

  Ambassadors came and went in the 679 currently manned offices. Time went on, people grew old, or they got tired of the monastic life the embassies imposed, or they got promoted within their own hexes, which were their countries.

  All but one—the ambassador from Ulik, a hex that lay along the Equatorial Barrier. Ulik was a high-tech hex, but one with a harsh, desert environment. Its people were great reptiles, snakelike to five or more meters beyond the waist, with humanoid torsos to which were attached three pairs of muscular arms with broad hands, the bottom four on crablike ball sockets. Their heads were squarish, thick, and both males and females had huge walruslike mustaches. Egg-layers who nursed their young when hatched, to non-Ulik eyes the only difference between males and females was the breast between each pair of arms on the female.

  Serge Ortega was a male, and an Entry. Long ago he had been a freighter pilot for the Com who, old and bored, had unknowingly opened up an ancient Markovian Well Gate that had transported him to the Well World, which had in turn transformed him into a Ulik. He liked being a Ulik; the Well, while never changing one's memories or basic personality, made you feel comfortable and normal as whatever creature it made of you. Thus, Ortega was still the scoundrel, pirate, freebooter, and manipulator he'd been before.

  The Ulik usually lived for about a century; none had ever lived past a century and a half. Serge Ortega, however, was already over three hundred years old, and he looked about fifty. He had blackmailed a race capable of magic into giving him immortality, but that, too, had its price. Such spells were effective only inside the hex of the casters or in Zone. Since the only way out of Zone was back to the nonmagical Ulik, Orgeta was a prisoner in the embassy, but an active one. Zone was his world and he made the most of it.

  In his time there he'd foiled many plots, helped defuse several wars, combined hexes into effective alliances, and, by fair means or foul, learned from his bugs, blackmail, and agents pretty much of everything that happened in the South. Data reached him in mountains of paper, in reports, computer printouts, and photographs. He lived in quarters behind his huge office, with its communications devices, computers, and other marvels giving him the data and the means of correlating it.

  In his own way, by his own labors and unique position, he was the closest thing to a head of government the Southern Hemisphere had—a Chairman or coordinator. And for every favor done, eventually a favor was asked i
n return. Some liked him, some admired him, many hated and feared him—but he was there and everyone had almost begun to take him for granted. He was de facto Chairman of the Southern Hex Council, an informal body of ambassadors called by intercom when matters of extreme gravity, such as the long-dead wars, threatened them all.

  And now he sat, coiled on his serpentine body, rocking slightly back and forth, looking things over.

  One report among all the others caused him to pause. It was the Ambreza's annual report on Mavra Chang, the one item he hated to see.

  Serge Ortega in his time, and always for what he believed to be the best of motives, had lied, cheated, stolen, and committed practically every other offense. Since he always believed he was working in a good cause—whether true or not—he regretted none of it, felt no pity or remorse.

  Except in this matter.

  His mind returned to the time a new satellite had suddenly appeared around the Well World. One ship, launched from it, had approached too close to the Well over hexes where the ship's technology just wouldn't work. The craft divided into nine modules, and each came down in a different hex. Sometime later a second ship, one not designed to break up, managed a dead-stick landing in the North, where the locals had shoved the passengers through Zone Gates to get them to the South where they, being carbon-based life, obviously belonged.

  That Northern ship had carried one Antor Trelig, would-be Emperor of a new interstellar Rome controlled by a home-built miniature version of the Well World, and Ben Yulin, his engineer-associate and the son of the sponge syndicate's number-two man. Trelig was number one. Also on that ship had been Gil Zinder, the scientist whose incredible mind had actually solved the basic principles of the Well World without even knowing of the Well's existence. He had built the great self-aware computer, Obie. They had come disguised as innocent victims—something Obie had managed—and they were through the Well before their true identities had been revealed.

  Gil's naïve and pudgy fourteen-year-old daughter, Nikki, had been in the second ship along with Renard, a rebellious guard. Both were hooked on the mind-destroying, body-distorting drug called sponge. And there was Mavra Chang.

  He sighed. Mavra Chang. Feelings of guilt and pity arose whenever he thought of her, and he tried to think of her as little as possible.

  With the Northern ship barred to them, some Well World nations had allied to seize the engine module in the South. The coldly inhuman Yaxa butterflies, the resourceful high-tech metamorphs of the Lamotien, and Ben Yulin, now a minotaur living in Dasheen's male paradise, had marched and killed and conquered. The froglike Makiem, the little satyrs of Agitar, who rode great winged horses and had the ability to store in their bodies and discharge at will thousands of volts, and the pterodactylic Cebu had marched and triumphed and killed in their own war. They were confident in Antor Trelig's ability to lead them back to New Pompeii and Obie.

  All so long ago, he reflected.

  He remembered Renard, the guard, cured of sponge by the Well when it turned him into an Agitar. How the man had rebelled when he found he was still serving his old master, Antor Trelig! He then sought the woman who had never given up the struggle to survive on this hostile world and had kept him alive until he was rescued.

  Odd that Mavra Chang affected him so, Ortega thought. He had never met her, and quite possibly never would. But he owed her, and he could repay that debt only by inflicting misery. He was the one who had dispatched the small party to Gedemondas, high in the silent mountains, where the engine pods lay. Whoever reached them first would get the one thing the Well World had not the resources nor the skills to manufacture. The team consisted of two Lata, flying pixies, because they were friendly to him and he knew one well, Renard on his great pegasus Doma, and Mavra Chang, because, as a qualified pilot, she would be the only one able to recognize and evaluate the engines.

  And she had completed her mission, he reflected, as he did every year when that report came by. She had witnessed the destruction of the great engines. Along the route, she was captured by fanatical great cats of Olborn. Their unique power was derived from six stones that somehow allowed them to turn their enemies into mulelike beasts of burden. Unfortunately they'd done a halfway job with Mavra before the others rescued her.

  He felt a certain satisfaction that Olborn had been practically destroyed in the war, and its own leaders turned into little mules.

  Some satisfaction, but not much: a ship lay intact to the north in far-off, unreachable Uchjin. Furthermore, Obie was very much alive and active, though currently held captive by the unwitting Well of Souls computer, which had concluded that Obie was to be its replacement, that a new master race had finally arisen. It kept trying to give Obie control of the master equations stabilizing all matter and energy in the finite universe. But that was like feeding the sum total of human knowledge to an ant—all at once. Obie just couldn't handle the input.

  So the Well wouldn't let Obie go, and Obie could not even talk to the Well. That stalemate had been unbreakable for many years now.

  But there was a way for Obie to break contact. Obie knew of it—and Serge Ortega knew, too. To do so would require a good deal of modification deep in Obie's core. But as long as Obie was tied up in the "defense" mode, it could not create its own technicians to go down there, for it couldn't open its own door. Only Trelig or Yulin knew the words to cancel the safeguards, for they alone created them—and the passwords were not in Obie's conscious circuits.

  Ortega had considered, as had others, kidnapping Yulin or Trelig and hypnoing the code out of them. But both had undergone extensive hypno burns to lock the magic words away from everyone, even from themselves, until they were once again physically on New Pompeii.

  And that thought brought him back to Mavra Chang. Like Yulin and Trelig, she was a qualified pilot. As a professional, she was the best of the three, and she understood the sophisticated systems of the downed ship and could possibly get it aloft. More important, she also knew the code Trelig used to get by the killer satellites of New Pompeii that still guarded it.

  At first, Ortega had kept her under wraps and out of the Well because of the war. Then, when it all came apart in Gedemondas, there she was—thanks to the Olbornians a freak, a one-of-a-kind creature on a world with 1560 types of creature. And yet he still had to keep her from the Well, which would have cured her physical problems, because he had no say in what she would become. She might easily awaken as a creature under the control of a Trelig, or a Yulin, or some ambitious third party who suddenly realized what a prize it possessed. Or perhaps she'd turn into a water-being, unable to pilot when the need arose, or something that could not move or had no individuality.

  There were too many variables.

  So he did the only thing he could do. There was the awful possibility that Antor Trelig or Ben Yulin, or someone they could enlist, would find a way to the North—and a way through the diplomatic tangle—to get that ship moved to a high-tech hex and properly set up for a takeoff. Against that, he had to keep her under his control, in that wretched condition.

  He had made life somewhat easier for her. He'd put her down in Glathriel, the hex of the primitive, tribal humans. It had a tropical climate, and was watched over by the friendly but wary Ambreza, who resembled large, cigar-smoking beavers. She had her own specially designed compound, and once a month a ship brought supplies in forms she could manage. He had also hypno-burned her, so that she considered her current form natural and normal.

  Ortega had hoped for a solution to the Northern-ship problem long before now, hoped that it would be solved or that the ship would be destroyed. Neither had happened, however. He had condemned Mavra to life as a thing, not for the short period originally intended, but for a long, long time.

  He took out the thick folder with her name on it to add the new brief form to it. As always, he couldn't help glancing through the file.

  She had been born on a frontier world that had gone Com. Her parents had fought the conversion an
d been condemned. Only the tiny five-year-old Mavra, so small she was easy to smuggle out, had been rescued by friends of the family. They had surgically altered her appearance to resemble the Oriental features and coloration of her stepmother, the freighter captain Maki Chang. After a lonely eight-year childhood in space, she'd been abandoned on a primitive, savage world at thirteen when her stepmother was arrested. She had coped, becoming a beggar—by sixteen, the queen of the beggars—and totally self-sufficient.

  She had been raised in a freighter, though, and craved a life in space. Trying to raise enough money to get out, to get to Pilot's School and earn a rating, she'd sold her body in spaceport dives. In due course, she'd met and married a spacer captain who made his real money at sophisticated burglary. He'd given her that life in space, a ship, a rating, and a career in burglary along with a thin veneer of culture. When sponge syndicate bosses killed her husband, tiny, beautiful Mavra Chang tracked down and killed them all, one by one. She then continued alone on her freighter and on her burglaries.

  Because of that record, she was picked by a moderate Comworld to represent them at Trelig's unveiling of Obie's powers. Hired was the better word—she was hired to get Nikki Zinder out, in order to break Trelig's hold over the older scientist.

  Trelig had run all the spectators through Obie, giving them all horse's tails so they would be living proof of his power. But Obie had also given Mavra the means and methods to allow escape with Nikki. She almost made it, getting away with Nikki, a ship, and even the computer's formula for an arresting agent that would break the sponge syndicate's stranglehold on its addicts.

  But Trelig had moved up the test, whereupon they had all been translated to the Well World along with New Pompeii, and there they crashed.

  A tremendous tribute to her ancestors, Ortega thought approvingly. She always coped with adversity, never quit in the face of impossible odds, never admitted defeat—and she always came through.