Exiles at the Well of Souls wos-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  A figure, seemingly a very small one, covered part of the grate, peering in. “Oh, yes! I see now,” the creature managed. Speaking the strange language was obviously a real problem for her. “We weel have to pool the grate away from them, so you get ovar near t’em, yes?”

  Mavra did as instructed. “Here all right?” she called.

  “Is fine,” the creature responded, and it was gone. No, it didn’t get up or crawl off, she decided. It just went away. She wondered more and more what her rescuers were. It didn’t matter. Anything was better than what she had, and at least one of them could speak her language, and they were obviously there to undertake a rescue.

  There was a pulling and tugging. The grate moved a little, then settled back down. They had obviously tied ropes or something to the thing and were trying to pull it away, but they were having difficulty with the weight. The bells and chimes grew much more intense. Mavra wondered if they were cursing or something. Even if they were, it sounded wonderfully melodic. They gave it another try. There suddenly seemed to be a lot of them, judging from the amount of tinkling bells she could hear, and they were obviously all on this one.

  A sudden, loud, single low note and they all pulled. The grate went up, rose straight up and balanced on the far edge. For a moment Mavra was afraid it would fall back down, and she understood why they had had her move. But their tugging continued, and the grate finally toppled outward and fell to the ground with a clanging sound.

  The shape returned above, then slowly seemed to float down into the cart until it stood on the floor not a meter in front of her, visible even in the darkness with Mavra Chang’s night vision.

  It was a tiny woman, a girl really, looking no more than nine or ten; about a meter tall, and finely and delicately featured, perfectly proportioned. Mavra decided in an instant that this was no child but a full-grown adult.

  She was very thin and light, weighing certainly no more than twelve to fifteen kilograms, if that. There were two very tiny breasts, almost undeveloped but somehow right. The face was the picture of girlish innocence, youthful and angelic—almost the perfect face, she thought.

  Then, suddenly, the girl seemed to glow. The light was real. It illuminated the entire interior and seemed to radiate from all parts of her body, a golden glow that was incredible and inexplicable.

  In the brightness the rest of the details of the newcomer became sharp and clear. Its skin was reddish in color, a pale echo of the glow; its hair, seemingly cut and styled, was set in a pageboy, the strands blue-black. Two tiny ears, both sharply pointed, jutted out from either side of her head, and her eyes seemed to have an eerie quality, like a cat’s, reflecting back the light. From her back, in neat pairs, grew four sets of wings, proportionately large to the body and totally transparent. The creature smiled, and walked toward Mavra Chang, palm up in greeting. As it moved forward there was a slight scraping sound. Mavra saw that it came from something very rigid extending from her backbone down to the floor itself. The protuberance was a much darker red than the girl’s complexion, and came to a nasty-looking point that made a slight mark in the wood.

  “ ’Allo, I am Veestaroo,” the creature said, and Mavra knew it was the same one who had spoken to her earlier.

  “Mavra Chang,” she responded. She looked at the still sleeping others. “The tall one is Renard, the fat one is Nikki.”

  “Reenard,” the creature repeated. “Neekee.”

  Mavra didn’t know if what she was about to say would mean anything to the creature, but she had to try. “They are on a drug called sponge,” she told Vistaru. “They are pretty far gone and need help fast. They can no longer help themselves.”

  The creature’s expression turned grim. She said something to herself in her native language, which, Mavra saw, came partly from within her and partly from a certain way that the wings were moved. There was no doubt, though, that the woman knew what sponge was.

  “We weel have to get t’em far away fast,” Vistaru told her. “And t’ey are so veree heavee.”

  Mavra understood the problem. It must have taken all of them to get that grate off.

  “I can get out on my own,” she told the creature. “Maybe I can be of some help outside.”

  The woman who could fly nodded, and Mavra started up the sides of the cart she knew so well with speed that astonished the creature. Climbing up over the top, Mavra did a flip and landed on the ground with a bouncy ease learned from jumping off two-storey ledges. She looked around, wishing again that her power pack worked.

  The sky had cleared a little, and some of the light from the great globular clusters shone down, giving the scene an eerie glow.

  She saw the two cyclopses lying there, one almost on top of the other, motionless. They appeared to be dead, but she couldn’t be sure. No matter what, she had new respect for those hard things that just had to be stingers. These little girls packed a real wallop.

  There were quite a number of rescuers—fifteen or twenty, anyway. They floated silently around, having no respect at all for the laws of gravity. Their wings made a slight humming sound that you could hear if you were close enough, but at any distance at all they were silent. They took to the air as their natural element—flitting, then hovering, then going off in another direction. Some were using their internal light sources now, and showed themselves to be a rainbow of colors. Some were reds and oranges, some greens, blues, browns, everything, and some were very dark while others were very light. Otherwise they all looked exactly alike. Some carried packs strapped to their bellies, obviously the source of the rope they’d used.

  Mavra turned from them back to the problem of the cart. If it could be upset, that would be easiest. But how to do it? She called to Vistaru, who floated easily up out of there and over to her.

  “Can you hook the ropes to this side of the cart?” she asked the creature. “Maybe if most pulled and a few of you and I pushed from the other side we could upset it.”

  Vistaru considered that, then floated up to a bright-blue companion hovering overhead. They talked in that music of theirs. The blue one hadn’t turned on its own illumination, but Vistaru exposed both, and Mavra saw with some surprise that it was a male. A male who, except for that one organ, seemed absolutely identical to the females. She thought of Renard. The perfect form for him, Mavra reflected.

  Vistaru returned. “Barissa say no, too moch dangar,” she told the human. “T’ere is bettar way. Is latch on cart back, see?”

  Mavra sighed and walked to the rear of the cart. There was a latch, a big wood-and-iron one, there obviously for loading sheep or something. Two of the creatures were working on it.

  Mavra turned to Vistaru. “What are you called?” she asked.

  “I tol’ you. Veestaroo,” she responded.

  Mavra shook her head. “No, no. I mean all of you. The”—she struggled for a word other than creature—“whole race of you.”

  The tiny pixie nodded understanding. “We are Lata,” she said. “At leased, t’at is what it comes out een Confedera-tion,” she added. “My name be,” there was a series of bell tones, “and the people be,” more tones, “in our talk.”

  Mavra nodded, and saw just how hard it was for the Lata to talk. She apparently strained to translate every word and remember its pronunciation and it was obvious that neither the grammar nor anything else was common between the human language and theirs.

  Vistaru seemed to sense this concern. “Not worree,” she assured the human. “We weel get t’em to help in time. An’ we weel be a-ble to talk more bet-tar soon.”

  Mavra wondered what that meant but let it pass. The first order of business was Renard and Nikki; after that, there would be time for her own problems.

  They managed to throw the latch, and it fell out and hit the ground. There was a sudden sharp series of bell tones which even Mavra interpreted as a warning. The two Lata hovering at the top of the cart pushed the back with an audible whack. It fell away and crashed down, forming a ramp. Pretty goo
d hinges for hand-forging, Mavra noted.

  She helped three Lata remove the unconscious bodies from the cart. The Lata male, Barissa, came over to her and motioned to Vistaru. He said something to her, and she nodded and turned to Mavra, who was thinking that sexual characteristics among the Lata weren’t very pronounced.

  “He say you can wake t’em op?” the translator asked.

  Mavra nodded, and they watched in some surprise as she pricked each one of them with her nail.

  “Nikki, can you hear me?” she asked.

  The girl nodded, eyes still closed.

  “You will get up and walk with me,” she instructed. The girl opened her eyes, got uncertainly to her feet, and stood there. “You will walk when I walk and stop when I stop and sit when I sit,” Mavra instructed.

  She did the same to Renard, noting with satisfaction that Nikki repeated her every movement, about a meter away.

  This seemed to excite the Lata. They tinkled and chimed all over. Vistaru came up to her.

  “How you do t’at?” she asked. “T’ey want to know if you have stingars in hands.”

  “Sort of,” Mavra replied, and they started off.

  * * *

  The trip was fairly easy. Mavra discovered that the top of the mountain range was also the border between the cyclopses’ hex, which the Lata called Teliagin “becous’ t’at is its name,” and the hex called Kromm. The change was amazing. There was still a chill in the air from the rain, and the wind had picked up to unpleasant proportions when they reached the border. No lines, guards, or sentinels stood there; not even a sign to mark the spot, yet one knew it was the border. It was like passing through a curtain.

  Suddenly the air was thick and muggy; it was so humid that Mavra was covered in perspiration in minutes. Insect sounds, vague and faint in Teliagin, were almost overpowering here, as if someone had suddenly cut on a giant loudspeaker. The air seemed thick, oddly scented, and slightly wrong somehow.

  “Not worree,” Vistaru assured her. “Deeferent, yes, but t’at is all: It weel not hurt you.”

  Maybe not, Mavra thought, but it was turning the caked mud back to real mud, and the ground itself got progressively moist, the vegetation almost jungle-like as they descended. At the bottom of the mountain was a swamp that seemed to stretch in all directions. The water didn’t appear very deep—perhaps fifty centimeters—but it was dark and dank and foul-smelling and almost certainly hid deep spots. The water seemed to be stagnant, and smelled it. Moss was everywhere.

  “Do we have to walk far through this?” she asked the Lata. “You can fly, but we can’t.”

  “Onlee short ways,” the pixie assured her. “Jost keep in back of me.”

  With that the creature turned her light back on—she apparently didn’t like to have it on all the time, and they had all taken turns in lighting the way for them—and did a very nice imitation of walking on top the water. Mavra knew she was flying, somehow, but the effect was doubly eerie. She hovered so close to the surface that the Lata’s stinger occasionally made a wake in the water.

  The mud became terrible, and the water did get deeper, deep enough so that it seeped into her boots and made them feel awful. Oh, well, what the hell, she thought philosophically. Back to your beginnings.

  They walked through the stuff for about an hour, until Mavra began to think that she was becoming one with the swamp. She was even beginning to get used to the odor, and that worried her. The thick growths thinned out. Even so, there was one last indignity, an underwater vine that caught her, and she went face down into, fortunately, very shallow muck.

  Dutifully, Renard and Nikki, who had not tripped on anything, fell face down, too, and it took a little effort to collect herself and get them up before they drowned.

  She used some of the water to get the muck out of her eyes, nose, and mouth, and, with Lata help, cleaned off the other two. It wasn’t much of a cleaning, though. They all looked more monstrous than any creature they’d yet seen on the Well World. Even her gift from Trelig, her horse’s tail, was so mud-caked it felt like there was somebody sitting on her rear end.

  Finally everything cleared. It was a strange transformation—from horrible swamp to calm sea. Vistaru told her to wait, and one Lata, probably Barissa, who seemed to be the leader, took off for what looked like a far-off clump of floating bushes.

  The sea, if it was a sea, was strangely beautiful. The sky was clear despite the oppressive humidity, and the great sky of the Well World, with its great multicolored gas clouds and bright stars, reflected an eerie, and yet magical glow on the waters.

  Suddenly she looked over to her left, sure she detected movement. She did. She stared in new wonder as one of the large clumps of bush seemed to break away and now head toward them, a bright-blue light shining atop it. The light, she knew, was Barissa.

  The bush proved to be a giant flower. It looked like a huge rose, closed, flanked by a great, thick green membranous platform.

  Barissa smiled and said something. She turned to Vistaru.

  “He say ol’ Macham is sleepee and grumblee bot he know the pro-blem and he weel tak you and the othars.”

  Mavra looked again at the creature. It was a bright orange, or would be if it were fully opened. From the center of the closed flower rose two stalks, like giant stalks of wheat. Following the Lata’s lead, she stepped up onto the green base of the creature. Nikki and Renard followed, and imitated her when she sat down, cross-legged, on the edge. Vistaru came over to her.

  “We will balance and take a break too. You just sit and ride. I hope you not get easee dizzee.”

  Mavra barely had time to wonder about that remark when she discovered its full force. The creature spun around slowly, then started moving out across the quiet lake. It seemed to move by this circular motion, and while the movement wasn’t tremendously fast, it was somewhat unsettling. Closing her eyes helped a little, but her inner-ear balance still conveyed the motion. She began feeling a little nauseated. After an hour or so she was simultaneously wishing she were dead and afraid she was dying. She was very seasick.

  Dawn broke after what seemed like an eternity. She continued gagging occasionally and watched the two hypnoed people, whom by this time she envied, imitate her. Vistaru walked calmly around to her.

  “You are steel sick?” she asked needlessly.

  “You better believe it!” was all Mavra Chang could manage.

  The Lata radiated concern. “Not worree much more. We are almos’ t’ere.”

  By this point Mavra didn’t care if they ever got “t’ere,” wherever “t’ere” was, but she managed to look around her for the first time.

  They were no longer alone.

  All over, by the thousands, other flowers were moving, spinning, dancing in a great ballet on the waters. They created myriad colors and color combinations, graceful and particularly resplendent now that they opened to the brilliant rays of the sun. In other circumstances, Mavra might even have enjoyed the show.

  The Krommian they rode was slowing now, to her considerable relief. It, too, had opened over them, forming a curtain of brilliant browns and oranges. The great stalks, she realized, were eyes—long, oval, curious brown eyes with black pupils that looked so strange it was as if a cartoonist had drawn them on. They were independent of one another and sometimes looked in different directions. Of the core, the “head” of the creature, little could be seen. A pulpy bright-yellow mass, it appeared, more like thick straight hair than the center of a flower. The spinning had slowed enough now that she actually managed to wonder if these creatures were really plants or some sort of exotic animal.

  The creature finally stopped spinning entirely and drifted slowly toward something. This didn’t stop the rest of the world from spinning, but it helped a great deal. They had traveled a great distance, that was for certain. Whatever means of locomotion these—people?—used, it shot them in the direction they wanted to go at many times their rate of spin.

  Mavra crawled around sligh
tly, making sure that her imitators wouldn’t fall off doing the same, and looked in the direction they were drifting. She could see an island—a tall but not very large rock outcrop in the middle of the sea. There appeared to be an artificial cave of some sort in the face, jet-black and without perspective.

  She suddenly realized it was a black hexagon.

  Vistaru came around. “We dock up close to the Zone Gate,” she said enigmatically. “You most tell the othars to go in the Gate.” She pointed to the rapidly approaching blackness.

  “Not me?” she asked.

  The pixie shook her head. “No, not now. Latar. The Krommeen ambassadar say no to you for now.”

  Mavra nodded toward the huge cave or hole or whatever it was—it looked curiously two-dimensional. “That thing will help my friends?”

  Vistaru nodded. “It is a gate. It weel tak’ t’em to Zone. T’ey weel be put through the Well of Souls. T’ey will become people of t’is planet, like me.”

  Mavra considered this. “You mean—it’ll change them into Lata?”

  The creature shrugged. “Maybee. If not Lata, sometheeng. No more sponge. Memory back, all bettar.”

  Mavra wasn’t quite ready to accept that, but she had to act as if it were true. It was certain she couldn’t help them.

  Seeing Mavra’s doubt, and realizing it came from ignorance of the Well World and its principles, Vistaru said, “Evereebodee who come from othar world t’ey go t’ru the Well. Come out all changed. Even me. I once as you. Went t’ru Well, woke up as a Lata.”

  Mavra almost believed her now. It explained why the creature knew her language. But that brought up another question.

  “Why not me, too, then?” she asked.

  Vistaru shrugged. “Ordars. T’ey say you are not Mavra Chang. T’ey say you some sort of bad person.”

  Mavra opened her mouth in surprise, then closed it again. “That’s ridiculous!” she exclaimed. “Why would they—whoever they are—think something like that?”