Exiles at the Well of Souls wos-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  Vistaru shrugged. “T’ey say t’ey already met Mavra Chang, and Reenard, and Neekee. T’ey say you are fakars.”

  Mavra started to respond, then thought better of it and sat down. She was mad as hell. It was the crowning touch to her being on this crazy world in the first place.

  Somebody was going to pay for this.

  South Zone

  “They certainly look like the same people,” Vardia said in some amazement.

  Serge Ortega nodded, looking at the two nearly comatose people lying on the floor in front of him. “That they do. Doctor?”

  They were in the Zone clinic, and Dr. Muhar, the Ambreza who looked like a giant beaver, was examining Renard and Nikki Zinder.

  “I wish I knew what kind of drug they’d been administered,” the doctor said. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. But it’s brain-localized; the other infection isn’t.”

  Ortega’s busy eyebrows went up. “Other infection?”

  The Ambreza nodded. “Oh yes. It seems to have infested every cell of their bodies. Some sort of enzyme, it looks like, and quite parasitic. There is evidence of tissue breakdown everywhere, and it’s continuing at a fairly steady rate. Would you recognize this sponge if you saw it?”

  The other two both shook their heads in the negative. “We have both seen the effects of it, long ago,” Vardia told the physician, “but the pure stuff, under a microscope, no.”

  Just then there was a commotion near the door. It opened, and a creature new to the group stood there.

  It was about 150 centimeters tall, and stood on two thick but jointless tentacles. It had some to spare—three more pairs, going up its midsection. Each seemed to have a cleft at its end, capable of picking up something much as a mitten might—or coil around, with the full forward part of the tentacle. It stood on the rear pair, but needed at least four to walk toward them. Its face was broad, with close-set, broad nose and flaring nostrils and two rounded eyes that looked like large velvet pads of glowing amber. Its mouth had a dislocatable jaw, and inside it was coiled, Ortega knew, a long and ropelike tongue that could be used as a ninth prehensile organ. It had two areas on either side of its head like saucers, and they were slightly offset from the head, yet seemed able to open and close on joints.

  But as the creature entered the room, all else paled before the great wings, like a giant butterfly’s, along its entire back, the wings of brilliant orange and spotted with concentric brown rings.

  Both Vardia and the Ambreza stepped back a bit at this entrance. Ortega had no such feelings, although its grim visage was frightening, almost menacing. Neither of the others had ever seen a Yaxa before, but Ortega had. He even knew this one. He slithered up to the newcomer.

  “Wooley!” he boomed. “I’m very glad you could come.”

  The creature remained coldly distant, but it responded, “Hello, Ortega.” It looked over at the comatose bodies of Renard and Nikki. “Are those the ones?”

  Ortega nodded, all business suddenly. “Dr. Muhar has some cell tissue under the microscope. Can you look into it or should we project it?”

  The Yaxa walked fluidly over to the microscope, peering at the sample with one of those impossible padlike eyes.

  “It’s sponge,” the creature said. “No doubt about it.” It turned its gaze back to the two people on the beds. “How far advanced are they?”

  “Five days with no dose,” Ortega told it. “What would you say?”

  The Yaxa thought a moment. “Depends on how they started out. The cell deterioration isn’t far along, but the mind goes first. If they were around average intelligence, they should be a lot brighter than the village idiot—for about another day or two. Then the animal-reversion stage sets in. They become great naked apes. I’d run them through the Well as soon as possible. Now.”

  “I agree,” Ortega told it. “And I appreciate your coming all this way to do this.”

  “They’re from the new moon?” the Yaxa asked, its voice, even through the translator, cold, sharp, emotionless.

  Ortega nodded. “And if they’re real we got big trouble. That means we got fooled by an earlier set of duplicates, at least one of which was the head of the sponge syndicate and the other two of whom know the principles of operating the Well.”

  For the first time the creature showed emotion. Its voice was harsh, excited. “The head of the sponge syndicate? And you let it slip through you like that?”

  Ortega turned all six palms up. “We didn’t know. They looked just like them. How was I to know?”

  “It’s true,” Vardia put in. “They were so nice and gentle and civilized—particularly that one,” it gestured at Renard.

  The Yaxa almost spit. “Agh! Fools! Anybody without sponge that long would have shown signs! You should have known!”

  “Come on, Wooley!” Ortega chided. “You’re a fanatic, and with good reason. But, hell, we weren’t expecting this sort of thing. Everything’s been more than a little crazy around here lately.”

  The great butterfly’s nostrils opened, and it actually snorted. “Oh, hell. Trust you to screw things up anyway.” It turned its great head, apparently on some kind of ball joint for a neck, and looked straight at him. “Give me the bastard’s name. He won’t always be so clever. One of these days I’ll get him. You know that.”

  Serge Ortega nodded, knowing that nothing could stop Wooley except death. Sooner or later, if that man surfaced at all, it would nail him.

  “Antor Trelig,” he told the Yaxa.

  The creature nodded its great, strange head as if filing the information. Then it said, “I’ve got to get back home. A lot’s going on. You will hear from me, though.” And, with that, it turned, not easy in the clinic’s space with those great wings, and went out the door.

  “Good heavens!” Vardia managed. “Who is that?”

  Ortega smiled. “Somebody you used to know. I’ll tell you sometime. Now we have more urgent work to do. We have to get these two through the Well, and I have to talk to the Council.”

  * * *

  There was no Council chamber for the ambassadors. All communication was done through intercoms, both for diplomatic reasons and to make it easier on everybody. There wasn’t much room for everybody, anyway.

  Ortega summarized the events to date, adding, “I’ve put out tracers on the first batch, and I hope that anyone will report their whereabouts if they appear in your hex. All Entries are to be checked out. These people are tricky as hell.”

  The speaker cracked to life. “Ortega?” said a metallic, toneless voice. “This is Robert L. Finch of The Nation.”

  Ortega couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “I didn’t know The Nation had names,” he remarked, remembering them as communal-minded robots.

  “The Nation has its Entries, too,” Finch replied. “When it is matters concerning such, the appropriate persona is selected.”

  Ortega let it go. “What’s your problem, Finch?”

  “The woman, Mavra Chang. Why have you left her with the Lata? Not playing any little games again, are you, Ortega?”

  Ortega took a deep breath. “I know she should be run through the Well, and she will be, sooner or later. Right now she is more useful in her original form—the only such Entry on the Well. I’ll explain all in due course.”

  They didn’t like it, but they accepted it. Other questions followed, a torrent, mostly irrelevant. The tone of many was the usual, “it’s not my problem,” and Ortega got the impression that others were not being very straightforward. But he’d done his duty, and that was that. The meeting ended.

  Vardia, the Czillian plant-creature, had sat in in Ortega’s office. There wasn’t anything its people needed to know that they didn’t already.

  Except one.

  “What about that Chang woman, Ortega?” Vardia asked. “What’s the real reason you’re keeping her under wraps.”

  He smiled. “Not under wraps, my dear Vardia. All six hundred thirty-seven races with Zone embassies know she’s w
ith the Lata. She’s bait—a recognizable object that could smoke out our quarries.”

  “And if they don’t take the bait?” Vardia prodded. “The fact that she’s a fully qualified space pilot still in a form that would be best for operating a spaceship wouldn’t have anything to do with your thinking, would it?”

  Ortega leaned back comfortably on his long coiled body. “Now isn’t that an interesting idea!” he responded sarcastically. “Thanks for the suggestion!”

  If there was a sincere, honest, or straightforward bone in Serge Ortega’s massive body, nobody had found it yet.

  Vardia decided to change the subject. “Do you think they’ll do it—report the Entries, that is?”

  Ortega’s expression grew grim. “A few might. Lata, Krommians, Dillians, Czillians, and the like. Most won’t. They’ll either try to bury them—which would be a mistake on their part they’ll live to regret, I suspect—or they’ll go along with them. Team up any of them with an ambitious, greedy government, and you’ve got the nucleus of that war I spoke about. An alliance and a pilot to fly the ship. Even a scientist who might be able to help put the pieces back together.” He shifted slightly, turned to face the Czillian square on, and said: “And as for Mavra Chang—if we’ve got her, we have some control. If we put her through the Well, they’ve got her. No fuel for the fire yet, my dear. It’s going to get hot as hell all by itself without the likes of you and me pouring oil on it.”

  Makiem

  He awoke and opened his eyes. For a moment, he was confused, disoriented. Things didn’t quite look right, and it took him half a minute to remember what had happened and what was supposed to happen.

  He had walked into that blackness in the wall, and there had been an odd sensation, like being wrapped in someone’s embrace—warm, probing, emotional; a thing he had never felt before. A drifting, dreaming sleep, except that he couldn’t remember the dreams—only the fact that most, perhaps all, had been about himself.

  I’m supposed to be something else,he remembered. Changed into one of those weird creatures, like the snake-man or the plant-thing. It didn’t bother him, really, that he was to become something else; what he had become, however, would shape his plans for the future.

  There was something strange about his vision, but it took him a little thinking to realize what it was. For one thing, depth perception had increased dramatically; everything stood out in sharp relief, and he had the strong feeling that he knew to the tenth of a millimeter how far one thing was from him and from anything else. Colors also seemed brighter, sharper; contrasts, both between slightly different shades of the same color and between light and dark, were markedly improved. But, no, that really wasn’t what mattered, either.

  Suddenly he had it. I’m seeing two images! he thought. There was almost an eighty-degree panorama on both sides; peripherally, he could almost see in back of him. But straight ahead there was a blank spot. Not a line or a divider; it was simply that what was absolutely dead ahead was barely out of his range of vision. His mind had to be forced to recognize the lapse, or he wasn’t conscious of it.

  There was movement to his right, and reflexively his right eye shifted a little to catch what it was. A large insect of some kind—very large, the size of a man’s fist—buzzed overhead like some small bird. It took him a little more time to realize that he’d moved the right eye independent of the left.

  He put both eyes as far forward as possible. He seemed to have a snout of some kind; his mouth was large and protrusive. He was conscious that he was resting comfortably, almost naturally, on all fours, and he raised his hand up to his right eye to see it.

  It was an odd hand, both strangely human and yet not. Four very long webbed fingers and an opposable thumb, each terminating in what appeared to be a small suckerlike tip where the fingerprint would be. Looking carefully, he saw that there was a print pattern inside the sucker. His hand and arm were a deep pea-green in color, with brown and black spots here and there. The skin looked tough and leathery, like the skin of a snake or other reptile.

  That’s what I must be, he decided. A reptile of some sort. The landscape was certainly right for it: jungle-like, with lush undergrowth and tall trees that almost hid the sun. What looked for all the world like a gravel-topped road cut through the dense vegetation. It was a road, and very well maintained, too. In thick brush like this, one would have to have road crews working constantly every hundred kilometers or so to keep the natural foliage back from the cleared area.

  He had just decided to go over to the road and follow it to whatever passed for civilization when another of those large insects came by, perhaps two meters or more in front of him. Almost without thinking, his mouth opened and a tremendously long tongue, like a controllable ribbon, shot out, struck the insect, and wrapped itself around the thing. Then it was retracted into his mouth, and he chewed and swallowed it. It didn’t have much taste, but the insect felt solid and went down well, and it helped the hungry ache inside him. He reflected curiously on his own reactions, or lack of them. It was a natural, normal thing to do, and it had been done automatically. The concept of eating a live insect didn’t even bother him that much.

  The Well World changes you, all right, in many ways, he thought. And yet—he was still Antor Trelig, inside. He remembered all that had transpired and regretted none of it—except flying too low over the Well World. Even that might be turned to ultimate advantage, he told himself confidently. If such power could be harnessed in the service of those best able to use it, ones like himself, it mattered not what form he was in or what he ate for breakfast. If the Well World had taught him nothing else, it taught him that everything was transitory.

  I wonder how I walk? he mused, chuckling at the absurdity of the question. Well, the eating had taken care of itself, probably that would, too.

  He eyed the road and started forward. Much to his surprise, his legs gave a great kick and he was to it, unerringly, in two large hops—coming down after the first one in a smooth, fluid motion that already had him set for the next leap, and coming to rest in the loose gravel with no rolling, imbalance, or discomfort. It was fun, really—like flying, almost.

  He tried just walking, and found that, if he used all fours, he could manage it with some effort, like a waddle. Jumping, or hopping, was the normal mode of locomotion for this race; walking was for the local stuff too short for a hop.

  He looked both ways. One direction was as good as the other, he decided; both ends of the path disappeared into the thick growth. He picked one and started off. It didn’t take long to come upon some others. He saw them from a great distance off, once he realized that a lot of the rustling he’d heard in the upper trees wasn’t just birds and insects.

  Ahead was a grove of giant trees almost set off from the rest of the forest, a small lake to one side. There were houses in those trees—intricate structures woven between the branches out of some straw or bamboolike material that almost certainly grew in the marshes.

  One of the creatures appeared in the lower doorway of one of the houses, looked around for a moment, then stepped out and walked down the almost ninety-degree angle of the trunk to the ground! Trelig understood now what those suction cups were for. Very handy.

  The creature resembled nothing so much as a great giant frog, its legs incredibly long when stretched out for walking, a light and smooth greenish-brown texture from the lower jaw down to the crotch, the same rough spotted green elsewhere.

  The creature went up to a large wooden box set on a stake near the road, sat up on its powerful hind legs, lifted the lid, and looked inside. Nodding to itself, it reached in and picked out several large brown envelopes. Trelig realized with some surprise that the thing was a mailbox.

  He approached slowly, not wanting either to alarm the creature or to seem out of place. It shifted an eye in his direction—its head was almost too integral a part of the body to allow flexible movement, but the eyes made up for it—and nodded politely to him. He sensed that there
was anger in the creature’s expression, but not directed at him.

  Trelig remembered that Ortega had said that the Well would provide the language. He decided just to talk normally.

  “Good day, sir!” the new frog said to the long-time resident. “A nice day, isn’t it?”

  The other snorted contemptuously. “You must work for the government to say something like that,” he growled in a deep bass that was not unpleasant but that seemed to originate from deep in the chest cavity. The creature held up one of the envelopes. “Tax bills! Always tax bills!” he almost shouted. “I don’t know how the sons of bitches expect an honest man to make a living these days.” The phrase wasn’t really “sons of bitches,” but some local equivalent, but that’s how Trelig’s mind understood it.

  He nodded slightly in sympathy. “No, I don’t work for the government,” he replied, “although I might some day. But I understand and sympathize with your problems.”

  That statement seemed to satisfy the other, who opened another envelope, pulling out a long yellow sheet of paper. He glanced at it, then balled it up in disgust.

  “Hmph! First they want your life’s blood, then they ask you to do them favors!” he snorted.

  Trelig frowned. “Huh?” was all he could manage.

  The frog-man tossed the rolled up paper slightly in his hand, like a ball. “Report any Entries that you might meet to the local police at once,” he spat. “What the hell do I pay all these taxes for, anyway? So I can do their jobs while they hunch on their fat asses eating imported sweetmeats bought with my money?”

  Trelig took the opportunity to glance at the tax bill. He couldn’t read it, couldn’t make any sense at all out of the crazy and illogical nonpatterns there. Obviously reading was not considered a necessary skill by the Well computer.

  “You ain’t seen no Entries, have you?” the man asked, not a little trace of sarcasm in his voice. “Maybe we’ll form a search party. Go out yelling, ‘Here, Entry! Nice Entry!’ ”