Exiles at the Well of Souls wos-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  He decided to chance it. As a newcomer, he might be excused some indiscretions, if he were careful enough not to get shot first. Let’s see—what had Ortega called new people? Entries? Yes, that was it.

  Most of the workers or family seemed to be out in the fields. There were obviously few seasons here; some of the fields had been harvested, some were about to be, and one on his left had just been plowed.

  He was almost to the house or barn, or whatever it was, when he saw his first fellow creature close up.

  She—there was no doubt it was a she—was using a plane to smooth down a plow handle. She was taller than he, with smaller head and longer, more flexible neck. Her horns were shorter and more rounded, even at the tips. Facially, she did resemble a cow, although the head was not right, more like a cartoonist’s humanized cow than a real one. Her arms were also strikingly different from his—tremendously long, with a double elbow that seemed to be able to bend in any direction. Not double in the same places, now; there was the elbow where the elbow should be, and then the arm continued, tremendously muscular, to a second elbow near the waist. Almost reflexively he looked again at his own elbow, and saw that he’d been right; although thick and muscle-bulging, his arm was definitely the one-elbow type he’d been born with.

  The final incongruity was that she wore a tremendous, leatherlike apron tied just above her waist. It bulged a bit in front, and at first he thought she mightbe pregnant, but as she worked, side turned to him, he could see that it concealed what had to be a large, tough-looking pink udder attached just above the waist.

  She still hadn’t seen him. He considered clearing his throat but wasn’t sure how to do that, so he just decided to try conversation and see if he would be understood. At least he would be noticed.

  “Hello?” he said hopefully.

  She jumped, turned, looked at him. There was no mistaking her mannerisms: shock and fear. She screamed, dropped her tool, and ran off into the big building through a large wooden door.

  He could hear her still screaming and yelling inside and also the sounds of other voices. He decided that the better part of valor was to stand there and see what happened next.

  What happened took exactly thirty seconds. The wooden door flew open with tremendous force, so violent and loud was the action that it shook the whole building. Standing there, a really nasty-looking iron crowbar in his hands, was the master of the house.

  He was slightly shorter than Yulin, but not much. The horns were huge, slightly curved and pointed; the head was massive and seemed to sit atop the torso without a neck. He wore a cloth kilt of some soft material from his waist to just below his knees. His huge, wide eyes sparked fire.

  “What the hell do you want here, he-cow?” he snarled derisively. “If it’s a cracked skull, just stay there another ten seconds!” He hefted the crowbar menacingly.

  Yulin felt panic rising in him, but managed to control himself. “Wait a minute! I mean no harm!” he managed.

  The crowbar didn’t move. “Then what are you doing just walking into here stark naked and panicking good women?” the other returned, that menacing tone growing. But, Yulin realized, he’d answered instead of attacking, and that meant reason could prevail.

  “I’m an Entry!” he almost yelled. “I just woke up in a field back there and I haven’t the slightest idea whereor what I am or what to do next!” That was certainly the truth.

  The big minotaur considered this. “Entry?” he snorted. “We have had only two Entries before that I know of, and they were both cows. Doesn’t make sense to have a bull Entry.” Still, there was something that made him hesitate. The crowbar lowered over so slightly.

  “I’m Ben Yulin,” he tried, attempting to sound friendly and not scared to death. “I need help.”

  There was something in the newcomer’s manner that didn’t seem right to the farmer. Yet he sensed, somehow, the genuineness of Yulin’s plea.

  “All right,” growled the man with the crowbar. “I’ll accept your story for now. But try anything funny and I’ll kill you.” He didn’t let go of the crowbar. “Come on in and we’ll at least get some clothes on you so you don’t have half the herd coming after you.”

  Yulin started toward the door, and the farmer hefted the bar again. “Not in there, you idiot! Holy shit! Maybe you really don’t know what’s what around here! Just walk around the house, here, and I’ll follow.”

  Yulin did as instructed, and entered a different door in what seemed to be a complex semidetached from the larger buildings. It was an apartment of sorts. There was a living room with small fireplace, a bull-sized rocking chair of a finely polished hardwood, windows looking out on the farm, and, to his surprise, artwork and reading material. A number of very large-sized books in a print he couldn’t read sat on two shelves, and there were pewter sculptures, not only of other minotaurs, both male and female, but of other, stranger subjects that implied surrealism. Some etchings on the wall, actually black-and-white line drawings, showed farm scenes, sunsets and other realistic subjects.

  The female sculptures showed him what he’d suspected—the cow did have big udders, like bulges hanging down—and a couple of the sketches, or prints, or whatever they were were rather graphic pornography. On top of a table near the rocking chair was a weird-looking mechanical device he couldn’t figure out. It was a box with a horizontal round plate that obviously rotated by means of a spring-driven hand crank on one side. A complex brass device on a single pivot was mounted to one side, and out of the back rose a tremendous horn-shaped device. There seemed also to be a place for another horn to fit on the front. Yulin couldn’t imagine what it did.

  The man went into another room and seemed to be trying to open some sort of cedar chest with one hand while at the same time keeping his eye on the newcomer through the doorway. Yulin decided to stay stock still in the center of the room and do nothing at all.

  The other room was obviously a bedroom, though. There was a wood frame there filled with a strawlike material, and there were also some carelessly tossed blankets and an enormous stuffed object that might have been a pillow. Thinking about his horns, Yulin wondered what happened if you rolled over in your sleep.

  The farmer threw him a large cloth, and he caught it. It appeared to be made of burlap, much rougher and coarser than what the other wore. There had been rope drawstrings placed in it, and Yulin got the idea pretty quickly of how to put it on.

  There was a thin, plain rug on the floor. “You’ll have to sit there,” the farmer told him, pointing to a spot on the rug. “I don’t get much visitor traffic here.” He sat down comfortably in the rocker and started to rock gently.

  “Now can you tell me what happens next?” Yulin prompted.

  “First you tell me about yourself. Who you are, what you were, how you got here,” the other responded. “Then, if I like what I hear, I’ll help you solve your problems.”

  Yulin complied, almost. He spared nothing, except his role in anything shady. He pictured himself as Gil Zinder’s assistant, nothing more, forced by the evil Antor Trelig to do what he did. He was convincing. When he got to the part about crashing in the North, the farmer’s eyes almost shone. “Been to the North, eh? That’s kind of a romantic thing for just about all the folks here in the South. Kind of exotic and mysterious.”

  Yulin thought that the South was sufficiently exotic and mysterious for him, but he said nothing. His story, however, was accepted. It was far too detailed to have been created out of whole cloth as a diversion. The farmer relaxed.

  “My name’s Cilbar,” he said, more friendly now. “This is my farm. You’re in Dasheen, which is both the country and the name of your new people. You’re a herbivore, so you’ll never starve to death—although, as a civilized man, you’ll find that while eating stuff in the raw will satisfy your hunger, prepared foods are better. The hex is nontechnological, so machines don’t work here unless they’re muscle-powered. We got the muscle, as you probably noticed.”

 
Yulin admitted he had.

  “I been around in my youth,” Cilbar continued. “Things are different everyplace, of course, but our system here’s a little more different than most. It’s the biology that does it. We get criticized by some other hexes, but that’s the way things are.”

  “What do you mean?” Yulin wondered.

  Cilbar sighed. “Well, a lot of races, they have two, maybe more sexes. Your old one did. There’s some differences, but basically they’re variations of the same critter. Brain power’s the same, and take away the sex stuff and the bodies aren’t that far different, either. Right?”

  “I’m following you,” Yulin replied.

  “Well, you mighta noticed that we don’t look like the cows,” the farmer said. “Not just the udder. We’re smaller, squatter, got shorter single-elbow arms, bigger, different heads, like that.”

  “I did notice it,” Ben Yulin acknowledged.

  “Well, we are different. Don’t know why. First of all, there’s only an average of one male for every one hundred females. That’s why I was surprised not that you were an Entry but that you were a male. You see?”

  Yulin did. All the more remarkable since he’d gone through the Well as a biological female. What was it Ortega said? The Well classified you according to unknown standards.

  “Anyway,” Cilbar continued, “just from a social standpoint that makes males more important than females. There’s less of us, so we’re not expendable. On top of that, we’re a hell of a lot smarter.”

  “How’s that?” was all Yulin could manage.

  Cilbar nodded. “Some scientists from a couple of other hexes once came in to prove to us that it wasn’t so. All they did was bear out what we already knew. Their brains are less developed. Trying to teach one to read is like trying to teach this chair. Oh, teach ’em to do any basic job and they’ll happily do it for hours. Plowing, harvesting, simple carpentry, hauling and such, sure. Hell, tell ’em to dig fence holes and they’ll happily do it forever until you call ’em off. Ask ’em how many holes they dug and they couldn’t tell you.”

  The green light of understanding went on in Ben Yulin’s head. “You mean,” he said, “that the women do all the labor and the men run things?”

  Cilbar nodded again. “That’s about it. The women built this farm, but a man designed it. The women work it, but I run it. Same with the art, the books—all by men for men.”

  Yulin was intrigued, and he thanked the Well even more that he’d come out as he did. This was the kind of place he was going to like.

  “You speak very well, very cultured,” the Entry remarked. “You have a lot of education?”

  The farmer chuckled. “Every male gets everything we can give him. I think we’re a group of spoiled brats, myself. I often wonder what we’d have to do in a pinch if things get tough. Yeah, a son is special. He gets it all. Then, if he’s got some particular aptitude, like art, or writing, or teaching, or trading, he takes it up. If not, like me, he takes over somebody’s farm when they get too old or too tired.”

  “There’s a small population here, then,” Yulin surmised.

  He nodded. “Very small. About ten thousand farms, more or less, with a bunch of small towns, rarely more than a few thousand in each, servicing them. A million and a quarter tops, no more.”

  “That means only a hundred thousand or so males,” Yulin pointed out.

  “Probably less,” agreed Cilbar. “I may be way overestimating the number. We don’t get around too much once we settle down. One time I remember somebody saying in some class that there were only seven hundred fifty thousand Dasheen and seventy-five thousand bulls. Could be.”

  “And what happens if the new young bull has no useful aptitudes and no farm’s open?” Yulin wondered.

  “Thinking about yourself, eh? A scientist in a non-tech hex! I can see the problems. Well, you can find a skill or job, do some traveling while you wait for an opening, like I did, or you can pick a farm, call out the owner, and fight him to the death, winner take all.”

  Suddenly Yulin understood why the farmer had been so upset at his initial appearance: he thought a young bull was calling him out.

  “What kind of government do you have, then?” he asked.

  “A small and simple one,” Cilbar told him. “All the farmers in a district elect somebody to a council. The towns elect one for every ten males. There’s a small bureaucracy to keep things together, and we meet in emergencies or twice a year for a few days in a small town named Tahlur in the center of Dasheen, where the training schools and the Zone Gate are.”

  “That’s where I should head, then,” the ex-scientist decided. “If I can get there without starving to death or getting run through by somebody less willing to listen to me than you.”

  Cilbar laughed deeply. “Look, they’ve called a council meeting for some time next week. Our own representative, Hocal, will be going. I’ll feed you, put you up for the night, and get you introduced to him. That should solve that problem.”

  Yulin thanked him. This was too easy, he thought, and too good. There had to be a fly in the ointment somewhere, and he waited for it.

  * * *

  Hocal wasn’t the fly but he was the instrument of it. He looked very surprised when Yulin was introduced to him.

  “That’s what all this business is about!” he exclaimed. “You people really messed up some things! Never thought one of you’d show up here, though. Seems some folks want to talk to us about reclaiming some of those parts of that spaceship. War’s been rumored. War! I hope we can keep out of it, but we’ll see. We’re right in the middle of things here geographically.”

  Yulin suddenly became interested. “How’s that? You mean the other ship, the one that came down in the South here?”

  Hocal nodded, and got down a large map, spreading it out on the table in front of him. It was ingeniously printed for the benefit of a color-blind race; it contained all the details in amazing black, white and gray contrasts. Yulin could interpret it, but he could not read the key or names. He would have to cure that, he decided.

  Hocal pointed a stubby finger at one hex. “Here we are in Dasheen,” he said.

  Yulin looked. They were close to the Equatorial Barrier, something Hocal translated as Cotyl occupying two half-hexes at the Barrier; then Voxmir to the northwest—unfriendly and inhuman, Hocal assured him; Jaq to the southeast—volcanic and hot as hell, too hot for a Dasheen to survive; Frick to the southeast—they had crazy, fat flying disks with steam jets; and Qasada to the southwest—from the description a highly advanced technological civilization of giant rats.

  “This is where the problem is,” Hocal pointed again. Just below Qasada and to the southwest of Frick was Xoda, a land of great, fierce insects—and a module. “There’s another in Palim, below it, Olborn, to the southwest, and, most important, only four hexes south, Gedemondas, about which little is known. The engines of the downed craft landed there, and they are, as you will appreciate, the big prize. I suspect we’ll know a lot more about Gedemondas before this is finished.”

  Yulin nodded. “I’d think that one of the others—the rats, for example—might make a better run for it,” he noted.

  Hocal agreed. “They should, but that’s a funny area. The races in there aren’t that friendly, or, like the Palim, have been, like us, peaceful too long to think of conflict. No, the trouble comes from way over here.”

  He pointed again far to the west, well beyond the far coast of the Sea of Storms.

  “This is Makiem, and up here is Cebu, and to the east is Agitar. Makiem is run by some clever and ruthless politicians and is a nontech hex, as we are. Cebu is semitech, and its people have the power of flight, which is particularly useful. Agitar is high-tech, and while we’ve been able to learn very little about it, they seem to have flying animals—which means their range isn’t limited by their machines—and some natural abilities with electricity that transcend the Well limits. They have formed an alliance to get the ship parts.”<
br />
  “But they couldn’t use them, even if they put them together, without a qualified pilot,” Yulin objected. “That’s not a simple rocket, you know.”

  “We are well aware of that,” replied Hocal, looking directly at him. “The war was to be the topic, but, I suspect, with you on hand, the discussion will be even livelier.”

  * * *

  The trip was easy and made in less than two days. They went in a comfortable coach pulled by six Dasheen cows from Hocal’s herd, and they made better speed than Yulin would have believed.

  Additionally, the tired pullers did everything for them, cooking delicious stews, rubbing them down, everything. Yulin loved being waited on; he saw how easy it would be to get spoiled here. The cows engaged mostly in small talk among themselves, occasionally playing childish games with one another, but they carried out their jobs without complaint, as if this was what they were born to do and they were happy doing it. In deference to his host, Ben Yulin kept at a distance from them.

  They arrived at Tahlur at midday to find most of the other members already there. They were taking nothing lightly, and grave discussions were already underway in the town’s alehouses. As on the farm and road, the females did all the work—all the cooking, cleaning, serving, all the basic labors. Yulin couldn’t do anything for himself. A cow was always there to get him a chair, to bring food or drink, to take him to a comfortable room in an inn, to prepare and clean everything. They even ran to open doors for the males.

  Even though the service was easy to take, he wondered about it, about whether it was truly mental inferiority or just a rigid social system. They weren’t automatons; they talked and laughed sometimes and sulked sometimes and generally acted like people.

  And there were the rings and collars. All the cows wore them—large rings welded in their huge noses, and brass collars welded around their necks, with small hooks on the back. They were distinctive; they bore the marks of the herd the cow was from. The females were even branded on the right rump, he found, with the herd-mark.