Midnight at the Well of Souls wos-1

by Jack L. Chalker

  They all looked alike to her except for size. She wondered idly if they were all women.

  Finishing her drink, she made her way, slowly, to the shore. She made large splashes and was terrified she would fall.

  The noise awakened the sleeper.

  “Well, hello!” she said in a pleasant, musical voice. The Umiau could make the sounds of the Czillian language, and most of them at the Center knew it. Czillians could not mock any other, so all conversations were in the Czillian tongue.

  “I—I’m sorry if I awakened you,” Vardia apologized.

  “That’s all right,” the Umiau replied, and yawned. “I shouldn’t be wasting my time sleeping, anyway. The sun dries me out and I have a fever for hours after.” She noticed Vardia’s problem. “Twinning, huh?”

  “Y-yes,” Vardia replied, a little embarrassed. “My first time. It’s awful.”

  “I sympathize,” the mermaid said. “I passed the egg this cycle, but I’ll receive it next.”

  Vardia decided to root near the stream for a while, and did. “I don’t understand you,” she told the creatlure hesitantly. “Are you, then, a female?”

  The Umiau laughed. “As much as you,” she replied. “We’re hermaphrodites. One year we make an egg, then pass it to another who didn’t, where it’s shot with sperm and develops. The next year, you get the egg passed to you. The third year you’re a neuter; then the cycle starts all over again.”

  “You cannot abstain, then?” Vardia asked innocently.

  The Umiau laughed again. “Sure, but few do, unless they get themselves sterilized. When the urge hits, honey, you do it!”

  “It is pleasant, then?” Vardia persisted innocently.

  “Unbelievably,” the Umiau replied knowingly.

  “I wish this was,” Vardia pouted. “It is making me miserable.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” the Umiau told her. “You only do it two or three times in your very long lives.” The mermaid suddenly glanced at the sun. “Well, it’s getting late. It’s been pleasant talking with you, but I have to go. Don’t worry—you’ll make out. The twin’s coming along fine.”

  And, without another word, it crawled into the water more rapidly than Vardia would have suspected possible and swam away.

  * * *

  The next few days were mostly boring repetitions of the earlier ones, although she did occasionally talk to other Umiau for brief periods.

  On the ninth day when she needed water again, she discovered she had little control over herself. Every forward movement seemed to be countered by the twin now almost fully developed on her back. Even her thoughts ran confused, every thought seeming to double, echoing in her mind. It took immense concentration to get to the water, and, in getting out, she fell.

  She lay there for some time, feeling embarrassed and helpless, when she suddenly realized a curious fact, a thought that echoed through her mind.

  I’m I’m seeing seeing in in both both directions directions, her mind thought.

  Getting up was beyond her, she knew, and she waited most of the afternoon for help. The confusing double sight didn’t help her, since both scenes seemed to be double exposures.

  She tried to move her head, but found she couldn’t without burying it in the sandy bank. Finally, an hour or two before sunset, others came for rooting and pulled her out and helped her back to a rooting spot.

  The tenth day was the worst. She couldn’t think straight at all, couldn’t move at all, couldn’t judge scenes, distances, or anything. Even sounds were duplicated.

  The sensation was miserable and it seemed to go on forever.

  On the eleventh day nothing was possible, and she was in a delirium. About midday, though, there was a sudden release, and she felt as if half of her had suddenly, ghostlike, walked out of her. Everything returned to normal very suddenly, but she felt so terribly weak that she passed out in broad daylight.

  The twelfth day dawned normally, and she felt much better, almost, she thought, euphoric. She uprooted and took a hesitant step forward. “This is more like it!” she said aloud, feeling light and in total control again.

  And, at exactly the same moment, another voice said exactly the same thing! They both turned around with the same motion.

  Two identical Vardia’s stood looking, amazed, at each other.

  “So you’re the twin,” they both said simultaneously.

  “I’m not, you are!” they both insisted.

  Or am I? each thought. Would the twin know?

  Everything was duplicated. Everything. Even the memories and personality. That’s why they kept saying and doing the same things, they both realized. Will we ever know which is which? they both thought. Or did it matter? They both came out of the same body.

  Together they set out for the Center.

  They walked wordlessly, in perfect unison, even the random gestures absolutely duplicated. Communication was unnecessary, since each knew exactly what the other was thinking and thought the same thing. The procedure was well established. Once at the reception desk, they were taken to different rooms where doctors checked them. Pronounced fit and healthy to go back to work, each was assigned to a part of the project different from that she had previously been working on, although with similar duties.

  “Will I ever see my twin again?” asked the Vardia who was in Wing 4.

  “Probably,” the supervisor replied. “But we’re going to get you into divergent fields and activities as quickly as possible so each of you can develop a separate path. Once you’ve had a variety of experiences to make you sufficiently different, there’s no reason not to see each other if you like.”

  In the meantime the other Vardia, having asked the question sooner and having received the same answer, was settling in to a very different sort of position, even though the basic computer problem was the same.

  She began working with a Umiau, for all the world identical to the one she had talked with along the riverbank. Her name—Vardia’s mind insisted on the feminine for them even though they were neither—and both—was Endil Cannot.

  After a few days of feeling each other out, they started talking as they worked. Cannot, she thought, reminded her of some of the instructors at the Center.

  Every question seemed to get a lecture.

  One day she asked Cannot just what they were looking for. The work so far consisted of feeding legends and old wives’ tales from many races into the computer to find common factors in them.

  “You have seen the single common factor already, have you not?” Cannot replied tutorially. “What, then, is it?”

  “The phrase—I keep hearing it off and on around here, too.”

  “Exactly!” the mermaid exclaimed. “Until midnight at the Well of Souls. A more poetic way of saying forever, perhaps, or expressing an indefinite, like: We’ll keep at this project until midnight at the Well of Souls—which seems likely at this rate.”

  “But why is it important?” she quizzed. “I mean, it’s just a saying, isn’t it?”

  “No!” the Umiau replied strongly. “If it were a saying of one race, perhaps even of bordering races, that would be understandable. But it’s used even by Northern races! A few of the really primitive hexes seem to use it as a religious chant! Why? And so the saying goes back as far as antiquity itself. Written records go back almost ten thousand years here, oral tradition many times that. That phrase occurs over and over again! Why? What is it trying to tell us? That is what I must know! It might provide us with the key to this crazy planet, with its fifteen hundred and sixty races and differing biomes.”

  “Maybe it’s literal,” Vardia suggested. “Maybe people sometime in the past gathered at midnight at some place they called the Well of Souls.”

  The mermaid’s expression would have led anyone more knowledgeable in all-too-human emotions to the conclusion that the dumb student had finally grasped the obvious.

  “We’ve been proceeding along that tack here,” Cannot told her. “This is, afte
r all, called the Well World, but the only wells we know of are the input wells at each pole. That’s the problem, you know. They are both input, not opposites.”

  “Must there be an output?” Vardia asked. “I mean, can’t this be a one-way street?”

  Cannot shook her statuesque head from side to side. “No, it would make no sense at all, and would invalidate the only good theory I have so far as to why this world was built and why it was built the way it was.”

  “What’s the theory?”

  Cannot’s eyes became glazed, but Vardia could not tell if it was an expression or just the effect the Umiau had when closing the inner transparent lid while keeping the outer skin lid open.

  “You’re a bright person, Vardia,” the mermaid said. “Perhaps, someday, I’ll tell you.”

  And that was all there was to that.

  A day or two later Vardia wandered into Cannot’s office and saw her sitting there viewing slides of a great desert, painted in reds, yellows, and oranges under a cloudless blue sky. In the background things got hazy and indistinct. It looked, Vardia thought, something like a semitransparent wall. She said as much aloud.

  “It is, Vardia,” Cannot replied. “It is indeed. It’s the Equatorial Barrier—a place I am going to have to visit somehow, although none of the hexes around it are very plentiful on water, and the trip will be hard. Here, look at this,” she urged, backing the slides up several paces. She saw a view taken through the wall with the best filters available. Objects were still indistinct, but she could see just enough to identify one thing clearly.

  “There’s a walkway in there!” she exclaimed. “Like the one around the Zone Well!”

  “Exactly!” the mermaid confirmed. “And that’s what I want to know more about. Do you feel up to working through the night tonight?”

  “Why, yes, I guess so,” she replied. “I’ve never done it before but I feel fine.”

  “Good! Good!” Cannot approved, rubbing her hands together. “Maybe I can solve this mystery tonight!”

  * * *

  Stars swirled in tremendous profusion across the night sky, great, brilliantly colored clouds of nebulae spreading out in odd shapes while the starfield itself seemed to consist of a great mass of millions of stars in swirls the way a galaxy looked under high magnification. It was a magnificent sight, but one not appreciated by Vardia, who could not see it with her coneless eyes as she worked in the bright, artificial day of the lab, or by unseen onlookers out in the fields to the south.

  At first they looked like particularly thick grains of the wild grasses in the area. Then, slowly, two large shapes rose up underneath the stalks, shapes with huge insect bodies and great eyes.

  And—something else.

  It sparkled like a hundred trapped fireflies, and seemed to rest atop a shadowy form.

  “The Diviner says that the equation has changed unnaturally,” said The Rel.

  “Then we don’t go in tonight?” one of the Akkafian warriors asked.

  “We must,” replied The Rel. “We feel that only tonight will everything be this auspicious. We have the opportunity of an extra prize that increases the odds.”

  “Then the balance—this new factor—is in our favor?” asked the Markling, relieved.

  “It is,” The Rel replied. “There will be two to carry back, not one. Can you manage it?”

  “Of course, if the newcomer isn’t any larger than the other,” the Markling told The Rel.

  “Good. They should be together, so take them both. And—remember! Though the Czillians will all sleep as soon as the power-plant detonator is triggered, the Umiau will not. They’ll be shocked, and won’t see too well or get around too much, but there may be trouble. Don’t get so wrapped up in any struggle that you sting either of our quarry to death. I want only paralysis sufficient to get us back to the halfway island.”

  “Don’t worry,” the warriors assured almost in unison. “We would not fail the baron like that.”

  “All right, then,” The Rel said in a voice so soft it was almost lost in the gentle night breeze. “You have the detonator. When we rush at the point I have shown you, I shall give a signal. Then and only then are you to blow it. Not sooner, not later. Otherwise the emergency generators will be on before we are away.”

  “It is understood,” the Markling assured the Northerner.

  “The Diviner indicates that they are both there and otherwise alone in their working place,” The Rel said. “In a way, I am suspicious. This is too good fortune, and I do not believe in luck. Nonetheless, we do what we must.

  “All right— now!”

  DILLIA—UPLAKE

  Wu Julee groaned and opened her eyes. Her head was splitting and the room was spinning around.

  “She’s comin’ around!” someone’s voice called out, and she was suddenly conscious of a number of people clustering around her.

  She tried to focus, but everything was blurry for a few moments. Finally, vision cleared enough for her to see who each was, particularly the one non-Dillian in the crowd.

  “Brazil!” she managed, then choked. Someone forced a little water down her throat. It tasted sour. She coughed.

  “She knows you!” Yomax yelled, excited. “She remembers things agin!”

  She shut her eyes tightly. She did remember—everything. A spasm shook her, and she vomited the water.

  “Yomax! Jol!” she heard the Healer’s voice call. “You louts take her behind! Captain Brazil, you pull; I’ll push! Let’s try and get her on her feet as soon as possible!”

  They fell to their tasks and managed to pull it off with several tries. No thanks to me, Brazil thought. Man! These people have muscles!

  She was up, but unsteady. They put side panels padded with cloth under her arms and braced them so she could support herself. The room was still spinning, but it seemed to be slowing down. She still felt sick, and started trembling. Someone—probably Jol—started stroking her back and that seemed to calm her a little.

  “Oh, my God!” she groaned.

  “It’s all right, Wu Julee,” Brazil said softly. “The nightmares are past, now. They can’t hurt you anymore.”

  “But how—” she started, then threw up again and kept gagging.

  “All right, all of you outside now!” the Healer demanded. “Yes, you, too, Yomax! I’ll call you when I’m ready.”

  They stepped out into the chill wind. Yomax shrugged, a helpless look on his face.

  “Do you drink ale, stranger?” the aged centaur asked Brazil.

  “I’ve been known to,” Brazil replied. “What do you make it out of?”

  “Grains, water, and yeast!” said Yomax, surprised at the question. “What else would you make ale out of?”

  “I dunno,” Brazil admitted, “but I’m awfully glad you don’t either. Where to?”

  The three of them went down the main street, Brazil feeling like a pygmy among giants, and up to the bar, front on now.

  The place was full of customers—about a dozen—and they had trouble squeezing in. Brazil suddenly became afraid that he would be crushed to death between equine rumps.

  The conversation stopped when he entered, and everyone looked at him suspiciously.

  “I just love being made to feel welcome,” Brazil said sarcastically. Then, to the other two, “Isn’t there a more, ah, private place to talk?”

  Yomax nodded. “Gimme three, Zoder!” he called, and the bartender poured three enormous steins of ale and put them on the bar. He handed one to Jol and the other to Brazil, who almost dropped it when he found out how heavy the filled stein really was. Using two hands, he held on and followed Yomax down the street a few doors to the oldster’s office.

  After Jol stoked the fire and threw some more wood in, the place seemed to warm and brighten spiritually as well as literally. Brazil let out a long sigh and sank to the floor, resting the stein on the floor beside him. As the place warmed up, he took off his fur cap and coat. Underneath he didn’t seem to be wearing anyth
ing.

  The two centaurs also took off their coats, and both of them stared at him.

  Brazil stared back. “Now, don’t you go starting that, or I’ll go back to the bar!” he warned. The Dillians laughed, and everybody relaxed. Brazil sipped the brew, and found it not bad at all, although close to two liters was a bit much at one time for him.

  “Now, what’s all this about, mister?” Jol asked suspiciously.

  “Suppose we swap information,” he offered, taking out his pipe and lighting it.

  Yomax licked his lips. “Is that—is that tobacco?” he asked hesitatingly.

  “It is,” Brazil replied. “Not very good, but good enough. Want some?”

  Yomax’s expression, Brazil thought, was as eager and unbelieving as mine was when I saw that steak at Serge’s.

  Was that only a few months ago? he asked himself. Or was it a lifetime?

  Yomax dragged out an old and battered pipe that resembled a giant corncob and proceeded to fill it. Lighting it with a common safety match, he puffed away ecstatically.

  “We don’t get much tobacco hereabouts,” the old man explained.

  “I never would have guessed,” Brazil responded dryly. “I picked it up a fair distance from here, really—I’ve traveled nine hexes getting here, not counting a side trip to Zone from my home hex.”

  “Them rodent fellas are the only ones in five thousand kilometers with tobacco these days,” Yomax said ruefully. “That where?”

  Brazil nodded. “Next door to my home hex.”

  “Don’t think I remember it,” the old official prodded curiously. “Except that you look like us, sort of, from the waist up, I don’t think I ever seen your like before.”

  “Not surprising,” Brazil replied sadly. “My people came to a no-good end, I’m afraid.”

  “Hey! Yomax!” Jol yelled suddenly. “Lookit his mouth! It don’t go with his talkin’!”

  “He’s using a translator, idiot!” snapped Yomax.

  “Right,” the small man confirmed. “I got it from the Ambreza—those ‘rodent fellas’ you mentioned. Nice people, once I could convince them that I was intelligent.”