Midnight at the Well of Souls wos-1

by Jack L. Chalker

  “Nathan!” Wuju said louder. “What is Ivrom? You haven’t told us!”

  “Because I don’t know, love,” he replied casually. “Lots of forest, rolling hills, plenty of animals, most familiar. The atlas said there were horses and deer there. It’s a nontechnological hex, so it’s the sword-and-spear bit again, probably. The intelligent life form is some kind of insect, I think, but nobody’s sure. Those active volcanoes to our left—that’s Alisstl, and it’s a formidable barrier. The people there are thick-skinned reptiles who live in temperatures close to boiling and eat sulfur. Probably nice folks, but nobody drops in.”

  She looked over at the range of volcanic mountains. Most were spouting steam, and one had a spectacular lava fountain along a side fissure. She shivered, although it wasn’t cold.

  “This is the way to travel if you can!” Brazil said with enthusiasm, taking a deep breath of the salty air. “Fantastic! I used to sail oceans like this on big ships, back in the days of Old Earth. There was a romance to the sea, and those who sailed it. Not like the one-man space freighters with their computers and phony pictures of winking dots.”

  “How soon will we land?” Wuju asked him, a bit ill at the rolling and tossing he liked so much. She was happy to see him obviously enjoying himself, talking like his old self again, but if it was at the cost of this kind of upset stomach, she would take land.

  “Well, they’ve gone exceptionally fast,” he replied. “Strong devils, and amazing in their element. I’ll have to remember that strength. Wouldn’t do to underestimate our Dr. Skander.”

  “Yes, but how long?” she insisted.

  “Tomorrow morning,” he replied. “Then it’ll be no more than a day or so to Ghlmon—we won’t have to cross the whole hex of Ivrom, just one facet—and another day to the top of the bay in Ghlmon.”

  “Do you really think we’ll meet them—the others, that is—up there?” Vardia asked. “I’m most anxious to free my other self—my sister—from those creatures.”

  “We’ll meet them,” Brazil assured her, “if we beat them—and we certainly should at this rate. I know where they have to go. When they get there, we’ll be ready for them.”

  “Will I be able to scout this Ivrom tonight?” Cousin Bat called out to him. “I’m sick and tired of fish.”

  “I’m counting on you, Bat,” Brazil replied laughing. “Eat up and tell us what’s what.”

  “No more midnight rescues from the jaws of death, though,” Bat replied in the same light vein.

  “You never know, Bat,” Brazil replied more seriously. “Maybe this time I’ll rescue you.”

  * * *

  The Umiau had been remarkably uninformed about Ivrom, which wasn’t as strange on the face of it as it would seem. The Umiau were water creatures, and their need was for technological items they could not manufacture. An alliance with the Czillians was natural; their other neighbors they at least knew from watery experience, even if they didn’t get along too well with all of them, and Aisstl was too hot to handle. Ivrom, named from the old maps and not by the inhabitants, was peaceful forests and meadows, no major rivers, although it had hundreds of tiny creeks and streams. It was a nontechnological hex, so it wasn’t easy to get to, even harder to move around in, and probably not worth the trouble. Of course, the major problem was that no one who had ever set out for Ivrom—to study, for contact, or to go through it—had ever been seen or heard from again. For that reason the party stopped on a reef, over a submerged shoal in deep water, and anchored for the night even though there would still have been time when they arrived to have made camp on or near the beach.

  It did look inviting, too. The air was sweet and fresh, about twenty degrees Celsius, surprisingly comfortable humidity for a shore area because of the inland breeze, a few light, fluffy clouds but nothing that looked threatening, and a deep blue sky.

  The shoreline revealed a virgin sandy beach, flat and yellow and stretching down the coast. The breakers and some obvious storms had forced driftwood onto the shore, where it had built up near the beginning of the forest. It was a very dense forest, rather dark from the thickness of the underbrush and giant evergreens, but nothing looked suspicious or sinister. As twilight deepened, they could make out an occasional small deer and a number of other animals much like muskrats, marmots, and other woodland creatures.

  It reminded Brazil of a number of really pleasant places on Old Earth before they were paved over. Even the animals and birds, now flocking to roosts in the tall trees, seemed very Earthlike—far more than even the most familiar hexes he had been through.

  He wished he could recall more about the place, but he couldn’t. Nobody could keep track of everything, he thought, even though the mind behind Ivrom had obviously paid a great deal of attention to a Type 41 habitat.

  Insects, his mind kept telling him. But that was the kind of fact that you heard once or twice rather than recalled from personal experience, and it registered but was not something you had paid attention to at the time. Everything has changed so much it probably wouldn’t matter anyway, he thought. Evolution and natural processes like erosion and deposition, diastrophism and the other forces operated in accordance with the logic of each hex, so things were constantly changing on the Well World as they were everywhere in the universe.

  Darkness totally obscured the shoreline for all but Cousin Bat, who reported that he couldn’t see anything they hadn’t seen by day.

  “Well, maybe something,” Bat corrected. “I can’t be sure at this distance, though. Looks like tiny, little, blinking lights, on and off, on and off, all over the forest—moving around, too, but slowly.”

  Lightning bugs, Brazil thought. Was he the only person from their little corner of the galaxy who could remember lightning bugs?

  “Well, go on in, then,” Brazil told the bat after a while, “but be careful. Looks peaceful, but the place has a really spooky reputation, and except for the fact that my mind keeps insisting that the life form there is insects, I can’t think of anything else to tell you. Just watch out for insects, no matter how small or insignificant—they might be somebody we’d rather make friends with.”

  “All right,” Bat responded calmly. “Insects are a normal part of my diet, but I won’t touch them if I can help it. Just a quick survey, then I’ll be back.”

  They agreed and Bat took off into the darkness.

  When the sun came up the next morning, Cousin Bat still had not returned.

  JUST OVER THE NATION—SLELCRON BORDER—MORNING

  The Rel stopped just ahead as the air suddenly cleared and they walked into bright sunshine.

  “You may all remove your breathing apparatuses and discard them,” it told them. “The air is now quite safe for all of you.”

  Skander reached up and took off her mask, but stowed it in the pack case. “I’ll keep mine, and I think you others should, too,” the Umiau cautioned. “I have no idea what the interior is like, but it’s possible we may need the couple hours of air left in these tanks. If the mechanism is self-operating, it may not exist in any atmosphere.”

  “I am well aware of that, Doctor,” The Rel replied. “I, too, can not exist in a vacuum—The Diviner requires argon and neon, and I require xenon and krypton, which, thankfully, have been present in the quantities we need in all of the hexes so far. We had weeks to prepare for this expedition, you know, and I fully expected us ultimately to have to face a vacuum—in which those little respirators will do us no good whatsoever. The packs contain compressed pressure suits designed for each of us.”

  “Then why didn’t we use them in that hellhole we just went through?” Hain grumbled, outraged. “That stuff burned!”

  “That was a hex of sharp edges and abrasives where the suits might have suffered premature damage,” The Rel replied. “It was a discomfort, no more. I thought it best not to take any risks with pressurized equipment until we have to.”

  Hain grumbled and cursed, and Skander wasn’t much better—she was drying out rap
idly and itched terribly. Only Vardia was now perfectly comfortable—the sun was very strong, the sky was blue and cloudless, and she even somehow sensed the richness of the soil.

  “What is this place, anyway?” Skander asked. “Any chance of a shady stream where I can wet down?”

  “You’ll survive,” The Rel responded. “We will alleviate your discomfort as soon as we can. Yes, there are almost certainly streams, lakes, and ponds here. When I find one shallow enough and slow enough that it will not be your avenue away from us, you will get your wish.”

  The place was thinly forested, but had tremendous growth of bushes and vines, and giant flowers—millions of flowers, as far as the eye could see, rising on stalks from one to three meters high, bright orange centers surrounded by eighteen perfectly shaped white petals.

  Huge buzzing insects went from flower to flower, but the actions were individualistic, not as they would move in a swarm. Each was about fifty centimeters long, give or take, and very furry; and though their basic color was black, they had stripes of orange and yellow on their hind sections.

  “How beautiful,” Vardia said.

  “Damned noisy, if you ask me,” Skander yelled, noting the tremendous hum the insects’ wings made as they moved.

  “Are the insects the life form?” Hain asked. The Rel had to move back close to the huge beetle to be heard.

  “No,” the Northerner replied. “As I understand it, it is some sort of symbiosis. The flowers are. Their seeds are buried by the insects, and if all goes well the braincase develops out of the seed. Then it sprouts the stalk and finally forms a flower.”

  “Then maybe I can eat a few of the buzzing bastards,” Hain said eagerly.

  “No!” The Rel replied quickly. “Not yet! The flowers drop seeds, so they do not reproduce by pollination. The bees bury the seeds, but little else—yet they are obviously gaining their food from the center of the flowers. See how one lands there, and sticks its proboscis into the orange center? If the flowers feed them, they must do something for the flower.”

  “They can’t uproot,” Vardlia said sympathetically. “What’s the use of having a brain if you can’t see, hear, feel, or move? What kind of a dominant species is that?”

  The ultimate Comworld, Skander thought sarcastically, but said aloud, “I think that’s what the insects do. If you keep watching one long enough, it goes to one other flower, then returns to the original. It might go to dozens of flowers, but it returns between trips to a particular one.”

  Vardia noticed a slight lump in the grass just ahead of them. Curiously she went over to it and carefully smoothed the dirt away.

  “Look!” she called excitedly, and they all came to see. “It’s a seed! And see! An egg of some kind attached to the outside! Each insect attaches an egg to each seed before burying it! It’s grown attached! See where the seed case is growing over the egg, secreting that film?”

  Skander almost fell out of her saddle peering over Hain’s hard shell to see, but the glance she got told the story.

  “Of course!” the scientist exclaimed. “Amazing!”

  “What?” they all asked at once.

  “That’s how they communicate—how they get around, don’t you see? The insect’s like a robot with a programmable brain. They grow up together—I’ll bet the insect hatches fully formed and instinctively able to fly when the flower opens. Whatever it sees, hears, touches, it communicates to the flower when it returns. I’ll bet after a while they can send the creatures with messages, talk to each other. And every time the insect gets to another flower, the old hands give information for it to take back. The creatures live, but they live their lives secondhand, by recording, as it were.”

  “Sounds logical,” The Rel admitted. “Hain, I would suggest you eat anything but those flowers and the black, striped insects. You could get huge numbers of them, we all could, but if we upset them we could face a programmed army of millions of the things. I want to be peaceful.”

  “All right,” Hain agreed grumpily. “But if there’s nothing else to eat, the hell with them.”

  At that moment one of the huge insects flew right into their midst and started carefully but quickly re-burying the exposed seed and egg. Satisfied, it flew off to a nearby flower and buried its head in the flower’s center. They watched it carefully, both for intent and out of curiosity. Finally it seemed satisfied and backed out, flying over to them and hovering menacingly in front of them, darting from one to the other. They stayed still, but Hain’s antennae radiated, “If that thing makes one wrong move, I’ll eat it regardless.”

  Finally the creature got to Vardia, flew all around her, then suddenly jumped on her head, and before she could make a move it pushed its sharp, mosquito-like proboscis into the top of her head just under the leafy growth. They were all too stunned to move for several seconds. Suddenly Hain said, “I’ll zap it.”

  “No!” Skander shouted violently. “You might leave that thing in her. Wait a minute and let’s see what happens.”

  Vardia had no pain centers but she did have sensitive nerves, and they felt the thing enter and probe until it touched a particular set of nerves, the ones that sent messages to and from her head and brains.

  Quite suddenly everything went dark, and a strange voice much like her own thoughts, only stronger, asked, “Who and what are you and what are you doing here?”

  She could think of nothing but answering. The alien thought was so powerful it was hypnotizing. It was more demand than question.

  “We are just passing through your hex on our way to the equator.”

  She felt the proboscis withdraw, and the lights came on again. She was in control and saw the thing heading away at high speed.

  “Va— Chon,” Skander corrected. “What happened?”

  “It… it spoke to me. It asked who we were, and I said we were just people going through the hex toward the equator. Man! It’s strong! I have the strangest feeling that I would have to answer anything it asked—and do whatever it said.”

  The Rel drifted over and lifted itself up so it could examine her head with whatever it used for sensory equipment. As it drifted just a few centimeters from her up to her head, she felt a strange tingling. Obviously it did not float—something supported it.

  The Diviner and The Rel seemed satisfied and floated back down. “No sign of a wound of any kind,” the creature said. “Amazing. One of the flowers got curious, and since you were the only member of the vegetable kingdom around, it picked you. Stay still and let it happen again. Assure them we’ll do no harm and get through as quickly as possible. Tell them we’re following the coast and will take care.”

  “I don’t think I can tell them anything they don’t ask,” Vardia responded weakly. “Oh, oh, here it comes again!”

  The creature did not have to probe the second time; it went straight to the proper nerve endings. “readout!” came the command, and suddenly she felt herself being drained, as if that which was her very essence was being sucked up into a bottle through a straw. The process took several minutes.

  “Look!” Skander cried. “My god! She’s rooted! Unmoving in bright daylight! What did that thing do to her?”

  The insect moved back into the mass of flowers.

  “We can’t do anything but wait,” The Rel cautioned. “We don’t know the rules here. At least those insects seem to be dominant only on the plants. Take it easy and let things run their course.”

  Hain and The Rel both moved toward her, where she stood rooted and motionless. Hain pressed against her skin, and got no response, nor any from the blank eyes.

  “Are we going to have to camp here?” Hain asked at last in a disgusted tone. “Why not just leave her?”

  “Patience, Hain,” The Rel warned. “We can’t afford to proceed until this drama plays itself out, even if it takes hours. We have only a little more than two hundred kilometers in this hex but we want to survive it.”

  They waited, and it took hours.

  * *
*

  Vardia felt suspended in limbo, unable to see, hear, feel, or do anything else. Yet it wasn’t like being asleep—she knew that she existed, just not where.

  Suddenly she felt that sucking feeling again, and suddenly she was aware of someone else. She couldn’t understand how she knew, but something else was there, all right. Suddenly that force of thought she had felt when the insect had first penetrated her head was all around her.

  “i meld what is yours to me and what is me to you,” the voice that was pure thought said, and it was so.

  There was an explosion in her mind, and she clung desperately to control, to her own personality, even as she felt it being eroded away, mixed into a much larger and more powerful, yet alien, set of thoughts, memories, pictures, ideas.

  Why do you resist? asked a voice that might have been her own thoughts or someone else’s. Submit. This is what you have always wanted. Perfect union in uniformity. Submit.

  The logic was unassailable. She submitted.

  * * *

  “It’s coming back!” Skander yelled, and the other two followed the path of the insect to Vardia’s head and watched it bury its sharp proboscis as before. This time it stayed an abnormally long time—perhaps three or four times longer than it had the last trip. Finally it finished and withdrew, buzzing off back to its home flower. They watched as her body came back to life, the eyes moving, looking about. She uprooted, and moved her tentacles around, shook her legs.

  “Chon! Are you all right?” Skander called out, concerned.

  “We are fine, Dr. Skander,” replied Vardia in a voice that was hers yet strangely different. “We may proceed now, without any problems.”

  The Diviner’s little flashing lights became extremely agitated. The Rel said, “The Diviner says that you are not the one of our party. Who or what are you? The equation has been altered.”