Echoes of the Well of Souls watw-1

by Jack L. Chalker

  While there seemed very little sensation in the rather large feet, the palms proved to have a lot of nerve sensors, and she could get a surprisingly good “feel,” as good as or better than her old hands. I’llnever touch-type again, though, she thought inanely. Not with two fewer fingers, even though the size of the hands and the length of the fingers gave her, if anything, more control.

  She still thought of herself as a “she,” and she knew that she probably would have to make a major mental adjustment on that score. Nobody in this new place would know that she’d been a woman most of her life; they’d see her in this man’s body instead.

  She felt her face. It seemed human enough—mouth, even with what seemed to be thicker lips and maybe a longer, slightly thicker tongue, but her jaw moved side to side as well as up and down, and the teeth indicated that whatever these people were, they were omnivores, not herbivores as she would have expected. The canines, in fact, seemed a bit larger and sharper than they used to be—and no caps, no missing back tooth!

  She had always been farsighted, which was the reason she had been able to survive among the People without her glasses, but vision now seemed perfect, with every little hair easy to pick out even very close up. She couldn’t remember when she’d seen this clearly at all distances.

  Nose… Well, human, sort of, but there was something odd inside the nostrils, controlled by voluntary muscles. She flexed them and suddenly found her breathing cut off. She relaxed them again very quickly. Protection against blowing sand, perhaps? The eyes felt a little funny, too. She concentrated and found that she had double eyelids that could be independently controlled if she concentrated or would operate as one if she didn’t. The outer lids were essentially what she thought of as “normal”; the inner ones, however, were transparent. They distorted her vision and in fact seemed to filter color so that the world became a study in contrasting grays, but she could see through them.

  The ears were definitely not “normal.” They went more back than up and were protected by large pointed lobes, more like a horse’s ears or some similar animal’s. They could, she discovered, be somewhat rotated, raised, or lowered, even independently of one another. There was a shock of bushy hair atop the head, but it didn’t seem to grow long down the back. With some trepidation she pulled one and looked at it. It appeared nearly snow white in color and very long and thick.

  Lori had a sudden thought and reached around to her behind. There appeared to be a bit of excess hair at the base of the spine but not the tail she almost expected to find. In a way it was kind of disappointing. She’d always wondered what it would feel like to have a tail.

  She looked around, trying to figure out how to get up. Equinelike or not, this wasn’t the body of a four-footed animal, no matter what its ancestors might have been like. It wasn’t as easy as getting up in a human body, it seemed, but she figured it out with a little experimentation. She turned over and used the hands as forefeet and then pushed off, letting her back muscles lift her upright. The true feet were clearly designed for sand; she found no problems with footing at all.

  She looked around, wondering where the hell she might go. In doing so, she saw her shadow, and it made an amazing vision to her eyes even though, with the sun not so high, it was distorted and lengthened. Curiously, though, it was only by seeing that shadow that she noticed the horn.

  Her hand went up to the top of her head and found it easily, almost centered up there. A twisting, rock-hard spiral going up, not quite straight, to a very wicked point. Although it was hard and almost half a meter long, she had no sensation of it being there at all, not even weight or balance on the head.

  A male bipedal unicorn? she wondered to herself. Why would any evolving race keep a horn like that?

  For now she could only guess. A weapon perhaps, considering the thinness and fragility of the arms? Or… She had an awful thought it might be used in some way involving mating no matter how conventional it seemed.

  All right, Lori, you know the basics about what they’ve stuck you with; now what?

  Again she scanned the horizon, and this time a curious effect happened. When she concentrated on any far point, it was as if her vision suddenly became telescopic. She could bring her view of the horizon closer, much closer, seeing detail at very great distances indeed. Although there was about a half second’s disorientation when she switched her focus to something more close up, the effect was the neatest thing about this body she’d discovered.

  But what good was it to be able to zero in on the distant horizon if there was nothing but sand to be seen?

  “Get to a zone gate and tell me where and what you are,”Mavra had said, but how could she do that when there seemed nowhere to go to get anywhere!

  Lori continued the horizon pan, stopping and magnifying, trying to see anything. What good was all this if she was going to be stuck, alone and without food or water, in this desert?

  She suddenly stopped and zeroed in on a tiny black speck far, far away. She would never even have noticed it without this perfect vision, and she would certainly have never been able to tell that it was more than a dune shadow without the remarkable telescopic abilities. Even with them it was barely discernible, but it seemed to be a dark area of some kind protruding from the desert floor. Rocks? It didn’t seem likely.

  Trees! An oasis!

  The sun was definitely climbing, and the day was heating up fast. Now was the time to make for any possible haven, and second-guessing was a luxury that she could not afford.

  She started off toward the black dot and began to improve on her walking and balancing abilities with almost every step. She did not walk with those feet; she sort of trotted or even galloped, kicking up sand but making very good speed. She also learned rather quickly and a bit painfully that when moving fast, she had to lean a bit forward and keep the hips wide, otherwise that thing down there flapping away would get crunched between the upper calves.

  It was getting progressively hotter, and she could actually see the heat both as it came down upon her and as it was first trapped and then radiated back by her body. She wondered just how hot to the touch she was right now.

  She began to have trouble seeing. The heat radiation was coloring everything and distorting her sight. It suddenly occurred to her that there was more than one use for those inner lids, and she closed them. Virtually all colors snapped out and the world became a mass of infinite grays, yet the black dots that hadn’t seemed to grow any closer no matter what speed she was making now began to resolve themselves a bit more clearly and did in fact seem to be getting ever so slightly larger.

  It was an oasis! That might not mean people, but those were clearly trees of some kind, and trees needed water.

  Or at least she hoped that trees here needed water.

  She would have expected to become winded after a while and have to rest, particularly in the growing heat, but she found that running across the sands like this gave her a real rush; her chest apparently contained mostly lung, and it went in and out with each giant breath she took. But the rhythm of the breathing and the running was very easy to slip into, and even though it seemed like she’d been running for hours across many, many kilometers, she didn’t feel the least bit tired or winded.

  She was definitely hungry and thirsty, though, which only gave her more impetus to reach her goal as quickly as physically possible.

  Soon the oasis loomed before her, filling much of her vision, and it was enough of a dark mass that she lifted the inner lids to get the full detail.

  The trees weren’t like any she’d ever seen before, but they had a tropical look, with thin and supple trunks rising to layers of oversized palm- or fernlike leaves.

  She ran right through the first row and found the area larger than she had expected and the ground inside harder with much exposed white-veined gray rock that produced a “clopping” sound when her feet hit it. She slowed but found that she needed to go up to a tree and put a hand out to fully stop herself wit
hout falling over.

  It was almost a letdown to stop running, but her chest continued to heave and she continued to gulp in air at the same rhythm until her breathing slowed to a more normal rate.

  She looked around, and her ears automatically rotated about a hundred degrees on either side, checking for sounds. There wasn’t much except the rustling of some leaves in the highest part of the trees, apparently in reaction to a slight breeze that didn’t reach the ground.

  Her nose, though, brought an overpowering aroma that she recognized immediately, even though she’d never smelled it before— water!

  Finding it was as simple as following her nose.

  She didn’t hesitate a moment worrying that it might not be good water. It wasn’t any new inner sense that told her anything about it but rather an all-consuming thirst that made it clear that the question was moot. She simply had to have water.

  The water was in fact from a spring that bubbled out of the rocks and created an attractive, shaded pool about a dozen meters across. She headed for it, got on all fours, then dropped down and just stuck her face in it and began to suck and lap it in. Her natural nose plugs closed the instant her face hit the water, and she hardly noticed.

  It was an eerie sensation, though, because she just drank and drank. She had never drunk this much of anything in her whole life, and long after a human her size would have been satisfied she continued to take it in. She could feel it, cooling down her whole body in stages, coiling around inside her like a living thing, and finally concentrating in her back. There was no telling how much she drank before, unable to take another gulp, she came up out of the water and settled back, lying there on her side. For several minutes she felt bloated but cool, and then, slowly, her body temperature seemed to come back to normal and that bloated feeling subsided.

  She wondered where all the water had gone. She didn’t feel like she’d grown some sort of camel’s hump, nor did rolling on her back for a moment reveal one, but clearly this body had areas to store a lot of excess liquid. After a while she forced herself to get up, even though she actually felt sleepy. For one thing, the pool was not totally calm but it did reflect decently and she wanted to get a more complete image of herself. And then it would be prudent to look around. Although Lori the American college teacher wouldn’t have resisted, Bimi of the People knew that it wouldn’t do to just zonk out without checking the lay of the land.

  The image of herself in the gently rippling water was both strange and familiar. She’d always had something of a long neck, and she still did; the face, although the same beige or light tan color, contained enough of the old Lori Sutton to be recognizable, although it had a harder, larger, rougher cast. It was, she realized, what her face would have looked like had she been born a man. She’d always had that boyish look to her face, and now it seemed to have firmed up and looked not nearly as bad to her as it had all those times in the mirror.

  The lips were thicker by quite a bit and were a dark brown, the nose was a bit larger, the eyes were dark black blobs against a medium brown field, the ears were very equine and larger than she’d thought, and the eyebrows were thick and snow white and rose on either side of the eyes at a slight angle, giving her a slightly exotic look. The big shock of white hair was actually kind of cute. The horn, the same color brown as the skin fur, looked, well, different from what she had imagined. That’s one hell of a phallic symbol, she thought. Jeez! As weird as this body is, it sure would have turned me on!

  She tore herself reluctantly away from the self-examination and got up and looked around the rest of the oasis. It was, thankfully, deserted. Not that she wanted to hide out forever, but she wasn’t sure she was ready for others of this kind yet, particularly not as a man.

  This was clearly a popular stop. In the sandy soil were traces of great numbers of people—beings like herself, anyway—having moved through here, and probably not long ago, since clearly the winds came through this place and erased many signs as if they’d never been. There was also signs of some sort of civilized behavior as well—holes which clearly were some kind of tent pole supports, a central fire pit with more support holes that might indicate anything from a rotisserie to grates being placed there, and a veritable waste pile of damaged and broken crockery, much of it of fired clay and some of it inlaid with elaborate designs.

  The designs were very interesting, since among the more abstract parts were some scenes of what might have been life in this place. The style was almost reminiscent of ancient Egyptian, all in profile and two very flat dimensions yet finely featured. She couldn’t be sure if these were domestic or religious scenes, but a lot could be learned from them.

  For one thing, they went in for decoration more than clothes, and that was instructive—not that clothes made a lot of sense out here with this kind of body. Either these beings came in a rainbow of colors or dyed fur in different colors and patterns was popular. So was decorating the horns, some of which were depicted as impossibly long. There was also a fair amount of jewelry on the males and what appeared to be serapelike capes with intricate designs worn over the head but extending down only chest-high and, on some but not all, a kind of highly decorated but very brief codpiece. Males didn’t seem to grow facial hair, but the big clump of hair on top tapered down the back until it vanished completely about three-quarters of the way down in a manelike appearance.

  The females were quite different. First, they were all depicted as at least a head shorter than any of the males, although that might be just the male artist’s perspective. They had very soft feminine faces and no horn at all, but they had a huge amount of hair that trailed down their backs.

  They also had tails, much like horses’ tails, that were almost mirror images of their hair and seemed to be deliberately styled to be that way and kept up with some kind of stays. They were not brown-furred but rather a soft, pale yellow, and their body hair and tails were a variety of browns, reds, even blonds, as well as black. How much was artificial and how much was “natural” color couldn’t be determined.

  They also had two pairs of breasts, one atop the other. It was a very strange sight, but with the erotic equine curves of the body it didn’t look wrong, either. That got Lori to examining her own chest, where, after some effort even with the short hair, she did indeed locate four small nipples.

  Did they have that many kids that they needed all that excess capacity? Or did they have a lot of kids and only a few made it past weaning? No, probably not. They didn’t seem big enough to carry more than one or two routinely, any more than human women did. The breasts, which seemed almost “humanlike,” had some of the short pale yellow fur about two-thirds of the way to the nipples but were otherwise all a very light brown.

  Some of the decorations simply depicted scenes from some kind of tribal life: guards flanking a particularly decorated male who wore a lot of gold and a bright scrape adorned with a sash, females preparing food in fire pits. The males carried spears, and some seemed to be wearing swords—there was one scene of two males dueling, possibly in sport, the swords thin and rapierlike, with hilts somewhat reminiscent of their horns. There were also scenes that were blatantly erotic, often two or more females with one male, and the sexual attributes depicted made her own rather large endowment seem downright trivial.

  Still, aside from the alienness of the people depicted, the scenes for the most part looked right out of some ancient Near Eastern Earth culture. A tribal, nomadic people, but with a sense of art and, from the odd-looking bands around some of the broken pottery, with a form of writing as well.

  She was about to abandon her look through the remnants when a large fragment caught her eye and she reached down, picked it up, and frowned. It gave her a sudden chill to look at the scene, the first one she really didn’t like at all.

  Their tents, crockery, ornamental stuff, all their goods moved on what seemed to be sledlike devices made to slide through the sand. Several had been depicted open or parked in other scenes, but this s
cene was of some in motion. She wondered why she hadn’t seen any depictions of domesticated animals, and this was why.

  The females were lined up on a series of wooden bars passed through a forward support, and teams of six to ten of them, depending on the size of the desert sled, were clearly pulling them while the males ran with their spears to either side.

  The females were the draft animals.

  In fact, suddenly flashing back through the other scenes, she realized that whenever work was depicted, it was the females who were doing it. The males might fence or look magnificent or whatever, but never were they shown actually doing anything, except in the erotic ones, of course, when they were doing what men always liked to do.

  She felt outraged by the sight as all her old principles came to the fore, and yet she found herself thinking, Thank God I’m not a woman here!

  She was ashamed of the thought, yet damn it, the idea of being one of the bosses rather than one of the servants was something of a turn-on. She hated herself for feeling that, too, and tried to get some self-control back. She didn’t know what it was to be as oppressed as these women obviously were, but she knew what it was like to be a woman in a man’s world, and she hoped she wouldn’t descend to that level even if she had to adjust to this society.

  She tossed the shard back in the pile, and it landed with a crash and cracked again.

  This was too much to handle, coming all at once, she thought. It made the kidnapping and subsequent life among the People seem almost ordinary by comparison. Still, Alam—Mavra—had been right. Without that first experience, she wasn’t sure if she could have handled this one at all.

  She looked around, but there was clearly nothing to eat here. There did seem to be some kind of round, green fruit way up atop the trees, but even if it were edible and ripe enough to eat, this body was good for a lot of things, but tree climbing wasn’t one of them. Filled with water, though, she was in no immediate danger of anything more than a growling stomach. She would pick a spot in the shade with some promise of concealment just in case and get the badly needed rest. Then she could think of what to do next.