Twilight at the Well of Souls wos-5

by Jack L. Chalker

  Finally he heard a click, as if a speaker had opened, and an electronically colored voice instructed, “You will go to the center of the room, under the large chandelier, and stay very still.” The voice held no menace, just a little suspicion. He did as instructed, and was told to move his tail a little this way or that, shift a bit here or there, until he was wondering if he was posing for a magazine layout. Finally the voice said, “That’s excellent. Now remain perfectly still. You will not be harmed.”

  Suddenly he was engulfed in a series of colored beams, some of which felt oddly hot and irritating. That lasted only a few seconds, but it was damned uncomfortable. Even after they were cut off, he tingled uncomfortably.

  “Now proceed to the door and enter the audience chamber,” the voice instructed. He looked around, realizing for the first time that an entire wall was silently sliding away. He shrugged and walked into the smaller chamber, which was spartanly furnished with a few tables, some glasses, and little else. The wall slid shut behind him, and he glanced back at it for a moment. Guards, booby traps, steel doors, wired rooms, sliding walls—what else?

  What else proved to be a flickering in the air opposite him and the rapid fade-in of a figure much like himself, differing mainly in the fact that this newcomer wore a scarlet tunic and cape trimmed in expensive-looking exotic furs. The Supreme Lord, he knew, appearing as some sort of hologram. What kind of paranoia would sterilize somebody against germs when he was only going to meet a projection?

  The Supreme Lord looked him over critically. “Well, I can tell you really are an Entry,” the Hakazit leader snorted. “None of the bowing and scraping or inbred social gestures.”

  “For a solidograph?” Marquoz retorted.

  The other laughed. “One of my predecessors had people salute his photograph, which was everywhere,” he responded. “He didn’t last long, needless to say.”

  Marquoz studied the image, thinking furiously. “So that’s why you take all these precautions? Everybody’s out to bump you off?”

  The Supreme Lord roared with laughter. “Now I know you are an Entry!” he laughed. “Such a question! Tell me, how did you come to that conclusion?”

  “Most dictators fear assassination,” the Com worlder noted. “It’s not unusual, since they hold power by everybody else’s fear of them.”

  The Supreme Lord stopped laughing and looked at the newcomer with interest. “So you know that this is, in fact, a dictatorship? You’re not very much like any Entry I’ve ever heard of before. No, ‘Where am I? What am I doing here?’ and all that. That’s what’s so interesting about you, Marquoz.”

  The Entry looked around the room. “Is that why so many security precautions? Because you think there’s something funny about me?”

  “Well, no, not really. Not entirely, anyway,” the Supreme Lord replied. “Ah, you call Hakazit a dictatorship. In the purest sense of that term I suppose it is. I flip the intercom, dictate an order, and it is unquestioningly carried out no matter how stupid. And yet—-well, Hakazit is also the most democratic nation on the Well World.”

  Marquoz’s head snapped up. “Huh? How’s that?”

  “I am fifty-seven years old,” the dictator told him. “Fifty-seven. And do you know how many Supreme Lords there have been in my lifetime? Sixty-seven! And at least one ruled for almost four years. The record according to recent history is nine years, three months, sixteen days, five hours, forty-one minutes. In a history that goes back over a thousand years!”

  Marquoz sighed. “It figures,” he muttered. “And that’s despite all this protective stuff, this gimmickry, the best electronics you can devise. I suppose for every charm there’s a counter charm.”

  “Exactly,” the Supreme Lord agreed. “Right now there are hundreds of officers trying to figure out how to get to me. One will, one of these days, and then they’ll add me to the books.”

  “I’m surprised you don’t know who they are and have them taken care of,” the Entry noted practically. “I know I would.”

  The ruler sniggered derisively. “Marquoz, you fail to appreciate the problem. Every Hakazit is doing it. Schoolchildren do it for fun or abstract exercise. Storekeepers, bartenders, you name it. Everybody. You can’t get rid of everybody—then you would have nobody to take dictation.”

  “It’s a problem, all right,” Marquoz admitted. “It’s a wonder you’d want this job—or that anybody else would want it under those conditions.”

  The Supreme Lord looked puzzled. “But what is the purpose of life if it isn’t to become Supreme Lord? It’s the only thing people have to live for!”

  That stopped the newcomer for a moment as he digested the idea. A warrior race with no wars. What’s the result of conquest? The ability to order everybody about, to do anything you wanted, to have anything you wanted. The ultimate fantasy. And that position was here, open, available to anyone, regardless of rank, sex, social position, or authority, who could knock off the reigning leader. It was as crazy an idea as he had ever heard, as nutty a social system as he had ever thought about—and it made absolute, logical sense. That was the trouble. It made sense.

  He changed the subject. “Well, one thing has got me curious. Why did you say you had only a thousand years of recorded history? Surely this land and this race are a lot older than that.”

  “True,” the other agreed. “But, you see, combat is built into us. We’re the most aggressive race on the Well World, and we’re surrounded by hexes designed to make it impossible to conquer or even reasonably fight them. Radiations lethal only to us, poisons lethal only to us, and the like. We hire some of the people out as mercenaries, guards—even pirates—that kind of thing, to others, but the system has us boxed in. We’re too rational to fight to extinction or maybe fight a war when there’s absolutely nothing to be gained, since we can’t hold what we gain. So, naturally, after a while the system—any system—we create to hold things together here collapses. Civil war, anarchy, a return to barbarism when all the restraints are off. Civilization gets destroyed and has to rebuild again. Our people say any social system lasts an average of two thousand years, so we’re in the middle of a period now. You have no idea how ferocious these social breakdowns can be. And neither do we. After all, they’re so bad that almost nothing survives from the previous age except crumbling ruins and a few relics.”

  Marquoz nodded. He appreciated what these creatures would be like in an all-out war with no quarter given or asked and surrender unthinkable. It was a wonder that any of them were left, he thought. But, no, as long as a single male and female were left, the Well would gradually replenish the stock, or so he understood the system. That thought was unsettling, though. Such devastation as the Supreme Lord intimated implied that those wars were literally wars of self-genocide; it was probably only the ones away from hex and home that returned to rebuild. The dead end, he thought glumly. The left overs from the Markovian dream in the eternal replay of the rise and fall of civilization. It was pretty damned depressing.

  “I can understand Your Lordship’s interest in me,” he said carefully. “Here I show up in the middle of nowhere, an Entry or an exile, either one the same, but without any of the psychological problems or wonder of what you’re used to. You figure I’m the one to get you—right?”

  The Supreme Lord shrugged slightly. “Are you?”

  Marquoz sighed. “No… no, Your Lordship, absolutely not. The last thing I want is your job. That may be hard to believe under these conditions, but you’re a very clever man or you wouldn’t be where you are. I’m sure your lie detectors are telling you now that I’m being sincere.”

  The other gave him a look of grudging admiration. “Clever one, aren’t you? But a psychopath would register the same.”

  “Your Lordship, use those truth detectors now and believe what I say. Inside of a few weeks, if it hasn’t started already, you’re going to be flooded with Entries, and none of them are going to be typical. And I don’t mean ten, twenty, a hundred. I mean en
ough so that they’ll quickly double your population. Double it!”

  The hollow burning red eyes of the projection shifted to a point outside the image, as if checking on something—a chart recorder, most likely, Marquoz guessed.

  “Hakazit couldn’t support them,” the Supreme Lord said in a thin, worried tone. “We would have to kill them.”

  “They won’t be that easy to kill,” Marquoz cautioned. “And, besides, they won’t be here to eat you out of house and home. They’ll be here to do a job and fulfill a set function.” Quickly he explained about Brazil, about the Well of Souls, about how it was damaged and had to be repaired.

  “What are you offering?” the Supreme Lord asked warily.

  “A battle. A full be-damned war! A war that could be fought by proxies trained by your people or by a combination of the two. An outlet for all this aggression, an outlet for all this pent-up civilization. And, of course, on the right side should Brazil gain the Well. And he will get there. Bet on it. Whether I die, whether Hakazit joins my side or opposes us, no matter what, he’ll win. And once he’s inside he might be able to help this situation you’ve got here. Think about it on a different level, too. This outlet, this release, will be enormously popular. You have a people who love war and have none. Now they’ll have one, and a set of purposes and objectives for it. It could be the safety valve you lack, put off collapse for many thousands of years—perhaps long enough to work out, this time, a more permanent system. And you’ll be a hero, too, for giving it to them. How long have you been Supreme Lord?”

  The leader was thinking it over. “Huh? Oh, a little over three years.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to hold on and maybe break that fellow’s old record? Hell, even if the yen doesn’t fade with the war, think about this: your biggest threats are going to be in the forefront of planning and leadership in this thing—not only too occupied to have a serious go at you, but up front, where you can see who’s really got a chance.”

  “The people… they’ll have to be pre-prepared for this, you realize,” the Hakazit leader muttered. “It’ll have to be carefully planned, carefully orchestrated.”

  Marquoz nodded. “That’s why I was sent here, specifically here, to Hakazit,” he told the other, realizing the truth himself, now, for the first time. “Uh, tell me, you have a secret police, of course.”

  “A very good one,” the Supreme Lord confirmed proudly.

  “Uh huh. And how does one get to head that service?”

  The leader looked a bit sheepish. “Well… you know…”

  “Oh,” Marquoz managed. “Your Secret Police chief, he doesn’t have this place bugged, too, does he?”

  The Supreme Lord looked shocked. “Of course not! Only I control this. The proof is that I’m still here.”

  That seemed reasonable to Marquoz. “Hmmm… this chieftan, is he a nice fellow as people go? Loving wife and kiddies?”

  “General Yutz? Ha!” the dictator chuckled. “He’s a rotten son of a bitch, the rottenest I’ve ever seen. Strangled his last wife and his oldest son because he thought they were plotting against him.”

  “I’m so very glad to hear that,” Marquoz responded sincerely. “Otherwise I’d have guilt feelings when I knocked him off.”

  The leader looked surprised. “Knocked him off? Easier said than done, my friend.”

  The newcomer chuckled dryly. “Oh, come on, Your Lordship. If you couldn’t kill him any time you felt like it, he’d have your job by now. His death should be simple to arrange.”

  The Supreme Lord of Hakazit looked at Marquoz as if for the first time, shaking his head slowly in undisguised admiration and fascination. “You know, Marquoz,” he said after a while, “I think this might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  “Could be, Your Lordship,” Marquoz responded, managing a slight smile on his stiff, fierce face. “Could be indeed. I’d much rather work with you than overthrow you. It makes my job so much nicer.”

  So much nicer, he thought to himself, and so much easier. Much easier than the alternate plan, which would have been to overthrow the whole damned system.

  “Let’s do it,” the Supreme Lord said at last.

  Awbri

  The land of Awbri was a strange jungle rainforest, thick with huge trees growing out of a dense swamp, rising thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of meters into the air. The atmosphere was heavy and humid; little droplets seemed forever suspended in the air and there was nothing, really, but water, water, water… Water from waterfalls spilling down the trees and over broad leaves in a series of cascades, going down, ever down, into the forest floor below. And yet there was little sunlight; the great trees blocked it somewhere, up there, in the omnipresent gray clouds themselves, perhaps even above those clouds. The people of Awbri, if they knew, did not seem to care.

  And below, far, far below, was the Floor, the base of the forest and the destination of those cascades. Down there, it was said, was a horrible swamp with quicksand and quagmire the rule and in which lived terrible, voracious mud and swamp creatures, creatures both animal and parasitic plant—and even carnivorous plant—that fought one another in a continual battle and devoured all that came near. None could climb, however, and even the parasites seemed stopped as they grew upward, halted by secretions from the great trees. The insects were mostly symbiotic, or, if parasitic, were so on animals and not the trees. Of insects there seemed an infinite number, some of which could penetrate and draw life-giving blood even from the bodies of the Awbrians, but that, too, was fair: in addition to the fruits of the trees and the vegetables from the vines that clung to great limbs, the Awbrians ate enormous quantities of those insects.

  The Awbrians themselves lived only in the trees, from about the hundred-meter level to the clouds at about the fifteen-hundred-meter level. They had comic-looking short duck bills that were somewhat flexible, mounted on thin, flat heads whose long supporting necks joined lithe, almost infinitely supple ro-dentlike bodies. Their four limbs all terminated in identical monkeylike hands, each with opposable thumb; there was no difference between hand and foot, which, with the Awbrian’s infinitely flexible backbone and limbs, were used as either as the situation warranted. Except for their bare gray palms and long, flat, almost rigid, kitelike tails, their bodies were covered in thick fur whose oils repelled water. All limbs were connected by fur-covered membranes, and their bones were hollow, allowing them considerable bird-like buoyancy in the air, something they needed because, with arms and legs outstretched and using the tail as a rudder, these creatures could fly between the treetops and glide for long distances, agilely darting around limbs, leaves, and other obstructions. Unlike birds, they were ultimately victims of gravity, more gliders than powered flyers. Yet by sensing the air currents and speeds and distances, they could, like a glider, remain aloft a long, long time.

  Such was the physical world into which Yua, former high priestess of Olympus, had been reborn through the Well of Souls. The cultural world had been, for her, the greater shock.

  As with her own people, there were many more females born here than males, perhaps ten or more to one. But here the men ruled supreme, whereas in her old world they had functioned merely as pampered courtesans. She had sought out the leadership of this land when she first awakened here and had been directed, finally, to the local council, which had its headquarters in a great tree that seemed set apart from the rest. So far, she had been treated with discourtesy, even downright rudeness, and had little liking for her new people, a feeling that grew even more ominous when she discovered she was to be assigned to a family of low rank. She was pragmatic; she accepted their rule for now because she could do nothing else about it, and because the alternative was to be drugged or lobotomized into acceptance and submission.

  Awbri had no central government. It was made up of clans, each of which was an extended family all living and working together. Each tree could support between a dozen and twenty or so Awbrians; clans spread to adjoining t
rees and their relative power and social ranking was based on the number of people in the clan and, by extension, the number of trees it inhabited and controlled. Within each clan, which ranged from as few as a hundred to more than five thousand, male rank was a combination of age, birth, and tests of strength and endurance. Female rank depended more on age and relationship to the chief male of the clan than on anything else, although the highest-ranking female was always well below the lowest-ranking male.

  A young Awbrian female came for her in the morning. She was Dhutu of Tokar, she told the newcomer, and she was here to help Yua get to her new home and to help her in adjusting.

  Dhutu was friendly, at least, and helped her with the fine points of flying, although the more Yua did it the easier it became. She seemed instinctively to know distances and to “feel” and “see” the sluggish air. Still, lacking complete confidence in her ability as yet, she grabbed trees and took things in short stages. Dhutu was amused but patient, and it was during such stops that Yua learned more of the culture of Awbri.

  The men, it seemed, spent most of their time in combat-type sports and rivalries, although they also regulated commerce and trade, swapping whatever their clans produced for whatever they needed. They decided what would be grown on the limbs and in the mulch-lined hollows of branches; they decided just about everything, in fact. Only males received any sort of education. She found Dhutu’s ignorance almost appalling. The female considered reading and writing things of magic; books and letters were mysterious symbols that “talked” only to males. She had no idea what lay over the next grove beyond her own local neighborhood, let alone the fact that she was on a planet—-or even what a planet was. She knew there were other races, of course; hexes were too small to conceal that fact. But she knew nothing about them, for they were all monsters and could be understood only by clan chiefs. And anyhow, she had no curiosity.