Exiles at the Well of Souls

by Jack L. Chalker

  "We must stay hidden from anyone, Nikki," he whispered to her. "No one must see us."

  "Oh, yes, Ben," she responded, and they crept along the side of the walk, for the most part hidden in the bushes. There were some sharp needles on some of the bushes and plants that lined the walk, and Nikki was scratched and splintered by them, but aside from occasional rubbing or a near-silent exclamation, she didn't complain. Once he didn't see a short, dark man turn a corner, and she pulled him down behind a bush.

  Finally they reached the grassy, unlit area that for obscure reasons some called the campus, and they cut across it, walking normally. Finally, crouched in a dark corner in the shadow of another building, they waited.

  She kept her arm around him and leaned into him.

  He put his arm around her, and she sighed. She was rubbing him and kissing his clothing.

  He found the whole thing embarrassing and slightly nauseating, but he'd established the rules of the game and had to suffer for it.

  At last, a small, sleek private carrier slid up to them in the blackness. A gull-wing was raised, and a man emerged and approached them. Nikki, hearing movement, looked around and then tried to drag Yulin back into the blackness.

  "No, Nikki, that man's a friend of mine," he told her, and she accepted his statement and immediately relaxed.

  "Adnar! Over here!" he called, and the man heard and came closer.

  "You must go with Adnar," he told her softly. She looked stricken and clung even tighter to him.

  "This is the only way we can be together, Nikki," he told her. "You must go away for a short time, but, if you make no complaints and do everything Adnar and his friends tell you without question, I'll come to you, I promise."

  She smiled at that. Her mind was clouded; she could think only of Ben, and if Ben said something then it was true.

  "Let's go," Adnar called impatiently.

  Yulin steeled himself, then hugged the girl and kissed her long and passionately.

  "Remember that while we're apart," he whispered. "Now, go!"

  She went with the strange man. Unquestioningly, without complaint, they climbed into the black carrier, and it sped away.

  Ben Yulin allowed himself to exhale, and for the first time noticed he was perspiring. Shakily, he made his way back to his own building and bed.

  * * *

  Antor Trelig displayed the charming smile of a poisonous snake. He sat, relaxed, in Gil Zinder's office once more. The little scientist was visibly shaken.

  "You monster!" he snapped at the politician. "What have you done with her?"

  Trelig looked hurt. "Me? I would do nothing, I assure you. I am much too big a man for something like a petty kidnapping. But, I do have a lead on where she might be, and I have some facts on what's happened to her up to this point."

  Zinder knew the big man was lying, but he could also see the reason for the pretense. Trelig hadn't done the deed personally, and he would have made very certain that it wasn't traceable to him.

  "Tell me what you—they've done to her," he groaned.

  Trelig did his best to look serious. "My sources tell me that your daughter is in the hands of the sponge syndicate. You've heard of it?"

  Gil Zinder nodded, a cold chill going through him.

  "They deal in that terrible drug from that killer planet," he responded, almost mechanically.

  "Quite so," Trelig responded sympathetically. "Do you know what it does, Doctor? It decreases the IQ of someone by ten percent for every day it goes untreated. A genius is merely average in three or four days, and hardly more than an animal in ten days or so. There's no cure—it's a mutant thing unlike any life form we've ever encountered, produced by a mixture of some of our organic matter and some alien stuff. The effect is painful, too. A burning in the brain, I believe is the description, spreading to all parts of the body."

  "Stop! Stop!" Zinder sobbed. "What is your price, you monster?"

  "Well, remission is possible," Trelig responded, still sympathetic. "Sponge isn't the drug, of course, it's the remittent agent. Daily doses and there's no pain and little loss. The—ah, disease, is made dormant."

  "What is your price?" Zinder almost screamed.

  "I believe I can locate her. Buy off these men. My medical staff has some sponge cultures—quite illegal, of course, but we've discovered many people in high places in your situation, blackmailed by these villains. We could go after her, retrieve her, and give her sufficient sponge to restore her to normal." He shifted slightly, enjoying himself immensely.

  "But I'm a politician, and ambitious. That's true enough. If I do something, particularly going up against an illegal band of cutthroats and then risking discovery of my illegal sponge, I must have something in return. To do it—"

  "Yes? Yes?" Zinder was almost in tears.

  "Report your project a failure and put in to close down," Trelig suggested. "I will arrange the transfer of—Obie, I think you call it—to my planetoid of New Pompeii. There you will plan and direct the construction of a much larger model than the one you have here, one large enough to be used at a distance on, say, an entire planet."

  Zinder was appalled. "Oh, my god! No! All those people! I can't!"

  Trelig smiled smugly. "You don't have to decide now. Take as long as you want." He got up, smoothing out his angelic white robes. "But remember, every passing day Nikki is more subject to the drug. Pain aside, the brain damage is ongoing. Consider that when thinking over your decision. Every second you waste the pain increases, and your daughter's brain dies a tiny bit."

  "You bastard," Zinder breathed angrily.

  "I'll initiate a search anyway," the big man told the scientist. "What I can spare, but not all-out, because it's merely in the name of humanity. Might take days, though. Even weeks. In the meantime, with a single call to my office saying you agree, I will put everybody on it, sparing nothing. Good-bye, Dr. Zinder."

  Trelig walked slowly to the door, then out. It shut behind him.

  Zinder stared hard at the door, then sank into his chair. He considered calling the Intersystem Police but thought better of it. Nikki would be well-hidden, and accusing the vice president of the Council of being a sponge merchant and kidnapper without a shred of evidence—Zinder knew the big man would have an ironclad alibi for the night past—would be futile. They'd investigate, of course, take days, even weeks, while poor Nikki . . . They'd let her rot, of course. Let her rot for five or six days. Then what? A lowgrade moron, washing floors happily for them, or perhaps a toy given to Trelig's men for sex and sadism.

  It was that last he couldn't stand. Her death he thought he could accept, but not that. Not that.

  His mind whirled. There would be ways later. Obie could cure her if he could get her back soon enough. And the device he was to build—it could be a two-edged sword.

  He sighed, a tired and defeated little man, and punched the code for Trelig's liaison office on Makeva. He knew the big man would still be there. Waiting. Waiting for the inevitable response.

  Defeated for now, he thought resolutely, but not vanquished. Not yet.

  On New Pompeii, an Asteroid

  Circling the Uninhabited

  System of the Star Asta

  New Pompeii was a large asteroid, a little over four thousand kilometers at its equator. It was one of those few small bits that inhabit all solar systems that deserved to be called a planetoid; it was fairly round, rounder than most planets, and its core was made up of particularly dense material, giving it a gravity of .7 G when balanced against its ample centrifugal force. The effect took a little getting used to, and people tended to do things faster and feel tremendous. But since it was a government-owned resort, that was all to the good.

  Its orbit was relatively stable, by far more circular than elliptical, although night and day were hard to take; thirty-two sunrises and sunsets in a Council-standard twenty-five hours did tend to be unsettling to people's internal clocks.

  The discomfort was partially offset by
the fact that half the entire planetoid was encased in a great bubble made of a very thin and light synthetic material; the bubble was a good light reflector and blurred the view, so it merely seemed to get darker, then lighter, and so forth, the effect being similar to that on much nicer and more natural worlds on a partly cloudy day. Accounting for the glow effect, was a thin—less than a millimeter—gauze material in somewhat liquid form between the two layers of the bubble. Any punctures were instantly sealed. Even a large one could if necessary be closed long enough to activate safety bubbles around the human centers inside. Compressed air, aided by the lush vegetation planted all over, kept the environment stable.

  Theoretically, this was a place for party leaders on New Outlook to get away from the pressures for a bit. Actually the resort's existence was known to only a few people, all intensely loyal to Antor Trelig, who was, after all, the party chairman. Protected by computer battle systems erected both on nearby natural dust specks and in special ships, no one could approach within a light-year without being blown apart, not unless Antor Trelig or his people approved.

  The place was unassailable politically, too; it would take a majority vote of the Council to enter over Trelig's diplomatic immunity and sovereignty, and Trelig controlled the largest bloc of votes on the Council.

  When they brought Nikki Zinder to New Pompeii she didn't really pay much attention to her surroundings. All she could think of was Ben and Ben's promise that he'd come for her. They put her in a comfortable room; quiet, faceless human servants brought her food and cleared it away. She lay around most of the day, hugging pillows, pretending that he was there. She used some pencils and paper she found to draw innumerable pictures of him, none very good but all showing him as an angelic superman. She determined to lose some weight for him, to surprise him, but his absence, aided and abetted by the tremendous variety of natural foods offered, caused just the reverse. Every time she thought of him she ate, and she thought of him constantly. Already overweight, by the end of six weeks she had gained almost eighteen kilos. She didn't really notice.

  They also took pictures of her at various times, even had her read some words to a recorder. She didn't mind. It wasn't important to her.

  Time was meaningless to her; every minute was terrible and drawn out as long as he wasn't there. She wrote childish love poems to him and endless reams of letters, which they said they'd deliver.

  It took eight weeks before Gil Zinder completed all the procedures necessary to shut down the project and prepare to move. Yulin's role in all that had happened was still unknown to him, but he was somewhat suspicious of the younger scientist when the man so eagerly volunteered to work on the new Trelig project. As for Trelig, he kept Zinder at least satisfied that his daughter was still alive by providing coded messages along with fingerprint and retinal-pattern ID to go with the pictures. The fact that she read the statements did not disturb her father; it indicated to him that she still could read normally and that Trelig was being a man of his word on neutralizing the sponge.

  For the final transfer of the master computer center and console to New Pompeii, they had to disconnect Obie from the apparatus that could alter or affect reality. And when they did, they made a startling discovery.

  Zetta, who they had made younger and more attractive, remained the way they'd designed her, but now she suddenly realized that she had been changed. The old equations were restored when Obie broke with the mechanism; she was still transformed, because they had used the machine to transform her—but now she knew she had been transformed.

  She was coming with them, of course, so there was no danger that a third person who realized the potential of the device would spread the news, but that worried Ben.

  For good reason.

  * * *

  Nikki Zinder sat in her room on New Pompeii. She was eating and daydreaming as usual, when, suddenly, it seemed that a fog simply disappeared from her mind, and she began thinking with crystal clarity.

  She looked around the room, cluttered with the remains of a long habitation, as if she were seeing it for the first time. She shook her head and tried to reason out what had happened.

  She felt as if she were coming down from some sort of drug high. She remembered going to sleep, then she remembered getting this tremendous crush on Ben, who took her out and handed her to some people who brought her here. She didn't understand any of it, though, nor could she relate to it. What had happened was dreamlike, as if it had happened to someone else.

  She got up from the little table still littered with food and looked down at herself. She could see enormous breasts and, just barely, some sort of bulge below; but she couldn't see her own feet. With a gasp she went over to a closet mirror and looked at herself.

  She felt like crying. She waddled more than walked; her legs were sore from rubbing against each other every time she moved. Her face was rounder than usual, and she had several chins. Her hair was always long, but now it was uncombed, unkempt, and tangled.

  And, worst of all, she was hungry.

  What's happened to me? she wondered, then broke down and cried. It eased her panic but did little to relieve the misery she felt.

  "I've got to get out of here, got to call Daddy," she murmured aloud, then wondered if even he would still love her as she was now. There was little else to do, though, and she hunted for some clothes. I'm going to need a twelve-person field tent, she thought morosely.

  She found her old nightgown, neatly washed and folded, and tried to get it on. It was too tight now, and it didn't come down nearly far enough. Finally she gave up and thought for a moment. She spied the rumpled sheet on the bed and, with some difficulty, managed to pull it off. Folding and tying it, she managed to make at least a covering. Then she found a paper clip on the writing desk. By unraveling the clip and using it as a pin, she was able to bind the sheet.

  She paused at the desk, looking down at a half-finished, multipaged letter. It was her handwriting, all right, but it read like some insane erotic mishmash. She couldn't believe she'd written it, although she had vague memories of writing others like it.

  She walked over to the door and put her ear up to it, listening. There seemed to be no sound, so she pressed the stud and it opened. Beyond was a corridor, lined in some kind of fur, that ran on in one direction past a lot of doors. In the other direction it was only a short way to an elevator door. She rushed to it, tried to summon the elevator, but she could tell from the call strip that it was keyed. Looking around, she discovered some stairs behind what looked like a laundry room, and she started climbing. It was an easy choice—they only went up.

  After only two dozen or so steps, she was already panting, feeling dizzy and out of breath. Not only did the extra weight get to her, but she had had no exercise to speak of for—how long? In over eight weeks of constant eating, she had put on over three kilos a week.

  Panting, heart beating so hard she could feel it, she started up again. She again felt dizzy, her head ached, and she could hardly go on. Once she was so dizzy that she almost slipped and fell. Looking down, she saw she'd climbed less than a dozen meters. She felt as if she had climbed a tall mountain and realized she couldn't go on much farther. Finally, one more landing, one more turn, and she saw a door. Gasping, she almost crawled the last few meters.

  The door opened, and a rat-faced little man looked down on her with mixed scorn and disgust.

  "Well, well, well," he said. "And where do you think you're going, baby hippo?"

  * * *

  It took three of them to carry her, exhausted, back to the elevator and down to her room. From their questions and her reactions, they did find that whatever spell she'd been under was now broken. Their docile idiot had somehow become a near-hysterical captive.

  The rat-faced man gave her a shot to calm her, and it did help a little. While the sedative was taking hold, he used a wall intercom outside her room to call and report her new status and to get instructions. This didn't take long, and he returned to t
he room and looked at her. She was still breathing hard, but she looked at him and pleaded, "Will somebody please tell me where I am and what is going on?"

  Rat-face smiled evilly. "You're the guest of Antor Trelig, High Councillor and Party Chairman of New Outlook, on his private planetoid of New Pompeii. You should feel honored."

  "Honored, hell!" she spat. "This is some scheme to get at my father, isn't it? I'm a hostage!"

  "Bright girl, aren't you?" the man replied. "Well, yes, you've been sort of hypnotized for the past two months, and now we have to deal with you as you are."

  "My father—" she started hesitantly, "he isn't—isn't going to . . . ?"

  "He'll be here with his whole staff and everything within a week," the man replied.

  She turned her head. "Oh, no!" she moaned. Then, for a second, she thought about him seeing her—like this.

  "I'd rather die than have him see me like this," she told the man.

  He grinned. "That's all right. He loves ya anyway. Your condition is a byproduct of a drug we gave you as an insurance policy. Normally we just give a measured dose of the sponge, but we had to make sure that nothin' happened to spoil your mind as long as we need your old man, so we kinda overdid it. ODs affect different people different ways. In your case the stuff makes you eat like a horse. Believe me, better than the other way. Better than some other OD reactions, too, which usually gets you in the sex department somewheres, gets girls all hairy and deep-voiced, sometimes worse."

  She didn't know what sponge was, but she had the idea that they had addicted her to some kind of drug that would rot her mind if untreated.

  "My daddy can cure me," she told him defiantly.

  The rat-faced man shrugged. "Maybe he can. I don't know. I just work here. But if he can, he'll do it only because the boss lets him, and, in the meantime, you'll continue to grow. Don't worry—some likes 'em big."

  She got upset at that, and at the tone of the remark. "I won't eat another thing," she resolved.