Shadow of the Well of Souls watw-2

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Shadow of the Well of Souls watw-2 Page 3

by Jack L. Chalker


  The Well World did require rather bizarre ships, since there were water hexes as well as land ones and those water hexes had the same technological limitations as their dry counterparts. Thus, a large ship had to be able to move entirely by sail through nontech waters, switch to basic steam fed by manual labor or ingenious cog-drive mechanisms for the semitech, but could use an efficient fusion plant for the high-tech regions.

  “I began in sail, if that’s what you mean,” Brazil told him. “And I’ve got—had—a master’s license for steam as well. My latest ships were big diesels, but the power source of a modern plant isn’t relevant if the power’s fed to the engines in the amount the bridge demands. I’m a little out of shape to climb rigging myself, but I could handle most anything else.”

  “Then why do you not sail there yourself?”

  “For the same reason you, as an air force colonel, didn’t have your own personal supersonic transport. That would take an incredible amount of money, and I’m afraid I’m still a wee bit short.”

  The colonel chuckled, a very eerie sound. “Yes, I see. But there are much smaller craft making the runs. Private and government yachts, ferries that are built in one place and must be sailed to where they are needed, smaller fishing boats or their equivalents, that sort of thing. Like many other high-tech coastal hexes, Hakazit has a very competitive shipbuilding industry, you know, and they often have only skeleton crews to take those ships to their customers, as most experienced crew live on and have a share in their own ships. Forget shipping agencies, sir! Try the shipwrights! Why, I managed to finagle passage here because they needed someone familiar with government-type contracts to check on an overdue naval vessel my nation has on order. Permit me to ask around when I go down there tomorrow morning. Perhaps I can find something for you. One-way, of course, and probably not precisely to where you wish to go, but sufficient, I would expect.”

  “I have no papers for this world,” Brazil reminded him, “so I never even thought of that route. But, if you can find somebody who’ll take me north, I’ll be glad to sign on.”

  “Done, sir!”

  “You sound very confident,” Brazil noted dryly.

  “Why, sir, I am first and foremost a Brazilian! In my country you learn very quickly how to deal with mosquitoes, however large they are!”

  In point of fact, Theresa “Terry” Perez did remember who she had been and where she had come from, but that only accentuated the change within her. What was different was that it no longer mattered to her, nor even did it disturb any part of her in the slightest that it no longer mattered to her. Nothing that mattered to virtually all the others in the hotel and in the city really mattered to her, except for a few basics. That was at the root of this new, nonlinear way of thinking that the Glathrielian group will imposed upon her, and not unwillingly on her part although she hadn’t known at the time what it would mean and the old Terry might well have fled instead. In point of fact, the Glathrielians had not imposed a great deal; rather, they had in effect rewired her brain so that it processed information in a way more alien to Earth standards than most of the cultures of the wildly varying races of the Well World. It created a new Terry, one who automatically saw the world in a new and very different way.

  The Glathrielian imperative was essentially quite simple: At all times, consider only all the things that are relevant to you, and miss not a one of those. Anything irrelevant or unnecessary was a distraction; distraction was the way to destruction, so anything unimportant must be literally factored out of the mind and not even allowed to register. It would take years of self-training to master it completely, but Terry, helped by the experience and self-training of the Glathrielian elders, had achieved an amazingly high level of mastery in so short a time.

  If she could filter out all distractions, all things not directly relevant to her existence and what was of true importance to her, and automatically observe only what she needed, the amount of information that simply came to her was enormous, far beyond the sort of knowledge others might possess. Thoughts, actions, and processes that did not require decisions should be automated so that they, too, ceased to exist as a factor. The energy field that her brain could generate and her body could use for so many things was one such process she had already relegated to that status. Although she didn’t know or care exactly what it was doing, or how, it protected her from the elements that might cause distraction—extremes of heat and cold, for example, or even adjusting gravitation or filtering out any impurities from an atmosphere so that if the chemicals needed to breathe were present in any mixture, it would extract only those and allow them into her lungs.

  Of course, it was also useful both as a defense and as an offense, if needed, and those functions, too, were automated.

  Without even realizing she had done so, she had reordered much of her digestive system and metabolism for maximum efficiency and maximum reserves of power.

  Whatshe ate, so long as it was not poisonous to her system and was not of flesh, was irrelevant to her, and even much that might have made her ill or killed her was now separated out and isolated and passed through without harm. The body maintained its own vitamin, mineral, fat, and sugar requirements as best it could with whatever was at hand; it basically controlled what and how much she ate. She didn’t even think of it.

  All the knowledge of her past and the person she’d been was not gone, but it had been reordered and placed in an out-of-the-way, protected area of the brain. The sight of an object or an assemblage of objects brought forth an instant reaction based on that knowledge but only what was needed to deal with it. Thus, the sight of electrical cables or sockets might evoke a warning of danger rather than a definition or a picture of what they were. By simply obeying those impulses automatically, she did not have to deal with them, either. The standard senses—sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch—were processed on a wholly subconscious level, almost as if she had a second parallel mind with access to all the same data whose sole function was to evaluate each and every “frame” of information, sixty or more per second, calculate if an action was necessary, and send the irresistible order to her consciousness.

  This alone gave her enormous abilities of which she was as yet not completely aware that when used would not be thought about or reflected upon but merely accepted.

  She was totally unaware that she was in a city, let alone a strange city on another planet peopled almost entirely by creatures alien to her. Yet her senses and her past knowledge of cities allowed her to cross busy streets at peak hours safely and, quite literally, without thinking about it. That was knowledge the Glathrielians themselves would have lacked, and they would have been easy targets for the first speeding truck. That was why she was unique even for Glathriel. She could survive in wildly unfamiliar places because her previous knowledge base gave her sufficient information for her to do so.

  She felt uncomfortable inside because walls and barriers blocked not only the irrelevant but the important as well. Enclosures distracted and had to be dealt with. Still, the knowledge base informed her that the object: Mate was subject to environmental weaknesses that no longer plagued her, and it was unthinkable that she would keep him in discomfort when it was possible to do otherwise. The concept of separating from him any more than necessary was simply not allowable. She and he were linked in biophysical and biochemical ways that neither understood but that she realized and accepted. That she had in fact induced the linkage to ensure that he took her with him she no longer even remembered; it was irrelevant. Is mattered; was did not matter and was thus dismissed from the mind unless was was absolutely required for a current action.

  And all of is was composed of objects. Mate is. Interactor with Mate is. At that moment those two objects were the only things in her mind. All else was filtered out as irrelevant. She understood nothing that was said; indeed, those very sounds were filtered out as irrelevant. But she felt what Mate felt; every little nuance of feeling was input, to a level he could not
have comprehended. These were assimilated and appended to the Mate object’s is, which in turn formed a complete and constantly changing whole object picture in her mind.

  The Glathrielian way saw life as a series of assembled objects leading to clearly pictured objectives, the latter simplified to the most basic form. Situation: hunger. Objective: find, consume sufficient food. Her one larger objective since turning Glathrielian had been to accompany now-mate. Having achieved that objective, she’d had no need for another. She understood, however, that Mate had his own objective. Because she lacked any data that the objective affected her in any way she would consider important and lacked any overall further objective of her own, Mate’s objective was in control and she would support him as he required. Just what Mate’s objective was she neither knew nor cared, nor would she care until and unless it affected what she considered important.

  Her conscious mind saw no irrelevant external details; it saw other life as a seemingly infinite variety of colors and color mixes and patterns. She saw what was inside rather than what was outside in this circumstance.

  Mate’s is was warmth, comfort, interaction with Other; interaction produced in him a range of sensations, none of which were unpleasurable and which included some hope and optimism, which meant that Mate was interacting with Other in pursuit of Mate’s objective. The Other, however, was radiating a very different is that Mate seemed oblivious to.Deceit, dishonesty, coldness, cruelty—danger! These impressions all came to her as they could only when her mind was freed of distractions. She could not interact with the Other, but she could with Mate, both empathically and physically. She knew that Mate was getting the information in the same manner as she was sending it, but while he did not reject it, it seemed only to reinforce his own instinct about the Other; neither did Mate act upon it as she would have.

  If she still could think in the old ways, she would have thought to herself, He knows the colonel is a lying, two-faced bastard with ulterior motives, but for now he’s stringing the creature along.

  She was uneasy about this only because she lacked any knowledge of what the creature was and how it might be dealt with. With the creatures she’d taken on in the past, she’d been able to absorb sufficient data from Mate to formulate a course of action; in this case, however, Mate didn’t seem to know anything about the damned creature, either, meaning that the only course open if the thing turned dangerous was to run like hell.

  For his part, Nathan Brazil was getting a little irritated by the waves of warning coming from the girl. He fervently wished there was some way to tell her, ” Iknow, the guy’s a slimy, dangerous son of a bitch, but I need to know what he’s up to.” Still, she seemed to actually be making an important point. If this creature were to try anything now, he hadn’t the slightest idea how to hurt it or just what it could do to him. He was suddenly so astonished that she had actually managed relevant and intelligent communication with him that he almost fumbled acting on it. Repressing his excitement, at least for the moment, he got control and asked, “By the way, Colonel, I don’t want to sound insulting, but just what the devil are you, anyway? Your race and nationality, I mean. You’re a new species to me.”

  That wasn’t quite true, but it must have been eons ago when he’d last encountered such a creature as this, and he just didn’t have anything to go on.

  “The nation is called Leeming, sir,” the colonel told him. “At least, that is the way the translators spit it out, and that’s acceptable. And our kind are called Leems, not Leemingites or whatever, which is very close to the actual sound.”

  The name, pronounced a bit differently but still close enough, did indeed ring a distant bell. They had no skeletal structure, and the brain case was a rock-hard ball that could move to any part of the fluid body. The outer membrane was thick enough to stop most projectiles, and yet they could control their skin and fluid interior almost down to the cellular level. What they needed, they could quickly create the internal musculature to make. Arm, hand, tentacles, functional eyes, functional mouths and voice mechanisms, ears, even the semblance of a former Brazilian Air Force colonel. They could maintain simple shapes or appendages almost forever but were unable to sustain complex forms for very long, especially when under stress. The Leem were asexual, but two were required to reproduce, each consuming a massive quantity of food and growing to almost one and a half times its normal size, then splitting off that new half, which then joined with a half from the other to produce a whole new being. They ate by secreting an acidic poison that could dissolve virtually any organic life to a puddle of warm goo, which was then absorbed directly through the skin.

  Now where the hell did allthat come from? Brazil wondered. From the Well data bank was the obvious answer, but it still startled him. The Well had never been so generous or so obvious or so detailed with him before.

  The data flowed into Terry from him and were added to her own internal knowledge base. This in turn changed the conscious picture of the Other dramatically, and it startled her. Mate had not known; then, suddenly, there had been a tiny burst of energy and a data stream had come from no specific point into his mind and then secondarily from his mind to hers.

  She felt his surprise and initial puzzlement at it, then his comfort of recognition and his surprised pleasure rather than continued bafflement. It was something unexpected, new data that could not now be correlated.

  Like her, Mate had a knowledge base that gave important data, but unlike her, the source was external. And while he knew the source, he had not expected the data to be given. There was something very important about that fact beyond its obvious comforting factors and its convenience to Mate, but as yet she could relate it to no objective of hers. But if it was not important to his objective beyond the obvious, and not relevant to hers, but was relevant and important beyond a doubt, then to whose objective did it relate? The priorities were clear:self ‹family ‹tribe. Mate + external knowledge base = great power. Family + external knowledge base = great power2. Tribe + external knowledge base = ? 8 ?

  Such speculation was fruitless and irrelevant to her now and was immediately wiped from her conscious mind as if it had never been considered. What remained was the relevant part: that she had a tribal objective that overruled all other actions, and that was for her and Mate to reach Mate’s objective. Until that was attained, reaching Mate’s objective was the sole motivator of all subsequent actions. And any actions on her part to further that objective were justified.

  Without exception.

  Cibon, Off the Itus Coast

  It had not been a pleasant voyage for the former Julian Beard, although at the time she didn’t realize how unusual the experience was.

  The monks of Erdom, pledged to maintain a stable society, had been faced with a pair of Erdomites, one male, one female, from another world, another culture, another race, now in Erdomite bodies but with their old minds and memories. Lori Sutton, once a human female and an astronomy professor as well, was now an Erdomite male through the oddities and occasional sick humor of the Well, two meters tall, strong, fast, an equine humanoid with a horn on his head and a pair of legs that could propel him at up to twenty miles an hour in deep sand. Julian Beard, once a handsome human man, an engineer and a shuttle astronaut, was now a pastel yellow Erdomite female, small, with little upper body strength, with a mane of hair and a matching tail, coping with not one but two pairs of breasts, and with hands that were little more than mittenlike split soft hooves. Both were trapped in a Well World nation where only mechanical energy was allowed, a medieval desert society where females had neither status nor rights, and where education and knowledge were tightly held and controlled by a pervasive church run by Erdomese eunuchs. To the monks these two were the very definition of a pair who just would not culturally fit.

  The original plan had been simple: to use one of the monks’ great herbal potions to essentially hypnotize them into being good Erdomites, with a posthypnotic command that each should take the drug every
night and then reinforce the hypnotic commands on the other. Only the monks’ failure to command them to forget their pasts and past knowledge and a fortuitous plea for help from Mavra Chang had taken them out of the monks’ clutches before the conditioning could be completed.

  Julian had found herself totally submissive, without any sort of aggression or defenses, in a mental state where her whole reason for living was to please her husband and anticipate his wishes. Lori had become the strutting cavalier male, accepting Julian and all Erdomese females as incapable of more than pleasing men, doing household work, and having babies. He associated with other males and treated his wife as some kind of chattel slave without regard for her feelings.

  Three days out of Erdom on the voyage north to Itus, they had taken the last of the drug without remembering it. The fourth day out, they went to take it and there was none left; they both went through the commanded ritual anyway, but without the potion they were aware of it and could understand what had been done to them. The effect was even worse because the old dosages had not worn off. When they said them, the statements sounded somewhat reasonable. It was only well after, when they awoke the next morning, that the full significance of it hit them.

  The first realization was that they had been badly had by the monks of Erdom. The second was more than a little guilt and shame at having fallen for it.

  That morning, in the cabin, they did not speak to one another for quite some time. Finally it was Julian, uncharacteristically, who broke the silence.

  “I think for sanity’s sake we should speak to each other in private only in English from now on. I think we both need the mental equivalent of a cold shower, and that’s it. Not to mention the vocabulary.”

  “That’s fine with me,” Lori replied softly, not looking directly at Julian. “It seems to me that we’re in enough trouble with those monks that it hardly makes a difference if we break our other promises now.”

 

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