Shadow of the Well of Souls watw-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  “Ten to one the short horns are females and the long horns males,” Tony remarked. “Notice how there are far fewer long horns and that they’re rather well spaced in the fields. Each oldster watching out for his wives, most likely, with the shorter ones inside probably sons. Oh, my! Look at them jump!”

  Mavra took the glasses and saw immediately what she meant. They did not run, not exactly; they leapt, the larger ones springing free of the tall grass cover. The bodies seemed to be covered in a light, short beige fur, and for a moment they looked like yellowish kangaroos, but in addition to short, tiny arms they had two rather small hoofed front feet and two enormous rear feet that powered the leap and seemed all out of proportion to the rest of the creature. They had short, stubby fanlike tails that, unlike a kangaroo or wallaby, could not support them standing on the rear legs alone, so when still, they were on all fours with the long neck craning their heads up.

  “Six limbs,” Annie Marie noted. “Like us!”

  Something panicked a gathering not far from the shimmering border wall—some large reptilian birdlike thing swooping overhead, it looked like. In any event, it almost started a stampede of the creatures, who leapt out of the grass as if one and then came down again, apparently on their front hooves, then launched using their gigantic rear legs once more. The movement of one group startled some of the others, but Tony noted that the larger long-horned ones he’d thought of as males turned and looked up at the threat above them and seemed to act almost in a coordinated fashion to track and if need be fight the predator.

  The attacker, an ugly dark-looking thing with an impossibly long snakelike neck and a head that seemed to be all eyes and mouth, swooped down and found itself confronted by a series of male defenders who would leap, horns out, in an attempt to gore or at least scare the creature when it came too close.

  It was quite an impressive bit of teamwork and was quite effective; every time the attacker would come down for some wee one in the still-fleeing herd, it would meet one or more of the males. Still, the herd was too large to guard against air attack. Eventually the thing outmaneuvered the defenders, swooped into the madly fleeing and scattering herd, and came up with something small and wiggling. Then the thing flew off toward the nearby grove of trees with its prize.

  “Disgusting,” Anne Marie snorted.

  “Nature, that is all, my dear,” Tony responded pragmatically. “One overpopulates; the other manages it. It is the same way on Earth.”

  “Not in England!” she responded, as if it made sense.

  Tony turned to Mavra. “You know, I have been thinking. Do you suppose those herds are the Gekir? They have hands of a sort, or so it appears, and they have some sort of logical defense organizations.”

  “I doubt it,” Mavra replied. “Too basic. After all this time they’d be about as sophisticated here as a nontech civilization can get, I’d say. No, you were right. That’s instinct and nature. No tools and no weapons that are built with tools. I can’t say I’m too thrilled by that thing that attacked them, though. I wish it had gone anywhere but in that grove.”

  “We can bypass it.”

  “Yeah, but how many more will we have to bypass if we do? And Julian needs a real long drink or we’ll have to let her empty all our canteens.” Briefly, and skipping the details, she explained what had taken place in the night.

  “Poor dear! But she should ride today! I’m certain that either of us could take both of them,” Anne Marie responded.

  “Yes, particularly if she’s the one against my back this time,” Tony added, rubbing a bruise where Lori’s horn had stuck her. “How far do you think it is to the coast?”

  “Not far. Half a day at the most,” Mavra told them. “An hour or less if it was just the two of us.”

  “Perhaps we can repack this differently,” Tony suggested. “I think I could take both Julian and you and half the supplies, and Anne Marie could take Lori and the remaining supplies. He’s the only one that weighs much of anything among the three of you.”

  “How sweet,” Anne Marie remarked. “You want to ensure that we have matching bruises, too.” She sighed. “Very well. Then we can avoid that horrid creature over there altogether.”

  “I’ll go that far with you, about riding, that is,” Mavra told them, “but I don’t think we can skip water. No, if we run every time there’s a predator around, we’ll be running all the time. We’ll give that pair another hour or two while we re-sort out this stuff. If that thing hasn’t decided to leave and find somebody new to play with, we’ll see if it cares if we show up or not. It might be too full to care.”

  Dlubine

  Things had been going well in the sailing department. The oceans had remained generally clear of other ships, although one or two had been sighted either as distant wisps on the horizon or as sets of far-off running lights in the night, but no one had come near, no one had challenged.

  They had also managed to steer a northerly course with a good wind at their backs, and thanks to clear skies both day and night, Nathan Brazil now had a relatively decent idea of where they were.

  The shortest distance to the north coast would have been straight through Mowry, but the hue and cry for him had to be all over the Well World by now and certainly would have reached a nearby high-tech water hex via Zone long before they got there. He had no desire to face all the locating devices, let alone the speed and weaponry, of a fast, well-armed naval corvette such as the one the colonel had allegedly been waiting to pick up.

  They would also probably have come from Mowry to Dlubine with the news, including a halfway decent description of the stolen vessel and her rather distinctive crew, and they would certainly be waiting for him at all the island harbors.

  Still, in order to give Mowry a wide berth and make the long crossing to nontech Fahomma—where they’d have a chance of either slipping ashore on the coast of Lilblod or perhaps skirting the coast all the way up to Betared—they would need supplies, and those tiny islands were the best sources. Any searchers would be looking for the ship and for two Glathrielians, male and female, in a hex limited to kinetic forms of energy. They could generate power here, but they could not store it.

  Most important to their needs, though, was that those looking for the ship probably did not know about Gus.

  Gus had accepted the relative technology levels at face value, as products of the culture. It wasn’t until talking with Nathan Brazil that he had realized that the limits were imposed by the Well, hex by hex.

  “The idea,” Brazil explained, “was to approximate as closely as possible what the mother world of the race would provide. Of course, these are only rough limits, approximations, but the general idea holds. The world of the Dahir, for example, is probably mineral-poor, with all the heavy stuff too far down to use and not much surface volcanism—not a lot with which to develop a sophisticated technologically based culture. You’re probably more limited here than the Dahir are on their own world, but I wouldn’t expect television or trains or a lot of other stuff even after a very long period of development. They’d develop a different way. When resources are there but much harder to get at, and the land and water areas are conducive to some technological development but not on the scale of advanced electronics like computers and satellites, the Well imposes the semitech limit approximation here, too. Planets like Earth, with creatures like the ones we grew up as and with all those resources and conditions, get the high-tech treatment. No limits.”

  “Yeah? You mean there’s an actual Dahir planet someplace? With Dahirs the boss civilization like humans are on Earth? Ain’t that a kick in the pants!”

  “There definitely is, and don’t think that because you’re nontech here that they haven’t somehow developed a lot more than your people could. It would just be a lot harder than it was for us, and you know how long it took us. Who knows how it turned out? Or is still turning out, more likely. Your group here was just the prototype, to see if they could survive and prosper under condition
s stricter than they would find out there. There’s a huge number of races out there, far more than the 1,560 here. These are just the leftovers. The last batch, as it were. Why they stayed, or were stuck here more likely, I couldn’t guess. At any rate, they’ve been here ever since.”

  “Huh! Talk about not havin’ no future! Jeez… Just here, huh? Kinda depressing, really.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “Well, jeez, I mean, all these people—and all of ’em are people, no matter what they look like—bein’ born and livin’ and dyin’ and it just goes on and on. No population explosions, no Tom Edisons or Philo T. Farnsworths or nothin’ in most of ’em, at least none that can actually invent things and change everybody’s lives, and the high-techs either gettin’ fat and lazy or turnin’ into ant colonies with traffic jams, seems like. I mean, you talk about havin’ nothin’ to look forward to! No big changes or revolutions or nothin’. The most you can hope is that your kids grow up to have just what you have. Now, that’s depressing—to me, anyway.”

  Brazil thought about it. “I guess my viewpoint’s different. To me, this is a place where maybe folks can find out what’s really important.”

  “Well, that’s ’cause you’re the audience, not an actor in the play. Even so, I notice you went back and lived through all the shit in Earth history. You didn’t stick around here watchin’ folks contemplate their navels.”

  The captain sighed. “I don’t know, Gus. Maybe you’re right. Your whole life was trying to be where the action was, and I guess mine is, too. Don’t exempt yourself, though, from that audience. We’re both a couple of ambulance chasers, rushing off to see where the siren’s going. Maybe that’s the trouble with us. You didn’t rush to rescue the child from the burning building or catch the robber or put your life on the line for a cause. You went there to film it. I didn’t really have any cause, either. I might have tackled the robber or tried to save the kid, but it was just because it was something to do. Now it’s us who are the story. This time we’re the reason for everything that’s going on. I doubt if either of us is comfortable in that role.”

  “Maybe. Maybe I just would rather have been one of them high-tech types here to tape all this for the eleven o’clock news. Maybe that’s my problem. Or maybe it’s just that this is the only game in town right now, and when it’s over, it’s gonna be boring as hell.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Things do happen here, although on a smaller scale. There were some wars here once and might be again sometime, and revolutions do happen, cultures do get turned. Look at the ancestral home of Earth. Conquered by a nontech hex that forced it to switch places.”

  Gus looked out over the wheel at Terry, who still relaxed on the deck, seemingly oblivious to everything. “Yeah, and look at what we did with it. What the hell did they do to her, anyway? You can’t know what a difference there is. You can’t imagine it.”

  “I don’t know, Gus,” Nathan Brazil admitted, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “I don’t know what happened at all. They weren’t like that the last time I was here, and that was long after the switch. She—they—are the best example that things do change on the Well World. There are other things, too. I don’t remember the Dahir being as sleek and streamlined as you are, and I sure don’t remember ever hearing about this vanishing trick you do. I’ve seen some other races, too, races I knew, and they’re different as well. A lot has changed here, for all the look of it. An awful lot. I haven’t figured it out yet, and I doubt if I can get a real handle on any of it until I’m inside the Well, in that incredible form, able to digest all this and figure it out.” He sighed. “And that is the only real priority.”

  And if I fail, I could die here…Brazil was still having trouble with that, still fighting against the idea, but it wouldn’t get out of his mind. It scared him, and he hadn’t expected that, but there was also a bit more zest to this race because it was there.

  For the first time his very existence was at stake. The sense of risk was both uncomfortable and oddly exhilarating. It was something totally new to him, and anything totally new was attractive, even in so perverse a fashion as this.

  But then again, the girl was something new and unexpected as well, and for all Nathan Brazil felt for her, he still wasn’t at all certain if she represented a true asset or yet another threat.

  Why had she joined him in the first place, and stuck with him, considering the vast gulf between them? Why was she so intent on using her powers to help him clear obstacles from his path? Did she want to be put back, become Terry once again? He could do it, inside the Well, but how could she know that or anything else about his true nature? Was she perhaps fleeing from whatever had made her the way she was, or had that hidden intellect directed her to join him?

  Gus went over to her as she ate some of the hard bread and tried to make her see him. He just couldn’t believe that somehow, somewhere, deep inside her, he couldn’t make her understand who he was.

  She did see him when he put his huge reptilian face in front of her and stared into her eyes and began to talk. For a moment she was visibly startled to see this huge creature apparently materialize so close, but then she just frowned a bit and went back to the bread.

  He had no way of knowing that at that moment she had looked beyond his surface appearance, looked deep inside him, and sensed only friendliness and a total absence of threat either to her or to Brazil. That had placed him in the category of factors not to worry about, and there seemed little point to anything more until and unless some concerted action was required.

  He didn’t accept that. “Terry! It’s Gus! Gus! Do you understand me? It’s Gus, at your side like always! You’ve just gotta be in there somewhere, damn it! We went through too much together!”

  But Gus’s words registered only as random sounds, and she could read or infer nothing at all from his features or form. She was aware that it was almost frantically trying to communicate with her, but she saw no possible point to the communication even if there had been a way. It seemed to feel some actual affection for her, which seemed odd, but that, too, wasn’t relevant to her, nor was it a problem worth pursuing at this time.

  She would, of course, have recognized Gus if he had looked as she had known him; those memories were still there, still accessible when needed. But she had not had the briefing for new entries in Zone. She had gone through the Zone Gate and emerged still human. All her experience told her that the Zone Gate was nothing more than another variation of the gate that had brought her to the Well World; she had no information at all on its transformation and adaptation abilities and functions. There was therefore no way for her to know that her companions of the past now looked remarkably different.

  She did consider the problem of why she hadn’t been able to see the creature until now. She had sensed it, even back on land, and knew it was the same one, but because it radiated only friendship and no sense of danger, it had been ignored.

  She heard its heavy steps on the wooden deck going away from her, back toward the Mate, and looked up and was again startled to see nothing. That should not be. She could feel it, sense it, but only in general terms, enough to know it was there.

  But where? It was so big, so colorful… She tried shifting through all the bands, but nothing showed up. Now, suddenly, Gus interested her a great deal. It was an unacceptable situation not to be able to see other creatures.

  She sat statuelike, virtually all her mental resources suddenly fixed on this one problem, scanning every single energy band, mental and physical, one by one, examining and going through all sorts of tests on each, trying to find one that somehow wasn’t right.

  Busy with running the ship and with making plans, the two men hardly noticed that she sat there hour after hour, not moving, hardly breathing, all resources concentrated on this one problem.

  And eventually she found it. One tiny, thin wave of medium power. She tried to block it off but found that impossible to do without also blocking off needed bra
in processing power. It was so perfectly located on the mental spectrum that it couldn’t be jammed, couldn’t be neutralized, without causing more harm than good. The best she could do finally was to narrow it down, localize it, pinpoint its source, then file it away.

  She still couldn’t see Gus unless he wanted to be seen, but from that point on she knew exactly where he was, which was more than sufficient. It was, however, an interesting capability for all that. The band was a common one, and the broadcast was strictly one-note, designed to do just one specific thing and to do that very well indeed. Given sufficient energy, it might be possible to duplicate the effect from the human brain. Almost casually, without even thinking about, let alone grasping, how she did it, she just did it.

  Gus immediately popped into full visibility up there next to the Mate. One single narrow frequency; two broadcasts canceled out the effect on sender and receiver. Obvious and simple. Otherwise the creatures could never see one another, either. Once satisfied that she could turn it on or off at will, she filed the information away and finally turned her attention again to the now very old bread.

  While all this was going on, late enough in the day to be nearing dusk and only a few minutes later than Brazil had predicted, they reached the hex barrier with Dlubine.

  “Looks pretty peaceful,” Gus noted. “Big fluffy clouds but not much else. Even the whitecaps don’t seem real big.”

  Brazil nodded. “I’d hoped we’d reach it while we still had some light. I think we’re pretty much dead on where I thought we were from the charts, too. I just hope it isn’t freezing cold or something over there, although I doubt it. There’d be something of a permanent storm front at the barrier if it was, and while the sky looks a bit different, it’s not enough to worry me. Still… I gather you’re warmblooded, Gus, or you wouldn’t have done so well back in that snowstorm. What’s your range of comfort?”