Midnight At the Well of Souls

by Jack L. Chalker

  "Nathan?"

  "Yes?"

  "What kind of people live here? I mean, what—"

  "I know what you mean. I couldn't get a really good description out of anyone. It's not the most traveled route, mostly a through route. The best I could get was that they were two-legged vegetarians."

  "That's good enough for me," she replied, and started picking clumps of grass and chewing them.

  "Don't get too far away!" he called. "It's too damned hot to build a fire, and I don't want to attract the wrong people. We might be—probably are—trespassing."

  Satisfied as long as he could still see her, he stretched out the furs to dry and stripped completely. After discovering that some of the grass was stiff and sharp, he spread the three wet towels out to form a mat, then got out a couple of large bricks of cooked confection he had bought back in Donmin. He sat on the towels and ate about half of one bar, which was hard and crunchy but filling, and then came down with a terrible candy-thirst.

  He reached for the flagon containing water, but decided to leave its half-empty contents if he could. No telling what the water was like here.

  He got up and went over to the border, only a few meters away. He could hear the howling winds and see the blowing snow. Some of the cold radiated out a few centimeters from the border. He got down on his knees, reached into the cold, and came up with a handful of snow.

  That did the job.

  He went back and stretched out on the towels. He still ached from the day's ride, but not nearly as bad. He knew the pain would come back when he mounted the next day, though. Maybe in three or four days he would get used to riding. By his own estimates, they were still almost nine hundred kilometers from the Center.

  She came back after a while and surveyed him lying there on the towels.

  "I thought you'd be asleep," she said.

  "Too tired to sleep," he responded lazily. "I'll get off in a little while. Why don't you get some? You're doing all the work, and there's a lot yet to do. In the next few days we'll sure find out if they have pneumonia on this world."

  She laughed and the laugh developed into a major yawn.

  "You're right," she admitted. "I'll probably fall over in the night, though. Nothing to lean on here."

  "Ummm-humm," he half-moaned. "Can you sleep lying down?"

  "I have, once or twice, mostly on the end of drunks," she replied. "It's not normal, but if I don't crush my arm, I can. Once we go to sleep we're just about unconscious and unmoving for the night."

  She came up close to him and knelt down, then slowly rolled over on one side, very close to him and facing him.

  "Ahhh . . ." she sighed. "I think this is going to work, tonight, at least."

  He looked at her, still half-awake, and thought, Isn't it funny how human she looks like that? Some of her hair had fallen over in front of her face, and, on impulse, he reached over and put it in back of her gently. She smiled and opened her eyes.

  "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to wake you," he whispered.

  "That's all right," she replied softly. "I wasn't really asleep. Still ache?"

  "A little," he admitted.

  "Lie with your back to me," she told him, "I'll rub it out."

  He did as instructed and she twisted a little to free her left arm then started a massage that felt so good it hurt.

  After a few minutes he asked her if there was something he could do in return, and she had him stroking and rubbing the humanoid part of her back and shoulders. Doing so was awkward, but she seemed satisfied. Finally, he finished and resumed his position on the towels.

  "We really ought to get some sleep," he said quietly. Then, almost as an afterthought, he leaned over and kissed her.

  She reached out and pulled him to her, prolonging the embrace. He felt terribly uncomfortable, and, when she finally let him go, he rolled back onto the towels.

  "Why did you really come with me?" he asked her seriously.

  "What I said," she replied in a half-whisper. "But, also, I told you I remember. I remember all of it. How you gambled to save my life. How you held me up in the Well. And—how you came out of your way to find me. I saw the map."

  "Oh, hell," he said disgustedly. "This will never work. We're two different kinds of creature, alien to each other."

  "You've been wanting me, though. I could feel it."

  "And you know damned well our bodies don't match. Anything like sex just won't work for us now. So get those ideas out of your head! If that's why you're here, you should go back in the morning!"

  "You were the only clean thing I ever ran into in that dirty old world of ours," she said seriously. "You're the first person I ever met who cared, even though you didn't know me."

  "But it's like a fish falling in love with a cow," he retorted in a strained, higher-than-normal tone. "The spirits are there but they happen to come from two different worlds."

  "Love isn't sex," she replied quietly. "I, of all people, know that better than anyone. Sex is just a physical act. Loving is caring as much or more about someone else than you do about yourself. Deep down inside you have the kind of feeling for others that I've never really seen before. I think some of it rubbed off. Maybe, through you, I'll face down that fear inside of me and be able to give myself."

  "Oh, hell!" Brazil said sourly, turning his back to her.

  In the quiet that followed, they both went to sleep.

  The centaur was huge, like a statue of the god Zeus come to life, and it mated with the finest stallion. He came out of his cave at the sound of footsteps, then saw who it was and relaxed.

  "You're getting careless, Agorix," the man said to him.

  "Just tired," the centaur replied. "Tired of running, tired of jumping at every little noise. I think soon I will go into the hills and end it. I'm the last, you know."

  The man nodded gravely. "I have destroyed the two stuffed ones in Sparta by setting the temple on fire."

  The centaur smiled approvingly. "When I go, there will be naught but legends to say that we were here. That is for the best." Suddenly tears flowed from his great, wise eyes. "We tried to teach them so much! We had so much to offer!" he moaned.

  "You were too good for this dirty little world," the man replied with gentleness and sympathy.

  "We came of our own choice," the centaur replied. "We failed, but we tried. But it must be even harder on you!"

  "I have to stay," the man said evenly. "You know that."

  "Don't pity me, then," the centaur responded sharply. "Let me, instead, mourn for you."

  * * *

  Nathan Brazil awoke.

  The hot sun was beating down on him, and had he not already been tanned from earlier travels, he would have had a terrible sunburn.

  What a crazy dream, he thought. Was it touched off by last night's conversation? Or was it, like so much lately, a true memory? The latter scared him a little, not because the dream was obscure, but because it would explain a lot—and in a most unpleasant direction.

  He put it out of his mind, or tried to.

  Suddenly he realized that Wu Julee was gone.

  He sat up with a start and looked around. There was a large indentation in the grass where she had been, and some divots kicked up where she had gotten up, but no sign of her.

  He looked around, noting several things about the landscape.

  For one thing, they had been fairly lucky. Although the area around was a grassy hill, it sloped down into dank, swampy wetlands not far away. There were odd buildings, like mushrooms, scattered about near the swamp and through it, but no sign of any real activity. He looked back at the border. It was a snowy forest scene that greeted him, but the storm had passed and the sky was quickly becoming as blue there as it was overhead. He walked over to the border, got some snow, and rubbed his face with the cold stuff.

  Blinking the sleep from his eyes, he turned back to look for Wu Julee. He spotted her at last, coming back toward him at full gallop.

  He turned and packed th
e towels away in the pack, removing from the clothing pouch a bundle of black cloth. He unfolded it and looked at it. He had had it made in another hex, awfully nonhuman, but it had seemed right when he had tried it on.

  The pants fitted, and his feet slipped into shoe-shaped bottoms with fairly tough, leathery soles on the outside. The material was of the stretchy type, and it seemed to adhere to him like a second skin, as did the pullover shirt. He had two of the latter, and chose the one with no sleeves over the other, which had formfitting gloves.

  It works, he thought to himself, and fairly comfortable, too. But it's so form-fitting and so thin I still feel naked. Oh, well, at least it'll keep the sun out.

  He wished for sunglasses, not for the first time. But the first group he had hit who made them were the Dillians, and the smallest was a bit too large for him.

  Wu Julee came up to him at that point, looking excited.

  "Nathan!" she called, "I've been out exploring and you'll never guess what's over the next hill!"

  "The Emerald City," he retorted, even though he knew that expression would draw a blank look. In fact, it went right past her.

  "No! It's a road! A paved road! And it has cars on it!"

  He looked puzzled. "Cars? This close to the border? What kind of cars?"

  "Electric ones, I think," she replied. "They don't go all that fast, and there aren't many of them, but there they are. There's a little parking lot up by the border. The Dillian roadhouse is a hundred meters or so farther on!"

  "So we did miss it in the storm and got off the track!" he said. "They must supply the roadhouse with various things, and use the roadhouse as a business base. Funny you never heard of them."

  "I've been uplake all my time here," she reminded him. "The only others I ever heard about were the mountain people, and I never saw any of them."

  "Well, what do these people look like?" he asked curiously. "We'll have to travel through most of their hex."

  "They're the strangest—well, you'll have to see. Let's get going!"

  He strapped the pack on her and climbed aboard. She seemed particularly happy and eager and, well, alive this morning, he thought.

  They moved along at a fast clip, and the old pains came back almost immediately, although he was getting to the point where he was going up when she was and down when she did. It helped a little, but not much.

  They cleared the top of the hill in about five minutes, and he saw immediately what she meant. A half dozen vehicles were parked in a little paved area near the border. They were mostly open, except for one with a roof of canvas or something like it. None of them had seats, and, from the looks of the one with the top, their drivers were very tall and drove by a two-lever combination. The road was wide enough for one car to pass another, and it had a white line painted down the center of the black surface.

  She stopped near the lot. "Look!" she said. "Now you'll see what I mean by weird people!"

  And she was most definitely right, Brazil decided. The last time he had seen anything remotely resembling it was on a long-ago, month-long bender.

  Imagine an elephant's head, floppy ears and all, but no tusks, with not one but two trunks growing from its face, each about a meter long and ending in four stubby, jointless fingers grouped around the nostril opening. Mount the head on a body that looked too thin to support such a head, armless and terminating in two short, squat, legs and flat feet that made the walker look as if he were slightly turning from side to side as he walked. Now paint the whole creature a fiery red, and imagine it wearing green canvas dungarees.

  Nathan Brazil and Wu Julee didn't have to imagine it. That was exactly what was walking at a slow pace toward them.

  "Oh, wow!" was all he could manage. "I see just what you mean."

  The creature spotted them and raised its trunks, which seemed to grow out of the same point between and just below the eyes, in a greeting. "Well, hello!" it boomed in Dillian in a voice that sounded like an injured foghorn. "Better weather on this side of the line, hey?"

  "You can say that again," Brazil responded. "We almost got caught in the storm and missed the roadhouse. Spent the night over in the field, there."

  "Heading out, then?" the Slongornian asked pleasantly. "Going to tour our lovely country? Good time of year for it. Always summer here."

  "Just passing through," replied Brazil casually. "We're on our way to Czill."

  The friendly creature frowned, which gave it an even more comical aspect that was hard to ignore. "Bad business, that. Read about it last night."

  "I know," Nathan replied seriously. "One of the victims—the Czillian—was a friend of mine. Ours," he quickly corrected, and Wu Julee smiled.

  "Why don't you go into the roadhouse, have breakfast, and try to bum a ride through?" the creature suggested helpfully. "All of these trucks'll be going back empty, and you can probably hitchhike most of the way. Save time and sore feet."

  "Thanks, we'll try it," Brazil called after the Slongornian as that worthy climbed into the covered truck and started backing it out, controlling the steering with a trunk on each lever. The truck made a whirring noise but little else, and sped off down the road at a pretty good clip.

  "You know, I bet he's doing fifty flat out," he said to Wu Julee as the truck disappeared from view. "Maybe we can move faster and easier than we figured."

  They walked over the border to the incongruously snow-clad roadhouse. The cold hit them at once, Wu Julee being unclad except for the pack, and his clothing not much more than protection from the sun. They ran to the roadhouse, and she was inside almost a minute ahead of him.

  Five Slongornians stood at a counter shoving what appeared to be hay down their throats with their trunks. One drained a mug of warm liquid somewhat like tea and then squirted it into its mouth. The innkeeper was a middle-aged female Dillian who looked older than her years. Two young male centaurs were sorting boxes in the back, apparently arranging the deliveries the Slongornians had made.

  And there was one other.

  It's a giant, man-sized bat! Brazil thought, and that is what it did look like. It was taller than he was by a little bit, and had a ratty head and body with blood-red eyes; its sharp teeth were chewing on a huge loaf of sweetbread. Its arms were slightly outstretched and they melded into the leathery wings, the bones extended to form the structural support for the wings. It had long, humanoid legs, though, with a standard knee covered in wiry black hair like gorillas' legs, and ending in two feet that looked more like large human hands, the backs covered with fur. The thing was obviously double- or triple-jointed in the legs, since it was balanced on one with no apparent effort while holding the loaf in the other, the leg brought up level with the mouth.

  The creature seemed to ignore them, and no one else in the place seemed to pay any attention. They turned and ordered breakfast, a thick porridge in a huge bowl served steaming hot with wooden spoons stuck in the stuff. Wu Julee just ordered water with it, while Nathan tried the pitch-black tea. It tasted incredibly strong and bitter, and had an odd aftertaste, but he had found from the days he had spent in Dillia that the tea woke him up and got his motor started.

  It didn't take long for one of the Slongornian truck drivers to strike up a conversation. They seemed to be an extraordinarily friendly and outgoing people, and when curious about this strange-looking one in their midst felt no hesitancy in starting things off. Between comments about the weather, the porridge, and the hard and thankless life of truck drivers, Brazil managed to explain where he was going and as much of his reason as he had told the one in the parking lot.

  They sympathized and one offered to take them the nineteen kilometers to his base in the nearest Slongornian city, assuring them that they could probably hitch rides from terminal to terminal across the country.

  "Well, Wu Julee, no exercise and no aches today," Nathan beamed.

  "That's nice," she approved. "But, Nathan—don't call me by that name anymore. It's somebody else's name—somebody I'd rather not
remember. Just call me Wuju. That's Jol's nickname, and it's more my own."

  "All right," he laughed. "Wuju it is."

  "I like the way you say it," she said softly. He reflected to himself that he didn't feel comfortable with the way she had said that.

  "Excuse me," said a sharp, nasal, but crystal-clear voice behind them, "but I couldn't help overhearing you on your travel plans, and I wondered if I could tag along? I'm going in the same direction for a while."

  They both turned, and, as Brazil expected, it was the bat.

  "Well, I don't know . . ." he replied, glancing at the willing truck driver who cocked his head in an unmistakable why-the-hell-not attitude.

  "Looks like it's all right with the driver, so it's all right with us, ah—what's your name? You've already heard ours."

  The bat laughed. "My name is impossible. The translator won't handle it, since it's not only a sound only we can make but entirely in the frequencies beyond most hearing." The creature wiggled his enormous bat ears. "My hearing has to be acute, since, though I have incredible night vision, I'm almost blind in any strong light. I depend on my hearing to get around in the day. As for a name, why not call me Cousin Bat? Everyone else does."

  Brazil smiled. "Well, Cousin Bat, it looks as if you're along for the ride. But why not just fly it? Injured?"

  "No," Cousin Bat replied, "but this cold's done me no good, and I've traveled quite a distance. Frankly, I'm extremely tired and sore and would just as soon let machines do the work instead of muscle."

  The bat went over to settle his bill, paying in some kind of currency that Brazil guessed was valid in Slongorn, which would be used to pay for the supplies.

  He felt a sudden, hard pressure on his arm, and turned. It was Wu Julee—Wuju, he corrected himself.

  "I don't like that character at all," she whispered in his ear. "I don't think he can be trusted."

  "Don't be prejudiced," he chided her. "Maybe he feels uncomfortable around horses and elephants. Did you have bats on your home world?"