Midnight At the Well of Souls

by Jack L. Chalker

  "Looks that way," Bat responded slowly. "At least they told me that the injuries were already too severe for me to have caused the final damage. They can't understand how he survived the Murnie blows that broke his neck and spinal column in two places. Nobody ever survived damage like that. It's as good as blowing your brains out or getting stabbed through the heart."

  They talked on until dawn, when the still landscape suddenly came alive with awakening Czillians. Bat led them into the Center, and took them to the medical wing, on the river side.

  The Czillians were fascinated by Brazil and insisted on checking him with electroencephalographs and all sorts of other equipment. He was impatient but submitted to the tests with growing confidence. If they were this far advanced, perhaps they could give him a voice.

  They took Nathan down to a lower level after a while and showed him his body. Wuju came along, but one quick glance was all she needed and she rushed from the room.

  They had him floating in a tank, attached to hundreds of instruments and life-sustaining devices. The monitors showed autonomic muscle action, but no cranial activity whatsoever. The body itself had been repaired as much as possible, but it looked as if it had been through a meat grinder. Right leg almost torn off, now sewn back securely but lifeless in the extreme. The giant, clawed hand that had ripped the leg had also castrated him.

  Brazil had seen enough. He turned and left the room, climbing the stairs back to the clinic carefully. They were not built to take something his size and weight, and the turns were difficult. He didn't fit in the elevators, which were designed for Umiau in wheelchairs.

  Having a 250-plus-kilo giant stag walk into your office can be unsettling, but the Czillian doctor tried not to let it faze it. The doctor heard from Bat, who had heard it from Wuju, that Brazil could write. Since soft dirt was one thing that was very plentiful in Czill, it had obtained what appeared to be a large sandbox filled with dry, powdery gray sand from the ocean shore.

  "What do you want us to do?" the doctor asked.

  "can you build me voice box," Brazil scratched.

  The doctor thought a minute. "Perhaps we can, in a way. You might know that the translator devices, which we import, sealed, from another hex far away, work by being implanted and attached to neural passages between the brain and the vocal equipment—whatever it is—of the creature. You had one in your old body. We now have nothing to attach the translator to in your case, and putting anything in there would interfere with eating or breathing. But if we could attach a small plastic diaphragm and match the electrical impulses from your brain to wires leading to it, we might have an external voice box. Not great, of course, but you could be understood—with full translator function. I'll tell the labs. It's a simple operation, and if they can come up with anything, we might be able to do it tomorrow or the next day."

  "sooner the better," he scratched, and started to leave to find Bat and Wuju.

  "Just a minute," the doctor called. "As long as you're here, alone with me, I'd like to take up something you might not know."

  Brazil stopped, turned back to it, and waited expectantly.

  "Our tests show you to be—physically—about four and a half years old. The records show that the average life span of the Murithel antelope is between eight and twelve years, so you can expect to age much more rapidly. You have four to eight more years to live, no more. But that is at least that many years longer than you would have lived without the transfer." It stopped, looking for a reaction. The stag cocked his head in a gesture that was unmistakably the equivalent of a shrug. He walked back to the sandbox.

  "thanks anyway," he scratched. "not relevant," he added cryptically, and left.

  The doctor stared after him, puzzled. It knew that everyone said Brazil might be the oldest person ever to live, and certainly he had shown incredible, superhuman life and stamina. Maybe he wants to die, it mused. Or maybe he doesn't think he can, even now.

  * * *

  The operation was a simple one, performed with a local anesthetic. The only problem the surgeon had was in isolating the correct neural signals in an animal brain so undesigned for speech of any kind. The computers were fed all the neural information and some samples of him attempting speech. They finally isolated the needed signals in under an hour. The only remaining concern was for the drilling in the antlers, but when they found that the bony growths had no nerves to convey pain, it simplified everything. They used a small Umiau transistor radio—which meant it was rugged and totally waterproof. Connections were made inside the antler base, and the tiny radio, only about sixty square centimeters, was screwed into the antler base. A little cosmetic surgery and plastic made everything but the speaker grille blend into the antler complex.

  "Now say something," the surgeon urged. "Do it as if you were going to speak."

  "How's this?" he asked. "Can you hear and understand me?"

  "Excellent!" the surgeon said enthusiastically, rubbing its tentacles in glee. "A landmark! There's even a suggestion of tone and emphasis!"

  Brazil was delighted, even though the voice was ever so slightly delayed from the thought, something he would have to get used to. His new voice sounded crazy to his ears, and did not have the internal resonance that came with vocal cords.

  It would do.

  "You'll have a pretty big headache after the anesthetic wears off," the surgeon warned. "Even though there are no pain centers in the antlers, we did have to get into the skull for the little wire contacts."

  "That won't bother me," Brazil assured them. "I can will pain away."

  He went out and found the bat and Wuju waiting anxiously in the outer office.

  "How do you like my new voice?" he asked them.

  "Thin, weak, and tinny, very mechanical-sounding," Bat replied.

  "It doesn't sound like you at all, Nathan," Wuju said. "It sounds like a tiny pocket radio, one that a computer was using. Even so, there's some of you in it—the way you pause, the way you pronounce things."

  "Now I can get to work," Brazil's strange new voice said. "I'll have to talk to the Czillian head of the Skander project, somebody high up in the Umiau, and I'll need an atlas. In the meantime, Wuju, you get yourself a translator. It's really a simple operation for you. I don't want to be caught in the middle of nowhere with you unable to talk to anybody again."

  "I'll go with you," said the bat. "I know the place fairly well now. You know, it's weird, that voice. Not just the tiny sound from such a big character. It doesn't seem to come from anywhere in particular. I'll have a time getting used to it."

  "The only part that's important is your calling me a big character," Brazil responded dryly. "You don't know what it's like to go through life being smaller than everybody else and suddenly wind up the largest person in a whole country." Brazil felt good; he was in command again.

  They walked out, and Wuju was left alone, internally a mass of bewildering emotion. This wasn't turning out the way she had thought at all. He seemed so cold, so distant, so different—it wasn't Nathan! Not the voice, she thought. It was something in the voice, a manner, a coldness, a crispness that she had never felt before.

  "Get a translator" he had told her, then walked out to business without so much as a good-bye and good luck.

  * * *

  "I want to go down to the old body one last time," Brazil said to the bat, and they made their way down the stairs to the basement room.

  Bat, too, had noticed a change in his manner, and it disturbed him. He wondered whether the transformation had altered or changed Brazil's mind. Some forms of insanity and personality disorders are organic, he thought. Suppose the deer brain isn't giving the right stuff in the right amounts? Suppose it's only partially him?

  They walked into the room where his body was floating, still alive according to all the screens and dials. Brazil stood by the tank, just looking at the body, for quite some time. Bat didn't interrupt, trying to imagine what he would be thinking in the same circumstances.

&nb
sp; Finally Brazil said, almost nostalgic in tone, "It was a good vessel. It served me for a long, long time. Well, that's that. A new one's as easy as repair this time. Let it go."

  As he uttered the last word, all the meters fell to zero and the screens all showed a cessation of life.

  As if on command, the body had died.

  Brazil turned and walked out without another word, leaving Bat more confused than ever.

  * * *

  "There's no question that Skander solved the riddle," the Czillian project chief, whose name was Manito, told Brazil and Cousin Bat. "Unfortunately, he kept the really key findings to himself and was very careful to wipe the computer when he was through. The only stuff we have is what was in when he and Vardia were kidnapped."

  "What was the major thrust of his research?" Brazil asked.

  "He was obsessed with our collection of folklore and legends. Worked mostly with those, and keying in the common phrase: Until midnight at the Well of Souls."

  Brazil nodded. "That's safe enough," he replied. "But you say he dropped that line of inquiry when he returned?"

  "Shortly after," the Czillian replied. "He said it was the wrong direction and started researching the Equatorial Barrier."

  Brazil sighed. "That's bad. That means he's probably figured the whole thing out."

  "You talk as if you know the answer, too," the project chief commented. "I don't see how. I have all the raw data Skander did and I can't make sense of it."

  "That's because you have a puzzle with millions of pieces, but no concept of the size and shape of the puzzle even to start putting things together," Brazil told her—he insisted on thinking of all life forms that could do the act of reproducing, growing a new being, as she. "Skander, after all, had the basic equation. There's no way you can get that here."

  "I can't understand why you let him use you so," Bat put in. "You—both races—gave him a hundred percent protection, cooperation, and access to all the tools he needed without getting anything in return."

  The Czilian shook her head sadly. "We thought we were in control. After all, he was a Umiau. He couldn't exist outside his own ocean because he couldn't travel beyond it. And there was, after all, the other—the one who disappeared. He was a mathematician. Whose data banks was he consulting? Was he brilliant enough not to need them? We couldn't afford not to back Skander!"

  "Any idea where they are?" Brazil asked.

  "Oh, yes, we know where they are—fat lot of good it does us. They are currently being held captive in a nation of robots called, simply enough, The Nation. We received word that they were there, and, since we have a few informational trades with The Nation, we pulled in all our IOU's to hold them there as long as possible."

  Brazil was suddenly excited. "Are they still there? Can we get them out?"

  "Yes, they're still there," Manito replied, "but not for long. There's been hell to pay from the Akkafians. Their ambassador, a Baron Azkfru, has threatened to bomb as much of The Nation as he can—and he can do a good deal of damage if that's all he's out for. That's the line. They'll be released today."

  "Who's in the party?" Bat asked. "If it's weak enough we might be able to do something yet."

  "We've thought of that already," the Czillian responded. "Nothing that wouldn't get our person killed along with the rest. Aside from Vardia and Skander, there's an Akkafian—they are huge insects with great speed, the ability to fly, and nasty stingers, and they eat live prey—named Mar Hain, and a weird Northerner we know little about called The Diviner and The Rel. If they're one or two I can't find out."

  "Hain!" Brazil exclaimed. "Of course, it would be. That son of a bitch would be in the middle of anything dirty."

  "You know this Hain?" Bat asked curiously.

  Brazil nodded. "The gang's all here, it looks like." He turned to Manito suddenly. "Did you bring the atlas I asked for?"

  "I did," the Czillian replied, and lifted a huge book onto a table. Brazil walked over to it and flipped it open with his nose, then started turning pages with his broad tongue. Finally he found the Southern Hemisphere map and studied it intently. "Damned nuisance," he said. "Antelope don't need very good vision."

  "I can help," the Cziillian said, and walked toward the stag. "It is in Czillian, anyway, which you can't read."

  Brazil shook his head idly from side to side. "It's all right. I see where we are now, and where they are. We're about even—two hexes up on this side to the Ghlmon Hex at the northern tip of the ocean. They've gotten two up the eastern side of the same ocean to pretty much the same spot."

  "How can you possibly know that?" the Czillian blurted out, stunned. "Have you been here before? I thought—"

  "No," Brazil replied. "Not here." He flipped a few more pages, studying a close-up map of a particular hex. Then he flipped again, studied another, then to yet another. All in all, he carefully examined five hexes. Suddenly he looked up at the confused Czillian.

  "Can you get me in touch with some Umiau big shot?" he asked. "They owe us something for Skander. They've got Slelcron, which is a nontech hex and so is fine from our point of view, and Ekh'l, which could be anything at all these days. We've got Ivrom, which I don't like at all, but there's no way around it, and Alisstl, which will make Murithel look like a picnic. We can contend with Ivrom, I hope, but if we went through the Umiau hex, on a boat of some kind, we could avoid the nasty one and maybe even gain some time on the others. If they stick near the coast—and I think they will, because those are the best roads by far—we might just beat them there and intercept them here," he pointed with his nose to the map, "at the northern tip of the bay here, in Ghlmon."

  "Just out of curiosity," Bat said, "you said that the Umiau were warned the first time about a kidnap try on Skander. Now, you said you heard they were in The Nation. Who told you those things?"

  "Why, we don't know!" the Czillian answered. "They came as, well, tips, passed in common printer-machine type in our respective languages, to our ambassadors at Zone."

  "Yes," Bat persisted, "but who sent them? Is there a third set of players in the race?"

  "I was hoping you could tell me that," Brazil said flatly.

  Bat's eyes widened. "Me? All right, I admit I knew who you were back in Dillia, and that I joined you on purpose. But I don't represent anyone except myself and the interests of my people. We got word the same way the Czillians and Umiau did, at Zone. Said where you'd be, approximately when, and that you were going after Skander and Varnett. We couldn't find who sent it, but it was decided that we had a stake in the outcome. I was elected, because I've done more traveling than most of my people. But—me? The third party? No, Brazil, I admit only to not being truthful with you. Surely by now you know that I'm on your side—all the way."

  "That's too bad," Brazil replied. "I would very much like to know our mysterious helper, and how he gets his information."

  "Well, he seems to be on our side," Bat said optimistically.

  "Nobody's on any side but his own," Brazil snapped back. "Not you, not me, not anybody. We're going to have a tough enough time just dealing with the Skander party. I don't want to reach the goal of this chase and have our helpful third party finish off the survivors."

  "Then you propose to give chase?" the Czillian asked stupidly.

  "Of course! That's what all this is about. One last question—can you tell me the last major problem Skander fed to the computer?"

  "Why, yes, I think so," the Czillian replied nervously. She rummaged through some papers, coming up with two. "He asked two, in fact. One was the number of Entries into hexes bordering the Equatorial Zone, both sides."

  "And the answer?"

  "Why, none on record. Most curious. They're not true hexes anyway, you know. Since the Equatorial Barrier splits them neatly in half, they are two adjoining half-hexes, each side—therefore, twice as wide as a normal hex and half the distance north and south, with flat equatorial borders."

  "What was the second question?" Brazil asked impati
ently.

  "Oh, ah, whether the number six had any special relation to the Equatorial Zone hexes in geography, biology, or the like."

  "And the answer?"

  "Still in the computer when the unfortunate, ah, incident occurred. We did, of course, get the answer, even though it was on a printout which the kidnappers apparently took with them. The material was still in storage, and so we got another copy."

  "What did it say?" Brazil asked in an irritated tone.

  "Oh, ah, that six of the double half-hexes, so to speak, were split by a very deep inlet all the way up to the zone barrier, evenly spaced around the planet so that, if you drew a line from zone to zone through each of the inlets, you'd split the planet into absolutely equal sixths."

  "Son of a bitch!" Brazil swore. "He's got the whole answer! Nothing will ever surprise me again!"

  At that moment another Czillian entered the room and looked at the bat and the stag confusedly. Finally she picked the bat and said, shyly, "Captain Brazil?"

  "Not me," Bat replied casually, and pointed a bony wing at the stag. "Him."

  She turned and looked at the creature that was so obviously an animal. "I don't believe it!" she said the way everyone did. Finally she decided she might believe it and went over to the great Murithel antelope, and repeated, "Captain Brazil?"

  "Yes?" he answered pleasantly, curious in the extreme. Captain Brazil?

  "Oh," she responded softly, "I—I realize I've changed a great deal, but nothing like you. Wow!"

  "Well, who are—um, that is, who were you?" he asked, intrigued.

  "Why, I'm Vardia, Captain," she replied.

  "But Vardia was kidnapped by the bugs!" Bat exclaimed.

  "I know," she replied. "That's what's really upset me."

  A ROAD IN THE NATION

  "Quarantine, hell!" Skander grumbled, strapped in again atop Hain's back, irritated by the yellowish atmosphere and the discomfort of the breathing apparatus. Her voice was so muffled by the mask that none could understand a word.

  "Stop grumbling, Skander," the Rel responded. "You waste air and can't be understood by anybody but me anyway. You are quite right, though—we've been stalled."