Midnight At the Well of Souls

by Jack L. Chalker

  Vardia, whose head and vocal mechanism were not related in any way to her respiratory system, asked, "Who could be responsible? Who knew we were here, would be staying at that particular hotel? Perhaps our people have tracked you down." There was hope in her voice.

  "Don't get yourself that excited, Czillian," The Rel replied. "As you can see, the delaying action slowed us but did not stop or deter us—nor did it liberate you. No, this smells of darker stuff. Of the one who planted the hidden listening device in the baron's office at Zone and prevented our escapade weeks earlier."

  This was the first Vardia had heard of that incident, and it made her think back to the many things that had happened to her. That distress signal where one could not have been operating. The vanishing of the two shuttlecraft on Dalgonia, and the disappearance of their lifeboat. The opening of the Well Gate only after they were all securely in it. Captain Brazil's firm belief that he was being suckered by someone.

  That strange snakeman, Ortega. Over seven hundred chances, and Brazil is met by the only person at Zone who knew him. Coincidence?

  She suddenly felt furious, thinking of all of it in detail. Someone was using her—using all of them—moving them like pieces in a game.

  What about the hex assignments? Skander to a place where she had all the tools at her disposal, corrupting a peaceful people in the process. She to the hex next door, assigned—actually assigned!—to work with Skander and kidnapped with her. By whom? Someone working for that bastard Datham Hain!

  And Captain Brazil! She had gotten the word when Brazil had entered Zone, looking exactly the same as he had before. Why didn't the Gate change him? And that pathetic little addict—dumped into a hex almost perfect for getting back to being human without pressures. Brazil had been hung up on her, she recalled. Probably they were together now.

  Why? she wondered. Sex? That was something the animals did, she told herself. She had never understood it, or why people liked it; and if her own twinning was any indication, it was a most unpleasant experience. Why was a distinguished, high-ranking person of such a responsible position as Captain Brazil willing to jeopardize his career and his life for the sake of some wasted girl he never knew—didn't know, in fact, even through Zone? Even if he had saved her, she wouldn't have contributed anything. She was practically an animal then. More sense to get her to a Death Factory where her remains would help fertilize a field.

  Perhaps this was why the Com philosophy was developing and spreading, she thought. It was rational, planned. Like being a plant, or one of these robots. Even Hain's dirty crew couldn't stop the march of such perfection of order, she felt sure. The sane hexes here proved it.

  "We will have better service, and a shorter stay, at other hotels," The Rel informed them, breaking Vardia's reverie. "I think we will be out of this place where we are so unpopular in two days. Slelcron will be no faster but easier. No one communicates with the Slelcron. We will be ignored but unimpeded. As for Ekh'l—well, I have no information there, but I feel confident that, no matter what happens, we will not be beaten."

  "You seem pretty sure of yourself," Vardia commented. "More prophecy from The Diviner?"

  "Logic," The Rel replied. "We were impeded for someone's purpose. Why? To what end? So they can beat us to the equator? I doubt it. It would be easier to kill us than detain us so. No, they will have to come out to us at the equator. They want to be there when we arrive because they know who and where we are, but not what Dr. Skander knows—how to get to the Well. They want in with us—indeed, they may be allies, since they will assuredly take steps to see that no one else beats us to the goal. And make no mistake about it, there is another expedition. The Diviner has said that we will not enter until all the recent Entries combine. That is fine—as long as we are in charge."

  "We will be," Hain suddenly said.

  NEAR THE IVROM BORDER IN THE UMIAU NATION

  They presented a sight unprecedented on the Well World: a broad raft of logs, pulled along by ten Umiau wearing harnesses. On the raft were a Dillian centaur, a giant stag, a two-meter-tall bat, and a Czillian, plus a well-depleted bale of hay and a box of dirt.

  "Why can't the Umiau just take us all the way up?" Vardia asked Brazil.

  The stag turned his head. "I still can't get used to the idea that you are in two places at once, so to speak," he said through his radio speaker. The splashing and sound of the wind on the water made it hard to hear his little box if you weren't positioned just right.

  "I have a hard time thinking that the little captain I came here with is a huge deer," she replied. "Now answer the question."

  "Too dangerous," he told her. "We're going as far up as possible, but you eventually start getting some nasty currents, whirlpools, and other stuff. They don't get along too well with the inhabitants, either. The Umiau would make out, but those nasty fish with the twenty rows of teeth would chew up this raft and us before we could be properly introduced. No, we'll take our chances with a hundred and sixty kilometers of Ivrom."

  "What is Ivrom, Nathan?" Wuju asked. She had gotten the translator, and overcome most of her reservations. He treated her gently, and said only the right things, and she had eased up. There was still that something different about him, that indefinable something they all sensed but couldn't put their fingers on.

  Wuju had talked it out with Cousin Bat. "How would you feel," Bat had asked her, "if you'd awakened not a Dillian but a regular horse? And looked down at your own dead body? Would you still be the same?"

  She had accepted that explanation, but Bat didn't believe it himself. What had changed in Brazil was the added air of total command, of absolute confidence and certainty. And he had as much as admitted he knew the answer to the total puzzle. He could get in to the control center, control the world—or more.

  Bat was more encouraged now, really. So much the better. The man with the answers had no hands, couldn't even open a door by himself. Let him get in, Bat thought smugly. Let him show how to work things.

  "Nathan!" Wuju said louder. "What is Ivrom? You haven't told us!"

  "Because I don't know, love," he replied casually. "Lots of forest, rolling hills, plenty of animals, most familiar. The atlas said there were horses and deer there. It's a nontechnological hex, so it's the sword-and-spear bit again, probably. The intelligent life form is some kind of insect, I think, but nobody's sure. Those active volcanoes to our left—that's Alisstl, and it's a formidable barrier. The people there are thick-skinned reptiles who live in temperatures close to boiling and eat sulfur. Probably nice folks, but nobody drops in."

  She looked over at the range of volcanic mountains. Most were spouting steam, and one had a spectacular lava fountain along a side fissure. She shivered, although it wasn't cold.

  "This is the way to travel if you can!" Brazil said with enthusiasm, taking a deep breath of the salty air. "Fantastic! I used to sail oceans like this on big ships, back in the days of Old Earth. There was a romance to the sea, and those who sailed it. Not like the one-man space freighters with their computers and phony pictures of winking dots."

  "How soon will we land?" Wuju asked him, a bit ill at the rolling and tossing he liked so much. She was happy to see him obviously enjoying himself, talking like his old self again, but if it was at the cost of this kind of upset stomach, she would take land.

  "Well, they've gone exceptionally fast," he replied. "Strong devils, and amazing in their element. I'll have to remember that strength. Wouldn't do to underestimate our Dr. Skander."

  "Yes, but how long?" she insisted.

  "Tomorrow morning," he replied. "Then it'll be no more than a day or so to Ghlmon—we won't have to cross the whole hex of Ivrom, just one facet—and another day to the top of the bay in Ghlmon."

  "Do you really think we'll meet them—the others, that is—up there?" Vardia asked. "I'm most anxious to free my other self—my sister—from those creatures."

  "We'll meet them," Brazil assured her, "if we beat them—and we certainly shoul
d at this rate. I know where they have to go. When they get there, we'll be ready for them."

  "Will I be able to scout this Ivrom tonight?" Cousin Bat called out to him. "I'm sick and tired of fish."

  "I'm counting on you, Bat," Brazil replied laughing. "Eat up and tell us what's what."

  "No more midnight rescues from the jaws of death, though," Bat replied in the same light vein.

  "You never know, Bat," Brazil replied more seriously. "Maybe this time I'll rescue you."

  * * *

  The Umiau had been remarkably uninformed about Ivrom, which wasn't as strange on the face of it as it would seem. The Umiau were water creatures, and their need was for technological items they could not manufacture. An alliance with the Czillians was natural; their other neighbors they at least knew from watery experience, even if they didn't get along too well with all of them, and Aisstl was too hot to handle. Ivrom, named from the old maps and not by the inhabitants, was peaceful forests and meadows, no major rivers, although it had hundreds of tiny creeks and streams. It was a nontechnological hex, so it wasn't easy to get to, even harder to move around in, and probably not worth the trouble. Of course, the major problem was that no one who had ever set out for Ivrom—to study, for contact, or to go through it—had ever been seen or heard from again. For that reason the party stopped on a reef, over a submerged shoal in deep water, and anchored for the night even though there would still have been time when they arrived to have made camp on or near the beach.

  It did look inviting, too. The air was sweet and fresh, about twenty degrees Celsius, surprisingly comfortable humidity for a shore area because of the inland breeze, a few light, fluffy clouds but nothing that looked threatening, and a deep blue sky.

  The shoreline revealed a virgin sandy beach, flat and yellow and stretching down the coast. The breakers and some obvious storms had forced driftwood onto the shore, where it had built up near the beginning of the forest. It was a very dense forest, rather dark from the thickness of the underbrush and giant evergreens, but nothing looked suspicious or sinister. As twilight deepened, they could make out an occasional small deer and a number of other animals much like muskrats, marmots, and other woodland creatures.

  It reminded Brazil of a number of really pleasant places on Old Earth before they were paved over. Even the animals and birds, now flocking to roosts in the tall trees, seemed very Earthlike—far more than even the most familiar hexes he had been through.

  He wished he could recall more about the place, but he couldn't. Nobody could keep track of everything, he thought, even though the mind behind Ivrom had obviously paid a great deal of attention to a Type 41 habitat.

  Insects, his mind kept telling him. But that was the kind of fact that you heard once or twice rather than recalled from personal experience, and it registered but was not something you had paid attention to at the time. Everything has changed so much it probably wouldn't matter anyway, he thought. Evolution and natural processes like erosion and deposition, diastrophism and the other forces operated in accordance with the logic of each hex, so things were constantly changing on the Well World as they were everywhere in the universe.

  Darkness totally obscured the shoreline for all but Cousin Bat, who reported that he couldn't see anything they hadn't seen by day.

  "Well, maybe something," Bat corrected. "I can't be sure at this distance, though. Looks like tiny, little, blinking lights, on and off, on and off, all over the forest—moving around, too, but slowly."

  Lightning bugs, Brazil thought. Was he the only person from their little corner of the galaxy who could remember lightning bugs?

  "Well, go on in, then," Brazil told the bat after a while, "but be careful. Looks peaceful, but the place has a really spooky reputation, and except for the fact that my mind keeps insisting that the life form there is insects, I can't think of anything else to tell you. Just watch out for insects, no matter how small or insignificant—they might be somebody we'd rather make friends with."

  "All right," Bat responded calmly. "Insects are a normal part of my diet, but I won't touch them if I can help it. Just a quick survey, then I'll be back."

  They agreed and Bat took off into the darkness.

  When the sun came up the next morning, Cousin Bat still had not returned.

  JUST OVER THE NATION—SLELCRON BORDER—MORNING

  The Rel stopped just ahead as the air suddenly cleared and they walked into bright sunshine.

  "You may all remove your breathing apparatuses and discard them," it told them. "The air is now quite safe for all of you."

  Skander reached up and took off her mask, but stowed it in the pack case. "I'll keep mine, and I think you others should, too," the Umiau cautioned. "I have no idea what the interior is like, but it's possible we may need the couple hours of air left in these tanks. If the mechanism is self-operating, it may not exist in any atmosphere."

  "I am well aware of that, Doctor," The Rel replied. "I, too, can not exist in a vacuum—The Diviner requires argon and neon, and I require xenon and krypton, which, thankfully, have been present in the quantities we need in all of the hexes so far. We had weeks to prepare for this expedition, you know, and I fully expected us ultimately to have to face a vacuum—in which those little respirators will do us no good whatsoever. The packs contain compressed pressure suits designed for each of us."

  "Then why didn't we use them in that hellhole we just went through?" Hain grumbled, outraged. "That stuff burned!"

  "That was a hex of sharp edges and abrasives where the suits might have suffered premature damage," The Rel replied. "It was a discomfort, no more. I thought it best not to take any risks with pressurized equipment until we have to."

  Hain grumbled and cursed, and Skander wasn't much better—she was drying out rapidly and itched terribly. Only Vardia was now perfectly comfortable—the sun was very strong, the sky was blue and cloudless, and she even somehow sensed the richness of the soil.

  "What is this place, anyway?" Skander asked. "Any chance of a shady stream where I can wet down?"

  "You'll survive," The Rel responded. "We will alleviate your discomfort as soon as we can. Yes, there are almost certainly streams, lakes, and ponds here. When I find one shallow enough and slow enough that it will not be your avenue away from us, you will get your wish."

  The place was thinly forested, but had tremendous growth of bushes and vines, and giant flowers—millions of flowers, as far as the eye could see, rising on stalks from one to three meters high, bright orange centers surrounded by eighteen perfectly shaped white petals.

  Huge buzzing insects went from flower to flower, but the actions were individualistic, not as they would move in a swarm. Each was about fifty centimeters long, give or take, and very furry; and though their basic color was black, they had stripes of orange and yellow on their hind sections.

  "How beautiful," Vardia said.

  "Damned noisy, if you ask me," Skander yelled, noting the tremendous hum the insects' wings made as they moved.

  "Are the insects the life form?" Hain asked. The Rel had to move back close to the huge beetle to be heard.

  "No," the Northerner replied. "As I understand it, it is some sort of symbiosis. The flowers are. Their seeds are buried by the insects, and if all goes well the braincase develops out of the seed. Then it sprouts the stalk and finally forms a flower."

  "Then maybe I can eat a few of the buzzing bastards," Hain said eagerly.

  "No!" The Rel replied quickly. "Not yet! The flowers drop seeds, so they do not reproduce by pollination. The bees bury the seeds, but little else—yet they are obviously gaining their food from the center of the flowers. See how one lands there, and sticks its proboscis into the orange center? If the flowers feed them, they must do something for the flower."

  "They can't uproot," Vardlia said sympathetically. "What's the use of having a brain if you can't see, hear, feel, or move? What kind of a dominant species is that?"

  The ultimate Comworld, Skander thoug
ht sarcastically, but said aloud, "I think that's what the insects do. If you keep watching one long enough, it goes to one other flower, then returns to the original. It might go to dozens of flowers, but it returns between trips to a particular one."

  Vardia noticed a slight lump in the grass just ahead of them. Curiously she went over to it and carefully smoothed the dirt away.

  "Look!" she called excitedly, and they all came to see. "It's a seed! And see! An egg of some kind attached to the outside! Each insect attaches an egg to each seed before burying it! It's grown attached! See where the seed case is growing over the egg, secreting that film?"

  Skander almost fell out of her saddle peering over Hain's hard shell to see, but the glance she got told the story.

  "Of course!" the scientist exclaimed. "Amazing!"

  "What?" they all asked at once.

  "That's how they communicate—how they get around, don't you see? The insect's like a robot with a programmable brain. They grow up together—I'll bet the insect hatches fully formed and instinctively able to fly when the flower opens. Whatever it sees, hears, touches, it communicates to the flower when it returns. I'll bet after a while they can send the creatures with messages, talk to each other. And every time the insect gets to another flower, the old hands give information for it to take back. The creatures live, but they live their lives secondhand, by recording, as it were."

  "Sounds logical," The Rel admitted. "Hain, I would suggest you eat anything but those flowers and the black, striped insects. You could get huge numbers of them, we all could, but if we upset them we could face a programmed army of millions of the things. I want to be peaceful."

  "All right," Hain agreed grumpily. "But if there's nothing else to eat, the hell with them."

  At that moment one of the huge insects flew right into their midst and started carefully but quickly re-burying the exposed seed and egg. Satisfied, it flew off to a nearby flower and buried its head in the flower's center. They watched it carefully, both for intent and out of curiosity. Finally it seemed satisfied and backed out, flying over to them and hovering menacingly in front of them, darting from one to the other. They stayed still, but Hain's antennae radiated, "If that thing makes one wrong move, I'll eat it regardless."