Quest for the Well of Souls Read online

Oh, she remembered her past, but somewhere, years before, something had snapped inside her. She remembered that part of her life only in a lopsided, distorted way: everyone she remembered looked like her—the beggars, the whores, the pilots, her husband. Mentally, she saw them all as the kind of creature she had become—even though she knew she was a freak and that the people of her past did not resemble her present form.

  That was right after the last time she'd tried to escape, to run for the border, to somehow find out what the hell the Gedemondan meant.

  Doing so didn't seem so important, either, anymore.

  She had brooded and dreamed and sunk into a tremendous, suicidal depression after that, and then the change had come over her. She didn't understand it, but she accepted it.

  On a world with 1560 races, there was room enough for one more, a Chang, if you will.

  And Joshi had come along just after that, as if in answer to this new feeling inside her.

  She rolled over and got up unsteadily. It was no simple task, yet she'd done it so often it had become second nature. She stretched again, and her long hair swung down over her face. She didn't mind that it reached the floor both in front and behind her ears; no more than she minded that her horse's tail was now a great broom, trailing behind her.

  She walked over to a low, two-meter-long mirror, and turned her head, shaking it a bit to clear the hair from her eyes.

  You've changed in more ways than one, Mavra Chang, she told herself.

  The creature that stared back was a strange one indeed to all but her and Joshi. In fact, it had been years before she even asked for a mirror. Not until after she'd changed.

  First, remove the limbs from the torso of a small woman; then turn it face down, elevating the hips about a meter off the ground, the shoulders about eighty centimeters. Now attach a perfectly proportioned pair of mule's front legs on the shoulders. Add two hind legs, also a mule's, but keep it all "human," perfectly matched to the hairless orange torso—except for the hooves on all four feet. Replace the woman's ears with meter-long jackass ears of human skin. The result is even more impressive when one realizes that the woman was originally under 150 centimeters, head and legs included, so that the ears are actually longer than the torso. Now, as a final touch, add a horse's tail at the base of the spine. The last was a gift from Antor Trelig's New Pompeii party so long ago. Thus had Mavra Chang been transformed by the cats of the Olborn.

  She didn't worry about her hair blocking her vision; at maximum head lift she could see less than three meters ahead, anyway. She had learned to rely less on her eyes than on other organs, the ears in particular. Although they gave no better hearing than the originals, they were independently controllable from small muscles in the scalp. These she used as an insect would use its feelers.

  She walked to the outer, roofed part of the compound, lowered her face to the ground, and grabbed a sheet of leather in her teeth. She pulled it back, to reveal a crude leather bag, which she then lifted with her teeth. The Ambreza kept her teeth in good shape.

  Her neck muscles were the only aid she needed to lift the heavy sack. Placing a foreleg on either side of the bag, she worked at it with nose and mouth until it was wide enough open for her face. Inside was chopped cooked meat, cold but still fresh. She ate as a dog might. Afterward, she managed to close the bag, replace it in the hole, and cover it again.

  The Ambreza left nice little tabbed plastic bags of tasteless trash every month. But she'd never accepted that. That routine made her dependent on others, and she had not stood it for long.

  She walked over to the small fresh-water spring that ran through the compound on its way to the nearby Sea of Turagin. She lowered her face into the water and drank deeply. Its coldness refreshed her completely.

  No dependencies, not for long, she thought with satisfaction. The dominant culture in this hex was primitive human. The natives were a dark people with Negroid facial features but compact build. Their hair was straight and black like her own. Originally, the locals panicked themselves with tales that the Goddess of Animals lived in her compound and that they would be turned into animals if they so much as caught sight of her.

  And, of course, for quite a while she wanted no one, preferring to sulk in self-pity. But, eventually she would leave the compound, sometimes for the beach where she would prop herself up so she could see the magnificent starfield. Eventually she also explored inland, but always by night to minimize possible problems. Except for the mosquitoes and other pests she no longer felt, there were no predators that could bother her, and the natives feared the dark.

  But, of course, she had eventually run into a couple anyway, and the first encounter was a disaster. They knew immediately what they saw—the very animal described in their tales—and it so terrified them that one actually did drop dead on the spot and the other became insane.

  The most powerful voodoo is the one one's mind believes in, she found.

  And so, at first, she was cautious. Having a translator meant she could understand them and they her—although the device added an eerie tone to her voice.

  Just the right effect. Ambreza-like, but not Ambreza. Something else: The Goddess!

  And, of course, finally she announced to the local natives that if they served her she would show herself once without their suffering any ill effects. When she eventually walked into the firelight, ghostly and eerie, they did what she had hoped. They fell on their faces and worshipped her.

  But, she warned them, to tell the Ambreza was to risk her wrath. Even to tell other tribes would bring down upon them a fate worse than death. Her tribe had kept the faith. They were the People of the Goddess, and they reveled in that knowledge.

  Mavra demanded offerings, and offerings she got. Hoards of food dumped at the door of the compound. Tobacco, too. Rare on the Well World, the substance was much prized; the Ambreza took most of the crop, of course—but now she had some to trade with the monthly supply ship for things she wanted more than the now largely unneeded provisions.

  For tobacco, the ship's crews would bring what she asked. Since Glathriel was a nontech hex, machines were out; but books, geographies, and grammars were useful. She learned to read several related languages and waded through everything in their published histories.

  She was, by her eleventh escape attempt, probably the greatest living expert on Well World life, geography, and geology. And she reread the books frequently, turning pages with nose and tongue until the volumes were almost unreadable. Even after she changed she continued to read voraciously; it was one of the few activities that kept her properly stimulated.

  She also gave native hunters advice on game traps, which increased their yields, and suggestions for the manufacture of new nontech weapons. The Glathriel, of course, worshipped her all the more. The Ambreza became suspicious, but there was little they could do. The situation had gone too far.

  Then, one night just after she changed, she noticed a strange glow in the direction of the village. Positioning herself nearby, she watched as one of the huts burned and people screamed. They got only one out alive, a young boy with massive burns on hands and feet.

  She ordered him brought to the compound and launched one of her little rockets to signal the Ambreza. More Goddess magic.

  And the Ambreza doctor had come, and looked at the boy.

  "There's no hope," he told her. "I can get him to a hospital, yes, but not in time to do any good. He's horribly burned. I might save his life, but never his limbs, and he'll bear those tremendous scars his whole life as a cripple. Best I put him out of his misery."

  Something rose in her, looking at the burnt and pitiful boy of ten or eleven. "That's not a pet to be put out of its misery!" she'd shouted to the beaverlike creature. "That's a person! If you won't save him for yourself, save him for me!"

  She didn't know why she'd said that, it just seemed right, somehow. The helpless, disfigured boy in some way reminded her of her own differences, and she took the Ambreza's comments per
sonally.

  She accompanied the boy and the doctor to Ambreza and saw him later, still sedated in a high-tech hospital. He was a mass of scars, and both hands and feet had been amputated.

  They argued with her. Ordinarily they wouldn't have paid any attention, but the Ambreza felt a special guilt and a special responsibility for Mavra Chang.

  "But what can he do?" they had asked. "The tribe would kill him. You can't help him. Make sense!"

  And, suddenly, the solution had risen, unbidden, in her brain and come out. Such intuition was uncharacteristic of her; it was the change.

  "He's a male!" she'd shouted back. "If the Olbornians still have those yellow stones, take him there! Touch his shattered arms until they change, then his twisted legs until they change! Make him a Chang like me, and give him to me!"

  They were stunned. They didn't know what to do.

  So they did what she had asked, with a little push from their psychiatric technicians and a lot of nudging from Serge Ortega.

  They hypno-burned his tortured brain clear of memories and then adjusted him for his new existence, with Mavra doing the instructing. She was like a maniac as she went at it, but the Ambreza indulged her because they owed her something and because, for the first time, she had a passionate interest beyond escape.

  Joshi was the first step in the project that had been forming in her mind, a project she was now frantic to live to see: the establishment of their own independent little world.

  He wasn't as bright as she by a long shot. That is not to say that he was stupid or retarded, merely average. She taught him to speak Confederation, in which she still thought, and to read Ambreza and the old Glathriel tongue, no longer used but still enshrined in prewar books maintained by the Ambreza. Most of his knowledge had to be force-fed; the studies didn't really interest him, and he tended to forget things he didn't use, as most people will.

  Their relationship was an odd but close one; she was both wife and mother to him, he her husband and son. The Ambreza, who followed her activities off and on, believed that she had to play the dominant role, that she had to feel and actually be a little superior to one close to her.

  * * *

  Joshi stirred behind her. It was getting dark, their natural time to be active established by long routine. The helpless ten-year-old had grown and matured; he was larger than she, and almost coal black, although the pinkish scars of the fire marked him all over.

  He came up to her. They had been careful in transforming him; too long an exposure to that Olbornian stone made one a docile mule in all respects.

  In some ways, despite the scars and darker coloring, he resembled her—same type of legs, ears, and downward angle to the body. But he had no tail, of course, and his hair was quite different. Some of it had been burned away in the fire, but he still had a fairly full head and a manelike growth down the spine to the waist. He was also fat. The native diet was not the world's best balanced. His scraggly beard was tinged with white, although he was still in his twenties.

  They were used to each other. Finally, after drinking, he asked her, "Going down to the beach? Looks like a clear night."

  She nodded. "You know I will."

  They left the compound and cantered down the trail. The sound of the pounding surf grew very loud.

  "Must've been a storm out there," he remarked. "Listen to those breakers!"

  But far-off storm or not, the sky was mostly clear, obscured here and there by isolated wispy clouds that lent an almost mystical atmosphere to the scene.

  He lay down in the sand, and she settled more or less atop him, propping herself up enough so she could see the stars.

  In many ways, she had changed less than she thought. She had genuine affection for Joshi, and he for her. But Joshi was, in the end, part of her project, one designed as a means to gain independence from others. Dependency she hated more than anything else. She had never been dependent for very long on anyone, and the state to which they'd reduced her was intolerable.

  But her brain had compensated for most of that; if she lived long enough, one day it would redress the balance.

  But it was only coping. Mentally and emotionally she had acclimated to her physical condition and limitations, but never had she abandoned the stars, the great swirling gulfs that shined so brightly all around her on nights like this that you could almost leap forward into them. So close, so visible—and yet, so far.

  That was where she belonged, and she never gave up.

  First you must descend into Hell. Then, only when hope is gone, will you be lifted up and placed at the pinnacle of attainable power . . .

  But hope was never gone, she thought to herself. Not while she lived. Not while the stars shined so.

  Joshi turned his head upward a little, looking out at the northeastern horizon.

  "Look!" he said. "You can see your moon!"

  She lowered her gaze toward the horizon. It was there, a large silvery ball looking unreal and out of place, like a huge chunk of silver.

  Surely they're all long dead now, she told herself. All but Obie—poor, isolated Obie. The computer had been much more than any self-aware model she'd ever known. Obie was the son of Gil Zinder, and regarded himself that way. His own tragedy was that self-aware personality; how lonely he must be, she thought.

  Lonely. That was an odd term for her to use, she thought. All her life it had been her normal condition, except for those few years of marriage. And yet, she was better off than Obie now. She had Joshi, and the tribe.

  After a while the salt spray from the incoming tide started to reach them, and clouds obscured the view, so they got up and headed back to the compound.

  "The Trader's due in some time this week, isn't it?" he asked her.

  She nodded. "I hope they brought the bio references I asked for, and those books on seine fishing techniques, too."

  He sighed. "The fishing stuff I can see—for the tribe, anyway. Got to keep the faithful faithful and all that. But what's all this interest in bio? You know we're a race of two, sterile. If we weren't, we'd have had some by now."

  She chuckled. The logistics of that had been a real tangle, since their sexual equipment was not in the best places, but it had been accomplished. She wondered whether her renewed appetite for sex after so many years of abstinence was due to middle age.

  "Well, I'm sterile, anyway," she responded. "Even if I weren't, we'd have Glathriel children. But there may be ways, somewhere. I've seen crazier experiments in genetic manipulation. It might be too late for me, though; I'm getting too old for that sort of thing."

  He snuggled up to her. "You're not too old for me. A little frazzled and fat and big-assed, but I like 'em that way."

  She snorted mock-contemptuously. "You just say that because I'm the only woman you've got. Besides, I know about that sacrificial virgin bit you've been working on the tribe."

  He laughed. "I had a good teacher," he pointed out. Then he grew serious. "But I'm not a Glathriel. Not any more. Not ever that I can remember. I'm a Chang and you're a Chang and nothing can alter that."

  That pleased her. They went back into the sleeping compound together, and Mavra felt confident that, before she died, once again she would control her own destiny and manage her own fate.

  But destiny had always controlled Mavra Chang.

  Dasheen

  Ben Yulin was nervous. Yaxa weren't very welcome in Dasheen, not since the days of the wars, when peaceful, agrarian Dasheen had been dragged into the Northern campaign by his presence and the Yaxa's insistence.

  The Dasheen were minotaurs; they numbered about eight hundred thousand at the moment, only eighty thousand of whom were males. Their large, thick-bodied, muscular shapes were coated with fine fur; their heads, those of streamlined bulls: immense, almost neckless, with short snouts, broad pink noses, wide brown eyes, and tremendous curved horns.

  From the males' view, the only worm in Dasheen's apple was the fact that Dasheen bulls lacked the ability to digest calcium di
rectly, causing a deficiency that could only be counteracted by the milk of the females.

  The Yaxa had arrived at the great farm unannounced, panicking the cows. Its great wings cast a tremendous shadow across the fields of oats and wheat, like some great, multicolored predator. It landed near the main house—a huge structure that included silos, storage facilities, quarters for Yulin's 117 wives and daughters, and his own quarters.

  It was not that he'd been totally out of contact with the Yaxa. But such meetings were usually carried out surreptitiously, with him going to a neutral high-tech hex to test his theories, or arranging a rendezvous in Zone.

  Yulin calmed down his family and went to meet the Yaxa.

  The great butterfly, impassive as always, seemed to bow slightly. Yulin motioned for it to enter his own living quarters, and it did, clearing the doorway with some difficulty. Yulin took his seat in a broad rocking chair and waited for the creature to speak.

  "I am Racer," the Yaxa said, using its nickname. Their names were untranslatable, so they generally adopted and stuck to translatable nicknames when dealing with others.

  Ben Yulin nodded. "Well, welcome, Racer. But isn't it a little risky coming here like this? I mean, I know the border's not far from here, but I doubt if you could avoid being seen. There will be a lot of questions."

  "What I have to say is much too important to keep. Zone itself is far too risky for it, and there wasn't time to get you out plausibly. The questions may not matter, anyway, when you hear what I have to say."

  "I'm listening," he said, a growing feeling of unease mixed with the excitement rising within him. He suspected he knew why the Yaxa had come.

  "We have placed Yaxa in a Northern hex. We can place anyone there now—with difficulty, but with complete certainty."

  A thrill shot through him, but it was tempered by his engineer's mind. Like them, he'd worked on the problem for many years to no avail.

  "How is it possible?" he asked.

  "A Northern energy creature, the Yugash, grows crystalline creatures tailored to its needs and then operates them by entering the creatures' bodies and controlling them," Racer explained. "Finally a Yugash, who are high-tech, got together with us. They, like us, thought that the Well used mind-set rather than physical form to regulate transfer between Zone and hex gates. We allowed a Yugash called the Torshind to possess a Yaxa completely while the thought processes of the Yaxa were heavily sedated. The Yaxa body entered the Yaxa embassy Zone Gate—but walked out in Yugash!"