Twilight at the Well of Souls

after honey.”

Yua stared at him a moment. “You are more powerful than Brazil,” she said flatly. “How is that possible?”

Gypsy chuckled uneasily. “I wish that were true. In a sense, I am more powerful. But only as regards me. I couldn’t change any of you into anything at all, couldn’t hypnotize you, force you to do anything you didn’t want except by nagging or talking you to death, anything like that. And, no, Yua, I have abilities Brazil does not have in his present form. So do you all, if you think about it. But that’s all it is. A con, really. Just another scam. Just remember this: I can be killed just as easily as any of you. I expect to die in this. Maybe we all will. But not Brazil. He can’t die. The Well won’t let him.” He paused for a moment, considering his words, almost as if trying to decide whether or not to say anything at all. Finally, he said, “Look, this is just guesswork, but I think Brazil wants to die. I think he’s planning on it.”

“You just said he couldn’t,” Marquoz pointed out.

“Not here. Not now. But in there, inside the Well itself, he can die. He’s a guardian. He’s had a rough job, too. He’s had to stick around for maybe billions of years, watching everybody else grow old and die, experiencing all that can be experienced, and I bet he’s bored to death. The records said that the last time he was on the Well World he didn’t know he had ever been here before. He didn’t remember. He’d blocked it out of his mind completely, mostly as a compensation, I guess the psychmen would say. He wanted to forget and he forgot. It took the Well World to completely unblock him, and I think he’s been trying to forget again ever since.”

“I’m not sure I couldn’t take that,” Mavra murmured aloud. “After all, I’m not bored after a thousand years.”

“You may get the chance,” Gypsy warned her. “Or one of the others of you. I think he intends, once he goes in there and does what has to be done, to pick somebody else, train them to do it, then die. I’d almost bet on it.”

Breaking the long silence following that statement, Yua said, “I don’t believe it. He couldn’t. He is the Lord God.”

Gypsy shrugged. “Don’t believe it, then. But I think you know there’s a grain of truth in it, even from an amateur psych like me. You’ve all researched him, met him, talked to him. I’ve also got a pretty good idea who he’s Chosen as his replacement.”

Mavra caught his eye and nodded almost imperceptibly. She remembered that Brazil refused to take the responsiblity for turning off the machine for repairs and thereby condemning all those trillions to oblivion. He had insisted that she give the order to him, and, therefore, take that responsiblility. She was seeing it, more and more, as the passing of a torch. But did she really want it?

She saw she was going to have a lot of sleepless nights over that one—if, that is, she lived to get that far.

Embassy of Ulik, South Zone

Serge Ortega was furious and frustrated at one and the same time, and that made him something like a fearsome madman.

“First,” he screamed at the intercom, “first this idiotic attempt on Mavra Chang. Fools! Worse than fools! Sloppy! You turned a hex that was inclined to stay entirely out of this into one of theirs, and in the process managed to injure and get mad at us the closest thing to a national hero they’ve got! And now— this! A summit meeting of the enemy commanders right here, not a thousand meters from me, right here in South Zone. And by all that’s holy, we don’t know a thing! And why? Because they hire some from our own side to blank out communications! Our own side! Free enterprise… bullshit!”

No reply was allowed, nor did they expect the opportunity. In fact, most of the embassies hooked in had turned their own intercoms down to a very tiny roar until he was spent, and it took a long time for him to be spent. In the back of his mind, Ortega knew this, too. But it made him feel better, and that was all it was ever intended to do.

Finally he said in a normal tone, “You can all come back now. We have to do some serious work.”

It took another twenty minutes for all of them to be notified that they could dare turn up the volume and turn back to business once again.

For longer than any Well Worlder could remember Serge Ortega had been its imprisoned tyrant. Not that he actually ruled; none could do that. But he had been an old man, near death from natural causes, when he discovered the arcane fact that there was at least one race, and a southern one at that, with the power to extend his life. It wasn’t any great scientific leap, or unique minerals; nothing like that.

It was magic.

There was magic on the Well World. Not a lot, and it was pretty scattered around, but it was there in some races. The entire world was a laboratory, a set of experiments used by ancient Markovians to prove out their races before establishing them out there, in the universe. But when your largest social lab is 614.4 kilometers at its widest point near the equator, compensations must be allowed for. Not merely the technological handicaps, either, but often more. Magic. The ability to do something no other race could do, apparently out of nothingness. Of course, what was magic to the other races was magic only because they didn’t know how to do it or simply couldn’t. All it meant was that these races could draw those powers from the great machine that kept everything working, the Well itself. The mumbo-jumbo, if it existed, came later.

And one race had a spell that could sustain him indefinitely, keep him from aging. It was relatively easy to get them to do it; he had spies all over the Well World and he had all the embassies thoroughly bugged. He knew where everybody’s bodies were buried, and if they had no skeletons in their closets, he was perfectly capable of creating them to order and to need. But there were limits to magic, too.

This magic worked only in the home hex of the spell-caster. Not all magic was like this—some worked anywhere. Not this, though. And since the hex was, not only a water hex but a deepwater hex, he could hardly move there even as alien-in-residence. The spell was against aging, not drowning.

The only other place such things would work would be here, in Zone, and so that’s where he remained. His home hex of Ulik didn’t mind; as they saw it, they benefited two ways. Their ambassador was the most powerful and crooked (but not corrupt—there is a big difference) politician on the Well World. As such, Ulik benefited greatly from the fear and respect Ortega generated. And, of course, they never had to worry about such a powerful personage as Ortega ever coming home to muck up the local works. He could not leave. That would break the spell, and he was very old.

And so they let him rant and rave, and let him tell them what to do the few times some crisis or another came up. And they hated him for it. He knew it, but really didn’t give a damn.

“Now, then, Ambassadors, now that we’ve had our little prologue,” he continued sweetly when he knew by his broad and long experience that they were back, “let’s take a rational look at this. You have now seen what unilateral action does; it gives the enemy more converts and more power. Even had the attempt on Chang succeeded, the involvement of the Colonel alone would have been enough to guarantee their emnity—and never mind the murders of those innocents. What’s worse, the Colonel has done an awful lot of favors and undertaken an awful lot of work for many of us. Some of you, firmly voting with us not long ago, are now wavering toward neutrality, and we’ve all seen what that road means. Others of you are undertaking pretty vicious pogroms against Entries, despite our agreement not to do so. Well, it’s your neck. But if you agree to a common policy and then violate it, well, what chance do we have on the battlefield? Make up your minds which way you will go. You are either our friends, which means you agree to work as part of a coordinated whole and abide by its policies and decisions, or you are our enemies. Is there anyone who wishes to change over to the enemy list? Speak now. We will not overlook breaches in the future.”

Nobody spoke.

After waiting as long as he thought reasonable, Ortega sighed and resumed. “Very well, then. The killing stops. Now. Think of them as hostages, but not as hunter’s quarry. Not now, anyway.”

“All pretty well for you to say,” an acid-sounding voice responded. “We have no room for such newcomers,