Twilight at the Well of Souls

“Thirty to one, Marquoz,” the snake-man responded. “I think the terrain brings the odds down to, say, five to one. Only a few hundred of them will finally make it through, but they will make it. Too late to stop Nate, though, if we do our jobs right. But, tell me, Marquoz, why are you here? Why not with them? You could enter the Well with them, get immortality if you wanted it, or anything else you might wish. I think he’d do it for you—it’s a different situation than last time. He made you the offer, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” Marquoz replied. “He made the offer.”

“So why here, in a lonely pass on an alien planet? Why here and why now?”

Marquoz sighed and shook his massive head. “I really don’t know. Call it stubbornness. Call it foolishness, perhaps, or maybe even a little fear of going with them and what I might find there. Maybe it would just be a shame not to put this body and brain to important use. I really can’t give you an answer that satisfies me, Ortega. How could I give one that would satisfy you?”

Ortega looked around in the darkness. “Maybe I can help—a little, anyway,” he reflected. “I bet if we went around to every one of our people here, all volunteers, remember, we’d get the same sort of feeling I got now. A sense of doing something important, even pivotal. I think that in every age, in every race, a very few find themselves in positions like this. They believe in what they’re doing and the rightness of their cause. It’s important. It’s why they still tell the stories and honor the memory of such people and deeds even though their causes, in some cases their whole worlds, are long dead, their races dust. But you’re not stuck in the position, Marquoz. You put yourself directly into it when you could have sat back and made a nice profit.”

“But that’s exactly what I’ve been doing my whole life,” the Hakazit responded. “I could never really belong to my own Chugach society. I was the outsider, the misfit. My family had wealth, position, and no real responsibilities so I never really had to do anything. I studied, I read, I immersed myself in non-Chugach things as well. I wanted to see the universe when the bulk of my race had no desire to see the next town. I was the ultimate hedonist, I suppose— anything I wanted and no price to pay, and I hated it. Just me, me, me—the position most people say they’d like to be in. I can’t say I’ve lost my faith, because I never had any to begin with. The way of the universe was that the people with power oppressed the people without it. And if the people without it suddenly got it, by revolution or reform, they turned around and oppressed still other people or fought among themselves to have it all. Religion was the sham that kept the people down. I never once saw a god do anything for anybody, and most religions of all the races I knew were good excuses for war, mass murder, and holding onto oppressive power. Politics was the same thing by another name. Ideology. The greatest social revolutionaries themselves turned into absolute monarchs as soon as they consolidated their power. Only technology improved anything, and even that was controlled by the power brokers who misused it for their own ends. And what if everybody got rich and nobody had to work? You’d have a bunch of fat, rich, stagnant slobs, that’s all.”

Ortega grinned at the other’s cynicism, the first he had ever encountered that far exceeded his own. “No romances in your life?” he asked.

The other sighed. “No, not really. I never felt much of a physical attraction for anyone else. The Chugach are romantics in a sense, yes; sitting around drinking and telling loud lies about their clans, singing songs and creating artistic dances about them. But, personally, no. I never liked my people much, really. A bunch of fat, rich, lazy slobs themselves. You know, there are stories on many worlds about people lost in the wilderness as babies and raised by animals that come out thinking and acting like animals. There’s more to that than to physical form. Externally I was Chugach, yes; internally I was… well, something else. Alien.”

Ortega’s eyebrows rose. “Alien? How?”

Marquoz considered his words. “I once met a couple of Com humans who were males but absolutely convinced that, inside, somehow, they were spiritually female. They were going to have the full treatment, become biologically functioning females. Maybe it was psychological, maybe it was pre-birth hormones, maybe it was anything—but it wasn’t really sexual in the usual sense. Those two males were in love with each other, yet both were going to be females. Crazy, huh? I identified with them, though, simply because I was an alien creature in the body of a Chugach. No operation for me, though—it wasn’t that simple. I was an alien inside the body of a Chugach, trapped there. I didn’t feel like a Chugach, didn’t act like one, didn’t even think like one. I felt totally alienated among my own people.”

“I have to admit it’s a new one to me,” Ortega admitted. “But I can see how it might be inevitable.”

“Not so new. I think all races have their share. Here, on the Well World, with 1,560 races all packed closely together, I’ve run into a lot of it. I suspect it’s a more common ailment than we’re led to believe. People just don’t talk about it because there’s no point. They’re just called mad, given some kind of phobia label, and told they must learn to adjust. And what can you do about it? You can’t go to the local doctor and say, ‘Make me over into something else.’ Consider how many of the humans regarded the Well World with longing. A romantic place, a place where you could be changed into some other creature totally different than you were. And for every one that was repulsed by the idea, there was at least one who fantasized what they wanted to be and were excited by it.”

“And that’s why you volunteered to spy on the humans and Rhone?”

Marquoz chuckled. “No, I didn’t really volunteer —although I might have if I’d ever known about the program. They selected me. My psychological profile was the type they were looking for: somebody who’d feel as comfortable in an entirely alien culture as they did among their own kind.”

Ortega nodded. “Makes sense. And were you any happier in the Com?”

“Happier? Well, I suppose, in a way. I was still an alien creature, of course, but now I was an exotic one. It didn’t change my feelings toward my own racial form, but it turned it into something exciting, at least.”

It was growing quite dim now, and Ortega looked around. He could see almost nothing in the nearly total darkness, but there was the occasional flash that showed the coded “all’s well” from one emplacement to another. And, not far away, he could see a couple of dim figures checking the nets in the river and making certain the mines were active. Nobody would get up that way, either. He turned back to Marquoz and the conversation, a conversation he knew they wouldn’t be having under any other circumstances.

“You’re not a Chugach any longer,” he pointed out. “What did that to to your self-image?”

Marquoz shrugged. “Well, it’s not that much of a change, really. And I had no more choice in it than I had in being a Chugach. Makes no difference.”

“But that brings us back to my original question,” Ortega noted. “You could have been whatever you wanted if you’d just gone with them.”

Marquoz sighed. “You must understand, put the thing in the context of what I’ve been telling you. You see, this is the first operation I’ve been involved in that had any meaning. It’s something like you said for yourself. Found dead in his bed from jaundice, did nothing for anybody, made no difference if he had ever lived at all: that could be the obituary of just about everyone who ever lived, here and anywhere else in the universe. It makes absolutely no difference in the scheme of things whether all but a handful of people live or die. No more than the importance of a single flower, or blade of grass, or vegetable, or bird. It would make no difference if those men who held that ancient pass or that equally ancient fort had, instead, died of disease or old age or in a saloon fight. But it made a difference that they died where they did. It mattered. It justified their whole existence. And it matters that 1 am here, now, and make this choice. It matters to me and to you. It matters to the Well World and to the whole damned universe.”

He raised his arms in a grand sweep at the blackness. “Do you really understand what ws’re doing here?” he went on. “We’re going to decide the entire fate of the universe for maybe billions of years. Not Brazil, not Mavra Chang, not really. They’re only making the decisions because we are allowing them to! Right here, now, tomorrow, and the next day. Tell me, Ortega, isn’t that worth dying for? Others may be misfits; they may be born on some grubby little world or in some crazy hex, and they might grow up to be farmers or salesmen or dictators or generals or kings, only then to grow old and die and be replaced by other indistinguishable little grubs that’ll do the same damned things. And it won’t matter one damned bit. But we’ll matter, Ortega, and we all sense it. That’s why our enemies will sing songs about us and our names and memories will become ageless legends to countless races. Because, in the end, who we are and what we do in the next two days is all that matters, and we’re the only ones that are important.”