Midnight at the Well of Souls

trunk, the legs almost forming a solid front.

She noted absently that picking one’s spot for the night was more important than had been first indicated. The unrooting was apparently triggered by the sun’s rays falling on the single leaf atop the head, so the more objects scattered about blocked the sun’s first rays, the slower one was to be freed. She felt her own tendrils retract and suddenly she could move freely, as if a paralysis had worn off.

Brouder came up to her. “Well? Do you feel better?” it asked cheerfully.

“Yes, much,” she replied, and meant it. She did feel better, her fears and insecurities fading into a tiny corner of her mind. For the first time she noticed that Brouder wore a neck chain similar to the ones on the two she had followed. Now she looked at the tiny object suspended from it.

It was a digital watch.

Brouder looked at it and nodded. “We’re early,” it said, then looked somewhat sheepish. “I always say that, even though we always wake up at the same time.”

“Then why wear a watch?” she asked. “It is a watch, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes,” the Czillian affirmed. “I need it to tell me the time and day so I can make my meetings at the Center. It’s been hectic lately, and I am always afraid that I’m going to get trapped and not be able to come home nights.”

“What are you working on?” she asked.

“A very strange project, even for this place,” came the reply. “We are attempting to solve a probably unsolvable riddle that is endemic to this world—a great deal of the Center is devoted to it right now. And the worst part is that most of us feel it is unsolvable.”

“Then why bother with it?” she asked.

The Czillian looked at her, a grave expression coloring its body movements.

“Because, while we are the best equipped to work on the problem, others are also at work on it. If there is any chance it is solvable, the ultimate knowledge will be ours. In others’ hands, that knowledge might threaten the very survival of us all.”

Here was something Vardia could understand, and she pressed her new friend for more information. But the Czillian dismissed further inquiry for the time being. She had the strong impression that the work was of too high a grade for her to be trusted, even though she was now one of them.

“I am going to the Center now,” Brouder told her. “You should come with me. Not only will that give you a chance to see a little of our country—it’s your country now, you know—but only at the Center can you be tested and assigned.”

She agreed readily and they started off, back down the road she had followed the day before. As they walked, Brouder pointed out the land and vegetation and sketched out the country for her. “Czill is six hundred fourteen point eight-six kilometers across, as is every other hex on the Well World except the equatorial hexes.”

She marveled at the knowledge that the measurement it used bore no relationship to the metrics of her own world, yet was translated to the decimal points instantly inside her head.

“We have, of course, six neighbors, two of which are ocean species. Our seven great rivers are fed by hundreds of streams like the one at our camp. The rivers in turn empty into a great ocean—one of three in the South—covering almost thirty hexes. This one of ours is the Overdark Ocean. One of the sea folk is a marine mammal, half-humanoid and half-fish. They are air-breathers, but live most of their lives underwater. They are the Umiau, and you might run into a few at the Center. We are always cooperating on a number of projects, particularly oceanographic studies, since we can’t visit their world except in pressure suits. The other ocean species is a nasty group called the Pia—evil characters with great brains and humanoid eyes. But they have ten tentacles with slimy, adhesive suckers and a gaping mouth with about twenty rows of teeth. You can’t really talk to them, although they are quite intelligent. They tend to eat anybody not of their race.”

Vardia shuddered, imagining such horrors. “Then why don’t they eat the Umiau?” she asked.

Brouder chuckled. “They would if they could, but, as with all hexes near antagonistic species on the Well World, natural limitations are designed into the system. The Umiau’s land is near the mouth of three rivers and the low salt content isn’t to a Pia’s liking. Also, the Umiau do have certain natural defenses and can swim faster and quicker. They’re in some kind of uneasy truce now, anyway, since the Umiau, although they aren’t fanatical about it, can and will eat Pia, too.”

They remained silent for a while, until they came to a major fork in the road.

“We go to the left,” Brouder said. “Don’t ever go down that right fork—it leads to the camps of the diseased and isolated.”

“What sort of diseases?” she asked uneasily.

“About the same number as anywhere else,” Brouder replied. “But every time we discover an immunizing agent, something new mutates in the viruses. I wouldn’t worry about it, however. The average Czillian life span is over two hundred and fifty years, and if nothing serious happens to change that, you’ll twin several times anyway. The population’s a stable million and a half—crowded, but not so much that we cannot have empty spaces and camp room. Our births and deaths are almost exactly even—the planet’s master brain sees to that. Besides, since we don’t really age in the sense most other things do, and since we can regenerate most of our parts that go bad or get injured, there’s naturally a constant death factor to keep the population in bounds. The master brain only interferes in critical situations.”

“Regenerate?” Vardia asked, surprised. “Do you mean that if I lose an arm or leg it will grow back?”

“Just so,” Brouder affirmed. “Your entire pattern is held within every cell of your body. Since respiration is direct, through the pores, as long as your brain’s intact, you’ll come back. It’s painful—and we don’t experience much pain—but possible.”

“So the only area I have to protect is my head,” she remarked.

Brouder laughed a high, shrill laugh. “No, not your head, certainly not! Either foot,” it said, pointing to her strange feet that looked like inverted bowls with spongy lids for soles.

“Do you mean I’m walking on my brains?” she gasped incredulously.

“Just so, just so,” affirmed Brouder. “Each controls half of your body, but each has the total content of the body’s input, including thought and memory. If we were to chop you off at the bottom of the stalk, your two feet would dig into the ground and each would sprout a new you. Your head contains sensory input neural circuits only—in fact, it’s mostly hollow. Chop it off and you’d just go to sleep and dig in until you grew a new one.”

Vardia marveled at this news as much as she had at Ortega back at Zone. But this isn’t some alien creature I just met, she told herself. It is me it is talking about.

“There’s the Center,” Brouder said as they came over a rise.

It was a great building that seemed to spread out for kilometers across the horizon. There was a great bubble in the center that reflected light like a mirror, then several arms—six of them, she noted with dry amusement—made of what appeared to be transparent glass—spread out symmetrically. She saw skyscrapers of the same transparent material, a few twenty or more stories, rising around the bubble and opposite the tips of the arms.

“It’s incredible!” she managed.

“More than you know,” Brouder replied with a touch of pride. “There our best minds work out problems and store the knowledge we obtain. The silvery rails that thread through the walls and ceilings are artificial solar light sufficient to keep us awake and fed through the night, and if you look to the horizon you’ll see the River Averil coming in. The Center’s built over it, giving us a constant water source. With light and water provided—and some vitamin baths—you can work around the clock for seven to ten days. But sooner or later it catches up with you and the longer you stay awake the longer you will have to plant in the end.”

Something made her think of Nathan Brazil and that book he had been reading, the one with the lurid cover.

“You have a library here?” she asked.

“The best,” the other boasted. “It has everything we’ve ever been able to collect, both from our studies on this planet and from Entries like yourself who provide history, sociology, and even technical information.”

“Any stories?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” came the reply. “And legends, tales, whatever. The Umiau are particularly fertile in that department. The river’s how they get up to the Center.”