Midnight at the Well of Souls

“Hmmmm…” Azkfru mused. “Too bad she’s a breeder, but it can’t be helped. Where is this Entry now?”

“In lull sleep, safe for two or three more days,” the general told him. “Kluxm thinks I’ve notifled the Imperial Household and the Privy Council. He’s expecting someone to pick her up.”

“Very good,” Azkfru replied approvingly. “It looks like things are breaking our way. I never put much stock in fortune-tellers and such crap, but if this has happened then Providence has placed a great opportunity in our hands. Who else knows of this besides Kluxm and yourself?”

“Why, no one, Highness,” Ytil replied. “I have been most careful.”

Baron Azkfru’s mind moved quickly, sorting out the facts and deciding on a course of action with a speed that had guaranteed his rise to the top.

“All right, return to your post for now, and nothing of this to anyone! I’ll make all the necessary arrangements.”

“You’re making the deal with the Northerners?” Ytil asked.

Azkfru gave the Akkafian equivalent of a sigh. “Ytil, how many times do you need to be reminded that I am the baron? You take orders, and leave the questions and answers to your betters.”

“But I only—” Ytil began plaintively, but Azkfru cut him off.

“Go, now,” the ambassador said impatiently, and Ytil turned to leave.

Azkfru reached into a drawer and pulled out a pulse rifle. This one worked in Zone, at least in his offices.

“Ytil!” he called after the other, who was halfway out the door.

Ytil stopped but couldn’t turn. “My Lord?” he called back curiously.

“Good-bye, fool,” Azkfru replied, and shot the general repeatedly until the white-haired body was a charred ruin.

Azkfru buzzed for his guard, and thought, Too bad I couldn’t trust the idiot, but his incompetence would give the show away.

The guard appeared, and looked down at the general’s remains nervously but without curiosity.

“The general tried to kill me,” he explained without any effort to be convincing. “I had to defend myself. It appears that he and the Baron Kluxm are at the heart of a baronial revolt. After you dispose of this carrion, go to Kluxm’s, and eliminate his whole staff and, of course, the baron. Then go to the rest area and bring a Markling named Hain to my estate. Do it quietly. I’ll report the revolt.”

They nodded, and it look them only a few minutes to eat the body.

After they had left, he buzzed for a clerk.

“You will go to the Classification Gate and enter. It will take you to the North Zone. When you get there don’t leave the Gate room, but simply tell the first inquirer that you want to talk to Ambassador Thirteen Forty, and wait for that person. When it comes, tell it who you are, who sent you, and that we are ready to agree. Got that?”

The clerk waved her antennae affirmatively and repeated the message.

Dismissing her, he attended to the last detail. He flipped the intercom to the receptionist’s desk.

“The General Ytil wasn’t here,” he told her. “Understand? You never even heard of him.”

The clerk understood all too well, and rubbed out Ytil’s appearance in her logbook.

It was a big gamble he was taking, he knew, and it would probably cost him his life. But the stakes! The stakes were too great to ignore!

THE BARONY OF AZKFRU, AKKAFIAN EMPIRE

Datham Hain’s massive body, now in a drugged sleep, rested in the center of the lowest floor of the Baron Azkfru’s nest. The room was filled with computer banks flashing light-signals and making clicking and whirring sounds. Four large cables were attached to Hain’s head at key points, and two smaller ones were fixed to the base of her two antennae. Two neutered Markling technicians with the symbol of the baron painted between their two huge eyes checked readings on various dials and gauges, and checked and rechecked all the connections.

Baron Azkfru’s antennae showed complete satisfaction. He had often wondered what the Imperial Household would say if they knew he had one of these devices.

There would be civil war at the very least, he thought.

The conditioner had been developed by a particularly brilliant Akkafian scientist in the imperial household almost eighty years before, when the ambassador himself was just a youngling. It ended the periodic baronial revolts, and assured the stability of the new—now old—order by making revolution next to impossible. Oh, you couldn’t condition everyone with certainty, so it was done subtly. Probably every baron dreamed of overthrowing the empire—it let the pressure and frustration out.

But none of them could do it. Because, although they could dream about it, they couldn’t disobey a direct imperial command.

But Azkfru could.

His father had duplicated the device here in the earliest days of its development. Here, slowly, methodically, key ones were deconditioned and reconditioned. Even so, he reflected, you couldn’t change the basic personality of the conditioned. That was why Ytil had to go—too dumb to keep quiet. As for Kluxm—well, it was known for some particularly strong-willed Nirlings to break free, although never with any prayer of support from the rest of the conditioned leadership.

“We are ready when you are, Highness,” called one of the Markling technicians. Azkfru signaled satisfaction and went down to the floor.

Quickly and efficiently two additional cables similar to the ones on Hain were placed on his own antennae. When he now said something, it would be placed in the machine, amplified, processed, and fed directly into the brain of Datham Hain in such a way that it would be taken as acceptable input and engraved in the other’s mind.

The baron signaled a go-ahead, and the technicians touched the last controls.

“Datham Hain!” the ambassador’s brain called out.

Hain, although unconscious, answered, “Yes?”

“Your past to this point you retain, but it is an academic past, there to call upon if needed but irrelevant to your present and future,” the baron told her. “What is important to you, what is the only thing of importance to you, is that you are a breeder Markling of the Barony of Azkfru. Your destiny is whatever the Baron of Azkfru wishes, and that is acceptable and normal to you. My will is your will, your only will. You exist to serve me alone. You would never betray me, nor allow harm to come to me. You are my own, my property, and that is all that is good and happy in your mind or life. When you serve me you are happy, and when you do not you are unhappy. That is the measure of your joy in life. I am your leader, your lord, and your only god. Your worship is normal. Do you understand this?”

“I understand, my lord,” replied Hain mechanically.

The baron signaled to the technicians to break contact, which they quickly did, then unfastened the two cables from his antennae.

“How did it take?” Azkfru asked one of the technicians.

“The subject is receptive,” replied one of the technicians, part of whose own conditioning was never to consider the idea that she might have been conditioned. “However, her psychological profile is one of extreme selfishness. That might eventually cancel the conditioning, producing mental breakdown.”

“What do you advise, then?”

“Go along with the idea,” the technician suggested. “Go back into her mind and tell her that her only avenue to wealth and power is through you and no one else. That’s something her mind can completely accept, and it will be acted upon in concert with the standard conditioning you’ve already administered. Then, after she’s awake and you are interviewing her, hold out the highest possible position a breeder Markling could attain.”

“I see,” the baron replied, and he did see. That made everything perfect. “Let us complete the conditioning,” he commanded.