Midnight at the Well of Souls

them had even been men. Had any of them really cared about him?

Not one, he thought bitterly. Not one, deep down in their selfish little hearts. Lovers, hell. The only friends who hadn’t betrayed him in some manner or the other were those who hadn’t had the chance.

Would he really care if the Murnies ate him ?

Just tired, the centaur had said. Tired of running, tired of jumping at every little noise.

I’m tired, too, he thought. Tired of running nowhere, tired of that tiny belief, often foresworn, that somewhere, somewhere, was someone who would care.

If all that were true, why did he care about the Murnies? Why did he feel fear?

The wild ports, the happy drugs, the whores and dives, the endless hours alone on the bridge.

Why have I lived so long? he asked himself. Not aging wasn’t enough. Most people didn’t die of old age, anyway. Something else got them first.

Not him.

He had always survived. Banged up, bleeding, nearly dead thousands of times, and yet something in him would not let him die.

He remembered the Flying Dutchman suddenly, sailing the world’s oceans with a ghost crew, alone but for one short leave every fifty years, doomed until a beautiful woman would love him so much that she would give up her life for him.

Who commands the Dutchman? he asked the winds.

Who curses him to his fate?

It’s psychology, he thought. The Dutchman, Diogenes—I’m all these people. It’s why I’m different.

All those millions over the centuries who killed themselves when nobody cared. Not me, I’m cursed. I can’t accept the universality of shallow self-interest.

That fellow from—what was the name of that country? England. Yes, England. Orwell. Wrote a book that said that a totalitarian society sustains itself by the basic selfishness of everybody. When the chips were down, his hero and heroine betrayed each other.

Everybody thought he was talking of the fears of a future totalitarian state, Brazil thought bitterly. He wasn’t. He was talking about the people around him, in his own enlightened society.

You were too good for this dirty little world, he had said, but he had stayed. Why? In failure?

Whose failure? he wondered, suddenly puzzled. He almost had the answer, but it slipped away.

There was movement in back of him and he jumped and jerked around.

Wuju came up to him slowly. He looked at her curiously, as if he had never seen her before. A chocolate brown girl with pointy ears welded to the working half of a brown Shetland pony. And yet it worked, he thought. Centaurs always looked somehow noble and beautiful.

“You should have called one of us,” she said softly. “The sun’s almost straight up. I thought you were asleep.”

“No,” he replied lazily. “Just thinking.” He turned back to gaze over the valley, now seemingly swarming with Murnies and deer-things.

“About what?” she asked casually, starting to massage his neck and shoulders.

“Things I don’t like to think about,” he replied cryptically. “Things I hid away in little corners of my mind so they wouldn’t bother me, although, like all ghosts, they haunt me even when I don’t know it.”

She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I do love you, Nathan,” she whispered.

He got up and walked toward the back of the cave, patting her gently on her equine rump as he did so. There was a puzzled half-smile on his face, and he said, as he stretched out near Cousin Bat, in a voice so low it was really to himself, “Do you, Wuju? Do you, really?”

THE BARONY OF AZKFRU, AKKAFIAN EMPIRE

The baron was, if anything, more majestic than before, and Datham Hain was at her lowest ebb, at the brink of suicide from weeks now in the dung pits.

“You have your name back, now, Mar Hain,” the baron pronounced in that godlike tone he had.

That was a small gesture, yet to Hain it was as momentous as being crowned supreme ruler of the galaxy, for it restored a measure of her self-respect. It also bound the Entry all the more to the baron, from whom all blessings flowed.

“I have now a task for you, of the utmost difficulty,” the baron told her. “It will require loyalty and devotion, as well as all of your intelligence and cunning. If you fail me, you are lost forever; if you succeed, you shall sit beside me in an honored place as chief concubine of, not your baron, but at the very least the emperor, perhaps not only of this empire.”

“You have but to instruct this humble slave and I will obey though there be no reward and the cost be my life,” Hain groveled.

I’ll bet, the baron thought sarcastically. Once more he regretted having to trust such a one as this on so important a mission. Blast that Northerner! Yet, The Diviner had so far been a hundred percent correct on everything, and he dared not go against the creature, at least not until the final moments.

“Listen well, Mar Hain,” the baron said carefully. “Soon you will meet three aliens. You will have a translation device implanted so that you can follow all conversations. Also, two of them are Entries, and may be able to communicate in the nontranslatable tongue of your old life—so it is better if you feign both ignorance and stupidity whenever possible.

“You will be going on a great journey together. Now, here is what you are to do…”

* * *

“Those filthy bugs!” Vardia, now calling herself Chon, exclaimed as they set her down on a road with the others and flew off, making irritating buzzing noises as they did so.

“Let’s have no racial slurs,” Hain said sternly. “They think even less of you, and they are my people.”

“Come on, you two, cut it out!” Skander snapped. Unable to walk, they had built a saddle which left the mermaid perched only mildly comfortable atop Hain’s back. “We have a long and probably difficult journey ahead of us. Our lives may depend on each other, and I don’t want all this carping!”

“Quite so,” The Rel agreed. “Please remember, you two, that although you were kidnapped, we all have a common goal. Save all disputes for the time we reach our goal, not during the journey.”

They were at the imperial border, manned by bored sentries. The change in the landscape was tremendous. The arid, hilly, pinkish-gray land of the Akkafians ended abruptly as if there were some physical barrier, perfectly straight, stretching from horizon to horizon.

“All of you put on your respirators,” The Rel instructed, needing none for itself. They still didn’t know if it breathed. Hain’s was bulky, the great insect looking as if she were wearing some sort of giant, distorted earmuffs behind her eyes. Vardia’s hung on a strap around her neck and was attached to her lower legs by two cables ending in needles which were inserted in her skin. Skander’s was a simple mask over mouth and nose, with tubes leading to a tank also on Hain’s back. Vardia’s alone contained not an oxygen mixture but pure carbon dioxide. There was a mechanism by which the waste contents in her canister could be exchanged with those of Skander and Hain.

The hex they faced was bleak enough; the sky showed not the various shades of blue common to much of the world, but an almost irritatingly bright yellow.

“Sound will travel, but slowly and with great distortion,” The Rel told them. “The atmosphere has enough trace elements to allow us to get by with such simple devices, but that is mostly due to seepage—the other hexes surrounding it naturally leak a little. We will be able to refresh our tanks from supplies along the way, but under no circumstances remove your masks! There are elements all about which will not harm your exteriors but will,