Exiles at the Well of Souls

boards were set for that. Now he was a much smaller individual, and had to almost lean over on the control board from the chair to reach some of the controls.

“Obie?”

“Yes, Ben?”

“This is on open-file storage, not keyed,” he told the computer. “At the same time as you file the previous transactions, you will energize into the Defend mode. All systems will be locked and frozen, and you will kill anyone attempting to gain entry to this area from the point of the center of the bridge. Can you hear audibles from the center of the bridge?”

Obie considered a second. “Yes, Ben. You might have to yell.”

Yulin accepted this. “All right, then, you will remain in Defend until someone comes to the center of the bridge with his arms raised high over his head, palms out. I will shoot a small mark on the bridge as we leave. At that mark, this individual must say, ‘There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.’ Got that?”

Trelig chuckled. “Old habits are hard to break, eh?” But it pleased him—easy to remember, but nobody was ever likely to say that one and include the appropriate gestures, unless they knew.

“I understand, Ben.”

He switched off, and they waited for Zinder to come around. It took about six minutes, these things varying with the individual. Zinder was tingling, as though his whole body were asleep, but the effect wore off quickly enough.

“Let’s go,” Yulin said, and they walked out across the bridge. About halfway, Yulin set his pistol to Full and shot at the restraining wall over the pit. It was a hard, tough material, but the shot gouged a nasty scar that was visible, yet would be mistaken by others as perhaps a remainder of the gun battle.

They walked on, got into the car, and settled back. Trelig pressed the stud, the door closed, and the car started Topside.

Inside Obie, as this happened, circuits opened and closed, energy danced, and Obie went into the defense mode, but he could not remember how to break it. That disturbed him. The last thing he remembered was Yulin at the control panel and the guards dying of the poisoned sponge.

It was an impossible mystery. He returned quickly to his primary job of trying to disengage himself from the great Well World computer, or, failing that, to create some sort of partnership with it.

It would be long, tough work.

Teliagin, Southern Hemisphere, the Well World

Mavra Chang had been dozing in spite of herself. When tension wears off, it produces a kind of worn-out lethargy that is almost impossible to shake. Suddenly, however, she came awake with a start and looked around, bleary-eyed. She understood what had happened and cursed herself for it, but she was mostly concerned now with what had brought her to consciousness.

Nikki and Renard were still asleep, sprawled out on the grass, and appeared to be the better for it. Nervously, she looked around, eyes, ears, nose straining for the disturbance.

There was a warm breeze blowing fleecy white clouds across a blue sky, and she could hear the rustle of treetops in the wind and the chatter of strange birds and insects. Out across the meadow, came the distant sounds of animals in great agitation. She knew the signs; something was coming, something that the ordinary dwellers of the forest considered a danger or an intruder or both. She turned to the sleeping pair, shook Renard gently. At first he didn’t stir, then, as she shook him harder, he moaned and said, “Huh? What?”

“Wake up!” she hissed. “Company coming!”

They both woke Nikki, an even harder task than with Renard, and Mavra thought about what to do.

“We have to get away from here,” she told them. “Now! I’d like to see who or what we’re facing before they find us.”

They stood up and followed her back into the woods a ways.

“If anybody knows what the module out there is, they’ll be looking for us,” she told them. “Still, I want to see what we’re up against. Stay here and stay hidden in the undergrowth. I’m going to sneak back for a quick look.”

“Be careful,” Renard cautioned, needlessly but with real concern in his voice.

She nodded, appreciating the concern, and crept back to the clearing. Whoever or whatever was approaching was big—she could tell that. It was almost as if the ground was trembling slightly, and the clatter among the wildlife was intense.

Cautiously she peered out from behind a bush and gave a short gasp of surprise. She had expected almost anything but what she saw coming toward her.

It was huge—between three and four meters tall, with incredible shoulders and bulging muscles. Its chest and arms were vaguely reddish in color, and humanoid—that is, a human muscleman. The face was huge and ugly: almost an oval, with a broad, flat nose with flaring nostrils, and a mouth permanently set in anger, two long, sharp fangs protruding out of the corners. The ears were large and looked vaguely like great seashells, although they came to a point at the top. A mane of dark blue-black hair sat atop the head, coming to a point between two nasty-looking, sharp horns nearly a meter long.

But it was the eye that commanded attention. It looked like one huge humanlike eye right above the nose and dead center below the forehead. A closer look showed it to be segmented in some way, as if the eye were actually a collection of eyes with one great lid.

From the waist down the creature was covered in thick, wooly rust-red hair, the great muscled legs ending in elephantine hoofs. It wore a single garment, a dirty white wool brief around the crotch that did little to disguise the male sex organ that was proportionate to the figure’s great size. It seemed to growl and grumble as it approached steadily, fearing nothing and looking as fierce as any wild thing Mavra had ever seen.

It stopped, seemed to sniff the air, looking first one way and then the other. She worried that it might catch her scent, and found herself almost unconsciously pressing back, crouched and wound up like a coiled spring, although she wondered if anyone could outrun such a monster.

And then she saw the strange thing. The creature had a band made of some sort of skin wrapped around its left arm; attached to it had to be what it appeared—a massive wind-up type wrist watch.

For the first time Mavra realized she was seeing one of the dominant races of this strange place.

The wind shifted slightly, and the creature seemed to lose the scent it had been trying to localize. It turned its attention back to the passenger module. For a moment it just stood there, looking the thing over as if wondering what to do, then it approached, not cautiously but with great confidence. Clearly this thing had nothing to fear in its own land.

The creature was almost as tall as the module, and it looked the alien thing over critically, as if puzzled by it. Then it seemed to spy the open hatch and tried to pull itself up to it. This proved a failure, and after several tries the thing gave a massive roar of rage and hit its right fist into its left palm in a very human gesture of frustration.

Just then a second cyclops came into view and roared to the first one. The sounds seemed brutish and animalistic to Mavra, but she knew it must be some form of speech. Animals don’t use or need wrist watches.

The newcomer approached, and off in the distance Mavra thought she heard the roars of several more. They had obviously not landed in a densely-populated area—luckily!—but investigators were now steadily arriving, along with the curious, on the scene.

The second one came up to the first and started spewing a whole series of snarls and grunts, with appropriate gestures. The first, slightly taller and broader, responded in kind, pointing to the module, the open hatch, and making all sorts of circles with his hands.

After a while a third one appeared, and a fourth, and a fifth. Two of the newcomers were females, Mavra noted. They were almost a meter shorter than the males, making them only three meters tall, and, unlike the