Exiles at the Well of Souls

“You know what’s going on?” Ortega asked.

“I’ve just been conferring on it,” the plant creature replied. “Why? Going to play games with somebody else?”

He shrugged off the minor nastiness. The plants duplicated, so it could be one of several Vardias, but they all had their basic memories. One time, long ago, he’d done the original Vardia rather dirty, and Czillians don’t forget.

“Bygones be bygones,” he retorted. “This is bigger than petty plots. We’ll need the Czillian Crisis Center activated immediately at the Center. Your computers are the best on the Well World, and we’ll need somebody to coordinate. A lot of different hexes are involved here.” He explained the situation as it stood to the Czillian.

“And what are you doing about it now?” Vardia asked him.

“I’ve sent Lata in to try and rescue the pilot if he’s still alive, and anybody else they can. If—and it’s a big if —we can get one of them here alive we’ll know what’s going on. But that’s not your worry right now. Follow through on the logic here and maybe you’ll understand.”

“I’m listening,” Vardia replied, still doubtful.

“I’ve located all nine modules. They’re all in the west, and dispersed in a southwesterly pattern, so I have an idea of what’s what. If I can do it, so can others. Probably have. Vardia, one of them is the engine module, intact! I’ll bet on that! There’s no way to build that in any hex on the Well World. The rest, though—that can be fabricated one place and another. Whoever reclaims the parts of that ship, particularly the engine module, might possibly make a spaceship that’ll fly. Launch it straight up, the right angle and pattern, and it’ll be free of the Well. If I thought of that angle, so have others. I’m talking about war, Vardia! War! There are enough old pilots around here that somebody might be able to fly it!”

Vardia still sounded doubtful, but now it was more in the nature of an unwillingness to think what Ortega was saying could be true. But—could they afford to take the chance?

“War is impossible,” the Czillian responded. “Triff Dhala demonstrated that by losing the Great War over eleven hundred years ago!”

“But that was for conquest,” Ortega pointed out. “This would be for limited objectives. I’ll bet five dozen rulers are reading Dhala’s Theory of Well Warfare cover to cover right now. A spaceship, Vardia! Think about it!”

“I don’t want to,” responded the Czillian. “But—I’ll relay all this to the Center. If the scholars and the computers agree with you, it will be done.”

“That’s all I ask,” the Ulik told the other, and switched off. He stared down at the map again, his eyes fixed on Lata and Teliagin. How had they come in? To the southwest. Okay, that meant they flew over the Sea of Storms, then got wiped out over Kromm. Then there was breakup because of Kromm’s limited tech restrictions, and they came down in Teliagin. They would have seen the seas and the mountains before they were depowered. If the pilot knew what he was doing, he’d know that the mountains and sea would be east of him. He’d make for it as soon as he caught sight of those Teliagin monstrosities.

If they made Kromm, and didn’t mind getting wet, they’d be okay. He had to bet on that pilot’s experience.

“Get me the Lata ambassador again, will you, Jeddy?” he asked. “I know he’s out, but I’ll talk to an assistant.”

His eyes went back to that map.

The Lata had to be in time. They just had to.

The Lift Car Nearing Topside, New Pompeii

“You’re too tense,” Antor Trelig told Ben Yulin. “Relax. Become Mavra Chang. Act like her, react like her, think like her. Let her persona completely control you. I want no slip-ups here.”

Yulin nodded and tried to relax. He tapped his fingernail on the chair side—long, sharp, hard nails, like steel. He looked suddenly down. He felt something funny, odd, just then. He stared down at the chair arm and saw that there was a tiny pool of liquid there. He dabbed a finger in it, put it up to his nose, and sniffed it. Odorless. He touched a little bit to his tongue. There was a mild numbing sensation there. Now what the hell? he wondered.

Suddenly he was looking at all ten fingers in curiosity. Some kind of cartilage, just a little fatter than human hair. A tube that was rigid and controlled by a tiny muscle. Poison? he wondered.

He resolved to try it when he got the opportunity.

A warning light went on and the car started to slow.

“Okay, here we go,” Trelig said lightly, and they braced for a stop. Gil Zinder could do nothing, his personality forced into the back of his mind. He was Nikki Zinder until one of the two in the car let him out; they were the guard Renard and Mavra Chang, and he had to act like it, really believe it. Obie had taken the easiest path—he literally had made the old man his own daughter and isolated the new personality from reality.

The door opened and they walked out, out into the warm, fresh air and bright sunlight. Everything was slightly different now—there were shadows, the sun was at a different distance and of a slightly different color, which changed everything, and there was that planet up there, filling a tenth of the sky.

They all gasped. Nothing had prepared them for the sight of the thing, like a glistening, silvery, multifaceted ball twinkling in the sun; below a swirl of clouds it was blue to the south, while the north seemed awash with reds and yellows. The plasma shield’s distortions made it look ghostly.

“Oh, wow!” breathed Gil.

Trelig, ever practical, was the first to break the spell. “Come on!” he said. “Let’s see who’s running this place.”

Several guards ran out to greet them, and a serving girl or two.

“Renard! Thank god!” said one, and Trelig noted that he didn’t know what relationships these people had. He did, however, know their names and backgrounds, and that helped.

“Destuin!” he responded, and hugged the little man. No, that’s right, Destuin was a woman, he thought angrily to himself.

He looked at them gravely. “Thanks for what?” he asked sourly. “Another five days?”

That seemed to take their minds off any further comparisons.

“Where are the rest of the guests?” Ben asked.

“Around,” one of the guards said. “We haven’t bothered them much, and they’ve stayed away from us. It doesn’t matter much. You’re in the same fix we are.” The guard pointed toward the Well World. “See that little black dot there against the planet? There, just below the split in the big one, and a little to the right.”

Ben looked hard, and finally saw it—a tiny black pinhead, like a hole in the bigger world. It was moving.

“That’s a sentinel,” the guard told her. “It’ll blow the hell out of any ship that tries to take off. Only Trelig knew the stop codes, and he’s gone. So you get to see us die, but four, maybe five weeks from now you’ll run out of food, and go, too. Or make a run for it in the remaining ship and get blown up. Maybe that’s what we all should do. Better than the other ways.”

That was grim talk, and not the kind the newcomers wanted to hear.

“I’m an expert with these ships,” Ben told them. “Let me go down and see if there isn’t something I can do about it. What can it hurt?”

The guard shrugged. “Why not? Want somebody to go along?”

“Renard? How about you?” Ben prompted.

Trelig, however, was better than that. Too much danger right now. “You go ahead. Take the girl with you. It won’t make much difference to us anyway. I’ll come down later and see how you’re doing.”