Exiles at the Well of Souls

She shrugged. “I was too small to be a waitress, and I couldn’t reach over the bar. I never learned much about dancing, I didn’t have much in the way of social graces, and no real education. I talked like a wharf rat, and while Maki had taught me reading and writing and numbers, I hadn’t done much of it. I had only one thing to sell, and I sold it, learned how to sell it just right. Male, female, once, twice, ten times a night if I could. It got pretty boring after a while, and none of it meant anything, but, lord! How the money rolled in!”

He looked at her strangely in the near darkness, feeling slightly uncomfortable. It wasn’t what she was saying, but how she was saying it that affected him so. He wasn’t sure what to say. He was certain that she hadn’t told this to anyone, particularly a stranger—maybe not at all—in years. The fact that she was telling it now, and to him, meant something even his increasingly cloudy brain could fathom. Deep down, she was as scared as he was.

“You certainly speak well enough now,” he pointed out. “And you said you were a pilot. Did you make enough money to do all that?”

She laughed dryly. “No, not from that. I met a man—a very kind and gentle man, who was a freighter captain. He started coming around real regular. I liked him—he had some of those qualities I mentioned in my long-ago rescuer. He was loud, brash, cynical, detested the Com, and had the most guts of any man I’d ever known. I guess I knew I was in love with him, looked forward to seeing him, to meeting him, going out with him. It wasn’t like with the others. It wasn’t sex. I doubt if I could do that with any feeling with anybody. It was something else, something better than that. When I found out he was diverting often just to see me, our relationship grew even deeper. We complemented each other. And he owned his own ship, the Assateague, a really good, fast, modern job.”

“That’s kind of unusual, isn’t it?” Renard commented. “I mean, those things are for corporations, not people. I never heard of a captain owning his own ship.”

“Yes, it is unusual,” she admitted. “It took a while to find out why. He finally asked me to come with him, move onto the ship. Said he couldn’t afford all these side trips. Well, that was what I’d always wanted, so of course I did. And then he had to tell me how he had so much money. He was a thief.”

Renard had to laugh. It was a ridiculous climax to her story. “What did he steal, and who from?” he asked.

“Anything from anybody,” she replied. “The freighter was a cover and afforded mobility. Jewels, art, gold, silver, you name it. If it had a high value, he stole it. Rich people, corporation heads, party leaders on Comworlds were a particular target. Sometimes there were break-ins, sometimes he did it with electronics and a fine knowledge of bureaucratic paperwork. After we got together, we became a team. He got all sorts of teaching machines, sleep learners, hypno aids, and the like for me, and he coached me and rehearsed me until I sounded educated and acted properly.” She giggled. “One time we broke into the master storage area in the Union of All Moons treasury building, exchanged some chips, and had the next three days’ planetary income automatically diverted to dummy interstellar units accounts in Confederacy banks, and even after we closed down, withdrew the stuff, and transferred it far away, they never caught on. I wonder if they ever did?”

“Your man—what happened to him?” Renard asked gently.

She turned somber again. “We were never caught by the police. Never. We were too good. One day, though, we lifted two beautiful little solid gold figurines by the ancient classical artist Sun Tat, and they had to be fenced to a big collector. The meet was arranged in a bar, and we had no reason to suspect anything was wrong. It was. The collector was a front for a big syndicate boss we’d hit a year or so earlier, and the whole thing was a set-up. They cut him into little pieces and left the figurines with the remains.”

“And you inherited the ship,” Renard guessed.

She nodded. “We’d gotten a traditionalist ceremony a year or so before, just in case, I didn’t really want to, but he’d insisted, and it turned out he was right. I was his sole heir.”

“And you’ve been alone ever since?” he added, fascinated by this strange little woman.

There was acid and cold steel in her voice. “I spent half a year tracking down his killers. Every one died— slowly. Every one knew why they were dying. At first the big boss didn’t even remember him!” Tears welled up in her eyes. “But he remembered at the end,” she added, with evident satisfaction.

“Since that time, I have continued the family trade, you might say,” she went on. “Both of them.

“I’ve paid for the best the underworld can offer, and kept myself in top shape. Surgeons have turned me into a small deadly weapon, with things you wouldn’t believe built in and deep-programmed. Even if I were ever caught, the story I just told you couldn’t even be gotten by deep-psych probe. They’ve tried.”

“You were hired to get Nikki out, weren’t you?” Renard said.

She nodded. “If you can’t catch a crook, set her to catch other crooks. That was the idea. It almost worked.”

He grunted at the last. It brought everything back to the present situation, although now he could understand why she believed they would get out of this. With a life like hers, miracles were a common, everyday occurrence.

“There’s nothing really to tell about me,” he said wistfully. “Nothing violent or romantic.”

“You said you were a teacher,” she noted.

He nodded. “I was from Muscovy. A Comworld, yes, but not a really serious one. None of that genetic-manipulation stuff. Traditional family structure, prayers five times a day— There is no God but Marx and Lenin is His Prophet—and testing to see where you fit into the communal structure.” He was audibly straining for the words. They came hard to him. He didn’t appear to notice.

“I was smart, so I was put in school. But I never was interested in anything useful, so I studied old literchur”—that’s the way he pronounced it, as best he could—“and became a teacher. I was always kind of effinate”—he meant effeminate—“in looks and acts, but not inside. I got a lot of fun poked at me. It hurt. Even the students were mean. Mostly behind my back, but I knew what they were saying. I didn’t like the men who liked other men, and the women all believed I didn’t like them. I kind of withdrew into my own shell, in my apartment with my books and vid files, and came out only for classes.”

“How about a psych?” she wondered.

“I went to a bunch,” he replied. “They all started talking about all sorts of wild things, did I love my father and all that. They put me in some kind of drug training that was supposed to change my mannerisms, but it didn’t work. The more they tried and failed, the more unhappy I got. Finally, I sat there one night and considered how little I had done. I hadn’t really directly touched one other life—even for the worst. I thought about killing myself, but the psych probes out-guessed me there, and the People’s Police came and got me before I could do it.”

“Would you have?” she asked seriously.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. I sure haven’t since, have I? No guts, I guess. Or maybe they deep-programmed me not to.” He paused a moment in thought—or trying to organize his thoughts.

“They took me to the political asylum. I’d never been there before. They seemed kind of upset that I was thinking of killing myself. Took it personally, like because I failed, the system had failed. They thought about wiping me clean, maybe converting me to being a woman and doing a new personality that would match.”

“Why not just kill you and be done with it?” Mavra asked. “It would be cheaper and less trouble.”

He looked shocked, then remembered her own background. “They just don’t do that on Comworlds! Not Muscovy, anyway. No, I was kept there for a long time—I don’t know how long. Then somebody came by and told me that some bigwig wanted to talk to me. I had no choice, so I went. He was from a different Comworld, a real far-gone one—true hermaphroism, genetically identical people programmed to love their work, and so on. He said he needed, of all things, a librarian! People who could read books, and be familiar with them, were rare— thatwas true! Even Muscovy had a ninety-two percent ill— nonreader rate.” The big words got him, and he either badly mispronounced them or couldn’t handle them.

“Trelig,” she guessed.

He nodded. “Right. I was taken away on his ship to New Pompeii, given a huge overdose of sponge, and I was stuck. The OD did crazy things to me in the weeks and months that followed. My girlish manners were made a hundred times worse, and my features became more and more like those of a woman, even to the breasts. But—it was funny. My male organs actually grew, and, inside my head, I was still a man. I finally had my first real sex experience on New Pompeii. I really was his librarian, too—