Exiles at the Well of Souls

and I was also one of the guards for special prisoners, like Nikki, there. Everybody on New Pompeii had psych problems of some kind plus a skill Trelig needed. He recruited from the best political asylums in the Com.”

“And now here you are,” she said to him, very gently.

He sighed. “Yes, here I am. When I shot Ziggy and helped you get out, I felt it was the first really important thing I had ever done. I almost felt that I was born and existed only for that one moment, that one act—to be there to help you when you needed it. And now—look what a mess we have!”

She kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Go get to sleep and don’t worry so much. I haven’t lost yet—and if I haven’t, you haven’t either.”

She wished she believed that.

Uchjin, Northern Hemisphere

“A hell of a mess,” Ben Yulin said, looking over the landscape. With no power to the air-renewal system on the ship, they had been forced to don their spacesuits. The largest aboard was almost too small for Zinder in the body of his rotund daughter, but the things were made to form-fit a variety of sizes. You got into them and they were all tremendous, loose, and baggy. But when you hooked up the air supply, which was, fortunately, a manual rebreather type, the material acted like something alive, constricting until it became almost a second, very tough white skin.

“How much air do we have?” Trelig asked, looking around at the barren rocky desert in which no sign of life appeared anywhere.

Yulin shrugged. “Not more than a half-day’s supply at best without the special electrical system in the rebreather.”

“We aren’t far from that next hex, where there appeared to be some water,” Trelig noted hopefully. “Let’s try for it. What have we got to lose?”

They started off, following the marks of the giant skid the courier ship had made in its belly-landing.

They hadn’t gone far before twilight set in. Yulin felt that something was wrong, and he tried to put his finger on it. There seemed to be shapes around, kind of half-shapes, really, that appeared at the corner of your eye but weren’t there when you turned around.

“Trelig?” he called.

“What?” the other snapped.

“Do either you or Zinder notice anything odd going on? I’d swear we have company of some kind.”

Trelig and Zinder both came to a halt, although they didn’t want to, and looked around. Yulin found they were easier to see the darker it got.

They seemed to exist in only two dimensions—length and width—and even that was variable. From the side, they seemed to vanish. They were flying, or floating—it was hard to tell which—all around them. Yulin was reminded of paint spilled on a sheet of clear plastic. There was a thick leading edge, and it flowed—not necessarily down, but up and along as well. As it did, the edge seemed to spread out so that it was sometimes a meter wide and almost two meters long. That was the limit for them—when they were fully extended, the rear edge seemed to slowly flow back into the leading edge until it was just a meter-wide lump of paint, only to start spreading out again.

They were different colors, too. Almost every color they could think of, although never more than one. Blues, reds, yellows, greens—of every possible shade and hue.

“Are they intelligent?” Yulin wondered aloud.

Trelig had been thinking the same thing. “They sure seem to be clustering around us, like a crowd of curious onlookers at an accident,” the syndicate boss noted. “I don’t see how, but I’d bet money that these are the people who live here.”

“People” was too strong a word, Yulin thought. These creatures were the stuff of artists’ dreams, not real, tangible things.

“I’m going to try and touch one,” Trelig said.

“Hey! Wait! You might—” Yulin protested, but got only a laugh in reply.

“So I do something bad,” the boss responded. “We’re dead anyway, you know.” With that he reached out and tried to grab the one nearest him. Nothing he’d ever seen had ever reacted that fast. One moment it was there, all stretched out, the next it just seemed to be somewhere else, a meter or two out of reach.

“Wow!” Trelig exclaimed. “They sure can move if they want to!”

Yulin nodded. “Maybe, if they’re intelligent in any way, we can talk to them,” he suggested.

Trelig wasn’t so sure. “So what do you say to a two-meter living paint smear, and how?” he asked sarcastically.

“Maybe they can see somehow,” Yulin suggested. “Let’s try some gestures.”

He made sure of his audience—and he did have the funny feeling that they were looking at him—and pointed to Zinder’s air tanks. Then he put his hands to his throat, made choking motions, and fell to the ground.

The flowing streaks seemed to like that. More of them arrived, and they seemed to become much more agitated. Yulin repeated the act several times, and they became increasingly agitated, sometimes almost touching one another in their eagerness to get a better view.

Enough acting, Yulin decided. It used up air. He got up, faced them, and put out his hands in what he hoped would be a gesture of friendship and supplication.

This action seemed to excite them even more. He had the strange feeling that he was the subject of a furious debate that none but these strange creatures could hear.

But were they debating whether to help, how to help, or what was the meaning of this strange creature’s actions? That last was definitely the most unsettling—and the most likely.

A couple of the creatures floated over, seemed to examine his air pack from a distance of fifty centimeters or so. He remained still, letting them. That was a good start. They might be getting the idea. Or they might be wondering why he was pointing at that funny thing.

More and more appeared as darkness fell. They were coming out of cracks in the ground, they observed— small cracks they would never have noticed otherwise. The natives seemed to rise like wraiths, fully extended, then curl up or flow or whatever, pulling out in a different direction and heading, mostly, their way. There was a regular assembly now, a rainbow of weird flowing and undulating shapes.

Finally, they seemed to reach some sort of decision or consensus. They crowded around the humans, so thick it was impossible to see. Then, very deliberately, a narrow opening appeared to one side. They waited.

“I think we’re being directed someplace,” Trelig noted. “Shall we go?”

“Better than collapsing here and dying in another hour or two,” Yulin replied. “You lead, or shall I?”

Trelig started walking, then Zinder, and finally Yulin. That they were being led somewhere was quickly apparent—the opening continued, but the area they vacated was closed in by the strange creatures.

Yulin checked his air supply. About two hours, he noted. He hoped wherever they were going wasn’t far off.

That thought was in all their minds, along with the last shreds of doubt, when, a little over an hour later, they reached a rock outcrop. A huge number of the creatures was there—perhaps many thousands. Some had obviously assembled there because of them, but others seemed to be carrying on all sorts of deliberate but unfathomable business.

“Yulin! Look!” Trelig called excitedly.

Ben Yulin peered into the star-lit darkness at the cliff’s face, and, for a moment, didn’t see what had attracted the other man. Finally he could make out a deeper blackness against the cliff.

“A cave?” he asked, feeling disappointed. “Hell, we’ve been taken to their leader or something.”

“No! No!” Trelig protested. “My Renard eyes must be better than your Mavra Chang’s. Look at the shape of the hole!”

Yulin peered again, approaching closer. It was large—perhaps two meters on each of its six sides. Six