Exiles at the Well of Souls

another ten seconds!” He hefted the crowbar menacingly.

Yulin felt panic rising in him, but managed to control himself. “Wait a minute! I mean no harm!” he managed.

The crowbar didn’t move. “Then what are you doing just walking into here stark naked and panicking good women?” the other returned, that menacing tone growing. But, Yulin realized, he’d answered instead of attacking, and that meant reason could prevail.

“I’m an Entry!” he almost yelled. “I just woke up in a field back there and I haven’t the slightest idea whereor what I am or what to do next!” That was certainly the truth.

The big minotaur considered this. “Entry?” he snorted. “We have had only two Entries before that I know of, and they were both cows. Doesn’t make sense to have a bull Entry.” Still, there was something that made him hesitate. The crowbar lowered over so slightly.

“I’m Ben Yulin,” he tried, attempting to sound friendly and not scared to death. “I need help.”

There was something in the newcomer’s manner that didn’t seem right to the farmer. Yet he sensed, somehow, the genuineness of Yulin’s plea.

“All right,” growled the man with the crowbar. “I’ll accept your story for now. But try anything funny and I’ll kill you.” He didn’t let go of the crowbar. “Come on in and we’ll at least get some clothes on you so you don’t have half the herd coming after you.”

Yulin started toward the door, and the farmer hefted the bar again. “Not in there, you idiot! Holy shit! Maybe you really don’t know what’s what around here! Just walk around the house, here, and I’ll follow.”

Yulin did as instructed, and entered a different door in what seemed to be a complex semidetached from the larger buildings. It was an apartment of sorts. There was a living room with small fireplace, a bull-sized rocking chair of a finely polished hardwood, windows looking out on the farm, and, to his surprise, artwork and reading material. A number of very large-sized books in a print he couldn’t read sat on two shelves, and there were pewter sculptures, not only of other minotaurs, both male and female, but of other, stranger subjects that implied surrealism. Some etchings on the wall, actually black-and-white line drawings, showed farm scenes, sunsets and other realistic subjects.

The female sculptures showed him what he’d suspected—the cow did have big udders, like bulges hanging down—and a couple of the sketches, or prints, or whatever they were were rather graphic pornography. On top of a table near the rocking chair was a weird-looking mechanical device he couldn’t figure out. It was a box with a horizontal round plate that obviously rotated by means of a spring-driven hand crank on one side. A complex brass device on a single pivot was mounted to one side, and out of the back rose a tremendous horn-shaped device. There seemed also to be a place for another horn to fit on the front. Yulin couldn’t imagine what it did.

The man went into another room and seemed to be trying to open some sort of cedar chest with one hand while at the same time keeping his eye on the newcomer through the doorway. Yulin decided to stay stock still in the center of the room and do nothing at all.

The other room was obviously a bedroom, though. There was a wood frame there filled with a strawlike material, and there were also some carelessly tossed blankets and an enormous stuffed object that might have been a pillow. Thinking about his horns, Yulin wondered what happened if you rolled over in your sleep.

The farmer threw him a large cloth, and he caught it. It appeared to be made of burlap, much rougher and coarser than what the other wore. There had been rope drawstrings placed in it, and Yulin got the idea pretty quickly of how to put it on.

There was a thin, plain rug on the floor. “You’ll have to sit there,” the farmer told him, pointing to a spot on the rug. “I don’t get much visitor traffic here.” He sat down comfortably in the rocker and started to rock gently.

“Now can you tell me what happens next?” Yulin prompted.

“First you tell me about yourself. Who you are, what you were, how you got here,” the other responded. “Then, if I like what I hear, I’ll help you solve your problems.”

Yulin complied, almost. He spared nothing, except his role in anything shady. He pictured himself as Gil Zinder’s assistant, nothing more, forced by the evil Antor Trelig to do what he did. He was convincing. When he got to the part about crashing in the North, the farmer’s eyes almost shone. “Been to the North, eh? That’s kind of a romantic thing for just about all the folks here in the South. Kind of exotic and mysterious.”

Yulin thought that the South was sufficiently exotic and mysterious for him, but he said nothing. His story, however, was accepted. It was far too detailed to have been created out of whole cloth as a diversion. The farmer relaxed.

“My name’s Cilbar,” he said, more friendly now. “This is my farm. You’re in Dasheen, which is both the country and the name of your new people. You’re a herbivore, so you’ll never starve to death—although, as a civilized man, you’ll find that while eating stuff in the raw will satisfy your hunger, prepared foods are better. The hex is nontechnological, so machines don’t work here unless they’re muscle-powered. We got the muscle, as you probably noticed.”

Yulin admitted he had.

“I been around in my youth,” Cilbar continued. “Things are different everyplace, of course, but our system here’s a little more different than most. It’s the biology that does it. We get criticized by some other hexes, but that’s the way things are.”

“What do you mean?” Yulin wondered.

Cilbar sighed. “Well, a lot of races, they have two, maybe more sexes. Your old one did. There’s some differences, but basically they’re variations of the same critter. Brain power’s the same, and take away the sex stuff and the bodies aren’t that far different, either. Right?”

“I’m following you,” Yulin replied.

“Well, you mighta noticed that we don’t look like the cows,” the farmer said. “Not just the udder. We’re smaller, squatter, got shorter single-elbow arms, bigger, different heads, like that.”

“I did notice it,” Ben Yulin acknowledged.

“Well, we are different. Don’t know why. First of all, there’s only an average of one male for every one hundred females. That’s why I was surprised not that you were an Entry but that you were a male. You see?”

Yulin did. All the more remarkable since he’d gone through the Well as a biological female. What was it Ortega said? The Well classified you according to unknown standards.

“Anyway,” Cilbar continued, “just from a social standpoint that makes males more important than females. There’s less of us, so we’re not expendable. On top of that, we’re a hell of a lot smarter.”

“How’s that?” was all Yulin could manage.

Cilbar nodded. “Some scientists from a couple of other hexes once came in to prove to us that it wasn’t so. All they did was bear out what we already knew. Their brains are less developed. Trying to teach one to read is like trying to teach this chair. Oh, teach ’em to do any basic job and they’ll happily do it for hours. Plowing, harvesting, simple carpentry, hauling and such, sure. Hell, tell ’em to dig fence holes and they’ll happily do it forever until you call ’em off. Ask ’em how many holes they dug and they couldn’t tell you.”

The green light of understanding went on in Ben Yulin’s head. “You mean,” he said, “that the women do all the labor and the men run things?”

Cilbar nodded again. “That’s about it. The women built this farm, but a man designed it. The women work it, but I run it. Same with the art, the books—all by men for men.”

Yulin was intrigued, and he thanked the Well even more that he’d come out as he did. This was the kind of place he was going to like.

“You speak very well, very cultured,” the Entry remarked. “You have a lot of education?”

The farmer chuckled. “Every male gets everything we can give him. I think we’re a group of spoiled brats, myself. I often wonder what we’d have to do in a pinch if things get tough. Yeah, a son is special. He gets it all. Then, if he’s got some particular aptitude, like art, or writing, or teaching, or trading, he takes it up. If not, like me, he takes over somebody’s farm when they get too old or too tired.”

“There’s a small population here, then,” Yulin surmised.

He nodded. “Very small. About ten thousand farms, more or less, with a bunch of small towns, rarely more