Ghost of the Well of Souls

Ambora

The dreams started soon after she had begun to sense the intricate threads and pulsing energies of the Well World. At first they were a torrent of voices, data, scenes, and visions, some wonderful, some so terrible that she awoke screaming from the very sight of them. But as time went on she began to get some selectivity and control over what she was receiving.

The Well, which she continued to think of as some sort of divine creation, albeit a secondary one since it, too, had been created by entities even higher and wiser—a device of the gods, not a god itself—continued to pretty much ignore her. Its job was to maintain the Well World first and foremost, and then to maintain the structures and living creations that had sprung from it and covered so much of the universe; it concerned itself with individuals only when they threatened its basic purpose or if it was somehow damaged and needed attention. Other than that, it was content even if things were not going the way its builders imagined.

There was a question about that, although it was one raised by others of her kind and not herself. It seemed to Jaysu blasphemous to think that she was becoming the superior creation the Well World had been designed to develop and to breed. She certainly acknowledged her power, but she was awed and not a little frightened of it, and in no mood to test it or to use it. Power without the wisdom to use it properly was a very good definition of evil, she thought.

And so she continued to intercept the input and output going from the Well to the universe and back again. Not that she could understand it or follow it, except in those individual dreams and nightmares where occasional coherent thoughts and visions would exist. No organic mind had the speed and capacity to comprehend that vast data stream.

Things were happening to her that were far beyond her understanding, and she could neither stop nor control them. At first it had seemed she’d been anointed by the gods to be elevated to some state that might restore peace to the world, but now she wasn’t so sure. She certainly wasn’t sure that it was the gods doing this to her; if so, it was a more complex god than she had ever imagined.

The worst thing was, it was so lonely, this mysterious process. But how could she even hope to explain to, let alone gain wisdom from, anyone else?

She certainly had to do something, though. She was sure of that. She could feel the reaction of the people, her people, upon seeing her, and it was a mixture of fear and awe. She understood that to keep isolated in the higher altitudes and in the remote mountains was to lay herself open to being considered a god herself, and that was the ultimate blasphemy.

There was no other way for her, no other conclusion that any logic could draw that would change things.

She had to leave Ambora. She had to leave it until she completed this process, whatever it was, and gained sufficient wisdom to understand and know what she was to do then.

Strange as it was, the only one she could consult with on this was an alien in Zone.

Spreading her huge snow-white wings, Jaysu flew inland toward the Zone Gate, not expecting to find answers but hoping for something constructive to do.

Core was astonished at the change in her. Jaysu was truly becoming the classical concept of an angel, purer than pure, whiter than white, and with great power to match. In a sense, Core thought, she was the direct opposite of the one she’d come to for help. Core was still struggling with her new limitations, limits in storage, retrieval speed, and overall capabilities imposed by this physical body, not to mention the distractions the body also offered. Considering her former master and employer, though, there was one difference.

Core had been a demon searching for liberation and accepting mortality to gain it. Jaysu had been a mere girl who was now evolving into an angel and looking for God to give her orders.

Still, it was Core, the old Core, who had made this new person by stealing her mind’s place, and it was Core to whom she’d come for advice.

Core sat in one of the special wheelchairs used when her kind were topside, a special covering over the lower half of her body allowing for a slow but steady application of water. Drying out wasn’t fatal to Kalindans, but it itched like crazy.

“What is it that you want of me?” Core asked the angelic creature.

“I want to know what I am becoming, and why,” she answered simply.

“And you think I can tell you?”

“Perhaps not. But I think that if you do not know, then nobody does.”

Core sighed. “It is a very complex case, my dear. I can’t say for certain, but I have some ideas.”

“You know who I am, at least. Or was.” It wasn’t a question.

The Kalindan shifted uncomfortably in the chair, not from the posture or from being out of the water but from the conversation. She wondered why she was feeling so odd talking to this Amboran girl.

“I know who you were, at least in part. A bit of the personality remains. What I don’t know is how much you can understand, or will accept. I am not a mystic, nor am I much of a believer in gods and supernatural occurrences. You understand that?”

Jaysu sensed the Kalindan’s discomfort but ignored the skepticism. “Who was I?”

“Your name was, rather ironically, Angel. Angel Kobe,” Core told her, pronouncing it Ko-bay, as the original had. “They told me that the Well of Souls sometimes exhibited what some people thought of as a sense of humor. You were called ‘angel,’ and now you are becoming one.”

The sound of the name stirred something within her. It sounded familiar, like some comfortable garment she’d always had but had lost and now discovered again. There was also something else, something just beyond her that stirred at its sound, but she could not hold on to it long enough to understand anything about it. Best to continue.

“What was I—back there?”

“What you are now. A mystic. Priestess, nun, reverend, minister, whatever. Different religion, different god, but it’s rather astonishing how the job remains pretty much the same regardless.”

“I had a flock? I was a spiritual adviser?”

“Well, not exactly. You were too young for that, but you were on your way to doing that, yes. You were born and raised into a kind of religious order, and that was what you were to be and, in fact, what you wished to be. So, in a sense, what you have here is very much what you would have had if you had never found the Well World, only without wings.”

That startled her. She’d never considered that she hadn’t been of the same people. “Can you show me what I used to look like?”

Core shrugged. “I can show you roughly what you looked like. At least, I can show you a picture of a young female of the same race.” She turned in the chair, and gnarled, webbed hands reached out for a console and pressed a sequence on a control panel. “Type forty-one, female, age approximately sixteen,” she ordered. The screen above the console flickered, and then on the screen there was a three-dimensional color picture of a young Terran-type girl, totally naked and unadorned. This was a classification file, not a travelogue.

She studied the photo, fascinated. The girl looked so— bare, so vulnerable. No wings, no talons, funny flat feet, hair that could only be decorative considering where it was. She was not impressed.

“That is what I was?”

“Essentially, yes.”

“And that is also what you were?”

Core coughed nervously. “No, not exactly. The others that you met here, most of them were either males or females of that type, although not all.”

“I thought you were a different sort of creature than the others. There is a different sense about you. I sense a deep alienness that goes beyond the various races of this world. If I may ask—just what were you?”

Core sighed and turned back around to face her. “If you must know, I was a machine. It will do no good to explain further since it is a far different sort of machine than you know of here. Closer to this computer that I am using, but different. Far worse than this computer, really, because, like it, I had to obey whatever commands were