Ghost of the Well of Souls

given me, but unlike it, I was self-aware. I could think, I could analyze and make judgments, and that was bad since I had to carry out my orders even if I knew they were evil.”

“Were they? Evil, I mean?” She had the distinct sensation that Core didn’t have the same sort of value judgments that she had.

“Yes and no,” the Kalindan admitted. “I was detached from good and evil. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t influence much on my own, so I was left to think a lot but not observe behavior. I knew the definitions of right and wrong but had no moral compass, no moral sense.”

“And do you now?” the Amboran asked, wondering why she was making uncomfortable the only one she thought could help her. Maybe it was just in her nature to minister, she thought, but then again, maybe it was an attempt to find out if, by befriending or being befriended by this creature, she might not be selling her soul.

It was a question Core had been thinking long and hard on. “In one sense, yes. But I have a lot to learn and still limited experience. There are many things I like about this body, about being truly alive, but there are also things that frustrate and disturb me. I am trying to learn.”

It was an honest answer; she could sense that. She understood by now that nobody could lie to her, not really. Oh, they could tell lies, but she would always know. Odd how she could read even alien intent with absolute certainty yet be unable to get beyond and into the inner mind and soul of even one of her own people.

But Core—Core was unique, at least in her experience. In many ways an empathic scan brought that cold empty intellect to the fore and screamed that she was still a machine indeed. And yet… and yet… even since the last time they’d met, there was something more, something else there, something more—human, used in that broad sense of covering any sentient beings. Core indeed was something of a counterpoint, yet kin to her. The Kalindan was turning into a human, and deep down, although Jaysu tried desperately to hide it even from herself, this frightened her as much as she was frightened of becoming more than she could handle.

There was reassurance in that.

“What am I becoming?” she asked the Kalindan pointedly.

“I have no idea,” Core replied honestly. “However, I would say that you are getting close to it. There is great power in you, the kind of power that was attributed to angels in the ancient religions. Physical strength and near supernatural power. You know it, and you are mostly worried that you can’t handle that kind of power. Am I correct?”

“That is as close as I can get, yes,” she admitted.

“If you must know, I believe that there is a threat to both the Well World and to the Realm, the great Commonwealth from which we originally came. It is related, and the Well requires people like us to meet that threat. I think you and I are a part of stopping it.”

The records were obscure, but between the factual data and the legends and myths, a coherent frame for the way the Well worked was becoming clear. Somewhere, out there, was one creature, possibly more than one, either a Maker restricted to the kind of physicality as everybody else, who could in fact come here and repair the Well if it malfunctioned.

But they were there only for malfunctions and breaches of the Well if any existed. Otherwise, the Well ran as it was designed to do.

And it was designed to allow the myriad races who had been developed here by the Makers—in times so ancient as to be beyond anyone’s memory to develop in their natural places in the universe—to evolve, grow, mature. If they died out, well, so be it. If they reached the stars, all the better. Overall, though, they were nurtured, not managed, by the Well, which simply maintained conditions that would allow them to develop. Whether they did was up to them.

There was, however, one area where the Well intruded— when some sort of external disruption would screw up the experiments. When that condition occurred, Core was convinced that the Well could and sometimes did manipulate probabilities to the extent of putting in place those people who could keep the experiments, the development of the races, from being “contaminated,” as it were. The Well did this by creating conditions that allowed the experiments to defend themselves. No more. Anything else would create a counterforce that would be as much of a contaminant as that which they were formed to prevent.

Those who had come from the Commonwealth—as unlikely a group as Core could have imagined—were the counterforce. They had the means, but only if they applied themselves and actually stopped it.

Josich was the contaminant. There was no doubt about that.

Or were they truly the ones intended to stop the monster, rather than some offworlders who just fell through? Core had worried about that, and about the whole theory of intervention, but there was no way to prove things one way or the other. It didn’t matter anyway; if they could stop Josich, then they had to do it. There were higher obligations even if the Well had nothing to do with it.

Sitting here, looking at “Jaysu,” though, it was hard to imagine that the god machine hadn’t come up with something very original. Core had always thought itself to be at least a demigod in status because of the range of knowledge it had and the enormous resources it could control back when it was a machine. Now, even with those capabilities gone save from memory, the former computer was forced to admit that, next to the Well, it had been so minor as to be insignificant.

Now, as a Kalindan, she often wondered if the limitations she faced, the aches and pains she endured, and the comparisons to what she once had been, weren’t very much like what the Makers would have felt after processing themselves through the Well.

“Madam Core?”

“Huh? Oh, I’m sorry, my dear. I get reflective once in a while, I’m afraid. It is the habit of an old recluse. I’m physically just another Kalindan now, it is true, but mentally there is still a part of me that I cannot let go of nor explain to others.”

She nodded. “You are as afraid of losing your loneliness as you are desperate to get rid of it. It is a very sad paradox.”

“Eh? That’s an interesting way of putting things. I’ll have to think on that one. Still, let us get back to the problem at hand. What do you want of me that I can give you?”

“I want to know where I should be. I have to believe that I am undergoing this—this metamorphosis or whatever it is, for a reason. I have been given great power in order to do something, but the ones who have bestowed this upon me have not told me what it is I am supposed to do.”

“And you come to me for the answer? Jaysu, nothing in creation is all one thing or the other, not even good or evil, although I admit that nobody has figured out anything good in Josich’s nature. Still, he, or she, or whatever, is just a creature like you. Born of parents in some far-off place, raised one way, now here and playing out what is deep within its soul. The Well and the Makers are the closest things to gods that I have come across that I can accept, and the former is only interested in maintaining a status quo, and the latter didn’t give a damn about us. In one way I envy you your faith, because it convinces you that there truly is destiny. Because I’m a rationalist, though, I can’t tell you what to do. I do welcome you to our fight and cause simply because I feel that all of us are uniquely endowed to combat this menace. Right now, though, the only air- breathing freelancer I have available is O’Leary, and somehow the idea of an angel with a serpent seems oddly wrong.”

She frowned. “I remember him from that meeting. The snake is not a good figure in our faith, you know. Still, I did not sense evil in him.”

“Nor in your old one,” Core told her. “O’Leary, however, is a very good man, born of the same race as Angel Kobe.”

“That explains it,” she responded. “He has a different soul. The body changes, the soul remains the same.”

Core decided not to ask her if she believed that sentient machines had souls, or whether she believed that Angel’s soul was really inside her. Core suspected where Angel’s soul, such as it was, really resided right now. Those things, however, would only complicate matters.

“Do you think you could work with him, then?”

She seemed startled. “Work with him? In what way?”

“I believe that some sort of military operation is about to be launched on the nation of Quislon. The