Ghost of the Well of Souls

Ming did the same at almost the same instant. Then she rolled over, sat up and looked at him and started laughing.

“It still got it wrong!” she laughed.

They were separate people again, and Terrans as well. In fact, they were better than they’d left, for now each one of them had a body that looked as it did when it was in its late teens, perfectly healthy and as yet unabused.

The trouble was, Ming was looking at her sixteen-year-old body from Ari’s sixteen-year-old body, and he hers.

“Cheer up,” Ming laughed in Ari’s voice. “At least if we go nuts like this, we can go through the Well again!”

“You really had hair this long?” Ari managed.

There was a sound between thunder and a hiss, and they both turned and their expressions faded. There was the mirror image of the Straight Gate, and, on the other side, Josich of Chalidang, looking less than amused.

“You now have a sample of the power of this device,” the Empress told them. “And we do not have to make you what you were, so please remember that. We did this as a demonstration of power and as a convenience to our purposes. If you want to be restored to your own bodies, and, particularly, if you want to get off that desolate rock in your next lifetime, you will do what I say.”

“What do you want us to do?” Ari asked her.

“Young nephew of Wallinchky, you know this compound. We wish you to survey it and check it out and ensure that it is still secure, that no one else is there, and you will try and determine how the Gate got to be where it was. The other will help you. When you find out things, send the other with a report, even a partial report. We will be waiting.”

Jules Wallinchky watched the whole thing in astonishment. This was better than he ever imagined, and his real problem was not letting Josich know it. Still, he couldn’t help commenting, “You could send me over. I could find out everything in there in minutes.”

“Yes, dear Jules, we are sure that you could, but we find you in person to be, well, a bit more like us than we expected, and we would not send us if our positions were reversed without a lot more need.”

Ming and Ari were happy to be out of sight of the monstrous creature, and happy as well to suddenly be individuals again after all this time, even if Josich had deliberately scrambled them.

“She might have made a mistake,” Ming commented. “If I could shut this down right now, it wouldn’t bother me at all to stay this way. Jeez! I was good-lookin’!”

“Before the past year and a half or so, I would have fought like hell against the idea, but frankly, right now I’d go along with it.” All of Ari was inside this new mind, but from the Kalindan time, when thoughts and even dreams were shared, there was a fair amount of Ming mixed in as well, and the reverse was also true, as they both knew. In fact, it was still fairly easy for both of them to know what the other one was thinking.

Ari went into the computer control center, which was also a very comfortable lounge, and while Ming dialed up some drinks from the old days, Ari sat at the console.

“Computer, Security Code Picasso Seven, Michelangelo Four-one, Titan Six-twelve,” Ari said to the console.

“Access denied,” the computer responded. “Invalid eye, hand, and voice print.”

“Argh! Ming, you’re going to have to do it. It’s looking for my body or Uncle Jules’s original one.”

Ming sipped on a favorite cocktail she’d long reconciled to never tasting again and handed another to Ari. She then sat down and, with his prompting, went through the same sequence.

“Access denied,” the computer responded. “Eye and hand information does not match voice print on file.”

Ming sighed. “I suppose we could sit here and try my acting abilities at getting the voice right, but I’m not sure we could. It can tell there’s something wrong with me. I think that’s what it was designed to do.”

“Right. Tell you what. I’m going to check on the old human staff area and see if they’ve been stuck here all this time or got polished off or managed to get out or what. I’ll meet you back at the thing in a few minutes. Okay?”

“Go ahead. I’m gonna finish my Zerian smokehouse here, and then I’ll head back up. Doesn’t taste quite the same as I remember it, but it’s still good enough. I think your taste buds aren’t as high-class as mine.”

“Says you,” Ari retorted, patting Ming on the behind, and then he was off.

Ming got up, walked around to the console, and saw in it a reflection of the young Ari’s body. “God!” she said aloud. “I’m back to being Terran again, I’m in a young guy’s sexy body who’s hung like a horse, and ten to one I’m gonna wind up back on the Well World turned into a fish.”

She put down the empty glass and walked back out into the hall. It was odd. She’d gotten so familiar with this place during her slavelike captivity that she knew it backward and forward, yet it didn’t seem quite right somehow. Oh, it was the same place, taken care of by the cleaning and maintenance systems, but there was something odd about it. Like a feeling of being watched. Almost like Core had never left.

She slowly walked back up to the Straight Gate, which looked precisely the same as the one she’d come through, and she could see Josich there, framed in the hex.

“Well?” Josich demanded.

“There is nothing to report. So far there is no sign of life, but also no sign of a breach of security. We can’t access the computers, though. The system won’t believe that I’m Ari or that Ari is me. That’s what you get for buying too good a security system.”

“There are overrides, but only from inside,” Wallinchky’s voice came to her. They all sounded odd, almost mechanical, unlike what she’d been used to. She realized then that the translator hadn’t come with them; she was speaking the old Confederacy speech and their translators were changing it and then translating back. Without a translator of your own, the voices did not convey nearly the nuances and emotions as when both speakers had them.

“You want to give me one? Or Ari? At least we can ask the computer what’s going on.”

“Give them one!” Josich snapped, but it wasn’t Wallinchky who answered, it was Core.

“Tell the system Emergency Priority Override Matthew Mark Moses Mohammed Stoke Da Vinci Rembrandt Rodin. Can you remember all that?”

“I’ll try.” She repeated it several times, making mistakes, but finally got it. She always had a knack for memory, even if it made no sense at all.

She ran back into the computer room, sat down at the console and repeated the entire string before she could screw it up. Even so, it took three tries before the computer announced, “Accepted. Instructions?”

“Computer, identify me as Ari Martinez y Palavri, record new voice print to match hand and eye.”

“Accepted. Instructions?”

“Cross-link identity and accept female other as Ming Dawn Palavri y Martinez. Accept either as valid.”

“Accepted. Instructions?”

“Computer, are there any Terrans or other races resident on this world or inside this compound at this time?”

“Six remaining staff members were extricated by escape capsule eleven months ago. Since then no others inside compound. A landing was made on the far side, but no attempt was made to breech the compound.”

“Computer, then who brought the device sitting in the hall inside the airlock to where it now sits?”

“Robotic staff.”

“From the ship docked at the airlock?”

“There is no ship docked at the airlock.”

“What!” Then, suddenly, she remembered. O’Leary had left the compound! He’d landed somewhere else and came upon them that way. But if O’Leary’s ship was down outside, on the surface somewhere, then…

She had a strange feeling about this all of a sudden.

Ari came back and looked in. “I went back to the Gate, but they said you’d gotten a code and come back