Quest for the Well of Souls

with her, and managed to steal a ship and not get shot down by my robot sentinels—they’re still up there, too, you know—by knowing a password based on a system only I could possibly know. How? Because she was in league with that goddamned computer of Zinder’s, that’s how! It’s self-aware, you know! It’s the only answer. That means I haven’t the slightest idea whether or not she really could get back through to that computer if she ever managed to get back up there! Even Yulin might have problems getting by the sentinels, but she won’t! And her mind’s so strange, so unfathomable, that no one knows what she’d do with that kind of power. She’s vicious and vengeful, I know that. I lost a number of good syndicate hit men once when they killed her husband. I know what she’d like to do to me!”

Burodir shifted. She’d heard it all before. “But she won’t!” she pointed out. “There’s no way for anybody to get up there!”

“There’s a perfectly preserved ship in the North,” he retorted. “I ought to know—Ben and I crashed in it.”

“But in a nontech hex populated by beings so alien they don’t even understand what it is, and won’t permit any other race to move it,” she continued. “And, besides, it’s impossible for a Southerner to go beyond North Zone. You know that. Any Zone Gate on the Well World, North or South, just brings you back to Makiem. You can’t get beyond North Zone!”

That thought didn’t bother him. “I’d have once said what Chang did was impossible,” he pointed out. “I’d have said the Well of Souls, the Well World, Makiem, and all the rest were impossible, too. Besides, I’ve been reading the histories. A little over two centuries ago a Northerner did make it to the South, here. If it can be done that way, the same thing can be done in reverse.” She nodded. “I know, the Diviner and the Rel, or something. That whole story is so mucked up in distortion and legend, few believe it anyway. You know that. There was also supposed to be a Markovian then—still around a million or more years after the rest of his race died out—and the Well was supposedly opened, entered, and then sealed for all time. If you believe those lands of fairy tales, you’ll believe anything!”

He considered what she said. “Well, back where I came from, there were myths about weird, intelligent creatures in the dim past—centaurs and mermaids and pixies and fairies and flying winged horses and minotaurs and more. I have seen every one of those here. This Markovian—this Nathan Brazil, as he was called, from my sector of space—was a real person. There are records and descriptions of him in places like that plant-research center, Czill. Those people are not likely to accept fairy tales. And Serge Ortega believes in him, even claims to have known him.”

“Ortega!” she sniffed. “A scoundrel. A prisoner in Zone because of his own quest for immortality, and centuries older than any Ulik has a right to be. He’s a senile old man.”

“Ancient he is,” Trelig agreed, “but senile he is not. Remember, he’s the one who has kept Mavra Chang on ice and protected, until such time as he finds his own solution to this Northern mess. He’s the one who brought up that Diviner and Rel business. He was there!”

She tried to change the subject. “You know, it’ll be our season in less than two weeks,” she pointed out. “Have you cleared everything for it? I’m already starting to feel the urges.”

Trelig nodded absently. “We’ve got twenty brats now. The worst curse of the war—this extreme fertility the Well imposed to replace the dead.” But he continued to look out into the night, even though New Pompeii was now obscured by the western mountains. “Mavra Chang,” she heard him mutter under his breath.

Burodir hissed in disgust. “Damn it! If she bothers you so much, why not do something about her? You’re supposed to be a big plotter and dirty thinker. What would you do if some slip of a cripple was a threat to your power here?”

His great reptilian head cocked slightly as he considered her challenge. “But killing her wouldn’t be enough,” he responded. “No, I have to know what sort of things that computer put into her, and how much of it she’s revealed to anyone else.” His mind raced now. “A kidnapping, though. She’s helpless to resist, given the situation she is in, and she’s even isolated from Ortega’s meddling. A kidnapping and a thorough hypno job in’some high- tech hex that could be bought or blackmailed. Of course!”

“It took you all these years to figure that out?” his wife responded sarcastically.

He didn’t recognize the tone. “Nine years to get a position here, almost the same to get the diplomatic mess straight, to repair and rebuild,” he replied seriously. “Plus all the work on the Northern problem. Priorities. But— why not?”

“Want me to arrange it?” Burodir asked, thankful that, perhaps, this obsession could finally be cleared up. “Makiem will have to be well out of the affair on the surface, or we undo the diplomatic ties and bring Ortega and the rest down on us. But, it can be done.” Trelig nodded idly. “Mavra Chang!” he breathed.

South Zone

There were 780 races in 780 hexes in the Well World’s Southern Hemisphere. In each self-contained little world was at least one Zone Gate—a yawning hexagonal blackness that would instantly bring any of the hemisphere’s creatures passing through it to an area around the South Pole known as Zone. Around a huge central Well—the input staging area for Markovians who had taken part in the great experiment to repopulate the stars by becoming lesser creatures of their own design, living, reproducing, dying so the children could go out again to a universe their parents had abandoned—were 780 small areas. Airlocks and atmospheric controls adapted each to one of the 780 life forms of the South; they were all connected by long corridors.

Here and here alone, all the races of the South could meet. Here most technology worked—as did magic, too, for some of the races had powers given by the Well to simulate some condition on the real planets their races were designed to inhabit. However, high-tech pistols would not fire, a diplomatic nicety.

Zone, too, was halved, with one half for the water races and the other for the land races. But high-tech hexes had long ago rigged intercoms among them all, and it was here that senior ambassadors with translators could conduct interhex business, try and keep the peace, deal with common problems, work out trade negotiations and the like.

Not all the embassies were manned, or had ever been. Some hexes remained complete mysteries, trafficking in nothing to no one. One such was the snowbound, mountainous hex of Gedemondas, where the war had ended in a fiery display as the spaceship’s engine module plunged into a valley in full sight of the warring parties. It exploded as it pierced a thin floor of solidified lava masking volcanic magma. Other creatures, such as those Antor Trelig would once have called “human,” also went unrepresented. The Glathriel, for instance, lost a war with their nontech neighbors, the Ambreza, who had secured a Northern Hemisphere gas that reduced the humans to the most basic primitive tribalism and then took their hex. The Ambreza controlled both Zone Gates, and made certain that, if humanity rose again, it would do so in ways they, not the humans, chose.

Ambassadors came and went in the 679 currently manned offices. Time went on, people grew old, or they got tired of the monastic life the embassies imposed, or they got promoted within their own hexes, which were their countries.

All but one—the ambassador from Ulik, a hex that lay along the Equatorial Barrier. Ulik was a high-tech hex, but one with a harsh, desert environment. Its people were great reptiles, snakelike to five or more meters beyond the waist, with humanoid torsos to which were attached three pairs of muscular arms with broad hands, the bottom four on crablike ball sockets. Their heads were squarish, thick, and both males and females had huge walruslike mustaches. Egg-layers who nursed their young when hatched, to non-Ulik eyes the only difference between males and females was the breast between each pair of arms on the female.

Serge Ortega was a male, and an Entry. Long ago he had been a freighter pilot for the Com who, old and bored, had unknowingly opened up an ancient Markovian Well Gate that had transported him to the Well World, which had in turn transformed him into a Ulik. He liked being a Ulik; the Well, while never changing one’s memories or basic personality, made you feel comfortable and normal as whatever creature it made of you. Thus, Ortega was still the scoundrel, pirate, freebooter, and manipulator he’d been before.

The Ulik usually lived for about a century; none had ever lived past a century and a half. Serge Ortega, however, was already over three hundred years old, and he looked about fifty. He had blackmailed a race capable of magic into giving him immortality, but that, too, had its price. Such spells were effective only inside the hex of