Quest for the Well of Souls

the casters or in Zone. Since the only way out of Zone was back to the nonmagical Ulik, Ortega was a prisoner in the embassy, but an active one. Zone was his world and he made the most of it.

In his time there he’d foiled many plots, helped defuse several wars, combined hexes into effective alliances, and, by fair means or foul, learned from his bugs, blackmail, and agents pretty much everything that happened in the South. Data reached him in mountains of paper, in reports, computer printouts, and photographs. He lived in quarters behind his huge office, with its communications devices, computers, and other marvels giving him the data and the means of correlating it.

In his own way, by his own labors and unique position, he was the closest thing to a head of government the Southern Hemisphere had—a Chairman or coordinator. And for every favor done, eventually a favor was asked in return. Some liked him, some admired him, many hated and feared him—but he was there and everyone had almost begun to take him for granted. He was de facto Chairman of the Southern Hex Council, an informal body of ambassadors called by intercom when matters of extreme gravity, such as the long- dead wars, threatened them all.

And now he sat, coiled on his serpentine body, rocking slightly back and forth, looking things over.

One report among all the others caused him to pause. It was the Ambreza’s annual report on Mavra Chang, the one item he hated to see.

Serge Ortega in his time, and always for what he believed to be the best of motives, had lied, cheated, stolen, and committed practically every other offense. Since he always believed he was working in a good cause —whether true or not—he regretted none of it, felt no pity or remorse.

Except in this matter.

His mind returned to the time a new satellite had suddenly appeared around the Well World. One ship, launched from it, had approached too close to the Well over hexes where the ship’s technology just wouldn’t work. The craft divided into nine modules, and each came down in a different hex. Sometime later a second ship, one not designed to break up, managed a dead-stick landing in the North, where the locals had shoved the passengers through Zone Gates to get them to the South where they, being carbon-based life, obviously belonged.

That Northern ship had carried one Antor Trelig, would-be Emperor of a new interstellar Rome controlled by a home-built miniature version of the Well World, and Ben Yulin, his engineer-associate and the son of the sponge syndicate’s number-two man. Trelig was number one. Also on that ship had been Gil Zinder, the scientist whose incredible mind had actually solved the basic principles of the Well World without even knowing of the Well’s existence. He had built the great self-aware computer, Obie. They had come disguised as innocent victims— something Obie had managed—and they were through the Well before their true identities had been revealed.

Gil’s naive and pudgy fourteen-year-old daughter, Nikki, had been in the second ship along with Renard, a rebellious guard. Both were hooked on the mind-destroying, body-distorting drug called sponge. And there was Mavra Chang.

He sighed. Mavra Chang. Feelings of guilt and pity arose whenever he thought of her, and he tried to think of her as little as possible.

With the Northern ship barred to them, some Well World nations had allied to seize the engine module in the South. The coldly inhuman Yaxa butterflies, the resourceful high-tech metamorphs of the Lamotien, and Ben Yulin, now a minotaur living in Dasheen’s male paradise, had marched and killed and conquered. The froglike Makiem, the little satyrs of Agitar, who rode great winged horses and had the ability to store in their bodies and discharge at will thousands of volts, and the pterodactylic Cebu had marched and triumphed and killed in their own war. They were confident in Antor Trelig’s ability to lead them back to New Pompeii and Obie.

All so long ago, he reflected.

He remembered Renard, the guard, cured of sponge by the Well when it turned him into an Agitar. How the man had rebelled when he found he was still serving his old master, Antor Trelig! He then sought the woman who had never given up the struggle to survive on this hostile world and had kept him alive until he was rescued.

Odd that Mavra Chang affected him so, Ortega thought. He had never met her, and quite possibly never would. But he owed her, and he could repay that debt only by inflicting misery. He was the one who had dispatched the small party to Gedemondas, high in the silent mountains, where the engine pods lay. Whoever reached them first would get the one thing the Well World had not the resources nor the skills to manufacture. The team consisted of two Lata, flying pixies, because they were friendly to him and he knew one well, Renard on his great pegasus Doma, and Mavra Chang, because, as a qualified pilot, she would be the only one able to recognize and evaluate the engines.

And she had completed her mission, he reflected, as he did every year when that report came by. She had witnessed the destruction of the great engines. Along the route, she was captured by fanatical great cats of Olborn. Their unique power was derived from six stones that somehow allowed them to turn their enemies into mulelike beasts of burden. Unfortunately they’d done a halfway job with Mavra before the others rescued her.

He felt a certain satisfaction that Olborn had been practically destroyed in the war, and its own leaders turned into little mules.

Some satisfaction, but not much: a ship lay intact to the north in far-off, unreachable Uchjin. Furthermore, Obie was very much alive and active, though currently held captive by the unwitting Well of Souls computer, which had concluded that Obie was to be its replacement, that a new master race had finally arisen. It kept trying to give Obie control of the master equations stabilizing all matter and energy in the finite universe. But that was like feeding the sum total of human knowledge to an ant—all at once. Obie just couldn’t handle the input.

So the Well wouldn’t let Obie go, and Obie could not even talk to the Well. That stalemate had been unbreakable for many years now.

But there was a way for Obie to break contact. Obie knew of it—and Serge Ortega knew, too. To do so would require a good deal of modification deep in Obie’s core. But as long as Obie was tied up in the “defense” mode, it could not create its own technicians to go down there, for it couldn’t open its own door. Only Trelig or Yulin knew the words to cancel the safeguards, for they alone created them—and the passwords were not in Obie’s conscious circuits.

Ortega had considered, as had others, kidnapping Yulin or Trelig and hypnoing the code out of them. But both had undergone extensive hypno burns to lock the magic words away from everyone, even from themselves, until they were once again physically on New Pompeii.

And that thought brought him back to Mavra Chang. Like Yulin and Trelig, she was a qualified pilot. As a professional, she was the best of the three, and she understood the sophisticated systems of the downed ship and could possibly get it aloft. More important, she also knew the code Trelig used to get by the killer satellites of New Pompeii that still guarded it.

At first, Ortega had kept her under wraps and out of the Well because of the war. Then, when it all came apart in Gedemondas, there she was—thanks to the Olbornians a freak, a one-of-a-kind creature on a world with 1560 types of creature. And yet he still had to keep her from the Well, which would have cured her physical problems, because he had no say in what she would become. She might easily awaken as a creature under the control of a Trelig, or a Yulin, or some ambitious third party who suddenly realized what a prize it possessed. Or perhaps she’d turn into a water-being, unable to pilot when the need arose, or something that could not move or had no individuality.

There were too many variables.

So he did the only thing he could do. There was the awful possibility that Antor Trelig or Ben Yulin, or someone they could enlist, would find a way to the North—and a way through the diplomatic tangle—to get that ship moved to a high-tech hex and properly set up for a takeoff. Against that, he had to keep her under his control, in that wretched condition.

He had made life somewhat easier for her. He’d put her down in Glathriel, the hex of the primitive, tribal humans. It had a tropical climate, and was watched over by the friendly but wary Ambreza, who resembled large, cigar-smoking beavers. She had her own specially designed compound, and once a month a ship brought supplies in forms she could manage; He had also hypno-burned her, so that she considered her current form natural and normal.

Ortega had hoped for a solution to the Northern-ship problem long before now, hoped that it would be solved or that the ship would be destroyed. Neither had happened, however. He had condemned Mavra to life as a thing, not for the short period originally intended, but for a long, long time.