Quest for the Well of Souls

Yugash battle that did it?” he asked casually.

Wooley, still nursing her head, emitted a sigh that sounded like metal scraping glass. “No, I don’t think so. Certainly her experience would have been no worse than what I went through, which was bad enough—and I surely had the crazy one. The creature was totally insane, its thoughts flooded into my brain somehow. It hated us—it hated all of us, everything and everybody. It was incredible. And I almost lost. If Vistaru hadn’t yelled…”

“So what is wrong with her?” Vistaru asked, perplexed. “Why won’t she say anything?”

Renard, now cleaned up thanks to a chemical suggested by Wooley and provided by the Bozog, got to his feet and walked over to her.

Twenty-two years, he thought. She has changed more than I; she had a nasty life for that period while I enjoyed things. The guilt he felt was mixed with admiration for her. She was here, she’d come this far. He was also convinced that she’d survived because of her total egoism, her absolute belief in self, in the ability to do anything no matter what the odds.

He looked at her. “Come on, snap out of it!” he said sharply. “You’re Mavra Chang, damn it. Perhaps you loved him, cared for him as wife or mother, but you’ve gone through that before! You never let it get to you! You survived! You triumphed! That’s what life’s all about to you! The chase is coming to a climax after all this time! Come on! You can’t give up now!”

He sensed a flicker in her eyes, minimal animation, fleeting but nonetheless very real. She heard him and understood him all right.

“Don’t you think you’re being a little hard on her?” Vistaru asked, concerned.

“Let him be, Star,” Wooley whispered. “Let’s face it, he knows her a lot better than we.”

The Lata nodded silently. “You feeling as guilty and rotten as I am?” she asked after a moment. Wooley didn’t reply.

Renard threw up his hands in exasperation and walked over to them. “So much for psychology,” he sighed and sat back down. They were silent a time, and Yulin drowsed off. Finally, Renard turned to Wooley and Vistaru. “Are you really her grandparents?” he asked.

Vistaru nodded. “Yes—although I didn’t know it until Ortega told me. This bastard’s known for over twenty years, but didn’t even tell me when we met on that island and joined forces to find her.”

Wooley chirped a dry chuckle. The Yaxa couldn’t manage to change its cold voice, but there seemed an extra dimension of humanity, of warmth in it somehow. “You want to tell him the story, or should I?” she asked.

The Lata shrugged. “I’ll start and you can join in any time you want.” She turned to face Renard. “Let’s see—where to begin. I suppose we ought to go way back, to the first of our three lives.”

Yulin was suddenly awake and interested, too. “Three lives?” he said.

Vistaru nodded. “I was born on a Comworld, one of those where you are made into little plastic ten-year-old neuters and raised and conditioned only for a specific function. The theory’s to produce a society much like an insect colony—and it works, after a fashion. I was called Vardia Diplo—I was a courier, a kind of human tape recorder. You understand this was two centuries ago.”

“My background was much the same,” Wooley put in. “I was a farm worker who didn’t work out on a world that didn’t work out, either. It was Com, but syndicate-controlled. I suppose you know about that, Yulin.”

Yulin’s bull’s face could show no human expression, but the minotaur’s bearing seemed to grow sheepish and apologetic. Yulin could show sincerity and conviction—whether he felt or not.

“I was never involved with that,” the Dasheen responded defensively. “Look, I was born into the syndicate, the son of a major controller. Raised in luxury on a private world a lot more human and humane than Trelig’s. Who knew? Educated in the best places as a scientist and engineer. You have to understand—when the big-shot villains of the galaxy are your father, mother, friends, family—everybody you know—then they aren’t villains at all. Not to you. Not to me. It’s true I had no particular regard for anything but family law, but, then, again, aren’t freighter captains like Chang there just variations of the same attitude?”

In Mavra Chang’s case it was particularly true; she’d been a rebel and a thief the first half of her life.

“Never mind the alibis, let’s get back to the story,” Renard snapped impatiently. Yulin shrugged and settled back down.

The Yaxa paused a moment and continued. “I was developed as a woman, put in a Com whorehouse for party bigwigs, and got so screwed up and was so abused by the men who came by that I became unable to relate, sexually or socially, with men at all. That made me wrong for the job, so they gave me to a bastard controller in the sponge syndicate to use as a sample—hook me on sponge, then decrease the dosage very slightly as a living example.”

Renard nodded sympathetically. “Remember, I was a spongie, too—and I saw New Pompeii in its heyday.”

“Well, the two of us found ourselves on a freighter bound for Coriolanus,” Vistaru continued. “The captain was a funny little guy named Nathan Brazil.”

Renard’s dark eyebrows rose in surprise. “It’s been over twenty years since I heard that name. I can hardly remember where. Mavra, I think. He’s not for real, if I remember. The Wandering Jew.”

“He’s for real,” Vistaru assured him. “He discovered that Wooley was on sponge and decided to make a run for the sponge world without us knowing. We got detoured by a strange distress signal from a Markovian world, discovered a mass murder, and wound up falling through a Gate and winding up here. Wooley came out a Dillian first, I came out a Czillian—you may have seen some. Intelligent plant creatures.”

Renard nodded. “Seems to me I met one—named Vardia, come to think of it.”

She nodded. “That was me, too. The Czillians reproduce by budding off. There are probably several of the original me still around, with memories complete to that point.”

“Wait a minute!” Yulin objected. “You say she was a Dillian and you were a Czillian. That’s not possiblel You only get one trip through the Well and you know it!”

“Most people,” the Lata corrected. “We got more. Brazil’s immortality is easily explained. We accompanied him on a journey much like this one, to the Well of Souls itself—and it opened for him. He was a Markovian, Yulin! Perhaps the only one still alive!” Yulin was fascinated, and so was Renard. “A living Markovian!” the Dasheen breathed. “Still around! Incredible! What did he look like? Did you ever see him in his natural form?”

Both Wooley and Vistaru nodded. “Oh, yes, for a while inside the Well. It looks like a huge human heart on six tentacles. Brazil—well, he claimed to be more than that.”

“He said he was God,” Wooley put in. “He said he created the Markovians and saw them go wrong, and he was waiting around to see if we did a better job of it.”

The prospect was unnerving. “Do you believe him?” Renard asked.

Vistaru shrugged. “Who knows? One thing’s for sure—he’s at least a Markovian, and he could work the Well. Somehow, during the worst of the journey, the two of us had grown closer together—I guess I was learning how to be a real human being. As for Wooley—well, she kind of loved Nathan Brazil, but he was too inhuman, and she also hated being a woman. Nathan fixed it. We were transported from the Well World to Harvich’s World, which was then on the frontier. He put me in the body of a beautiful but suicidal whore, and Wu—Wooley—well, became a farmer named Kally Tonge, a big, handsome man who’d just died in an accident We became those people and got together—as Nathan had planned, I think.”

“We ran the farm together for years,” Wooley added. “They were great years. We had nine kids, too, and we brought them up right. Some got real big on their own—politicians and space captains and Com police, that level. Most left Harvich’s World for greener pastures, but one stayed.”

The Lata nodded. “Our daughter Vashura. She was smart as hell, and beautiful, too. Became the senator for the district, and would have been councillor if she’d had enough time. Kally and I went through one rejuve, and it took pretty well, I guess. Both of us went out-system, did a lot of work with the Com police on the sponge trade after selling the farm. Interesting work, but it grew increasingly frustrating as we got older. Finally we faced another rejuve and maybe some loss of memory or ability along with it. We decided not to. About the only thing we had to stay around for was helping Vashura fight the Com threat to Harvich’s World. A local party apparatus had grown up, and it looked weak until suddenly lots of key votes switched. We knew sponge was the cause, but