Quest for the Well of Souls

He took out the thick folder with her name on it to add the new brief form to it. As always, he couldn’t help glancing through the file.

She had been born on a frontier world that had gone Com. Her parents had fought the conversion and been condemned. Only the tiny five-year-old Mavra, so small she was easy to smuggle out, had been rescued by friends of the family. They had surgically altered her appearance to resemble the Oriental features and coloration of her stepmother, the freighter captain Maki Chang. After a lonely eight-year childhood in space, she’d been abandoned on a primitive, savage world at thirteen when her stepmother was arrested. She had coped, becoming a beggar —by sixteen, the queen of the beggars—and totally self-sufficient.

She had been raised in a freighter, though, and craved a life in space. Trying to raise enough money to get out, to get to Pilot’s School and earn a rating, she’d sold her body in spaceport dives. In due course, she’d met and married a spacer captain who made his real money at sophisticated burglary. He’d given her that life in space, a ship, a rating, and a career in burglary along with a thin veneer of culture. When sponge syndicate bosses killed her husband, tiny, beautiful Mavra Chang tracked down and killed them all, one by one. She then continued alone on her freighter and on her burglaries.

Because of that record, she was picked by a moderate Comworld to represent them at Trelig’s unveiling of Obie’s powers. Hired was the better word—she was hired to get Nikki Zinder out, in order to break Trelig’s hold over the older scientist.

Trelig had run all the spectators through Obie, giving them all horse’s tails so they would be living proof of his power. But Obie had also given Mavra the means and methods to allow escape with Nikki. She almost made it, getting away with Nikki, a ship, and even the computer’s formula for an arresting agent that would break the sponge syndicate’s stranglehold on its addicts.

But Trelig had moved up the test, whereupon they had all been translated to the Well World along with New Pompeii, and there they crashed.

A tremendous tribute to her ancestors, Ortega thought approvingly. She always coped with adversity, never quit in the face of impossible odds, never admitted defeat—and she always came through.

But her life had been ten normal ones, and rough as no one person should ever have to endure. No wonder she was bitter, no wonder she was unable to relate much to other people.

How Ortega longed to talk to her, to reveal to her her true history and heritage, which he alone completely knew—but he couldn’t. He couldn’t be sure of its effect on her, and he needed her to remain as tough, nasty, and self-confident as she was. She needed that strength to survive, and he would need it if he ever needed her.

He checked the sheet.

“Subject was given annual check by Dr. Quozoni 13/12,” it read. “Had minor skin and dysentery problems from not taking proper care of herself, easily correctable. Although a balanced diet is mandated, subject tends to obesity, apparently from unauthorized foodstuffs. Her apparent obesity is aggravated by permanent curvature of the spine resulting from body adjustments to the deformities and from the fact that breasts and fat hang as dead weight. However, overweight is not considered serious enough to jeopardize life as yet. Major organs in excellent shape considering the obesity, probably from the forced heavy exercise she gets when walking. Hearing has deteriorated with age, but normally and not seriously, considering that she started with above-normal acuity. Eyesight, which is not a serious factor considering her condition, is far above Type 41 norm at night but very poor in daylight, partially a result of her adopting a nocturnal schedule. Thankfully, aging has brought on near- sightedness, which does not warrant correction considering her three-meter maximum range due to head limitations.

“Mental state appears to be continuing in that odd new track. There have been no attempts at escape in the past eleven years, which had us worried; but she also seems to have developed a total alienation from humanity. She can no longer even conceive of herself as anything but what she is. To watch her one would swear that she is, indeed, a truly natural creature. Recently she has taken an abnormal interest in biology and genetic structure and has talked of founding a race. We find that optimistic, and yet psychologically and scientifically intriguing. Of course, she had herself sterilized at an early age, but this blossoming maternal interest and the continuing relationship between her and Joshi bears watching. One cannot but think of the possibilities of designing a part of one hex, either Glathriel or Olborn—which owes it to her—into an ecosystem in which such creatures as she would survive on their own. We are sufficiently indebted to her that we are looking into this.”

Ortega looked away from the sheet, reflecting. Odd how she was changing, yet, somehow, still in character. Escape—even if it could be attained—was futile: where could she go and for how long could she survive on her own? So she’d turned to a different form of coping, a dream of founding a race of her own kind designed, like a minihex, for its physical requirements. If it could be done, Ortega decided, it would be.

He sighed, filed the report without reading the rest, and pulled out a communications device from a drawer with his middle right hand.

It was on an odd circuit, and so could not easily be intercepted, he felt, by anyone else. The office itself was debugged daily, so he was confident about its security. The line went directly from his office across to the other side of Zone, to the embassy of Oolagash, deep in the Overdark Ocean.

The connection buzzed a number of times, and, for a moment, he felt that he’d picked the wrong time. But, finally, he heard a click, and a hollow, high-pitched voice answered him via a translator. What with the water, the connection, and the double translator, it sounded eerie, as though made by an electronic instrument, yet it was intelligible. He wondered what he sounded like to the Oolagash.

“Tagadal,” said that voice.

Ortega smiled. “Tag? Ortega. I have a little ecology problem for you to run through Obie, and a genetic question, too.”

“Fire away,” replied Dr. Gilgam Zinder.

North Zone

Like its counterpart in the South, the Northern Hemisphere, with 780 noncarbon-based life forms, had its Zone and its own embassies and ambassadors. In all, 702 hexes maintained permanent or semipermanent representatives in Zone, and had their own interzone council with rotating chairmanship. Yet the North had more problems than the South, which, though it had races so alien from one another as to make identification difficult, had more of a sense of unity. The Markovians had been carbon-based, and they naturally devoted much of their energies to other forms also based on carbon.

But they couldn’t overlook a bet. In their suicidal project to find for their children the glory their forebears had missed by attaining a stagnant godhead, the Markovians could not afford to miss the slight chance that they were doomed because they were carbon-based.

North Zone was the true experimenter’s paradise. There were no rules or restrictions on the 780 Northern hexes, and some of the life forms were so wildly alien that they could not even find common ground with one another. Such had been the way with the Uchjin, in whose nontech hex Trelig and Yulin had crashed. They had an ambassador on station—it was the only reason the refugees had made it to the South—but few could talk to them. Their utterances just didn’t make sense; their frame of reference, concepts, and the like were so totally alien that it would have been impossible even to convey to them what the ship was or what it represented.

“No,” however, translated quite well, even to the Northern races who had themselves tried to gain control of the ship—and some in the North were fully as greedy and Machiavellian as others in the South—and they had really tried. To no avail.

The creature standing in the Well Gate at North Zone did not belong there. It was large—over two meters, not counting the vast orange-and-brown spotted butterfly’s wings now compactly folded along its back—and its shiny rock-hard body rested on eight rubbery black tentacles, each of which terminated in soft, sticky claws. Its face was like a human skull, jet black with small yellow half-moons making it a devil’s mask; two feelers rose interminably from it, vibrating. Its eyes were velvet pads of deep orange, clearly marking a visual system different from the common one of the South.