Jack Chalker - Exiles at the Well of Souls

“The original Obie and the original device,” Trelig explained. “Obie is attached, of course, to the larger one, which is just nearing completion. Come! Fan out around the rail here so that you may all view the disk below.” He glanced over, and they saw a young, good-looking man dressed in a shiny lab tech uniform sitting at the far control panel.

“Citizens, that is Dr. Ben Yulin, operations manager here,” Trelig told them. “Now, if you’ll look below, you’ll see two of my associates bringing a third out and placing her on the disk.”

They looked down and saw two of the women Mavra recognized as guards gently leading a frightened girl of no more than fourteen or fifteen toward the disk.

“The girl you see is a victim of the addiction known as sponge,” Trelig explained. “Already the drug has rotted her mind so that she is no more than a childlike idiot. I have many such poor unfortunates here; they will soon be cured. Now, watch and be quiet. Dr. Yulin will take it from here.”

Ben Yulin flipped a couple of switches on his console. They heard the crackle of some sort of speaker and could hear his cool, pleasant baritone clearly.

“Good morning, Obie.”

“Good morning, Ben,” came Obie’s pleasing tenor—no longer coming from the console transceiver, but seemingly from the air around them. It was not a big voice or a threatening one, but it seemed to be all around them, every place and no place in particular.

“Index subject file code number 97-349826,” Yulin intoned. “Record on my mark— now!”

The mirror swung into place over the terrified girl, and the blue light shone from it, enveloping her. They saw the girl freeze, flicker, and wink out.

Trelig grinned and turned to them. “Well, what do you think of that?”

“I’ve seen holographic projectors before,” a little man said skeptically.

“Either that or you’ve disintegrated her,” another put in.

Trelig shrugged. “Well, what will convince you?” He brightened. “I know! Tell me, name a creature of the common forms! Anybody!”

They all remained silent for a second. Finally, someone called out, “A cow.”

Trelig nodded. “A cow it is. Did you hear, Ben?”

“Very good, Councillor,” Yulin responded through the speaker. His voice changed tone, and he called to his computer.

“Index RY-765197-AF, Obie,” he intoned.

“I know what a cow is, Ben,” Obie scolded gently, and Yulin chuckled.

“All right, then, Obie,” he replied, “I’ll leave it to you. Nothing dangerous, though. Docile, huh?”

“All right, Ben. I’ll do my best,” the computer assured him, and the mirror swung out once again, the blue light shone, and something flickered in.

“Magician’s tricks,” scowled the red-bearded man. “Woman into cow.”

But what materialized below was not a cow; it was a centauroid: a cow’s body—hooves, tail, and udder—and the girl’s torso and head, unchanged except that her ears stuck out as a cow’s ears would, and from the area around her temples grew two small, curved horns.

“Let’s go down and examine her,” Antor Trelig suggested, and they all moved single-file down a small staircase nearby.

The cow-woman stood there, looking blankly forward, hardly paying them notice.

“Go ahead!” Trelig urged. “Touch her. Examine her as closely as you want!”

They did, and the girl paid them little notice except when one observer touched the udder nipples, provoking a mild and annoying kick that missed its target.

“Good lord! Monstrous!” grumbled one councillor. Others were stunned.

Trelig then led them back up to the balcony, explaining that the viewing area had invisible shielding that was necessary to screen out the effects of the small mirror.

He nodded to Ben, who gave another series of instructions to Obie. The girl-cow vanished and was replaced, only moments later, by the girl. Again they went down, looked at her, found her dull-eyed and fearful but otherwise perfectly human—and unmistakably the same girl.

“I still don’t believe it,” the bearded man uttered. “Some kind of monstrous genetic cloning, yes, but that’s all.”

Trelig smiled. “Would you like to try, Citizen Rumney?” he prodded. “I assure you that we will not harm you in any way. Or, if not you, then anyone else?”

“I’ll try,” the red-bearded man replied. The girl was guided down from the disk and taken out a door below. Rumney stepped up, looked around, still trying to figure out the trick. The rest returned to their perch.

Yulin was ready. Rumney was encoded quickly, winking out and then, almost immediately, winking back in. They had made two slight alterations in him: he had a donkey’s long ears and a large, black equine tail emerging just above his rectum and covering it. Since reality was kept consistent for him, he was quickly aware of his change. He felt his long ears in wonder, and moved his tail. He looked stunned.

“What do you think, now, Citizen Rumney?” Trelig called out good-naturedly.

“It’s—incredible,” the man managed, voice cracking.

“We can adjust all reality so that you and everyone else will believe you have always been that way,” the master of New Pompeii told them. “But, in this case, I think not.”

“Did it hurt?” Someone called to the man. “What did it feel like?” another asked.

Rumney shook his head. “It didn’t feel like anything,” he replied, wonderingly. “Just saw the blue light, then you all seemed to flicker, and here I was.”

Trelig smiled and nodded. “See?” he told them all. “I said there was no pain.”

“But how did you do it?” someone gasped.

“Well, much earlier, we fed Obie the codes for various common animals, plants, and the like. He used the device overhead to reduce them to an energy pattern that is, mathematically, the equivalent of the creature. This information was stored, and when Citizen Rumney was on the disk it did the same for him. Then, using Dr. Yulin’s instructions, it blended the ears and tail of the ass to the physiognomy of Rumney; it re-encoded the cells as well to make it his natural form.”

Mavra Chang felt the same chill run through her that ran through the others. Such incredible power—in the hands of Trelig.

The councillor of New Harmony relaxed, savoring the expressions and the thoughts he knew were troubling them. Finally, he said, “But this is only the prototype. Right now we can take only a single individual at a time. We can, of course, make our own individuals, but there are some things we haven’t figured out how to get into Obie so they come out whole people, mentally. That’s only a matter of time and practice. And, of course, we can create anything known that is no larger than the disk and whose code we’ve first stored in Obie. Food of any kind, anything organic or inorganic, absolutely real, absolutely indistinguishable from the original.”

“You said this machine was a prototype,” Mavra Chang noted. “May we assume that things have advanced beyond that stage now?”

“Very good, Citizen Chang,” Trelig approved. “Yes, yes indeed! You saw the large tube going through the center of the big shaft?” They nodded. “Well, it has just been connected to a huge version of that little energy radiator you see in the center of that little mirror, there. I had the parts built in a dozen different places and assembled here by my own planet’s people. The same with a huge version of that mirror, slightly different in shape and property, of course. And huge— it fills most of the surface of Underside. If the power is sufficient, and we believe it is, it should be effective from a distance of over fifteen million kilometers on an area at least forty-five to fifty thousand kilometers in diameter.”