Jack Chalker - Midnight at the Well of Souls

Vardia and Varnett found soft places near the side of the tent and were asleep in minutes. Wuju tried to join them, but lay there awake for what seemed like hours. Her insomnia upset her—she was tired, aching, and uncomfortable, yet she couldn’t sleep.

The torches had been extinguished, but she could make out Brazil’s large form in the gloom near the entrance. Painfully, she got up and walked over to him.

He wasn’t asleep either, she saw. His head turned as she approached. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I—I dunno,” she replied hesitantly. “Can’t sleep. You?”

“Just thinking,” he said, an odd, almost sad tone in his electronic voice.

“About what?”

“This world. This expedition. Us—not just the two of us, all of us. It’s ending, Wuju. No beginnings anymore, just endings.”

She looked at him strangely in the darkness, not comprehending his meaning. Unable to pursue it, she changed the subject.

“What’s going to happen to us, Nathan?” she asked.

“Nothing. Everything. Depends on who you are,” he replied cryptically. “You’ll see what I mean. You’ve had a particularly rough time, Wuju. But you’re a survivor. Tough. You deserve to enjoy life a little.” He shifted uncomfortably, then continued.

“Just out of curiosity, if you had a choice, if you could return to our sector of the universe as anything or anybody you wanted to be, what would you choose?”

She thought for a minute. “I’ve never considered going back,” she replied in a soft, puzzled tone.

“But if you could, and you could be who and where you wanted—like the genie with the three wishes—what would you choose?”

She chuckled mirthlessly. “You know, when I was a farmer, I had no dreams. We were taught to be satisfied with everything. But when they made me a whore in the Party House, we’d sometimes sit and talk about that. They kept the males and females separate—we never saw any males except Party locals and favored workers. We were programmed to be supersexy and give them a hell of a time. I’m sure the male jocks were equally fantastic for the female bigwigs. They shot us full of hormones, thought we couldn’t think of anything but sex—and, it’s true, we craved it, constantly, so much so that during slack times we were in bed with each other.

“But the Party people,” she continued, “they knew things, went places. Some of them liked to talk about it, and we got to know a lot about the outside world. We’d dream about getting out into it, out perhaps to other worlds, new experiences.” She paused for a moment, then continued in that dreamy, yet thoughtful, somewhat wistful tone.

“Three wishes, you said. All right, if we’re playing the game, I’d like to be rich, live as long as I wanted, and be young all that time, and fantastically good-looking, too. Not on a Comworld, of course—but that’s four, isn’t it?”

“Go on,” he urged. “Never mind the three. Anything else?”

“I’d like to have you under those same conditions,” she replied.

He laughed, genuinely pleased and flattered. “But,” he said, serious again, “suppose I wasn’t there? Suppose you were out on your own?”

“I don’t even want to think about that.”

“Come on,” he prodded. “It’s only a game.”

Her head went up, and she thought some more. “If you weren’t there, I think I’d like to be a man.”

If Brazil had had a human face, it would have risen in surprise. “A man? Why?”

She shrugged, looking slightly embarrassed. “I don’t know, really. Remember I said young and good-looking. Men are bigger, stronger, they don’t get raped, don’t get pregnant. I’d like to have children, maybe, but—well, I don’t think any man could turn me on except you, Nathan. Back in the Party House—those men who came. I was like a machine to them, a sex machine. The other girls—they were real people, my family. They cared. That’s why the Party gave me to Hain, Nathan—I’d gotten to the point where I couldn’t turn on to men at all, only women. They felt, they cared, they weren’t—well, weren’t threatening. All of the men I met were—except you. Can you understand that?”

“I think I can,” he responded slowly. “It’s natural, considering your background. On the other hand, there are many worlds where homosexuality is accepted, and you can get children by anything from cloning to artificial insemination. And, of course, men have just as many problems and hang-ups as women. The grass isn’t greener, just different.”

“That might be the fun of it,” she replied. “After all, it’s something I’ve never been—like I’d never been a centaur before, and you’d never been a stag. I know what it’s like to be a woman—and I don’t particularly care for it. Besides, we’re only playing.”

“I guess we are,” he responded. “Since we are, would you rather go back to being a Dillian than what you are now? You can, you know—just go back to Zone through the local Gate and back through again. You’ll be readjusted to the original equation. That’s the most common way of breaking spells around here, you know. That’s the way I’d have handled things if I’d had the time back in Ivrom rather than risking that facedown with the Swarm Queen.”

“I—I’m not sure I could go back to Dillia,” she said softly. “Oh, I loved being that big and strong, loved the country and those wonderful people—but I didn’t fit. That’s what was driving me crazy in the end. Jol was a wonderful person, but it was Dal I was attracted to. And that doesn’t go over in Dillia socially—and, if it did, it’s impractical.”

He nodded. “That’s really what you meant when you told me long ago about how people should love people no matter what their form or looks. But what about me? Suppose I turned into something really monstrous, so alien that it bore almost no resemblance to what you knew?”

She laughed. “You mean like the bat or a Czillian or maybe a mermaid?”

“No, those are familiar. I mean a real monstrosity.”

“As long as you were still you inside, I don’t think anything would change,” she replied seriously. “Why do you talk like that, anyway? Do you expect to turn into a monster?”

“Anything’s possible on this world,” he reminded her. “We’ve seen only a fraction of what can happen—you’ve seen only six hexes, six out of ftfteen hundred and sixty. You’ve met representatives of three or four more. There’s a lot that is stranger.” His voice turned grim. “We have to meet the new Datham Hain shortly, you know. He’s a giant female bug—a monster if ever there was one.”

“Now his outside matches his foul inside,” she snapped bitterly. “Monsters aren’t racial, they’re in the mind. He’s been a monster all his life.”

He nodded. “Look, trust me on this. Hain will get what he deserves—so will everybody. Once inside the Well, we’ll all be what we once were, and then will come the reckoning.”

“Even you?” she asked. “Or will you stay a deer?”

“No, not a deer,” he replied mysteriously, then changed the subject. “Well, maybe it’s better over. Two more days and that’ll be it.”

She opened her mouth to prod, then closed it again. Finally, she asked, “Nathan, is that why you’ve lived so long? Are you a Markovian? Varnett thinks you are.”

He sighed. “No, not a Markovian—exactly. But they might as well continue to think I am. I may have to use that belief to keep everything from blowing apart too soon.”

She looked stunned. “You mean all this time you’ve been dropping hints that you were one of the original builders, and it was all a bluff?”