Jack Chalker: Twilight at the Well of Souls

It was a harsh land. The planet for which it was a laboratory model must have been something hellish indeed, Marquoz thought. The terrain was a burned, ugly, hard-packed desert with jagged, fierce-looking volcanic outcrops. Occasionally earth tremors would start slides and the very rare but horribly violent storms sometimes turned dry, dusty gullies into deadly torrents which carved great gashes in the landscape.

With almost no water on top, and the ocean to the north salt water only, the people were where the fresh water was—underground, on the bedrock at the water table, in huge caverns carved by millennia of erosion on the basic limestone and marble beneath. There had been predators, too; terrible, fierce beasts with skin like solid rock and endless appetites for Hakazit flesh.

And so, of course, the Hakazit were built for combat and for defense. Like granite itself, their fierce, demonic faces were tough skin over extremely thick bone, their features fixed in a furious and chilling expression, broad mouths opening to reveal massive canines capable of rending the flesh of their wild natural enemies. Their eyes were skull-like sockets that glowed blazing red in the darkness. It was not a traditional method of seeing, not eyes in the sense he had always known them, yet to his brain they served the same way, giving up long range for extreme-depth perception and, perhaps (he could never be sure) altering the color sense quite a bit to emphasize contrasts. Bony plates formed over each socket like horns.

The great, muscular steel-gray body was humanoid, a mass of sinew with arms capable of uprooting medium-sized trees and snapping them in two. The five-fingered hands ended in lethal, steellike talons also designed for ripping and tearing flesh, and the thick legs ended in reptillian feet that could grasp, claw, propel that heavy body over almost any obstacle. Trailing behind was a long tail of the same steely gray ending in two huge, sharp bones like spikes, which could be wielded by the prehensile tail as additional weapons. The body itself was so well armored, so tough and thick, that arrows bounced off its hide, and even a conventional bullet would do only minor damage. Control of the nervous system was absolute and automatic with the Hakazit; pain centers, for example, could be disabled in a localized area at will.

It was, thought the former small dinosaurlike creature, the most formidable living weapon he had ever seen. The males stood over three meters tall with a nine-meter tail; females were smaller and weaker: only two and a half meters, on the average, and just able to crush a large rock in their bare hands.

But now he, as one of them, was being taken down to a great cavern city, a prisoner, it seemed, of the local authorities. The city itself was impressive, a fairyland of colorful lights and moving walkways, scaled to the size of the behemoths who lived there. A high-tech civilization to boot, he noted, amazed. No handicaps, like some of the hexes on the Well World where only technology up to steam was allowed or where nothing that didn’t work by mechanical energy was possible. Yes, the world the Markovians had in mind for the Hazakit race had to be one real hell.

Everybody seemed to wear a leather or cloth pullover with some rank or insignia on it. He couldn’t interpret them, or the signs, or the codes, but it looked quite stratified, almost as if everybody was in the army. Here was a crisp, disciplined place where everybody seemed to be on some kind of desperate business with no time to dawdle or socialize. No trained eye was necessary to see that some of the creatures were there to keep an eye on the other creatures. One group, in particular, wearing leather jerkins with targetlike designs on them, wore side arms of an unfamiliar sort. Marquoz had no doubt that those pistols could penetrate to the vital parts of a Hakazit.

His escort, Commander Zhart, delighted in showing off Harmony City, as it was called. He pointed out the Fountain of Democracy, the People’s Congress, the Avenue of Peace and Freedom, and so forth. Marquoz just nodded and looked over the place. It somehow seemed all too familiar to him, an echo of every dictatorship he had ever been in. Coming from a world that didn’t even have a central government yet hadn’t had a major war in thousands of years, this was something of a contrast. Yet he had spent long years in the “human” Com, where dictatorship was the rule and things didn’t appear to be all that different.

They finally headed for a giant, palatial structure built into the side of the cavern and dominating it and the city skyline. The seat of government, he guessed, probably for the whole hex. Finally he could stand it no longer. “Where’s the enemy?” he asked Zhart.

The other stopped and turned, looking slightly puzzled. “What do you mean?” he asked, not suspiciously but just befuddled.

Marquoz waved a massive arm back in the general direction of the city. “All this. The militarization of the population, the fierceness of the race. All this points to a really nasty enemy. I just wanted to know who or what.”

“There’s no enemy,” Zhart responded, sounding slightly wistful. “No enemy at all. Used to be—long, long ago, maybe thousands of years. You can visit the Museum of Hakazit Culture sometime and see the dioramas and displays about it. But there’s nothing much now. None of the surrounding hexes could live in the radiations of the day, and they’re not up to tackling us even if there was a reason.” He shrugged as they continued walking to the palace.

That was it, of course, Marquoz realized. A warrior people created for a nightmare planet that they had conquered here, thereby proving that they could make it out there in the real universe. But that had been during the Markovian experiment, who knew how many millions of years ago, gone now, done now, leaving the descendants bred for battle but with nothing left to fight.

It would create a strange, stagnant culture, he decided. He understood now what sort of entertainment probably went on at the People’s Stadium, for example. So a rigid sort of dictatorship would be necessary to control a population made up of such muscular death machines—although he wondered how any regime could sustain itself for long if the people truly got pissed off at it. Maybe they were so accustomed to the situation they never considered the alternatives, he speculated to himself. Or maybe, deep down, they knew there was only one way to keep the place from breaking down into carnage and savagery—as it ultimately would, inevitably, anyway. This dictatorship was just buying time, but it was the best justification for a dictatorship he could remember.

The palace proved to have surprisingly few people in it. He had been conditioned by the Com to expect a huge bureaucracy, but only three officials were in evidence in the entry hall, and he had the impression that two of them were waiting to see somebody or other. Commander Zhart introduced him to the one who seemed to belong there and bid him good luck and farewell.

The official looked him over somewhat critically. “You are an Entry?” he asked at last.

Marquoz nodded. “Yes. Newly arrived in your fair land.”

The official ignored the flattery. “What were you before?”

“A Chugach,” Marquoz told him. “That would mean very little here.”

“More than you think,” the other responded. “Although we’re both speaking Hakazit, I wear a translator surgically implanted in my brain. It translated your own term into a more familiar one. There’s a bit of telepathy or something involved, although it’d be easier if you were wearing one, too. I got a picture of what your people were like and I recognize them. Here on the Well World they are called the Ghlmonese.”