Jack Chalker: Twilight at the Well of Souls

Marquoz studied the image, thinking furiously. “So that’s why you take all these precautions? Everybody’s out to bump you off?”

The Supreme Lord roared with laughter. “Now I know you are an Entry!” he laughed. “Such a question! Tell me, how did you come to that conclusion?”

“Most dictators fear assassination,” the Com worlder noted. “It’s not unusual, since they hold power by everybody else’s fear of them.”

The Supreme Lord stopped laughing and looked at the newcomer with interest. “So you know that this is, in fact, a dictatorship? You’re not very much like any Entry I’ve ever heard of before. No, ‘Where am I? What am I doing here?’ and all that. That’s what’s so interesting about you, Marquoz.”

The Entry looked around the room. “Is that why so many security precautions? Because you think there’s something funny about me?”

“Well, no, not really. Not entirely, anyway,” the Supreme Lord replied. “Ah, you call Hakazit a dictatorship. In the purest sense of that term I suppose it is. I flip the intercom, dictate an order, and it is unquestioningly carried out no matter how stupid. And yet—-well, Hakazit is also the most democratic nation on the Well World.”

Marquoz’s head snapped up. “Huh? How’s that?”

“I am fifty-seven years old,” the dictator told him. “Fifty-seven. And do you know how many Supreme Lords there have been in my lifetime? Sixty-seven! And at least one ruled for almost four years. The record according to recent history is nine years, three months, sixteen days, five hours, forty-one minutes. In a history that goes back over a thousand years!”

Marquoz sighed. “It figures,” he muttered. “And that’s despite all this protective stuff, this gimmickry, the best electronics you can devise. I suppose for every charm there’s a counter charm.”

“Exactly,” the Supreme Lord agreed. “Right now there are hundreds of officers trying to figure out how to get to me. One will, one of these days, and then they’ll add me to the books.”

“I’m surprised you don’t know who they are and have them taken care of,” the Entry noted practically. “I know I would.”

The ruler sniggered derisively. “Marquoz, you fail to appreciate the problem. Every Hakazit is doing it. Schoolchildren do it for fun or abstract exercise. Storekeepers, bartenders, you name it. Everybody. You can’t get rid of everybody—then you would have nobody to take dictation.”

“It’s a problem, all right,” Marquoz admitted. “It’s a wonder you’d want this job—or that anybody else would want it under those conditions.”

The Supreme Lord looked puzzled. “But what is the purpose of life if it isn’t to become Supreme Lord? It’s the only thing people have to live for!”

That stopped the newcomer for a moment as he digested the idea. A warrior race with no wars. What’s the result of conquest? The ability to order everybody about, to do anything you wanted, to have anything you wanted. The ultimate fantasy. And that position was here, open, available to anyone, regardless of rank, sex, social position, or authority, who could knock off the reigning leader. It was as crazy an idea as he had ever heard, as nutty a social system as he had ever thought about—and it made absolute, logical sense. That was the trouble. It made sense.

He changed the subject. “Well, one thing has got me curious. Why did you say you had only a thousand years of recorded history? Surely this land and this race are a lot older than that.”

“True,” the other agreed. “But, you see, combat is built into us. We’re the most aggressive race on the Well World, and we’re surrounded by hexes designed to make it impossible to conquer or even reasonably fight them. Radiations lethal only to us, poisons lethal only to us, and the like. We hire some of the people out as mercenaries, guards—even pirates—that kind of thing, to others, but the system has us boxed in. We’re too rational to fight to extinction or maybe fight a war when there’s absolutely nothing to be gained, since we can’t hold what we gain. So, naturally, after a while the system—any system—we create to hold things together here collapses. Civil war, anarchy, a return to barbarism when all the restraints are off. Civilization gets destroyed and has to rebuild again. Our people say any social system lasts an average of two thousand years, so we’re in the middle of a period now. You have no idea how ferocious these social breakdowns can be. And neither do we. After all, they’re so bad that almost nothing survives from the previous age except crumbling ruins and a few relics.”

Marquoz nodded. He appreciated what these creatures would be like in an all-out war with no quarter given or asked and surrender unthinkable. It was a wonder that any of them were left, he thought. But, no, as long as a single male and female were left, the Well would gradually replenish the stock, or so he understood the system. That thought was unsettling, though. Such devastation as the Supreme Lord intimated implied that those wars were literally wars of self-genocide; it was probably only the ones away from hex and home that returned to rebuild. The dead end, he thought glumly. The left overs from the Markovian dream in the eternal replay of the rise and fall of civilization. It was pretty damned depressing.

“I can understand Your Lordship’s interest in me,” he said carefully. “Here I show up in the middle of nowhere, an Entry or an exile, either one the same, but without any of the psychological problems or wonder of what you’re used to. You figure I’m the one to get you—right?”

The Supreme Lord shrugged slightly. “Are you?”

Marquoz sighed. “No… no, Your Lordship, absolutely not. The last thing I want is your job. That may be hard to believe under these conditions, but you’re a very clever man or you wouldn’t be where you are. I’m sure your lie detectors are telling you now that I’m being sincere.”

The other gave him a look of grudging admiration. “Clever one, aren’t you? But a psychopath would register the same.”

“Your Lordship, use those truth detectors now and believe what I say. Inside of a few weeks, if it hasn’t started already, you’re going to be flooded with Entries, and none of them are going to be typical. And I don’t mean ten, twenty, a hundred. I mean enough so that they’ll quickly double your population. Double it!”

The hollow burning red eyes of the projection shifted to a point outside the image, as if checking on something—a chart recorder, most likely, Marquoz guessed.

“Hakazit couldn’t support them,” the Supreme Lord said in a thin, worried tone. “We would have to kill them.”

“They won’t be that easy to kill,” Marquoz cautioned. “And, besides, they won’t be here to eat you out of house and home. They’ll be here to do a job and fulfill a set function.” Quickly he explained about Brazil, about the Well of Souls, about how it was damaged and had to be repaired.

“What are you offering?” the Supreme Lord asked warily.

“A battle. A full be-damned war! A war that could be fought by proxies trained by your people or by a combination of the two. An outlet for all this aggression, an outlet for all this pent-up civilization. And, of course, on the right side should Brazil gain the Well. And he will get there. Bet on it. Whether I die, whether Hakazit joins my side or opposes us, no matter what, he’ll win. And once he’s inside he might be able to help this situation you’ve got here. Think about it on a different level, too. This outlet, this release, will be enormously popular. You have a people who love war and have none. Now they’ll have one, and a set of purposes and objectives for it. It could be the safety valve you lack, put off collapse for many thousands of years—perhaps long enough to work out, this time, a more permanent system. And you’ll be a hero, too, for giving it to them. How long have you been Supreme Lord?”