Jack Chalker - Twilight at the Well of Souls

This one, believe it or not, is for the National Park Service, for having such wonderful places as Stehekin, Washington, where the Well World was born, and such nice folks as those rangers at Chiricahua National Monument, without whom I might never have been seen or heard from again.

“A Morvath squad reports it definitely just killed Nathan Brazil,” the Czillian said wearily, limbs drooping and pumpkinlike head somehow conveying a note of exhaustion as well.

Serge Ortega sighed. “How many does that make today?”

“Twenty-seven,” the plant-creature responded. “And it’s early yet.”

Relaxing, Ortega sat back on his great serpentine tail and shook his head. “You have to admire the genius of it, though. He knew the Well World Council would never dare let him back in. So he gets surgeons back in the Com to remake a bunch of people roughly his size and build and sends them through. Got to admire it. Got to admire the guts of the people who let such a thing be done to them, too—unless they’re damned naive or just damned fools.”

The Czillian’s vineline tentacles formed a very human shrug. “No matter. What does it get him? We, just kill every one that comes through, anyway—and we know he has to come through looking pretty much the way our photos say he looks. Even if he should get by in some kind of disguise, we know he has to show up in Ambreza—and that hex is an armed camp with wall-to-wall watchers. How could one of known appearance, naked, shorn of disguise, ever hope to elude them?”

“You don’t know Brazil,” Ortega responded. “I do. Now, stop thinking like a computer for a moment and start thinking like a pirate. Nate’s a nasty, clever pirate—almost equal to me in the way he thinks. Smart, Grumma. Real smart. He understands us, the way we think, the way we react to things—look how easily he figured he’d need all this window dressing to sneak in. Now, he certainly realizes that we would expect him and lay a snare. If you guessed that far in advance of putting this plan into action, and you knew the limitations, when would you arrive in the Well World?”

The Czillian considered that one a moment. “I cannot say. Wait, perhaps, until we’re so sick and tired of killing imitations that we stop?”

Ortega shook his head firmly from side to side. “Never. Too risky. Communication between the Well World and the rest of the universe is strictly one way. He’d have no way of knowing when we reached that point—or if we’d ever reach it. Uh uh. Not like Nate to take that kind of a risk when the operation’s so important.”

“When, then?” The Czillian was curious. Coming from a hex whose social system resembled a great university, the creature was well versed in the most esoteric knowledge, but its life had been a sheltered one and this sort of devious thinking was beyond its experience.

“I keep wondering about the others, the first through,” Ortega told Grumma. “Okay, so you send your key people in first so they get through. That makes sense. If we’d known something was up on this scale ahead of time, we’d have stopped the plan right there. And the Chang girl—why did she actually stop in here to see me? Old times’ sake? She has more reason to kill me than anything else—and she’s one of my kind, too. No idle curiosity, either. The risk was too great that I’d smell a rat. Uh uh. Why come in, introduce herself, then tell me there was this great plot in the works and that Brazil was coming back?”

The Czillian was patient but only to a point. “All right. Why?”

Ortega smiled admiringly. “It came to me only this morning, and I could ram my head against a wall for not catching on sooner. She did it for several reasons. First, she sounded me out on how I’d feel about all this and got a measure of what power I might still have here. Second, she guaranteed that this sort of operation—a hunt for Brazil—would take place.”

“But that would doom Brazil,” the Czillian pointed out.

The sickly grin widened. “ Not if Nathan Brazil was already here, ahead of them all. We’d waste so much time hunting for him, we’d never look for him in Ambreza until it was too late. Want to bet?”

“Do you have any proof of this?” the Czillian asked skeptically.

“It’s the old shell game,” the snake-man continued, partially ignoring the question. “You take three shells, put a pebble under one, then shuffle them in such a way that you misdirect the sucker. He thinks he sees the shell with the pebble move to the right, but that’s illusion. The pebble’s stayed in the middle. That’s what happened this time. First the pebble—Brazil— slipped in, then we were left staring at the shuffling of empty shells.”

“But do you have any proof?” the Czillian persisted.

Bushy eyebrows rose. “Proof? Of course. Once I realized that I’d been had, it was simple.” Ortega reached across his U -shaped desk and his lower right hand pushed a combination of buttons on a small control panel. A screen on the far wall flickered to life, showing a still of the great Well Gate chamber through which entered all who fell into the teleportation gates of the long-dead Markovians. Cameras had been set up in there for as long as any could remember so that no one would enter without being seen and given his introduction and orientation to the Well World.

Images flickered across the screen; strange shapes from twenty or more different worlds, their only commonality their carbon-based structure. Non-carbon-based life automatically went to the North Zone.

“We’re going backward,” Ortega told his associate. “Backward from the point at which Chang and her friends came through.”

“How far back in time are we now?” the plant-creature asked, while examining the image of a spindly structure seeming without head, tail, or limbs.

“Three weeks. I went back further than that. There! There’s the one I was looking for!” One of Ortega’s six arms shot out and stabbed a button, freezing the picture. “That, my friend, is Nathan Brazil,” he said flatly.”

The Czillian stared. The figure on the screen was small and lithe, but it was by no means the sort of creature Grumma knew Brazil to be. A humanoid torso of deep blue ended in hairy, goatlike legs; the satyr’s face peered through dark-blue hair and a full beard: two small horns protruded atop the head.

“That is not a Type 41,” the Czillian noted. “That is a 341—an Agitar.”

Ortega chuckled. “No it’s not. Oh, true, it looks like one, but it’s supposed to. A fine make-up job, if I do say so, but Nate probably called in the best costumers in the business on it. The disguise is so perfect it’d fool the Agitarian ambassador here, I’m sure —provided Nate didn’t have to demonstrate his electric-shock ability. He counted on nothing but coming in, meeting with the duty officer, receiving the standard briefing, and then being shoved through the Well. Very clever. We’d never even notice. We get two or three of his type every century. Very clever. Insidious.”

“Then why are you so sure he isn’t just a 341 Entry?” the plant-creature persisted.

“He made a slip,” Ortega responded. “One lousy slip. A slip I would never catch until too late—that nobody would catch here in Zone. Deliberate, I think. At least there was no way around it. He didn’t know the language of the… Saugril, I think they call themselves out in the universe. That race and the Com never met, so he couldn’t know it.”