Jack Chalker - Echoes of the Well of Souls

“I think there’s a lot more of Julian Beard in you than you think,” Lori told her. “Otherwise you’d have given up and given in long ago.” She decided she liked Julian—liked her a lot. It was the first time she felt she was really attracted to a female here.

“Maybe. When a female gets close to a male she trusts, she gets these feelings, these urges that are hard to control. I’m feeling them right now, in here, with you. Right now my mind, the one thing I’ve been able to somehow keep, is able to suppress them, but every day I’m here it gets harder and harder to fight, to keep control. I’m slipping more and more.”

“Tell me something. The women here—are they really as dumb as they seem to be?”

That brought a smile to Julian’s still-tearful face. “No, some are quite smart, but they’ve learned to hide it well. Being smart in this culture just means trouble if you’re a woman. They’re pretty ignorant, though, and they don’t know any other system. Sometimes I think of those women in the countries back on Earth that went western and then returned to fundamentalism. They might resent the restrictions, but somehow they’re comforted by the absolutism of the rules and religion. And like I said, security is everything.”

“I just—I dunno—I just had a hunch that might be it,” Lori replied. “It really offended me that they might all be frightened little bimbos. But I forgot to ask the one question I wanted to know more than anything. How did you ever get here in the first place?”

“Stupidity,” Julian Beard replied. “That meteor that came down in the jungle—I was on assignment from NASA to take a look at it. Good publicity, too. Then that news team disappeared and the army took over, and it was weeks before anything serious could be done.”

“Yes, I was one of the team.”

“I thought so. I figured what happened to us happened to you. Anyway, this tough old Brazilian Air Force colonel who was in charge out there was more a politician than a military man. He finally called off the search and bent to pressures to let in researchers, at least a few at a time. Well, the whole world came down on us, or so it seemed, and they wanted pictures and all that for the publicity, and since a number of people had climbed all over that meteor before, we figured it wasn’t any big deal. The colonel and I were asked to pose on top of it for the media; he talked me into it, and you can guess what happened.”

“The hex gate opened, and you both wound up in Zone talking to a polka-dotted dragon.”

“Actually, it was a mean-looking five-foot-tall talking butterfly. You?”

“Too long a story to tell here and now. The first thing we have to do is decide what to do about you.”

“Huh?”

“Look, it may be backward, but we’re here and we’re stuck. That Zone had elaborate computers and all sorts of technology, and I happen to know that a third of the countries here—they call them hexes, after their shape—support high technology, some way in advance of Earth’s. I’m going crazy here, and you want to kill yourself before you lose it all. There’s a seacoast and ports here, believe it or not, and ships that go all sorts of places. We’re both wrong-bodied opposites with a lot of the same background. I’d like to find a place where I could really study that astronomer’s dream of a sky up there. You’d like to get someplace where you could still be an individual and not a harem girl. There’s got to be such a place here somewhere.”

Julian sighed. “You’d have to marry me to take me anywhere here,” she pointed out. “And I have to tell you, I think I’d rather rot in here than have a name-only marriage. Earlier, maybe, but not at the stage I’m at now. I’m a woman now, an Erdomite woman, and I’d go bananas if I wound up a mere housemaid or a nun.”

“Yeah, well, we’re the original odd couple all right, but you’ve just given me the first decent conversation I’ve had since I got here.” She was fighting with herself inside and trying to get the right words out. “I like you, Julian. I like you a lot. If you can accept your fate, I guess, with your help, I can accept mine. Like you, I’m here and I’m stuck this way. I think I might just be able to be a man, maybe the man I always said I wanted to see, with you. Okay. Deal?”

“You’d be responsible for me. And I don’t know, like I said—I don’t know how much of me is left and how much I can keep over time. This having a two-way conversation in English has really helped, but it’s a real fight. It’s like, well, half of me is an old air force jock clinging desperately to his old identity through real contact with a colleague and half of me lusts after your body and would become your slave if you’d just let her attend your needs. No, it’s worse. There’s not even close to fifty percent of Julian Beard left. I don’t know, it sounds crazy, but this contact, this conversation, this hope is actually making the Erdomite part harder to control.”

“Just take it easy,” Lori said soothingly. “I’ll go make the arrangements.” And Posiphar would have to be told that his security was about to leave him.

Julian was already thinking ahead. “We’ll need money for this…”

Lori grinned. “I get the idea that our tentmaker friend out there will pay me handsomely to take you off his hands.”

And he was just the one to get the best deal!

Nathan Brazil had to admit to himself that the Well World was probably the one place in all creation where a good-looking human woman could play Lady Godiva and not fear anything more than if she was overdressed.

He really wasn’t quite certain just what to do with the girl. Clearly she wanted to come along, but she wasn’t an asset on a long trip as she was. It was as if she’d been reborn as a water creature who couldn’t really communicate or travel any distance over land.

Still, he wasn’t sure how to ditch her, either. She certainly had a mind of her own.

She also had something of an appetite. Any time they stopped during their journey, she’d find something edible around and down it. Like nearly all the Glathrielians he’d seen, she was chubby but not fat and apparently in excellent condition. He wondered if she wouldn’t start putting on weight if she kept eating like that, but it was a moot point. Things she could eat that were so readily available would be few and far between in many of the hexes he’d have to travel, including Flotish itself, considering that the hex was part of the Gulf of Zinjin and was in fact salt water to near ocean depths.

He was nonetheless still fascinated by her and loath to cast her out. She should not have become a Glathrielian. And since she had, she shouldn’t have retained what was obviously her natural coloration and features. The Well had changed her in many ways, including taking who knew how many years off her age, but the one thing it clearly had not done was change her genetic code.

He wished he could just know her name. He wasn’t sure Glathrielians even used names anymore, but she had one, and no amount of blocking or rewiring of some brain functions would keep her from knowing it. The problem was in finding some way for her to tell it to him.

It was not a problem he could solve on the back of a horse, though, not with her on another horse.

That, too, was a wonder. He’d gotten the impression that the Glathrielians wouldn’t even use a live animal, yet she’d picked her horse, gotten on, and now rode quite comfortably. Another mystery. When they were making speed, she’d go forward and hang on somehow up against the horse’s neck, but she never kicked it to start, never seemed to guide it at all. The horse, though, did just what it was supposed to do every time. Sometimes he thought that the two moved so naturally and effortlessly together that it was as if somehow she and the horse were one.