Jack Chalker - Shadow of the Well of Souls

Living in a high-tech cosmopolitan hex, however, the Ituns were well aware of the burdens their comfortable home placed on most other races and did what they could. Corridors back into the hotel were wide moving walkways, and there were very large elevators at regular intervals. The key, however, kept telling them to go straight back, until they were at the back of the building itself. It then indicated a turn to the right, and they walked slowly down a long, wide corridor until the key suddenly stopped blinking and became a bright white in front of an extratall, extrawide door. Lori saw the slot and inserted the key, and the door slid open.

“Air-conditioning!” Julian gasped in English, there being no term for it in Erdomese, but she quickly lapsed into the normal tongue, too tired to think straight. “I beg you please to shut the door, my husband, so that its coolness might not flee.” She plopped down on the cushions, still wearing the pack, obviously exhausted.

Lori knew how she felt. Both had their tongues hanging out, panting, their forms, so suited to the desert need for retaining moisture, unable to sweat in the humidity.

It probably wasn’t all that cool in the room; they were accustomed to greater heat than even Itus provided. But the air conditioner also dehumidified, and that created a level of comfort that was unbelievable.

“I am never going to leave this room again. Ever,” Julian gasped. “I am going to live and die here.”

He unhooked and pulled off the small pack on her back and tossed it into a corner, then slipped off the leather codpiece he wore that felt like it was cutting him in two and tossed that over with the pack. The thing was more for propriety than for protection, and he wondered if he really needed it so long as he wasn’t going to pay a call on the Erdomese consul. While a number of races wore bright and ornate clothing, many others wore little or none, even some of the most developed, unless it was needed as protection against the elements. Here—-well, he probably would, since there were enough Erdomese passing through Itus on various business that he might well be noticed. If and when they got farther away, though, so that he and Julian were more curiosities than familiar forms, he might just chuck it until needed.

Clothes had been a mania with him once, as an Earth female; now, as an Erdomese male, they seemed totally uninteresting except for utilitarian value.

He looked over at Julian and saw that she was asleep. She looked so tiny and nearly helpless without him, he thought. And so damned sexy… A whole rush of stereotypical Erdomese male attitudes, thoughts, and feelings came into his mind. The lingering aftereffects of the monks’ treatments, he wondered, without really fighting them, or was it the onrush of male hormones shaping him into somebody he didn’t know, somebody he should think of with disgust? Damn it, there was something new in his nature, something that made it a virtual turn-on that she was here and dependent on him. In a sense, that terrible feeling was beginning to define him. She was at least as smart as he was, perhaps smarter. Oddly, he valued that, too, so much that it was a real fear that she might not need him at some point, that she was essential to him while he’d been more an escape route for her. Away from that suffocating culture and away from any who might even know it, she might well eventually find him superfluous. The thought raised his insecurity to almost the fear level.

And the old conflicts surfaced as well. Damn it, he liked having someone dependent on him for a change, even though it made him feel guilty as hell.

What was at the heart of the conflict, though, was not that he could continue to suppress or fight that kind of feeling, but now, as things were, did he need it so badly that he might not put up the fight?

Considering how mild her own reaction had been when the drug supply was exhausted and they became aware of the conditioning, he couldn’t convince himself deep down that despite her protestations, she hadn’t liked it in that role, too. No, no! That was a damned rationalization, no better than “Well, dressing like that, she asked for it.”

Had she liked it? No, of course not, he told himself. Had he liked it, even to the far lesser degree that he’d experienced it growing up an Earth female? But the argument somehow failed to totally convince the dual nature within him.

Maybe it was simpler but more insidious than that. In the end it hadn’t been a matter of liking it or not liking it. It had simply been easier, more comfortable not to be in a constant battle against one’s own language and culture, particularly when every personal moral victory was no more than that. That culture, that society, wasn’t about to change, ever. And neither were they from who and what they were now.

He felt confused and depressed, as if his whole life’s attitudes had somehow now been proved bogus, a self-delusional sham. People on the bottom of systems always said they wanted equality, but did they, really? Or did they, deep down, yearn more to have the situation reversed? Did the oppressed really believe the ideals they espoused, or was that just rhetoric? Did they in fact really want to instead become the oppressors?

It was his most disturbing fear, a fear that it might well go deep down in the “human” psyche as the sort of flaw people did not want to admit, even to themselves. But how many times had sincere reformers run for office against entrenched corrupt politicians and won, only to slowly turn into exactly what they’d run against? How many idealistic Third World revolutionaries had overthrown the horrors of dictatorship and been at best no better and often something worse? What kind of revolution had the feminist movement been when it had been limited to rich Western nations, while the women who made up ninety percent of the rest of the world’s female population remained mired in the muck?

“The first thing the freed slaves from America did after founding Liberia was to build plantations and enslave the African native population…” He remembered that from a history lecture long ago.

He wondered if that was why Terry and the news crew had been so cynical. They’d covered the Third World—Terry’s parents had been from the Third World—and they had more perspective than the closed, ivory-tower lives of the American and west European crusaders. Maybe that was why so much of the press in general was so cynical.

How much easier it would have been for her if the Well hadn’t played its cruel joke on the two of them. If Julian had emerged as the male and Lori as the female, both could have retained far more of their core beliefs. Neither was really comfortable staring their alternate selves in the face, each playing the other’s role.

And there was still Mavra Chang, an enigma from a previous universe for God’s sake, who’d chosen for her own reasons to live as the leader of a band of Stone Age women deep in the Amazon jungles. Instead of trying to dominate men or help create a new equal society, she’d rejected men and all that they’d built.

And that brought up another point. It was only because of Chang’s call that they were in Itus, but what the hell did he owe Mavra Chang? It was Mavra Chang whose abduction of the whole crew had destroyed his life and led inevitably to Erdom and what he was now. Indirectly, even Julian was here because of her, since without her jungle adventures he’d have been nowhere near that damned meteor.

True, Julian Beard and Lori Anne Sutton had both been at low points in their “real” lives when all this had happened, but he doubted that either of them had wanted this.

But the question remained: Now that they were here, what did they owe that mysterious crazy woman?