Jack Chalker - Shadow of the Well of Souls

“You were—together? For a long time?”

“Yeah, a long time. Oh, we split up on occasion, but we always arranged to meet at some place, some time. Then, one time, she just said she was going down to the bazaar for a few things, walked out of the place where we were staying, and I never saw or heard from her again. We had our fights, but we weren’t fighting then. There wasn’t anything I ever could put a finger on. She just vanished. I searched for her, of course, not just then but for many long years after. Occasionally I’d hear stories or tales or ninth-hand legends that sounded like her, but they never panned out. After a while I just stopped looking. I figured that if she really wanted to find me, my habits and preferences were an open book to her and she’d eventually at least get word to me. She never did.”

“Huh! How long ago was it when she split?”

He shrugged. “I’ve lost count. But the house was just inside the Ishtar Gate in Babylon during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar the Great. What would that be in current Earth terms? A few hundredb.c., I guess.”

“Jesus! That’s like twenty-five hundred years or so!”

Brazil shrugged again. “I said it had been a long time. You ever notice that the older you get, the faster time seems to run?”

“Yeah. It’s a cruel joke. I guess it’s because each day you live becomes a smaller fraction of your total life, or so I’ve been told.”

“That’s about it. Well, you can see how even that kind of time span might not seem so ancient to me. Funny, though. Some of that ancient stuff I can see like it was yesterday, while other stuff, maybe only a few months or years ago, I can’t remember at all. I guess we remember the highlights and the lowlights, and the rest gets caught in the cracks.”

Gus thought about it, but such a life over so much time made his head spin. “Sure would’ve liked to have had a camera and tape along back there, though. Man, I bet it was somethin’! ”

“Yeah, well, it was. But it was also before any real medicine, before mass communication, before a lot of creature comforts. People died young, and they lived lives harder than you can imagine, most of them. Even the rich didn’t live all that great by modern standards. Smelled like a garbage dump, too. Folks just tossed it anywhere at all, and almost nobody took baths because the water had so many parasites in it, you could die slowly from a refreshing dip. No, on the whole I prefer things as high-tech as you can get, except, of course, on this particular trip.”

Gus wasn’t thinking of Brazil’s colorful past, though, but of what he’d said before. “This Mavra Chang—this Well computer or whatever it is considers her the same as you?”

“Pretty much, yes. Oh, I see what you’re driving at. You’re asking if she could do the kinds of things that are supposed to be my job if she got inside.”

“Right. Could she?”

“Yes, I’m pretty sure she could.”

“She’s nuts, Cap. You know that. I mean, livin’ as one of those naked savages in the middle of the jungle, all them women—she sure don’t have much liking for men. Maybe she did once, but not now. I remember enough of it to say that for sure. Maybe she just couldn’t handle it, Cap. Maybe all them years, what you got as memories she’s got as hurts. Some guy, or a lot of ’em, put her ’round the bend but good. I hate to point this out, Cap, but you’re the only equal she’s got, and you’re a man. You said she was groomed to take over. If she gets in there first, she could unplug you same as you plugged her in, couldn’t she?”

Nathan Brazil felt a numbing chill deep inside him in spite of the tropical warmth as he saw just what Gus was trying to point out. It was the one thought he had not wanted to think or dared consider, yet there it was.

“Yes, Gus,” he admitted. “Yes, I suppose she could.”

It was something he had long thought about and even occasionally desired, but always before it had been an abstract problem, something safe to think about because it was impossible.

It wasn’t impossible. Not this time. Gus was absolutely right.

I might actually die this time…

Even in the nearly total darkness it was easy to know when they had crossed the border from Itus into Gekir.

The dense jungle ended abruptly, as if cut off, and in its place was a wide, flat expanse of grasslands punctuated with groves of trees. The nearly omnipresent clouds were gone as well; the sky blazed brightly from the dense stars in the Well World’s spectacular sky.

Walking through the hex barrier instantly lowered the humidity to a small percentage of what it had been, and instead of feeling heavy, tired, and dragged down by the earth underfoot, all of them felt a sudden sense of relief as if a very heavy pack had been lifted from each of their backs.

“Now, is this gravity back to normal, or is this place actually below normal as the last one was above it?” Julian asked quizzically, as much of herself as of the others.

“Impossible to say,” a weary Mavra replied. “It would make sense to have a fairly large disparity, though, simply because it would keep Ituns from being interested in spreading out over here and probably the other way around, too. To tell you the truth, it hadn’t been so dramatic in the places I was last time, at least so I could notice.”

“Now what?” one of the centauresses—Tony, from the accent—asked. “Is anybody around here we should worry about?”

“You worry about everything on this world,” Mavra warned. “Even the friendly places. There’s not much chance of diseases—all but a very few don’t even travel well between species on Earth, and they’re all much closer than the ones here—but meat eaters will eat the meat of carbon-based forms and many plants and animals are potentially poisonous. Even potentially friendly tribes tend sometimes to shoot first and ask questions later. Julian?”

The Erdomese shifted to the infrared spectrum and scanned the relatively flat grasslands. “There are whole herds of creatures out there, most bunched close together and showing little signs of activity. Asleep, probably.”

“You think they’re natives?” Anne Marie asked, suddenly feeling a little bit refreshed by the lowered gravity and humidity but still feeling sore from the burdens of Itus.

“Who can say? But I tend to doubt it. I’ve seen the same sort of patterns with cows out on the western ranges and such, and you’d figure that a race would have some kind of night watch and probably fires or the remains of fires that I could easily see. If Earth is any example, and it seems to be to at least some extent, then this is a savanna, much like east Africa. That means lots of herd-type animals, which is what the patterns here suggest. Like the antelope. There are probably a lot of other creatures who are also grass eaters here.”

Lori had slept for a while and had finally awakened just before the crossing when he’d shifted a bit and his horn had jabbed Tony in the back.

“Where there’s a lot of herbivores,” he noted, “there are also carnivores. Probably not all intelligent, either. You’ve got a finite space here, no matter how large a hex is, so something, usually a combination of things, has to keep the population managed. The gravity barrier and maybe incompatible vegetation would keep the animals on this side of the line, but what keeps them in balance?”

Mavra nodded. “We’ve got to make a camp. Tromping through this meter-high grass for any length of time at night, we’re likely to start a stampede, and that’s the last thing we want. Who knows what this stuff could conceal, too?”