Jack Chalker: Shadow of the Well of Souls

In point of fact, Theresa “Terry” Perez did remember who she had been and where she had come from, but that only accentuated the change within her. What was different was that it no longer mattered to her, nor even did it disturb any part of her in the slightest that it no longer mattered to her. Nothing that mattered to virtually all the others in the hotel and in the city really mattered to her, except for a few basics. That was at the root of this new, nonlinear way of thinking that the Glathrielian group will imposed upon her, and not unwillingly on her part although she hadn’t known at the time what it would mean and the old Terry might well have fled instead. In point of fact, the Glathrielians had not imposed a great deal; rather, they had in effect rewired her brain so that it processed information in a way more alien to Earth standards than most of the cultures of the wildly varying races of the Well World. It created a new Terry, one who automatically saw the world in a new and very different way.

The Glathrielian imperative was essentially quite simple: At all times, consider only all the things that are relevant to you, and miss not a one of those. Anything irrelevant or unnecessary was a distraction; distraction was the way to destruction, so anything unimportant must be literally factored out of the mind and not even allowed to register. It would take years of self-training to master it completely, but Terry, helped by the experience and self-training of the Glathrielian elders, had achieved an amazingly high level of mastery in so short a time.

If she could filter out all distractions, all things not directly relevant to her existence and what was of true importance to her, and automatically observe only what she needed, the amount of information that simply came to her was enormous, far beyond the sort of knowledge others might possess. Thoughts, actions, and processes that did not require decisions should be automated so that they, too, ceased to exist as a factor. The energy field that her brain could generate and her body could use for so many things was one such process she had already relegated to that status. Although she didn’t know or care exactly what it was doing, or how, it protected her from the elements that might cause distraction—extremes of heat and cold, for example, or even adjusting gravitation or filtering out any impurities from an atmosphere so that if the chemicals needed to breathe were present in any mixture, it would extract only those and allow them into her lungs.

Of course, it was also useful both as a defense and as an offense, if needed, and those functions, too, were automated.

Without even realizing she had done so, she had reordered much of her digestive system and metabolism for maximum efficiency and maximum reserves of power.

Whatshe ate, so long as it was not poisonous to her system and was not of flesh, was irrelevant to her, and even much that might have made her ill or killed her was now separated out and isolated and passed through without harm. The body maintained its own vitamin, mineral, fat, and sugar requirements as best it could with whatever was at hand; it basically controlled what and how much she ate. She didn’t even think of it.

All the knowledge of her past and the person she’d been was not gone, but it had been reordered and placed in an out-of-the-way, protected area of the brain. The sight of an object or an assemblage of objects brought forth an instant reaction based on that knowledge but only what was needed to deal with it. Thus, the sight of electrical cables or sockets might evoke a warning of danger rather than a definition or a picture of what they were. By simply obeying those impulses automatically, she did not have to deal with them, either. The standard senses—sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch—were processed on a wholly subconscious level, almost as if she had a second parallel mind with access to all the same data whose sole function was to evaluate each and every “frame” of information, sixty or more per second, calculate if an action was necessary, and send the irresistible order to her consciousness.

This alone gave her enormous abilities of which she was as yet not completely aware that when used would not be thought about or reflected upon but merely accepted.

She was totally unaware that she was in a city, let alone a strange city on another planet peopled almost entirely by creatures alien to her. Yet her senses and her past knowledge of cities allowed her to cross busy streets at peak hours safely and, quite literally, without thinking about it. That was knowledge the Glathrielians themselves would have lacked, and they would have been easy targets for the first speeding truck. That was why she was unique even for Glathriel. She could survive in wildly unfamiliar places because her previous knowledge base gave her sufficient information for her to do so.

She felt uncomfortable inside because walls and barriers blocked not only the irrelevant but the important as well. Enclosures distracted and had to be dealt with. Still, the knowledge base informed her that the object: Mate was subject to environmental weaknesses that no longer plagued her, and it was unthinkable that she would keep him in discomfort when it was possible to do otherwise. The concept of separating from him any more than necessary was simply not allowable. She and he were linked in biophysical and biochemical ways that neither understood but that she realized and accepted. That she had in fact induced the linkage to ensure that he took her with him she no longer even remembered; it was irrelevant. Is mattered; was did not matter and was thus dismissed from the mind unless was was absolutely required for a current action.

And all of is was composed of objects. Mate is. Interactor with Mate is. At that moment those two objects were the only things in her mind. All else was filtered out as irrelevant. She understood nothing that was said; indeed, those very sounds were filtered out as irrelevant. But she felt what Mate felt; every little nuance of feeling was input, to a level he could not have comprehended. These were assimilated and appended to the Mate object’s is, which in turn formed a complete and constantly changing whole object picture in her mind.

The Glathrielian way saw life as a series of assembled objects leading to clearly pictured objectives, the latter simplified to the most basic form. Situation: hunger. Objective: find, consume sufficient food. Her one larger objective since turning Glathrielian had been to accompany now-mate. Having achieved that objective, she’d had no need for another. She understood, however, that Mate had his own objective. Because she lacked any data that the objective affected her in any way she would consider important and lacked any overall further objective of her own, Mate’s objective was in control and she would support him as he required. Just what Mate’s objective was she neither knew nor cared, nor would she care until and unless it affected what she considered important.

Her conscious mind saw no irrelevant external details; it saw other life as a seemingly infinite variety of colors and color mixes and patterns. She saw what was inside rather than what was outside in this circumstance.

Mate’s is was warmth, comfort, interaction with Other; interaction produced in him a range of sensations, none of which were unpleasurable and which included some hope and optimism, which meant that Mate was interacting with Other in pursuit of Mate’s objective. The Other, however, was radiating a very different is that Mate seemed oblivious to. Deceit, dishonesty, coldness, cruelty—danger! These impressions all came to her as they could only when her mind was freed of distractions. She could not interact with the Other, but she could with Mate, both empathically and physically. She knew that Mate was getting the information in the same manner as she was sending it, but while he did not reject it, it seemed only to reinforce his own instinct about the Other; neither did Mate act upon it as she would have.