Jack Chalker - Shadow of the Well of Souls

“Makes sense.” Lori nodded. “But what about me? You said I still had a woman’s soul. I sure haven’t felt much like it; even my thoughts sometimes would have made the old me very mad.”

“Oh, you’re obvious. You—just like in the jungle—never got to that point. You’re having a lot of guilty fun playing at being a man. But you’re not. Physically, yes, but not deep down. It’s always easier for women to adjust to other roles and accept them than it is for men.”

He thought about it. “Well, it’s true that when you see two guys kissing, you have a whole set of reactions, maybe depending on your own feelings about sexuality, but everybody has reactions because it’s not done. Women kiss each other all the time, and nobody thinks anything of it. And I know women dress more for each other than for men. I can’t remember a boyfriend I ever had who ever noticed that I had had my hair redone, and most of them didn’t notice new clothes or perfume or whatever until I pointed it out to them.”

“But you still notice. Even in Erdom.”

“Yeah, I guess I do. But a lot of that is how they’re brought up, too, isn’t it? I mean, competitive sports, competitive grades, competitive businesses, everything’s competition. Even in Erdom that’s true.” He thought of the sword fighting and other such activities. “I wasn’t brought up like that. What competition I did was on a different level. All appearances and comparing possessions. Men fight or they get the crap beat out of them. Women try to reach a consensus, and a fight between two girls, when it happens, is real scandal or real news. Yeah, I see what you mean, I guess. I stopped seriously competing real early. I was always the consolation prize, if I ever got invited to the dance in the first place, and the kind of life a business career offered never appealed to me. I just wanted to be a scientist. I wanted to find out how things worked and why they worked. I was good at math, and girls weren’t supposed to be good at math. I loved computers, and girls were supposed to hate them. I guess I figured that so long as 1 was already a social geek, I might as well be a total one. I just decided to do what I loved doing. I’d love to do it here, too.”

Mavra nodded. “Yeah, I understand that. That’s another problem with coming through the Well. The high-tech types already know what you know, and more. The others either don’t or can’t use it. Coming from the tech level you do and the occupation you do, you not only would have to learn from scratch, you’d have to unlearn half of what you learned as gospel. The very fact that you stand here as an Erdomese man says that better than I could. The same went double for Julian. Pilots of any sort, and particularly jet and space pilots—well, they’re useless here, aren’t they? So it decided you were useless and dumped you in low-tech. You’d have had a better shot at high-tech if you hadn’t been as smart, frankly. Doesn’t take brains to learn how to push buttons. Same goes for Tony—airline pilot. I think somewhere there was a theory built into the Well that said that if your skills were useless, you should be put in a spot where they couldn’t be used so that you might adjust and use that brain power where it would do some good. Just a hunch—no inside information there. But it kinda holds, doesn’t it?”

“Could be. But in Erdom the knowledge that might be useful is held by that damned priesthood and the price is much too high, and the guilds leave me out of most of the other trades that might be of any interest. It seemed like the best I could be would be some kind of glorified night watchman or street sweeper or something else menial. I mean, like much of the population there, even though I know seven languages and have a universal translator implanted, I’m still a total illiterate in Erdom, and having looked at that language, I probably will remain so. I think that’s why I jumped at your note even though I was under that hypnotic drug’s spell at the time. Cut off or not, I knew when I had an opportunity for something better rather than facing my alternatives there.”

“Well, I never figured on the hypnotic drugs, but I kind of hoped that either curiosity or ambition or both would bring you. Just a few days more and we’ll be ashore in uncharted realms for both of us. I need you. Do the job for me and I’ll make sure you have a future you’ll like. If we lose this race, you’ll have seen something of the world and won’t be any worse off. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough. But thinking about those priests’ drugs brings me back to what kicked off this talk. I still feel uncomfortable with all this. Did you really do this yourself once?”

“Sure. Okay, that shocks you, but as I said, this is a place with 1,560 tiny worldlets with no future and no past, more or less. They’re kinda stuck here. They know there’s a possibility that their kids might be worse off than they are but won’t be better off. Mostly it’ll be hard to tell one stagnant age from another. Deep down most know that or at least feel or sense it. It’s why life can be cheap here, and it’s little wonder some turn to chemical escapes. You mean you never tried some drugs out of curiosity or boredom or depression or whatever?”

“Me? Not much. Some marijuana now and then—I did it heavy in college, I admit, but less once I got a job—and some alcohol but nothing hard. I tried cocaine once at a party and darn near choked. Never touched it or anything else again. Why?”

“And these were all legal substances?”

“No. Alcoholic drinks, yes, but not marijuana or cocaine. Not in my lifetime, anyway. But it’s not the same.”

“It is the same. Even legal, it’s used for the same purposes. Illegal just feeds the whole business. The same ones who got your illegal drugs in also brought in the rest, of which you disapproved. Your money went to help them finance the ships and men like this one. I’ve not only been with them on this level, I’ve fought the ugly side of the business, too, against the thoroughly rotten people at the top. You might say that far back in the distant past I saw the future of this as well, and nothing you see here can compare to the depravity of what lies ahead.”

“But it’s a matter of degree. Some is harmful, some not.”

Mavra Chang sighed. “I remember a people once in east Africa. Two tribes, same ancestry, all that, but one of them lived by a great river and tilled the land and mined gold and such from the nearby mountains that served as a barrier separating them from the others. Those others, they lived on the other side, a lot of the same geography and possibilities, but their home was in a virtual cannabis forest. They were a far happier tribe and more content, but for generations they remained no more advanced than the People of the upper Amazon. I don’t judge. The tribe that remained in the forest was probably happier than the other one that built a great city, but the happy ones were stagnant, stuck, just like the Well World.”

“You’re one to talk!”

Mavra shrugged. “We used some drugs from the native forest, you know, and not always as a practical thing. What can I say? After being kicked around for a few thousand years I called a halt. I didn’t like Earth much, Lori. I didn’t like it much at all. It was uglier and more primitive than I could have imagined in ways I never dreamed it could be. I’m sorry, but that is my perspective. I left it. I escaped where it wasn’t so ugly, and I remained there rather than come out to face more ugliness. One day things would be different. There would be what I considered real progress and advancement, and they would discover interstellar travel. By that time the rain forest would be cut down, and I’d be able to get off that miserable planet. I do know that I’m not going back there. Or if the Well somehow forces me back there, I am not going back as Mavra Chang or anything remotely like her. If I can, I’m going to be something else.”