Jack Chalker - Shadow of the Well of Souls

Helpless, dependent, no ability to talk or understand, no way to form words silently or use sign language… they’d really cut her off. To literally everyone else, even those she knew and who knew her—save only the ones who had done this with masterful skill and a technology far beyond expectation, and Campos, of course—she’d be seen as—she was— the world’s first exotic animal junkie.

Well, she’d kept Campos around, a captive, drugged and hauled about through the jungle, and had wound up making him into the world’s sexiest duck creature. Now Campos had in her own twisted mind attained the perfect revenge.

What was odd was how she was taking it. She herself noticed this, but only as a curiosity, not because it really bothered her. She just accepted it fatalistically as something that was. She knew it was the drug, placing a soft, pleasant haze between herself and reality, but she did not want that haze to disappear. So long as it was there, she could accept almost anything. It was her only friend, her only protector.

Still, there was the practical, pragmatic need to get used to it. She waddled over in the direction of the door, blurry though it was, and the usual food cakes and drink were there. Although a little nervous about it, she discovered that they’d set the balance and center of gravity exactly right. These doctors were geniuses with the souls of monsters. She could bend completely forward on those knee joints, and the bill, serrated a bit, was perfect to break into the loaves and get pieces she could mush and break up inside her mouth proper and swallow without difficulty by raising her head a bit while keeping bent over. Drinking was harder to master and amounted to using the tongue or a back part of her mouth to get some suction through the tiny bill if it was immersed, but it, too, was manageable.

The only real problem was with the breasts, which amounted to dead weight tumbling down when she bent over and which, with no arms and true shoulder muscles to stabilize them, went every which way, pulling on her neck and throwing her slightly off balance. She’d never had large breasts as a human, and they could well have dispensed with them as they did with other parts of her, but instead they’d enlarged them and created a problem. More of Campos’s revenge, she understood. She would learn to live with them with practice, she decided.

A technician or guard or whatever who looked like an underdressed turtle gave her the drug regularly, in the form of a solid soft cube. It was far slower to take effect when eaten, but the creature was never late with it. Campos, she worried, might not be so punctual.

And finally the Cloptan came for her. Campos seemed absolutely enthralled by the redesign, and Mavra was again taken aback to discover that thanks to the legs, she was now even shorter, no more than a meter or so tall. She had always been small and mostly looked up to see other faces, but this meant craning her neck.

“Oh, but this is so excellent!” Campos gushed. “Revenge is seldom so perfect! Can you understand me?”

To her surprise, Mavra could. “ Yes, I can.”

“Wonderful!You see, the little device inside you is tuned only to me. It even blocks out other people’s translators from your mind. And what it transmits, only I have been given the ability to translate and understand. And all I have to do is think about it and I can turn it off, or on, at will. So you will communicate, and understand, only to me and when I wish. What you send is a computer code that sounds to all others like the noise of a bird. You will truly be my pet, and you will act like it. You will guard me and protect me at all costs if you can, and the rest of the time you will be a nice little trained birdie and do everything I say, because I and I alone have those nice little red cubes. You will exist to please me and never to displease me, now, won’t you?”

“Yes,” she replied resignedly.

“Oh, no! We begin right here. It will from now on be ‘Yes, master .’ Not even ‘mistress,’ not ‘madame.’ Master. Understand?”

“Yes—master.”

“And you can spend your time thinking of ways to sing my praises. How beautiful I am, how intelligent, how simply wonderful I am. You will spend your time thinking of new ways to praise, flatter, worship me as your one and only god, and you will do it with conviction, with enthusiasm; you will convince me that you believe it. And in the same breaths you will do the opposite to yourself. Remind me and yourself how low you are, how dependent, how miserable and undeserving a creature you are and how lucky you are to be my property, and you will say those things, too, with the same fervor. And any time I find either part unconvincing, I might just forget your little cube for a while. Maybe a very long while, until you are totally believable. Understand?”

One pang of true abject fear pierced the insulating haze. “Yes, my most wonderful master, from whose great kindness all blessings flow. Please forgive this most miserable of helpless wretches who is nothing without you!”

Campos smiled. “It is a start. We shall have many, many long conversations together, and all of them, even the ones that matter, will be partially tests. Practice it in your mind. You will come to believe that what you say is true so that it becomes second nature to use it. Now, come. I have a travel cage for you, and we must catch the return steamer for Buckgrud, the city where I live in Clopta. There, in my flat, I have a nice little place provided for you.”

“As you command, most powerful and magnificent master.”

The worst part of it was, the words weren’t even sticking in her throat.

Still, now would begin the trial, until one day Campos would decide for whatever reason that she’d had enough or wanted more. Then Mavra would be the only means by which Campos could have her revenge on just about everything and everybody she hated, and that was almost the entire universe now. The Cloptan had already thought ahead on this; that was why they could still speak to one another, and she was conditioning her “pet” to think like an obedient slave to ensure complete control. Otherwise, when Juan Campos had the burning desire to get her hands on the Well World controls, how could she make Mavra let her do it? The worst part was, as she was, Mavra didn’t even care.

“You separated me from my husband! I will kill y ou for that!”

“Now, calm down, I tell you,” Zitz soothed. “There was nothing I could do. They’d have killed you anyway if you made a fuss.”

“They might as well have killed us both!” Alowi cried. “My husband cannot survive without me!”

“Nothing to do with love, I’m afraid,” Tony explained. “She produces something inside her that heals his injuries. We’ve seen it in action.”

“Well, it’s done, and that’s that. I can’t even give you a clue as to where they took ’em. I don’t know nothin’ about the land part of this, and I don’t wanna know. I’ll tell you. though, that either we did what they said or they’d have took ’em anyways and blown all of us out of the water the moment we dropped the load. Blown all three of you away as it was. Think we liked it? We’re gonna lose a fortune because we gotta give back them stolen jewels! And it’d have been easier for us to just knock all three of you off and dump you in the ocean. We’re droppin’ you here instead. That over there’s Lilblod. It’s not a real nice place, but you take care and keep to the trails and keep your nose out of where it don’t belong and you’ll make it. About fifty kilometers north is Clopta, a high-tech coastal hex where you can get a ride into a Zone Gate and a quick pass back home. South maybe sixty, seventy kilometers is Agon, same deal. Don’t think you can go down there and stir up stuff and find them. They probably never made shore there. Got picked up by some other ship and are maybe anywhere or heading anywheres else by now. Go home. It’s over.”