Quest for the Well of Souls

by Jack L. Chalker

  Vistaru looked back nervously. "Who the hell are you?" she challenged.

  "Nikki Zinder!" the other yelled. "Stand clear! Ben Yulin's mine!" she snarled so viciously that the other two let her pass.

  Yulin heard them coming, and instantly realized what had happened.

  Physical changes were accomplished by biological redesign; they were permanent unless changed by Obie, the Well, or a similar agency. But mental—attitudinal—controls and changes were impositions by the computer, held in place by the computer's continued operation.

  Yulin no longer had slaves, he had old enemies.

  He threw his chair down the stairs with great force, and the women jumped out of the way to avoid it. Yulin took advantage of their momentary confusion to run out the door.

  The two women on the bridge had not previously had strong personalities, having been but animalistic savages, yet they retained the language and skills Obie had programmed into them in the same way that Mavra had retained the plans for New Pompeii. But for a few fleeting memories, the two felt as if they had just been born. They were totally confused.

  Realizing their probable state, Yulin raced in their direction. One seemed to be puzzled by her energy pistol and he lunged toward her. Almost upon them, Yulin encountered the Agitar form of Renard running toward him. Yulin was going to be beaten to the girl and the gun.

  He stopped, frantic now, and looked back. Four of his former love-slaves were heading toward him, all armed, all grimly determined. From the opposite direction, Renard rushed past the women, pistol drawn.

  Yulin opted for Renard. With a snarl he turned and ran into him; both went sprawling.

  Yulin rolled, jumped to his feet, and grabbed Renard's pistol. Smiling now, he passed the two women, grabbing another pistol, and backed along the side of the bridge.

  The lights in the main shaft were flickering, and there were more rumblings and bangings from below.

  "Standoff!" Yulin yelled at them over the din. "Let's everybody stay calm!"

  "Give it up, Yulin!" Nikki Zinder screamed, almost drowned out by the din from the shaft. The scene was eerily unreal in the dim and flickering light.

  Yulin laughed. "Just stay away." He continued to back along the shaft, and they continued to match him, coming warily forward.

  Renard ran into the control room.

  "We've got to get him," Wooley called from in back. "If he gets to the ship we're trapped—and he can build another Obie."

  But they were bunched a little too close. A single shot from him could take them, but not, perhaps, before one of them also fried him.

  As Yulin said, it was a draw, and he was backing along the side of the bridge.

  He risked a quick glance back. Almost across now. Once in the corridor, he could outrun them to the car. Just a little farther . . .

  Suddenly an orange tentacle lashed over the side of the bridge behind him, wrapped itself around his neck, and pulled him with a jerk up and over, then let go. Yulin felt himself lifted, turned over, then dropped down into the shaft.

  He screamed in horror for some time. But thanks to Coriolis effect, he was smashed to death against the shaft long before he struck bottom.

  The Bozog climbed up and over the bridge and down onto it, the pale-red cloak of the Ghiskind following.

  Wooley saw what happened and applauded. There was more rumbling, booming, and flickering and she grew suddenly businesslike.

  "Vistaru, Zinder, go with the Bozog and the Ghiskind! Get both elevator cars open and ready! Com'on, Star! Let's help Renard get the others!" They ran back to the open, dark doorway.

  "Renard!" Wooley screamed.

  "Here!" he yelled. "Damn it! Come and help! I can't see a blasted thing!"

  They could, and Vistaru gently herded the confused and blank other women up the stairs and out the door.

  "Come on!" she yelled.

  "Mavra! We've got to find Mavra!" Renard screamed.

  Wooley looked around with her exceptional night vision. "I don't see her! Mavra!" she screamed. "Mavra!"

  Suddenly the whole control room shook with a thunderous wrenching, and part of the far balcony collapsed.

  Wooley grabbed Renard. "Come on! Get out of here!" she yelled at him. "We need you to get the others out!"

  He looked desperate, tragic. "But—Mavra!" he screamed back.

  "She's got to be dead, or unconscious, or something!" Wooley snapped back. Another spasm shook them and the shaft lights stayed out. "Come on! We've got to get out of here or we'll all die!"

  With her deceptive strength she picked him up and raced up the stairs. At the top, she looked back, and there seemed to be tears in her eyes.

  "Forgive me once more, dear Mavra," she whispered more to herself than to Renard, although he heard.

  Then she was off across the bridge.

  * * *

  Both cars were packed with bodies, and they stopped and started several times and moved jerkily. Despite moments when they seemed stuck, doomed to die of asphyxiation, both made it to the surface.

  Renard, though still in shock, realized it was now his show. "To the ship!" he yelled. Time for mourning later.

  Aboard the Shuttle

  The shuttle had originally been designed for humans. The Bozog engineers had adapted it for the flight from the Well World to New Pompeii—and though there were now eleven humans and only three nonhumans aboard, they managed. The shuttle had been designed for up to thirty people, and the rear area still had its seats—with two to spare.

  The Bozog and the Ghiskind remained with Renard on the bridge. The Agitar struggled to get ahold of himself. "Ghiskind, look in back and make sure everybody's seated and strapped down," he snapped. The red specter drifted back, looked, came back, and its hollow-hooded head nodded.

  "E-release," Renard muttered. "Now—oh, yeah. Hold tight!" He checked his own straps and reached over to a keyboard, punching the code in.

  Nothing happened.

  He cursed, then thought a bit, trying to figure out what he had done wrong. Suddenly, he had it.

  "E-lift," he punched.

  The ship broke free and rose at near maximum power.

  "Code please," a pleasant, mechanical voice came at them over the ship's radio, startling him. "Correct code within sixty seconds or we will destroy your ship."

  "The robot sentinels!" he cried. "We forgot about them!"

  But Mavra hadn't. She'd had him program the entire sequence.

  "The Decline and Fall of Pompeii," came her recorded voice over the radio. It was, Renard thought with some relief, a truly appropriate title.

  Now the ship slowed, came almost to a standstill. Before him, the screens showed a meaningless series of figures and lots of circles, dots, and other shapes.

  The shuttle began to move forward again.

  He sighed and relaxed. "That's that for now," he told the others. "She said it would be a day or two before we'd be in range of anybody, unless we run into someone coming our way first."

  He walked back to the passenger compartment.

  "Goddamned bushy horse's tail!" one of the women swore. "Feels like you're sitting on a rock, and it's so long you sweep the floor with it!"

  Another laughed. "I guess we got off lucky," she said cheerfully. "He hadn't thought of the tails until he got the people in from the forest."

  Renard was confused. Except for slight differences in coloration, and the occasional tail, they all looked alike.

  "Who's who?" he moaned.

  One laughed. "I'm Wooley, Renard, so relax. This is Star—ah, Vistaru, that is. And these two over here are Nikki Zinder and her daughter, Mavra." She choked up, but recovered quickly.

  He didn't. "Nikki Zinder . . ." he mumbled. "Her daughter . . ."

  The girl stared at him unbelievingly. "Are you really my father?" she asked.

  He shook his head slowly. "No, somebody else was, somebody human. I have his memories, and his personality, but I'm something else now."

  That
seemed to satisfy her, and Nikki, who'd tensed at the question, visibly relaxed.

  Renard looked at the others, anxious to change the subject. "What about them?" he asked, looking at the seven other girls.

  Wooley undid her straps and walked to him. She was taller than he and her tail trailed like a bird's plume.

  "We've explained to them that they have all lost their memories for good," she whispered to him, "because of the machine. They'll be okay."

  That relieved him, and his body reminded him of a different need. "We've got at least a couple of days on this tub," he pointed out, "and very little to eat."

  She shrugged. "We can hold out if we have to. Actually, there's enough organic stuff in the padding and old packs. We can all have something, I think. You're the one that will probably have the most problem."

  He chuckled and looked at his passengers. "Live on love, huh?" he cracked.

  * * *

  By the time contact was made two and a half days out, they had all practiced what was to be said—and what was not to be said—and their courses of action.

  "This is the Com police," a stern male voice came over the radio. "Identify yourself by number and destination."

  Renard sighed. "This is a refugee ship from New Pompeii, a planetoid formerly owned by New Harmony," he replied. "I am not a pilot and there is not one aboard."

  That seemed to disturb the police a bit. There was some anxious checking against police computer files.

  "Stand by, we will match you and board," the police ship stated.

  "It's in your hands," he responded. "However, first I think I better warn you about a few things."

  He proceeded to tell them of Antor Trelig's party, of Obie, the Well World, everything. The only details omitted concerned how to reach the Well World.

  The police didn't believe, of course, but they recorded the information anyway; then they matched the ships, locked, and two armored cops boarded.

  One look at the passengers and they had less reason to doubt.

  Com police were an odd group: the wild ones, the undomesticated, the lovers of freedom and the restless. They were carefully recruited in midlife, usually after having been caught red-handed at something nasty.

  In exchange for voluntarily undergoing some loyalty conditioning, they were paroled—to police the rest, to protect the Com and the frontier from others just like them.

  They generally knew a hot potato when they grabbed it. The taped conversations were coded, sealed, and sent directly to the eleven-member Council Presidium, which made decisions when the full Council could not be summoned—or when it shouldn't be.

  Three Council members were out to the ship in less than fourteen additional hours. They were Com, all right, yet each maintained his own strong character. One, a woman apparently approaching middle age, had an especially regal bearing.

  "Some twenty-two years ago," Councillor Alaina said, "before I had this last rejuve, I hired Mavra Chang to attend Antor Trelig's little party as my agent. I never heard from her again, of course—but, since New Pompeii disappeared, taking dear Antor with it, I was satisfied." She looked around at the odd little group of human women and aliens. "And now I see she succeeded after all."

  They all had tears in their eyes, and even the Bozog quivered a bit. Only the Ghiskind, as usual, was impassive.

  "When I heard the police report, I didn't believe it—but here you all are, even Nikki Zinder!" She turned to Vistaru. "And you—an unexpected pleasure, Star Tonge. One of your sons is an invaluable Chief Counselor."

  "The kids," Wooley murmured to herself. "It'd be interesting to see the kids again."

  "And now we must decide what is to be done," Councillor Alaina continued. "We owe you all a great deal."

  Renard slapped himself. "The sponge cure!" he blurted.

  The refugees looked startled, and he nodded. "Obie—the computer—gave it to Mavra. She recorded it in the ship's log."

  Alaina nodded to a Com policeman. "Get it," she ordered. "Secure it." She looked preoccupied, as if watching new vistas unfold. "If that cure holds up," she continued, "it'll break the back of the syndicate. The changes will be revolutionary."

  "It'll work," the Agitar assured her. "Mavra said it would."

  A grim expression marred the Councilor's normally impassive features. "Mavra Chang. Yes. So sad. You're sure we can't go back for her?"

  "Studies show most power has failed," a policeman put in. "The plasma shield itself is weakening. If anybody's still there, they're dead now for sure."

  She nodded. "I thought as much. But her name shall live on in our histories. She shall be celebrated among the greats. We will not forget her."

  "None of us will," Renard replied sincerely.

  * * *

  They sat about half a light-hour off New Pompeii. On the screens the planetoid showed clearly as a small ball.

  "Everyone thinks that you need the weapons locker to destroy a planet," Alaina noted. "But you don't. That takes a vote of all the Council, and we can't put this to the Council until we've substantially laundered it. No use informing the universe that such a thing as Obie is possible. Somebody else would surely build one."

  All agreed.

  Four ships showed on the screens, Com police cruisers towing huge objects with tractor beams.

  "What are they?" Wooley asked, fascinated.

  "Antimatter, my dear," Alaina replied. "It's all over the place, you know. Always has been. Calculate the mass of the object you want to destroy, grab some antimatter of equal mass, bring the two together, and they cancel each other out. Took a century even to create a tractor beam that wouldn't react with the stuff. The police craft will follow a trajectory that will have the antimatter asteroids strike New Pompeii at the same time. Should be quite a flash, and that will be that."

  They watched as the ships moved by, curved, swung the asteroids around and let them fly.

  And then scrammed like hell.

  While they waited for the missiles to reach their target, Alaina discussed other things.

  "Makes you wonder," she said, looking at Renard, the Bozog, and the Ghiskind. "If you three can exist, how many others might? Maybe just over the next solar system, so to speak. Perhaps within our lifetime two of our cultures will meet. How I'd love to see that!"

  "If you'd been on the Well World you'd have your fill of alien races pretty quickly," Vistaru responded.

  She shrugged. "I've always wondered. Perhaps such a clash will be the ultimate problem. Perhaps the other beings will be antimatter? That would be frustrating!" She laughed, then changed tone.

  "Have you thought about your own futures?" she asked them.

  "We—the Bozog, the Ghiskind, and I—can return to the Well World," Renard replied. "We've told you that. Just get us to a Markovian world. That's what we have to do, of course. There's no place for us in this part of the universe."

  She nodded, and turned to the others. "What about you, Tonges?"

  Wooley smiled. "Nikki Zinder has never had a chance to be a real person, live a real life. Her daughter even less so—and the others, well, they can learn to be people. It will be interesting to see how the family's come along. And, well, Star and I really did love each other, you know. It'll be fun being together again after all those long years."

  "And we owe Mavra something," Vistaru put in. "Both of us keep thinking, if only we had stayed a little longer, if only we'd made sure that Vash's children all got out. If only we hadn't left them. She had such a horrible life—maybe we can help these other women, instead of letting them wind up in a hole, like Mavra. I think we owe that much to her, to them, and to ourselves."

  Alaina nodded. "I think I can understand. Bodies like those can be wonderful, or the biggest curse you can have. And I'll help. Mavra's fee was agreed to, recorded, and never paid. I think you could do a pretty good job with a million, couldn't you?"

  Wooley's eyes went wide. "A million?" She laughed suddenly. "Wow! We'll buy our own frontier world!" She
looked at Vistaru. "You know, it's crazy, isn't it? We had lives once, then second lives on the Well, then third lives back here, fourth back on the Well, now fifth—I wonder if that means we're going to keep living forever? We can always return to the Well again in the future."

  Vistaru laughed. "Yeah, but take it easy. You aren't my husband any more. You're superwoman now."

  "I started out a woman," the other pointed out. "Not much of one, I admit. Maybe it's time for Wu Julee to find out what it's really like."

  Vistaru nodded. "It can really be wonderful," she said softly.

  "Look!" Renard yelled. "The asteroids are about there!"

  As he spoke four smaller dots converged on the large ball. A tremendous flash of energy blurred their vision momentarily, then there was nothing.

  Scans revealed no trace of New Pompeii, not the slightest speck of dust.

  Alaina sighed. "That's it, then. Let's get out of here."

  The ship throbbed to life and started moving. There were tears in Renard's eyes and all were silent.

  "Good-bye, Mavra. Forgive us."

  And even the Yugash's hood bowed.

  An Unnamed Star in M-51

  She stood and stretched all four legs in the darkness. She was used to working in the dark, and her nose quickly found some edible fruit and some stale bread. It would do, and the fruit provided needed water. She'd gone through the last of the preserved foodstuffs the day before.

  She wondered why she was still alive. She wondered why she persisted in postponing the end.

  The lights came on. That, in itself, was no surprise. She'd been expecting it any time now, ever since she'd experienced the familiar blackout and that long dropping feeling a few hours before.

  She turned her downward-facing head and looked around. The place was a mess. Much of the structures had collapsed, including part of the far balcony.

  The explosions, hisses, and rumbles had stopped several days earlier, but they had been replaced by the sounds of hammering and welding and lots of clanking. She'd actually gone out to see what was making them, but except for discovering some emergency lighting still going in the main shaft area, there was nothing that could be seen. Whatever was going on was going on far below her, she was sure.