Echoes of the Well of Souls watw-1

by Jack L. Chalker

  Terry shrugged. “Besides, I can always come out someday. Be the tattooed lady, the sole survivor who lived as a Stone Age savage. The Enquirer alone would pay me enough, with book and TV movie rights, for me to live out my old age.”

  Lori sighed. “Then I better really see Gus.”

  Gus was still drugged, as was Campos, but he was conscious. After a long period of apparent catatonia, he was able to be coaxed out on occasion, although he did not recognize what had happened to him and still seemed only vaguely aware of his surroundings. He was thin and weathered; his bindings had scarred his wrists and ankles, and he looked almost like a living skeleton. It was pretty clear that he’d need a lot of help, but he was so wasted away and Lori was in such good shape now that she found she could carry him with little trouble.

  “Gus, hang on,” she said to him. “One more day and we’ll get you out of here.”

  He smiled sleepily like a little child. “Big story?”

  “The biggest.”

  “Lots of pictures?”

  “As many as you can take.”

  He seemed happy at that. She squeezed his hand and went over to Juan Campos. Compared to Gus, Campos was in great shape. He was one very tough cookie, and he had eventually made the best of a mostly intolerable situation. After two early attempts at escape, when he’d shown enough strength to break the tough natural rope bonds and shake off the effects of a very mind-dulling drug, he’d accepted his punishment and the improbability of getting away and tried to make the most of it. He had begun to play up to his captors and to show unmistakable invitations and intent, and he’d been taken up on it by many, and one, possibly two, had conceived with him.

  He’d still remained drugged and mostly bound and always well guarded, but he had managed by this to gain extra food and drink and, while weak for lack of any regular exercise, might well be able to make it on his own.

  He had figured out who Lori and Terry were and found their transformations into native jungle girls highly amusing.

  “All right, Campos. Listen up. The tribe wants to dispose of you, but the chief has other plans. Tomorrow your legs will be freed, and we’ll try and give you a little time to exercise them. You’re going for a walk, and you’ll wear a gag and have rope binding your arms. You do exactly what you’re told and you might get out of this alive. Understand? You make one funny move and you’ll be full of darts with enough curare to kill you in midstep. Understand?”

  He nodded sleepily.

  “Do one thing right and you’re home free. Be stupid and you’re dead. And be aware that nobody here really cares which.”

  There was nothing else to do now but get some sleep and wait for the next day. It was not easy to do. Please, God! Let Terry and I both be making the right decision tomorrow!

  Professor Umberto Alcazar-Diaz, visiting professor of astrogeology at the University of São Paulo, director general of Site A, and, not incidentally, also a research fellow at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Houston, had just taken off his glasses and settled back for a nap. He had been working almost nonstop on the lab findings dropped off by the morning helicopter, and his eyes were killing him.

  Suddenly he heard a commotion among the guards outside. He was curious but too tired to see to it. “Carlos. You want to see what that’s all about?”

  “Si, Professor,” the young man replied, getting up from his bunk and putting aside the routine security report he’d been writing up in English so that his bosses at the Agency could quickly read it back in Washington. He opened the frame door on the elaborate tent with a casual air and felt something sting him in the neck. He fell back inside, out cold.

  The professor couldn’t see much without his glasses, but he knew that the young man had fallen, and he jumped up and went to his aid. Seeing that he was unconscious, Umberto Alcazar-Diaz opened the door to call to the guards, but he felt a sting in his neck before he could call out, and that was the last he remembered. The door came shut again.

  Outside, the guards were oblivious to the happenings in the tent some twenty meters from any of them, but the armed soldier on duty in the camp was staring at something in the evening sun and had his rifle to the ready, while the other off-duty guards stopped what they were doing and tensed, guns not far away.

  “No tire! Somos amigos simpáticos!” a young woman’s voice called from not far away. It wasn’t Portuguese and was oddly structured, but one of the men at the card table made it out.

  “Antonio! Hold up!” he called in Portuguese. “It’s some woman speaking Spanish!”

  “Woman? Women?” the duty guard called back in amazement. “Can you understand them?”

  “Let me see.” The Spanish-speaking sergeant looked out and saw a number of native women standing nervously in a clearing just in front of one of the few immediate stands of trees that had survived the blast. They were all naked and painted up, but that wasn’t all that unusual, although he’d never seen markings quite like those before.

  “Habla español?” the same woman asked. She seemed to be the leader.

  “Si. Quién es?” the sergeant called back, not too nervous but puzzled.

  “Soy llamado Teysi.”

  “Donde viene de?”

  “Somos de la aldea.”

  “She says her name is Teysi and that they come from the village. That must be the one about three kilometers southeast that refused to evacuate.”

  “What are they doing out here so late in the day and all by themselves?” the duty guard asked, not suspicious but just as curious. “I have been out here so long that even they look good to me.”

  “You never know about these natives, but the ones in the village are friendly so long as you don’t ask them to leave.” He turned back to the small group of women—six, no seven of them! “Porqué vienen ustedes niñas aquí?” he asked them.

  The answer came in halting, not very good Spanish, but the message was clear.

  “Nuestros hombres son enfermos o muertos,” Teysi explained. “Nos mantienen lejos de hombres. Ninguno de nosotros ha tenido un hombre en mucho tiempo. Nos mantienen lejos de hombres. Somos muy solo y triste. Vemos que hombres guapos son aquí. Vamos fuera verle. Le gustaríamos vernosotros?”

  The sergeant grinned. “I wonder… She says that they are the widows of men who are dead or something like that. That they are being kept locked away and haven’t had men in a long time and that they are very lonely. They heard that some handsome men were here and snuck out to see us. I think they want to come up and see us close.”

  “Some of these tribes are sneaky,” another guard warned.

  “You ever heard of any of the tribes using women as bait? It would be dishonorable to the men. No, they are too simple and too primitive to be other than what they say. What do you think? Should we invite them up?”

  “Why not?” one guard asked. “If they do not smell too bad, maybe we can have some fun. I do not think we will have to search them for concealed weapons!”

  They all laughed at that.

  “Yes, but what about the professor and his shadow?” another asked.

  They glanced at the tent, whose door was shut.

  “If they want some, let them get their own,” the sergeant joked. “Maybe they will just sleep through it, eh? If they object, I will handle them.”

  With that, he gestured the women to approach the camp.

  “Soy el único aquí que hablo español,” explained the leader, a dark girl with a ring of bone in her nose. She might be hell to kiss long and hard, but she had quite a body, and her other assets were… outstanding.

  The sergeant responded that he was the only one who spoke Spanish among his crew, too.

  The lead girl gave a soft laugh. “Queremos tocar y palpamos, no hablamos.”

  “I think she says they want more touch and feel than talk, boys! Her Spanish is terrible, but what the hell! I think we will finally break the monotony of this wretched post!”

  A couple of the w
omen pointed to the guards and made comments.

  “Le dicen son hombres muy bonitos,” the dark one said as she reached them.

  “She says they think we look pretty, boys!” the sergeant laughed. “If it wasn’t coming from them and out here, I think I’d be insulted!”

  Terry had been nervous before they had revealed themselves. Using the halting, stilted, not quite correct Spanish had been easier; it wasn’t as if the soldier’s Spanish was much better.

  She found that she actually was turned on, too, perhaps as much by the danger as by the desire. Somehow it was poetic that here, on almost the very spot where they had been taken captive who knew how long ago, she had returned as one of her captors to break, in the most dramatic of ways, all ties to her past.

  That left the guard near the equipment.

  It would have been easier to have just taken him out, but they weren’t at all certain they could do it without the others seeing or perhaps calling to him. He had seen and heard most of what was going on down at the camp and had come almost halfway back to see the scene he’d liked to have been a part of.

  Each of the women had one of the men, but that left two women, and they came toward the remaining guard with innocent smiles, strutting to be sure he understood them. It wasn’t very long before he was totally distracted and effectively out of direct sight of the crater itself.

  Alama nodded. Lori again picked up poor Gus, who seemed light as a feather, and Alama pushed Campos forward. “Down there?” he said with amazement, but he knew how many of these women were around and knew that Lori’s threat wasn’t an idle one. He might escape even now if he felt he could, but he wasn’t going to do anything until he was pretty damned sure he’d live through it.

  The crater wall was thick with fine dust and shiny fragments—it wasn’t as easy as it had seemed to get to the meteor. The ground was littered with micalike hexagonal fragments, like tiny odd geometric forms from some bizarre workshop, many of which were fairly sharp, making walking difficult. Lori almost lost Gus once, and Campos actually slipped and fell.

  “Up there! Fast!” Lori ordered.

  “What? On the meteor? We will get burned!”

  “There’s nothing to burn you. Do as I say. You’re almost free.”

  Alama had already scrambled up, showing the way, and was now standing on a jagged outcrop very near where the so-called doorway to the stars was. She was keeping an eye on Campos, and she had a poison-tipped spear poised in case he tried to flee. She felt a moral obligation to take him along, but she understood what slime he was.

  There was a sound of happy commotion coming from just beyond her line of sight, and she smiled to herself and thought, Do good, my children. Get many fine babies. Farewell.

  But was it farewell? Where the hell was the doorway?

  Damn it, it had been expecting her! Beckoning her! Why didn’t it show up?

  Campos passed her and at that moment gave her something of a shove. It was hard to tell if he’d slipped or if it was deliberate, but it knocked Alama down, sending the spear clattering down to the bottom of the crater.

  He turned, looked at Lori, struggling up with Gus, smiled, and said “Adios, muchachas! I will return, and your tribe will serve me forever!” He turned his back, took a step…

  And vanished as if a three-dimensional television image had been abruptly turned off.

  “Alama! Are you all right?”

  The small woman struggled back to balance. “I am good enough. Where is he?”

  “He winked out!”

  “Ah. It knows when to come, as always.” She gave Lori a hand, and together they hauled Gus the last little bit. Alama pulled him a little, then said, “You will have to take him in with you. When I go, it goes.”

  Lori nodded, saw the blackness, but hesitated, looking back toward the camp.

  “I know what you think. If she do that, she will make it. Now hurry! Go!”

  Lori picked up Gus once more, half dragging him, and backed into the black area. As soon as Gus’s feet cleared the black boundary, there was total darkness all around her and a sensation of falling.

  Alama sighed and for the first time noticed the cameras. She hadn’t ever seen their like, but she knew what they were. It didn’t matter. Not anymore.

  She stood there for a moment in all her Amazonian glory, bowed to each, then jumped into the blackness and winked out.

  Terry lay on the blanket next to the sergeant and tried to catch her breath. A whole range of strange emotions and thoughts whirled in her head, and she needed time to regain control.

  Suddenly, as it always seemed to do in this country, it began to rain hard, ending the trysts with a start and sending people scrambling.

  Her sergeant rolled off the blanket and made for the nearby tent without even thinking of her for the moment, assuming she would follow. She, however, was used to the rain now, even this driving rain, and she got up and looked toward the crater.

  The meteor was still glowing and pulsing. Maybe faster now; there was something different about it, but it was still active.

  Curiosity and a certain sense of emptiness and loss overcame her, and she made for it. The crater guard ran past her, half-dressed and cursing in Portuguese, without ever being aware of her.

  She reached the low point between the two sets of covered equipment and stared for a moment. They must have made it, she thought. There’s no sign, and we sure gave them enough time.

  But the thing hadn’t died down; the black “hole” was still there, but it looked odd. It looked, in fact, like something was keeping it open when it wanted to close.

  Sweet Jesus! she thought, staring at it. Do I have the nerve, after all?

  The rain pounded all around, and she had a tense feeling that some dramatic event was imminent.

  “The hell with it. I never could pass up a great story,” she said aloud to herself, and ran into the crater, ignoring the dust that was turning to mud and the piles of glassine hexagonal minerals. With a surefootedness she could never have imagined before this, she made her way up the side of the meteor and to the edge of the hole, certain that it would close just as she reached it. As she neared it, she slipped, bruised a knee, then managed to get up and, with supreme effort, drag herself on top of the blackness. It felt solid as a rock, and for a moment she felt the oddest mixture of relief and disappointment.

  The world winked out, and there was only blackness and a sensation of falling fast through space.

  Back at the meteor site the ground started to shake, and there were cries of “Earthquake!” from the camp.

  Almost too fast to see, the meteor became duller, its surface fading to a dull rock sheen; cracks appeared, and fissures opened up along its fracture points.

  The glow died; the pulsing stopped, and it grew suddenly very dark at the camp.

  When the scientist and the intelligence agent came around two hours later, there were no native women, no real sign of what had happened to them or why, and six very confused soldiers who had already vowed to tell no one of the night’s activities.

  Alama was falling in the blackness, and then suddenly she stopped, not on a cold, hard surface, as she had expected, but suspended somehow in the gate’s usual emptiness, a state she could never comprehend.

  And then a voice came to her. A voice speaking an ancient tongue, but the tongue of her birth, and speaking it directly into her mind.

  “Mavra! Mavra! Oh, you must hear me and understand! Mavra!”

  A vast scene unfolded from her memories, a scene of a huge artificial moon filled with great equipment of impossible complexity, a moon that had a name, personality, and a soul. A name so dear to her that it was wrenched back even after all this time by the “sound” of that voice in her mind.

  “Obie?”

  “Mavra! Please! You must listen! I can’t keep this gateway open long!”

  “Obie—you’re dead. You’re many thousands of years dead and gone.”

  “No! We’re not
dead. And yet not alive. We’re shifted over, like ghosts, unable to do much but still very much here!”

  “What? Who’s ‘we’?”

  “All of us. The trillions and trillions of us of all the races that ever were except the first. All the beings from the past universe, from our universe, and all the beings from the universes before. We’re stored, stored in the records of the Well, so we can be reused if needed. Only I am strong enough to retain some independent action, because I can manipulate, too, in a way. I’ve been waiting, waiting a long time until you intersected the Well matrix again and I could reach you!”

  “Obie! You’re inside the Well?”

  “I am part of it! We are all part of it now! We provide the templates for the re-created universe as needed. It is a horrible existence. Not even a half of living. Those— Markovians—or whatever they’re called never cared about what they were doing to all those lives if a reset was needed. I don’t think they ever thought that there would be a reset. But, like the Watcher, we are mere—insurance.”

  This was too much all at once.“Obie, I —”

  “Keep quiet for once and let me talk! I can’t hold this gate open very much longer, and I don’t think I can contact you again until you’re here, inside the control computer, where we’re all stored.”

  “Obie—you want me to come to you? Is that it? What would I do? I don’t know how anything works. I just pushed the buttons Nathan told me to push! You’d need him to help you.”

  Nathan! That was his name! That was the other one like her!

  “No! No! Not Nathan! That is what we fear most! He will come again and he will reset, and we will have more company and be pushed farther back in the memory banks, leaving even less of what little remains of us and cutting us off completely!”

  “He wouldn’t do that if he knew!”

  “He not only would, he will. He doesn’t know it, but he will. He has no choice, Mavra! He is the Watcher! He is programmed to do it each and every time.”

  “Programmed? Obie—it has been a long time. I remember very little of the old days. It is coming back, but it is still hazy.”