Twilight at the Well of Souls wos-5

by Jack L. Chalker

  “Why don’t you let ’em get in there, Ortega? Make it easy on them. You know he ain’t gonna do anything to louse up your little empire here. He doesn’t give a damn.”

  “You know I couldn’t, even if I wanted to,” the Ulik responded. “I don’t run this world, no matter what you may think. Self-interest runs the world here, just like everywhere else. He’s trying to get into the Well to switch it off, make repairs. Too many nervous governments here to allow that.”

  “But the Well World’s on a separate machine,” Gypsy pointed out. “His turning off the big machine won’t really do anything here. They all should know that much, anyway.”

  Ortega shrugged all six arms. “They only know what I know and they only believe a fraction of that. We have only Brazil’s word on that sort of thing. And if we take him at his word, then this new universe he’s going to create will need seeds, new Markovian seeds like the last time. This planet was built to provide those seeds. If we take him at his word on how the system works, he’ll depopulate the Well World in that reseeding. The Well governments face extinction, Mister Gypsy, or whoever you are. No getting around that!”

  “Not if you help,” the man came back. “You and I know that the natives are already murdering hordes of newcomers in many hexes. There are proposals simply to kill everything that comes in through the Well Gate. You gotta stop that, Ortega. One way or another. Don’t you understand? These newcomers are the seeds!”

  The Ulik’s jaw dropped in amazement. “Of course! That makes sense! I don’t know what’s wrong with me these days. Senility, I guess. But—just saying so won’t make the plan acceptable. They’re scared, mister. Scared little people. They won’t take chances.”

  “But you can stall, do what you can. Your influence is still pretty strong here. You know it and I know it. You got blackmail on most of those little men. We need time, Ortega. We need you to help us get that time.”

  Serge Ortega leaned back and sighed once again. “So what’s your plan?”

  Gypsy chuckled dryly. “Oh, no. We trust you just about as far as you trust us. One thing at a time. But you know your part—if you’ll do it. There’s no real cost to you, I promise you. You have Brazil’s word on that and you know that’s good.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” the snake-man responded, apparently sincere.

  Gypsy got up, stamped out his cigarette on the shiny floor, and looked around at the large office. “Tell me, Ortega, how do you stand it—being trapped in here all the time, year after year, for so long? I think I’d go nuts and kill myself.”

  A wan smile came to Ortega’s face. “Sometimes I think of that. It’s easy, you know, for me. All I have to do is go to the Zone Gate and go home. I’m over two thousand years old, you know. Too old. But the spell that keeps me alive traps me here. You should know that.” His voice dropped to a dreamy whisper and he seemed to be gazing at not his visitor or the wall but something beyond the wall, something only he could see. “To feel wind again, and rain, and see the stars one last time. Oh, by God! Do I dream of that!”

  “Why not do it, then? At least, do it after this is all over.”

  The Ulik snorted. “You don’t really realize my trap, do you? I’m a Catholic, Gypsy. Not a good one, perhaps, but a Catholic nonetheless. And stepping back there—it would be suicide. I can’t bring myself to do it, you see. I just can’t kill myself.”

  Gypsy shook his head in silent wonder. “We make our own hells, don’t we?” he murmured, almost too softly to be heard. “We make ’em and we live in ’em. But what kind of hell could be worse than this one?” He looked squarely at Ortega and said, louder, “You’ll hear from Brazil himself shortly, and I’ll keep in touch.” And with that he walked over to the office door, which opened for him, and stepped through. It closed behind him, leaving only the butt on the floor and the smell of stale cigarette smoke as signs he had ever been there.

  The Ulik wasted no time. He rammed an intercom button home. “Attention! Apprehend a Type 41 just leaving the Ulik Embassy.” He gave Gypsy’s dress.

  There was silence on the other end for a moment, then the guard outside, working to handle the hordes of incoming people more than as a police force, responded, puzzled, “But, sir, I’ve been just outside your door the past hour. Nobody’s come out. Not a soul since that Czillian, anyway. And definitely no Type 41.”

  “But that’s impossible!” Ortega roared, then switched off and looked over at the floor. The crushed butt, to his great relief, was still there.

  The intercom buzzed and he answered it curtly. “Ambassador Udril here,” came a translator-colored voice.

  “Go ahead,” Ortega told the Czillian ambassador. “On that information you wanted on those three Entries. The one, Marquoz, is a Hazakit and is, well, it’s hard to believe after only a few weeks…”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, Ambassador, he appears to be the new head of the Hazakit secret police.”

  Ortega almost choked. “And the others?”

  “Well, the woman, Yua, appears to be enlisting fellow Awbri into some sort of military force with surprising ease. And as for Mavra Chang…”

  “Well?” Ortega prompted, feeling increasingly out of control.

  “She seems to have appeared as a Dillian, enlisted some local help, and, well, vanished.”

  “Vanished! Where? How?”

  “A few days ago she and a small party of Dillians went into the mountains of Gedemondas. Nobody’s heard anything from them since.”

  Hakazit

  It was a harsh land. The planet for which it was a laboratory model must have been something hellish indeed, Marquoz thought. The terrain was a burned, ugly, hard-packed desert with jagged, fierce-looking volcanic outcrops. Occasionally earth tremors would start slides and the very rare but horribly violent storms sometimes turned dry, dusty gullies into deadly torrents which carved great gashes in the landscape.

  With almost no water on top, and the ocean to the north salt water only, the people were where the fresh water was—underground, on the bedrock at the water table, in huge caverns carved by millennia of erosion on the basic limestone and marble beneath. There had been predators, too; terrible, fierce beasts with skin like solid rock and endless appetites for Hakazit flesh.

  And so, of course, the Hakazit were built for combat and for defense. Like granite itself, their fierce, demonic faces were tough skin over extremely thick bone, their features fixed in a furious and chilling expression, broad mouths opening to reveal massive canines capable of rending the flesh of their wild natural enemies. Their eyes were skull-like sockets that glowed blazing red in the darkness. It was not a traditional method of seeing, not eyes in the sense he had always known them, yet to his brain they served the same way, giving up long range for extreme-depth perception and, perhaps (he could never be sure) altering the color sense quite a bit to emphasize contrasts. Bony plates formed over each socket like horns.

  The great, muscular steel-gray body was humanoid, a mass of sinew with arms capable of uprooting medium-sized trees and snapping them in two. The five-fingered hands ended in lethal, steellike talons also designed for ripping and tearing flesh, and the thick legs ended in reptillian feet that could grasp, claw, propel that heavy body over almost any obstacle. Trailing behind was a long tail of the same steely gray ending in two huge, sharp bones like spikes, which could be wielded by the prehensile tail as additional weapons. The body itself was so well armored, so tough and thick, that arrows bounced off its hide, and even a conventional bullet would do only minor damage. Control of the nervous system was absolute and automatic with the Hakazit; pain centers, for example, could be disabled in a localized area at will.

  It was, thought the former small dinosaurlike creature, the most formidable living weapon he had ever seen. The males stood over three meters tall with a nine-meter tail; females were smaller and weaker: only two and a half meters, on the average, and just able to crush a large rock in their bare hands.

 
But now he, as one of them, was being taken down to a great cavern city, a prisoner, it seemed, of the local authorities. The city itself was impressive, a fairyland of colorful lights and moving walkways, scaled to the size of the behemoths who lived there. A high-tech civilization to boot, he noted, amazed. No handicaps, like some of the hexes on the Well World where only technology up to steam was allowed or where nothing that didn’t work by mechanical energy was possible. Yes, the world the Markovians had in mind for the Hazakit race had to be one real hell.

  Everybody seemed to wear a leather or cloth pullover with some rank or insignia on it. He couldn’t interpret them, or the signs, or the codes, but it looked quite stratified, almost as if everybody was in the army. Here was a crisp, disciplined place where everybody seemed to be on some kind of desperate business with no time to dawdle or socialize. No trained eye was necessary to see that some of the creatures were there to keep an eye on the other creatures. One group, in particular, wearing leather jerkins with targetlike designs on them, wore side arms of an unfamiliar sort. Marquoz had no doubt that those pistols could penetrate to the vital parts of a Hakazit.

  His escort, Commander Zhart, delighted in showing off Harmony City, as it was called. He pointed out the Fountain of Democracy, the People’s Congress, the Avenue of Peace and Freedom, and so forth. Marquoz just nodded and looked over the place. It somehow seemed all too familiar to him, an echo of every dictatorship he had ever been in. Coming from a world that didn’t even have a central government yet hadn’t had a major war in thousands of years, this was something of a contrast. Yet he had spent long years in the “human” Com, where dictatorship was the rule and things didn’t appear to be all that different.

  They finally headed for a giant, palatial structure built into the side of the cavern and dominating it and the city skyline. The seat of government, he guessed, probably for the whole hex. Finally he could stand it no longer. “Where’s the enemy?” he asked Zhart.

  The other stopped and turned, looking slightly puzzled. “What do you mean?” he asked, not suspiciously but just befuddled.

  Marquoz waved a massive arm back in the general direction of the city. “All this. The militarization of the population, the fierceness of the race. All this points to a really nasty enemy. I just wanted to know who or what.”

  “There’s no enemy,” Zhart responded, sounding slightly wistful. “No enemy at all. Used to be—long, long ago, maybe thousands of years. You can visit the Museum of Hakazit Culture sometime and see the dioramas and displays about it. But there’s nothing much now. None of the surrounding hexes could live in the radiations of the day, and they’re not up to tackling us even if there was a reason.” He shrugged as they continued walking to the palace.

  That was it, of course, Marquoz realized. A warrior people created for a nightmare planet that they had conquered here, thereby proving that they could make it out there in the real universe. But that had been during the Markovian experiment, who knew how many millions of years ago, gone now, done now, leaving the descendants bred for battle but with nothing left to fight.

  It would create a strange, stagnant culture, he decided. He understood now what sort of entertainment probably went on at the People’s Stadium, for example. So a rigid sort of dictatorship would be necessary to control a population made up of such muscular death machines—although he wondered how any regime could sustain itself for long if the people truly got pissed off at it. Maybe they were so accustomed to the situation they never considered the alternatives, he speculated to himself. Or maybe, deep down, they knew there was only one way to keep the place from breaking down into carnage and savagery—as it ultimately would, inevitably, anyway. This dictatorship was just buying time, but it was the best justification for a dictatorship he could remember.

  The palace proved to have surprisingly few people in it. He had been conditioned by the Com to expect a huge bureaucracy, but only three officials were in evidence in the entry hall, and he had the impression that two of them were waiting to see somebody or other. Commander Zhart introduced him to the one who seemed to belong there and bid him good luck and farewell.

  The official looked him over somewhat critically. “You are an Entry?” he asked at last.

  Marquoz nodded. “Yes. Newly arrived in your fair land.”

  The official ignored the flattery. “What were you before?”

  “A Chugach,” Marquoz told him. “That would mean very little here.”

  “More than you think,” the other responded. “Although we’re both speaking Hakazit, I wear a translator surgically implanted in my brain. It translated your own term into a more familiar one. There’s a bit of telepathy or something involved, although it’d be easier if you were wearing one, too. I got a picture of what your people were like and I recognize them. Here on the Well World they are called the Ghlmonese.”

  “Ghlmonese,” Marquoz repeated, fascinated. His racial ancestors… Somehow that had never occurred to him. He decided he would like to visit there someday, if he could.

  “You told Commander Zhart that you worked mostly on alien worlds in your old life,” the official continued. “Glathrielites and Dillians mainly. Naked apes and centaurs. Very unlike your own kind. You said you were a spy?”

  Startled, Marquoz realized suddenly that somehow he had been bugged since being discovered on the surface by a military patrol. This explained Zhart’s chum-miness in contrast to the coldness the others showed— but it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that he should have anticipated this and had not. He hoped he wasn’t becoming old and senile.

  “A spy, yes,” he admitted, realizing, too, that this individual was some sort of psychologist, possibly for the inevitable secret police. “You understand that my people were discovered by the others. They were an aggressive, warlike lot with a strong sense of cultural superiority that matched their real technological superiority. We hadn’t developed space travel, and most of our weaponry was museum vintage, even to us, except in sport. They had a big interworld council, of course, but we were entitled to only one seat and one vote as a one-world culture—hardly a position of influence. They needed somebody out there, traveling around, observing trends, attitudes, threats, and possibilities, and reporting same. A lot of somebodies, really, but I was the only one to really succeed at it.”

  The psychologist was interested. “Why you? And why were you successful when the others of your kind were not?”

  Marquoz shrugged. “I’m not sure. In terms of getting in the right positions, well, the dominant races have psychological quirks that make them either destroy lesser races, absorb lesser races, or, in some odd and perverse tendency, to bend over backward to show that they don’t consider your race lesser even if they actually do. I’ve always had some sort of knack for being where trouble is, even on my home world. If there was a big storm, or a fire, or some equally major event, I somehow usually wound up being there. Call it some kind of perverse precognition, I don’t know what. I happened to be in a position to overhear plans for a minor but nasty rebellion and took the opportunity to report it. The Com Police crushed the rebellion, of course, and I became some sort of minor celebrity to them. From there it was easy to worm my way into the Com Police itself, not only because I delivered the goods, so to speak, but also because, as a Chugach, I would be a symbol of their liberalism. There are some mighty guilty consciences there, I suspect. That helped immeasurably. And the deeper entrenched I became, the easier it was to pick up everything, from trade to forbidden technological information, and pass it along to my own people.”

  The psychologist looked disturbed. “Do you think your being reborn as a Hakazit means that we are in for some particularly bad trouble?”

  This race’s mouth wasn’t built for expression so Marquoz’s sardonic smile wasn’t evident to the other. “Oh, yes, I’d say so. I’d say that a catastrophe of major proportions is going to hit not only Hakazit but the whole of the Well World any minute now. I’m afraid I’m p
art of the cause this time, though. You see, I’m here on a mission.” He tried to sound really conspiratorial.

  “A mission?” the psychologist echoed, looking more and more disturbed.

  Marquoz nodded gravely. “Yes. You see, I’m here to save the universe in the name of truth and purity and justice.”

  They kept him waiting for quite some time and he became very bored. There weren’t many people to talk to, and those who did come in or out were hardly the talkative type. He knew that somewhere in this building they were arguing, discussing, deciding his fate, and that he could do little about it, at least until they made their own moves. He wished terribly that he had a cigar. The Well World was supposed to change you, even make you comfortable in your new form—and it had. A rebirth is only a rebirth, he reflected glumly, but a good cigar is a smoke.

  He tried a few of his old dance moves but soon discovered that those, too, were gone for good. Ballet ill-befitted armored tanks.

  Finally someone came—not the same one, he decided, who had interviewed him. He was finding it easier to tell individuals apart now, more so as he went along, although he knew that non-Hakazit might have a problem in that direction.

  “Thank you for waiting,” the newcomer said pleasantly, as if he had anywhere else to go. “The Supreme Lord will see you now. Follow me.”

  He started and almost repeated the title aloud. The supreme lord? Well, no use getting your hopes up too far, Marquoz, he reminded himself. Around here that might be the term for chief palace janitor. These folks looked like they loved titles.

  It was soon apparent, though, that this was a personage of considerable rank. Not only the smartly uniformed guards along the hall attested to this, but also the hidden traps, emplacements, and other nastiness that only his trained eye could make out signified rank and importance. Finally he entered a pair of huge, ornate steel doors and found himself in a barren hall. He looked around warily. Yes, television sensors, definitely, and a lot more—but no people. The steel grid he could barely make out under the flooring probably meant the possibilities of instant electrocution should he not meet with the unseen onlooker’s approval. He studied that great set of doors now sliding shut behind him. Some kind of detection system there, too, he noted. Probably x-ray, flouroscope, metal detector— the whole works. One thing beyond the power of this Supreme Lord was dead certain: Whoever and whatever he was, he was scared to death.