Twilight at the Well of Souls wos-5

by Jack L. Chalker

  The women, it turned out, provided the labor. They not only bore and raised the young, they farmed the limbs, harvested the vines and fruits, created the special mulches for better yields, and were also the craftsmen and manufacturers. Working in wood was elaborate work here, since it was incredible and ornate, yet it had to be done without killing the tree. They built and maintained highly detailed homes inside the trees and created the intricate woodwork, the distinctive furniture, objets d’art, and household equipment, such as vases. They also made strange musical instruments for elaborate compositions—written by men, of course—and the tools and weapons for their own work and for the men’s sport.

  They reached a tree—her tree, Dhutu told her— and landed on a lower limb. “This is a new tree,” she was told, “that is, it was acquired in a trade with the Mogid clan, who needed additional fruit production. We had extra fruit trees off near their border, they had some spare life trees near by, and we needed new space. It has caused us great excitement, for such a thing has not happened before in any of our memories. We are only now starting to develop the tree properly, work in which you will share.” She said it with such enthusiasm that Yua supposed that she was expected to feel thrilled or something at that.

  They entered a large cavity and descended a ladder to a lower floor that was more developed. The trees were huge; she guessed that the tree must be thirty or more meters in diameter, with its own life system in its outer area. The trees seemed naturally hollow, so there was little damage done by living inside them, but what was done inside was something impressive indeed.

  The new level was in the process of being transformed. Females busily worked hand-sanding areas, using planes and small tools to refashion and reshape the interior into something that looked more manufactured than grown, yet with such thought that it used the contours of the tree and the tree’s various natural wooden supports to good benefit. Shaping, sanding, polishing, and finishing were all being done in different areas. Artisans also worked carving elaborate designs into the wood. It was obvious that the thick flooring was also mostly natural, but it had been finished so slickly that it was now completely level, shined, and polished like finished wood on furniture.

  Dhutu stopped and called out, “My sisters! Meet our new sister, Yua, who will join us!” The others halted their work, turned, nodded to her in friendly fashion, then went back to work. “Come on, let’s get you settled in,” the Awbrian continued, and went to a neatly concealed trap door, opened it, and climbed down. Yua followed. There seemed nothing else to do.

  Lower levels were finished and appeared all the more impressive. What was most fascinating, she thought, was the way in which some sort of luminous sheen had been carefully applied all around, allowing the light from very tiny glass-covered lamps to illuminate those huge rooms. The living tree was moist enough that the small oil lamps provided almost no threat of fire, but a huge blaze, like the kind that would be required to illuminate the room in normal circumstances, would have been far too dangerous even if there had been some outlet for the smoke.

  On one level they did not stop at all, and it was blocked by high curtains from floor to ceiling from view. “The men’s quarters,” Dhutu explained, and they continued. The next level was living quarters for a number of older Awbrian females, the supervisors of this world. “All are past their Time,” Dhutu whispered enigmatically. “Respect must be shown them at all times.”

  Yua was taken to one ancient Awbrian, who was reclining on a soft, huge pillow, somewhat catlike in manner. Yua needed no guide to know that this one was old indeed; her bill was blotched with odd marks of age, and her fur seemed mottled not only with white but with mange. Her hands were wrinkled and withered, and she was so thin she looked almost skeletal; her skin, already loose because of the membranes, seemed to hang baggy and limp all about her, from face to tail.

  “Revered grandmother,” Dhutu said, bowing slightly, “this is the one we have been told to expect.”

  The ancient female peered myopically at the Entry. Finally she said in a cracked, withered voice, “You are one who was once some other creature?”

  Deciding that it was better at this stage not to anger the leadership, particularly the lower-echelon leadership, Yua nodded but said nothing.

  The elder seemed satisfied. “You won’t like it here,” she said abruptly.

  Yua decided that called for a comment. “It is not what I am used to,” she admitted. “I admire the trees and the work, but not some of the ways I have been told you have here.”

  The elder nodded. “What work did you do—before?” she asked.

  “I was a speaker, a traveler, a… a religious leader,” Yua replied, groping for the right words in this new tongue.

  “I suppose you could hold a book so it would talk to you?”

  Yua nodded. “I could—but in my old tongues, of course.”

  The elder Awbrian sighed. “You won’t like it here at all,” she repeated with emphasis, then fell silent for a time so long that Yua felt awkward and feared the old one had fallen asleep. But Dhutu still stood there respectfully, and so she thought she might as well do likewise.

  Finally the old female opened her eyes again and looked right at Yua. “Better you had been a carpenter, or farmer, or artisan,” she croaked. “You have no skills of use here, so you are fit only for the most boring, repetitive, unskilled work. It will drive you mad. You will try to show your cleverness, and if there is one thing men will not allow, it is that in women. You will be a threat, and threats must be dealt with. Eventually they will send you to a Healer and then you will think no more.”

  Yua considered this. “You don’t sound very dumb or ignorant yourself,” she noted.

  The old one’s bill curved in the Awbrian version of a smile. “But I am a survivor,” she said proudly. “Growing up in this society I found ways to be clever and to learn but never to betray that fact. It is something born of a lifetime’s experience, and you have not the lifetime to learn it. It is called subtlety, I believe. And to what end? To spend my last days on a cushion inhaling drugged vapors and dreaming of what a waste it all has been?”

  If Dhutu was shocked by all this, she showed no sign. In fact, she barely moved at all.

  “I should think,” Yua almost whispered, “that there is more here to this society than meets the eye of a newcomer—or a man.”

  Again that smile. “Yes, that is so. Within the clans are the guilds, and within the guilds are things that— help. A hidden school, you might say. I tell you this only because it will be more obvious to you than to the men, and you will get along better if you make no obvious betrayals, to ask no wrong questions. You understand the men’s rule here is absolute. You are property, not a person at all. They may do anything with you they wish, and you have no rights or say in the matter. As a result, all that we do is at great risk, yet it is necessary. We have the same brains and talents as they, yet we cannot show it. We must work far in the background, so that our own ideas are thought of as men’s ideas, not ours. It is the way we progress, and it is the only way possible.”

  “But why?” Yua wanted to know. “Why is it so? This system looks ripe for revolution.” She struggled with the last concept, which had no equivalent in the Awbrian language. The word came out something like “changing the way things work,” but it made the point.

  The elder sighed. “My child, you do not yet know or understand. When your first Time is done you will understand that this way is the only way. Now go. I release you from work until your first Time and clan induction. After that, things will be clearer to you. After that you may want to kill yourself.” Her eyes narrowed. “And remember, if there is any chance that you might, even accidentally, betray what you now know, you will have an even easier, and more sudden, out.”

  With that threat the interview was over. The old woman settled back, took up a small box filled with some fine white powder and form-fitted to her bill, inhaled deeply, and seemed to sink into some kind
of pleasant oblivion. Dhutu gestured and they went out, down to the next level.

  The women stayed in spartan quarters on several levels, divided according to guild—carpentry, farming, artisan, etc.—with the bottom-most level left for those without guild or classification. It looked much like the others, a barren hall with straw pillows for sleeping, an ingenious plumbing system where outer waterfalls were tapped and brought through the thick trunk and then back out again, and toilet facilities, open to all, flushed in the same manner by the force of a trickle of running water in a trough. But unlike the trough for washing, bathing, and the like, the toilet outlet went to an area below the lowest level, where a natural system filtered it out. The fecal matter of the Awbrians helped nourish the tree, so it was a clever system, but it made the level just above one nasty stinking place —and that, of course, was the level for unskilled and non-guild workers, her level.

  “You’ll get used to the stench,” Dhutu assured her. “After a while here you don’t even notice it any more. We all started in a level like this. Most of your sisters will be very young and not yet apprenticed to guilds —or very, very stupid. You understand.”

  Yua nodded less than enthusiastically. “Dhutu, there’s something I’m still puzzled about. This thing about my ‘Time.’ At first I misunderstood you, thinking you were talking about time in general. But you’re not. The ancient one above referred to it. What does it mean?”

  Dhutu hesitated a moment. “Best you experience it. It is hard to describe. It is just your Time, that’s all. You’ll see. Then you will not need it explained.”

  That wasn’t satisfactory, but despite all her pressing, that was all she was going to get.

  The next few days passed slowly, but she was allowed some freedom to see the kind of work that went on in making a life tree ready and was given some introduction to the type of life they lived here. The different kinds of trees for different purposes interested her. Only some of the trees were life trees, huge with hollow interiors able to support colonies of Awbrians; some grew specific fruits; others offered nothing on their own but had flat branches with depressions in them in which the mulch, mixed from chewed bark, straw, insects, and lots of other stuff and molded together by saliva from glands only the females possessed, was deposited and then the mess seeded expertly, fertilized, and tended lovingly until a crop of some kind of vegetable or even straw was raised.

  She grew more puzzled, too, at Obie’s grand design. Something, she felt certain, had gone wrong. She was to organize and lead an army, or as much of one as possible, rallying others along the way to her cause, finally linking up in some place called Glathriel with forces raised by Marquoz and Mavra Chang, wherever and whatever they were now. But even if she knew where that was, and where she was, the Awbrian system made it all but impossible for her to do what was required. And she couldn’t really see what sort of skills the Awbrians possessed, anyway. Perhaps she had become the wrong thing, she feared. Or, possibly, Obie did need the Awbrians for some reason, some balance of forces—there was the omnivorous character and the flying, for example—perhaps he forgot in his encoding of her to specify sex. Perhaps she should have been an Awbri male. It would make more sense.

  Time was running out, too. In a very short while the flood of people into the Well World would begin —if it hadn’t already. The Well World’s population was due to double, even in Awbri. In some cases the system would break down completely. Perhaps, she thought hopefully, when Olympian Entries outnumber the Awbrian population the revolution would come automatically and she would then be in a position to rally and lead them. Perhaps. She could only hope and wait, impatiently.

  Several times she thought of escape, but that seemed a dead end. She alone would not rally anything; each hex was like a separate alien planet anyway, and she had no idea where on the world she was.

  But it was maddening all the same, made even more so by this totally degrading existence.

  A week after she arrived she started having odd feelings, strange dreams she couldn’t quite relate to any reality, and hot and cold flushes. She was afraid she had become ill, but the others assured her what she was experiencing was normal, natural. She was approaching her Time.

  And, one morning, she awoke to it in full. She felt an enormous ache, an absolute need to be satisfied, like a drug addict too long without her drug. It was a craving beyond reason, beyond belief. Her entire body ached with longing and she could not think at all, couldn’t get control of herself. Her entire being wanted, needed, desired only one thing, and nothing else would matter until she got it. The elders knew, too, and made the arrangements, and soon she was up on the upper-level quarters, in the quarters of the males, and they in turn gave her what she wanted, needed, craved. She had no idea how many of them there were, nor how long it took, nor, afterward, could she even remember anything of the experience except the tremendous, ultimate pleasures it brought and the fact that she would have done anything, anything at all, for them.

  Later she learned it had lasted for two days and nights—about average, they told her. And it recurred about every six weeks except during pregnancy—the hormones pregnancy triggered made an individual docile and somewhat dreamy, increasing more so as term neared.

  She felt even more degraded, not merely from the experience but because of her own uncontrollable passions. She had had sex before, as an Olympian, but it had been nothing like this. Nothing. This was in and of itself a drug, a feeling so pleasurably intense and so total that the memory remained as a pleasing ache and her mind kept anticipating her next Time even as her intellect feared and abhorred it.

  And this, she realized, was the trap. This is what they meant, why there had been no revolution nor was there a likelihood of one, and why the men were so secure in their position. The women could rebel, all right—and the men would simply wait for the Time to bring the rebels crawling, begging, so much in heat they’d probably kill their best friend if that friend tried to stop them. Here was a cruel biological control on this society, and an absolute one. The female reproductive system, it seemed, was very chintzy with its eggs, and even with this system pregnancy was usual only once in every two or three years. Conditions, both for male and female, had to be absolutely perfect to produce young.

  About the only positive thing was that all the women now called her “sister” and she received far better treatment from everyone in the clan, even from the very few males she ran across. She was one of them now.

  All this made her reflect once more on the ancient matriarch’s comments and warnings. Something had definitely gone wrong with Obie’s plans and now she was trapped, totally trapped. Even escape was now out of the question, since the Time was open-ended and continued until release was found, and there was only one way to get that.

  That night, totally down, facing assignment the next day combing through the dung accumulation and gathering enough for certain kinds of fertilizer, she slept, finally, fitfully, and she dreamed. She was aware that she was dreaming, yet it seemed so real. She was an Olympian again and she was bathed in a strange, shimmering purple glow. There was a presence there with her, she sensed. All around, all-encompassing.

  “Obie?” her dream self called out.

  “I’m here, Yua,” came the familiar tenor of the great computer.

  “But you’re dead!” she protested. “I’m dreaming all this!”

  “Well, yes, I must be dead or at least badly damaged,” the computer admitted. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this little chat. Obviously my fears were realized—the union with Brazil badly damaged or destroyed me and, therefore, the job must be done the hard way. Too bad. If he just hadn’t been so obstinate I could have beamed him down to the Well World at an Avenue and we wouldn’t have had these problems.” He paused. “Well, who am I kidding? With the rip in space-time I was too screwed up to do the job anyway. It doesn’t matter. It only matters that, if we’re talking like this, you must be in Awbri and past your first Time.”
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br />   She started in surprise. “You know about that? But —what am I saying? This is a dream. Wish-fulfillment, nothing more. I’m not really talking to you.”

  “You’re right on most counts but wrong on that last one,” the computer responded. “Yes, this is a dream. You’re asleep somewhere in the bottom of a tree in Awbri right now. And, yes, I’m not really here or near by. Even if I could get there, I doubt that I would have the power to overcome that nullified space and that tremendous short circuit of Markovian energy. But we are having this conversation—already had it, in fact. When you went through me for the last time, all of this was planted by me deep in your subconscious to pop up at the proper moment. Only after you’d gone into heat for the first time could it come out. You had to know what you were up against.”

  “I don’t really believe this,” she told herself and the ghostly computer. “I’m just fantasizing what I desperately want to happen.”

  “Well, fantasize this, then,” Obie came back. “Right now you’re seeing a map of your area of the Well World, and you see where you are in relation to Glathriel. Also in your mind at this point is a briefing on the lifeforms and such of the hexes in between.

  And, here, I’ll give you a complete political-topographic map of Awbri as well. You’ll need it before long.”

  And it was true. There it all was, in glowing detail, so much a part of her mind now that she doubted she could ever forget it. She began to feel a glimmer of hope that, perhaps, her dream might be real.

  “But what good does all this do me, Obie?” she asked, still defeated. “If you had made me a male, I might have done something, but this!”