Twilight at the Well of Souls wos-5

by Jack L. Chalker

  Dear Serge,

  Sorry to have missed you on the way in, but you’ll understand why I didn’t stop to chat. I wanted to get this off to you first to stop all the unnecessary killings of those Nathan Brazil copies. I’m in. You don’t have to do that any more. As you might have been told, I’m not doing this by choice, either. Frankly, the only real appeal all this has is that it promises some fun, a little change from the ordinary—but you’d understand that, wouldn’t you?

  I don’t understand you, I’ll admit that. It seems to me that what you want to do to me by force you have done to yourself—put yourself in a velvet prison. That isn’t the old Serge I used to tear up bars on dozens of worlds with. Not even the old S.O.B. who took me for a sucker the last time I was here. If you want out of that prison, then come and join me if you can. Contrary to what you believe, the spell won’t suddenly turn you into a thousand-year-old wizened corpse. You’ll just pick up where you left off. So if you want to be in on the big finish, just come on out at the right time. If you make it into the Well with me, I can even fix your problems. You have my word on it.

  You doubted my story about being God when most people swallowed it whole. We’re two of a kind, you and me. We understand each other. But whether I’m God or not, I know how to work these damned machines. That you know, so you know I can make good. Think it over. Even if you’ve changed so much we don’t meet again, well, it’s always a pleasure to match wits with you. But if you go against me this time, I’m going to whip you so bad that that long tail of yours will tie itself into knots of its own accord.

  My best, regardless. This is going to be fun, isn’t it? Like old times… And in that spirit, I am, as always,

  Nathan Brazil

  He held it there, staring at it over and over, then finally reached into his desk again, came out with a box, some matches, and a small ceramic tray. Striking a match, he lit the letter and held it until he had to drop it, flaming brightly, into the tray. Soon it was completely consumed. Only some small bits of ash still with traces of writing remained, and they were easily crushed into powder.

  Had he changed, really? he asked himself—and not for the first time, although this situation, and in particular that letter, had made him ask it with more intensity and urgency.

  Yes, he decided. He had changed—before the Well World. Decades as a smuggler, pirate, mercenary, you name it, had led him, toward the end of his life, to a feeling of bored malaise. He had decided that he had done everything he could do, conquered every world he was likely to conquer, bedded all the beautiful women he could want. He had done it all, and had a lot of fun doing it, but what was left? So he had taken his ship out, trying to get enough nerve to do himself in but unable to get over his strict Catholic beliefs he had turned his back on when still a young boy but which haunted him in his old age. Suicide, the one crime for which repentance was impossible… Continuing out, out into areas not yet explored or charted, he had found himself wishing that there was some new world, some new experience for him that would give new meaning to his life. Then there had been that odd distress signal, a look at a massive asteroid belt in a huge, sterile system circling a red giant, and, quite suddenly, here he had been on the Well World, the answer to his dream.

  Or was it? he now wondered. As a young Ulik he had started again from scratch, learned a new society, new culture, experienced a whole new range of sensuality while accumulating power. But that had been long ago.

  Now here he was, once again, at the same point he had been so long ago. There was simply nothing left to do. A velvet prison, Brazil had called it. But there were no Markovian holes to fall through this time, no new Well Worlds to start again.

  He thought again of Brazil. If he was as ancient as he claimed to be, he was well over fourteen billion years old. Fourteen billion years. The mind couldn’t really grasp that. He doubted Brazil’s could, really. Never changing, living the same life after a while, life after life. No rebirth, no new experiences. Same form, same old stuff, even limited by the technology of the people with whom he had marooned himself. Entry interrogations—of this new batch, anyway—said that they had tracked him down by research, for even he left records of a sort.

  Brazil had hardly been inconspicuous. He seemed to have been involved in every war and movement on Old Earth, always in the headlines, always in the forefront, yet clever enough that, even when his cover occasionally slipped, new legends were spawned. The Flying Dutchman, the Wandering Jew, Gilgamesh.

  Brazil was trying to escape terminal boredom and madness, Ortega alone realized. But what the hell do you do when you’ve done it all and there’s nothing left to do? You pilot a freighter between Boredom and Tedium and try and forget who you are, what you are, putting on a kind of mental shutdown.

  Brazil said this would be fun. Fun, of all things! And only to Ortega would that make perfect sense.

  And that left him with a problem. Should he take on Brazil once again, see if, this time, he was still the master of the dirty trick and underhanded blow, always in control? The temptation was there—it certainly was. It would, as Brazil said, be fun.

  But if he, Ortega, won, would there be a victory?

  If he only knew the answer to that one…

  Dillia

  Asam and Mavra Chang looked out on their army. It wasn’t huge, by the standards of the history of the universe, but it was immense in terms of the Well World.

  “Six weeks,” Asam muttered to himself, “all this in six weeks.”

  She heard him, turned, and smiled. “If we had more time, we’d do even better,” she told him. “The Entries are still coming through.”

  It was, in fact, mostly an Entry army, an army composed of creatures that flew, crawled, slithered, spun, and even oozed. Roughly a hundred and fifty to two hundred from something like eighty hexes—eight thousand alien creatures. To that were added over a thousand Dillians, the best chosen by Asam to avenge Dillian honor, and perhaps a thousand more native Well Worlders who decided, on their own or on orders from their governments, to join this side for the fight.

  Such an army had several problems, of course, mostly in terms of communications and logistics. Though simply insuring that the commanders of each racial company had translators and using Com speech where possible eased the former quite a bit.

  As for feeding the horde, they would take with them what they could and forage what they could not. They were not an army of conquest but one on the move; still, their sense of destiny made them disregard a lot of feelings about property rights where they were going. Almost half the force were herbivores, like the Dillians, and could get along most anywhere even if the fare was less than appetizing. For the rest, well, they’d taken on some provisions but they would never last—or keep—over the long march. Food worried Mavra most of all, since some of the species were perfectly edible to some of the others.

  Another problem was that they were getting too many from the west; redundancies better picked up along the way or left to prepare the way. Many simply hadn’t followed instructions, some couldn’t. One couldn’t adequately brief a billion-plus people.

  The premium went to weaponry, and some of it was formidable. Nontech hexes required the crossbow, sword, axe, and pike. The Dillians could hold their own there, with some of the others getting training as they went along. In addition to the Dillians some of the others could handle projectile guns. It took very little training to use a submachine gun effectively, only discipline.

  It was the high-tech hexes they feared. Dillia could not supply that sort of armament, and precious little could be bought or stolen by a neophyte army reborn naked into this world. And not much could be arranged for in six weeks, either.

  “I’m just amazed that so many of the hexes who voted against us are represented here,” Mavra noted. “I would have expected a lot more trouble.”

  Asam shrugged. “Not that many hexes will actually lay their lives on the line, no matter how they side politically. There’s a prett
y good backlash of feeling that things would be a lot nicer if we’d only go away, which is what we’re trying to do. That’ll intensify when a force this size crosses a border. It’s easy to rattle the saber if the enemy’s five thousand or more kilometers distant.”

  She nodded hopefully, then said, “But some will fight.”

  “Some will fight,” he agreed. “And the decisive battle they’ll try and force will be a nasty one. Don’t kid yourself on that. A lot of these people will die before this is done.”

  That was a sobering thought, and for a while she was silent. Finally she said, “There’s word that a deep-water army is forming, too. Did you know that?”

  “I expected as much,” he replied. “Gypsy said we weren’t the only ones—and each hex is getting an equal number of Entries. Remember, Brazil called a lot of his old buddies to him, and there was the crew of your little world. I expect that deepwater force will be necessary, too.” He took out an overall map and studied it.

  “You think he’s really going by sea, then?” she asked. “Up the Josele-Wahaca Avenue?”

  “Seems logical,” Asam replied. “I’ll bet something is, anyway. This computer of yours, the one that planned this, seems to have been quite a dirty trickster so far.”

  She nodded. “And it’s a combination. Obie, Brazil, and Gypsy.” She paused. “Gypsy… I wish I knew more about him. Who he is. What he is. He scares me, even though he’s on our side. He’s like an Obie himself, all that huge computer capacity embodied in one being.”

  “But your computer mostly did that sort of thing to other people,” Asam pointed out. “This Gypsy can only do it to himself.”

  “So he says,” she retorted. “I’m not sure I totally trust him.”

  “Your computer trusted him,” he noted.

  She nodded. “But if he has equal power to Obie, then Obie could have been fooled. He’s too convenient, too good to be true.”

  “We can’t do anything about it,” he said philosophically. “When the time comes, we’ll know—and then deal with it as best we can. What else can we do?”

  She nodded grumpily. As it was, there were too many things in this operation that smelled. Enough to fool Ortega and the Council? She wondered. Who was fooling who?

  The army moved. It was fairly easy at first, traveling up through Gedemondas along well-established trails, camping in long lines where possible and posting nocturnals as guardians of the camp. No opposition was expected in Gedemondas, of course, but it worried Asam that, strung out as they were and in cold, high altitudes, they were as vulnerable as they would ever be. Nothing opposed them, though. Gypsy had been correct; they would be unimpeded until Brazil, somewhere, sometime, surfaced.

  She had hoped to contact or gather Gedemondans in the passage, but they were out of sight as usual. Occasionally one would be spotted, far off, or they would hear the eerie calls of the great white creatures echoing through mountain passes and around rocky walls, but nothing else. She was more than disappointed; she felt she had gone through that whole damned trip for nothing.

  On the western slope of the Gedemondan mountains was a plain, the only flat area in the whole hex. Looking out on it from the high trail, she had the first twinges of memory.

  That plain, so empty and peaceful now… She remembered a different time, a time when far different armies converged on that plain for a horribly bloody battle so very long ago.

  Down on the flat, the sensations were even greater. They had come through just before the major armies had converged, she recalled. And over there they had met their Dillian guide, by that cabin—no, not that cabin, but the cabin’s predecessor, perhaps. And there from the north, had come the Yaxa on great, soaring orange wings…

  She talked about it a lot with Asam, who had become her closest friend and confidant. He was warm and kind and understanding—and fascinated by her memoirs of a great event that he knew only from the dimness of history books.

  Alestol, to the south, with its carnivorous plants exuding poisonous and hypnotic gasses, they were happy to bypass. The Alestolians had massed on the border, it was true, but could not get at the army if it didn’t come to Alestol. Although mobile, they were plants, they required occasional rooting in a soil that contained a certain balance of minerals and suspended gasses necessary to their continued existence. That had left Palim as the focus of intense diplomatic activity, with the council and Mavra’s forces playing on the huge, elephantine creatures. Their’s was a highly advanced high-tech hex whose inhabitants weighed in at more than a ton each.

  But they were gentle giants; they had withdrawn when the warring forces of the Wars of the Well had approached, working out safe passage for one while taking no sides. There were never more than twenty thousand or so Palims in their entire hex—and, therefore, their entire race. They could see no profit in a fight and had voted abstention on the council. They abstained now.

  But a hundred and twenty-one of them, all Entries, all former Olympians, joined the force. They were welcome. As herbivores they would place only a slight drain on supplies, but they could carry ten times the weight of any Dillian without even noticing—and just the sight of them was fearsome.

  Next was Olborn, about which Mavra Chang still had nightmares. A theocracy whose magic could transform enemies, dissidents, and even casual travelers into donkeylike beasts of burden, they had almost done it to her. For many years she had suffered, half-human, half-donkey, because of them. Her only solace was that the long-ago war had not been kind to them.

  And yet, they had voted on the council with the opposition. She had to wonder if her name, after all those centuries, was still cursed in Olborn.

  And, true enough, at the border their advance aerial scouts told them that a large armed force of Olbornians was waiting for them. They even brought back photographs of the massed troops, great cats that stood upright and wore some kind of livery that indicated a well-organized army.

  “Should be relatively simple,” Mavra commented, looking at the photos. “This looks like the way they lost to the Makiem alliance a thousand years ago. We just outflank them and cut them to pieces.”

  Asam shook his head worriedly. “Uh uh. Think about it. It may be in the dim past for me and most o’ the Well World, but that was the most significant event in their history, not to mention the most humiliatin’. I just don’t think they’d be dumb enough to do it again. Just a gut feelin’, o’ course—but there’s some dirty work afoot here.”

  “I don’t know…” she responded hesitantly.

  “We’ll pull up close to the border but we won’t cross right off,” he said firmly. “I want more recon, day and night, of that area. They’re just too much like targets in a shootin’ match.”

  “Those are machine guns they’re packing,” she pointed out. “And those are gun emplacements. This isn’t any pushover—particularly with that swampy area, there, of over fifteen hundred meters. They’ve cleared it—see? We’ll be coming into them, there in the trees, over fifteen hundred meters of open ground that’s also soggy, maybe even quagmire.”

  “You’re thinkin’ too much in the past,” he admonished. “I know a little o’ the history here. Hell, woman, that damned war was the most interestin’ thing in the history books to me! After them pussy cats got sliced to pieces by the Trelig alliance, well, it blew hell outa their religion. I mean, how can you be the Well World’s chosen people and get wiped up like that, like I’d swat a fly with my tail? They turned on the priests, there was a wholesale massacre, and a real revolution. O’ course new, strong leaders finally took over. Hard rule was clamped back on, this time by what was left o’ the military and the aristocracy. They got tramped on because they didn’t truck with other folks, other hexes. Nobody to help ’em out. This is a pragmatic lot now. Bet on it. And they been workin’ on their magic, too. I think we got trouble if we do the expected thing here. I want a lot more recon here—and I want a staff meetin’ soon after.”

  “All right, all right,”
she said, surrendering. “It’s your show.”

  Asam frowned at the photographs. “How many scouts did we send out?” he asked worriedly.

  “Fifteen, I think,” somebody replied. “All aerial, of course.”

  He nodded. “And how many got back?”

  “Why, all of them,” the officer, another Dillian, responded. “I don’t even remember a report of anybody being shot at.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he murmured. “Damn! It don’t make sense a’tall! Not a bit! Five thousand pussy cats all lined up in neat rows, so’s they’re easier to attack, and fixed gun emplacements so obvious we could wipe ’em clean with an air attack. And with all that firepower there, do they take shots at us? Try and knock us out o’ the air? They do not! They sit there, posin’, and smile for the camera. It stinks, I tell you. Stinks wors’n a Susafrit—beggin’ yer pardon, there.”

  One of the commanders, a strange, round creature with short quill-like hairs all over its body, just shrugged. She was used to it by now: to all but her own kind, her race literally stank when it wanted to. It came right out of the pores in the skin.

  “Now, then,” Asam continued, “let’s take a look here again. What would you say the regular, orthodox military move would be here?”

  “Use our flying people to drop hell on them,” one of the commanders said. “Then, when they scatter to their positions, send forces of one or two thousand on either side and close in on the main one when we get into position. Encircle and that’s it.” It sounded simple.