Exiles at the Well of Souls

by Jack L. Chalker

  On the brighter side, all personal animosities were off. He was one of their own now, suddenly. They would be the weakest member of the alliance militarily, but the other monstrous partners in this coalition would have to depend entirely on a Dasheen to get there and get into the computer.

  He was taken around where former enemies who had suggested his imprisonment or death only a day before were now his blood brothers.

  "He must have his own herd!" one big shot insisted, and they all agreed.

  "Only a small one right now. Later—anything he wants!" another stipulated.

  "How about one from each of the five service guilds in town?" a third suggested. "More practical than giving him farmhands!" So he got five daughters, one each from the Metalworkers, City Service, Cooks and Waiters, Builders, and Housekeeping guilds—a perfect practical balance of skills.

  The Metalworkers also gave him his own brand, distinctive ring, and collar. His herd were all young, all virgins. He found that there was a lot of tradition and ceremony associated with unions.

  For one thing, daughters had numbers instead of names until they were assigned to a herd, whether farm or guild. The male, who was always called Master, would name them in the ceremony, then consummate the union, which bound her to him. She would then be branded, ringed, and collared. The whole process took five days.

  He loved every minute of it.

  In the meantime, subcouncils met, Yaxa came and went, and a percentage of every herd in the country was conscripted for military training. This worried some of the men, who wondered what the effect would be when so many cows were taught the art of killing. But there was much at stake here. As for the Yaxa, they didn't seem to find anything but amusement in that worry.

  The Yaxa, Ben learned, were female. After they mated, they ate their male mate. It was almost the reverse of Dasheen, and he couldn't help but wonder if Yaxa presence might give somebody ideas.

  Agitar

  Although Renard didn't know it yet, the Well World must have a sense of humor. The shock of waking up in an alien land as something else was much greater for him; he did not really remember anything since waiting before a big plain for darkness so they could avoid the cyclopses.

  He sat up and looked around. A nice looking place, he thought. Green trees here and there, nice fields growing various vegetables—even signs of hothouses and other modern conveniences. There was a small service road near him, obviously for farm vehicles going to the groves rather than for through traffic, yet it was macadam-paved. He was definitely in a rural area, but this was no primitive cyclops land.

  Far off in the distance was what appeared to be the ghostly skyline of a city. It looked kind of strange, the buildings kind of twisted or pointed, but that was to be expected.

  He had no doubt in his mind that he was still on this strange world where they had crashed. How he'd gotten here was a mystery; somebody must have brought him, that was for sure. Why couldn't he remember? The sponge?

  A sudden realization shot through him. He felt good. Really good. Totally clear-headed. He found he could remember things he hadn't thought of in years—and felt no trace whatever of the sponge-longing or its effects. Almost wondrously he thought of Mavra Chang. She alone believed that somewhere on this world sponge addiction could be cured, and she was right. He knew it, deep inside. He was free!

  But where?

  He rose to his feet and found himself somewhat out of balance. He fell forward, breaking his fall with his hands.

  It wasn't dizziness; it was balance. Something was wrong. He looked at the arm that had broken his fall. Short, stubby fingers with nails that looked more like claws. A deep-blue skin—

  He rolled over and sat up again. He felt something funny when sitting this way, and reached behind him. It was like he was sitting on a rock.

  No he wasn't. He was sitting on his short, stubby tail.

  His what?

  He looked down at himself. The skin was the deepest of blues, and thick and porous. At the waist a very thin curly body hair became suddenly tremendously thick. It was like sheep's wool, dense and curly. Except for being blue-black, his sexual organ looked fairly normal, which was a relief. He was no longer taking anything for granted. But his legs, very thick in the upper calf, were queerly shaped below, coming to a thin knee joint fairly high up, then going down to—

  Sharp, shiny-black cloven hooves?

  What the hell was going on here?

  The hooves looked too small to support his thick body. That must have been why he'd fallen—no large foot support. But—how was he supposed to walk, then? Crawl on his hands and knees? Or did the knack come with practice?

  For a brief moment he thought he'd become a cyclops. But, no, he had two eyes in the right places, and the feet and hair were definitely wrong, as was his odd complexion.

  He felt his head, wonderingly. Sharp pointed ears close to the scalp, but at least where ears should be. Nose seemed a bit large but felt normal. Even the teeth seemed normal. He'd lost six at various points in his life and never had them put back; but they were all there now, although the front ones felt a hell of a lot sharper and maybe a little longer, top and bottom, than he remembered.

  He had hair. He risked pulling a strand, and it was blue-black. It started in a V-shape in the center of his forehead, then spread out on both sides of the horns—

  Horns?

  Yes, they were there. Bony things, not long but sharp, and definitely a part of his skull.

  Kind of a triangular face, terminating in a sharp, thick, pointed goatee.

  All right, Renard, think it through logically, he told himself. But it just wouldn't wash. There was no logic to this. Only facts.

  Fact: He'd awakened in some alien land, cured of sponge, anatomically totally male, clear-minded, and in the body of some alien creature.

  Fact: He didn't know where the hell he was, what he was, or what was going on.

  Well, he told himself, no matter what, the only way to find out was to find somebody and ask. There was that city out there in the distance. Even hazy smog from some factory or other.

  He crawled on hands and knees over to a spindly tree a few meters away, and, grabbing it, managed to get to his feet. He was top-heavy, no doubt about it. And yet, when he calmed down and considered it, he realized that his sense of balance was tremendous. With a little practice, he could angle parts of his body differently, knowing somehow that certain combinations felt wrong, others right.

  In about half an hour he managed to stand without holding on to the tree. He did it repeatedly, and the ability pleased him. He also found that the tail went flush into the rectal cavity, so, when sitting, he didn't have to be uncomfortable.

  Walking, however, was a lot harder. After repeatedly falling down he crawled back to the tree, stood up, and resolved to succeed no matter what. He stepped out, going as fast as he could from a standing start. To his surprise, he stayed up, making the weight and balance compensations automatically. When he came to a halt, though, he almost always fell over again. More practice.

  The Well World gave you the means of adaptation to your new form, although Renard didn't know that. As the afternoon progressed, he got the hang of it more easily than anyone should have.

  This was, he decided, a fast-paced culture. The faster you went the better control you had. Still, he managed now to sort of half-run, and to stand still without falling on his face. It was enough. Subtleties could be gotten later. He could move on toward that city now.

  He followed the farm road until it reached a dead end. He realized he'd made the wrong choice, and retraced. At the pace he ran, he arrived at a main road before he knew it. What a road! A highway, really. A highway without vehicles, but with lots of people.

  And the road moved.

  It was a giant moving walkway, and people holding onto moving handrails moved along in ten lanes in either direction. The middle two lanes were reserved for commercial traffic; large boxlike containers with odd symbols and
sometimes graphics moved there on their own walkways, and he wondered how they got them off.

  Two other things struck him immediately. One was that the people wore clothes, which caused him a real problem. The males wore shirts and sometimes light jackets, with briefs to cover the nether regions. The females—well, that was another thing. He had heard the term "opposite sex" for years, but this was the first time the difference was graphic.

  Blue-skinned all, from the waist down the females appeared roughly human. Oh, they had the little tails, too, and their feet seemed to be a bit broader and more solid than human feet, but human enough. They mostly wore pants and sandals. But from the waist up—

  They were goats.

  Well, not exactly, he decided. The head was a rounded triangular shape with a long lower jaw running its length, and their noses were black and located at the end of the upper jaw. Their ears were the same pointed type as his own, and their horns short and more rounded than the males. Over the entire upper torso was that thick, woolly blue hair that was his from the waist down; the female's arms looked like a goat's forelegs except that they terminated in lone, thin, fragile-looking hands.

  They all had what appeared to be very large human breasts, almost gargantuan, and covered with either brightly colored bras or tied halters. And he got erotic sensations looking at them. Not just at the breasts, but at all of them. It amazed him. He began to realize just how much he had become this new creature.

  The lack of clothing concerned him most; obviously if he stepped out into that traffic he'd cause a stir. Nowhere was there any evidence that nudity was normal or accepted.

  He sat back down in what appeared to be a fruit grove to think. He was hungry; if he was going to skulk around or wait until dark to try and bargain for a pair of pants, he'd need something to sustain him.

  He eyed the large, orange fuzz-covered balls on the bushes around him. He'd seen peaches on New Pompeii; he knew they didn't grow on bushes like this, but he suspected that these were close enough, and very edible, since nobody would grow the things like this to poison anyone. He reached over and picked one.

  There was a crackle and a pop, and he felt some sort of release inside him that seemed to flow into his hand. The peach crackled; it was cooked solid, and suddenly very hot. He dropped it with an oath. He felt a dull burning sensation in his hand, but it wasn't from whatever had cooked the fruit but rather from the fruit heating up.

  What else? he wondered, both curious and anxious.

  He carefully reached out to pick up another fruit off the bush. He felt the sensation rising within him, and fought it. It seemed to subside, go down. He picked the thing and ate it. It tasted good.

  Trying to figure out what had happened, he reached over and probed the cooked peach; it was still warm. Somehow, he thought, my body contains hundreds, perhaps thousands of volts of electricity that can be discharged and renewed. He instinctively knew it, and the success he had in fighting the power the second time, when he expected it, showed that it could be contained or discharged at will.

  He picked up another peach, put it down in front of him, and kind of let the sensation flow, touching the peach with his index finger. He felt the sensation rise, flow into his arm, down it, and there was a slight crackle and the peach started smouldering.

  Where does that energy come from? he wondered. He considered the thick upper calves and thighs, and the tremendously dense hair there. That might well build up a static charge, he thought, particularly with all that running. A charge transferred to his body, to some sort of storage, discharging only when that body willed it.

  I could possibly electrocute somebody by shaking hands with him! he thought in wonder.

  He found he could feel the energy, even feel a slight loss after a discharge. It could be routed to any part of his upper body. Talk about a shocking embrace!

  He was still experimenting when a sharp voice said behind him, "If you're all through trying to burn the field down, will you kindly get up and tell me why you're sitting in a fruit field, stark naked, frying peaches?"

  He turned with a start. It was a male—whatever else he was. There was no mistaking his manner, the club and radio on his belt.

  He was a cop.

  * * *

  They had radioed for a lock-up cart, and it arrived. They hustled him into it, and it rolled down the moving roadway smoothly, bumping only when it reached a junction point where two belts met.

  How you got off or on the roadway was simple. There was a small set of casterlike wheels attached to the underside, and they, in turn, were attached to a basic electric motor.

  The cops provided their own electrical power.

  They rolled to a halt inside the police garage and took him out. A female desk sergeant, her goatlike head impassive, punched information into a computer and asked him questions.

  "Name?"

  "Renard," he responded.

  "Odd name," she commented. "Place and date of birth?"

  "The city of Barentsk, on the planet Muscovy, August 12, 4412 N.D.," he answered honestly.

  She stopped typing and looked at him. "You trying to be funny?" she asked. The two male cops flanking him didn't look amused.

  "No," he told her, trying to sound sincere. "Honest. Look, I crashed here in a spaceship, somewhere in a place inhabited by giant cyclopses, and then I woke up here. I don't know anything more than you do."

  She remained impassive, that rigid face incapable of showing emotion, but she said, "Less," cryptically, and punched something on the terminal. There was a flip-flop on the screen, and a new printout appeared, line-by-line. She nodded, looked at the two cops.

  "He's an Entry, all right. One of the drug addicts."

  "You sure," one of the cops responded. "He just looks like a Class-One nut to me."

  Renard felt insulted, but decided not to press the matter.

  "Look," the desk clerk said. "Take my word for it. Get some clothes for him from the lockup and then take him up to Lieutenant Ama's office. I'll call ahead."

  They reluctantly agreed, using the age-old principle of uncertainty: when you're not positive of your own position, pass the buck. They gave him some uncomfortable, tight-fitting briefs of a bright-white color, and a white T-shirt that was too large and obviously had been worn by a legion of people before him. The bright-white was obvious: the contrast with his deep-blue complexion was spottable a kilometer away. Jail clothes.

  Lieutenant Ama was a typical bored servant of the people who didn't like problems in his district. He also wouldn't answer questions of any kind, although he asked a number, obviously to make sure that Renard was indeed who he said he was. Nobody else would talk, either.

  He sat there for hours. He knew what was happening—at least he hoped he knew. Ama was calling his superior, who was calling his superior, who was—and so forth, until somebody decided what to do with him.

  Well, they fed him, anyway. They even showed him how you touched different points on the metal plate set in the wooden base to cook anything you liked how you liked it. He discovered that men were the cooks here. Women couldn't do it—didn't have the electrical capacity. They were, however, as immune to electrical shocks of any kind as the males. Renard wondered idly how you made love around here without burning the house down.

  He slept in an unlocked cell, and by the middle of the second day he was wondering if he'd been forgotten.

  He hadn't. A little into the afternoon, they came for him. Big guys—bigger than he was, anyway. It occurred to him that, since everything was to scale, he had no idea how big he was. Could be ten centimeters high or four meters high.

  Another trip, much longer this time, and then into a huge building that was shaped like a pyramid but with minaretlike towers all around. Into another office, this one obviously a big shot's, and more questioning. They had no doubts he was who he said he was; the questions were quite different this time.

  Most of them were about Antor Trelig.

  He told them
everything; he held nothing of his hatred back. He described the man who enslaved so many to terrible drugs, the depravities of New Pompeii, Trelig's mad ambitions. They took it all down.

  And, finally, they answered some of his questions.

  "Where am I?" he asked.

  The interrogator, a slighter-built man who wore glasses, thought a moment. "You are in Agitar, and you are an Agitar."

  "I'm still on the planet where I crashed?"

  Slowly, they told him the story of the Well World, the hexes, and some of the problems his arrival had caused.

  "You can't pilot a spaceship, can you?" the interrogator asked hopefully.

  "No," he admitted. "I was a teacher of classics and a librarian and sometimes a guard for Trelig's prisoners."

  The man thought for a minute. "You must understand our position in relation to you. Agitar is an advanced, technologically based hex. There is nothing electrical, I believe, closed to us, stemming from research on our own bodies. Science is king here. Now we prepare for a war, a war for those spaceship parts your party brought down. And here you are—totally illiterate, possessing absolutely no skills of use to us. Now you are an Agitar for the rest of your life. You're young, strong, but little else. You must be fitted in here, and when we look at this compilation, the only usable quality you possess is a familiarity with weapons and the ability to shoot straight."

  "Where are the others who came in with me?" he asked, no liking the direction of the conversation. "I would like to get in contact with the woman, Mavra Chang—"

  "Forget it," the other told him. "She's in the hands of the Lata, and, although they've stayed neutral so far, they are almost certainly philosophically, maybe actually, in opposition to us." He sighed. "No, I think there's only one place you would fit in now, and it'll do you good, work you into Agitar society with discipline."