Shadow of the Well of Souls watw-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  The Itun behind the front desk of the transients’ hotel seemed a bit larger and older and perhaps a bit more shopworn than the average denizen of the hex but was accustomed to dealing with alien types on a daily basis. Unable to form the kind of sounds that Common Speech required, it relied on one of the benefits of a high-tech hex: a small transmitter attached to the top of its head right above and between the eyes.

  “Lori of Alkhaz,” he told the desk clerk. “Party of two Erdomese. I was told that we would be expected.”

  Lower feet were already tapping something into an Itun terminal. The head cocked and looked down and read something on a screen.

  “Yes,” the clerk responded in a toneless electronic-sounding voice. “An Erdomese suite was prepaid for you. Do you have much baggage?”

  “Very little,” Lori responded. All that they owned was in one small pack.

  “Very well,” the clerk said, and pushed a small plastic card over to him.

  “Um—are there any messages for me?”

  “No, nothing. It would have shown on the console.”

  That was disappointing. “Uh, then—how do I find the room?”

  “Follow the key, of course,” replied the clerk, and turned to take care of someone else.

  Lori picked up the plastic card, which seemed a plain ivory white in color, turned it over, and shrugged. There was nothing imprinted on it at all, not even an arrow or a magnetic stripe.

  He was about to ask how the thing worked when he noticed that a tiny spot was pulsing a brighter white along one of the edges of the card. As he turned to face the lobby, holding the card out, the spot moved. He turned the card in his hand, but the spot moved to always keep the same relative position.

  “Come on, Julian. I think I have this thing figured out,” he said, and moved toward the rear corridor in the direction of the blinking light.

  “Moo!” Julian snorted. “I feel like a damned cow like this!”

  Youare a cow, Lori thought, but checked himself before he said it. Damn it! It was tough not to reflexively say something that sounded patronizing or offensive! And the truth was, Erdomese, for all their resemblance to equine forms, really were biologically closer to the bovine family with perhaps a bit of camel. Even their sexual temperament was more bovine, with the male overly dominant, competitive, territorial, and violent, the female by nature passive. Even the native language was divided and reinforced the differing natures; there were strict masculine and feminine forms of every part of speech, without exception. They were in a sense speaking two complementary but different languages in which every word form had two variants. In this dual track of Erdomese, the male spoke Erdomo, which was what he thought in, and the female Erdoma, which was what Julian naturally used.

  It was why they tried so hard to converse in English; to even think in Erdomese was to impose and reinforce the expected roles of attitude and behavior. It was, however, tough to get around without constant effort because the Well acclimation process imposed the native language as the primary one, since language defined a culture and the system was designed to ease the transition, not to fight it. Both of them lapsed into it more often than not; they thought in it, even dreamed in it, and it gave a heavy accent to and put a cast upon even their translations into their former native tongue.

  Living in a high-tech cosmopolitan hex, however, the Ituns were well aware of the burdens their comfortable home placed on most other races and did what they could. Corridors back into the hotel were wide moving walkways, and there were very large elevators at regular intervals. The key, however, kept telling them to go straight back, until they were at the back of the building itself. It then indicated a turn to the right, and they walked slowly down a long, wide corridor until the key suddenly stopped blinking and became a bright white in front of an extratall, extrawide door. Lori saw the slot and inserted the key, and the door slid open.

  “Air-conditioning!” Julian gasped in English, there being no term for it in Erdomese, but she quickly lapsed into the normal tongue, too tired to think straight. “I beg you please to shut the door, my husband, so that its coolness might not flee.” She plopped down on the cushions, still wearing the pack, obviously exhausted.

  Lori knew how she felt. Both had their tongues hanging out, panting, their forms, so suited to the desert need for retaining moisture, unable to sweat in the humidity.

  It probably wasn’t all that cool in the room; they were accustomed to greater heat than even Itus provided. But the air conditioner also dehumidified, and that created a level of comfort that was unbelievable.

  “I am never going to leave this room again. Ever,” Julian gasped. “I am going to live and die here.”

  He unhooked and pulled off the small pack on her back and tossed it into a corner, then slipped off the leather codpiece he wore that felt like it was cutting him in two and tossed that over with the pack. The thing was more for propriety than for protection, and he wondered if he really needed it so long as he wasn’t going to pay a call on the Erdomese consul. While a number of races wore bright and ornate clothing, many others wore little or none, even some of the most developed, unless it was needed as protection against the elements. Here—-well, he probably would, since there were enough Erdomese passing through Itus on various business that he might well be noticed. If and when they got farther away, though, so that he and Julian were more curiosities than familiar forms, he might just chuck it until needed.

  Clothes had been a mania with him once, as an Earth female; now, as an Erdomese male, they seemed totally uninteresting except for utilitarian value.

  He looked over at Julian and saw that she was asleep. She looked so tiny and nearly helpless without him, he thought. And so damned sexy… A whole rush of stereotypical Erdomese male attitudes, thoughts, and feelings came into his mind. The lingering aftereffects of the monks’ treatments, he wondered, without really fighting them, or was it the onrush of male hormones shaping him into somebody he didn’t know, somebody he should think of with disgust? Damn it, there was something new in his nature, something that made it a virtual turn-on that she was here and dependent on him. In a sense, that terrible feeling was beginning to define him. She was at least as smart as he was, perhaps smarter. Oddly, he valued that, too, so much that it was a real fear that she might not need him at some point, that she was essential to him while he’d been more an escape route for her. Away from that suffocating culture and away from any who might even know it, she might well eventually find him superfluous. The thought raised his insecurity to almost the fear level.

  And the old conflicts surfaced as well. Damn it, he liked having someone dependent on him for a change, even though it made him feel guilty as hell.

  What was at the heart of the conflict, though, was not that he could continue to suppress or fight that kind of feeling, but now, as things were, did he need it so badly that he might not put up the fight?

  Considering how mild her own reaction had been when the drug supply was exhausted and they became aware of the conditioning, he couldn’t convince himself deep down that despite her protestations, she hadn’t liked it in that role, too. No, no! That was a damned rationalization, no better than “Well, dressing like that, she asked for it.”

  Had she liked it? No, of course not, he told himself. Had he liked it, even to the far lesser degree that he’d experienced it growing up an Earth female? But the argument somehow failed to totally convince the dual nature within him.

  Maybe it was simpler but more insidious than that. In the end it hadn’t been a matter of liking it or not liking it. It had simply been easier, more comfortable not to be in a constant battle against one’s own language and culture, particularly when every personal moral victory was no more than that. That culture, that society, wasn’t about to change, ever. And neither were they from who and what they were now.

  He felt confused and depressed, as if his whole life’s attitudes had somehow now been proved bogus, a self-delusional sham. People o
n the bottom of systems always said they wanted equality, but did they, really? Or did they, deep down, yearn more to have the situation reversed? Did the oppressed really believe the ideals they espoused, or was that just rhetoric? Did they in fact really want to instead become the oppressors?

  It was his most disturbing fear, a fear that it might well go deep down in the “human” psyche as the sort of flaw people did not want to admit, even to themselves. But how many times had sincere reformers run for office against entrenched corrupt politicians and won, only to slowly turn into exactly what they’d run against? How many idealistic Third World revolutionaries had overthrown the horrors of dictatorship and been at best no better and often something worse? What kind of revolution had the feminist movement been when it had been limited to rich Western nations, while the women who made up ninety percent of the rest of the world’s female population remained mired in the muck?

  “The first thing the freed slaves from America did after founding Liberia was to build plantations and enslave the African native population…” He remembered that from a history lecture long ago.

  He wondered if that was why Terry and the news crew had been so cynical. They’d covered the Third World—Terry’s parents had been from the Third World—and they had more perspective than the closed, ivory-tower lives of the American and west European crusaders. Maybe that was why so much of the press in general was so cynical.

  How much easier it would have been for her if the Well hadn’t played its cruel joke on the two of them. If Julian had emerged as the male and Lori as the female, both could have retained far more of their core beliefs. Neither was really comfortable staring their alternate selves in the face, each playing the other’s role.

  And there was still Mavra Chang, an enigma from a previous universe for God’s sake, who’d chosen for her own reasons to live as the leader of a band of Stone Age women deep in the Amazon jungles. Instead of trying to dominate men or help create a new equal society, she’d rejected men and all that they’d built.

  And that brought up another point. It was only because of Chang’s call that they were in Itus, but what the hell did he owe Mavra Chang? It was Mavra Chang whose abduction of the whole crew had destroyed his life and led inevitably to Erdom and what he was now. Indirectly, even Julian was here because of her, since without her jungle adventures he’d have been nowhere near that damned meteor.

  True, Julian Beard and Lori Anne Sutton had both been at low points in their “real” lives when all this had happened, but he doubted that either of them had wanted this.

  But the question remained: Now that they were here, what did they owe that mysterious crazy woman?

  Well, of course, it was a job of sorts, something definite to do, and it got the both of them out of Erdom and might allow them to see some of this strange world. Although if there were many more of these “hexes” as miserable as Itus, he wasn’t sure his curiosity and enthusiasm could stand it. But that was exactly what it was and would remain. A job. A job that could be quit. A job in which he would feel no outstanding loyalties or long-standing obligations to the employer.

  Most of all, maybe it would be a chance to sort out, removed from cultural and church pressures, who and what they now were and what options there might be for the future.

  Fine words, but the dual nature persisted. The intellectual half wanted to make this a totally new start, to prove that things didn’t have to be the way they were back home no matter who was on top. But the other half, that dark, primal part of the psyche, wanted to bury Lori Anne Sutton, her ivory-tower ideals and her guilt trips, and become the new Erdomese man that the monks wanted. Even her logical side couldn’t work out a point to fighting it, considering how much everything was stacked against change. Without even a hope of change, how could clinging to the old ideas result in anything more than a life of frustration and misery?

  “Some men do run the world,” Julian had said. “The bad news is that you are not one of them.”

  Damn it all! It was a hell of a lot harder to fight this nature when a person was the one on top!

  He finally did begin to nod off when suddenly there was a series of steady beeps from a small room between the main one and the bath. He went in, anxious mostly to silence it lest Julian awaken, and discovered that while the small room was of a very odd look and design, it had all the earmarks of a telephone booth. There was a red bar that was beeping on the far wall, and above it a small speaker that could be detached if need be, and above it a small screen. Thinking fast, he did what seemed logical and pushed the bar.

  The screen popped on, and he was looking at the face of Mavra Chang.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, hoping he didn’t have to pick up or push anything to be heard. “I’m going to close the door.”

  He peered out, but Julian seemed to have just shifted position and gone back to sleep. He pulled the sliding door closed and turned again to the screen.

  “Holy shit!” Mavra Chang said, shaking her head. “Is that really you, Lori?”

  Chang’s whole appearance had changed. She seemed younger, her skin smoother, her hair expertly cut very short, wearing some kind of black pullover outfit. Cleaned up and made over, she looked very Chinese indeed. Only her big, dark eyes were the same, those ancient, weary, yet penetrating eyes.

  “Yes, it’s me. You knew how I wound up, surely. You were there.”

  “Yeah, I know, but it takes seeing for it to sink in, I think. I don’t know what my mental picture of you was really, but it wasn’t that. Don’t get me wrong, but it’s just not the Lori I knew.”

  “I—I’m not,” he admitted. “I’m just not sure exactly who I am now, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a shame you had to undergo all this before we could talk normally, but we’ll need brawn as well as brains on this trip, so it might just work out. I gather everything went okay. God knows the bribes I had to spread around—with accompanying curses and threats of curses—to make sure you got at least one of my messages. I decided to take a gamble on Greek; my Greek’s rusty as all hell, but it seemed a better bet than Latin or Portuguese.”

  “You picked one of the few I could handle,” he assured her. “Who would have guessed that we had something of a common language all along? We could have spoken back in the Amazon, at least by writing in the dirt.”

  “No, no. I was pretty far gone back there; it took the shock of coming through the Well Gate to bring some useful things back to me. I’d been in that jungle, by my best guess, maybe three hundred years or even longer. I think I was right on the edge of losing all memory of anything but the jungle. But that’s a long story for another time. Things are different now, and in many ways I’m as different a person as you are from the life back then.”

  Different, yes, but not in the same ways at all,he thought.

  He noticed that her words, although they sounded like they were coming in her voice with normal intonation and expression, weren’t really matching what her lips were forming. He had seen this on the ship as well. In fact, it had been very strange to walk into a room filled with a number of races, and understand some plainly while others made just weird-sounding noises or spouted gibberish. “You have a translator now,” he said a bit enviously.

  “Yeah, well, the one I had originally gave out long ago, and they’re only useful here, anyway. It was one of the first things I had done once I had the method and the means. It’s very quick, and there’s no more pain than the prick of a sharp needle. The trouble is, they’re not available at just any shop and they’re incredibly expensive. I’ve got quickly dwindling fortunes here and a very long way to go. And I assume that you have your wife with you—Jeez! That sounds funny to say!—and that she was some kind of soldier or pilot or something who came through ahead of us.”

  “Yes. She, in fact, was once a he. An American, like me and the news crew, only sent down by the government to help with the investigation of the meteor. He was in fact a space shuttle pilot. An
astrogeologist, I think. Got sucked in long before we entered while posing for a picture on top of the thing.”

  “Huh! Think of that! And you thought you had a shock! Believe me, it’s not at all unheard of for the Well to switch sexes when it switches forms, but it’s very rare to have two from so small a sample wind up the same race, let alone both switching sexes. In fact, I know of only one other case, and at least I think I understand why that one happened.”

  “I was thinking of that myself. She was so despondent in that culture that she was on the verge of suicide when I found her. Our marriage, I think, was the only thing that saved her life. It seems like amazing luck.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s luck and then there’s the Well. I can tell you about luck. The Well doesn’t have any means of reversing its first random decision once you’re processed and incorporated into this strange big family, but it monitors everything that goes on. I can’t help but wonder if it somehow sensed your Julian was in danger of death by its actions and used you to correct that when it had the chance. Now, though, you’re both on your own. Don’t count on the Well to save you anymore, either of you.”

  “Well, it might explain what happened, but I haven’t counted on the Well to save either of us from anything, anyway. In fact, you saved us from becoming good little loyal feudal types.” Quickly, he told her what had happened in the temple.

  “Wow! Nick of time, sounds like! Well, look, as comfortable as this high-tech hex might be, I don’t want to be here or any other spot too long. I’m already sure I’m being watched, bugged, and monitored, and I’m not even sure by who.”