Shadow of the Well of Souls watw-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  He shrugged. “I suppose that summarizes it. But he wasn’t her husband. As far as I can tell, she never had one. I’m not sure what the relationship with this man was, but he, too, is here, and they are no longer friends but enemies. Still, you seem to be blaming her for leaving him when we don’t know the reason. We don’t even know if she left him or some accident separated them and they never again found one another.”

  “All I can see is that she wants to be a man and cannot accept the idea that she is not. She has the same kind of demon that made my life so horrible, and she will stay miserable, unstable, perhaps dangerous, until she accepts what she is as I did and casts that demon out.”

  “She doesn’t want to be a man,” Lori responded. “If she did, she might well have become one, if the powers of that Well are what she claims, and she didn’t. She simply wants to be self-sufficient and have the same degree of independence, the same choices and respect, that the man had.”

  “Perhaps.”

  He was irritated. “Remember, she came from a civilization we would think of as far advanced, a civilization with ships that sailed between the stars and one that did not have the same attitudes that we have. She was unprepared for the primitive early history of Earth.” He paused. Did Alowi even remember Earth?

  She didn’t seem to, but she answered. “I know only that their race is much like ours. There are males and females. They have different bodies and lives and each can do things the other cannot, but they need each other to do those things. I can cure your ills and bear and raise your children. You cannot do these things, but you protect me from the evil that is everywhere and you provide for my own needs. When each does what he or she does best, there is contentment. When each tries to do the other’s role, there is no contentment, and no one can really perform another’s role. You did not make yourself, your role, or this way of life. Neither did I mine, nor do we truly have the choices we might like. But to pretend that you are what you cannot be leads to madness. This I believe.”

  Lori started to continue the argument, then realized it was useless to do so. Even Julian might have thought along those lines, although perhaps a bit more sophisticatedly. He’d never been an Earth-human woman.

  Still, Alowi had made a practical point he’d been wrestling with all along. Here at least, as an Erdomese, on this world, did he really have that many choices in how to act, how to live, and what he could do? The priests, the whole culture, wanted stasis. Everyone and everything in its proper place. Biology was stacked against the Erdomese, too, almost forcing on them the ancient traditional roles. What was it Tony had told him? She could adjust to being a woman, but she could never become what Anne Marie wanted. She couldn’t still be Tony, the gentleman pilot from Brazil; to avoid madness, she had to accept and become what she now was. Hell, Lori Ann had never wanted to be a man. Never. And yet, now that she was a he, there were more basic differences than Lori Ann would have thought, yet few practical differences in day-to-day terms. When one became a different species of animal, the sexual differences seemed even more trivial, anyway.

  The practical differences, the ones that crossed from the old species Homo sapiens to the new, were in social terms: the ability to walk freely down strange streets without more than pragmatic caution, for example. A whole level of fear was removed from the simplest social interactions, as well as the constant uncertainty of whether the strangers one met were seeing one as another person or as an object. That far outweighed the physiological differences, and it mattered. He was quickly becoming accustomed to the physiological change, as was Tony, but it was the sociological change that had made him feel somehow free. There was much about being a man he didn’t like; in its own way it was as confining and restrictive a role as the female’s. Yet he wouldn’t want to trade this absence of a massive layer of tension for anything.

  Maybe that was it, he thought. Compromise. Fully accept what one now was and the role and situation one was now locked into but never forget the values and achievements of who one once had been. Tony still had those skills and that knowledge from the past and maybe could appreciate things more because she’d been on both sides of the coin. She could retain her kind heart, too, and the love of Anne Marie’s spirit and inner strength that she masked with that little old lady act. Tony wasn’t his old self, and she wasn’t Anne Marie, either, no matter how identical they were; she was compromising, no, synthesizing into a whole new person. Maybe Lori had to finally do that, too. Accept, become Lori of Alkhaz, an Erdomese male and husband, keeping what was valuable and universal but not letting Lori Ann torture him every time he did something that she might disapprove of. Julian couldn’t synthesize, and so she broke instead, retaining only the pragmatic part.

  Might that, in the end, be the problem of the two immortals? To go so long, through so many lifetimes and cultures, not only unchanging but unable to change. Somehow he suspected that if somehow ancient folk long dead could be resurrected and taken to either this Brazil or Chang, they would instantly recognize them and find them much the same. Even growing up a person changed, often radically—from helpless infant to dependent child, through rebellious teen years and hopeful twenties and thirties, into middle age, when life’s course had been set and for the first time death became a reality as the years passed subjectively at a faster and faster clip, and finally into the combined wisdom and resignation of old age. Just as pictures in the photo album showing the same person at all those stages somehow also showed completely different people, life was a constant series of radical changes.

  But not for these immortals. They hadn’t changed in so long, they could remember being no other way. Endless, unchanging life—probably passing at breakneck speed to them but never getting them anywhere—had made even the chance of new experiences slim. They could fight against the system as Chang had and suffer, or they could roll with it and drift as this Solomon, or Brazil, apparently did. Eventually, even Mavra Chang had stopped fighting and had withdrawn to the most basic of all human existences. Now she was racing the fellow with an idea to making the next time different.

  But would it be?

  Just the little he’d seen of the Well World—and his understanding of it as a laboratory for founding new races and seeding the vast numbers of worlds in the universe—-had convinced him that those Ancient Ones had probably thought of just about all the themes and variations that could be imagined. In Gekir, women ruled and the men were bimbos. He hadn’t yet seen one, but he’d heard that there were asexual and unisexual races here, and other races with more than two sexes. Dillian society sounded as if it was like the better places on Earth, but Tony could never be regarded as “one of the boys” and there would always be a social-sexual separation no matter how equal the opportunities and how safe the roads.

  There were 1,560 races here, from the radically different to the fairly similar, and who knew how many had been developed before this final batch was left at the end? And after all this time, had any of them developed the true Utopia? If so, he hadn’t heard of it.

  Mavra might well be able to radically change the race of Earth. But if she did it too much, would it still be human or just another experiment? And if but little, would it make a difference? One might well be able to program all sorts of physiological stuff, but who was smart enough to program social development, attitudes, and cultures over the life span of a race of people? Maybe even this Brazil still believed deep down that there must be a better way but knew he wasn’t omnipotent enough to create and maintain it. Greece, Rome, but also the Mongol hordes and the Vandals and Visigoths. Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed, but also Attila the Hun, Napoleon, Stalin, and Hitler.

  One might well get something different, but how would one ensure that it was superior when even a race that was close to godhood as evolution could produce couldn’t figure that out?

  Could it be that the dark side of the human soul was just as essential to the evolutionary development and growth of a race as the beautiful side? Depressi
ng thought, but otherwise why did the Ancient Ones leave it in?

  And if he could think of this, why hadn’t Mavra Chang? Perhaps confusing immortality with wisdom wasn’t a smart thing to do. He began to get the eerie feeling that he was better qualified to play god than she was, and he had no real desire to take on that awesome and impossible responsibility. He knew he just wasn’t smart enough to do it. Nobody was.

  Maybe this Brazil knew that, which was why he always remade things the same. The fact that Mavra Chang apparently didn’t see this trap was unsettling. She wasn’t really out to correct humanity; she was out to avenge herself against the forces that had hurt her.

  And that was the most uncomfortable feeling of all. When push came to shove, as it inevitably would if they got to this Well, on which side of this strange race should his sword fall?

  He looked at Alowi. “I think I’d like to go on deck. I can hear all sorts of noises up there, and I’d like to see what’s going on. Do you want to go or stay here?”

  “I will do as you wish.”

  “No, this is not one of those kind of decisions. Do you want to go up there or remain here?”

  “I do not like those creatures above,” she admitted, “but if it is my choice, I will go where you go.”

  “For the record, I don’t like them much, either, but come on. We’re going to have to live with them for a while, it seems.”

  Darkness had fallen, and the lights of the city market area were still very close, but they had definitely pulled away from the small private dock and were in the process of turning the ship toward the channel. The two spiderlike beings were up in the twin masts, and the rest of the small crew were tending ropes on the starboard side of the ship. Lori stayed as far from the action as possible and peered over the side. There, in the darkness, two huge longboats filled with very large Gekirs pulling on oars were guiding the ship like tugs in a big harbor. The captain, barely visible in the darkness, was on top of the wheelhouse getting a view of the entire area. Clearly the creature was basically nocturnal by nature and saw well in just the starlight and the reflected glow from the city. The crocodilelike mate was at the wheel, looking at some basic instruments and taking cryptic cues from the captain and the crew on the lines.

  “Away all lines!” the captain shouted. “Clear ship!” The commands were repeated even louder by the crew on the lines, and the ropes, expertly tied, were loosened and thrown into the water to be reeled in by the longboats. “Engage rudder! All hands to embarkation stations!” Now the mate turned and began winding hard and fast on a wooden wheel, which went around and around for a while and then held firm. The mate checked something, pulled up a large lever, then turned back to the main wheel, which had been essentially free but which now seemed to have a mind of its own. The rest of the crew scurried to positions on either side of the sails. Only one small sail was dropped, but the wind caught it and the ship slowly began moving out of the harbor at a crawl, following what appeared to be small oil-fed lamps floating in the water. Just ahead, on spits of land on either side, twin lighthouses gave off amazingly bright beams, easily marking the limits of the entrance to the bay.

  The port area was going by on the right-hand side, the buildings suddenly changing in character from dark, closed shops to a small harbor filled with activity just ahead. At the moment where there seemed to be nothing on the shore, between the dark buildings and the lighted dock or warehouse beyond, Lori felt a sudden tingling sensation and started. It felt as if something incredibly thin had brushed against his full body. It was gone in a moment, but suddenly the wind shifted direction and picked up considerably, and the temperature dropped from a tropical twenty-six degrees Celsius to perhaps no more than ten or twelve. Summer had turned to spring in an instant, and the wind did not help the feeling at all.

  He looked at Alowi, who was clearly uncomfortable. “Do you wish to go below or perhaps get one of the jackets?” he asked her.

  “I am all right,” she told him, but she didn’t look it.

  Mavra came over to them, still dressed only in the thin black clothing and boots she favored and appearing not at all uncomfortable.

  “It’s pretty impressive when you think about it,” the Earth woman commented. “The Well World has no moon and so very little in the way of a tide. That’s hell for a sailing ship and cuts off a lot of harbors as too shallow. Magnetic compasses are useless, too, since there’s no magnetic pole. The instruments they were using to get out of there are incredibly clever but unique to these conditions. Now, however, they’ve got full instrumentation. That’s a computerized compass that always points to true north in the wheelhouse, and they’ve got something similar to, but much better than, mere radar. It may look like just water, but it’s high-tech water now.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for it,” Lori responded. “Still, all that fancy navigation equipment only helps in a third of the hexes they sail.”

  “True, but a good sailor has a hundred means of setting course and position and only needs those instruments in familiar waters to confirm things. You’ll note they’re going in steps to full sail, even though they could use the main engines. When you have this kind of wind and it’s in your favor, you take it.” She looked up as the crew made a series of by-the-numbers calls, and there were sudden loud, deep crackling and rippling sounds. “Yep. There come the mainsails.

  The ship was clearly at sea now, the water choppy and causing significant spray forward, some of it reaching the deck. There was a pitching motion now as well, often in more directions than one, and Lori found he had to hold on tight to the railing with both hands.

  Mavra grinned. “Yeah, I’m having to get used to sea legs as well. It’s been a long time. You’ll find the motion a lot more pronounced aboard this small ship than on that giant you came up to Itus on.” She turned and gestured. “See those ropes? They’re well secured with steel clips, and they run all around the deck. Use them to keep yourself steady in rough seas.” She grinned. “Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it. Promise.”

  Lori wasn’t so sure. “That’s a lot easier to say, built like you are, but hooves designed for sand and rough ground don’t do all that well on slick hardwood decks. I think for now we’ll be better off below.”

  Mavra nodded. “Suit yourselves. The Dillians have things fairly well set up back there, but they’re also going to have to get used to balance.”

  “Yeah, well, they’ve got four feet! I think if I had four, I might at least be able to stay upright.” And with that he gestured to a very relieved Alowi, and hand over hand, using the ropes, they made their way below.

  For Mavra Chang, however, it was something else, something quite different. Looking aft at the rapidly receding lights, feeling the lurch of the ship, the smell of salt air, the rustling canvas above, and the strong breeze pushing them on, two sets of opposing thoughts and emotions rose within her.

  In a positive way she felt home somehow, alive once more. The only thing that would have made it better would be if this were her ship and she was in the wheelhouse charting courses and giving commands. In some ways, perhaps, she would prefer that even to commanding the bridge of a starship, where one was in command of a vast but lonely structure in which the crew was wholly automated and the silence and stillness were ever-present.

  But there were darker memories as well, of other ocean voyages where she had been not in charge or even a passenger but cargo, and disposable cargo at that, where the days were full of pain and the nights full of horror.

  Theywould never do that to her again. She would see to that.

  Dlubine, Moving Toward the Fahomma Border

  there was a dramatic scene anywhere one looked afterdark in Dlubine. All around, at different very specific locations, one could see lightning illuminate large cloud masses or occasionally but spectacularly snake down to the sea and play along it, often for several seconds, looking like some mad scientist’s laboratory experiment. Yet overhead there would be frequent break
s in the clouds, giving windows into the magnificent and colorful night sky of the Well World, while below varicolored lights crisscrossed and weaved intricate patterns, sometimes exploding into huge complex patterns for a while, although nothing on the scale of what they’d seen the first night. And now and then the winds would bring whiffs of sulfur or the rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide. At least once they’d sailed past an island perhaps two or three kilometers distant that, while invisible in the darkness, betrayed itself by showing streams of red running tendrillike down dark self-made mountains to the sea and ending in great plumes of steam. Where hot lava met the sea, the combination created its own very local thunderstorms.

  “You could make a million bucks selling cruises through here,” Gus noted, just staring out at the amazing sights.

  “Well, I suppose the inhabitants would have something to say about that,” Brazil responded, taking advantage of the conflicting winds from the surrounding turbulence and making reasonably good time. “Still, what would you do with the money, Gus? What’s the top of the real estate market in Dahir?”

  Gus laughed. “Not that great. Oh, it’s comfortable enough, but, well, this might sound funny, but they’re just too much like the small town in northern Minnesota that I got out of.”

  “Like what?” Brazil chuckled. ” This I got to hear.”

  “Well, the place is pretty damned dull, frankly, just like home. Nothin’ much happens, and what little that does isn’t important but it becomes the biggest thing around ’cause it’s something. Everybody’s into everybody else’s business ’cause they don’t have much else to do, the life’s routine, and the pleasure for them is simple. On top of it all it’s dominated by a straitlaced church that’s gonna make sure you behave and go to heaven, or wherever they think Dahirs go. No imagination, no curiosity. Even the weather’s borin’. And I mean, think about this kinda invisibility thing. Even that’s a drag there. I mean, so you decide to rough it and hunt your own food down ’cause it’s fun, right? Only nothin’ can see you comin’, so where’s the sport? Even back home the deer could see you and make a break for it or hide out, and even the fish had a little bit of a chance. Nothing’s even really wild in Dahir. It’s all carefully managed. I couldn’t stand it no longer than I did.”