Shadow of the Well of Souls watw-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  She was descending into madness with the speed of a spaceliner when they’d finally come and given her some more. Within a minute, maybe two, it was all receding, all going away, things were wonderful once more…

  After several cycles, as her system became accustomed to having the drug in it, they were ready for the next phase.

  She was put under for the bulk of it. She had almost no memories of it or who did it or where or how long it took or how the hell they did it at all. Nor was there any real sense of how much time had passed, only that it had. By the time she was able once again to awaken and move about on her own, it was done.

  She felt—odd—beyond the high and knew that Campos had accomplished her total threat. They had done something to her. Something major. It was only a question of what.

  She had no feeling at all in her arms. They’d never let her use her arms or hands, not since the beginning, and so it wasn’t totally surprising, but it bothered her. She was walking oddly, too, as if she couldn’t bend her legs. Nothing felt right.

  She was in a small but ordinary room furnished only with a thick pillow, but one wall seemed extra polished and she made her way laboriously over to it. Then, seeing the ghostly reflection, she looked down at herself to confirm the worst.

  She was almost completely covered in feathers. Tiny little feathers that made a second skin, feathers of bright colors: gold and emerald and crimson and deep, rich blue, making intricate random designs. She couldn’t feel her arms because she no longer had arms, or shoulders, for that matter. Somehow they’d managed to transplant some of the muscle tissue, though, because she still had breasts, fattier and larger than before and also feathered right down to the nipples.

  But for those she was shaped pretty much like a turnip. She had a large, rotund, feathered stomach and rear end, and they’d widened her hips. That had been done as much for balance as for design, since they’d taken her knee joints and placed them just below those widened hips, as if the upper calves and thighs had been turned upside down, and these terminated in a pair of very wide leathery feet that were more like pads with a flat extension both forward and rear. She did not walk so much as slowly waddle. It would take some practice, and she wasn’t sure how she’d get up again if she fell over.

  She had to get very close to the reflection to see her face. They’d done something to the skin to make it look very dark brown and leathery, extending her nose until it was virtually a hawk-nosed bill of the same consistency as the face. They’d brought in the mouth to almost a pucker and replaced the lips with a short curved birdlike bill. Only the eyes seemed familiar, but even there they’d done something, or maybe it was the drug. She saw quite well but only to maybe one and a half, two meters. After that everything was a blur, even in the small room.

  They’ve made me into a human owl,she thought, more in shock than in disgust. In fact, while the overall effect was somewhat comical in the same way a penguin was comical, the combination of colors and the fluidity of the design were quite attractive. It was also true that she could appear like this in public and no one, not Lori, not the Dillians, not even Brazil, would recognize her.

  It was also true that she was now more helpless and more dependent than a captive songbird with clipped wings. She could waddle, first one side forward, then the other, like a penguin, but not very far or very fast. Climbing or getting her own food was out of the question. She might manage a little something with her head and mouth—beak—but not a lot. She was totally defenseless. She couldn’t run, fly, or grab or use a weapon or tool, and even her bright colors were a problem, making concealment difficult. That was if the enemy came within two meters so she could see it.

  Even her hearing seemed off. True, they’d recessed the ears into the head and covered them with feathers so it appeared she had none, but even so, she thought it odd that all she heard from the corridor outside were what sounded like snorts, clicks, and silly noises.

  She suddenly felt foolish. That drug did make one stupider, she thought. Of course they would have removed the translator. Did they do more? She opened her mouth and called “Hey, out there! Shut up!” but the only thing that came out was a series of awful-sounding squawks. They’d altered her vocal chords or replaced them. And she couldn’t even form words with her lips. Not with this rigid beak.

  Helpless, dependent, no ability to talk or understand, no way to form words silently or use sign language… they’d really cut her off. To literally everyone else, even those she knew and who knew her—save only the ones who had done this with masterful skill and a technology far beyond expectation, and Campos, of course—she’d be seen as—she was—the world’s first exotic animal junkie.

  Well, she’d kept Campos around, a captive, drugged and hauled about through the jungle, and had wound up making him into the world’s sexiest duck creature. Now Campos had in her own twisted mind attained the perfect revenge.

  What was odd was how she was taking it. She herself noticed this, but only as a curiosity, not because it really bothered her. She just accepted it fatalistically as something that was. She knew it was the drug, placing a soft, pleasant haze between herself and reality, but she did not want that haze to disappear. So long as it was there, she could accept almost anything. It was her only friend, her only protector.

  Still, there was the practical, pragmatic need to get used to it. She waddled over in the direction of the door, blurry though it was, and the usual food cakes and drink were there. Although a little nervous about it, she discovered that they’d set the balance and center of gravity exactly right. These doctors were geniuses with the souls of monsters. She could bend completely forward on those knee joints, and the bill, serrated a bit, was perfect to break into the loaves and get pieces she could mush and break up inside her mouth proper and swallow without difficulty by raising her head a bit while keeping bent over. Drinking was harder to master and amounted to using the tongue or a back part of her mouth to get some suction through the tiny bill if it was immersed, but it, too, was manageable.

  The only real problem was with the breasts, which amounted to dead weight tumbling down when she bent over and which, with no arms and true shoulder muscles to stabilize them, went every which way, pulling on her neck and throwing her slightly off balance. She’d never had large breasts as a human, and they could well have dispensed with them as they did with other parts of her, but instead they’d enlarged them and created a problem. More of Campos’s revenge, she understood. She would learn to live with them with practice, she decided.

  A technician or guard or whatever who looked like an underdressed turtle gave her the drug regularly, in the form of a solid soft cube. It was far slower to take effect when eaten, but the creature was never late with it. Campos, she worried, might not be so punctual.

  And finally the Cloptan came for her. Campos seemed absolutely enthralled by the redesign, and Mavra was again taken aback to discover that thanks to the legs, she was now even shorter, no more than a meter or so tall. She had always been small and mostly looked up to see other faces, but this meant craning her neck.

  “Oh, but this is so excellent!” Campos gushed. “Revenge is seldom so perfect! Can you understand me?”

  To her surprise, Mavra could. “Yes, I can.”

  “Wonderful!You see, the little device inside you is tuned only to me. It even blocks out other people’s translators from your mind. And what it transmits, only I have been given the ability to translate and understand. And all I have to do is think about it and I can turn it off, or on, at will. So you will communicate, and understand, only to me and when I wish. What you send is a computer code that sounds to all others like the noise of a bird. You will truly be my pet, and you will act like it. You will guard me and protect me at all costs if you can, and the rest of the time you will be a nice little trained birdie and do everything I say, because I and I alone have those nice little red cubes. You will exist to please me and never to displease me, now, won’t you?”

&n
bsp; “Yes,” she replied resignedly.

  “Oh, no! We begin right here. It will from now on be ‘Yes, master.’ Not even ‘mistress,’ not ‘madame.’ Master. Understand?”

  “Yes—master.”

  “And you can spend your time thinking of ways to sing my praises. How beautiful I am, how intelligent, how simply wonderful I am. You will spend your time thinking of new ways to praise, flatter, worship me as your one and only god, and you will do it with conviction, with enthusiasm; you will convince me that you believe it. And in the same breaths you will do the opposite to yourself. Remind me and yourself how low you are, how dependent, how miserable and undeserving a creature you are and how lucky you are to be my property, and you will say those things, too, with the same fervor. And any time I find either part unconvincing, I might just forget your little cube for a while. Maybe a very long while, until you are totally believable. Understand?”

  One pang of true abject fear pierced the insulating haze. “Yes, my most wonderful master, from whose great kindness all blessings flow. Please forgive this most miserable of helpless wretches who is nothing without you!”

  Campos smiled. “It is a start. We shall have many, many long conversations together, and all of them, even the ones that matter, will be partially tests. Practice it in your mind. You will come to believe that what you say is true so that it becomes second nature to use it. Now, come. I have a travel cage for you, and we must catch the return steamer for Buckgrud, the city where I live in Clopta. There, in my flat, I have a nice little place provided for you.”

  “As you command, most powerful and magnificent master.”

  The worst part of it was, the words weren’t even sticking in her throat.

  Still, now would begin the trial, until one day Campos would decide for whatever reason that she’d had enough or wanted more. Then Mavra would be the only means by which Campos could have her revenge on just about everything and everybody she hated, and that was almost the entire universe now. The Cloptan had already thought ahead on this; that was why they could still speak to one another, and she was conditioning her “pet” to think like an obedient slave to ensure complete control. Otherwise, when Juan Campos had the burning desire to get her hands on the Well World controls, how could she make Mavra let her do it? The worst part was, as she was, Mavra didn’t even care.

  Lilblod

  “You separated me from my husband! I will kill you for that!”

  “Now, calm down, I tell you,” Zitz soothed. “There was nothing I could do. They’d have killed you anyway if you made a fuss.”

  “They might as well have killed us both!” Alowi cried. “My husband cannot survive without me!”

  “Nothing to do with love, I’m afraid,” Tony explained. “She produces something inside her that heals his injuries. We’ve seen it in action.”

  “Well, it’s done, and that’s that. I can’t even give you a clue as to where they took ’em. I don’t know nothin’ about the land part of this, and I don’t wanna know. I’ll tell you. though, that either we did what they said or they’d have took ’em anyways and blown all of us out of the water the moment we dropped the load. Blown all three of you away as it was. Think we liked it? We’re gonna lose a fortune because we gotta give back them stolen jewels! And it’d have been easier for us to just knock all three of you off and dump you in the ocean. We’re droppin’ you here instead. That over there’s Lilblod. It’s not a real nice place, but you take care and keep to the trails and keep your nose out of where it don’t belong and you’ll make it. About fifty kilometers north is Clopta, a high-tech coastal hex where you can get a ride into a Zone Gate and a quick pass back home. South maybe sixty, seventy kilometers is Agon, same deal. Don’t think you can go down there and stir up stuff and find them. They probably never made shore there. Got picked up by some other ship and are maybe anywhere or heading anywheres else by now. Go home. It’s over.”

  “Come, come dear!” Anne Marie said sympathetically. “Let’s get off this terrible ship first and be on our own. Then we can decide what to do next.”

  With neither the Dillians nor Alowi having a translator, it was up to Zitz to interject.

  There was no purpose now to further protests, and Alowi nodded and tried to calm down. “All right,” But I will feed the name of this accursed ship and all of its crew to my people back in Erdom. Such an assault on our honor cannot go unavenged.

  “This is going to be a problem, though,” Tony commented. “We really can’t speak to or understand her, nor she us.”

  “Sister, if she’s nuts enough to go off tramping in that crazy forest by herself, let her,” Zitz responded. “You won’t find much with a translator in there, but it’s easy in either Clopta or Agon. Just get everybody out, huh?” He turned to Alowi.

  “Okay, lady, here’s the way it is. They’re gonna head for one or another of these places where you can get home and they’ll take you. Maybe you can’t talk to each other, but you’ll make do. You ain’t cut out to be an avenger. You just ain’t built for it. Relax. Take it easy. Tell the authorities if you want to once you get there. It’s no big deal to us. But one way or another you’re gettin’ off this ship as soon as we get in a little more. Either you get off with all your gear or we shoot you and shove you off and keep it. Your choice.”

  “We’ll go, curse your black heart,” Anne Marie responded acidly.

  “Oh, yeah, one more thing,” the Zhonzhorpian said. “You can report this and this ship, but remember that all three of you are wanted in Gekir for jewel theft. And even though they’ll still check it out, we’ll show that this ship, under an alternative name and registry, was thousands of kilometers away at the time. You’re out of your league here. Forget it. You won’t find them—hell, the authorities couldn’t anyway, could they, or you wouldn’ta been aboard in the first place. All you’ll do by stirring up trouble is to make sure you all get sent back to Gekir, where you’ll be blinded and sent out for life to work in the salt mines until you die. Nobody wins on this one. Sometimes it happens.”

  It wasn’t much of an answer, but it was a collection of hard truths that was impossible to ignore.

  The Star Runner came close enough to the shore to scrape bottom, and that was as far as it dared. Anne Marie picked up the sobbing Alowi and put her on Tony’s back, where she clung as hard as she could, and Anne Marie hefted the saddlebags and packs, and they jumped the short distance from the rails down into the water and quickly struck mud. It was a little tough to get some footing, but finally both of them managed to force their way up and onto the shore, Alowi still clinging to Tony’s back, looking wet and disheveled but otherwise none the worse for the wear.

  It was very dark and very quiet on the shore; there were no lights to be seen anywhere.

  “Now what?” Anne Marie asked, trying to see something other than forbidding swampy forest in the thick gloom of the night.

  “We camp as soon as we can find a dry place, of course,” Tony responded. “We still have some matches in a waterproof container, and we might try a fire, if only to scare away anything unwelcome. When we get some light, we’ll see about finding a road.”

  “Which way?”

  “It really doesn’t matter, does it? I should think, though, if we have any real chance of tracing them, it should be south. At least they’ll have communications, possibly enough to get word to the embassy in Zone. Then we might be able to arrange to get this poor girl home and maybe be out of this and home ourselves. I’ve had quite enough of discomfort and double crosses. We did our duty as best we could. Now we deserve a chance to live our own lives.”

  “Duty! Bah!” Anne Marie almost spit. “This poor dear won’t go home willingly. She’ll try to find her husband, even if that’s impossible, because it’s her duty and because she’s in love. You heard what they said about that dreadful culture. She’d be married off to some old bum she didn’t know and die of a broken heart!”

  “Anne Marie, this is not a romance no
vel.”

  “Tony Guzman! What in the world has gotten into you? It’s not like we are innocent bystanders in all this! Nor entirely without some responsibility, too, simply because we weren’t all that honest with them, either.”

  “We didn’t ask to go along on this adventure!” Tony argued. “We were drafted!”

  “Nonsense! That nice young man from the Zone embassy came along and asked us to do it. To go and link up with this Mavra Chang and find out as much as we could. And we found out a great deal, I think! We were also to get off a report to the ambassador if they lost track of the party. Thank goodness we didn’t have to do that. I would have felt just dreadful about it!”

  “But it’s over, Anne Marie! We’re the party now. The only satisfaction we might have is rubbing it in that smug drug runner’s face after he discovers we were not fugitives but shadows.”

  “Spies, you mean. Spies for our government.”

  Tony sighed. “Anne Marie, spies are professionals. Espionage is a highly regarded art. We were rank amateurs dropped into a situation where we might have been hurt or killed by a government that wouldn’t have really cared, and now we got out with our lives and whole skins. I don’t want to be blinded or crippled. Not again. Now we have a second chance. I want to go home before something does happen. We were very nearly killed back there, you know. Anne Marie, we’re sixteen years old again, only this time we’re sexy blond bombshells that had the men of Dillia already making fools of themselves around us. I’ve been on that side. I want to find out if it’s any more fun on this side.”