Chalker, Jack L. – Well of Souls 06

“Well, at least one or two. They hate it here and do not stay. They wander the universe and do what we cannot know. When something goes wrong, one of them or all, it is difficult to judge, are summoned to repair the Well. As far as we can tell, this has not happened in this case. Either the Well is not broken, or its ability to send for help is impaired for some reason, or, for still other unknown reasons, the watchers can­not or will not come. Either way, we are on our own.”

“But how do you know that they are not here?” Core asked.

“Because we know what they look like. It is in the rec­ords. We know where they will appear and as what. None known have come. It is—ah! Here is another!”

Nakitti entered and looked around. “Too bad,” she com­mented. “I like a nice bath myself, but I’ll never fit in one of those.”

“Nakitti a Oriamin of Ochoa,” Dukla said in introduc­tion. “Formerly known as Tann Nakitt the Ghoman, I be­lieve. These are the ones you knew as Ari and Ming in one body, and that, over there, calls himself Core.”

Core looked up at the Ochoan. “An evolutionary branch off certain types of pterodactyls,” he noted. “Extraordinary.”

“Hey! Watch who you’re calling a—whatever you called me!” Nakitti snapped.

“An ancient flying creature related to both reptiles and birds that became extinct sixty or more million years ago on ancient Terra,” Core explained. “Similar designs have been found on other worlds, but you are the first sentient branch I know. Of course, I do not have my full databases anymore so I cannot be sure.”

“Sure sounds like a damned machine,” Nakitti snapped. “So? This thing stole a body and you two are married for­ever whether you want to be or not, huh? If one of you wasn’t a cop and the other one of the guys who got me into this mess in the first place, I’d feel real sorry for you.” She turned back to Core. “And what about you? If your old master showed up as a giant asshole right now, would you be required to kiss it?”

Core took the question seriously and replied, “I simply do not know the answer to that.” It put a real chill in the room.

“Yeah, so, who’s missing? The martial arts girl who got turned into a roving terminal? I’m sorry, Ambassador, but I was a kidnap victim of these folks and I’m here by accident and I don’t have many friends among that group. I do have a ton of problems to solve and the clock’s running, though, so I can’t waste an entire afternoon here singing ‘My Old School Walls.’ ”

“Just relax, Nakitti,” Dukla told him. “Remember, I am on your side and solving Ochoa’s problem also solves my problems. Ah! And here is another most unique new inhabi­tant. Please! Come in, child!”

Jaysu walked into the room and looked around uncer­tainly, feeling more out of place than ever. She had never seen the like of any of them before, even in the brief time here in Zone, and she found them more like the totems of Ambora than real people. Even so, she wasn’t scared of them. It was odd, but she hadn’t been scared of anybody lately.

“Oh, my god! She’s an angel!” Ari breathed. “Right out of the great religous paintings. She’s even got a halo of sorts!”

Wasn ‘t that her name originally? Angel something or other? Ming reminded him.

She stared at Ari and Ming. “There are two of you in one? How is this possible? And you know who I was and where I came from?”

Take it, Ming. Too much of a Catholic upbringing, I guess. She gives me the creeps.

Jaysu frowned. “I do not want to give anyone the—what did you call it? ‘Creeps?’ ”

“You can read our minds?” Ming asked her. “You are still telepathic!”

“I-Is that what I am doing? I do not know. I know only that I have somehow been able to read what others read or write, and that I can understand many others even if they do not have this translator thing. Am I truly reading minds? That is most disturbing. I do not wish to do it.”

“Don’t knock it, if it’s you doing it and you’re in control,” Ming told her. “Can you read the minds of the others?”

She turned and looked at Dukla, then at Nakitti, and finally at Core. She stopped only when she looked at Core, shud­dering. “This one is not like any of the rest of you,” she said.

“You got that right,” Nakitti commented. “So, we don’t need to keep introducing ourselves with you, anyway. Wow! Are those real feathers? Those are so gorgeous!”

Ming looked over at Core. “Don’t get any funny ideas. Let her alone!”

Core seemed transfixed somehow by the angelic being. Fi­nally he said, “I—I have no intention of doing her harm. I— There is something proactive about her on levels I cannot fathom and have never seen. Look deep. I do not believe anyone can do her harm. I think she is beyond where even I am in one sense.”

“I have known the Amborans here since I took this posi­tion,” Dukla told them, “and I have never seen one such as she. Accelerated evolution?”

“Possibly,” Core responded.

“Well, you made her,” Ming snapped. “If you don’t know, who does?”

Jaysu felt the tension in the room and it disturbed her. “Please stop this! If I am the source of any animosity be­tween you all, then I shall be more than happy to leave. I did not wish to be here in the first place, as I know none of you do and have no memories of anything in my past.”

“Do you want to know?” the High Commissioner asked her, both curious and because it was now possible for her to do so.

“I used to anguish and agonize over it,” the Amboran admitted. “Now, though, I find it curiously irrelevant. I have no interest in it.”

“Did anybody tell you what you were then? A priestess?” Ming asked her. “That should at least tell you that you’re where you are supposed to be.”

“I have not doubted that since my installation,” she re­sponded. “Again, it is irrelevant. I am who and what I am. It was ordained this way by powers higher than me, powers I neither understand nor question, but serve. You both are afraid that this other one can make you slaves and do things to your mind. He can, but only if you do so willingly. He cannot do it merely by touch. Does that make you feel better?”

“How do you know that?” Ming asked her.

“I know that the sun rises and the air is fresh and clean where I should live. I do not question how I know. I seem to know things as required.” She turned and looked at Core. “You are afraid that you will be returned to slave status should your old master return. Again, only if you so choose. If you do so choose, however, the decision will be irre­versible. You have never had to face a choice of your life or your soul before. You may.”

“Do we drag out the crystal ball and watch the table rise?” Nakitti griped. “Then perhaps we could do horo­scopes for that new sky out there, the one with a million times more visible stars and not a one we knew. What’s the difference?”

She looked over at Nakitti, who felt the power of that gaze. It was unnerving; it seemed to go right through her.

“You mask fear and worry with cynicism. It is a part of you, but it is not an attractive part. He is already smitten with you. If you were to truly let go, if you are capable of doing so, he may even love you, and there will be far less of the nobility in the coming times.”

“Okay, you do your homework. You’re good. I’m not sure whether to hope that you’re right or you’re wrong, but it doesn’t do anything for me,” Nakitti said with the same sour tone.

“It may,” she responded. “You and he do not know it yet, but you are already carrying his child.”

It was said so matter-of-factly, Nakitti almost believed it, but hoped there was nothing to it. The last thing she needed now was pregnancy. Hell, even in the best of times, she wasn’t at all ready to be a mother. You had to at least not want to eat all children first, and the Baron was up to his wingtips in heirs as it was.

Yeah, sure.

Damn, she was irritating! When you can’t even lie to your­self around her, you’re really vulnerable. I wonder if we could send her to Josich?

For her part, Jaysu had no idea where all this was coming from, but she couldn’t avoid saying it, and knew the moment it passed her lips that it was right. It was as if something inside her was somehow able to reach all the way down inside them and yank out their feelings and even their self-delusions, strengths, and weaknesses.

She looked at the High Commissioner. “Not everyone is here. Two are still missing, including one who is essential. You cannot hope to defeat the evil that so threatens the world without the Avenger.”

“Indeed? And who is this ‘Avenger?’ ” Dukla replied, not sure himself what to make of her. He couldn’t help placing a mental bet that her own people would love to see her get interested in being anywhere but home, though.

She shook her head. “I do not know. I suppose it is one of those who is not here.”

Nakitti felt relieved. “Then you don’t know everything!” She looked around. “Well, I guess it’s either Uncle Jules, that muscle-bound detective, or the robot monster.”

Jaysu shook her head in puzzlement. “Please—say the names again. Slowly. One at a time.”

“He means,” Ming told her, “Jules Wallinchky, the man who turned the both of us into slaves for a period just for the fun of it, and who may or may not still be alive somewhere—”

“No, not him. I do feel that he is still alive, but I feel nothing more about him now. What is the next, please?”

“Genghis O’Leary, a detective I once knew, and the guy who almost nabbed Josich back in the Realm and saved this world a lot of grief—”

“He is here! Somewhere here!”

Ming nodded. “On the Well World? Sure he is. We knew that.”

“No, I mean here. In this place. Not in this room, but not far. Who was the third?”

“His name is Jeremiah Wong Kincaid, and he is like no­body else,” Ming told her.

“He is here, too! He is the one! But—he does not see himself leading an army for good, but as an assassin. So long as he believes and acts that way, he will fail. If he cannot adapt and face evil out of something other than pure revenge, he will fail, and if he fails, then everyone fails. He is the key. The Avenger. I do not know how.”

At that moment the door behind her opened and another creature walked in and suddenly stopped dead at the sight of all of them, and particularly of the glowing Jaysu.

He had clearly never seen an angel before, and none of them had ever seen what looked for all the world like an enormous hooded snake with wings.

“Saints preserve me!” exclaimed Genghis O’Leary.

“Good to see you finally made it, O’Leary,” the High Commissioner said. “We are having quite a religious experi­ence ourselves here. Come, join the crowd. I believe you will fit.”

“So where is Kincaid?” Ming wondered. “And what is Kincaid?”

“We’ve not had any real contact with him,” Dukla ex­plained. “If he is here, he has not told us about it.”

“He is here,” Jaysu insisted. “I feel him. Not close, but here. He is filled with hatred and fury that he cannot control, but it makes him stand out in my mind. He is not here for us, although he should be. He is here to kill someone.”

That stopped them for a moment. Finally, Ari asked, “Com­missioner, can’t you locate him, try and talk him in here?”

“Under normal circumstances, yes, but under the con­ditions imposed by this conference, with fifty times the normal complement here and all that to-and-fro traffic— impossible. We don’t even know what he is, and we have tried to discover it. It appears that everything about your entry seems to have caused the Well to do things it simply has never done. The results have been unprecedented. The Czillians—the plant people you have seen around the po­dium here with the leaf on their heads—are a race devoted to scholarship and analysis. They have a great computer complex of their own and created it as a gigantic resource, a university, if you will, with no restrictions as to nationality or use by anyone. They maintain the records that allow us to know our histories and not reinvent the wheel, as it were. You would think we would then use it to learn something about cooperation, but we never seem to.”

O’Leary moved as carefully as he could into the hall, and they saw that he was a large and powerful creature indeed. The eyes, the mouth with its nasty-looking fangs, its undu­lating movements—all screamed “giant snake.” But the large hood, which seemed ribbed on the underside, proved to be much more than that. The ribs in fact were small blue-white arms ending in soft, mittenlike claws, dozens on each side. They were certainly arms and not legs, but while it was easy to see that they could do a lot of tasks performed by more normal hands or even tentacles, it was impossible to figure out how those reptilian eyes could see what it was doing under there. The body was about four meters long and as thick as O’Leary had been as a Terran male, and it slithered slowly but quite firmly into place and curled itself up, leaving only the head and hood resting on top. Unlike a snake, its tongue did not go in and out constantly; there was a sense that it had both a keen sense of smell and ears buried somewhere in the head or hood.

Equally striking was the back of the creature, which was mottled and gave a false but clear impression of having feathers on a part of it, and, just below the hood, sported a bizarre set of upfolded wings that looked leathery, more like an Ochoan wing than an Amboran’s, but with the same multicolored, featherlike pattern. Its underside was bluish-white and quite uniform. If it weren’t for the wings and the extra length, it would have reminded some of the water types of a large land manta ray.

“I know, you’re all wondering what the devil I am,” O’Leary said conversationally. “Well, we’re called Pyron, it’s what’s called a nontech hex, we’re not reptiles but warm­blooded, it’s a bisexual race, and I’m a man. Truth to tell, there are some real interesting qualities to this body and this race, although I wouldn’t have chosen it myself, and the thing I miss most is what I’ve been finding here—the com­forts of technology.”

“Do those wings work?” Nakitti asked, fascinated if a bit nervous, considering the relative size of the creature to herself.

O’Leary chuckled. “If you mean can I fly like a bird, no. Can I fly like an Ochoan, even? No. Can I push off from a rock and glide at a fair speed in any sort of headwind? Yes. It’s rather difficult to explain the other uses, but let us say I don’t float in the air.”

“How long have you been here, O’Leary?” Ari asked him.

“Since before the conference began. I’ve been in the of­fices here trying to trace you all down, truth be told, and see what became of you. Rather an odd lot compared to how we arrived, I’d say.”

“More important to us is where this Pyron is,” Nakitti noted. “If you’re on the other side of the world from the rest of us, you’re no help.”

“Yes, I thought of that,” he admitted. “In fact, I’m south­east of you all and one hex away from the Overdark, al­though the hex between is high tech and inhabited by giant dancing jack-o’-lanterns, and as we’re not partial to vege­tables, we get along quite well, you see.”

They let that one pass. Those who understood the jack-o’-lantern reference simply didn’t want to know.

“Are you poisonous?” the Ochoan pressed.

“Of course! But of more importance, I can swallow a good-sized cuttlefish whole.” And, with that, he gave a huge yawn, revealing a mouth as much like a great cat’s as a snake’s, but clearly able to swallow a large animal. “I have a cuttlefish that slipped my net and I don’t like it. I think that’s why I’m here. I want to finish this job, and if that means goin’ fishin’, then so be it.”

Nakitti nodded and turned back to the High Commis­sioner. “Sir, what do you know about Josich? I don’t mean the gory details of her rapid rise, but beyond that?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Dukla replied. “Explain.”

“I think you do, to some extent. I think that’s why you called this gathering. You’ve seen the entry recordings that I have seen, and heard the comments. From the indoctrination lecture as well as what we’re told in the hexes we’re as­signed to, we’ve been drilled with this system, this history, all of it. But we aren’t the only ones where some of us broke the rules. You said that it’s a one-way trip here, yet Josich clearly knew precisely where he was when he got here. That implies that either he was here before or that somebody left and told him. Now he appears with this knowledge and manages to wind up pretty much the same sort of creature he was when we knew him. About the only thing different is he’s a woman here, and that seems to have actually made it easier for him to rise quickly. His four half brothers haven’t been here but are still under some kind of orderly plan, and they wind up in key hexes very close to Chalidang. This is quite a coincidence when you consider what happened to us. Look around. Pyron, Kalinda, Ochoa—what was yours, dear?”

“Ambora,” Jaysu responded.

“Right. Very different, rather random, and with the hexes spread over Hell and gone. I think we’re all within reach of the Overdark, but the Overdark’s six thousand kilometers wide! Never mind the amnesia and the two-in-ones, it’s mostly as advertised anyway. Not Josich. His brothers wind up close, as an armored, semitech water civilization that’s almost a natural ally to Chalidang; another is a high-tech hex of those who live in water but breathe air. A third is land-based, somewhat like giant bugs, and can march right up rock walls. The fourth are the sea slugs that can hypno­tize you into marching right into their bellies. The only thing he missed was a flying race, and you get the feeling he only missed that because either he was rushed or because not all the party he was transporting here made it, thanks to In­spector O’Leary and his friends. He stole that device to deliberately trigger the Gate. He just was a tad premature, or the gods know what we’d be facing now!”

For a while the High Commissioner said nothing, but fi­nally he responded, “Yes, we do see the same things. I hadn’t been as aware of the circumstances as you have outlined, but I noticed from the recordings and from his and his brothers’ actions that they seemed to be rather well-organized for those who just drop in here. It’s not unprece­dented to wind up in the same race, provided such a race is still one of the active ones here and also certain very strict conditions are met. Usually it’s when someone has a well-established pregnancy. The Well is programmed to safe­guard life, and adapting someone to a whole different race while also adapting a still developing fetus is simply not done. But the Haduns were all male when they arrived. Josich is the only female after processing, in fact, although the Quacksans are asexual. I had to believe it was coinci­dental, but there were always those doubts deep down, no matter how much I didn’t want to think on it.”

“Josich was definitely born a Hadun in the pre-Realm Confederation,” O’Leary assured them. “His birth and up­bringing, his entire history, was quite well known.”

Core was equally skeptical. “Josich could not have inter­faced with the core computer of one of the worlds of the Ancient Ones,” it maintained. “I was as well-equipped as any in all creation to do so, and the basics of it were so far beyond anything our advanced civilization understood it bordered on magic.”

“You were a computer,” Ming pointed out. “Maybe you still are, I think. You can’t believe in magic!”

“Magic,” Core responded, “is anything observable and perhaps repeatable that cannot be explained in terms of any existing knowledge on the part of the observer. To your own ancestors, all this would be magic. To us, well—we have an excellent example right here. The Amboran is magic. Some of her remarkable abilities are easily explained, of course— a natural telepathy, an uncanny ability to identify an indi­vidual from the data in our own minds and then identify him in a vast location like Zone, and who knows what other attributes? The radiant glow—hardly a defensive condition, but one that can inspire fear, awe, respect, if that one does not need a defense. A unique multigenerational evolutionary advance in her species? Perhaps. But since all of this is con­jecture and leaves some holes, right at the moment she is magic.”

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