SHADOW
OF THE
WELL OF
SOULS
A Well World Novel
Jack L. Chalker
For Fritz Leiber,
who enjoyed the original Well saga
but left us before this one was done, and
likewise for my old friend Reg Bretnor,
also gone too soon, my writing opposite of sorts,
who packed more laughs into fewer words than
any science-fiction author in history.
The worst thing about growing old
is the increasing number of missing,
and missed, friends.
Preface
“Oh, No! Not Another Trilogy!”
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON A JOURNEY BACK TO THE WELL World . . .
The Well of Souls series was the only five-volume trilogy I had ever written, and I felt it was basically symmetrical and right; I had no intention of going back to it after I finished Twilight at the Well of Souls in 1979. For one thing, I didn’t want to be “typed” and wind up cheapening the concept or the original book(s) by ripping off Well World No. 386. I didn’t get into the writing business to do that.
Still, when Del Rey came to me with the proverbial Offer I Couldn’t Refuse, it had been ten years since I’d as much as looked at the series, and I had a number of other very successful books, multivolume big books, and one or two series as well. Footnote: Publishers call all multivolume works “series,” but actually only a couple of mine are. A series is an open-ended set of tales having in common a setting, a premise, or a set of characters. Anthony’s Xanth is a series; so are King’s Gunslinger saga, Zelazny’s Amber, and, for that matter, Mark Twain’s Sawyer and Finn books.
The multivolume novel is what happens to writers who like to write novels the size of War and Peace in an age of computerized budgets and mass market-publishing. The writer simply outlines a single, stand-alone novel as he would any other but then is informed that there are “price points” and that he has to cut to fit the prescribed maxiIF mums or, frankly, production costs on the book will push it beyond its “price point” where there is more sales resistance than acceptance. So you split it in two, or three, or whatever.
Tolkien’s Rings books are in fact both a series and a multivolume, or “serial,” novel. The Lord of the Rings is a serial novel; its middle volume, in fact, ends on a classic cliff-hanger (worthy of Republic film serials of the thirties) with Sam shut out of the evil dungeon and in the land of the enemy, beating his fists futilely against the closed gates while the narration says, “Frodo was alive, but captured by the enemy.” To be continued. Of course, since the concept began with The Hobbit, a totally independent novel, and has continued even after the author’s death, the Rings is in fact a series which contains a serial novel.
Midnight at the Well of Souls was a single novel and remains today a single novel in one volume, a totally standalone work. Acceptance of it was so great that both I and the publisher couldn’t resist so vast a canvas, so I outlined a second novel that, as it turned out ran about 250,000 words, or about twice the length of Midnight. Presto! It was a serial novel, a single book in two parts, that was also a sequel to an independent book.
I then found that even with this addition I couldn’t finish the story I wanted to tell. Oh, I wrapped the novel up, but there was a ton of material I couldn’t put in it and more that I wanted to do, particularly visiting the northern hemisphere. That brought forth another novel outline, which, again, ran very long and wound up as two books. Hence, a five-volume trilogy, a series containing three novels in five books.
This is a fourth novel in the series (and when you go beyond the trilogy that Tolkien seems to have defined as the cliche-length of a serial novel, you find that ad agencies say you’re writing a “saga”), and it’s longer than the preceding three. I really thought I could wrap it in two in the same way I was certain that I could do the second book in about the same amount of space that I’d used for Midnight. It didn’t happen.
So, I could still have done it in two if I were willing to cut out much of this volume, which is the philosophic heart of this fiber-novel and begins to make some sense of what happened in Echoes of the Well of Souls. Never mind all the heady discussions between characters and all the mushy stuff, some would say—cut to where you start the massacres. Well, I don’t work that way, either. A novel is as long as it takes to properly tell the story; it shouldn’t be any longer than that or be cut any shorter than it absolutely needs.
Hopefully, if you aren’t familiar with the original “Saga of the Well World,” you’ll pick it up—it is, or should be, available at finer booksellers everywhere—and start from there. If you have read the original series but missed Echoes of the Well of Souls, it’s still out there and you should find it. In fact, all competently run bookstores should certainly have copies of it available when this book comes out. If they don’t have it where you found this, go back and tell them what you think about that fact and how it reflects on them.
There will be one more volume of this long novel. It’s already outlined, and it’s got my usual very big finish. Some of it will be what you expect after reading this, but I think there will be a number of surprises. There are in fact several surprises in store in this book, if you wait for them. But you can see we’re shaping up here for one cosmic cataclysm, and I do not plan to disappoint you. So if you already have Echoes, let’s go. If you don’t, go out and get it first and “see it from the beginning”! This is, after all, the middle of my 350,000-word novel!
Somewhere
Between Galactic Clusters
the kraang had good reason to be complacent. after so long, so very long, its plans were coming to a head, and with each passing day its link to and power within the Well Net grew. It could already send within the field and could receive and track and monitor as well. While none of the principals in the drama it had concocted were directly addressable—unless they were in a full Well field such as traveling through and between hex gates and Zones—and the Watchers were outside its direct monitoring abilities, the others whom it had identified as they were processed by the system were far easier to track.
When the Kraang’s ship itself was not in the slingshot gateways, it was now possible to see through the eyes and hear through the ears of the others who had been processed, and that was more than sufficient to monitor the Watchers’ track, while both Watchers and their monitors were unaware even of its very existence. And although unable to send to them under normal circumstances, it could do more than merely receive; it knew them. It knew their innermost thoughts, their loves, hates, fears, and nightmares. It knew that little band better than they knew themselves. That not only allowed the Kraang to filter out subjective impressions from the raw data, it also provided such deep individual knowledge of them that when more was possible, when they finally opened the gate that would bring it to them, they would be as soft clay, as easily remolded inside as they had been outside to serve the Kraang’s purposes.
It had been nothing less than the remaking of the cosmos that had allowed the Kraang’s liberation, although close to a billion years had passed until chance had ultimately given it access to the net once again, access the Ancient Ones believed had been denied it for eternity. The rest of the system had provided just a moment, mere nanoseconds, when the program that had bound it for billions of years could not control its destiny. That tiny moment had been sufficient for the Kraang to alter the system, however slightly, without detection by the net or the Watchman, so that when the program was reimposed, it was flawed. Afterward it had been a mere matter of waiting, suspended of activity, until eventually chance would place the Kraang and its prison within distance of possible direct contact with a Well Gate. The Well computer became aware of the flaw only when that contact came, and then it was too late: the Kraang had access to the net. And the Kraang could be disengaged from the net only by the Watchman, since the Well was powerless in and of itself to do harm to one of its creators. Only another Maker could do that.
So the Kraang had done what it had to do. The world upon which the Watchman lived was still primitive; there was no space travel of consequence, no way to create a situation by which the Watchman could be drawn to a gate. The gate, then, had to come to the Watchman by the crude but effective method of sending Well Gates down to the planet of the Watchman as meteors.
But there had been two Watchers instead of one at this juncture, the second created by the original Watchman when the cosmos was reset. Multiple gates were required because the two were separated. And so the gates had fallen, remaining open until the Watchers were collected, operating in their normal manner until the Well could safely close them. During that period it was almost inevitable that others, natives of the planet, would fall through, and it was amazing how few had actually done so.
Few, but enough.
The newspeople—Theresa Perez, the producer; Gus Olafsson, the cameraman; and Dr. Lori Ann Sutton, the university astronomer tapped as the expert for the newspeople—had been captured by a primitive Amazonian tribe deep in the jungles of Brazil. A tribe whose mysterious leader was the female Watcher, who had taken them through with her to the Well World, along with the Peruvian gangster and drug lord Juan Campos. And, before them, two of the always-inevitable investigators of the meteor, Colonel Jorge Lunderman, Brazilian Air Force regional commander, and Julian Beard, U.S. Air Force scientist-astronaut. Those two had been taken while posing for photos atop the “meteor,” perhaps as an object lesson for all others to stay away.
The other, the original Watchman, had also been in Brazil, but on the civilized coast, taking a sort of holiday in the nation that shared his name. Only two natives had been taken in with him, both at his invitation: the blind former airline pilot Joao Antonio Guzman and his dying British wife, Anne Marie.
Eight natives who were processed by the Well, each becoming something else, another creature, another race, yet with their memories and essential selves, their souls as it might be colorfully put, intact, for good or evil. The Kraang had no influence over what they had become, but it ever after had been along for the ride.
During the processing, a link could be and was established.
Even communication with the Watchers was possible during that period, but it was dangerous to go too far. Surface thoughts and surface memories triggered by the experience had been available even though the Watchers themselves remained essentially out of the Kraang’s control. One thought, however, one memory, one weakness, particularly on the part of the newer Watcher, was sufficient. Had been sufficient.
Now the game was commencing. Now one of them certainly would open the way. Now one of them, at least, would be the unwitting agent freeing the Kraang and summoning it home. Home to the Well. Home to become God.
Hakazit
although in many ways the well world felt familiar, even comfortable to him, in other ways, Nathan Brazil reflected, he always had a sense of wrongness when on it.
It wasn’t the bizarre variety of creatures and cultures, the things that made new entrants so uneasy; rather, it was the common things. Some things might be expected to change when crossing a national boundary, but not the climate, and absolutely not the gravity, yet one could cross from the tropics to snow in a few footsteps or have gravitational fluctuation of up to twenty percent in the same distance if one were near one of those borders. And of course it should be cold at the poles and grow warmer toward the equator, even more so than on Earth, as the Well World had no appreciable axial tilt and thus no natural seasons. The days, and nights, a bit longer than back on Earth, were nonetheless always pretty close to equal.
But Glathriel, near the south polar region, was tropical; Hakazit, a thousand kilometers or so west of Glathriel yet only a bit north, was raw and cold, the winds off the Ocean of Shadows brisk and biting, carrying small droplets of ice and snow and swirling them around, not in the sense of a storm but rather as persistent irritants, felt but not really seen.
He pulled his fur-lined jacket tightly about him, hoping to ward off some of the wintry chill, his breath causing huge puffs of steam as it came from his warm interior and struck the frigid air with every exhalation. He looked over at the girl standing atop the rocky cliff looking out at the pounding surf. Although as Earth-human, in some ways more Earth-human, than he was, she was wearing not a stitch of clothing, and Brazil marveled again at her total insulation.
He would have liked to know how they had pulled it off. Some sort of internally generated energy field, certainly, a true cosmic aura fueled from within by some autonomic source he couldn’t imagine. Certainly she didn’t do it consciously; it was simply too perfect for that. But even if he granted the unlikely and heretofore unsuspected power to Type 41 humans to do this sort of thing, he couldn’t imagine why it would evolve in a primitive and totally tropical hex where only “wet” and “dry” had much meaning. Nor did it account for the selectivity. She was standing there in temperatures well below freezing on rock that itself was cold enough to freeze any water it had, but the cold didn’t affect her. She was warm to the touch even on the surface of her skin, and the icy droplets that were turning his own hair into a miniature ice field were hitting her as well, as warm and liquid as a summer drizzle. Yet her long black hair blew free in the wind, a wind that made the chill factor almost Arctic on bare skin but that, in that incredibly small fraction of a millimeter before it struck any part of her, was suddenly turned as warm as a tropical breeze.
Clearly the talent had not been evolved for situations like this; it merely served this function as well. What was it, then? What was this mysterious inner-produced energy field’s primary function?
Clearly it required a lot of energy. The photo he’d received here of her in the Zone Gate corridor, taken off the monitor recording, had shown her very lean and somewhat muscular; now she was, well, fat. Not obese—nobody who could move like she did could be considered that—but the thighs were very large, the ass ample, the breasts enlarged to substantial proportions and resting on an ample tummy.
She ate a lot, yet it never seemed to slow her down, and he’d never seen her pant for breath once, even while running. That surplus wasn’t there for the usual reasons; most of the Glathrielians he had seen were at the least chubby. It was there as fuel for whatever additional engine they had within themselves.
She was more than merely another of the Well World’s many mysteries, though. The Well World left no one unchanged who entered through its Zone Gate save Mavra and himself, yet she was clearly not of Glathriel, the only Earth-human hex here. Her west African heritage showed clearly in her skin and lips, yet her naturally straight, lush, long black hair and general facial features betrayed an equally obvious Hispanic ancestry. She had been made by no Well computer; she had been born and had grown up like this. Whatever changes had been made, they had been inside, in the adaptation stage, in which the brain was slightly reprogrammed to accept a new situation.
But the Well World wouldn’t have programmed in an evolutionary change made after the last reset. It would use the basic template.
Conclusion: She had not been changed inside by the Well at all, but by some other force, and that force could only be the Glathrielians themselves.
And that disturbed him most of all, because the last time Glathriel’s template had been examined and revised, he had done it himself, and while he might well have expected some sort of tropical tribal primitive society or some other variation of it, he’d given them nothing with which to develop the society, if it could be called that, and the powers that they now possessed. A society that used no tools, built no structures, altered its environment not a whit, had no apparent spoken language or even the concept or need for one, consuming only what it found day by day, and not even using fire. Yet somehow they presented the sensation of a tightly knit and intelligent tribal society.
He had no idea who this girl was, or what she had been, or where other than Earth she’d come from. She’d almost snuck into Zone on her own and crept past the officious and preoccupied duty personnel there. The recordings of her from South Zone, discovered too late, showed a picture of a primitive savage, painted and dressed in little but bones, but she didn’t look like any Amazonian Indian he’d ever heard of. The group she had followed in, Mavra’s group, had entered similarly primitive-looking, yet had proved to be from a modern and articulate educated society. He’d like to know that story one of these days; it was probably a hell of a saga.
Was she from one of the primitive tribes of the Amazon, a native who had been caught in the hex gate, perhaps after seeing the others go through? Some orphan, perhaps, or a captive raised by them, which would explain her different look? She was tough and had guts; she’d taken on an Ecundo whose body was armored and whose tail meant death without a second thought—and with her bare hands. Yet even as she rejected all the fruits of technology as a Glathrielian would, she’d not been surprised or even curious about them. She seemed to know exactly what was dangerous to touch and what was safe, and she seemed to understand the setup of a developed society even if she did not join in on any of its activities.
Despite this, and for no logical reason he could determine, he found her attractive in ways he couldn’t really explain. He hadn’t remembered feeling this way about anybody, possibly ever, certainly not in countless thousands of years. It was oddly sexual, stirring in him feelings he’d believed dead so long that they’d ceased to be more than abstractions to him. He had of course felt closeness, friendship, even a sort of love for individuals over time, as much as he’d tried to repress such feelings, knowing the brief time they had compared to him, but not on this level. It was also clear that she sensed this and, in what ways she could, reciprocated. She was anything but naive and unsophisticated in the art of making love, and while nobody had longer experience than he in that sort of thing, she made him feel things, physical things, to a degree he knew he’d never reached before. It was as if she were some powerful and addictive drug, one that, once taken, he could never again be without. It was the first new experience he’d had since . . . since . . . since before he’d re-created the universe.
Of course, he suspected that it wasn’t entirely natural. Glathriel’s revenge, he thought with a trace of genuine irony. Take us out of our nice, comfortable high-tech little worldlet and stick us in a nontech swamp designed for a race of giant beavers, will you? Well, it took us a million years, but we finally figured out a way to get back at you! Then, through her, it is we who will control you!
He considered that a distinct possibility, although he wasn’t certain how sophisticated the Glathrielians were along those lines. It did not, however, overly concern him. For one thing, she was at least partly Earth-human, no matter how changed she might be, and he’d had a very long time to learn to read beyond the surface of Earth people, to detect even slightly corrupt attitudes or motives as well as pure ones. He’d never sensed any deception in her. If it was something Glathrielian women did to snare men, it worked both ways, of that he was positive. If she was the only girl in his world—pretty well true at the moment, come to think of it—then he was her only boy. He was absolutely convinced that she would not, could not act against him. Whatever unsuspected potential lurked in the Type 41 brain, the link that bound the two of them together was empathic in nature, and that was the most revealing sense of all. Even telepaths learned how to cheat each other just to survive; an empath seldom could, since the very power dealt in emotions which no one could ever fully control.
Within their own subjective limits, he felt what she felt, and she felt what he felt. That was what made physical intimacy so intense, but it also left him convinced that she could not knowingly play false with him.
“Knowingly,” of course, was an important distinction, but even if there was something sinister at work and he was deluding himself, he knew in the end that it didn’t matter.
Once inside the Well, he was invulnerable to anything the universe could throw at him, even betrayal. And once inside, he would be able to find out what the hell was going on.
In the meantime something deep within his own psyche, his own deep chasm of loneliness, despair, and alienation from others, assuaged over long years only with tiny morsels of hope and self-delusion, had been, however temporarily, partially filled, and for the moment that was enough.
Still, it was too damned cold for him, even if not for her, and the kind of warmth she could give him was not the sort he now required. He went over to her and put his hand on her shoulder. She turned and smiled at him, and he made an exaggerated shiver and gestured back toward the town. She nodded and looked sympathetic; clearly she was also no stranger to a cold environment, even if she couldn’t feel it herself.
All seaport towns had a certain basic similarity to them. Although the towns themselves and their urban layouts tended to vary in wild and bizarre ways, reflecting the very different races that lived in them, there was always a section by the docks generally known as the International Quarter, even though it was a far smaller piece of the town than that. Where ocean ships crewed by a polyglot of races made ports of call like spaceships docking in new tiny worlds, a level of comfort, convenience, and service was necessary to cater to alien needs. Some were far better than others at this, of course, but Hakazit was a high-tech hex with a huge automated port, and its facilities, were first-rate. The Hakazitians were a bit harder to take, if only because they resembled, to Brazil’s mind at least, human-sized mosquitoes with a proboscis that looked like a giant version of one of those Happy New Year whistles that unrolled when blown. But the Hakazitians’ “nose,” when extended, proved to be not one but six sticky tendrils capable not only of feeding but also of doing almost any task hands could do and a few they could not. Their huge hivelike structures dominated the landscape as far back as anyone could see.
The girl—she’d never taken to or responded to any name he’d tried, so she’d just become the girl—never liked being inside a structure. Glathrielians, it seemed, were a bit claustrophobic even in fairly large rooms. It was a measure of how attached they’d become that she was willing to enter most buildings, even sleep where he did, although she was always clearly uncomfortable and still preferred floors to beds, at least for sleeping. She almost seemed to get a charge, though, out of walking unconcerned and unafraid stark naked down bustling streets and in crowded hotel lobbies, something unthinkable on Earth. But since the only other one of her species was her companion and lover, it gave her a rush of liberation that was as unique to her as his feelings for her were to him.
Vagt Damstrl, which meant “the Hotel Grand” in Hakazit, or so they said, was an imposing structure that dominated the skyline in a way only the huge port cranes could match, and its management prided itself on being able to provide both accommodations and necessaries for any race of the Well World that might be a guest. As usual, considering the state of Glathriel and its people, it had nothing precisely the way he’d want it, but many races liked carpeting on the floors and many others liked soft beds and many bathed in pools or tublike creations, so that they were able to assemble a spacious room for him that not only was to his standards but went beyond them. Nor was food a problem; a fair number of races who traveled for various reasons ate things close to or even the same as Type 41’s, and a short scan by a clever little device he’d never seen before resulted in room service deliveries of meals, even some sort of meat and fish, that were tasty and had no unusual side effects. Even silverware was provided to his specifications.