The creature floated slowly by the Yaxa and up to the blackness of the Well Gate. It turned, nodded again, and drifted into the Gate, sharply visible as a strange specter before it was swallowed up. The Yaxa followed, more nervous now than ever, and emerged from the South Zone Well Gate instantaneously.
The Yugash floated up to it, touched it. The Yaxa felt an eerie, uncomfortable tingling, but nothing else. It was suddenly chilled, stuffy, nervous. Blending into the Yaxa body, the Yugash now vanished.
There were a few other creatures about in Zone, but none gave the Yaxa much notice. The huge butterflies were cold and aloof always, and they inspired fear in some others. Only another Yaxa would have noticed how awkward the creature seemed, how unsure of itself.
It entered the Yaxa embassy, almost bruising its wings on the doorway. Inside were the ambassador and several other Yaxa leaders—all females. The male of the species was groundbound, a soft, pulpy caterpillar designed for only one purpose, and it responded with abandon. The males were kept dormant until needed. The Yaxa female always ate her mate after.
The ambassador looked concerned. “There is something wrong?”
The newcomer stopped and wobbled unsteadily on four tentacles. Its voice was hard to understand, and it was unlike anything they had ever heard before.
“I am the Torshind of Yugash,” it mumbled. “You must forgive me. I am still learning to use this body. In Yugash we grow the bodies we need, and they are of good crystals and bred to their tasks. Yours is an incredibly complex creature, and there is also a great deal of resistance from the host.”
“Do you mean,” one asked, “that you are a Northern creature currently occupying the body of our sister?”
The strange Yaxa nodded. “Yes. Will you please instruct the creature not to resist me so? We cannot complete this test until I am in complete control of the cranial area.”
They all looked nervous, uncomfortable now, both from the implications of what they were seeing and hearing and from being called “creatures.”
“Please!” asked the Torshind again. “Do so or one of two alternatives will result. I shall either have to abandon the body, or there will be permanent brain damage!”
That last got them. “Hypno!” one ordered, and soon a syringe to Yaxa requirements was produced.
The doctor, if that was what she was, looked uncertain. “You’re sure this won’t put you under, too?” she asked, worried. “And a total takeover—it’s reversible?”
The Yaxa-Yugash nodded. “Totally. The creature will simply not be able to recall more than dimly the possession. Come! It is becoming more difficult!”
The syringe was inserted through a joint, and in a few minutes the jerking ceased. The Yaxa was in a deep hypnotic sleep. Suddenly it became animated. It rose on all eight tentacles confidently, flexing its wings and tentacles. It donned a Yaxa pressure suit.
“That is much better,” said the Torshind. “I am in complete control now. I would have to spend several days in a body as complex as this to learn it all, but I think I can manage. Shall we go?”
They left, the whole party, and walked to the nearest Zone Gate. Everyone, including the Torshind, was tense.
The ambassador and the project leader entered the Zone Gate first, then the Yaxa-Yugash, followed by the rest.
In his office far down the corridor, Serge Ortega cursed. His monitors had told him everything except whether the experiment had worked. Was the Torshind now in Yaxa or in Yugash?
Only the Yaxa knew, but Ortega would fix that.
Glathriel
The Gedemondan, almost three meters high, of white fur, with padlike legs and a dog’s snout, chuckles.
“But the true test of awesome power is the ability not to use it.” He looks toward her and points a clawed, furry finger.
“No matter what, Mavra Chang, you remember that!” he warns sharply.
She feels puzzled. “You think I’m to have great power?” she asks skeptically and a little derisively, reflecting the way she feels about such mysticism.
“First you must descend into Hell,” the Gedemondan warns her. “Then, only when hope is gone, will you be lifted up and placed at the pinnacle of attainable power, but whether or not you will be wise enough to know what to do with it or what not to do with it is closed to us.”
Vistaru, the Lata pixie challenges it. “How do you know all this?” she asks.
The Gedemondan chuckles. “We read probabilities. You see, we see—perceive is a better word—the math of the Well of Souls. We feel the energy flow, the ties and bands, in each and every particle of matter and energy. All reality is mathematics, all existence—past, present, and future—is equations.”
“Then you can foretell what’s to happen,” Renard the Agitar satyr points out. “If you see the math you can solve the equation.”
The Gedemondan sighs. “What is the square root of minus two?” it asks smugly.
Mavra Chang awoke, the words of the snow-giant echoing as always in her ears. She’d dreamed that dream a thousand times since the actual event. How long ago? Twenty-two years, the Ambreza doctor had said.
She had been twenty-seven then; she was approaching fifty now. All those years, she thought, lying here on her cushions. A lifetime.
She stretched, and thought about it for a bit. About herself, how she had changed so much in the years.
She no longer thought about the time she’d been human. She knew they’d hypno-burned that impression into her twenty-two years before, but it had worn off, in time, with the dreams and the thoughts.
And, for a while, it had mattered. She remembered the Gedemondans, even if they’d made sure nobody else did—their power and wisdom, the way one of them had simply pointed a finger at the engine pods and they had toppled and exploded.
She remembered being captured by the Olbornians—great bipedal cats in ancient livery—and taken to their temple, where they had touched her extremities to that curious stone. But she couldn’t remember what life was like before that.
Oh, she remembered her past, but somewhere, years before, something had snapped inside her. She remembered that part of her life only in a lopsided, distorted way: everyone she remembered looked like her—the beggars, the whores, the pilots, her husband. Mentally, she saw them all as the kind of creature she had become—even though she knew she was a freak and that the people of her past did not resemble her present form.
That was right after the last time she’d tried to escape, to run for the border, to somehow find out what the hell the Gedemondan meant.
Doing so didn’t seem so important, either, anymore.
She had brooded and dreamed and sunk into a tremendous, suicidal depression after that, and then the change had come over her. She didn’t understand it, but she accepted it.
On a world with 1560 races, there was room enough for one more, a Chang, if you will.
And Joshi had come along just after that, as if in answer to this new feeling inside her.
She rolled over and got up unsteadily. It was no simple task, yet she’d done it so often it had become second nature. She stretched again, and her long hair swung down over her face. She didn’t mind that it reached the floor both in front and behind her ears; no more than she minded that her horse’s tail was now a great broom, trailing behind her.
She walked over to a low, two-meter-long mirror, and turned her head, shaking it a bit to clear the hair from her eyes.
You’ve changed in more ways than one, Mavra Chang, she told herself.
The creature that stared back was a strange one indeed to all but her and Joshi. In fact, it had been years before she even asked for a mirror. Not until after she’d changed.
First, remove the limbs from the torso of a small woman; then turn it face down, elevating the hips about a meter off the ground, the shoulders about eighty centimeters. Now attach a perfectly proportioned pair of mule’s front legs on the shoulders. Add two hind legs, also a mule’s, but keep it all “human,” perfectly matched to the hairless orange torso—except for the hooves on all four feet. Replace the woman’s ears with meter-long jackass ears of human skin. The result is even more impressive when one realizes that the woman was originally under 150 centimeters, head and legs included, so that the ears are actually longer than the torso. Now, as a final touch, add a horse’s tail at the base of the spine. The last was a gift from Antor Trelig’s New Pompeii party so long ago. Thus had Mavra Chang been transformed by the cats of the Olborn.
She didn’t worry about her hair blocking her vision; at maximum head lift she could see less than three meters ahead, anyway. She had learned to rely less on her eyes than on other organs, the ears in particular. Although they gave no better hearing than the originals, they were independently controllable from small muscles in the scalp. These she used as an insect would use its feelers.
She walked to the outer, roofed part of the compound, lowered her face to the ground, and grabbed a sheet of leather in her teeth. She pulled it back, to reveal a crude leather bag, which she then lifted with her teeth. The Ambreza kept her teeth in good shape.
Her neck muscles were the only aid she needed to lift the heavy sack. Placing a foreleg on either side of the bag, she worked at it with nose and mouth until it was wide enough open for her face. Inside was chopped cooked meat, cold but still fresh. She ate as a dog might. Afterward, she managed to close the bag, replace it in the hole, and cover it again.
The Ambreza left nice little tabbed plastic bags of tasteless trash every month. But she’d never accepted that. That routine made her dependent on others, and she had not stood it for long.
She walked over to the small fresh-water spring that ran through the compound on its way to the nearby Sea of Turagin. She lowered her face into the water and drank deeply. Its coldness refreshed her completely.
No dependencies, not for long, she thought with satisfaction. The dominant culture in this hex was primitive human. The natives were a dark people with Negroid facial features but compact build. Their hair was straight and black like her own. Originally, the locals panicked themselves with tales that the Goddess of Animals lived in her compound and that they would be turned into animals if they so much as caught sight of her.
And, of course, for quite a while she wanted no one, preferring to sulk in self-pity. But, eventually she would leave the compound, sometimes for the beach where she would prop herself up so she could see the magnificent starfield. Eventually she also explored inland, but always by night to minimize possible problems. Except for the mosquitoes and other pests she no longer felt, there were no predators that could bother her, and the natives feared the dark.
But, of course, she had eventually run into a couple anyway, and the first encounter was a disaster. They knew immediately what they saw—the very animal described in their tales—and it so terrified them that one actually did drop dead on the spot and the other became insane.
The most powerful voodoo is the one one’s mind believes in, she found.
And so, at first, she was cautious. Having a translator meant she could understand them and they her—although the device added an eerie tone to her voice.
Just the right effect. Ambreza-like, but not Ambreza. Something else: The Goddess!
And, of course, finally she announced to the local natives that if they served her she would show herself once without their suffering any ill effects. When she eventually walked into the firelight, ghostly and eerie, they did what she had hoped. They fell on their faces and worshipped her.
But, she warned them, to tell the Ambreza was to risk her wrath. Even to tell other tribes would bring down upon them a fate worse than death. Her tribe had kept the faith. They were the People of the Goddess, and they reveled in that knowledge.
Mavra demanded offerings, and offerings she got. Hoards of food dumped at the door of the compound. Tobacco, too. Rare on the Well World, the substance was much prized; the Ambreza took most of the crop, of course—but now she had some to trade with the monthly supply ship for things she wanted more than the now largely unneeded provisions.
For tobacco, the ship’s crews would bring what she asked. Since Glathriel was a nontech hex, machines were out; but books, geographies, and grammars were useful. She learned to read several related languages and waded through everything in their published histories.
She was, by her eleventh escape attempt, probably the greatest living expert on Well World life, geography, and geology. And she reread the books frequently, turning pages with nose and tongue until the volumes were almost unreadable. Even after she changed she continued to read voraciously; it was one of the few activities that kept her properly stimulated.
She also gave native hunters advice on game traps, which increased their yields, and suggestions for the manufacture of new nontech weapons. The Glathriel, of course, worshipped her all the more. The Ambreza became suspicious, but there was little they could do. The situation had gone too far.
Then, one night just after she changed, she noticed a strange glow in the direction of the village. Positioning herself nearby, she watched as one of the huts burned and people screamed. They got only one out alive, a young boy with massive burns on hands and feet.
She ordered him brought to the compound and launched one of her little rockets to signal the Ambreza. More Goddess magic.
And the Ambreza doctor had come, and looked at the boy.
“There’s no hope,” he told her. “I can get him to a hospital, yes, but not in time to do any good. He’s horribly burned. I might save his life, but never his limbs, and he’ll bear those tremendous scars his whole life as a cripple. Best I put him out of his misery.”
Something rose in her, looking at the burnt and pitiful boy of ten or eleven. “That’s not a pet to be put out of its misery!” she’d shouted to the beaverlike creature. “That’s a person! If you won’t save him for yourself, save him for me!”
She didn’t know why she’d said that, it just seemed right, somehow. The helpless, disfigured boy in some way reminded her of her own differences, and she took the Ambreza’s comments personally.
She accompanied the boy and the doctor to Ambreza and saw him later, still sedated in a high-tech hospital. He was a mass of scars, and both hands and feet had been amputated.
They argued with her. Ordinarily they wouldn’t have paid any attention, but the Ambreza felt a special guilt and a special responsibility for Mavra Chang.
“But what can he do?” they had asked. “The tribe would kill him. You can’t help him. Make sense!”
And, suddenly, the solution had risen, unbidden, in her brain and come out. Such intuition was uncharacteristic of her; it was the change.