Midnight at the Well of Souls

JUST OVER THE NATION—SLELCRON BORDER—MORNING

The Rel stopped just ahead as the air suddenly cleared and they walked into bright sunshine.

“You may all remove your breathing apparatuses and discard them,” it told them. “The air is now quite safe for all of you.”

Skander reached up and took off her mask, but stowed it in the pack case. “I’ll keep mine, and I think you others should, too,” the Umiau cautioned. “I have no idea what the interior is like, but it’s possible we may need the couple hours of air left in these tanks. If the mechanism is self-operating, it may not exist in any atmosphere.”

“I am well aware of that, Doctor,” The Rel replied. “I, too, can not exist in a vacuum—The Diviner requires argon and neon, and I require xenon and krypton, which, thankfully, have been present in the quantities we need in all of the hexes so far. We had weeks to prepare for this expedition, you know, and I fully expected us ultimately to have to face a vacuum—in which those little respirators will do us no good whatsoever. The packs contain compressed pressure suits designed for each of us.”

“Then why didn’t we use them in that hellhole we just went through?” Hain grumbled, outraged. “That stuff burned!”

“That was a hex of sharp edges and abrasives where the suits might have suffered premature damage,” The Rel replied. “It was a discomfort, no more. I thought it best not to take any risks with pressurized equipment until we have to.”

Hain grumbled and cursed, and Skander wasn’t much better—she was drying out rapidly and itched terribly. Only Vardia was now perfectly comfortable—the sun was very strong, the sky was blue and cloudless, and she even somehow sensed the richness of the soil.

“What is this place, anyway?” Skander asked. “Any chance of a shady stream where I can wet down?”

“You’ll survive,” The Rel responded. “We will alleviate your discomfort as soon as we can. Yes, there are almost certainly streams, lakes, and ponds here. When I find one shallow enough and slow enough that it will not be your avenue away from us, you will get your wish.”

The place was thinly forested, but had tremendous growth of bushes and vines, and giant flowers—millions of flowers, as far as the eye could see, rising on stalks from one to three meters high, bright orange centers surrounded by eighteen perfectly shaped white petals.

Huge buzzing insects went from flower to flower, but the actions were individualistic, not as they would move in a swarm. Each was about fifty centimeters long, give or take, and very furry; and though their basic color was black, they had stripes of orange and yellow on their hind sections.

“How beautiful,” Vardia said.

“Damned noisy, if you ask me,” Skander yelled, noting the tremendous hum the insects’ wings made as they moved.

“Are the insects the life form?” Hain asked. The Rel had to move back close to the huge beetle to be heard.

“No,” the Northerner replied. “As I understand it, it is some sort of symbiosis. The flowers are. Their seeds are buried by the insects, and if all goes well the braincase develops out of the seed. Then it sprouts the stalk and finally forms a flower.”

“Then maybe I can eat a few of the buzzing bastards,” Hain said eagerly.

“No!” The Rel replied quickly. “Not yet! The flowers drop seeds, so they do not reproduce by pollination. The bees bury the seeds, but little else—yet they are obviously gaining their food from the center of the flowers. See how one lands there, and sticks its proboscis into the orange center? If the flowers feed them, they must do something for the flower.”

“They can’t uproot,” Vardlia said sympathetically. “What’s the use of having a brain if you can’t see, hear, feel, or move? What kind of a dominant species is that?”

The ultimate Comworld, Skander thought sarcastically, but said aloud, “I think that’s what the insects do. If you keep watching one long enough, it goes to one other flower, then returns to the original. It might go to dozens of flowers, but it returns between trips to a particular one.”

Vardia noticed a slight lump in the grass just ahead of them. Curiously she went over to it and carefully smoothed the dirt away.

“Look!” she called excitedly, and they all came to see. “It’s a seed! And see! An egg of some kind attached to the outside! Each insect attaches an egg to each seed before burying it! It’s grown attached! See where the seed case is growing over the egg, secreting that film?”

Skander almost fell out of her saddle peering over Hain’s hard shell to see, but the glance she got told the story.

“Of course!” the scientist exclaimed. “Amazing!”

“What?” they all asked at once.

“That’s how they communicate—how they get around, don’t you see? The insect’s like a robot with a programmable brain. They grow up together—I’ll bet the insect hatches fully formed and instinctively able to fly when the flower opens. Whatever it sees, hears, touches, it communicates to the flower when it returns. I’ll bet after a while they can send the creatures with messages, talk to each other. And every time the insect gets to another flower, the old hands give information for it to take back. The creatures live, but they live their lives secondhand, by recording, as it were.”

“Sounds logical,” The Rel admitted. “Hain, I would suggest you eat anything but those flowers and the black, striped insects. You could get huge numbers of them, we all could, but if we upset them we could face a programmed army of millions of the things. I want to be peaceful.”

“All right,” Hain agreed grumpily. “But if there’s nothing else to eat, the hell with them.”

At that moment one of the huge insects flew right into their midst and started carefully but quickly re-burying the exposed seed and egg. Satisfied, it flew off to a nearby flower and buried its head in the flower’s center. They watched it carefully, both for intent and out of curiosity. Finally it seemed satisfied and backed out, flying over to them and hovering menacingly in front of them, darting from one to the other. They stayed still, but Hain’s antennae radiated, “If that thing makes one wrong move, I’ll eat it regardless.”

Finally the creature got to Vardia, flew all around her, then suddenly jumped on her head, and before she could make a move it pushed its sharp, mosquito-like proboscis into the top of her head just under the leafy growth. They were all too stunned to move for several seconds. Suddenly Hain said, “I’ll zap it.”

“No!” Skander shouted violently. “You might leave that thing in her. Wait a minute and let’s see what happens.”

Vardia had no pain centers but she did have sensitive nerves, and they felt the thing enter and probe until it touched a particular set of nerves, the ones that sent messages to and from her head and brains.

Quite suddenly everything went dark, and a strange voice much like her own thoughts, only stronger, asked, “Who and what are you and what are you doing here?”

She could think of nothing but answering. The alien thought was so powerful it was hypnotizing. It was more demand than question.

“We are just passing through your hex on our way to the equator.”

She felt the proboscis withdraw, and the lights came on again. She was in control and saw the thing heading away at high speed.

“Va— Chon,” Skander corrected. “What happened?”

“It… it spoke to me. It asked who we were, and I said we were just people going through the hex toward the equator. Man! It’s strong! I have the strangest feeling that I would have to answer anything it asked—and do whatever it said.”

The Rel drifted over and lifted itself up so it could examine her head with whatever it used for sensory equipment. As it drifted just a few centimeters from her up to her head, she felt a strange tingling. Obviously it did not float—something supported it.

The Diviner and The Rel seemed satisfied and floated back down. “No sign of a wound of any kind,” the creature said. “Amazing. One of the flowers got curious, and since you were the only member of the vegetable kingdom around, it picked you. Stay still and let it happen again. Assure them we’ll do no harm and get through as quickly as possible. Tell them we’re following the coast and will take care.”

“I don’t think I can tell them anything they don’t ask,” Vardia responded weakly. “Oh, oh, here it comes again!”

The creature did not have to probe the second time; it went straight to the proper nerve endings. “readout!” came the command, and suddenly she felt herself being drained, as if that which was her very essence was being sucked up into a bottle through a straw. The process took several minutes.

“Look!” Skander cried. “My god! She’s rooted! Unmoving in bright daylight! What did that thing do to her?”

The insect moved back into the mass of flowers.

“We can’t do anything but wait,” The Rel cautioned. “We don’t know the rules here. At least those insects seem to be dominant only on the plants. Take it easy and let things run their course.”

Hain and The Rel both moved toward her, where she stood rooted and motionless. Hain pressed against her skin, and got no response, nor any from the blank eyes.

“Are we going to have to camp here?” Hain asked at last in a disgusted tone. “Why not just leave her?”

“Patience, Hain,” The Rel warned. “We can’t afford to proceed until this drama plays itself out, even if it takes hours. We have only a little more than two hundred kilometers in this hex but we want to survive it.”

They waited, and it took hours.

Vardia felt suspended in limbo, unable to see, hear, feel, or do anything else. Yet it wasn’t like being asleep—she knew that she existed, just not where.

Suddenly she felt that sucking feeling again, and suddenly she was aware of someone else. She couldn’t understand how she knew, but something else was there, all right. Suddenly that force of thought she had felt when the insect had first penetrated her head was all around her.

“i meld what is yours to me and what is me to you,” the voice that was pure thought said, and it was so.

There was an explosion in her mind, and she clung desperately to control, to her own personality, even as she felt it being eroded away, mixed into a much larger and more powerful, yet alien, set of thoughts, memories, pictures, ideas.

Why do you resist? asked a voice that might have been her own thoughts or someone else’s. Submit. This is what you have always wanted. Perfect union in uniformity. Submit.

The logic was unassailable. She submitted.

“It’s coming back!” Skander yelled, and the other two followed the path of the insect to Vardia’s head and watched it bury its sharp proboscis as before. This time it stayed an abnormally long time—perhaps three or four times longer than it had the last trip. Finally it finished and withdrew, buzzing off back to its home flower. They watched as her body came back to life, the eyes moving, looking about. She uprooted, and moved her tentacles around, shook her legs.

“Chon! Are you all right?” Skander called out, concerned.

“We are fine, Dr. Skander,” replied Vardia in a voice that was hers yet strangely different. “We may proceed now, without any problems.”

The Diviner’s little flashing lights became extremely agitated. The Rel said, “The Diviner says that you are not the one of our party. Who or what are you? The equation has been altered.”

“We are Chon. We are everything that ever was Chon. The one you call Chon has been melded. It is no longer one but all. Soon, as even now it happens, all will be Chon and Chon will be all.”

“You’re that damned flower!” Hain said accusingly. “You swapped minds with the Czillian somehow!”

“No swap, as you call it, was involved,” it told them. “And we are not that damned flower as you said, but all the flowers. The Recorders transfer and transmit as you surmised, but the process may be and usually is total at first sprout, or how else should we get our information, our intellect? A new bloom is a blank, an empty slate. We merge.”

“And you merged with the Czillian?” The Rel said more than asked. “You have all of its memories, plus all that was you?”

“That is correct,” the creature affirmed. “And, since we have all of the Czillian experience within us, we are aware of your mission, its reason, and goal, and we are now a part of it. You have no choice, nor do we, since we cannot meld with you.”

Skander shivered. Well, Vardia got her wish at last, the mermaid thought. And we’ve got problems.

“Suppose we refuse?” Skander shot at the new creature. “One gulp from Hain here and you’re gone.”

The creature in Vardia’s body stepped boldly in front of Hain and looked at the big insect’s huge eyes.

“Do you want to eat me, Hain?” it asked evenly.

Hain started to flick her sticky tongue, but something stopped her. Suddenly she didn’t want to eat the Czillian, not at all. She liked the Czillian. It was a good creature, a creature that had the interest of the baron at heart. It was the best friend she had, the most loyal.

“I—I don’t understand,” Hain said in a perplexed tone. “Why should I want to eat it? It’s my friend, my ally. I couldn’t hurt it, never, or the pretty flowers and insects, either.”

“It’s got some kind of mental power!” Skander screamed, and tried to free herself from the saddle in panic. Suddenly Hain spread out, lowering her shell to the ground, legs extended outward.

Skander was free of the harness and looked around for a place to leap. Her darting eyes met the lime disks of the Czillian, and suddenly all panic fled. She couldn’t remember why she was afraid in the first place, not of the Czillian, anyway.

The thing came right up to the mermaid, so close they could touch. A Czillian tentacle stroked the Umiau’s hair, and the mermaid smiled and relaxed, content.

“I love you,” Skander said in a sexy voice. “I’ll do anything for you.”

“Of course you will,” the Slelcronian replied gently. “We’ll go to the Well together, won’t we, my love? And you’ll show me everything?”

The Umiau nodded in ecstasy.

The Slelcronian turned to The Diviner and The Rel, who stood there a few meters away, viewing the scene dispassionately.

“What are you going to do with me?” The Rel asked in the closest it could come to sarcasm. “Look me in the eye?”

For the first time the creature was hesitant, looking uncertain, puzzled, less confident. It reached out its mind to the Northern creature, and found nothing it could contact, understand, relate to. It was as if the creature was no longer there.

“If we cannot control you, you are at least irrelevant to us,” Vardia’s voice said evenly. The Diviner and The Rel didn’t move.

“I said the equation had changed,” The Rel said slowly. “I didn’t say which way. The Diviner is always right, it seems. Until this moment I had no idea whatsoever how we were to control Skander once in the Well, or why the addition of the Czillian tipped things more in our favor. It’s clear now.”

The Rel paused for a moment. “We have been in charge of this project from its inception,” The Rel continued. “We have used a judicious set of circumstances and The Diviner’s amazing skills to make our own situation. We lead. Now we lead without worry.”

“What power do you possess to command us?” scoffed the new Vardia. “We are at this moment summoning the largest of our Recorders to crush you. You are no longer necessary.”

“I have no power at all, save speech and movement,” The Rel admitted as eight huge insects hummed thunderously into view over the flowery fields. “The Diviner has the power,” The Rel added, and as it spoke the flashing lights of The Diviner grew in intensity and frequency. Suddenly visible bolts shot out from the blinking creature and struck the eight Recorders at the speed of light.

The Recorders’ outlines flashed an electrical white. There was a tiny roll of thunder as each of the creatures vanished, caused by air rushing in to take the place where it had been. It sounded like eight distant cannon shots.

“Hmmm…” The Rel said in its flat tone, “that’s a new one. The Diviner is full of surprises. Shall we go? I should not like to spend more than two nights in your charming land.”

The Slelcronian mind in Vardia’s body was staggered and crushed. Something seemed to deflate inside, and the confident glow in its eyes was replaced by respect mixed with something new to its experience—fear. “We—we didn’t know you had powers,” it almost gasped.

“A trifle, really,” The Rel replied. “Well? Do you want to join us or not? I hope you will—it’s so much simpler than what The Diviner would have to do to get Skander’s cooperation, and I’m certain that, in the interest of your people, both of them, you’d rather we made it before anyone else.”

The stunned creature turned to Skander and said, shakily, “Get back into your harness. We must go.”

“Yes, my darling,” Skander replied happily, and did so.

“Your lead, Northerner,” the Slelcronian said.

“As always,” The Rel replied confidently. “Do you know anything about Ekh’l?”