Shadow of the Well of Souls

Agon

They awoke, chained to a wall by efficient shackles, unable to move any of their limbs more than a very short way.

It was a surprisingly modern room with a glowing ultra-modern ceiling providing more than enough light and vents feeding in air-conditioning at a reasonable level of comfort. Lori hung to the right of the entrance, Mavra to his left. Along the other walls were built-in work tables and fancy computer screens, and in the center were a number of benches with all sorts of science equipment on them, giving the place the look of a college chemistry lab.

Mavra groaned and looked around. “Lori? Are you all right?”

“I—well, if you call this all right, I guess so,” Lori groaned, then looked around and tested the chains. “Now what happens?”

“Nothing good,” Mavra responded. “You remember that I said you’d never really come face-to-face with what future technology could and would do for criminals? Well, welcome to the future. I’m just devastated to see this kind of setup here.”

“Yeah, but I thought the equivalent of the UN or something wanted you. This sure isn’t them—and why us, too?”

“Well, why don’t you just hang around and find out?” Mavra snapped with heavy irony.

Lori sighed, “I guess it doesn’t really matter much, for me, anyway. Without Alowi I’m a dead man, anyway.”

They did not have long to wait, but the creature who walked through the door was beyond anything they expected.

My god!Lori thought. It’s Daisy Duck with tits!

In fact, the body appeared more humanoid than duck-like, although it was completely covered by tiny white feathers wherever it was exposed, and the legs, slightly bowed, were of a tough-looking ribbed yellow-orange texture, and while the feet could not be seen, it was not beyond the bounds of imagination to think of two thick webbed feet somehow crammed into a pair of vastly oversized black pumps.

The arms seemed extremely thin, extending a bit out from the shoulders, with a ball-like elbow joint in the middle and ending in two huge mittlike hands, each with three nearly equal-sized webbed fingers and an opposing thumb, without any sign of nails, claws, or whatever. Extending from the underside of the impossibly thin arms was a row of feathers that might have been what remained of vestigial wings but that were now nothing more than decoration. The entire body, which stood perhaps 165 centimeters discounting the heels, was curvaceous and sported two rather ample mammallike breasts that were easily seen thanks to the rather slinky black dress the creature wore.

The head sat atop what appeared to be a very thin, short neck; it was large enough to match the body and began with long, straight black hair parted in the middle and going down to the shoulders on either side; the eyes were huge and oval-shaped, with the longest points vertical rather than horizontal as on Earth-human eyes, and contained large, round jet black pupils. These sat atop a long, curved ducklike orange-colored bill that extended a good twenty centimeters out from the head and was wide enough to be hinged on the sides of the lower face. Two small black slits atop the bill served as the nostrils; no ears were obvious.

Not Daisy Duck, Lori decided. More like Donald’s wet dream. Even so, the effect was comical enough that somehow the figure did not seem threatening.

The bill proved amazingly malleable, almost like a human mouth at its front, and helped the creature shape its words. These words, however, came after it stood there for a very long time and just stared at each of them in turn, but particularly at Mavra, to whom the huge black eyes kept coming back.

Finally it said in a deep, throaty feminine voice that seemed to come from somewhere far back in the head, “This is a surprise I hoped for but one that I did not really expect to catch. In fact, I was actually not expecting to catch up with you at all. The net was basically out for Brazil and still is, but you will do nicely. Very nicely.” That last was said with just enough menace to chill them.

“Who are you?” Mavra asked in as confident a voice as she could muster. “What is this place, and what do you want with us?”

One of the oversized fingers came up and gently stroked under the beak. “Who am I? I am hurt at the question, but I will answer it in due course. What I am is a Cloptan. It is not far. Right now you are in an underground laboratory on the border with Lilblod. It is in Agon, but above there is something more—ordinary. To get in and out one must go through a tunnel into Lilblod. It solves not only the technical but the jurisdictional problems rather nicely. You might have guessed that what is processed and packaged here is not exactly popular among most of the world’s governments.”

“Drugs,” Lori sniffed.

“Yes, drugs. Specifically, two types. One is of little interest to you, but the other is the one you knew was in those containers aboard the ship that brought you to us. It has many names, but in the form we process it here we call it ‘rhapsody.’ It has different effects on different species. In fact, for a number it is lethal, for others it causes brain and nervous system damage, while to yet others it is simply a tasty spice. When processed into slightly different forms, however, for those races that are similar enough in brain chemistry and share some common enzymes in the cells, it is a drug. A wonderful drug, in fact. You take it, and all of your pain goes away. All of your physical pain, if any, and much of your mental pain as well. All the bad, negative things, the psychological scars of a lifetime, they all have little effect on you. It’s all there, but it can’t hurt you. I am told that the initial effects are like nothing else imaginable, but as your body gets used to it, you just sort of settle down into a situation where life is—simpler. The effects last for varying periods, the average being eight to ten hours before it gets down to where you’ll need some more—but slowly, very slowly.”

“I’m sure you’ll spell it out in excruciating detail for us,” Mavra commented dryly.

The Cloptan ignored the comment. “First the little aches and pains start returning, then full physical awareness, and looming on the horizon is every single horrible thing in your mind, all your worst fears and nightmares. You can feel them, almost see them coming. Fear turns to desperation, desperation to terror. There is nothing at all you can do. The only way is, of course, to take more rhapsody. Eventually, of course, your system gets used to it, and you level out, becoming more normal on a regular basis and with only one big overriding fear—that the supply will stop and you will face the horrors of your own mind.”

“How horrible,” Lori muttered. The bitch was enjoying this!

“Even the strongest minds cannot withstand it forever. Some can fight it off for hours, a few for days, but they tell me no one succeeds in breaking it completely. The depression becomes so absolute, you will kill yourself first. It keeps the business—profitable.” She walked over and stood right in front of Mavra.

“They say you are possibly immortal, that you cannot be killed. I am not certain I believe that anyone can’t be killed, but I think it will not make much difference. It would be a nice experiment, though, to see just how long you could go without it. If you could not even kill yourself, would your mind crack? What form would the insanity take? I wonder… It is tempting, but I think I have other plans in the end. Oh, yes, the blood tests say that one form of it will work quite nicely on you. Sutton, on the other hand, is sufficiently different from you to require a different formulation, but the science folks say that it will work on him as well.”

“For God’s sake!” Lori cried. “What do you want! What are you doing this to us for? We’re thousands of miles from home and surely can’t be of any use to you here!”

“I should think it would be obvious to you by now,” the Cloptan replied. “Because of this,” she said, gesturing down her body with her hands. “She made me like this!” she snapped, pointing to Mavra. “And you—you went along, Doctor Lori Sutton. And you—you became the man! The big macho hunter with his little devoted four-titted bitch! I do this for revenge! Venganza! Revenge for daring to drag into hell Juan Alfonso Campos de la Montoya!”

“Oh, God!” Lori sighed, feeling all hope vanish.

“So that’s why they wanted only the two of us,” Mavra said.

’The Dillians are nothing to me and too large to have handled in any case. What are they going to do? It will take them days just to find their way out of Lilblod. Then what? Report to the authorities? They are already looking for you and would find you now if they could. As for Sutton’s crazy little bitch, she, too, was nothing to me and just so much excess baggage. Do not worry, Doctor Sutton. The computers here are excellent. We know of the deficiency in your system, and we have the means to fix it. If I had wanted you dead, I would have just had them kill you.”

Lori shook his head in wonder, unable to understand this kind of thinking. “What is it with you? I didn’t pick this body any more than you picked that one. I’d trade you if I could. There are times I would have killed for a shape like that. But look at you! Is it so awful being a woman? You’re young, probably very pretty by the standards of your race, and in an incredibly short time you’ve managed to get this far up in the drug trade. Some new start, but I guess it’s what you know. I’m broke and helpless in a backward medieval desert, for god’s sake!”

“Being a woman is bad enough,” Campos responded angrily. “It is hell to me! And yes, I am very beautiful by Cloptan standards. Do you know how hard it was to adjust to that? To have every lecherous Cloptan man pawing you? Do you know what I had to lower myself to do to get to this? I do not own this lab, nor do I control it. Finding the Cloptan underworld was not difficult, and they were interested in me because I came from the same business but on a different world. No, getting inside was not difficult, but once there I was just another girl, just another piece of furniture to them! Me! The son of the greatest patriot of modern Peru, the man who could strike and corrupt and bring down the most evil and powerful oppressor of all Latin peoples with a weapon as simple and impossible to fight as common coca! I had to defile myself! To swallow all pride and self-respect and put myself in the gutter! I am nothing in this organization except a powerful man’s current favorite toy! But now, now, it is all worthwhile. Here you are. If I can get the others, too, it will be complete. Brazil and that other bitch. Even if fortune does not smile, however, it has smiled enough. For a while yet we will play games so that I may have the satisfaction to repay my humiliation! Then, when the time is right, you, ‘goddess of the trees,’ will willingly and cheerfully beg to let me let you put things right. It may take weeks or months yet, I hope not years, but one day you will put things right for me and repay all the suffering that you have caused! Once you are under the drug’s spell, you will willingly tell me anything and everything. If you are what some say you are, then one day we will take a trip, just us girls, and you will go inside this world and put me right!”

So that was it,Mavra thought. One more horror to endure, one more long torment, but the direction that damned Machiavellian Well was taking was now clear. It was sad that Lori yet again had been dragged into this. Mavra had mostly wanted to help them. Well, if he stayed alive, maybe someday she still could. There was certainly nothing to be done now. She just wished she’d listened to them and left Juan Campos back on Earth or finished him off. Damn her sense of fair play! One could totally change such as him, but he remained as evil as ever. He had already changed more than he knew or wanted to recognize, judging from what he’d done as a female and even how she now spoke and moved. But the Well did nothing to change that inner self, and Juan Campos had been an insane, evil, power-mad egomaniac in his former life, and the new persona had done nothing to change that but had reinforced it.

Sooner or later, though, no matter what was to come, she’d be taken to the Well. There was no question that such a sophisticated operation could get the truth out of her. It could only be hoped that Campos was so insane she believed that inside the Well, in a Markovian body, she could still dictate to Mavra Chang.

Campos stood back and looked at both of them with satisfaction. “Do the shackles hurt? Well, soon you will be free of them, I promise. And the medical teams here, freed of such stupidities as government oversight and ethical colleagues, can do absolute wonders. Even though you are one of the most wanted people on this planet, these people specialize in making wanted fugitives unrecognizable, although in most cases they do not have the level of freedom they have in your case. You, Sutton, might be quite useful as a courier once we give you some motivation for making appointments on time. But not you, ‘goddess.’ You are mine. From you they will carve a work of art. Then, as my dear boyfriend Giquazo, who I will definitely kill someday, promised, you will go home with me. You will be my pet, my toy. Oh, we will have a fun time, I promise you!”

Mavra’s heart sank as one of her bitterest Well World memories surfaced: living all those years with those donkeylike legs, always looking down…

But she had survived that and worse, and she would survive this for as long as it took, until opportunity knocked. And if Nathan was having the same kind of luck, she might yet be first to the Well.

“Some technicians will be in shortly to inaugurate you both into our widening family,” Campos told them. “I go first to speak with those who will see you next, and then I will see you once more before leaving. But do not worry, my little goddess. I shall be back for you.” With that, the Cloptan turned and left the room.

“I think I would rather die than go through this,” Lori told Mavra.

“Don’t! Never give up! She’s too insane to have them mutilate me so much that I won’t be able to speak to her and she to me. To that type, life is all about power. Everything else—drugs, money, you name it—is to gain power. That’s what she really hates about being female now. She’s lost power, and I’m the only way for her to get it back. There are only two more hexes after Clopta to the equator and an avenue in. So long as Brazil isn’t also caught and trapped, he’s as much a threat to Campos as to me. If I can just convince her, no matter what I look like, to get me to the Well before Brazil, we win. Stay alive. Even now, hope’s not gone.”

Lori very much wanted to believe that.

Juan Campos, or Wahna as her name was pronounced by the Cloptan tongue, made her way through the labyrinthine underground complex to the medical section. There she met with Nuoak, a giant creature resembling a huge brown-furred slug with countless long, tiny tendrils that in combination could perform the most delicate operations, and Drinh, an Agonite resembling a human-sized shellless turtle with long powerful hands and fingers.

“They are yours any time you want them,” she told the medics. “Now that you have their scans, have you decided what you will do?”

“Well, the Erdomite is not difficult,” Drinh commented.

“He must be castrated!” Like I was… “But he must not die! I wish him to work for us, becoming what he most fears and helping, even promoting our own interest which he hates so much! And the rest of what I asked as well, so he will always be reminded of me.”

“We have not had either of these species before, but they seem to represent no serious challenges. We believe that we can adapt your Erdomite to become a courier for us over possibly difficult terrain. We have noted the lack of proper clotting factor in his blood, but the gland that aids in its production is merely immature, not missing, and so that problem is easily dealt with. Do not worry. He shall be fit to do only what is useful to us, and all that you request be done to him will be a part of it.”

“Perfect! Do it! But what about the other? That one requires very special treatment.”

“There’s not as much to work with,” the master surgeon noted. “Still, the small size and lack of major features and your own requirements make it obvious that the best way to ensure that no one who ever knew her or saw her picture recognizes her is to create from her an animal. It can be a unique animal, since with the countless varieties of the Well World there is nobody who knows them all or will question a convincing appearance. This is what we came up with after much study.” He pushed a few buttons on a console, and a hologram of a figure appeared.

Campos laughed in delight. “Oh, that is wonderful! Perfect! But—can you do such a radical thing?”

“It’s not as radical as it looks. Mostly a matter of adding a lot of fatty body mass, moving the knees, implanting the natural feathers, that sort of thing. Then reinforcing it with a pictin—an artificial virus tailor-made to her and her alone. It will methodically go from cell to cell and manipulate the stock DNA chains that will make the change permanent. Internally there’s not much changed, so she’ll still have to eat what she normally would and such, you understand.”

“That is all right. Appearance is everything. Delicious! And her speaking? She must be able to speak to me, and I to her, but with limits.”

“Much simpler. We will simply remove her translator and replace it with a synthetic one. As you may or may not know, we’ve never successfully created a translator crystal, but we do have ones that are very limited. We can tune this one not only to one language but to the specific harmonics of your translator. When she speaks, it will be instantly translated into a preset, encoded binary sequence which can be received and decoded only by your translator. To anyone else it will sound like meaningless squawks and screeches. Similarly, since that code will be fed to your translator alone, she will understand you as if you were speaking normally no matter what language you use, while all other speech will be picked up by her translator, which will overload trying to decode what isn’t there and produce meaningless random sounds. No one but you will even think that she is a sentient being. Is that satisfactory, madame?”

“Perfect.” Juan Campos sighed. “How long will it be before I can bring her home?”

“Not long. Two, three weeks tops.”

“Do it, then. Do it as quickly as you can, but do it right.”

The Erdomese constitution handled the drug a bit differently but just as effectively from the point of view of the dealers. There was not any massive high but rather a continuous feeling of being just a bit isolated from reality, a “slight buzz” as Lori thought of it. It was when it was withdrawn that its full power and potency revealed itself; the pain, the horrors, the hallucinations were beyond anyone’s endurance. He knew he could not exist without the drug but was not so insulated that he did not hate them for doing it to him. That, and the way they treated him, half the time as some sort of interesting lab specimen and the other half as no better than a slave, he thought, the worst possible existence imaginable.

But that was before he met the duo he began thinking of as Mengele Turtle and Frankenstein’s Slug. He knew by their detached and clinical discussions that they were going to do something more to him, something awful, but he had no way of knowing what.

Then, shortly afterward, the keepers came for him and gave him an injection, and he remembered no more.

The first realization that he was waking up from a sustained anesthetic-induced sleep was an awareness that he was on all fours. That was odd; Erdomese men were never on all fours. He opened his eyes, but they refused to focus very well, as if still mostly asleep, but he reached out and tried to stand—and found that he could not.

His first thought was that they’d taken his fingers, and then he managed to put his head down close to his arms and saw hooves.

Not even the kind of hooves Alowi had—real hooves, like on his feet.

But his feet, too, were on the floor. How could that be without him being at an angle or on his knees? It was as if his legs had been shortened and his hips turned so that he was now a four-legged, four-hoofed beast a mere three and a half feet off the ground!

With a sinking feeling he realized that it was exactly what they had done. He still had his tail, but it was down and dragged on the floor, trailing between his—hind legs.

And with less shock than he might have thought, he realized that the tail was the only thing between those legs, in far too short a time he had gone from female to male to—nothing. There weren’t even any internal muscles there to feel or flex.

You didn’t have to go to med school to figure out Campos, did you?

Still, even with blurry vision, he could see that there was something in back of his—well, forelegs. He not only could see the shapes in a somewhat blurry way, he could feel the dead weight hanging down.

Breasts? Four breasts on a eunuch? What on earth for? Particularly such a large and heavy set, which cleared the floor only by several inches. Sensing something else, a wrongness, he flexed his back a bit so that they did touch the floor, then straightened again. If they had nipples, there was no sensation in them.

He wondered why he hadn’t bled to death during their butchery and then realized what the breasts really were. Not just more Campos humor—they had placed in him, or activated by hormones, the internal engine of the female, the healing factors. No nipples, because whatever function they served they did so for his benefit, and he was one of a kind.

The neck was very long and supple. He could look forward or down, although his vision seemed to be limited to about two feet clearly, three before almost everything was lost. Still, he could see very close, and it almost looked to him as if he had some sort of muzzle on, as if he could see part of his nose and jaw.

Then the door opened, and he smelled Mengele Turtle enter. The doctor—if that was what he could be called—began making a lot of very stupid silly noises at him, until finally he heard, “One… two… three. Ah! I see you can hear me now! Very good! We, of course, removed your translator, among, ah, other things. It has been replaced with an artificial device that interpolates speech both in and out. You can speak, but to be understood you will have to be heard by someone with the same sort of device set to the same frequency. Similarly, you must hear something through the same conditions to understand it. Otherwise, even your native tongue will sound like nothing more than a noise pattern. It is quite useful for couriers such as you will be trained to become. It can’t be removed or bypassed without causing permanent damage to the speech centers of the brain, and it can be reset to any frequency we choose or even reprogrammed with a whole new code by remote control. You see how handy that is. You can convey the most sensitive message, but only one who has both the device and your code and frequency can retrieve it. You, on the other hand, sound like an animal making random noises. If anyone attempts to play random sequences and hits it but does not give the code header, it erases, cutting you off completely. Absolutely secure.”

“Very clever,” he admitted sourly. “But what sort of courier would this body make? And what makes you so sure that I’ll transfer the right information?”

“Well, you will be trained, of course, both in the uses of the body and in courier technique. You will be used locally, basically between Agon and Clopta through Lilblod. The system itself is simple. There is a specific version of the drug you are on. To survive, you will have to make your assignations, for only they will have it. If any of them find out later that you gave false or incorrect or even incomplete information, they will notify someone and they might well forget your dose. As for finding your way, it will take practice, but you will find that your senses of smell and hearing are incredibly acute. You will learn to follow days-old scents and interpret a vast number of sounds. As most of your route will be through dense forest at night, sight is of little use anyway. The drug will motivate you and ease your pain and exhaustion. Your digestive system can handle most of the ground-level plants of Lilblod. Save for an insignificant amount of the drug you need, you are, shall we say, cost-free and maintenance-free labor.”

“Yeah, well these breasts are going to cause no end of trouble in the woods.”

“They are tough, and you will get used to them. In addition to supplying your absent clotting factor, they can carry enough food in the form of fat and water to allow you, if need be, to exist for a week or more eating and drinking nothing, so if something happens and you fall behind, you can skip food and water to make up time. You also have a small pouch of which I’m quite proud. It will hold small microencoded materials and even carry the receiving code and frequency for you. It will, however, dissolve such material in gastric juices if you are very late getting your dosage. Withdrawal, in other words, triggers it, so even if you are captured, nothing will be learned.”

“You must have studied hard to think up things like this.”

The doctor ignored the comment. “Food and drink will be necessities, but they consist of raw leaves and grasses and water—only water will really do—and they’ll taste pretty much like what they are. Anything else will make you sick. You won’t have much in the way of conversations or companionship, obviously, and you are as asexual as a machine. We were able to locate and neutralize the actual sexual center in your brain. You can’t have sex, do not and will not want it, won’t even fantasize about it; indeed, if we’ve done it properly, you won’t even be able to figure out why you or anyone else liked it in the first place. It boils down to this: The only thing, the absolute only thing that can and will stimulate your pleasure center is our little cube. Over time, as brain and body adjust, it will become your sole reason for existence and our sole expense. Perfect, are you not?”

“Yeah. Perfect.” Drug or not, I’ll kill myself at the first opportunity rather than live like that.

He seemed to anticipate the thought, “If you think of suicide, be sure you do it, because otherwise we’ll give you no cube at all for one full cycle…”

That was too much. He knew he’d never go through with it, couldn’t kill himself with that kind of threat.

They had won. All this way and the bad guys had won!

For the other captive it was possibly even worse.

At one time or another Mavra Chang had been put on or tried an enormous number of drugs, but nothing like rhapsody. Within minutes it seemed as if every pleasure center in her brain and body exploded in continuous delight while all else, everything else, faded into total insignificance. She knew she was still chained to the wall, but it just didn’t seem important, nor did it when they released her and she dropped to the floor. Everything, every touch, every move, was a new delight.

She was aware of others, of being asked questions and answering them, but it was of so little consequence, she didn’t even remember the specifics of the conversations. Darkness, light, colors, sounds, creatures moving around, all had their wonders and delights. She was being poked and probed and moved here and there, but none of it really mattered to her.

It was hard to say how long this lasted, but the coming down was very, very slow. Awareness outside of herself returned in dribs and drabs, shapes and creatures took on more realistic appearances, and things began to seem more logical. Even so, she remained high and knew she was, able to function but still somewhat bathed in a nice, soft, comfortable cocoon. Things being done seemed peculiar or even hilarious but caused no alarm.

By the time real rationality had returned and there was just a glow and slight lack of coordination, they had put her in a small padded cell. Her feet were free, but her hands were cuffed behind her back. Overcome at that point with a seemingly insatiable hunger and thirst, she found a pot of some cold liquid and three very large varicolored loaves of different things, what she couldn’t guess. The urge to eat and drink was just irresistible, even if she had to do it on her knees or prone, biting into the loaves as best she could and manipulating the container of liquid with only her mouth and neck. It tasted sweet and heavy with a kind of creamy aftertaste, something like buttermilk, and she managed to drink most of it while spilling only about a quarter, and that she found herself lapping up with her tongue. She had left nothing when she was done.

She now felt sleepy but tried to shake it off and think. That rhapsody was the most dangerous drug she’d seen since sponge. In fact, it might be an ancestor of just that for all she knew. She did know that she would be mentally incapable of turning it down if it were offered again, and that brought forth the first and primary fear. They had to give more to her! Nothing, absolutely nothing was of more importance to her than that. She’d kill her own friends and betray any trust to get it.

She knew she was hooked, on the line completely, but as much as she hated the thought and those who’d done it to her, she knew they’d accomplished what they had set out to do.

Why keep me locked up and shackled like this? There is no way I can leave this place. Not now.

But she was a new species for them, she realized, and they couldn’t be sure of her compliance or even positive that they’d gotten the dosage right. And they were probably scared of her, scared of the rumors about her possible powers. They would make very sure.

Within a few more hours she was in tears, hysterically banging her head against the padded door and begging, pleading, promising anything if they would just give her more and stop the torment. She hated them, hated their cold, callous way of treating her in this, hated Campos for what she’d done to her, hated herself for being so damned vulnerable, but it was horrible, awful… Far worse than heroin, which she’d managed to kick more than once. But the withdrawal pains hadn’t been nearly at this level. The waking nightmares, the hallucinations of every horror she’d ever lived through, the onrush of all the fear and pain she had ever endured…

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?”

“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.