Shadow of the Well of Souls

Cibon, Off the Itus Coast

It had not been a pleasant voyage for the former Julian Beard, although at the time she didn’t realize how unusual the experience was.

The monks of Erdom, pledged to maintain a stable society, had been faced with a pair of Erdomites, one male, one female, from another world, another culture, another race, now in Erdomite bodies but with their old minds and memories. Lori Sutton, once a human female and an astronomy professor as well, was now an Erdomite male through the oddities and occasional sick humor of the Well, two meters tall, strong, fast, an equine humanoid with a horn on his head and a pair of legs that could propel him at up to twenty miles an hour in deep sand. Julian Beard, once a handsome human man, an engineer and a shuttle astronaut, was now a pastel yellow Erdomite female, small, with little upper body strength, with a mane of hair and a matching tail, coping with not one but two pairs of breasts, and with hands that were little more than mittenlike split soft hooves. Both were trapped in a Well World nation where only mechanical energy was allowed, a medieval desert society where females had neither status nor rights, and where education and knowledge were tightly held and controlled by a pervasive church run by Erdomese eunuchs. To the monks these two were the very definition of a pair who just would not culturally fit.

The original plan had been simple: to use one of the monks’ great herbal potions to essentially hypnotize them into being good Erdomites, with a posthypnotic command that each should take the drug every night and then reinforce the hypnotic commands on the other. Only the monks’ failure to command them to forget their pasts and past knowledge and a fortuitous plea for help from Mavra Chang had taken them out of the monks’ clutches before the conditioning could be completed.

Julian had found herself totally submissive, without any sort of aggression or defenses, in a mental state where her whole reason for living was to please her husband and anticipate his wishes. Lori had become the strutting cavalier male, accepting Julian and all Erdomese females as incapable of more than pleasing men, doing household work, and having babies. He associated with other males and treated his wife as some kind of chattel slave without regard for her feelings.

Three days out of Erdom on the voyage north to Itus, they had taken the last of the drug without remembering it. The fourth day out, they went to take it and there was none left; they both went through the commanded ritual anyway, but without the potion they were aware of it and could understand what had been done to them. The effect was even worse because the old dosages had not worn off. When they said them, the statements sounded somewhat reasonable. It was only well after, when they awoke the next morning, that the full significance of it hit them.

The first realization was that they had been badly had by the monks of Erdom. The second was more than a little guilt and shame at having fallen for it.

That morning, in the cabin, they did not speak to one another for quite some time. Finally it was Julian, uncharacteristically, who broke the silence.

“I think for sanity’s sake we should speak to each other in private only in English from now on. I think we both need the mental equivalent of a cold shower, and that’s it. Not to mention the vocabulary.”

“That’s fine with me,” Lori replied softly, not looking directly at Julian. “It seems to me that we’re in enough trouble with those monks that it hardly makes a difference if we break our other promises now.”

“Were you a feminist back in your previous life?” Julian asked. It seemed an odd question for the situation.

“Of a sort, yes. The word had come into disrepute because it was co-opted by radicals with a different agenda from most women, but on the basic issues I was. Something of an activist, in fact.” Although, Lori admitted, I compromised my ideals more than once to get or keep a position.

“Well, now you’re going to find out the truth of one thing they told you and one other thing they didn’t. First, men do control and set the rules in society—at least in the two I know, Earth’s and Erdom’s. Maybe a lot of other places. That’s true. And now you’re a man and have to know the second thing.”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

“The men who rule? You’re not one of them. You’re stuck with those stupid rules the same as every woman, and you can’t change them much, either.”

“Thanks a lot. After the way I treated you the last four days…”

“Think of it as an education, or the start of one,” Julian sighed. “We were trapped. Both of us. But we couldn’t escape because it was built into the society. If we hadn’t agreed on the temple visit, I would have been stuck with that tentmaker and gotten the treatment later, when the local monk got the drugs he needed. If you agreed but then didn’t show up, they’d have sent people looking for us, and in that society it’s pretty hard to hide for very long. And then we’d have been kept in the temple, but instead of just being drugged and hypnotized, we’d have been the subjects for their chemical inquisition. We’d have come out of there with our brains scrubbed so clean that not a trace of Julian Beard or Lori Sutton would have remained.”

Lori shook his head in wonder and sighed. “I wonder what would have happened if they hadn’t passed me that letter. Or if they’d told me to simply forget I was ever anything but an Erdomite and then handed me a letter I couldn’t read.”

“I suspect that this friend of yours paid a handsome bribe to ensure that we’d get the letter. As to the other, remember, they’d never had two people like us before. They couldn’t think of everything that quickly. But we’d have continued to drug and hypnotize each other, and over weeks, months, a year, we’d have had reinforcing visits to the temple so they could correct any problems. Eventually we’d be so steeped in our roles and behavior and so indoctrinated into the religion and culture, nothing else would have been needed. I shouldn’t wonder that my next prescription might have included some mind-dulling chemicals, slowing down my mental processes until I couldn’t keep two thoughts in my head at once or have much long-term memory. I’d just be another of those stupid bubbleheads.”

“You think they’re smart enough to have stuff like that?”

“I think it’s about time we stop thinking of them as ignorant and stupid just because they live in a feudal, primitive society. They are a very old culture. Ancient by Earth standards. I think they know an awful lot about everything that is possible to use in a nontechnical society and even more about keeping things the way they are and under complete control.”

“But—we’re Erdomese! You said it yourself a week ago. We’re Erdomese whether we like it or not. Sooner or later—”

She nodded. “Sooner or later we’ll be back there and even more suspect because we’ve traveled abroad. I hope by then we’ll have figured out some way to beat them.”

“If we survive this, and if this woman’s telling the truth or anything close to it, we might have a crack. The promised reward is ‘anything we want.’ Maybe even out of here, if we wanted it. I take it that you’re not so enamored of being female after the last few days.”

“Not treated like that, I’m not! I don’t mind being the junior partner along for the ride, but I treated my dog better than I got treated by you! And the dog didn’t have to work, either.”

“I—I know. You think I’m proud of that?”

Julian grinned. “I think it’s a lot tougher holding to principle when you’re on the top of the heap instead of on the bottom. But for your information, it’s not the gender I’m upset with, it’s the bottom position and its permanence. Being a culturally correct Erdomese female is the pits, I’ll tell you. If I were forced to go back to that, I’d cheerfully take their stupid pills. Like this I can manage, I think, although there’s still some residual effect from that stuff. Alone in the cabin with just you, I find I can fight it, but out there, among others, particularly other Erdomese on the ship, I’m not so sure I won’t have a relapse.”

“Until we’re well away from Erdomese it might not be so bad to keep to the fiction, anyway,” Lori noted. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of these businessmen traders here didn’t also report back to the temple on just about everything they see and hear. I doubt if they could do anything this far from home, but we are citizens of Erdom, and we can’t hide that fact. They do all their diplomacy in the polar Zone, but it’s as if they have a voice in every one of these hex-shaped countries. We left pretty suddenly. If they decided to trump up some charges against us, we could easily wind up being arrested and sent back through one of those gates right back to Erdom, with the monks waiting for us at the other end. I think it’s best not to relax too much until we have some protection from others who know this place better than we do.”

It was a sobering thought. “Thanks. Just what I needed—more reasons to jump at shadows. Actually, the residue of these past few days is different from what you think I meant. I mean, I know how to play the sniveling little bimbo if I have to. I hate it, but it’s kind of a survival skill. No, it’s not that—it’s the fear.”

“Huh? Fear of what?”

“Of anything. You see, up until we got the treatment, I was playacting. To a certain extent the lifetime and instincts of good old Julian Beard were still there. Spending these days as a ‘pure’ Erdomese woman, though, I didn’t have those old senses to call upon. For the first time I faced the added burden of being a female in a male-dominated society that places women somewhere just above the herd animals or even below them. Without you around as a protector, I was absolutely defenseless. I had to take all the feelies from those merchants, all the guff, and all of a sudden every single one of them looked like a threat. My body was entirely at their mercy, and I needed, required you to stand in their way. I didn’t want to be out of your sight, and if you went off, I got back to this cabin in a hurry and locked myself in, scared to death all the way here. Until now I hadn’t understood why I felt the need to be locked up to be safe. I put it down to the drugs or the body or the changes in me. This brought it home. The old me, the male me, would have explored this ship from stem to stern and never had a second thought. Now, suddenly, I was in the midst of strangers, and I didn’t know friend from foe. I was scared to leave and scared to stay.”

Lori felt a sudden sympathy for Julian. “I think I know what you mean,” he responded. “It explains a lot about how I’m reacting to all this, too. I’ve had a cavalier, adventurous attitude since becoming male and a kind of charge-straight-ahead-and-damn-the-consequences feeling. Until now I was only aware that some sort of burden had been lifted off me but not what it was. It was just that the sort of feeling I had growing up female back home was gone. When I was seventeen, I was raped by my prom date. At the time I felt disgusted, but I never said anything because there was always this feeling somewhere deep down that I’d encouraged him somehow, let him do it—I don’t know. I do know I changed after that. Cut my hair real short, started to be a slob, got fat and stayed that way, just about never used makeup—made myself unattractive in general. I stopped dating for a long time, until after I’d gotten my Ph.D., really, hung out in women’s studies centers and even socialized with a lesbian group, although I never really wanted to go to bed with them. I did go to bed with men—a lot of them—but they were always men I picked out, and they were mostly nerds who were desperate for any female interest. They were going to love me for me, no frills or compromises, or to hell with them. Don’t get me wrong—I knew I was reacting—but I had a justification for everything. And, surrounded by lots of women I knew and trusted, or by men of my choosing, I managed to keep the fear down. I guess that’s why I took to the all-women tribe so easily. No men to threaten, and women who were not only self-sufficient but actually dangerous.”

“And now we both realize that, just like in physics, nothing is really lost, it’s just transferred,” Julian said with a sigh. “Now I’ve got the burden and yours is gone. About the only thing I can cling to as a real advantage is that this body sure delivers dynamite sex.”

“I guessed as much, considering your responses. And that’s the downside of my change. I can turn on like a light switch, but everything’s concentrated in just one spot. It explains a lot about my previous lovers. I feel a lot less guilt now.”

They had a laugh at that and then went on to more immediate worries.

“What do you know about this Chang woman, anyway?” Julian asked.

“Not a lot. As far as I was concerned, she was the leader and demigoddess of a tribe of primitive rain forest Amazons—literally. Though, mean, and ruthless; that was her reputation among the tribe. Then, suddenly, all this comes about and suddenly she’s claiming to be some immortal from this world. I would have sworn she’d have barely recognized anything beyond Stone Age technology as anything but magic and that she had no experience beyond the jungles, yet here she is, suddenly a different sort of person, comfortable with technology well in advance of our own and writing notes to me in ancient Greek!”

“Yeah, how’d she know you knew Greek?”

“I don’t even know how she’d know I knew German, let alone Greek. Our only common language was that of a Stone Age tribe. I don’t count it because I can’t speak it, and I was surprised that I could read the note at all. She made it pretty basic, though, and it all came back to me. She certainly knows no English, and if she did, it would probably sound more like Shakespeare’s or even Chaucer’s. She’d been in that jungle an awfully long time. It was almost like she was hiding out from the world.”

“From that other fellow with the appropriate name, perhaps. Brazil.”

“Maybe. But I get the feeling it’s not that simple. She’s not just a small woman, she’s tiny. Under five feet, skinny, wiry, but moves like a cat. She also has a confident, brassy voice and manner, but I wonder if that’s just a mask for what we were talking about.”

“Huh?”

“The fear factor.”

“But—she’s immortal, or she says she is. And according to you, the tribe at least believed that any injuries to her, no matter how severe, would heal without scars and that she could even regrow limbs.”

“Yes, she’s beyond some of our most common fears—if it’s all true, anyway. But she still can be badly hurt, and she feels the same pain. I wonder if she also feels the same kind of psychological pain. She’s strong for her size but no match for an average man. Suppose she is immortal and started life on Earth thousands of years ago? The way the Erdomese look at women and women’s rights is about standard for most cultures in human history until fairly recently. I wonder… After a few thousand years of being a victim with no end in sight, I might run off to a rain forest and surround myself with cast-off and runaway tribal women, too. I sort of ran away socially for years from just one incident. And this Brazil person—I assume they started out together and they got separated centuries or longer ago. I wonder if that’s not part of the problem.”

“What? That she lost her protection?”

“That she needed his protection in the first place. Her ego is pretty damned strong. There would be only so much protection she could stand before cracking.”

“You think he was abusing her or something?”

“No, I don’t think so. Even in Zone she described him as basically a good person. She would have cast him as the epitome of evil if he’d done anything to her. No, I think it’s more basic than that. Thousands of years in a series of what must have seemed very primitive societies to her, always with that fear factor… Suppose he simply never noticed? Suppose he, the immortal male, just couldn’t comprehend it?”

It was something to think about but not something that could be proved one way or the other, not until they actually met this mysterious Brazil—if, indeed, they ever did. This and their mental hangover and associated guilt produced a minute or two of silence.

Finally Julian spoke. “I really don’t understand a lot of this at all. If what we’re being told is correct, much of what I learned about creation, evolution, the birth and death of the universe—it’s all wrong. Yet everything, all the laws of science, seem to be more or less holding in spite of all that, and it doesn’t make any sense. We’ve gone from a solid foundation down through the rabbit hole to Wonderland.”

“Not exactly,” Lori responded. “We don’t know enough to draw any conclusions about the universe at large. There were a lot of theorists in physics who postulated bizarre theories that were at least mathematically possible. White holes, parallel universes, and much more. Even in the Einsteinian sense we casually accepted gravity bending time itself. This doesn’t show that what we knew was wrong, only that we knew far less than we thought we did. You know the old saw—I believe it was Arthur C. Clarke—that says that a civilization separated by countless years of development from our own would discover and know so much more that its technology would seem like magic to us. I think that’s what’s bugging you—all that work, all that knowledge, and we’re as ignorant of this sort of stuff as the most primitive tribes of Earth are ignorant of our science.”

“It’s that,” Julian admitted, “but it’s more than that, too. We’re not talking here about centuries ahead, or even thousands of years, but millions of years—maybe even more than that. All that time, and look at what they’ve come up with! Stagnant fundamentalism, ignorance, sexism, racism, violence—all the things we were trying to beat. All that knowledge, all that experience—and look at it! It’s not the science that they know, it’s what they don’t have, or don’t use!”

Lori sighed. “I know. Still, I keep telling myself that this isn’t the future, it’s an experimental slide. This is an artificial place, maintained by a computer. The civilizations here aren’t futuristic, they’re by definition stagnant, limited, leftovers after the experiment’s done, left over and forgotten. Their populations are fixed, their capabilities are fixed, they can’t grow, they can’t progress, and they can’t leave. Long ago—very long ago—they adapted to the situation. Some of them went mad, I suspect; some developed religious justifications for all that they had. Others went savage; still others just settled into a static condition where there’s no future beyond the individual’s. A few may have wound up like the People in the Amazon or some of the tribes of Papua New Guinea, where they repudiated all that had been learned, rejected all progress in the same way that we were told that the makers of this world rejected and turned their back on near godhood, equating progress with evil. In many ways this is less a romantic world than a tragic one.”

“Maybe,” Julian said thoughtfully. “But that brings up a nasty little thought for the immediate future. This Mavra Chang is from another age, another time, no matter what her name and appearance. I think we can take that much for granted.”

“She sure knows her way around. And if she’s been here before, and the only way out is through this Well, this control room, then we can assume she has even more knowledge.”

“But knowledge isn’t wisdom,” Julian pointed out. “That’s exactly what we were talking about. If she’s been here before, she’s very, very old. Maybe ‘ancient’ isn’t even a good enough term for her. Never changing, never able to have a decent relationship with other human beings—they age and die in what for her would be a very short time—she’s pretty much an individual example of what these hexes have gone through.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Well, if these hexes, trapped as they are, turned into the kind of things we’re seeing, what must the effect be on an individual isolated from all around her? Maybe there’s another explanation for why she might have shut herself off from the world, from all progress, in a never-ending primitive tribal group in the middle of nowhere for all those centuries. She created her own hex, a stagnant, never-changing one, just to cope. That doesn’t make her sound very sane, either, does it?”

Lori didn’t like the logic of that. “And if she’s insane, in some sense, anyway, then what does that make this much more ancient Nathan Brazil? Thanks a lot. What you’re saying is that we’re on our way to help an ancient, probably insane demigoddess do battle with an even older and probably madder demigod. Now, that is a way to cheer me up!”

Julian shrugged. “At least it makes the whole problem of Erdom and the monks seem rather trivial, doesn’t it?”

Itus was, if anything, as hot as Erdom but additionally was as humid as Erdom was dry. The air seemed a solid thing, a thick woolen blanket that enveloped one and made one slow, groggy, and exhausted from fighting against it. The gravitation, too, seemed greater; they felt heavy, leaden, and it took effort just to walk. Julian, particularly with the added dead weight of the four breasts, found it next to impossible to walk without support on just her thin equine legs, and dropped to walking on all fours, something that didn’t seem at all unnatural. Lori almost envied her after walking a couple of blocks. Julian did not seem as pleased, but the alternative was next to impossible. And frankly, even standing on all fours, bringing her height down to about a meter plus, she was still on a reasonable level for the natives of this place.

The Ituns were insectoids, large, low, caterpillarlike creatures with dozens of spindly legs emerging from thick hairy coats and faces that seemed to be two huge, bulging oval eyes, and a nasty-looking mouth flanked by intimidating, curved tusks. They seemed to be able to bend and then lock themselves into just about any position they required and, supported by the hind rows of legs, use their many forelegs as individual hands, fingers, or tentacles. Far worse for the newcomers than the eternally nasty faces and fixed vicious expressions, though, was the sight of all that thick hair in the constant heat and humidity. It made them feel even hotter just watching.

The Itun behind the front desk of the transients’ hotel seemed a bit larger and older and perhaps a bit more shopworn than the average denizen of the hex but was accustomed to dealing with alien types on a daily basis. Unable to form the kind of sounds that Common Speech required, it relied on one of the benefits of a high-tech hex: a small transmitter attached to the top of its head right above and between the eyes.

“Lori of Alkhaz,” he told the desk clerk. “Party of two Erdomese. I was told that we would be expected.”

Lower feet were already tapping something into an Itun terminal. The head cocked and looked down and read something on a screen.

“Yes,” the clerk responded in a toneless electronic-sounding voice. “An Erdomese suite was prepaid for you. Do you have much baggage?”

“Very little,” Lori responded. All that they owned was in one small pack.

“Very well,” the clerk said, and pushed a small plastic card over to him.

“Um—are there any messages for me?”

“No, nothing. It would have shown on the console.”

That was disappointing. “Uh, then—how do I find the room?”

“Follow the key, of course,” replied the clerk, and turned to take care of someone else.

Lori picked up the plastic card, which seemed a plain ivory white in color, turned it over, and shrugged. There was nothing imprinted on it at all, not even an arrow or a magnetic stripe.

He was about to ask how the thing worked when he noticed that a tiny spot was pulsing a brighter white along one of the edges of the card. As he turned to face the lobby, holding the card out, the spot moved. He turned the card in his hand, but the spot moved to always keep the same relative position.

“Come on, Julian. I think I have this thing figured out,” he said, and moved toward the rear corridor in the direction of the blinking light.

“Moo!” Julian snorted. “I feel like a damned cow like this!”

Youare a cow, Lori thought, but checked himself before he said it. Damn it! It was tough not to reflexively say something that sounded patronizing or offensive! And the truth was, Erdomese, for all their resemblance to equine forms, really were biologically closer to the bovine family with perhaps a bit of camel. Even their sexual temperament was more bovine, with the male overly dominant, competitive, territorial, and violent, the female by nature passive. Even the native language was divided and reinforced the differing natures; there were strict masculine and feminine forms of every part of speech, without exception. They were in a sense speaking two complementary but different languages in which every word form had two variants. In this dual track of Erdomese, the male spoke Erdomo, which was what he thought in, and the female Erdoma, which was what Julian naturally used.

It was why they tried so hard to converse in English; to even think in Erdomese was to impose and reinforce the expected roles of attitude and behavior. It was, however, tough to get around without constant effort because the Well acclimation process imposed the native language as the primary one, since language defined a culture and the system was designed to ease the transition, not to fight it. Both of them lapsed into it more often than not; they thought in it, even dreamed in it, and it gave a heavy accent to and put a cast upon even their translations into their former native tongue.

Living in a high-tech cosmopolitan hex, however, the Ituns were well aware of the burdens their comfortable home placed on most other races and did what they could. Corridors back into the hotel were wide moving walkways, and there were very large elevators at regular intervals. The key, however, kept telling them to go straight back, until they were at the back of the building itself. It then indicated a turn to the right, and they walked slowly down a long, wide corridor until the key suddenly stopped blinking and became a bright white in front of an extratall, extrawide door. Lori saw the slot and inserted the key, and the door slid open.

“Air-conditioning!” Julian gasped in English, there being no term for it in Erdomese, but she quickly lapsed into the normal tongue, too tired to think straight. “I beg you please to shut the door, my husband, so that its coolness might not flee.” She plopped down on the cushions, still wearing the pack, obviously exhausted.

Lori knew how she felt. Both had their tongues hanging out, panting, their forms, so suited to the desert need for retaining moisture, unable to sweat in the humidity.

It probably wasn’t all that cool in the room; they were accustomed to greater heat than even Itus provided. But the air conditioner also dehumidified, and that created a level of comfort that was unbelievable.

“I am never going to leave this room again. Ever,” Julian gasped. “I am going to live and die here.”

He unhooked and pulled off the small pack on her back and tossed it into a corner, then slipped off the leather codpiece he wore that felt like it was cutting him in two and tossed that over with the pack. The thing was more for propriety than for protection, and he wondered if he really needed it so long as he wasn’t going to pay a call on the Erdomese consul. While a number of races wore bright and ornate clothing, many others wore little or none, even some of the most developed, unless it was needed as protection against the elements. Here—-well, he probably would, since there were enough Erdomese passing through Itus on various business that he might well be noticed. If and when they got farther away, though, so that he and Julian were more curiosities than familiar forms, he might just chuck it until needed.

Clothes had been a mania with him once, as an Earth female; now, as an Erdomese male, they seemed totally uninteresting except for utilitarian value.

He looked over at Julian and saw that she was asleep. She looked so tiny and nearly helpless without him, he thought. And so damned sexy… A whole rush of stereotypical Erdomese male attitudes, thoughts, and feelings came into his mind. The lingering aftereffects of the monks’ treatments, he wondered, without really fighting them, or was it the onrush of male hormones shaping him into somebody he didn’t know, somebody he should think of with disgust? Damn it, there was something new in his nature, something that made it a virtual turn-on that she was here and dependent on him. In a sense, that terrible feeling was beginning to define him. She was at least as smart as he was, perhaps smarter. Oddly, he valued that, too, so much that it was a real fear that she might not need him at some point, that she was essential to him while he’d been more an escape route for her. Away from that suffocating culture and away from any who might even know it, she might well eventually find him superfluous. The thought raised his insecurity to almost the fear level.

And the old conflicts surfaced as well. Damn it, he liked having someone dependent on him for a change, even though it made him feel guilty as hell.

What was at the heart of the conflict, though, was not that he could continue to suppress or fight that kind of feeling, but now, as things were, did he need it so badly that he might not put up the fight?

Considering how mild her own reaction had been when the drug supply was exhausted and they became aware of the conditioning, he couldn’t convince himself deep down that despite her protestations, she hadn’t liked it in that role, too. No, no! That was a damned rationalization, no better than “Well, dressing like that, she asked for it.”

Had she liked it? No, of course not, he told himself. Had he liked it, even to the far lesser degree that he’d experienced it growing up an Earth female? But the argument somehow failed to totally convince the dual nature within him.

Maybe it was simpler but more insidious than that. In the end it hadn’t been a matter of liking it or not liking it. It had simply been easier, more comfortable not to be in a constant battle against one’s own language and culture, particularly when every personal moral victory was no more than that. That culture, that society, wasn’t about to change, ever. And neither were they from who and what they were now.

He felt confused and depressed, as if his whole life’s attitudes had somehow now been proved bogus, a self-delusional sham. People on the bottom of systems always said they wanted equality, but did they, really? Or did they, deep down, yearn more to have the situation reversed? Did the oppressed really believe the ideals they espoused, or was that just rhetoric? Did they in fact really want to instead become the oppressors?

It was his most disturbing fear, a fear that it might well go deep down in the “human” psyche as the sort of flaw people did not want to admit, even to themselves. But how many times had sincere reformers run for office against entrenched corrupt politicians and won, only to slowly turn into exactly what they’d run against? How many idealistic Third World revolutionaries had overthrown the horrors of dictatorship and been at best no better and often something worse? What kind of revolution had the feminist movement been when it had been limited to rich Western nations, while the women who made up ninety percent of the rest of the world’s female population remained mired in the muck?

“The first thing the freed slaves from America did after founding Liberia was to build plantations and enslave the African native population…” He remembered that from a history lecture long ago.

He wondered if that was why Terry and the news crew had been so cynical. They’d covered the Third World—Terry’s parents had been from the Third World—and they had more perspective than the closed, ivory-tower lives of the American and west European crusaders. Maybe that was why so much of the press in general was so cynical.

How much easier it would have been for her if the Well hadn’t played its cruel joke on the two of them. If Julian had emerged as the male and Lori as the female, both could have retained far more of their core beliefs. Neither was really comfortable staring their alternate selves in the face, each playing the other’s role.

And there was still Mavra Chang, an enigma from a previous universe for God’s sake, who’d chosen for her own reasons to live as the leader of a band of Stone Age women deep in the Amazon jungles. Instead of trying to dominate men or help create a new equal society, she’d rejected men and all that they’d built.

And that brought up another point. It was only because of Chang’s call that they were in Itus, but what the hell did he owe Mavra Chang? It was Mavra Chang whose abduction of the whole crew had destroyed his life and led inevitably to Erdom and what he was now. Indirectly, even Julian was here because of her, since without her jungle adventures he’d have been nowhere near that damned meteor.

True, Julian Beard and Lori Anne Sutton had both been at low points in their “real” lives when all this had happened, but he doubted that either of them had wanted this.

But the question remained: Now that they were here, what did they owe that mysterious crazy woman?

Well, of course, it was a job of sorts, something definite to do, and it got the both of them out of Erdom and might allow them to see some of this strange world. Although if there were many more of these “hexes” as miserable as Itus, he wasn’t sure his curiosity and enthusiasm could stand it. But that was exactly what it was and would remain. A job. A job that could be quit. A job in which he would feel no outstanding loyalties or long-standing obligations to the employer.

Most of all, maybe it would be a chance to sort out, removed from cultural and church pressures, who and what they now were and what options there might be for the future.

Fine words, but the dual nature persisted. The intellectual half wanted to make this a totally new start, to prove that things didn’t have to be the way they were back home no matter who was on top. But the other half, that dark, primal part of the psyche, wanted to bury Lori Anne Sutton, her ivory-tower ideals and her guilt trips, and become the new Erdomese man that the monks wanted. Even her logical side couldn’t work out a point to fighting it, considering how much everything was stacked against change. Without even a hope of change, how could clinging to the old ideas result in anything more than a life of frustration and misery?

“Some men do run the world,” Julian had said. “The bad news is that you are not one of them.”

Damn it all! It was a hell of a lot harder to fight this nature when a person was the one on top!

He finally did begin to nod off when suddenly there was a series of steady beeps from a small room between the main one and the bath. He went in, anxious mostly to silence it lest Julian awaken, and discovered that while the small room was of a very odd look and design, it had all the earmarks of a telephone booth. There was a red bar that was beeping on the far wall, and above it a small speaker that could be detached if need be, and above it a small screen. Thinking fast, he did what seemed logical and pushed the bar.

The screen popped on, and he was looking at the face of Mavra Chang.

“Wait a minute,” he said, hoping he didn’t have to pick up or push anything to be heard. “I’m going to close the door.”

He peered out, but Julian seemed to have just shifted position and gone back to sleep. He pulled the sliding door closed and turned again to the screen.

“Holy shit!” Mavra Chang said, shaking her head. “Is that really you, Lori?”

Chang’s whole appearance had changed. She seemed younger, her skin smoother, her hair expertly cut very short, wearing some kind of black pullover outfit. Cleaned up and made over, she looked very Chinese indeed. Only her big, dark eyes were the same, those ancient, weary, yet penetrating eyes.

“Yes, it’s me. You knew how I wound up, surely. You were there.”

“Yeah, I know, but it takes seeing for it to sink in, I think. I don’t know what my mental picture of you was really, but it wasn’t that. Don’t get me wrong, but it’s just not the Lori I knew.”

“I—I’m not,” he admitted. “I’m just not sure exactly who I am now, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a shame you had to undergo all this before we could talk normally, but we’ll need brawn as well as brains on this trip, so it might just work out. I gather everything went okay. God knows the bribes I had to spread around—with accompanying curses and threats of curses—to make sure you got at least one of my messages. I decided to take a gamble on Greek; my Greek’s rusty as all hell, but it seemed a better bet than Latin or Portuguese.”

“You picked one of the few I could handle,” he assured her. “Who would have guessed that we had something of a common language all along? We could have spoken back in the Amazon, at least by writing in the dirt.”

“No, no. I was pretty far gone back there; it took the shock of coming through the Well Gate to bring some useful things back to me. I’d been in that jungle, by my best guess, maybe three hundred years or even longer. I think I was right on the edge of losing all memory of anything but the jungle. But that’s a long story for another time. Things are different now, and in many ways I’m as different a person as you are from the life back then.”

Different, yes, but not in the same ways at all,he thought.

He noticed that her words, although they sounded like they were coming in her voice with normal intonation and expression, weren’t really matching what her lips were forming. He had seen this on the ship as well. In fact, it had been very strange to walk into a room filled with a number of races, and understand some plainly while others made just weird-sounding noises or spouted gibberish. “You have a translator now,” he said a bit enviously.

“Yeah, well, the one I had originally gave out long ago, and they’re only useful here, anyway. It was one of the first things I had done once I had the method and the means. It’s very quick, and there’s no more pain than the prick of a sharp needle. The trouble is, they’re not available at just any shop and they’re incredibly expensive. I’ve got quickly dwindling fortunes here and a very long way to go. And I assume that you have your wife with you—Jeez! That sounds funny to say!—and that she was some kind of soldier or pilot or something who came through ahead of us.”

“Yes. She, in fact, was once a he. An American, like me and the news crew, only sent down by the government to help with the investigation of the meteor. He was in fact a space shuttle pilot. An astrogeologist, I think. Got sucked in long before we entered while posing for a picture on top of the thing.”

“Huh! Think of that! And you thought you had a shock! Believe me, it’s not at all unheard of for the Well to switch sexes when it switches forms, but it’s very rare to have two from so small a sample wind up the same race, let alone both switching sexes. In fact, I know of only one other case, and at least I think I understand why that one happened.”

“I was thinking of that myself. She was so despondent in that culture that she was on the verge of suicide when I found her. Our marriage, I think, was the only thing that saved her life. It seems like amazing luck.”

“Yeah, well, there’s luck and then there’s the Well. I can tell you about luck. The Well doesn’t have any means of reversing its first random decision once you’re processed and incorporated into this strange big family, but it monitors everything that goes on. I can’t help but wonder if it somehow sensed your Julian was in danger of death by its actions and used you to correct that when it had the chance. Now, though, you’re both on your own. Don’t count on the Well to save you anymore, either of you.”

“Well, it might explain what happened, but I haven’t counted on the Well to save either of us from anything, anyway. In fact, you saved us from becoming good little loyal feudal types.” Quickly, he told her what had happened in the temple.

“Wow! Nick of time, sounds like! Well, look, as comfortable as this high-tech hex might be, I don’t want to be here or any other spot too long. I’m already sure I’m being watched, bugged, and monitored, and I’m not even sure by who.”

“You won’t get any argument from us,” he assured her. “This added gravity and tremendous humidity are doing me in slowly, and Julian is having even worse trouble with it.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve been here awhile and I’ve gotten somewhat used to the slightly higher G, and the climate’s no worse than the Amazon, but I keep forgetting that you’re a different species of creature now, designed more for a desert climate and sandy soil. You guys must be miserable! Well, at least in a high-tech hex you don’t have to walk unless you want to. It might not be the soul of comfort, designed as they are for giant caterpillars, but there is a kind of train going to almost any point we need in this hex. But it’s a long, nasty way to where we’re going, and I’ve seen worse than this place. Look, I’ll tell you what. I’ll figure out how to float the two translators somehow, but I want to get the implant done fast, and then we’re out of here. Could we do it this afternoon?”

“I suppose I could. Julian’s asleep. But look,” he found himself saying, almost without thinking, “if it’s too much of an expense, then we could do without the translators. Besides, in Julian’s case, an Erdomese female with a translator would in the best case be exiled from any contact with foreigners once we returned. It might do her more harm than good.”

Mavra considered that. “Hmmm… I forgot about that damned culture down there. Woulda made me puke if I hadn’t seen and been forced to live in so many similar cultures back on Earth. In China some families actually drowned girl babies because they had no value or status! And they were still having enough babies to one day overrun the planet!” She sighed. “Well, it would be a savings I could use, and she will be able to understand anybody else with one. Still, I’d like more than one of us to have one. Okay, I’m going to give you a name and address. The front desk will be able to tell you how to get there. It’s not far. Just be warned—that loud crackling and buzzing you hear all over when you go out will sound like a huge mob of people all talking at once when you come back. You’ll understand it, but don’t expect to make full sense out of it. The Ituns don’t exactly have the same frame of reference as we do.”

Lori got the address and repeated it back several times until Mavra was satisfied. Fortunately, the city was on a grid system, and the streets were basically numbers and Itun alphabetical characters so that he could use an Erdomese equivalent and the concierge’s translator would understand.’

“Okay, then. Get it done, come back, have dinner—make sure you order room service; you won’t even want to see Ituns eat—and get as much rest as you can. We’ll finish up what we need to do today as well and meet you tomorrow at the hotel. Since I’m being so thoroughly and obviously shadowed, there’s not much point to cloak-and-dagger stuff—yet.”

“We?”

“Yes, there will be more of us.”

“You mean you found Gus?” He hesitated a moment. “Not—Campos! Please, not him!”

“No, neither one, really. Your Gus wound up a Dahir, or so I’m told, and that’s a fair distance from here, although we might be able to contact him somehow along the way. I didn’t really know him, remember. We kept him and the other guy kind of out of it.”

“Yeah, well, Campos is a psycho. Rapist, drug dealer, gangster—you name it. The lowest common denominator of all the worst things in humans. Now, there’s somebody who should have been an Erdomese female! That would have been justice! Gus was a nice guy, very gentle, a photographer in fact.”

“Well, I got no word on Campos, but I know the type. I doubt if he’s anywhere near Erdom or even Itus, but the Well’s been known to have a sense of humor about some people. I don’t pretend to understand it, but I was led to believe that the Well actually takes your personality, both conscious and subconscious, your dreams and ambitions, even your fantasies and your fears, into consideration, but on a kind of loopy basis I doubt if anybody but another giant machine could fully understand.”

“Then—the colonel Julian spoke of, perhaps?”

“Nope. Don’t know where or what he is, either. No, you don’t know them. They came in with Nathan in about the same way that you wound up coming through with me. I needed a source of information on him, and we hit it off. It’s a kind of sweet story, as unique, I suspect, in the very long history of the Well World as your own story and Julian’s, and as oddly perverse as well. You’ll have to see and hear the story for yourself. Let’s leave it until tomorrow, when we’ll all have to discuss our options. Besides, it’s getting past midday, and I want your translator in today.”

He sighed. “All right, then, until tomorrow.”

The connection was broken.

Lori went out as silently as possible and saw that Julian was still asleep. He got his codpiece and put it on, then went silently to the door, feeling a pang of guilt at sneaking out for this without her. Why had he done that? Denied her a translator? The devices were unlikely to process Earth languages, so she’d have to speak Erdomese to be understood by them, and as with Mavra just now, the speech she’d hear from the translator would be in Erdomese to her as well. Erdomese didn’t possess a lot of technical terms, the feminine form even less so. Anyone who didn’t have a translator—rare and expensive, Mavra said, so uncommon—or speak Erdomese—highly unlikely, particularly as they went farther from Erdom—would be unable to communicate with her or she with them except through someone like him. And even then some very basic technical terms wouldn’t translate at all—they’d be gibberish. She’d had to use English just to say “air-conditioning.”

Outside the door he felt like a heel. As he was on the moving walkway, though, he began to rationalize. Mavra had been groping for him to give her an excuse not to spend the extra funds and had readily accepted his explanation. And he wasn’t kidding, either. Back in Erdom, where they would surely eventually wind up, for a female to even speak in the male “voice” was considered a sin, and in Erdom sin equaled crime. Suppose, when she spoke to a male back there, the translator changed things to the male form of the language? Even if that didn’t happen, he had every intention of living in the capital and not out in the middle of nowhere when this was all over with, and she was too smart to consistently fake ignorance of a foreign tongue if it said something interesting or relevant.

Lori knew he was groping for good reasons to get rid of the guilt, but by the time he had gotten his directions and left the hotel, he had decided that what was done was now done, and besides, if he was really wrong about this, he’d make sure she got a translator at some point along the way. By the time he reached the Interspecies Clinic near the docks, he had almost fully accepted that version.

The procedure to implant the translator really wasn’t all that much. The medical personnel at the clinic, supervised by Ituns but of several races from hexes along the main coastal route here, put him through an imager, ran a three-dimensional scan of him through their medical computer, and determined exactly where and how to insert the translator—a tiny little gem that apparently was grown or cultured by one of the undersea races. They showed him how to activate it, then they put him under a light anesthetic with a simple and painless injection, and the totally computerized surgery began. In less than twenty minutes he was coming out of it with a headache from the anesthesia and a sore spot on the back of his neck.

An Itun and another creature entered and did a visual examination. The creature looked like nothing imaginable but was as close to a living version of an Earth child’s toy—a long-necked little bird that hung on the side of a glass and dipped its bill into the water, then sprang back up, only to repeat the motion until the water ran out. Lori had the distinct feeling that the birdlike thing with the incredibly long, thin, straight neck could see right inside and through him, but he couldn’t explain that feeling.

“How are you feeling?” asked the Itun, and Lori started to put his hand up to his neck and then hesitated.

“Uh—all right to touch the area?”

“Oh, yes. It is completely sealed. The soreness is internal bruising, but it will pass very quickly. You should feel nothing by tomorrow.”

“And—it’s in?”

“Oh yes. I wear no speaker to allow someone to hear me in their native language, you will notice. You are hearing me directly in Erdomese, although I speak only Itun, a tongue you are as physically incapable of uttering as I am yours, and I am hearing you quite clearly in Itun at the same time that my colleague here is hearing you in what passes for a voice in Wukl.”

“You be not born as form utilized,” the strange, comic birdlike Wukl put it, the voice sounding like nothing Lori had ever heard or imagined. It was a kind of chilling sound, yet without any emotion or inflection whatsoever, and it seemed only partly said aloud and partly formed inside his own brain. It was, of course, male-voice Erdomese, but apparently the way the creature thought wasn’t exactly compatible with the Erdomese language. There were limits on these things.

Still, he was amazed and impressed almost beyond words. “Incredible! Uh—no, I wasn’t born Erdomese, if that’s what you mean. I entered through the Well. But how do you know?”

“Conflict is,” the Wukl attempted to explain, “clear to sense. Know not base not knowable. If unpleased could mediate self.”

“Don’t try and follow it too closely,” the Itun warned. “You will just turn your thoughts to boiling. We, too, think differently than you do, but I have had much training in dealing with others. The Wukl—well, they see things so differently from most races that we know it is difficult for them to understand others, but they are very skilled surgeons and they have good souls and desire to help. Their help, however, can be as convoluted and as unwanted as the initial problem. If given its own way, what would result would be what we might euphemistically call a surgical compromise that would be at best unique and not at all an improvement, as the injured and shipwrecked of a number of races have discovered when washed up on their shores. Nor should you take it too literally. The Wukl see everyone of us as horribly flawed, you see. We’re not Wukls.”

The headache was passing, leaving only the slight stinging. “Yes, I see.”

“No want Wukl betterment?” the Wukl asked.

“Um, no, not at this time, thank you. But—as of now I’ll be able to understand all the other races, whether they themselves have translators or not? And they will understand me?”

“Within limits, yes,” the Itun responded. “You will find those limits can be daunting indeed, as the Wukl here demonstrates in one area, and there are some races simply too different in their thought patterns to allow any meaningful communication. But for the most part you will find that it will take more practice editing out the sounds than understanding what you wish. It will take a little getting used to, but for a traveler to foreign hexes it is the one thing to not be without.”

“Can I go now? I think I’m all right,” Lori told them.

“Yes, the Wukl is a superb diagnostician within limits, and if it hasn’t noted a problem by this point in the procedure, then there is none. We have received payment in advance from your benefactor by messenger, so you are free to go as soon as you feel able.”

He was still a little groggy, and the humidity and heavy gravity made him not totally steady, but he decided he should get back to the hotel.

He soon experienced the strangeness of hearing those alien speakers all about him, and the initial disorientation, since while the words were understandable, the meaning was in most cases more obscure than the Wukl. His respect for the Ituns like the doctor and the hotel people went up enormously; Ituns definitely did not think along the lines of humans or Erdomese.

Julian was awake and apparently had been for some time. Although Erdomese did not take baths on the whole—a complete immersion for any length of time would remove naturally protective oils and could lead to an ugly and sometimes painful itchy skin condition akin to mange—spraying their faces and upper torsos with a showerlike wand could have a cooling and freshening effect. Clearly she’d spent some time in the bath area and had made some use of cosmetics and oils both from their meager case and from what the hotel provided. To him, at least, she looked refreshed and smelled quite sweet.

“Hello, my husband,” she said in Erdomese. “You have been gone a long time. I was beginning to worry for your safety.”

“Chang called and made arrangements for me to get a translator put inside my head. It was no worse than going to a dentist, but it was not pleasant. You were still asleep, and I decided you needed rest more than news at the time, and almost the last words you spoke were that you didn’t want to leave this room again!”

She accepted it. “This thing in your head—it means you can speak to and understand all not-Erdomese speech?”

He nodded. “Pretty much. It was a simple task, but it is very expensive. I am sorry that Chang did not have the money for both of us to have one. Perhaps someday.”

Julian had no reason to doubt him, but she was disappointed. “Yes, probably someday,” she repeated, knowing how unlikely that “someday” might be. It did, however, increase her sense of isolation.

“This Madam Chang speaks not English?”

“No. I don’t think so. She mentioned Greek, Latin, and Portuguese but not English. But it won’t matter in that case. Since she has one of these things in her head, too, you will be able to understand her and she will be able to understand you—in Erdomese.”

She sighed. “In Erdorma, you mean. Oh, well, it is better than silence.” She paused a moment, then asked, “Is there no other news?”

“Oh, yes. She’s coming by tomorrow, with others—I’m not sure how many. People from Earth who came in with the other fellow, her counterpart. I don’t know what race. She wants to leave pretty quickly—don’t worry! She says we’re going to ride out of here. Hopefully all the way out, and quickly.”

He thought that would make her happy, but she just let it go by. She seemed off, depressed, and he went over and stood behind her and massaged her back and neck. She did react as always to that, and she seemed to relax a little.

“We should eat and rest,” she said at last. “After tonight we may not be able to do it when we need to.”

He nodded. “I’ll order something from the hotel. I’m starving, anyway; I didn’t eat because of the surgery.”

Nor did I, because you forgot,Julian thought, but said nothing. She couldn’t quite explain her feelings even to herself, but she was generally irritated by him today, leaving without a word or a message, more like the drugged and hypnotized Lori than the one from before or even the one of this morning. She’d deliberately kept using Erdoma, which made her sound like some sort of Arabian Nights wimp by its very nature, maybe to test him and see if he’d switch to English. He hadn’t. When that was coupled with sneaking out for so long, the apparent start of a new pattern depressed her. Well, maybe it wasn’t a trend. Maybe he was just too tired to realize the way he was acting, she hoped. Maybe it was just this extra gravity that made her feel like a hippopotamus. Maybe she was just getting her period, and that was a wonderful thought to look forward to when they were starting off on a hard trip.

Most of all, she needed somebody else to talk to.

Mavra Chang arrived early the next morning, as promised. The door buzzed irritatingly, telling them that someone was there, and Julian, still feeling heavy and bloated but somewhat better than the day before, went to the door and pushed the opener so that it slid back. She’d hardly remembered that there would be more than one, but she had been curious almost since hearing Lori’s story to see this mysterious, ancient immortal human female.

She was not prepared for someone so incredibly tiny. Julian, although petite compared to Lori, was nonetheless pretty much the same five foot ten she’d been as a human male; if Mavra Chang was over five feet tall, it was because of her high-heeled black leather boots, and it would be amazing if the woman weighed a hundred pounds. She had a nearly perfect waist but almost no breasts at all, and big almond-shaped eyes looked up at Julian from a classically pretty Han Chinese face.

The ancient, imposing immortal of Julian’s mental image shattered in front of somebody who looked thirteen years old.

Chang’s tiny form was set off even more by the two figures behind her. Both stood almost as tall as Lori and stared at Julian through big green eyes with the longest lashes Julian had ever seen. From the waist up, where it curved inward in the expected way, they seemed quite human-looking except for the pointed equine ears that emerged from a thick gusher of strawberry blond hair. They were, in fact, stunningly beautiful young women of perhaps sixteen or so—from the waist up.

From the waist down they were most like palomino ponies.

They were female centaurs—centauresses, Julian thought, amazed.

And they were absolutely identical twins down to the smallest detail.

Mavra Chang smiled. “Hello. You must be Julian,” she said pleasantly in a deep female voice that nonetheless sounded hard-edged and tough in spite of its speaking Erdoma. “I’m Mavra Chang. And the girls-—well, you two think you have problems! Don’t worry, though. You won’t have any trouble telling this pair apart. Meet Tony and Anne Marie, the only other case of two entries to the same species. You see, before they went through, they were a married couple…”