Shadow of the Well of Souls

Itus

“I understand that we have something in common,” one of the twin centauresses said to Julian in heavily accented English as they entered the hotel room.

“Yes?” was all Julian could manage, still startled both by the unexpectedly diminutive appearance of Mavra Chang and by the startling if imposing twins who seemed to have stepped out of Fantasia.

“You were a human male, were you not? And so was I. Not so Anne Marie, who was my wife.”

“I’m afraid Tony is having a very difficult time with this,” Anne Marie put in, her voice absolutely identical to the other’s but with a definitely softer and gentler, almost “sweet” tone, while Tony seemed much firmer, almost aristocratic. There were clearly two different personalities inside those mirror-image heads, not to mention the fact that Anne Marie’s accent was very British.

“I will survive the shock,” Tony commented, as if reassuring herself as well as Anne Marie. Tony was in fact looking at the very feminine, pastel-colored, and four-breasted Julian and already seeing how much worse things might have been.

Mavra walked over to Lori and stood looking at him. While she had always projected the feeling of someone much larger, in fact she now barely came up to the middle of his chest, heeled boots and all. She gave a low whistle.

“Man! The Well outdid itself on this batch! The two guys become girls, one of the girls becomes a guy, and the other girl becomes the exact identical twin of her husband. Boy! Talk about screwing around with people’s psyches!”

Lori was as stunned by the twin centauresses as Julian had been. “I thought you said two entries to the same species was just about unheard of,” he said to Mavra. He left unsaid that he was startled to be “hearing” the centauresses in Erdomese in spite of the fact that since Julian could understand them, they were most likely speaking English. Was that, he worried, a price of the translator? That it translated even languages one knew! He wondered for a moment why he hadn’t noticed this with Julian, then realized that they had uncharacteristically spoken only Erdomese to one another since his return the previous afternoon.

Mavra nodded at Lori’s comment about same-species conversions being uncommon. “They are. Sex changes—no, they happen all the time. The reason generally is to maintain the balance in the hex, since you can’t add territory. Dillians—that’s what this pair is—tend to mate only a couple of times a year and have long gestation periods. I know the race well myself. The result is that they often have periods when there are fewer births than normal, so they’re a natural to add to during one of those times, and newcomers are almost always females there because with that long gestation, they’re not necessarily going to increase the population before the Well can balance things out. It would also be most common to be female if you got put in Erdom, as Julian was, since they have a lot more females than males. Lori, I think you were the exception for reasons we discussed. On the other hand, if you had come through first, you’d undoubtedly have been female, and Julian wouldn’t even have wound up Erdomese. Hard to say. For my selfish purposes, anyway, I’m glad it worked out the way it did. Happy to have you both aboard.”

The twins, as it were, were stunning creatures on both the “human” and nonhuman halves. Both stood about 215 centimeters tall, with thick, billowing strawberry blond hair that cascaded from their heads and went down the back like a mane, out of which stuck two very equine ears that seemed to be able to pivot independently of one another, and big green eyes set in an exotically beautiful face that contained elements of classical European but had other influences from many races. The complexion was a golden brown, although it was difficult to determine if it was tanned or naturally that way. The breasts were rather large and seemed designed more to hang down when the torso leaned forward, suggesting that centaur young nursed standing on all fours; otherwise, the figure was close to perfect, going down to a very small waist at the point where the humanoid torso merged into the equine half just about where a horse’s neck would begin, so that the entire humanoid torso seemed to be slightly forward of the main body.

The lower half was not quite horse, either, but rather an equine extension of the torso, clearly having a single, supple backbone that ran from the humanoid shoulders all the way to the tail. The pony like body tapered in just forward of the rear thighs and was covered with short golden hair, ending in a large, bushy tail of the same strawberry blond as the hair on their heads. They were for all that almost supematurally supple; the backbone had to be able to flex effortlessly in almost any direction. They could bend the humanlike torso down so that they were able to actually touch the ground without bending at the knees, turning it almost backward, while swiveling the rear hips around to reach their own tails. It was in form a masterpiece of beauty and functional design.

They were the sexiest-looking creatures Julian had ever seen or imagined, all the more so because, while bipedal, she shared some of the equine look herself. She found herself thinking, Now, that’s the way it should be done!

Lori had much the same reaction and was somewhat amazed and embarrassed to discover that he was becoming turned on just looking at them. He decided he’d better sit down.

The room, which had seemed large, was pretty cramped with the two centaurs inside, but they made do as best they could. “We ordered some coffees and teas,” Julian told them. “It was all we could think of since we did not know the nature or needs of your companions.”

“Tea is fine with me,” Mavra told her. “Tony, being a native Brazilian, will probably complain about the coffee, but he won’t drink much else. Anne Marie, being British, is self-explanatory.”

“I feel like I should help you, dear,” Anne Marie said apologetically, “but I’m afraid I haven’t gotten used to all this excess baggage on my rear end in rooms like this yet. Both of us have already made some frightful messes knocking over things.”

“No, no. You are our guests,” Julian told her, and went into the corridor to the bath and prepared the drinks, then brought them back out. The sight of the two centauresses standing there holding cups and saucers was almost funny.

Anne Marie looked at Julian as if studying a sculpture. “You know, I always fantasized about becoming what I am now, but I do believe that had I known of or imagined your form, I should have preferred it. You are so pretty and combine much of the best of both human and animal form.”

“I think you got the best of it,” Julian told her. “The status of females in Erdomese society is that of objects. It would be unthinkable for one or two females to travel alone even there, let alone to other lands.”

“Oh, yes, I’m afraid Mavra has told us about that. What a shame for you, poor dear! At least you are fortunate to be married to someone from your own culture. I will say that Dillian society is quite comfortable and relaxed. Oh, the men like to show off their strength and do a lot of man things like drinking heavily and boasting and competing in all sorts of games and silly contests, but women are equal on the councils and in education. The people are all quite civil, so there’s not the fear and pressure there is back home. I can—and did—walk the trails alone at night with no more worry than that of tripping over a log. There’s quite a lot of stock taken in family. Not much privacy, but you can’t have everything, after all. It’s quite pleasant, really. More than I hoped for and much less than I feared.”

Julian looked over at Tony, who seemed in general a bit less happy about the situation, but she decided it was a matter for later, more discreet discussion.

“I’ll get right to the point,” Mavra told them, her sharp, penetrating voice more than compensating for her tiny size. “We’ve got passage on a cross-country train this afternoon that will take us directly to the Ogadon border. Ogadon’s a water hex, so that means taking another ship.” She unfurled a map on the cushions, and they all looked at it.

“There are some places here I’d rather not revisit if I can avoid it,” she continued. “Makiem is definitely one of them; dealing with an absolute monarchy of giant toads with little love for their own kind, let alone others, is not something I want to do. Parmiter is a whole nation of professional thieves and scoundrels, I’m told. I have a fondness for Awbri, but it’s not much for trade and few ships stop there, and since they’re fliers, there are no roads or even trails to speak of. Agon is the most likely jumping-off spot and about as far as I think I can afford. Trouble is, once we’re ashore, we’re in totally foreign territory for me. I’m much more familiar with the regions north and particularly east of here.”

“Then why not go north through that one, there?” Lori asked her, pointing to Wygon and wishing she could read the scratches that served for writing on Mavra’s map. “Or even hop a ship east? There are lots of those.”

“Well, several reasons,” Mavra told them. “For one thing, while the Wygon are good folks, we’d be heading up to this point here, the Yaxa-Harbigor border. I don’t know how the Yaxa are now, but I doubt if they’re any nicer or dumber than they were, and they were not people easily tangled with. That route is also mostly overland; we’ve got no flying races in our group and will be walking or riding blind. In fact, this is the first time I ever had this big a party with me and only two races represented! As for water, it damn near broke me getting Anne Marie and Tony here from Dillia, which is not an easy hex to get out of, not to mention the bribes I had to spread around Aqomb to reach the two of you. If all I could get us back to was Zhonzhorp, we’d be as far from any possible goal as we are now and dead broke. I think I can get us a deal to Agon. Not fancy, maybe, but it’s only four days’ sail. We’ll also need supplies before we take off into unknown country. You can’t assume anything about climate, edible food, or much else when you go overland, and in a lot of places you can’t use money even if you have it. I’m not going to go over our exact route now; I’ll wait until we’re well away from here and in a place where I’m not certain I’m being recorded and examined. Any questions I can answer right now?”

“Yeah, one,” Lori said, staring at the map. “What do you need us for, anyway?” Mavra had said more words in one gulp since entering the room than she’d spoken altogether in all that time in the Amazon. Her whole manner was as domineering and pushy as ever, but now it was accompanied by nonstop talking, as if she were making up for all those years of near silence.

“Basically, because it’s between difficult and impossible to get any distance here by traveling only overland,” Mavra responded. “You really have no idea yet. And also because somebody—either hired by Nathan or on their own or a combination of both—definitely doesn’t want me to get up there, or at least not to get there first. If Nathan gets in before I do, the first thing he’ll do is take me out of the Well master system. That’ll mean I’ll be processed just as you were, forced to go through a Well Gate and come out as something else. I’ll also become just another mortal. I know that’s my problem, but it means you guys will be stuck far from even your new homes with nothing to show for it. If, on the other hand, I get in first, I can pretty well call my own tune, and yours as well. You can’t believe what power I can have inside there, and more important, if what I think is true really is true, I may well be able to take some of that power out with me. You can get whatever you want—the race and sex of your choice, riches, power, or, if it turns out that what I suspect is true, you can come with me and travel the whole damned universe.”

“That sounds exciting,” Anne Marie said with typical understatement. “But is it really as dangerous as you make it out to be?”

“There are things worse than death here,” Mavra Chang warned. “Once I was captured and transformed halfway into a donkey. Human torso, donkey legs, ears, and tail. No hands, just legs, and unable to raise my head. Then, getting away like that, I fell into the land of the Wukl, who decided to ‘perfect’ my design. I spent many long years as a fat pig-like creature, always looking down at the ground. And that wasn’t the only experience I had. No, you never know what’s going to get you here, and with every evidence that somebody somewhere is trying to get me, there’s more safety in numbers. Besides, I like the company.”

There were passenger trains across Itus, but the kind of passengers they were designed to carry were built quite differently from the party of travelers. The result was that they had the choice of riding in the Itun equivalent of a boxcar—which looked as if it would easily heat up enough to fry eggs no matter how many hatches were open—or the same equivalent of a flatcar, with some thin but strong metal fencing, a meter or so high, placed around the edges. They chose the latter.

After watching the increasingly boring countryside go by, Lori decided to try to nap; Anne Marie—at least Julian thought it was Anne Marie—went over and spoke to Mavra, and that left Tony down on the other side of the flatcar staring off into space. Hesitantly, Julian made her way over to where the centauress who had said that they had much in common but had otherwise said little was standing. Julian wasn’t really sure how to approach either of them or even if she should, but it was worth a try. Still, she stood there, waiting to be noticed.

For a few moments the centauress continued to stare vacantly to the side, but then she said in that same accented English, “I think you are even more unhappy than I, are you not?”

“I—I’m not sure. You are—Tony? Is that right?”

“Yes. And you are—Julian? Is that right?”

“Julian Beard. Or so I was. Lori-Julian now. I can understand how it can be tough on you, winding up the identical twin of your wife, but I still envy you. I would trade places in a moment, except I couldn’t do that to anybody.”

“Yours is one of those medieval cultures where women are chattel, I gather.”

“Pretty much, yes. Sort of like some of those Middle Eastern societies back on Earth, only worse. This culture is built into the genes. The fight, the aggression just sort of drains out of you. Not all at once, but little by little. I was a hell-raising bitch like they’d never seen when I first woke up there, but over time it began to dribble away. The body chemistry, brain chemistry, whatever, just takes over. It’s not that you like it—even the ones born this way mostly don’t like it—but you just can’t help yourself. I was able to keep a little of my old self, enough for my self-respect, so long as Lori was remembering his own former self and giving me some room, but lately he’s been acting, well, as badly as I think I used to act when I was a teenager. I was a handsome guy—triple-letter athlete, honor student, you name it. The girls used to fall all over themselves trying to get my attention, and I was so macho and so full of myself, I pretty well treated them like toys. I admit it. Even after I got married, I cheated. Hotshot air force officer, poster boy, often away from my family.”

“You were married?”

“Divorced.”

Tony paused. “I see. But this Lori, she was on the other end of such behavior, was she not? Growing up, I mean. And now the tables are turned. Are you Catholic?”

“No. Not much of anything, really, although my parents were Methodists.”

“I was just curious. I have many differences from you and your life, but in one way I find a certain sameness. I feel as if I am in purgatory, that I was not that bad a man, but the angels have found the one way to show me my sins and crumple my pride. Perhaps that is what this is. Purgatorio. Not as Dante imagined it but the same in the essentials. For Anne Marie it is different, because she never even had much chance to sin. For her this is a wondrous fantasy, and she is amused but not overly upset by my own state. One would think it would be more difficult to deal with having four legs and the bottom half of a horse than with changing to a woman, but I am a Latin and I was raised in a culture where this is simply unthinkable. I believe that if it were not for my love of and duty to Anne Marie, I would have killed myself.” He hesitated. “No, that is not true. The nuns did too good a job on me for me to take my life. But I would have left alone and wandered this world until I died, a hermit to my own kind. This now I cannot do, so I must learn to deal with it. In a Latin culture, macho means more than merely what you Americans would call being a ‘male chauvinist pig.’ In fact, it should not even mean that at all. It is a code of behavior, a set of duties and responsibilities for men, a way of thinking and approaching life. Not that there are not millions of womanizers, but I was brought up too well to be one of those. I respected women and loved them, but as a man. Even though we could never have sex, I was never unfaithful to Anne Marie.”

“You could never have sex?”

“She was badly crippled when we met. I was a pilot for Varig, and I was blinded in an accident. At one stroke my passion and livelihood were taken from me forever. It was while recovering in an English hospital that I met Anne Marie. She was so much more battered and broken than I, yet she was not there as a patient but as a giver of care and love. Other than her mind and soul, which shone through anything, even my darkness, the only other thing that worked perfectly on her was her eyes. So, together we became one person. She provided my eyes and my soul, and I provided the body and strength she never had. It was a love beyond anything you might imagine, and sex had virtually nothing to do with it.”

Julian was absolutely amazed at hearing this. “I think that’s an amazing story! My God! And you came through together and wound up the same species and still together, too.”

“I fully admit to never quite believing the whole story until we went through that gateway in the fallen rock,” Tony admitted. “Even then I did not believe that we were truly in another place, on another world. I was not sure that we had not died, except that I was still blind and my knee hurt from falling on that hard floor. Anne Marie almost did die; her wheelchair did not arrive with us, and the shock of being flung onto the floor was almost too much for her. Captain Solomon, as we knew him, led me as I carried her to the place where they gave us comfort and what is, I suppose, the standard briefing. Still I did not quite believe. I thought that it must be some sort of dream or trick, or a hallucination, that we had begun our suicide pact or perhaps that I had gone mad. Still I clung to her, afraid to let go, and they decided we should go through without delay because of her failing state. I thought she was at least unconscious, but just before we leapt, she whispered, ‘Centaurs. There are centaurs here, Tony. I saw one! Hold me tight and leap and think of me and centaurs!’ And I was so desperate that it was all I did think of, down to my core. At that moment, and only at that moment, I found myself believing it, believing all of it, and the thing that I was horribly afraid of was that we would be separated, that we would be separated forever by distance and perhaps by species itself. That we would become monstrous to one another. With all of that in my head, I went forward… And I awoke in a forest glade as you see me now.”

The first thing, the very first thing he did, was open his eyes and see. See normally, see perfectly, see as well as he had when he had taken his first pilot’s examination. There were colors and shapes and textures that had been but somewhat blurred and idealized memories.

He could see!

And then he had seen her, stirring, trying to get up, and he’d known instantly who she was although he’d never seen her picture or allowed anyone to describe her. He’d known her hair was blond and her eyes were green, and that had been enough.

He’d thought, wonderingly, that she made the most beautiful centauress in all creation.

He also felt the weight and the difficulty in breathing and orientation and hauled himself up to standing at almost the same moment that she did. Standing on all fours, facing her, looking at her, knowing that his prayers had been answered. They were together and of the same kind!

And then she had stared at him, first in awe, then in wonder, and said, “Tony? That can’t beyou, dear, can it?” And she had continued to stare, an expression that was half shock and half bemusement on her pretty face.

“Then—it is true!” he’d responded, his voice sounding very strange to his ears. “Then we are still together! And whole!” He did not care what form they were, human, centaur, crocodile, or swamp rat, only that they were no longer blind or infirm but healthy and still together. Still, he sensed that something was wrong. “What is it, Anne Marie?”

“I’m afraid that we’re a bit more together than either of us thought,” she’d responded hesitantly. “I wish we had a mirror, but, well, look at as much of your new self as you can and be prepared for a bit of a shock.”

“It was the one thing that I, that neither of us, had ever thought about, even considered” Tony continued. “It is still very hard for me. Not for Anne Marie, I don’t believe. Not really. As before, she sees more inside a person than the surface. But for me, and the culture in which I was raised, it is much, much harder. I think it gives the old term ‘soul mates’ a whole new meaning, does it not?”

Julian could think of a lot worse fates, but needing sympathy, she decided not to deny it to another. Still, she really thought he was lacking a lot of perspective. “It could have been much worse. Both of you as females of my race, for example. Or the ultimate fear you mentioned—that you would be of two species monstrous to one another. I of all people understand your shock, but I would trade with you in a moment.”

“Oh, I do not doubt that!” Tony responded. “And I sympathize. Still, hormones can only account for so much of anyone’s behavior, true? Otherwise, why do both of you have minds and wills? Both you and Lori must learn to control your new selves. The real problem is that you see yourself in your husband because you grew up a man, and you see yourself as the equivalent of how you perceived those young girls who threw themselves at you in your youth. Neither of us grew up female. Neither of us has the grounding of experience in the differences that brings, so we do not know how to cope. You yield because you do not know how to defend as she would. I fight when I should yield because my subjective universe was far more rigidly divided sexually than yours by my culture and upbringing. You are in despair because you cannot be her, and you cannot be your old self, and you do not have the experience or tools to be someone new. I—I can accept this. I was, after all, prepared to die with her, and I find some old prejudices crumbling now, the most basic of which is that it really does not feel that much different to be a woman. The problem is not with the body but with the mind, with needing a whole new frame of reference—not just accepting it and living with it myself but accepting the way others now perceive me and react and interact with me.”

“You mean the way men treat you.”

“No, I mean the way all others treat me. The way men look at me even when they are being nice, the very words and approach they take when speaking to me, the way certain conversations are closed to me now. And it is not just the men. The women react differently as well. As I am certain you know, a conversation strictly among women is quite different from one between men or between men and women.”

“You can say that again,” Julian agreed.

“So it is a matter of learning the rules, as it were. But I can no longer be Tony, the old Tony. Not like this. Not even to her. And I do not know how to be anything else, particularly with her. And that is something that I understand and she, not having been male, cannot yet grasp. I can be her—sister, her best friend, but I can no longer be her husband.”

“Maybe. Maybe you’re right. We’ve all got a lot to learn.” She decided that this was enough mutual wallowing for now. What Tony had said was true, but it was damned hard to feel sorry for the centauress when she would sell her soul to be either one of them. “On the other hand, this Mavra Chang is something else, isn’t she? She reminds me of a couple of women astronauts I trained with. Tough, knowledgeable, able to handle almost anything or anyone no matter what her size and sex, but still undeniably feminine.”

“She is indeed someone quite unusual,” Tony agreed. “I can only hope that toughness rubs off on the rest of us.”

“Um, I’m curious,” Julian said cautiously. “Is this what Anne Marie says she looked like? I mean, are you now a clone of her?”

“Clone is a good term,” Tony replied. “We are clones of a sort—they were so amazed at us that they sent us off to a hospital and took samples, which, I believe, were sent out to one of the high-tech lands. I believe the interest was in the fact that we even had the same fingerprints. Even identical twins do not quite have that. We are genetically absolutely identical. Only the personalities and experiences are different, and that makes quite a difference indeed.”

That was fascinating but not the answer to the question. “No, I mean, do you look like she used to? I know you said you didn’t want to have her described, I assume so you could hold a mental picture, but surely she’s said something now.”

“Oh, I see. No, we do not look like she used to. In fact, I can see something of my mother and one of my own sisters in us. I think that somehow, we were designed out of the genetic patterns of her mother and my maternal chromosome. Or so it was theorized. We are a combination of the pattern and look of the best of both of us. As for the horse part, well, I have never seen a horse built quite like this, with such style and grace, as it were, looking at her and thus myself from my old male vantage point, but I am certain that wherever it comes from, it is not in either of our ancestries.”

Julian chuckled, then suddenly realized that it was the first time she had laughed at all on the Well World. Tony had at least a sense of humor about things, and that was what would certainly pull her through to some solution to her own inner conflict. The Erdomese could use something to laugh about, but there had been little to do up to now.

Anne Marie came over to them. “Oh, I’d hoped you two would get along!” she gushed. “Tony has been too much in a shell since all this, haven’t you, dear? I, on the other hand, have been quite excited by it all. I’ve done more and seen more in the past few months than I had ever dreamed to do in a lifetime! I find everything here so frightfully fascinating!”

Julian wondered if that sense of adventure would last if they got into a really bad situation. She couldn’t imagine that Anne Marie could kill a fly willfully and with malice aforethought.

The train ran silently along on a magnetic track, levitating just above the surface. There was no engineer, no crew; the entire process was automated, and each car could be switched in and out at will or become part of a new train at almost every junction. They’d gone through a large number of such junctions, when everything slowed to a crawl and pieces of train were diverted, some were added, some were taken away on spurs or alternate tracks, and a new train was put together. It was a marvel of efficiency and served the hex well.

Now they slowed for one more switching yard and in a matter of minutes watched the long train divide into five separate sections and go off in all directions. There was a slight bump as their own car was joined to other sections old and new, and then everything speeded up once more. It was a few minutes after this that Mavra Chang had the odd feeling that something wasn’t right. At first she couldn’t put her finger on it, and she began to inventory her surroundings to see what it was that was setting off warnings in the danger-sensing area of her brain. The car was the same; the other cars were innocuous enough, and the surroundings looked little different from what they had looked like before. What was the problem?

She was almost ready to dismiss her feeling as being too jumpy when suddenly she had it. The sun!

They had been going generally due west. Now, suddenly, the sun was not behind them as it should have been in late afternoon with the Well World’s west-east rotation, but on their left. They were still going west, but it was now south-southwest. Clearly the car was no longer heading for the port at all. Something, or someone, had ordered them diverted.

“Everybody! Listen up!” she shouted. “Lori, wake up! We’ve got trouble!”

Lori stirred and shook his head to clear it. “Huh? What?”

“They’ve switched us south onto another line,” she told them as they gathered around the tiny woman.

“’They’?” Lori asked. “Who’s ‘they’?”

“If I knew that for sure, I could deal with them!” Mavra snapped. “Never mind that now. Somebody with influence who definitely doesn’t want me to get up to the Well first, that’s for sure. Anybody here a good judge of land speed? About what speed do you think this car is making now?”

It was Julian who spoke up. “At its maximum, no more than two hundred kilometers an hour,” she stated with a certainty that surprised them. “At average, about one hundred forty.”

“That’s a fair enough estimate,” Mavra responded, impressed.

“You were never in astronaut training.”

“That’s right! I’d forgotten you were a spacer! Okay, and according to this cheap watch I bought months ago, we’ve been going for three and a half hours. That would mean we’re about two-thirds of the way, or were when we were switched. At the angle we’re now traveling, if it stays fairly constant, we’ll still reach the coast, but way, way south of where we want to be. There’s only one decent harbor on the west coast, or so I’m told; the coastal waters are otherwise too shallow. Mostly small towns along there dependent on rail. I’d say that they’re aiming to bring us in down there at one of the small towns on the southwest border, maybe the southernmost one, at or after dusk.”

“But why? That’s the question,” Lori said, frowning.

“That’s easy enough. We miss our ship, we’ve got a long, slow walk up, since we can’t trust the trains anymore, and we’re in the kind of area where we always will stick out like sore thumbs.”

“But we can’t walk, not in this humidity and gravity!” Julian protested. “At least I can’t!”

“This is not as much of a problem for us,” Tony pointed out. “If need be, I could carry you and Mavra, too, and I am certain that Anne Marie could carry Lori.”

“Of course,” the other centauress replied. “It is a bit more difficult for us, and we have to go slower because of the burden on these thin legs, but you would hardly add to the burden.”

Mavra shook her head. “Uh uh. We might do that for a short distance but not a long one. Not only do I want out of here, I want to get lost. At least to whoever’s behind this. And the last thing I want to do is make a grand march under these conditions to a place where somehow I know they won’t have a ship for us.”

“But what is the alternative?” Tony asked her.

“If we keep going this way, we’ll come in to the southwesternmost yard in a small town almost at the Gekir border. Gekir’s a nontech hex and I’ve never been there, but my experience has been that if you want to get lost, get into a nontech hex. No mass transportation, but no mass communications, either. Nontechs are also the most dangerous for a lot of reasons, but while I don’t remember much about them, what was said indicates that the Gekir are not a mean or hostile people, and there’s some trade between there and Itus. As to what kind of creatures they are, I haven’t a clue, even though we might or might not have seen them among the races back in the capital. If we’re lucky, there might be some kind of sailing vessels that call along the coast. It’s worth a try.”

“But if whoever is chasing you is influential enough to divert our railcar, they will have people watching out for us at the town, won’t they?” Julian asked worriedly.

“Yes, so we’ll have to get off before that point and avoid the town. It shouldn’t be too hard to do. They’re bound to have a decoupling yard just before the town to route the various cars to loading areas. When the train slows, we get off, fast. It’ll still be moving, so watch yourselves, but it should be moving at a crawl, at least up to the switch. Tony, I assume you and Anne Marie could jump off.”

“I don’t think that would be a problem, but we’ll have to time it right,” Tony replied. “I don’t think either of us should risk a broken ankle at this point, and the heavier gravity is a major threat. Wait a moment! Anne Marie, come give me a hand here.”

The two centauresses went over to the left side and studied the short staked fence. “They look just placed in,” Anne Marie said, and with both hands tried to pry one up. She tried as hard as she could, but it wouldn’t budge. “No go, I’m afraid, dear.”

Tony got close beside her. “Both of us together, then.”

They tried, but it was as if the panel were welded on.

Julian came over and looked at the panel as well, bending down to see what might be holding it in. “I think it’s more magnets,” she said at last. “This train runs on the basis of magnetic polarity. There are two strong electromagnets underneath, one the track and the other on the undercarriage. When power is applied, they repel, we float essentially friction-free, and by moving one set, speed can be quickly achieved or slowed, even stopped on a dime. But the stakes, I bet, are matched to the polarity of the undercarriage. When it’s powered, they’re pulled tight.” She thought a moment. “I wonder if there are any dead spots.”

“Dead spots?” one of them asked.

“Yes. Have you ever ridden on a subway—underground, metro, or whatever—or an electric-powered train? There’s often points where the track is either not powered because of some repair or connector or the power source changes. The lights might flicker or even go off, but it’s brief and the train’s forward momentum keeps it rolling until it gets to the next powered section. I thought I felt a slight loosening at one point while I was leaning on it here, and there were the vibrations rattling the stakes briefly, but then it was tight again. If there’s another, then in that brief moment this panel should be able to be pulled. If it’s really held by the electromagnets, that is.”

“There is only one way to find out,” Tony said. “I will just stand here and pull on it and see.”

Although it was a rather simple explanation of the principle, Lori found himself momentarily taken aback by Julian’s sophisticated knowledge, even though he knew her background. He hadn’t been used to her being very assertive of late, and it gave him oddly mixed feelings he neither liked nor wanted to deal with. Julian had come up almost effortlessly with the solution to a problem of the sort that only seemed obvious when it was explained. The rattling had happened every few minutes off and on since they boarded, yet only Julian had put it together. Although he was quite proud of her, the two warring halves of his nature could not have been more divided on interpretation. The Lori Sutton part was cheering; the Lori of Alkhaz part was furious that she’d just given it to them all rather than tell him in private so that he could bring it up to the group.

Several minutes passed, and a bored Tony, feeling circulation going in her arms, was just about to give it up when suddenly the panel came up and she staggered back a bit, barely keeping balance. It didn’t come all the way out but was now held only by two flat pins, no longer flush with the flatcar floor.

“If need be, I could probably kick it down at this point,” Tony commented, “but I think that Lori might do better pushing up from beneath. Just be sure you don’t fall off the train when it comes up!”

Lori looked at it dubiously. “Yeah, right,” he said, but lay down, got his body in as close as he could with his legs well beyond the almost-free panel, and pushed against the very solid-feeling section.

When the moment came, tense as he was, the panel almost did take him with it; it flew up and away, and he suddenly felt himself going forward into the opening. Only Anne Marie’s strong hands grabbing his legs and bringing him back in saved him, and, being hauled back on his stomach, he was suddenly very thankful he’d kept wearing the hardened codpiece.

“Wow! Can she bend!” Julian gasped. “She didn’t even have to kneel!” But she rushed to Lori.

Mavra nodded and said to herself, “Things aren’t quite as static as they seem on the Well World. Dillian evolution has sure done a neat job on them!”

Julian bent down next to Lori, concerned. “Are you all right, my husband?” She asked in Erdomese.

He nodded. “Just bumped around a bit. I will be all right in a minute or two.” He turned on his side and looked back and up at the centauress who’d grabbed him. “Thanks a lot, Tony.”

“Think nothing of it, dear,” responded Anne Marie, not taking any offense at all at being confused with her twin.

Mavra came over and inspected the opening. “Okay. That means Lori, Julian, and I can sit on the edge and then jump off rather than having to contend with a meter-high hurdle, and you two have a straight jump.”

“How much longer will it be, do you think?” Julian asked her.

Mavra looked at her watch and then at the sun. “Maybe fifteen minutes. Okay, you’ve all seen these switching points; you know what they look like. Get as far away to the south—the direction that you’ll jump—as you can as fast as you can and stay out of sight of anybody in the yard area. Assemble behind the first building that gives us cover and wait until we’re all there. Understood? They may not be expecting us to jump, but they’re sure to have somebody at the station to keep a tail on us, and it’ll most likely be an Itun hired for the job. From this point we avoid Ituns until we’re across the border.”

They waited as the shadows grew and the light began to fade around them. Darkness came quickly to the Well World, and within a few minutes it would be pitch black. That actually bothered the two Erdomese the least, since they could simply lift their natural eye filters and see the full spectrum. Mavra and the two Dillians, however, had no more night vision than ordinary Earth humans, a thought that occurred to Julian.

“We should jump off last,” she said to Lori, “because we can see.”

He shook his head. “No, I think we go first for that very reason. We can find them a lot easier than they can find us, and I think it would be better to be on the ground just in case one of them has a problem with the jump.”

“All right, then. You go and I’ll follow. Night is almost completely upon us, and there are many lights not far ahead. I can already feel us slowing just a bit.”

Lori turned to Mavra, who had noticed the lights as well, and she nodded. “Any time you feel right after we’re slow enough. Just don’t take it too fast. We’ll get out.”

The Erdomese moved to the opening in the flatcar stakes. Lori sat, legs over the side of the car, uncomfortable sitting on his behind because of the tail and tailbone. It was not a normal position for Erdomese, and he decided to jump as soon as he felt it was safe.

“Remember the heavier gravity,” Julian warned him. “You will hit very hard, my husband.”

“You take care, too.”

The train was definitely slowing now, going perhaps thirty kilometers per hour, and it continued to slow. Lori’s tailbone was hurting badly enough that when it was down to about twenty, he took a deep breath and launched himself into the night. He hit as hard as Julian had warned, pitched forward, and found himself rolling down a small embankment into a fetid, muddy drainage ditch. Covered with stinking mud, he almost panicked, got control, and clawed himself out of it and up onto dryer land. He lay there, breathing hard, for a minute or so, then picked himself up. He not only stank, he was sore, and his left ankle and right wrist stung when he moved them. For a moment he was afraid that he’d broken something, but he quickly realized that they were probably only sprains and not that serious. By force of will he made his way in the darkness just below the tracks toward the lighted area about half a kilometer farther on.

Julian came to meet him, walking on all fours. “Are you all right?” she asked, concerned, then twitched her nose. “You sure don’t smell all right!”

“Rolled all the way down into the drainage canal. Didn’t pay enough attention to the slope. I’ve got some twists, but I can handle it. You?”

“A little bruised but not bad. It was slower, and I had a more level area. About the only problem I’ll have is getting grass stains out of my fur.”

He managed a chuckle at that. “The others?”

“Mavra was right behind me. She just jumped out, rolled once, and landed on her feet almost beside me! Like an acrobat or something. She told me to find you and she was going to check on the Blondie Twins.”

“Let’s join up,” he told her, gesturing forward.

“You are limping! Come! Put your hand on my shoulder, and I will help you,” she invited, standing erect.

“I—I can make it on my own,” Lori insisted, then grimaced and almost fell forward. She caught him and helped brace him, and this took just enough weight off that he was able to manage it.

“I thought you couldn’t even move, let alone stand in this place,” he noted.

“I grow strong when I am needed,” she responded, quoting a female Erdomese proverb.

Both Dillians had jumped without a hitch and now waited with Mavra for Lori and Julian to join them in a dark area behind the first automated switching tower. Mavra, seeing them in the very dim glow of the tower lights, motioned for the much larger centaurs to remain where they were and ran toward the two Erdomese. “What happened?” she asked. “Are you hurt bad?”

“I’m not sure,” Lori answered honestly. “I thought the ankle was just twisted a little, but now I’m not so sure. It doesn’t feel broken, but I think it’s a hell of a sprain.”

“Well, a very ancient man who knows the Well World far better than I do once said to never travel without a Dillian if you can manage it. We can repack all the stuff on one of them and put you on the other. Don’t argue! Whoever’s watching us has probably already discovered that we’re not there. The sooner we get away from here, the better!”

When they reached the Dillians, one of them was already repacking the saddlebags on the other. Then the one who carried all the equipment helped Lori onto the other’s back.

“Ride forward,” the centauress suggested. “That should take the pressure off your tail as well. And watch that horn on your head! I don’t want to get stabbed if I have to make a sudden stop!” Left unsaid was the rather noticeable stink of swamp and mud permeating his hair.

He felt awkward and helpless and, even worse, stupid. It was almost like a horse riding a horse. He was just never designed to ride on the back of a soft animal, but there was little choice at the moment.

Mavra turned to Julian and said, “Well, you’re leading the way because you can see and we can’t. Can you handle it? I know how hard this high G is on you.”

“I’ll be all right,” she assured the woman in black. “You said south, right? How far do you wish to go tonight?”

“Well, we’re going to be moving a lot slower and more cautiously than I planned, but we ought to go on until at least one of us has to stop. It shouldn’t be more than a dozen kilometers or so to the border if we head due south. That’s a haul on foot in the dark under these conditions, but we haven’t done much more than rest on our duffs all day. Can you make it?”

“Yes.” No equivocation, no hesitancy. Mavra liked that.

“I think you’re gonna do just fine, Julian. You sure you know which way’s south? We had a bend just before we came in.”

“I know. It is something in the Erdomese brain. Once we have a fix on the sun at any point, we always know direction, even when the sun is gone.” She looked around, thinking. “The first thing is to find a road or trail of some kind going in our direction and parallel it. I do not think we should risk Tony or Anne Marie tripping over jungle vines or fallen logs. Just keep close and I will get you through.”

“You sound like you’ve done this sort of thing before.”

“Air force survival training. This is no worse than the jungles of Panama or Honduras.”

“That’s right! Lori said you were once captain of a spaceship.”

“No, captain was my rank in the air force. A military service. I was a mission specialist on the space shuttle, not a pilot or commander, although I had a jet pilot’s license.”

“Too much of this is new to me,” Mavra admitted, her translated voice coming to Julian’s ears as an odd but understandable mixture of Erdomese and English, depending on the terms used. “I was in the jungle, cut off, for so long that it wasn’t until a few years ago that I even realized that Earth had progressed to power tools, let alone flying machines and spacecraft, and by that time I saw them only as evil magic. Until I spoke with Tony and Anne Marie here, I had no idea Brazil wasn’t still a Portuguese colony, let alone that your own country even existed. It was all very ironic. All I was doing was holding out in the wilderness until technology advanced to where I could get off that planet, and I managed to fall into a trap where I rejected all technology. Even now I’m sweating like a stuck pig. I still haven’t gotten used to clothing, and these boots feel bizarre.”

“What’s stopping you from taking them off? The nearest Earth-human type is probably a thousand miles from here, if even that close.”

“Practicality, mostly. Certainly not modesty. I was born without that word having much meaning. Back in the Amazon, that was my jungle. I loved it and still do, but I knew everything about it. Everything. This isn’t my jungle. I don’t know the effects of anything I step on here, and any protection is better than none when you’ve only got bare skin in an unknown land.” She dropped her voice low. “Hell, I remember when female Dillians wore bras, and they weren’t nearly as hung as those two.”

Julian also lowered her voice to a high whisper. “Is it just me, or is it really difficult to tell which is which unless they speak? I mean, I’ve had the eeriest feeling that the same one I spoke to who was Tony, definitely Tony, was later talking like Anne Marie.”

“I know what you mean,” Mavra whispered back. “Actually, I’m sort of relieved that somebody else feels it, too. Maybe it’s just how absolutely identical they look, but it’s spooked me more times in the past few weeks than I can tell you.”

“That is what I mean. Is there something else about them I do not know but should?”

“Could be, but if so, I don’t know it, either. If it is more than mental confusion on our part, I’m absolutely positive that they aren’t aware of it themselves. I just don’t know. Every time I say that absolutely nothing can surprise me anymore, something does. How the two of them were processed is unprecedented; you and Lori make a different but equally unprecedented case. I don’t know what’s going on here, but until I get to the Well, I can’t find out for sure myself. Even the Well World seems odd. I always thought of it as static, too tightly managed to change radically, but there are many differences. Differences you wouldn’t notice from one time here, but it’s different. Some of the cultures are changed, a few radically so. There are differences in alliances, attitudes, you name it. Even the races are different. Not a lot in some cases, a great deal in one or two that I’ve seen, but there are changes from radical to subtle in all the ones I knew. It may be a normal thing, as with all worlds, but this is not a normal world, nor was it ever intended to be. I can’t help wondering if it feels the same way to Nathan, wherever he is.”

That brought up a point Julian was even more interested in. “This Nathan. Tell me about him.”

“He is—well, he cannot be described. Oh, I can tell you what he looks like, more or less, and from what Tony and Anne Marie have told me he’s changed very little. You’d like him. Most people do. There’s a kindness and gentleness in him that comes through, and he’s the loneliest creature in all the cosmos.”

“You were not just—associates. Or even teacher and pupil.”

“No.”

“You still speak of him with affection, yet this kind, wise, gentle man you describe is out to get you and maybe worse.”

Mavra sighed. “I think so. At least the evidence points that way, and it almost feels like his handiwork. You can be seduced by him in many ways, and at the time he means it, but deep down, where the soul resides, he’s also something else. Something almost—monstrous. It’s hidden most of the time, I think even from himself, but it’s always there, and in the end it’s always in control. You won’t see it much when he’s human, but inside the Well it’s much clearer. It is nothing less than the collective will of the ancient creatures that built this place and remade the universe as they pleased. He doesn’t even like it. Last time he fought like hell against it and wound up almost forced to do its will, kicking and screaming all the way. It is there, and I find it most significant that this time he didn’t even try to fight it. He’s surrendered to it, I think, and that alone makes him the most dangerous creature since the universe was born.”

“And yet—he gave you immortality and the key to this Well, this God-computer,” Julian noted.

“Yes. I’ve come up with many theories as to why, some more flattering to my ego than others, but it wasn’t until I came here once again that I found out the truth. He is two creatures—the kind, gentle, but tough and resourceful man I knew and described and this—thing. He’s been the man so long, it is more his true self than that hidden within him, but he knows he’s in a trap, an eternal trap. By taking me in there, by making me reset things last time, he dodged his own conflict while still doing what he was compelled to do. Now I think it was more than that. I don’t have this thing inside me. I was born to this form and grew up as you see me. I think his human half wants to be stopped. In the end, I think that was the idea all along. The next time, this time, I’d be there, too. Something inside him wants me to beat him and seize control. To stop his compulsive pattern. Maybe it’s because he became too much like us; maybe it’s simple logic. The stress of last time and its responsibilities brought it home to him that there was a flaw in the plans of those who created this place. They wanted a new, even greater race of true gods to evolve, but even they couldn’t foresee all the things that could happen in so vast a universe over so much time. So they left him as their guardian, to keep it on track, but they blew it. They didn’t just set it going, they made it a controlled experiment instead, all the variables taken into account.”

Julian saw where she was going, or thought she did, as much as this whole place made any sense. “You are saying that they overcontrolled. That by insisting on things developing as they designed, they gave it no opportunity to develop differently.”

“Well, they sure weren’t as godlike as they thought they were, that was for sure,” Mavra agreed. “They couldn’t conceive that being a race of true gods would become boring as hell after some great length of time. Their whole racial history was motivated by a belief that true and absolute perfection was possible. They could not face the fact that it wasn’t, and so they built this world, and the races that were successful here were sent out into the universe to see if they could attain that perfection. If anything loused up the experiment beyond repair, though, they had a mechanism for resetting things to start so absolute that everything would develop exactly the same, except that whatever caused the collapse would be factored out. Even you were probably there in the past creation, the one that I, many relative centuries in the future, wiped out and re-created. The same nations, the same races, the same people, being born, living, progressing, dying, over and over.”

“My God! You mean I’ve done this before? Or someone exactly like me?”

“No. I have no doubt there was a Julian Beard who lived your life and did all the same things—up to the point where you were sent to investigate the meteor. And a Lori who remained the first female full professor of astronomy at wherever she taught, and a Tony and Anne Marie who probably died in a suicide pact, and the others as well. Your coming here changed that for you and for the others. I believe Nathan has at one point or another changed a number of individuals’ lives. It is difficult to say this, but most individual lives, if removed or altered, won’t change the fabric very much so long as the number of them is kept very small. It is said that the Well Gates react to people’s wills and that no one who would mess up the master plan is ever transported here. I don’t know. But I do know it can’t continue. Reset after reset, the same people, the same races, the same lives over and over… In the end, if that keeps happening, then nobody really matters. Nobody at all. And if I fail this time, that’s what is going to keep going on again and again. A continuous wheel, a perpetual replaying of the same damned recording over and over until the universe dies. That’s what this is all about. That’s why you’re all here.”

“Sweet Jesus!” Julian gasped, thinking of the implications of what she was saying.

“What are you two girls whispering about?” Lori called to them.

Mavra Chang gave a crooked smile. “Us women are talking woman talk,” she replied aloud.

It was a long way yet in the dark to the border.