Twilight at the Well of Souls

Embassy of Ulik, South Zone

Serge Ortega was furious and frustrated at one and the same time, and that made him something like a fearsome madman.

“First,” he screamed at the intercom, “first this idiotic attempt on Mavra Chang. Fools! Worse than fools! Sloppy! You turned a hex that was inclined to stay entirely out of this into one of theirs, and in the process managed to injure and get mad at us the closest thing to a national hero they’ve got! And now— this! A summit meeting of the enemy commanders right here, not a thousand meters from me, right here in South Zone. And by all that’s holy, we don’t know a thing! And why? Because they hire some from our own side to blank out communications! Our own side! Free enterprise… bullshit!”

No reply was allowed, nor did they expect the opportunity. In fact, most of the embassies hooked in had turned their own intercoms down to a very tiny roar until he was spent, and it took a long time for him to be spent. In the back of his mind, Ortega knew this, too. But it made him feel better, and that was all it was ever intended to do.

Finally he said in a normal tone, “You can all come back now. We have to do some serious work.”

It took another twenty minutes for all of them to be notified that they could dare turn up the volume and turn back to business once again.

For longer than any Well Worlder could remember Serge Ortega had been its imprisoned tyrant. Not that he actually ruled; none could do that. But he had been an old man, near death from natural causes, when he discovered the arcane fact that there was at least one race, and a southern one at that, with the power to extend his life. It wasn’t any great scientific leap, or unique minerals; nothing like that.

It was magic.

There was magic on the Well World. Not a lot, and it was pretty scattered around, but it was there in some races. The entire world was a laboratory, a set of experiments used by ancient Markovians to prove out their races before establishing them out there, in the universe. But when your largest social lab is 614.4 kilometers at its widest point near the equator, compensations must be allowed for. Not merely the technological handicaps, either, but often more. Magic. The ability to do something no other race could do, apparently out of nothingness. Of course, what was magic to the other races was magic only because they didn’t know how to do it or simply couldn’t. All it meant was that these races could draw those powers from the great machine that kept everything working, the Well itself. The mumbo-jumbo, if it existed, came later.

And one race had a spell that could sustain him indefinitely, keep him from aging. It was relatively easy to get them to do it; he had spies all over the Well World and he had all the embassies thoroughly bugged. He knew where everybody’s bodies were buried, and if they had no skeletons in their closets, he was perfectly capable of creating them to order and to need. But there were limits to magic, too.

This magic worked only in the home hex of the spell-caster. Not all magic was like this—some worked anywhere. Not this, though. And since the hex was, not only a water hex but a deepwater hex, he could hardly move there even as alien-in-residence. The spell was against aging, not drowning.

The only other place such things would work would be here, in Zone, and so that’s where he remained. His home hex of Ulik didn’t mind; as they saw it, they benefited two ways. Their ambassador was the most powerful and crooked (but not corrupt—there is a big difference) politician on the Well World. As such, Ulik benefited greatly from the fear and respect Ortega generated. And, of course, they never had to worry about such a powerful personage as Ortega ever coming home to muck up the local works. He could not leave. That would break the spell, and he was very old.

And so they let him rant and rave, and let him tell them what to do the few times some crisis or another came up. And they hated him for it. He knew it, but really didn’t give a damn.

“Now, then, Ambassadors, now that we’ve had our little prologue,” he continued sweetly when he knew by his broad and long experience that they were back, “let’s take a rational look at this. You have now seen what unilateral action does; it gives the enemy more converts and more power. Even had the attempt on Chang succeeded, the involvement of the Colonel alone would have been enough to guarantee their emnity—and never mind the murders of those innocents. What’s worse, the Colonel has done an awful lot of favors and undertaken an awful lot of work for many of us. Some of you, firmly voting with us not long ago, are now wavering toward neutrality, and we’ve all seen what that road means. Others of you are undertaking pretty vicious pogroms against Entries, despite our agreement not to do so. Well, it’s your neck. But if you agree to a common policy and then violate it, well, what chance do we have on the battlefield? Make up your minds which way you will go. You are either our friends, which means you agree to work as part of a coordinated whole and abide by its policies and decisions, or you are our enemies. Is there anyone who wishes to change over to the enemy list? Speak now. We will not overlook breaches in the future.”

Nobody spoke.

After waiting as long as he thought reasonable, Ortega sighed and resumed. “Very well, then. The killing stops. Now. Think of them as hostages, but not as hunter’s quarry. Not now, anyway.”

“All pretty well for you to say,” an acid-sounding voice responded. “We have no room for such newcomers, and no way to treat them other than as fertilizer. Should we ship them to you?”

The Ulik thought it over. “Why not? There are a number of hexes with open expanses, even some where the entire surface isn’t used. These would make pretty good camps, which could be managed by very few guards. Mix up the species and they’ll be a mishmash of alien creatures who can’t even talk to one another. How about the ambassador from Kronfushun? Kent Lucas, you there?”

“I’m here,” a voice responded, sounding none too thrilled. Kronfushuns were creatures of extreme Arctic cold, odd, whirling disks that skipped across the frozen ice and could not live in temperatures approaching zero.

“Kent, you’re an Entry from the Com, as I know. You’re best to handle this. Can you put together a committee—Entries at or near our level, if possible— to see to that?”

“I’ll give it a try,” Lucas responded, still sounding none too enthusiastic.

Ortega couldn’t blame him, but nonetheless felt that a recent Com Entry would tend to be far more sympathetic to saving lives, particularly the lives of their old race.

“On the military front, we’ve organized into wet and dry military zones across the whole hemisphere,” he told them. “Mobilization is proceeding fairly well, particularly in the critical areas—the routes away from Glathriel, where we’re sure the enemy will head first. You water hexes and boating cultures are particularly important now. If Brazil tries to run by sea, we really don’t have anything like a navy to stop him, and there’s no time to build one. But if we know he’s on a ship, and where that ship is, we can certainly arrange to sink it without problems, then pick Brazil off the inevitable iceberg that will be conveniently floating by near him, even if it’s in a tropical hex. Things will turn our way shortly, the staff meeting means they’re getting ready to move. When we see where they move, after converging on Ambreza-Glathriel, their logical first move, it’ll be all our way after that.”

“You really believe that?” somebody asked.

“I do,” he responded firmly. “And you’d better, too.”

“He outsmarted us to get here,” somebody else noted. “What makes you think he won’t pull any more fast ones?”

“He very well might,” Ortega admitted. “I have no idea. That’s what we have to watch out for. Remember, though, we’ll have people undercover with their forces as well. Once their plan starts, it’ll become clear what they’re doing.”

It was mostly a pep talk, and after he said his piece he let them rant and rave and worry at each other while he tuned them out. Somehow, he thought grumpily, it doesn’t really seem to matter any more.

He reached down and pulled out a sheet of crumpled paper from a desk drawer, smoothed it out, and read it again. It had been put on his desk not long ago, while he had stepped out to the bathroom. There were no signs that anybody had entered or left the office, but there it had been. He looked at it again and again, as if it were some impossible ghost from the past— which, in a sense, it was. It was written in Com language, in a clear hand, with what looked like a quill or fountain pen.

He held it there, staring at it over and over, then finally reached into his desk again, came out with a box, some matches, and a small ceramic tray. Striking a match, he lit the letter and held it until he had to drop it, flaming brightly, into the tray. Soon it was completely consumed. Only some small bits of ash still with traces of writing remained, and they were easily crushed into powder.

Had he changed, really? he asked himself—and not for the first time, although this situation, and in particular that letter, had made him ask it with more intensity and urgency.

Yes, he decided. He had changed—before the Well World. Decades as a smuggler, pirate, mercenary, you name it, had led him, toward the end of his life, to a feeling of bored malaise. He had decided that he had done everything he could do, conquered every world he was likely to conquer, bedded all the beautiful women he could want. He had done it all, and had a lot of fun doing it, but what was left? So he had taken his ship out, trying to get enough nerve to do himself in but unable to get over his strict Catholic beliefs he had turned his back on when still a young boy but which haunted him in his old age. Suicide, the one crime for which repentance was impossible… Continuing out, out into areas not yet explored or charted, he had found himself wishing that there was some new world, some new experience for him that would give new meaning to his life. Then there had been that odd distress signal, a look at a massive asteroid belt in a huge, sterile system circling a red giant, and, quite suddenly, here he had been on the Well World, the answer to his dream.

Or was it? he now wondered. As a young Ulik he had started again from scratch, learned a new society, new culture, experienced a whole new range of sensuality while accumulating power. But that had been long ago.

Now here he was, once again, at the same point he had been so long ago. There was simply nothing left to do. A velvet prison, Brazil had called it. But there were no Markovian holes to fall through this time, no new Well Worlds to start again.

He thought again of Brazil. If he was as ancient as he claimed to be, he was well over fourteen billion years old. Fourteen billion years. The mind couldn’t really grasp that. He doubted Brazil’s could, really. Never changing, living the same life after a while, life after life. No rebirth, no new experiences. Same form, same old stuff, even limited by the technology of the people with whom he had marooned himself. Entry interrogations—of this new batch, anyway—said that they had tracked him down by research, for even he left records of a sort.

Brazil had hardly been inconspicuous. He seemed to have been involved in every war and movement on Old Earth, always in the headlines, always in the forefront, yet clever enough that, even when his cover occasionally slipped, new legends were spawned. The Flying Dutchman, the Wandering Jew, Gilgamesh.

Brazil was trying to escape terminal boredom and madness, Ortega alone realized. But what the hell do you do when you’ve done it all and there’s nothing left to do? You pilot a freighter between Boredom and Tedium and try and forget who you are, what you are, putting on a kind of mental shutdown.

Brazil said this would be fun. Fun, of all things! And only to Ortega would that make perfect sense.

And that left him with a problem. Should he take on Brazil once again, see if, this time, he was still the master of the dirty trick and underhanded blow, always in control? The temptation was there—it certainly was. It would, as Brazil said, be fun.

But if he, Ortega, won, would there be a victory?

If he only knew the answer to that one…