02. Shadows of the Well of Souls (30 page)

At least they hadn't also taken on celibacy, although that would hardly be practical in a grand experiment involving an entire population over thousands of generations.

Maybe that was where the lamas had gone wrong back in the Himalayas. They had brought themselves to the limits of individual higher mental attainments, but the emphasis had still always been on
individual
attainment, and although their belief in reincarnation gave them ample time in their own minds, in reality death had cut them off short. Even without that limitation Brazil had eventually abandoned that life when he'd suddenly realized that the attainment of the absolute, the joining with the That Which Is Behind All That, was oblivion. It was too much like being at the end of the line with the Markovians but not having had any fun getting there. It was, however, a god-awful amount of work, whether it was that traditional system of Earth's or the Glathrielian grand project.

The fact that the Glathrielians had given her the end results of this work, much as one would stick a bunch of programs on a computer mass storage device for easy access, didn't really matter. Everything he'd seen of Glathrielians indicated a total rejection of the physical ways of the world. The most they did was pick some fruit off trees. Even when doing that, he'd observed how their actions were almost hivelike, almost as if they were a collective organism even though on the surface they seemed like individuals. They condescended to the body only in the sense of its need to eat, drink, sleep, and reproduce.

They had given Terry those powers and imposed that overculture as a kind of control program, but she'd not been born into it or brought up with it. It wasn't a natural state to her. Like him or Gus, she had more in common in her background with the Ambrezans than with the Gedemondan mystics, but she had no way of really understanding it. She had been surprised to get any sort of a linkage with him after being together so long. That was the group mind part, the impulse to co-opt those of one's own kind into the greater consciousness. But she was still too much the individual inside, and when she'd absolutely had to, she had compromised the Glathrielian programming in a way that the group mind part of the Gedemondan whole would never have even considered.

Faced with Terry's very appearance, they had done the one thing with her that such a community, insular as it was, wasn't all that used to doing.

They had improvised.

He thought he had them now, although not by any means all their powers and strengths. He doubted that
she
knew what she could do, except it was inside her, like individual programs on disks, waiting to be accessed if demanded by circumstance. A Glathrielian would know. A true Glathrielian
child
would know, would probably have fun switching bodies and moving stones and doing who knew what else. They had the experience of the group mind and were raised and trained to know. But they'd had Terry for only the shortest time. Days or weeks, perhaps.

A television professional would think of things first in visual terms. They must have seized on that as something
simpatico
with their own way of thinking. Whole chunks that made a picture, an object rather than a linear assemblage of cross-referenced information. The holographic mind with no intermediate steps, no aids, not even a linear language to slow down the process. Need?
Bang!
Entire solution. Just like that.

He could see them now, considering
him
before they had her. He'd been living very close to them for a while. They sensed his difference, sensed, perhaps, his connection to the Well. They couldn't tap or access that connection, but they understood it on their level, and they understood the potential. But what to do? Problem, even opportunity, but no solution.

Then, suddenly, Terry walks in. She's in shock, she's scared, and she's Earth-human, or close enough to Glathrielian that they recognize her as one of their own. Possibly their communal field was strong enough and she was still shocked enough from her arrival that she sensed and was perhaps even guided by the permeating group mind. They had taken her in, and they had made her one of them, or so it seemed. Compromise was necessary. In them, everything was to a purpose; in her, it had to run on automatic.

Then they sent her back with an absolute command to remain with him at all costs. Sooner or later he might let his guard down. When it happened, she was to copy everything from her mind to his. Make him Glathrielian. Then, when he entered the Well, he would be one of them. The whole of Glathriel could then be connected to the Well itself.

That was how they differed from the Gedemondans. The Gedemondans were seeking a third way, as the founding race had intended, a new way to attain power and an even greater godhood on their own.

The Glathrielians wanted to take over the damned controls!

Well, they couldn't do it, but how would they know that? It was certainly worth a shot. Worth risking one strange girl.

So last night she had made the link, made the attempt, automatically. Not even the whole of Glathriel could do it even with his cooperation, but she'd made the attempt. She'd transferred the programs and linked the two of them so that the energy that was her only tool was shared. His Earth-human body and physical brain and nervous system were still human enough for that. What they could not do, could never do, was get down to the core of his being, his "soul" for want of any better concept, and reprogram at that level. They could control every aspect of his body but not his core ego.

But the programs were still there. Perhaps not in his mind, because of their ultimate failure, but accessible from
hers
over the energy linkage. That linkage had to be physiological to some degree; she'd tapped into something inside him, perhaps inside all Earth-human brains, and activated it. Whether necessary for their plans or not, he would have to accept and accommodate the control program requirements as much as possible, but some of it could be bypassed either by force of will, as when she'd compromised for expediency, or because it was designed to filter
her
input/output, not his. He might not be able to run the whole suite of programs concurrently because of this, but maybe, just maybe, because they'd been designed to be run by someone who didn't have the owner's manual, he might run them one at a time.

He was wide-awake, even a little excited, but he remembered his own long lessons in mental discipline from long ago and relaxed, closing his eyes, clearing his mind, breathing deeply, rhythmically, letting his consciousness roam, but not without a sense of purpose. He felt her, felt everything about her, matched her own deep breathing, thought only of the secondhand but very real existence of her own body, not his own.

This time it was very gentle, very slow. There was no rushing force, no fast-forward pull, not even disorientation. He moved toward her, into her and gently displaced her, sending her, still in a deep, deep sleep, back along the path and inserting himself fully into her body.

He opened his eyes—
her
eyes, knowing that his own body still reclined aft, now sound asleep. Carefully he sat up, then discovered that he was partly sitting on long hair and pulled it free.

He felt the body's fatigue, and there were a few aches and pains where muscles and joints pleaded for more rest, but he wasn't going to do this for very long. He got up on her feet, feeling a bit dizzy, even a little sick, but nothing he couldn't manage. A smile played across her lips.

The old adage holds true again, as always,
he thought with some glee.
Never try to con a con num. He'll pick your pockets while letting you believe you're stealing him blind

He began to walk forward, keeping one hand on something to steady her body, and considered that it wasn't quite as similar as he'd imagined. The center of gravity was different and took a little getting used to; he was more aware of the large breasts and equally aware of the lack of male gen-italia than he'd considered. Still, it was basically the same: two legs, two arms, eyes, and ears. Things
did
look a bit different, and he wondered for a moment if that was something new he was tapping. After all, he was also using her brain, even if his memories and personality were being scrolled off his own sleeping form. Then he realized that it was just that there were subtle shifts in the colors. So it was true—for purely physical reasons no two people probably saw colors exactly the same. But they weren't all
that
different—green still looked green, red looked red. They were just slightly different, often in brightness or degree, although he thought he saw more gradations of each color than he'd been aware of before. There also seemed to be a vastly wider array of smells, both good and bad, indicating that the biochemists had been right in saying that women really
could
smell a greater variety of scents than men. That explained why there were so many varieties of perfume even though most men, himself included, could barely tell the difference.

He tried to speak. "Hello, I am not Terry," he croaked. Her voice was raspy and it was almost painful to awaken those throat muscles so long silent, but it sounded like a decent voice, a nice voice, although he knew it would sound different to her, or to him as her, than it would to him as himself.

This was already more than enough for now, but he couldn't resist making his way slowly and carefully aft, then climbing the stairs and looking down at his own sleeping body.

Good lord! I really
am
an ugly SOB,
he thought. As
many
times as he'd seen himself in a mirror, it was different to look upon his body through another's eyes.

Still, he'd proved his point and gotten something of a charge out of it at that. Hell, he vaguely remembered being an animal once, for some reason, the details of which totally escaped him. But he'd never been a woman.

In the distance he heard the sound of a steam whistle. Something was leaving the harbor, something with power, and that meant the naval corvette unless somebody new had shown up. Instantly he felt a pang of fear at the thought that they might have caught Gus and were now going hunting.

He had to get back in his own body and quickly. Not only would this be embarrassing, her body was too worn out to be of any real use in a fight right now, even if he could get used to it fast enough to do the quick, automatic moves that might be required.

He suddenly panicked at the thought that he might well be stuck in her body; he had not, after all, quite done it her way even if he'd used her inner knowledge and power to do it. And with thoughts suddenly coming to him about the possible implications of that steam whistle, how could he clear his mind enough to do it, anyway?

He had to, he decided. He just had to. There was no other choice.

Carefully, he lay down alongside his body, stretched out, and closed his eyes, resisting the body's impulse to lapse back into deep slumber.
Not yet,
he thought, and tried to recreate the conditions he'd established when he had started the stunt, putting all sounds, all worries, out of the way, concentrating only on doing the one thing.

Although he'd done it more gently, there still was a tiny bit of that tension there, and he was able to use it. He naturally belonged over there, and she naturally belonged here. There was a better fit, for want of a more appropriate term, when each was in the body he or she had been born to. It wasn't like what the Well did, not a bit.

A hand slid over a little and touched his, and he felt himself flow back into his body and her back into her own without any real effort or direction.

He opened his eyes, sat up, and shook his head as if to clear it, then looked down and actually felt around himself just to make sure he was in the form he wanted to be in.

He could hear the sound of engines now, coming closer, coming their way.
Thank God they didn't let go that whistle when I was trying to get back inside,
he thought, quickly running through his options.

There wasn't any real wind; the heat and the high rock walls had created a nearly dead calm inside the cove. His mind raced through all possible combinations of sail, anything that might get him moving if he had to, but he finally realized that it wouldn't matter if he had an atomic engine.

If that cutter came in the passage, its cannon and small arms would be on him no matter what he tried, and it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

There was only one possible way to escape, and he didn't like it a bit. They'd have to go over the side opposite where the cutter would come in and swim for it to the rock formations beyond. Most of the cliff was sheer, but there was a small break in the outer rocks that might provide a way out through an eroded, irregular crack in the wall. If they could make it through there, they might be able to get up a bit and inland enough so that the cutter wouldn't be able to find them.

They'd be stuck on a speck of volcanic rock with the navy searching for them, but it would be a chance. At least, with the protection he now had from her energy shell, it wouldn't be immediately life-threatening and would give him a chance to figure out something.

The cutter was coming very close now,
very
close. It would be at the mouth of the narrow passage in perhaps a minute or two.

Terry was suddenly up, and he felt her momentary confusion at waking up somewhere far removed from where she'd thought she'd gone to sleep, but she dismissed it immediately. She had slept through all his clever tricks, but she'd come instantly awake when she'd felt his sense of peril.

Using sign language, he pointed in the direction of the passage, then at the water, and made swimming motions, pointing to the far end of the cove where the crack was. He had no idea if that crack was big enough for either of them, having only noted it in passing, but it was better than nothing.

She nodded, and he felt her draw on some reserve of strength and become suddenly energized in the physical sense, tense and ready to jump into the water.