02. Shadows of the Well of Souls (44 page)

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

"I'm sure you'll spell it out in excruciating detail for us," Mavra commented dryly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, God!" Lori sighed, feeling all hope vanish.

"So that's why they wanted only the two of us," Mavra said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lori very much wanted to believe that.

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

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

"Well, the Erdomite is not difficult," Drinh commented.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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