Jack L. Chalker Watchers at the Well 02 Shadows of the Well of Souls

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somehow." She sighed. "No, I'm sure she's still back on Earth, and I'm pretty
sure she's still in the jungle. Unlike you, she found something in the jun-gle
that she loved. I think she didn't want to come because she'd already found
her version of the Well World. I think she really wanted to stay just as she
was."
"You didn't know her. She'd go nuts living in there like that forever."
Mavra smiled. "Maybe you didn't know her. I looked at you over a period of a
week or two, and I saw somebody willing to play jungle Amazon and go along
because that was better than death, but you were always playing at it. Once
you got over your fear and your natural feeling that rescue was at hand, you
got into it, but it was always a game with you. You didn't ever belong there.
I looked at her, though, and I saw somebody hiding one hell of a lot of inner
pain. I don't know what it came from, but it was there. And once she got over
the same two hurdles you did, she didn't accept things like you did, she
embraced them. I've seen the same thing in countless girls who came to us over
the years. Like some kind of horrible burden had been lifted, removed from
inside them. You fell into a trap; she escaped one. I wouldn't be surprised if
she went totally, completely native."
"We saw totally different people," Lori said, shaking his head. "I wonder
which one of us saw the right one."
Mavra sighed. "Well, you've seen it happen with Alowi, and I would have bet
you that Julian Beard would never have flipped out like that. We'll probably
never know for sure about her. At least I'll try to find out once I'm inside.
If I can, and she's still alive, where and what she is back there will kind of
settle it and what I do for her if I can do much. That jungle was already
disappearing at a horren-dous rate. I wish I
knew how long any of those tribes can continue to exist as they want to exist.
It's a real shame, but it's the way that whole planet went. Right from ancient
times they called it 'progress.' I guess it is if you're doing the chopping
and not being chopped."
That brought Lori back to his original train of thought. "What about this drug
trade right here? It makes me feel sleazy. Worse than that, it depresses me.
Here, all this time, all this civilization, and they wind up like we were
going in my old corner of civilization. The whole damned world seemed to be
falling into the hands of the Camposes and their ilk."
"Well, having used drugs of a sort in the jungle, and earlier in other places,
and having done a little smuggling in my time, I can't be too judgmental about
these people. In a sense, they're the kind of people I
was born and raised with. And I can't really say I'm surprised that this
exists here; rather, I'm surprised that it didn't seem to exist when I was
here last. At least not in anything that wasn't species-specific and too
localized to notice. The biggest problem you have if you're born and raised on
the Well World is that you have to face the fact that it's meaningless. I
mean, what can you hope to do? These are the descendants of the leftovers, the
last races tested out here. They're managed from on high or, rather, from on
low and on the whole, things don't change very much. That's why they don't
keep a lot of the kind of history here that we do, on the whole. Even the
Erdomese, on their own planet, might discover electricity, might discover
radio and video and research bi-ology, and might even figure out a way to get
to the stars. They just have less to work with, and it might take them longer.
They might not, but it's possible. Not here."
"Well, yeah, but it's not that bad, I don't think."
"No? You were a scientist. I'll bet you know enough to create a small
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renaissance in scientific knowledge in most hexes here, including Erdom. But
it's all useless knowl-edge, isn't it? Useless because nothing except muscle
and some water and wind power works there, and even then, if you generate a
current, it'll die before it reaches anything that might use it. That was
Julian's problem. Just about ev-ery bit of the knowledge she has and the
talents she pos-sesses are useless in Erdom. Permanently. She can't even
swagger around and be Senor or Senora Macha. Everything in Julian Beard's life
was denied him as an
Erdomese by it-self and by being an Erdomese woman in particular. Build
things? Paint? With rock-hard mittens for hands? In a land and culture where
anything she might do intellectually is considered deviant behavior and women
are virtual property forget it. On top of that he had a ton of guilt over
being less than a wonderful human being by his own lights. And his mind-set
was so much Mister Macho that he was finally faced with the ultimate problem
and it tore him to bits."
"You mean he just couldn't handle being a woman?"
"No, he couldn't handle falling in love with a man, you idiot! Even if it was
with a man who used to be a woman and still has, I think, a woman's soul."
"Julian? In love with me? I mean, really in love?"
"Sure. Plain as day. But Julian couldn't be in love with a guy, just couldn't
handle it, and Julian wasn't useful in any meaningful way from this point on.
So Julian goes, Alowi enters. Call it a split personality if you want, but one
of them won. The one who could be in love with you and be of use to you and
not go bonkers because of what she could no longer be or do."
Lori sighed. "Well, ain't that a kick in the head. Mavra, I swear to you, even
though I never thought it for real until just now, I really did fall in love
myself! But with Julian, not Alowi. Not that I'm not still, but, well, it's
not the same."
Mavra shrugged. "Well, you have a problem maybe unique in romance, don't you?
I seem to attract the
unique in that department. The thing is, though, you've got the Jul-ian
problem kind of the way he had it."
"What? Now you've lost me again."
"The Well World changes bodies around. That's not unique, you know. It's
technology. The same principle as the matter transmitter. I once knew somebody
who's a distant ghost to me now who discovered the same principle on his own.
An Earth-human type. It's not magic. It's physics and mathematics, and enough [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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