03. Quest for the Well of Souls Read Online Free PDF Page A

minihex, for its physical requirements. If it could be done, Ortega decided, it would be.
    He sighed, filed the report without reading the rest, and pulled out a communications device from a drawer with his middle right hand.
    It was on an odd circuit, and so could not easily be intercepted, he felt, by anyone else. The office itself was debugged daily, so he was confident about its security. The line went directly from his office across to the other side of Zone, to the embassy of Oolakash, deep in the Overdark Ocean.
    The connection buzzed a number of times, and, for a moment, he felt that he'd picked the wrong time. But, finally, he heard a click, and a hollow, high-pitched voice answered him via a translator. What with the water, the connection, and the double translator, it sounded eerie, as though made by an electronic instrument, yet it was intelligible. He wondered what he sounded like to the Oolakash.
    "Tagadal," said that voice.
    Ortega smiled. "Tag? Ortega. I have a little ecology problem for you to run through Obie, and a genetic question, too."
    "Fire away," replied Dr. Gilgam Zinder.
     

North Zone
    Like its counterpart in the South, the Northern Hemisphere, with 780 noncarbon-based life forms, had its Zone and its own embassies and ambassadors. In all, 702 hexes maintained permanent or semipermanent representatives in Zone, and had their own interzone council with rotating chairmanship. Yet the North had more problems than the South, which though it had races so alien from one another as to make identification difficult, had more of a sense of unity. The Markovians had been carbon-based, and they naturally devoted much of their energies to other forms also based on carbon.
    But they couldn't overlook a bet. In their suicidal project to find for their children the glory their forebears had missed by attaining a stagnant godhead, the Markovians could not afford to miss the slight chance that they were doomed because they were carbon-based.
    North Zone was the true experimenter's paradise. There were no rules or restrictions on the 780 Northern hexes, and some of the life forms were so wildly alien that they could not even find common ground with one another. Such had been the way with the Uchjin, in whose nontech hex Trelig and Yulin had crashed. They had an ambassador on station—it was the only reason the refugees had made it to the South—but few could talk to them. Their utterances just didn't make sense; their frame of reference, concepts, and the like were so totally alien that it would have been impossible even to convey to them what the ship was or what it represented.
    "No," however, translated quite well, even to the Northern races who had themselves tried to gain control of the ship—and some in the North were fully as greedy and Machiavellian as others in the South—and they had really tried.
    To no avail.
    The creature standing in the Well Gate at North Zone did not belong there. It was large—over two meters, not counting the vast orange-and-brown spotted butterfly's wings now compactly folded along its back—and its shiny rock-hard body rested on eight rubbery black tentacles, each of which terminated in soft, sticky claws. Its face was like a human skull, jet black with small yellow half-moons making it a devil's mask; two feelers rose interminably from it, vibrating. Its eyes were velvet pads of deep orange, clearly marking a visual system different from the common one of the South.
    The Yaxa never felt comfortable in North Zone, fearing that a sprung seal or some overzealous controlling hand might admit whatever atmosphere boiled on the other side of that door. For lack of interest and proper equipment, this was as far as Southerners usually came.
    The Well Gate would zip a Northerner to South Zone or the reverse, and that's what made traveling so frustrating: there was just no opening from either Zone to the outside world; only the Zone Gates provided transportation in and out of the