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

hexes. And any Zone Gate, North or South, always brought one back immediately to his home hex.
    This time the Yaxa wore no pressure suit, which was one thing that made it nervous. The other was what it was about to meet.
    The Yaxa had been among the originators of the Wars of the Well that had ended so futilely, and they had never given up on the North. Once, long ago, a Northerner went through a Southern Zone Gate—and had come out in that Southern zone's hex. The evidence was irrefutable.
    How?
    The Yaxa had worked on that problem for years, with very little to go on. They knew the Northerner had been a symbiont called The Diviner and the Rel, who came from the Northern hex the translator reproduced as Astilgol—none of the Northern hex names really translated, but that's the way the sound always came out.
    The Astilgol were interested in the ship; they had already tried to talk to the Uchjin, but failed like everyone else. Floating just off the ground, the Astilgol looked totally alien to any Southerner—just a long stream of glistening silver chimes suspended from a crystal bar with a series of tiny lights glowing atop it, like fireflies caught in a round bowl. Yet no bowl was visible—only the sense that one was there.
    The Astilgol ambassador had been interested in the Yaxa's contacts; they were in the North, and the Yaxa controlled Yulin. They'd also listened to Trelig's Makiem, and to Ortega as well.
    But they could not help with the basic problem: the Diviner, it seemed, had been born a bit of a mutant, able to tune in occasionally on the internal processes of the Well. Sometimes it could prophesy when the Well calculated probabilities on new input—but this was not common. Only three Diviners had been born in known history, and the one that journeyed south had never returned. It was the last.
    Why had the Well allowed the Diviner and the Rel through? Nobody knew. The Well was a computer but not an entity; it didn't decide to let the Diviner through—somehow the fused creature had interacted with the Well's transport system in a way no other could.
    The Yaxa had theorized about this for years. The solution had boiled down to how the Well classified a creature. It had always been assumed that this was determined from its physical makeup, but what if that wasn't so?
    Had the Diviner's relationship to the Well somehow jammed the normal translation process? Or had the Diviner somehow simply informed the Well that it was a different kind of creature than it actually was? Did the Well recognize an individual by its self-image? Could the Well, then, be fooled? Had the Diviner said to the Well, then, be fooled? Had the Diviner said in the South, "I am an Azkfru," and wound up not in Astilgol but in Azkfru?
    They'd tried some experiments using deep hypnos on other creatures to convince them that they were Yaxa. They'd done the hypnos well, but the creatures continued to pop out in their true hexes.
    Northern races maintained some trade with the South. The translators, for example, were actually grown inside the Northern creatures in Moiush and traded for iron that the Moiush needed. Thus, some Northern races had Southern contacts, just as some Southern races cooperated with the North. Word gets around on any project after awhile.
    Finally it even got to the Yugash.
    They never manned their embassy at Zone; they were neither liked nor trusted; they apparently had nothing of value to trade, and they generally treated the other races as mere animals, beneath their notice.
    Their physical structure was just bonded energy. Wild creatures of unimaginable shapes and sizes inhabited their crystalline hex; the Yugash grew an organism to order—and then they entered it in some way, possessed it, and controlled it completely.
    Physical creatures were but tools to the Yugash, things to be used until they were broken or no longer useful. As natives of a high-tech hex they were aware of the spaceship in Uchjin; it had passed over