Quest for the Well of Souls - By Jack L. Chalker & James P. Baen Page 0,4

hex that could be bought or blackmailed. Of course!"

"It took you all these years to figure that out?" his wife responded sarcastically.

He didn't recognize the tone. "Nine years to get a position here, almost the same to get the diplomatic mess straight, to repair and rebuild," he replied seriously. "Plus all the work on the Northern problem. Priorities. But—why not?"

"Want me to arrange it?" Burodir asked, thankful that, perhaps, this obsession could finally be cleared up. "Makiem will have to be well out of the affair on the surface, or we undo the diplomatic ties and bring Ortega and the rest down on us. But, it can be done."

Trelig nodded idly. "Mavra Chang!" he breathed.

South Zone

There were 780 races in 780 hexes in the Well World's Southern Hemisphere. In each self-contained little world was at least one Zone Gate—a yawning hexagonal blackness that would instantly bring any of the hemisphere's creatures passing through it to an area around the South Pole known as Zone. Around a huge central Well—the input staging area for Markovians who had taken part in the great experiment to repopulate the stars by becoming lesser creatures of their own design, living, reproducing, dying so the children could go out again to a universe their parents had abandoned—were 780 small areas. Airlocks and atmospheric controls adapted each to one of the 780 life forms of the South; they were all connected by long corridors.Here and here alone, all the races of the South could meet. Here most technology worked—as did magic, too, for some of the races had powers given by the Well to simulate some condition on the real planets their races were designed to inhabit. However, high-tech pistols would not fire, a diplomatic nicety.

Zone, too, was halved, with one half for the water races and the other for the land races. But high-tech hexes had long ago rigged intercoms among them all, and it was here that senior ambassadors with translators could conduct interhex business, try and keep the peace, deal with common problems, work out trade negotiations and the like.

Not all the embassies were manned, or had ever been. Some hexes remained complete mysteries, trafficking in nothing to no one. One such was the snowbound, mountainous hex of Gedemondas, where the war had ended in a fiery display as the spaceship's engine module plunged into a valley in full sight of the warring parties. It exploded as it pierced a thin floor of solidified lava masking volcanic magma. Other creatures, such as those Antor Trelig would once have called "human," also went unrepresented. The Glathriel, for instance, lost a war with their nontech neighbors, the Ambreza, who had secured a Northern Hemisphere gas that reduced the humans to the most basic primitive tribalism and then took their hex. The Ambreza controlled both Zone Gates, and made certain that, if humanity rose again, it would do so in ways they, not the humans, chose.

Ambassadors came and went in the 679 currently manned offices. Time went on, people grew old, or they got tired of the monastic life the embassies imposed, or they got promoted within their own hexes, which were their countries.

All but one—the ambassador from Ulik, a hex that lay along the Equatorial Barrier. Ulik was a high-tech hex, but one with a harsh, desert environment. Its people were great reptiles, snakelike to five or more meters beyond the waist, with humanoid torsos to which were attached three pairs of muscular arms with broad hands, the bottom four on crablike ball sockets. Their heads were squarish, thick, and both males and females had huge walruslike mustaches. Egg-layers who nursed their young when hatched, to non-Ulik eyes the only difference between males and females was the breast between each pair of arms on the female.

Serge Ortega was a male, and an Entry. Long ago he had been a freighter pilot for the Com who, old and bored, had unknowingly opened up an ancient Markovian Well Gate that had transported him to the Well World, which had in turn transformed him into a Ulik. He liked being a Ulik; the Well, while never changing one's memories or basic personality, made you feel comfortable and normal as whatever creature it made of you. Thus, Ortega was still the scoundrel, pirate, freebooter, and manipulator he'd been before.

The Ulik usually lived for about a century; none had ever lived past a century and a half. Serge Ortega, however, was already over three hundred years old, and he looked about