03. Quest for the Well of Souls by Jack L. Chalker Read Free Book Online Page B

muscular shapes were coated with fine fur; their heads, those of streamlined bulls: immense, almost neckless, with short snouts, broad pink noses, wide brown eyes, and tremendous curved horns.
    From the males' view, the only worm in Dasheen's apple was the fact that Dasheen bulls lacked the ability to digest calcium directly, causing a deficiency that could only be counteracted by the milk of the females.
    The Yaxa had arrived at the great farm unannounced, panicking the cows. Its great wings cast a tremendous shadow across the fields of oats and wheat, like some great, multicolored predator. It landed near the main house—a huge structure that included silos, storage facilities, quarters for Yulin's 117 wives and daughters, and his own quarters.
    It was not that he'd been totally out of contact with the Yaxa. But such meetings were usually carried out surreptitiously, with him going to a neutral high-tech hex to test his theories, or arranging a rendezvous in Zone.
    Yulin calmed down his family and went to meet the Yaxa.
    The great butterfly, impassive as always, seemed to bow slightly. Yulin motioned for it to enter his own living quarters, and it did, clearing the doorway with some difficulty. Yulin took his seat in a broad rocking chair and waited for the creature to speak.
    "I am Racer," the Yaxa said, using its nickname. Their names were untranslatable, so they generally adopted and stuck to translatable nicknames when dealing with others.
    Ben Yulin nodded. "Well, welcome, Racer. But isn't it a little risky coming here like this? I mean, I know the border's not far from here, but I doubt if you could avoid being seen. There will be a lot of questions."
    "What I have to say is much too important to keep. Zone itself is far too risky for it, and there wasn't time to get you out plausibly. The questions may not matter, anyway, when you hear what I have to say."
    "I'm listening," he said, a growing feeling of unease mixed with the excitement rising within him. He suspected he knew why the Yaxa had come.
    "We have placed Yaxa in a Northern hex. We can place anyone there now—with difficulty, but with complete certainty."
    A thrill shot through him, but it was tempered by his engineer's mind. Like them, he'd worked on the problem for many years to no avail.
    "How is it possible?" he asked.
    "A Northern energy creature, the Yugash, grows crystalline creatures tailored to its needs and then operates them by entering the creatures' bodies and controlling them," Racer explained. "Finally a Yugash, who are high-tech, got together with us. They, like us, thought that the Well used mind-set rather than physical form to regulate transfer between Zone and hex gates. We allowed a Yugash called the Torshind to possess a Yaxa completely while the thought processes of the Yaxa were heavily sedated. The Yaxa body entered the Yaxa embassy Zone Gate—but walked out in Yugash!"
    Yulin thought about it. "You mean these things can take over your body? And the Well switches them—and whatever body they're in—to Yugash?"
    "It is so. A bit unnerving, but, thankfully, they cannot enter hexes in the South. The Well is called the Well of Souls for good reason—it recognizes you by your mind, not your form. We firmly believe that we can now move a party of our choosing to Yugash, only three hexes, straight line, from where you crashed in Uchjin."
    The news was incredible. He could hardly believe it—there had to be a fly in the ointment somewhere, and he thought of one immediately.
    "What's to prevent these creatures from not just letting us go once they take us over?" he asked cautiously. "I've seen enough Well World life to know that my own people's legends of centaurs and mermaids and ghosts were more than racial memory—some of those creatures must actually have gone to the home world of the humans in the early days. There are also legends of people being possessed by demons. I can't but wonder if the Yugash . . ." He left the uneasy