07. Ghost of the Well of Souls by Jack L. Chalker Read Free Book Online Page B

taste of sulfurous compounds in the water. They stung the eyes and gills and any minor cuts or scrapes.
    It was not a town either Ari or Ming would feel comfortable living in for other reasons entirely. Even in the murky water, it spread out before them in an alien design. Broad boulevards were clearly designed for a species that liked to walk rather than swim. Large but low buildings no more than four stories tall were designed by and for nothing vaguely hu-manoid. The town was lit in varying colors by what could only be some sort of chemical secretions, whether natural or artificial, that were mixed and matched for shade and brightness and applied where needed. The streets were clearly outlined in bright green lights, the buildings in varying reddish hues. The Yabbans were all over the place, crowding central squares and going in and out of building entrances with such speed and sense of purpose it reminded both of them less of a city—Terran or Kalindan—than of an insect colony.
    Of greater interest were numerous long, thin transparent tubes. They went in and out of every building and crossed streets overhead. Things were routed inside the tubes at great speed as they went into and out of rooftop level enclosures. Since they were much too small to be the transportation tubes the Kalindan engineer had been referring to, it took several minutes and a much closer look before Ari and Ming realized what they were.
    Some kind of high pressure piping! Ari noted, amazed, as he watched a Yabban at street level insert something into a small cylinder, open a branch tube, put it in, then use a claw to press a lever. There was a hiss and some bubbling and the small cylinder suddenly took off and joined the main route. As it passed the point of the lever, the yellow-painted bar shot back up on its own, closing off the start.
    Wonder how it knows where it's going? Ming mused.
    Must be in those little houses up top. Somebody's throwing switches, maybe based on color codes. We'll never know, I suspect. Translators allow us to speak to these folks like natives and be understood the same way, but they don't teach us how to read Yabban.
    And, as they were learning, just because you heard somebody as if they were a native didn't mean that you could understand what they said. Creatures like the Yabbo were quite alien to Kalindans.
    Still, it wasn't its incomprehensibility that made the town one they didn't feel comfortable in, but rather what it was built upon and what lay just beyond it. It was an active volcano, and blotted out much of anything beyond to the south.
    Much of the activity was coming off the sides of the mountain—smoking, hissing, and often exploding. It was unnerving, almost as unsettling as the fact that the town was built on a lava flow right up against that mountain.
    You think they can predict when it'll go off? Ming wondered.
    Probably. I'd say these folks had to be experts if this is the way they live. Otherwise there wouldn't be any Yabbans around by now. They must not hear like we do, though. Those explosions would not only keep you awake, they 'd drive you batty.
    In a layer of construction between the town and the volcanic activity there were large artificial works: towers, spirals, pyramids, and cubes. Much of it had the look and feel of Kalindan construction. Even through the murkiness they could see how large the industrial works were, and they could also see networks of cables going along the floor of the sea in all directions.
    There's the answer. Power, Ari noted. Natural steam power harnessed and directed through pressure regulators anywhere else they wanted. Pressure to run turbines or move heavy machinery or even generate electrical fields. The "rules" prevented batteries from working here, but apparently not transformers, as there were several large ones just at the edge of the town. They couldn't store it, but they could use the steam power so long as the volcano and the molten magma beneath them