Free 07. Ghost of the Well of Souls by Jack L. Chalker Page A

the magic powers from the assembled unit."
    "Well, yes, but it seems to me you're overlookin' one major problem," the Pyron detective noted.
    "Eh?"
    "You can't find Excaliber, if it exists or existed. If the Lost Ark's real, it's still hid beyond anyone's knowledge but God's. The Black Stone of Karnath might be real, except nobody knows where Karnath is, or even what planet it was supposed to be on. This, on the other hand, appears to be real. Get the pieces and you can build it. That's a heap of difference from some mythical magical totems. I'd say this thing was a myth based on a real gadget, and who knows what the gadget will do?"
    Tann Nakitt stared at the diagram intently. "There's more than that," she commented.
    "What, my little friend?" O'Leary asked.
    "You've seen it. Or one like it. I didn't exactly see it, but I saw its picture."
    "Indeed? In Ochoa? That is fascinating!"
    "No, not in Ochoa. Not on the Well World. Think back, O'Leary. You were part of the raid on Josich's setup back in the Commonwealth. Fill it in. Make the frame a sort of ebony finish, the base black textured marble, and the internal hex some kind of lens, or glassy covering."
    "They said that the hex wasn't filled—oh, my God!"
    "What is the problem, you two?" Core asked curtly, disliking any situation where others had knowledge it did not.
    "Josich was playin' with it when we staged the raid! They were settin' it up on that dead Ancients' world when we surprised 'em!"
    Nakitt nodded. "And I'm certain that if you showed this to Ming and Ari they would confirm it. They may well have seen it, too. It's the thing that Jules Wallinchky sold to Josich for the jewels."
    There was a stunned silence. Then Core asked, "But how can that be? The thing can't be back in the Commonwealth and also here. Besides, why do I have no record of it in my own memory? I handled the background for all of Wallinchky's dealings."
    "This was barter, and, I suspect, not in your records since you were a fixed unit at the time," O'Leary told the ex-computer. "You might think back and see that you got those fabulous jewels into inventory with no record of outgo for them."
    "Hmmm . . . You're right. Still, I had the womens' memories in storage, even Ming's. Curious."
    "I doubt if your brain now holds a fraction of the data it once did, as impressive as you are," O'Leary told it. "Either that or it was information protected even from you without perhaps your boss's personal codes. It's not important. The important thing is, what the devil is something venerated here doin' way back there ?"
    Once Core accepted as fact that he didn't know everything, even about Wallinchky's criminal empire, he was back on a solid mental track. "It wasn't," she said. "What you saw cannot be the same thing as Josich is now trying to assemble here, because Josich knows it's back there. And if we accept that the eight pieces as we see them here are still on the Well World—as I think we must, considering this drawing and the spare-no-resources effort to locate and obtain them—then the obvious conclusion is that there are at least two of them. This device is not a device in and of itself, but only one part of a device. Consider the name."
    "The Straight Gate?"
    "Indeed. And a named gate, in the traditions of this world, is a kind of transportation device. You go in one gate, you come out another gate. We all got here that way. We assumed that all of Josich's entourage got here the same way."
    "We know they did!" O'Leary told her. "We saw it, and had it on video."
    "Indeed? And you saw what you were trained to see. You saw the ancient Gate activated, as ours was, and you saw it transport the others to the entry area here in South Zone. They were all Ghomas, which here are called Chalidang, yet only one remained so, and that was Josich."
    "You're saying that Josich didn't come in the same way? That he jumped through this Straight Gate instead?"
    "I believe he did, yes."
    "But he still changed sex when