Free 02. Shadows of the Well of Souls by Jack L. Chalker

are for giant caterpillars, but there is a kind of train going to almost any point we need in this hex. But it's a long, nasty way to where we're going, and I've seen worse than this place. Look, I'll tell you what. I'll figure out how to float the two translators somehow, but I want to get the implant done fast, and then we're out of here. Could we do it this afternoon?"
    "I suppose I could. Julian's asleep. But look," he found himself saying, almost without thinking, "if it's too much of an expense, then we could do without the translators. Besides, in Julian's case, an Erdomese female with a translator would in the best case be exiled from any contact with foreigners once we returned. It might do her more harm than good."
    Mavra considered that. "Hmmm . . . I forgot about that damned culture down there. Woulda made me puke if I hadn't seen and been forced to live in so many similar cultures back on Earth. In China some families actually drowned girl babies because they had no value or status! And they were still having enough babies to one day overrun the planet!" She sighed. "Well, it would be a savings I could use, and she will be able to understand anybody else with one. Still, I'd like more than one of us to have one. Okay, I'm going to give you a name and address. The front desk will be able to tell you how to get there. It's not far. Just be warned—that loud crackling and buzzing you hear all over when you go out will sound like a huge mob of people all talking at once when you come back. You'll understand it, but don't expect to make full sense out of it. The Ituns don't exactly have the same frame of reference as we do."
    Lori got the address and repeated it back several times until Mavra was satisfied. Fortunately, the city was on a grid system, and the streets were basically numbers and Itun alphabetical characters so that he could use an Erdomese equivalent and the concierge's translator would understand.'
    "Okay, then. Get it done, come back, have dinner—make sure you order room service; you won't even want to see Ituns eat—and get as much rest as you can. We'll finish up what we need to do today as well and meet you tomorrow at the hotel. Since I'm being so thoroughly and obviously shadowed, there's not much point to cloak-and-dagger stuff—yet."
    "We?"
    "Yes, there will be more of us."
    "You mean you found Gus?" He hesitated a moment. "Not— Campos !Please, not him !"
    "No, neither one, really. Your Gus wound up a Dahir, or so I'm told, and that's a fair distance from here, although we might be able to contact him somehow along the way. I didn't really know him, remember. We kept him and the other guy kind of out of it."
    "Yeah, well, Campos is a psycho. Rapist, drug dealer, gangster—you name it. The lowest common denominator of all the worst things in humans. Now, there's somebody who should have been an Erdomese female! That would have been justice! Gus was a nice guy, very gentle, a photographer in fact."
    "Well, I got no word on Campos, but I know the type. I doubt if he's anywhere near Erdom or even Itus, but the Well's been known to have a sense of humor about some people. I don't pretend to understand it, but I was led to believe that the Well actually takes your personality, both conscious and subconscious, your dreams and ambitions, even your fantasies and your fears, into consideration, but on a kind of loopy basis I doubt if anybody but another giant machine could fully understand."
    "Then—the colonel Julian spoke of, perhaps?"
    "Nope. Don't know where or what he is, either. No, you don't know them. They came in with Nathan in about the same way that you wound up coming through with me. I needed a source of information on him, and we hit it off. It's a kind of sweet story, as unique, I suspect, in the very long history of the Well World as your own story and Julian's, and as oddly perverse as well. You'll have to see and hear the story for yourself. Let's leave it until tomorrow, when