"Who are you?" Mavra Chang asked him in a normal, civil tone. Interestingly to Lori and Campos, the device on the necklace-obviously some sort of advanced translating computer-picked up her strange tongue and echoed it to them.

"I am Auchen Glough, Amba.s.sador from Kwynn and the unfortunate current Duty Officer at South Zone. I a.s.sume you all fell in from this terrible planet called Dirt just like the others?"

"Close enough," Mavra responded. "There have been others?"

"Oh, my, yes! Not on my watch, I admit, but we've all seen the pictures and gotten the reports. First there was a party of three, then, a day or so later, two more, and now, after aninterminable period when it's rained junk in here, the four of you. How many more?"

"No more, I shouldn't think," Mavra told him.

"Most unusual, most odd," muttered the amba.s.sador. "We have had new arrivals here, but never,never from a planetbound group. Well, I suppose we should get this over with. If everyone will stand, I will take us back to the of-fice for indoctrination and briefing."

"He can't stand," Lori said of Gus. "He's very weak and ill. He needs attention."

"Hmmm. Well, carry him over the junction points, and that will be enough for now. He's not likely to die in an hour or two, is he?"

"No. At least I don'tthink so. But if he doesn't get some kind of attention, he's going to die fairly soon."

"Then we'd best get on with it. Come."

Juan Campos felt some of his confidence coming back. "I am not following thatthing until I find out where I am and what the h.e.l.l this is all about!" he stated.

"If you follow me, I will tell you," the amba.s.sador re-sponded. "If you don't, you will get very hungry and very thirsty out here. We are headed for the only exit."

For now, at least, that seemed good enough.

With Gus in her arms, Lori stepped past the wall open-ing. Mavra was already there, and Campos followed last, wary but more worried about remaining alone than about going with what he still thought of as a potentially vicious monster.

The amba.s.sador turned around, showing that the spiny plates did indeed extend down the tail and that the tail itself terminated in a very nasty-looking bony spike. He struck the side twice, and the moving walkway started, carrying them back down the chamber toward the unknown.

They were barely out of sight when Terry materialized on the concave floor.

She was a little confused and disoriented, having gone from a very unusual encounter with the Brazilian sergeant to a rain-soaked climb and then a fall through darkness, but she felt glad to be alive and looked around, amazed at the size and strangeness of the place.

I don't know where this is, but it sure isn't Brazil, she thought, gaping. Sweet Jesus! I thought the People were weird enough, but this is getting weirder by the minute!

She got up, unarmed and naked as the day she was born with nothing that wasn't glued in or tattooed on, and looked around. She was wondering what to do next when she heard sounds of what might have been voices coming from very far away to her left. It wasn't much, and the sounds seemed to be diminishing with each pa.s.sing moment, but, naked and unarmed or not, there wasn't much choice but to head off in that direction. She eyed the openings and the low barrier wall and scrambled up to the top of the nearest one.

She looked around, but the sounds were gone now, and there was an unnerving quiet and stillness about this mas-sive place. There seemed nothing to do but head in the di-rection she'd thought the sounds had come from and hope for the best. She was certainly exposed as h.e.l.l here.

She stared off into the distance and sighed. It was going to be along walk.

No seats in the South Zone conference room seemed to be designed for humans, but there was plenty of floor s.p.a.ce.

The Kwynn amba.s.sador went to the front and pushed a concealed panel in the wall, and a small lectern and oper-ating console rose from the floor until it was at the consid-erable height most useful to him.

"I realize that you all are very confused right now as to where you are and all the rest," he began hesitantly, trying to find the right words for what he considered the most primitive-looking bunch he'd ever known to come through. "I will try to make it as simple as I can. You are no longer on the planet on which you were born and raised. Some-how, by accident or design, you entered a device which transported you here. Never mind how-you could not pos-sibly understand it even if you were the most advanced of races."

You don't understand it at all yourself, you old fraud, Mavra thought, but kept silent.

"Seeing you, I believe it," Juan Campos responded. "But my only question is, How do I get back?"

"Um, well, you don't. It's strictly a one-way system now, although it once went in both directions. That was ages ago, beyond any living memories and all but the most basic of our records. I'm afraid you are here to stay."

"That is impossible! If one can get somewhere, one can get back!"

"Well, you are welcome to try, but I wouldn't suggest poking blindly even around here. You would be taken as a Glathrielian and could wind up being in a deadly situation. Glathriel doesn't really have any representation here except the Ambreza, and I doubt if you'd fare too well with them, either."

"What will you do with us?" Lori asked nervously.

"If you will kindly just allow me to continue, I think I can answer all your questions!" the amba.s.sador snapped ir-ritably. "It is difficult enough trying to simplify this when you don't have the background to understand it. Uh, youdo know what planets are, don't you?"

"We are not as we appear," Mavra told him. "I think ev-eryone will understand what you say. Do not simplify any-thing. If there's something we don't understand, we'll ask questions afterward."

"Oh, very well. You might understand what this place is a little better if you have some basic background, though. The universe as we know it is around twenty-four billion years old, give or take a few billion. On the vast number of worlds in the vast number of galaxies that it contains, life of all sorts evolved. It stands to reason that someone had to evolve up to a high standard first. There are many terms for them, but the one we use these days is simply the First Race. They were nothing like anything you know or even I know, and we have little direct information about them. What wedo know is that they came up just like every other race does in the natural system and reached a level well be-yond where any races are today. At least a billion or maybe more years ago they reached the top. They were every-where, they'd explored everything that could be explored, and they were so advanced, they didn't need s.p.a.ceships or much of anything to move from point to point. You arrived by one of their methods of travel. We call them hex gates, for obvious reasons. They did an awful lot of things based on sixes, and the hexagon was their sort of 'pet shape,' as it were. Finally they reached the point where they were like G.o.ds, permanently linked to their machines and able to have or do or experience almost anything they wanted just by, well, thinking of it."

Lori tried to imagine what they must have been like and failed. A race so advanced that they were magic. Whatever they wished, they could have. "Where are they now?" she asked. "Here?"

"No. And yes. And maybe. That is the impossible ques-tion, and it has a lot of answers, not all of them verifiable. You-all of us-would think that such an existence would be the ultimate one, and it probably was for quite a while. They banished fear and want and desire and even death. They probably had a lot of fun, maybe for millions of years, but after a while something we might not imagine happened."

"They started losing it?" Campos guessed. "No. They grew bored. Horribly, horribly bored. Have any of you ever played any gambling game? Any game of chance at all?"

They all nodded. "Of course," Campos responded. "What would happen if you discovered one day that you couldn't lose. That you couldnever lose?"

"I would settle a lot of old scores and wind up owning the world!" Campos replied.

But Lori said, "I think I see what you mean. It would get boring. It wouldn't be any fun anymore. If you can't lose, then winning is meaningless."

"Yes, precisely so. And that's what happened to them. Life lost all its meaning. There was nothing more to learn, nothing more to do that they hadn't all done a thousand times, no surprises, no reason for existence anymore."

"You mean theykilled themselves out of boredom?" Lori was appalled.

"The ancient records imply that this is indeed what started happening; others went a bit mad, imagining a higher state beyond where they were and believing that they had a way to get there-which also, of course, meant death if they were wrong. It was the first crisis they faced in so long it was beyond their memory, so they got together and tried to figure out why being omnipotent was so empty. They couldn't believe that a permanent state of ultimate happiness was impossible, since their whole racial effort had been directed for so long at attaining just that, so they came up with the only other answer they could.

They figured that they were somehow flawed. That they had evolvedincorrectly. And since their experiments showed that they would wind up the same way if they started from scratch, they decided that their whole race had evolved wrongly, that it was impossible to reach that state as the First Race. It sounds crazy, I know, and perhaps it is, but that's the way they thought. Which of us could understand their thinking? And thus came about their Great Project."

"I do not think that I would get so bored," Campos com-mented. "Such power!"

"Perhaps. But we are not they. As I was saying, the Great Project. Even now I don't think we can even under-stand it. It is very unclear. It seems, however, that a giant experiment and computer-you know what a computer is? Good!-was built the size of a reasonable planet. On it, 1,560 laboratories, in fact, were built, each containing a unique ecosystem. They took beings from worlds where life had evolved, and they in many cases altered or speeded up the evolution of those races. In some cases, what had once been animals became a thinking and dominant race. In other cases, they made things up from whole cloth, often taking variations of ideas done by others. The idea was to create and test as large and varied a selection of potential master races starting from different worlds and back-grounds, to try and design the one system that would in fact produce the heaven they dreamed of. The laboratory areas, tightly controlled to make them simulate the theoretical planets and systems they'd invented, were divided into two segments. Since about half of all life that had evolved in the universe, including apparently them, was based on car-bon, half the world was given over to carbon-based life-forms. The other half, just to be sure, was given over to non-carbon-based forms, like silicon, even pure energy and for forms with alternative atmospheres like ammonia and methane. A great barrier was placed between the two halves so that they could not interact with one another, and the non-carbon-based half had extra barriers guarding against one environment polluting another. The southern half was the carbon-based half. You are carbon-based, as am I, so we are in the south."

Lori was fascinated. "You meanthis is the laboratory? And the experiment is still going on?"

"Well, this is the laboratory world, yes, but wethink the experiment is long over with. In fact, it is somewhat hum-bling to realize that someone else got first crack. Thelast ones to have at it were the bottom of the barrel-still G.o.d-like creatures, nonetheless. We here now are, sad to say, among the last created. We call our current state the Last Races, for obvious reasons."

"Fifteen hundred and sixty different races?" Lori said as much as asked. "All here? Now? How bigis this place, anyway?"

"Not huge, but big enough. Unfortunately, the translator has limits, one of which is measurement systems.

From what I have learned from watching the recordings of prior entries here, I gather we are somewhat close to the same size as your home world."

"Huh? On a world the size of Earth, you've got 1,560 little worlds? It sounds like a collection of small domes."

"No, no, it's not like that. You will see."

"You were talking about those G.o.d creatures," Juan Cam-pos put in. "You never said why they did this thing or what happened to them." He didn't like the idea of a whole race of G.o.dlike beings looking over his shoulder.

"Oh, yes. Well, it is unclear what happened, but itis clear that for the experiments to prove that their systems had possibilities, they used themselves."

"What?" This was getting too much for Lori to handle. "You mean they became the races they invented?"

"So it would seem. All but the control group. That one worked on the 'next phase' of evolution some thought must exist. They were also supposed to be the guardians to en-sure that those who became part of the experiment might be able to back out. After a while, though, it didn't happen. The control group vanished-n.o.body knows where or how or why. Some say they found their higher state. Others say they killed themselves attempting it. It is unknown what happened, but one thing was sure: When they left, no pure members of the First Race remained. The First Race had been consumed by retaking on mortality in the course of its experiment. The new races that had proved themselves were moved out to worlds to begin a natural evolution. Only the last series of experiments were left, and because there was no control, they were never shut down even when they were used as the templates for worlds like the one you came from. n.o.body left here knew how to get off of this world or how to get to, much less operate, the com-puter and machinery, so we have been here ever since, maintained by the master computer as we were, free only within the limits of its programming. You are here because all the First Race hex gates all over the universe were left switched on, all with this place as their terminus; there was no one to turn them off."

"I see," Lori said, nodding. But shedidn't see, not to-tally. How did that explain this Alama, this Mavra Chang?

"Two ancient terms have come down from those past ages," the amba.s.sador told them. "The word that appears to refer to this laboratory world seems to translate out, for no discernible reason, as 'well.' Thus we refer to this as the Well World. The operating computer that maintains it and us, and possibly a lot more, has the ancient name of the Well of Souls. Very poetic, actually."

"You said that most of them left the way we came in," Juan Campos noted, thinking of what he and his family might do with access to all this. "Then thereis a way to get out."

"Oh, certainly. You simply have to get into the master computer and give it the proper instructions.

That's obvi-ous. The trouble is, the last race to leave locked the master computer and took the keys with them, as it were. It is likely that the gate you used-a meteor, I believe-was one of the gates used when your world was being prepared and designed for full habitation. A work-gang gate, as it were, parked somewhere after it was no longer needed. Some cosmic catastrophe jolted it out of its...o...b..t, and it came down and snared you and the others. This happens. Some races, as I have said, who are already s.p.a.cefaring sorts have accidentally b.u.mped into them, mostly on ancient, deserted worlds once inhabited by the First Race. The gates are lo-cally controlled, and it appears that because the races in-volved are the recognized designs of the First Race, it can't tellyou apart fromthem. So it brings you here. And here you will remain for reasons I have already stated."

"You said that we were-what did you call it?-Glath something?" Lori said, thinking.

"Glathriel. Yes. You are different in minor details but basically the same race and clearly of their origin. It is un-derstandable that, stuck here over vast periods of time, dif-ferences would fade as evolution produced single uniform races, and that is pretty much the rule in all of the hexes."

"Hexes?" Campos prompted.

"Yes. All of the experimental areas, the 'nations' of the Well World now, are hexagonal in shape except at the equa-tor and at the poles. The ones ab.u.t.ting both are of more a wing shape but still manage six sides. The equator, as I said, is an impenetrable barrier. None of us could survive for long in most of the North, and few of those races could survive here. There are a couple of exceptions, but not many. We do some limited trade and contacts through this zone-there is a local hex gate that goes between them- but very little. We haven't much in common. Each hex also has its own local gate, but it will carry you only to here and then will return you back to your 'native' hex when you leave."

"Where is 'here' exactly in all this?" Lori asked him.

"South Zone. The south polar region. The 'cap,' as it were. You cannot enter this zone except by the local hex gates or the way you arrived. You can leave only through the local gates. This area was once the social control center, transport hub, you name it, of the Great Project. Now it is used essentially as emba.s.sies for the various hexes. Not ev-ery hex has an amba.s.sador or representative here-some do not socialize much with other races-though about half do, mostly the high-tech hexes and some of the semis."

"Huh?"

"I told you each hex was an artificially created environ-ment in which various conditions were duplicated or enforced to simulate real worlds. Resource- and food-rich worlds would eventually evolve technological civilizations. Those hexes are fully controlled by natural law, and many, like my own, are extremely developed. Others might have a very livable ecosystem but lack the sort of resources that would allow the easy development of a high-tech civiliza-tion. In those, some natural laws are, for lack of a better term, deactivated. Those are the semitech hexes, in which things like steam power are allowed, but not more ad-vanced systems. In yet others, those with few resources or particularly harsh environments, survival itself was the pri-mary aim and the races had to be tested on that basis. It was also thought, or so it is surmised, that these hexes might be an attempt to see if a race could attain perfection in a natural state and to explore the idea that machines and high technology might well be the corrupting influence. In these hexes only direct mechanical energy works. Muscle power, water power, and the like, but always in a preindus-trial stage. Do not take them lightly. Some of them have de-veloped amazing powers that seem almost like magic to the rest of us, although most are stagnant to a large degree."

"The other creatures-they are like you?" Campos asked.

"Oh, my, no! Only the Kwynn are like the Kwynn. Our land is on the equator west of the Sea of Storms. And yes, there are vast ocean areas and water-breathing races who live here under the same rules. There are 1,560 different races. There are some similarities among these, even some outright mixture of racial traits. A Dillian might be consid-ered a mixture of a draft animal from Glathriel and the dominant Glathrielian race, for example. There are also somewhat similar combinations of my own kind, from cold-blooded to warm, short to tall, and all sorts of mix-tures. A few are, well, unique."

"You brought up this Glathriel again," Lori noted. "Why don't they have an emba.s.sy here?"

"Glathriel was, as you might expect, a high-tech hex," the Kwynn replied. "It reached a very high level very fast, partly because, it is said, they were so violent and warlike. In ancient times a king arose who decided to expand beyond his hex and conquer other hexes, either enslaving or exterminating the natives to increase his own race. A peaceful nontech agrarian hex that had an abundant supply of food and an extremely fertile land was to be the first tar-get, since Glathriel had become too developed to support its own population and did not have sufficient trade to buy what it needed. This other race, the Ambreza, got wind of the plot and somehow created a kind of gas, harmless to Ambreza, that would interact with the atmosphere in Glathriel and become quickly pervasive. It appears to have altered brain chemistry or some such. In quite a short pe-riod of time, before they could even realize what was hap-pening, it reduced the entire Glathrielian population to moron level, barely more than animals. The Ambreza then moved into Glathriel and enjoyed the benefits of high technology, then they rounded up the Glathrielians, perhaps a million of them, and forced them into Ambreza, where they are used as draft animals, tilling the fields under Ambreza plantation supervisors. Of course, the only ac-count we have is the Ambreza one, so we don't know if the Glathrielians were really that mean or simply outsmarted themselves by forgetting that nontech is not a synonym for 'stupid,' 'ignorant,' or 'defenseless.' "

"How horrible! And you said 'are used.' You mean they were genetically altered? They remain-moronic?"

"No, not at all. But they remain a rather primitive bunch, I fear. Apparently, over the generations they achieved a tol-erance for the gas, which is actually a derivative of a nat-ural marsh product. The Ambreza retained a fairly good-sized chunk of the place for their plantations border-ing on the new Ambreza, and the rest was left to the re-maining Glathrielians, who regained their senses over time but never more than a fraction of their previous numbers. Indeed, their population has been stable at about fifteen or twenty thousand for as long as we have valid records. The rest of the hex that the Ambreza didn't need was allowed to grow wild. Today they live in tribal groups as simple hunter-gatherers and remain very primitive. The Ambreza say that a wild plant they always considered a nuisance proved a mild drug to Glathrielians, who use it quite a lot.

It has sapped their ambition as well as their fierceness and is at the center of their primitive homegrown religion. A few of the tribes are willing to work on the Ambreza plan-tations as farm labor, getting good-quality fruits and vege-tables for their effort. Most consider the Ambreza devils, although they don't really know why. They have totally lost their past."

Lori could just imagine the Glathrielians. All the Amazo- nians might feel right at home there. "But isn't there some sense of guilt that these people should be so limited be-cause of crimes by an ancestral group that n.o.body remem-bers except in the winner's legends?" she asked.

"One might say that," the amba.s.sador conceded, "but the vast gulf of time also argues for leaving them just that way. We are, after all, theleftovers from the Grand Experiment, no matter what we think of ourselves now; we are not the experiment itself. They are not that much different, and no worse off, than many other races and hexes. Indeed, we have only the Ambreza legends and the fact that when Ambrezans come here, they must leave to Glathriel, not their own hex, to show that there is any truth to it, anyway. After all this time, no one is much worried about it."

"Ain't n.o.body gonna expose me to a gas that turns me into no animal!" Juan Campos declared. "I won't let it hap-pen!"

"n.o.body said it would," the amba.s.sador pointed out.

"But you said we were Glath-those people! The place used to be ours and is now in the hands of these guys who steal our minds with drugs! I mean, it took the peoplegen-erations to get used to it. We're not used to it. We breathe that stuff, and we're just big hairless apes!"

"No. Itis true that there is a slight danger, but if youwere going to Glathriel, you'd emerge not there but in Ambreza. Besides, whoever said you were going to Glathriel? The odds are something like 779 to 1 against it."

Even Lori was suddenly confused. "But you said that's where we'd go!"

"Uh, yes, if you wereGlathrielians. But that is not how it works. After all, our ancestors also used this mechanism tobecome our ancestors, you see. The computer here things in a careful balance. If a hex becomes overpopulated, then no babies are born until the population levels out. If a hex is underpopulated, it can'tavoid having more children. You are not yet in the census. When you go through the hex gate for the first time, you will be detected by the mas-ter computer as a newcomer not in its data base. It will then look at that data base and see where one extra person might fit without disturbing any balances. No one actually comes through a gate as he is. You are broken down and converted into energy, and the blueprint for 'you' is sent along with the energy packet. You are then reconstructed at the other end according to that blueprint. When you go through the first time, the computer will decide where you best fit in its system, and it will alter the blueprint. Just as the First Race were converted into their creations, so will you be. Your packet will be reconstructed with a new blueprint. Your mind, your memories, won't change, but your physical, ra-cial form will. You will become a new creature of a race new to you."

"What!" both Lori and Campos exclaimed at much the same time.

"Yes. And certain-adjustments will be made so that you can survive. For one thing, you will begin at or just beyond the age of adulthood. That varies, of course, but you will be younger certainly. The primary thinking and memory areas of the brain will be retained, so you will still be pretty much the person you are, but the more animal levels of the brain and its functions will be those of the new race, not the one you have now. Thus, you will be able to handle the body comfortably and will not be repulsed by the sight of others. It is an adjustment mechanism, although, to be sure, making the sentientmental adjustment to fully accept what you are and that you will be that way forever is easier for some than for others. The rest you will learn from the na-tives. They will want to know about you as much as you will want and need to learn from them."

Campos was appalled. "You mean I could walk through that thing and come out looking likeyou ?"

"I am a diplomat, so I will ignore the insult. Yes, you could. Race, s.e.x, all that will be computer-selected based on the needs of the Well World. There have always been theories that the individual does unconsciously influence the selection to some degree, but it is not clear how or why. Don't be upset. You have a whole new life, starting with coming of age. A whole new start."

"Well, I don't want it!" Juan Campos proclaimed. "I want my old life back-asme !"

"You have no choice, as I say. You will either walk through or, to be blunt, you will be thrown through. I as-sure you that the personnel here in South Zone and even the automated systems here will use force if need be."

Campos let it go, but he was clearly not at all pleased.

"The others who came before-they have already all gone through?" It was Mavra's first question in the session.

"Yes, all, and quite some time ago."

"Who were they? Can you say?"

"Not exactly. Let me punch up the records. Hmmmm. First was a very civilized fellow named David Solomon- pardon the p.r.o.nunciation. He came nicely dressed, along with two companions, both older, I believe-it is not easy for me to tell much about your race-who were both crip-pled in some way. The male, who said he was named Joao Antonio Guzman, could not see, as I remember, and the woman, Anne Marie Guzman, presumably a relation, had a terrible disease and could not even move much on her own. Then, a few days later, two males came through. One was definitely an older man in a uniform who said he was Col-onel Jorge Lunderman of something called the Brazilian Air Force, whatever that is, and the other was a much younger man in a different uniform named Captain Julian Beard of somebody else's air force."

"I wonder wherethey came from?" Lori mused. "I won-der if they were part of the first investigative team there and got caught?"

"You would not think it would be two officers," Campos commented. "I mean, always send the privates in first is the old rule."

"Perhaps. But if they were part of the science team, it might make sense," Lori said.

"And now the four of you. And I hope that is it for now," the amba.s.sador added.