Read 01. Midnight At the Well of Souls for Free Online Page B

draped down on the side. She was breathing hard but she had a sort of idiot's smile on her face.
    Relief for another day, the little sponge cube swallowed, the body breaking down the evidence.
    Nathan Brazil's stomach finally turned.
    What were you, Wu Julee, before Datham Hain served dinner? he mused. A student or scholar, or a professional, like Vardia? A spoiled brat? A young maiden, perhaps one day expecting to bear children?
    Gone now, he thought sadly. The recordings would nail Datham Hain clean—and the syndicate of sponge merchants would let him hang, too. Most he had ever heard of were compulsive suiciders when subjected to any psych probes or the like. They would get nothing from him but his life.
    But Wu Julee—without sponge, she needed eighteen days from where they would be at absolute flank speed to make that damned planet colony, and she was already near or at the exponential reproductive stage.
    She would arrive a mindless vegetable, unable to do anything not in the autonomic nervous system, having spent most of the voyage as an animal. A day or two after that, it would eat her nervous system away and she would die.
    So they wouldn't bother. They'd just send her to the nearest Death Factory to get something useful out of her.
    They said Nathan Brazil was a hard man: experienced, efficient, and cold as ice, never a feeling for anything but himself.
    But Nathan Brazil cried at tragedy, alone, in the dark, on the bridge of his powerful ship.
    * * *
    Neither Hain nor Wu Julee came to dinner again, although he saw the fat man often and kept up the pretense of innocent friendship. The sponge merchant could actually be quite entertaining, sitting back in the lounge over a couple of warm drinks and telling stories of his youth. He even played a fair game of cards.
    Vardia, of course, never joined in the games and stories—they were things beyond her conception. She kept asking why they played card games since the only practical purpose of games was to develop a physical or mental skill. The concept of gambling, of playing for money, meant even less to her—her people didn't use the stuff, and only printed it for interplanetary trade. The government provided everyone with everything they needed equally, so why try to get more?
    Brazil found her logic, as usual, baffling. All his life he had been compulsively competitive. He was firmly convinced of his uniqueness in the universe and his general superiority to it, although he was occasionally bothered by the universe's lack of appreciation. But she remained inquisitive and continued asking all those questions two cultures could never answer for each other.
    "You promised days ago to show me the bridge," she reminded him one day.
    "So I did," he acknowledged. "Well, now's as good a time as any. Why don't we go all the way forward?"
    They made their way from the aft lounge, alongthe great catwalk above the cargo.
    "I don't mean to pry," he said to her as they walked along, "but, out of curiosity, is your mission of vital importance?"
    "You mean war or peace, something like that?" Vardia responded. "No, very few are like that. The truth is, as you may know, I have no knowledge of the messages I carry. They are blocked and only the key from our embassy on Coriolanus can unlock whatever I'm supposed to say. Then the information will be erased, and I will be sent home, with or without a message in return. But, from the tone or facial expressions of those who give me the messages, I can usually tell if it's serious, and this one certainly is not."
    "Possibly something to do with the cargo," Brazil speculated as they entered the wardroom and walked through it this time and out onto another, shorter catwalk. The great engines which maintained the real-universe field of force around them throbbed below. "Do you know how bad things are on Coriolanus?"
    She shrugged. "Not too bad, I understand. No widespread famine yet. That will happen months from now, when the harvest doesn't