Quest for the Well of Souls - Jack L. Chalker [43]
"Where did you find these two?" it asked the forester.
"By the fence, as you see them," Toug replied. "I received a buzz alarm at Post 43 and went down to investigate."
The gamekeeper seemed bewildered. "Were they trying to get into Ecundo, then?"
"No, Senior, they were by all appearances trying to get into Wuckl," the other responded.
The gamekeeper's long neck moved as it surveyed the unconscious body. Long thin fingers probed this way and that. Finally it said, "Return to your duties. This will take some thought."
"They are not dead, then?" Toug responded with obvious concern.
The other Wuckl wagged its head in a circular motion. "No, not dead. But their systems are far too delicate for what they have received. Go, now, while I solve this riddle."
Once Toug was gone, the examination of Mavra and Josh began in earnest. The Wuckl simply could not figure them out. As animals, they did not make sense.
The brain seemed inordinately large and complex, but there was little for it to do. With such limited limb movement and a total lack of prehensility, these creatures could not possibly be of a high order. They were clearly hoofed animals. They were shaped like bundas, but their internal construction was all wrong, and their faces faced downward. The legs, muscle tone, and the like were too obviously correct to be constructs; therefore, these must be mutants, it decided. But mutations of what?
They were strange, that was certain. The Wuckl pulled down its Well World Catalog and looked through it, but nothing matched up. There were centauroids, yes, but these were not like those. In some ways they were similar to those of Glathriel, yet far enough different that the gamekeeper rejected that possibility. The others were even more remote.
It replaced the books, satisfied that these were animals, not intelligent creatures, brain structure notwithstanding.
But what to do with them? Their nervous systems had suffered tremendously. The creatures needed help or they would surely die, and though it didn't know exactly what they were, the Wuckl had not devoted so much time to becoming a senior in Animal Skills to let animals die when it was within its power to save them.
Mavra's reproductive system brought the Wuckl up short. Someone with Skills had operated on it, crudely but effectively. These were not, then, something wild.
It thought about this, and reached the only conclusion it could think of that fit the facts. It remembered that five of its fellow students had been expelled, sent to disgrace in Manual Skills for their efforts. Though quite different in result, what he had before him reminded the Wuckl of their experiment. Taking a basic animal as a start, the five had added and subtracted with abandon, rearranging limbs, taking organs from other animal stocks. They created a pair of monstrosities.
What if recent students had done the same? And, fearing discovery, they'd taken the poor creatures and left them in Ecundo to be eaten or otherwise lost to Wuckl authority?
No Wuckl could deliberately kill, so that solution to the hypothesized dilemma never occurred to the gamekeeper.
That, of course, is what these creatures must be. Hideous creations of students. It explained a lot, but the implications were even uglier. These brains might have come from high-order creatures, implanted, perhaps, in the fetal stage, growing with the creatures for—how long?
Death might be a mercy for such as these, it thought sadly, but, then, these two would never know that they were what they were, and surely would not and should not suffer for the horrors growing from the minds of others.
It would report this butchery, though; the perpetrators would be caught, and their minds adjusted to Manual Skills. Even that was too good for them, but compassion was in all Wuckl.
But what to do with these two?
To leave them as they were was unthinkable; they were not in the Catalog, they could not assimilate into the Balanced Environment. To cast them out, as had been obviously tried, was equally