There were 780 races in 780 hexes in the Well World’s Southern Hemisphere. In each self-contained little world was at least one Zone Gate—a yawning hexagonal blackness that would instantly bring any of the hemisphere’s creatures passing through it to an area around the South Pole known as Zone. Around a huge central Well—the input staging area for Markovians who had taken part in the great experiment to repopulate the stars by becoming lesser creatures of their own design, living, reproducing, dying so the children could go out again to a universe their parents had abandoned—were 780 small areas. Airlocks and atmospheric controls adapted each to one of the 780 life forms of the South; they were all connected by long corridors.

Here and here alone, all the races of the South could meet. Here most technology worked—as did magic, too, for some of the races had powers given by the Well to simulate some condition on the real planets their races were designed to inhabit. However, high-tech pistols would not fire, a diplomatic nicety.

Zone, too, was halved, with one half for the water races and the other for the land races. But high-tech hexes had long ago rigged intercoms among them all, and it was here that senior ambassadors with translators could conduct interhex business, try and keep the peace, deal with common problems, work out trade negotiations and the like.

Not all the embassies were manned, or had ever been. Some hexes remained complete mysteries, trafficking in nothing to no one. One such was the snowbound, mountainous hex of Gedemondas, where the war had ended in a fiery display as the spaceship’s engine module plunged into a valley in full sight of the warring parties. It exploded as it pierced a thin floor of solidified lava masking volcanic magma.