Ambassadors came and went in the 679 currently manned offices. Time went on, people grew old, or they got tired of the monastic life the embassies imposed, or they got promoted within their own hexes, which were their countries.
All but one—the ambassador from Ulik, a hex that lay along the Equatorial Barrier. Ulik was a high-tech hex, but one with a harsh, desert environment. Its people were great reptiles, snakelike to five or more meters beyond the waist, with humanoid torsos to which were attached three pairs of muscular arms with broad hands, the bottom four on crablike ball sockets. Their heads were squarish, thick, and both males and females had huge walruslike mustaches. Egg-layers who nursed their young when hatched, to non-Ulik eyes the only difference between males and females was the breast between each pair of arms on the female.
Serge Ortega was a male, and an Entry. Long ago he had been a freighter pilot for the Com who, old and bored, had unknowingly opened up an ancient Markovian Well Gate that had transported him to the Well World, which had in turn transformed him into a Ulik. He liked being a Ulik; the Well, while never changing one’s memories or basic personality, made you feel comfortable and normal as whatever creature it made of you. Thus, Ortega was still the scoundrel, pirate, freebooter, and manipulator he’d been before.
The Ulik usually lived for about a century; none had ever lived past a century and a half. Serge Ortega, however, was already over three hundred years old, and he looked about fifty. He had blackmailed a race capable of magic into giving him immortality, but that, too, had its price. Such spells were effective only inside the hex of the casters or in Zone. Since the only way out of Zone was back to the nonmagical Ulik, Ortega was a prisoner in the embassy, but an active one. Zone was his world and he made the most of it.