"Interesting," Marquoz said. "But if that's the case, who are all those people there now? Shouldn't the place be bare as a billiard ball?"
"Well, there were always some who didn't want to go in any group," Brazil told them. "Since they were about to lose their home hexes, though, they had little choice. What you have now on the Well World are the last fifteen hundred and sixty races, successes and failures, that were created. The end of the line."
"I noticed on the Well World that many of the Southern Hemisphere races were at least vaguely familiar," Mavra put in. "Some—not all, of course. There were giant beaverlike creatures that seemed to have existed in human myth, according to my friend of the time, Renard, who was a classicist. Centaurs were in the old legends, he said, and winged horses, and even Agitar—goatlike devil creatures. I never was clear as to why."
Brazil shrugged. "Well, by the time you were down to the last of the race you were down to the bottom of the imaginative barrel in most cases. As a result, those of limited imagination, pressed to create a race, stole ideas from the animals and plants of other hexes. A lot of the subordinate stuff, the plants and animals, is also similar from one hex to another, again with variations. The Well made them just different enough that they can't breed outside their home hex. That included the vast majority of microorganisms, so you can't have a widespread plague, either. As to the myths, well, I told you that those today are the leftovers. Some didn't want to be leftovers, particularly the thinkers, those with something to contribute. They occasionally hitched rides when other groups were seeded, sometimes legitimately, when conditions warranted and you had a kindly supervisor, sometimes by crook. Our own Earth had a small colony of centaurs—brilliant men and women—and a number of other races both legit and problem oriented. They didn't last. The illegals the Markovians helped exterminate, finally; the good ones, like the centaurs, were mostly murdered by men because they were different."
He paused and suddenly seemed distant, as if his mind were off in another place. "The Spartans of ancient Greece hunted down the last of them like animals. They stuffed a pair for their big museum. I couldn't stop it—but I burned down that damned museum." He turned full attention back to them. "There were others, many others," he said, "but they were all wiped out. I suspect that that centaur business is the reason the Rhone haven't a real trust for humans. Who knows? Maybe a now-vanished Rhone civilization got to the stars earlier and discovered the facts. Hard to say. They know, though."
"The Well recognizes you," Mavra pointed out. "Why don't you just have it bring you to it? Why take such a big walk?"
Brazil paused a moment, thoughtful. "Mainly because I can't talk to it until I'm inside. It figures I am a technician, so it sends me where I'm supposed to be—the human hex. I have to start from there. Worse, those who are in power on the Well World, particularly those with access to good records, know this. They'll try and stop me from reaching the Well—and they know the hex where I've got to start. It puts me at something of a disadvantage."
"Why should they want to stop you?" Yua asked. "Obie said that the Well World would survive your actions."
"It will," Brazil agreed. "Mostly because it's maintained by a separate computer. But, you see, my actions will wipe out the civilized Universe. Oh, I suppose one or two races—maybe more—will survive, the race or two that evolved naturally instead of through the Well. But the rest—gone. The Universe will be a pretty dead place. So, I pull the plug. I fix the big machine—or, rather, I let it fix itself and help where I can." He turned and looked them squarely in the eye. "Now, who do I use to reseed this Universe?"
They were silent. Understanding dawned on all, one by one, except for Yua, who looked a little confused. "You need the Well World to reseed them," Mavra almost whispered.
He nodded. "They know that, too. Better than we. To them it'll be a choice of their own survival or everybody else's. They're no different from anybody else. They'd rather survive and let the Universe go hang. But even if we figure a way around that—and there's a way, but not a sure one—there's the basic fear. Once I'm inside the Well they know I can make any changes I want, changes not only in the Universe but to the Well World itself. They'll be nervous. Even though I didn't do anything the last time, they don't know that I won't this time. They don't understand me or the machine, and what people don't understand they fear. Balance it out. You're a practical, logical leader. Would you take a chance on letting me get into the Well when by preventing me you could be sure of business as usual? I think not."
"But you're immortal," Mavra noted. "They should know that. They couldn't hold you forever."
"They don't have to, but they would be prepared to," he told them. "Remember what they did to you. They could do that to me. Turn me into an animal or some kind of vegetable. Keep me sedated in a cell with no way out. Oh, I might eventually break free but it'd take years—hundreds, thousands maybe. Too late to do our project any good. No, there was enough skulduggery last time, when they didn't know who I was, just knew we were going to get into the Well. It'll be hell this time."
"You mean that there will be no one to help us?" Yua gasped. "Everyone will be against us?"
He shook his head. "Some will help because they understand the problem or will trust us. Some will violently oppose us. The rest will stay on the sidelines but join those against us if we appear to be succeeding. The average being, of course, will be the most frightened of all. Now, obviously, this means an even longer run to an Avenue since I can hardly go in a straight line—and it means I'll need lots of muscle to get through."
Even Yua understood his meaning. "The Fellowship."
He nodded. "Exactly. If we require allies and fighters every step of the way, then we will have to make sure we have them where we need them. That'll be the Olympian holy crusade—with you four helping and, I hope, leading. But for these allies we will give up the element of surprise. Zone is going to see a veritable horde of people trooping through the Well and they're going to find out the story. They'll be laying for me, you can bet on it. The best thing we can do is keep them harried and off-balance. The Well tends to distribute newcomers evenly—Entries, they're called—around the hemisphere in which they enter. We'll all enter in the south since we're carbon-based. That means seven hundred and eighty hexes filled with sentient races—plants, animal variations, water creatures, insect creatures, and creatures that are none or all of the above. Although there are wide variations based on the size of the people and the capabilities of the hex, we can assume about a million whatevers in each hex. That's seven hundred and eighty million people, more or less, in the south." He gave a smug look to Yua. "Now, how many Olympians are there?"
Her mouth formed an oval shape. "Over a billion," she breathed.
He nodded. "And if we add just the committed Fellowship, those we can trust to do the job? None of this conditioned crap—they have to really believe it, since the Well will remove any artificial restraints."
She shrugged. "Another million, perhaps more."
"Okay, now add to that certain others whom I will invite and allow. I think we can put one and a half billion people on the Well World. That's a lot more than it can handle on a long-term basis, but I don't think it'll give us any short-term problems. If all get through we'll outnumber the natives almost two to one—and the survivors will be the prototype souls for the reseeding. We'll give them part of the bargain—a chance at building their own Paradise."
Gypsy, who so far had made no sound, said quietly, "The natives aren't stupid, I wouldn't think."
Brazil's eyebrows rose. "Huh?"
"Well, suppose you were a Well World potentate and you got the story and were suddenly knee-deep in fanatical converts. I don't know what you'd do, but if these folks are as nasty and scared as you say, I'd set up my own army or whatever in Zone, wherever they come in—and I'd kill 'em as fast as they came through."
Brazil leaned back, lit a cigarette, and considered his point. "I guess I'm just getting soft. That never
occurred to me. Of course you're right. But there's little we can do about it. The thing in our favor is that the only people they'll trust less than us are each other. It'll take a while for them to catch on, longer to get together and decide on a logical course of action, and they'll need a majority of Zone races to break the rules and keep an armed force there. That'll take some time. They'll probably be inundated with Entries before they take effective action, and it might be too late to stop us. Still, we have to face facts. The nastiest of them will start pogroms, killing all Entries as soon as they appear in their own lands. Don't need a vote for that." He sighed. "I didn't say this enterprise would be easy. We could well fail. The only thing I can say is that we either call the whole thing off now, or we try for it now. You're the council for this operation. On your heads will be most of the responsibility for the operation. What do you say? Yua?"
"Do it," she responded instantly.
"Gypsy?"
"I'd rather die fighting than be wiped out of existence by some crazy crack in space."
"Marquoz?"
"This is beginning to look interesting, a true challenge," the little dragon responded. "I wouldn't miss it for the world."
"Mavra?"
She sighed. "Let's get it over with. At least I won't have to finish life as a Rhone."
"All right, then. You four will go in first. Obie indicated that he had some way of influencing the Well's choice, so I can assume that all four of you will somehow be placed to do me and yourselves maximum good. I don't know whether he'll be a hundred percent successful in this but I expect you to be rallying your Entry armies around you by the time I get there. After giving you sufficient time to become adapted to your new forms and environments, I'll start sending in the hordes. The hue and cry will be enormous and immediate. There'll be a new body in every back yard. You'll know when. Time your actions properly—don't move too soon or the locals will be on to you before you have sufficient strength to tell them where to go. Then, and only then, rise up, announce yourself, rally the newcomers around you. Later Entries will carry a more sophisticated timetable. That's what I'm going to use my nonhuman friends for. More likely even after they've begun to shoot all the Amazonian women they see, they'll let others pass. Rally and move to consolidate your forces as quickly as possible. Move on Ambreza, which is where everybody knows I'll appear."
"But Ambreza is the hex of the big beavers," Mavra objected. "I remember that much."
"But you forget that they had a war with the humans that the humans lost and they swapped hexes," Brazil responded. "So as a human I'll show up in modern-day Ambreza."
"Sounds a little odd to me," Gypsy remarked. "Seems to me that as we sweep down we'll tell everybody when and where you're coming."
Brazil grinned. "Seems like it, doesn't it? But, you see, you won't have any idea where I am or when I'm coming through. If I need you I'll contact you, but otherwise you'll not know. I could arrive early, in the middle, or at the end. All your marching and fighting and all the rest of that will be the big show, the window dressing. In the meantime I'll be sneaking up toward the Avenue."
"In other words, we might not even know if you've succeeded—at least until the newcomers start vanishing around us?" Mavra said, incredulously.
He chuckled. "Oh, everybody will know before that. I wish it would go that smoothly, but it won't. I'll need firepower before the end—I just hope it isn't until we're almost there. And I'll have to let everybody know—it isn't so simple to reseed a Universe, particularly when you have so few races to work with. I'll give the Northerners the option of losing half their people or being left out—that may be enough, with some of them. But you'll know." He turned and looked straight at Mavra Chang. "You in particular will know. If you're still alive, if you survive, you'll be there with me, inside the Well, and you will give me the order to turn off the juice. If you fail, Mavra, then it'll be one other of you four. And one of you had better survive—because I will not turn the Well off except on somebody else's orders. The responsibility will not be mine."
He looked around at them. "All straight? Well, let's get started, then. We've got a lot of groundwork to lay, a whole population to brief, and that'll take time and sweat. Let's move!"
Serachnus
The shuttle landed with no fanfare. There wasn't anyone present; no marching bands; no good-luck parties; nothing. It was a dead world of barren rock pitted by countless meteor strikes.
It was a ghost world, too; they could see that as the landscape, slowly rolling past their screens now as Nathan Brazil put on the brakes, showed areas blasted eons ago through high mountains and vague traces of roadways. Occasionally they would pass over a dead city, strange-looking places with hexagonal central squares, and strange, twisted buildings and spires. All dead now, all dead for ten billion years or more.
"Once this was a green place," Brazil noted, sounding almost nostalgic. "The air was sweet, the climate warm and comfortable, and several million people lived in those cities."
"Markovians, you mean," Mavra remarked. "Not people."
He nodded vigorously. "People. Shaped like big leathery hearts with six suckered tentacles and all sorts of yucky attributes, yes, but people all the same. Not too different, deep down, from us, I suspect, considering how similar our wildly varying alien civilizations have developed. We're their children, remember. Down there they lived and laughed and played and worked and thought just as people have been doing for ages, and down there they worried and decided and left. They left to go to the Well World, to give up their mortality for our kind of existence."
"You seem pretty certain that we can get there the same way," Marquoz noted. "There is some sort of transportation system, you said?"
Brazil nodded. "A Well Gate. It'll open if you want it to open and it'll take you one place if you really want to go there. The Markovians built their machines too well; the computer that once sustained a civilization in a materialist utopia is still alive, still waiting for instructions. If somebody orders the Well Gate to open, it will respond and do so—and send you to the Well World. You've been well briefed; you remember the facts."
"Just hard to believe," the Chugach replied. "I mean, all these computers and nobody's ever been able to make 'em do anything—and, heaven knows, enough time, trouble, and money's been spent trying to make them do something. Not even discover the Well Gate, as you call it."
"People have discovered the Well Gate," Brazil told him. "People who wanted to find it found it—and it swallowed them, took them to the Well World. Others, well, there are gates all over, even on asteroids where Markovian worlds used to be, that snare the bored, the fantasizers, the would-be suicides—the people who are sick of their own lives and earnestly wish for a new start. The computers see that as a reflection of the Markovian attitudes. That's how people like Ortega got to the Well World. That's how Mavra's grandparents returned not once but twice."
"Do you think either may still be alive?" Mavra asked him.
He shook his head. "I doubt it very strongly. It's been too long. Some Well World lifeforms live an awfully long time, but none lives that long."
"Ortega," she pointed out.
"A special case," he replied. "Still, your name should also be known to a lot of the Well World from your part in the wars; if any of your relatives who got through are still alive, I'm pretty sure you'll have no trouble finding them. They'll find you."
He set the boat down on a barren plain. "Far as I go," he told them. "I can't just fly into it or past it; it'd probably snatch me, too, and I can't go just yet. I can hear it screaming for me now, though. So into your pressure suits and out you go."
They dressed quickly, almost in silence. Tension, already high, was practically visible now. Finally they were all set, all on internal air and power, and Brazil threw the switch that isolated the scout pilot's cabin from the rest of the ship.
He leaned over and flicked his communications switch. "Mavra, use your own judgment with Ortega. The res
t of you—you don't even know each other."
"Don't worry," Marquoz grumbled. "And don't keep repeating the obvious so much. If you didn't trust us with this thing then you shouldn't have sent us."
He smiled, knowing what was going on inside all of them. They were saying good-bye to their pasts, their worlds, their Universe. The ones who'd never been on the Well World before were at the biggest disadvantage, but for Mavra, too, it was highly traumatic. He understood that. She loved freedom most of all, and freedom to her was a fast ship crossing the starflelds.
Not for the first time did he worry about Obie. Could the computer really influence what they'd become? And had he done the best job in that regard? If they all wound up immobile, or mass-minds, or water-breathers they'd be of precious little help to him when it counted.
He checked his screens. "There. It's open. See it ahead of you on your right?"
They were out of the ship now, four white-suited figures against the dull-gray rock, walking single-file with Mavra's Rhone body leading.
They stopped and looked. It was there, on the plain—a huge hole, it seemed, with infinite blackness filling it. If they had been airborne they would have seen its hexagonal shape.
"Just walk into it," he urged. "And—good luck to all of you. I hope to see you all one midnight at the Well of Souls."
There was no response. He sat back, sighed, switched off the transmitter although he left the receiver on, and lifted off. In the airless void they hadn't heard or noticed his slow departure, but he wanted to remove any possibilities of second thoughts now that they were so close. Alone, with a day's air or less and no food, they had little choice but to walk into the hole no matter what.
They were at the edge now. He knew it even though he was too far up to see them clearly. Just their breathing and their noise—or sudden lack of it—told him.
"Well? Who's first?" he heard Mavra ask, nervousness creeping into her voice. Up until this time the plan had just been theoretical; now this one act was one of irrevocable and possibly fatal commitment.
The Return of Nathan Brazil Page 24
