"I'll go," Gypsy's voice responded. Brazil heard some shuffling, then the strange man's voice say, "Not too bad. It's not a hole at all. Still solid. I guess—"
And that was it for Gypsy. Brazil knew that on the ground he had simply winked out. He could hear from the slight decrease in static that the man was no longer anywhere nearby.
"We've followed each other over fifty worlds," Marquoz said dryly. "Here goes."
"Yua? Shall we go together?" Mavra asked.
The Olympian swallowed hard. "Yes, I—I'd like that," she responded. "I—oh! It sort of tingles, doesn't it?"
"No different from Obie, I don't think," Mavra replied.
"It's—it's so dark . . ."
They were all gone now.
Brazil sighed, lit a cigarette, and punched in the codes to return to his main ship and from there to the Nautilus. It's done, he thought. It's started. Damn! I wish I could know what's going on at the other end!
South Zone
"Mavra? Help me up, will you? I feel a little dizzy," Yua muttered.
Mavra knelt down on her forelegs and reached out, helping the Olympian to her feet.
"That was a decidedly uncomfortable ride," Marquoz grumbled. He looked a little unsteady himself.
Mavra looked around, suddenly puzzled. "Where's Gypsy?"
The other two suddenly realized that they were only three and peered around. The chamber was huge; they stood on a flat, smooth, glassy black surface of unknown composition. The slab was six-sided, but so large was the hall it was difficult to tell. Illumination was from a massive six-sided panel on the ceiling. A rail concealing what appeared to be a walkway circled the chamber, and steps led to gaps in the rail.
"We might as well get going," Mavra said, making for the nearest steps, which appeared to be made of stone. The walkway was a series of moving belts, they saw—but still now.
"You've been here before. How do we start the walkway?" Marquoz asked Mavra.
She chuckled. "I was never here. Here is where everybody else arrived who wasn't born here. I arrived by ship. I crashed. The only time I was ever in Zone was a brief stay as a prisoner in an embassy. I'm afraid this experience is as new to me as it is to you. Just remember, though I've been on this planet before, I haven't been through the Well. I'm as raw as the rest of you about what to expect."
Suddenly they heard a whirring sound from far off in the chamber and felt a vibration through the rail. "Looks like our welcoming committee is coming," Mavra remarked.
Marquoz looked back out at the glassy floor. "But where is Gypsy? I know he came here. He went first."
Mavra sighed. "I don't know. There's been something eerie about him since the moment I met him. He's your friend. I can't think of any reason why he wouldn't be here no matter who or what he was, though."
Marquoz shrugged. "I've known him for years yet I don't really know him at all. Perhaps what we all saw was some sort of disguise. Perhaps he was a noncarbon-based lifeform that fooled us into seeing him as a man and he's in North Zone. Who knows? Obie did, I think. I think it's best not to mention him at all right now, though. There may be more afoot than we know."
Mavra nodded. "I agree—but I don't like it. I don't like puzzles at all."
Suddenly Marquoz pointed.
Approaching them was a huge creature. It had a deep-brown torso shaped like a man's, but plated. Six arms, extended from the sides of the torso four of them rotating on ball joints, yet terminating in fingered hands. All six looked hard and muscular. The head was ovoid and had no ears. Deep, black human eyes flanked a flat nose below which grew a massive white moustache. Below, the torso ended in long, serpentine coils.
The creature approached them without fear—which was natural, since he was obviously master here. He slapped the wall sharply as he drew within a few meters of them and the walkway stopped. Bushy white eyebrows rose.
"A human, sort of, a Dillian and a Ghlmonese? What is this?" He seemed genuinely perplexed. "Do you understand what I am saying?"
Mavra nodded. "Ah—yes, perfectly," she said, only partly feigning nervousness. She had never met such a creature as this before on or off the Well. "We are from the Com."
Amazement spread all over the creature's face. "The Com! And not one of you true human! Oh, my! How things must have changed since I was last there!"
Yua gasped. "You were once in the Com?"
He smiled a very human smile beneath his bushy moustache. "Oh, yes. Once I was human like you—well, I didn't have a tail like that, and I was a man, and women sure didn't look as good as you—but you know what I mean." The voice was deep, thick, and rich but had no trace of an accent. Only Mavra understood immediately that a translator, a small surgical implant made by a Northern race, was really doing the talking. She would need one soon; they all would. She'd had one, once.
"The Com has many races now," she told the creature. "All living in peace. That is, with each other. Together we just fought a war with a no-compromise nonhuman race."
The creature was still wondering at it all. "Multiracial cooperation in the Com! Who'd have thought it! You mean the brotherhood boys were right all along about improving the human race?" It was more a question directed at himself than one to them but Marquoz answered anyway.
"If you mean their petty little social philosophies, no," he told the alien. "That's mostly breaking down now. And having spent the last several years in the human worlds I can tell you that I was tolerated more than embraced."
The six-limbed creature shrugged all his limbs. "So? In my day it would have been war and intolerance all around. Death and destruction." He grew a little more serious. "But you said there'd been a war? Is that why you're here?"
Mavra jumped in quickly. "I don't know why we're here—and I'm not sure where 'here' is. No, it wasn't the war, though. We won that. We won it, but tore a hole in space-time to do it. It is eating the Com now. You might say we were refugees, although how we wound up here I don't know. We set down on an old world to take a vote on just where to go and the lights went out. We woke up here."
The creature nodded. The explanation was about what he expected to hear—which is why the cover story had been invented in the first place.
The creature slithered back, allowing room for all of them on his section of belt. "You can take off the spacesuits, by the way. The Well pressurizes before it brings you through so right now it's set to be comfortable for you. Or keep 'em on until we get to my office, as you will."
He slapped the wall with his lower left hand, swiveled without really turning, so he was facing the other way, and the belt whirred to life.
"What are your names?" the creature called back to them as they traveled.
"I am Tourifreet, a Rhone," Mavra told him. "The human is Yua, an Olympian, and the Chugach is Marquoz."
"Pleased to meet you," the creature responded amiably. "It's been a long, long time since anybody from my old stamping grounds has been through here. People fall into those holes all the time, like I did—maybe a hundred a year, give or take. But no humans in the last century or two. Been a while. I, by the way, am Serge Ortega."
Mavra's head snapped up and there was a sudden, odd gleam in her eyes. Ortega, his back to her, saw nothing. "Easy, girl," Marquoz whispered.
Ortega! She thought. After all this time! After all this . . . Ortega, still alive, still in charge. The man who imprisoned her so many years ago, coldly, cruelly, for so very long.
The one man for whom she still felt a smouldering hatred.
And here he was, leading them calmly into the depths of Zone, back to her. How easy to plunge a knife in that broad, leathery back—if only she had a knife. To kill this man who treated people as playthings, and had been doing so for over a thousand years.
They left the big chamber now and headed down an oval tunnel, a large corridor whose junctions were curved and smooth. It seemed to be made of some heavy, grainy stone that had been painted a dull yellow.
They passed chamber
s as their tunnel twisted and turned; it wasn't a single corridor but a labyrinth. Each chamber, Ortega told them, contained a mini-biosphere for one of the Well World's fifteen hundred and sixty races. The ones in this section were the embassies of the seven hundred and eighty Southerners.
When they reached his office and began to relax, Ortega sent for food and drink. He told them what they already knew, about the Well World and its foundings, about the hexes, zones, and gates. They listened as if they had never heard any of it before, asking all the right questions; but it was Ortega's political map of the Well World that held their interest. Brazil had done a rough one from memory and it had been all they had; now they could see the true complexity of the Well World and the enormity of their task. In particular, they saw, for the first time, the vast oceans of the Well World and the topography of the landscape. Mavra located the areas she'd been in, and spotted Glathriel, which, Ortega explained needlessly, was where the human race now resided in tribal primitivism.
That hex held a different interest for them, for next to it was Ambreza, the original home of humanity and the point at which Nathan Brazil must emerge once he arrived. That was their initial goal.
Mavra knew the place well. Glathriel had been her prison so many years before, and she doubted the Ambreza had let it change much. Her eyes drifted northward, to Lata and Agitar and other exotic names from the Wars of the Well, and to Olborn, where she'd been half-turned into a beast, and to cold, mountainous Gedemondas, whose strange inhabitants had destroyed the rocket engines for which the war had been fought. They had also predicted her future. She wondered what the Gedemondas were predicting now. Ortega replaced the map, seemingly oblivious to their real interests. "Enough politics," he told them. "After you arrive at your home hexes you will have opportunities for more relaxed studies."
Yua could hardly contain her fright at those words, but it only lent verisimilitude to her staged question. "What—what do you mean, our home hexes?"
Ortega smiled. "From here, you will shortly be taken to another gate. It is the Well Gate. It removes you from the Universe you have always known and makes you a part of the Well. Once inside, the Well analyzes you according to criteria we've never been able to understand and chooses a form for you. You will wake up, as if from a sleep, as one of the seven hundred and eighty Southern races—just as I did, long ago. The Well helps in that it makes you comfortable with your new form and conditions, so you won't feel totally alien, but it does not toy with your memories—you will still be you and you'll remember all that has been. From that point you're on your own. Don't fight it. Whatever you wake up as you will be for the rest of your natural lives."
It was a sobering thought. The rest of their lives as something—else. Something alien. To some it might have had a romantic ring, but to these comrades who were not on the Well World out of desperation but on a mission, the words had a particularly forbidding sound.
But Ortega wasn't through with them quite yet. He pumped them about conditions in the Com. They were pretty honest about it—they told him of the Dreel, and the Zinder Nullifiers, and the widening hole in space. They did not tell him about Obie or about Nathan Brazil. It was Ortega who brought up the latter's name.
"I wouldn't worry about it," he consoled them. "The Well will repair it. If it didn't there's a surviving Markovian around to make the repairs and he'd have been here by now if it were necessary."
"How do you know he hasn't?" Marquoz asked pointedly.
Ortega smiled. "I know him. He's human—looks like a skinny little runt, goes by the name of Nathan Brazil. If he'd passed through here I'd have heard of it." He scratched under his chin with his upper right arm and stared at them. "You know, it's funny. I been looking at you two women and feeling I know you—or should know you. Funny, isn't it? It isn't possible, of course."
Mavra coughed slightly. "No, hardly."
He shrugged. "I guess in your case," he decided, looking at Yua, "one or two of your fellow Olympians musta come through a long time ago. There's been so many and it's so long . . ." He seemed to be wandering, then looked back at Mavra. "And you—seems even further back. Damn if I can think why, though. You just look a little like somebody I used to know, way back—ah, well. No matter. Ready for the Well?"
"No," Marquoz told him. "But what choice do I have other than to move in with you or the—what was it?—Ghlmonese ambassador?"
Ortega laughed. "All right, then. Come along." The door opened and he slithered out. They followed as close as they dared, trying not to come too close to his lower coils.
They entered a normal room, a rectangle except for the rounded corners, barren of furniture. The door closed behind them.
Walls, floor, ceiling were of the same grainy yellowish material as the corridors except the far wall, which was another dose of total darkness.
"The Well Gate," he told them. "You have no choice at all now. The door behind me will not open from the inside. The only way out is through the gate—and the Well."
That was a lie, and Mavra knew it. Still, she could see that it would be useful in his line of work.
They had shed their spacesuits in Ortega's office and were all naked now. Marquoz had salvaged his cigar case and he and Mavra puffed on the last of them. Both wondered idly if they'd ever do it again.
Mavra looked at Ortega. She still hated the man, but he seemed less an ogre in person than as an untouchable she'd never even seen. He'd been quite pleasant with them, even a little charming, and that in itself was unsettling. Brazil had called him a total scoundrel yet liked him all the same, and they'd had long debates on whether to trust the snake-man with the advance secret. And after all these years, he was still here, still in charge, never leaving Zone, never getting a day older thanks to Well magic and a liberal dose of blackmail—Mavra knew he'd had just about every embassy in Zone—and possibly a lot more places—bugged.
"Who first?" she asked the others, feeling as if it were a replay of the scene back on that dead Markovian world. Then Gypsy had stepped forward and vanished—Gypsy, who had vanished utterly, it seemed.
Whatever you wake up as you will be for the rest of your natural lives.
The sentence haunted them all.
"Oh, the hell with it." Marquoz mumbled and stepped on the butt of his cigar. "I'm out of cigars, anyway." He walked up to the black wall and through. It swallowed him utterly.
Yua turned and looked at Mavra, and there was fear in her eyes. Not for the first time Mavra wondered why Obie had chosen this one from those he could have selected for this mission. Only Obie knew, and Obie was far, far away.
"We'll meet again," the Olympian said quietly to her, taking and squeezing her hand. Then, unhesitatingly, she turned and walked the route Marquoz had walked, stepping boldly into the engulfing blackness.
"And then there was one," said Serge Ortega behind her.
She smiled to herself. He was so cocksure, so rock steady. She took a step toward the darkness, then stopped, her mind, unbidden, making the choice Brazil had left to her.
"Wait a minute, Ortega," she said coolly, and turning to face him. "I am going to need your help."
He was taken aback. "Huh?"
"The other two—they are meaningless to you or to anybody else. Window dressing. I'm not. I've been standing around debating this moment since I arrived at the entrance gate and had just about decided not to say anything, but I think I'm taking a reasonable risk."
He coiled his serpentine body tightly and rocked his torso atop the heap, all six arms folded. "Go on. I'm listening," he said, curious.
"The Well is broken. It's shorted out," she told him. "Slowly by cosmic standards but actually pretty quickly the whole damn Universe is being snuffed out. In a while the rift will grow so big it'll damage the Well beyond repair. Shortly—very shortly—you're going to be inundated with refugees, mostly Olympians, from the destruction of the Com."
"Go on," he said, not changing position or expression. "I'm listening."
"But if the Well is fixed all will be as before," he pointed out.
"No, it has to be turned off first. The whole experiment of the Markovians is over, and it failed. Time to press reset and start again. You must help. Those people must be allowed to do what we are doing, go through the Well, come out as something else. You know better than I the reaction that that many people coming through is going to cause. We need your help."
Ortega remained impassive, saying nothing, betraying no emotion, for over a minute. Finally he said, "What you're telling me is that not only is Nathan Brazil coming back but this time he's going to really do something serious."
She nodded apprehensively.
"And how do you know all this?"
She considered how to tell him, had thought about this moment a long, long time. "Because this centaur body isn't the real me. Because it was made by Obie. Because I'm Mavra Chang."
Serge Ortega almost fell over backward. Then he chuckled, then he laughed, and continued laughing until he couldn't stop for a bit. Finally he said, "How is such a thing possible? Obie was destroyed. Mavra Chang was still on Obie, so she was destroyed with the computer. We had witnesses to this return."
"We faked it," Mavra told him. "We had to. Otherwise Obie, totally in control of himself and beyond any override—and a miniature Well of Souls—would have been hated, feared, perhaps eventually destroyed in spite of his powers. And me—if you'll remember, I was in the worst shape of anybody to face rejoining the human race. I had no desire to come back as a circus freak, didn't know that Obie was still alive, so to speak, and decided to die with him. I didn't. We went to a far galaxy and had a lot of fun together."
He swayed back and forth a little but Mavra couldn't tell what he was thinking. The reptilian part of him was in command now, a solid mask.
"And Obie? Where is he?"
The Return of Nathan Brazil Page 25
