Twilight at the Well of Souls wos-5

by Jack L. Chalker

  “And that’s why you volunteered to spy on the humans and Rhone?”

  Marquoz chuckled. “No, I didn’t really volunteer —although I might have if I’d ever known about the program. They selected me. My psychological profile was the type they were looking for: somebody who’d feel as comfortable in an entirely alien culture as they did among their own kind.”

  Ortega nodded. “Makes sense. And were you any happier in the Com?”

  “Happier? Well, I suppose, in a way. I was still an alien creature, of course, but now I was an exotic one. It didn’t change my feelings toward my own racial form, but it turned it into something exciting, at least.”

  It was growing quite dim now, and Ortega looked around. He could see almost nothing in the nearly total darkness, but there was the occasional flash that showed the coded “all’s well” from one emplacement to another. And, not far away, he could see a couple of dim figures checking the nets in the river and making certain the mines were active. Nobody would get up that way, either. He turned back to Marquoz and the conversation, a conversation he knew they wouldn’t be having under any other circumstances.

  “You’re not a Chugach any longer,” he pointed out. “What did that to to your self-image?”

  Marquoz shrugged. “Well, it’s not that much of a change, really. And I had no more choice in it than I had in being a Chugach. Makes no difference.”

  “But that brings us back to my original question,” Ortega noted. “You could have been whatever you wanted if you’d just gone with them.”

  Marquoz sighed. “You must understand, put the thing in the context of what I’ve been telling you. You see, this is the first operation I’ve been involved in that had any meaning. It’s something like you said for yourself. Found dead in his bed from jaundice, did nothing for anybody, made no difference if he had ever lived at all: that could be the obituary of just about everyone who ever lived, here and anywhere else in the universe. It makes absolutely no difference in the scheme of things whether all but a handful of people live or die. No more than the importance of a single flower, or blade of grass, or vegetable, or bird. It would make no difference if those men who held that ancient pass or that equally ancient fort had, instead, died of disease or old age or in a saloon fight. But it made a difference that they died where they did. It mattered. It justified their whole existence. And it matters that 1 am here, now, and make this choice. It matters to me and to you. It matters to the Well World and to the whole damned universe.”

  He raised his arms in a grand sweep at the blackness. “Do you really understand what ws’re doing here?” he went on. “We’re going to decide the entire fate of the universe for maybe billions of years. Not Brazil, not Mavra Chang, not really. They’re only making the decisions because we are allowing them to! Right here, now, tomorrow, and the next day. Tell me, Ortega, isn’t that worth dying for? Others may be misfits; they may be born on some grubby little world or in some crazy hex, and they might grow up to be farmers or salesmen or dictators or generals or kings, only then to grow old and die and be replaced by other indistinguishable little grubs that’ll do the same damned things. And it won’t matter one damned bit. But we’ll matter, Ortega, and we all sense it. That’s why our enemies will sing songs about us and our names and memories will become ageless legends to countless races. Because, in the end, who we are and what we do in the next two days is all that matters, and we’re the only ones that are important.”

  Ortega stared at him, even though all he could really make out were the creature’s glowing red eyes. Finally he said, “You know, Marquoz, you’re absolutely insane. What bothers me is that I can’t really find any way to disagree with you—and you know what that makes me.” He reached to the heavy leather belt between his second and third pair of arms and removed a large flask. “I seem to dimly recall from old diplomatic receptions that Hakazits have funny drinking methods but tend to drink the same stuff for the same reason as Uliks. Shall we drink to history?”

  Marquoz laughed and took the bottle. “To history, yes! To the history of the future we write in the next two days! To our history, which we chose and which we determined!” He threw his head back and poured the booze down his throat, then coughed and handed the bottle back to Ortega, who started to work on the remains of it.

  “That’s good stuff,” the Hakazit approved.

  “Nothing but the best for the legion the night before,” Ortega responded.

  A voice nearby said, “Got enough of that left for me? Or would it kill me?”

  They jumped slightly, then laughed when they saw it was Gypsy. “Damn it. I keep expecting Gunit Sangh to pop out of the rocks,” Ortega grumbled. He threw the flask to the tall man, who caught it and took a pull, then screwed up his face in pleasant surprise.

  “Whew! Nothing synthetic in that!” he approved, then got suddenly serious. “I’m about to go to Yua and tell her the situation. Last I heard she’d taken some of her squad and flown around Khutir’s main force on her way here. They surprised the old general good; gave him a sound thrashing. But they’re still three days behind.”

  Marquoz chuckled. “Three days. Couldn’t be two.”

  “Anything you want me to particularly tell her?” Gypsy asked.

  “Tell her—” Ortega’s voice quivered slightly— “tell her… that we’ll hold for Brazil. We’ll hold until she gets here, damn it all. Tell her a lot of very brave and very foolish people are going to make it all work. And tell her thanks, and godspeed, from old Serge Ortega.”

  Gypsy nodded understandingly, a sad smile on his own face. “I’ll be back in time for the battle, Serge.”

  The Ulik chuckled and shook his head unbelievingly. “You, too? The number of martyrs we’re getting these days must set a new record. My, my!”

  “Practicality,” Gypsy told him. “You see, when Brazil enters the Well and shuts it down I’ll lose my contact with it. I’ll no longer be a creature of the universe, only of the Well World from whence I came so long ago. And I was a deepwater creature. I’ll be dead from the pressure so fast I won’t have time to suffocate.”

  “You can always return to Oolakash, Doctor, and do it all over again,” Ortega suggested. “It hasn’t changed all that much, even in a thousand years.”

  Marquoz looked at them both, puzzled. “Doctor? Oolakash? What the hell is this?”

  Gypsy stared at Ortega for a moment. “How long have you known?”

  “Well, for a certainty only right at this moment,” the Ulik admitted. “I’ve suspected it almost since the first time we met. You could do the impossible and that wasn’t acceptable. The only possible explanation was that you had completely cracked the Markovian puzzle, completely understood just exactly what they did and how they did it. And I could think of only one man who could possibly do that. If you’d been from a race that had done it, well, there’d be more of you. If you were a long-gone Markovian, I think Brazil would have known you, at least when you met. So that left only one man, a man I once knew, the only man I ever knew who understood how the Well worked and whose lifework it was to learn all there was to learn about it—a man who vanished and was presumed dead long ago.”

  “All right, all right,” growled Marquoz. “I think I’m entitled to know what the hell you two are talking about.”

  “Marquoz,” Ortega said lightly, “I’d like you to meet the first man to tame the Markovian energies, the man who built the great computer Obie and whose fault most of this is. Marquoz, Dr. Gilgram Zinder.”

  The Hakazit looked over at Gypsy, then laughed. “Gypsy? You? Zinder? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my whole life.”

  “That’s what threw me,” Ortega admitted. “The man who did all that, who finally, first with Obie’s aid and then without, managed to be able to talk to the Markovian computers and make them obey his will—and he chooses to go home and become a wandering gypsy and bum?”

  Gilgram Zinder chuckled. “Well, not at the start, no. And
the human mind isn’t up to the training, nor is it perfectly matched for full communication. But I got to the point where I could influence it as regarded myself. Takes a lot of effort, and off the Well World it can cause monster headaches. I really never was able to do much with it beyond myself, and I realized that, without a lot of additional apparatus, I never would be able to get any further, and that needed apparatus would make Obie a toy. It would take something the size of the Well of Souls, and that was not worth thinking about for obvious reasons. So I used the power to wander a while, as Obie and Mavra wandered and explored, over the whole of the universe in various forms until I got bored with it. After all, unlike Obie, I could do little except survive and adapt. So, I went home at last to the Com and found it much improved from my day. It gave me a lot of satisfaction to see that a lot of the worst evils were gone, in part, at least, due to what we accomplished many years before. You understand, I always had lived a very restrictive sort of life. A lonely life. I wasn’t handsome, or even distinctive. I had my work, and that’s all I had. I had to bribe a woman to bear my child and build my other child myself.”

  “But your work succeeded beyond your wildest dreams,” Ortega pointed out.

  “Beyond my— Yes, I suppose it did. I’m now as close to a Markovian as I think it’s possible for one of our time to become.”

  “Perhaps you should have completed your work,” the snake-man suggested. “Maybe if you had, we wouldn’t be in this situation now.”

  “Perhaps,” he admitted grudgingly. “But, damn it, I gave my entire life to science and they laughed at me, those who didn’t try to use the new power for evil ends. And then I had to give my daughter and my race and environment to it, too. And even the good side in that fight, when they were presented with my work, got frightened of it and tried to bury it forever. So I looked at this and I thought, What about me? Where do I get anything but royally screwed by the system? Selfless men wind up in neglected graves. I felt like I’d been given a new life, a new chance at all the things I’d missed, and I took it. A new life— a new series of lives. Even the Well World gave you only one start, but I had an infinite number. I was a rich and handsome playboy. Then I tried the other side, as an exotic and beautiful dancer who had to beat off would-be lovers with a stick. I learned to play a variety of instruments and composed music that attracted a serious following. I painted, I sculpted, I wrote a few stories and some poetry. I was on my way to being everything everybody ever wanted to be. The ultimate fantasy was mine: I could be any fantasy I chose, and I was. I enjoyed it all, too. The Gypsy phase was just another one of those, one I particularly enjoyed after teaming up with Marquoz, here—enjoyed it, that is, until the fools dug up my work, misunderstood it, misapplied it, and abused it to their own destruction, the fools.”

  “Why didn’t you step in then?” Ortega wanted to know. “Tell them what they were doing wrong?”

  Zinder shrugged. “What could I do? By the time I knew what they were working on it was too late. Even then I was really blocked. Suppose I had suddenly showed up and said, ‘Hi! I’m Gil Zinder! I know you think I’ve been dead a thousand years, but I was only fooling.’ Who would have believed me or paid attention to me? I’d never have gotten through the bureaucracy. It’s much easier to make a bureaucracy not notice you than to notice and take you seriously. I left them the keys to godhood, to the universe, and they took it and destroyed themselves with it. And me—look at what it’s cost me! Nikki… Obie… All that was dear to me.”

  Marquoz still couldn’t quite believe all this. “So you killed Nikki Zinder? Your own daughter? Did Obie know?”

  “He knew,” Zinder assured him. “Although I didn’t realize that until I was inside him myself and we could talk. We talked it out at great length, a sort of mutual catharsis. He would have had to do it if I hadn’t, and that was the one thing he simply could not do. He could not harm Nikki. I even tried to talk him out of trying to integrate with Brazil, but to no avail.”

  “Brazil,” the Hakazit muttered. “Why did Brazil do that to Obie?”

  “Short him out, you mean? For much the same reason that I lose my powers when he turns it off. You see, we have a mathematical matrix here, a set of relationships that says, ‘I am the universe and I am this way, according to these laws.’ That’s the original universe, the Markovian, or naturally formed one. It’s quite small, really, compared with ours. The whole thing was barely the size of a small galaxy. Now, the Markovians did it over themselves. They had a second creation, you might say, which, since it originated from the same point as their own for safety’s sake, destroyed their planets and incorporated that old universe into ours. And since ours was a much larger explosion, it expanded with ours as well, which is why you find more Markovian worlds out there than around here. But they’re the old, dead, original universe. Ours is superimposed on it—they didn’t dare wipe theirs out or they’d wipe themselves out as well. This is the matrix imposed by the Well, the mathematical formulae of the Markovian computers, and that is what I came to decipher. With it I can adjust the superimposed mathematical building blocks just a tiny bit to suit myself. Obie could do no more than I, but he could do it over a planetary area. The individual Markovians, I believe, could do it even better, since it was matched to their brains specifically. But it is the Well that maintains this mathematically superimposed set. When Brazil turns it off, that set of mathematics will cease to exist. And, when he repairs it and turns it back on, he’ll have to instruct it to build a new mathematical model. A new one. It’ll be very much like the original, but it will differ in many specifics. It can’t be as far-reaching, for example, since he’ll have only 1,560 races here to work with. It’ll also be formed from the power of his mind, and that will color it ever so slightly. It will be slightly different. Very slightly, perhaps one digit in a billion-place equation, but it will be different. He can’t help it. Obie is part of the old math. So is the universe we knew—the Com, the stars and planets, the races out there.”

  “I think I understand you,” Ortega put in. “Obie was built to cope with this superimposed set of rules, or math, or whatever you want to call it. So is everything we know—except the Well World, which is on a separate, model computer not affected. And Brazil is from the old math, the Markovian math, and Obie simply couldn’t cope with him because he was slightly, ever so slightly, off, and that blew Obie’s circuits.”

  Zinder nodded. “A tiny difference, but vital. He just couldn’t cope with that difference. The same reason why Brazil can’t really change his appearance once he sets it in the Well. He’s not a part of the math of the known universe; he reverts always to form. We can’t even kill him. There is always a way out provided by circumstance, which is another way of saying that the Well looks out for him. Only inside the Well can he die, since the Well was partly designed to change Markovians to the new mathematics.”

  “Do you think he’ll kill himself?” Ortega asked. “I think I understand him now, a little. I’ve lived too long and I’m ready to go, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Now I can, and it’s a blessing and a relief. You can’t believe the lack of a burden I feel. You can live too long, Doctor. Particularly when you can’t change.”

  Zinder considered the question. “Will he kill himself? He’s said so, many times. He’s said that that’s the only thing he wants to do. I think that’s what Mavra Chang is there for—to receive the passing of the torch. She will go inside and be taught the workings of the Well, and it’ll be matched to her. Once that happens and he checks her out on it, well, then he can die with a clear conscience. Somebody will be left to guard the truth, and instead of the Wandering Jew the new humans will have the mysterious, immortal woman.”

  “What a horrible fate,” Ortega sighed.

  “But it’s of her own free will,” Zinder pointed out. “When she tells him to turn off the machine, she takes full responsibility for the consequences, all of them. When she emerges, she’ll be the only being anywhere left based
on the present, rather than the new mathematics. She won’t be able to be killed, or changed, and she’ll be like that until she can turn it over to some wiser future race, if it ever arises, that again discovers the Well equations and does something with them other than destroy itself. If they do destroy themselves, some billions of years, perhaps, from now, she’ll have the job of starting it all over again and maybe passing the torch herself at that point.”

  They thought about it, thought about the loneliness, the aimless wandering, without change, without end, the Well not even permitting madness. For a while she would enjoy it, of course, as Brazil must have, as Ortega had in his more limited yet no less oppressive self-exile. But, eventually, she would reach that point when she had lived too long, and she would know. “I don’t think she realizes the devil’s bargain she’s making,” he said sadly.

  Zinder shrugged. “Does anyone? And can we go back and do it all again? Can I undo the damage to the universe? To the Well? No, I think not. Not any more than you can take back any of your crucial decisions.” He paused. “I better go now. Yua must be told —and I want to be back by dawn.”

  Serge Ortega put out his hand and Zinder took it. “Until dawn, then, Gilgram Zinder. We shall meet, together, down there at the canal, eh?”

  “At the canal,” the other man agreed. “But not Doctor Gilgram Zinder, no, not now. Most of him died in Oolakash about nine hundred years ago. What little of him survived that event died with Nikki on Olympus and the rest with Obie on Nautilus. I’m just Gypsy, Ortega. That’s the way I want it to be, and so that’s who I am. I can be whoever and whatever I want.”

  “Wait! One more thing!” the Ulik almost shouted. “How will we know if we held long enough? Can you tell me that?”