Exiles at the Well of Souls

by Jack L. Chalker

  Nothing happened. Renard whistled and almost collapsed. Mavra started trembling slightly, and couldn't stop for half a minute. She felt drained.

  They sat there, silent, while they continued out at full thrust. Finally Mavra turned to the strange man who looked like a woman and said, almost in a whisper, "Renard? What time is it?"

  Renard frowned, then reached over, flipped up his shoulder holster.

  "Twelve ten," he replied.

  Mavra felt better. There was a better than even chance that they would make it in time. If Trelig's craft couldn't, nothing could.

  Then, suddenly, there was a blackness. Mavra's eyes wouldn't adjust to it, nor was there any sensation of a solid ship around them. They were in a deep, black hole, falling, falling fast.

  Renard screamed, and so did Nikki, plaintively, from somewhere in back of them.

  "Son of a bitch!" Mavra said with disgust. "They moved up the damned test!"

  Underside—New Pompeii

  Trelig had been impatient. The asteroid had been lined up early by the robotic tugs; Yulin was ready, the rest of the staff was monitoring all the necessary instruments. He saw no reason to delay until thirteen hundred because of some arbitrary time he'd set. He ordered the test to begin, and Yulin, following orders, gave the command to Obie.

  For its part, the computer was upset. It couldn't ignore Yulin's direct command, although it had tried to divert them with several minor breakdowns. Obie had its own limits, and when Yulin gave the code, it had to obey, hoping that its agent had gotten away early.

  The total blackness, and the sensation of falling, was unexpected to Zinder. Even Obie felt it; the computer knew that they were not falling anywhere and analyzed that the early fifty percent option had occurred. There was insufficient power to maintain New Pompeii in a stable relationship with the rest of the universe; the pull had come, too strong to resist had it wanted to, and the planetoid had yielded without hesitation.

  Unaffected by the terrible sensory sensations the others were feeling, Obie probed the state. There was nothing out there. Nothing.

  New Pompeii was still intact; Obie managed to verify that fact. But it had switched to reserve power the moment the big disk had gone on; it could detect no other matter anywhere, not the tiniest dust particle beyond the proximity limits of the ray, a little under a light-year. They were in a separate cosmos all to themselves.

  And yet there was something only Obie could feel. The pull, and the tremendous field of force, the stability equation for their physical existence, snapped now, like a stretched rubber band slipping off one of its anchors. That was the pull, the computer realized. All matter and all energy in the cosmos had its linkages to the master computer somewhere; when that linkage was disturbed or disrupted, the reality involved dissolved into its primal energy pattern. That was why they could sense no reality, why they could not touch the solid planetoid of New Pompeii even though Obie's instrumentation said it was there. It was not. They were all, Obie included, an abstract mathematical concept set now, returning to their creator.

  Then, suddenly, there was stability again. Power returned, and Obie could feel solar energy bathing the plasma which, miraculously, seemed to have held up as well.

  All of the humans were sprawled over the walkway and control room, stunned, shocked, or unconscious.

  Then, suddenly, one figure groaned and sat up, moving his head around as if to flex painfully twisted muscles. Breathing hard, half-walking, half-crawling, he made his way to the control room, ignoring the groans from others around him.

  Yulin had been knocked out, tossed from his chair against a panel. There was a nasty cut on his forehead.

  The man didn't care. He opened a switch.

  "Obie! Are you all right?" he called.

  "Yes, Dr. Zinder," the computer replied. "That is, much better than you or I expected."

  Gil Zinder nodded. "What's our status, Obie? What happened?"

  "I have been analyzing all the data, sir, and correlating it as much as I can. We were removed from reality, as we anticipated, and reassembled elsewhere. We appear to be in a stable orbit approximately forty thousand kilometers above the equator of a very strange planet, sir."

  "The brain, Obie!" Zinder called excitedly. "Is it the Markovian brain?"

  "Yes, sir, it appears to be," the computer answered, sounding more than a little upset.

  "What's wrong, Obie?" Zinder said.

  "It's the brain, sir," Obie replied, sounding hesitant and slightly confused. "I have a direct link with it. It's incredible, as far beyond me as I am beyond a pocket communicator. I can decipher just a little under a millionth of the signal information it is transmitting, and I doubt if I could ever comprehend it fully, but—"

  "But what?" Zinder prodded, not even seeing Yulin get up behind him.

  "Well, sir, as near as I can figure out, it seems to be asking me for instructions," Obie replied.

  On Trelig's Ship, Half a

  Light-year Out from

  New Pompeii—1210 Hours

  The world returned suddenly. Mavra Chang looked around, slightly dazed, then checked the instruments. They read total nonsense, so she looked over at Renard and saw him groggily shaking his head.

  "What happened?" he managed.

  "We were caught in the field and carried along with them," Mavra explained with more authority than she felt. She looked down at the instruments again, then punched a random search pattern. The screen flickered but remained blank in front of her. Finally, she turned the damned thing off.

  "Well, that tears it," she said, resigned.

  Renard looked over at her strangely. "What do you mean?" he asked.

  "I just punched the star chart navigational locator. Inside the little chip is stored every known star pattern, from every angle. There are billions of combinations. It went through them all—and didn't flash once. We're not in any section of known space."

  He envied her calm acceptance of the fact. "So what do we do now?" he asked apprehensively.

  Mavra flipped a series of switches and then pulled back on the long handle to her right. The whine and vibration of the ship's engines slowed. "First we see what the neighborhood looks like, then we decide where in it we want to go," she told him matter-of-factly.

  She punched up another series on the small control board, and the main screen in front of them, which usually showed a simulated starfield, showed something else entirely. There were stars there—more stars than either of them had ever seen before. They were so close together it looked as if the firmament were on fire with a white heat. It took some filters to get any definition, and that didn't help much. There were also great clouds of space gas, glowing crimson and yellow, and there were shapes and forms never seen, not even in astronomical photos.

  "We're definitely in somebody else's neighborhood," Mavra commented dryly, and, after checking speed, started to turn the craft around. "We're just about dead still now," she told him. "I'm going to give us a panorama."

  The enormous clouds of stars and strange shapes did not diminish; they were surrounded by them. A small green grid to Mavra's left was mostly blank, indicating nothing within a light-year or more of them. Then, suddenly, a small series of dots appeared.

  "Look, Trelig's robot guardians," she noted. "Everything else is debris from the rest of that fragmented system. It seems the whole neighborhood moved. If that's true—yes, see it? The big dot, there, with the slightly smaller one just off it. That's New Pompeii and its would-be target."

  Renard nodded. "But what's that huge object just to its right?" he asked.

  "A planet. From the looks of it, the only planet in the system. Funny it took the whole solar system with it but not the star. That star's definitely larger and older," she pointed out.

  "It's moving," Renard said, fascinated in spite of himself. "New Pompeii's moving."

  Mavra studied it, punched in, got the data back. "It's in orbit around that planet, a satellite of it now. Let's get a good
look at the place." Again more button-pushing, and the screen zeroed in on the central object shown electronically on the green scope.

  "Not a big place," Mavra said. "Let's see . . . about average, I'd say. A little more than forty thousand kilometers around. Hmmm . . . that's interesting!"

  "What?" Renard prodded, staring.

  "The diameter's exactly the same pole to pole," she replied in a puzzled tone. "That's almost impossible. The damned thing's a perfect ball, not the slightest meter of variation!"

  "I thought most planets were round," he said, slightly confused.

  She shook her head. "No, there's never been a round one. Rotation, revolution, they all take their toll. Planets bulge, or get pear-shaped, or a million other things. Roughly round, yes—but this thing's perfectly round, as if somebody—" she paused for a second, and an awed tone crept into her voice "—as if somebody built it," she finished.

  Before Renard could reply, she eased the ship forward, toward the strange world.

  "You're going there?" he asked her.

  Mavra nodded. "Well, if we pulled through, so did the folks on New Pompeii," she reasoned. "That means there's a furious, probably murderous Antor Trelig somewhere back there, and a lot of scared people. If he's still in control, the three of us would be better off blowing up this ship than landing. If he's not, then we'd walk into a human hell."

  Renard's expression was blank, his eyes somewhat glassy. Mavra, busy looking at the ship's controls and the world that would be visible to them shortly, hardly noticed for a while. Soon the magnifiers were getting a better view, though; the planet was about the size of an orange. The green grid said that New Pompeii was about to go around the other side.

  "It's got a straight up and down axis!" she said excitedly. "It was built by somebody!" She turned to Renard, then her excitement faded, turning to concern. "What's the matter?" she asked.

  He licked his lips but remained with that vacant expression, staring not at her or at the screen but at nothing.

  "The sponge," he replied hollowly. "It comes in daily at eighteen hundred hours, from a roving supply ship. Your ship didn't come with us, so it wouldn't have either, if it was there at all." He turned to look at her, and there was mild terror building in his eyes. "There's no sponge today. There's no sponge ever again. Not for me, not for them."

  Mavra understood suddenly what was going through his mind, and perhaps Nikki's as well. She was under restraining straps in the back and they'd almost forgotten about her.

  She sighed, wishing she could say something. Being sorry didn't seem right, somehow, and her pity was too apparent to need expression.

  "The only hope then," she said at last, "is that there's somebody living on that world out there, somebody with a good chemical lab."

  Renard smiled weakly. "Nice try, but even if there is, by the time we contact them, figure out how to talk to them, explain the problem, and have them mix a batch, you'll be preserving a couple of naked apes."

  She shrugged. "What other choice is there?" Suddenly a thought came to her. "I wonder if the rest of the guards on New Pompeii have figured that out yet? What will they do when the shipment doesn't come at eighteen hundred and confirms their fears?"

  Renard thought that over. "Probably the same thing I'd do. Find Trelig and take a great deal of pleasure in torturing him to death."

  "The computer!" Mavra exclaimed excitedly. "It can cure sponge! If we can get in contact with it somehow—" She started frantically scanning all the Com bands, punching in a call sign. Obie would recognize it if he could hear it—Obie had her memories in storage.

  The radio crackled and wheezed. Several times in the scan they swore they could hear voices of some kind, but speaking strange tongues, or so inhuman-sounding as to cause chills in them.

  Then, quite abruptly, a familiar voice popped in.

  "Well, Mavra, I see you didn't make it," Obie sighed. She returned the sigh, hers one of relief.

  "Obie!" she responded. "Obie, what's the situation down there?"

  There was silence for a moment, then the computer replied, "It's a mess. Dr. Zinder recovered first and got to me, and I have some of his instructions before Ben pulled him away. Two of the guards were there, and they heard me tell Dr. Zinder that we were in a different area of space. They started screaming about sponge, and Trelig shot them dead."

  "So they figured it out already," she said. "What about Topside?"

  "Trelig figured they had to go up and try and control the other guards. They could have trapped him down here. He hopes to bargain their processing through me to rid them of the sponge, but I don't think he'll have much success. Most of them wouldn't believe he could cure them anyway, and the rest would be even more furious that such a cure was here and not used. They would, I feel certain, go along with him only long enough to get the cure, then kill him anyway."

  Mavra nodded. "And if you can figure that out, so can Trelig. He has no percentage in a cure." She paused a moment, then said, carefully, "Obie, is there a way that we could get in to you? There's Nikki—and one of the guards, an ally, Renard."

  Obie sighed again. It was weird to hear so human a voice and so human a reaction from a machine, but Obie was much more than a machine.

  "I'm afraid not, at least not right now. The big dish is frozen in contact with the Well—the great Markovian computer that runs that world down there. It is beyond my control right now. It may take some time—days, weeks, even years—for me to figure a way to break off, if there is a way. As for the little dish, Trelig's no fool. He left, but he first coded defense mechanisms beyond my control. If I had the big dish I could neutralize them, but I don't. Anyone trying to get into the little room first has to pass over the bridge across the shaft. That bridge will kill unless Trelig's code is given, and I don't have it."

  She frowned. "Well, can you keep anybody else from blowing it?"

  "I think so," the computer replied uncertainly. "I have run a current through the shaft walls. That should keep anyone from getting to the bridge."

  "Okay, Obie, looks like I have to go in and save Trelig's noble neck," she said, and applied power. The new moon that was New Pompeii had disappeared around the strange planet, and she established an intercept vector.

  "Wait! Don't!" Obie's voice called. "Break off! You'll have to come in under New Pompeii to hit the Topside area, and that will swing you too close to the Well."

  But it was too late. The ship was already closing on the planet, felt its pull, and used it to whip around to the other side.

  Here was an incredible sight. The world, close up, shimmered like a dream-thing, and yet it somewhat resembled a great, alien jewel. It was faceted, somehow; countless hexagonal facets of some sort, and below whatever was causing the faceting was a hint of broad seas, mountain ranges, and fields of green around which clouds swirled. That is, that was the case below the equator. The equator itself looked odd, as if it were designed for a child's globe. A thick strip, semitransparent but with an amber coloration, like a broad plastic band around the world. The north—it, too, was faceted hexagonally, but the landscapes there contained nothing familiar; eerie, stark, strange. The poles, too, were strange—areas of great expanse, yet of a nonreflective darkness, almost as if they weren't there at all.

  The sight spellbound them. And the proper boost and cut had been preapplied. To get out of it, Mavra would have to swing around the planet tangentially to the equator anyway.

  "Too late! Too late!" Obie wailed. "Quick! Get everyone in the lifesaving modules!"

  Mavra was puzzled. Everything seemed normal, and she suddenly caught sight of New Pompeii, half green and shiny, half covered with the great mirror surface.

  "We better do what he says," Renard said quietly. "Where's the lifeboat? I'll get Nikki."

  "Bring her here," Mavra told him. "The bridge will seal if anything goes wrong."

  "I'll hurry," Renard replied, worried now about the immediate threat. Mavra couldn't see any threat; she was breaki
ng, coasting toward New Pompeii, swinging about a third of the way to the planet below in a standard approach that would take her once around New Pompeii and in. It was all so normal.

  "Damn it! I'm okay!" she heard Nikki almost scream. She turned and saw the girl enter, an angry expression on her face. Renard followed.

  "Your father's alive, Nikki," Mavra told the girl. "I'm in contact with Obie. Maybe we—"

  At that moment the ship shuddered, and all the electronics, including the lights, flickered, then winked out.

  "What the hell?" Mavra tried punching everything she could find. The bridge was pitch-dark, and there was no motor noise or vibration of any kind. Even the emergency lights and safety controls were out, although they shouldn't be. They couldn't be.

  Her mind raced. "Renard!" she called. "Get Nikki into your chair, then get in mine with me! I think we can both fit! Nikki! Strap yourself in as tight as you can!"

  "Wha—what's happening?" the girl called.

  "Just do what I say! Quickly!" the small woman snapped. "Somehow we've lost all power, even the emergencies! We were too close in to the planet! If we don't get power back—"

  She heard Nikki stumble, flop into the seat. She felt Renard's hand almost grab her in the face. Her own eyes, Obie-designed, adapted to infrared immediately. She saw them—but nothing else. There was no other heat source on the bridge!

  She managed an, oath, reached up, pushed Renard into the chair. It was a very tight fit, and it didn't quite work. That damned tail! she thought angrily.

  "I'm going to have to sit in your lap," she told him, shifting.

  "Ouch!" he exclaimed. "Move down a little! That tailbone is pressing on my sensitive area!"

  She shifted down slightly, and he just barely pulled the straps over both of them, then wrapped his arms around her, squeezing tightly more from nervousness than anything else.

  Suddenly, everything flicked back on again.

  The screen showed that they'd lost tremendous altitude during the blackout. They could see a sea ahead, and, beyond that, some mountains.