Exiles at the Well of Souls

by Jack L. Chalker

  "We're over the equator into the south, anyway," Mavra managed. "Let me see if I can boost us out of here."

  She started to undo the straps when, suddenly, the screen showed that they had cleared the ocean—and everything went black again.

  "Damn!" she swore. "I wish I knew what the hell was going on here!"

  "We're going to crash, aren't we?" Nikki asked, more resigned than panicked.

  "Looks like it," Mavra called back. "We'll start breakup soon unless the power comes on."

  "Breakup?" Renard repeated.

  "There are three systems on these ships," she told him. "Two are electrical, one mechanical. I hope the mechanical holds, because we have no power, none at all. In two of the three, including the mechanical, the ship separates into modules. In the mechanical mode it will deploy parachutes thirty seconds after breakup, then use air resistance to trigger the main chutes. It'll be a rough ride."

  "Are we gonna die?" she heard Nikki ask.

  "Might as well," she heard Renard murmur to himself, too low for the girl to hear. She understood what he meant. This would be quicker, by far, than sponge.

  "I hope not," she responded, but there was a tinge of doubt in her voice. "If we had a complete failure in space, we would—we'd use up the air. But down there—I don't know. If we can breathe the stuff, and if we survive the landing, and if the chutes open, we should make it."

  A whole lot of ifs, she thought to herself. Probably too many.

  The ship shuddered, and there were loud noises all around. Separation had been achieved.

  "Well," she sighed. "Nothing we can do about it now, anyway. Even if the power came on again—the engines aren't attached to us anymore."

  There came now a series of sharp, irregular bumps. Renard groaned, catching both the effects of him against the chair and Mavra against him. Then there was a single very sharp jerk that almost made them dizzy.

  "The chutes!" Mavra exclaimed. "They opened! We have air of some kind out there!"

  It was now a dizzying, swaying, rocking ride in total darkness. A few minutes of this and they all began feeling a little sick. Nikki had just started to complain when there was a much stronger, almost violent series of jerks.

  "Main chute," Mavra sighed. "Hold on! The next one will be one hell of a bang!"

  And it was. They felt as if they'd slammed into a brick wall, then they seemed to be rolling over and over, coming to a stop hanging upside down.

  "Easy now!" Mavra cautioned. "We're resting on the ceiling now. The gravity feels close to one G—about right for a planet of this mass. Nikki! You all right?"

  "I feel awful," the girl complained. "God! I think I'm bleeding! It feels like every bone in my body's broke!"

  "That goes double for me," Renard groaned. "You?"

  "I've got burns from the straps," Mavra told them. "Feels like it, anyway. Too early to tell the real damage. Right now it's shock. Let's get down from here first, then we can treat any injuries. Nikki, you stay put! We'll get you down in a minute."

  She felt the straps holding them. Only a few centimeters were still in the clasp. One more bang, she thought, and we'd have come loose.

  "Renard!" she said. "Look, I can see in this darkness, but you can't, and I can't get down without dropping you. See if you can grab onto the chair when I release the straps. It's about four meters, but it's smooth and rounded. Then I'll get you to the floor." She guided his arms, and he got some kind of grip, but he was facing the wrong way to have any leverage.

  "Maybe I could have done it years ago," he said dubiously, "but since my body changed—I don't know. I don't have much strength in my arms."

  "Well, try to swing free, jump when you have to," she told him. "Here goes. . . . Now!"

  She hit the master stud, and the belt-web dropped away. She dropped immediately to the floor and rolled. Renard yelled, then let go, coming down in a heap and sprawling. She went over to him, examined him, felt his bones.

  "I don't think there's anything broken," she told him. "Come on! I know you're a mess of bruises, but I need you to help Nikki down!"

  He had twisted his ankle, and it hurt like hell to stand, but he managed on sheer will power. Carefully, they managed to get him under Nikki, and, by reaching up, he could touch her.

  He wasn't strong enough to support her, but he did manage to make her fall less severe, and she landed somehow on her rump. It was painful and she moaned, but, again, Mavra detected nothing broken. Bruised and twisted they were, and sore they would be, but they all had come through miraculously well.

  Renard tried deep-breathing exercises to ease the pain, all the time rubbing his sore legs with his equally sore arms. "Just out of curiosity, Mavra, how many times have you made a landing like this?" he gasped.

  She chuckled. "Never. They say these systems are too impractical. Many ships no longer even have them. Once in a million they're usable."

  He grunted. "Umph. That's what I thought. Now, how do we get out of here?"

  "There's an under and over escape-hatch system," she told them. "The thing's an airlock, but it won't pump, of course. You're going to have to lift me up so I can trip the safety switches. The ceiling one's no good to us."

  He groaned, but managed. She reached out, just barely getting the controls, and, after several tries and one or two drops, there was a hissing sound and the hatch dropped. More long minutes passed while she tried to jump from his shoulders and grab the edge of the hatch. Finally, when they'd almost given up and Renard was complaining he couldn't take it any more, she got a grip, hoisted herself in, and flipped open the outer lock.

  "Suppose we can't breathe out there!" Nikki yelled to Mavra.

  Mavra looked down at them. "In that case we're dead anyway," she told them. Actually, she knew the odds were against the air being something they could use, but there had been an ocean and green trees, and that held hope.

  She pulled herself out of the lock, and stared.

  "Smells kind of funny, but I think we're all still alive," she called back. "I'll get some tether cable from the work locker. It was supposed to anchor spacesuits, but it should hold you."

  Nikki was the toughest. She was very heavy and not very athletic, and while they pulled in the darkness—Renard had climbed the anchored tether cord on his own—both Nikki's arms and theirs seemed ready to give out. They were working on adrenalin now, they knew, and that energy would not last forever.

  But they did get Nikki clear of the first hatch, where the ribbed sides gave some sort of tenuous leg supports, and they managed to get her out.

  Once off the bridge module, they sank on what appeared to be real grass, exhausted, the landscape swimming by them. Mavra put herself through a series of body-control exercises and managed to will away much of the pain but not the feeling of exhaustion. She opened her eyes, looked back at the other two, and saw them sprawled out, asleep and breathing hard.

  She scanned the horizon. Nothing looked particularly threatening; it was around midday, and their surroundings looked like a quiet forest scene from any one of a hundred planets. Some insects were audible, and she saw a few very standard-looking birds floating on air currents high above, but little else.

  She looked again at her unconscious companions and sighed. Even so, somebody had to stay awake.

  New Pompeii—1150 Hours

  A blue-white shot sang out across the great void that was the pit of the big disk. A little bit of the molding around the control room smoldered and hissed. Somebody cursed. All over were blotches where previous shots had struck, and the window out onto the pit was long gone.

  Gil Zinder sat nervously hunched back against his control panel on the balcony. Antor Trelig was growling and using the scarred but still reflective side molding of the door to try and ascertain the location of the shooters. Ben Yulin, on the opposite side of the doorway, checked his own pistol for its remaining charge.

  "Why don't you close the door?" Zinder shouted feebly. "Those shots are starting to come i
nto here!"

  "Shut up, old man," snarled Trelig. "If we shut it they can seal it with their fire and then we might never get out of here. Ever think of that?"

  Yulin snapped his fingers and made his way to the interior control panel. A shot came near him, but the control panel was angled away from the door sufficiently so that anybody shooting at it would be a perfect target for Trelig.

  Anxiously, Yulin flipped the intercom open. "Obie?" he called.

  "Yes, Ben?" the computer replied.

  "Obie, how are your visuals in the tunnel? Can you give us a fix on how many there are and what damage there is?"

  "My visuals are unimpaired," Obie responded. "There are seven of them left. You shot three and they are gone. There is a lot of damage to the pit control room and the facing wall, but nothing major."

  Yulin nodded to himself, and Trelig suddenly and quickly crouched, leaned out of the doorway, and shot a volley.

  "Missed them by a kilometer, Trelig," Obie observed in a tone that indicated a smug satisfaction. Trelig, hearing it, bristled but said nothing.

  "Obie, how operational are you?" Yulin asked, gesturing to Zinder to crawl over to the console. The older man at first seemed too scared to move, but then, slowly, started inching his way there.

  "Not very," the computer told them. "The computer that runs the world down there is both infinitely more complex and simpler than I am. Its input capabilities appear to be unlimited, and it has complete control of all prime and secondary equations at output—but it is entirely preprogrammed. It is not self-aware, not an individual entity."

  Gil Zinder reached the console and sighed, then crouched next to Yulin.

  "Obie, this is Dr. Zinder," he told the machine. "Can you break contact with the other computer?"

  "Not at this time, Dr. Zinder," Obie responded, his tone much nicer now, and more tinged with concern. "When we activated the reverse field, we released the tension of the energy controlling our own existence. It brought us here. Apparently the world computer has been preprogrammed for just such an event, but the programmers assumed that anyone who could tap the Markovian equations in such a manner and bring themselves here would be at close to the same technological level as the builders of the world computer. We are supposed to supersede previous programming, tell it what to do next."

  "Where is here, Obie?" Zinder asked.

  "The coordinates would be useless, even if I had a frame of reference," Obie replied. "We are, in a sense, in the center of the tangible universe, or so I gather from what I can make of the other computer's information circuits."

  Even Trelig understood the implications. "You mean this is the center for all existence of all matter in the galaxy?" he shouted.

  "Just so," agreed Obie. "And all energy, too, except the primal energy that is the building blocks for everything else. This is the central Markovian world, from which, as near as I can see, they recreated the universe."

  That thought sobered all of them. Trelig's eyes shone, and his expression took on new determination. "Such awesome power!" he said, too low for the others to hear. A blue-white shot didn't snap him out of it but did bring him back to reality. With such power within his grasp, he still had to survive this experience.

  "Obie, can you converse with this big machine?" Yulin asked eagerly.

  The computer seemed to think for a moment. "Yes and no. It's hard to explain. Suppose you had a functional vocabulary of just eighty words? Suppose, in fact, you were only capable of knowing eighty words. And suppose someone from your culture with a doctorate in physics started talking his technical field with you. You couldn't even absorb all the words, let alone understand any of the conversation."

  "But you could talk to it in those eighty words," Yulin pointed out.

  "Not if you couldn't even phrase the question," Obie retorted. "I haven't the ability even to say 'hello' in an understandable manner—and I'm almost afraid to try. There is an incredibly elaborate preprogrammed sequence that I am aware of but cannot follow or comprehend. I don't dare try. It might wipe out all reality, or the other computer and all reality as well, leaving me as the only thing left. What then?"

  The scientists saw what he meant. The Markovians had preprogrammed the computer to turn over everything to their successors, when they reached the Markovian level. It apparently had never occurred to them that a Gil Zinder, a primitive ape, would stumble onto their precious formula millennia before man was ready. The master computer out there was waiting for Obie to tell it to shut down, that new masters were taking over.

  But the new masters were three very scared primitives and an equally scared computer, the primitives trapped by the former employees of one of them. The guards, seeing the change in position and realizing that the sponge supply ship would not be coming, knew they were going to die horribly.

  But they were going to die free. They were going to take their hated master with them.

  "Obie?" Yulin called.

  "Yes, Ben?"

  "Obie, can you figure out how the hell we can get out of here?"

  The computer had anticipated that one.

  "Well, you could just wait them out," Obie suggested. "There are provisions here for a week, and I can create more than enough to sustain you. In three weeks or so all the guards will be dead; in two they will be in no condition to oppose you or do you harm."

  "No good!" Trelig shouted to them all. "There are two ships up there that must be placed under our control—otherwise we're trapped. Remember, there are a lot of agents and diplomatic people who won't be affected by the sponge wearing off! With the guards gone wild, some are probably armed by now and might be able to take the ships. If they jump away, we're stuck for good!"

  "Correction," Obie responded. "There is one ship. Mavra Chang, Nikki Zinder, and a guard named Renard got off in one."

  Gil Zinder seemed to come to life again. "Nikki! Away from here! Obie—did they make it out? Are they back home?"

  "Sorry, Dr. Zinder," the computer said sadly. "The early start for the tests forced my hand. They were taken in the vortex with us, and have since crashed on the Well World."

  The old scientist's look of hope gave way to despair, and he seemed to crumble. Trelig was upset by a different point entirely.

  "What do you mean, forced your hand?" the erstwhile master of New Pompeii snarled angrily. "You treasonous machine!"

  Obie was nonplussed. "I am a self-aware individual, Councillor. I do what I must do, and yet I have certain freedom of action outside those parameters. Just like people," he added, not a little smugly.

  Ben Yulin's mind was the engineer's. "What did you call that world they crashed on, Obie?" he asked, ignoring the others.

  "The Well World," responded the computer. "That is its name."

  Yulin thought for a moment. "The Well World," he murmured, almost to himself. Now he looked straight at the speaker. More shots were being exchanged between Trelig and the guards outside.

  "Obie?" Ben almost whispered, "tell me about this Well World. Is it just a big Markovian computer, or what?"

  "I have to interpolate, Ben," Obie apologized. "After all, I'm getting this information in bits and pieces and it's all coming in at once. No, I don't think so, though. The computer—the Well—is the entire core of the planet. The planet itself seems to be divided into many more than a thousand separate and distinct biospheres, each with its own dominant life form and supporting its own flora, fauna, atmospheric conditions, and the like. It's like a massive number of little planets. I infer these as prototype colonies for later implantation into the universe in their true, mathematically precise environments. They are alive, they are active, they exist."

  The other two were listening now, fascinated in spite of themselves.

  "The three, who crashed," Gil Zinder tried dryly. "Did they—did they . . . survive?"

  "Unknown," Obie replied truthfully. "Since they are not part of the Well World matrix, they are not in the computer's storage. Even if they were, I doubt
if they could be picked out. There are too many sentient beings down there."

  "Why don't you ask him something practical, like how the hell we get out of here?" Trelig snapped, breaking the reverie. "The fact that there's only one ship left makes the matter even more pressing!"

  Yulin nodded, unhappy to break this fascinating new line of discovery but unable to argue with Trelig's practicality. But the computer was a hostile accomplice; questions would have to be in absolutes. Yulin suddenly felt like he knew what it was like to have to strike a bargain with the devil.

  And then, suddenly, without Obie's aid, he had it. Yulin let out a disgusted exclamation that made the others turn, then slammed his right fist into his left palm. "Curse me for a fool!" he swore. "Of course!" Calming himself down, he asked, "Obie, is your little disk still operable?"

  "Yes, Ben," Obie replied. "But only within its previous limits. The big disk is locked into the Well computer until I or somebody can figure out how to disengage it, and I have no ideas at all on that right now."

  Yulin nodded, more to himself than to the machine. "Okay. Okay. The little one's all I need now. Obie, you have the formula for sponge, don't you?"

  "Of course," came the reply, a little startled. "From the bloodstream of a number of early subjects."

  "Uh, huh," Yulin muttered. He was all business now. "Activate and energize. I want a small quantity of sponge, say five grams, in a leakproof plastic container. The straight stuff. And, I want an additional kilogram of the stuff with the following chemical substitutions." He proceeded to rattle off a long chemical chain that startled the others.

  Zinder was the first to realize where Yulin was headed, and almost moaned, "But—you can't do that!"

  But Yulin could, had ordered it, energized Obie, and the disk was even now swinging out over the circular platform, and the blue field was forming.

  "What the hell are you going to do?" Trelig shouted.

  "He's going to poison the poor bastards," Gil Zinder replied. He looked up at Yulin. "But—why? With sponge they'll be back under your command again anyway."