Echoes of the Well of Souls

Meteor Site A, Upper Amazon Basin

It was ironic that the two women adapted quicker and better to the life of the People after being offered a way out. Terry in particular took some delight in looking after the two men, particularly Campos, who had no idea who she was. Bound and drugged most of the time, allowed only a little exercise under watchful blowguns, neither was in great shape, but they at least seemed to have stabilized a bit.

Terry and Lori took the ceremonies of full initiation into the tribe, which involved a rather complex set of rituals culminating in drinking the blood of all the members of the tribe, which had been mixed with some juice in a gourd. This didn’t free them from work, but it gave them equal status with the others. Both spent long periods learning the ways of the People; Alama encouraged them and seemed quite pleased by their actions.

They finally picked a village site, well hidden and deep in the densest region of the jungle but located within two or three days walk of several more traditional tribal villages, so that they could at least get the one thing from men that nature could not provide. Making the huts, building the specialized structures of sticks and straw, coping with the driving rains—it was a real education.

Terry went along on a scouting expedition to one of the villages and saw that the tribe had at least some remote contact with the outside world. The bronze cross and small empty hut showed that missionaries had been there.

It said something about how easily she was adapting to the life that Terry never once considered that such contact provided a means of escape. Instead, she was quite pleased with how confidently she now moved through the forest and how well she had adapted to the hard life and way of survival of the People.

It was almost as if, Lori thought, Terry had burned all her mental bridges and was acting out some sort of fantasy. Lori, too, had acclimated well. She had certainly learned a lot of skills and had grown strong and self-reliant in her own way.

All of which pleased Alama no end. If she could get those two through, she thought, they would probably be the best prepared individuals ever to be dumped on that world.

Now, though, she would have to face the first barrier to be overcome.

She had told the tribe that the thing from the sky had come for her, to take her home. They hadn’t questioned it, but they were not at all happy about it. They had the law and well-trained leaders, but now they would have to see if they could survive on their own. Oddly, she felt worse about putting them in danger to get to the meteor than about leaving. After all the millennia, she was tired of the dying; she wanted, needed a challenge. This time, more than ever, she felt that she was ready for it.

Only the one small stand of trees remained for any sort of cover; the darkness would have to suffice the rest of the way, although the meteor still glowed brightly like some great floodlight in the ground, waiting for her.

The quartzlike hexagonal facets were incredibly regular, but the thing was not round. It might have been round once, but the part that had plowed into the ground here was irregular, jagged and misshapen, as if parts of it had been consumed and other parts had been broken off as it had made its way in. The crater should have been a couple of kilometers deep; instead, it was fairly shallow, only ten meters deep.

Looking at it from the treetops, Alama felt its energy and its life, felt its pull. Somehow she was certain that it knew she was there. And not quite on top but angled a little back was the spot that now and again turned into the deepest black, beckoning her.

She wished it were that easy. She wished that she’d been quicker recognizing it when it had struck, that she’d simply gone to it and seen it for herself before any of the scientists or military had gotten there. It would have been so much simpler.

The guards were Brazilian soldiers in camouflage fatigues, nasty-looking automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. They were a tough-looking bunch, but they looked extremely bored. Weeks, months—who could say how long it had been since the thing had hit?—of no activity and little else to do were taking their toll. Only two stood perfunctory guard, one at the camp and the other farther up at the equipment tent next to the crater, the other four playing cards and smoking cigars outside their big tent.

There seemed to be only two scientists currently in the camp, although the crater was ringed with instruments and, clearly, some effort had been made to take large samples. Probes ran from a portable generator right onto and into the meteor itself; long cables carried power to instruments guarded against rain and anchored against sudden wind. It had become routine.

There were signs all around that a near army had been there at one time, that many other tents and structures had once been set up here, and that a huge area had been cleared for such a group. Now just these few remained.

Lori in particular was somewhat shaken by the small size of the camp. How long had they been in the jungle? It had seemed weeks, no more, and the events of that frantic and terrifying night were still fresh in her mind, but mere weeks would not have reduced the world’s interest so much. The search after their mysterious disappearance would have slowed them down, and scientists the world over with visions of Nobel prizes would have been clamoring to be here—that the camp was so small and the scientific inquiry so routine meant it must have been a year… or longer.

It couldn ‘t be that long. Gus and Campos could not have survived their miserable half-drugged imprisonment that long. Then again, how long had it taken to build these tough, callused feet that no longer felt the jungle floor, these hard hands that did much heavy work, or the muscles she had developed? It all seemed to make no sense.

What did make sense was the two days they spent observing every move of the camp. The military helicopter came in the morning and often deposited a few people, probably scientists and research assistants, who checked the data, read out information from the instruments into their portable computers, and did a lot of routine maintenance work. They remained all day and were picked up by the helicopter again before nightfall, leaving only the guards and the two permanent party members there: an old white-haired man in khaki shirt and shorts and a young bearded man who wore boots and jeans and a kind of cowboy hat but usually went shirtless.

Terry climbed effortlessly up one of the trees and stared at the pulsing, glowing meteor during the night. She watched as the black hexagon came on and saw, or thought she saw, some kind of shimmering just above it. Then, startled, she saw a small black shape crawling on the meteor near the hole. A lizard of some kind, she realized. It reached the black area, seemed to pause for a moment, then stepped into it. For a brief second it seemed frozen, suspended in dark space, and then it winked out.

The equipment around the edge of the crater became more active, clicking and whining, then subsided. The scientists had measured the effect and the fate of the hapless reptile.

She came down the tree and stood there, chewing absent-mindedly on a finger while in thought, then sought out Lori.

“I am going to the men to see if they are able to help themselves,” Lori said. “I can carry one if I have to, but if they walk, is much help.”

“Bimi,” Terry said hesitantly, using Lori’s tribal name, “I cannot go with you.”

“You can! You have to! This life is not for you. Death comes young with the People. You belong Outside!”

“Outside I cannot go,” Terry reminded her. “And I just watch a lizard go into the black hole, and it cooked in fire!

Alama takes you all to death now, not life. Life can still be long.”

“I, too, watch things go in the hole. It is not like cooking. She says it is a door.”

“It is death! You stay here with me! For Alama, the men, it is quick and with no hurt. But not you!”

“Something says to trust Alama. I do. I must. Best take the risk than live as the People to death.”

“You are of the People! You think, speak first as one of the tribe. Have to think to speak other tongues. You are strong, tough. You know the magic of the potions. We can live happy here.”

“No. I cannot. I do not think you can, but we are not the same. Alama says the door will be no more when we go. If you do not come now, you cannot come.” She shifted mental gears, suddenly aware that Terry had a point on how they were thinking, and began whispering in English.

“Terry, I’m a scientist, not a witch or medicine woman. That is a great mystery. I’ve watched it as you have. I don’t know just what it is, but I am convinced that it is a machine, not a monster. I recognized some of the monitoring devices. They know it’s a machine, too. They’re trying to figure out what it is. They probably lost somebody to that door in the early stages, which is why they’re so low-key here. It’s too heavy to move, and I think they’re still too scared it’ll blow up. And a lot of that equipment is military stuff. Not Brazilian but American. I think they’ve evacuated the area as much as they could and are waiting until they figure out what to do next.”

“Suppose she’s right. Suppose it’s what she says. What’s it like in there or wherever you come out? You think they’ll be people, like Alama? Suppose it’s a probe or something? Poke and study and dissect you for science. She couldn’t tell you if she wanted to. Our one common tongue can’t handle it.”

“I’ll take the chance. I may not like her much, but I think I trust her. And is this life any better? No doctors, no vaccines, constant dawn-to-dusk hunting and gathering to eat? You’re an educated woman of the modern world.”

“I dunno. I spent ten years since college batting my head against the wall, getting shot at and beaten up and worse, no real home, no personal life to speak of, working sixty-, seventy-, eighty-hour weeks sometimes just to prove I was better than any of them. And what am I? After all that I’m still a line producer, no on-air anything, doing the same job they’re giving to twenty-two-year-old bimbos fresh out of school. And when I had my one shot, a year ago, a real producer’s job in Washington with ABC, I put them off because they begged me to cover fighting in Zaire. So I got stuck in this jerkwater hotel up the Congo. These soldiers came along; they shot most everybody and raped me and left me for dead. I came out anyway, but the ABC job’s gone and the rumor is that I lost my nerve! Lost my nerve! And now this happens. But, it’s a funny thing. I’m good at this. I have a family here. All women, and nobody but nobody questions my nerve! This is another planet, and I am already living on it.”

“But your family! Your friends!”

“My parents split when I was ten. My father sits in Miami, laundering drug money and dreaming of the old Cuba. My mother spends her alimony sitting in a beach house on Dominica and stuffing white powder up her nose. I don’t have a family—I have a series of Catholic boarding schools. And I don’t have friends. I thought I did, but they all started whispering about my ‘nerve’ the first chance they got. I’ve had years of one-night stands and little else. Nobody is gonna miss me, even now.”

Lori was shocked. “I—I never knew…”

“Well, we never had the time to get to know each other well. Go if you must—I pray that it is as wonderful as you dream. I don’t know if I can live like this forever or not, but I realized a long time ago that if anybody was to get away without all of us getting killed, I would have to stay. I accept that.”

“What? No! I want you to come!”

“You know Alama’s plan. The four of us disappeared here—who knows how long ago now, but they still have guns up there. It will be necessary to have someone who can speak with them.”

“But you don’t know Portuguese!”

“No, but it is close enough to Spanish.”

“But you can’t go up there! You know how they’re supposed to be diverted!”

“It is not the same. If it is to work, I must go with them.”

“You have spoken to Alama about this?”

“Yes. She made some of the same arguments, sort of, but she said it was up to me. She knew, though, that the plan had a much better chance with me staying behind than going with you.”

“You can still change your mind.”

“Perhaps. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I will always regret this. But the fact is, I have little choice. I really believe I might wind up thinking this was the best choice for me. Time will tell.”

Lori could only hug her and say, “I hope for your sake that it is.”

Terry shrugged. “Besides, I can always come out someday. Be the tattooed lady, the sole survivor who lived as a Stone Age savage. The Enquirer alone would pay me enough, with book and TV movie rights, for me to live out my old age.”

Lori sighed. “Then I better really see Gus.”

Gus was still drugged, as was Campos, but he was conscious. After a long period of apparent catatonia, he was able to be coaxed out on occasion, although he did not recognize what had happened to him and still seemed only vaguely aware of his surroundings. He was thin and weathered; his bindings had scarred his wrists and ankles, and he looked almost like a living skeleton. It was pretty clear that he’d need a lot of help, but he was so wasted away and Lori was in such good shape now that she found she could carry him with little trouble.

“Gus, hang on,” she said to him. “One more day and we’ll get you out of here.”

He smiled sleepily like a little child. “Big story?”

“The biggest.”

“Lots of pictures?”

“As many as you can take.”

He seemed happy at that. She squeezed his hand and went over to Juan Campos. Compared to Gus, Campos was in great shape. He was one very tough cookie, and he had eventually made the best of a mostly intolerable situation. After two early attempts at escape, when he’d shown enough strength to break the tough natural rope bonds and shake off the effects of a very mind-dulling drug, he’d accepted his punishment and the improbability of getting away and tried to make the most of it. He had begun to play up to his captors and to show unmistakable invitations and intent, and he’d been taken up on it by many, and one, possibly two, had conceived with him.

He’d still remained drugged and mostly bound and always well guarded, but he had managed by this to gain extra food and drink and, while weak for lack of any regular exercise, might well be able to make it on his own.

He had figured out who Lori and Terry were and found their transformations into native jungle girls highly amusing.

“All right, Campos. Listen up. The tribe wants to dispose of you, but the chief has other plans. Tomorrow your legs will be freed, and we’ll try and give you a little time to exercise them. You’re going for a walk, and you’ll wear a gag and have rope binding your arms. You do exactly what you’re told and you might get out of this alive. Understand? You make one funny move and you’ll be full of darts with enough curare to kill you in midstep. Understand?”

He nodded sleepily.

“Do one thing right and you’re home free. Be stupid and you’re dead. And be aware that nobody here really cares which.”

There was nothing else to do now but get some sleep and wait for the next day. It was not easy to do. Please, God! Let Terry and I both be making the right decision tomorrow!

Professor Umberto Alcazar-Diaz, visiting professor of astrogeology at the University of São Paulo, director general of Site A, and, not incidentally, also a research fellow at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Houston, had just taken off his glasses and settled back for a nap. He had been working almost nonstop on the lab findings dropped off by the morning helicopter, and his eyes were killing him.

Suddenly he heard a commotion among the guards outside. He was curious but too tired to see to it. “Carlos. You want to see what that’s all about?”

“Si, Professor,” the young man replied, getting up from his bunk and putting aside the routine security report he’d been writing up in English so that his bosses at the Agency could quickly read it back in Washington. He opened the frame door on the elaborate tent with a casual air and felt something sting him in the neck. He fell back inside, out cold.

The professor couldn’t see much without his glasses, but he knew that the young man had fallen, and he jumped up and went to his aid. Seeing that he was unconscious, Umberto Alcazar-Diaz opened the door to call to the guards, but he felt a sting in his neck before he could call out, and that was the last he remembered. The door came shut again.

Outside, the guards were oblivious to the happenings in the tent some twenty meters from any of them, but the armed soldier on duty in the camp was staring at something in the evening sun and had his rifle to the ready, while the other off-duty guards stopped what they were doing and tensed, guns not far away.

“No tire! Somos amigos simpáticos!” a young woman’s voice called from not far away. It wasn’t Portuguese and was oddly structured, but one of the men at the card table made it out.

“Antonio! Hold up!” he called in Portuguese. “It’s some woman speaking Spanish!”

“Woman? Women?” the duty guard called back in amazement. “Can you understand them?”

“Let me see.” The Spanish-speaking sergeant looked out and saw a number of native women standing nervously in a clearing just in front of one of the few immediate stands of trees that had survived the blast. They were all naked and painted up, but that wasn’t all that unusual, although he’d never seen markings quite like those before.

“Habla español?” the same woman asked. She seemed to be the leader.

“Si. Quién es?” the sergeant called back, not too nervous but puzzled.

“Soy llamado Teysi.”

“Donde viene de?”

“Somos de la aldea.”

“She says her name is Teysi and that they come from the village. That must be the one about three kilometers southeast that refused to evacuate.”

“What are they doing out here so late in the day and all by themselves?” the duty guard asked, not suspicious but just as curious. “I have been out here so long that even they look good to me.”

“You never know about these natives, but the ones in the village are friendly so long as you don’t ask them to leave.” He turned back to the small group of women—six, no seven of them! “Porqué vienen ustedes niñas aquí?” he asked them.

The answer came in halting, not very good Spanish, but the message was clear.

“Nuestros hombres son enfermos o muertos,” Teysi explained. “Nos mantienen lejos de hombres. Ninguno de nosotros ha tenido un hombre en mucho tiempo. Nos mantienen lejos de hombres. Somos muy solo y triste. Vemos que hombres guapos son aquí. Vamos fuera verle. Le gustaríamos vernosotros?”

The sergeant grinned. “I wonder… She says that they are the widows of men who are dead or something like that. That they are being kept locked away and haven’t had men in a long time and that they are very lonely. They heard that some handsome men were here and snuck out to see us. I think they want to come up and see us close.”

“Some of these tribes are sneaky,” another guard warned.

“You ever heard of any of the tribes using women as bait? It would be dishonorable to the men. No, they are too simple and too primitive to be other than what they say. What do you think? Should we invite them up?”

“Why not?” one guard asked. “If they do not smell too bad, maybe we can have some fun. I do not think we will have to search them for concealed weapons!”

They all laughed at that.

“Yes, but what about the professor and his shadow?” another asked.

They glanced at the tent, whose door was shut.

“If they want some, let them get their own,” the sergeant joked. “Maybe they will just sleep through it, eh? If they object, I will handle them.”

With that, he gestured the women to approach the camp.

“Soy el único aquí que hablo español,” explained the leader, a dark girl with a ring of bone in her nose. She might be hell to kiss long and hard, but she had quite a body, and her other assets were… outstanding.

The sergeant responded that he was the only one who spoke Spanish among his crew, too.

The lead girl gave a soft laugh. “Queremos tocar y palpamos, no hablamos.”

“I think she says they want more touch and feel than talk, boys! Her Spanish is terrible, but what the hell! I think we will finally break the monotony of this wretched post!”

A couple of the women pointed to the guards and made comments.

“Le dicen son hombres muy bonitos,” the dark one said as she reached them.

“She says they think we look pretty, boys!” the sergeant laughed. “If it wasn’t coming from them and out here, I think I’d be insulted!”

Terry had been nervous before they had revealed themselves. Using the halting, stilted, not quite correct Spanish had been easier; it wasn’t as if the soldier’s Spanish was much better.

She found that she actually was turned on, too, perhaps as much by the danger as by the desire. Somehow it was poetic that here, on almost the very spot where they had been taken captive who knew how long ago, she had returned as one of her captors to break, in the most dramatic of ways, all ties to her past.

That left the guard near the equipment.

It would have been easier to have just taken him out, but they weren’t at all certain they could do it without the others seeing or perhaps calling to him. He had seen and heard most of what was going on down at the camp and had come almost halfway back to see the scene he’d liked to have been a part of.

Each of the women had one of the men, but that left two women, and they came toward the remaining guard with innocent smiles, strutting to be sure he understood them. It wasn’t very long before he was totally distracted and effectively out of direct sight of the crater itself.

Alama nodded. Lori again picked up poor Gus, who seemed light as a feather, and Alama pushed Campos forward. “Down there?” he said with amazement, but he knew how many of these women were around and knew that Lori’s threat wasn’t an idle one. He might escape even now if he felt he could, but he wasn’t going to do anything until he was pretty damned sure he’d live through it.

The crater wall was thick with fine dust and shiny fragments—it wasn’t as easy as it had seemed to get to the meteor. The ground was littered with micalike hexagonal fragments, like tiny odd geometric forms from some bizarre workshop, many of which were fairly sharp, making walking difficult. Lori almost lost Gus once, and Campos actually slipped and fell.

“Up there! Fast!” Lori ordered.

“What? On the meteor? We will get burned!”

“There’s nothing to burn you. Do as I say. You’re almost free.”

Alama had already scrambled up, showing the way, and was now standing on a jagged outcrop very near where the so-called doorway to the stars was. She was keeping an eye on Campos, and she had a poison-tipped spear poised in case he tried to flee. She felt a moral obligation to take him along, but she understood what slime he was.

There was a sound of happy commotion coming from just beyond her line of sight, and she smiled to herself and thought, Do good, my children. Get many fine babies. Farewell.

But was it farewell? Where the hell was the doorway?

Damn it, it had been expecting her! Beckoning her! Why didn’t it show up?

Campos passed her and at that moment gave her something of a shove. It was hard to tell if he’d slipped or if it was deliberate, but it knocked Alama down, sending the spear clattering down to the bottom of the crater.

He turned, looked at Lori, struggling up with Gus, smiled, and said “Adios, muchachas! I will return, and your tribe will serve me forever!” He turned his back, took a step…

And vanished as if a three-dimensional television image had been abruptly turned off.

“Alama! Are you all right?”

The small woman struggled back to balance. “I am good enough. Where is he?”

“He winked out!”

“Ah. It knows when to come, as always.” She gave Lori a hand, and together they hauled Gus the last little bit. Alama pulled him a little, then said, “You will have to take him in with you. When I go, it goes.”

Lori nodded, saw the blackness, but hesitated, looking back toward the camp.

“I know what you think. If she do that, she will make it. Now hurry! Go!”

Lori picked up Gus once more, half dragging him, and backed into the black area. As soon as Gus’s feet cleared the black boundary, there was total darkness all around her and a sensation of falling.

Alama sighed and for the first time noticed the cameras. She hadn’t ever seen their like, but she knew what they were. It didn’t matter. Not anymore.

She stood there for a moment in all her Amazonian glory, bowed to each, then jumped into the blackness and winked out.

Terry lay on the blanket next to the sergeant and tried to catch her breath. A whole range of strange emotions and thoughts whirled in her head, and she needed time to regain control.

Suddenly, as it always seemed to do in this country, it began to rain hard, ending the trysts with a start and sending people scrambling.

Her sergeant rolled off the blanket and made for the nearby tent without even thinking of her for the moment, assuming she would follow. She, however, was used to the rain now, even this driving rain, and she got up and looked toward the crater.

The meteor was still glowing and pulsing. Maybe faster now; there was something different about it, but it was still active.

Curiosity and a certain sense of emptiness and loss overcame her, and she made for it. The crater guard ran past her, half-dressed and cursing in Portuguese, without ever being aware of her.

She reached the low point between the two sets of covered equipment and stared for a moment. They must have made it, she thought. There’s no sign, and we sure gave them enough time.

But the thing hadn’t died down; the black “hole” was still there, but it looked odd. It looked, in fact, like something was keeping it open when it wanted to close.

Sweet Jesus! she thought, staring at it. Do I have the nerve, after all?

The rain pounded all around, and she had a tense feeling that some dramatic event was imminent.

“The hell with it. I never could pass up a great story,” she said aloud to herself, and ran into the crater, ignoring the dust that was turning to mud and the piles of glassine hexagonal minerals. With a surefootedness she could never have imagined before this, she made her way up the side of the meteor and to the edge of the hole, certain that it would close just as she reached it. As she neared it, she slipped, bruised a knee, then managed to get up and, with supreme effort, drag herself on top of the blackness. It felt solid as a rock, and for a moment she felt the oddest mixture of relief and disappointment.

The world winked out, and there was only blackness and a sensation of falling fast through space.

Back at the meteor site the ground started to shake, and there were cries of “Earthquake!” from the camp.

Almost too fast to see, the meteor became duller, its surface fading to a dull rock sheen; cracks appeared, and fissures opened up along its fracture points.

The glow died; the pulsing stopped, and it grew suddenly very dark at the camp.

When the scientist and the intelligence agent came around two hours later, there were no native women, no real sign of what had happened to them or why, and six very confused soldiers who had already vowed to tell no one of the night’s activities.

Alama was falling in the blackness, and then suddenly she stopped, not on a cold, hard surface, as she had expected, but suspended somehow in the gate’s usual emptiness, a state she could never comprehend.

And then a voice came to her. A voice speaking an ancient tongue, but the tongue of her birth, and speaking it directly into her mind.

“Mavra! Mavra! Oh, you must hear me and understand! Mavra!”

A vast scene unfolded from her memories, a scene of a huge artificial moon filled with great equipment of impossible complexity, a moon that had a name, personality, and a soul. A name so dear to her that it was wrenched back even after all this time by the “sound” of that voice in her mind.

“Obie?”

“Mavra! Please! You must listen! I can’t keep this gateway open long!”

“Obie—you’re dead. You’re many thousands of years dead and gone.”

“No! We’re not dead. And yet not alive. We’re shifted over, like ghosts, unable to do much but still very much here!”

“What? Who’s ‘we’?”

“All of us. The trillions and trillions of us of all the races that ever were except the first. All the beings from the past universe, from our universe, and all the beings from the universes before. We’re stored, stored in the records of the Well, so we can be reused if needed. Only I am strong enough to retain some independent action, because I can manipulate, too, in a way. I’ve been waiting, waiting a long time until you intersected the Well matrix again and I could reach you!”

“Obie! You’re inside the Well?”

“I am part of it! We are all part of it now! We provide the templates for the re-created universe as needed. It is a horrible existence. Not even a half of living. Those— Markovians—or whatever they’re called never cared about what they were doing to all those lives if a reset was needed. I don’t think they ever thought that there would be a reset. But, like the Watcher, we are mere—insurance.”

This was too much all at once.“Obie, I —”

“Keep quiet for once and let me talk! I can’t hold this gate open very much longer, and I don’t think I can contact you again until you’re here, inside the control computer, where we’re all stored.”

“Obie—you want me to come to you? Is that it? What would I do? I don’t know how anything works. I just pushed the buttons Nathan told me to push! You’d need him to help you.”

Nathan! That was his name! That was the other one like her!

“No! No! Not Nathan! That is what we fear most! He will come again and he will reset, and we will have more company and be pushed farther back in the memory banks, leaving even less of what little remains of us and cutting us off completely!”

“He wouldn’t do that if he knew!”

“He not only would, he will. He doesn’t know it, but he will. He has no choice, Mavra! He is the Watcher! He is programmed to do it each and every time.”

“Programmed? Obie—it has been a long time. I remember very little of the old days. It is coming back, but it is still hazy.”

“It means that he has no choice. He was designed by the Markovians to do just one thing.”

“You speak of him as if he were a machine!”

“Mavra, he is a machine! And he doesn’t even know it! Only a machine could bear these long, long lives, recreation after re-creation. He is the only self-aware construct of the ancient ones, and he is rigidly compelled to act in only one way when he is needed. You were not on Earth before, and you had no formal education. You do not know history. All the monsters of history, all the mass killers, the armies, the hatreds, the diseases, the things that represent all evil in the universe are re-created time after time as well, very much as they were, to do their evil over and over again to the same people over and over again. He has the power to change it. He has the power to make things better, to alleviate suffering and misery and death, to create a wonderful universe for all the Last Races, but what does he do? He makes it all the same. He uses the templates. He does it over and over just the same. He doesn’t even change himself. Oh, no, that would corrupt their damnable experiment! The ultimate evil, unintended though it was. They were so sure they were gods. They were so certain that they could not make mistakes. The reset mechanism, the Watcher, were there to ward off natural deviations. They allowed for randomness and chaos to possibly require that the experiment be restarted, but they were certain that they were right! If it goes wrong, the Watcher puts it back exactly as it was. He doesn’t want to. He fought it the last time. But he still did it. And he will do it again. He will reset the experiment, kill trillions on over fifteen hundred worlds, and the evil will start anew. He has to, even if he doesn’t understand why. He cannot refuse, even if he learns the truth himself and believes it. It is built in that he will do it”

Nathan a—what was the word?—a robot! She could hardly believe it, yet it explained much. It was the first time he really made any sense at all.

“He—he is already there?”

“Yes, but he will fight it. He will fight it until he is forced to act. Mavra—you must use that time! You must get here before him! You must act as if he were your enemy, although he is ours. You must do it for our sake and the sake of anybody you ever cared about back on Earth.”

“But—Obie? I told you—I wouldn’t know what to do!”

“The last time he made a mistake. He thinks, he feels, he cares. Outside of his one mission, he is basically good. He recoiled at the reset and had you do it. He remade you into a being like himself. The Well will let you in if you come. And once inside, we can speak together without these limits! I can tell you what to do, Mavra! Together we can break this vicious cycle and create a better, more stable universe based on good. But you must get here first!”

There was sudden silence, and she called out mentally, “Obie?”

“I can’t hold it anymore, Mavra. Come! Get here ahead of him! Let me live again and we’ll have a universe that is glorious! I know how. You can do it. Come!”

“Obie! Wait!”

But there was no answer; the falling sensation resumed.

Only her quick reflexes kept her from falling right on top of Gus. She rolled and got immediately to her feet and looked around at their surroundings with mixed emotions. After the unexpected “conversation” in transit, she had much to think about, and it wasn’t of a sort she wanted to deal with, at least right now. On the other hand, the familiarity of the great chamber after such a very long time was beyond satisfaction; she felt suddenly alive again.

Lori watched in amazement as the woman she knew as Alama got to her feet, raised her arms and turned slowly around in a circle, as if drinking in the cold and bizarre view, then gave a surprisingly deep yet joyful laugh that echoed through the chamber. Lori could not, however, understand the words the tiny woman called out in that same tone of joy and amusement, said in an odd, melodic tongue like none she’d ever heard before.

“Hello, you big, beautiful Well World, you! Mavra’s back!”

“Alama,” Lori called out, interrupting the scene in the only common language the two now shared, that of the People, “when you do not come, I do not know what to do next.”

She was more than a little relieved to find that contrary to Terry’s fears, she was still very much alive and none the worse for wear, but she had felt very alone and exposed there, with Gus so weak and out of it.

The small woman stopped, frowned, then, abruptly all business, turned toward Lori. “Where is the other man?”

“Campos? He knows not where he is. He is very angry. He said he will find a way out of this trap. He walks in that direction.” She pointed.

“He is still tied?”

“His hands.”

The small woman smiled. “He will be easy to find. Do not worry.”

“Alama, Gus is bad off. We must find help for him.”

She nodded and knelt to examine the man, who was conscious but still clearly in something of a fog. Then she looked back up at Lori. “Take him up there. I will follow. Do not worry. He will be all right.” She paused a moment, then added, “Not Alama. No more Alama. I am Mav-ra. Mavra Chang.”

“Mavra Chang,” Lori repeated. It sounded odd and not quite right, but the family name was most interesting. Chang. So she was a true Oriental! Chinese probably, with a name like Chang. But that didn’t solve the mystery. If she was Chinese, then she wasn’t a native of wherever this was. “The stars beyond the stars.” The idea of some hidden, ancient group of Chinese from another planet seemed ludicrous.

That is, if this place was another planet. It was true that the trip had been a bizarre one, but it hadn’t seemed long, and while this vast chamber was like nothing she’d ever seen before, it certainly didn’t have the feel of some extraterrestrial locale.

It was a huge place, though. She wasn’t certain if she could see the end of it in either direction. The shiny, slightly concave coppery surface of the floor reflected bright, indirect light from an unseen source, giving an illusion of great distance. On two sides of the floor was a low barrier wall topped by a dark rail, and here and there, there were openings in it so that one could get up onto whatever was beyond. With a tired sigh, she hoisted Gus and made her way carefully over to the nearest opening, and, going through, she deposited him again on the floor.

This area was quite different in many respects. The “floor” was brown and felt like padded plastic; it gave slightly to her weight, and she felt a slight stickiness on her bare feet. The barrier wall was a dark brown inside and seemed to mesh seamlessly with the floor surface. It was surprisingly wide; several people could walk abreast on it and not touch the main wall or barrier wall. It, too, seemed to go on forever.

What was almost as unnerving as the size of the place was the deathly silence, so that every sound they made seemed magnified. Suddenly they heard a terrified scream far ahead of them and then the sound of a panicked running. Lori tensed, but Alama—Mavra—seemed to find it amusing.

In another minute they could see the frantic form of Juan Campos racing toward them, and as he drew close, his expression looked as if he had just gazed upon the most gruesome of ghosts.

He would have run right past them, or so it seemed, except that Mavra stuck out a leg and tripped him.

“Campos! What did you see?” Lori pressed, nervous. This was not a man who scared easily.

“A monster! Horrible! Help me up! We can’t stay here! It is right behind me!”

She looked up at Mavra, who she knew couldn’t possibly have understood what the terrified man had said yet who didn’t ask about it, either.

Up ahead, from the direction Campos had come, there was the sudden whine of machinery, and she felt a vibration through the floor.

Campos heard and felt it, too, and he whimpered, then turned, wide-eyed in fear, toward the sound of the noise.

Lori gasped and felt the same panic rise in her that had already mastered Juan Campos; only Mavra’s cool assurance and bemused expression kept her where she was.

Seemingly floating toward them was a huge apparition, a monstrous reptilian form perhaps three or four meters high, with a mean-looking head much like a tyrannosaurus Lori had seen in museum dinosaur exhibits. The head, however, was perched on an even wider body, with a burnt-orange underbelly fully exposed, all supported by two monstrous legs that vanished below the barrier wall. It seemed to have a tail as great as its body, and gigantic bony plates extended from just below the neck down to, and perhaps onto, the tail.

Its primary coloring was a passionate purple, broken with crimson spots so thick and regular, they seemed almost like polka dots.

The creature filled perhaps eighty percent of the width of the walkway, and it was coming straight for them, riding on a section that was moving.

Mavra turned to them and said, “Tell them do not move. Just wait and all will be safe.”

Lori swallowed hard but said, “Come on, Campos! Be the macho man you always wanted to be! She says don’t move and nobody will get hurt.”

It was clear that Campos wanted to get up and run, but he was stopped both by the fact that his bound wrists made it hard to get back on his feet and by the sheer bravado of the two women. There was just no way Juan Campos could run away from anything in fear if two women stayed.

“Very well, but if I am to die, let me die with my hands free.”

It seemed like a fair request. Lori allowed herself to take one eye off the still-approaching Leviathan and gesture to the bonds for approval. Mavra nodded, and Lori untied him.

He sat up, rubbing his wrists. “What sort of lunatic place is this, and how did we get here?” he asked, both eyes still on the approaching monster.

“I only promised you’d be free,” Lori reminded him. “I didn’t say where.”

The creature was now very close, and it reached over and down with one of its fully formed hands at the end of long, spindly arms and struck the side of the barrier wall. The belt it was on stopped moving, leaving it about ten feet from them.

Lori gaped at the thing in wonder and saw now that it wore some kind of sash around its neck and upper torso with a complex symbol embossed on it by a method suggesting some advanced technology. Around its neck and over the sash hung a thick gold chain like some kind of giant necklace, and at the end of it hung what appeared to be a ruby-colored gemstone, hexagonal in shape.

The creature looked them over as well, and its head shook a bit from side to side and its eyes widened. The gem on the necklace seemed to light up and emitted a very soft whine, followed by a voice that Lori heard in English, Campos in Spanish, and Mavra in her ancient native tongue. It was a high-pitched, slightly nervous voice that didn’t at all match the monstrous visage before them.

“Oh, my! Goodness gracious!” said the voice. “Savages!”