Quest for the Well of Souls

The Launch Complex Four Hours Later

Bozog attendants wheeled out the last of the problem cases, janitorial crews swabbed down the floor, and blowers cleansed the air. Several decisions had been made by the survivors, which had pared things down nicely.

Of them all, Renard had been the least hurt; the paralysis from the Yaxa venom wore off within an hour of the battle. Wooley was slower to recover; she had lost some blood in the first clash and had a debilitating headache as a result of the second. Burodir and the centaurs were sent to the Zone Gate for return home. The form of a Yugash still lay on the floor, indistinct but definitely alive. The survivors still had no idea which Yugash had survived; to most of their tastes, it would have been better if the two enemies had destroyed each other.

And now they sat—just Renard, Wooley, Yulin, Vistaru, and Mavra Chang—and the odd red form on the floor.

With Bozog help, they’d managed to get Mavra to her feet; she hadn’t made any protest, just remained limp and glassy-eyed.

Ben Yulin looked her over carefully, trying to get some reaction, but none was forthcoming. “Think it was the Yugash battle that did it?” he asked casually.

Wooley, still nursing her head, emitted a sigh that sounded like metal scraping glass. “No, I don’t think so. Certainly her experience would have been no worse than what I went through, which was bad enough—and I surely had the crazy one. The creature was totally insane, its thoughts flooded into my brain somehow. It hated us—it hated all of us, everything and everybody. It was incredible. And I almost lost. If Vistaru hadn’t yelled…”

“So what is wrong with her?” Vistaru asked, perplexed. “Why won’t she say anything?”

Renard, now cleaned up thanks to a chemical suggested by Wooley and provided by the Bozog, got to his feet and walked over to her.

Twenty-two years, he thought. She has changed more than I; she had a nasty life for that period while I enjoyed things. The guilt he felt was mixed with admiration for her. She was here, she’d come this far. He was also convinced that she’d survived because of her total egoism, her absolute belief in self, in the ability to do anything no matter what the odds.

He looked at her. “Come on, snap out of it!” he said sharply. “You’re Mavra Chang, damn it. Perhaps you loved him, cared for him as wife or mother, but you’ve gone through that before! You never let it get to you! You survived! You triumphed! That’s what life’s all about to you! The chase is coming to a climax after all this time! Come on! You can’t give up now!”

He sensed a flicker in her eyes, minimal animation, fleeting but nonetheless very real. She heard him and understood him all right.

“Don’t you think you’re being a little hard on her?” Vistaru asked, concerned.

“Let him be, Star,” Wooley whispered. “Let’s face it, he knows her a lot better than we.”

The Lata nodded silently. “You feeling as guilty and rotten as I am?” she asked after a moment. Wooley didn’t reply.

Renard threw up his hands in exasperation and walked over to them. “So much for psychology,” he sighed and sat back down. They were silent a time, and Yulin drowsed off. Finally, Renard turned to Wooley and Vistaru. “Are you really her grandparents?” he asked.

Vistaru nodded. “Yes—although I didn’t know it until Ortega told me. This bastard’s known for over twenty years, but didn’t even tell me when we met on that island and joined forces to find her.”

Wooley chirped a dry chuckle. The Yaxa couldn’t manage to change its cold voice, but there seemed an extra dimension of humanity, of warmth in it somehow. “You want to tell him the story, or should I?” she asked.

The Lata shrugged. “I’ll start and you can join in any time you want.” She turned to face Renard. “Let’s see—where to begin. I suppose we ought to go way back, to the first of our three lives.”

Yulin was suddenly awake and interested, too. “Three lives?” he said.

Vistaru nodded. “I was born on a Comworld, one of those where you are made into little plastic ten-year-old neuters and raised and conditioned only for a specific function. The theory’s to produce a society much like an insect colony—and it works, after a fashion. I was called Vardia Diplo—I was a courier, a kind of human tape recorder. You understand this was two centuries ago.”

“My background was much the same,” Wooley put in. “I was a farm worker who didn’t work out on a world that didn’t work out, either. It was Com, but syndicate-controlled. I suppose you know about that, Yulin.”

Yulin’s bull’s face could show no human expression, but the minotaur’s bearing seemed to grow sheepish and apologetic. Yulin could show sincerity and conviction—whether he felt or not.

“I was never involved with that,” the Dasheen responded defensively. “Look, I was born into the syndicate, the son of a major controller. Raised in luxury on a private world a lot more human and humane than Trelig’s. Who knew? Educated in the best places as a scientist and engineer. You have to understand—when the big-shot villains of the galaxy are your father, mother, friends, family—everybody you know—then they aren’t villains at all. Not to you. Not to me. It’s true I had no particular regard for anything but family law, but, then, again, aren’t freighter captains like Chang there just variations of the same attitude?”

In Mavra Chang’s case it was particularly true; she’d been a rebel and a thief the first half of her life.

“Never mind the alibis, let’s get back to the story,” Renard snapped impatiently. Yulin shrugged and settled back down.

The Yaxa paused a moment and continued. “I was developed as a woman, put in a Com whorehouse for party bigwigs, and got so screwed up and was so abused by the men who came by that I became unable to relate, sexually or socially, with men at all. That made me wrong for the job, so they gave me to a bastard controller in the sponge syndicate to use as a sample—hook me on sponge, then decrease the dosage very slightly as a living example.”

Renard nodded sympathetically. “Remember, I was a spongie, too—and I saw New Pompeii in its heyday.”

“Well, the two of us found ourselves on a freighter bound for Coriolanus,” Vistaru continued. “The captain was a funny little guy named Nathan Brazil.”

Renard’s dark eyebrows rose in surprise. “It’s been over twenty years since I heard that name. I can hardly remember where. Mavra, I think. He’s not for real, if I remember. The Wandering Jew.”

“He’s for real,” Vistaru assured him. “He discovered that Wooley was on sponge and decided to make a run for the sponge world without us knowing. We got detoured by a strange distress signal from a Markovian world, discovered a mass murder, and wound up falling through a Gate and winding up here. Wooley came out a Dillian first, I came out a Czillian—you may have seen some. Intelligent plant creatures.”

Renard nodded. “Seems to me I met one—named Vardia, come to think of it.”

She nodded. “That was me, too. The Czillians reproduce by budding off. There are probably several of the original me still around, with memories complete to that point.”

“Wait a minute!” Yulin objected. “You say she was a Dillian and you were a Czillian. That’s not possiblel You only get one trip through the Well and you know it!”

“Most people,” the Lata corrected. “We got more. Brazil’s immortality is easily explained. We accompanied him on a journey much like this one, to the Well of Souls itself—and it opened for him. He was a Markovian, Yulin! Perhaps the only one still alive!” Yulin was fascinated, and so was Renard. “A living Markovian!” the Dasheen breathed. “Still around! Incredible! What did he look like? Did you ever see him in his natural form?”

Both Wooley and Vistaru nodded. “Oh, yes, for a while inside the Well. It looks like a huge human heart on six tentacles. Brazil—well, he claimed to be more than that.”

“He said he was God,” Wooley put in. “He said he created the Markovians and saw them go wrong, and he was waiting around to see if we did a better job of it.”

The prospect was unnerving. “Do you believe him?” Renard asked.

Vistaru shrugged. “Who knows? One thing’s for sure—he’s at least a Markovian, and he could work the Well. Somehow, during the worst of the journey, the two of us had grown closer together—I guess I was learning how to be a real human being. As for Wooley—well, she kind of loved Nathan Brazil, but he was too inhuman, and she also hated being a woman. Nathan fixed it. We were transported from the Well World to Harvich’s World, which was then on the frontier. He put me in the body of a beautiful but suicidal whore, and Wu—Wooley—well, became a farmer named Kally Tonge, a big, handsome man who’d just died in an accident We became those people and got together—as Nathan had planned, I think.”

“We ran the farm together for years,” Wooley added. “They were great years. We had nine kids, too, and we brought them up right. Some got real big on their own—politicians and space captains and Com police, that level. Most left Harvich’s World for greener pastures, but one stayed.”

The Lata nodded. “Our daughter Vashura. She was smart as hell, and beautiful, too. Became the senator for the district, and would have been councillor if she’d had enough time. Kally and I went through one rejuve, and it took pretty well, I guess. Both of us went out-system, did a lot of work with the Com police on the sponge trade after selling the farm. Interesting work, but it grew increasingly frustrating as we got older. Finally we faced another rejuve and maybe some loss of memory or ability along with it. We decided not to. About the only thing we had to stay around for was helping Vashura fight the Com threat to Harvich’s World. A local party apparatus had grown up, and it looked weak until suddenly lots of key votes switched. We knew sponge was the cause, but we couldn’t prove it. Finally, the strain became too much for us. We decided to pack it in. Neither of us could bear to be around and see the world that had so much of our sweat and blood in it turn into another cookie-cutter insect world.”

Renard understood. “What about your daughter, though?”

“We tried for the longest time to convince her to take the family and get out,” the Yaxa told him. “She was stubborn—got it from us, I guess. Thought she could fight them. By the time it was clear she couldn’t, well, it was too late to leave. We barely got out in time ourselves. We didn’t know what to do. Vashura would fight to the death, but there were the grandchildren to think of. So, before finding a Well Gate, we used every bit of pull, contact, IOU, and subterfuge we had to locate Nathan Brazil.”

“And did you?” the Agitar responded, surprised. “He actually returned to our part of the universe?”

Vistaru nodded. “Oh, yes. He promised to get the kids out if it were physically possible and if their parents would allow it. All he managed was Mavra.” That last was spoken with incredible sadness.

“This Brazil—when you found him, almost two centuries later—how did he look?” Yulin asked, genuinely interested.

“Exactly the same,” the Yaxa replied. “Not a hair different, not a sign of aging. I think he’s looked like that since mankind was born.”

“I wonder why he picked us to live among?” Renard mused. “Couldn’t be our superior good looks.”

“As a Markovian he’d helped establish the original Glathriel,” Wooley explained. “As he described it, it wasn’t his project, but he was—well, the manager. He arranged the transfer to Old Earth. But, unlike the others, he never transformed himself totally and irrevocably. He stayed a Markovian.”

Yulin nodded. “A temporary line. When we built Obie, we found out all about that. The whole universe is just stabilized energy fields. How that energy is transformed and manipulated creates the different elements we know—and the Well—or on a smaller scale, Obie—stabilizes them. You can have a permanent change, literally writing an equation to hold the elements so thoroughly together that your creation becomes normal reality and is perceived as such by everyone around you. Using Obie, we changed a woman into a centaur long before we heard of Dillia, and, sure enough, everybody always remembered her as a centaur, there was even a logical reason for it going all the way back to her birth. That’s how the Markovians recreated the universe.”

“Clear as mud,” Renard noted.

Yulin shrugged. “Then, at Trelig’s bidding, we ran the people through Obie and gave them all horse’s tails—it was supposed to be an example. So everybody had to know they shouldn’t have the tails they had. We created a temporary equation, a local one, as it were. Their tails, which were not considered normal, are like Brazil’s humanity. He is a Markovian, and reverts to it when in the Well. I wonder if he’s the only one of them who did that?”

It was a thought, but not one that could be resolved. They didn’t worry about that or dwell on it.

Renard looked at Mavra Chang, “Why the hell did you desert her?” he asked angrily. “Why didn’t you stay around to raise and educate her?”

Wooley and Vistaru felt more than a little guilt on that score, but it was expressed in rather human terms, defensively.

“Why did you desert her in Glathriel and go home to Agitar?” Vistaru countered. “How many visits did you pay her in twenty-two years? After all, I didn’t know about her until Ortega told me just before we left for here—but you owe her your life. Some repayment!”

He started to protest, to justify, but saw her point. “There’s plenty of guilt around for everybody, isn’t there?” he said sheepishly.

“The Yaxa had decided to polish her off,” Wooley told them. “Ortega told me the story about her in order to get my aid. I managed to short-circuit those attempts all along. That’s why it was I who managed to be the one who was finally sent to capture her. I couldn’t trust anyone else not to take the easy way out.” Her shiny yellow-and-black death’s head turned to Vistaru. “As for you, I did not know then. Ortega made a couple of slips a few years ago and I drew the proper conclusions.”

“If I remember, Nathan Brazil set the Well to summon him if anything ever went wrong,” Vistaru pointed out. “Why didn’t it call him when New Pompeii suddenly appeared overhead?”

“I can answer that,” Yulin responded. “You see, to the Well nothing is wrong. The Markovians knew that at some future time one of their races would attain the ability to manipulate the universe as they could. At that time the Well was to transport the young race to it and receive new instructions, a changing of the guard so to speak. As far as the Well’s concerned, it’s just waiting for Obie or his operators to talk to it. Of course, that’s like waiting for a monkey to quote the Koran. The Markovians blew it. We found the secret early, too early, and our artifacts can’t even absorb its data, let alone talk to and order the Well. Obie, with some justification, refuses to try. Suppose it issued an incorrect instruction and wiped out humanity?”

It was a sobering thought. “You say ‘he’ often when talking about this computer of yours,” Wooley noted. “Why?”

Yulin chuckled. “Oh, it’s a person, all right, and it perceives itself as male. Self-aware computers have been around for a thousand years—I’m sure you ran into one or two. But never one like this one. It really is a person, as human as any of us. When you see and hear him, you’ll know what I mean.”

They let it go. Suddenly Renard’s head came up, and his eyes blazed. He stood up and walked back over to the still-unmoving Mavra.

“All right, Mavra Chang,” he told her in that same hard tone he’d used before. “You’ve heard it all now. Make up your mind. The ship will cross the border this evening and be ready in another day or two. Do you want to be on it? Because, by damn, you’ll go through Well processing as you should have twenty-two years ago unless you snap out of it! Make your choice! Make it now! What the hell is wrong with you, anyway?”

Something seemed to penetrate. Slowly her respiration increased, and life began to flow weakly back into her.

“Why did he do it, Renard? Tell me why?” she asked, totally bewildered.

The tone matched his own. “Huh? Why did who do what?”

“Why did Joshi jump in front of that pistol burst? It’s insane. I can’t understand it. I—I wouldn’t deliberately sacrifice my life for anyone, Renard. Why would he?”

So that was it. He looked into her eyes. “Because he loved you, Mavra.”

She shook her equine head. “How can anyone love anyone else that much? I just don’t understand.”

“I’m not sure I do, either,” he told her. “I’m not sure any of us can understand that. Welcome back to the land of selfish hypocrites.” He sighed and smiled. She turned and faced the others. “You two—you are truly my grandparents? The stories—your tales of the Well World, Nathan Brazil. They were all real? The old memories were all real?”

Vistaru nodded. “And Nathan cared, even if we failed,” she said. “Ortega received occasional communications from Brazil in tubes sent from Well Gates. They were meant for us, but, perhaps wisely, the snake-man kept them. He felt it was better if we didn’t know who or what the other was, or what had happened to you and Vashy and the rest. He was a lousy parent and he botched the job of finding the right one, and he knew it. But he never lost sight of you, Mavra.” She looked at the Lata quizzically. “It was Brazil who, when he was unsuccessful in warning Maki Chang on the smuggling setup, made sure they didn’t find you. It was Brazil who got old Gimmy the beggar king to look out for you. It was Brazil who steered Gymball Nysongi to you—supposedly just to check on you, although it developed better. He took the heat off you when Nysongi was killed. And so on and so forth. It’s all in the dispatches in Ortega’s office.”

She was stunned again. Renard sensed something wrong, went to her again. “What’s wrong? I think it’s wonderful—to have someone do that for you, year after year.”

“It’s horrible, grotesque!” she spat back. “Don’t you see? It makes my whole life a lie. I didn’t do everything on my own. I didn’t do anything on my own! I was being helped by an immortal super-Markovian all the way!”

And he did understand, although the others could not. The only thing she had, the only thing that had kept her going, was her enormous self-confidence, her ego, her total belief in her ability to surmount any odds and overcome any obstacles. When ego and self-image are suddenly kicked away, there’s very little left. In Mavra’s case, only a tragic little girl, lonely and alone; an intellient horse, but a dependent plaything.

“I understand,” was all Renard could manage, softly, gently, somewhat sadly. “But you’re on your own now, Mavra Chang. You’ve been on your own since you escaped from Glathriel.”

She shook her head and turned away. It wasn’t true. Joshi had put the final lie to it. Suddenly she hated him, hated him with a fury that defied reason.

For he’d given his life for her, the ultimate interference.

And now she was just Mavra Chang, a shell inside a shell, all alone, helpless, and dependent. In the dark, forever.