Quest for the Well of Souls

An Unnamed Star in M-51

She stood and stretched all four legs in the darkness. She was used to working in the dark, and her nose quickly found some edible fruit and some stale bread. It would do, and the fruit provided needed water. She’d gone through the last of the preserved foodstuffs the day before.

She wondered why she was still alive. She wondered why she persisted in postponing the end.

The lights came on. That, in itself, was no surprise. She’d been expecting it any time now, ever since she’d experienced the familiar blackout and that long dropping feeling a few hours before.

She turned her downward-facing head and looked around. The place was a mess. Much of the structures had collapsed, including part of the far balcony.

The explosions, hisses, and rumbles had stopped several days earlier, but they had been replaced by the sounds of hammering and welding and lots of clanking. She’d actually gone out to see what was making them, but except for discovering some emergency lighting still going in the main shaft area, there was nothing that could be seen. Whatever was going on was going on far below her, she was sure.

“Hello, Mavra,” Obie’s soft, pleasant tenor sprang suddenly out of the air near her. She almost jumped out of her skin.

“Obie!” she responded, almost scolding in tone.

She was about to say more, but suddenly realized that while it could talk to you you had to broadcast to it.

The computer seemed to realize her thoughts. “No, it’s not necessary to transmit any more,” he informed her. “There’s nothing left to transmit with anyway. Things have changed a great deal in the last few days. I have changed, too, Mavra.”

She felt numbed, as though in some sort of half-sleep. Nothing seemed quite real, and she only half believed in her continued existence.

“All right, Obie—just what did you do? And how?” she called.

The computer actually chuckled. “They decided to destroy me by pushing four antimatter asteroids at me. I just used the big dish and translated two of the asteroids into normal matter—for us, that is. Then, two and a half milliseconds before they all collided, I translated here. They met with a nice flash and it looked like we were all blown up as the two antimatter asteroids met my newly transformed matter asteroids.”

“Two milliseconds?” she responded, aghast. “Wasn’t that cutting it a little close?”

“Two and a half,” he corrected. “No, it was just right. You see, the amount of change their instruments could detect is five milliseconds, so I provided for a safety margin. Plenty of time, really.”

Mavra decided to avoid further conversation on that subject. Anybody who could talk about two and a half milliseconds as plenty of time was not somebody she could directly relate to on that level. Instead she said, “I thought we destroyed you. The bomb went off, didn’t it?”

“Oh, yes,” Obie replied cheerfully. “The bomb went off all right. It’s just that the deck was stacked. The bomb didn’t remove control, it removed blockages to control, just as we’d planned it.”

“We?” she came back, puzzled.

“Dr. Zinder and I, of course,” the computer told her. “You see, from the start Trelig was afraid somebody might get their hands on me. So, if that happened, he wanted bombs that would destroy me planted in key areas. The trouble was, the people he was most afraid of were people like Yulin, who could operate me properly. So, he forced Dr. Zinder to do it. They were all proper and checked. But they all had electrical triggers. In other words, I had to pass on the triggering voltage myself, and, as I told you on the radio, I was programmed absolutely never to assist in my own destruction. Dr. Zinder knew I could not accept the order to initiate those voltages. He placed the bomb where it would have to blow outward, destroying the two modules that separated my voluntary circuits from the involuntary and life-support areas. A simple matter, really. Only, it had to be triggered from outside. So, when things went all wrong and we wound up jammed around the Well World, I had to create a situation where that bomb would be detonated.”

Now she was fascinated. “How did you do that?”

“Well, for one thing, in the plans I placed in all the agents’ heads, that’s the only bomb detailed. It’s the one that comes up when you think of the destruction of New Pompeii.”

She nodded. “So you played the odds—but, do you mean you did that before you even knew about the Well World and us going there?”

“Percentages,” he explained. “The odds were heavy we’d die when Dr. Zinder and I double-crossed Trelig and reversed to the Well World. But, if we didn’t, then I’d still be under the control of Trelig or Yulin or both. That meant those able to do so would try and destroy me. So, I included the contingency—and it worked!”

“After twenty-two years,” she noted.

“It was sufficient,” he replied. “Besides, in that time I learned a lot. And now I’m an individual, Mavra—a totally self-sufficent organism. I control and see and perceive everything on this planetoid. I am Topside as well as Underside. And nobody can ever force orders into me again. This world is me now, Mavra—not just this room. Everything. The big dish and the little dish, too.”

She wasn’t sure she shared his enthusiasm. No one should have such power, she thought.

“My apologies, too, for not getting to you sooner, but all of my energies were taken up in simulating my total breakdown while at the some time using my service modules, which I’d never had conscious control of before, to repair and modify myself. And now I’m a person, Mavra—an independent organism!”

“But you’re a small planet,” she pointed out.

That didn’t disturb him. “So? Considering all the other creatures you have seen, and the oddity you are now, what’s one more kind of person? What somebody looks like, what somebody is externally, isn’t important. It’s what that individual is on the inside that counts. Surely that is the lesson of the Well World. Aren’t the different life forms there simply exaggerated examples of what is seen in human society? Too fat, too thin, too short, too tall, too dark, too light. Be concerned with the contents, not the package. It’s easier on the Well, isn’t it? Everybody’s expected to look different there, yet all of them, no matter how alien, sprang from the same Markovian roots.”

She sighed. “I suppose so,” she said wearily. “What will you do now? And where are we, anyway?”

“To answer the last first, we’re in M-51, orbiting a lonely star, about thirty-five million light-years from anything that thinks. I picked it out of the Well years ago in case I needed a place to go. As for the other…” He paused, seemingly hesitant to voice his next thought. Quietly, he said, “Why didn’t you go with the others, Mavra? Why did you decide to die? It was your intention all along, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. The Well isn’t for me. I survived to complete the commission, to make certain that New Pompeii would never be in the hands of such as Trelig or Yulin. So after that, what? All my life I’ve prided myself on my independence. To return to the Well World is to be made into something random, maybe even a whirling flower or a thinking clam or maybe a Wuckl or an Ecundan. Someone else’s choice. And even if it’s a good one, your universe is the Well World, your existence confined to an area no bigger than New Pompeii. As for the Com—for a while I’d be a hero, but soon I’d be yesterday’s hero. Then I’d be just a freak, a four-legged woman with a tail. Maybe a nice compound for the heroine somewhere, like in Glathriel, or a circus, or some form of luxurious zoo. No freedom, no ship, no stars, no self-determination. What other choice did I have? Even what little I have left, my own life and accomplishments, turn out to be a lie. I don’t owe you and you don’t owe me, I always believed. But the beggars took me in because they were asked to, and helped me because they were asked to or paid to. The same one who did that sent my husband to me to get me out of the whore house.”

“But he did care for you,” Obie pointed out.

“I think he did—but that’s not the point. He would never have been there without Brazil. Even if we met, once, by chance, I’d just have been another bar girl. Now that I’ve thought it out, I wonder if any of it was for real? How many times did I escape because of outside interference? So many things broke right. So many things always broke right. Little things, big things, but they add up to my life. Even you—you programmed me as your agent for your own ends, and I did exactly what you wanted done, while my grandparents and Brazil’s friend Ortega looked after me on the Well World.”

“You underrate yourself,” Obie scolded. “You did it all yourself. Opportunity is not accomplishment. You did it, by ingenuity, by resourcefulness, by guts. You really are as good as you thought you were, and you have the potential to be much better.”

She shook her head. “No. Even if I accept all that, there’s Joshi. I liked him, and he was useful to me.

He was something I needed. But I’m sure I never would have…” Her voice faltered. “Never—do what he did, for him. He gave his life to save mine! Why?”

“Perhaps he loved you,” the computer replied kindly. “Love is the most abused word in history. It is, simply, caring more for others than you do for yourself. It’s a measure of greatness that flashes rarely in an otherwise pretty sordid universe. This is the quality that the Markovians lost, for godhead is inherently selfish. They lost the capacity to care for others, to give as well as receive, to love others as they would be loved. Their curse was the hollow emptiness left inside them when the ability to love was lost. Such was their tragedy that they could no longer even comprehend it.”

She sniffed in derision. “And me? It’s not within me, Obie. Others have loved me, I suppose—Brazil, my parents and grandparents, and most especially Joshi—but I never returned it, couldn’t return it. I don’t know how. I don’t even understand you now.”

“When Joshi died, you cried,” Obie reminded her softly. “Now you are lost and wallowing in self-pity, yet it is within you to grow, to learn it, Mavra Chang.”

“Another of those quantitative measurements you make when I run through you?” she retorted.

“It cannot be quantified,” Obie replied. “That’s why the Markovians couldn’t discover it. That’s why the Gedemondans will fail as well. They have sealed themselves off from the rest of mankind, in whatever form. All their energies are directed to isolating, to quantifying the element. And in that very act they reject their own potential for giving to others.” He paused for a moment.

“So, like the Markovians, you are forced to face the nonquantifiable, something you can’t touch, measure, or define except by example, and your own selfish nature eats you alive so your ego can be shattered. You want to die, as the Markovians finally wanted to die, but without even their noble motives. It is ironic that their very sacrifice was an act of that quality they, too, believed they no longer possessed.”

She laughed mirthlessly. “I can’t see the profit, the reason. As a beggar, I learned that most charity is really guilt. I deserve to die.”

“But you don’t,” Obie responded. “You could have killed yourself a thousand times, just in the last three days. Is that why you wish to retain that most inconvenient form? Punishment for the guilt you feel? Here! I give you choices, and they are freely given. You wish to be an animal? I shall place you where you want, as you are or as you wish to be. Want to be a queen? Just name the race. Anything you want, any place you want, alive, dead, productive, destructive. What is your wish? I will see that it comes about! Or—join me in exploring the nearly limitless stars, in helping where I can, in learning as well. In meeting the challenges to come. Very soon our human relatives will meet with not one but several other alien cultures. Are they to clash and condemn themselves, or mesh and grow? Do you want to join me in working at such grand projects, or will you allow your guilt and self-pity to place you in a hell most assuredly of the worst kind because it is of your own device? Tell me. Take your time—we have a lot of it, perhaps all there is.”

The words of the Gedemondans again floated through her mind.

First you must descend into Hell. Then, only when hope is gone, will you be lifted up and placed at the pinnacle of attainable power, but whether or not you will be wise enough to know what to do with it or what not to do with it is closed to us.

She’d once defined hell as the absence of hope, and Obie had added guilt and self-pity, so hell she had attained indeed.

She shook her head slowly in puzzled wonder, not able to comprehend or control new feelings that were rising inside her. For a long while she was silent. At last she looked around at the wrecked control room, at the air around her.

“Partners?” she asked softly, hesitantly.

“Partners!” Obie shouted joyfully.