Twilight at the Well of Souls

Bache

It had been an eerie trip through Dahir, a land that looked at once peaceful and deadly dangerous. The quiet landscape of gentle green forests and large ranch-style farms contrasted with the inhabitants, who looked inscrutable, formidable, and dangerous. They had sat there, atop great horned creatures, not like occasional onlookers or curious parade-watchers, but in highly disciplined ranks, staring with eyes that told nothing of the thoughts behind them.

They were tall and insectival, although not quite insects. Humanoid in shape, they had long, broad feet that ended in sharp claws. On smooth legs leading up to a metallic-looking torso, their slender, exoskel-etons were so polished that the creatures looked somewhat like robots in a stylized and idealized picture of such things. They had oval heads, with multiple orifices and mandibles set below oval eyes of faceted gold and above which rose long, quivering tendrils. Their bodies were of many colors, all with a metallic sheen—blues, greens, gold, reds and silver, among others. But their hands looked like mail fists. The seething anger and tension in them was immediately discernible. They didn’t like being ordered to stand aside.

Their mounts were mammals, and looked at first glance like classical unicorns, curved horns like conch shells rising out of the center of their horselike heads. But their rear legs were much larger and their hind feet broad and flat, like their rider’s. They could sit erect, looking almost like kangaroos, or use their double-jointed hind legs to lope about on all fours, and on close inspection their snouts were narrower, their heads smaller than a horse’s.

Of their reputed magic powers nothing could be seen, but the menace of it could almost be felt by the passing forces. They were glad to get through there. It had been decided to use a wide river valley in Bache to regroup and reorganize after the march. Now, so close to their goal and to the major opposition forces, all had to be perfect.

It was late afternoon, but the command tents were already up. Brazil left his own little corner of the field and walked to the main tent shared by Asam and Mavra; Marquoz left his own position to join them. This was to be the last staff meeting of the group, although only Brazil, who had called it, was aware of that fact.

They ate quietly, mostly discussing the eerieness of the Dahir and the tiredness they were feeling, forgetting the rwst for a while. Brazil even seemed to become a bit nostalgic.

“You know,” he said, “out there, among the stars, trillions of people are going about their normal daily affairs right now. Even back in the Com, as crazy as things were getting, most people are still going about their daily tasks. It’s kind of weird, all this. I have never felt at home on the Well World; it’s too much of a fantasy land, divorced from reality, from the whole rest of creation, apart and insular.”

“I find it refreshing,” Marquoz countered. “I kind of like the variety here. Different creatures, different social systems, ways of life. It’s a microcosm, yes, but unique, too. You seem to assume that insularity is necessarily bad.”

“That’s right, son,” Asam put in. “After all, this little war is the first in a thousand years, the third in history, and one of the other two was also caused by outsiders coming in. It’s really not a bad place at all.”

“But you haven’t been outside” Brazil noted. “You haven’t been anywhere but the Well. Tell me. Asam, haven’t you ever looked up at that glorious starfield there and wished you could go out there and visit it? Fly from star to star, world to world?”

Asam’s expression was thoughtful. Finally he said, “Well, I’ve been too much of a realist to do much dreaming like that, I’m afraid. Hell, I’ve still got most of this world to see, and I’ve seen more of it than most anybody alive. Out there—what do you have? A lot of emptiness and a lot of worlds, like this one, each with one race on it. Big, empty, and everybody always fighting everybody whenever they meet. Nope, I think I like it here.”

Brazil looked at Mavra. “You’ve been both places,” he noted. “Last time you were here you did damn near everything to get away. Have you changed your mind?”

She thought it over. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I really don’t. Asam has shown me another kind of life, one possible here. And I’m in a form that makes sense here, one that leaves me free, not the crippled beast I was back then.” She paused a moment, looking both thoughtful and sad. “But, then, it really doesn’t matter, does it? I mean, it’s going to be a long, long time before there’s space travel in the universe again, isn’t there? Unless you like rubbing sticks together and huddling in caves, this will soon be the only game in town.’”

He stared at her. “Maybe,” he answered cautiously. “Maybe not. All is relative when you deal with the Well of Souls. And what you say is only true for this universe, anyway.”

“It’s the only universe we’ve got,” she shot back.

He shook his head. “Uh uh. It’s only a universe, not the universe. The energy to start this one came from another. There has to be a complement. Physics requires it. At the center of every black hole, for example, is a singularity. What happens at that point? Does it ever come out? Energy and matter don’t cease to exist—they can neither be created nor destroyed. That’s the law. Only changed. All that glop has to be somewhere—it comes out in the other universe. A white hole. It’s the way things work. Just because the Well looks like magic, don’t make the mistake of assuming it is magic. It’s not. It’s just simply a technology higher than you can currently comprehend.”

Marquoz stared at him. “This doesn’t sound like the man I knew, who played the flute for pennies in dives around the fringes of the Com. It doesn’t sound like you at all.” He looked at Brazil with some suspicion. “Are you really Gypsy?”

He sighed and sat back, seemingly arguing inwardly with himself. Finally he said, so softly it was difficult to hear him, “If I’m not Gypsy, then who or what am I?”

Mavra looked at him in sudden horror. “You’re not Gypsy!” she gasped. “You really are Brazil!” She shook her head in disgust. “All our talks about me, about Brazil… How you must have been laughing at me. You son of a bitch!” She whirled around and trotted briskly out of the tent.

The rest were silent for a while, mostly from being unable to think of anything to say. Finally, Marquoz broke the impasse.

“You are Brazil, aren’t you? That’s why you’ve been avoiding me so much.”

He nodded. “Yeah, why not? Cat’s out of the bag now. What difference does it make?”

“Quite a lot, if Mavra’s reaction means anything’,” Asam noted.

He sighed. “Mavra has a problem. She feels deprived, deserted, abandoned at an early age, unloved. That craving for love, for a father, I suppose, turned into bitter hatred of me. Why not? I was the closest to a father figure she ever had. Growing up the way she did, alone, that bitterness formed a shell around her that seldom cracks. If you feel the lack of something, you convince yourself you’re better off without it. You take a fierce pride in your aloneness, your loneliness. You turn a liability into a self-perceived asset. That’s what she’s done. And she’s been hurt every time she let that shell drop, even slightly.”

“If she needs love, I can give her that,” Asam said sincerely.

“It might not be enough,” he warned. “She’s had so much hurt when she did become attached to somebody that she’s afraid to do it again. She may be more hung up than you can handle, Asam. Still, I’ll give her her own choice. Inside the Well, I can do a lot of things. If she wants to remain here, with you, she can. Her choice.”

Marquoz shuffled uncomfortably at all this talk of Mavra. He decided it was better to change the subject to more immediate problems.

“All right, Brazil. Suppose you explain what the hell you’re doing here instead of Gypsy—and what we’re doing here, too. How the hell do you expect to get in the Well like this?”

Brazil shrugged. “Don’t blame me for all this,” he responded defensively. “Remember, I didn’t even want to be here in the first place. It’s that damned computer that came up with everything, right from the start. I got tracked down and hauled to Obie kicking and screaming all the way. It was the computer that convinced the bunch of you to take this course of action, and the computer that charted the course. I’ll admit it’s a damned crazy machine—Mavra’s influence, I suspect. But it is a computer, and once all the facts it had were fed into it, it decided that I must repair the Well and it decided on this scheme based on all the data it had fed into it.”

“Including you,” Marquoz noted.

He nodded sourly. “Yeah, that, too. Did him precious little good, though. Did him in, maybe—almost me, too. Well, anyway, Obie was once hooked into the Well, so he knows how it works—how it’s programmed, anyway, which is more than I do. He decided to run the entire population of Olympus through the big dish to meet his specifications and some others, too, ourselves included. We got the treatment—somehow, Obie reconstructed you and Mavra and Yua, for example, to come out as certain specific creatures when put through the Well. Also the rest of the Nautilus crew, most of whom were sent ahead here to make the initial preparations. We had to buy the ships, scout the terrain, that sort of thing. The key to the plan turned out to be Gypsy, who, among other things, could somehow make himself into the spitting image of anybody he wanted.”

“Who—or what—is Gypsy, Brazil?” Marquoz wanted to know. “I thought I picked him up on a backwater, even though there were always a lot of odd things about him.”

Brazil slowly shook his head. “I know, I know. But, to tell you the absolute truth, I haven’t the slightest idea as to the answer. I’d love to know myself. I think Obie knew, but he didn’t tell anyone. At least Gypsy’s on our side and is a key to the plan. His power, if that’s the best word for it, is the ability to somehow use the Well powers by sheer force of will. I’ve figured out that much, anyway. Like a little Obie, he can tap the whole thing, but only in regards to himself. He can’t zap you or me other places or alter our appearances.”

“Like a little Markovian, you mean,” Asam put in. “Sounds to me like he’s just exactly what they had in mind.”

Brazil considered that. “In a way, I guess you’re right. He can do just about what any average Markovian could have done, and if he had a full Markovian brain around to tap, to use as an amplifier for that, he could probably do whatever they did.”

“He has the whole damned Well of Souls,” Marquoz pointed out.

Brazil shook his head. “Uh uh. That isn’t the way it works. It’s a different kind of machine, run in a different way and for a different purpose.”

“Mavra figured, when we learned that it wasn’t you that dropped her off on that Markovian planet, that Obie had made a double of Gypsy while Gypsy played you,” Asam told him.

“Wouldn’t work,” he replied. “Oh, Obie could make a construct that looked like Gypsy, but not one that would hold up among friends and associates for any length of time. No, I suspect that when you saw Gypsy you were seeing what Gypsy wanted you to see and hear. I think he has that much power. And when he reached the Markovian planet he had enough reserve force from its own computer brain to maintain the illusion even after he left.”

“You’re supposed to be a Markovian,” Asam noted. “Couldn’t you spot another one? If there’s one, why not two?”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t think that’s the answer. It’s possible, but highly unlikely. Somehow I have the gut feeling that the answer to Gypsy’s mystery is right in front of us, simple, logical, obvious, but we can’t see it. It really doesn’t matter, except that it’ll drive me crazy someday. The fact is that he can do what he can do and Obie used that.”

Marquoz looked at the small man strangely. “If Gypsy can do those things, why can’t you?”

“Because I’m not a Markovian and I don’t have the slightest idea how the system works,” he replied quickly. “That doesn’t mean I can’t fix the problem— I know which buttons to push, so to speak. Except for that I’m really not much different from either of you. I can’t see the Markovian energy, can’t feel anything special, nor can I use the power. I have power only inside the machine—and, even there, I’m the computer operator, not a designer. There’s a big difference.”

“Sounds like you’re runnin’ yourself down, son,” Asam commented. “A whole lot of people have fought and died for you.”

“Or something,” he responded glumly. “No, there’s nothing particularly special about me, Asam. I couldn’t even accept responsibility in Mavra’s case. I palmed off this inconvenient child on others. She’s really got a case against me, I guess.”

“Not feelin’ a little guilt on that, are you?” the centaur prodded.

Brazil chuckled. “No, Asam, not really. The truth is, if I let guilt get to me, I’d be truly insane. Maybe I am, anyway, but I just can’t feel much anymore. I have simply been alive too long. Much too long.”

“Bitter?” Marquoz asked him.

“Not bitter. Just tired. Very, very tired, Marquoz. You can’t believe what it’s like to live day after day, year after year, century after century, for uncounted centuries. I’m a foolish, foolish man, Marquoz. I did this to myself. I chose it, freely, without turning a hair or doubting a second. But nobody, nobody can imagine how horribly lonely it is. Lonely and dull. Races don’t mature overnight; they do it over thousands of years. And you wait, and you watch everybody you cared about grow old and turn to dust, and mankind goes forward maybe a millimeter or less every century or two. Finally you decide you want out, decide you can’t take it any more—and you can’t get out. You’re trapped, absolutely.”

“Gypsy told us you might kill yourself once you fixed the Well,” Asam said uneasily. “Sounds like he wasn’t far off the mark.”

Brazil smiled bitterly. “It all depends, Asam. That’s the only place I can do it, but I can’t unless there’s somebody to take over the watch, assume the responsibility.”

The Dillian suddenly reached down and gripped Brazil tightly in iron fists. “Not Mavra! You won’t do that to Mavra!” he growled.

Brazil reached up and peeled the angry centaur’s hands from his shoulder. “I won’t do that to anyone, Asam,” he said gently. “I couldn’t do it. All I can do is offer choices. That’s all anybody in this life gets— choices. I’m the only one in the whole damned universe with no choices, really, at all.”

There wasn’t much to say to that, so Marquoz brought him back to the original subject. “Well, so what’s the plot of this crazy business?”

Brazil looked up at Asam and rubbed his shoulder a little. “Look, Colonel, got one of your cigars? I’ve been going crazy with these damned cheap bastard cigarettes trying to convince you I was Gypsy.”

Asam went over to his pack, rummaged around, found two, threw one to him and stuck the other in his mouth. Marquoz watched them light up mournfully, wanting nothing more than to join them and no longer having the suction in his mouth to manage it.

“I’ll just sniff yours,” he moped.

Settled down again, Brazil continued the story, explaining things up to this point. “Now, two nights hence, Gypsy’s going to deliberately expose himself as me,” he told them. “That’ll lead them to the correct conclusion that the one they know about is the real one. And I’ll still be here—sort of.”

Marquoz nodded. “I think I see. Gypsy will use those powers of his to come here instantly. Brazil will make his usual appearances—only you’ll be gone. They’ll think they have the correct one and they’ll move in for the kill.”

He nodded. “And I’ll have a day’s head start. I plan to leave tomorrow night. A few of those Agitarian Entries we picked up a few days ago aren’t what they seem. They’re Nautilus crew and they’ve got a couple of those pegasus—pegasi? Eh, who cares? Anyway, I’m about the same size as one of them and they can carry double, anyway. We’ll form half the team. A couple of Eflik will take Mavra with us on a conveyance designed for that purpose. Don’t look alarmed, Asam, we tried it and it’s perfectly safe and the Eflik are more than able to handle the weight if we don’t fly more than a couple of hours at a time.”

“It’s not that I’m thinkin’ of,” the centaur said darkly.

Brazil sighed. “I told you I wouldn’t force anything on anybody. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not going to do a damned thing. It’s up to Mavra all the way. It’s her show, really.”

“She’d better change the act, then,” said a voice behind them. They all whirled around, startled.

Standing there, looking very much his old self, was Gypsy.

“They caught me before I was ready,” the newcomer said disgustedly. “Nothing I could do. They were going to drug me.”

“Oh, shit,” Brazil muttered. “Well, I guess we go now, then. It might still work.”

“Why shouldn’t it?” Marquoz wanted to know. “So you have to go an extra few hours’ flight. That shouldn’t be more than an inconvenience.”

“It’ll be tough on the Eflik,” Brazil replied, “but a little more risky for us. We’ll have to fly by night, hide by day. Verion will be impossible to cross for the next few days—it’s some kind of rutting season there and those worms glow like electric lights. We’ll be spotted, and what can be spotted can be reported and maybe shot down. That’ll mean a southern route—and Yua’s Awbrians aren’t far enough along yet to have drawn Khatir’s forces away from the Avenue or even provide a good diversion.”

“I’ve helped with that,” Gypsy told him. “I stopped off and dropped in on Yua to explain the situation. She’s proceeding with all speed. It’s riskier than it would be night after next, but the odds are still pretty much with us. I say we go.”

Brazil nodded, looking over at Asam. “Get Mavra, will you?”

For a moment the Dillian hesitated, thinking, perhaps, that if she didn’t go there was no further threat.

“Not thinking of changing sides now, are you, Asam?” Marquoz prodded the centaur. “If you did, you’d lose her anyway.”

The Colonel sighed and went out to find Mavra.

Brazil turned to Gypsy. “You old son of a bitch, you’re going to have to explain yourself to me before this is over.”

Gypsy grinned. “Maybe. Before it’s over,” he said playfully. “Hey, Marquoz, about time we got together for this! We’re a team again this time!”

“Could be,” the Hakazit responded thoughtfully. “Could be…”

Brazil shifted uncomfortably. “Wonder what’s keeping Asam? Damn it, we’ve got to get a lot of stuff together before we go, and we have to go as quietly as possible. Gypsy, can you cover for us?”

He nodded. “For a little while, which is all we need. It’s a big army, a big, long line. I think I can put in the required Brazil appearances with no trouble and maybe occasionally become Mavra if the question comes up.”

“Okay, then. Damn! What’s wrong out there? Is Mavra so mad at me she won’t even come back? Or did Asam…?” He let the thought trail off.

Suddenly they were all on their feet, nervous and anxious. Brazil looked at Gypsy. “Give yourself some protective coloration,” he told the dark man. “We’re going to find out what’s up.”

Gypsy shimmered, changed, became a Hakazit.

“That’s a female Hakazit,” Marquoz noted playfully.

“Got to keep up your reputation,” Gypsy came back, and they went out.

They spread out, looking around the flat valley floor. Thousands of creatures of many different races were camped out there, firelights stretching in all directions, but they couldn’t see any sign of Asam or Mavra Chang.

Brazil called his humans to him and gave them instructions to comb the area. Gypsy, disguised as a Hakazit, quickly memorized names and faces as Brazil did so.

As more time passed and no word came, Brazil turned to Gypsy and said, “I don’t like the feel of this.”

“Me neither,” Gypsy agreed. “You think maybe we’ve had it our own way too long and the odds are starting to balance out now?”

“I’m afraid—” Brazil began, but was cut off by a shout from one of his humans. He took off at a run in the indicated direction and Gypsy lumbered along behind him.

Very near the small river was a grove of trees, and it was to these that the runners directed them. Brazil reached the river first and spotted Marquoz, standing there and looking at something in the river mud. Next to the Hakazit stood Asam, looking stricken.

“Right in the middle.of the whole goddamn army!” Marquoz snarled. “God! We were so damnably cocky! Those sons of bitches!”

Brazil looked down at the mud. He could see the hoofprints of a Dillian, walking along the river and very near the clump of trees. Part of the bank was torn from its moorings just ahead and there the hoofprints became a tangled, blotched mess. No other prints could be seen anywhere.

“Damn it! How the hell do you snatch a five hundred kilo Dillian out from under the noses of ten thousand friendly troops?” Marquoz fumed.

Asam looked up at Brazil, his face ashen, his expression a mixture of grief and bewilderment.

“She’s gone,” he rasped in an unbelieving tone. “They’ve got her.”

Gypsy lumbered up behind them, stopped, and instantly realized what must have happened.

“Oh, shit,” said both Nathan Brazil and Gypsy in unison.