02. Shadows of the Well of Souls (35 page)

Mavra grinned. "Yeah, I'm having to get used to sea legs as well. It's been a
long
time. You'll find the motion a lot more pronounced aboard this small ship than on that giant you came up to Itus on." She turned and gestured. "See those ropes? They're well secured with steel clips, and they run all around the deck. Use them to keep yourself steady in rough seas." She grinned. "Don't worry. You'll get used to it. Promise."

Lori wasn't so sure. "That's a lot easier to say, built like you are, but hooves designed for sand and rough ground don't do all that well on slick hardwood decks. I think for now we'll be better off below."

Mavra nodded. "Suit yourselves. The Dillians have things fairly well set up back there, but they're also going to have to get used to balance."

"Yeah, well, they've got four feet! I think if I had four, I might at least be able to stay upright." And with that he gestured to a very relieved Alowi, and hand over hand, using the ropes, they made their way below.

For Mavra Chang, however, it was something else, something quite different. Looking aft at the rapidly receding lights, feeling the lurch of the ship, the smell of salt air, the rustling canvas above, and the strong breeze pushing them on, two sets of opposing thoughts and emotions rose within her.

In a positive way she felt
home
somehow, alive once more. The only thing that would have made it better would be if this were
her
ship and
she
was in the wheelhouse charting courses and giving commands. In some ways, perhaps, she would prefer that even to commanding the bridge of a starship, where one was in command of a vast but lonely structure in which the crew was wholly automated and the silence and stillness were ever-present.

But there were darker memories as well, of other ocean voyages where she had been not in charge or even a passenger but
cargo,
and disposable cargo at that, where the days were full of pain and the nights full of horror.

They
would never do that to her again. She would see to that.

Dlubine,

Moving Toward the Fahomma

Border

THERE WAS A DRAMATIC SCENE ANYWHERE ONE LOOKED AFTER dark in Dlubine. All around, at different very specific locations, one could see lightning illuminate large cloud masses or occasionally but spectacularly snake down to the sea and play along it, often for several seconds, looking like some mad scientist's laboratory experiment. Yet overhead there would be frequent breaks in the clouds, giving windows into the magnificent and colorful night sky of the Well World, while below varicolored lights crisscrossed and weaved intricate patterns, sometimes exploding into huge complex patterns for a while, although nothing on the scale of what they'd seen the first night. And now and then the winds would bring whiffs of sulfur or the rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide. At least once they'd sailed past an island perhaps two or three kilometers distant that, while invisible in the darkness, betrayed itself by showing streams of red running tendrillike down dark self-made mountains to the sea and ending in great plumes of steam. Where hot lava met the sea, the combination created its own very local thunderstorms.

"You could make a million bucks selling cruises through here," Gus noted, just staring out at the amazing sights.

"Well, I suppose the inhabitants would have something to say about that," Brazil responded, taking advantage of the conflicting winds from the surrounding turbulence and making reasonably good time. "Still, what would you do with the money, Gus? What's the top of the real estate market in Dahir?"

Gus laughed. "Not that great. Oh, it's comfortable enough, but, well, this might sound funny, but they're just too much like the small town in northern Minnesota that I got out of."

"Like
what
?"
Brazil chuckled. "
This
I got to hear."

"Well, the place is pretty damned dull, frankly, just like home. Nothin' much happens, and what little that does isn't important but it becomes the biggest thing around 'cause it's
something.
Everybody's into everybody else's business 'cause they don't have much else to do, the life's routine, and the pleasure for them is simple. On top of it all it's dominated by a straitlaced church that's gonna make sure you behave and go to heaven, or wherever they think Dahirs go. No imagination, no curiosity. Even the weather's borin'. And I mean, think about this kinda invisibility thing. Even that's a drag there. I mean, so you decide to rough it and hunt your own food down 'cause it's fun, right? Only nothin' can see you comin', so where's the sport? Even back home the deer could see you and make a break for it or hide out, and even the fish had a
little
bit of a chance. Nothing's even really wild in Dahir. It's all carefully managed. I couldn't stand it no longer than I did."

"Urn, I see what you mean. You couldn't just find an attractive female and go off and buy your own swamp or something?"

"Not likely. Hell, it's the
women
who run the damn place. They're the bigger ones, they got the muscles, and they're all kinda muddy brown. It's us guys who have all the color and are supposed to attract a female. They lay the eggs, but the guys hatch 'em. I know I'm supposed to have been made comfortable with bein' a Dahir and all that, but that's just the physical part. I mean, the swimmin', the eatin' the way I eat and what I eat, stuff like that, no problem, but in my head I'm still the same guy. I been him too long to be somebody else. And that arrangement just don't seem
natural
to me."

"I know some women who'd like that arrangement just fine." Brazil laughed. "It's not as uncommon among either animals or sentient species as you think, but I can see your point. Some people handle the cultural differences fine, but others find things just too topsy-turvy to adjust in that department. Tell me, what
would
you do if you had your pick? You've seen a bit of this world and its denizens. Would you be something else? Or would you go back if you could?"

Gus thought about it. "I dunno. I guess I ain't seen enough of this place to really decide if there's somethin' neat to be. I sure wouldn't be no Earth-human type, not if it meant havin' done to me what was done to Terry. Go back? Yeah, maybe. I loved the job, no question. That's what I miss most. But I also had started thinkin' that I was gettin' older too fast and slowin' down and the odds were gonna catch up to me sooner or later. You know the worst thing, though? The one thing I dreaded, really hated? And it wasn't bein' shot at or bombed or nothin' like that."

"I couldn't guess."

"Comin' home. Thing was, I didn't really have one. My folks are dead; the rest of my family's as happy not to see me as I am not to see them. Got one sister who married a career navy guy and she's got a couple of neat kids, but I always felt like a stranger when I visited, like I didn't really belong there no matter how much she said she liked me visitin' her. I dunno. You get to a point in life, you don't want to stop what you love doin', but you also want something else, something more . . . permanent, I guess. And I just wouldn't feel right keepin' on doin' what I'm doin' if I had a wife and kids, particularly kids. Be worse than bein' a navy wife. Sort of like bein' a cop's wife, wonderin' if I was gettin' my ass blown off someplace and only coming home between revolutions and massacres. There's some that do it, but I couldn't, and takin' a job runnin' around to the latest drug bust or bank heist or whatever isn't the same thing."

"Permanence but with a lot of action and variety—that's a pretty tall order," Brazil commented.

"Yeah, I know. I guess I'll never find what I'm lookin' for. Kinda like the sign I once saw in a shop. 'Quality! Service! Price!' it read. Then underneath it added, 'Pick any two.' Still, I'd love to go back if I could keep this invisibility or whatever it is. You could still get caught by a random bullet and nobody'd notice you sinkin' in the quicksand, but you could walk right into the rebel camp and film away. Speaking of which, how come you ain't been spooked once since I got back? I really didn't think about it until just now, but you've had no problems seem' me, have you?"

"No," Brazil admitted. He hadn't told Gus about all that had transpired, and he wanted to keep most of it that way. What Gus didn't know he couldn't reveal if he really got captured later on. Besides, who knew how he'd feel about Brazil having that kind of bond with Terry? But a few things had to be addressed.

"I picked up her second sight, sort of," he told the Dahir. "I don't know how, but somehow she gave it to me. At least, when I woke up, I had no more problems seeing you or her just like I'd expect to."

"Yeah? You also got the power to blank out other folks?"

"I haven't the slightest idea," Brazil replied honestly. "Unfortunately, at some point in this trip I'm almost sure to find out. I wouldn't be surprised, though. After all this time I tend not to be surprised at very amazing things happening when I need them."

"You sure got the luck, all right," Gus noted. "I mean, bad as it is for Terry, she's been a real plus for you this trip, right? Then I'm here as a Dahir with this crazy, built-in disappearin' act, and she figures it out and then gives it to you when they got your picture splattered all over creation. What are the odds of
that
?"

"Very low, Gus, but that's my point. It's not luck. It's the Well—the master computer. I'm just a glorified serviceman, like I said, but I have to be able to be there at the very infrequent times it needs me. So it kind of watches over me, like a guardian angel. It can manipulate probability, make a chain of events happen that serve its interests, although it doesn't do that for much of anything or anybody except me—and Mavra Chang. That doesn't mean that bad things don't happen to me. Sometimes nasty things happen in spades. I got sloppy this time around, didn't remember everything, and wound up spending a year and a half in Auschwitz for my trouble during World War II. It just means that nothing permanent happens. I suffered, I starved, I was treated lower than an animal there, but I survived. Barely, but I survived. That's what it does, Gus. It makes sure I survive."

"Jeez! I keep forgettin' you don't age. But what did you mean by gettin' sloppy 'this time around'? You talk like you lived through the Nazis before."

"I did—but in Ireland last time, I think. That's the scary part of it all, Gus. Inside there, inside the Well, among other routine things, is something I can't really explain but which is, for all intents and purposes, a reset button. It's a last gasp thing, something only I, not the Well, can decide to push. What it does is—complicated. Now
there's
an understatement for you! But anyway, it resets. Not completely, of course. The universe still continues to expand, the
basics
don't change, but all life out there is essentially canceled out. All people, all history, everything pretty much. Time and space become objects of manipulation. In some cases it can use the same planet and solar system again; in other times it has to find material from somewhere else that pretty well matches what existed before and re-create from scratch. Each of the worlds goes through the whole process of development, of evolution, you name it. From the vantage point of the Well World, it happens in the wink of an eye, but it can be a few billion years or more out there. Don't ask me how that's possible. I'm just the guy who has to push the button sometimes, not the ones who built or designed it or the computer capable of such godlike things."

"Jesus! And you've actually
done
this?"

"Twice. The memory of doing
that
is something that's always stored somewhere inside me. I might forget it for a while, but when I get here, I remember. Hitler, Stalin, all the mass murderers of Earth history are pikers compared to me, Gus. I've killed
trillions
with one decision, and worse, I erased all signs of their existence. All their history, culture, everything. Gone. But then I brought them back, in real time. The Well is a master of matching probabilities. Everything repeats as closely as possible. Maybe not an absolute one hundred percent, but it repeats so eerily that you wind up seeing the same people, the same empires, the same dreams, the same wars, the same nations and ideologies."

"Jeez! You mean you killed
me
at some time in the past? Or another me? And another Terry, and all the rest?"

"Well, no. You two were long dead by the time I did it the last time. The time before—I only remember that I did it, that's all. But I was still a captain both times, I'm pretty sure of that. Not of some ship like this, though, or even the big supertanker I was skippering back on Earth. Spaceships, Gus. Mavra, too. She had her own ship. She wasn't even
born
on Earth and might not even have heard of it until she fell in with me here. We moved a lot of cargo and occasional passengers between stars over a third of the Milky Way galaxy. God! How I loved that job! That's my equivalent of your photojournalism, Gus."

"Spaceships. Wow, that's neat!"

"Yeah, only the Well never inserts me at a point where I can do my job. This last time it inserted us, oh, I think maybe 50,000 B.C. or so. Since that time Mavra and I have both been, well, surviving, waiting until Earth once again headed for the stars. This time we didn't make it."

"Holy smoke! You mean you got to reset that thing again?
That's
what this is all about?"

"Maybe. I hope not. I don't know if I can do it again. I can't imagine why I'm here, but I've been here in between for other things. Somebody once was actually smart enough to figure out the mechanics of the Well and some Markovian mathematics. The Well was alarmed, not because he could do anything major but because he had the potential to do some damage right here. Events got manipulated so I fell through a Well Gate shortly after, and it was up to me to solve the problem. No damage done in the end, and I just went back to doing what I'd been doing. The Well doesn't let you stick around to get the universe into real trouble when it doesn't need you anymore. I
can
tell you that something's off kilter and may need adjustment. Something happened, maybe recently, maybe back as far as the last reset, but the tiny differences have accumulated to the point where, over thousands of years, they made a big change or a series of big changes. I noticed that when the Soviet Union collapsed so suddenly. I knew the consequences were terrible for later history that it did, but I kind of hoped it was just the result of a local aberration, just Earth, in other words. There're a lot more worlds and races than that out there."