03. Quest for the Well of Souls (37 page)

The girl stared at him unbelievingly. "Are you really my father?" she asked.

He shook his head slowly. "No, somebody else was, somebody human. I have his memories, and his personality, but I'm something else now."

That seemed to satisfy her, and Nikki, who'd tensed at the question, visibly relaxed.

Renard looked at the others, anxious to change the subject. "What about them?" he asked, looking at the seven other girls.

Wooley undid her straps and walked to him. She was taller than he and her tail trailed like a bird's plume.

"We've explained to them that they have all lost their memories for good," she whispered to him, "because of the machine. They'll be okay."

That relieved him, and his body reminded him of a different need. "We've got at least a couple of days on this tub," he pointed out, "and very little to eat."

She shrugged. "We can hold out if we have to. Actually, there's enough organic stuff in the padding and old packs. We can all have something, I think. You're the one that will probably have the most problem."

He chuckled and looked at his passengers. "Live on love, huh?" he cracked.

* * *

By the time contact was made two and a half days out, they had all practiced what was to be said—and what was not to be said—and their courses of action.

"This is the Com police," a stern male voice came over the radio. "Identify yourself by number and destination."

Renard sighed. "This is a refugee ship from New Pompeii, a planetoid formerly owned by New Harmony," he replied. "I am not a pilot and there is not one aboard."

That seemed to disturb the police a bit. There was some anxious checking against police computer files.

"Stand by, we will match you and board," the police ship stated.

"It's in your hands," he responded. "However, first I think I better warn you about a few things."

He proceeded to tell them of Antor Trelig's party, of Obie, the Well World, everything. The only details omitted concerned how to reach the Well World.

The police didn't believe, of course, but they recorded the information anyway; then they matched the ships, locked, and two armored cops boarded.

One look at the passengers and they had less reason to doubt.

Com police were an odd group: the wild ones, the undomesticated, the lovers of freedom and the restless. They were carefully recruited in midlife, usually after having been caught red-handed at something nasty.

In exchange for voluntarily undergoing some loyalty conditioning, they were paroled—to police the rest, to protect the Com and the frontier from others just like them.

They generally knew a hot potato when they grabbed it. The taped conversations were coded, sealed, and sent directly to the eleven-member Council Presidium, which made decisions when the full Council could not be summoned—or when it shouldn't be.

Three Council members were out to the ship in less than fourteen additional hours. They were Com, all right, yet each maintained his own strong character. One, a woman apparently approaching middle age, had an especially regal bearing.

"Some twenty-two years ago," Councillor Alaina said, "before I had this last rejuve, I hired Mavra Chang to attend Antor Trelig's little party as my agent. I never heard from her again, of course—but, since New Pompeii disappeared, taking dear Antor with it, I was satisfied." She looked around at the odd little group of human women and aliens. "And now I see she succeeded after all."

They all had tears in their eyes, and even the Bozog quivered a bit. Only the Ghiskind, as usual, was impassive.

"When I heard the police report, I didn't believe it—but here you all are, even Nikki Zinder!" She turned to Vistaru. "And you—an unexpected pleasure, Star Tonge. One of your sons is an invaluable Chief Counselor."

"The kids," Wooley murmured to herself. "It'd be interesting to see the kids again."

"And now we must decide what is to be done," Councillor Alaina continued. "We owe you all a great deal."

Renard slapped himself. "The sponge cure!" he blurted.

The refugees looked startled, and he nodded. "Obie—the computer—gave it to Mavra. She recorded it in the ship's log."

Alaina nodded to a Com policeman. "Get it," she ordered. "Secure it." She looked preoccupied, as if watching new vistas unfold. "If that cure holds up," she continued, "it'll break the back of the syndicate. The changes will be revolutionary."

"It'll work," the Agitar assured her. "Mavra said it would."

A grim expression marred the Councilor's normally impassive features. "Mavra Chang. Yes. So sad. You're sure we can't go back for her?"

"Studies show most power has failed," a policeman put in. "The plasma shield itself is weakening. If anybody's still there, they're dead now for sure."

She nodded. "I thought as much. But her name shall live on in our histories. She shall be celebrated among the greats. We will not forget her."

"None of us will," Renard replied sincerely.

* * *

They sat about half a light-hour off New Pompeii. On the screens the planetoid showed clearly as a small ball.

"Everyone thinks that you need the weapons locker to destroy a planet," Alaina noted. "But you don't. That takes a vote of all the Council, and we can't put this to the Council until we've substantially laundered it. No use informing the universe that such a thing as Obie is possible. Somebody else would surely build one."

All agreed.

Four ships showed on the screens, Com police cruisers towing huge objects with tractor beams.

"What are they?" Wooley asked, fascinated.

"Antimatter, my dear," Alaina replied. "It's all over the place, you know. Always has been. Calculate the mass of the object you want to destroy, grab some antimatter of equal mass, bring the two together, and they cancel each other out. Took a century even to create a tractor beam that wouldn't react with the stuff. The police craft will follow a trajectory that will have the antimatter asteroids strike New Pompeii at the same time. Should be quite a flash, and that will be that."

They watched as the ships moved by, curved, swung the asteroids around and let them fly.

And then scrammed like hell.

While they waited for the missiles to reach their target, Alaina discussed other things.

"Makes you wonder," she said, looking at Renard, the Bozog, and the Ghiskind. "If you three can exist, how many others might? Maybe just over the next solar system, so to speak. Perhaps within our lifetime two of our cultures will meet. How I'd love to see that!"

"If you'd been on the Well World you'd have your fill of alien races pretty quickly," Vistaru responded.

She shrugged. "I've always wondered. Perhaps such a clash will be the ultimate problem. Perhaps the other beings will be antimatter?
That
would be frustrating!" She laughed, then changed tone.

"Have you thought about your own futures?" she asked them.

"We—the Bozog, the Ghiskind, and I—can return to the Well World," Renard replied. "We've told you that. Just get us to a Markovian world. That's what we have to do, of course. There's no place for us in this part of the universe."

She nodded, and turned to the others. "What about you, Tonges?"

Wooley smiled. "Nikki Zinder has never had a chance to be a real person, live a real life. Her daughter even less so—and the others, well, they can learn to be people. It will be interesting to see how the family's come along. And, well, Star and I really did love each other, you know. It'll be fun being together again after all those long years."

"And we owe Mavra something," Vistaru put in. "Both of us keep thinking, if only we had stayed a little longer, if only we'd made sure that Vash's children all got out. If only we hadn't left them. She had such a horrible life—maybe we can help these other women, instead of letting them wind up in a hole, like Mavra. I think we owe that much to her, to them, and to ourselves."

Alaina nodded. "I think I can understand. Bodies like those can be wonderful, or the biggest curse you can have. And I'll help. Mavra's fee was agreed to, recorded, and never paid. I think you could do a pretty good job with a million, couldn't you?"

Wooley's eyes went wide. "A
million?
" She laughed suddenly. "Wow! We'll buy our own frontier world!" She looked at Vistaru. "You know, it's crazy, isn't it? We had lives once, then second lives on the Well, then third lives back here, fourth back on the Well, now fifth—I wonder if that means we're going to keep living forever? We can always return to the Well again in the future."

Vistaru laughed. "Yeah, but take it easy. You aren't my husband any more. You're superwoman now."

"I started out a woman," the other pointed out. "Not much of one, I admit. Maybe it's time for Wu Julee to find out what it's really like."

Vistaru nodded. "It can really be wonderful," she said softly.

"Look!" Renard yelled. "The asteroids are about there!"

As he spoke four smaller dots converged on the large ball. A tremendous flash of energy blurred their vision momentarily, then there was nothing.

Scans revealed no trace of New Pompeii, not the slightest speck of dust.

Alaina sighed. "That's it, then. Let's get out of here."

The ship throbbed to life and started moving. There were tears in Renard's eyes and all were silent.

"Good-bye, Mavra. Forgive us."

And even the Yugash's hood bowed.

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!"