05. Twilight at the Well of Souls - The Legacy of Nathan Brazil (35 page)

"Perhaps you should have completed your work," the snake-man suggested. "Maybe if you had, we wouldn't be in this situation now."

"Perhaps," he admitted grudgingly. "But, damn it, I gave my entire life to science and they laughed at me, those who didn't try to use the new power for evil ends. And then I had to give my daughter and my race and environment to it, too. And even the good side in that fight, when they were presented with my work, got frightened of it and tried to bury it forever. So I looked at this and I thought, What about me? Where do
I
get anything but royally screwed by the system? Selfless men wind up in neglected graves. I felt like I'd been given a new life, a new chance at all the things I'd missed, and I took it. A new life— a new series of lives. Even the Well World gave you only one start, but I had an infinite number. I was a rich and handsome playboy. Then I tried the other side, as an exotic and beautiful dancer who had to beat off would-be lovers with a stick. I learned to play a variety of instruments and composed music that attracted a serious following. I painted, I sculpted, I wrote a few stories and some poetry. I was on my way to being everything everybody ever wanted to be. The ultimate fantasy was mine: I could be any fantasy I chose, and I was. I enjoyed it all, too. The Gypsy phase was just another one of those, one I particularly enjoyed after teaming up with Marquoz, here—enjoyed it, that is, until the fools dug up my work, misunderstood it, misapplied it, and abused it to their own destruction, the fools."

"Why didn't you step in then?" Ortega wanted to know. "Tell them what they were doing wrong?"

Zinder shrugged. "What could I do? By the time I knew what they were working on it was too late. Even then I was really blocked. Suppose I
had
suddenly showed up and said, 'Hi! I'm Gil Zinder! I know you think I've been dead a thousand years, but I was only fooling.' Who would have believed me or paid attention to me? I'd never have gotten through the bureaucracy. It's much easier to make a bureaucracy
not
notice you than to notice and take you seriously. I left them the keys to godhood, to the universe, and they took it and destroyed themselves with it. And me—look at what it's cost me! Nikki . . . Obie . . . All that was dear to me."

Marquoz still couldn't quite believe all this. "So
you
killed Nikki Zinder? Your own daughter? Did Obie know?"

"He knew," Zinder assured him. "Although I didn't realize that until I was inside him myself and we could talk. We talked it out at great length, a sort of mutual catharsis. He would have had to do it if I hadn't, and that was the one thing he simply could not do. He could not harm Nikki. I even tried to talk him out of trying to integrate with Brazil, but to no avail."

"Brazil," the Hakazit muttered. "Why did Brazil do that to Obie?"

"Short him out, you mean? For much the same reason that I lose my powers when he turns it off. You see, we have a mathematical matrix here, a set of relationships that says, 'I am the universe and I am this way, according to these laws.' That's the original universe,  the Markovian,  or naturally formed  one.  It's quite small, really, compared with  ours. The whole thing was barely the size of a small galaxy. Now, the Markovians did it over themselves. They had a second creation, you might say, which, since it originated from the same point as their own for safety's sake, destroyed their planets and incorporated that old universe into ours. And since ours was a much larger explosion, it expanded with ours as well, which is why you find more Markovian worlds out there than around here. But they're the old, dead, original universe. Ours is superimposed on it—they didn't dare wipe theirs out or they'd wipe themselves out as well. This is the matrix imposed by the Well, the mathematical formulae of the Markovian computers, and
that
is what I came to decipher. With it I can adjust the superimposed mathematical building blocks just a tiny bit to suit myself. Obie could do no more than I, but he could do it over a planetary area. The individual Markovians, I believe, could do it even better, since it was matched to their brains specifically. But it is the Well that maintains this mathematically superimposed set. When Brazil turns it off, that set of mathematics will cease to exist. And, when he repairs it and turns it back on, he'll have to instruct it to build a new mathematical model. A new one. It'll be very much like the original, but it will differ in many specifics. It can't be as far-reaching, for example, since he'll have only 1,560 races here to work with. It'll also be formed from the power of his mind, and that will color it ever so slightly. It will be slightly different.
Very
slightly, perhaps one digit in a billion-place equation, but it
will
be different. He can't help it. Obie is part of the old math. So is the universe we knew—the Com, the stars and planets, the races out there."

"I think I understand you," Ortega put in. "Obie was built to cope with this superimposed set of rules, or math, or whatever you want to call it. So is everything we know—except the Well World, which is on a separate, model computer not affected. And Brazil is from the old math, the Markovian math, and Obie simply couldn't cope with him because he was slightly, ever so slightly, off, and that blew Obie's circuits."

Zinder nodded. "A tiny difference, but vital. He just couldn't cope with that difference. The same reason why Brazil can't really change his appearance once he sets it in the Well. He's not a part of the math of the known universe; he reverts always to form. We can't even kill him. There is always a way out provided by circumstance, which is another way of saying that the Well looks out for him. Only inside the Well can he die, since the Well was partly
designed
to change Markovians to the new mathematics."

"Do you think he'll kill himself?" Ortega asked. "I think I understand him now, a little. I've lived too long and I'm ready to go, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. Now I can, and it's a blessing and a relief. You can't believe the lack of a burden I feel. You
can
live too long, Doctor. Particularly when you can't change."

Zinder considered the question. "Will he kill himself? He's said so, many times. He's said that that's the only thing he
wants
to do. I think that's what Mavra Chang is there for—to receive the passing of the torch. She will go inside and be taught the workings of the Well, and it'll be matched to her. Once that happens and he checks her out on it, well, then he can die with a clear conscience. Somebody will be left to guard the truth, and instead of the Wandering Jew the new humans will have the mysterious, immortal woman."

"What a horrible fate," Ortega sighed.

"But it's of her own free will," Zinder pointed out. "When she tells him to turn off the machine, she takes full responsibility for the consequences, all of them. When she emerges, she'll be the only being
anywhere
left based on the present, rather than the new mathematics. She won't be able to be killed, or changed, and she'll be like that until she can turn it over to some wiser future race, if it ever arises, that again discovers the Well equations and does something with them other than destroy itself. If they
do
destroy themselves, some billions of years, perhaps, from now, she'll have the job of starting it all over again and maybe passing the torch herself at that point."

They thought about it, thought about the loneliness, the aimless wandering, without change, without end, the Well not even permitting madness. For a while she would enjoy it, of course, as Brazil must have, as Ortega had in his more limited yet no less oppressive self-exile. But, eventually, she would reach that point when she had lived too long, and she would
know.
"I don't think she realizes the devil's bargain she's making," he said sadly.

Zinder shrugged. "Does anyone? And can we go back and do it all again? Can I undo the damage to the universe? To the Well? No, I think not. Not any more than you can take back any of your crucial decisions." He paused. "I better go now. Yua must be told —and I want to be back by dawn."

Serge Ortega put out his hand and Zinder took it. "Until dawn, then, Gilgram Zinder. We shall meet, together, down there at the canal, eh?"

"At the canal," the other man agreed. "But not Doctor Gilgram Zinder, no, not now. Most of him died in Oolakash about nine hundred years ago. What little of him survived that event died with Nikki on Olympus and the rest with Obie on
Nautilus.
I'm just Gypsy, Ortega. That's the way I want it to be, and so that's who I am. I can be whoever and whatever I want."

"Wait! One more thing!" the Ulik almost shouted. "How will we know if we held long enough? Can you tell me that?"

Gypsy laughed. "If I'm here, you'll know for sure and in a very sudden and messy manner. If not—well, if you can last until night, and if it's clear and you're in position to see a little bit of the sky, you'll see the stars go out."

"But that's impossible!" Ortega protested. "Even if the universe goes out, it would be thousands of years before we'd know!"

"When he pulls that plug," Gypsy told them both, "the universe won't simply cease to be. For all practical purposes it will never have been. There never will have been those stars and dust to radiate that light. There'll be nothing but the dead Markovian universe —and the Well World. Nothing else will exist, will ever have existed, beside that."

It was a sobering thought.

"One last thing," Marquoz put in. "Did you tell Brazil who you were?"

Gypsy chuckled. "Nope. He fished for it, but he wouldn't tell me why a Markovian guardian should be a Jewish rabbi, so fair's fair." And he vanished.

"That's a good point," Ortega noted to nobody in particular. Finally he turned to Marquoz. "Since you're going to be here, you'll take command of the Verion side, I trust?"

Marquoz nodded. "It's all arranged. They're ready to fly me over whenever I'm ready."

For the second time that night Ortega extended his hand in firm comradeship and for the second time it was taken in the same spirit.

"Like with Gypsy," Ortega said. "We'll meet at the canal."

"At the canal," Marquoz agreed. "We'll be only thirty meters apart."

"We'll swim it," Ortega said warmly.

There was a loud explosion downstream, not at all near them, and lights went on farther down. There was some automatic-controlled fire, then everything winked off and there was silence.

"I'd better go," the Hakazit said, the echo of the explosion and shots still sounding up and down the canyon. He turned, then paused and looked back. "You know, wouldn't it be crazy if we won?"

Ortega laughed. "It'd louse up all this for sure."

Marquoz turned back and trudged off in the darkness. Ortega remained, sitting back on his tail and looking out into the darkness, settling down to wait for the dawn and trying, on occasion, to get a look at the obscured stars above.

The Avenue, at the Equatorial Barrier

SERGE ORTEGA HAD BEEN AS GOOD AS HIS WORD. ALTHOUGH they had passed signs of fighting and occasional dead bodies of hapless patrols, no opposition faced them all the way up the Avenue. A few times they had almost fallen into the water from the unstable rock slides, but that had been the extent of the problem.

Mavra had never seen the Equatorial Barrier except from space, and now that it loomed over her she found it much less a dark wall than it looked from a distance. Partially translucent, it went up as far as the eye could see, a huge dam at the head of the river, which was merely a trickle at this point. She noticed that the area where the Avenue reached the wall was absolutely dry; obviously the only water here would be that which struck and ran down from the enormous barrier.

It looked like a giant nonreflecting shield of glass, not very thick and amazingly shiny and free of any signs of wear. It was only here, at the wall itself, that the true Avenue could be seen—shiny and smooth, like the barrier itself. Where it joined the wall there was no seam, no crack; the two simply merged.

It was near dusk of the second day, but even Brazil could not enter immediately. Using the Gedemondan, now their only companion, he told the other two, "We have to wait for midnight, Well time, or a little more than seven hours after sunset. That means we sit and wait."

Mavra relaxed and looked back up the canyon. "I wonder if they're still alive back there?" she mused aloud.

"Yeah," was all he could say in response. He didn't really want to betray the fact to anyone, least of all Mavra, but he was deeply and sincerely affected by the sacrifice those creatures of many races, some of whom meant a good deal to him by this time, were making. The war was more of a mass thing, an abstract thing, and there were many possibilities in a battle. You could win or lose, you could live or die, but you always had a chance. They hadn't had a chance and they knew it, yet they did it so that he could stand here.

His thoughts went back to Old Earth once again, to Masada in particular. He hadn't been there, hadn't really been very close to the place, but the history of the tremendous sacrifice they had put up, the miraculous amount of time they had held, and, in the end, their total commitment, which ordained death rather than surrender to tyrrany, had uplifted him at a time when he had felt desolate and dispirited. If man had such a spirit, there was hope.

There were few such examples of that spirit, he reflected sadly. Few, but always one, always at a time when one would swear greatness was dead, the human spirit dead, and all was lost. This was such a moment now, he reflected. It might be a long, long time before such a thing happened again, but for the first time he found himself believing that it
would
happen again.

He was amazed by the thought, by his capacity to still think it after such a long, long time. Could it be, he found himself wondering, that
his
spirit wasn't dead, either?

He was amazed, too, that there was just the three of them. Just he, Mavra, and the Gedemondan they needed to speak to each other. He had offered it to more, to anybody who wanted to come, in fact. They had chosen to stay at the pass. Maybe they're the smart ones, he thought wistfully. At least they had the choice.