Twilight at the Well of Souls

Ortega stared at him, even though all he could really make out were the creature’s glowing red eyes. Finally he said, “You know, Marquoz, you’re absolutely insane. What bothers me is that I can’t really find any way to disagree with you—and you know what that makes me.” He reached to the heavy leather belt between his second and third pair of arms and removed a large flask. “I seem to dimly recall from old diplomatic receptions that Hakazits have funny drinking methods but tend to drink the same stuff for the same reason as Uliks. Shall we drink to history?”

Marquoz laughed and took the bottle. “To history, yes! To the history of the future we write in the next two days! To our history, which we chose and which we determined!” He threw his head back and poured the booze down his throat, then coughed and handed the bottle back to Ortega, who started to work on the remains of it.

“That’s good stuff,” the Hakazit approved.

“Nothing but the best for the legion the night before,” Ortega responded.

A voice nearby said, “Got enough of that left for me? Or would it kill me?”

They jumped slightly, then laughed when they saw it was Gypsy. “Damn it. I keep expecting Gunit Sangh to pop out of the rocks,” Ortega grumbled. He threw the flask to the tall man, who caught it and took a pull, then screwed up his face in pleasant surprise.

“Whew! Nothing synthetic in that!” he approved, then got suddenly serious. “I’m about to go to Yua and tell her the situation. Last I heard she’d taken some of her squad and flown around Khutir’s main force on her way here. They surprised the old general good; gave him a sound thrashing. But they’re still three days behind.”

Marquoz chuckled. “Three days. Couldn’t be two.”

“Anything you want me to particularly tell her?” Gypsy asked.

“Tell her—” Ortega’s voice quivered slightly— “tell her… that we’ll hold for Brazil. We’ll hold until she gets here, damn it all. Tell her a lot of very brave and very foolish people are going to make it all work. And tell her thanks, and godspeed, from old Serge Ortega.”

Gypsy nodded understandingly, a sad smile on his own face. “I’ll be back in time for the battle, Serge.”

The Ulik chuckled and shook his head unbelievingly. “You, too? The number of martyrs we’re getting these days must set a new record. My, my!”

“Practicality,” Gypsy told him. “You see, when Brazil enters the Well and shuts it down I’ll lose my contact with it. I’ll no longer be a creature of the universe, only of the Well World from whence I came so long ago. And I was a deepwater creature. I’ll be dead from the pressure so fast I won’t have time to suffocate.”

“You can always return to Oolakash, Doctor, and do it all over again,” Ortega suggested. “It hasn’t changed all that much, even in a thousand years.”

Marquoz looked at them both, puzzled. “Doctor? Oolakash? What the hell is this?”

Gypsy stared at Ortega for a moment. “How long have you known?”

“Well, for a certainty only right at this moment,” the Ulik admitted. “I’ve suspected it almost since the first time we met. You could do the impossible and that wasn’t acceptable. The only possible explanation was that you had completely cracked the Markovian puzzle, completely understood just exactly what they did and how they did it. And I could think of only one man who could possibly do that. If you’d been from a race that had done it, well, there’d be more of you. If you were a long-gone Markovian, I think Brazil would have known you, at least when you met. So that left only one man, a man I once knew, the only man I ever knew who understood how the Well worked and whose lifework it was to learn all there was to learn about it—a man who vanished and was presumed dead long ago.”

“All right, all right,” growled Marquoz. “I think I’m entitled to know what the hell you two are talking about.”

“Marquoz,” Ortega said lightly, “I’d like you to meet the first man to tame the Markovian energies, the man who built the great computer Obie and whose fault most of this is. Marquoz, Dr. Gilgram Zinder.”

The Hakazit looked over at Gypsy, then laughed. “Gypsy? You? Zinder? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my whole life.”

“That’s what threw me,” Ortega admitted. “The man who did all that, who finally, first with Obie’s aid and then without, managed to be able to talk to the Markovian computers and make them obey his will—and he chooses to go home and become a wandering gypsy and bum?”

Gilgram Zinder chuckled. “Well, not at the start, no. And the human mind isn’t up to the training, nor is it perfectly matched for full communication. But I got to the point where I could influence it as regarded myself. Takes a lot of effort, and off the Well World it can cause monster headaches. I really never was able to do much with it beyond myself, and I realized that, without a lot of additional apparatus, I never would be able to get any further, and that needed apparatus would make Obie a toy. It would take something the size of the Well of Souls, and that was not worth thinking about for obvious reasons. So I used the power to wander a while, as Obie and Mavra wandered and explored, over the whole of the universe in various forms until I got bored with it. After all, unlike Obie, I could do little except survive and adapt. So, I went home at last to the Com and found it much improved from my day. It gave me a lot of satisfaction to see that a lot of the worst evils were gone, in part, at least, due to what we accomplished many years before. You understand, I always had lived a very restrictive sort of life. A lonely life. I wasn’t handsome, or even distinctive. I had my work, and that’s all I had. I had to bribe a woman to bear my child and build my other child myself.”

“But your work succeeded beyond your wildest dreams,” Ortega pointed out.

“Beyond my— Yes, I suppose it did. I’m now as close to a Markovian as I think it’s possible for one of our time to become.”

“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,