02. Shadows of the Well of Souls (15 page)

He felt awkward and helpless and, even worse, stupid. It was almost like a horse riding a horse. He was just never designed to ride on the back of a soft animal, but there was little choice at the moment.

Mavra turned to Julian and said, "Well, you're leading the way because you can see and we can't. Can you handle it? I know how hard this high G is on you."

"I'll be all right," she assured the woman in black. "You said south, right? How far do you wish to go tonight?"

"Well, we're going to be moving a lot slower and more cautiously than I planned, but we ought to go on until at least one of us has to stop. It shouldn't be more than a dozen kilometers or so to the border if we head due south. That's a haul on foot in the dark under these conditions, but we haven't done much more than rest on our duffs all day. Can you make it?"

"Yes." No equivocation, no hesitancy. Mavra liked that.

"I think you're gonna do just fine, Julian. You sure you know which way's south? We had a bend just before we came in."

"I know. It is something in the Erdomese brain. Once we have a fix on the sun at any point, we always know direction, even when the sun is gone." She looked around, thinking. "The first thing is to find a road or trail of some kind going in our direction and parallel it. I do not think we should risk Tony or Anne Marie tripping over jungle vines or fallen logs. Just keep close and I will get you through."

"You sound like you've done this sort of thing before."

"Air force survival training. This is no worse than the jungles of Panama or Honduras."

"That's
right
!
Lori said you were once captain of a spaceship."

"No, captain was my rank in the air force. A military service. I was a mission specialist on the space shuttle, not a pilot or commander, although I had a jet pilot's license."

"Too much of this is new to me," Mavra admitted, her translated voice coming to Julian's ears as an odd but understandable mixture of Erdomese and English, depending on the terms used. "I was in the jungle, cut off, for so long that it wasn't until a few years ago that I even realized that Earth had progressed to power tools, let alone flying machines and spacecraft, and by that time I saw them only as evil magic. Until I spoke with Tony and Anne Marie here, I had no idea Brazil wasn't still a Portuguese colony, let alone that your own country even existed. It was all very ironic. All I was doing was holding out in the wilderness until technology advanced to where I could get off that planet, and I managed to fall into a trap where I rejected all technology. Even now I'm sweating like a stuck pig. I still haven't gotten used to clothing, and these boots feel bizarre."

"What's stopping you from taking them off? The nearest Earth-human type is probably a thousand miles from here, if even that close."

"Practicality, mostly. Certainly not modesty. I was
born
without that word having much meaning. Back in the Amazon, that was
my
jungle. I loved it and still do, but I knew everything about it. Everything. This isn't my jungle. I don't know the effects of anything I step on here, and any protection is better than none when you've only got bare skin in an unknown land." She dropped her voice low. "Hell, I remember when female Dillians wore bras, and they weren't nearly as hung as those two."

Julian also lowered her voice to a high whisper. "Is it just me, or is it really difficult to tell which is which unless they speak? I mean, I've had the eeriest feeling that the same one I spoke to who was Tony, definitely Tony, was later talking like Anne Marie."

"I know what you mean," Mavra whispered back. "Actually, I'm sort of relieved that somebody else feels it, too. Maybe it's just how absolutely identical they look, but it's spooked me more times in the past few weeks than I can tell you."

"That is what I mean. Is there something else about them I do not know but should?"

"Could be, but if so, I don't know it, either. If it is more than mental confusion on our part, I'm absolutely positive that they aren't aware of it themselves. I just don't know. Every time I say that absolutely nothing can surprise me anymore, something does. How the two of them were processed is unprecedented; you and Lori make a different but equally unprecedented case. I don't know
what's
going on here, but until I get to the Well, I can't find out for sure myself. Even the Well World seems odd. I always thought of it as static, too tightly managed to change radically, but there are many differences. Differences you wouldn't notice from one time here, but it's
different.
Some of the cultures are changed, a few radically so. There are differences in alliances, attitudes, you name it. Even the races are different. Not a lot in some cases, a great deal in one or two that I've seen, but there are changes from radical to subtle in all the ones I knew. It may be a normal thing, as with all worlds, but this is not a normal world, nor was it ever intended to be. I can't help wondering if it feels the same way to Nathan, wherever he is."

That brought up a point Julian was even more interested in. "This Nathan. Tell me about him."

"He is—well, he cannot be described. Oh, I can tell you what he looks like, more or less, and from what Tony and Anne Marie have told me he's changed very little. You'd like him. Most people do. There's a kindness and gentleness in him that comes through, and he's the loneliest creature in all the cosmos."

"You were not just—associates. Or even teacher and pupil."

"No."

"You still speak of him with affection, yet this kind, wise, gentle man you describe is out to get you and maybe worse."

Mavra sighed. "I think so. At least the evidence points that way, and it almost
feels
like his handiwork. You can be seduced by him in many ways, and at the time he means it, but deep down, where the soul resides, he's also something else. Something almost—monstrous. It's hidden most of the time, I think even from himself, but it's always there, and in the end it's always in control. You won't see it much when he's human, but inside the Well it's much clearer. It is nothing less than the collective will of the ancient creatures that built this place and remade the universe as they pleased.
He
doesn't even like it. Last time he fought like hell against it and wound up almost forced to do its will, kicking and screaming all the way. It is there, and I find it most significant that this time he didn't even try to fight it. He's surrendered to it, I think, and that alone makes him the most dangerous creature since the universe was born."

"And yet—he gave
you
immortality and the key to this Well, this God-computer," Julian noted.

"Yes. I've come up with many theories as to why, some more flattering to my ego than others, but it wasn't until I came here once again that I found out the truth. He is two creatures—the kind, gentle, but tough and resourceful man I knew and described and this—
thing.
He's been the man so long, it is more his true self than that hidden within him, but he knows he's in a trap, an eternal trap. By taking me in there, by making
me
reset things last time, he dodged his own conflict while still doing what he was compelled to do. Now I think it was more than that. I don't have this thing inside me. I was born to this form and grew up as you see me. I think his human half wants to be stopped. In the end, I think that was the idea all along. The next time,
this
time, I'd be there, too. Something inside him wants me to beat him and seize control. To stop his compulsive pattern. Maybe it's because he became too much like us; maybe it's simple logic. The stress of last time and its responsibilities brought it home to him that there was a flaw in the plans of those who created this place. They wanted a new, even greater race of true gods to evolve, but even they couldn't foresee all the things that could happen in so vast a universe over so much time. So they left him as their guardian, to keep it on track, but they blew it. They didn't just set it going, they made it a controlled experiment instead, all the variables taken into account."

Julian saw where she was going, or thought she did, as much as this whole place made any sense. "You are saying that they overcontrolled. That by insisting on things developing as they designed, they gave it no opportunity to develop differently."

"Well, they sure weren't as godlike as they thought they were, that was for sure," Mavra agreed. "They couldn't conceive that being a race of true gods
would
become boring as hell after some great length of time. Their whole racial history was motivated by a belief that true and absolute perfection was possible. They could not face the fact that it wasn't, and so they built this world, and the races that were successful here were sent out into the universe to see if
they
could attain that perfection. If anything loused up the experiment beyond repair, though, they had a mechanism for resetting things to start so absolute that everything would develop
exactly
the same, except that whatever caused the collapse would be factored out. Even you were probably there in the past creation, the one that I, many relative centuries in the future, wiped out and re-created. The same nations, the same races, the same
people,
being born, living, progressing, dying, over and over."

"My God! You mean I've done
this
before? Or someone exactly like me?"

"No. I have no doubt there was a Julian Beard who lived your life and did all the same things—up to the point where you were sent to investigate the meteor. And a Lori who remained the first female full professor of astronomy at wherever she taught, and a Tony and Anne Marie who probably died in a suicide pact, and the others as well. Your coming here changed that for you and for the others. I believe Nathan has at one point or another changed a number of individuals' lives. It is difficult to say this, but most individual lives, if removed or altered, won't change the fabric very much so long as the number of them is kept very small. It is said that the Well Gates react to people's wills and that no one who
would
mess up the master plan is ever transported here. I don't know. But I
do
know it can't continue. Reset after reset, the same people, the same races, the same lives over and over . . . In the end, if
that
keeps happening, then
nobody
really matters. Nobody at all. And if I fail this time, that's what is going to
keep
going on again and again. A continuous wheel, a perpetual replaying of the same damned recording over and over until the universe dies. That's what this is all about. That's why you're all here."

"Sweet Jesus!" Julian gasped, thinking of the implications of what she was saying.

"What are you two girls whispering about?" Lori called to them.

Mavra Chang gave a crooked smile. "Us
women
are talking
woman talk
,"
she replied aloud.

It was a long way yet in the dark to the border.

Pulcinell

THE SIGHT OF NATHAN BRAZIL'S BROAD-BRIMMED HAT, SOGGY and crumpled though it was, atop the top spoke of the ship's wheel made everything else, from the escape to the weather to the girl's extraordinary powers, seem distant and pale. More, his empathic link with the girl told him that not only had she not done it, she was unaware of anyone else around to do it, either.

Either I'm losing my mind or there's somebody else here,
he told himself.

The girl, riding out the storm just behind the mainmast, instantly sensed his feelings of danger and confusion and turned to look back at him, all her vast array of senses and powers deployed against a threat.

There was nothing. No threat at all. She frowned. No threat, but there was something else, something
different
here. Something that had not been there before, not until that odd lurch the ship had taken. Whatever it was, it was no enemy, but why couldn't she see it or find it? There was only something vague, and that something, like a fuzzy, friendly ghostlike presence, was back there with Nathan Brazil.

Brazil had no choice but to retake the wheel, removing the hat first and throwing it forward. The wind caught it, but it was too soggy to blow away; it skidded across the deck and stuck against the side. He unlocked the wheel and began to try to think of ways to use this wind rather than fight it. It was no use, though. Somebody—or
something
— had put that hat on the wheel. Something that was there with him now. Something that even the girl could only dimly perceive.

"What are you? Who are you?" he yelled against the howling gale. "Stop playing children's games and show yourself! Where the hell are you?"

"Right here at your side, Captain Brazil,"
responded a low, deep, resonant voice that nonetheless was not formed by humanlike lips.

Nathan Brazil almost jumped out of his skin. He whirled around, letting go of the wheel.

"Right here," said the voice, and when it spoke, he could suddenly see it, if only vaguely.

It
was
big, big enough to tower the better part of a meter over him, and broad and strong of body. It had a head much like a snake's or a giant lizard's, long and flattened with two big, yellow catlike eyes that popped up from its surface, and a large, thick serpentine body that was balanced on two thick legs that ended in clawed, webbed feet but started too far down the torso to be a main support for the rest of it. It balanced now on those two feet and on the remainder of that body, which ended in a broad, almost shovellike tail. Extruding from either side of the torso, a bit below where the shoulders ought to have been, were two very thin, frail-looking arms terminating in four clawed, long webbed fingers and an opposable thumb. Like the legs, they extended out from the torso, more like a reptile than a mammal. The whole thing was covered in silvery scales that seemed to give off a rainbow of colors as the swirling clouds varied the available light and which were probably spectacular in direct sunlight.