Nautilus—Topside
“marquoz!”
The sight of the familiar, squat little dragon puffing on his ever-present cigar seemed to reassure her, bring her back to reality. Mavra had never felt so helpless, so alone, not even when she was alone, making her own way from orphaned beggar to streetwalker to space captain and master thief.
She felt like hugging the little monster, but refrained. Instead she just held up a hand in greeting and waited for him to come across the grassy lawn to her. He could move damned fast, she found.
“Well! Mavra, I hope?” the Chugach’s foghorn voice boomed. “Still in harness, so to speak?”
She shrugged. “Obie said it would help if I kept this shape a little longer. He’s running this show.”
And that, of course, was part of the problem. As had happened on the Well World many years before when Mavra was a hopeless cripple, she felt like a pawn, an ornament, in a grand design being woven by others, uncertain of her future, even of whether she had a future, and unable to do a damned thing about it.
Marquoz seemed to understand. “Obie had us bugged, as you know,” he told her. “When the Olympians moved, he dispatched more of the crew to get us. Man, was that Amazon leader mad!”
That was more like it. Real. Down-to-earth. “What have you done with the Olympians?” she asked.
“Ran ’em through Obie, of course,” the little dragon replied. “Tame as kittens now.”
She nodded. “And where’s Brazil?”
“Eating—eating big, too, for such a little man. Says it’s the first nonsynthetic stuff he’s had in ages except grain products. One of the boys is going to take him on the grand tour later.”
That returned her thoughts to reality, and she didn’t want any more of that right at the moment. “Where’s Gypsy?” she asked. “I could use a good card game or something right now. Bet he lorded it all over you that he stayed back here nice and comfortable while we were getting shot up!”
Marquoz’s large head cocked itself slightly to one side. “That’s the odd thing. He isn’t here. Obie said he asked to borrow a ship to fix up some personal things before he got completely tied down and trapped in this business. Rather odd—I didn’t even know he could fly one. Even odder that Obie would give it to him.”
She nodded, a funny feeling in her stomach. “He’s a very strange man,” she said, “with very strange powers. I wonder where he went?”
“Stranger than that,” the little dragon added. “He didn’t go anyplace at all. We were in the Rhone sector, we’re still in the Rhone sector, and his ship’s on standby in deep space just a few light-years from here, or so Obie tells me.”
That was even odder. “Has Obie given you any idea about what’s going on? I mean, is Gypsy doing something for us that we’re just not being told about?”
Marquoz shrugged. “Who knows? What on Earth would anybody use Gypsy for? No, I got the distinct impression that Obie is as bewildered as we are—but, just like with the customs men, security men, and the rest, Gypsy seems to have a power over even Obie.”
She shivered slightly. “I hope he’s on our side.”
“Oh, I have no doubt he’s on his own side and no other,” the Chugach said. “But he’s not against us, I’ll stake my life on that. Have, in fact.”
“I hope you’re right” was all she could manage. “Still, I’d like to ask him a few questions when he gets back. Curious, too, that he should take off like that just when Brazil comes on. I wonder if he will be back? Doesn’t he want to meet Nathan Brazil?”
“Perhaps not,” the dragon admitted. “We’ll see . . . Well, come on. Let’s go up and relax a bit. I’m not as adept at gaming as Gypsy, but me and the boys would be delighted to have you join us in a little game of chance.”
Olympus, the Chamber of the Holy Mother
THE ELEVATOR DOOR OPENED AND A MAN STEPPED out into the chamber. That was sacrilege—that he was not even an Olympian male was simply impossible.
Nikki Zinder was aware of his presence as soon as he stepped into the chamber; she would have been aware of him earlier but she alone controlled the elevators and they had not been operating. None of them had been. It was as if he had simply appeared in the elevator out of nowhere.
“Who dares enter the chamber of the Holy Mother so?” she thundered.
The man stopped, looked around, and nodded, a thoughtful pout on his face, like a tourist strolling through some dead shrine. He took out a cigarette, lit it, and stood dead center in the chamber looking at the far wall. “Hello, Nikki,” he said casually.
Bells and alarms went off all over the Temple several stories above them and computer monitors struggled to bring her cybernetic juices back under control. The Holy Mother was blowing her top.
“Who are you that you dare to come here so?” she demanded.
“You know who I am, Nikki,” he replied calmly, quietly. “You have only to look at me to know.”
“You are the Evil One Himself!” she screeched through electronic voice centers. “You dare to come here, Evil One, particularly in that guise? How dare you!”
Bolts of lightning shot out from all over the chamber, arcing and aiming directly for the man who stood in the center, still puffing on his cigarette. Though hot enough to fry anything living and to disrupt the flow of even a creature of pure energy, he stood at the center of the furious storm as if protected by an impervious bubble. None of the strikes found their mark.
Realizing this, Nikki turned off the electricity while considering what else might have some effect on him. There was a smell of ozone in the air.
“It’s time to go now, Nikki,” he said, still, quietly, calmly.
“No, Evil One! You shall not take me!” she thundered.
He smiled. “It’s your time, Nikki. It’s past your time. Long past. Your world is ending. Parts of it should never have begun. Parts of it are needed elsewhere now.” There seemed to be tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Nikki. Yours is not the life it should have been—but none of us can fully control our fate. You were born for an unhappy destiny. Perhaps you would have been better unborn. Perhaps, then, none of this would have happened, none of this would have been necessary. But it is, Nikki. It exists. Cheated of life, your time is still past. You must go now.” He said it sadly, the sincerity so deep it almost penetrated her senile brain.
“You are the Enemy!” she persisted, but now she . felt fear.
He smiled. “I am the Friend,” he responded. “Look at me, Nikki. Tell me what I am.”
“You’re dead!” she shrieked. “Dead! Dead! Dead!” There was a rumble and the dim lights in the chamber went out completely except for a glow that emanated not from the machines in the walls but from the man himself. He, too, underwent a transformation. Suddenly he was very tall, caped, and hooded, and inside the black garments his form could be seen, a ghostly, ghastly form.
A skeleton. A skeleton looking at her, peering deep through the walls and the machines with eyeless sockets into the reinforced cell where her brain and nervous system were imbedded in a semiorganic substance that nurtured her.
A skeleton with a cigarette gripped between flesh-less jaws.
“You are death!” she screamed. “Away with you! Away! I am beyond death!”
“I am rest,” he replied. “I have come for you, Nikki.”
“No!” she screamed, panicked to the core of her soul. “No! Away, I say! No!”
Computers struggled to correct the imbalances, restore normalcy, but deep inside the ancient brain something welled up, beyond control, and vessels burst. Dials flickered, reflected the struggle briefly, then zeroed.
Terrified Olympian technicians, summoned by the alarms, knew even then that the Holy Mother was dead. Still they made for the elevators, tried to reach the chambers. Eventually somebody remembered the emergency bypass system and activated it. Elevators rose to the Temple levels and quickly filled with High Priestesses. Back down they rode, nervous, unsure of themselves, and then burst through the doors into the Holy Mother’s chamber.
No one was there. No one. And yet, on the floor in the center of the oval room were the crushed remains of a still-smouldering cigarette.
Nautilus—Underside
mavra chang’s suspicions about gypsy’s unwillingness to meet with Nathan Brazil proved unfounded. The strange, dark man returned within half a day after her return from Meouit, though he would say not a word about what he had been doing in space except to note that he “felt a need to be alone for a little while.” Somehow he seemed much different; he still talked like an old con man and was outwardly unchanged, but there was something deep down, something that anyone who’d known him any length of time sensed but couldn’t pin down. Until now there had been a touch of the child in Gypsy; he wasn’t feared for his talents and was generally liked because of this puckish humor. All that seemed gone now; only the mannerisms and act remained.
They were all gathered in the control room waiting, for what they weren’t quite sure. It had been Obie’s show from the start and Obie was still very much in charge. He was telling as little as he could get away with. If he had questioned Gypsy about the strange trip, he hadn’t told anyone his results.
Brazil hadn’t remembered Gypsy but when reminded of a few incidents that had occurred many years earlier —neither could remember just how many—he vaguely recalled the strange man.
And now here they were, at Obie’s bidding. Brazil, Gypsy, Marquoz, centauroid Mavra Chang, and, interestingly, Yua.
“Prepare for drop,” Obie warned. Mavra always wondered why the computer bothered; there wasn’t anything you could do to prepare for it. There was the blackness, the drawn-out sensation of falling, and then back to normal once again.
Obie had asked them to gather in the control room to monitor televisor screens of the big dish, the giant Zinder radiator that was a large part of the lower surface of the planetoid.
They were seeing a world mostly blue-green and white but with patches of red, yellow, and other colors. Yua recognized it at once and gasped. “That’s Olympus!” she exclaimed.
The image of the planet shifted a bit, first this way and then that as Obie oriented the huge antenna so that the planet was in the center of the screen. He matched orbital velocity with the planet’s rotation so that he stayed in the same position relative to it.
“We need the Olympians,” Obie’s voice told them. “They can be brought into line with a minimum of alteration. I propose to do so at this time. I have rarely used the big dish except to drop to various locations by reversing the field; however, time is pressing and I must use it now. I also selected Olympus because I know the pattern of its inhabitants without further study. After all, I designed the race. I—” He broke off in midsentence, pausing for almost a minute and a half. What the hell was going on? They wondered.
“Sorry,” Obie’s voice returned. “I just intercepted a mass of messages from Olympus. The only real problem I had has apparently been removed without me. Nikki Zinder is dead.”
Yua gasped. “The Holy Mother? But that’s impossible!”
“No, not really,” the computer responded. “Brain cells wear out, malfunction, and die even in the best of setups—and this was the best, believe me. A massive stroke, it appears. No signs of foul play—the techs say she just blew a gasket for some reason—except they found a cigarette on the floor of her chamber. Extraordinary!”
Gypsy sat back and lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply.
“No sign of forced entry, no way for anybody to get in and out,” the computer continued. Their medical people have fed the medical monitor data through and I’ve analyzed It. Amazing. I would swear she was frightened to death!’
Mavra Chang sighed. “Poor Nikki. I feel so sorry for her. She never had a chance at a real life.”
To her surprise, Nathan Brazil spoke. “She’s better off now. Life’s a tragedy anyway.” He seemed genuinely sorry.
She turned and looked at him. Now, divested of his makeup, he looked quite ordinary. A small man, almost tiny, with fine-chiseled features and black hair and eyes. Though he was not handsome, except for his diminutive size and build there was something classic about him, like a Greek statue in the old records.
“You’re supposed to be god,” she muttered. “Is there an afterlife where she might find happiness?”
To her surprise he answered. “Truthfully, I don’t know, since I can’t escape this one,” he said quietly. “The math allows for the possibility of such a thing, but—who knows? The evidence is ambiguous. It doesn’t matter, anyway—even that would be wiped out when this sector goes.”
That was depressing, so nobody pursued it.
“You won’t see much on the screens,” Obie told them. “I am reprogramming the Olympians. Nathan Brazil has been found and is in command, and he has new tasks for them to perform. They will follow his orders—they will do whatever we tell them, gladly. You others are taking on the role of saints. They’ll worship you as they would him.”
“You know, this has possibilities,” Brazil murmured. “A whole planetful of superwomen who’ll do anything I tell ’em to. The hell with porn.”
All of a sudden they heard a tremendous hum; vibration filled the great shaft outside and shook the walls of the control room. Only the image of the planet on the screen remained steady. The great power of Gil Zinder’s full creation was being employed.
And then a great shudder was felt all over the Nautilus. The planetoid started to move. The vibration was so great that they were aware of the movement only because the planet on the screen appeared to revolve slowly. It seemed to be bathed in a glow. The vibration continued for some minutes, until Obie had completely circled Olympus, then slowly died.
“It’s done,” Obie announced. “We have willing workers now—millions of them.”
“There seems to be something vaguely immoral in all this,” Brazil commented sourly. “One zap and instant racial slavery.” He looked genuinely disturbed. “If I’d realized the full power of this thing, I’d have gone to that party at Trelig’s.”
Mavra gave him a dark look. “Now’s a fine time to find it out,” she snapped.
“Is it true?” Yua asked wonderingly. “Am I now a goddess among my people?”
“It’s true,” Obie assured her.
“But—how will anyone know me from the others?”
“No one left on the planet has a tail or any memory that anybody on Olympus save you ever had a tail,” Obie told her. “Your tail is your sign of godhood.”
Marquoz gave a low chuckle. “It seems our little liberated chick is taking all too well to a wider Universe than she was born to,” he muttered. Gypsy chuckled.
“Please, now, everyone come into the old lab,” Obie invited. “I have some things that must be done and some things that must be said. Watch yourselves as you round the small corner to the doorway; the main shaft is very hot.”
It was. It was like an oven; those who could sweat were soaked in just the time necessary to cross the few meters from the control-room door to the lab entrance.
The old lab felt almost frigid after the steambath, and they all stood gasping for a few moments.
Mavra, coughing, looked around and noted a number of rifle-carrying crewmen lining the walk. She grew apprehensive; Obie had been acting strangely since the problem in space-time began and she didn’t like the look of this development at all. She began to fear that the effect of the rip in space had somehow unhinged him.
“Please move down to the lower level,” Obie ordered. They complied, all eyeing the armed guards and wondering what the hell was going on. Soon they were facing the dais on the lower level. They could see the little dish, the original Zinder creation that had started everything so many centuries before.
“Please pardon the strong-arm stuff,” Obie said, “but I expect some resistance to what must be done and, as I expect to die today, I want no one able to change things.”
“Obie! No!” Mavra screamed.
“I must, Mavra,” he replied, almost pleading. “I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to die, Mavra. Nobody does. But . . . I must, I think. I . . . I don’t know. Maybe I won’t. We’ll see. But I have to act as if I will.”
Nathan Brazil didn’t seem very upset by Obie’s statements. “Why all the histrionics, Obie? I’m not going to do it and you know it—and you know you can’t force me to.”
“You speak with your heart, Brazil,” the computer responded, “for which I envy you. I, too, have a heart in the poetic sense, but I am cursed by my realization as an enormous machine. Machines are designed to think logically, to cut through all the crap at impossible speed and with all the information needed. We machines can’t ignore the facts or the logic. It’s always there, always right at your metaphorical fingertips. I can do quintillions of different calculations at the same time. I have no subconscious mind—just an infinitely large conscious one. I can be sad, I can be happy, I can mourn the death of my poor sister, I can fear for my own self, I can feel love and hate and pity. But I can’t use my emotions to run from the truth as the rest of you can. You all cope because of your ability to shuffle things in your brain, reinterpret them through your emotions—be a bit psychotic, if you will. I cannot. I was not designed to do it, much as I envy the trait. I am always perfectly sane. That is my curse. That is the factor that makes my thing different—not just faster—than yours.”
They said nothing; it was clear that none knew where Obie was headed.
“I say that Nathan Brazil must reenter the Well of Souls,” Obie continued. “He must disconnect the Well from the power source. This will undo the last, say . . . roughly the last ten billion years, at once. All that we know will cease to exist. Then Brazil must repair what is broken and allow the Well to repair itself, too. He must do this because, if he does it right now, or in the immediate future, he will most assuredly be able to use the Well World to recreate the Universe. It will start back at square one, of course, for the Markovian races and for the forces of evolution that produce new forms in response to their preset natural laws. If he waits, as he now wishes to, Brazil risks a twenty-one percent chance that the Well will short out within the next few decades. That means a seventy-nine percent chance that it won’t, which is what he clings to. I submit that a one-in-five chance is too great a risk to play with.
“You see, if the Well shorts out it will then be damaged beyond repair. There can be no re-creation. There will be only darkness, and life of any sort will exist only upon the Well World itself. Forever.”
Marquoz, Yua, Gypsy, and Mavra all looked at Brazil. “Is this true?” the little dragon asked.
“I’m willing to take the risk,” Brazil replied calmly. “It’s four to one that most of the races of the Universe will have the millions of years they deserve.”
“But is there a one-in-five chance of what he says happening?” Marquoz pressed.
Brazil nodded. “Something like that. I think he’s probably exaggerating for effect. Five to eight percent— one out of twelve at the outside—more likely, within the next one to three million years, anyway.”