“So they said,” the little creatures replied.
“That is interesting,” the Dahbi muttered, mostly to himself. He started to move now, and the Lamotien watched, fascinated, as he appeared to glide along the support beam to the side of the tent, then down the tent side to the floor.
“Tell my staff I want a meeting in ten minutes,” he told the creature. “Right here. See that they all come.”
The little creature bowed slightly, then said, “I will be returning to Zone soon. Any message?”
Gunit Sangh thought a moment, then said, slowly, “Tell them we will attempt to deal with all eventualities, but that they should be prepared to lose.”
The Lamotien just stared for a moment. Finally it said, “Lose?”
Sangh nodded somberly. “Where there is one false Brazil there may be twenty, or two hundred,” he noted. “We will do our best, but that is all we can do. Tell them, if they have any bright ideas, now is the time to get them to me.”
The little Lamotien went out, looking very much in a state of shock.
“The main army is here, in Bache,” the field commander told him. “They appear to be massing. We feel they will push into Koorz and try and fight the decisive battle in Yaxa. Lamotien would be almost an impossible position for them, what with the terrible storms and earth movements as well as the Lamotien themselves. They have also avoided fights in high-tech hexes, even going out of their way to do so.”
“But they could go to Bahaoid,” the Dahbi pointed out. “And thence to Verion. There’s almost no force in Bahaoid, and despite its being a high-tech hex, the Bahaoidans are neither very mobile nor very dangerous.”
The field commander, a Yaxa, shook her insect’s head. “No, I’d be shocked if they tried it, and not a little pleased. Verion looks easy only on a map. It is a tremendously mountainous region, extremely difficult to cross with any force at all, and leaving a small force highly vulnerable to native attack. The Verionites are, shall we say, more savage than we are used to, but they are wormlike creatures that eat rock and can pop up any place and strangle and devour you. We’re pretty confident of their strategy, since any change favors us even more.”
Gunit Sangh nodded, wishing he felt as certain about things as the field commander. “And the Awbrian force?”
“Moving slowly and deliberately towards Ellerbanta and Verion,” another reported. “We feel this is mostly a diversion to keep General Khutir’s forces pinned down in Quilst.”
“You may be right,” Sangh responded, “but what’s to stop the main force from turning and linking, say, in Quilst, with the others for a drive there?”
“Too much distance,” the field commander assured him. “It would take a week to do it. We’d have enough warning to be able to take countermeasures. I might say, though, that Quilst is making a lot of fuss about throwing Khutir out of there. The army has, shall we say, been indelicate, and the Quilst see themselves now as the battleground for a fight between the Awbrians and Khutir.”
“They may have a point,” the Dahbi noted. “In that case, we’d be in a poor position if the Quilst themselves should turn tables and join with the Awbrians. Order General Khutir to move south to engage the Awbrian force as quickly as possible, preferably out of Quilst. Let Quilst stand guard over the entrance to the enemy and see if we can get some Ellerbantan coverage of their side of the border as a hedge against the unlikely. In the meantime, prepare your own troops to move against the main force while it is still consolidating in Bache. Better a semitech hex friendly to us than a nontech of little or no use. We’ve been on the damned defensive the whole way here and we’ve gotten creamed, played for fools and worse. Let’s end this matter, ourselves, with our own forces in a place of our own choosing!”
“It will be done,” the others said, a great deal of excitement and anticipation in their voices. Like Sangh, they, too, were sick and tired of the situation and wanted action.
On the way out Sangh asked one of the field commanders to ask the Dahbi’s chief aide and fellow creature to step in. This was done, and in another couple of minutes the two Dahbi were alone.
“Your Holiness?” The aide bowed respectfully.
“Sagrah, that matter of which we spoke so long ago back in our beloved homeland now demands attention,” he said cryptically.
“Holiness?”
“We must face reality, Sagrah. We have been outclassed by an enemy who understood us better than we ourselves. We must face the fact that, in all probability, Brazil will reach the Well.”
Sagrah wasn’t that convinced. “But, Holiness, if the other was a diversion, then the real one must be with their army. If we smash their army we have him, or have him on the run in our territory.”
“And if he is not the real Brazil?” Sangh shot back. “No, we must do as you say, engage them, fight this out. It can not be helped. But in our own interests —Dahbi’s interest, Sagrah, since I am the one who led the opposition to him—we must have a hold on him. Go yourself to Zone. Tell our people there to activate our insurance plan—just that. Got it?”
The aide bowed. “Yes, Holiness. ‘Activate our insurance plan.'”
“And, Sagrah,” the Dahbi leader added, “tell our people to make certain that the Brazil with the main force does not move. I want no sudden disappearances, no funny business. I want that man where one of us can see him at all times. Understand?”
“I hear, Holiness, but I’m not sure I follow all this.”
“You don’t have to,” Gunit Sangh retorted. “But, if you must think on such things, answer this question: why, if you have a duplicate Brazil, go to all the trouble of keeping his existence hidden and secret? Why sneak him in so elaborately and so expensively when he’s just a diversion? So much so we trapped him mostly by luck? It makes sense only in one way, Sagrah.”
The other Dahbi considered the point. “As a diversion, he’d have to allow discovery sooner or later,” he mused. “That means he was supposed to be discovered sneaking in at a predetermined place and time.”
“Very good,” Sangh approved. “And since he was discovered early? You see? You make sure of both things, Sagrah. You make sure that the other Brazil remains with the main army, and you activate our insurance plan. We can win this yet, Sagrah. Win it one of two ways. Now, go!”
The aide went, leaving Gunit Sangh to ponder the position maps still on the table in front of him. Something had gone wrong with the enemy’s intricate plans, of that he felt certain. It was a gut feeling, unsubstantiated by facts, yet it was an absolute conviction with him. Something had gone wrong when that patrol had discovered and unmasked the false Brazil when it did.
The more complex and intricate the planning, the more chances there are for something to go wrong, he reflected. If only he could capitalize on this, he might come out on top yet.
If that was the real Brazil with the main force, he was a long, long way from walking up an Avenue and into the Well. A long way.
Maybe forever.
Bache
IT HAD BEEN AN EERIE TRIP THROUGH DAHIR, A LAND
that looked at once peaceful and deadly dangerous. The quiet landscape of gentle green forests and large ranch-style farms contrasted with the inhabitants, who looked inscrutable, formidable, and dangerous. They had sat there, atop great horned creatures, not like occasional onlookers or curious parade-watchers, but in highly disciplined ranks, staring with eyes that told nothing of the thoughts behind them.
They were tall and insectival, although not quite insects. Humanoid in shape, they had long, broad feet that ended in sharp claws. On smooth legs leading up to a metallic-looking torso, their slender, exoskel-etons were so polished that the creatures looked somewhat like robots in a stylized and idealized picture of such things. They had oval heads, with multiple orifices and mandibles set below oval eyes of faceted gold and above which rose long, quivering tendrils. Their bodies were of many colors, all with a metallic sheen—blues, greens, gold, reds and silver, among others. But their hands looked like mail fists. The seething anger and tension in them was immediately discernible. They didn’t like being ordered to stand aside.
Their mounts were mammals, and looked at first glance like classical unicorns, curved horns like conch shells rising out of the center of their horselike heads. But their rear legs were much larger and their hind feet broad and flat, like their rider’s. They could sit erect, looking almost like kangaroos, or use their double-jointed hind legs to lope about on all fours, and on close inspection their snouts were narrower, their heads smaller than a horse’s.
Of their reputed magic powers nothing could be seen, but the menace of it could almost be felt by the passing forces. They were glad to get through there. It had been decided to use a wide river valley in Bache to regroup and reorganize after the march. Now, so close to their goal and to the major opposition forces, all had to be perfect.
It was late afternoon, but the command tents were already up. Brazil left his own little corner of the field and walked to the main tent shared by Asam and Mavra; Marquoz left his own position to join them. This was to be the last staff meeting of the group, although only Brazil, who had called it, was aware of that fact.
They ate quietly, mostly discussing the eerieness of the Dahir and the tiredness they were feeling, forgetting the rwst for a while. Brazil even seemed to become a bit nostalgic.
“You know,” he said, “out there, among the stars, trillions of people are going about their normal daily affairs right now. Even back in the Com, as crazy as things were getting, most people are still going about their daily tasks. It’s kind of weird, all this. I have never felt at home on the Well World; it’s too much of a fantasy land, divorced from reality, from the whole rest of creation, apart and insular.”
“I find it refreshing,” Marquoz countered. “I kind of like the variety here. Different creatures, different social systems, ways of life. It’s a microcosm, yes, but unique, too. You seem to assume that insularity is necessarily bad.”
“That’s right, son,” Asam put in. “After all, this little war is the first in a thousand years, the third in history, and one of the other two was also caused by outsiders coming in. It’s really not a bad place at all.”
“But you haven’t been outside” Brazil noted. “You haven’t been anywhere but the Well. Tell me. Asam, haven’t you ever looked up at that glorious starfield there and wished you could go out there and visit it? Fly from star to star, world to world?”
Asam’s expression was thoughtful. Finally he said, “Well, I’ve been too much of a realist to do much dreaming like that, I’m afraid. Hell, I’ve still got most of this world to see, and I’ve seen more of it than most anybody alive. Out there—what do you have? A lot of emptiness and a lot of worlds, like this one, each with one race on it. Big, empty, and everybody always fighting everybody whenever they meet. Nope, I think I like it here.”
Brazil looked at Mavra. “You’ve been both places,” he noted. “Last time you were here you did damn near everything to get away. Have you changed your mind?”
She thought it over. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I really don’t. Asam has shown me another kind of life, one possible here. And I’m in a form that makes sense here, one that leaves me free, not the crippled beast I was back then.” She paused a moment, looking both thoughtful and sad. “But, then, it really doesn’t matter, does it? I mean, it’s going to be a long, long time before there’s space travel in the universe again, isn’t there? Unless you like rubbing sticks together and huddling in caves, this will soon be the only game in town.'”
He stared at her. “Maybe,” he answered cautiously. “Maybe not. All is relative when you deal with the Well of Souls. And what you say is only true for this universe, anyway.”
“It’s the only universe we’ve got,” she shot back.
He shook his head. “Uh uh. It’s only a universe, not the universe. The energy to start this one came from another. There has to be a complement. Physics requires it. At the center of every black hole, for example, is a singularity. What happens at that point? Does it ever come out? Energy and matter don’t cease to exist—they can neither be created nor destroyed. That’s the law. Only changed. All that glop has to be somewhere—it comes out in the other universe. A white hole. It’s the way things work. Just because the Well looks like magic, don’t make the mistake of assuming it is magic. It’s not. It’s just simply a technology higher than you can currently comprehend.”
Marquoz stared at him. “This doesn’t sound like the man I knew, who played the flute for pennies in dives around the fringes of the Com. It doesn’t sound like you at all.” He looked at Brazil with some suspicion. “Are you really Gypsy?”
He sighed and sat back, seemingly arguing inwardly with himself. Finally he said, so softly it was difficult to hear him, “If I’m not Gypsy, then who or what am I?”
Mavra looked at him in sudden horror. “You’re not Gypsy!” she gasped. “You really are Brazil!” She shook her head in disgust. “All our talks about me, about Brazil . . . How you must have been laughing at me. You son of a bitch!” She whirled around and trotted briskly out of the tent.
The rest were silent for a while, mostly from being unable to think of anything to say. Finally, Marquoz broke the impasse.
“You are Brazil, aren’t you? That’s why you’ve been avoiding me so much.”
He nodded. “Yeah, why not? Cat’s out of the bag now. What difference does it make?”
“Quite a lot, if Mavra’s reaction means anything’,” Asam noted.
He sighed. “Mavra has a problem. She feels deprived, deserted, abandoned at an early age, unloved. That craving for love, for a father, I suppose, turned into bitter hatred of me. Why not? I was the closest to a father figure she ever had. Growing up the way she did, alone, that bitterness formed a shell around her that seldom cracks. If you feel the lack of something, you convince yourself you’re better off without it. You take a fierce pride in your aloneness, your loneliness. You turn a liability into a self-perceived asset. That’s what she’s done. And she’s been hurt every time she let that shell drop, even slightly.”
“If she needs love, I can give her that,” Asam said sincerely.
“It might not be enough,” he warned. “She’s had so much hurt when she did become attached to somebody that she’s afraid to do it again. She may be more hung up than you can handle, Asam. Still, I’ll give her her own choice. Inside the Well, I can do a lot of things. If she wants to remain here, with you, she can. Her choice.”
Marquoz shuffled uncomfortably at all this talk of Mavra. He decided it was better to change the subject to more immediate problems.
“All right, Brazil. Suppose you explain what the hell you’re doing here instead of Gypsy—and what we’re doing here, too. How the hell do you expect to get in the Well like this?”
Brazil shrugged. “Don’t blame me for all this,” he responded defensively. “Remember, I didn’t even want to be here in the first place. It’s that damned computer that came up with everything, right from the start. I got tracked down and hauled to Obie kicking and screaming all the way. It was the computer that convinced the bunch of you to take this course of action, and the computer that charted the course. I’ll admit it’s a damned crazy machine—Mavra’s influence, I suspect. But it is a computer, and once all the facts it had were fed into it, it decided that I must repair the Well and it decided on this scheme based on all the data it had fed into it.”
“Including you,” Marquoz noted.
He nodded sourly. “Yeah, that, too. Did him precious little good, though. Did him in, maybe—almost me, too. Well, anyway, Obie was once hooked into the Well, so he knows how it works—how it’s programmed, anyway, which is more than I do. He decided to run the entire population of Olympus through the big dish to meet his specifications and some others, too, ourselves included. We got the treatment—somehow, Obie reconstructed you and Mavra and Yua, for example, to come out as certain specific creatures when put through the Well. Also the rest of the Nautilus crew, most of whom were sent ahead here to make the initial preparations. We had to buy the ships, scout the terrain, that sort of thing. The key to the plan turned out to be Gypsy, who, among other things, could somehow make himself into the spitting image of anybody he wanted.”
“Who—or what—is Gypsy, Brazil?” Marquoz wanted to know. “I thought I picked him up on a backwater, even though there were always a lot of odd things about him.”
Brazil slowly shook his head. “I know, I know. But, to tell you the absolute truth, I haven’t the slightest idea as to the answer. I’d love to know myself. I think Obie knew, but he didn’t tell anyone. At least Gypsy’s on our side and is a key to the plan. His power, if that’s the best word for it, is the ability to somehow use the Well powers by sheer force of will. I’ve figured out that much, anyway. Like a little Obie, he can tap the whole thing, but only in regards to himself. He can’t zap you or me other places or alter our appearances.”
“Like a little Markovian, you mean,” Asam put in. “Sounds to me like he’s just exactly what they had in mind.”
Brazil considered that. “In a way, I guess you’re right. He can do just about what any average Markovian could have done, and if he had a full Markovian brain around to tap, to use as an amplifier for that, he could probably do whatever they did.”
“He has the whole damned Well of Souls,” Marquoz pointed out.
Brazil shook his head. “Uh uh. That isn’t the way it works. It’s a different kind of machine, run in a different way and for a different purpose.”
“Mavra figured, when we learned that it wasn’t you that dropped her off on that Markovian planet, that Obie had made a double of Gypsy while Gypsy played you,” Asam told him.
“Wouldn’t work,” he replied. “Oh, Obie could make a construct that looked like Gypsy, but not one that would hold up among friends and associates for any length of time. No, I suspect that when you saw Gypsy you were seeing what Gypsy wanted you to see and hear. I think he has that much power. And when he reached the Markovian planet he had enough reserve force from its own computer brain to maintain the illusion even after he left.”
“You’re supposed to be a Markovian,” Asam noted. “Couldn’t you spot another one? If there’s one, why not two?”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t think that’s the answer. It’s possible, but highly unlikely. Somehow I have the gut feeling that the answer to Gypsy’s mystery is right in front of us, simple, logical, obvious, but we can’t see it. It really doesn’t matter, except that it’ll drive me crazy someday. The fact is that he can do what he can do and Obie used that.”
Marquoz looked at the small man strangely. “If Gypsy can do those things, why can’t you?”
“Because I’m not a Markovian and I don’t have the slightest idea how the system works,” he replied quickly. “That doesn’t mean I can’t fix the problem— I know which buttons to push, so to speak. Except for that I’m really not much different from either of you. I can’t see the Markovian energy, can’t feel anything special, nor can I use the power. I have power only inside the machine—and, even there, I’m the computer operator, not a designer. There’s a big difference.”
“Sounds like you’re runnin’ yourself down, son,” Asam commented. “A whole lot of people have fought and died for you.”
“Or something,” he responded glumly. “No, there’s nothing particularly special about me, Asam. I couldn’t even accept responsibility in Mavra’s case. I palmed off this inconvenient child on others. She’s really got a case against me, I guess.”
“Not feelin’ a little guilt on that, are you?” the centaur prodded.
Brazil chuckled. “No, Asam, not really. The truth is, if I let guilt get to me, I’d be truly insane. Maybe I am, anyway, but I just can’t feel much anymore. I have simply been alive too long. Much too long.”