Ortega considered it. “That would take the cake, wouldn’t it, now? Marquoz, I want you to pass the word. When I go, they’re to burn my body beyond recognition, beyond any hope of even identifying what sort of creature I was. I want nothing of me left. That’ll scare the hell out of the bastards for two generations.”
The Hakazit chuckled. “It’ll be done,” he assured the other. He looked out and down the dark pass. “How soon do you think we’ll have company?”
“Advance scouts and patrols any time now,” Ortega told him. “No main force until dawn, though. A fly couldn’t get through this pass at night against those heat-ray generators up there. The cliff face and slides are in our favor, too. They can’t get a clear shot at any of them without exposing themselves.”
“In fact, I would come now,” Marquoz came back. “A small force, one traveling light and with skill and silence, with a large part nocturnals and the rest with sniperscopes and computer-guided lasers. I’d do it between midnight and dawn, positioning them just so, knocking out emplacements one by one and quietly. Then I’d charge up here with everything I had at dawn.”
“I’ve already considered that possibility,” the Ulik replied. “If there’s any hint of movement, we can hit floodlights throughout the fifty or so meters in front of us, radar controlled and tracker types, too. Some of my boys see just fine in the dark, too, and they’re up toward, on the watch. We’re cross-coding our emplacements, too. Every position fires a slightly changing code to its neighbors every ten minutes. No signal, we light up the place anyway and investigate. There’s challenge and reply codes, too, from one point to another. Now, Gunit Sangh probably assumes this, so he’ll try it anyway, not to expect anything but just to test out our defenses a little and keep us all awake until dawn when his well-rested troops will make the assault.”
Marquoz, who was somewhat nocturnal himself, looked again at the pass. “Hell of a thing, though, asking t oops to march up that. If there’s another way, he’ll take it.”
Ortega chuckled. “What are troops to him? He knows the score pretty well, too. Two thousand against sixty-six counting you and the Agitar.”
“I know, I know. The terrain is a leveler, but it’s not that much of a leveler. Not thirty to one. Not when you’ve got nice, mobile high-tech weapons carried by creatures that can climb sheer cliffs and others that maybe could swim right up that deep current there in the middle.”
Ortega shrugged. “The high-tech favors us,” he insisted. “They have only what the. brought with them and could drag through that gap. No armored vehicles, for example, that could really cause trouble. No aerials, not in this confined space. A full frontal attack through that little gap is what he can do best. He can’t even go over and around, as Nate found out.”
“But thirty to one . . .” Marquoz said doggedly.
“This is similar to a number of situations in my own peoples history,” Ortega told him. “My old people’s —and Mavra’s, and Nate’s, too, I think. Not the flabby, engineered idiots of the Com you knew. The ones who started with a flint in caves and carved out an intersellar empire before they’d run their course. The histories were full of stuff like that, although they probably don’t teach it any more. Six hundred, it was said, held a pass wider than this for days against an army of more than five thousand. Another group held a fortress with less than two hundred against a well-trained army of thousands for over ten days. We need only two. There are lots of stories like that; our history’s full of such things. I suspect the history of any race strong enough to carve civilization out of a hostile world has them.”
Marquoz nodded. “There are a few such examples in the history of the Chugach,” he admitted. “But, tell me, what happened to those who held that pass after their time limit was reached? What happened to those people in that old fort after the ten days?”
Ortega grinned. “The same thing that happened to the Chugach in your stories, I think.”
“I was afraid of that,” Marquoz sighed. “So we’re all going to die at the end of this?”
“Thirty to one, Marquoz,” the snake-man responded. “I think the terrain brings the odds down to, say, five to one. Only a few hundred of them will finally make it through, but they will make it. Too late to stop Nate, though, if we do our jobs right. But, tell me, Marquoz, why are you here? Why not with them? You could enter the Well with them, get immortality if you wanted it, or anything else you might wish. I think he’d do it for you—it’s a different situation than last time. He made you the offer, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” Marquoz replied. “He made the offer.”
“So why here, in a lonely pass on an alien planet? Why here and why now?”
Marquoz sighed and shook his massive head. “I really don’t know. Call it stubbornness. Call it foolishness, perhaps, or maybe even a little fear of going with them and what I might find there. Maybe it would just be a shame not to put this body and brain to important use. I really can’t give you an answer that satisfies me, Ortega. How could I give one that would satisfy you?”
Ortega looked around in the darkness. “Maybe I can help—a little, anyway,” he reflected. “I bet if we went around to every one of our people here, all volunteers, remember, we’d get the same sort of feeling I got now. A sense of doing something important, even pivotal. I think that in every age, in every race, a very few find themselves in positions like this. They believe in what they’re doing and the rightness of their cause. It’s important. It’s why they still tell the stories and honor the memory of such people and deeds even though their causes, in some cases their whole worlds, are long dead, their races dust. But you’re not stuck in the position, Marquoz. You put yourself directly into it when you could have sat back and made a nice profit.”
“But that’s exactly what I’ve been doing my whole life,” the Hakazit responded. “I could never really belong to my own Chugach society. I was the outsider, the misfit. My family had wealth, position, and no real responsibilities so I never really had to do anything. I studied, I read, I immersed myself in non-Chugach things as well. I wanted to see the universe when the bulk of my race had no desire to see the next town. I was the ultimate hedonist, I suppose— anything I wanted and no price to pay, and I hated it. Just me, me, me—the position most people say they’d like to be in. I can’t say I’ve lost my faith, because I never had any to begin with. The way of the universe was that the people with power oppressed the people without it. And if the people without it suddenly got it, by revolution or reform, they turned around and oppressed still other people or fought among themselves to have it all. Religion was the sham that kept the people down. I never once saw a god do anything for anybody, and most religions of all the races I knew were good excuses for war, mass murder, and holding onto oppressive power. Politics was the same thing by another name. Ideology. The greatest social revolutionaries themselves turned into absolute monarchs as soon as they consolidated their power. Only technology improved anything, and even that was controlled by the power brokers who misused it for their own ends. And what if everybody got rich and nobody had to work? You’d have a bunch of fat, rich, stagnant slobs, that’s all.”
Ortega grinned at the other’s cynicism, the first he had ever encountered that far exceeded his own. “No romances in your life?” he asked.
The other sighed. “No, not really. I never felt much of a physical attraction for anyone else. The Chugach are romantics in a sense, yes; sitting around drinking and telling loud lies about their clans, singing songs and creating artistic dances about them. But, personally, no. I never liked my people much, really. A bunch of fat, rich, lazy slobs themselves. You know, there are stories on many worlds about people lost in the wilderness as babies and raised by animals that come out thinking and acting like animals. There’s more to that than to physical form. Externally I was Chugach, yes; internally I was . . . well, something else. Alien.”
Ortega’s eyebrows rose. “Alien? How?”
Marquoz considered his words. “I once met a couple of Com humans who were males but absolutely convinced that, inside, somehow, they were spiritually female. They were going to have the full treatment, become biologically functioning females. Maybe it was psychological, maybe it was pre-birth hormones, maybe it was anything—but it wasn’t really sexual in the usual sense. Those two males were in love with each other, yet both were going to be females. Crazy, huh? I identified with them, though, simply because I was an alien creature in the body of a Chugach. No operation for me, though—it wasn’t that simple. I was an alien inside the body of a Chugach, trapped there. I didn’t feel like a Chugach, didn’t act like one, didn’t even think like one. I felt totally alienated among my own people.”
“I have to admit it’s a new one to me,” Ortega admitted. “But I can see how it might be inevitable.”
“Not so new. I think all races have their share. Here, on the Well World, with 1,560 races all packed closely together, I’ve run into a lot of it. I suspect it’s a more common ailment than we’re led to believe. People just don’t talk about it because there’s no point. They’re just called mad, given some kind of phobia label, and told they must learn to adjust. And what can you do about it? You can’t go to the local doctor and say, ‘Make me over into something else.’ Consider how many of the humans regarded the Well World with longing. A romantic place, a place where you could be changed into some other creature totally different than you were. And for every one that was repulsed by the idea, there was at least one who fantasized what they wanted to be and were excited by it.”
“And that’s why you volunteered to spy on the humans and Rhone?”
Marquoz chuckled. “No, I didn’t really volunteer —although I might have if I’d ever known about the program. They selected me. My psychological profile was the type they were looking for: somebody who’d feel as comfortable in an entirely alien culture as they did among their own kind.”
Ortega nodded. “Makes sense. And were you any happier in the Com?”
“Happier? Well, I suppose, in a way. I was still an alien creature, of course, but now I was an exotic one. It didn’t change my feelings toward my own racial form, but it turned it into something exciting, at least.”
It was growing quite dim now, and Ortega looked around. He could see almost nothing in the nearly total darkness, but there was the occasional flash that showed the coded “all’s well” from one emplacement to another. And, not far away, he could see a couple of dim figures checking the nets in the river and making certain the mines were active. Nobody would get up that way, either. He turned back to Marquoz and the conversation, a conversation he knew they wouldn’t be having under any other circumstances.
“You’re not a Chugach any longer,” he pointed out. “What did that to to your self-image?”
Marquoz shrugged. “Well, it’s not that much of a change, really. And I had no more choice in it than I had in being a Chugach. Makes no difference.”
“But that brings us back to my original question,” Ortega noted. “You could have been whatever you wanted if you’d just gone with them.”
Marquoz sighed. “You must understand, put the thing in the context of what I’ve been telling you. You see, this is the first operation I’ve been involved in that had any meaning. It’s something like you said for yourself. Found dead in his bed from jaundice, did nothing for anybody, made no difference if he had ever lived at all: that could be the obituary of just about everyone who ever lived, here and anywhere else in the universe. It makes absolutely no difference in the scheme of things whether all but a handful of people live or die. No more than the importance of a single flower, or blade of grass, or vegetable, or bird. It would make no difference if those men who held that ancient pass or that equally ancient fort had, instead, died of disease or old age or in a saloon fight. But it made a difference that they died where they did. It mattered. It justified their whole existence. And it matters that 1 am here, now, and make this choice. It matters to me and to you. It matters to the Well World and to the whole damned universe.”
He raised his arms in a grand sweep at the blackness. “Do you really understand what ws’re doing here?” he went on. “We’re going to decide the entire fate of the universe for maybe billions of years. Not Brazil, not Mavra Chang, not really. They’re only making the decisions because we are allowing them to! Right here, now, tomorrow, and the next day. Tell me, Ortega, isn’t that worth dying for? Others may be misfits; they may be born on some grubby little world or in some crazy hex, and they might grow up to be farmers or salesmen or dictators or generals or kings, only then to grow old and die and be replaced by other indistinguishable little grubs that’ll do the same damned things. And it won’t matter one damned bit. But we’ll matter, Ortega, and we all sense it. That’s why our enemies will sing songs about us and our names and memories will become ageless legends to countless races. Because, in the end, who we are and what we do in the next two days is all that matters, and we’re the only ones that are important.”
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.”