But then the rain started. Not a bad rain, or a big storm, but a steady rain that was warm but uncomfortable. It quickly turned the ground into mud and soaked them through. Nikki seemed to enjoy it, but it was miserable going, and the trees didn’t offer much protection.
Mavra Chang cursed. The mud was becoming deeper and more teacherous, and they couldn’t keep going much longer hi this kind of mess. More lost time, with time running out on her.
Then the wind started to pick up, chilling their soaked bodies to the bone, forcing her hand. She found some shelter, a grove of particularly tall, broad trees growing close together that afforded a measure of dryness, and they settled down and huddled together for all the good it did.
The next morning dawned brighter and dryer, but only because the clouds had thinned and it had stopped raining on them. They all looked a mess, mud-caked, with hair tangled and mud-clumped.
Renard was disturbed. “I can’t seem to think so good,” he told her with obvious distress. “I can’t seem to think of things any more. Why is that, Mavra?”
She felt a consuming pity for the man, but she couldn’t answer his question. Nikki, of course, was even worse. She’d found a mud-puddle and was happily playing in it, splashing around and making some sort of mud cakes. She looked up as they approached.
“Hi!” she called out. She reached down and picked up a mud pie. “Thee what I made?”
Mavra sighed and thought fast. A glance at the sun had told her that they’d been moving roughly east, but how far and at what angle?
She thought fast about the pair she now had on her hands. Renard was still capable of handling himself, but for how much longer? As for Nikki-she was sinking almost before Mavra Chang’s eyes. Something had to be done to keep them under control.
She put them both under quickly, finding she had to choose her words carefully so they could follow her.
“Nikki, you don’t remember anything about who you are except that your name is Nikki. Understand?”
“Uh huh,” the girl acknowledged.
“Now, you’re a very little girl, and I am your mommy. You love your mommy and always do what she says, don’t you?”
“Uh huh,” the girl agreed.
She turned to Renard.
“Now, Renard, you don’t remember anything about who you are or who we are, only that your name is Renard. Okay?”
“All right,” he agreed.
“You are Renard. You are five years old and you are my son. I am your mommy, and you love your mommy and always do what she tells you. Understand?”
His tone became softer, more childlike. “Yes, Mommy,” he replied.
“Good,” she approved. “Now, Nikki is your sister. She is younger than you and you have to help her. Understand? You love your sister and have to help her.”
“Yes, Mommy,” he responded. She turned back to Nikki. “Nikki, Renard is your big brother and you love him very much. You will let him help you if you have trouble.”
“Uh huh,” she responded, very childlike.
Mavra was as satisfied as she could be. She’d done this regression thing before, although under very different circumstances. She had once convinced an art-museum director that he was her son, and he’d opened the place and shut off the alarm for her. Even helped her cart stuff out. He thought he was helping his mommy move.
She would have to remember, though, that she was Mommy to two very big but definite children from now on, and act the part.
She brought them out of it. “Come on, children. We have to go now,” she said softly.
Nikki looked upset. “Ah, p’eathe, Mommy! Can’t we pway some more?”
“Not now,” she scolded gently. “We have to go. Come on, both of you give Mommy your hands.”
They went along for some time. It was difficult at times to control them as children, despite the hypnoed instructions. Kids skipped and played and generally acted up, and it took some stern acting and will power to keep them pretty much in line.
Mavra began to worry that she was wrong after all, that she would never see any mountains and a sign of an end to this strange place. Yet, the terrain was becoming hillier; the rocks were larger, and mostly igneous. They might be foothills.
And, suddenly, there they were. Not terribly tall mountains, or grand ones, but wonderful to see all the same. Gently folded, like great wrinkles in the earth, they rose up about eight hundred meters from where they stood. As with most folded mountains, though, there were frequent breaks, where streams and ice had eroded passes through the barrier. The lowest and closest of these would still require a climb of about three hundred meters, but the slope was gentle and there were many rocky outcrops for rest or shelter. They might make it over before dark if they were lucky, she thought.
There were a lot of sheep on the hillsides. She didn’t like that; in this place, where there were grazing sheep there was usually one or more giant one-eyed shepherds. She debated waiting until darkness, but she feared any more time lost. She looked carefully around, wishing she could trust them to stay put while she did a better reconnoitering job-but she dared not put them to sleep. She might not have any control later.
She decided to chance it. Taking their hands and cautioning them to be quiet, they started as quickly as possible across the open area to the first protective outcropping a few thousand meters ahead.
It looked closer than it was, and the “children” were hard to restrain as they passed close to some grazing sheep. Even as tense as she was, looking for any sign of more dangerous life, Mavra reflected how curious it was that such an animal, so common in her own part of the universe, should be here.
The outcrop loomed near now, and she almost had them running for it at full speed. Just a few seconds more … now! Made it!
There was a sudden terrible roaring sound, and they stopped dead. A massive shape, then two, suddenly rose up in front of them. Two of them! A big male and a big female, either waiting for them behind the rocks or doing their own business there. It didn’t matter.
Nikki screamed, and they all turned to run, but the creatures, once they recovered from their initial surprise, reacted very swiftly. A great hand came down and grabbed the slowest, Nikki, then tossed her like a ripe fruit to the other.
The big male came on, catching Mavra first. Although she was fast, ten of her steps were two for the giant cyclops, and she was suddenly in the grip of its huge hands. The female came up behind, took her with amazing gentleness, and went back behind the rocks.
Renard was well away when he heard Mavra cry out, and he turned to see what had happened. That proved to be enough; the great creature caught him and shrugged off his futile blows. He turned, holding the man like a large doll, and joined his mate in back of the rocks. It was a little camp, obviously a tem-porary shelter for the shepherds in the area. There was a crude but huge wooden lean-to, with great straw mats and large, crudely woven wool blankets, and an outside barbecue pit of some sort, with hot coals and a rotisserie of smelted iron over it. Apparently some of them liked their meat cooked; a fresh-killed and skinned sheep was on the skewer. They also saw one of those big wooden carts, and it was into this that all three were dropped. Its sides were almost three meters high.
Mavra looked around. The cart stank of things she didn’t want to know much about, and there were the remains of dried vegetation and even some of what looked like grass-roll. Nikki was huddled in a corner, crying, and Renard didn’t look or act much better.
Mavra looked around. The planks offered something of a foothold, and she still had some of the thief devices in her mud-caked boots. She might be able to get out.
She looked around at the other two. She might, but never them. Her venom was no good at all; she’d tried both kinds on the two cyclopses, and they hadn’t even noticed the scratch. Possibly their systems were too alien for it, maybe they were just of such great bulk that it would take more than she could produce to have a real effect. It made no difference. This was the end of the primary mission, and she had failed.
She peered out of a crack between the planks that was just barely accessible to her if she stood on tiptoe. The female was arguing with the male, that was obvious. There was a lot of bellowing and snorting and hand gestures, some of them unmistakable.
Finally he seemed to cave in, and went into the lean-to, coming out a moment later with a large iron screen. Mavra had a sinking feeling, which proved justified. The creature came over, looked in the cart, gave them a strange sort of leer, and slammed the heavy screen on top of the cart. He snorted once, then went away. Pretty soon, there were the sounds of munching and chewing.
Mavra looked at the screen. Its holes were a little too fine for her to get through, she could tell from the cart floor. And it was made of cast iron; there was no way she was going to lift it.
She settled down into a heap, and tried to figure out how to keep from being eaten.
SOUTH ZONE
Ben Yulin groaned and awoke slowly. He tried to move, but pain shot through him. He could tell he was in a bed of some kind, that he was naked, and had some sort of blanket over him-but nothing more.
He opened his eyes, then moaned, and closed them again. It took several seconds until he was willing to try it again.
They were still there.
Closest was a large furry creature in a lab coat with what looked like a modified stethoscope around its thick neck. The thing looked like nothing so much as a giant beaver, complete with two huge buck teeth in front. Only the eyes were different-they were bright and clear and a deep-gold color, and radiated intelligence and warmth. Behind the beaver was the six-armed snake-man named Serge Ortega, looking concerned under his snow-white brush. The plant creature was there, too, completing the bizarre scene.
Yulin looked around uneasily, then spotted the figure of Renard, wearing some kind of great cloak tied around his neck, over near the door, looking bored. This seemed to snap him out of it.
The shape and manner was Renard, but the indefinable aura of confidence and control from the Renard-like figure marked him for Yulin as Antor Trelig. With that knowledge also came Trelig’s final warning, and Ben Yulin tried to relax, to bring Mavra Chang to the fore.
“Where am I?” he managed, then coughed.
“In a hospital,” the strange rodentlike creature replied. Yulin was surprised to note that the creature was actually speaking Confederation plain talk-with considerable difficulty, true, but understandable nonetheless.
The snake-man spoke up, his own Confederation speech clear and perfect. “Dr. Muhar is an Ambreza,” he explained, at the same time explaining nothing. Seeing this, he added, “There is a hex on the Well World with your kind of people in it. The Ambreza are neighbors. Your people have had a bad time of it, and the Ambreza are used to working with your medical problems. That’s why we summoned him.”
“What happened to me?” Ben asked, still unable to move.
The Ambreza turned to Ortega, who spoke the required language as if born to it.
“You collapsed in the Polar Gate,” the snake-man reminded him. “When we got that spacesuit off you, we found out you were a mess. Black and blue all over, three ribs broken, one of which, because of your walking so far with it, had dislocated so badly it punctured a couple of organs.”
“Can you heal me?” Yulin asked, concerned.
The Ambreza clucked. “With a lot of time, yes,” it said in a high-pitched voice, sounding like a recording played slightly too fast. “But it will not be necessary. We will put you through the Well.”
Yulin tried to move, couldn’t. Drugs? It made no difference.
“Renard, here, has been filling us in on what’s been going on,” Ortega said. “You all have been through a lot. I’d like to keep you around a while, but both Renard and Citizen Zinder have a sponge problem, and only the Well can cure that. Your injuries are critical. I don’t know how you kept going.”
Yulin laughed. “Fear. When you’re running out of air, the pain just doesn’t seem important.”
The snake-man nodded. “I can understand that. A good attitude. We had to do a very quick operation just to save your life, that is, Dr. Muhar and his associates did. Lifesaving was our only goal, so we went the most direct route. Now, I don’t want you to panic when I tell you this, because it is not permanent, but right now you are totally paralyzed.”
That didn’t stop Yulin from starting in shock. Emotions welled up inside, emotions that may have been Chang’s or his or both. Almost to his own surprise, he started crying softly.
“I said the condition wasn’t permanent,” Ortega assured the stricken human. “Nothing is permanent on the Well World when you just get here-and sometimes not even later. Take me. I was a man of your own race, tough and small like you, when I came here. The Well World cures what’s wrong with you, but it changes you, too.”
Yulin suppressed a sniffle. “What-what do you mean?”
“I was waiting until you came around to brief everyone. I’ve put the time to good use now, anyway. Now we know what we’ve got here, and that is a relief in and of itself.” He turned to Trelig and nodded. “Bring in the girl.”
Trelig went outside for a moment, then brought Zinder in. The conditioning was holding, Yulin noted. She reacted to the sight of Yulin in that condition exactly as the real Nikki would have reacted to the real Mavra.
“As I said, I would like to have kept at least one of you here for some time while we coordinate our actions on these new conditions,” Ortega continued, “but with the sponge problem on the two of you and Citizen Chang’s critical nature-we need a lot more than this clinic to help you-this isn’t possible. As a result, the Embassy Council has decided that you are to be briefed and run through the Well as quickly as possible.”
Trelig spoke for the first time. “This is an embassy, then? I guessed as much.”
Ortega nodded. “All the Southern Hemisphere hexes have places here, although some don’t use them. It’s the only means of intercommunication possible. There are fifteen hundred sixty hexes on the Well World. The seven hundred eighty south of the Equatorial Barrier -you might have seen that it is really a barrier, too-are either carbon-based life or life that can exist in a carbon-based environment. The Northern half, the other seven hundred eighty, contain non-carbon-based life. You experienced Uchjin, in the North, and you can appreciate how different some of the forms are there.”
All three of the humans nodded in agreement at that.
“Anyway, let me start at the beginning. The beginning, as far as this place is concerned, was a race of beings your people call the Markovians. They were a great race. Looked something like giant human hearts with six evenly spaced tentacles. Just like human numerology generally was based on five, tens, or twenties, because of the number of digits, their base mathematics was six. The number dominated their whole lives-which is why we have hexagons, and why there are fifteen hundred sixty here. Almost a perfect number for folks who thought in sixes. There is even an idea that they had six sexes, but we’ll let that go.
“Anyway, they reached the highest point of physical evolution it is believed possible to attain, and, as importantly, they reached the highest level of material technology possible as well. Their worlds were spread over many galaxies-not solar systems, galaxies. They’d build a local computer on one, program it with everything they could imagine, then put a rock crust on top of it. They built their cities there, and each Markovian was mentally coupled to the local brain. The architecture was only a common frame of reference, for, linked to their computers, they could simply wish for anything they wanted and the computer did an energy-to-matter conversion and there it was.”
“Sounds like a godlike existence,” Trelig commented. “What happened to them? I know a little about the Markovians. They’re all dead.”
“All but one,” agreed Ortega. “Basically, what killed them was sheer boredom. Immortal, every wish fulfilled, and they felt as if they were rotting-or missing something. The height of material attainment was theirs, and it wasn’t enough. Their best brains-and what brains they must have been!-got together and finally decided that, somewhere, the Markovian development had taken a wrong turn. They decided that the race was going to rot and die from paradise, or they could do the other thing.”
“Other thing?” Ben prompted.
Ortega nodded. “First they built the Well World, the ultimate Markovian computer. Instead of a thin layer of computer in a real planet, the whole planet was one massive computer. If a thin strip could create anything locally, then imagine a solid planet, about forty thousand kilometers around, of Markovian computer! That’s what we’re sitting on top of. Then they added the standard crust, so we’re a little over forty-thousand kilometers in diameter.”
“But why all the hexes, the different races on top?” Trelig asked the snake-man.
“That was the next step in the great plan,” Ortega replied. “The greatest artisans of the Markovian race were then called in, all the material and philosophical artists they had. Each one was given a hex to play with. Each hex is a miniature world. Near the equator, a side runs about three hundred fifty-five kilometers, six hundred fifteen kilometers between opposite sides. They were carefully arranged. And in each one, the artisans were allowed to create a complete, self-contained biosphere, with a single dominant form of life and all supporting life for a closed ecosystem. The dominant life, at the start, were Markovian volunteers themselves.”
“You mean,” Trelig put in, aghast, “they gave up paradise to become someone else’s playthings?”
The Ulik shrugged, which was something with six arms. “From sheer boredom there was no lack of volunteers. They became mortal, had to accept the rules of the game as set up by the artisans, and prove it out. If the system did prove out, the master computer established a world-set for the particular biosphere somewhere in the universe, and then the natives were transferred to it. They could speed up time, slow it down, anything. The world they entered was consistent with the laws of physics, even if it was created speeded up. At the right evolutionary moment, zap! The race was inserted. Then a new race was created to replace the one that left, and the experiments started all over again.”
“What you’re saying,” Yulin commented, “is that we are all Markovians. That is, their descendants.”
Ortega nodded. “Yes, exactly. And the races here now are the last batch-that is, the descendants of the last batch. Some didn’t go or want to go, some hadn’t proved out, when there became too few Markovians to supervise the project. We’re the byproducts here of the shutdown.”
“And these races have lived here since?” Trelig asked.