Suddenly, as it always seemed to do in this country, it began to rain hard, ending the trysts with a start and send-ing people scrambling.
Her sergeant rolled off the blanket and made for the nearby tent without even thinking of her for the moment, a.s.suming she would follow. She, however, was used to the rain now, even this driving rain, and she got up and looked toward the crater.
The meteor was still glowing and pulsing. Maybe faster now; there was something different about it, but it was still active.
Curiosity and a certain sense of emptiness and loss over-came her, and she made for it. The crater guard ran past her, half-dressed and cursing in Portuguese, without ever being aware of her.
She reached the low point between the two sets of cov-ered equipment and stared for a moment.They must have made it, she thought.There"s no sign, and we sure gave them enough time.
But the thing hadn"t died down; the black "hole" was still there, but it looked odd. It looked, in fact, like some-thing was keeping it open when it wanted to close.
Sweet Jesus! she thought, staring at it. Do I have the nerve, after all?
The rain pounded all around, and she had a tense feeling that some dramatic event was imminent.
"The h.e.l.l with it. I never could pa.s.s up a great story," she said aloud to herself, and ran into the crater, ignoring the dust that was turning to mud and the piles of gla.s.sine hexagonal minerals. With a surefootedness she could never have imagined before this, she made her way up the side of the meteor and to the edge of the hole, certain that it would close just as she reached it. As she neared it, she slipped, bruised a knee, then managed to get up and, with supreme effort, drag herself on top of the blackness. It felt solid as a rock, and for a moment she felt the oddest mixture of re-lief and disappointment.
The world winked out, and there was only blackness and a sensation of falling fast through s.p.a.ce.
Back at the meteor site the ground started to shake, and there were cries of "Earthquake!" from the camp.
Almost too fast to see, the meteor became duller, its sur-face fading to a dull rock sheen; cracks appeared, and fis-sures opened up along its fracture points.
The glow died; the pulsing stopped, and it grew suddenly very dark at the camp.
When the scientist and the intelligence agent came around two hours later, there were no native women, no real sign of what had happened to them or why, and six very confused soldiers who had already vowed to tell no one of the night"s activities.
Alama was falling in the blackness, and then suddenly she stopped, not on a cold, hard surface, as she had expected, but suspended somehow in the gate"s usual emptiness, a state she could never comprehend.
And then a voice came to her. A voice speaking an an-cient tongue, but the tongue of her birth, and speaking it di-rectly into her mind.
"Mavra! Mavra! Oh, you must hear me and understand! Mavra!"
A vast scene unfolded from her memories, a scene of a huge artificial moon filled with great equipment of impos-sible complexity, a moon that had a name, personality, and a soul. A name so dear to her that it was wrenched back even after all this time by the "sound" of that voice in her mind.
"Obie?"
"Mavra! Please! You must listen! I can"t keep this gate-way open long!"
"Obie-you"re dead. You"re many thousands of years dead and gone."
"No! We"re not dead. And yet not alive. We"re shifted over, like ghosts, unable to do much but still very much here! "
"What? Who"s "we"?"
"All of us. The trillions and trillions of us of all the races that ever were except the first. All the beings from the past universe, from our universe, and all the beings from the universes before. We"re stored, stored in the records of the Well, so we can be reused if needed. Only I am strong enough to retain some independent action, because I can manipulate, too, in a way. I"ve been waiting, waiting a long time until you intersected the Well matrix again and I could reach you!"
"Obie! You"re inside the Well?"
"I am part of it! We are all part of it now! We provide the templates for the re-created universe as needed. It is a horrible existence. Not even a half of living. Those- Markovians-or whatever they"re called never cared about what they were doing to all those lives if a reset was needed. I don"t think they ever thought that there would be a reset. But, like the Watcher, we are mere-insurance."
This was too much all at once."Obie, I -"
"Keep quiet for once and let me talk! I can"t hold this gate open very much longer, and I don"t think I can contact you again until you"re here, inside the control computer, where we"re all stored."
"Obie-you want me to come to you? Is that it? What would I do? I don"t know how anything works. I just pushed the b.u.t.tons Nathan told me to push! You"d need him to help you."
Nathan! That was his name! That was the other one like her!
"No! No! Not Nathan! That is what we fear most! He will come again and he will reset, and we will have more company and be pushed farther back in the memory banks, leaving even less of what little remains of us and cutting us off completely!"
"He wouldn"t do that if he knew!"
"He not only would, he will. He doesn"t know it, but he will. He has no choice, Mavra! He is the Watcher! He is programmed to do it each and every time."
"Programmed? Obie-it has been a long time. I remem-ber very little of the old days. It is coming back, but it is still hazy."
"It means that he has no choice. He was designed by the Markovians to do just one thing."
"You speak of him as if he were a machine!"
"Mavra, he is a machine! And he doesn"t even know it! Only a machine could bear these long, long lives, recreation after re-creation. He is the only self-aware con-struct of the ancient ones, and he is rigidly compelled to act in only one way when he is needed. You were not on Earth before, and you had no formal education. You do not know history. All the monsters of history, all the ma.s.s killers, the armies, the hatreds, the diseases, the things that represent all evil in the universe are re-created time after time as well, very much as they were, to do their evil over and over again to the same people over and over again. He has the power to change it. He has the power to make things better, to alleviate suffering and misery and death, to create a wonderful universe for all the Last Races, but what does he do? He makes it all the same. He uses the templates. He does it over and over just the same. He doesn"t even change himself. Oh, no, that would corrupt their d.a.m.nable exper-iment! The ultimate evil, unintended though it was. They were so sure they were G.o.ds. They were so certain that they could not make mistakes. The reset mechanism, the Watcher, were there to ward off natural deviations. They al-lowed for randomness and chaos to possibly require that the experiment be restarted, but they were certain that they were right! If it goes wrong, the Watcher puts it back ex-actly as it was. He doesn"t want to. He fought it the last time. But he still did it. And he will do it again. He will re-set the experiment, kill trillions on over fifteen hundred worlds, and the evil will start anew. He has to, even if he doesn"t understand why. He cannot refuse, even if he learns the truth himself and believes it. It is built in that he will do it"
Nathan a-what was the word?-arobot! She could hardly believe it, yet it explained much. It was the first time he really made any sense at all.
"He-he is already there ? "
"Yes, but he will fight it. He will fight it until he is forced to act. Mavra-you must use that time! You must get here before him! You must act as if he were your enemy, al-though he is ours. You must do it for our sake and the sake of anybody you ever cared about back on Earth."
"But-Obie? I told you-I wouldn"t know what to do!"
"The last time he made a mistake. He thinks, he feels, he cares. Outside of his one mission, he is basically good. He recoiled at the reset and had you do it. He remade you into a being like himself. The Well will let you in if you come. And once inside, we can speak together without these lim-its! I can tell you what to do, Mavra! Together we can break this vicious cycle and create a better, more stable universe based on good. But you must get here first!"
There was sudden silence, and she called out mentally,"Obie?"
"I can"t hold it anymore, Mavra. Come! Get here ahead of him! Let me live again and we"ll have a universe that is glorious! I know how. You can do it. Come!"
"Obie! Wait!"
But there was no answer; the falling sensation resumed.
Only her quick reflexes kept her from falling right on top of Gus. She rolled and got immediately to her feet and looked around at their surroundings with mixed emotions. After the unexpected "conversation"
in transit, she had much to think about, and it wasn"t of a sort she wanted to deal with, at least right now.
On the other hand, the famil-iarity of the great chamber after such a very long time was beyond satisfaction; she felt suddenlyalive again.
Lori watched in amazement as the woman she knew as Alama got to her feet, raised her arms and turned slowly around in a circle, as if drinking in the cold and bizarre view, then gave a surprisingly deep yet joyful laugh that echoed through the chamber. Lori could not, however, un-derstand the words the tiny woman called out in that same tone of joy and amus.e.m.e.nt, said in an odd, melodic tongue like none she"d ever heard before.
"h.e.l.lo, you big, beautiful Well World, you!Mavra"s back !"
"Alama," Lori called out, interrupting the scene in the only common language the two now shared, that of the People, "when you do not come, I do not know what to do next."
She was more than a little relieved to find that contrary to Terry"s fears, she was still very much alive and none the worse for wear, but she had felt very alone and exposed there, with Gus so weak and out of it.
The small woman stopped, frowned, then, abruptly all business, turned toward Lori. "Where is the other man?"
"Campos? He knows not where he is. He is very angry. He said he will find a way out of this trap. He walks in that direction." She pointed.
"He is still tied?"
"His hands."
The small woman smiled. "He will be easy to find. Do not worry."
"Alama, Gus is bad off. We must find help for him."
She nodded and knelt to examine the man, who was con-scious but still clearly in something of a fog.
Then she looked back up at Lori. "Take him up there. I will follow. Do not worry. He will be all right."
She paused a moment, then added, "NotAlama. No more Alama. I am Mav-ra. Mavra Chang."
"Mavra Chang," Lori repeated. It sounded odd and not quite right, but the family name was most interesting. Chang. So shewas a true Oriental! Chinese probably, with a name like Chang. But that didn"t solve the mystery. If she was Chinese, then she wasn"t a native of whereverthis was. "The stars beyond the stars." The idea of some hidden, an-cient group of Chinese from another planet seemed ludi-crous.
That is, if this placewas another planet. It was true that the trip had been a bizarre one, but it hadn"t seemed long, and while this vast chamber was like nothing she"d ever seen before, it certainly didn"t have the feel of some extra-terrestrial locale.
Itwas a huge place, though. She wasn"t certain if she could see the end of it in either direction. The shiny, slightly concave coppery surface of the floor reflected bright, indirect light from an unseen source, giving an illu-sion of great distance. On two sides of the floor was a low barrier wall topped by a dark rail, and here and there, there were openings in it so that one could get up onto whatever was beyond. With a tired sigh, she hoisted Gus and made her way carefully over to the nearest opening, and, going through, she deposited him again on the floor.
This area was quite different in many respects. The "floor" was brown and felt like padded plastic; it gave slightly to her weight, and she felt a slight stickiness on her bare feet. The barrier wall was a dark brown inside and seemed to mesh seamlessly with the floor surface. It was surprisingly wide; several people could walk abreast on it and not touch the main wall or barrier wall. It, too, seemed to go on forever.
What was almost as unnerving as the size of the place was the deathly silence, so that every sound they made seemed magnified. Suddenly they heard a terrified scream far ahead of them and then the sound of a panicked run-ning. Lori tensed, but Alama-Mavra-seemed to find it amusing.
In another minute they could see the frantic form of Juan Campos racing toward them, and as he drew close, his ex-pression looked as if he had just gazed upon the most grue-some of ghosts.
He would have run right past them, or so it seemed, except that Mavra stuck out a leg and tripped him.
"Campos! What did you see?" Lori pressed, nervous. This was not a man who scared easily.
"A monster! Horrible! Help me up! We can"t stay here! It is right behind me!"
She looked up at Mavra, who she knew couldn"t possibly have understood what the terrified man had said yet who didn"t ask about it, either.
Up ahead, from the direction Campos had come, there was the sudden whine of machinery, and she felt a vibration through the floor.
Campos heard and felt it, too, and he whimpered, then turned, wide-eyed in fear, toward the sound of the noise.
Lori gasped and felt the same panic rise in her that had already mastered Juan Campos; only Mavra"s cool a.s.sur-ance and bemused expression kept her where she was.
Seemingly floating toward them was a huge apparition, a monstrous reptilian form perhaps three or four meters high, with a mean-looking head much like a tyrannosaurus Lori had seen in museum dinosaur exhibits. The head, however, was perched on an even wider body, with a burnt-orange underbelly fully exposed, all supported by two monstrous legs that vanished below the barrier wall. It seemed to have a tail as great as its body, and gigantic bony plates extended from just below the neck down to, and perhaps onto, the tail.
Its primary coloring was a pa.s.sionate purple, broken with crimson spots so thick and regular, they seemed almost like polka dots.
The creature filled perhaps eighty percent of the width of the walkway, and it was coming straight for them, riding on a section that was moving.
Mavra turned to them and said, "Tell them do not move. Just wait and all will be safe."
Lori swallowed hard but said, "Come on, Campos! Be the macho man you always wanted to be! She says don"t move and n.o.body will get hurt."
It was clear that Campos wanted to get up and run, but he was stopped both by the fact that his bound wrists made it hard to get back on his feet and by the sheer bravado of the two women. There was just no way Juan Campos could run away from anything in fear if two women stayed.
"Very well, but if I am to die, let me die with my hands free."
It seemed like a fair request. Lori allowed herself to take one eye off the still-approaching Leviathan and gesture to the bonds for approval. Mavra nodded, and Lori untied him.
He sat up, rubbing his wrists. "What sort of lunatic place is this, and how did we get here?" he asked, both eyes still on the approaching monster.
"I only promised you"d be free," Lori reminded him. "I didn"t say where."
The creature was now very close, and it reached over and down with one of its fully formed hands at the end of long, spindly arms and struck the side of the barrier wall. The belt it was on stopped moving, leaving it about ten feet from them.
Lori gaped at the thing in wonder and saw now that it wore some kind of sash around its neck and upper torso with a complex symbol embossed on it by a method sug-gesting some advanced technology.
Around its neck and over the sash hung a thick gold chain like some kind of gi-ant necklace, and at the end of it hung what appeared to be a ruby-colored gemstone, hexagonal in shape.
The creature lookedthem over as well, and its head shook a bit from side to side and its eyes widened.
The gem on the necklace seemed to light up and emitted a very soft whine, followed by a voice that Lori heard in English, Campos in Spanish, and Mavra in her ancient native tongue. It was a high-pitched, slightly nervous voice that didn"t at all match the monstrous visage before them.
"Oh, my! Goodness gracious!" said the voice. "Sav-ages!"
South Zone
INAN INSTANT THAT SILLY, HIGH-PITCHED VOICE WITH A TRACEof a lisp in it, the riotous colors, and the comment and tone made Lori think more of the Reluctant Dragon than of a terrible monster.
"I don"t know what this place is coming to," the creature went on, speaking aloud mostly to itself.
"Gentlemen, sol-diers, and savages, all Type 41 Glathrielians, of all things, plus dumb animals, outright junk-what"s next? This used to be such apeaceful posting!"