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close to his lower coils.
They entered a normal room, a rectangle except for the rounded corners, barren
of furniture. The door closed behind them.
Walls, floor, ceiling were of the same grainy yel-lowish material as the
corridors except the far wall, which was another dose of total darkness.
"The Well Gate," he told them. "You have no choice at all now. The door behind
me will not open from the inside. The only way out is through the gate  and
the Well."
That was a lie, and Mavra knew it. Still, she could see that it would be
useful in his line of work.
They had shed their spacesuits in Ortega's office and were all naked now.
Marquoz had salvaged his cigar case and he and Mavra puffed on the last of
them. Both wondered idly if they'd ever do it again.
Mavra looked at Ortega. She still hated the man, but he seemed less an ogre in
person than as an un-touchable she'd never even seen. He'd been quite pleasant
with them, even a little charming, and that in itself was unsettling. Brazil
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had called him a total scoundrel yet liked him all the same, and they'd had
long debates on whether to trust the snake-man with the advance secret. And
after all these years, he was still here, still in charge, never leaving Zone,
never getting a day older thanks to Well magic and a liberal dose of
blackmail Mavra knew he'd had just about every embassy in Zone and possibly a
lot more places bugged.
"Who first?" she asked the others, feeling as if it were a replay of the scene
back on that dead
Markovian world. Then Gypsy had stepped forward and vanished Gypsy, who had
vanished utterly, it seemed.
Whatever you wake up as you will be for the rest of your natural lives.
The sentence haunted them all.
"Oh, the hell with it." Marquoz mumbled and stepped on the butt of his cigar.
"I'm out of cigars, anyway." He walked up to the black wall and through. It
swallowed him utterly.
Yua turned and looked at Mavra, and there was fear in her eyes. Not for the
first time Mavra won-dered why Obie had chosen this one from those he could
have selected for this mission. Only Obie knew, and Obie was far, far away.
"We'll meet again," the Olympian said quietly to her, taking and squeezing her
hand. Then, unhesitat-ingly, she turned and walked the route Marquoz had
walked, stepping boldly into the engulfing blackness.
"And then there was one," said Serge Ortega be-hind her.
She smiled to herself. He was so cocksure, so rock steady. She took a step
toward the darkness, then stopped, her mind, unbidding making the choice
Brazil had left to her.
"Wait a minute, Ortega," she said coolly, and turn-ing to face him. "I am
going to need your help."
He was taken aback. "Huh?"
"The other two they are meaningless to you or to anybody else. Window
dressing. I'm not. I've been standing around debating this moment since I
arrived at the entrance gate and had just about decided not to say anything,
but I think I'm taking a reasonable risk."
He coiled his serpentine body tightly and rocked his torso atop the heap, all
six arms folded. "Go on. I'm listening," he said, curious.
"The Well broken. It's shorted out," she told him. "Slowly by cosmic
standards but actually pretty is quickly the whole damn Universe is being
snuffed out. In a while the rift will grow so big it'll damage the
Well beyond repair. Shortly very shortly you're going to be inundated with
refugees, mostly
Olympians, from the destruction of the Com."
"Go on," he said, not changing position or expres-sion. "I'm listening."
"They're to be the seed for new races," she con-tinued. "They are the ones
who'll provide the souls or whatever once the Well is fixed."
"But if the Well is fixed all will be as before," he pointed out.
"No, it has to be turned off first. The whole experi-ment of the Markovians is
over, and it failed. Time to press reset and start again. You must help. Those
people must be allowed to do what we are doing, go through the Well, come out
as something else. You know better than I the reaction that that many people
coming through is going to cause. We need your help."
Ortega remained impassive, saying nothing, be-traying no emotion, for over a
minute. Finally he said, "What you're telling me is that not only is Nathan
Brazil coming back but this time he's going to really do something serious."
She nodded apprehensively.
"And how do you know all this?"
She considered how to tell him, had thought about this moment a long, long
time. "Because this centaur body isn't the real me. Because it was made by
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Obie. Because I'm Mavra Chang."
Serge Ortega almost fell over backward. Then he chuckled, then he laughed, and
continued laughing until he couldn't stop for a bit. Finally he said, "How is
such a thing possible? Obie was destroyed. Mavra
Chang was still on Obie, so she was destroyed with the computer. We had
witnesses to this return."
"We faked it," Mavra told him. "We had to. Other-wise Obie, totally in control
of himself and beyond any override and a miniature Well of Souls would have
been hated, feared, perhaps eventually destroyed in spite of his powers. And
me if you'll remember, I was in the worst shape of anybody to face rejoining
the human race. I had no desire to come back as a circus freak, didn't know
that Obie was still alive, so to speak, and decided to die with him. I didn't.
We went to a far galaxy and had a lot of fun together."
He swayed back and forth a little but Mavra couldn't tell what he was
thinking. The reptilian part of him was in command now, a solid mask.
"And Obie? Where is he?"
She sighed. "Dead or good as." Quickly she told the past history of Obie and
Brazil as truthfully as she could.
"And Brazil? When is he coming through?" the snake-man pressed.
She shrugged. "I don't know. Nobody but he does and I'm not sure if he isn't
just waiting for the right moment."
"And he told you to tell me all this?" Ortega asked skeptically.
She smiled. "He left the decision to me. He said you'd be essential as an
ally, but if you weren't to re-mind you that he beat you once when he didn't
know who he was fighting and he could do it again with his eyes open if he had
to."
Ortega rocked with laughter again. "Yes, yes! That is Brazil! Ah, this is
marvelous!"
Then all the mirth seemed to drain from him. He suddenly looked very ancient,
as ancient as he actually was, then his eyes seemed to soften. "You are really
Mavra Chang?"
She nodded.
"Well, I'll be damned. God is good even to the fallen," he muttered to
himself. He looked up at her, "You know, in all the time I lived I killed an
awful lot of people, almost all of whom were either trying to kill me or who
deserved killing, anyway. I screwed a lot of people who deserved to be screwed
and, you know, if I had it to do all over again, I would. There's only one
blot on my conscience, one person who has haunted me through the years -even
though I had no choice, which made it all the more maddening.
What you're saying is that I have achieved absolution. That one person lives,
and has lived a full life, lived longer than any except maybe Brazil and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]