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"Tell her " Ortega's voice quivered slightly "tell her . . . that we'll hold
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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 unbeliev-ingly. "You, too? The number of
martyrs we're get-ting 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 ex-planation was that you had
completely cracked the Markovian puzzle, completely understood just ex-actly
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 wan-dering 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 ap-paratus would make Obie a toy. It would take some-thing 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 uni-verse 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
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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." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]