He looked up at her, nodded, and smiled a bit. “So how are you, great-granddaughter?” he greeted lightly.
“Surviving,” she responded coldly. Obie had been right on that score; they were too much alike to feel comfortable in each other’s presence.
“Well, surviving is all we can do,” he came back. “I’ve called a petit council meeting—no reflection, that term—shortly, so the rest will soon be here. I’ve been seriously hampered by lack of materials. Everything was in Obie. When were you on the Well World?”
“Over seven hundred years ago,” she replied, fascinated by his sudden but easy transformation from world-weary sage to crisp businessman. “We looked in on it occasionally, but they were Obie’s checkups, nothing more. It was pretty easy to do—just monitor transmissions, mostly. Ortega and Dr. Zinder both had transmitters capable of reaching us, but Obie never used them. We were supposed to have been destroyed by the Com Police. Obie felt he was better off dead to all parties. I certainly have no love for the place, barely knew Zinder, and never met Ortega—although I have less reason to love him than anyone.”
Brazil smiled. “Still mad at the old bastard? I’d think by now you’d have faced the fact that, under similar circumstances, you’d have done to him exactly what he did to you. I’d never accuse the old boy of having a conscience, though.”
She looked surprised. “You know Ortega?”
He nodded. “Oh, yes. Matched wits with him lord knows how long ago on a number of capers in the Com. He’s a wily old scoundrel. I’ve always liked him despite the fact we’re usually on opposite sides. He was on the Well World last time I was there—my welcoming committee, in fact, and later on, my adversary. He should have been dead then, but the Olympian record indicates that he’s somehow managed to survive.”
She nodded. “Some kind of magic spell, I was told. But he’s a prisoner in Zone, even though he practically runs the place.”
“Then he’s likely still there and even more in control,” Brazil noted. “That can be good or catastrophic, and I have no way of knowing which in advance. Damn! The worst thing about the loss of Obie is that we’ll be flying blind in this. I won’t know conditions on the Well World until I get there. A real-life kriegspiel. I’ve never liked the game.”
“Kriegspiel?”
“Chess. You know the game? Only the opponents sit back to back with their own boards and a referee tells you that your opponent’s made a legal move. You have to figure out from the illegal moves where your opponent’s pieces are. And we don’t have a referee in this one.”
“You make it sound like we’ll have to fight another war on the Well World,” she said, slightly puzzled. “I’m not sure I’m clear on this yet.”
“We probably will,” he responded, then looked up. “Well, here come the other three now, so if everybody will relax I’ll explain what this is all about.”
“Let’s first set our own situation properly,” Brazil began. “First, I have to get from a hex near the south of the Southern Hemisphere to an Avenue, an opening to the Well of Souls at the equator. The best-case distance is over forty-nine hundred.”
“Excuse me,” Marquoz interrupted, “but why so far?”
“Fair question,” he replied. “I keep forgetting that you’re not up on this sort of thing. In fact, only Mavra and I have ever been there, so I’ll return to the basics.
“The Well World is a construct. It was created a little over ten billion years ago by a race known to you as the Markovians. You know the story—we keep running into the remains of their dead planets as we expand outward. Cities, yes, but no artifacts of any kind. No machines, no ruined food stores, no art or pottery, even. Nothing. The reason is rather simple. The Markovians were the first race to develop out of the big bang that started the Universe. They evolved at the normal rate, or maybe a little faster than normal due to local conditions, and they went through most of the stages our peoples have. By the time the Universe was barely two and a half billion years old—I know that sounds long, but on a cosmic scale it’s not—they’d spread out and reached virtually every place in their corner of the Universe. Having reached the limits of expansion, they turned inward, eventually developing a computer linked to each of their minds. They removed the entire crust of each of their planets and replaced it with a poured quasi-organic substance about two kilometers thick—the computer—then programmed it with just about everything they knew. They matched their minds to their local computers and, presto! A civilization without need of anything physical. They replaced the old crust atop the computer, of course, and built cities more to delineate the physical space, the property, of each than to serve any utilitarian purposes. Then they settled back and dreamed up their own houses—and the computer created the things by an energy-to-matter conversion. Hungry? Just think of what you wanted and the computer served it up to order. Art? Create anything you wanted in your mind and the computer realized it for you. No wants, no needs, the perfect materialist Utopia.”
“It sounds pretty wonderful to me, if a little like magic,” Yua commented.
Brazil chuckled. “Magic? Magic is doing something the other guy can’t do. We haven’t learned how to do it yet, so it’s magic. When we learn how and understand it, it’s science. Obie could do it, of course. That’s what his builder, Gilgram Zinder, discovered—the same principles that made the Markovian computers work. Of course, Obie was a tiny, primitive prototype when compared to the Markovian models, but he was able, within his design limits, to do those things. Zinder wasn’t the first to stumble onto the Markovian history, only the first to be able to build a machine that could do the conversions.”
“But the Markovians are all dead,” Gypsy pointed out.
Brazil nodded. “Yes, all dead. They got bored, fat, lazy, and stagnant. My latest theory is that they spent too much time connected to their computers and tended to merge minds with parts of their devices, which forced them to face up to the fact that they’d gone as far as they could go, done everything they could do, reached the point all races strive for—and there wasn’t anything there. No challenge. Nothing to look forward to. Since the idea seems to have spread and taken root among Markovians all over the Universe within a fairly short period of time, this computer concept becomes the most logical. They spent very little time playing god, it appears. A few generations, no more. And then, as one, they decided to scrap everything and try again.”
“It sounds logical,” Mavra agreed. “But why theorize? Weren’t you there?”
Brazil coughed slightly. “Well, ah, yeah. But it—well, it’s just so long ago that my memories of that time are pretty well nonexistent now. A lot of this stuff is rediscovery. Bear with me. I’ve lived an awfully long time.”
They accepted that, although not without some reservations. Mavra, at least, thought that there was something decidedly phoney about Nathan Brazil, something she couldn’t put her finger on. A mass of contradictions, Obie had called him. That was putting it mildly.
“Anyway, the Markovians decided that they’d made a wrong turn somewhere in evolution. They couldn’t accept the idea that what they had was the be all and end all, because that made all striving, all progress, a joke in their minds. They couldn’t handle that. So, they decided they’d blown it—and they’d have to start again.
“The means chosen was peculiar,” Brazil continued. “They couldn’t wipe out the whole Universe without wiping out themselves as well. So they created a monster computer, a computer as big as a planet, and one that had to be manually operated. They were large creatures that would be real monsters to any of us now—like big, throbbing leathery human hearts standing on six long, suckered tentacles. They were, however, our cousins in that they were a carbon-based lifeform whose atmosphere though different from ours, was close enough that we could breathe it. Now, they poured a crust over this planet-sized computer, this master brain, and then divided it into fifteen hundred and sixty hexagonal biospheres. Since you can’t cover a sphere with hexagons, they divided large areas at the poles into mini-biospheres around the polar centers. These are North and South Zone, the two areas where the creatures they were going to invent could gather comfortably and talk, trade, or whatever.”