“Wait a minute, Ortega,” she said coolly, and turning 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 is broken. It’s shorted out,” she told him. “Slowly by cosmic standards but actually pretty 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 expression. “I’m listening.”
“They’re to be the seed for new races,” she continued. “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 experiment 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, betraying 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 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. Otherwise 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 remind 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 myself. You’re telling me I did the right thing, that I’m forgiven now.”
She peered at him, a little uncomfortable with his reaction. It was not what she’d expected from the man at all. She could almost swear that there were tears welling up in his eyes.
“I haven’t forgiven you, Ortega,” she said evenly. “You are the one man I could still cheerfully kill—if I didn’t need you.”
He chuckled. “You really are Mavra Chang?” He seemed to need the reassurance, as if he couldn’t accept the truth. “I’ll be damned.” Suddenly he hardened. “Listen. If you are Mavra Chang, then you owe me.”
It was her turn to be surprised. ” I owe you?”
He nodded. “If I hadn’t done what I did back then you’d be out there someplace, right now, dead these seven hundred years, dead and buried. Dead never having gotten off this stinkin’ world, never having seen the stars again. I saved you and you owe me that much. I saved you and that means everything to me.” His eyes were burning now. “How I envy you. Seven hundred years out there. I haven’t seen the stars in much longer than that. I haven’t been out of this stinkin’ hole since long before you were born. Do you know what that means? I was a captain too, you know.”
She did know what that meant, although it was unnerving, somehow, to find it still in Ortega as well. She tried to imagine it. All this time Ortega had been built up as a Machiavellian mastermind, the true ruler of the Well World—and, in fact, he really had tremendous power, more power than anyone had ever had here. People lived or died, governments rose and fell, trade was or was not accomplished according to his will and whims. And yet…
He nodded and smiled slightly. “I see that you understand me. I am a prisoner, more than you ever were. All this power is meaningless. A diversion for an old man in an artificially lit prison cell who hasn’t seen a star or a blade of grass except in pictures in almost a thousand years.” He sighed. “You know, old memories keep popping up here and there. I remember the last time Nate was here. He said the only thing he wanted to do was die—he was sick of living. He’d done everything, been everything, lived too long. I thought he was nuts. The only difference between Brazil then and me now is that he took longer. So will you, although you probably won’t live that long. You were probably just reaching the first stages of boredom, I think. You lasted longer than me because you could move, see the stars and trees and bright desert colors and blue skies. Even in Glathriel you had that. Imagine your last seven centuries locked in here. ”
She shook her head in wonder. “If you feel that strongly, why not just walk through that gate with me? Go home to Ulik and see the deserts and the stars?”
He chuckled dryly. “You want to know why? You think I haven’t thought about it, over and over again, every spare hour? Every time I feel the walls close in, or I see my distinguished colleagues return, rested, from trips home? You want to know? I’m scared. Me, Serge Ortega. I’ll match swords or guns or anything else—including wits—with anybody. I’ll charge into Hell itself—but I will not go there invited.”