“When he pulls that plug,” Gypsy told them both, “the universe won’t simply cease to be. For all practical purposes it will never have been. There never will have been those stars and dust to radiate that light. There’ll be nothing but the dead Markovian universe —and the Well World. Nothing else will exist, will ever have existed, beside that.”
It was a sobering thought.
“One last thing,” Marquoz put in. “Did you tell Brazil who you were?”
Gypsy chuckled. “Nope. He fished for it, but he wouldn’t tell me why a Markovian guardian should be a Jewish rabbi, so fair’s fair.” And he vanished.
“That’s a good point,” Ortega noted to nobody in particular. Finally he turned to Marquoz. “Since you’re going to be here, you’ll take command of the Verion side, I trust?”
Marquoz nodded. “It’s all arranged. They’re ready to fly me over whenever I’m ready.”
For the second time that night Ortega extended his hand in firm comradeship and for the second time it was taken in the same spirit.
“Like with Gypsy,” Ortega said. “We’ll meet at the canal.”
“At the canal,” Marquoz agreed. “We’ll be only thirty meters apart.”
“We’ll swim it,” Ortega said warmly.
There was a loud explosion downstream, not at all near them, and lights went on farther down. There was some automatic-controlled fire, then everything winked off and there was silence.
“I’d better go,” the Hakazit said, the echo of the explosion and shots still sounding up and down the canyon. He turned, then paused and looked back. “You know, wouldn’t it be crazy if we won?”
Ortega laughed. “It’d louse up all this for sure.”
Marquoz turned back and trudged off in the darkness. Ortega remained, sitting back on his tail and looking out into the darkness, settling down to wait for the dawn and trying, on occasion, to get a look at the obscured stars above.
The Avenue, at the Equatorial Barrier
Serge Ortega had been as good as his word. although they had passed signs of fighting and occasional dead bodies of hapless patrols, no opposition faced them all the way up the Avenue. A few times they had almost fallen into the water from the unstable rock slides, but that had been the extent of the problem.
Mavra had never seen the Equatorial Barrier except from space, and now that it loomed over her she found it much less a dark wall than it looked from a distance. Partially translucent, it went up as far as the eye could see, a huge dam at the head of the river, which was merely a trickle at this point. She noticed that the area where the Avenue reached the wall was absolutely dry; obviously the only water here would be that which struck and ran down from the enormous barrier.
It looked like a giant nonreflecting shield of glass, not very thick and amazingly shiny and free of any signs of wear. It was only here, at the wall itself, that the true Avenue could be seen—shiny and smooth, like the barrier itself. Where it joined the wall there was no seam, no crack; the two simply merged.
It was near dusk of the second day, but even Brazil could not enter immediately. Using the Gedemondan, now their only companion, he told the other two, “We have to wait for midnight, Well time, or a little more than seven hours after sunset. That means we sit and wait.”
Mavra relaxed and looked back up the canyon. “I wonder if they’re still alive back there?” she mused aloud.
“Yeah,” was all he could say in response. He didn’t really want to betray the fact to anyone, least of all Mavra, but he was deeply and sincerely affected by the sacrifice those creatures of many races, some of whom meant a good deal to him by this time, were making. The war was more of a mass thing, an abstract thing, and there were many possibilities in a battle. You could win or lose, you could live or die, but you always had a chance. They hadn’t had a chance and they knew it, yet they did it so that he could stand here.
His thoughts went back to Old Earth once again, to Masada in particular. He hadn’t been there, hadn’t really been very close to the place, but the history of the tremendous sacrifice they had put up, the miraculous amount of time they had held, and, in the end, their total commitment, which ordained death rather than surrender to tyrrany, had uplifted him at a time when he had felt desolate and dispirited. If man had such a spirit, there was hope.
There were few such examples of that spirit, he reflected sadly. Few, but always one, always at a time when one would swear greatness was dead, the human spirit dead, and all was lost. This was such a moment now, he reflected. It might be a long, long time before such a thing happened again, but for the first time he found himself believing that it would happen again.
He was amazed by the thought, by his capacity to still think it after such a long, long time. Could it be, he found himself wondering, that his spirit wasn’t dead, either?
He was amazed, too, that there was just the three of them. Just he, Mavra, and the Gedemondan they needed to speak to each other. He had offered it to more, to anybody who wanted to come, in fact. They had chosen to stay at the pass. Maybe they’re the smart ones, he thought wistfully. At least they had the choice.
“What will happen when we… go in?” Mavra asked him, eying the seemingly solid, impenetrable wall again.
“Well, at midnight the lights will go on for this section,” he told her. “Then this section around the Avenue will fade and you’ll be able to walk through to it inside. Once in there, neither you nor the Gedemondan will change, but I will. The thing was designed for Markovians, so it’ll change me into one. They’re pretty ugly and gruesome, worse than most anything you’ve seen to date. Don’t let it bother you, though. It’ll still be me in there. After that, we take a ride down into the control room area, I’ll make some adjustments to the Well World system to activate it once again and key the Call, then we’ll go down and see just how bad the damage is.”
“The Call?” she repeated.
He nodded. “The Call. Halving the populations of each hex, preparing the gateways, and impelling those we need to do the things we have to have done when we need them done. You’ll see. It’s not as complicated as it sounds.”
“And what about us?” she asked. “What happens to us?”
“You’re going to be a Markovian, Mavra,” he told her. “It’s necessary for several reasons, not the least of which is that the Well is keyed to the Markovian brain and it really is necessary to be a Markovian to understand what it is and what it’s doing. It’ll also give you the complete picture of what you will tell me to do. That’s the worst thing, Mavra. You’re going to know exactly what the effect of that repair will be—if it can be fixed. We won’t know that until we’re inside.”
He didn’t mention the Gedemondan, of course. He had no idea what he was going to do with the creature, but he would have to be disposed of fairly quickly or he would just get in the way. Obviously, when all was said and done, he deserved some kind of reward, but what he wasn’t quite sure yet. Certainly the possibility of a Gedemondan with access to the Well didn’t seem that appetizing.
It was quite dark now, and Mavra, gesturing to the Gedemondan, said to both of them, “Look! You can see the stars from here.”
The other two looked up, and, sure enough, in the wide gap between the end of the cliffs and the Equatorial Barrier the swirls and spectacular patterns of the Well World sky were clearly visible. It was the most impressive sky of any habitable planet Brazil had known, the great nebulae and massive collection of gasses filling the sky. The Gedemondan did not look long, though; in the well-known psychological quirk of many races and people who were born and lived near stunning beauty, they had simply taken the scene for granted.