Jack Chalker - Exiles at the Well of Souls

Renard dashed in after her, took the copilot’s chair, and strapped himself in. Mavra was at work in seconds, flipping switches, punching orders into the activated computer, setting procedures for emergency lift.

“Hang on!” she yelled to Renard as the ship hummed and vibrated with full power buildup. “This will be rough!”

She punched E-Lift, and the ship broke free of its mooring pad and rose at near-maximum power.

“Code, please,” a mechanical voice demanded pleasantly over the radio. “Correct code within sixty seconds or we will destroy your ship.”

Mavra grabbed frantically for the headset, tried to put it on, found it so large it wouldn’t stay on even at its smallest setting. Still, she got the mike activated and close to her mouth.

“Stand by for code,” she said into it, and then paused. Come on! Come on! she thought urgently. Nikki’s aboard and we’re away! Give me the goddamned code!

“For god’s sake give the code!” Renard screamed at her.

“Thirty seconds,” the robot sentry pointed out politely.

Suddenly she had it. The words burst into her mind, suddenly, so strangely that for a moment she doubted they were correct. She took a deep breath. That had to be, or that was it anyway.

“Edward Gibbon, Volume I,” she said.

No response. They held their breath together. The seconds ticked seconds ticked off in their minds, five… four… three… two… one… zero…

Nothing happened. Renard whistled and almost collapsed. Mavra started trembling slightly, and couldn’t stop for half a minute. She felt drained.

They sat there, silent, while they continued out at full thrust. Finally Mavra turned to the strange man who looked like a woman and said, almost in a whisper, “Renard? What time is it?”

Renard frowned, then reached over, flipped up his shoulder holster.

“Twelve ten,” he replied.

Mavra felt better. There was a better than even chance that they would make it in time. If Trelig’s craft couldn’t, nothing could.

Then, suddenly, there was a blackness. Mavra’s eyes wouldn’t adjust to it, nor was there any sensation of a solid ship around them. They were in a deep, black hole, falling, falling fast.

Renard screamed, and so did Nikki, plaintively, from somewhere in back of them.

“Son of a bitch!” Mavra said with disgust. “They moved up the damned test!”

Trelig had been impatient. The asteroid had been lined up early by the robotic tugs; Yulin was ready, the rest of the staff was monitoring all the necessary instruments. He saw no reason to delay until thirteen hundred because of some arbitrary time he’d set. He ordered the test to begin, and Yulin, following orders, gave the command to Obie.

For its part, the computer was upset. It couldn’t ignore Yulin’s direct command, although it had tried to divert them with several minor breakdowns. Obie had its own limits, and when Yulin gave the code, it had to obey, hoping that its agent had gotten away early.

The total blackness, and the sensation of falling, was unexpected to Zinder. Even Obie felt it; the computer knew that they were not falling anywhere and analyzed that the early fifty percent option had occurred. There was insufficient power to maintain New Pompeii in a stable relationship with the rest of the universe; the pull had come, too strong to resist had it wanted to, and the planetoid had yielded without hesitation.

Unaffected by the terrible sensory sensations the others were feeling, Obie probed the state. There was nothing out there. Nothing.

New Pompeii was still intact; Obie managed to verify that fact. But it had switched to reserve power the moment the big disk had gone on; it could detect no other matter anywhere, not the tiniest dust particle beyond the proximity limits of the ray, a little under a light-year. They were in a separate cosmos all to themselves.

And yet there was something only Obie could feel. The pull, and the tremendous field of force, the stability equation for their physical existence, snapped now, like a stretched rubber band slipping off one of its anchors. That was the pull, the computer realized. All matter and all energy in the cosmos had its linkages to the master computer somewhere; when that linkage was disturbed or disrupted, the reality involved dissolved into its primal energy pattern. That was why they could sense no reality, why they could not touch the solid planetoid of New Pompeii even though Obie’s instrumentation said it was there. It was not. They were all, Obie included, an abstract mathematical concept set now, returning to their creator.

Then, suddenly, there was stability again. Power returned, and Obie could feel solar energy bathing the plasma which, miraculously, seemed to have held up as well.

All of the humans were sprawled over the walkway and control room, stunned, shocked, or unconscious.

Then, suddenly, one figure groaned and sat up, moving his head around as if to flex painfully twisted muscles. Breathing hard, half-walking, half-crawling, he made his way to the control room, ignoring the groans from others around him.

Yulin had been knocked out, tossed from his chair against a panel. There was a nasty cut on his forehead.

The man didn’t care. He opened a switch.

“Obie! Are you all right?” he called.

“Yes, Dr. Zinder,” the computer replied. “That is, much better than you or I expected.”

Gil Zinder nodded. “What’s our status, Obie? What happened?”

“I have been analyzing all the data, sir, and correlating it as much as I can. We were removed from reality, as we anticipated, and reassembled elsewhere. We appear to be in a stable orbit approximately forty thousand kilometers above the equator of a very strange planet, sir.”

“The brain, Obie!” Zinder called excitedly. “Is it the Markovian brain?”

“Yes, sir, it appears to be,” the computer answered, sounding more than a little upset.

“What’s wrong, Obie?” Zinder said.

“It’s the brain, sir,” Obie replied, sounding hesitant and slightly confused. “I have a direct link with it. It’s incredible, as far beyond me as I am beyond a pocket communicator. I can decipher just a little under a millionth of the signal information it is transmitting, and I doubt if I could ever comprehend it fully, but—”

“But what?” Zinder prodded, not even seeing Yulin get up behind him.

“Well, sir, as near as I can figure out, it seems to be asking me for instructions,” Obie replied.

The world returned suddenly. Mavra Chang looked around, slightly dazed, then checked the instruments. They read total nonsense, so she looked over at Renard and saw him groggily shaking his head.

“What happened?” he managed.

“We were caught in the field and carried along with them,” Mavra explained with more authority than she felt. She looked down at the instruments again, then punched a random search pattern. The screen flickered but remained blank in front of her. Finally, she turned the damned thing off.

“Well, that tears it,” she said, resigned.

Renard looked over at her strangely. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“I just punched the star chart navigational locator. Inside the little chip is stored every known star pattern, from every angle. There are billions of combinations. It went through them all—and didn’t flash once. We’re not in any section of known space.”

He envied her calm acceptance of the fact. “So what do we do now?” he asked apprehensively.

Mavra flipped a series of switches and then pulled back on the long handle to her right. The whine and vibration of the ship’s engines slowed. “First we see what the neighborhood looks like, then we decide where in it we want to go,” she told him matter-of-factly.