Jack Chalker - Exiles at the Well of Souls

“Renard!” she said. “Look, I can see in this darkness, but you can’t, and I can’t get down without dropping you. See if you can grab onto the chair when I release the straps. It’s about four meters, but it’s smooth and rounded. Then I’ll get you to the floor.” She guided his arms, and he got some kind of grip, but he was facing the wrong way to have any leverage.

“Maybe I could have done it years ago,” he said dubiously, “but since my body changed—I don’t know. I don’t have much strength in my arms.”

“Well, try to swing free, jump when you have to,” she told him. “Here goes… Now!”

She hit the master stud, and the belt-web dropped away. She dropped immediately to the floor and rolled. Renard yelled, then let go, coming down in a heap and sprawling. She went over to him, examined him, felt his bones.

“I don’t think there’s anything broken,” she told him. “Come on! I know you’re a mess of bruises, but I need you to help Nikki down!”

He had twisted his ankle, and it hurt like hell to stand, but he managed on sheer will power. Carefully, they managed to get him under Nikki, and, by reaching up, he could touch her.

He wasn’t strong enough to support her, but he did manage to make her fall less severe, and she landed somehow on her rump. It was painful and she moaned, but, again, Mavra detected nothing broken. Bruised and twisted they were, and sore they would be, but they all had come through miraculously well.

Renard tried deep-breathing exercises to ease the pain, all the time rubbing his sore legs with his equally sore arms. “Just out of curiosity, Mavra, how many times have you made a landing like this?” he gasped.

She chuckled. “Never. They say these systems are too impractical. Many ships no longer even have them. Once in a million they’re usable.”

He grunted. “Umph. That’s what I thought. Now, how do we get out of here?”

“There’s an under and over escape-hatch system,” she told them. “The thing’s an airlock, but it won’t pump, of course. You’re going to have to lift me up so I can trip the safety switches. The ceiling one’s no good to us.”

He groaned, but managed. She reached out, just barely getting the controls, and, after several tries and one or two drops, there was a hissing sound and the hatch dropped. More long minutes passed while she tried to jump from his shoulders and grab the edge of the hatch. Finally, when they’d almost given up and Renard was complaining he couldn’t take it any more, she got a grip, hoisted herself in, and flipped open the outer lock.

“Suppose we can’t breathe out there!” Nikki yelled to Mavra.

Mavra looked down at them. “In that case we’re dead anyway,” she told them. Actually, she knew the odds were against the air being something they could use, but there had been an ocean and green trees, and that held hope.

She pulled herself out of the lock, and stared.

“Smells kind of funny, but I think we’re all still alive,” she called back. “I’ll get some tether cable from the work locker. It was supposed to anchor spacesuits, but it should hold you.”

Nikki was the toughest. She was very heavy and not very athletic, and while they pulled in the darkness—Renard had climbed the anchored tether cord on his own—both Nikki’s arms and theirs seemed ready to give out. They were working on adrenalin now, they knew, and that energy would not last forever.

But they did get Nikki clear of the first hatch, where the ribbed sides gave some sort of tenuous leg supports, and they managed to get her out.

Once off the bridge module, they sank on what appeared to be real grass, exhausted, the landscape swimming by them. Mavra put herself through a series of body-control exercises and managed to will away much of the pain but not the feeling of exhaustion. She opened her eyes, looked back at the other two, and saw them sprawled out, asleep and breathing hard.

She scanned the horizon. Nothing looked particularly threatening; it was around midday, and their surroundings looked like a quiet forest scene from any one of a hundred planets. Some insects were audible, and she saw a few very standard-looking birds floating on air currents high above, but little else.

She looked again at her unconscious companions and sighed. Even so, somebody had to stay awake.

A blue-white shot sang out across the great void that was the pit of the big disk. A little bit of the molding around the control room smoldered and hissed. Somebody cursed. All over were blotches where previous shots had struck, and the window out onto the pit was long gone.

Gil Zinder sat nervously hunched back against his control panel on the balcony. Antor Trelig was growling and using the scarred but still reflective side molding of the door to try and ascertain the location of the shooters. Ben Yulin, on the opposite side of the doorway, checked his own pistol for its remaining charge.

“Why don’t you close the door?” Zinder shouted feebly. “Those shots are starting to come into here!”

“Shut up, old man,” snarled Trelig. “If we shut it they can seal it with their fire and then we might never get out of here. Ever think of that?”

Yulin snapped his fingers and made his way to the interior control panel. A shot came near him, but the control panel was angled away from the door sufficiently so that anybody shooting at it would be a perfect target for Trelig.

Anxiously, Yulin flipped the intercom open. “Obie?” he called.

“Yes, Ben?” the computer replied.

“Obie, how are your visuals in the tunnel? Can you give us a fix on how many there are and what damage there is?”

“My visuals are unimpaired,” Obie responded. “There are seven of them left. You shot three and they are gone. There is a lot of damage to the pit control room and the facing wall, but nothing major.”

Yulin nodded to himself, and Trelig suddenly and quickly crouched, leaned out of the doorway, and shot a volley.

“Missed them by a kilometer, Trelig,” Obie observed in a tone that indicated a smug satisfaction. Trelig, hearing it, bristled but said nothing.

“Obie, how operational are you?” Yulin asked, gesturing to Zinder to crawl over to the console. The older man at first seemed too scared to move, but then, slowly, started inching his way there.

“Not very,” the computer told them. “The computer that runs the world down there is both infinitely more complex and simpler than I am. Its input capabilities appear to be unlimited, and it has complete control of all prime and secondary equations at output—but it is entirely preprogrammed. It is not self-aware, not an individual entity.”

Gil Zinder reached the console and sighed, then crouched next to Yulin.

“Obie, this is Dr. Zinder,” he told the machine. “Can you break contact with the other computer?”

“Not at this time, Dr. Zinder,” Obie responded, his tone much nicer now, and more tinged with concern. “When we activated the reverse field, we released the tension of the energy controlling our own existence. It brought us here. Apparently the world computer has been preprogrammed for just such an event, but the programmers assumed that anyone who could tap the Markovian equations in such a manner and bring themselves here would be at close to the same technological level as the builders of the world computer. We are supposed to supersede previous programming, tell it what to do next.”

“Where is here, Obie?” Zinder asked.

“The coordinates would be useless, even if I had a frame of reference,” Obie replied. “We are, in a sense, in the center of the tangible universe, or so I gather from what I can make of the other computer’s information circuits.”