Jack Chalker - Twilight at the Well of Souls

“All right, all right,” growled Marquoz. “I think I’m entitled to know what the hell you two are talking about.”

“Marquoz,” Ortega said lightly, “I’d like you to meet the first man to tame the Markovian energies, the man who built the great computer Obie and whose fault most of this is. Marquoz, Dr. Gilgram Zinder.”

The Hakazit looked over at Gypsy, then laughed. “Gypsy? You? Zinder? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my whole life.”

“That’s what threw me,” Ortega admitted. “The man who did all that, who finally, first with Obie’s aid and then without, managed to be able to talk to the Markovian computers and make them obey his will—and he chooses to go home and become a wandering gypsy and bum?”

Gilgram Zinder chuckled. “Well, not at the start, no. And the human mind isn’t up to the training, nor is it perfectly matched for full communication. But I got to the point where I could influence it as regarded myself. Takes a lot of effort, and off the Well World it can cause monster headaches. I really never was able to do much with it beyond myself, and I realized that, without a lot of additional apparatus, I never would be able to get any further, and that needed apparatus would make Obie a toy. It would take something the size of the Well of Souls, and that was not worth thinking about for obvious reasons. So I used the power to wander a while, as Obie and Mavra wandered and explored, over the whole of the universe in various forms until I got bored with it. After all, unlike Obie, I could do little except survive and adapt. So, I went home at last to the Com and found it much improved from my day. It gave me a lot of satisfaction to see that a lot of the worst evils were gone, in part, at least, due to what we accomplished many years before. You understand, I always had lived a very restrictive sort of life. A lonely life. I wasn’t handsome, or even distinctive. I had my work, and that’s all I had. I had to bribe a woman to bear my child and build my other child myself.”

“But your work succeeded beyond your wildest dreams,” Ortega pointed out.

“Beyond my— Yes, I suppose it did. I’m now as close to a Markovian as I think it’s possible for one of our time to become.”

“Perhaps you should have completed your work,” the snake-man suggested. “Maybe if you had, we wouldn’t be in this situation now.”

“Perhaps,” he admitted grudgingly. “But, damn it, I gave my entire life to science and they laughed at me, those who didn’t try to use the new power for evil ends. And then I had to give my daughter and my race and environment to it, too. And even the good side in that fight, when they were presented with my work, got frightened of it and tried to bury it forever. So I looked at this and I thought, What about me? Where do I get anything but royally screwed by the system? Selfless men wind up in neglected graves. I felt like I’d been given a new life, a new chance at all the things I’d missed, and I took it. A new life— a new series of lives. Even the Well World gave you only one start, but I had an infinite number. I was a rich and handsome playboy. Then I tried the other side, as an exotic and beautiful dancer who had to beat off would-be lovers with a stick. I learned to play a variety of instruments and composed music that attracted a serious following. I painted, I sculpted, I wrote a few stories and some poetry. I was on my way to being everything everybody ever wanted to be. The ultimate fantasy was mine: I could be any fantasy I chose, and I was. I enjoyed it all, too. The Gypsy phase was just another one of those, one I particularly enjoyed after teaming up with Marquoz, here—enjoyed it, that is, until the fools dug up my work, misunderstood it, misapplied it, and abused it to their own destruction, the fools.”

“Why didn’t you step in then?” Ortega wanted to know. “Tell them what they were doing wrong?”

Zinder shrugged. “What could I do? By the time I knew what they were working on it was too late. Even then I was really blocked. Suppose I had suddenly showed up and said, ‘Hi! I’m Gil Zinder! I know you think I’ve been dead a thousand years, but I was only fooling.’ Who would have believed me or paid attention to me? I’d never have gotten through the bureaucracy. It’s much easier to make a bureaucracy not notice you than to notice and take you seriously. I left them the keys to godhood, to the universe, and they took it and destroyed themselves with it. And me—look at what it’s cost me! Nikki… Obie… All that was dear to me.”

Marquoz still couldn’t quite believe all this. “So you killed Nikki Zinder? Your own daughter? Did Obie know?”

“He knew,” Zinder assured him. “Although I didn’t realize that until I was inside him myself and we could talk. We talked it out at great length, a sort of mutual catharsis. He would have had to do it if I hadn’t, and that was the one thing he simply could not do. He could not harm Nikki. I even tried to talk him out of trying to integrate with Brazil, but to no avail.”

“Brazil,” the Hakazit muttered. “Why did Brazil do that to Obie?”

“Short him out, you mean? For much the same reason that I lose my powers when he turns it off. You see, we have a mathematical matrix here, a set of relationships that says, ‘I am the universe and I am this way, according to these laws.’ That’s the original universe, the Markovian, or naturally formed one. It’s quite small, really, compared with ours. The whole thing was barely the size of a small galaxy. Now, the Markovians did it over themselves. They had a second creation, you might say, which, since it originated from the same point as their own for safety’s sake, destroyed their planets and incorporated that old universe into ours. And since ours was a much larger explosion, it expanded with ours as well, which is why you find more Markovian worlds out there than around here. But they’re the old, dead, original universe. Ours is superimposed on it—they didn’t dare wipe theirs out or they’d wipe themselves out as well. This is the matrix imposed by the Well, the mathematical formulae of the Markovian computers, and that is what I came to decipher. With it I can adjust the superimposed mathematical building blocks just a tiny bit to suit myself. Obie could do no more than I, but he could do it over a planetary area. The individual Markovians, I believe, could do it even better, since it was matched to their brains specifically. But it is the Well that maintains this mathematically superimposed set. When Brazil turns it off, that set of mathematics will cease to exist. And, when he repairs it and turns it back on, he’ll have to instruct it to build a new mathematical model. A new one. It’ll be very much like the original, but it will differ in many specifics. It can’t be as far-reaching, for example, since he’ll have only 1,560 races here to work with. It’ll also be formed from the power of his mind, and that will color it ever so slightly. It will be slightly different. Very slightly, perhaps one digit in a billion-place equation, but it will be different. He can’t help it. Obie is part of the old math. So is the universe we knew—the Com, the stars and planets, the races out there.”

“I think I understand you,” Ortega put in. “Obie was built to cope with this superimposed set of rules, or math, or whatever you want to call it. So is everything we know—except the Well World, which is on a separate, model computer not affected. And Brazil is from the old math, the Markovian math, and Obie simply couldn’t cope with him because he was slightly, ever so slightly, off, and that blew Obie’s circuits.”

Zinder nodded. “A tiny difference, but vital. He just couldn’t cope with that difference. The same reason why Brazil can’t really change his appearance once he sets it in the Well. He’s not a part of the math of the known universe; he reverts always to form. We can’t even kill him. There is always a way out provided by circumstance, which is another way of saying that the Well looks out for him. Only inside the Well can he die, since the Well was partly designed to change Markovians to the new mathematics.”