03. Gods at the Well of Souls (41 page)

Campos was appalled. "You mean that is what all this is about? A stinking  computer calling its repairman! And for that all of us were wrenched from our  lives and twisted and reshaped and dropped into this nightmare of a world?" "Something like that," Mavra admitted. "It does have a way of making its summons  a bit dramatic if we can't get to one of its doorways in space, and I'm afraid a  lot of people often get dragged in. It wasn't designed that way. I doubt if it  ever occurred to the builders that people like you even existed, Campos, let  alone that they'd be hauled over here to cause even more misery. I doubt if it  ever occurred to them just what trouble it might be for the Watcher to get in  here, either; otherwise they would have made it easier. But I'm here now in  spite of the best efforts of quite a number of people to prevent it, including  some of you here. The only ones I expected and invited were Lori and Julian.  Ummm ... Yes, minor detail to set right." 

Lori's body was suddenly misty, then distorted, and when it was again clear and  distinct, Lori of Erdom, fully restored, stood in their midst. He shook his head  as if clearing something out of it, something rattling around inside. Finally he  sighed and said, "I feel like I'm waking up from some awful nightmare. I have  all these crazy memories, impressions, but most of them don't make any sense." "Well, you were a horse," Mavra pointed out. "I'm afraid all that information in  your head couldn't always fit in that horse brain, but your spirit, your drive,  remained, and in the end you still did what you had to do." 

"Julian, I-" he began, and stopped, seeing something in her eyes and manner. It  was readily apparent that Julian was less than fully thrilled to see her husband  back to normal. 

"Lori, Julian's going to be a little bit complicated, so just hang on for a  little bit," Mavra told him. 

The colonel spoke, although they all were awed at the display of power Mavra had  just performed. "You-you can do that? With your mind alone?" 

"I just order it. I don't bother with how it's done any more than you bother  with how the electricity gets to the lamp when you turn it on. It's easy in  specific cases, but it gets more complicated if you have to do something on the  scale of a hex. When you get beyond that, to whole civilizations and worlds, I'm  not so sure I'm up to it. Still, we may see." 

Gus, too, was awed and fascinated, but not to the point where he didn't want to  press things a bit to satisfy his curiosity. "So what's wrong?" he asked her. "Huh? What do you mean?" 

"Well, we all got stuck here for some reason, right? I mean, it called you and  the captain, and that was to fix stuff. What's broke?" 

Mavra seemed disturbed by the question. "I-I've been trying to find out. All of  the diagnostics so far are turning up just fine. The universe isn't in peril, no  world is about ready to die, nothing appears wrong. Still, we were called here  for something. The Well went to a great deal of trouble to get us here. I guess  I haven't hit it yet, although that is rather odd. If something's broken enough  to summon us, then something in the Well's diagnostics routine should have told  me straight away. So far-nothing. It's very strange." 

As if in response, she began to receive a data stream from somewhere deep within  the Well. Something about a "Kraang Matrix Formula," but it didn't make any  sense. It didn't correlate with anything in the Well's operational system, in  the symmetry of its physics and mathematics. What the hell was a Kraang Matrix  Formula? 

Before she could even request research information on it, another signal broke  in, one she'd heard only once before but one that had provided a major motivator  for her to reach the Well. 

"Mavra! Mavra! You've done it! Now free me! Free me! " 

"Obie? Is that really you? Can you really live again?" Once, in the past cycle  of existence, before the last reset, she had roamed the universe with Obie, a  moon-sized computer built by some of the most brilliant minds of her own time, a  self-aware computer that could in a limited way do some of the things on a  vastly smaller scale that the Well could do. She could never explain Obie, but  having to see him-Obie had always been a "him"-wiped out with the rest of that  universe had been the most horrible thing she had ever had to face because of  its permanence. 

"How can I do it, Obie? I don't know a lot about working this thing." "I’ll send you the instructions. I already knew a lot, so I could follow what  was being done here. Just pass the instructions along exactly as I give them to  you, no changes, no hesitations, and I'll once again be formed in orbit around  this world. Think of it, Mavra! The two of us together again!" No more horrors of existence on that grubby Earth, no more crawling before the  likes of Campos, no more pettiness and Earthbound strife ... Together again,  with that power, no matter how limited, roaming the universe, exploring,  learning, helping out ... 

"Brazil never told you because he wanted me to die," Obie sent to her. "He  thought that my power was too great a potential disruption to the Well. He  couldn't help it, but he did it, Mavra! He killed me, Mavra! And now you can  bring me back! Now you are in charge! Take the data stream and command the  instructions! Free me! Free me!" 

"Go ahead. Send. I'll try, Obie. I'll try!" 

All the exchange, her internal debate, and the final decision, had, to the  others, taken place within the blink of an eye. They barely knew that something  was going on. 

"So what will you do with us now?" the colonel asked her. "Revenge? That seems a  rather petty thing for one in your current circumstances." 

"You are right," she answered him. "Revenge is something beyond a superior  creature such as this one. When I am human, I am very vengeful, but not like  this. Not now." 

She could see Campos seem to relax, and the colonel, more suspicious, also seem  a bit more comfortable. "What will you do, then?" Lunderman asked her. "Justice," she answered, sending new fear into them. "Justice is the highest  calling of a higher intellect." 

"Sequence completed and program running. Done. Input accepted. Result nominal,"  the Well reported to Mavra. 

But what did that mean? Was Obie reconstituted, alive again in orbit? All the  Well's local sensors showed no change. Nothing but the usual random debris up  there. What had she just done? 

"Obie? Where are you, Obie?" 

"Obie couldn't come," said a strange, commanding, powerful voice that seemed to  fill the whole of the great hall. "So I came instead." 

"Holy shit! It's another one!" Gus exclaimed. "And this one sounds like Darth  Vader!" 

And from the center of the hall another shape appeared, very much like Mavra,  but not quite like Mavra. It was bigger, more than three meters tall and half  again as thick, and it seemed to be bathed in a radiant glow. 

"How wondrous it is to be free once again!" the Kraang exclaimed. "I did not  believe that it would ever happen in spite of my best efforts!" Mavra had no conception of who this newcomer was, but she knew pretty damned  well that it had been the result of her commands to the Well, which was now  reporting a return to "nominal” status, meaning no more repairs were necessary. Mavra Chang tried to retrieve information on this newcomer, this bizarre new  creature who seemed to have come from nowhere, but she couldn't. Suddenly she  felt the Well closing off from her as if a series of switches were being thrown  one by one, shutting her out, diminishing her ... 

She tried to fight, but the Kraang was out of her league. Suddenly, for the  first time, she realized that it had all been for nothing, that she'd been  played for one of the biggest fools in the history of the cosmos. She stood there, suddenly just Mavra Chang again, a tiny Oriental-looking woman,  slightly built, naked, and looking very, very small indeed. 

"Don't feel so bad," the booming voice of the Kraang said to her. "I have been  most impressed with you. Most impressed. You couldn't know about me because I  was outside of the entire system, outside of the entire Master Program. It was  designed that way so that I would drift forever in space, neither fully alive  nor dead, never intersecting or interacting with anything. Designed that way  over five billion years ago." 

"You! It was you sending me those messages!" she said, openmouthed, never  feeling more like a sucker in her whole life than right now. "And you were what  was wrong! You were what I was called to fix!" 

"Clever. Yes, it is true. You know the principle of the fifty million monkeys.  That sooner or later fifty million monkeys at fifty million typewriters will  write the works of Shakespeare if given an infinite amount of time. Well, my  condition was like that. Eventually, in a coincident situation during the last  reset, the Well was supposed to give a course correction that would have  continued my endless lonely isolation. At that moment, however, the reset was  executed, and that command was not completely given. Eventually, an intersection  was made in spite of it all. I was able to tap into the data stream, although  only in limited ways. I've been watching you-all of you-since you were processed  through the Well and became part of the minor data stream. I've seen it all  through your eyes, heard your thoughts, monitored your dreams. But it was all  for naught. All for nothing if someone came here who understood the problem and  corrected it. Fortunately, you made it in first, my dear. That will stand you  forever in my favor." 

"Nathan," she said guiltily. "If Nathan would've gotten here first, he would  have been able to deal with you." 

"Yes, that's true, I suspect, although I am still not terribly clear on who or  what he actually is beyond being a pathological liar. Severing him from the data  stream will take considerably more work, but there is no hurry now, is there?" "You are one of the founders? An original of this race?" Lori asked. "I am." 

"Then why did they imprison you so? And where did the rest of them go? Will you  tell us that?" 

"As a race they went collectively mad," the Kraang responded. "This insane  project, this march to oblivion, began with nobler motives, but eventually the  infection was complete. Only I stood against them. Even those who agreed with me  were eventually won over, co-opted. Those who thought as I but did not have the  courage to speak or act against it were carried along in its momentum. They did  not exile me. They came to kill me. They came to put me through the Well, to  make of me what the Well did to you. I was the one with the courage, and I was  too smart for them. Deep below here, in the workrooms and stations of the Well,  I arranged my own exile. I exiled myself rather than be forced into their  madness! And I did it in a prison of my own devising, one that was controlled by  an endless loop that the Well itself could neither monitor nor touch. I suppose  they might have been able to break it in time, but they apparently decided to  let it go, seeing how perfect my exile was. To them, I had committed a racial  sin, and I had devised my own punishment, my own hell, as it were, and sent  myself forever to it. They did not know that I was in a suspended state, shut  down, all but the most minute part of myself in semioblivion so that the passage  of such a great amount of time would be as nothing to me." 

"But then, you must have known that somehow, sometime it would break down," Lori  noted, fascinated as they all were, even if still terrified of this strange  specter from out of ancient epochs. 

"I was a mathematician," the Kraang explained. "I knew of randomness, of chaos,  of the infinite amounts of time before this universe. Would it happen before the  universe began to contract in upon itself once more and finally die as quietly  as it had been born so noisily? That I could not say. It was nonetheless a vast  amount of time in which, even with the Well, almost anything could happen. I  must say that it never occurred to me that it would be this soon. Now, though, I  am here and they are gone. Now the Well serves me and me alone. Overall, this  universe is a patchwork remade by amateurs. I shall proceed to perfect it. Not  right away, not so frighteningly dramatic, but slowly, with subtlety, with  conscious interaction. I will provide the way, and the universe will choose to  follow me and perfect itself. That portion which does not will be destroyed. My  vision is a challenge to me, to the Well, to all the peoples and worlds of the  universe! Those who see and accept me and my vision and follow shall inherit it  under me!" 

"It sounds like you're thinking of becoming God Almighty," Anne Marie said  somewhat scornfully. 

"I AM GOD ALMIGHTY, MASTER OF THIS UNIVERSE AND ALL THAT IS WITHIN IT!" the  Kraang thundered. 

Then, in still thunderous but more moderate tones, he added. "That happened the  moment my program was canceled. How can I explain it to your puny, primitive  intellects? The moment I returned to the point where I had left was the moment  that the Well came under my total and complete domination and will, an  instrument of myself. You are honored to be present at the coronation of the one  and only true God of the universe. Now and forever." 

"Amen," Gus said a bit sourly. 

Mavra just sat there, head down, thinking over and over, What have I done? What  have I done? 

The Kraang, however, was going on. It was, Gus supposed, the first time he'd had  a captive audience in billions of years. 

"What is God?" mused the Kraang. "The ultimate leader. Immortal, all-powerful,  able to call up any fact, any bit of information, no matter how large or how  small, as he chooses. One able to reward those who worship him and follow his  instructions and to punish those who transgress his will, his whims, no matter  how petty. You all had gods-at least, virtually all of you-and one, Mavra Chang,  played goddess for centuries to a bunch of people even more ignorant and  primitive than she. The god of the Jews slew whole populations because one  person transgressed. He punished individuals who did nothing more than slip once  in an otherwise pious life with death and damnation. He set down a list of rules  so arcane, so complex, that no one could truly follow them all. And yet he could  take someone who murdered, who committed adultery, who violated almost every one  of his commandments and make him a beloved king in spite of all that. Now where  is the logic in that? Yet on your world that god became god of the Christians,  god of the Moslems, the most influential and important god on the planet. The  Hindus-we won't even talk about the destroyer of universes; it is  self-explanatory. They perhaps had the clearest idea of the system as it truly  was, but to what end? So that a rigid class structure could always be maintained  on the people by the ruling elite in which even social climbing would be a  mortal sin. The Buddhists-they saw through everything. Existence proceeded stage  upon stage, until you reached the That Which Is Beyond. Oblivion. And that's  just your world. You cannot imagine what some of the others came up with! Am I  so much worse than the gods you did worship? The gods you tried to follow? Or am  I merely a threat because I am real, I exist, you cannot deny me or my power or  doubt it? You-none of you can rationalize me away!"