03. The Maze in the Mirror (28 page)

He chuckled, apparently enjoying my discomfort. "No, it's clean-possibly cleaner than most worlds-but quite sad. These people here-they are the survivors, the ones whose grandparents didn't die, and who found a small pocket where things still grew normally, although it was a nasty place. We brought them some animals and better tools and they have been quite grateful to us, and very hospitable. Some of the nasty micro-organisms, mutated over the years, still exist, and might pose a threat to them if they went too far, but it's funny. This world is just different enough from ours-yours or mine or many others-that those pests die if they get into our systems. Just a little difference, perhaps in biochemistry, or vitamins, or hormones, or solar radiation-who knows? But we, Horowitz-and most people from other universes-are poison to their germs. So, relax."

I had an uncomfortable thought that something like germs in the Labyrinth air exchange system might readily close the thing down, but I dismissed it for now. The air was exchanged with the various worlds with which the cubes came in contact. Each cube was essentially self-contained, so there'd be only a tiny bleedover, and you'd certainly infect all the worlds any organism contacted. It
wasn't very practical, but it didn't make me feel any better.

"All right, I'm relaxed in that department, although I can't see how you can work in here without setting this place on fire. Shall I ask you some questions now?"

He nodded. "Go ahead."

"First of all, how well did you know Pandross?"

He thought a moment. "Oddly, not at all well, in spite of our long association. He was an odd sort of chap, very much a loner. I doubt if anyone, certainly not any of us, really knew him closely or well."

There it was again-that same distance between Pandross and the others.

"But he was dependable and reliable at all times," Yugarin contihued, "and he had an affinity for anything mechanical or electrical that defied rational explanation. He was the only man I ever knew who could fix a machine he'd never seen before by opening it up and somehow deducing or tracing just exactly how it worked and why. He created many of Kanda's intricate mathematical computer programs when we're certain he didn't understand the math the program did. I don't know how that's possible, but that was Pandross."

I nodded. "Did he ever spook anybody? Any of the others? I mean, I've known guys of that type myself and even the people they worked for felt real nervous and uncomfortable around them."

"Oh-I see. You are looking into motivation. I doubt that Tarn was very close to him, and Voorhes kept some distance as well. Mendelez tried to seduce him once, early on, and he flew into the only rage I can ever recall from him-indeed, the only real emotion I ever saw him display except a child-like happiness when playing with his gadgets. It was a cold rage, but she never quite forgave him for it and never directly spoke to him again. But that was
years
ago."

I was chasing something, something I'd sensed but couldn't pin down from my earliest conversations with this crew, and I wasn't about to let it go yet. But there were other things in the room that also caught my interest, and I stood up. Like a map of the twin Zero regions, right and left of the Zero World, with all the sidings and switches in, including mine, that I knew about and many I didn't. And the one to home sweet home, if I could get a look at it, along with a number of others, had big red circles around it.

"Sorry," I said as apologetically as I could, "but it's been a while since I rode horses and I've got to stand and stretch a bit or I don't think I'll ever stand again."

"Feel free, but there is not much room to move."

"I don't need to move much, just shift weight for circulation." I paused, then continued, "Your- organization-is given to complex, Machiavellian plans, if you know the term."

He nodded. "Go on."

"Your attempt to switch key people for doubles in some central Company worlds was like that, and the plot to hook the Directors on drugs was also similar. I assume there are many more I don't know about because either they worked or were before my time. Still, there's a consistency in your group thought that builds a pattern. Whose idea was the double replacement scheme?"

Yugarin thought back. "Voorhes came up with that one, if I remember, although we all participated to a degree. It was rather successful to a degree."

"Cranston was Voorhes' man, then?" I angled over and got a very good look at the master map he had tacked up on the wall behind his desk, a map covered with writings and symbols in various colors of marker ink. The system wasn't that hard to deduce, once I got one spot located and identified that I knew.

"Yes," he replied to my question, not even taking much notice of me and my deliberately casual-looking observations. "I wasn't much involved in that and it is difficult to remember, but, yes. Cranston was a replacement himself who surpassed all our expectations."

"And the drug business was Carlos."

"Oh, indeed, although both Valintina and Cutler were involved in the extensive set-up and experimental stages, as was I, since getting supplies of it from that far up the line down to the Zero region was tricky in the extreme."

Uh huh! That's what ties it up. Big bangs here and over there and just off that switch there-so that was it! Or was it?

"And Pandross supplied the security system, warm bodies, and maintained the loyalty of the underlings," I went on.

"Essentially, yes. All security personnel were under Pandross, of course, but his personal involvement was and remained overall system security, not the security of any given operation."

"Did Pandross ever propose any plan or scheme, even way back when?" I asked him. "I mean, did
he ever actually develop anything on his own or take personal charge in an operation?"

Yugarin thought a moment, then shook his head no. "Not once. Not really. One might call him the ultimate engineering mind. Once given a problem he could map it out and show you its strengths and weaknesses, gains and risks, and even suggest efficiencies and improvements, but he never actually proposed or thought up anything, no. I am not at all certain he could improvise on the field level. You gave
him
the problem. Problem in, solution out-if there was a solution."

"All right," I said, sitting back down in my chair, confident that I'd seen all I could see without being obvious. "What about your own pending project? Did you go to Pandross with it before you brought it to the full council? I know you went to Mancini."

"Not ahead of time, no. When the thing was fully worked out and ready, and the group voted its approval, then he was almost instantly on it as a security and logistics problem."

"But he voted for it."

Yugarin shrugged. "He always went along with whatever the majority decided to do. You must remember that, other than inclination, it was not his job to come up with grand schemes and designs, but to take such things and apply his own unique level of expertise to them to see how they could be done securely, in secret, and with minimal risk and maximum coverage."

I filed that one away. "Mancini says your plan has a better than one in twenty chance of wiping out all humanity up and down the entire line, absolutely and forever. As I understand it, that's
where what opposition to it that there was came from. That prospect doesn't bother you?"

He nodded. "Yes, it bothers me. It bothered me when I came up with it at first, which is why I took so long before putting the whole thing together. I remember discussing it with Mancini, oh, ten years ago. ..."

"Ten years!"
Good lord! That was it! That was the answer!
All of a sudden a whole set of building blocks fell into place. Now all I really needed was the big question-who was on which side?

He nodded. "It was percolating a long time, and came from my efforts at truly mapping and understanding the Labyrinth. At the time, the risks to all the worlds was more on the order of fifty percent. It either worked or it killed everyone and everything. That's why it was never proposed at the time. Mancini eventually took Kanda into his confidence and they worked on it off and on, with some input from me, over the years as time permitted us to do so. They came up with a theory very early to drastically reduce the risk, but we had no way to test it out without mounting major operations. Finally, not very long ago, we got a computer simulation that Mancini and Kanda felt comfortable with that showed the risk at five percent and also indicated very little chance of us getting below that. We decided to bring it fully formed to the others and see if they felt the risk acceptable. It was either that or abandon it entirely after all this time, and, frankly, no one had any alternative bright ideas."

Time to see if I could confirm any of my theories without drawing pictures or putting Yugarin on the track.

"Then you didn't bring it to them with a firm argument to do it and with the votes already counted as Tarn said. It was just a 'this is all we've been able to come up with in a new grand design?'"

He nodded. "Quin Tarn is one of your Machiavellian manipulator types, and someone incapable of believing that anyone his intellectual equal would not think and act as he would. He would see our proposal that way whether it was true or not because he was, as it were, on the losing side and that is the way
he
would have done it."

Yeah, that made sense. "But Mancini and Kanda were all for it."

"They want to try it. They want to try it because they have nothing else to live for but their work, and, having invested so much in this, they want to find out if they were right."

"And it doesn't trouble you that they might be wrong?"

"Not really. The cosmos has been singularly unkind to me and singularly uncaring of what is or was done to me. I feel no differently towards it than it does of me." He fingered the gold cross. "If there is a God, then He will not permit the worst to happen, or it is His will, the Final Judgment Day, he's looking for. If there is not, then, one day, perhaps a thousands of millions of years hence, time will end, the universes will either dissolve or collapse inward, and nothing we do or ever did means anything anyway. Either way, it's not my problem, is it?"

I didn't answer right away, but, looking at him there, Rasputin's creed came floating in from some hidden corner of my mind where it had sat
since I learned about it way back when in high school history or someplace.
Anything done by or with a holy man is holy. With me, by me, there are no questions.

Finally I said, "Nobody really knows the big questions, do they? But maybe, just maybe, all of you have been consumed. You suffered a bigger tragedy, all of you, than I hope I will ever know, but you-all of you-brilliant people, the last and perhaps the best of your world. You could have made that world live, in a sense, with all the knowledge and skills you had. Instead you all decided that you died back then and you've been feeding on sheer hatred ever since. There are probably other worlds out there with other Voorhes and Yugarians and Quin Tarns, only different in small ways from your own. Somewhere those you love still are represented, still live in a way. Would you kill them, too?"

He whirled angrily and for a moment I thought he was going to attack me, but he got control of himself.

"Yes!" he shouted at me. "Can't you understand that what you say is just what is wrong?
That the cancer that consumes our souls is rooted in the very knowledge that the rest of creation continues unmoved and unchanged!"

He sat back down, then looked down at the floor, and finally back up at me. "You have asked all the questions you required. Go," he said, in a hollow, empty voice.

I didn't want to push him any more, and he was right. I had, in fact, learned far more than I ever dreamed I would, and I had no wish to provoke him. Without another word, I hauled myself out of the chair and left the room, where Moustache Mouth was waiting for me.

I stayed with the people of the Holy Tartar Empire, all three hundred or so of them plus maybe fifty more of Yugarin's boys, for two days. They were a fairly jolly lot for a primitive, rag-tag group of survivors, and they thought of Yugarin as some sort of god.

I guess if I'd been starving at the edge of nowhere in a land laid waste I'd be pretty close to worshiping the guy who brought in chickens and pigs and cows and horses and sheep and much of the little manufactured goods we take for granted -like the precision tools to make other things.

Yugarin had found a kind of kinship with the wretched survivors of a world that had destroyed itself without even needing the helping hand of the Company, and, ironically, one which the Company might have saved had it been here. As rotten to the core as the Company was, it was that alone that kept me oriented to its side. I knew that the same octopus of exploitation also used its powerful and hidden tentacles to defuse the ultimate, to keep worlds like mine from giving in to the human bent for total destruction.

The same organization that had destroyed at least one world had saved countless others. It didn't matter about the motives involved; I had a stake in the Company's continued existence for much the same reason that these people wanted to destroy it utterly.

I didn't see Yugarin but that once, and had no real idea if he remained there or not, but his men clearly had orders that until I was picked up I was
to be kept there. I only hoped Maria hadn't gotten into any real trouble. I didn't relish spending the rest of my life in the place in spite of the camaraderie. It was too damned cold and primitive, and it stank.

Finally, though, Moustache Mouth came for me. "Your pretty partner, she is here for you at the gate," he said, and I was eager to go to her.

By "gate" the security man meant the Labyrinth, and we rode out the same way as before, along the dirt road and then overland on the old trail to the small ramshackle wooden building on the hill.

Maria, in a heavy and expensive-looking fur coat and hat and fur-lined boots, was sitting there, leaning against the building, waiting for me. She looked like she'd done pretty well for herself in the couple of days on her own. I only hoped that she'd done as well for me, and nothing against me, during that period.