In Mavra Chang’s case it was particularly true; she’d been a rebel and a thief the first half of her life.
“Never mind the alibis, let’s get back to the story,” Renard snapped impatiently. Yulin shrugged and settled back down.
The Yaxa paused a moment and continued. “I was developed as a woman, put in a Com whorehouse for party bigwigs, and got so screwed up and was so abused by the men who came by that I became unable to relate, sexually or socially, with men at all. That made me wrong for the job, so they gave me to a bastard controller in the sponge syndicate to use as a sample—hook me on sponge, then decrease the dosage very slightly as a living example.”
Renard nodded sympathetically. “Remember, I was a spongie, too—and I saw New Pompeii in its heyday.”
“Well, the two of us found ourselves on a freighter bound for Coriolanus,” Vistaru continued. “The captain was a funny little guy named Nathan Brazil.”
Renard’s dark eyebrows rose in surprise. “It’s been over twenty years since I heard that name. I can hardly remember where. Mavra, I think. He’s not for real, if I remember. The Wandering Jew.”
“He’s for real,” Vistaru assured him. “He discovered that Wooley was on sponge and decided to make a run for the sponge world without us knowing. We got detoured by a strange distress signal from a Markovian world, discovered a mass murder, and wound up falling through a Gate and winding up here. Wooley came out a Dillian first, I came out a Czillian—you may have seen some. Intelligent plant creatures.”
Renard nodded. “Seems to me I met one—named Vardia, come to think of it.”
She nodded. “That was me, too. The Czillians reproduce by budding off. There are probably several of the original me still around, with memories complete to that point.”
“Wait a minute!” Yulin objected. “You say she was a Dillian and you were a Czillian. That’s not possiblel You only get one trip through the Well and you know it!”
“Most people,” the Lata corrected. “We got more. Brazil’s immortality is easily explained. We accompanied him on a journey much like this one, to the Well of Souls itself—and it opened for him. He was a Markovian, Yulin! Perhaps the only one still alive!” Yulin was fascinated, and so was Renard. “A living Markovian!” the Dasheen breathed. “Still around! Incredible! What did he look like? Did you ever see him in his natural form?”
Both Wooley and Vistaru nodded. “Oh, yes, for a while inside the Well. It looks like a huge human heart on six tentacles. Brazil—well, he claimed to be more than that.”
“He said he was God,” Wooley put in. “He said he created the Markovians and saw them go wrong, and he was waiting around to see if we did a better job of it.”
The prospect was unnerving. “Do you believe him?” Renard asked.
Vistaru shrugged. “Who knows? One thing’s for sure—he’s at least a Markovian, and he could work the Well. Somehow, during the worst of the journey, the two of us had grown closer together—I guess I was learning how to be a real human being. As for Wooley—well, she kind of loved Nathan Brazil, but he was too inhuman, and she also hated being a woman. Nathan fixed it. We were transported from the Well World to Harvich’s World, which was then on the frontier. He put me in the body of a beautiful but suicidal whore, and Wu—Wooley—well, became a farmer named Kally Tonge, a big, handsome man who’d just died in an accident We became those people and got together—as Nathan had planned, I think.”
“We ran the farm together for years,” Wooley added. “They were great years. We had nine kids, too, and we brought them up right. Some got real big on their own—politicians and space captains and Com police, that level. Most left Harvich’s World for greener pastures, but one stayed.”
The Lata nodded. “Our daughter Vashura. She was smart as hell, and beautiful, too. Became the senator for the district, and would have been councillor if she’d had enough time. Kally and I went through one rejuve, and it took pretty well, I guess. Both of us went out-system, did a lot of work with the Com police on the sponge trade after selling the farm. Interesting work, but it grew increasingly frustrating as we got older. Finally we faced another rejuve and maybe some loss of memory or ability along with it. We decided not to. About the only thing we had to stay around for was helping Vashura fight the Com threat to Harvich’s World. A local party apparatus had grown up, and it looked weak until suddenly lots of key votes switched. We knew sponge was the cause, but we couldn’t prove it. Finally, the strain became too much for us. We decided to pack it in. Neither of us could bear to be around and see the world that had so much of our sweat and blood in it turn into another cookie-cutter insect world.”
Renard understood. “What about your daughter, though?”
“We tried for the longest time to convince her to take the family and get out,” the Yaxa told him. “She was stubborn—got it from us, I guess. Thought she could fight them. By the time it was clear she couldn’t, well, it was too late to leave. We barely got out in time ourselves. We didn’t know what to do. Vashura would fight to the death, but there were the grandchildren to think of. So, before finding a Well Gate, we used every bit of pull, contact, IOU, and subterfuge we had to locate Nathan Brazil.”
“And did you?” the Agitar responded, surprised. “He actually returned to our part of the universe?”
Vistaru nodded. “Oh, yes. He promised to get the kids out if it were physically possible and if their parents would allow it. All he managed was Mavra.” That last was spoken with incredible sadness.
“This Brazil—when you found him, almost two centuries later—how did he look?” Yulin asked, genuinely interested.
“Exactly the same,” the Yaxa replied. “Not a hair different, not a sign of aging. I think he’s looked like that since mankind was born.”
“I wonder why he picked us to live among?” Renard mused. “Couldn’t be our superior good looks.”
“As a Markovian he’d helped establish the original Glathriel,” Wooley explained. “As he described it, it wasn’t his project, but he was—well, the manager. He arranged the transfer to Old Earth. But, unlike the others, he never transformed himself totally and irrevocably. He stayed a Markovian.”
Yulin nodded. “A temporary line. When we built Obie, we found out all about that. The whole universe is just stabilized energy fields. How that energy is transformed and manipulated creates the different elements we know—and the Well—or on a smaller scale, Obie—stabilizes them. You can have a permanent change, literally writing an equation to hold the elements so thoroughly together that your creation becomes normal reality and is perceived as such by everyone around you. Using Obie, we changed a woman into a centaur long before we heard of Dillia, and, sure enough, everybody always remembered her as a centaur, there was even a logical reason for it going all the way back to her birth. That’s how the Markovians recreated the universe.”
“Clear as mud,” Renard noted.
Yulin shrugged. “Then, at Trelig’s bidding, we ran the people through Obie and gave them all horse’s tails—it was supposed to be an example. So everybody had to know they shouldn’t have the tails they had. We created a temporary equation, a local one, as it were. Their tails, which were not considered normal, are like Brazil’s humanity. He is a Markovian, and reverts to it when in the Well. I wonder if he’s the only one of them who did that?”
It was a thought, but not one that could be resolved. They didn’t worry about that or dwell on it.