That was the mission of the Nautilus this time: an exclusive resort with a wonderful reputation gained through free miracle cures and word of mouth, attracted the wealthiest and most powerful. Change those minds, and, perhaps, a disastrous future could be prevented.
Sri Khat was still sitting, relaxed, when Nautilus seemed to shudder. A momentary loss of power caused lights to flicker and small objects to fall over. The effect was something like that of a mild earthquake; but no such thing could possibly happen here.
She was on the intercom in a second. “Attention all personnel! Calm guests as first priority. Damage Control, see to any problems Topside! All hands stand by!” She flipped a switch anxiously. “Obie! What the hell happened?”
“I—I don’t quite know,” a shaky tenor replied. “One moment all was going well, then, suddenly, I felt a stabbing pain, a real wrenching pain! It caused me momentarily to lose control!”
“You’re a machine, damn it! You can’t feel pain!”
“That’s what I thought,” the massive computer who was Nautilus replied, “but—it was horrible! I can still feel it!”
Khat was thinking fast. “Are you damaged? Did something blow?”
“No, no, nothing like that. I’ve already performed a complete maintenance check. The source is external.” He was calming down, anyway. How many times had she gone through similar things with the computer, calming and soothing him—it was impossible to think of Obie as an “it”? The most sophisticated computer complex known save one, Obie often behaved like a child crying in the night.
That didn’t mean, though, that the situation wasn’t serious. Obie was frightened only because so great a computer normally so much in control now faced something outside his experience. To be reminded that you are neither totally in control nor omnipotent can shatter your confidence.
“Analysis, Obie. What caused it?”
“No way to tell,” he responded, sounding more assured. “It was not a local disturbance. It was not, in fact, anywhere in this galaxy, I think. I—I’m very much afraid that something might have happened to the Well of Souls computer. I experienced a double impact, one much stronger than the other, but from two directions. One would indicate the Well, the other is from somewhere in the neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy. I’m afraid something terrible has happened—first because the impact was instantaneous, despite the distances, which rules out anything except the fabric of space—time, our very reality; and second because I can still feel it. I think we’d better drop this project for now and investigate.”
Sri Khat agreed. “We don’t want to shock or disrupt anybody, though. We’ll have to manufacture failures of our own, refund everybody’s money and send the Gramanch home. Then we can announce to our agents planetside that we’ve had mechanical problems and will have to go off for a complete overhaul. That should take care of it.”
“But that’ll take several days!” Obie protested.
“Nevertheless, we have a responsibility,” she reminded him. “And we want an orderly withdrawal or we’ll fuel their paranoia as you’ve never imagined when we go.”
Obie emitted a very human sigh. “Well, you’re the captain.”
“You bet your sweet metallic ass I am,” Mavra Chang replied.
In Orbit Off the Well World
It was a strange and solitary solar system; even Obie was not very clear on where it was located. He simply allowed himself to be drawn there along the massive energy force fields radiating from it to all parts of the Universe.
The system itself didn’t amount to much—a medium-yellow G-type star of no special attributes except that it should have burnt itself out billions of years earlier and burnt in fact at a precise, constant rate; some asteroids and planetoids of no consequence or interest; a few comets and other such natural debris; a lone planet circling the star at about one hundred and fifty million kilometers out in a perfect circle.
Beyond the perfection of its orbit, the planet itself was extraordinary. Not huge, not imposing, it shimmered and glistened like a fantastic Christmas-tree bulb, perfectly round, with a dark band around its center. Its period of rotation was a little over twenty-eight hours, standard, and it had no axial tilt.
The two hemispheres defined by that dark band were quite different, although both north and south reflected sunlight from hundreds of hexagonal facets. The blue and white South Hemisphere was home to seven hundred and eighty carbon-based races, each existing in its own hexagonal biosphere; the North, swirling with exotic colors, supported seven hundred and eighty noncarbon-based races that breathed esoteric gases if they breathed at all.
In the first few billion years after the creation of the Universe, a single race had evolved capable of expanding beyond its planetary bounds. Carbon-based but nonhuman, it had attained a demigodhood on planets throughout the galaxies, a state that eventually led to boredom and stagnation that the race, in its greatness, recognized. Something had gone wrong in the climb to the top; the creatures had reached god-hood and found it wanting. Somewhere, somehow they had taken a wrong turn, a turn they could not divine, and they were frustrated. So frustrated, in fact, that they had decided to give it all up, to restage the creation under different rules and circumstances. This banded, honeycomb world, the Well World, was their laboratory, where new races and biospheres were created by the best engineers and artisans and allowed to develop—up to a point. Then, using the great computer that was the planet beneath the crust, they created and developed worlds where the great drama of evolution could be replayed with different rules and a different cast. Giving their own bodies and minds to the project, the masters became their new creations, surrendering immortality and godhood in the hope that their descendants, alien and ignorant of the past, would find the greatness their creators had missed.
Over seven hundred years before the arrival of the Dreel on Parkatin, Obie had double-crossed Antor Trelig at his demonstration on New Pompeii. The computer thought everyone present would die but, instead, the Well of Souls, the great Markovian computer that monitored and maintained reality, had drawn them to the Well World.
“It has been a long time.” Obie’s voice spoke to her from the monitor.
Mavra Chang nodded absently. “A long time,” she echoed.
They paused for a few moments, thinking, remembering experiences from centuries past.
In her natural human form as she appeared now, Mavra Chang was tiny and thin, with the physique of a champion gymnast. Her face was exotic and quite Oriental. Long black hair trailed down her back. Although well over seven hundred and fifty years old, she looked about twenty—Obie’s control over the equations of reality was complete, although localized. A great computer, he easily handled complexities that had baffled the Com, yet he was quantum jumps below the Well of Souls in capacity or sophistication.