His name was Antor Trelig and he looked a lot like a giant frog. Nothing much unusual in this; in Makiem, everybody looked like a giant frog.
Trelig's chest bore the tattoo of the Imperial Household. From his office in the palace he could look out across the great city of Druhon—a lively, medieval center for 250,000 Makiem—to the great lake beyond that reflected the city's gaslights and the fairyland lighting of the castle. In the lake the land-dwelling Makiem could wet down their bodies as needed, swim underwater for long periods for recreation, and there, for one glorious week a year, the otherwise nonsexual Makiem bred.
Looming like dark shadows on either side of the lake were high mountains that provided an irregular frame for the great starfield mirrored in the lake. The sky of the Well World was spectacular to an unimaginable degree; from the Southern Hemisphere it was dominated by a great globular cluster and clouds of swirling gas, punctuated by an impossibly dense starfield that reflected the Well's position near a galactic center. Trelig often reclined on his balcony seat, looking out at the vista on clear nights. There was no other sight quite like it.
He heard a noise behind him but didn't turn away from the view. Only one person could enter his office without challenge or concern.
"You've never given up, have you?" The voice just behind him was somewhat softer than his, but with a toughness that showed that his wife, Burodir, was not just another pretty face.
"You know I haven't," he almost sighed. "And I never will. I can't when—now, for instance—you can actually see the damn thing tantalizing me, almost mocking me. Challenging me." He pointed a clawed and webbed index finger out at the dark.
She sat beside him. Theirs was not a romantic union. She had been married off to him because her father was the power behind the throne and needed a watch kept on this stranger. Though rumor said the old man had choked to death on a bad mork-worm, she knew deep inside that Antor Trelig had somehow arranged his demise, and then moved into the vacated place.
She was her father's daughter, though, so revenge was out of the question. She would remain loyal and faithful to Trelig—unless and until she could increase her own powers safely by knocking him off.
He understood that. He was the same way.
She peered out into the darkness and the U-shaped starfield showing through the Mountain Gate. "Where is it?" she asked.
"Almost at the horizon," he gestured. "About the size of a twenty-nug piece. See it, all silvery in the reflection of the sun?"
Now she had it in sight—it was huge, really, but so low down and so oddly colored that it would often escape detection if one had a limited view of the horizon.
"New Pompeii," he breathed. "It was mine once—it will be mine again."
Once he'd been what he called human—resembling the folk of Glathriel far to the southeast. He'd been born unguessable billions of light-years from this spot, born to rule the Comworld of New Harmony, where everyone was hermaphroditic and all looked the same, but where party leaders like him had been larger, grander, than the rest.
He loved power; he'd been born to it and raised to wield it. Wealth and position meant nothing to him unless they served his lust for power. That was why he was content for now to be Minister of Agriculture, an anonymous lower cabinet position. Few knew him even in Makiem, except as the Entry who'd crashed there in a spaceship.
"Up there is all the power one could want," he told her, for perhaps the nine-thousandth time. She didn't mind; she was just like him. "A giant computer is the entire southern half of that little world," he continued. "It's a small-scale Well of Souls, able to transform physical and temporal reality on a scale that might be planetwide. See that sparkle, about halfway down? That's the edge of the big dish, locked on the Well of Souls at the equator, frozen in place. But if freed, it would be able to transform a world as large as this one. Think of it! A world! With the people designed to your pattern, the land and resources laid out to your specifications, and everything absolutely loyal to you—you who can be made immortal. And that computer can accomplish it all merely by adjusting reality in such a way that nobody would even know anything had been done. Everyone would just accept it!"
She nodded sympathetically. "But you know there is nothing on the Well World that could build an engine with sufficient thrust to reach New Pompeii," she pointed out. "You and I both saw the engines tumble and explode in that glacial valley in Gedemondas."
He nodded absently. "Fourteen thousand already dead from the Alliance that warred to get that fragmented ship, perhaps another forty thousand dead in the war itself—and the same number from the opposition alliance that the Yaxa and Ben Yulin headed."
He talked as if he were sincerely pained by the waste and futility the war represented, but she knew it was the compulsive politician in him that made it sound so. He couldn't care less about the dead and crippled, only that the war had been for nothing and had cost Makiem its friendship with its allies and neighbors, who took a dimmer view.
"What about Yulin?" she asked. Yulin had been the brilliant engineer who had kidnapped Gil Zinder's daughter, Nikki, and forced Zinder, who had designed the computer, to move and expand the project to New Pompeii, Trelig's private little world. Yulin was the only other creature who knew the code to bypass New Pompeii's computer defenses and could get in to operate the great machine. Not even Gil Zinder, who had somehow totally vanished on the Well World, as had his daughter, could get in without the passwords.
The mention of Yulin brought a chuckle to Trelig's great reptile lips. "Yulin! He's a semiretired farmer in Dasheen. He's got a hundred minotaur cows bred to adoring slavery for him. He's done some engineering work for his former allies, the Yaxa and Lamotien, but the Well math is beyond him—a great engineer, a so-so theoretical scientist. Without Zinder he can run, even build, some of the great machines, but he can't design one from scratch. They've tried! Besides, I think he's rather happy in Dasheen. It's the kind of place he's always fantasized about, anyway. The Yaxa had to drag him kicking and screaming into the war."
She was thoughtful. "This Zinder, though. He could build another such computer, couldn't he? Doesn't that worry you?"
He shook his head. "No. If he was in a position to do so, he'd have done it by now, I'm sure—and such a massive undertaking would be impossible to hide. No, with all the searches that have been launched over all this time, I'm certain that he's dead, or locked in one of those mass-mind worlds or nontech immobile-plant hexes. Nikki, I'm sure, is also dead. I doubt if she could survive anywhere on her own." First one, then the other of his huge independent eyes seemed to fog a bit. "No, it's not Yulin or Zinder I fear—it's that girl who troubles me."
"Humph!" his wife snorted. "Mavra Chang, always Mavra Chang. It's an obsession with you! Look, she's deformed—she couldn't run a ship even if you put her in charge. No hands, face always looking down. She can't even feed herself. Better face it, Antor, dear. There is no way of ever returning to that glittering bauble of yours up there in the sky, and no way anybody else can, either—particularly not Mavra Chang!"
"I wish I had your confidence," he responded glumly. "Yes, it's true I'm obsessed with her. She's the most dangerous antagonist I ever faced. Tiny little slip of a girl—not much bigger than Parmiter's owl-faced apes. And yet, she managed to get devices of incredible complexity past my detectors—and they were the best you could buy! Then she slipped into Nikki Zinder's prison, past all but a couple of the guards, talked one guard into deserting with her, and managed to steal a ship and not get shot down by my robot sentinels—they're still up there, too, you know—by knowing a password based on a system only I could possibly know. How? Because she was in league with that goddamned computer of Zinder's, that's how! It's self-aware, you know! It's the only answer. That means I haven't the slightest idea whether or not she really could get back through to that computer if she ever managed to get back up there! Even Yulin might have problems getting by the sentinels, but she won't! And her mind's so strange, so unfathomable, that no one knows what she'd do with that kind of power. She's vicious and vengeful, I know that. I lost a number of good syndicate hit men once when they killed her husband. I know what she'd like to do to me!"
Burodir shifted. She'd heard it all before. "But she won't!" she pointed out. "There's no way for anybody to get up there!"
"There's a perfectly preserved ship in the North," he retorted. "I ought to know—Ben and I crashed in it."
"But in a nontech hex populated by beings so alien they don't even understand what it is, and won't permit any other race to move it," she continued. "And, besides, it's impossible for a Southerner to go beyond North Zone. You know that. Any Zone Gate on the Well World, North or South, just brings you back to Makiem. You can't get beyond North Zone!"
That thought didn't bother him. "I'd have once said what Chang did was impossible," he pointed out. "I'd have said the Well of Souls, the Well World, Makiem, and all the rest were impossible, too. Besides, I've been reading the histories. A little over two centuries ago a Northerner did make it to the South, here. If it can be done that way, the same thing can be done in reverse."
She nodded. "I know, the Diviner and the Rel, or something. That whole story is so mucked up in distortion and legend, few believe it anyway. You know that. There was also supposed to be a Markovian then—still around a million or more years after the rest of his race died out—and the Well was supposedly opened, entered, and then sealed for all time. If you believe those kinds of fairy tales, you'll believe anything!"
He considered what she said. "Well, back where I came from, there were myths about weird, intelligent creatures in the dim past—centaurs and mermaids and pixies and fairies and flying winged horses and minotaurs and more. I have seen every one of those here. This Markovian—this Nathan Brazil, as he was called, from my sector of space—was a real person. There are records and descriptions of him in places like that plant-research center, Czill. Those people are not likely to accept fairy tales. And Serge Ortega believes in him, even claims to have known him."
"Ortega!" she sniffed. "A scoundrel. A prisoner in Zone because of his own quest for immortality, and centuries older than any Ulik has a right to be. He's a senile old man."
"Ancient he is," Trelig agreed, "but senile he is not. Remember, he's the one who has kept Mavra Chang on ice and protected, until such time as he finds his own solution to this Northern mess. He's the one who brought up that Diviner and Rel business. He was there!"
She tried to change the subject. "You know, it'll be our season in less than two weeks," she pointed out. "Have you cleared everything for it? I'm already starting to feel the urges."
Trelig nodded absently. "We've got twenty brats now. The worst curse of the war—this extreme fertility the Well imposed to replace the dead." But he continued to look out into the night, even though New Pompeii was now obscured by the western mountains. "Mavra Chang," she heard him mutter under his breath.
Burodir hissed in disgust. "Damn it! If she bothers you so much, why not do something about her? You're supposed to be a big plotter and dirty thinker. What would you do if some slip of a cripple was a threat to your power here?"
His great reptilian head cocked slightly as he considered her challenge. "But killing her wouldn't be enough," he responded. "No, I have to know what sort of things that computer put into her, and how much of it she's revealed to anyone else." His mind raced now. "A kidnapping, though. She's helpless to resist, given the situation she is in, and she's even isolated from Ortega's meddling. A kidnapping and a thorough hypno job in some high-tech hex that could be bought or blackmailed. Of course!"
"It tookyou all these years to figure that out?" his wife responded sarcastically.
He didn't recognize the tone. "Nine years to get a position here, almost the same to get the diplomatic mess straight, to repair and rebuild," he replied seriously. "Plus all the work on the Northern problem. Priorities. But—why not?"
"Want me toarrange it?" Burodir asked, thankful that, perhaps, this obsession could finally be cleared up. "Makiem will have to be well out of the affair on the surface, or we undo the diplomatic ties and bring Ortega and the rest down on us. But, it can be done."
Trelig nodded idly. "Mavra Chang!" he breathed.