Echoes of the Well of Souls watw-1

by Jack L. Chalker

  She gave him a weak smile. “Thanks, John. Let’s get this show on the road!”

  He hesitated a moment. “What about the doc? Think she’ll get the same treatment?”

  “I dunno. Maybe. She’s kinda old and frumpy for Juan, but some of these other guys—you haven’t seen many women around here.” She sighed. “We’ll all stick close.”

  The second spot went smoothly, and then everybody started to move fast. Gus and an assistant from the Brazilian network gathered their material and headed for the front of the big house; the sound man, also Brazilian, stuck with the newsman and the two women, his portable pack energized. Neither Maklovitch nor Terry said anything about Juan to Lori; no sense in alarming her unnecessarily and then possibly having to spill the backup plans where other ears could hear.

  “We’ll be on almost continuously from about five or ten minutes before anything shows up right through the strike and aftermath,” the newsman warned the scientist. “Just comment on what you see and don’t worry about what’s going out. Just remember to watch your language.”

  “I’ll try,” she assured him. “I’m getting used to it now. I think once I’m away from this place, well, it’ll be more relaxing.”

  “I know what you mean. We have to return and drop off the backup tape and the like for uplink, but we’ll have to play it by ear from that point. If the main body hits anywhere within 150 or so miles of here, as it’s supposed to, we’ll probably have to use Don Francisco’s helicopter to get in close. I, for one, want to see it close up after it hits if conditions permit and before the military and scientific teams get in and start blocking everything off. Still, if the thing looks like a nuclear blast, it might be too dangerous.”

  “It still depends on how much burns away and whether it fragments,” Lori told him. “But if it’s a good size, it’s going to be a very nasty sight.”

  They took the station wagon back to the plane with guards and the technical crew riding in a truck behind. The pilot and copilot were there, looking a little uncomfortable and anxious to be off, but they helped the crew stow its gear.

  “Wait a minute and let me and Hector here check the remote exterior cameras,” Gus asked them. He and his Brazilian associate climbed aboard, and in a couple of minutes Gus stuck his head back out and said, “Come on in! Gonna be kinda crowded, though.”

  Terry walked up to the plane and went inside and saw immediately what Gus meant.

  Sitting in the last row were Juan Campos and a big smelly bodyguard.

  Campos grinned when he saw Terry. “Come in, come in! We are all one big happy family here, no?’?

  It was fifty-nine minutes to rockfall.

  The Beach at Ipanema, Before Sunrise

  It was nearly deserted before dawn, this beach that was famous in song and story but would, before the morning was run, be crowded almost to bursting with bodies craving the sun and wind and waves. He liked the waves, the warm bodies wearing nothing or nearly so, the fun and general life of it all, and he came here often to watch, often entertained most by the reactions of puritanical American tourists seeing their first nude and topless bathers in what was basically an urban resort, but he liked this time, too, when he could still hear the waves, smell the salt air, and see that, indeed, there was sand on the beach.

  The homeless, particularly the bands of pitiful, roving children, were also pretty much absent now, huddled away in corrugated cartons, abandoned buildings, and other hideaways, away from those who might prey even on them. Also absent for the moment were the hustlers, con men, pickpockets and petty thieves who roamed the area near the beach.

  Not that he was alone, nor did he particularly want to be. Here and there, walking along the waves, barely visible in the beginnings of false dawn, were occasional couples and a determined jogger, and, up on the walk, a big man in a colorful shirt was either walking two enormous dogs on leashes or they were walking him. In the small cafes within sight of the beach there was already activity as they prepared for the morning onslaught of tourists and urban escapees, and as always in Brazil, the overpowering aroma of brewing coffee was beyond even the abilities of the morning breezes to completely dissipate.

  This, in fact, was his favorite period of any year or season, when he was not working, and had nowhere to go, and could just walk around and enjoy the sights, sounds, smells, and, yes, people.

  That would surprise those who’d known him over the long course of his life or even the few who currently knew him more than casually. He liked people; he genuinely liked them, else he’d never be here and certainly wouldn’t be stuck in this rut. He just couldn’t, wouldn’t get close to individual people, not if he could help it. No matter how good or how wonderful or fascinating they were, they had a fatal flaw, all of them, that would eventually break his heart.

  People grew old. People died.

  That was why he particularly relished times like this. A few weeks in a town far from his normal haunts, an anonymous stranger to everybody he might meet. And they in turn were here temporarily from, usually, very mundane pursuits, here to have a good time and be convivial and then go home.

  So long as he didn’t stay very long or they remained an even shorter time, all was equal. The people he’d met, the experiences he’d had while on these faraway holidays, were golden; they were, in fact, what kept him going. No matter who he met, they were equals, and, at least in his mind, they would always stay that way, for he could be close and friendly or cold and distant as it suited him to be, and those people with whom he interacted would be forever young, forever alive, because he would never see or hear of them again.

  He liked this age, too, or at least he liked things more from this age onward. Those who idealized the past, whether recent or ancient, should have had to live through and endure it. Then, perhaps, they would appreciate what they now had and just how far things had come.

  It also continued to astonish him how much of history duplicated itself, sometimes in the smallest details. It would have astonished even great Caesar to know that he, or one nearly his twin, had crossed the Rubicon before, and what measure of futile toil had been done on a Great Wall for inner China long before the first brick was laid for that wall in this world; to know that Michelangelo could accomplish more than one David—and more than one Sistine Chapel; that Great Zimbabwe had stood before, almost but not quite on the same exact spot, and that Alexander had marched and Aristotle had thought not once but over again on more ancient ground. That Cyril, whom they would make a saint, would again and again commit the atrocity of burning the great library at Alexandria, and, once again, what remained of Greco-Roman writings would be preserved for Europe against Europe’s best efforts by black Songhai at its library in great Timbuktu. Only the Hindus seemed to know, as they always did, that the cosmic wheel eternally came back again and again to the same place.

  He understood why this was so, that the first natural development of Earth had been recorded through him in a vast data base so distant that none here could comprehend such a gulf and that “reset” meant just that, not a random restart, lest the experiment be spoiled.

  He knew more or less what he was and had his own dim memories of before, but even now he found it more and more difficult to recall specific details, to remember all that much. The human brain could manage only so much. It was not a factor with these mortals, who died before they approached a fraction of their capacity, but for such as him it was… spooled off.

  Still, there were differences; there were always differences, but until now, through the countless centuries that preceded it, they were relatively minor ones. Even major changes tended to rectify themselves over time, allowing history to rejoin the original flow. Still, he hadn’t remembered the collapse of the Soviet Union at any point in this age, nor the creeping fascism edging out idealistic if no less abhorrent communism. It was so hard to remember, but that change had jolted him as nothing else he could remember with its sense of wrongness. If such a major departure was someh
ow allowed, did that mean that the experiment was inevitably corrupted or that perhaps this time history was running true? Certainly it would delay space exploration and colonization, perhaps for a century or two. He recalled fleeting snippets of time spent in the Soviet Mars colony. It was so long ago, and the thought was so fragmented, he could not be certain if it was a true memory or not, but he felt that it was. It sure wouldn’t be now. It would be interesting to see which would be the nation to get out to the stars. Or was there still some “rectification” to come?

  It bothered him, not so much in principle—he didn’t really care if things went differently or not, let alone who did what—but the mere fact that the difference existed at all. It seemed far too big to “rectify.” Something just as bad or worse might well come out of it all, but it seemed far too huge a departure for correction, and, lost memories or not, he was certain that a change this major had never happened before.

  Could it be some new glitch in the system? He hoped not. He prayed not. He wanted no more of that sort of thing, and anyway, if it was a glitch, the emergency program should call him and provide a means for him to come and fix things. That hadn’t happened. And it wasn’t as if, at this stage of technological development, he could just hop aboard an interstellar spacecraft and steer for one of the old portals. These people had barely made it to the moon the old-fashioned way, and when they had, they’d lost interest. He could never comprehend that; it seemed like social devolution. Oh, well…

  His thoughts were suddenly broken by the sight of a couple standing on the walk above looking out at the sea. There seemed something decidedly odd about them, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. Curiosity and the lack of anything better to do took him toward them. He saw that the woman was in a wheelchair—one of the elaborate, expensive, motorized kinds. There was something odd about the man, more than the fact that he was overdressed for the area and the occasion, something in the way he stood, in the carriage of his head, and in the sunglasses he was wearing.

  It was enough to draw him closer to them. One did not often see a blind man and a wheelchair-bound woman out on these streets at any time, particularly on their own. Perhaps they were merely naive—thieves and muggers were not at all uncommon near the beach, and this couple was in no position to either defend themselves or give chase should they be threatened with violence. But he admired their courage and their obvious insistence that just because they were both handicapped did not mean that they were going to shut themselves away for the rest of their lives.

  The woman sat oddly in the wheelchair, a position no one would naturally assume. A quadriplegic, most likely, with some limited control of at least one hand and arm sufficient to move the power joystick but not much else. She looked to be in her early to mid-forties, an attractive woman with short brown hair and lively eyes that seemed to pick up everything in a glance. She saw the stranger approaching and said something to her companion, who nodded.

  The man had on a white business suit and a well-knotted dark tie and wore a broad-brimmed Panama hat. He was a handsome man, too, perhaps a shade older than the woman, with signs of gray in the black hair that emerged beneath the hat, and he was fairly tall, almost a head taller than the man who was now walking toward him. He also had a look about him one saw only in this country—a curious mixture of nationalities, part Amerind, part European, part black, that had merged over the past four centuries into a unique and distinct new race, the Atlantic Brazilian.

  “Good morning, sir and madam,” the small man greeted them in an oddly accented but still very good Brazilian Portuguese dialect. He could see them both tense, as if they both had also just realized their vulnerability. “Please rest easy. I was simply walking along and could not help noticing you here. This is not a terribly safe place, you know.”

  “I was bom only two kilometers from here,” the man responded in a deep, elegant baritone. “I have no more fear of this place or these people than would you.”

  “What is he saying, Tony?” the woman asked in English with a clipped British Midlands accent. “I’m afraid I can’t make out more than a word or two.”

  The stranger immediately switched to English. “I’m sorry, I hadn’t realized that you both weren’t locals.” His accent was still odd, but the words were clear.

  “Just small talk, my dear,” the blind man assured her.

  “I distinctly got the impression of a warning,” she persisted.

  “I was just saying that this is a dangerous area these days, what with so many homeless youth gangs, thieves, and the like around,” the small man explained.

  “And I told him I was very familiar with the area,” her companion added.

  “Well, I said much the same,” the woman noted. “Your memories of this beach are about twenty years out of date.”

  “You do not live here, then?” the small man asked.

  “No,” responded the Brazilian, “we live in Salisbury, in England, actually. But I have been promising myself that I would return home someday no matter what, and after passing up previous opportunities, I decided that this was the time.”

  “You are staying with family, then?” The small man hesitated, feeling suddenly a bit embarrassed. “I’m sorry. My name is David Solomon—Captain David Solomon.”

  “Air force?”

  “No. Merchant. My ship is the Sumatra Shell out of Bahrain. One of those huge supertankers filled with oil. I live aboard her for four months at a time, going back and forth from wherever there is crude oil to where they want me to unload it, seldom getting off for more than a few hours or a day at a time. When I’m rotated off, I like to come to places I either have never been or haven’t been to in a very long time.”

  “I shouldn’t think that someone with a name like yours would be too welcome in Bahrain,” the man responded. “I, by the way, am Joao Antonio Guzman, and this is my wife, Anne Marie. I generally use ‘Tony’ as a first name because, frankly, the British do a terrible job on ‘Joao.’ They still pronounce Don Juan as Don Jew-an, you know.”

  “I can imagine,” the captain replied. “And you’re right. I’m Jewish, and that’s neither popular nor even particularly legal in the Gulf, but nobody really minds so long as I stay out of Saudi Arabia. Besides, I am also Egyptian, which helps a great deal in such things. In fact, for practical reasons I’m listed on my documents as a Coptic Christian. Nobody ever cares or checks, and frankly, as religiously observant as I am, one faith is as good as another. In any event, I’m not there long when I’m there, and quite often I’m nowhere near Moslem territory. I’ve been running from Brunei to Sydney most recently, and neither of them gives a damn what religion I might be. Certainly my Dutch employers don’t.”

  “And you’re here on holiday, then?” Tony Guzman asked him. “First time?”

  “First time in—a very long time. I’ve rented a small cottage at outrageous rates a few kilometers south but still near the beach. I just started walking and wound up here this morning. I like to watch the sun rise.”

  “As do we,” Anne Marie told him. “It’s such a huge, warm sun at this latitude. Tony, of course, can’t see it come up except in his mind’s eye, but he can feel it, and of course he has many more of these in his memories than I do, growing up here. We did this yesterday, too, taking a taxi from the hotel.”

  “Then you’re not staying with family?”

  “I have little family left here now. None close,” the man told him. “The few that are left tend to be uncomfortable either with my condition or with the fact that I married an Englishwoman and am now a British citizen.”

  “And one that makes them more uncomfortable,” Anne Marie put in.

  “Well, I don’t find either of you uncomfortable,” he said with a casual honesty they instantly knew was real. “In fact, I find you very interesting people, and I salute you for not letting anything get in the way of your enjoyment.”

  “Do you have a wife? Children?” Anne Marie asked him.

  He shook
his head. “No, no one, I’m afraid. The kind of life I lead, the kind of job, just doesn’t lend itself to marriage, and I’m unable to have children, so that point is moot.”

  She sighed. “That’s one thing we have in common. I used to be able, it’s true, but going through it would have killed me, they said.”

  “Your accident was early, then? Sorry—again, I don’t mean to pry. If you’d rather not discuss it, we’ll drop it.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind a bit. I minded the accident, and I’d much rather be walking about and feel something below the armpits, but I certainly don’t mind talking about it. I just wish it were more spectacular than it was, really, so I’d have a story to tell. An IRA bomb perhaps, or an aircraft accident, or perhaps a sport injury, but it was nothing so dramatic. Truth is, I don’t even remember it. It was winter, I was sound asleep in the family car coming home from some Christmas visit to relatives, we hit a patch of ice, slid off, and rolled down an embankment. I was always a sound sleeper, so all I remember is tumbling and some very sharp pain in my neck and back, and that’s it. I woke up unable to move anything below the neck. Years of therapy got me to this point, where I stuck. There’re just no more connections to make.”

  “Mine was a bit more exotic,” her husband added. “I was a pilot for Varig, and we had fuel and mechanical problems coming into Gatwick. We came in all right, but the nose wheel collapsed on landing, and we slid off the side of the runway and into a ground control radar hut. The base was concrete. All the passengers survived with only minor injuries, but we hit the small building head on. It shattered the windscreen, which is very hard to do, and crumpled in a part of the nose around the cockpit. My copilot had eleven broken bones and eventually lost his leg. I, on the other hand, had a piece of metal driven right into my skull. I have a very large metal plate in my head that makes it impossible for me to withstand airport security today— you should see their expressions when they use the hand scanner!—and although there is nothing wrong with the eyes themselves that we know of, there was internal bleeding and damage, and I’ve been unable to see since. I spent three years in British hospitals of one sort or another and remained there, partly because I had little to come home to and partly because, with the military government in power here and Brazil in such a bad shape economically, I could get much better care in the English system. Besides, I had to relearn even the basics of balance and get my confidence as a sightless man, and the therapy was quite good. I met Anne Marie while I was still in therapy.”