Free Chalker, Jack L. - Well of Souls 02 by Exiles At the Well of Souls Page B

more rapid, and then she stirred, flexed, stretched out on the bed, and turned over. Her right hand dangled just over the edge of the bed for a second, as she dropped an unseen object onto black cloth.
    And only then did Mavra Chang sleep.
    * * *
    If anyone knew of her roamings, they did not betray that fact the next morning. The major dispute was over Trelig's requirement that they all take showers and then don light, filmy garments and sandals. He apologized and offered to launder their own garments during their trip, but it was clear what he was doing. He could both examine their garments and make certain that little if anything was taken to Underside.
    Mavra was confident that the shielding in her boots and in the belt would be sufficient to escape detection; however, if anyone did try to open them, there would follow a hard-to-explain and quite messy violent explosion. She doubted if Trelig's people would go that far because of the defense mechanism risk; but her tools were to be denied her when they would do the most good. The pistol was not particularly hard to conceal; she'd hidden it against a hall cornice affixed with putty outside the room.
    She saw the surprised expressions when she entered the hall for breakfast; without the boots she was even tinier than usual. They all noticed, but no one was tactless enough to mention the subject.
    After eating, Trelig addressed them. "Citizens, distinguished guests all, may I now explain why you were all invited here, and what you will see today," he began. "First, let me refresh your memories a bit. As you all no doubt know, we are not the first civilization to have colonized worlds far beyond the one of our civilization's birth. The artifacts of that earlier, nonhuman civilization have been found on countless dead worlds. Dr. Jared Markov discovered them, and so we call them the Markovians."
    "We know all that, Antor," snapped one councillor. "Get to the point."
    Trelig gave a killing glance, then continued. "Now, the artifacts they left us when they died out or disappeared over a million years ago consist entirely of ruined structures— buildings. No furniture, no machinery, no utensils, no objects of art, nothing. Why? Generations of scholars have mused on this, to no avail. It seemed as insolvable a mystery as why they died out. But one scientist, a Tregallian physicist, had an idea."
    They stirred slightly, nodding. They all knew who he meant.
    "Dr. Gilgam Valdez Zinder," Trelig went on, "thought that our failure to solve the Markovian riddle stemmed from our too orthodox view of the universe. First, he postulated the concept that the ancient Markovians did not need artifacts because, somehow, they could convert energy into matter merely by willing it. We know that deep beneath the crust of each Markovian world was a semiorganic computer. Zinder believed the Markovians were directly, mentally linked to their computers, which were, in turn, programmed to turn any wish into reality. So he set to work on duplicating this process."
    There were murmurings now. Trelig was confirming the rumors that had brought them here, rumors too horrible to believe.
    "From this point, Zinder went on to postulate that the raw material they used for this energy-to-matter conversion was a basic, primal energy, the only truly stable component in the universe," Trelig explained. "He spent his life searching for this primal energy, proving its existence. He worked out its probable nature mathematically, designing his own self-aware computer to help him in this end."
    "And he found it," a woman who looked no more than a child but was an elder of a Com race interjected.
    Trelig nodded. "He did. And, in the process, produced a set of corollaries that are staggering in their implications. If all matter, all reality, is merely a converted form of this energy, then where did we come from?" He sat back, enjoying the expressions on the faces of those who were able to grasp the implications.
    "You're