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"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.

Renard looked at Mavra Chang. "Why the hell did you desert her?" he asked angrily. "Why didn't you stay around to raise and educate her?"

Wooley and Vistaru felt more than a little guilt on that score, but it was expressed in rather human terms, defensively.

"Why did you desert her in Glathriel and go home to Agitar?" Vistaru countered. "How many visits did you pay her in twenty-two years? After all, I didn't know about her until Ortega told me just before we left for here—but you owe her your life. Some repayment!"

He started to protest, to justify, but saw her point. "There's plenty of guilt around for everybody, isn't there?" he said sheepishly.

"The Yaxa had decided to polish her off," Wooley told them. "Ortega told me the story about her in order to get my aid. I managed to short-circuit those attempts all along. That's why it was I who managed to be the one who was finally sent to capture her. I couldn't trust anyone else not to take the easy way out." Her shiny yellow-and-black death's head turned to Vistaru. "As for you, I did not know then. Ortega made a couple of slips a few years ago and I drew the proper conclusions."

"If I remember, Nathan Brazil set the Well to summon him if anything ever went wrong," Vistaru pointed out. "Why didn't it call him when New Pompeii suddenly appeared overhead?"

"I can answer that," Yulin responded. "You see, to the Well nothing is wrong. The Markovians knew that at some future time one of their races would attain the ability to manipulate the universe as they could. At that time the Well was to transport the young race to it and receive new instructions, a changing of the guard so to speak. As far as the Well's concerned, it's just waiting for Obie or his operators to talk to it. Of course, that's like waiting for a monkey to quote the Koran. The Markovians blew it. We found the secret early, too early, and our artifacts can't even absorb its data, let alone talk to and order the Well. Obie, with some justification, refuses to try. Suppose it issued an incorrect instruction and wiped out humanity?"

It was a sobering thought. "You say 'he' often when talking about this computer of yours," Wooley noted. "Why?"

Yulin chuckled. "Oh, it's a person, all right, and it perceives itself as male. Self-aware computers have been around for a thousand years—I'm sure you ran into one or two. But never one like