Midnight at the Well of Souls wos-1

by Jack L. Chalker

  “We are Chon. We are everything that ever was Chon. The one you call Chon has been melded. It is no longer one but all. Soon, as even now it happens, all will be Chon and Chon will be all.”

  “You’re that damned flower!” Hain said accusingly. “You swapped minds with the Czillian somehow!”

  “No swap, as you call it, was involved,” it told them. “And we are not that damned flower as you said, but all the flowers. The Recorders transfer and transmit as you surmised, but the process may be and usually is total at first sprout, or how else should we get our information, our intellect? A new bloom is a blank, an empty slate. We merge.”

  “And you merged with the Czillian?” The Rel said more than asked. “You have all of its memories, plus all that was you?”

  “That is correct,” the creature affirmed. “And, since we have all of the Czillian experience within us, we are aware of your mission, its reason, and goal, and we are now a part of it. You have no choice, nor do we, since we cannot meld with you.”

  Skander shivered. Well, Vardia got her wish at last, the mermaid thought. And we’ve got problems.

  “Suppose we refuse?” Skander shot at the new creature. “One gulp from Hain here and you’re gone.”

  The creature in Vardia’s body stepped boldly in front of Hain and looked at the big insect’s huge eyes.

  “Do you want to eat me, Hain?” it asked evenly.

  Hain started to flick her sticky tongue, but something stopped her. Suddenly she didn’t want to eat the Czillian, not at all. She liked the Czillian. It was a good creature, a creature that had the interest of the baron at heart. It was the best friend she had, the most loyal.

  “I—I don’t understand,” Hain said in a perplexed tone. “Why should I want to eat it? It’s my friend, my ally. I couldn’t hurt it, never, or the pretty flowers and insects, either.”

  “It’s got some kind of mental power!” Skander screamed, and tried to free herself from the saddle in panic. Suddenly Hain spread out, lowering her shell to the ground, legs extended outward.

  Skander was free of the harness and looked around for a place to leap. Her darting eyes met the lime disks of the Czillian, and suddenly all panic fled. She couldn’t remember why she was afraid in the first place, not of the Czillian, anyway.

  The thing came right up to the mermaid, so close they could touch. A Czillian tentacle stroked the Umiau’s hair, and the mermaid smiled and relaxed, content.

  “I love you,” Skander said in a sexy voice. “I’ll do anything for you.”

  “Of course you will,” the Slelcronian replied gently. “We’ll go to the Well together, won’t we, my love? And you’ll show me everything?”

  The Umiau nodded in ecstasy.

  The Slelcronian turned to The Diviner and The Rel, who stood there a few meters away, viewing the scene dispassionately.

  “What are you going to do with me?” The Rel asked in the closest it could come to sarcasm. “Look me in the eye?”

  For the first time the creature was hesitant, looking uncertain, puzzled, less confident. It reached out its mind to the Northern creature, and found nothing it could contact, understand, relate to. It was as if the creature was no longer there.

  “If we cannot control you, you are at least irrelevant to us,” Vardia’s voice said evenly. The Diviner and The Rel didn’t move.

  “I said the equation had changed,” The Rel said slowly. “I didn’t say which way. The Diviner is always right, it seems. Until this moment I had no idea whatsoever how we were to control Skander once in the Well, or why the addition of the Czillian tipped things more in our favor. It’s clear now.”

  The Rel paused for a moment. “We have been in charge of this project from its inception,” The Rel continued. “We have used a judicious set of circumstances and The Diviner’s amazing skills to make our own situation. We lead. Now we lead without worry.”

  “What power do you possess to command us?” scoffed the new Vardia. “We are at this moment summoning the largest of our Recorders to crush you. You are no longer necessary.”

  “I have no power at all, save speech and movement,” The Rel admitted as eight huge insects hummed thunderously into view over the flowery fields. “The Diviner has the power,” The Rel added, and as it spoke the flashing lights of The Diviner grew in intensity and frequency. Suddenly visible bolts shot out from the blinking creature and struck the eight Recorders at the speed of light.

  The Recorders’ outlines flashed an electrical white. There was a tiny roll of thunder as each of the creatures vanished, caused by air rushing in to take the place where it had been. It sounded like eight distant cannon shots.

  “Hmmm…” The Rel said in its flat tone, “that’s a new one. The Diviner is full of surprises. Shall we go? I should not like to spend more than two nights in your charming land.”

  The Slelcronian mind in Vardia’s body was staggered and crushed. Something seemed to deflate inside, and the confident glow in its eyes was replaced by respect mixed with something new to its experience—fear. “We—we didn’t know you had powers,” it almost gasped.

  “A trifle, really,” The Rel replied. “Well? Do you want to join us or not? I hope you will—it’s so much simpler than what The Diviner would have to do to get Skander’s cooperation, and I’m certain that, in the interest of your people, both of them, you’d rather we made it before anyone else.”

  The stunned creature turned to Skander and said, shakily, “Get back into your harness. We must go.”

  “Yes, my darling,” Skander replied happily, and did so.

  “Your lead, Northerner,” the Slelcronian said.

  “As always,” The Rel replied confidently. “Do you know anything about Ekh’l?”

  THE BEACH AT IVROM—MORNING

  “Looks peaceful enough,” Vardia commented as they unloaded the raft onto the beach. “Very pleasant, really.”

  “Reminds me of the Dillian valley area, upvalley in particular,” Wuju added, as they strapped the bulky saddlebags around her.

  “Something in here doesn’t like people, though,” Brazil reminded them. “This hex has no embassy at Zone, and expeditions into it have always vanished, as Bat did last night. We have only this one facet of the hex to travel, but that’s still over one hundred kilometers, so I think we’ll stick to the beach as long as possible.”

  “What about Bat, then?” Wuju asked in a concerned voice. “We can’t just abandon him, after all he’s done for us.”

  “I don’t like doing so any more than you do, Wuju,” Brazil replied seriously, “but this is a big hex. He can fly at a good speed over obstacles, and by now he could be just about anywhere. We might as well be looking for a particular blade of grass. As much as I’d like to help him, I just can’t take the risk that whatever’s here will get one or all of us.”

  “Well, I don’t like it,” Wuju said adamantly, but there was no assailing his logic on any grounds except emotion. “We survived the Murnies,” she reminded him. “How much worse can it be here?”

  “Much,” he replied gravely. “I survived Murithel by luck, as did you—and we knew who the enemy was and the problems. This is even more chancy, because we don’t know what’s here. We’ve got to leave Bat to the Fates. It’s Bat or all of us.” And that settled that.

  With Bat gone, Brazil regretted more and more his lack of arms or other appendages that could hold and use things. Although this was a nontechnological hex, several good and somewhat nasty items would be usable, and these were given to Wuju and Vardia. The centaur was given two automatic, gunpowder-powered projectile pistols, worn strapped to gunbelts worn in an X—and carrying extra ammunition clips—across her chest. Vardia had two pistols of a different kind. They squirted gas kept under pressure in attached plastic bottles. When the trigger was pulled hard, a flint would ignite the gas, which could be liberated at a controlled rate. The flamethrower was good for about ten meters, and needn’t be very directional to be effective. Wuju, of course,
had never fired a pistol and had no luck with the little practice gotten in in the ocean. But these were still effective short-range weapons, psychologically if nothing else, and they made a lot of noise going off.

  “We stick to the beach,” Brazil reminded them. “If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to get the whole way without going into the forest.”

  As satisfied as they could be, they thanked the Umiau who had pulled them this far, and the mermaids left.

  Brazil said “Let’s go,” in a voice more filled with tension than excitement.

  The sand and huge quantities of driftwood slowed their progress, and they found on several occasions that they had to walk into the shallows to get around some points, but the journey went well.

  They made good time. By sundown, Brazil estimated that they had traveled more than halfway. Since his vision was extremely poor after nightfall, and Vardia was better off rooting, they stopped for what they all hoped would be their only night in the mysterious hex.

  The sandy soil was not particularly good for the Czillian, but she managed to find a hard, steady place near the beginning of the woods and was set for the night. He and Wuju relaxed nearby as the surf crashed on hidden rocks just beyond the shoreline, then gently ran up with a sizzling sound onto the beach.

  Something was bothering Wuju and she brought it up. “Nathan,” she said, “if this is a nontechnological hex like Murithel, how come your voice works? It’s still basically a radio.”

  The idea had never occurred to Brazil and he thought about it. “I can’t say,” he replied carefully, “but on all the maps and the like this is nontech, and the general logic of the hex layout dictates the same thing. It can’t work, though, unless it’s a byproduct of the translator. They work everywhere.”

  “The translator!” she said sharply. “Feels like a lump in the back of my throat. Where do they come from, Nathan?”

  “From the North,” he told her. “From a totally crystalline hex that grows them as we grow flowers. It’s slow work, and they don’t let many of them go.”

  “But how does it work?” she persisted. “It’s not a machine.”

  “No, not a machine in the sense we think of machines,” he replied. “I don’t think anyone knows how it works. It was, if I remember right, created in the same way as most great inventions—sheer accident. The best guess is that its vibrations cause some kind of link with the Markovian brain of the planet.”

  She shivered a little, and Brazil rubbed close to her, thinking the dropping temperature was the cause. “Want a coat?” he asked.

  She shook her head negatively. “No, I was thinking of the brain. It makes me nervous—all that power, the power to create and maintain all those rules for all those hexes, work the translators, even change people into other things. I don’t think I like the idea at all. Think of a race that could build such a thing! It scares me.”

  Brazil rubbed her humanoid back with his head, slowly. “Don’t worry about such things,” he said softly. “That race is long gone.”

  She was not distracted. “I wonder,” she said in a distant tone. “What if they were still around, still fooling around. That would mean we were all toys, playthings—all of us. With the power and knowledge to create all this, they would be so far above us that we wouldn’t even know.” She shook him off and turned to face him. “Nathan, what if we were just playthings for them?”

  He stared hard into her eyes. “We’re not,” he responded softly. “The Markovians are gone—long dead and gone. Their ghosts are brains like the one that runs this planet—just gigantic computers, programmed and automatically self-maintained. The rest of their ghosts are the people, Wuju. Haven’t you understood that from what you’ve learned by this trip?”

  “I don’t understand,” she said blankly. “What do you mean the people are the Markovian ghosts?”

  “ ‘Until midnight at the Well of Souls,’ ” he recited. “It’s the one phrase common to all fifteen hundred and sixty hexes. Think of it! Lots of us are related, of course, and many people here are variations of animals in other hexes. I figured out the solution to that part of the puzzle when I came out of the Gate the same as I went in—and found myself in a hex of what we always thought of as ‘human.’ Next door were one-and-a-half-meter-tall beavers—intelligent, civilized, highly intellectual, but they were basically the same as the little animal beavers of Dillia. Most of the wildlife we’ve seen in the hexes that come close to the type of worlds our old race could settle are related to the ones we had back there. There’s a relationship for all of them.

  “These hexes represent home worlds, Wuju,” he said seriously. “Here is where the Markovians built the test places. Here is where their technicians set up biospheres to prove the mathematics for the worlds they would create. Here’s where our own galaxy, at least, perhaps all of them, was engineered ecologically.”

  She shivered again. “You mean that all these people were created to see if the systems worked? Like an art class for gods? And if it was good enough, the Markovians created a planet somewhere that would be all like this?”

  “Partly right,” he replied. “But the creatures weren’t created out of the energy of the universe like the physical stuff. If so, they’d be the gods you said. But that’s not why the world was built. They were a tired race,” he continued. “What do you do after you can do it all, know it all, control it all? For a while you delight in being a race of gods—but, eventually, you tire of it. Boredom sets in, and you must be stagnant when you have no place else to go, nothing else to discover, to reach.” He paused, as the breaking waves seemed to punctuate his story, then continued in the same dreamy tone.

  “So their artisans were assigned to create the hexes of the Well World. The ones that proved out were accepted, and the full home world was then made and properly placed mathematically in the universe. That’s the reason for so much overlap—some artisans were more gifted than others, and they stole and modified each other’s ideas. When they proved out, the Markovians came to the Well through the gates, not forced but voluntarily, and they passed through the mechanism for assignment. They built up the hexes, struggled, and did what none else could do as Markovians—they died in the struggle.”

  “Then they settled the home worlds?” she gasped. “They gave up being gods to suffer pain and to struggle and die?”

  “No,” he replied. “They settled on the Well World. When a project was filled, it was broken down and a new one started. What we have here today is only the youngest worlds, the youngest races, the last. The Markovians all struggled here, and died here. Not only all matter, but time itself, is a mathematical construct they had learned and overcome. After many generations, the hexes became self-sufficient communities if they worked. The Markovians, changed, bore children that bred true. It was these descendants, the Markovian seed, who went to the Well through the local gates to what we now call Zone, that huge Well we entered by. On the sixth day of the sixth month of each six years they went, and the Well took them, in a single sweep like a clock around the Well, one sweep in the middle of the night. It took them, classified them, and transported them to the home world of their races.”

  “But surely,” she objected, “the worlds had their own creatures. There is evolution—”

  “They didn’t go physically,” he told her evenly. “Only their substance, what the Murnies called their ‘essence,’ went. At the proper time they entered the vessels which had evolved to the point of the Well. That’s why the translator calls it the Well of Souls, Wuju.”

  “Then we are the Markovian children,” she breathed. “They were the seeds of our race.”

  “That’s it,” he acknowledged. “They did it as a project, an experiment. They did it not to kill their race, but to save it and to save themselves. There’s a legend that Old Earth was created in seven days. It’s entirely possible—the Markovians controlled time as they controlled all things, and while they had to develop the worlds mathematically, to form them and creat
e them according to natural law, they could do millions of years work rather quickly, to slide in their project people at the exact moment when the dominant life form or life forms—would logically develop.”

  “And these people here—are they all Entries and the descendants of Entries?” she asked.

  “There weren’t supposed to be any,” he told her. “Entries, that is. But the Markovians inhabited their own old universe, you know. Their old planets were still around. Some of the brains survived—a good number if we blundered into even one of them in our little bit of space. They were quasi-organic, built to be integral with the planet they served, and they proved almost impossible to turn off. The last Markovian couldn’t shut his down and still get through, so they were left open, to be closed when time did to the old worlds what it does to all things left unmaintained.”

  “Then there are millions of those gates still open,” she speculated. “People could fall in all the time.”

  “No,” he replied. “The gates only open when someone wants them to be open. It doesn’t have to be a mystical key—although the boy Varnett, back on Dalgonia, caused it to open by locking into his mind the mathematical relationships he observed. It doesn’t happen randomly, though. Varnett was the exception. The key is mathematical, but anyone near one doesn’t have to know the key to operate the Gate.”

  “What’s the key, then?” she asked, puzzled.

  “Spacers—thousands of them have been through the Well, not just from our sector but from all over. I’ve met a number. It’s a lonely, antisocial job, Wuju, and because of the Fitzgerald Contraction and rejuve, it is a long one. All those people who came here through gates got signals on the emergency band that lured them to the gates. Whether they admit it or not, they all had one thing in common.”

  “What was that?” she asked, fascinated.

  “They all wanted to or had decided to die,” he replied evenly, no trace of emotion in his voice. “Or, they’d rather die than live on. They were looking for fantasy worlds to cure their problems.