Twilight at the Well of Souls wos-5

by Jack L. Chalker

  “How many people do you think we trapped in there?”

  He laughed. “Mostly Olympians, I’d say, who know what’s going on, and maybe some odd guards, patrols, and the like. Maybe even a couple of ambassadors, huh? Scared shitless at the moment, probably.”

  “Isn’t it going to get awfully crowded in there when the others start going through the Zone Gates?” she asked him. “I mean, the Well Gates are big places, but they couldn’t possibly hold the huge numbers going through.”

  “They won’t have to,” he assured her. “They’ll be hung up, like those billions we kidnapped a few minutes ago, waiting until there’s an outlet. It’s pretty confusing, I admit, but, damn it, the system was set up to populate one world at a time. It was never designed to do what we’re doing to it. That’s why we’ll get mostly the population we want on the world we want, but some of the others will get through as well. That’s how half the creatures in Old Earth’s mythologies got in there to begin with. Don’t worry. They’re not properly designed for those worlds and eventually they get eliminated, one way or another—at least, I think most of them do. Never was sure. Well, we have a long job ahead of us, anyway. Might as well relax and do the best we can.”

  She looked around at the controls, gauges, even the huge chambers with the countless black-dot relays. There was no energy, no power there. It was gone, except for the system of the Well World, which drew its power and maintained itself by grabbing the energy absorbed by a black hole in some other universe, a very tiny black hole, she noted.

  She wondered often about that other universe. Did it have a naturally evolved group of lifeforms? Did it have its own Markovians and its own version of the Well of Souls? There was no way to know, she realized. No way to ever know. Anyone who fell into a black hole here—when there were black holes again —would come out there, of course, but they would hardly be in any physical condition to see what was going on.

  It was unfortunate, in a way, that there was no way of knowing. With all this new power and knowledge, the only two mysteries left to her would be parallel universes and Nathan Brazil. But then, she reflected, there should be some mysteries left in the world.

  “How long will the complete job take?” she asked him.

  “Six days,” he responded, as if it were obvious. “Well World time, of course, which is the only time we got right now.”

  She thought back to their past experiences. “Ortega… Gypsy… Marquoz… I wonder if any of them are still alive.”

  “We’ll never know,” he told her. “As the experience of the past few months should tell you, it’s not good to hang around and be known on the Well World. You have to let ’em go a couple of hundred thousand years so they forget who and what you are, what they are, and all the rest. That way they don’t know you when you show up again. Nope, you take yourself out there, in the new universe, and you settle down, and you relax-—until you’re needed again. And you forget yourself, after a while. The Markovian brain remembers all of it, but that’s only here, in the Well. Otherwise you just don’t have the capacity, unless they evolve into it or build it. It’s a mercy, really, as you’ll see.”

  She thought about it. “You know, there are two of us. We could remain Markovians, this time.”

  “That’s no good,” he told her. “Not for us, not for everywhere else. A god gets bored and alienated even more than a human being does. And we can’t reproduce, so there would be just the two of us, playing some kind of monster god game or living on some Markovian world dreaming up new exercises for our minds and going batty like they did. Be my guest, if you want, but it’s more interesting the other way. It’s your choice, though. You can erase yourself, put yourself in any body on any world you want either as a Markovian prototype or, by going through the Well Gate, as one of these mere mortals. Me, I’ll stick with our people. They got so many interesting untapped possibilities.”

  “The ones we send out from here,” she said, “will be mostly our people, volunteers or Olympians who know what they’re getting into. Those others, though, the ones we kidnapped off those worlds just before the plug was pulled, the ones now hung up in Well World limbo, they’re just suddenly going to wake up on a primitive, alien world, cold and mysterious, naked and without any tools or weapons.”

  “They’ll make it,” he assured her. “Most of them, anyway. They did it before, they’ll do it again. It’s a pretty stubborn set of races those Markovians bred. After all this time I find I still like them, for the most part.”

  “Even the Dahbi?”

  “Gunit Sangh was the pure dark side that lives within all of us,” he told her. “But he wasn’t the Dahbi, just a Dahbi. We had our own share of those type. You never met an Adolf Hitler or Dathan Hain. Hardly good examples of our race, but I wouldn’t condemn everybody on the basis that we produced a lot of superstinkers.” He paused. “You ready for the first step?”

  “I’m ready,” she told him seriously. “I still don’t see how this can be done in six days, though. I admit I never had any formal education, but I do know it takes billions of years to do what we’re doing.”

  “Billions of years for them,” he replied. “Six days for us. Just watch. There’s nothing out there now. Absolutely nothing. Not a single speck. No matter, no energy except the primal energy at total rest. That means, too, there’s no space, time, or distance.”

  “The Markovian worlds with their Gates are still there,” she pointed out.

  “Well, that’s true, but they have no sun, no warmth, nothing. They exist in nothingness, and will until we fix it.”

  “I know the procedure, thanks to you,” she told him, “but I’m still unclear as to exactly what we do.”

  “You do this,” he told her, and reached out for the master control. “Let there be light!” he commanded with a laugh.

  Energy flowed once more from the tiny programming unit suspended above the control room entry hall. It flew to the Well of Souls computer and began its reset activation.

  Far out in space, billions of light-years from the Well World, a hole was punched. A great black hole from some other universe, the greatest of all black holes that universe had, suddenly found an outlet. A singularity of immense proportions was created, and the accumulated material it had swallowed and continued to swallow, including light itself, burst through from that universe into that of the Well.

  Nature reacted as it must; the static universe moved to close the hole, to plug it up quickly, but the Well of Souls now beat into renewed life. It reached out without regard for space or time and seized on the erupting white hole, keeping it open, allowing it to expand and grow. The effect was the greatest explosion possible in physics.

  “Whew! A whole hell of a lot farther away than last time,” Brazil noted. “Too bad. The Well World will continue to have a black sky. Well, you gotta take the white hole where you find it, and where the fabric is weakest, which is one and the same thing. Won’t make any difference to the rest, though, except it might be a little nicer. Won’t be much in the way of Markovian Gates in the neighborhood for quite a while. Well, we can relax now. We have to wait for all the usual natural processes to take place. Wow! That’s a beauty, though! Look at those energy gauges! Bigger and nastier by far than the last one! We’re gonna have a rip-roaring new universe here!”

  Little time passed for them inside the Well, for time had hardly any meaning there. The Well World was being kept separate, apart from the rest of the universe as it always had been. The rest of the Markovian universe, too, went along at the old rate and would continue to do so until they slowed everything to match Markovian time.

  They checked on the Well, saw that special circuits were already modifying, changing, repairing, even rebuilding damaged sections. They had been in time.

  An hour passed. Half a billion years passed. It was all the same thing. The universe expanded. Tremendous gases and other material continued to spin out, swirling as it did so from the forces at the vortex of the big ban
g.

  Twelve hours passed. Six billion years passed. It was all the same thing. Expansion continued. Cooling and congealing continued, even accelerated. Galaxies were forming, and inside those galaxies stars and even planets. The process continued on.

  Brazil idly flicked a control. The time rate slowed. By the end of the day it was down to a very small length of time, relatively speaking: barely a few million years an hour.

  On the second day he singled out the target worlds and started adjusting the processes by which life would form. The proper conditions were established for life, and on the third day, slowing time even more, he energized those elements, not merely on the planets he was going to use but on all those other worlds as well, worlds which, formed naturally, were good havens for life of one form or another but for which he had no people.

  Time slowed more on the fourth day. The amino acids, the crystalline structures, the building blocks of lifeforms North and South on the Well World formed; the carbon-based in the sea while plants now ruled the land, what there was of it.

  On the fifth day he slowed the rate still more, with Mavra’s assistance, and activated secondary lifeform programming. Animal life appeared, first in the sea, then on the land, all in its proper evolutionary order, all stemming from the single, inevitable first cause.

  And they looked at the millions of worlds and saw that they had done it right. It was working—not 100 percent, but more than enough for their needs. They spent most of the time doing this checking, using the Well computer itself to match worlds to lifeforms. A very few couldn’t be exactly matched, and that bothered them, Brazil in particular.

  “The Gedemondans,” he remarked. “That explains the Gedemondans. Once you lay down the physical laws, you have to live by them, obey ’em implicitly. Last time, for some reason, the Gedemondans couldn’t be properly matched to a world that formed in this mess. Won’t be that problem with them this time, though. I’ve kept my word on that. They have a world that looks damned near tailor-made. We may have some problems with a few of the others, but we’ll do the best we can.”

  Complex animal life was developing now, the ancestral prototypes of the dominant races of those worlds, flowing logically out of how Brazil and the Well programming had combined those first acids in the initial process, based on the world’s material and resources, as well as the biological and climatologic conditions they had to work under. But the Well was very good at predicting how a world would develop, and it made no mistakes. The prototypical new sentient races weren’t exactly like their counterparts on the Well World, but, overall, they were remarkably close. Natural selection was taking its toll along the main line of dominance, too, leading to the one minor branch that provided what was necessary for sentience, for dominance.

  Brazil checked out the Well World. Most hexes had complied with the demands placed on them, but there were a few too disorganized or too primitive to comply, and Brazil now took steps to include them indiscriminately. When their time came, any who fell short of the minimums would find their populations halved by Well fiat.

  Some of the Markovians, so long ago—Mavra was now beginning to realize just how long ago—had been reluctant, too.

  Both of them were prepared by midnight on the fifth day. It was time, they knew, time to insert what was needed to complete the exercise, as Brazil called it.

  Every few seconds, between midnight and midnight, another racial group was activated, sent through the Well Gate, out to their predestined planets. Physically, they would never arrive. They would inhabit the bodies prepared for them through billions of years of evolution. These included the millions saved from oblivion by Brazil’s actions with the Markovian Gates, who would now be able to carry on their own races, rebuild and grow or die as they themselves decided by their actions.

  Because there were still temporal differentials between the Well World and the universe, they were spread at different points, and some would reproduce, grow old, and die, and be thousands, perhaps millions of years different from other races placed on their worlds only minutes later, Well World time.

  But for those occasional ones of races not destined for those planets who, accidentally but unavoidably, went along for the ride, there was only an instantaneous trip. But they were incongruities on a primitive world not meant for or designed for them. Most died out quickly, or became half-whispered legends among the generations that followed, but a few would hold on, manage somehow to survive, at least for a time.

  At the end of the sixth day, when midnight came, the barriers to the Well Gate were removed, the Zone Gates shifted back to their normal patterns, all was as it was before.

  And across the Well World there was heaved a collective sigh of relief.

  Temporally, too, they were back on track. Six days had passed for them, almost fourteen for the new universe now being maintained by a repaired, repro-grammed, and revitalized Well.

  Nathan Brazil sighed and settled back on his tentacles. Mavra made some final checks and then did the same. It was over.

  “Until some new damn fool decides to play around with the Markovian mathematics, anyway,” Brazil commented sourly. He reached out to her. “What are your plans now?”

  “I need a rest, and I want to think about it,” she replied.

  And so on the seventh day they did nothing at all.

  “Decided yet?” he asked her early in the morning of the next day.

  “Yeah. I think so, anyway. Maybe it’s a mistake, I don’t know. But I have to play along with you, I suppose. Your way, for now. What about you?”

  “Oh, this is the fun part, the interesting part,” he told her. “Going down there and watching how they develop. It’s only after they get there that it starts driving you crazy.”

  She laughed. “I think it’s going to be fascinating,”

  “Okay,” he told her. “Let’s get going, then. It’s pre-civilization time in the new world, but by the time we get through all this, it’ll be the dawn of so-called civilization. Ugh. You decided pretty much what you’re going to be?”

  She nodded. “Pretty much the same, I think,” she told him. “Matched a little closer to our exit-point culture, of course, but pretty much the same. You?”

  “I’m afraid I proved to myself the last time that I couldn’t be anybody but what I always was. No matter what, I always seem to come out the same, more or less.”

  He flickered; the grand Markovian brilliance vanished. Nathan Brazil stood there, much as he had before. There was a slight difference in his color, and his beard was fuller, but it was still undeniably Nathan Brazil.

  And, oddly, some of the brilliance still showed through to her Markovian senses the more she stared at him.

  She flickered, then stood there, beside him. She was dark, lean, lithe, and yet somehow exotic.

  “Still the same old girl, huh?” he cracked. “Not even curious about being a man? Men have it much easier in primitive societies, you know.”

  She grinned, went over and kissed him, then held up her fingernails. Flexing the muscles slightly, tiny beads of some liquid oozed out from underneath the sharp points. “I can take care of myself,” she told him.

  He smiled warmly at her and put his arm around her, drawing her close to him. “I just bet you can,” he replied sincerely.

  Naughkaland, Earth

  They walked down the beach together, the man and the woman, naked and unashamed. Occasionally the woman, slightly smaller than he, would reach down and pick up a shell or pretty colored rock, then laugh and toss it into the ocean. It was a beautiful, brilliant warm day, the kind of day you always wished for.

  “It’s better than the last one,” the man remarked in a tongue totally alien to this bright new world. “Warmer, lusher, richer. I think things might be different, maybe better, this time out.”

  She laughed, a pleasant, playful laugh. “Always the optimist. Ever the optimist.” She threw her arms around him, kissing him long and passionately.

  He stoo
d there a moment, looking down into her face and her large, dark eyes. “In time, you may grow to hate me,” he warned.

  “Or you, me,” she shot back, a playful pout on her face. “But not now. Not today. Not with the sun and the sea and the birds calling and a warm wind blowing! Definitely not now!”

  The couple continued up the beach, holding hands and letting the warm ocean water wash over their feet.

  She stopped, pointed down at the still wet sand. “Look!” she said, wonderingly.

  “It’s just a sand crab,” he told her.

  She turned on him, slightly angry. “Are you going to be this grumpy over the next ten thousand years?” she asked irritably.

  He laughed. “Hell, no. I’ll get worse. But never all the way down, honey. Never all the way down. Because, as short as I am, you made yourself shorter and lighter than I am.”

  He grinned, and she grinned, and be took her hand and they continued on down the beach.

  It was a good day, he told himself, and a good place to be alive, if alive he had to be. But he was still Nathan Brazil, forty billion years out, bound for nowhere with a cargo hold empty of anything at all, even clothes on his back.

  Still waiting.

  Still caring.

  But no longer alone.

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