Midnight at the Well of Souls

THE AVENUE—AT THE EQUATOR

The journey up The Avenue had been without event, and none had tested Ortega’s defenses. They were all going where they wanted to go, and, as the Ulik had said, each one had his own selfish interests at heart. All during the journey Brazil had been talkative and friendly, yet there was a sadness deep within him they could all feel, although he tried to laugh it off. The four members of Brazil’s party kept to themselves. Hain kept looking at Wuju strangely, but bided her time, and Skander seemed resigned to Varnett’s existence in the party.

And now, in the afternoon’s waning sun, they stood at the Equatorial Barrier itself, imposing and seemingly impenetrable.

It was like a wall, partially translucent, that rose up until it merged with the deep blue, cloudless sky. The barrier itself didn’t look thick, and felt smooth and glassy to the touch, yet it had withstood attempts by many races on both sides to make as much as a mark on it. It went off to each side of them from horizon to horizon, like a giant, nonreflecting glass wall.

The Avenue seemed to merge into it, and there was no sign of any small crack, fissure, or even juncture of the odd paving of The Avenue with the surface of the barrier. They seemed to become one.

Brazil went up to the wall, then turned to face them. They waited expectantly.

“We can’t enter until midnight, so we might as well be comfortable,” he told them.

“Do you mean twenty-four hundred?” the real Vardia asked.

“No, of course not,” Brazil replied. “For one thing, the Well World’s days are about twenty-eight and a quarter standard hours, as you know, so the time twenty-four hundred has no meaning here. Midnight means exactly that—the middle of the night. Since a total day is exactly twenty-eight point three three four standard hours, and since the axis is exactly vertical, that means the light period is fourteen point one six seven hours, and so is the darkness. Midnight, then, comes seven point zero eight three five hours after sunset. The figures were determined by physical necessity when building the place. They just came out that way. Believe me, Markovian clocks were quite different from ours, and the time could be precisely determined.”

“Yes, but how will we determine it?” The Rel asked. “There are a couple of timepieces here, but they are by no means that exact.”

“No need,” Brazil assured the Northerner. “Hain, fly up to the surface there and watch the sun. When it vanishes to the west, then tell us immediately. Be conservative—err on the side of sunlight. We’ll check watches for seven hours from that point. After that, we can simply wait to open the wall. We’ll have only about two minutes, so it’s important that everyone goes as soon as the wall opens. The ones who don’t will be left out here.”

“What about the atmosphere inside?” Skander asked. “We have only a few pressure suits here.”

“No problem there, either,” Brazil responded. “All of us are compatible with the oxygen-nitrogen-carbon mix that’s common, in one sense or another, with the sectors on both sides of The Avenue. There will be a compromise adjustment, but while the mixture might make a few of us temporarily light-headed, it shouldn’t pose any problem. This system will automatically follow us, section by section, as we go down. The only problem we might have, and it’s minor, is some strongly differing gravitational pulls due to the lines of force flowing from here. None will be a real problem, just uncomfortable occasionally.”

His explanation seemed to satisfy them, and they sat down or otherwise relaxed, waiting for the proper time.

“Are you really—really me?” Vardia hesitantly asked the Slelcronian, who was awake only because of a small, lamplike gadget fastened over the headleaf.

The Slelcronian paused and thought carefully. “We are you, and we are more than you,” it replied. “All your memories and experiences are here, along with the millions of the Slelcronians. You are a part of us, and we are a part of you. Through the Recorder, you are a part of the total synthesis, not just the isolated portion in this body.”

“What’s it like?” she asked.

“It is the ultimate stage to which any can aspire,” the creature told her. “No individuality, no personality to corrupt. No jealousy, greed, anger, envy, or those other things that cause misery. All alike, all identical, all in communion. As plants we require nothing save water and sunlight, and carbon dioxide to breathe. When another is needed, we make a seed and mate it to the Recorders; it grows, and immediately after bloom becomes as we. The Recorders do not think, and get their food from our bodies.”

“But—what do you do?” she asked curiously. “What is the purpose to your life?”

“Universal happiness in a stable order,” the Slelcronian replied unhesitatingly. “Long have we yearned to spread the synthesis. Now, through this body and your experience, we can return to Czill and multiply. We shall work with the devices of Czill to create a synthesis of animal with plant. We shall expand, eventually, to the Well World, and, with the aid of the Well, to the corners of the universe. All shall become one with the synthesis, all shall enjoy perfect equality and happiness.”

She thought a minute. “And what if you can’t do it with the animals?”

“We will,” the Slelcronian replied confidently. “But, should it not be so, then the superior shall eliminate the inferior, as it is in the laws of nature since the beginning of time.”

This isn’t me, she thought. This can’t be me. Or—or is it? Is this not what my society strives for? Is this not why we clone, why genetic engineering is eventually planned to make everyone identical, sexless, equally provided for in every way?

A sudden question struck her, and she asked, “And what will you do once you have accomplished this all-encompassing synthesis? What then?”

“Then there will be perfection and harmony and happiness,” replied the Slelcronian as if reciting a litany. “Heaven will be ours and it will be forever. Why do you ask such a question? Are we not you? Did you not in fact accept the offered synthesis?”

The question disturbed her, for she had no answer. What had changed? How had the paths of Vardia I and II differed so radically in the last few weeks that such a question would even occur to her?

She turned away, and her eyes fell on Wu Julee and Nathan Brazil. They had some sort of symbiotic relationship, she thought. It was observable, no matter what form they had been in. When he could have clearly escaped the Ivrom spell, he had risked himself to free her.

She sat down, the chill of the night making the hardness of The Avenue feel like an ice cube on her bare behind.

What had she seen that her sister had not? Emotion? Love? Some different sort of relationship? Kindness? What?

What had her sister seen? A nation of great bugs all out to do each other in and lord it over the others. Hain. Skander. That weird Northern creature. A world of machines. They represented something far different from Nathan Brazil, Wuju—and Varnett, with guilt over seven dead people he probably couldn’t have saved anyway. Guilt over doing the right and proper thing? Impossible! Yet—she remembered him coming in in the early morning, carrying Brazil’s battered and broken body. Exhausted, weak, half-crazed from the burden, yet unwilling to sleep or eat until Brazil had been tended to. Standing over that body, only technically alive, and weeping.

Why?

She thought again of the Slelcronian and its dreams. The perfect society. Heaven. Forever.

The Markovians had it, had the ultimate in material existence.

And they had deliberately wrecked it for death, misery, pain, and struggle on countless worlds in countless forms.

What was perfection, anyway? What did the Markovians lack that gave the lie to the grand dream?

They forgot how to love, Brazil had said. But what was love?

Have we already forgotten it?

The thought upset her, and she couldn’t explain why. For the first time in her life, she felt alienated, alone, outside, left out.

Cheated.

And she had no idea what was missing.

For the first time, and perhaps the first of any being on the Well World, she knew what it must have been like to be a Markovian.

Was this, then, what Nathan Brazil felt? Was this why he felt he was cursed? Did he live all those millennia searching for the missing factor in the Markovian dream, hoping that someone would discover it?

But, no, she concluded. He knew what it was. He had tried to explain it.

Suddenly she shivered, but not from the chill. She had never thought, never brooded like this before, never faced the chill of reality before.

Oh, nonexistent, uncaring gods! she thought bitterly. What a curse more horrible than anything imaginable.

Suppose Nathan Brazil had what was missing, deep inside—and no one else did?

“Hello, Vardia,” said a voice behind her. She turned with a start, and saw Wuju standing there. “You’ve been sitting there looking strange for the longest time.”

She smiled weakly, but said nothing.

Wuju smiled and sat down beside her. “Yikes! This pavement’s cold!”

“If you just sit you don’t notice it,” Vardia told her.

“Everyone’s so somber and serious now,” Wuju noted. “Even me.”

Vardia looked at her strangely. “It’s the mission—the end of the mission. In there is anything you want. Just wish for it. And all of us are going in. I don’t know about anyone else, but I just discovered I don’t know what to wish for.”

“I wish we weren’t going,” Wuju said grimly. “If I had one wish, it’d be that this never had to end. Here—this journey, Nathan, all of you. It’s been the happiest time of my life. I’m afraid that nothing will be the same after we’re in there. Nothing.”

Vardia took her hand and patted it. Now why did I do that? she wondered, but she continued doing it.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Vardia said calmly. “I only know that I must change. I have changed. Now I must understand how and why.”

“I don’t like this at all,” Wuju responded in that same tone of foreboding. “I don’t like the idea of things being changed by a whim. No one should have that kind of power—least of all these sorts. I don’t like being a figment, an afterthought. I’m scared to death. I told Nathan, but he just shook his head and went away. I don’t understand that, either. I can face death, now—and evil, too. But I can’t face the fear of what’s in there. Not alone.”

“You’re not alone,” Vardia said with a gentleness that surprised her.

Wuju looked over at Brazil, standing facing the wall, unmoving, stoic, alone. She started to tremble.

“I can’t face it alone!” she wailed weakly.

“You’re not alone,” Vardia repeated, squeezing her hand tighter.

Elkinos Skander watched the two women with interest. So the robots have retained a little humanity after all, he thought with satisfaction. But it’s buried so deep within them that it took the Well World to bring any of it out.

And for what?

Things weren’t working out quite the way he had planned at all, but except for the Slelcronian and, perhaps, that Northerner, it was all right, particularly if the robots like Vardia could feel.

Surely they wouldn’t object to his requests of the Well.

He looked over at Hain, motionless in the darkness.

“Hain? You awake?” Skander asked softly.

“Yes. Who could sleep now?” came the bug’s response.

“Hain, tell me. What do you expect to get in there? What do you want of the Well?”

Hain was silent for a moment. “Power,” she replied at last. “I would make the Baron Azkfru emperor of the Well World, this galaxy, perhaps the universe. But, with this mob, I’ll settle for his being emperor for the longest of time in Akkafan, with such other power left to future effort. My Lord, the baron, can do anything except fight this machine.”

Skander raised his mermaid’s eyebrows in surprise. “But what do you get out of it?”

“I shall be the baron’s queen,” Hain replied excitedly. “I shall be at his throne, second only to him in power. I shall bear the broods that will rule for eternity, the product of Azkfru and myself! The workers, even the nobles, shall defer to me and my wishes, and envy me, and my subjects will sing my praises!” Hain paused, carried away by her own vision.

“I was born in a run-down shack in a hole called Gorind on Aphrodite,” she continued. “I was unwanted, sickly. My mother beat me, finally cast me out into the mud and dust when she saw I’d never be a miner. I was nine. I went into the city, living off the garbage, stealing to make do, sleeping in cold back doorways. I grew up grubbing, but in the shadow of the rich, the mineowners, the shippers from whom I stole. One day, when I was fifteen or so, I raped and killed a girl. She struggled, called me names—tried to scratch me, like my mother. They caught me, and I was about to be psyched into a good programmed worker when this man came to see me in my cell. He said he had need of people like me. If I agreed to serve him and his bosses, he would get me out.”

“And you accepted, of course,” Skander put in.

“Oh, yes. I went into a new world. I found that the rich whom I’d envied dreamed of greater riches, and that power came not from obeying the law but from not getting caught. I rose in the organization. I ate well, grew fat, ordered people around. I have—had—my own estate on a private world of the bosses. Staffed all by women, young women, held to me by sponge. Many were slaves; others I had reduced to animals. They roam naked in the forest on the estate, living in trees, eating the swill I put out for them like barnyard animals.”

Skander had an eerie feeling in his stomach, yet he followed Hain’s statement with morbid fascination. “But that’s gone now,” Skander said as calmly as he could manage.

“Not gone,” Hain replied, agitated. “I will be mother now.”

There was nothing Skander could say. Pity was for what Hain was or could have been, not what the creature was now.

“What do you want out of all this, Skander?” Hain asked suddenly. “Why all this trouble, all this effort? What do you want to do?”

“I want to restore humanity to itself,” Skander replied fiercely. “I want to get rid of the genetic engineers, the philosophers of political sameness on the Comworlds. I want to turn us around, Hain! I want to make people human again, even if I have to destroy civilization to save mankind. We’re becoming a race of robots, Hain. We wipe out the robots or we abdicate the universe to other races. The Markovians died of stagnation, Hain, and so will we unless it’s stopped!”

Hain had never liked fanatics, saviors, and visionaries, but there was nothing else to do but talk. “Tell me, Skander. Would you go back? If you could, I mean. Suppose you get your wish. Would you go back or stay here?”

“I think I could end my days here if I got what I want,” Skander replied honestly. “I like this place—the diversity, the challenges. I haven’t had time to enjoy being Umiau. But, then, I’d like to see what our little race would be if my plan were fulfilled. I don’t know, Hain. Would you go back?”

“Only as the Queen Mother of the Akkafians,” Hain responded without hesitation. “At the side of my beloved Lord Azkfru. Only to rule would I return, Skander. For nothing less.”

Ortega slithered over to them. He had small pistols in his hands, and he put one next to Skander and the other in front of Hain.

“Pistols for all,” he said lightly. “Nice little energy jobs. They will work in there, like in any high-tech hex. They’ll work on everybody except me. A dandy little circuit prevents that.”

Skander reached over, picked up the pistol, felt it. Suddenly the Umiau scientist looked into Ortega’s wide brown eyes.

“You expect us to kill each other, don’t you?” he said softly. “You expect all hell to break out after we get to the Well and learn how it operates. And then you’ll finish off the winner.”

Ortega shrugged, and smiled. “Up to you,” he replied calmly. “You can compromise with me, or with each other, or do as you say and shoot. But I will be in at the payoff no matter what.” He slithered away to distribute guns to the others, chuckling softly.

“That bastard,” Hain commented. “He hasn’t seen what The Diviner and The Rel can do, has he? Wonder what sort of defense he has for that?”

“I think he knows,” Skander responded. “That’s one slick pirate there. He’s counting on us to take care of the Northerner. And, damn his eyes, we have to! We have to, or that blinking little son of a bitch will zap all of us!”

“Just be thankful that snake did get transported to the Well World,” Hain said flatly. “Otherwise, he’d be running the whole damned galaxy by now.”

Varnett came over to Brazil, who was still standing facing the Equatorial Barrier. “Brazil?” he said softly. “You awake?”

Nathan Brazil turned slowly, looking at Varnett.

“Oh, yes, I’m awake,” Brazil told him. “I was just thinking. I’ve enjoyed this escapade, you know. Enjoyed it a great deal. Now it’s over, ended. And it ends like all the other episodes in my life. So I have to pick up and keep on once again.”

Varnett looked puzzled. “I don’t understand you at all, Brazil. You’re in the pilot’s seat. You alone know what’s in there—you do know, don’t you? You have a girl who loves you, and a future. What’s eating you?”

Brazil shook his head slowly.

“I have no future, Varnett,” he replied. “This part of the great play is over. I already know the ending, and I don’t like it. I’m trapped, Varnett. Cursed. This diversion helped, but not much, because it brought back too much pain and longing as well. And as for Wuju—she doesn’t love me , Varnett. She has a deep need to be loved. She loves a symbol, something that Nathan Brazil did to and for her, something in the way he reacted to her. But she wants of me what I can’t give her. She wants her dream of normality.” He shifted, stretching his legs out in front of him. He continued to face not the others, but the barrier.

“I’m not normal, Varnett,” he said sadly. “I can give her what she wants, needs, deserves. I can do it for all of you. But I can’t participate, you see. That’s the curse.”

“Sounds like grandiose self-pity to me,” Varnett said derisively. “Why not take what you want if you can do all that?”

Brazil sighed. “You’ll know soon enough. I want you just to remember this, Varnett. I want you to keep it in your head throughout all that happens. Inside, I’m no different from the rest of you.”

“What would you want, if you could have anything at all?” Varnett asked him, still bewildered.

Brazil looked at the other seriously, sadly. There was agony and torment within him.

“I want to die, boy. I want to die—and I can’t. Not ever. Not at all. And I want death so very much.”

Varnett shook his head uncomprehendingly. “I can’t figure you, Brazil. I just can’t figure you.”

“What do you want, Varnett?” Brazil asked sharply, changing tone. “What would you wish for yourself?”

“I’ve thought a lot about that,” the other replied. “I’m only fifteen years old, Brazil. Just fifteen. My world has always been dehumanized people and cold mathematics. I’m the oldest fifteen of my race, now, though. I think, perhaps, I’d like to enjoy life, enjoy a human life—and somehow make my contribution to progress. To stop this headlong rush of the human race into a Markovian hell and try to build the society they hoped would evolve from their tens of thousands of cultures and races. There’s a greatness here in the Markovian Well, a potential unrealized, perhaps, but great nonetheless. I’d like to see it reached, to complete the equation the Markovians couldn’t.”

“So would I, boy,” Brazil replied earnestly. “For only then could I die.”

“Seven hours!” Ortega’s voice broke through the stillness. “It’s almost time!” His voice cracked with excitement.

Brazil turned slowly to face them. They were all scrambling to be near the barrier.

“Don’t worry,” he assured them. “It’ll open for me. A light will go on. When that light comes on, walk into the barrier. When you do, it’ll be as nothing. Only I will change, but be ready for it. And understand something else— I will lead. I have no weapons, but the Well will give me a form unfamiliar to you. Don’t be upset by it, and don’t get trigger-happy with each other. Once we’re all inside, I’ll take you down to the Well of Souls, and I’ll explain everything along the way. Don’t do anything hasty, because I’m the only one who can get you down with certainty, and I’ll not forgive any breaches. Clear?”

“Big talk, Nate,” Ortega said confidently, but there was an unease in his manner. “But we’ll go along if you do.”

“I gave you my word, Serge,” Brazil said. “I’ll keep it.”

“Look!” the Slelcronian cried. “The light’s gone on!”

In back of Brazil a section of the floor corresponding to The Avenue was lit into the Equatorial Barrier.

“Let’s go,” Brazil said calmly, and turned and stepped into the barrier. The others, tension on their faces, followed him.

Suddenly Skander cried out, “I was right! I was right all along!” and pointed ahead. The others looked in the indicated direction.

There were several gasps.

Wuju stifled a small scream.

The Well had changed Nathan Brazil, just as he had warned.