Twilight at the Well of Souls

The Avenue, at the Equatorial Barrier

Serge Ortega had been as good as his word. although they had passed signs of fighting and occasional dead bodies of hapless patrols, no opposition faced them all the way up the Avenue. A few times they had almost fallen into the water from the unstable rock slides, but that had been the extent of the problem.

Mavra had never seen the Equatorial Barrier except from space, and now that it loomed over her she found it much less a dark wall than it looked from a distance. Partially translucent, it went up as far as the eye could see, a huge dam at the head of the river, which was merely a trickle at this point. She noticed that the area where the Avenue reached the wall was absolutely dry; obviously the only water here would be that which struck and ran down from the enormous barrier.

It looked like a giant nonreflecting shield of glass, not very thick and amazingly shiny and free of any signs of wear. It was only here, at the wall itself, that the true Avenue could be seen—shiny and smooth, like the barrier itself. Where it joined the wall there was no seam, no crack; the two simply merged.

It was near dusk of the second day, but even Brazil could not enter immediately. Using the Gedemondan, now their only companion, he told the other two, “We have to wait for midnight, Well time, or a little more than seven hours after sunset. That means we sit and wait.”

Mavra relaxed and looked back up the canyon. “I wonder if they’re still alive back there?” she mused aloud.

“Yeah,” was all he could say in response. He didn’t really want to betray the fact to anyone, least of all Mavra, but he was deeply and sincerely affected by the sacrifice those creatures of many races, some of whom meant a good deal to him by this time, were making. The war was more of a mass thing, an abstract thing, and there were many possibilities in a battle. You could win or lose, you could live or die, but you always had a chance. They hadn’t had a chance and they knew it, yet they did it so that he could stand here.

His thoughts went back to Old Earth once again, to Masada in particular. He hadn’t been there, hadn’t really been very close to the place, but the history of the tremendous sacrifice they had put up, the miraculous amount of time they had held, and, in the end, their total commitment, which ordained death rather than surrender to tyrrany, had uplifted him at a time when he had felt desolate and dispirited. If man had such a spirit, there was hope.

There were few such examples of that spirit, he reflected sadly. Few, but always one, always at a time when one would swear greatness was dead, the human spirit dead, and all was lost. This was such a moment now, he reflected. It might be a long, long time before such a thing happened again, but for the first time he found himself believing that it would happen again.

He was amazed by the thought, by his capacity to still think it after such a long, long time. Could it be, he found himself wondering, that his spirit wasn’t dead, either?

He was amazed, too, that there was just the three of them. Just he, Mavra, and the Gedemondan they needed to speak to each other. He had offered it to more, to anybody who wanted to come, in fact. They had chosen to stay at the pass. Maybe they’re the smart ones, he thought wistfully. At least they had the choice.

“What will happen when we… go in?” Mavra asked him, eying the seemingly solid, impenetrable wall again.

“Well, at midnight the lights will go on for this section,” he told her. “Then this section around the Avenue will fade and you’ll be able to walk through to it inside. Once in there, neither you nor the Gedemondan will change, but I will. The thing was designed for Markovians, so it’ll change me into one. They’re pretty ugly and gruesome, worse than most anything you’ve seen to date. Don’t let it bother you, though. It’ll still be me in there. After that, we take a ride down into the control room area, I’ll make some adjustments to the Well World system to activate it once again and key the Call, then we’ll go down and see just how bad the damage is.”

“The Call?” she repeated.

He nodded. “The Call. Halving the populations of each hex, preparing the gateways, and impelling those we need to do the things we have to have done when we need them done. You’ll see. It’s not as complicated as it sounds.”

“And what about us?” she asked. “What happens to us?”

“You’re going to be a Markovian, Mavra,” he told her. “It’s necessary for several reasons, not the least of which is that the Well is keyed to the Markovian brain and it really is necessary to be a Markovian to understand what it is and what it’s doing. It’ll also give you the complete picture of what you will tell me to do. That’s the worst thing, Mavra. You’re going to know exactly what the effect of that repair will be—if it can be fixed. We won’t know that until we’re inside.”

He didn’t mention the Gedemondan, of course. He had no idea what he was going to do with the creature, but he would have to be disposed of fairly quickly or he would just get in the way. Obviously, when all was said and done, he deserved some kind of reward, but what he wasn’t quite sure yet. Certainly the possibility of a Gedemondan with access to the Well didn’t seem that appetizing.

It was quite dark now, and Mavra, gesturing to the Gedemondan, said to both of them, “Look! You can see the stars from here.”

The other two looked up, and, sure enough, in the wide gap between the end of the cliffs and the Equatorial Barrier the swirls and spectacular patterns of the Well World sky were clearly visible. It was the most impressive sky of any habitable planet Brazil had known, the great nebulae and massive collection of gasses filling the sky. The Gedemondan did not look long, though; in the well-known psychological quirk of many races and people who were born and lived near stunning beauty, they had simply taken the scene for granted.

Nobody had a watch or any way of telling time now; they would just have to settle back and wait that eternal wait for the light to come on.

Oh, hell, he decided. Might as well ask the Gedemondan straight out. “Communicator? What do you wish of all this? What shall I do for and with you?”

The Gedemondan didn’t hesitate. “For myself, nothing, except to be returned to my people,” he told the other. “For my people, I would wish that you examine why the experiment which succeeded here failed out there and make the necessary adjustments so that it at least has an even chance this next time.”

Brazil nodded slowly. That sounded fair enough. He wondered about the creature, though, and whether or not it was entirely on the up-and-up. Quite often more than one race would wind up on a given planet once a pattern was established, occasionally by design because they might have something to contribute, occasionally by accident. The process just wasn’t all that exact. The insectlike Ivrom, for example, had managed by accident or their own design to get a few breeders into Earth during the last time, and had become the basis for many of the legends of fairies, sprites, and other mischievous spirits. Some of the others, too; once Old Earth had had a colony of Umiau, what it called mermaids, on the theory that perhaps a second race could use the oceans as the main race used the land.

The Rhone—descendants of the original Dillian centaurs—had attained space flight at an early age. An exploratory group had crashed on Old Earth when the humans still thought it a flat land on the back of a giant turtle or somesuch, and they had managed to survive there, even be worshiped by some of the primitive humans as gods or godlike creatures. But they were too wise, too peaceful, for the rough primitivism of Earth; eventually they had been hunted down and finally wiped off the face of the planet. He himself had arranged to destroy their remains and wipe all but legend from the sordid history of what man did to the great centaurs, but when the Rhone, fallen back into bad times, first lost, then regained, space, and again probed the human areas, they had known, somehow, of the fate of those earlier explorers. Humans had appeared in their dreams, in their racial nightmares, long before lasting discovery, and it had kept them somewhat distant and apart from humanity even as they entered into a pragmatic partnership with it.

As for the Gedemondans, there were legends, both on the Rhone home world and on Old Earth, of huge humanoid, secretive creatures that lurked in the highest mountains and the most isolated wilderness, somehow avoiding technological man through his whole history except for brief glimpses, legends, half-believed tales. Were some of these, the Yeti, the Sasquatch, and others like them, truly the evolved descendants of some Gedemondans who had somehow gotten shifted to the wrong place? He couldn’t help but wonder.

Time dragged for them, on the Avenue, at the Equator. More than once any of the three of them had the feeling that more than seven hours must have passed, that somehow they had either missed it, or this entryway wasn’t working, or there was some other problem.

The waiting, Mavra decided, was the worst thing of all.

Suddenly the Gedemondan said, “I sense presences near us.” He sounded worried.

Brazil and Mavra looked around, back into the darkness, but could see and hear nothing unusual In both their minds was the fear that, now, at the last moment, the armed force would catch up to them, that Serge Ortega and his group had been unable to hold the Borgo Pass long enough.

The Gedemondan read their apprehension. “No. Just three. They appear to be to our right. It is very odd. They seem to be inside the solid rock wall, coming toward us fairly fast.”

Mavra’s head jerked up. “It’s the Dahbi!” she warned. “They can do that.”

“That’s twice I’ve underestimated that bastard,” Brazil grumbled. “While Serge’s people hold his army, Sangh goes around them in a way only he can. The force at the pass told him what he needed to know— we were here and on our way. At least he can’t take any weapons on that route.”

“He doesn’t need them,” she shot back. “Those forelegs are like swords and the mandibles are like a vise. And we don’t have any weapons, either.” She looked around. “Or anywhere to go.”

“Except in,” he sighed. “But we can’t count on that.”

The Gedemondan turned and stared at a rock wall not fifteen meters from where they stood. Slowly there was a brightening of the rock in three places. They watched in horrified fascination as three ghostly creatures oozed out of the solid rock, seemed to solidfy, and stood there, a huge one in front, two slightly smaller in back, like ghastly sheets with two black ovals cut in them for eyes.

Brazil stared at them, fascinated. So those are Dahbi, he thought to himself. He remembered them now, vaguely. More legends and ancestral memory. And the big one in the middle had to be—

“Nathan Brazil, I am Gunit Sangh,” said the leader. “I have come to take you back.”

Brazil started to move forward to make connection with the Gedemondan so he could reply, but the Gedemondan ignored him and walked to only a few meters from the Dahbi leader.

“You’ve lost, Sangh,” said the Gedemondan in almost perfect imitation of Brazil’s accent and mannerisms. “Even if we went back with you now, our own forces are behind yours at the pass. You may go through walls, but you can’t take me that way.”

“I won’t have to,” Sangh replied confidently. “We shall go back with you as hostage and we shall walk right through that pass to my own forces, which, by that time, will have it secured. Then we need only hold it until the balance of my forces moves up to collect us. Your pitiful force in between can’t hope to do much more. After all, look at how well your own small force has held the pass against us so far.”

Both Mavra’s and Brazil’s heads came up at this. They had still been holding the pass!

“I stand here in front of the Well,” the Gedemondan responded threateningly. “You know the rules, Sangh. I cannot be killed, and I do not wish to be taken.”

“I weary of this,” Gunit Sangh sighed irritably. “Take him!”

The two smaller Daahbi unfolded, showing their full, grim insectival forms. The effect was startling, particularly on Brazil, who had never seen it before.

The two moved on the Gedemondan, who stood firmly facing them. Sticky forelegs dripping some gruesome liquid reached out for the great white creature, and all along the legs flashed the natural sabers of the Dahbi. The foreleg of the one to the Gedemondan’s left touched the creature, who reached over and grabbed it, unexpectedly, in his left hand. There was a brilliant flash of blue-white fire that seemed to envelop the Dahbi, a supernova that flared into momentary monumental brightness, then was gone.

Taking advantage of the stunned shock of the other, the Gedemondan already was turning, his right hand reaching out and taking hold of the other’s foreleg before it could withdraw. Again the flare, again, when it suddenly faded, there was no sign of the Dahbi.

Gunit Sangh hadn’t lived this long or gotten this far without guts and quick thinking. In a display of courage that rivaled his ferocity, his own foreleg lashed out and took the Gedemondan’s head off with one swing.

The headless body spouted blood from the severed neck, which dyed the beautiful white fur, and it lurched forward as if with a will of its own as Sangh, moving with a speed that seemed impossible, retreated back out of the way of the decapitated thing.

The Gedemondan’s arms reached out and it took one or two steps forward, then shuddered and toppled to the ground, where it twitched for a few moments, then lay still. Abruptly the stored energy in the body flared up, another brilliant nova, and then it was over. There was nothing left, nothing but the blood and the severed head, staring glassily from the Avenue floor.

Gunit Sangh was shaken, obviously, and a number of different ideas came rapidly through his mind at one and the same time. It was Brazil, but it was now dead, and Brazil couldn’t die so it couldn’t have been Brazil but if it wasn’t, then who was Brazil…?

He looked again at the Equatorial Barrier. Just two of the flying horses like the Agitar flew. What…? And why two?

It struck him almost like a physical blow. Mavra Chang’s catatonia, Brazil’s comatose body, all the powers and magicians’ tricks they had pulled.

And then Gunit Sangh laughed, laughed so loud it echoed up and down the canyon. Finally, he looked at the two flying horses and said, “Well, well. The real Nathan Brazil, I presume. And who’s this with you? Not a genuine flying horse, I wouldn’t think. No, could it be that I’ve also found the mysteriously missing Mavra Chang? Ah! A start of recognition! Yes, yes, indeed it is.” And he laughed again. “I’ve won!” he cried. “All the way to the wire and I’ve won!”

Behind the two of them a light clicked on.

Sangh saw it and roared with sudden rage. He moved on them, and, almost reflexively, they edged back into the Equatorial Barrier; edged into it and passed through it, inside the Well of Souls before they even realized what happened.

“Not yet!” screamed Gunit Sangh. “Oh, no! Not yet!” and he started for the still-lighted barrier.

Suddenly there was the sound of hoofprints, like a horse charging up the canyon towards the Barrier. Sangh, started, stopped momentarily and turned his massive head to see what it was. He froze.

Glowing slightly like some ghostly, supernatural thing, a Dillian was bearing down on him, a Dillian holding a large, ornate sword in his right hand.

Sangh lashed out with his deadly forelegs but the sword penetrated, slicing through the giant Dahbi like a knife through butter. Sangh screamed in pain and fell, where it started to change, grow more opaque, as it sought its only natural avenue of escape.

The huge centaur laughed horribly, waved its sword, and instead of the weapon there was now a bucket in his hand, a bucket that sloshed with liquid. Sangh’s head went up and he screamed, “No!” and then the contents were poured onto the Dahbi, half-sinking in the rock. Where the water struck, the form solidified once more into the brilliant off-white, and the Dahbi leader gave a choking gasp and fell victim to a vicious kick from the forelegs of the centaur that literally severed the Dahbi’s body in two at the point where it was half in the rock, half out. It quivered a moment, then went still.

Without a pause, the centaur laughed in triumph and threw the bucket against the far wall, where it hit with a clanging sound, then dropped to the floor of the Avenue. With that, the apparition whirled and galloped back off down the chasm, back into the darkness, and was quickly gone.

Inside the Equatorial Barrier, Mavra stared back at the scene she had just witnessed.

“Speak now, if you wish,” came Brazil’s voice behind her, definitely his yet somehow oddly changed and magnified. “I can hear your directed thoughts.”

“That—that was Asam!” she breathed. “But he’s dead! He was killed in the battle… They said…” She turned to face Brazil and stopped, gazing in horrid fascination. Brazil was no longer there.

In his place was a great, pulpy mass two and a half meters tall, looking like nothing so much as a great human heart palpitating with almost hypnotic regularity, a combination of blotched pink-and-purple tissue, with countless veins and arteries visible throughout its barren skin both reddish and blue in color. At the irregular top was a ring of cilia, colored an off-white, waving about—thousands of them, like tiny snakes, each about fifty centimeters long. From the midsection of the pulpy, undulating mass came six evenly spaced tentacles, each broad and powerful-looking, covered with thousands of tiny suckers. The tentacles were a sickly blue, the suckers a grainy yellow in color. An ichor seemed to ooze from pores in the central mass, thick and foul-smelling, which did not drip but, rather, formed an irregular filmy coating over the whole body with the excess reabsorbed by the skin.

“No, it wasn’t Asam,” Nathan Brazil told her, his voice seeming to emanate from somewhere inside that terrible shape. “It was simply justice. The Borgo Pass has held, and that freed an old friend of ours to look in on us from time to time.”

She was unable to take her eyes off the terrible thing that now stood with her, but she was able to control her revulsion by strong self-will.

“It was Gypsy,” she realized.

“But he looked like Asam to Gunit Sangh,” Brazil noted with satisfaction. “It was the way he should have died.”

“And a good thing, too,” she noted. “He almost had us, here, right at the end.”

“No he didn’t,” Brazil told her. “He’d lost as it was. He just didn’t notice it. Hard as it is to believe, Mavra, it still isn’t time for the Barrier to open up as yet. There was a—malfunction, let’s call it. A convenient malfunction, when I was trapped by a deadly enemy. The Well takes care of its own, Mavra, always. Even when you don’t want it to. And once inside here, I am invulnerable.”

She looked up at him and he could feel her disgust at the shape and form, her revulsion at the horrible smell, like rotting carrion. “That’s what the Markovi-ans were like?” she managed. “The fabled gods, the Utopian masters of creation? Oh, my God!”

He chuckled. “You’ve seen enough alien forms on this world and in the universe to know that mankind is neither unique nor particularly the model for creation. The Markovians evolved naturally, under a set of conditions far different than man’s, far different than most of the races’ of our universe. What is horrible to you was very practical to them. By their standards I’m tall, dark, and handsome.”

“It would be easier if you didn’t stink so much,” she told him.

“What can I do?” he replied in a mock hurt tone. “Well, let’s get this show on the road. If you got the guts, you’ll come to think of this smell as exotic perfume.”

“I doubt that,” she muttered, but when he started off, using the tentacles as legs, she followed, marveling at the ease and surity of his movements in that form.

“Although the Markovians may look strange, even repulsive, they were our kin in more ways than spiritually,” Brazil noted as they went along. “This form breathes an atmosphere compatible with what you’re used to. The balance is a little off, but not so much as you’d expect. And the cellular structure, the whole organism, is carbon-based and works pretty much like the other carbon-based organisms we know so well. It eats, sleeps, even goes to the bathroom just like all the common folk, although sleeping’s not mandatory at this stage. They outgrew it and acquired the ability for a selective shut down, which did the same thing. At least, they were biologically enough like us to be consistent with what we know of lifeforms everywhere. They don’t break any laws.”

He stepped onto a walkway on the other side of a meter-tall barrier. When he was certain she followed, he struck the side of the barrier with a tentacle and the walkway started to move. As they were carried along, the light behind them went out and the light in their area and immediately ahead switched on.

“This is the walkway to the Well Access Gate,” he told her. “In the early days a shift would come on and off at each Avenue every day. The workers and technicians would come in as we are now and go down to their assigned places. Near the end, when only the project coordinators were left, they limited access to midnight at each Avenue and then only for a short time, mostly to allow the border hexes to get on with their own growth and development. The entrances were later keyed only to the project coordinators, themselves gone native, so that nobody could run back in with second thoughts. The last time I was here I rekeyed them to respond only to me, since it was theoretically possible for somebody to solve the puzzle of the locks.”

They moved on in eerie silence, lights suddenly popping on in front of them, out in back of them, as they traveled. The walkway itself glowed radiantly as far as she could see, although no light source was visible. She noticed that the walkway was speeding up and that they were now heading down as well as forward, down into the depths of the planet. Then it opened into a chamber, dimly lit, and below them was a great hexagon outlined in light.

“That’s the Well Access Gate,” he told her. “One of six, really. It can take you any place you want to go within the Well. We’re going to the central control area and monitoring stations. I have to check on things first of all, see if everything will work as planned, and, of course, see just how badly damaged the Well really is by all this. Maybe, just maybe, Obie was wrong and we won’t have to do anything really drastic after all.”

He stepped off the walkway when it reached the hexagon and walked into its area. She hesitated a moment, then followed him. All light vanished and there was the uncomfortable sensation of falling for a moment, then the whole world was abruptly flooded with bright light, and she was back on solid flooring again.

It was a huge chamber, perhaps a kilometer in diameter, semicircular, the ceiling curving up and over them almost the same distance as it was across the room. Corridors, hundreds of them, led off in all directions. The Gate was in the center of the dome, and Brazil quickly stepped off, Mavra following, nervous that if she remained much longer, the thing could zap her to some remote part of this complex where she would never be found.

Walls, ceiling, even the floor, all appeared to be made of tiny hexagon-shaped crystals of polished white mica that reflected the light and glittered like millions of tiny diamonds.

Brazil stopped and pointed a tentacle back over the Gate. Suspended by force fields, about midway between the Gate and the apex of the dome, was a huge model of the Well World, turning very, very slowly. It had a terminator, and darkness on half its face, and seemed to be made of the same stuff as the walls, although the hexagons on the model were very large and there were dark areas at the poles and a dark band around the equator. The sphere was covered with a thin, transparent shell that also seemed segmented, its clear hexagons matching those below.

“It doesn’t look as pretty as the real thing does from space,” Mavra commented, “but its impressive all the same.”

“You can see the slight difference in reflected light on each hex,” he pointed out. “That’s Markovian writing. Numbers, really, from 1 to 1,560, in base-6 math, of course. The numbers aren’t in any logical order, though, since over a million races, at the outside, were created here and only the last batch, the final 1,560, remain, the leftover prototypes. As soon as one was cleared it would be completely stripped and then rebuilt to the new project and assigned a new number from the cleared hexes in order of new activation. That’s how Glathriel can be number 41 and Ambreza, right next to it, 386. It’s sloppy, but, what the hell, it wasn’t important.”

“It’s quite impressive and decorative,” she commented approvingly.

He chuckled. “Oh, that’s not just decoration. That’s it. That’s the brain that runs the Well World. The working model for the Well of Souls. It’s the heart of the whole thing, really, since it’s also the main power source to the Well and supplies the basic equations needed to operate properly. In a sense, it’s a giant computer program. It draws its power from a singularity that extends all the way into an alternate universe. If the Well’s beyond a quick fix, what we’ll have to do is disconnect the Well of Souls from that device, which will not affect the Well World but which will have the effect of clearing the programming completely from the Well of Souls itself. Then, when we hook it back up again, it’ll get the message as if new data. Since it’s a slow, progressive feed, as the program reaches the damaged area it will halt and wait while emergency programs go into effect to repair or replace whatever’s needed.”

“You can’t selectively shut it off, say, to the damaged areas?” she asked hopefully.

“Nope. Oh, it’s a good idea, and, I guess, theoretically possible, but we’d need the whole Markovian computer staff here to do it. It would mean completely reprogramming the Well of Souls—that is, writing a new program for it. You can do that with the Well World but not with the big computer, since they never thought it would have to be done twice in the universe, after all.”

“So what we’re going to do, then, is more or less go back in time, recreating the conditions that existed just before the big computer was activated, then essentially repeat what they did,” she said, trying to get it straight.

“Right. And the self-repair and correcting circuits will then go to work on the damage. They were put there because nobody really knew if the Well was 100 percent, whether or not they hadn’t made some mistakes, design or construction errors, things like that. So the program is self-correcting; when it hits a section that isn’t right, it alters or changes it so that it is correct.”

“So what do we do first?” she asked him.

He chuckled. “First we go down that corridor there. There’s a central control room not far—all those corridors lead to loads of control rooms, one for each race sent out from here—a lot more than 1,560, I might add.” He led the way, and again she followed.

They came to a hexagonal doorway that irised open, and a light switched on within. Inside was some sort of control room, filled with switches, knobs, levers, buttons, and the like, and what looked like a large black projection screen. Enormous dials and gauges registered she knew not what; there was no way to tell what any of the things did.

A tentacle went out and touched a small panel on a control console, activating what appeared to be a screen but what was a recessed tunnel, oval in shape, stretching back as far as the eye could see, a yellow-white light covered with trillions of tiny black specks. Frantic little bolts of electricity, or something like it, shot between all of them, creating a furious energy storm, a continuous spider’s web of moving energy.

“Let’s get you squared away first,” Brazil muttered. There was suddenly the sound of a great pump or some kind of relay closing, then opening, from deep within the planet and all around her. It sounded almost like the beating heart of some enormous beast.

“I’m just bringing the power up,” he told her. “Don’t be alarmed. The dials, switches, and such over there are main controls for the mechanisms. Minor stuff like this I can do without any sort of controls, although we’ll need some when the power’s cut. Okay, that ought to do it.”

There was a steady, omnipresent thump-thump, thump-thump through the control room.

“Okay, main control room up to full power,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “Activate… now!”

The world seemed to explode all around her. Vision expanded to almost 360 degrees, hearing, smell, all the senses flared into new intensity such as she had never known before. She could feel and sense the energies all around her, feel the enormous power surges that were suddenly so real they took on an almost physical form, as if she could just reach out and take hold of them, bend them any way she wanted. It was a tremendous, exhilarating, heady feeling, a rush of strength and power beyond belief. She was Superwoman, she was a goddess, she was supreme…

She looked at Brazil with her new senses and saw no longer the ugly, misshapen creature he had become but a shining beacon of almost unbearable light, a towering figure of almost unbearable beauty and strength and power.

She reached out to him not with any part of her body but with her mind, and he seemed to extend the same, a flow of sentient energy, of something, that met hers and merged with it.

And then she recoiled from it, or tried to, for a brief moment. For the first sensations she had received from him had been not of a godlike creature, which he undeniably was, but instead of an incredible, deep, aching loneliness that hurt so terribly it was almost unbearable. Pity overwhelmed her, and she grieved that such greatness should be in such misery and pain. The depth of its misery was fully as terrible as was his godlike greatness and power. It was so great that she feared to reach out again, to make more contact, lest such agony destroy her. She wept for Nathan Brazil then, and in that weeping she finally grasped his essential tragedy.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said gently, extending himself once again. “I have it more under control now. But you had to know. You had to understand.”

Hesitantly she reached out once again, and this time it was more bearable, suppressed from the direct contact of her mind and his. But it was far too much a part of him to be banished completely; it permeated his very being, the core of his soul, and even its shadow was almost too much.

And now he started to talk. No, not talk, transfer. Transfer data to her, directly, at the speed of his thought, registering the accumulated knowledge of Nathan Brazil on the operation of The Well of Souls, the Markovian physics, the experimental histories, everything about the Markovian society, project, and goals. And she realized what he had done to her, realized now, for the first time, that she, too, was a Markovian, and, in pure knowledge of the Well, his equal. Knowledge, yes, but not in experience, never in experience. For the experience was intertwined with the excruciating agony he suffered, and that he protected her from as best he could.

Finally, it was over, and he withdrew from her. She was never sure how long it had taken; an instant, a million years, it was impossible to say. But now she knew, knew what he faced, knew what she faced, and knew just exactly what to do. She realized, too, that in order to make her a Markovian he had fed her directly into the primary computer, the master computer program itself. She was like him, now, and would be unless she, herself, erased that data from the Markovian master brain.

“I want you to spend a little time here before we proceed,” he told her. “I want you to check on the control rooms, read them off, take a look at the Well of Souls and its products. Before the plug is pulled, you must know what you are destroying.”

She knew the controls, now, knew how to use them and how to switch them from one point to another. Slowly, together, they examined the universe.

The machinery was incredible, and matched to her new Markovian brain with its seemingly limitless capacity for data and its lightning-fast ability to correlate it, it was easy to survey the known and unknown. Time lost its meaning for her, and she understood that it really had no meaning anyway, not for a Markovian. The very concept was nothing more than a mathematical convenience applicable only to some localized areas for purposes of measurement. It had no effect, and therefore no meaning, to either of them, not now.

She saw races that looked hauntingly familiar, and races that were more terribly alien than anything she had ever known or experienced. She saw ones she know, too: the Dreel who had started all this and humanity, the Rhone, the Chugach, and all the others. There were others, too, an incredible number of others, so many individual sentient beings that numbers became meaningless in that context.

But they were life. They were born and they grew and learned and loved, and when they died they left a legacy to their own children and they to theirs. Legacies of greatness, legacies of decline and doom, things both wonderful and horrible and often both at the same time. What she was seeing was the history and legacy of Markovian man.

But there were areas around the central control room of the human hexes that were mostly destroyed or burned out. Other sections had switched to try and handle, maintain the load, but it was too much of a strain on them and they, too, were burning out, only to increase the load on still others. There was a cancer in the Well of Souls beyond its ability to halt, and it was growing. As it grew, so did the rent in space-time, faster now, ever faster. She realized, idly, that the area of space from whence she came would be gone in a relative moment, and then it would spread even further, ever further.

And, she realized, Obie had been right. As sections maintaining other parts of the universe had to carry the increased load against the soaring tide of nothingness, their increasing burdens made failures occur ever more quickly, in dangerous progression.

The Well could kill or cure the universe, but it could not save itself. Right now almost a sixth of the Well’s active control centers were destroyed, burned out, shorted beyond repair. When it reached a third of the Well’s capacity, it would be beyond the ability of the Well to maintain the damaged parts; it would go crazy trying, though, and the entire thing would short out, beyond repair. It needed help, and it needed it quickly, or it could not survive. In a sense it was a living organism of its own, she understood, and the cancer was creeping rapidly toward its heart. The final burnout would trigger a protective shutdown by the master program and power source to save itself, but that would be too late, beyond the capacity of the smaller device to repair or replace. There would be only the Well World left in the whole universe, it and nothing else, forever.

But she understood Brazil, too. That deep torment in which he lived, a god forever cut off from communion with his own kind, for he was unique in the entire universe, perhaps in all the universes there might be, doomed to walk the Earth and stars as a man who could never die, never change, never find any sort of companionship, yet a man, also, who felt he had a sacred trust.

Moreover, inside here he could feel and see and know those countless numbers of sentient beings whose entire history would be wiped out, who, if repairs were done, would be not even a memory but wiped out as if they had never existed at all, save in the memories of those Entries on the Well World and in her mind and his.

“This isn’t the first time this has happened, is it?” she asked him.

“No, it’s not,” he admitted. “Three times that I know of. Can you understand how terribly hard it is now for me to pull that plug?”

“Three times…” she repeated, wonderingly. Three times into the Well of Souls, three times massacring so many, many innocents who had done nothing wrong but live.

“And it was you all three times?” she asked him.

“No,” he replied. “Only the last time. I was born on a world now dead and to a people now dead beyond any memory, but it was much like Old Earth. It was a theocratic group, a group that lived its religion and its faith, and suffered for it in the eternal way in which such people are made to suffer by others. I grew up in it and became a cleric myself, a religious teacher and expert, a religious leader, you might say. I was pretty famous for it, among my own people. I had a wife, and seven children, three boys and four girls—Type 41 humans, all, no funny forms.

“Well, another religion grew up near by, and it had a convert-by-force philosophy, and since by that time society was highly technological and advanced in those ways, we were tracked down when that technocratic faith took over our own land, tracked down and made to convert or die. Even though their religion was a variant of our own, they didn’t trust us. We were small, clannish, secretive, and we didn’t even solicit converts. We were handy. We were weak and fairly affluent, convenient scapegoats for a dictatorial society.

“They came for me and my family one night, when they felt very secure. I was the leader, after all. I had little forewarning, but managed, by sheer luck—good or bad is up to you—to not be at home that night. They took my wife and children, and they put out a call to me: I could betray my people and my faith, or my family would be worse than killed. They would be given brainwipes and then handed over as playthings for the ruling families. There were no guarantees for me if I surrendered, or them, either, but also no way to free them. I got out, went into the desert wilderness, became something of a hermit, although I did channel refugees from my people, the ones who could get out, to various safe havens.”

“With that kind of reasoning, I’m surprised you didn’t plot revenge,” she commented.

He laughed sourly. “Revenge? You can take revenge against a single individual, even against a group, but how do you do it against the majority of the world? Oh, I hated them, all right, but the only real revenge I could take was to keep my people and my faith alive through those terrible times, try and have a historical revenge, you might say, upon them.

“And, one night, while checking out some routes across that desert, I stopped at an oasis up against the side of a cliff and saw something I considered impossible.”

“What?” she prompted.

“A centaur, half man, half horse, sneaking down from a cave to drink. Now, understand, this was at a technological stage where I was having to beat helicopter searches, radar, mind probes, and all that, and where colonies had been established on both moons and the nearest planet. Well, he spotted me, and instead of hiding or charging me he called out to me, called my own name! He knew me, even if I had never seen the likes of him before. He told me he was from another, alien civilization far off among the stars, and that that civilization no longer existed. He was the last of his kind. He was the first to tell me of the Markovians, of the Well World, and of the Well of Souls computer. He had quite a setup there, too, I’ll tell you, a technological haven carved inside that desert mountain.

“He knew a lot about me, He had monitored me, it seemed, for some time, for reasons of his own, which I didn’t then understand. He told me that, through an experimental accident, the entire universe was in danger of total and complete destruction and that he needed help to avert that. He’d chosen me for the task.”

“Why you? A religious leader on the run?”

Brazil chuckled. “Well, for one thing he was able to show me books, alien books, from three or four different civilizations. He had a learning machine that taught me those languages—you’re familiar with the type if not the actual device. And, as I read them, books from nonhuman civilizations out among the stars my own people had not yet reached, I realized something almost stunning. I was reading paraphrases or alien adaptations of my own holiest writings, those of my basic religion. Oh, the details were all different, of course, but the basic truths were there, the basic concept of a single, monotheistic God, of the creation and many of the laws. All four had what could be easily translated as the Ten Commandments, almost in the same order, although the stated means of giving them was different. I realized in an instant what he was saying to me by all this.”

She didn’t follow. “What?”

“That there was something of a universal religion,” he replied, “a set of basic beliefs and concepts so close in principles that they simply could not have been evolved independently by so many different races. The centaur himself was a follower of such a similar faith, and it was the similarity with my own, of which I was the supreme surviving authority, that drew him to me. You see?”

She still hesitated. “But… you said the repairs had been done three times before. How could such a religion pop up this time again?”

“You see the point, then. It couldn’t—unless, perhaps, there was at its core a basic truth. Well, with that, I could hardly refuse him anything, and what he wanted was someone to come to the Well, where we are now, and help him pull the plug and start it again. Since it’s something of a mental exercise, he wanted someone who shared his own basic philosophical precepts, since some of those, too, would color what went on. Well, of course, that was part of the point. He tricked me, the bastard.”

“Huh?”

“He was the sentinel, the heir to the project manager. I don’t know if he was a project manager or not, or whether, like me, he’d been tricked in the remote past, but what he wanted wasn’t an assistant. You see, now that the program is completely stored, it only requires one to direct the reset, although two are maybe a little handier. He put me through, with a lot less preparation than you’ve had in your life, and then he erased himself from the program. He stuck me with the job and then killed himself!”

She felt some uneasy stirrings, recalling Gypsy’s own predictions about Brazil and herself. But instead of voicing them right now she asked, “And what happened after that?”

“Well, I completed the job, closed up shop, and suddenly realized that I knew very little of what was going on, really. So I went home, to Earth, and when the time was right I presented—mostly through trickery, I’m ashamed to admit—my ancient faith to twelve tribes of related people. It was the right decision. Out of that faith grew many of the rest of that world’s religions and its codes. I gave ’em the rules. I’ll admit that, in the main, they didn’t obey those rules any better than the people of my own world had, but they had them and it was, overall, a good thing. The spin-off religions alone were pivotal in our people’s history. Islam saved scholarship and the greatness of the ancients from a barbaric world; Christianity kept a cultural darkness from being total and retained a sense of unity that outlasted the bad times and spread to the four corners of the Earth. My new people, unfortunately, suffered the same way as my old had. Persecuted, made scapegoats, they nonetheless kept faith and tradition alive through it all. They came out a hell of a lot better than my last group, too, in the end.”

“Brazil?” she began hesitantly. “You say the mental exercise colors the newly created places. Couldn’t that be explained by the last one to do this having that religion, and putting it, without realizing it, into the collective unconscious of the created races?”

“It could be,” he admitted. “I’ve occasionally thought about it. But it couldn’t hurt to believe otherwise, either, could it? Or, perhaps, that’s God’s way of insuring continuity through all this.”

“Somehow I never thought of you as a man of God,” she commented. “And I seem to remember that you told my grandparents you were God.”

“I have a knack,” he told her, “of having people take seriously anything I say if I say it seriously enough myself. And I am a compulsive liar.”

“Then how do I know that all that you just told me is true?” she asked playfully. “Maybe that was the lie to remove from my thoughts any suspicion you might just be God.”

“You’ll never really know, will you?” he taunted. “I don’t worry about it. People believe what they want to believe, anyway.”

“Brazil? Are you going to wipe yourself off the program? Are you going to kill yourself and leave me to take over? Gypsy said as much.”

He paused a long while before replying. “That was my original intention, if you wanted it,” he admitted hesitantly. “Believe me, I want to die. You cannot believe how much I want to die.”

“I think I can,” she responded kindly. “I felt it at the beginning, remember?”

“You can’t know, really know,” he insisted. “You touched only the surface and have no concept of the depth. No, what I was originally going to do was to tell you all this and then let you decide for yourself whether to take the job, knowing that eventually you’ll die a million deaths inside but never die yourself. But now, I’m not so sure. What’s another few million years at this stage of the game? I looked into you, Mavra, far more deeply than you have looked into me. You don’t have the practice to do it like I do. And the more I looked, the more I realized that you were the best qualified person I knew to take over—the best qualified, but, almost for that reason, I can’t do it. I can’t condemn you to that loneliness. I just can’t do it to someone else, damn it!”

She looked at the strange shining creature with renewed interest and curiosity, almost wonder. “You’ve never really lost it, have you? Not deep down, you haven’t. You’re very tired, Nathan, and you’ve been horribly hurt by all this, but, deep down inside there’s still a fire going in that spirit of yours. You still believe in something, in your old ideals. You still believe it’s possible for people to reach God, a God you very much believe in even if you’re not God himself.”

“I’ll only tell you this,” he responded seriously. “There is something beyond all that we can see, all that we know, something that survives beyond the Well of Souls. Perhaps it’s in another parallel universe, perhaps it’s all around us but unseen, like the Markovian primal energy. But it’s there, Mavra, it’s there. Three Gedemondans laid hands on us and our minds went into those of beasts. That’s impossible under even these rules, Mavra. What got transferred? Whatever it was, it’s the only important part of either of us, and it was absolute enough that the Well has twice recognized me as who I am despite both times being in the body of an animal. Can you quantify it, identify it, even here, inside the Well, in Markovian form? Can you see it, see it shining brightly, as I see it in you? What is it? The soul? What’s ‘soul’ but a term for describing that which we can now recognize, and which others throughout time have recognized occasionally but never been able to pin down? What rules do these parts of us obey? Do they die when our bodies die, snuffed out like candles? Ours certainly didn’t. Your body is dead, mine probably is. It makes no difference.”

“Do you know the answer?” she asked him.

“Of course not, for I have never died,” he replied. “And it looks like another long time before I will.”

She hesitated before going on. “Nathan, if you want to go, I’ll do it. I’ll take the responsibility from you. You’re free as of this moment. For the first time in your life, Nathan, you’re free.”

He took that in for a brief moment, then answered, “No, Mavra. I am not free. I’m not free because you were right a moment ago. God help me, I still care!” He paused. “Shall we pull the plug?”

“We must,” she responded. “You know it.”

“Before we do, I’m going to try something that worked last time,” he told her. “It’s obvious there are a lot more races than hexes. We might be able to salvage most of them, at least to the same degree that we’re doing here. Some won’t survive, of course, either because of the damage or because of miscalculation, the laws of physics, or a lot of other things, but there’s a chance. It worked last time. It might work again, particularly for those races with some space capabilities.”

They went back to the control room and he made a number of adjustments. She didn’t realize what he was doing at first, but as she watched she understood.

“We can’t do it without souls, Mavra,” he reminded her. “We got to have something to work with.”

Slowly, out in space, across the limitless reaches of the universe, the Well Gates came on—came on and, more, started to move. Great, yawning, hexagonal shapes of blackness lifted off their native worlds, lifted off and rose into space. They had but two dimensions, discontinuities in the fabric of reality, for their depth was here, at the other end, at the Well Gate.

“Timing will be critical,” he reminded her. “I’m setting them up as best I can so they’ll hit equally, but I can only stall this end for a few seconds at best. When I give you the word, you must pull the plug. Understand?”

She understood now. Understood a great deal. Understood how so many races could have survived this before, understood how a number of races could wind up mixed on the same world. It would be impossible to achieve perfection.

The gates moved into their respective positions. Not all could be used, of course, but there would be enough, enough, if all went right. He would still lose some races, still lose some whole civilizalions and ideas forever, but he could save a great many of them.

After a while—who knew or could tell if it was a few minutes, a few centuries?—he said, “All in position. Best I could do. We’re going to lose a few thousand civilizations, damn it, but that’s better than all of them. I’m moving in, now, moving on the nearest inhabited planet in each region.”

On a million different worlds, a million races were startled by the small yawning blackness that descended on their worlds out of the sky, a blackness that was complete, absolute, and resisted any attempts to harm it, to blow it up. There was panic, then, only heightened by what the yawning hexagon did once it touched their worlds. It started to move, rapidly, almost impossibly fast, too fast to do anything about, swallowing people wholesale.

“They’re in! Holy shit! What a headache I’m getting! Can’t hold off the Well Gate much longer. Damn it! Not enough! Not every race got enough through! Shit! I’ll have to let go. For God’s sake, Mavra, pull the plug now!”

A thought, an impulse, a single exact, deliberate mathematical command went out. She did it, she, herself, alone. She killed them all—all except the ones on the Well World and the ones caught in transit.

Across the night side of the Well World, people would look up at the stars and see a wondrous sight. The great, brilliant, wondrous starfield that was the night sky simply flickered, then winked out. There was only blackness where it had been, a blackness as absolute as anyone had ever seen.

It was reported from one end of the Well World to the other, told and retold, and the nervous panic began.

Brazil has reached the Well of Souls. The stars have gone out.

Some died by their own hand, some went mad, but most simply watched and waited and stared at the horrible empty sky, the lonely, desolate nothingness that surrounded them and seemed almost to close in on them.

At both North and South Zone, the Well Gate ceased to operate. Seals that none had ever known were there slid automatically into place, suddenly and abruptly. Many were trapped inside and could only wait it out. Those who knew quickly threw up additional guards around their hex Zone Gates lest anyone be lost. For you would not go to Zone through those gates, not while the Well Gates were shut. They were being diverted, the Well Gate itself reversed. Anyone going through a Zone Gate now would never see the Well World again.

But also, those in the various hexes, North and South, particularly those who ruled, knew they had a deadline, that they had to provide roughly half, their populations for that Gate, and that if they did not, the Gates would move and do it for them, indiscriminately. The message was now out, automatically, to all the creatures of the Well World, a message that, until this day, they had believed a meaningless, mythical, or archaic phrase, but a message they all now well understood.

It was Midnight at the Well of Souls.