“We probably will,” he responded, then looked up. “Well, here come the other three now, so if everybody will relax I’ll explain what this is all about.”
“Let’s first set our own situation properly,” Brazil began. “First, I have to get from a hex near the south of the Southern Hemisphere to an Avenue, an opening to the Well of Souls at the equator. The best-case distance is over forty-nine hundred.”
“Excuse me,” Marquoz interrupted, “but why so far?”
“Fair question,” he replied. “I keep forgetting that you’re not up on this sort of thing. In fact, only Mavra and I have ever been there, so I’ll return to the basics.
“The Well World is a construct. It was created a little over ten billion years ago by a race known to you as the Markovians. You know the story—we keep running into the remains of their dead planets as we expand outward. Cities, yes, but no artifacts of any kind. No machines, no ruined food stores, no art or pottery, even. Nothing. The reason is rather simple. The Markovians were the first race to develop out of the big bang that started the Universe. They evolved at the normal rate, or maybe a little faster than normal due to local conditions, and they went through most of the stages our peoples have. By the time the Universe was barely two and a half billion years old—I know that sounds long, but on a cosmic scale it’s not—they’d spread out and reached virtually every place in their corner of the Universe. Having reached the limits of expansion, they turned inward, eventually developing a computer linked to each of their minds. They removed the entire crust of each of their planets and replaced it with a poured quasi-organic substance about two kilometers thick—the computer—then programmed it with just about everything they knew. They matched their minds to their local computers and, presto! A civilization without need of anything physical. They replaced the old crust atop the computer, of course, and built cities more to delineate the physical space, the property, of each than to serve any utilitarian purposes. Then they settled back and dreamed up their own houses—and the computer created the things by an energy-to-matter conversion. Hungry? Just think of what you wanted and the computer served it up to order. Art? Create anything you wanted in your mind and the computer realized it for you. No wants, no needs, the perfect materialist Utopia.”
“It sounds pretty wonderful to me, if a little like magic,” Yua commented.
Brazil chuckled. “Magic? Magic is doing something the other guy can’t do. We haven’t learned how to do it yet, so it’s magic. When we learn how and understand it, it’s science. Obie could do it, of course. That’s what his builder, Gilgram Zinder, discovered—the same principles that made the Markovian computers work. Of course, Obie was a tiny, primitive prototype when compared to the Markovian models, but he was able, within his design limits, to do those things. Zinder wasn’t the first to stumble onto the Markovian history, only the first to be able to build a machine that could do the conversions.”
“But the Markovians are all dead,” Gypsy pointed out.
Brazil nodded. “Yes, all dead. They got bored, fat, lazy, and stagnant. My latest theory is that they spent too much time connected to their computers and tended to merge minds with parts of their devices, which forced them to face up to the fact that they’d gone as far as they could go, done everything they could do, reached the point all races strive for—and there wasn’t anything there. No challenge. Nothing to look forward to. Since the idea seems to have spread and taken root among Markovians all over the Universe within a fairly short period of time, this computer concept becomes the most logical. They spent very little time playing god, it appears. A few generations, no more. And then, as one, they decided to scrap everything and try again.”
“It sounds logical,” Mavra agreed. “But why theorize? Weren’t you
Brazil coughed slightly. “Well, ah, yeah. But it—well, it’s just so long ago that my memories of that time are pretty well nonexistent now. A lot of this stuff is rediscovery. Bear with me. I’ve lived an awfully long time.”
They accepted that, although not without some reservations. Mavra, at least, thought that there was something decidedly phoney about Nathan Brazil, something she couldn’t put her finger on. A mass of contradictions, Obie had called him. That was putting it mildly.
“Anyway, the Markovians decided that they’d made a wrong turn somewhere in evolution. They couldn’t accept the idea that what they had was the be all and end all, because that made all striving, all progress, a joke in their minds. They couldn’t handle that. So, they decided they’d blown it—and they’d have to start again.
“The means chosen was peculiar,” Brazil continued. “They couldn’t wipe out the whole Universe without wiping out themselves as well. So they created a monster computer, a computer as big as a planet, and one that had to be manually operated. They were large creatures that would be real monsters to any of us now—like big, throbbing leathery human hearts standing on six long, suckered tentacles. They were, however, our cousins in that they were a carbon-based lifeform whose atmosphere though different from ours, was close enough that we could breathe it. Now, they poured a crust over this planet-sized computer, this master brain, and then divided it into fifteen hundred and sixty hexagonal biospheres. Since you can’t cover a sphere with hexagons, they divided large areas at the poles into mini-biospheres around the polar centers. These are North and South Zone, the two areas where the creatures they were going to invent could gather comfortably and talk, trade, or whatever.”
“How’d they get in and out?” Marquoz asked.
“Zone gates,” Brazil replied. “In the middle of each hex is a gate—a big, black hole it looks like, shaped like a hexagon. It’ll take anybody in a hex to the appropriate Zone for him. There’s a lot of litt’e gates in Zone, that’ll take an individual back home. But while they might be considered matter transmitters in the same sense that Obie was able to move this whole world from one spot to another instantaneously, they will only take you from your home to Zone and back to your home. As set up, they’re no good for general transportation, although they can move inanimate objects and so are nice for trade. The Northern Hemisphere is a weird place, devoted to noncarbon- based life because it occurred to the Markovians that they might have evolved the wrong way. The south is carbon-based life. A special gate exists in each Zone to transport to the other so there can be some trade and contact between hemispheres.”
“And these hexes? They are sealed?” Yua asked, fascinated.
“Oh, no,” Brazil replied. “Their barriers are pure energy. But you’ve already been told a lot of this—about the technological limits and the like. I’m afraid I face a roughly forty-nine hundred kilometer walk through the Southern Hemisphere to the equator, where there is a physical barrier that keeps north and south divided. But it’s also a transportation system used to get Markovian technicians in and out of the Well of Souls. There are Avenues there, broad streets if you will, that form the borders of equatorial ‘hexes’—the only nonhexagons, since they have to stop at basically a straight line, they’re somewhat wing-shaped—to the doors to the Well of Souls.”
“The Well of Souls,” Marquoz echoed. “An odd name.”
Brazil shrugged. “Why the ‘Well’ I don’t know. The ‘Souls’ part is real enough. There’s something deep down in all sentient life that can’t be quantified but takes it a half-step from the animals. We call it the soul; religions are founded on it, and I have evidence it exists. At one point on the Well World a group of mystics who were convinced I was dying transferred me into the body of a deer. So there’s a soul that is you—it’s what the Well uses to change you into something else once you get there. The Markovians had a problem with souls. They couldn’t invent them. In order to start their prototype races they had to use people, if that’s the proper term, and change them. The Markovian artisans and philosophers and theoreticians got together and each designed a hex. Then they redesigned Markovians into races best suited to each engineered biosphere. The Markovian volunteers thus gave up their form, but, more than that, they gave up their immortality. They were convinced that what they were doing was right and that they should become mortal and primitive once more. And they lived, and died, and tried to make their cultures work. If they did work out—and cultural development was handicapped by each hex’s technological potential and the like—then the technicians went into the Well of Souls and made a few adjustments to newly developing planets in our expanding Universe so that they would develop into the reality being represented in the particular hex. At the proper evolutionary moment, the civilization in the hex would be transferred, seeding the planets with souls, so to speak. Then the old hex would be cleared away, scrubbed down, and turned over to a new designer.”
“Interesting,” Marquoz said. “But if that’s the case, who are all those people there now? Shouldn’t the place be bare as a billiard ball?”
“Well, there were always some who didn’t want to go in any group,” Brazil told them. “Since they were about to lose their home hexes, though, they had little choice. What you have now on the Well World are the last fifteen hundred and sixty races, successes and failures, that were created. The end of the line.”
“I noticed on the Well World that many of the Southern Hemisphere races were at least vaguely familiar,”
