Twilight at the Well of Souls

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