Twilight at the Well of Souls

“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,