Twilight at the Well of Souls

designed for those worlds and eventually they get eliminated, one way or another—at least, I think most of them do. Never was sure. Well, we have a long job ahead of us, anyway. Might as well relax and do the best we can.”

She looked around at the controls, gauges, even the huge chambers with the countless black-dot relays. There was no energy, no power there. It was gone, except for the system of the Well World, which drew its power and maintained itself by grabbing the energy absorbed by a black hole in some other universe, a very tiny black hole, she noted.

She wondered often about that other universe. Did it have a naturally evolved group of lifeforms? Did it have its own Markovians and its own version of the Well of Souls? There was no way to know, she realized. No way to ever know. Anyone who fell into a black hole here—when there were black holes again —would come out there, of course, but they would hardly be in any physical condition to see what was going on.

It was unfortunate, in a way, that there was no way of knowing. With all this new power and knowledge, the only two mysteries left to her would be parallel universes and Nathan Brazil. But then, she reflected, there should be some mysteries left in the world.

“How long will the complete job take?” she asked him.

“Six days,” he responded, as if it were obvious. “Well World time, of course, which is the only time we got right now.”

She thought back to their past experiences. “Ortega… Gypsy… Marquoz… I wonder if any of them are still alive.”

“We’ll never know,” he told her. “As the experience of the past few months should tell you, it’s not good to hang around and be known on the Well World. You have to let ’em go a couple of hundred thousand years so they forget who and what you are, what they are, and all the rest. That way they don’t know you when you show up again. Nope, you take yourself out there, in the new universe, and you settle down, and you relax-—until you’re needed again. And you forget yourself, after a while. The Markovian brain remembers all of it, but that’s only here, in the Well. Otherwise you just don’t have the capacity, unless they evolve into it or build it. It’s a mercy, really, as you’ll see.”

She thought about it. “You know, there are two of us. We could remain Markovians, this time.”

“That’s no good,” he told her. “Not for us, not for everywhere else. A god gets bored and alienated even more than a human being does. And we can’t reproduce, so there would be just the two of us, playing some kind of monster god game or living on some Markovian world dreaming up new exercises for our minds and going batty like they did. Be my guest, if you want, but it’s more interesting the other way. It’s your choice, though. You can erase yourself, put yourself in any body on any world you want either as a Markovian prototype or, by going through the Well Gate, as one of these mere mortals. Me, I’ll stick with our people. They got so many interesting untapped possibilities.”

“The ones we send out from here,” she said, “will be mostly our people, volunteers or Olympians who know what they’re getting into. Those others, though, the ones we kidnapped off those worlds just before the plug was pulled, the ones now hung up in Well World limbo, they’re just suddenly going to wake up on a primitive, alien world, cold and mysterious, naked and without any tools or weapons.”

“They’ll make it,” he assured her. “Most of them, anyway. They did it before, they’ll do it again. It’s a pretty stubborn set of races those Markovians bred. After all this time I find I still like them, for the most part.”

“Even the Dahbi?”

“Gunit Sangh was the pure dark side that lives within all of us,” he told her. “But he wasn’t the Dahbi, just a Dahbi. We had our own share of those type. You never met an Adolf Hitler or Dathan Hain. Hardly good examples of our race, but I wouldn’t condemn everybody on the basis that we produced a lot of superstinkers.” He paused. “You ready for the first step?”

“I’m ready,” she told him seriously. “I still don’t see how this can be done in six days, though. I admit I never had any formal education, but I do know it takes billions of years to do what we’re doing.”

“Billions of years for them,” he replied. “Six days for us. Just watch. There’s nothing out there now. Absolutely nothing. Not a single speck. No matter, no energy except the primal energy at total rest. That means, too, there’s no space, time, or distance.”

“The Markovian worlds with their Gates are still there,” she pointed out.

“Well, that’s true, but they have no sun, no warmth, nothing. They exist in nothingness, and will until we fix it.”

“I know the procedure, thanks to you,” she told him, “but I’m still unclear as to exactly what we do.”

“You do this,” he told her, and reached out for the master control. “Let there be light!” he commanded with a laugh.

Energy flowed once more from the tiny programming unit suspended above the control room entry hall. It flew to the Well of Souls computer and began its reset activation.

Far out in space, billions of light-years from the Well World, a hole was punched. A great black hole from some other universe, the greatest of all black holes that universe had, suddenly found an outlet. A singularity of immense proportions was created, and the accumulated material it had swallowed and continued to swallow, including light itself, burst through from that universe into that of the Well.

Nature reacted as it must; the static universe moved to close the hole, to plug it up quickly, but the Well of Souls now beat into renewed life. It reached out without regard for space or time and seized on the erupting white hole, keeping it open, allowing it to expand and grow. The effect was the greatest explosion possible in physics.

“Whew! A whole hell of a lot farther away than last time,” Brazil noted. “Too bad. The Well World will continue to have a black sky. Well, you gotta take the white hole where you find it, and where the fabric is weakest, which is one and the same thing. Won’t make any difference to the rest, though, except it might be a little nicer. Won’t be much in the way of Markovian Gates in the neighborhood for quite a while. Well, we can relax now. We have to wait for all the usual natural processes to take place. Wow! That’s a beauty, though! Look at those energy gauges! Bigger and nastier by far than the last one! We’re gonna have a rip-roaring new universe here!”

Little time passed for them inside the Well, for time had hardly any meaning there. The Well World was being kept separate, apart from the rest of the universe as it always had been. The rest of the Markovian universe, too, went along at the old rate and would continue to do so until they slowed everything to match Markovian time.

They checked on the Well, saw that special circuits were already modifying, changing, repairing, even rebuilding damaged sections. They had been in time.

An hour passed. Half a billion years passed. It was all the same thing. The universe expanded. Tremendous gases and other material continued to spin out, swirling as it did so from the forces at the vortex of the big bang.

Twelve hours passed. Six billion years passed. It was all the same thing. Expansion continued. Cooling and congealing continued, even accelerated. Galaxies were forming, and inside those galaxies stars and even planets. The process continued on.

Brazil idly flicked a control. The time rate slowed. By the end of the day it was down to a very small length of time, relatively speaking: barely a few million years an hour.

On the second day he singled out the target worlds and started adjusting the processes by which life would form. The proper conditions were established for life, and on the third day, slowing time even more, he energized those elements, not merely on the planets he was going to use but on all those other worlds as well, worlds which, formed naturally, were good havens for life of one form or another but for which he had no people.

Time slowed more on the fourth day. The amino acids, the crystalline structures, the building blocks of lifeforms North and South on the Well World formed; the carbon-based in the sea while plants now ruled the land, what there was of it.

On the fifth day he slowed the rate still more, with Mavra’s assistance, and activated secondary lifeform programming. Animal life appeared, first in the sea, then on the land, all in its proper evolutionary order, all stemming from the single, inevitable first cause.