Midnight at the Well of Souls

Souls,’ which you’ll probably hear. It’s just an old ritual saying now, although it may have had some real meaning in the distant past of prehistory. Hell, if that’s the Well of Souls, then it’s always midnight somewhere!”

“What do the hexagons represent?” Hain asked.

“Well, there are fifteen hundred and sixty of them on the planet,” Ortega replied. “Nobody knows the reason for that, either, but at least the figure only has one six in it. Each hex is identical in size—each one of the six sides is just a shade under three hundred fifty-five kilometers, and they’re a shade under six hundred fifteen kilometers across. Needless to say they didn’t use our form of measurements when they built the place, and we don’t know what system they had, but that’ll give you an idea in our terms.”

“But what’s in the hexes?” Brazil prodded.

“Well, you could call them nations with borders,” Ortega replied, “but that would be understating things. Each is a self-contained biosphere for a particular life form—and for associated lower life forms. They are all maintained by the Markovian brain, and each is also maintained at a given technological level. The social level is left to whatever the inhabitants can develop or want to have, so you have everything from monarchies to dictatorships to anarchies out there.”

“What do you mean technological level?” Brazil asked him. “Do you mean that there are places where there are machines and places where there are not?”

“Well, yes, that, of course,” Ortega affirmed. “But, well, you can only get to the level of technology your resources allow within the hex. Anything beyond it just won’t work, like Hain’s pistol yesterday.”

“It seems to me that you would have been populated to death here,” Brazil commented. “After all, I assume all creatures reproduce here—and then the Markovian brains keep shuttling people here as well.”

“That just doesn’t happen,” Ortega replied. “For one thing, as I said, people can die here—and do. Some hexes have very cheap life, some species live a comparatively short time. Reproductive rates are in accordance with this death rate. If populations seem to be rising too high, and natural factors—like catastrophes, which can happen here, or wars, which also can happen, although they are not terribly common and usually localized—don’t reduce the numbers, well, most of the next batch is simply born sexually normal in every way yet sterile, with just a very small number able to keep the breed going. When attrition takes its toll, the species goes back to being born fertile. Actually the population’s pretty stable in each hex—from a low of about twenty thousand to a high of over a million.

“As for Entries like you—well, the Markovians were extensive, as I said, but many of their old brains are dead and some of the gateways are closed forever for one reason or another. Others are so well disguised that a one-in-a-trillion blunder like mine is needed to find the entrance. We get no more than a hundred or so newcomers a year, all told. We have a trip alarm when the Well is activated and some of us take turns on a daily basis answering the alarms. Sheer luck I ran into you, but I take a lot of turns. Some of the folks here don’t really like newcomers and don’t treat them right, so I take their duty and they owe me.”

“There are representatives of all the Southern Hemisphere races here, then?” Vardia asked.

The snakeman nodded. “Most of them. Zone’s really a sort of embassy station. Distances are huge, travel is long here, and so here at Zone representatives of all of us can meet and talk over mutual problems. The Gate— which we’ll get to presently—will zip me back home in an instant, although, curse it, it won’t zip anybody back and forth except from here to his own hex. Oh, yes, there’s a special chamber for Northerners here and one for us up at the North Zone just in case we have to talk—which is seldom. They occasionally have something we are short of, or our scientists and theirs want to compare notes, or some-such. But they are so different from us that that’s rare.”

Brazil wore a strangely fixed expression as he said, “Serge, you’ve spelled out the world as much as you can, but you’ve omitted one fact I think I can guess—how did a little Latin shrimp like you become a six-armed walrus-snake.”

Ortega’s expression was one of resignation. “I thought it would be obvious. When you go out the Gate the first time, the brain will decide which hex could stand a person or four and that’s what you will become. You will, of course, also wind up in the proper hex.”

“And then what?” Hain asked nervously.

“Well, there’s a period of adjustment, of course. I went through the Gate the way Nate remembers me, and came out in the land of the Uliks looking like this. It took me a little while to get used to things, and longer for everything to sort itself out in my head, but, well, the change also produces an adjustment. I found I knew the language, at least all the analogues to my old one, and began to feel more and more comfortable in my new physical role. I became a Ulik, Nate, while still being me. Now I can hardly remember what it was like to be anything else, really. Oh, academically, sure—my mind was never clearer. But you are the aliens now.”

There was a long silence as they digested the information. Finally, Brazil broke it and asked, “But, Serge, if there are seven hundred and eighty life forms with compatible biospheres, why hasn’t there been a cosmopolitanism here in the South? I mean, why is everybody stuck in his own little area?”

“Oh, there is some mingling,” Ortega replied. “Some hexes have been combined, some not. Mostly, though, people stick to their own areas because each one is different. Besides, people have never liked other people who were different. Humanity—ours and everybody else’s, apparently—has always found even slight pretexts to hate other groups. Color, language, funny-shaped noses, religion, or anything else. Many wars were fought here at various times, and wholesale slaughter took place. Such things are rare now—everybody loses. So, mostly, everybody sticks to his own hex and minds his own business. Besides, there’s the factor of commonality, too. Could you really be good buddies with a three-meter-tall hairy spider that ate live flesh, even if it also played chess and loved orchestral music? And—could a society based on high technology succeed in capturing and subjugating a hex where none of its technology worked? A balance is kind of maintained that way— technological hexes trade for needed things like food with nontechnological farm hexes where society is anarchistic and only swords will work.”

Vardia looked up, eyes bright, at the mention of swords. She still had hers.

“And, of course, in some hexes there are some pretty good sorcerers—and their spells work!” Ortega warned.

“Oh, come on,” Hain said disgustedly. “I am willing to believe in a lot—but magic? Nonsense!”

“All magic means is a line between knowledge and ignorance,” Ortega responded. “A magician is someone who can do something you don’t know how to do. All technology, for example, is magic to a primitive. Just remember, this is an old world, and its people are different from anything in your experience. If you make the mistake—any of you!—of applying your own standards, your own rules, your own prejudices to any of it, it will get you.”

“Can you brief me on the general political situation, Serge?” Brazil requested. “I’d like to know a lot more before going out there.”

“Nate, I couldn’t do it in a million years. Like any planet with a huge number of countries and social systems, everything’s in a constant state of flux. Conditions change, and so do rulers. You’ll have to learn things as you go along. I can only caution that there is a lot of petty warfare and a lot of big stuff that would break out if one side could figure out a way to do it. One general a thousand years or so ago took over sixty hexes. But he was undone in the end by the necessity for long supply lines and by his inability to conquer several incompatible hexes in his backfield that eventually were able to slice him up. The lesson’s been well learned. Things are done more by crook than hook here now.”

Hain’s eyes brightened. “My game!” he whispered.

“And now,” Ortega concluded, “you must go. I cannot keep you here more than a day and justify the delay to my government. You cannot put off leaving indefinitely in any case.”

“But there are many more questions that must be answered!” Vardia protested. “Climate, seasons, thousands of needed details!”

“As for the climate, it varies from hex to hex but has no relationship to geographical position,” Ortega told her. “The climate is maintained in each case by the brain. Daylight is exactly fifty percent of each full day anywhere on the globe. Days are within a few hours of standard, so that’s fourteen and an eighth standard hours of day and the same of night. The axis is straight up—no tilt at all. But it will vary artificially. But—see! I could go on forever and you’d never know enough. It is time!”