Midnight at the Well of Souls

And, at exactly the same moment, another voice said exactly the same thing! They both turned around with the same motion.

Two identical Vardia’s stood looking, amazed, at each other.

“So you’re the twin,” they both said simultaneously.

“I’m not, you are!” they both insisted.

Or am I? each thought. Would the twin know?

Everything was duplicated. Everything. Even the memories and personality. That’s why they kept saying and doing the same things, they both realized. Will we ever know which is which? they both thought. Or did it matter? They both came out of the same body.

Together they set out for the Center.

They walked wordlessly, in perfect unison, even the random gestures absolutely duplicated. Communication was unnecessary, since each knew exactly what the other was thinking and thought the same thing. The procedure was well established. Once at the reception desk, they were taken to different rooms where doctors checked them. Pronounced fit and healthy to go back to work, each was assigned to a part of the project different from that she had previously been working on, although with similar duties.

“Will I ever see my twin again?” asked the Vardia who was in Wing 4.

“Probably,” the supervisor replied. “But we’re going to get you into divergent fields and activities as quickly as possible so each of you can develop a separate path. Once you’ve had a variety of experiences to make you sufficiently different, there’s no reason not to see each other if you like.”

In the meantime the other Vardia, having asked the question sooner and having received the same answer, was settling in to a very different sort of position, even though the basic computer problem was the same.

She began working with a Umiau, for all the world identical to the one she had talked with along the riverbank. Her name—Vardia’s mind insisted on the feminine for them even though they were neither—and both —was Endil Cannot.

After a few days of feeling each other out, they started talking as they worked. Cannot, she thought, reminded her of some of the instructors at the Center.

Every question seemed to get a lecture.

One day she asked Cannot just what they were looking for. The work so far consisted of feeding legends and old wives’ tales from many races into the computer to find common factors in them.

“You have seen the single common factor already, have you not?” Cannot replied tutorially. “What, then, is it?”

“The phrase—I keep hearing it off and on around here, too.”

“Exactly!” the mermaid exclaimed. “Until midnight at the Well of Souls. A more poetic way of saying forever, perhaps, or expressing an indefinite, like: We’ll keep at this project until midnight at the Well of Souls—which seems likely at this rate.”

“But why is it important?” she quizzed. “I mean, it’s just a saying, isn’t it?”

“No!” the Umiau replied strongly. “If it were a saying of one race, perhaps even of bordering races, that would be understandable. But it’s used even by Northern races! A few of the really primitive hexes seem to use it as a religious chant! Why? And so the saying goes back as far as antiquity itself. Written records go back almost ten thousand years here, oral tradition many times that. That phrase occurs over and over again! Why? What is it trying to tell us? That is what I must know! It might provide us with the key to this crazy planet, with its fifteen hundred and sixty races and differing biomes.”

“Maybe it’s literal,” Vardia suggested. “Maybe people sometime in the past gathered at midnight at some place they called the Well of Souls.”

The mermaid’s expression would have led anyone more knowledgeable in all-too-human emotions to the conclusion that the dumb student had finally grasped the obvious.

“We’ve been proceeding along that tack here,” Cannot told her. “This is, after all, called the Well World, but the only wells we know of are the input wells at each pole. That’s the problem, you know. They are both input, not opposites.”

“Must there be an output?” Vardia asked. “I mean, can’t this be a one-way street?”

Cannot shook her statuesque head from side to side. “No, it would make no sense at all, and would invalidate the only good theory I have so far as to why this world was built and why it was built the way it was.”

“What’s the theory?”

Cannot’s eyes became glazed, but Vardia could not tell if it was an expression or just the effect the Umiau had when closing the inner transparent lid while keeping the outer skin lid open.

“You’re a bright person, Vardia,” the mermaid said. “Perhaps, someday, I’ll tell you.”

And that was all there was to that.

A day or two later Vardia wandered into Cannot’s office and saw her sitting there viewing slides of a great desert, painted in reds, yellows, and oranges under a cloudless blue sky. In the background things got hazy and indistinct. It looked, Vardia thought, something like a semitransparent wall. She said as much aloud.

“It is, Vardia,” Cannot replied. “It is indeed. It’s the Equatorial Barrier—a place I am going to have to visit somehow, although none of the hexes around it are very plentiful on water, and the trip will be hard. Here, look at this,” she urged, backing the slides up several paces. She saw a view taken through the wall with the best filters available. Objects were still indistinct, but she could see just enough to identify one thing clearly.

“There’s a walkway in there!” she exclaimed. “Like the one around the Zone Well!”

“Exactly!” the mermaid confirmed. “And that’s what I want to know more about. Do you feel up to working through the night tonight?”

“Why, yes, I guess so,” she replied. “I’ve never done it before but I feel fine.”

“Good! Good!” Cannot approved, rubbing her hands together. “Maybe I can solve this mystery tonight!”

* * *

Stars swirled in tremendous profusion across the night sky, great, brilliantly colored clouds of nebulae spreading out in odd shapes while the starfield itself seemed to consist of a great mass of millions of stars in swirls the way a galaxy looked under high magnification. It was a magnificent sight, but one not appreciated by Vardia, who could not see it with her coneless eyes as she worked in the bright, artificial day of the lab, or by unseen onlookers out in the fields to the south.

At first they looked like particularly thick grains of the wild grasses in the area. Then, slowly, two large shapes rose up underneath the stalks, shapes with huge insect bodies and great eyes.

And—something else.

It sparkled like a hundred trapped fireflies, and seemed to rest atop a shadowy form.

“The Diviner says that the equation has changed unnaturally,” said The Rel.

“Then we don’t go in tonight?” one of the Akkafian warriors asked.

“We must,” replied The Rel. “We feel that only tonight will everything be this auspicious. We have the opportunity of an extra prize that increases the odds.”

“Then the balance—this new factor—is in our favor?” asked the Markling, relieved.

“It is,” The Rel replied. “There will be two to carry back, not one. Can you manage it?”

“Of course, if the newcomer isn’t any larger than the other,” the Markling told The Rel.

“Good. They should be together, so take them both. And—remember! Though the Czillians will all sleep as soon as the power-plant detonator is triggered, the Umiau will not. They’ll be shocked, and won’t see too well or get around too much, but there may be trouble. Don’t get so wrapped up in any struggle that you sting either of our quarry to death. I want only paralysis sufficient to get us back to the halfway island.”

“Don’t worry,” the warriors assured almost in unison. “We would not fail the baron like that.”

“All right, then,” The Rel said in a voice so soft it was almost lost in the gentle night breeze. “You have the detonator. When we rush at the point I have shown you, I shall give a signal. Then and only then are you to blow it. Not sooner, not later. Otherwise the emergency generators will be on before we are away.”

“It is understood,” the Markling assured the Northerner.