Midnight at the Well of Souls

works. It was, if I remember right, created in the same way as most great inventions—sheer accident. The best guess is that its vibrations cause some kind of link with the Markovian brain of the planet.”

She shivered a little, and Brazil rubbed close to her, thinking the dropping temperature was the cause. “Want a coat?” he asked.

She shook her head negatively. “No, I was thinking of the brain. It makes me nervous—all that power, the power to create and maintain all those rules for all those hexes, work the translators, even change people into other things. I don’t think I like the idea at all. Think of a race that could build such a thing! It scares me.”

Brazil rubbed her humanoid back with his head, slowly. “Don’t worry about such things,” he said softly. “That race is long gone.”

She was not distracted. “I wonder,” she said in a distant tone. “What if they were still around, still fooling around. That would mean we were all toys, playthings—all of us. With the power and knowledge to create all this, they would be so far above us that we wouldn’t even know.” She shook him off and turned to face him. “Nathan, what if we were just playthings for them?”

He stared hard into her eyes. “We’re not,” he responded softly. “The Markovians are gone—long dead and gone. Their ghosts are brains like the one that runs this planet—just gigantic computers, programmed and automatically self-maintained. The rest of their ghosts are the people, Wuju. Haven’t you understood that from what you’ve learned by this trip?”

“I don’t understand,” she said blankly. “What do you mean the people are the Markovian ghosts?”

“ ‘Until midnight at the Well of Souls,’ ” he recited. “It’s the one phrase common to all fifteen hundred and sixty hexes. Think of it! Lots of us are related, of course, and many people here are variations of animals in other hexes. I figured out the solution to that part of the puzzle when I came out of the Gate the same as I went in—and found myself in a hex of what we always thought of as ‘human.’ Next door were one-and-a-half-meter-tall beavers—intelligent, civilized, highly intellectual, but they were basically the same as the little animal beavers of Dillia. Most of the wildlife we’ve seen in the hexes that come close to the type of worlds our old race could settle are related to the ones we had back there. There’s a relationship for all of them.

“These hexes represent home worlds, Wuju,” he said seriously. “Here is where the Markovians built the test places. Here is where their technicians set up biospheres to prove the mathematics for the worlds they would create. Here’s where our own galaxy, at least, perhaps all of them, was engineered ecologically.”

She shivered again. “You mean that all these people were created to see if the systems worked? Like an art class for gods? And if it was good enough, the Markovians created a planet somewhere that would be all like this?”

“Partly right,” he replied. “But the creatures weren’t created out of the energy of the universe like the physical stuff. If so, they’d be the gods you said. But that’s not why the world was built. They were a tired race,” he continued. “What do you do after you can do it all, know it all, control it all? For a while you delight in being a race of gods—but, eventually, you tire of it. Boredom sets in, and you must be stagnant when you have no place else to go, nothing else to discover, to reach.” He paused, as the breaking waves seemed to punctuate his story, then continued in the same dreamy tone.

“So their artisans were assigned to create the hexes of the Well World. The ones that proved out were accepted, and the full home world was then made and properly placed mathematically in the universe. That’s the reason for so much overlap—some artisans were more gifted than others, and they stole and modified each other’s ideas. When they proved out, the Markovians came to the Well through the gates, not forced but voluntarily, and they passed through the mechanism for assignment. They built up the hexes, struggled, and did what none else could do as Markovians—they died in the struggle.”

“Then they settled the home worlds?” she gasped. “They gave up being gods to suffer pain and to struggle and die?”

“No,” he replied. “They settled on the Well World. When a project was filled, it was broken down and a new one started. What we have here today is only the youngest worlds, the youngest races, the last. The Markovians all struggled here, and died here. Not only all matter, but time itself, is a mathematical construct they had learned and overcome. After many generations, the hexes became self-sufficient communities if they worked. The Markovians, changed, bore children that bred true. It was these descendants, the Markovian seed, who went to the Well through the local gates to what we now call Zone, that huge Well we entered by. On the sixth day of the sixth month of each six years they went, and the Well took them, in a single sweep like a clock around the Well, one sweep in the middle of the night. It took them, classified them, and transported them to the home world of their races.”

“But surely,” she objected, “the worlds had their own creatures. There is evolution—”

“They didn’t go physically,” he told her evenly. “Only their substance, what the Murnies called their ‘essence,’ went. At the proper time they entered the vessels which had evolved to the point of the Well. That’s why the translator calls it the Well of Souls, Wuju.”

“Then we are the Markovian children,” she breathed. “They were the seeds of our race.”

“That’s it,” he acknowledged. “They did it as a project, an experiment. They did it not to kill their race, but to save it and to save themselves. There’s a legend that Old Earth was created in seven days. It’s entirely possible—the Markovians controlled time as they controlled all things, and while they had to develop the worlds mathematically, to form them and create them according to natural law, they could do millions of years work rather quickly, to slide in their project people at the exact moment when the dominant life form or life forms— would logically develop.”

“And these people here—are they all Entries and the descendants of Entries?” she asked.

“There weren’t supposed to be any,” he told her. “Entries, that is. But the Markovians inhabited their own old universe, you know. Their old planets were still around. Some of the brains survived—a good number if we blundered into even one of them in our little bit of space. They were quasi-organic, built to be integral with the planet they served, and they proved almost impossible to turn off. The last Markovian couldn’t shut his down and still get through, so they were left open, to be closed when time did to the old worlds what it does to all things left unmaintained.”

“Then there are millions of those gates still open,” she speculated. “People could fall in all the time.”

“No,” he replied. “The gates only open when someone wants them to be open. It doesn’t have to be a mystical key—although the boy Varnett, back on Dalgonia, caused it to open by locking into his mind the mathematical relationships he observed. It doesn’t happen randomly, though. Varnett was the exception. The key is mathematical, but anyone near one doesn’t have to know the key to operate the Gate.”

“What’s the key, then?” she asked, puzzled.

“Spacers—thousands of them have been through the Well, not just from our sector but from all over. I’ve met a number. It’s a lonely, antisocial job, Wuju, and because of the Fitzgerald Contraction and rejuve, it is a long one. All those people who came here through gates got signals on the emergency band that lured them to the gates. Whether they admit it or not, they all had one thing in common.”

“What was that?” she asked, fascinated.

“They all wanted to or had decided to die,” he replied evenly, no trace of emotion in his voice. “Or, they’d rather die than live on. They were looking for fantasy worlds to cure their problems.

“Just like the Markovians.”

She was silent for a while. Suddenly she asked, “How do you know all this, Nathan? The people here don’t, those children of the Markovians who didn’t leave.”

“You got that, did you?” he responded admiringly. “Yes, when the last were changed, they sealed the Well. Those who didn’t want to go, lost their nerve, or were happy here—they stayed, with only a memory, perhaps even regret once it was done, for they kept the phrase ‘until midnight at the Well of Souls’ alive as the symbol of forever. How do I know all this? I’m brilliant, that’s why. And so is Skander—that’s why we’re going where we have to go.”

She accepted his explanation, not noticing the evasion. “But if everything is sealed, why bother?” she asked. “Skander can’t do any harm, can he?”

“Deep beneath our feet is a great machine,” he told her seriously. “The Markovian brain is so powerful that it created and maintained the home worlds as it maintains this one; the brain keeps the equations that sustain all unnaturally created matter, that can undo the fabric of time, space, and matter as it created them. Skander wants