Midnight at the Well of Souls

Almost as if to answer the question, a tiny head popped out of the sand near them. Suddenly, it leaped out of the sand, revealing a small, two-legged dinosaur, about a meter high, with short, stubby arms terminating in tiny but very human hands. It had a very long tail which seemed to balance it.

It was a darker green than the Czillian, but this was broken by what appeared to be a tiny, rust-colored vest and jacket. The creature came up to them and stopped. Its flat head and raised eyes set on each side of a spade- shaped mouth surveyed them with quick, darting motions. Suddenly it leaned back on its tail in a relaxed posture.

“I say, old fellows,” it said suddenly in a casual tenor that seemed to come from deep inside its throat— suggesting a translator in use—“Are you the good guys or the bad guys?”

IVROM

“This turning you all back into what we think of as human has some definite drawbacks,” Nathan Brazil, still a giant stag, complained as they walked up the beach. The packs were on him, since none of the other three could now manage the heavy load.

“You think you have problems,” Wu Julee responded. “We’re all stark naked and none of the clothing in the packs fits anymore.”

“Not to mention feeling hunger, and pain, and cold again,” Vardia put in. “I had forgotten these sensations, and I don’t like them. I was happier as a Czillian.”

“But how is it possible?” Wuju asked. “I mean, how could things done by the Markovian brain be so undone?”

“Why not ask Varnett?” Brazil suggested. “He’s the brain that got this mess started, anyway.”

“You all are yelling about trivialities,” Varnett sulked. “I could fly. And before I set out to catch you, Brazil, I experienced sex. For the first time, I experienced sex. Now I’m back in this retarded body again.”

“Not that retarded,” Brazil responded. “You were arrested chemically, but that’s all out of your body now. Just as the sponge is out of Wuju. You should mature normally, in a couple of years, depending on your genes and your diet. Good looking, too, if I remember rightly, since you’re based on Ian Varnett. I remember him as one hell of a womanizer—particularly for a mathematician.”

“You knew Ian Varnett?” the boy gasped. “But—he’s been dead some six hundred years!”

“I know,” said Nathan Brazil wistfully. “He got caught up in the great experiment on Mavrishnu. What a waste. You know it was a waste, Varnett—I saw your Zone interviews.”

“There has always been trouble with Varnetts on Mavrishnu,” the duplicate of the great mathematician, made from cells of the long-dead original’s frozen body, said with a gleam in his eye. “They tried three or four early on, but I’m the first one in more than a century. They needed him again, at least, his potential. I wasn’t the first to interrupt Skander at his real work and inquiries—a lot of skillful agents put everything together. They were raising me for a different, more local set of problems, but I was already proving to be, I think, too much of a problem.

They set me up on Dalgonia to see if I could crack Skander’s work, figuring that whether I did or didn’t they could get me when I returned.”

The group continued talking as they walked down the beach, unhampered—as the charge to the Faerie required—by any obstructions.

“How much do you know, Varnett? About all this, that is,” Brazil asked.

“When I saw the cellular sample of the Dalgonian brain in the computer storage, I recognized the mathematical relationship of the sequence and order of the energy pulses,” the boy remembered. “It took about three hours to get the sequence, and one or two more to nail it down with the camp’s computers. I only had to look at the thing to see that the energy waveforms represented there bore no resemblance to anything we knew, and the matter-to-energy-to-matter process within the cells was easily observed. I combined what I saw with what we theorized must be the reason the Markovians had no artifacts. The planetary brain created anything you wanted, stored anything you wanted, on demand, perhaps even by thought. That gave me what was going on in that relationship, although I still haven’t any idea how it’s done.”

Vardia was impressed. “You mean it was like the spells on us here—they just wished for something and it was there?”

“That’s how the magic works here,” Varnett affirmed. “The only way such a concept is possible is if, in fact, nothing is real. All of us, these woods, the ocean, the planet—even that sun—are merely constructs. There is nothing in the universe but a single energy field; everything else is taking that energy, transmuting it into matter or different forms of energy, and holding it stable. That’s reality—the stabilized, transmuted primal energy. But the mathematical constructs that are so stabilized are in constant tension, like a coiled spring. The energy would revert to its natural state if not kept in check. These creatures—the Faerie—have some control over that checking process. Not enough to make any huge changes, but enough to change the equation slightly, to vary reality. That’s magic.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying too well,” Wuju put in, “but I think I get the basic idea. You’re saying that the Markovians were gods and could do or have anything they wished for, just like that.”

“That’s about it,” Varnett admitted. “The gods were real, and they created all of us—or, at least, the conditions under which we could develop.”

“But that would be the ultimate achievement of intelligence!” Vardia protested. “If that were true, why did they die out?”

Wuju smiled knowingly and looked to Nathan Brazil, once the only human, now the only nonhuman in the party, who was being uncharacteristically silent.

“I heard someone say why they died,” Wuju replied. “That someone said that when they reached the ultimate, it became dull and boring. Then they created new worlds, new life forms here and there—and all went off as those new forms to start from the beginning again.”

“What a horrible idea,” Vardia said disgustedly. “If that were true, it means that even perfection is imperfect, and that when our own people finally reach this godhood, they’ll find it wanting and die out by suicide, maybe leaving a new set of primitives to do the same thing all over again. It reduces all the revolutions, the struggles, the pain, the great dreams—everything—to nonsense! It means that life is pointless!”

“Not pointless,” Brazil put in suddenly. “It just means that grand schemes are pointless. It means that you don’t make your own life pointless or useless—most people do, you know. It wouldn’t make any difference if ninety-nine percent of the people of the human race—or any other—lived or not. Except in sheer numbers their lives are dull, vegetative, and nonproductive. They never dream, never read and share the thoughts of others, never truly experience the fulfilling equation of love—which is not merely to love others, but to be loved as well. That is the ultimate point of life, Vardia. The Markovians never found it. Look at this world, our own worlds—all reflecting the Markovian reality, which was based on the ultimate materialist Utopia. They were like the man with incredible riches, perhaps a planet of his own designed to his own tastes, and every material thing you can imagine producible at the snap of his fingers, who, nonetheless, is found dead one morning, having cut his own throat. All his dreams have been fulfilled, but now he is there, on top, alone. And to get where he was, he had to purge himself of what was truly of value. He killed his humanity, his spirituality. Oh, he could love—and buy what he loved. But he couldn’t buy that love he craved, only service.

“Like the Markovians, when he got where he’d wanted to be all his life, he found he didn’t really have anything at all.”

“I reject that theory,” Vardia said strongly. “The rich man would commit suicide because of the guilt that he had all that he had while others starved, not out of some craving for love. That word is meaningless.”

“When love is meaningless, or abstract, or misunderstood, then is that person or race also meaningless,” Brazil responded. “Back in the days of Old Earth one group had a saying, ‘What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ Nobody listened then, either. Funny—haven’t thought of that group in