Midnight at the Well of Souls

years. They said God was love, and postulated a heaven of communal love, and a hell for those who could not love. Later on that got crudded up with other stuff until the ideas were gone and only the artifacts were left. Like the Markovians, they paid more attention to things than to ideas— and, like the Markovians, they died for it.”

“But surely the Markovian civilization was heaven,” Vardia said.

“It was hell,” Brazil responded flatly. “You see, the Markovians got everything their ancestors had ever dreamed of, and they knew it wasn’t enough. They knew that something attainable was missing. They searched, poked, queried, did everything to try and find why the people were miserable, but since everything they had or knew was a construct of themselves, they couldn’t find it. They decided, finally, to go back and repeat the experiment, little realizing that it, too, was doomed to failure—for the experiment, our own universe, was made in a variety of shapes and forms, but it was still in their own image. They didn’t even bother to make a clean start—they used themselves as the prototypes for all the races they’d create, and they used the same universe—the one they’d lived in, rose in, and failed in. That’s why their artifacts are still around—the two artifacts they had—their cities and their control brains.”

Varnett let out a gasp. “Suddenly I think I see what you mean. This Well World we’re on, if you’re right, not only provided the trial-lab runs for the new races and their environments, and the way of changing everything to match—it was also the control!”

“Right,” Brazil affirmed grimly. “Here everything was laboratory-standard, lab-created, monitored, and maintained by automatic equipment to keep it that way. Not all of them—just a representative sample, the last races to be created, since they were the easiest to maintain.”

“But our race here destroyed itself,” Varnett protested. “I heard about it. Does that mean we’re out of it? That the best we can do is destroy ourselves, destroy others, or, perhaps, reach the Markovian level and wind up committing suicide anyway? Is there no hope?”

“There’s hope,” Brazil replied evenly. “And despair, too. That religion of Old Earth I told you about? Well, those who believed in it had the idea that their God sent his son, a perfect human being filled with nothing but goodness and love, to us humans. Son-of-God question aside, there really was such a person born—I watched him try to teach a bunch of people to reject material things and concentrate on love.”

“What happened to him?” Wuju asked, fascinated.

“His followers rejected him because he wouldn’t rule the world, or lead a political revolution. Others capitalized on his rhetoric for political ends. Finally he upset the established political system too much, and they killed him. The religion, like those founded by other men of our race in other times, was politicized within fifty years. Oh, there were some devoted followers—and of others like this man, too. But they were never in control of their religion, and became lost or isolated in the increased institutionalizing of the faiths. Same thing happened to an older man, born centuries earlier and thousands of miles away. He didn’t die violently, but his followers substituted things for ideas and used the quest for love and perfection as a social and political brake to justify the miseries of mankind. No, the religious prophets who made it were the ones who thought in Markovian terms, in political terms—the founder of the Com, for example, saw conditions of material deprivation that made him sick. He dreamed of a civilization like that of the Markovians, and set the Com on its way. He succeeded the best, because he appealed to that which everyone can understand—the quest for material Utopia. Well, he can have it.”

“Now, hold on, Brazil!” Varnett protested. “You say you were there when all these people were around. That must have been thousands of years ago. Just how old are you, anyway?”

“I’ll answer that when we get to the Well,” Brazil responded. “I’ll answer all questions then, not before. If we don’t get to the Well before Skander and whoever’s with him, it won’t make any difference, anyway.”

“Then they could supplant the Markovians, change the equations?” Varnett asked, aghast. “I at one time thought I could, too, but logic showed me how wrong I was. My people—my former people, those of the night—agreed with me. It was only when word came that Skander might make a run for it that they decided to send me to head him off. That’s why I joined up with you, Brazil—you said you were going to do the same thing back in Zone. Our mysterious informant told us to link up with you if we could, and I did.”

“Now how could—” Brazil started, then suddenly was silent for a moment, thinking. Suddenly the voice box between his antlers gave off a wry chuckle. “Of course! What an idiot I’ve been! I’ll bet that son of a bitch has bugged every embassy in Zone! I’d forgotten just what kind of a devious mind he had!”

“What are you talking about?” Wuju asked, annoyed.

“The third player—and a formidable one. The one who warned Skander against kidnap, got Varnett to link up with me. He knew all along where Varnett, here, and Skander were. He just wanted to be there for the payoff, as usual. I was his insurance policy, in case anything went wrong—and it did. Skander was kidnapped, and out of control or immediate surveillance. At least he has managed to delay one or another party on the way to the Well so that we’re supposed to get there at about the same time—where he’ll have a reception party waiting for us. He warned Skander so I’d have time to get to Czill, about even with them on the other side of the ocean. When we were trapped with the Murnies, he pulled strings to get the Czillians to put pressure on The Nation to bottle them up until we were even again! I don’t wonder that he might have some influence with the Faerie—maybe the Skander party somehow got bogged down, too!”

“Who the hell are you talking about, Nathan?” Wuju persisted.

“Look!” Brazil said. “There’s Ghlmon, the last hex before the equator! See the burned-out reddish sand? It goes across two hexes in width, a half-hex tall.”

“Who?” Wuju persisted.

“Well,” Brazil replied hesitantly, “unless I am wildly mistaken, somewhere out in the sunburned desert we’ll meet up with him.”

“Are we going to cross the border today?” Varnett asked, looking at the sun, barely above the horizon.

“Might as well,” Brazil responded. “It’s going to be pretty tough on all of us there, so we’d better get used to it. The heat’s going to be terrible, I think, and my fur coat’s going to be murder, while your naked skins will be roasted. So we’d better push on into the night as much as we can, following the shoreline as we have. Days may be unworkable there.”

Wuju had an infuriated look on her face, but Brazil speeded up, forcing them into a jog to keep up, and within a few minutes they crossed the border.

The heat hit them like a giant blanket, and it was humid, too, this close to the ocean. Within minutes of crossing the border, they had slowed to almost a crawl, the three humans perspiring profusely, Brazil panting wildly, tongue hanging out of his mouth. Finally, they had to stop and rest. Dusk brought only slight relief.

Wuju looked again at Brazil with that I’d-like-to-kill-you expression. Hot, winded, the sand burning her feet and, when she sat down, her rear, she remained undeterred.

“Who, Nathan?” she persisted, gasping for breath.

Brazil’s stag body looked as uncomfortable as anyone’s, but that mechanical voice of his said evenly, “The one person who could know for certain that I would go after Skander, and that I would get to you in Dillia before going anywhere, was the only person who could tell Varnett where to find me and why. He was a pirate in the old days. You couldn’t trust him with anything if he could make a shekel going against you, yet you could trust him with your life if there were no profit in it. That’s what I forgot—the stakes are high here; there’s a bigger profit potential than anyone could think of. He told me I could get help from everyone of all races, but trust none— including him, as it turned out. Although he figured I wouldn’t think of him as an opponent since we’d been good friends and I owed him. He was almost right.”

Understanding hit her at last, and she brightened. “Ortega!” she exclaimed. “Your friend we met when we first entered Zone!”

“The six-armed walrus-snake?” Vardia put in. “He’s behind all this?”

“Not all this,” came a voice behind them—a clipped, casual male voice that carried both dignity and authority. “But he still is happy everything has turned out right.”

They all whirled. In the near-darkness, it was hard for any of them to see properly, but the creature looked for all the world like a meter-tall dinosaur, dark green skin and flat head, standing upright on large hind legs, while holding a curved pipe in a stubby hand. He also appeared to be wearing an old-fashioned formal jacket.

The creature puffed on the pipe, the coals glowing in the dark.