Midnight at the Well of Souls

barrier itself didn’t look thick, and felt smooth and glassy to the touch, yet it had withstood attempts by many races on both sides to make as much as a mark on it. It went off to each side of them from horizon to horizon, like a giant, nonreflecting glass wall.

The Avenue seemed to merge into it, and there was no sign of any small crack, fissure, or even juncture of the odd paving of The Avenue with the surface of the barrier. They seemed to become one.

Brazil went up to the wall, then turned to face them. They waited expectantly.

“We can’t enter until midnight, so we might as well be comfortable,” he told them.

“Do you mean twenty-four hundred?” the real Vardia asked.

“No, of course not,” Brazil replied. “For one thing, the Well World’s days are about twenty-eight and a quarter standard hours, as you know, so the time twenty-four hundred has no meaning here. Midnight means exactly that—the middle of the night. Since a total day is exactly twenty-eight point three three four standard hours, and since the axis is exactly vertical, that means the light period is fourteen point one six seven hours, and so is the darkness. Midnight, then, comes seven point zero eight three five hours after sunset. The figures were determined by physical necessity when building the place. They just came out that way. Believe me, Markovian clocks were quite different from ours, and the time could be precisely determined.”

“Yes, but how will we determine it?” The Rel asked. “There are a couple of timepieces here, but they are by no means that exact.”

“No need,” Brazil assured the Northerner. “Hain, fly up to the surface there and watch the sun. When it vanishes to the west, then tell us immediately. Be conservative—err on the side of sunlight. We’ll check watches for seven hours from that point. After that, we can simply wait to open the wall. We’ll have only about two minutes, so it’s important that everyone goes as soon as the wall opens. The ones who don’t will be left out here.”

“What about the atmosphere inside?” Skander asked. “We have only a few pressure suits here.”

“No problem there, either,” Brazil responded. “All of us are compatible with the oxygen-nitrogen-carbon mix that’s common, in one sense or another, with the sectors on both sides of The Avenue. There will be a compromise adjustment, but while the mixture might make a few of us temporarily light-headed, it shouldn’t pose any problem. This system will automatically follow us, section by section, as we go down. The only problem we might have, and it’s minor, is some strongly differing gravitational pulls due to the lines of force flowing from here. None will be a real problem, just uncomfortable occasionally.”

His explanation seemed to satisfy them, and they sat down or otherwise relaxed, waiting for the proper time.

* * *

“Are you really—really me?” Vardia hesitantly asked the Slelcronian, who was awake only because of a small, lamplike gadget fastened over the headleaf.

The Slelcronian paused and thought carefully. “We are you, and we are more than you,” it replied. “All your memories and experiences are here, along with the millions of the Slelcronians. You are a part of us, and we are a part of you. Through the Recorder, you are a part of the total synthesis, not just the isolated portion in this body.”

“What’s it like?” she asked.

“It is the ultimate stage to which any can aspire,” the creature told her. “No individuality, no personality to corrupt. No jealousy, greed, anger, envy, or those other things that cause misery. All alike, all identical, all in communion. As plants we require nothing save water and sunlight, and carbon dioxide to breathe. When another is needed, we make a seed and mate it to the Recorders; it grows, and immediately after bloom becomes as we. The Recorders do not think, and get their food from our bodies.”

“But—what do you do?” she asked curiously. “What is the purpose to your life?”

“Universal happiness in a stable order,” the Slelcronian replied unhesitatingly. “Long have we yearned to spread the synthesis. Now, through this body and your experience, we can return to Czill and multiply. We shall work with the devices of Czill to create a synthesis of animal with plant. We shall expand, eventually, to the Well World, and, with the aid of the Well, to the corners of the universe. All shall become one with the synthesis, all shall enjoy perfect equality and happiness.”

She thought a minute. “And what if you can’t do it with the animals?”

“We will,” the Slelcronian replied confidently. “But, should it not be so, then the superior shall eliminate the inferior, as it is in the laws of nature since the beginning of time.”

This isn’t me, she thought. This can’t be me. Or—or is it? Is this not what my society strives for? Is this not why we clone, why genetic engineering is eventually planned to make everyone identical, sexless, equally provided for in every way?

A sudden question struck her, and she asked, “And what will you do once you have accomplished this all- encompassing synthesis? What then?”

“Then there will be perfection and harmony and happiness,” replied the Slelcronian as if reciting a litany. “Heaven will be ours and it will be forever. Why do you ask such a question? Are we not you? Did you not in fact accept the offered synthesis?”

The question disturbed her, for she had no answer. What had changed? How had the paths of Vardia I and II differed so radically in the last few weeks that such a question would even occur to her?

She turned away, and her eyes fell on Wu Julee and Nathan Brazil. They had some sort of symbiotic relationship, she thought. It was observable, no matter what form they had been in. When he could have clearly escaped the Ivrom spell, he had risked himself to free her.

She sat down, the chill of the night making the hardness of The Avenue feel like an ice cube on her bare behind.

What had she seen that her sister had not? Emotion? Love? Some different sort of relationship? Kindness? What?

What had her sister seen? A nation of great bugs all out to do each other in and lord it over the others. Hain. Skander. That weird Northern creature. A world of machines. They represented something far different from Nathan Brazil, Wuju—and Varnett, with guilt over seven dead people he probably couldn’t have saved anyway. Guilt over doing the right and proper thing? Impossible! Yet—she remembered him coming in in the early morning, carrying Brazil’s battered and broken body. Exhausted, weak, half-crazed from the burden, yet unwilling to sleep or eat until Brazil had been tended to. Standing over that body, only technically alive, and weeping.

Why?

She thought again of the Slelcronian and its dreams. The perfect society. Heaven. Forever.

The Markovians had it, had the ultimate in material existence.

And they had deliberately wrecked it for death, misery, pain, and struggle on countless worlds in countless forms.

What was perfection, anyway? What did the Markovians lack that gave the lie to the grand dream?

They forgot how to love, Brazil had said. But what was love?

Have we already forgotten it?

The thought upset her, and she couldn’t explain why. For the first time in her life, she felt alienated, alone, outside, left out.

Cheated.

And she had no idea what was missing.

For the first time, and perhaps the first of any being on the Well World, she knew what it must have been like to be a Markovian.

Was this, then, what Nathan Brazil felt? Was this why he felt he was cursed? Did he live all those millennia searching for the missing factor in the Markovian dream, hoping that someone would discover it?

But, no, she concluded. He knew what it was. He had tried to explain it.

Suddenly she shivered, but not from the chill. She had never thought, never brooded like this before, never faced the chill of reality before.