Midnight at the Well of Souls

reached out, gently touched her wound. The smell was overwhelming. She shrank from the probe, fear on her face.

The heartlike mass tilted a little on its axis.

“Form doesn’t matter,” it mocked her voice. “It’s what’s inside that counts.” Then it said in Brazil’s old voice: “What if I were a monster, Wuju? What then?”

Wuju broke into sobs. “Please, Nathan! Please don’t hurt me!” she pleaded. “No more, please! I—I just can’t!”

“Does it hurt?” he asked gently, and she managed to nod affirmatively, wiping the tears from her eyes.

“Then trust me some more, Wuju,” Brazil’s voice came again, still gentle. “No matter what. Shut your eyes. I’ll make the hurt go away.”

She buried her head in her hands, still crying.

The Markovian reached out with a tentacle, and rubbed lightly against the angry-looking welt on her back and sides. She cringed but otherwise stayed still. The thing felt clammy and horrid, yet they all watched as the tentacle, lightly drawn across the wound, caused the wound to vanish.

As the pain vanished, she relaxed.

“Lie flat on your back, Wuju,” Brazil instructed, and she did, eyes still shut. The same treatment was given to her chest and sides, and there was suddenly no sign of any welt or wound.

Brazil withdrew a couple of meters from her. There was no evident front or back to him, nor any apparent eyes, nose, or mouth. Although the pulpy mass in the center was pulsating and slightly irregular, it had no clear- cut directionality.

“Hey, that’s fantastic, Nate!” Ortega exclaimed.

“Shall we go to the Well?” Brazil asked them. “It is time to finish this drama.”

“I’m not sure I like this at all,” Hain commented hesitantly.

“Too late to back out now, you asshole,” Skander snapped. “You didn’t get where you were without guts. Play it out.”

“If you’ll follow me,” Brazil said, “and get on the walkway here; we can talk as we ride, and probably panic the border hexes at the same time.”

They all stepped onto the walkway on the other side of the meter-tall barrier. The Avenue’s strange light went out, and another light went on on both sides of the walkway, illuminating about half a kilometer to their left.

“The lights will come on where we are, and go out where we aren’t,” Brazil explained. “It’s automatic. Slelcronian, you’ll find the light adequate for you despite its apparent lack of intensity. You can get rid of that heat lamp. Just throw it over the barrier there. It will be disposed of by the automatic machinery in about fourteen hours.” The Markovian’s tentacle near the forward part of the walkway struck the side sharply, and the walkway started to move.

“You are now on the walkway to the Well Access Gate,” he explained. “When the Markovians built this world, it was necessary, of course, for the technicians to get in and out. They were full shifts—one full rotation on, one off. Every day from dozens to thousands of Markovian technicians would ride this walkway to the control center and to other critical areas inside the planet. In those days, of course, The Avenue would stay open as long as necessary. It was shortened to the small interval in the last days before the last Markovian went native for good, to allow the border hexes some development and to keep out those who had second thoughts. At the end, only the three dozen project coordinators came, and then irregularly, just to check on things. As any technician was finally cleared out of the Well, the key to The Avenue doors was removed from his mind, so he could not get back in if he wanted to.”

They moved on in eerie silence, lighted sections suddenly popping on in front of them, out in back of them, as they traveled. The walkway itself seemed to glow radiantly; no light source was visible.

“Some of you know the story of this place already,” Brazil continued. “The race you call the Markovians rose as did all other species, developed, and finally discovered the primal energy nature of the universe—that there was nothing but this primal energy, extending outward in all directions, and that all constructs within it, we included, are established by rules and laws of nature that are not fixed just because they are there, but are instead imposed. Nothing equals anything, really; the equal sign is strictly for the imposed structure of the universe. Rather, everything is relative to everything else.”

“But once the Markovians discovered the mathematical constructs governing stability, why didn’t they change them?” Skander asked. “Why keep the rules?”

“They didn’t dare try to tackle the master equations, those governing physical properties and natural laws,” Brazil replied. “They could alter things a little, but common sense should tell you that in order to change the master equation you first have to eliminate the old one. If you do that, what happens to you and the rest of the universe? They didn’t dare—so they imposed new, smaller equations on localized areas of the preexisting universe.”

“Not gods, then,” Vardia said quietly. “Demigods.”

“People,” Brazil responded. “Not gods at all. People. Oh, I know that this form I’ve got is quite different than you’d think, but it’s no more monstrous or unusual than some of the creatures of this world, and less than some. The many billions of beings who wore bodies like this were a proud race of ordinary people with one finger on the controls. They argued, they debated, strove, built, discovered—just like all of us. Were their physical forms closer to the ones we’re familiar with, you would possibly even like them. Remember, they achieved godhood not by natural processes, but by technological advancement. It was as if one of our races, in present form, suddenly discovered the key to wish fulfillment. Would we be ready for it? I wonder.”

“Why did they die, Brazil?” Skander asked. “Why did they commit suicide?”

“Because they were not ready,” Brazil replied sadly. “They had conquered all material want, all disease, even death itself. But they had not conquered their selves. They reveled in hedonism, each an island unto itself. Anything they wanted, they just had to wish for.

“And they found that wasn’t enough. Something was missing. Utopia wasn’t fulfillment, it was stagnation. And that was the curse— knowing that the ultimate was attainable, but not knowing what it was or how to attain it. They studied the problem and came up with no solutions. Finally, the best amplified Markovian minds concluded that, somewhere in their development, they’d lost something—the true fulfillment of the dream. The social equation did not balance, because it lacked some basic component. One plus two plus three equals six, but if you don’t have the plus two in there, it can’t possibly reach more than four.

“Finally, they came to the conclusion that they were at a dead end, and would stagnate in an eternal orgy of hedonism unless something was done. The solution seemed simple: start over, try to regain the missing factor, or rediscover it, by starting from the beginning again. They used a variety of races and conditions to restart, none Markovian, on the idea that any repetition of the Markovian cycle would only end up the same.”

“And so they built this world,” Varnett put in.

“Yes, they built this world. A giant Markovian brain, placed around a young but planetless sun. The brain is the planet, of course, everything but the crust. Gravity was no problem, nor was atmosphere. They created an outer shell, about a hundred kilometers above the surface. The hexagons are all compartments, their elements held in all directions by fields of force.”

“So it was built to convert the Markovians to new forms?” Skander asked.

“Double duty, really,” Brazil told them. “The finest artisans of the Markovian race were called in. They made proposals for biospheres, trying to outdo one another in creativity. The ones that looked workable were built, and volunteers went through the Zone Gate and became the newly designed creatures in the newly designed environments. Several generations were needed for even a moderate test—the Markovians didn’t mind. A thousand years was nothing to them. You see, they could build, pioneer-style, but they were still Markovians. A lot of generations born in the biome and of the new race were needed to establish a culture and show how things would go. Their numbers were kept relatively stable, and the fields of force were much more rigid then than now. They had to live in their hex, without any real contact with other hexes. They had to build their own worlds.”

They were riding down now, at a deceptively steep angle. Down into the bowels of the planet itself.

“But why didn’t the first generation establish a high civilization?” Varnett asked. “After all, they were just like us, changed outside only.”