Exiles at the Well of Souls

were then called in, all the material and philosophical artists they had. Each one was given a hex to play with. Each hex is a miniature world. Near the equator, a side runs about three hundred fifty-five kilometers, six hundred fifteen kilometers between opposite sides. They were carefully arranged. And in each one, the artisans were allowed to create a complete, self-contained biosphere, with a single dominant form of life and all supporting life for a closed ecosystem. The dominant life, at the start, were Markovian volunteers themselves.”

“You mean,” Trelig put in, aghast, “they gave up paradise to become someone else’s playthings?”

The Ulik shrugged, which was something with six arms. “From sheer boredom there was no lack of volunteers. They became mortal, had to accept the rules of the game as set up by the artisans, and prove it out. If the system did prove out, the master computer established a world-set for the particular biosphere somewhere in the universe, and then the natives were transferred to it. They could speed up time, slow it down, anything. The world they entered was consistent with the laws of physics, even if it was created speeded up. At the right evolutionary moment, zap! The race was inserted. Then a new race was created to replace the one that left, and the experiments started all over again.”

“What you’re saying,” Yulin commented, “is that we are all Markovians. That is, their descendants.”

Ortega nodded. “Yes, exactly. And the races here now are the last batch—that is, the descendants of the last batch. Some didn’t go or want to go, some hadn’t proved out, when there became too few Markovians to supervise the project. We’re the byproducts here of the shutdown.”

“And these races have lived here since?” Trelig asked.

“Oh, yes,” Ortega replied. “And time exists here. You get old, you die. Some die young, some live longer than you’d think possible, but there’s a generational turnover anyway. The population’s maintained by the computer—if a hex gets too heavily populated, the birth rate goes to a minus for a while. Too low a population from disasters, fights, whatever, and suddenly a sexy race gets back up there. The population varies with each hex, of course. Some races are big enough that there are only a quarter-million or so people, others can handle up to three million.”

“I don’t understand why pests and plagues aren’t spread over the place,” Yulin told him. “And how come there aren’t a lot of wars? It would seem alien races on the whole wouldn’t like the others.”

“That’s true,” Ortega admitted. “But you might call it good systems engineering. Pests there are, but there are subtle changes in soil or atmospheric content that tend to inhibit or stop them, also geographical barriers— mountains, oceans, deserts, and the like. As for bacteria and viruses, we have them aplenty, but the various racial systems are just different enough that microbes that work against one race won’t have any effect on another.”

He paused for a minute, then remembered the other part of the question.

“As for wars,” he continued, “they’re not practical. Oh, there are local fights, but nothing catastrophic. Hexes are so arranged that the ground rules differ. We believe that that was done to simulate the problems from lack of resources or somesuch on the various real worlds the people would be going to. As I said, the natural laws had to be maintained. So in some hexes, everything works. In some, there is limited technology—say, steam engines work, but electrical generators won’t hold a charge. In some only muscle power will do. That’s what happened to your ship—it flew into a limited nontech zone, it wouldn’t work, and down you came.”

Trelig brightened. “So that’s what happened! And that’s why the power did come on for the time I needed to get the wings down and window cover up! We had drifted over a high-tech hex!”

Ortega nodded. “Exactly.”

“But,” Yulin objected, “wouldn’t a high-tech hex conquer a low-tech one?”

Serge Ortega chuckled. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But, no, it doesn’t work that way. A high-tech hex becomes dependent on its machines, as you were in the North. It learns how to maybe make flying machines and fantastic guns and such—and then it has to invade a hex where none of that works. And where two hexes of the same type border, well, one is land and the other water, or one has an atmosphere extremely uncomfortable to the other, or something like that. One general, long ago, did try conquest by allying various kinds of hexes in order to have the proper one for each hex fight in the appropriate manner; but his plan worked only to a point. Some hexes he had to skip for atmospheric conditions or tough terrain or the like, and eventually his supply lines for all these races grew too long to sustain. The unconquered ones chopped him to pieces in the end. There have been no wars since—and that was over eleven hundred years ago.”

They were silent for a minute, then Trelig asked, “I know how we got here, but— you said you were once one of us. How did you get here?”

Ortega grinned. “We get occasional new arrivals all the time—about a hundred a year. When the Markovians left their last planets, they didn’t turn off their computers—couldn’t. There is a kind of matter transmission—we don’t understand it—connecting all the worlds with this one. The last Markovian simply couldn’t close the door behind him. It opened whenever someone wanted it to open, and those old brains can’t tell a Markovian remote and altered descendant from the real thing. So if you really want the door to open, it will and you wind up here. In ninety-nine percent of the cases, the people involved didn’t even know about the doors. They just wished they were somewhere else, or somebody else, or that everything was different when they happened to be in the neighborhood of a door. I literally flew through one—the planet was mostly gone, but just enough remained.”

“You knew about them?” Yulin prodded.

“No, of course not. I was getting old and I was bored and I could see nothing but a dreary sameness in the future until death claimed me. You get introspective when you’re a pilot. Pop! Wound up here.”

“But how did you get turned into a giant snake?” Trelig asked him, without the slightest trace of embarrassment.

Ortega chuckled. “Well, when you first arrive somebody greets you. You’re what they call an Entry. They brief you, if they can, then shoot you through the Well Gate. It basically processes you into the computer. By a system of classification we don’t know or understand, the computer then remakes you into one of the seven hundred eighty races here and drops you into the hex native to that form. You get acclimation thrown in, so you get used to being what you are pretty quickly. Then you’re on your own.”

“But the matter-transmission system is still on,” Trelig noted.

“Yes and no,” the Ulik responded. “There is usually a Zone Gate and sometimes two in each hex. You can use that to go from your hex to here, South Polar Zone, and from here back to your own hex. But should you be ten hexes away and go through the Gate, you’ll still wind up here—and then back home. The big Well input, however, is that alone—you can come here from a Markovian world, but not go back. That was done, I suspect, to commit the original volunteers who had second thoughts. The only other gates are the ones between North and South zones, the one you came through. The Uchjin—those creatures you first saw—didn’t know who you were, but they knew you didn’t belong there or in the Northern Hemisphere. They passed the buck to North Zone, and they sent you down here. Now it’s your turn to go through the Well.”

Trelig looked uneasy. “We become something else? Some other creature?” he said, uneasily.

Ortega nodded. “That’s right. Oh, there’s a one in seven hundred eighty shot of staying what you call human, but it’s unlikely. You have to do it. You have no choice. There’s no other way out.”

They considered that. “Those others—the Entries. Are there… nonhuman entries?”

“Sure!” the Ulik answered. “Lots. Most, in fact. Even some real surprises—creatures that are nontech here, proving that it’s easier where they are than the problem set for them here. And some high-tech ones we’ve never seen. Even the North has a bunch, almost as many as we have. We have here a collection of stored spacesuits in forms and sizes you wouldn’t believe. We use them occasionally when somebody has to go north. There’s some trade, you know. We have tiny translator devices, for example, that are grown in a crystal world up there that needs iron for some reason only they know. The things work. Anybody wearing one will understand and be understood by any other race, no matter how alien.”

“You mean there isn’t a common language here?” Yulin almost exclaimed.

Ortega gave that low, throaty chuckle again. “Oh, no! Fifteen hundred sixty races, fifteen hundred sixty languages. When life and surroundings are different, you need to think differently. When you go through the Well you’ll emerge thinking in the language of your new race. Even now I have to translate, though, by practicing with