01. Midnight At the Well of Souls (36 page)

As satisfied as they could be, they thanked the Umiau who had pulled them this far, and the mermaids left.

Brazil said "Let's go," in a voice more filled with tension than excitement.

The sand and huge quantities of driftwood slowed their progress, and they found on several occasions that they had to walk into the shallows to get around some points, but the journey went well.

They made good time. By sundown, Brazil estimated that they had traveled more than halfway. Since his vision was extremely poor after nightfall, and Vardia was better off rooting, they stopped for what they all hoped would be their only night in the mysterious hex.

The sandy soil was not particularly good for the Czillian, but she managed to find a hard, steady place near the beginning of the woods and was set for the night. He and Wuju relaxed nearby as the surf crashed on hidden rocks just beyond the shoreline, then gently ran up with a sizzling sound onto the beach.

Something was bothering Wuju and she brought it up. "Nathan," she said, "if this is a nontechnological hex like Murithel, how come your voice works? It's still basically a radio."

The idea had never occurred to Brazil and he thought about it. "I can't say," he replied carefully, "but on all the maps and the like this is nontech, and the general logic of the hex layout dictates the same thing. It can't work, though, unless it's a byproduct of the translator. They work everywhere."

"The translator!" she said sharply. "Feels like a lump in the back of my throat. Where do they come from, Nathan?"

"From the North," he told her. "From a totally crystalline hex that grows them as we grow flowers. It's slow work, and they don't let many of them go."

"But how does it work?" she persisted. "It's not a machine."

"No, not a machine in the sense we think of machines," he replied. "I don't think anyone knows how it works. It was, if I remember right, created in the same way as most great inventions—sheer accident. The best guess is that its vibrations cause some kind of link with the Markovian brain of the planet."

She shivered a little, and Brazil rubbed close to her, thinking the dropping temperature was the cause. "Want a coat?" he asked.

She shook her head negatively. "No, I was thinking of the brain. It makes me nervous—all that power, the power to create and maintain all those rules for all those hexes, work the translators, even change people into other things. I don't think I like the idea at all. Think of a race that could build such a thing! It scares me."

Brazil rubbed her humanoid back with his head, slowly. "Don't worry about such things," he said softly. "That race is long gone."

She was not distracted. "I wonder," she said in a distant tone. "What if they
were
still around, still fooling around. That would mean we were all toys, playthings—all of us. With the power and knowledge to create all this, they would be so far above us that we wouldn't even know." She shook him off and turned to face him. "Nathan, what if we were just playthings for them?"

He stared hard into her eyes. "We're not," he responded softly. "The Markovians are gone—long dead and gone. Their ghosts are brains like the one that runs this planet—just gigantic computers, programmed and automatically self-maintained. The rest of their ghosts are the people, Wuju. Haven't you understood that from what you've learned by this trip?"

"I don't understand," she said blankly. "What do you mean the people are the Markovian ghosts?"

" 'Until midnight at the Well of Souls,' " he recited. "It's the one phrase common to all fifteen hundred and sixty hexes. Think of it! Lots of us are related, of course, and many people here are variations of animals in other hexes. I figured out the solution to that part of the puzzle when I came out of the Gate the same as I went in—and found myself in a hex of what we always thought of as 'human.' Next door were one-and-a-half-meter-tall beavers—intelligent, civilized, highly intellectual, but they were basically the same as the little animal beavers of Dillia. Most of the wildlife we've seen in the hexes that come close to the type of worlds our old race could settle are related to the ones we had back there. There's a relationship for all of them.

"These hexes represent home worlds, Wuju," he said seriously. "Here is where the Markovians built the test places. Here is where their technicians set up biospheres to prove the mathematics for the worlds they would create. Here's where our own galaxy, at least, perhaps all of them, was engineered ecologically."

She shivered again. "You mean that all these people were created to see if the systems worked? Like an art class for gods? And if it was good enough, the Markovians created a planet somewhere that would be
all
like this?"

"Partly right," he replied. "But the creatures weren't created out of the energy of the universe like the physical stuff. If so, they'd be the gods you said. But that's not why the world was built. They were a tired race," he continued. "What do you do after you can do it all, know it all, control it all? For a while you delight in being a race of gods—but, eventually, you tire of it. Boredom sets in, and you must be stagnant when you have no place else to go, nothing else to discover, to reach." He paused, as the breaking waves seemed to punctuate his story, then continued in the same dreamy tone.

"So their artisans were assigned to create the hexes of the Well World. The ones that proved out were accepted, and the full home world was then made and properly placed mathematically in the universe. That's the reason for so much overlap—some artisans were more gifted than others, and they stole and modified each other's ideas. When they proved out, the Markovians came to the Well through the gates, not forced but voluntarily, and they passed through the mechanism for assignment. They built up the hexes, struggled, and did what none else could do as Markovians—they died in the struggle."

"Then they settled the home worlds?" she gasped. "They gave up being gods to suffer pain and to struggle and die?"

"No," he replied. "They settled on the Well World. When a project was filled, it was broken down and a new one started. What we have here today is only the youngest worlds, the youngest races, the last. The Markovians all struggled here, and died here. Not only all matter, but time itself, is a mathematical construct they had learned and overcome. After many generations, the hexes became self-sufficient communities if they worked. The Markovians, changed, bore children that bred true. It was these descendants, the Markovian seed, who went to the Well through the local gates to what we now call Zone, that huge Well we entered by. On the sixth day of the sixth month of each six years they went, and the Well took them, in a single sweep like a clock around the Well, one sweep in the middle of the night. It took them, classified them, and transported them to the home world of their races."

"But surely," she objected, "the worlds had their own creatures. There is evolution—"

"They didn't go physically," he told her evenly. "Only their substance, what the Murnies called their 'essence,' went. At the proper time they entered the vessels which had evolved to the point of the Well. That's why the translator calls it the Well of Souls, Wuju."

"Then we are the Markovian children," she breathed. "They were the seeds of our race."

"That's it," he acknowledged. "They did it as a project, an experiment. They did it not to kill their race, but to save it and to save themselves. There's a legend that Old Earth was created in seven days. It's entirely possible—the Markovians controlled time as they controlled all things, and while they had to develop the worlds mathematically, to form them and create them according to natural law, they could do millions of years work rather quickly, to slide in their project people at the exact moment when the dominant life form or life forms—would logically develop."

"And these people here—are they all Entries and the descendants of Entries?" she asked.

"There weren't supposed to be any," he told her. "Entries, that is. But the Markovians inhabited their own old universe, you know. Their old planets were still around. Some of the brains survived—a good number if we blundered into even one of them in our little bit of space. They were quasi-organic, built to be integral with the planet they served, and they proved almost impossible to turn off. The last Markovian couldn't shut his down and still get through, so they were left open, to be closed when time did to the old worlds what it does to all things left unmaintained."

"Then there are millions of those gates still open," she speculated. "People could fall in all the time."

"No," he replied. "The gates only open when someone wants them to be open. It doesn't have to be a mystical key—although the boy Varnett, back on Dalgonia, caused it to open by locking into his mind the mathematical relationships he observed. It doesn't happen randomly, though. Varnett was the exception. The key
is
mathematical, but anyone near one doesn't have to know the key to operate the Gate."

"What's the key, then?" she asked, puzzled.

"Spacers—thousands of them have been through the Well, not just from our sector but from all over. I've met a number. It's a lonely, antisocial job, Wuju, and because of the Fitzgerald Contraction and rejuve, it is a long one. All those people who came here through gates got signals on the emergency band that lured them to the gates. Whether they admit it or not, they all had one thing in common."

"What was that?" she asked, fascinated.

"They all wanted to or had decided to die," he replied evenly, no trace of emotion in his voice. "Or, they'd rather die than live on. They were looking for fantasy worlds to cure their problems.

"Just like the Markovians."

She was silent for a while. Suddenly she asked, "How do you know all this, Nathan? The people here don't, those children of the Markovians who didn't leave."

"You got that, did you?" he responded admiringly. "Yes, when the last were changed, they sealed the Well. Those who didn't want to go, lost their nerve, or were happy here—they stayed, with only a memory, perhaps even regret once it was done, for they kept the phrase 'until midnight at the Well of Souls' alive as the symbol of forever. How do I know all this? I'm brilliant, that's why. And so is Skander—that's why we're going where we have to go."

She accepted his explanation, not noticing the evasion. "But if everything is sealed, why bother?" she asked. "Skander can't do any harm, can he?"

"Deep beneath our feet is a great machine," he told her seriously. "The Markovian brain is so powerful that it created and maintained the home worlds as it maintains this one; the brain keeps the equations that sustain all unnaturally created matter, that can undo the fabric of time, space, and matter as it created them. Skander wants to change those equations. Not just our lives but our very existence is at stake."

She looked at him for a long time, then turned idly, staring into the forest, lost in her thoughts.

Suddenly she said, "Look, Nathan! The flying lights are out! And I can hear something!"

He turned and looked into the forest. They
were
insects of some kind, he thought, glowing as they flitted through the forest. The light, he saw, was constant—the blinking that had been apparent from shore was an illusion, caused by their passage behind the dense foliage. The darkness was too complete for his deer vision to get any detail, but the floating, gliding lights were clear. There was something very familiar about them, he thought. I've never been here, yet I've seen this before.

"Listen!" Wuju whispered. "Hear it?"

Brazil's fine-trained ears had already picked it up even over the crashing of the waves.

It was music, haunting, strange, even eerie music, music that seemed to penetrate their very bodies.

"It's so strange," Wuju said softly. "So beautiful."

The Faerie! he thought suddenly. Of course there'd be Faerie! He cursed himself for not thinking of it before. This close to the equator there was bound to be magic, he realized. Some of those authoritarian sons of bitches had snuck onto Old Earth and it had been hell getting rid of them. He looked anxiously at Wuju. She had a dreamy look on her face, and her upper torso was swaying in time to the music.

"Wuju!" he said sharply. "Come on! Snap out of it!"

She pushed him away and started forward, toward the woods. He rushed up and tried to block her way, but she wouldn't be deterred. He opened his mouth and tried to grab her arm, but it wouldn't hold.

"Wuju!" he called after her. "Don't go in! Don't desert us!"

Suddenly a dark shape swooped down from the sky at him. He ducked by lowering his forelegs and started running. It swooped again, and he cursed the poor vision that kept him from taking full advantage of his reflexes.

He heard maniacal laughter above him, and the mad thing swooped again, brushing him this time.

They're forcing me into the forest! he realized. Every time he moved in any direction but in the creature's, laughing and gibbering, it would swoop in and block his way.

"Cousin Bat! Don't do it! It's Nathan Brazil!" he called to the dark shape, knowing the effort was futile, that the bat was under a Faerie spell.

Brazil was in the woods now, where Bat couldn't follow by flying. He saw the creature standing there, outlined in the starlight glare on the ocean, looking up and down the beach.

He looked around, and barely made out a large form heading away about eight meters farther in.

It's useless, he realized. The music's got her and Bat's got me.

I've faced them down before, he thought, and won. Maybe again, because they don't know that. No choice here, though. If I don't follow they'll send some other creatures after me.

He could barely see despite the light from the flitting bugs that grew thicker and thicker as he entered the forest, but he smelled Wuju's scent and followed it.

After what must have been twenty minutes, he emerged into a clearing in the woods.

A toadstool ring, he thought grimly.

Under a particularly huge tree was a wide ring composed of huge brown toadstools. The music came from here, made by the thousands of insects that swarmed in the center of the ring. Wuju was in the ring, too, almost covered by the creatures, so thick now that they lit up the place like a lamp. She was dancing and swaying to the eerie music of their wings, as were a number of other creatures, of varying shapes and sizes.