Jack Chalker: Midnight at the Well of Souls

It was only a glimpse, a flicker, but he had seen it—and worked on his own for months more to get a filter system that would show that energy photographically.

He had tested the classical samples from other digs, even had one sent to him by a supply ship. They had all been dead.

But not this one.

Somewhere, forty or so kilometers beneath them, the Markovian brain was still alive.

“What is that, Professor?” Skander heard a voice behind him. He quickly flipped the screen off and whirled around in one anxious moment.

It was Varnett, that perennial look of innocence on his permanently childlike face.

“Nothing, nothing,” he covered excitedly, the anxiety in his voice betraying the lie. “Just putting on some playful programs to see what the electrical charges in the cell might have looked like.”

Varnett seemed skeptical. “Looked pretty real to me,” he said stubbornly. “If you’ve made a major breakthrough you ought to tell us about it. I mean—”

“No, no, it’s nothing,” Skander protested angrily. Then, regaining his composure, he said, “That will be all, Citizen Varnett! Leave me now!”

Varnett shrugged and left.

Skander sat in his chair for several minutes. His hands—in fact, his whole body—began shaking violently, and it was a while before the attack subsided. Slowly, a panicked look on his face, he went over to the microscope and carefully removed the special filter. His hand was still so unsteady he could hardly hold on to it. He slipped the filter into its tiny case with difficulty and placed it in the wide belt for tools and personal items that was the only clothing any of them wore inside.

He went back to his private room in the dorm section and lay down on his bed, staring up at the ceiling for what seemed like hours.

Varnett, he thought. Always Varnett. In the three months since they had first arrived, the boy had been into everything. Many of the others played their off-duty games and engaged in the silliness students do, but not he. Serious, studious to a fault, and always reading the project reports, the old records.

Skander suddenly felt that everything was closing in on him. He was still so far from his goal!

And now Varnett knew. Knew, at least, that the brain was alive. The boy would surely take it the step further—guess that Skander had almost broken the code, was ready, perhaps in another year or so, to send that brain a message, reactivate it.

To become a god.

He would be the one who would save the human race with the very tools that must have destroyed its maker.

Suddenly Skander jumped up and made his way back to the lab. Something nagged at him, some suspicion that things were even more wrong than he knew.

Quietly, he stepped into the lab.

Varnett was sitting at the television console. And, on the screen, the same cell Skander had been examining was depicted with its energy connectors clearly visible!

Skander was stunned. Quickly his hands reached for the little pocket in which he kept his filter. Yes, it was still there.

How was this possible?

Varnett was doing computations, checking against a display on a second screen that hooked him to the math sections of the lab computer. Skander stood there totally still and silent. He heard Yarnett mumble an assent to himself, as if some problem he had been running through the computer had checked out correct.

Skander stole a glance at his chronometer. Nine hours! It had been nine hours! He had slept through part of his dark thoughts and given the boy the chance to confirm his worst nightmare.

Something suddenly told Varnett he wasn’t alone. He sat still for a second, then glanced fearfully around.

“Professor!” he exclaimed. “I’m glad it’s you! This is stupendous! Why aren’t you telling everyone?”

“How—” Skander stumbled, gesturing at the screen. “How did you get that picture?”

Varnett smiled. “Oh, that’s simple. You forgot to dump the computer memory when you closed up. This is what you were looking at, which the computer held in new storage.”

Skander cursed himself for a fool. Of course, everything on every instrument was recorded by the computer as standard procedure. He had been so shook up by Varnett’s discovery of his work that he had forgotten to dump the record!

“It’s only a preliminary finding,” the professor managed at last. “I was waiting until I had something really startling to report.”

“But this is startling!” the boy exclaimed excitedly. “But you have been too close to the problem and to your own disciplines to crack it. Look, your fields are archaeology and biology, aren’t they?”

“They are,” Skander acknowledged, wondering where this conversation was leading. “I was an exobiologist for years and became an archaeologist when I started doing all my work on the Markovian brains.”

“Yes, yes, but you’re still a generalist. My world, as you know, raises specialists in every field from the point at which the brain is formed. You know my field.”

“Mathematics,” Skander replied. “If I recall, all mathematicians on your world are named Varnett after an ancient mathematical genius.”

“Right,” the boy replied, still in an excited tone. “As I was developing in the Birth Factory, they imprinted all the world’s mathematical knowledge directly. It was there continuously as I grew. By the time my brain was totally developed at age seven, I knew all the mathematics, applied and theoretical, that we know. Everything is ultimately mathematical, and so I see everything in a mathematical way. I was sent here by my world because I had become fascinated by the alien mathematical symmetry in the slides and specimens of the Markovian brain. But all was for nothing, because I had no knowledge of the energy matrix linking the cellular components.”

“And now?” Skander prodded, fascinated and excited in spite of himself.

“Why, it’s gibberish. It defies all mathematical logic. It says that there are no absolutes in mathematics! None! Every time I tried to force the pattern into known mathematical concepts, it kept saying that two plus two equals four isn’t a constant but a relative proposition!”

Skander realized that the boy was trying to make things baby-simple to him, but he still couldn’t grasp what he was saying. “What does all that mean?” he asked in a puzzled and confused tone.

Varnett was becoming carried away with himself. “It means that all matter and energy are in some kind of mathematical proportion. That nothing is actually real, nothing actually anything at all. If you discard the equal sign and substitute ‘is proportional to’ and, if it is true, you can alter or change anything. None of us, this room, this planet, the whole galaxy, the whole universe—none of it is a constant! If you could alter the equation for anything only slightly, change the proportions, anything could be made anything else, anything could be changed to anything else!” He stopped, seeing from the expression on Skander’s face that the older man was still lost.

“I’ll give a really simple, basic example,” Varnett said, calmed considerably from his earlier outburst. “First, realize this if you can: there is a finite amount of energy in the universe, and that is the only constant. The amount is infinite by our standards, but that is true if this is true. Do you follow me?”

Skander nodded. “So you’re saying that there is nothing but pure energy?”

“More or less,” Varnett agreed. “All matter, and constrained energy, like stars, is created out of this energy flux. It is held there in that state—you, me, the room, the planet we’re on—by a mathematical balance. Something—some quantity—is placed in proportion to some other quantity, and that forms us. And keeps us stable. If I knew the formula for Elkinos Skander, or Varnett Mathematics Two Sixty-one, I could alter, or even abolish, our existence. Even things like time and distance, the best constants, could be altered or abolished. If I knew your formula I could, given one condition, not only change you into, say, a chair, but alter all events so that you would have always been a chair!”