Jack Chalker - Midnight at the Well of Souls

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.

Oh, nonexistent, uncaring gods! she thought bitterly. What a curse more horrible than anything imaginable.

Suppose Nathan Brazil had what was missing, deep inside—and no one else did?

“Hello, Vardia,” said a voice behind her. She turned with a start, and saw Wuju standing there. “You’ve been sitting there looking strange for the longest time.”

She smiled weakly, but said nothing.

Wuju smiled and sat down beside her. “Yikes! This pavement’s cold!”

“If you just sit you don’t notice it,” Vardia told her.

“Everyone’s so somber and serious now,” Wuju noted. “Even me.”

Vardia looked at her strangely. “It’s the mission—the end of the mission. In there is anything you want. Just wish for it. And all of us are going in. I don’t know about anyone else, but I just discovered I don’t know what to wish for.”

“I wish we weren’t going,” Wuju said grimly. “If I had one wish, it’d be that this never had to end. Here—this journey, Nathan, all of you. It’s been the happiest time of my life. I’m afraid that nothing will be the same after we’re in there. Nothing.”

Vardia took her hand and patted it. Now why did I do that? she wondered, but she continued doing it.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Vardia said calmly. “I only know that I must change. I have changed. Now I must understand how and why.”

“I don’t like this at all,” Wuju responded in that same tone of foreboding. “I don’t like the idea of things being changed by a whim. No one should have that kind of power—least of all these sorts. I don’t like being a figment, an afterthought. I’m scared to death. I told Nathan, but he just shook his head and went away. I don’t understand that, either. I can face death, now—and evil, too. But I can’t face the fear of what’s in there. Not alone.”

“You’re not alone,” Vardia said with a gentleness that surprised her.

Wuju looked over at Brazil, standing facing the wall, unmoving, stoic, alone. She started to tremble.

“I can’t face it alone!” she wailed weakly.

“You’re not alone,” Vardia repeated, squeezing her hand tighter.

Elkinos Skander watched the two women with interest. So the robots have retained a little humanity after all, he thought with satisfaction. But it’s buried so deep within them that it took the Well World to bring any of it out.

And for what?

Things weren’t working out quite the way he had planned at all, but except for the Slelcronian and, perhaps, that Northerner, it was all right, particularly if the robots like Vardia could feel.

Surely they wouldn’t object to his requests of the Well.

He looked over at Hain, motionless in the darkness.

“Hain? You awake?” Skander asked softly.

“Yes. Who could sleep now?” came the bug’s response.

“Hain, tell me. What do you expect to get in there? What do you want of the Well?”

Hain was silent for a moment. “Power,” she replied at last. “I would make the Baron Azkfru emperor of the Well World, this galaxy, perhaps the universe. But, with this mob, I’ll settle for his being emperor for the longest of time in Akkafan, with such other power left to future effort. My Lord, the baron, can do anything except fight this machine.”

Skander raised his mermaid’s eyebrows in surprise. “But what do you get out of it?”

“I shall be the baron’s queen,” Hain replied excitedly. “I shall be at his throne, second only to him in power. I shall bear the broods that will rule for eternity, the product of Azkfru and myself! The workers, even the nobles, shall defer to me and my wishes, and envy me, and my subjects will sing my praises!” Hain paused, carried away by her own vision.

“I was born in a run-down shack in a hole called Gorind on Aphrodite,” she continued. “I was unwanted, sickly. My mother beat me, finally cast me out into the mud and dust when she saw I’d never be a miner. I was nine. I went into the city, living off the garbage, stealing to make do, sleeping in cold back doorways. I grew up grubbing, but in the shadow of the rich, the mineowners, the shippers from whom I stole. One day, when I was fifteen or so, I raped and killed a girl. She struggled, called me names—tried to scratch me, like my mother. They caught me, and I was about to be psyched into a good programmed worker when this man came to see me in my cell. He said he had need of people like me. If I agreed to serve him and his bosses, he would get me out.”