Jack Chalker - Twilight at the Well of Souls

“You can’t selectively shut it off, say, to the damaged areas?” she asked hopefully.

“Nope. Oh, it’s a good idea, and, I guess, theoretically possible, but we’d need the whole Markovian computer staff here to do it. It would mean completely reprogramming the Well of Souls—that is, writing a new program for it. You can do that with the Well World but not with the big computer, since they never thought it would have to be done twice in the universe, after all.”

“So what we’re going to do, then, is more or less go back in time, recreating the conditions that existed just before the big computer was activated, then essentially repeat what they did,” she said, trying to get it straight.

“Right. And the self-repair and correcting circuits will then go to work on the damage. They were put there because nobody really knew if the Well was 100 percent, whether or not they hadn’t made some mistakes, design or construction errors, things like that. So the program is self-correcting; when it hits a section that isn’t right, it alters or changes it so that it is correct.”

“So what do we do first?” she asked him.

He chuckled. “First we go down that corridor there. There’s a central control room not far—all those corridors lead to loads of control rooms, one for each race sent out from here—a lot more than 1,560, I might add.” He led the way, and again she followed.

They came to a hexagonal doorway that irised open, and a light switched on within. Inside was some sort of control room, filled with switches, knobs, levers, buttons, and the like, and what looked like a large black projection screen. Enormous dials and gauges registered she knew not what; there was no way to tell what any of the things did.

A tentacle went out and touched a small panel on a control console, activating what appeared to be a screen but what was a recessed tunnel, oval in shape, stretching back as far as the eye could see, a yellow-white light covered with trillions of tiny black specks. Frantic little bolts of electricity, or something like it, shot between all of them, creating a furious energy storm, a continuous spider’s web of moving energy.

“Let’s get you squared away first,” Brazil muttered. There was suddenly the sound of a great pump or some kind of relay closing, then opening, from deep within the planet and all around her. It sounded almost like the beating heart of some enormous beast.

“I’m just bringing the power up,” he told her. “Don’t be alarmed. The dials, switches, and such over there are main controls for the mechanisms. Minor stuff like this I can do without any sort of controls, although we’ll need some when the power’s cut. Okay, that ought to do it.”

There was a steady, omnipresent thump-thump, thump-thump through the control room.

“Okay, main control room up to full power,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “Activate… now!”

The world seemed to explode all around her. Vision expanded to almost 360 degrees, hearing, smell, all the senses flared into new intensity such as she had never known before. She could feel and sense the energies all around her, feel the enormous power surges that were suddenly so real they took on an almost physical form, as if she could just reach out and take hold of them, bend them any way she wanted. It was a tremendous, exhilarating, heady feeling, a rush of strength and power beyond belief. She was Superwoman, she was a goddess, she was supreme…

She looked at Brazil with her new senses and saw no longer the ugly, misshapen creature he had become but a shining beacon of almost unbearable light, a towering figure of almost unbearable beauty and strength and power.

She reached out to him not with any part of her body but with her mind, and he seemed to extend the same, a flow of sentient energy, of something, that met hers and merged with it.

And then she recoiled from it, or tried to, for a brief moment. For the first sensations she had received from him had been not of a godlike creature, which he undeniably was, but instead of an incredible, deep, aching loneliness that hurt so terribly it was almost unbearable. Pity overwhelmed her, and she grieved that such greatness should be in such misery and pain. The depth of its misery was fully as terrible as was his godlike greatness and power. It was so great that she feared to reach out again, to make more contact, lest such agony destroy her. She wept for Nathan Brazil then, and in that weeping she finally grasped his essential tragedy.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said gently, extending himself once again. “I have it more under control now. But you had to know. You had to understand.”

Hesitantly she reached out once again, and this time it was more bearable, suppressed from the direct contact of her mind and his. But it was far too much a part of him to be banished completely; it permeated his very being, the core of his soul, and even its shadow was almost too much.

And now he started to talk. No, not talk, transfer. Transfer data to her, directly, at the speed of his thought, registering the accumulated knowledge of Nathan Brazil on the operation of The Well of Souls, the Markovian physics, the experimental histories, everything about the Markovian society, project, and goals. And she realized what he had done to her, realized now, for the first time, that she, too, was a Markovian, and, in pure knowledge of the Well, his equal. Knowledge, yes, but not in experience, never in experience. For the experience was intertwined with the excruciating agony he suffered, and that he protected her from as best he could.

Finally, it was over, and he withdrew from her. She was never sure how long it had taken; an instant, a million years, it was impossible to say. But now she knew, knew what he faced, knew what she faced, and knew just exactly what to do. She realized, too, that in order to make her a Markovian he had fed her directly into the primary computer, the master computer program itself. She was like him, now, and would be unless she, herself, erased that data from the Markovian master brain.

“I want you to spend a little time here before we proceed,” he told her. “I want you to check on the control rooms, read them off, take a look at the Well of Souls and its products. Before the plug is pulled, you must know what you are destroying.”

She knew the controls, now, knew how to use them and how to switch them from one point to another. Slowly, together, they examined the universe.

The machinery was incredible, and matched to her new Markovian brain with its seemingly limitless capacity for data and its lightning-fast ability to correlate it, it was easy to survey the known and unknown. Time lost its meaning for her, and she understood that it really had no meaning anyway, not for a Markovian. The very concept was nothing more than a mathematical convenience applicable only to some localized areas for purposes of measurement. It had no effect, and therefore no meaning, to either of them, not now.

She saw races that looked hauntingly familiar, and races that were more terribly alien than anything she had ever known or experienced. She saw ones she know, too: the Dreel who had started all this and humanity, the Rhone, the Chugach, and all the others. There were others, too, an incredible number of others, so many individual sentient beings that numbers became meaningless in that context.

But they were life. They were born and they grew and learned and loved, and when they died they left a legacy to their own children and they to theirs. Legacies of greatness, legacies of decline and doom, things both wonderful and horrible and often both at the same time. What she was seeing was the history and legacy of Markovian man.