Jack Chalker - Twilight at the Well of Souls

But there were areas around the central control room of the human hexes that were mostly destroyed or burned out. Other sections had switched to try and handle, maintain the load, but it was too much of a strain on them and they, too, were burning out, only to increase the load on still others. There was a cancer in the Well of Souls beyond its ability to halt, and it was growing. As it grew, so did the rent in space-time, faster now, ever faster. She realized, idly, that the area of space from whence she came would be gone in a relative moment, and then it would spread even further, ever further.

And, she realized, Obie had been right. As sections maintaining other parts of the universe had to carry the increased load against the soaring tide of nothingness, their increasing burdens made failures occur ever more quickly, in dangerous progression.

The Well could kill or cure the universe, but it could not save itself. Right now almost a sixth of the Well’s active control centers were destroyed, burned out, shorted beyond repair. When it reached a third of the Well’s capacity, it would be beyond the ability of the Well to maintain the damaged parts; it would go crazy trying, though, and the entire thing would short out, beyond repair. It needed help, and it needed it quickly, or it could not survive. In a sense it was a living organism of its own, she understood, and the cancer was creeping rapidly toward its heart. The final burnout would trigger a protective shutdown by the master program and power source to save itself, but that would be too late, beyond the capacity of the smaller device to repair or replace. There would be only the Well World left in the whole universe, it and nothing else, forever.

But she understood Brazil, too. That deep torment in which he lived, a god forever cut off from communion with his own kind, for he was unique in the entire universe, perhaps in all the universes there might be, doomed to walk the Earth and stars as a man who could never die, never change, never find any sort of companionship, yet a man, also, who felt he had a sacred trust.

Moreover, inside here he could feel and see and know those countless numbers of sentient beings whose entire history would be wiped out, who, if repairs were done, would be not even a memory but wiped out as if they had never existed at all, save in the memories of those Entries on the Well World and in her mind and his.

“This isn’t the first time this has happened, is it?” she asked him.

“No, it’s not,” he admitted. “Three times that I know of. Can you understand how terribly hard it is now for me to pull that plug?”

“Three times…” she repeated, wonderingly. Three times into the Well of Souls, three times massacring so many, many innocents who had done nothing wrong but live.

“And it was you all three times?” she asked him.

“No,” he replied. “Only the last time. I was born on a world now dead and to a people now dead beyond any memory, but it was much like Old Earth. It was a theocratic group, a group that lived its religion and its faith, and suffered for it in the eternal way in which such people are made to suffer by others. I grew up in it and became a cleric myself, a religious teacher and expert, a religious leader, you might say. I was pretty famous for it, among my own people. I had a wife, and seven children, three boys and four girls—Type 41 humans, all, no funny forms.

“Well, another religion grew up near by, and it had a convert-by-force philosophy, and since by that time society was highly technological and advanced in those ways, we were tracked down when that technocratic faith took over our own land, tracked down and made to convert or die. Even though their religion was a variant of our own, they didn’t trust us. We were small, clannish, secretive, and we didn’t even solicit converts. We were handy. We were weak and fairly affluent, convenient scapegoats for a dictatorial society.

“They came for me and my family one night, when they felt very secure. I was the leader, after all. I had little forewarning, but managed, by sheer luck—good or bad is up to you—to not be at home that night. They took my wife and children, and they put out a call to me: I could betray my people and my faith, or my family would be worse than killed. They would be given brainwipes and then handed over as playthings for the ruling families. There were no guarantees for me if I surrendered, or them, either, but also no way to free them. I got out, went into the desert wilderness, became something of a hermit, although I did channel refugees from my people, the ones who could get out, to various safe havens.”

“With that kind of reasoning, I’m surprised you didn’t plot revenge,” she commented.

He laughed sourly. “Revenge? You can take revenge against a single individual, even against a group, but how do you do it against the majority of the world? Oh, I hated them, all right, but the only real revenge I could take was to keep my people and my faith alive through those terrible times, try and have a historical revenge, you might say, upon them.

“And, one night, while checking out some routes across that desert, I stopped at an oasis up against the side of a cliff and saw something I considered impossible.”

“What?” she prompted.

“A centaur, half man, half horse, sneaking down from a cave to drink. Now, understand, this was at a technological stage where I was having to beat helicopter searches, radar, mind probes, and all that, and where colonies had been established on both moons and the nearest planet. Well, he spotted me, and instead of hiding or charging me he called out to me, called my own name! He knew me, even if I had never seen the likes of him before. He told me he was from another, alien civilization far off among the stars, and that that civilization no longer existed. He was the last of his kind. He was the first to tell me of the Markovians, of the Well World, and of the Well of Souls computer. He had quite a setup there, too, I’ll tell you, a technological haven carved inside that desert mountain.

“He knew a lot about me, He had monitored me, it seemed, for some time, for reasons of his own, which I didn’t then understand. He told me that, through an experimental accident, the entire universe was in danger of total and complete destruction and that he needed help to avert that. He’d chosen me for the task.”

“Why you? A religious leader on the run?”

Brazil chuckled. “Well, for one thing he was able to show me books, alien books, from three or four different civilizations. He had a learning machine that taught me those languages—you’re familiar with the type if not the actual device. And, as I read them, books from nonhuman civilizations out among the stars my own people had not yet reached, I realized something almost stunning. I was reading paraphrases or alien adaptations of my own holiest writings, those of my basic religion. Oh, the details were all different, of course, but the basic truths were there, the basic concept of a single, monotheistic God, of the creation and many of the laws. All four had what could be easily translated as the Ten Commandments, almost in the same order, although the stated means of giving them was different. I realized in an instant what he was saying to me by all this.”

She didn’t follow. “What?”

“That there was something of a universal religion,” he replied, “a set of basic beliefs and concepts so close in principles that they simply could not have been evolved independently by so many different races. The centaur himself was a follower of such a similar faith, and it was the similarity with my own, of which I was the supreme surviving authority, that drew him to me. You see?”

She still hesitated. “But… you said the repairs had been done three times before. How could such a religion pop up this time again?”