Jack Chalker - Twilight at the Well of Souls

“You see the point, then. It couldn’t—unless, perhaps, there was at its core a basic truth. Well, with that, I could hardly refuse him anything, and what he wanted was someone to come to the Well, where we are now, and help him pull the plug and start it again. Since it’s something of a mental exercise, he wanted someone who shared his own basic philosophical precepts, since some of those, too, would color what went on. Well, of course, that was part of the point. He tricked me, the bastard.”

“Huh?”

“He was the sentinel, the heir to the project manager. I don’t know if he was a project manager or not, or whether, like me, he’d been tricked in the remote past, but what he wanted wasn’t an assistant. You see, now that the program is completely stored, it only requires one to direct the reset, although two are maybe a little handier. He put me through, with a lot less preparation than you’ve had in your life, and then he erased himself from the program. He stuck me with the job and then killed himself!”

She felt some uneasy stirrings, recalling Gypsy’s own predictions about Brazil and herself. But instead of voicing them right now she asked, “And what happened after that?”

“Well, I completed the job, closed up shop, and suddenly realized that I knew very little of what was going on, really. So I went home, to Earth, and when the time was right I presented—mostly through trickery, I’m ashamed to admit—my ancient faith to twelve tribes of related people. It was the right decision. Out of that faith grew many of the rest of that world’s religions and its codes. I gave ’em the rules. I’ll admit that, in the main, they didn’t obey those rules any better than the people of my own world had, but they had them and it was, overall, a good thing. The spin-off religions alone were pivotal in our people’s history. Islam saved scholarship and the greatness of the ancients from a barbaric world; Christianity kept a cultural darkness from being total and retained a sense of unity that outlasted the bad times and spread to the four corners of the Earth. My new people, unfortunately, suffered the same way as my old had. Persecuted, made scapegoats, they nonetheless kept faith and tradition alive through it all. They came out a hell of a lot better than my last group, too, in the end.”

“Brazil?” she began hesitantly. “You say the mental exercise colors the newly created places. Couldn’t that be explained by the last one to do this having that religion, and putting it, without realizing it, into the collective unconscious of the created races?”

“It could be,” he admitted. “I’ve occasionally thought about it. But it couldn’t hurt to believe otherwise, either, could it? Or, perhaps, that’s God’s way of insuring continuity through all this.”

“Somehow I never thought of you as a man of God,” she commented. “And I seem to remember that you told my grandparents you were God.”

“I have a knack,” he told her, “of having people take seriously anything I say if I say it seriously enough myself. And I am a compulsive liar.”

“Then how do I know that all that you just told me is true?” she asked playfully. “Maybe that was the lie to remove from my thoughts any suspicion you might just be God.”

“You’ll never really know, will you?” he taunted. “I don’t worry about it. People believe what they want to believe, anyway.”

“Brazil? Are you going to wipe yourself off the program? Are you going to kill yourself and leave me to take over? Gypsy said as much.”

He paused a long while before replying. “That was my original intention, if you wanted it,” he admitted hesitantly. “Believe me, I want to die. You cannot believe how much I want to die.”

“I think I can,” she responded kindly. “I felt it at the beginning, remember?”

“You can’t know, really know,” he insisted. “You touched only the surface and have no concept of the depth. No, what I was originally going to do was to tell you all this and then let you decide for yourself whether to take the job, knowing that eventually you’ll die a million deaths inside but never die yourself. But now, I’m not so sure. What’s another few million years at this stage of the game? I looked into you, Mavra, far more deeply than you have looked into me. You don’t have the practice to do it like I do. And the more I looked, the more I realized that you were the best qualified person I knew to take over—the best qualified, but, almost for that reason, I can’t do it. I can’t condemn you to that loneliness. I just can’t do it to someone else, damn it!”

She looked at the strange shining creature with renewed interest and curiosity, almost wonder. “You’ve never really lost it, have you? Not deep down, you haven’t. You’re very tired, Nathan, and you’ve been horribly hurt by all this, but, deep down inside there’s still a fire going in that spirit of yours. You still believe in something, in your old ideals. You still believe it’s possible for people to reach God, a God you very much believe in even if you’re not God himself.”

“I’ll only tell you this,” he responded seriously. “There is something beyond all that we can see, all that we know, something that survives beyond the Well of Souls. Perhaps it’s in another parallel universe, perhaps it’s all around us but unseen, like the Markovian primal energy. But it’s there, Mavra, it’s there. Three Gedemondans laid hands on us and our minds went into those of beasts. That’s impossible under even these rules, Mavra. What got transferred? Whatever it was, it’s the only important part of either of us, and it was absolute enough that the Well has twice recognized me as who I am despite both times being in the body of an animal. Can you quantify it, identify it, even here, inside the Well, in Markovian form? Can you see it, see it shining brightly, as I see it in you? What is it? The soul? What’s ‘soul’ but a term for describing that which we can now recognize, and which others throughout time have recognized occasionally but never been able to pin down? What rules do these parts of us obey? Do they die when our bodies die, snuffed out like candles? Ours certainly didn’t. Your body is dead, mine probably is. It makes no difference.”

“Do you know the answer?” she asked him.

“Of course not, for I have never died,” he replied. “And it looks like another long time before I will.”

She hesitated before going on. “Nathan, if you want to go, I’ll do it. I’ll take the responsibility from you. You’re free as of this moment. For the first time in your life, Nathan, you’re free.”

He took that in for a brief moment, then answered, “No, Mavra. I am not free. I’m not free because you were right a moment ago. God help me, I still care!” He paused. “Shall we pull the plug?”

“We must,” she responded. “You know it.”

“Before we do, I’m going to try something that worked last time,” he told her. “It’s obvious there are a lot more races than hexes. We might be able to salvage most of them, at least to the same degree that we’re doing here. Some won’t survive, of course, either because of the damage or because of miscalculation, the laws of physics, or a lot of other things, but there’s a chance. It worked last time. It might work again, particularly for those races with some space capabilities.”

They went back to the control room and he made a number of adjustments. She didn’t realize what he was doing at first, but as she watched she understood.

“We can’t do it without souls, Mavra,” he reminded her. “We got to have something to work with.”

Slowly, out in space, across the limitless reaches of the universe, the Well Gates came on — came on and, more, started to move. Great, yawning, hexagonal shapes of blackness lifted off their native worlds, lifted off and rose into space. They had but two dimensions, discontinuities in the fabric of reality, for their depth was here, at the other end, at the Well Gate.