Jack Chalker - Twilight at the Well of Souls

“Timing will be critical,” he reminded her. “I’m setting them up as best I can so they’ll hit equally, but I can only stall this end for a few seconds at best. When I give you the word, you must pull the plug. Understand?”

She understood now. Understood a great deal. Understood how so many races could have survived this before, understood how a number of races could wind up mixed on the same world. It would be impossible to achieve perfection.

The gates moved into their respective positions. Not all could be used, of course, but there would be enough, enough, if all went right. He would still lose some races, still lose some whole civilizalions and ideas forever, but he could save a great many of them.

After a while—who knew or could tell if it was a few minutes, a few centuries?—he said, “All in position. Best I could do. We’re going to lose a few thousand civilizations, damn it, but that’s better than all of them. I’m moving in, now, moving on the nearest inhabited planet in each region.”

On a million different worlds, a million races were startled by the small yawning blackness that descended on their worlds out of the sky, a blackness that was complete, absolute, and resisted any attempts to harm it, to blow it up. There was panic, then, only heightened by what the yawning hexagon did once it touched their worlds. It started to move, rapidly, almost impossibly fast, too fast to do anything about, swallowing people wholesale.

“They’re in! Holy shit! What a headache I’m getting! Can’t hold off the Well Gate much longer. Damn it! Not enough! Not every race got enough through! Shit! I’ll have to let go. For God’s sake, Mavra, pull the plug now!”

A thought, an impulse, a single exact, deliberate mathematical command went out. She did it, she, herself, alone. She killed them all—all except the ones on the Well World and the ones caught in transit.

Across the night side of the Well World, people would look up at the stars and see a wondrous sight. The great, brilliant, wondrous starfield that was the night sky simply flickered, then winked out. There was only blackness where it had been, a blackness as absolute as anyone had ever seen.

It was reported from one end of the Well World to the other, told and retold, and the nervous panic began.

Brazil has reached the Well of Souls. The stars have gone out.

Some died by their own hand, some went mad, but most simply watched and waited and stared at the horrible empty sky, the lonely, desolate nothingness that surrounded them and seemed almost to close in on them.

At both North and South Zone, the Well Gate ceased to operate. Seals that none had ever known were there slid automatically into place, suddenly and abruptly. Many were trapped inside and could only wait it out. Those who knew quickly threw up additional guards around their hex Zone Gates lest anyone be lost. For you would not go to Zone through those gates, not while the Well Gates were shut. They were being diverted, the Well Gate itself reversed. Anyone going through a Zone Gate now would never see the Well World again.

But also, those in the various hexes, North and South, particularly those who ruled, knew they had a deadline, that they had to provide roughly half, their populations for that Gate, and that if they did not, the Gates would move and do it for them, indiscriminately. The message was now out, automatically, to all the creatures of the Well World, a message that, until this day, they had believed a meaningless, mythical, or archaic phrase, but a message they all now well understood.

It was Midnight at the Well of Souls.

“I’m surprised there’s still air and light in here,” Mavra commented.

“What did you think—that they built this thing in a vacuum?” he retorted. “In order to construct the Well they had to have light and heat and air. It comes with the rest of the planet. But the computer is definitely shut down now, and so are the Well Gates. Nobody in or out. The Zone Gates now take you directly to the Well Gate, one way.”

“How many people do you think we trapped in there?”

He laughed. “Mostly Olympians, I’d say, who know what’s going on, and maybe some odd guards, patrols, and the like. Maybe even a couple of ambassadors, huh? Scared shitless at the moment, probably.”

“Isn’t it going to get awfully crowded in there when the others start going through the Zone Gates?” she asked him. “I mean, the Well Gates are big places, but they couldn’t possibly hold the huge numbers going through.”

“They won’t have to,” he assured her. “They’ll be hung up, like those billions we kidnapped a few minutes ago, waiting until there’s an outlet. It’s pretty confusing, I admit, but, damn it, the system was set up to populate one world at a time. It was never designed to do what we’re doing to it. That’s why we’ll get mostly the population we want on the world we want, but some of the others will get through as well. That’s how half the creatures in Old Earth’s mythologies got in there to begin with. Don’t worry. They’re not properly designed for those worlds and eventually they get eliminated, one way or another—at least, I think most of them do. Never was sure. Well, we have a long job ahead of us, anyway. Might as well relax and do the best we can.”

She looked around at the controls, gauges, even the huge chambers with the countless black-dot relays. There was no energy, no power there. It was gone, except for the system of the Well World, which drew its power and maintained itself by grabbing the energy absorbed by a black hole in some other universe, a very tiny black hole, she noted.

She wondered often about that other universe. Did it have a naturally evolved group of lifeforms? Did it have its own Markovians and its own version of the Well of Souls? There was no way to know, she realized. No way to ever know. Anyone who fell into a black hole here—when there were black holes again —would come out there, of course, but they would hardly be in any physical condition to see what was going on.

It was unfortunate, in a way, that there was no way of knowing. With all this new power and knowledge, the only two mysteries left to her would be parallel universes and Nathan Brazil. But then, she reflected, there should be some mysteries left in the world.

“How long will the complete job take?” she asked him.

“Six days,” he responded, as if it were obvious. “Well World time, of course, which is the only time we got right now.”

She thought back to their past experiences. “Ortega… Gypsy… Marquoz… I wonder if any of them are still alive.”

“We’ll never know,” he told her. “As the experience of the past few months should tell you, it’s not good to hang around and be known on the Well World. You have to let ’em go a couple of hundred thousand years so they forget who and what you are, what they are, and all the rest. That way they don’t know you when you show up again. Nope, you take yourself out there, in the new universe, and you settle down, and you relax-—until you’re needed again. And you forget yourself, after a while. The Markovian brain remembers all of it, but that’s only here, in the Well. Otherwise you just don’t have the capacity, unless they evolve into it or build it. It’s a mercy, really, as you’ll see.”

She thought about it. “You know, there are two of us. We could remain Markovians, this time.”

“That’s no good,” he told her. “Not for us, not for everywhere else. A god gets bored and alienated even more than a human being does. And we can’t reproduce, so there would be just the two of us, playing some kind of monster god game or living on some Markovian world dreaming up new exercises for our minds and going batty like they did. Be my guest, if you want, but it’s more interesting the other way. It’s your choice, though. You can erase yourself, put yourself in any body on any world you want either as a Markovian prototype or, by going through the Well Gate, as one of these mere mortals. Me, I’ll stick with our people. They got so many interesting untapped possibilities. ”