Jack Chalker - Twilight at the Well of Souls

“The ones we send out from here,” she said, “will be mostly our people, volunteers or Olympians who know what they’re getting into. Those others, though, the ones we kidnapped off those worlds just before the plug was pulled, the ones now hung up in Well World limbo, they’re just suddenly going to wake up on a primitive, alien world, cold and mysterious, naked and without any tools or weapons.”

“They’ll make it,” he assured her. “Most of them, anyway. They did it before, they’ll do it again. It’s a pretty stubborn set of races those Markovians bred. After all this time I find I still like them, for the most part.”

“Even the Dahbi?”

“Gunit Sangh was the pure dark side that lives within all of us,” he told her. “But he wasn’t the Dahbi, just a Dahbi. We had our own share of those type. You never met an Adolf Hitler or Dathan Hain. Hardly good examples of our race, but I wouldn’t condemn everybody on the basis that we produced a lot of superstinkers.” He paused. “You ready for the first step?”

“I’m ready,” she told him seriously. “I still don’t see how this can be done in six days, though. I admit I never had any formal education, but I do know it takes billions of years to do what we’re doing.”

“Billions of years for them,” he replied. “Six days for us. Just watch. There’s nothing out there now. Absolutely nothing. Not a single speck. No matter, no energy except the primal energy at total rest. That means, too, there’s no space, time, or distance.”

“The Markovian worlds with their Gates are still there,” she pointed out.

“Well, that’s true, but they have no sun, no warmth, nothing. They exist in nothingness, and will until we fix it.”

“I know the procedure, thanks to you,” she told him, “but I’m still unclear as to exactly what we do.”

“You do this,” he told her, and reached out for the master control. “Let there be light!” he commanded with a laugh.

Energy flowed once more from the tiny programming unit suspended above the control room entry hall. It flew to the Well of Souls computer and began its reset activation.

Far out in space, billions of light-years from the Well World, a hole was punched. A great black hole from some other universe, the greatest of all black holes that universe had, suddenly found an outlet. A singularity of immense proportions was created, and the accumulated material it had swallowed and continued to swallow, including light itself, burst through from that universe into that of the Well.

Nature reacted as it must; the static universe moved to close the hole, to plug it up quickly, but the Well of Souls now beat into renewed life. It reached out without regard for space or time and seized on the erupting white hole, keeping it open, allowing it to expand and grow. The effect was the greatest explosion possible in physics.

“Whew! A whole hell of a lot farther away than last time,” Brazil noted. “Too bad. The Well World will continue to have a black sky. Well, you gotta take the white hole where you find it, and where the fabric is weakest, which is one and the same thing. Won’t make any difference to the rest, though, except it might be a little nicer. Won’t be much in the way of Markovian Gates in the neighborhood for quite a while. Well, we can relax now. We have to wait for all the usual natural processes to take place. Wow! That’s a beauty, though! Look at those energy gauges! Bigger and nastier by far than the last one! We’re gonna have a rip-roaring new universe here!”

Little time passed for them inside the Well, for time had hardly any meaning there. The Well World was being kept separate, apart from the rest of the universe as it always had been. The rest of the Markovian universe, too, went along at the old rate and would continue to do so until they slowed everything to match Markovian time.

They checked on the Well, saw that special circuits were already modifying, changing, repairing, even rebuilding damaged sections. They had been in time.

An hour passed. Half a billion years passed. It was all the same thing. The universe expanded. Tremendous gases and other material continued to spin out, swirling as it did so from the forces at the vortex of the big bang.

Twelve hours passed. Six billion years passed. It was all the same thing. Expansion continued. Cooling and congealing continued, even accelerated. Galaxies were forming, and inside those galaxies stars and even planets. The process continued on.

Brazil idly flicked a control. The time rate slowed. By the end of the day it was down to a very small length of time, relatively speaking: barely a few million years an hour.

On the second day he singled out the target worlds and started adjusting the processes by which life would form. The proper conditions were established for life, and on the third day, slowing time even more, he energized those elements, not merely on the planets he was going to use but on all those other worlds as well, worlds which, formed naturally, were good havens for life of one form or another but for which he had no people.

Time slowed more on the fourth day. The amino acids, the crystalline structures, the building blocks of lifeforms North and South on the Well World formed; the carbon-based in the sea while plants now ruled the land, what there was of it.

On the fifth day he slowed the rate still more, with Mavra’s assistance, and activated secondary lifeform programming. Animal life appeared, first in the sea, then on the land, all in its proper evolutionary order, all stemming from the single, inevitable first cause.

And they looked at the millions of worlds and saw that they had done it right. It was working—not 100 percent, but more than enough for their needs. They spent most of the time doing this checking, using the Well computer itself to match worlds to lifeforms. A very few couldn’t be exactly matched, and that bothered them, Brazil in particular.

“The Gedemondans,” he remarked. “That explains the Gedemondans. Once you lay down the physical laws, you have to live by them, obey ’em implicitly. Last time, for some reason, the Gedemondans couldn’t be properly matched to a world that formed in this mess. Won’t be that problem with them this time, though. I’ve kept my word on that. They have a world that looks damned near tailor-made. We may have some problems with a few of the others, but we’ll do the best we can.”

Complex animal life was developing now, the ancestral prototypes of the dominant races of those worlds, flowing logically out of how Brazil and the Well programming had combined those first acids in the initial process, based on the world’s material and resources, as well as the biological and climatologic conditions they had to work under. But the Well was very good at predicting how a world would develop, and it made no mistakes. The prototypical new sentient races weren’t exactly like their counterparts on the Well World, but, overall, they were remarkably close. Natural selection was taking its toll along the main line of dominance, too, leading to the one minor branch that provided what was necessary for sentience, for dominance.

Brazil checked out the Well World. Most hexes had complied with the demands placed on them, but there were a few too disorganized or too primitive to comply, and Brazil now took steps to include them indiscriminately. When their time came, any who fell short of the minimums would find their populations halved by Well fiat.

Some of the Markovians, so long ago—Mavra was now beginning to realize just how long ago—had been reluctant, too.

Both of them were prepared by midnight on the fifth day. It was time, they knew, time to insert what was needed to complete the exercise, as Brazil called it.