Jack Chalker: Twilight at the Well of Souls

Every few seconds, between midnight and midnight, another racial group was activated, sent through the Well Gate, out to their predestined planets. Physically, they would never arrive. They would inhabit the bodies prepared for them through billions of years of evolution. These included the millions saved from oblivion by Brazil’s actions with the Markovian Gates, who would now be able to carry on their own races, rebuild and grow or die as they themselves decided by their actions.

Because there were still temporal differentials between the Well World and the universe, they were spread at different points, and some would reproduce, grow old, and die, and be thousands, perhaps millions of years different from other races placed on their worlds only minutes later, Well World time.

But for those occasional ones of races not destined for those planets who, accidentally but unavoidably, went along for the ride, there was only an instantaneous trip. But they were incongruities on a primitive world not meant for or designed for them. Most died out quickly, or became half-whispered legends among the generations that followed, but a few would hold on, manage somehow to survive, at least for a time.

At the end of the sixth day, when midnight came, the barriers to the Well Gate were removed, the Zone Gates shifted back to their normal patterns, all was as it was before.

And across the Well World there was heaved a collective sigh of relief.

Temporally, too, they were back on track. Six days had passed for them, almost fourteen for the new universe now being maintained by a repaired, repro-grammed, and revitalized Well.

Nathan Brazil sighed and settled back on his tentacles. Mavra made some final checks and then did the same. It was over.

“Until some new damn fool decides to play around with the Markovian mathematics, anyway,” Brazil commented sourly. He reached out to her. “What are your plans now?”

“I need a rest, and I want to think about it,” she replied.

And so on the seventh day they did nothing at all.

“Decided yet?” he asked her early in the morning of the next day.

“Yeah. I think so, anyway. Maybe it’s a mistake, I don’t know. But I have to play along with you, I suppose. Your way, for now. What about you?”

“Oh, this is the fun part, the interesting part,” he told her. “Going down there and watching how they develop. It’s only after they get there that it starts driving you crazy.”

She laughed. “I think it’s going to be fascinating,”

“Okay,” he told her. “Let’s get going, then. It’s pre-civilization time in the new world, but by the time we get through all this, it’ll be the dawn of so-called civilization. Ugh. You decided pretty much what you’re going to be?”

She nodded. “Pretty much the same, I think,” she told him. “Matched a little closer to our exit-point culture, of course, but pretty much the same. You?”

“I’m afraid I proved to myself the last time that I couldn’t be anybody but what I always was. No matter what, I always seem to come out the same, more or less.”

He flickered; the grand Markovian brilliance vanished. Nathan Brazil stood there, much as he had before. There was a slight difference in his color, and his beard was fuller, but it was still undeniably Nathan Brazil.

And, oddly, some of the brilliance still showed through to her Markovian senses the more she stared at him.

She flickered, then stood there, beside him. She was dark, lean, lithe, and yet somehow exotic.

“Still the same old girl, huh?” he cracked. “Not even curious about being a man? Men have it much easier in primitive societies, you know.”

She grinned, went over and kissed him, then held up her fingernails. Flexing the muscles slightly, tiny beads of some liquid oozed out from underneath the sharp points. “I can take care of myself,” she told him.

He smiled warmly at her and put his arm around her, drawing her close to him. “I just bet you can,” he replied sincerely.

They walked down the beach together, the man and the woman, naked and unashamed. Occasionally the woman, slightly smaller than he, would reach down and pick up a shell or pretty colored rock, then laugh and toss it into the ocean. It was a beautiful, brilliant warm day, the kind of day you always wished for.

“It’s better than the last one,” the man remarked in a tongue totally alien to this bright new world. “Warmer, lusher, richer. I think things might be different, maybe better, this time out.”

She laughed, a pleasant, playful laugh. “Always the optimist. Ever the optimist.” She threw her arms around him, kissing him long and passionately.

He stood there a moment, looking down into her face and her large, dark eyes. “In time, you may grow to hate me,” he warned.

“Or you, me,” she shot back, a playful pout on her face. “But not now. Not today. Not with the sun and the sea and the birds calling and a warm wind blowing! Definitely not now!”

The couple continued up the beach, holding hands and letting the warm ocean water wash over their feet.

She stopped, pointed down at the still wet sand. “Look!” she said, wonderingly.

“It’s just a sand crab,” he told her.

She turned on him, slightly angry. “Are you going to be this grumpy over the next ten thousand years?” she asked irritably.

He laughed. “Hell, no. I’ll get worse. But never all the way down, honey. Never all the way down. Because, as short as I am, you made yourself shorter and lighter than I am.”

He grinned, and she grinned, and be took her hand and they continued on down the beach.

It was a good day, he told himself, and a good place to be alive, if alive he had to be. But he was still Nathan Brazil, forty billion years out, bound for nowhere with a cargo hold empty of anything at all, even clothes on his back.

Still waiting.

Still caring.

But no longer alone.