Jack Chalker - Echoes of the Well of Souls

The emergence, as always, was like suddenly being catapulted out of a great tunnel; there, ahead, a solar system, a governed construct in a pattern the Kraang understood well, although it had no knowledge of what sort of creatures might live there or their current stage of development. It did not matter. The Kraang was not supposed to be in this sort of proximity, and already the signal of an aberration would be flowing back to Control, but it was a very long way, and even at the sort of speed such messages could travel Underside, it would be several seconds before it reached Control, and then Control would react.

By now the Kraang knew how it would react.

Control was not self-aware, for if it were, it would be a living god of the universe with no limits and no governor. Automatic maintenance meant automatic response; the experiments were supposed to be controlled, not supervised.

The Kraang’s great mind searched frantically for the now-invisible termination of the force line. Great Shia!

Where was it? A world incredibly ancient, a world with an artificial yet living core…

For a moment the Kraang experienced panic. No such world existed in this system! The nine planets and dozens of assorted larger moons were all dead save the experiment itself! A billion years the lords of chance had made the Kraang wait for this moment! A billion years, and now to be faced with failure…! It would be too much for even the Kraang to bear.

And then, suddenly, it found what it was looking for. A planet once but no more, pulled apart by the strains of gravity and catastrophe, broken into impossibly small fragments that still worked together, trapped into sufficient cohesion by Control’s grasp of the energy of probability. Although in a million million pieces, the living heart still somehow functioned in what remained, two tiny steering moons and a vast additional ring…

Its mind reached out. Success! Connection! I give a small part of myself to you!

A sudden and violent bump, a wrenching jar—its container had been struck head on! An asteroid, small yet effective, had slammed into the container, altering its trajectory. It began to move quickly away, toward the still-distant inner gas giant. The Kraang relaxed and understood. Control was correcting. At this speed and trajectory the Kraang would rush headlong toward the giant world beyond, well away from the active matrix, and the giant’s great gravity would slingshot the container around, accelerate it to tremendous speed, sufficient to generate a space-time ripple, to take it out of this system, perhaps out of this entire galaxy.

But it would take two years, as time was counted here, for it to reach the giant and the better part of a third to achieve the desired effect. Out here, in the real universe. Control was constrained by its own laws and the basic laws of physics. Corruption of the system had now occurred; the experiment was now invalidated. It would have no choice but to use whatever mechanism it created to call the Watchman, down there, somewhere, on the experiment itself, the blue and white world third from the sun…

“Lori, could you step into my office for a minute?”

It was symptomatic of the problems in her professional life and of her feelings of hitting brick walls. Whiz kid Roger Samms, Ph.D. at twenty-four, was always “Dr. Samms,” but Lori Sutton, Ph.D., age thirty-six, was almost always “Lori” to Professor George Virdon Hicks, the department head and her boss. Hicks was basically a nice guy, but he belonged to a far older generation and was beyond even comprehending the problem.

She entered, somewhat puzzled. “Yes, sir?”

“Sit down, sit down!” He sighed and sank into his own chair. “I’ve got an interesting and fast-developing situation here that’s causing us some problems and may be opening up some opportunities for you. Uh—pardon me for asking, but I’m given to understand that you’re living alone here now, no particular personal ties or local family?”

She was puzzled and a little irritated at the speed of campus gossip. “That’s true.”

“And you did some of your doctoral research at the big observatories in Chile?”

She nodded. “Yes, under Don Mankowicz and Jorje Paz. It was the most fun I’ve had in science to date.”

“Did you get over the mountains and into the Amazon basin at all?”

It was hard to see where this was going. “Yes, I took a kind of back-country trip into the rain forests with the Salazars—they finance their fight against the destruction of the rain forest and its cultures by taking folks like me on such trips. It was fascinating but a little rugged.”

Hicks leaned forward a little and picked up a packet in a folder on his desk and shoved it toward her. She opened it up and saw it was full of faxes, some showing grainy photographs, others trajectory charts, star charts, and the like. She looked them over and read the covering letter from the MIT team down in Chile who’d sent them. And she was suddenly very interested.

“About nine days ago, during some routine calibration sweeps for the eighty-incher that’s just been overhauled, they picked this up. We’re not sure, but we think it’s a known asteroid—at least, a small one discovered about a dozen years ago should have been in that vicinity at about that time. It should have cleared the orbit of the moon by a good two hundred thousand kilometers, but something, some collision or force unknown, seems to have jarred it just so. It’s big—maybe as big as eight hundred meters— and it’s just brushing by the moon right now.”

She shrugged. “Fascinating, but we’ve had ones as big or bigger than this come in between us and the moon.”

“Yes, but they missed.”

She felt a cold, eerie chill go through her, and she looked at the computer readouts again. “It’s going to hit? This is— this could be Meteor Crater or Tunguska!”

He nodded. “Yes, on page three, there, you see that the current estimate based on angle, trajectory, and spectrum analysis of the composition estimates that possibly a third of it will survive to impact, possibly as a single unit. The explosion and crater are going to be enormous.”

“And it’s going to hit land? In South America?”

“We can’t be completely certain, not for another ten to twelve hours, maybe not even then. There are a lot of questions as to the exact angle of entry, how much true mass it represents, whether it will fragment, and so on. They’re now giving better than even odds that it’ll impact off the Chilean or Ecuadorian coast in the Pacific, but if it’s very heavy and hard inside and if the mass is great enough, it’ll come down short, possibly in the Andes, more likely in the Brazilian rain forest short of there. Fortunes are being wagered in every observatory and physics department in the world, or will be. It’ll hit the news shortly; there’s much debate, I understand, on how early to release it, since we’ll inevitably get special media coverage with experts talking about global warming and a new ice age from the dust and you name it and people living in both the wrong hemispheres panicking anyway. It’ll be out regardless by the evening news tonight.”

She nodded, fascinated but still puzzled. “So what has this to do with me?”

“There’ll be scientists from all over and news organizations as well gearing up to go in, but the Brazilian government is very concerned about possible injuries or deaths and wants nobody in the area. They have troops already up there trying to get the few settlements evacuated in time, and that, plus the usual red tape, is putting the brakes on most efforts. The exception is Cable News, which has some contacts there and a good relationship with the Brazilian press and government. They’ve used us before for science pieces and are mounting a team to cover it. To the frustration of the others, they’ll probably be the pool. They need somebody with them to tell them what the devil it is they’re seeing, or not seeing, and they’ve called us.”