Jack Chalker: Echoes of the Well of Souls

In the nearly one billion years it had been in its lonely imprisonment, it had never lost its conviction that this universe required a god.

For eons beyond countless eons it had traveled through space in its crystalline cocoon, imprisoned until the end of time, or so those who’d fashioned the cage had boasted, yet what was time to it? And could any prison hold one such as it? Not entirely. They could hold the body, but the mind was beyond imprisonment.

The universe had been re-created, not once but many times, since it had been cast adrift by the only ones who could achieve such a feat, those of its own kind. It had been startled at the first re-creation, for it had been separated and walled off from the master control lest even in its eternal damnation it should somehow get inside once again. The Watchman had done it, the Watchman had reset all, but even the Watchman could not reset its own existence or alter its imprisonment, for it was of the First Matter.

Indeed, each time the system had been reset, its own power had increased; each recreation required so much energy drawn from dimensions beyond the puny universe of its birth that for moments, for brief moments, there was no control at all, no chains, nothing to bind or hold, and its mind had been able to contact more and more of the control centers.

The jailers had not counted on that. They had not counted on a reset of their grand experiment in any way touching it, in any way influencing it; indeed, there had been much debate about whether to have a reset mechanism at all, and even those who argued in favor of it never dreamed it would actually be used, let alone more than once. Nothing was supposed to influence the prisoner in its eternal wanderings, but even gods can make mistakes; their mistakes, however, were of the sort that no one but another god could ever know of them.

But then, of course, freed of time, they nonetheless could never free themselves of its frame of reference; it was too ingrained in their genes and psyches. Unbound by instrumentalities, they had created their own boundaries in their less than limitless minds—minds indeed so limited that they could never accept the fact that absolute power was an end and not a means.

The last reset had done it. Intended to repair some sort of rip in the fabric of space-time itself, apparently wrought by artificial means, the reset had proved the need for a cosmic governor beyond doubt. The shift had been subtle, as they all had been subtle, yet the mathematics of its own prison were absolute, while that of the rest of the universe was not. At the crucial moment of the massive power drain, the one tiny fraction of a nanosecond when energy was not being equally applied as parts of the universe were selectively re-created, it was subject to the absolutes of physics without an interfering probability regulator.

It had been enough, just enough so that when the regulator kicked back in, it hadn’t allowed for that most infinitesimal of lapses.

A neutron star grabbed at its prison, pulled it with ever-increasing speed, not enough to crash into the terribly dense surface but enough to create massive acceleration, to eventually propel it, like a missile in a sling, to speeds approaching that of light, bending time and space, catching it in the eddies and currents of space and punching it right through a tunnel, a hole in space-time created by the series of massive bodies here.

As usual, the prisoner did not know where or when it would emerge, but it also knew that for the first time the regulator didn’t know either and would be slow to attempt adjustment. In that period it would be free of the regulator; in that period there might be a chance. Then only the Watchman would stand between it and ultimate power. It was a being that even space and time could never fully contain, a being that had spent long eons planning its rule and reign. It would have to meet the Watchman eventually; it knew that and welcomed it, for the Watchman was in a way very much a prisoner as well, doomed to wander forever until needed yet always alone. It looked forward to that meeting. In a billion years it had never been able to imagine who they’d gotten that was stupid enough to volunteer for the job and yet so slavishly loyal that, in all this time, it had never once taken advantage of the position.

It had been a shock opening the door to the apartment and seeing just how much was missing.

Have I accumulated so little in my life as this? she wondered, oddly disturbed as much by the thought as by the emptiness.

Even most of the furniture had been his. He’d been nice, of course, offering to leave some of it, but she wanted everything of his, everything that might bring her back into contact with him, removed.

The effect was as if thieves had broken in and stolen anything that could be carried but had gotten scared off just before finishing the job. The drapes were hers, and the small stereo, the TV and its cheap stand, the six bookcases made of screw-it-together-yourself particleboard that sagged and groaned under the weight of her books, and the plants in the window. But only the big beanbag chair with the half dozen patches afforded a place to sit.

She went over to the sliding glass door that led to the tiny balcony and saw that the two cheap aluminum and plastic patio chairs and the little table she’d picked up at a garage sale were still there. So, too, were the worn chairs at the built-in kitchenette. He’d been sparing of the cutlery and glassware and had taken nothing save his abominable Cap’n Crunch cereal.

Feeling hollow and empty yet still distanced from the emotional shock, she put the small kettle on for tea and continued the inventory.

All her clothes were still there, of course, but even though they took up the vast majority of the closet space, there was an emptiness. The dresser and makeup table were just where they always were, but the room looked grotesque without the water bed, just the impression of where it had rested on the discolored and dirty carpet. She would have to tend to that right off the bat. She wondered if she could get a bed in four hours and doubted it; she’d have to either go to a motel tonight or sleep on the floor with just a pillow and sheets until it was delivered. There was no way in heaven that she could get as much as a twin mattress in the little Colt she was driving.

A sudden wave of insecurity washed over her, almost overwhelming her, and she dashed into the bathroom and then grabbed the sink as if to steady herself.

Funny how the bathroom had a calming effect. Maybe it was because, other than being minus his toiletries, it was intact. Then she looked at herself in the mirror, and some of the fear, the emptiness, returned.

She was thirty-six years old and, thanks to the two years she’d spent working at various odd jobs while waiting for an assistantship to open up so she could afford grad school, only seven years out of college. All that time she’d been a single-minded workaholic—push, push, push, drive, drive, drive. Two years teaching gut courses at junior college because even in an age when they were crying for scientists to teach, she’d discovered, there was a lot of resistance from the older male-dominated science faculties to hiring a young woman. All the research and academic excellence counted for little. Oh, they’d never come right out and said anything, but she knew the routine by now; at first she had been merely frustrated but was quickly clued in by her female colleagues at the junior college. “They never take you serious unless you’re well over forty because they think you’re going to teach for a while and then quit and have babies” and “They still believe deep down that old saw about women not being as good as men in math and science.”