Exiles at the Well of Souls

South Zone

Ben Yulin groaned and awoke slowly. He tried to move, but pain shot through him. He could tell he was in a bed of some kind, that he was naked, and had some sort of blanket over him—but nothing more.

He opened his eyes, then moaned, and closed them again. It took several seconds until he was willing to try it again.

They were still there.

Closest was a large furry creature in a lab coat with what looked like a modified stethoscope around its thick neck. The thing looked like nothing so much as a giant beaver, complete with two huge buck teeth in front. Only the eyes were different—they were bright and clear and a deep-gold color, and radiated intelligence and warmth. Behind the beaver was the six-armed snake-man named Serge Ortega, looking concerned under his snow-white brush. The plant creature was there, too, completing the bizarre scene.

Yulin looked around uneasily, then spotted the figure of Renard, wearing some kind of great cloak tied around his neck, over near the door, looking bored. This seemed to snap him out of it.

The shape and manner was Renard, but the indefinable aura of confidence and control from the Renard-like figure marked him for Yulin as Antor Trelig. With that knowledge also came Trelig’s final warning, and Ben Yulin tried to relax, to bring Mavra Chang to the fore.

“Where am I?” he managed, then coughed.

“In a hospital,” the strange rodentlike creature replied. Yulin was surprised to note that the creature was actually speaking Confederation plain talk—with considerable difficulty, true, but understandable nonetheless.

The snake-man spoke up, his own Confederation speech clear and perfect. “Dr. Muhar is an Ambreza,” he explained, at the same time explaining nothing. Seeing this, he added, “There is a hex on the Well World with your kind of people in it. The Ambreza are neighbors. Your people have had a bad time of it, and the Ambreza are used to working with your medical problems. That’s why we summoned him.”

“What happened to me?” Ben asked, still unable to move.

The Ambreza turned to Ortega, who spoke the required language as if born to it.

“You collapsed in the Polar Gate,” the snake-man reminded him. “When we got that spacesuit off you, we found out you were a mess. Black and blue all over, three ribs broken, one of which, because of your walking so far with it, had dislocated so badly it punctured a couple of organs.”

“Can you heal me?” Yulin asked, concerned.

The Ambreza clucked. “With a lot of time, yes,” it said in a high-pitched voice, sounding like a recording played slightly too fast. “But it will not be necessary. We will put you through the Well.”

Yulin tried to move, couldn’t. Drugs? It made no difference.

“Renard, here, has been filling us in on what’s been going on,” Ortega said. “You all have been through a lot. I’d like to keep you around a while, but both Renard and Citizen Zinder have a sponge problem, and only the Well can cure that. Your injuries are critical. I don’t know how you kept going.”

Yulin laughed. “Fear. When you’re running out of air, the pain just doesn’t seem important.”

The snake-man nodded. “I can understand that. A good attitude. We had to do a very quick operation just to save your life, that is, Dr. Muhar and his associates did. Lifesaving was our only goal, so we went the most direct route. Now, I don’t want you to panic when I tell you this, because it is not permanent, but right now you are totally paralyzed.”

That didn’t stop Yulin from starting in shock. Emotions welled up inside, emotions that may have been Chang’s or his or both. Almost to his own surprise, he started crying softly.

“I said the condition wasn’t permanent,” Ortega assured the stricken human. “Nothing is permanent on the Well World when you just get here—and sometimes not even later. Take me. I was a man of your own race, tough and small like you, when I came here. The Well World cures what’s wrong with you, but it changes you, too.”

Yulin suppressed a sniffle. “What—what do you mean?”

“I was waiting until you came around to brief everyone. I’ve put the time to good use now, anyway. Now we know what we’ve got here, and that is a relief in and of itself.” He turned to Trelig and nodded. “Bring in the girl.”

Trelig went outside for a moment, then brought Zinder in. The conditioning was holding, Yulin noted. She reacted to the sight of Yulin in that condition exactly as the real Nikki would have reacted to the real Mavra.

“As I said, I would like to have kept at least one of you here for some time while we coordinate our actions on these new conditions,” Ortega continued, “but with the sponge problem on the two of you and Citizen Chang’s critical nature—we need a lot more than this clinic to help you—this isn’t possible. As a result, the Embassy Council has decided that you are to be briefed and run through the Well as quickly as possible.”

Trelig spoke for the first time. “This is an embassy, then? I guessed as much.”

Ortega nodded. “All the Southern Hemisphere hexes have places here, although some don’t use them. It’s the only means of intercommunication possible. There are fifteen hundred sixty hexes on the Well World. The seven hundred eighty south of the Equatorial Barrier—you might have seen that it is really a barrier, too—are either carbon-based life or life that can exist in a carbon-based environment. The Northern half, the other seven hundred eighty, contain non-carbon-based life. You experienced Uchjin, in the North, and you can appreciate how different some of the forms are there.”

All three of the humans nodded in agreement at that.

“Anyway, let me start at the beginning. The beginning, as far as this place is concerned, was a race of beings your people call the Markovians. They were a great race. Looked something like giant human hearts with six evenly spaced tentacles. Just like human numerology generally was based on five, tens, or twenties, because of the number of digits, their base mathematics was six. The number dominated their whole lives—which is why we have hexagons, and why there are fifteen hundred sixty here. Almost a perfect number for folks who thought in sixes. There is even an idea that they had six sexes, but we’ll let that go.

“Anyway, they reached the highest point of physical evolution it is believed possible to attain, and, as importantly, they reached the highest level of material technology possible as well. Their worlds were spread over many galaxies—not solar systems, galaxies. They’d build a local computer on one, program it with everything they could imagine, then put a rock crust on top of it. They built their cities there, and each Markovian was mentally coupled to the local brain. The architecture was only a common frame of reference, for, linked to their computers, they could simply wish for anything they wanted and the computer did an energy-to-matter conversion and there it was.”

“Sounds like a godlike existence,” Trelig commented. “What happened to them? I know a little about the Markovians. They’re all dead.”

“All but one,” agreed Ortega. “Basically, what killed them was sheer boredom. Immortal, every wish fulfilled, and they felt as if they were rotting—or missing something. The height of material attainment was theirs, and it wasn’t enough. Their best brains—and what brains they must have been!—got together and finally decided that, somewhere, the Markovian development had taken a wrong turn. They decided that the race was going to rot and die from paradise, or they could do the other thing.”

“Other thing?” Ben prompted.

Ortega nodded. “First they built the Well World, the ultimate Markovian computer. Instead of a thin layer of computer in a real planet, the whole planet was one massive computer. If a thin strip could create anything locally, then imagine a solid planet, about forty thousand kilometers around, of Markovian computer! That’s what we’re sitting on top of. Then they added the standard crust, so we’re a little over forty-thousand kilometers in diameter.”

“But why all the hexes, the different races on top?” Trelig asked the snake-man.

“That was the next step in the great plan,” Ortega replied. “The greatest artisans of the Markovian race were then called in, all the material and philosophical artists they had. Each one was given a hex to play with. Each hex is a miniature world. Near the equator, a side runs about three hundred fifty-five kilometers, six hundred fifteen kilometers between opposite sides. They were carefully arranged. And in each one, the artisans were allowed to create a complete, self-contained biosphere, with a single dominant form of life and all supporting life for a closed ecosystem. The dominant life, at the start, were Markovian volunteers themselves.”

“You mean,” Trelig put in, aghast, “they gave up paradise to become someone else’s playthings?”

The Ulik shrugged, which was something with six arms. “From sheer boredom there was no lack of volunteers. They became mortal, had to accept the rules of the game as set up by the artisans, and prove it out. If the system did prove out, the master computer established a world-set for the particular biosphere somewhere in the universe, and then the natives were transferred to it. They could speed up time, slow it down, anything. The world they entered was consistent with the laws of physics, even if it was created speeded up. At the right evolutionary moment, zap! The race was inserted. Then a new race was created to replace the one that left, and the experiments started all over again.”

“What you’re saying,” Yulin commented, “is that we are all Markovians. That is, their descendants.”

Ortega nodded. “Yes, exactly. And the races here now are the last batch—that is, the descendants of the last batch. Some didn’t go or want to go, some hadn’t proved out, when there became too few Markovians to supervise the project. We’re the byproducts here of the shutdown.”

“And these races have lived here since?” Trelig asked.

“Oh, yes,” Ortega replied. “And time exists here. You get old, you die. Some die young, some live longer than you’d think possible, but there’s a generational turnover anyway. The population’s maintained by the computer—if a hex gets too heavily populated, the birth rate goes to a minus for a while. Too low a population from disasters, fights, whatever, and suddenly a sexy race gets back up there. The population varies with each hex, of course. Some races are big enough that there are only a quarter-million or so people, others can handle up to three million.”

“I don’t understand why pests and plagues aren’t spread over the place,” Yulin told him. “And how come there aren’t a lot of wars? It would seem alien races on the whole wouldn’t like the others.”

“That’s true,” Ortega admitted. “But you might call it good systems engineering. Pests there are, but there are subtle changes in soil or atmospheric content that tend to inhibit or stop them, also geographical barriers—mountains, oceans, deserts, and the like. As for bacteria and viruses, we have them aplenty, but the various racial systems are just different enough that microbes that work against one race won’t have any effect on another.”

He paused for a minute, then remembered the other part of the question.

“As for wars,” he continued, “they’re not practical. Oh, there are local fights, but nothing catastrophic. Hexes are so arranged that the ground rules differ. We believe that that was done to simulate the problems from lack of resources or somesuch on the various real worlds the people would be going to. As I said, the natural laws had to be maintained. So in some hexes, everything works. In some, there is limited technology—say, steam engines work, but electrical generators won’t hold a charge. In some only muscle power will do. That’s what happened to your ship—it flew into a limited nontech zone, it wouldn’t work, and down you came.”

Trelig brightened. “So that’s what happened! And that’s why the power did come on for the time I needed to get the wings down and window cover up! We had drifted over a high-tech hex!”

Ortega nodded. “Exactly.”

“But,” Yulin objected, “wouldn’t a high-tech hex conquer a low-tech one?”

Serge Ortega chuckled. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But, no, it doesn’t work that way. A high-tech hex becomes dependent on its machines, as you were in the North. It learns how to maybe make flying machines and fantastic guns and such—and then it has to invade a hex where none of that works. And where two hexes of the same type border, well, one is land and the other water, or one has an atmosphere extremely uncomfortable to the other, or something like that. One general, long ago, did try conquest by allying various kinds of hexes in order to have the proper one for each hex fight in the appropriate manner; but his plan worked only to a point. Some hexes he had to skip for atmospheric conditions or tough terrain or the like, and eventually his supply lines for all these races grew too long to sustain. The unconquered ones chopped him to pieces in the end. There have been no wars since—and that was over eleven hundred years ago.”

They were silent for a minute, then Trelig asked, “I know how we got here, but—you said you were once one of us. How did you get here?”

Ortega grinned. “We get occasional new arrivals all the time—about a hundred a year. When the Markovians left their last planets, they didn’t turn off their computers—couldn’t. There is a kind of matter transmission—we don’t understand it—connecting all the worlds with this one. The last Markovian simply couldn’t close the door behind him. It opened whenever someone wanted it to open, and those old brains can’t tell a Markovian remote and altered descendant from the real thing. So if you really want the door to open, it will and you wind up here. In ninety-nine percent of the cases, the people involved didn’t even know about the doors. They just wished they were somewhere else, or somebody else, or that everything was different when they happened to be in the neighborhood of a door. I literally flew through one—the planet was mostly gone, but just enough remained.”

“You knew about them?” Yulin prodded.

“No, of course not. I was getting old and I was bored and I could see nothing but a dreary sameness in the future until death claimed me. You get introspective when you’re a pilot. Pop! Wound up here.”

“But how did you get turned into a giant snake?” Trelig asked him, without the slightest trace of embarrassment.

Ortega chuckled. “Well, when you first arrive somebody greets you. You’re what they call an Entry. They brief you, if they can, then shoot you through the Well Gate. It basically processes you into the computer. By a system of classification we don’t know or understand, the computer then remakes you into one of the seven hundred eighty races here and drops you into the hex native to that form. You get acclimation thrown in, so you get used to being what you are pretty quickly. Then you’re on your own.”

“But the matter-transmission system is still on,” Trelig noted.

“Yes and no,” the Ulik responded. “There is usually a Zone Gate and sometimes two in each hex. You can use that to go from your hex to here, South Polar Zone, and from here back to your own hex. But should you be ten hexes away and go through the Gate, you’ll still wind up here—and then back home. The big Well input, however, is that alone—you can come here from a Markovian world, but not go back. That was done, I suspect, to commit the original volunteers who had second thoughts. The only other gates are the ones between North and South zones, the one you came through. The Uchjin—those creatures you first saw—didn’t know who you were, but they knew you didn’t belong there or in the Northern Hemisphere. They passed the buck to North Zone, and they sent you down here. Now it’s your turn to go through the Well.”

Trelig looked uneasy. “We become something else? Some other creature?” he said, uneasily.

Ortega nodded. “That’s right. Oh, there’s a one in seven hundred eighty shot of staying what you call human, but it’s unlikely. You have to do it. You have no choice. There’s no other way out.”

They considered that. “Those others—the Entries. Are there… nonhuman entries?”

“Sure!” the Ulik answered. “Lots. Most, in fact. Even some real surprises—creatures that are nontech here, proving that it’s easier where they are than the problem set for them here. And some high-tech ones we’ve never seen. Even the North has a bunch, almost as many as we have. We have here a collection of stored spacesuits in forms and sizes you wouldn’t believe. We use them occasionally when somebody has to go north. There’s some trade, you know. We have tiny translator devices, for example, that are grown in a crystal world up there that needs iron for some reason only they know. The things work. Anybody wearing one will understand and be understood by any other race, no matter how alien.”

“You mean there isn’t a common language here?” Yulin almost exclaimed.

Ortega gave that low, throaty chuckle again. “Oh, no! Fifteen hundred sixty races, fifteen hundred sixty languages. When life and surroundings are different, you need to think differently. When you go through the Well you’ll emerge thinking in the language of your new race. Even now I have to translate, though, by practicing with other Entries. I’ve become quite proficient at it.”

“Then we’ll still remember Confederation.” Trelig’s words were more a statement than a question.

“Remember it, yes,” the snake-man replied. “And use it, if your physical anatomy permits. A translator causes problems, though. You automatically get translated, so managing a third tongue is nearly impossible. But with a translator you hardly need it. If your new race uses them, try to get one. They’re handy things.” He paused, looked at the plant-thing and the Ambreza, seeming to note some worsening in Yulin’s paralysis. “I think it’s time,” he concluded softly.

They nodded, and a second Ambreza came in and two giant beavers moved Yulin carefully onto a stretcher.

“But I don’t—” Trelig started to protest, but Ortega cut him short.

“Now, you can ask questions forever, but you have the sponge and she has even more immediate problems. If you can ever get to a Zone Gate, come back and visit. But now, you go.” The tone was very insistent. There would be no more argument. The fact that Trelig and Zinder didn’t actually have a sponge problem was beside the point; their own cover story had rushed things.

They came finally to a room similar to the Zone Gate they’d used in getting from North to South.

Yulin went in first; he had no choice. He thanked them all, and hoped he would see them again. Then the two stretcher-bearers upended the body of Mavra Chang so it fell forward into the black wall. Zinder looked hesitant and had to be coaxed, but then he went. Finally, Trelig was left alone with the curious assembly of aliens. He was resigned. There was much to be learned, but his hand was forced. There would be other times, he told himself.

He stepped into the blackness.

Ortega sighed, turned to Vardia. “Any news of the other ship?” he asked.

“None,” replied the Czillian, the mobile plant-creature who had met them. “Are they as important now as they were?”

Ortega nodded. “You bet. If what those people told me was true, we have some first-class villains up there, probably on the loose. And two of them know a hell of a lot about Markovian mathematics. Dangerous people. If they should fall into the wrong hands, and that ship were rebuilt so they got back to this New Pompeii and its computer—maybe they could lick the problems. They would control the Well.”

“That’s pretty far-fetched,” the Czillian objected.

Ortega sighed. “Yeah, but so was a funny little Jew named Nathan Brazil, and you remember what he turned out to be.” The plant-thing bowed, the equivalent of a nod. “The last, living Markovian,” it breathed.

“I wonder why this crisis hasn’t attracted him?” Ortega mused.

“Because it’s our crisis,” Vardia replied. “Remember, to the Well this isn’t a problem at all.”