“How’d they get in and out?” Marquoz asked.
“Zone gates,” Brazil replied. “In the middle of each hex is a gate—a big, black hole it looks like, shaped like a hexagon. It’ll take anybody in a hex to the appropriate Zone for him. There’s a lot of litt’e gates in Zone, that’ll take an individual back home. But while they might be considered matter transmitters in the same sense that Obie was able to move this whole world from one spot to another instantaneously, they will only take you from your home to Zone and back to your home. As set up, they’re no good for general transportation, although they can move inanimate objects and so are nice for trade. The Northern Hemisphere is a weird place, devoted to noncarbon-based life because it occurred to the Markovians that they might have evolved the wrong way. The south is carbon-based life. A special gate exists in each Zone to transport to the other so there can be some trade and contact between hemispheres.”
“And these hexes? They are sealed?” Yua asked, fascinated.
“Oh, no,” Brazil replied. “Their barriers are pure energy. But you’ve already been told a lot of this—about the technological limits and the like. I’m afraid I face a roughly forty-nine hundred kilometer walk through the Southern Hemisphere to the equator, where there is a physical barrier that keeps north and south divided. But it’s also a transportation system used to get Markovian technicians in and out of the Well of Souls. There are Avenues there, broad streets if you will, that form the borders of equatorial ‘hexes’—the only nonhexagons, since they have to stop at basically a straight line, they’re somewhat wing-shaped—to the doors to the Well of Souls.”
“The Well of Souls,” Marquoz echoed. “An odd name.”
Brazil shrugged. “Why the ‘Well’ I don’t know. The ‘Souls’ part is real enough. There’s something deep down in all sentient life that can’t be quantified but takes it a half-step from the animals. We call it the soul; religions are founded on it, and I have evidence it exists. At one point on the Well World a group of mystics who were convinced I was dying transferred me into the body of a deer. So there’s a soul that is you—it’s what the Well uses to change you into something else once you get there. The Markovians had a problem with souls. They couldn’t invent them. In order to start their prototype races they had to use people, if that’s the proper term, and change them. The Markovian artisans and philosophers and theoreticians got together and each designed a hex. Then they redesigned Markovians into races best suited to each engineered biosphere. The Markovian volunteers thus gave up their form, but, more than that, they gave up their immortality. They were convinced that what they were doing was right and that they should become mortal and primitive once more. And they lived, and died, and tried to make their cultures work. If they did work out—and cultural development was handicapped by each hex’s technological potential and the like—then the technicians went into the Well of Souls and made a few adjustments to newly developing planets in our expanding Universe so that they would develop into the reality being represented in the particular hex. At the proper evolutionary moment, the civilization in the hex would be transferred, seeding the planets with souls, so to speak. Then the old hex would be cleared away, scrubbed down, and turned over to a new designer.”
“Interesting,” Marquoz said. “But if that’s the case, who are all those people there now? Shouldn’t the place be bare as a billiard ball?”
“Well, there were always some who didn’t want to go in any group,” Brazil told them. “Since they were about to lose their home hexes, though, they had little choice. What you have now on the Well World are the last fifteen hundred and sixty races, successes and failures, that were created. The end of the line.”
“I noticed on the Well World that many of the Southern Hemisphere races were at least vaguely familiar,” Mavra put in. “Some—not all, of course. There were giant beaverlike creatures that seemed to have existed in human myth, according to my friend of the time, Renard, who was a classicist. Centaurs were in the old legends, he said, and winged horses, and even Agitar—goatlike devil creatures. I never was clear as to why.”
Brazil shrugged. “Well, by the time you were down to the last of the race you were down to the bottom of the imaginative barrel in most cases. As a result, those of limited imagination, pressed to create a race, stole ideas from the animals and plants of other hexes. A lot of the subordinate stuff, the plants and animals, is also similar from one hex to another, again with variations. The Well made them just different enough that they can’t breed outside their home hex. That included the vast majority of microorganisms, so you can’t have a widespread plague, either. As to the myths, well, I told you that those today are the leftovers. Some didn’t want to be leftovers, particularly the thinkers, those with something to contribute. They occasionally hitched rides when other groups were seeded, sometimes legitimately, when conditions warranted and you had a kindly supervisor, sometimes by crook. Our own Earth had a small colony of centaurs—brilliant men and women—and a number of other races both legit and problem oriented. They didn’t last. The illegals the Markovians helped exterminate, finally; the good ones, like the centaurs, were mostly murdered by men because they were different.”
He paused and suddenly seemed distant, as if his mind were off in another place. “The Spartans of ancient Greece hunted down the last of them like animals. They stuffed a pair for their big museum. I couldn’t stop it—but I burned down that damned museum.” He turned full attention back to them. “There were others, many others,” he said, “but they were all wiped out. I suspect that that centaur business is the reason the Rhone haven’t a real trust for humans. Who knows? Maybe a now-vanished Rhone civilization got to the stars earlier and discovered the facts. Hard to say. They know, though.”
“The Well recognizes you,” Mavra pointed out. “Why don’t you just have it bring you to it? Why take such a big walk?”
Brazil paused a moment, thoughtful. “Mainly because I can’t talk to it until I’m inside. It figures I am a technician, so it sends me where I’m supposed to be—the human hex. I have to start from there. Worse, those who are in power on the Well World, particularly those with access to good records, know this. They’ll try and stop me from reaching the Well—and they know the hex where I’ve got to start. It puts me at something of a disadvantage.”
“Why should they want to stop you?” Yua asked.
“Obie said that the Well World would survive yout actions.”
“It will,” Brazil agreed. “Mostly because it’s maintained by a separate computer. But, you see, my actions will wipe out the civilized Universe. Oh, I suppose one or two races—maybe more—will survive, the race or two that evolved naturally instead of through the Well. But the rest—gone. The Universe will be a pretty dead place. So, I pull the plug. I fix the big machine—or, rather, I let it fix itself and help where I can.” He turned and looked them squarely in the eye. “Now, who do I use to reseed this Universe?”