They moved on in eerie silence, lights suddenly popping on in front of them, out in back of them, as they traveled. The walkway itself glowed radiantly as far as she could see, although no light source was visible. She noticed that the walkway was speeding up and that they were now heading down as well as forward, down into the depths of the planet. Then it opened into a chamber, dimly lit, and below them was a great hexagon outlined in light.
“That’s the Well Access Gate,” he told her. “One of six, really. It can take you any place you want to go within the Well. We’re going to the central control area and monitoring stations. I have to check on things first of all, see if everything will work as planned, and, of course, see just how badly damaged the Well really is by all this. Maybe, just maybe, Obie was wrong and we won’t have to do anything really drastic after all.”
He stepped off the walkway when it reached the hexagon and walked into its area. She hesitated a moment, then followed him. All light vanished and there was the uncomfortable sensation of falling for a moment, then the whole world was abruptly flooded with bright light, and she was back on solid flooring again.
It was a huge chamber, perhaps a kilometer in diameter, semicircular, the ceiling curving up and over them almost the same distance as it was across the room. Corridors, hundreds of them, led off in all directions. The Gate was in the center of the dome, and Brazil quickly stepped off, Mavra following, nervous that if she remained much longer, the thing could zap her to some remote part of this complex where she would never be found.
Walls, ceiling, even the floor, all appeared to be made of tiny hexagon-shaped crystals of polished white mica that reflected the light and glittered like millions of tiny diamonds.
Brazil stopped and pointed a tentacle back over the Gate. Suspended by force fields, about midway between the Gate and the apex of the dome, was a huge model of the Well World, turning very, very slowly. It had a terminator, and darkness on half its face, and seemed to be made of the same stuff as the walls, although the hexagons on the model were very large and there were dark areas at the poles and a dark band around the equator. The sphere was covered with a thin, transparent shell that also seemed segmented, its clear hexagons matching those below.
“It doesn’t look as pretty as the real thing does from space,” Mavra commented, “but its impressive all the same.”
“You can see the slight difference in reflected light on each hex,” he pointed out. “That’s Markovian writing. Numbers, really, from 1 to 1,560, in base-6 math, of course. The numbers aren’t in any logical order, though, since over a million races, at the outside, were created here and only the last batch, the final 1,560, remain, the leftover prototypes. As soon as one was cleared it would be completely stripped and then rebuilt to the new project and assigned a new number from the cleared hexes in order of new activation. That’s how Glathriel can be number 41 and Ambreza, right next to it, 386. It’s sloppy, but, what the hell, it wasn’t important.”
“It’s quite impressive and decorative,” she commented approvingly.
He chuckled. “Oh, that’s not just decoration. That’s it. That’s the brain that runs the Well World. The working model for the Well of Souls. It’s the heart of the whole thing, really, since it’s also the main power source to the Well and supplies the basic equations needed to operate properly. In a sense, it’s a giant computer program. It draws its power from a singularity that extends all the way into an alternate universe. If the Well’s beyond a quick fix, what we’ll have to do is disconnect the Well of Souls from that device, which will not affect the Well World but which will have the effect of clearing the programming completely from the Well of Souls itself. Then, when we hook it back up again, it’ll get the message as if new data. Since it’s a slow, progressive feed, as the program reaches the damaged area it will halt and wait while emergency programs go into effect to repair or replace whatever’s needed.”
“You can’t selectively shut it off, say, to the damaged areas?” she asked hopefully.
“Nope. Oh, it’s a good idea, and, I guess, theoretically possible, but we’d need the whole Markovian computer staff here to do it. It would mean completely reprogramming the Well of Souls—that is, writing a new program for it. You can do that with the Well World but not with the big computer, since they never thought it would have to be done twice in the universe, after all.”
“So what we’re going to do, then, is more or less go back in time, recreating the conditions that existed just before the big computer was activated, then essentially repeat what they did,” she said, trying to get it straight.
“Right. And the self-repair and correcting circuits will then go to work on the damage. They were put there because nobody really knew if the Well was 100 percent, whether or not they hadn’t made some mistakes, design or construction errors, things like that. So the program is self-correcting; when it hits a section that isn’t right, it alters or changes it so that it is correct.”
“So what do we do first?” she asked him.
He chuckled. “First we go down that corridor there. There’s a central control room not far—all those corridors lead to loads of control rooms, one for each race sent out from here—a lot more than 1,560, I might add.” He led the way, and again she followed.
They came to a hexagonal doorway that irised open, and a light switched on within. Inside was some sort of control room, filled with switches, knobs, levers, buttons, and the like, and what looked like a large black projection screen. Enormous dials and gauges registered she knew not what; there was no way to tell what any of the things did.
A tentacle went out and touched a small panel on a control console, activating what appeared to be a screen but what was a recessed tunnel, oval in shape, stretching back as far as the eye could see, a yellow-white light covered with trillions of tiny black specks. Frantic little bolts of electricity, or something like it, shot between all of them, creating a furious energy storm, a continuous spider’s web of moving energy.
“Let’s get you squared away first,” Brazil muttered. There was suddenly the sound of a great pump or some kind of relay closing, then opening, from deep within the planet and all around her. It sounded almost like the beating heart of some enormous beast.
“I’m just bringing the power up,” he told her. “Don’t be alarmed. The dials, switches, and such over there are main controls for the mechanisms. Minor stuff like this I can do without any sort of controls, although we’ll need some when the power’s cut. Okay, that ought to do it.”
There was a steady, omnipresent thump-thump, thump-thump through the control room.
“Okay, main control room up to full power,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “Activate… now!”
The world seemed to explode all around her. Vision expanded to almost 360 degrees, hearing, smell, all the senses flared into new intensity such as she had never known before. She could feel and sense the energies all around her, feel the enormous power surges that were suddenly so real they took on an almost physical form, as if she could just reach out and take hold of them, bend them any way she wanted. It was a tremendous, exhilarating, heady feeling, a rush of strength and power beyond belief. She was Superwoman, she was a goddess, she was supreme…