Watcher At The Well - Echoes Of The Well Of Souls Part 1

Chalker, Jack L.

Watcher at the Well.

Echoes of the Well of Souls.

Prologue:

Near an Unnamed Neutron Star in the Galaxy M-22

IN THE NEARLY ONE BILLION YEARS IT HAD BEEN IN ITS LONELYimprisonment, it had never lost its conviction that this uni-verse required a G.o.d.

For eons beyond countless eons it had traveled through s.p.a.ce in its crystalline coc.o.o.n, 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 d.a.m.nation 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 al-ter its imprisonment, for it was of the First Matter.

Indeed, each time the system had been reset, its own power had increased; each re-creation required so much en-ergy 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 con-trol 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 G.o.ds can make mistakes; their mistakes, however, were of the sort that no one but another G.o.d 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 instru-mentalities, 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 s.p.a.ce-time itself, apparently wrought byartificial means, the reset had proved the need for a cos-mic 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 ma.s.sive power drain, the one tiny fraction of a nanosecond when energy was not being equally applied as parts of the universe were selec-tively 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 ma.s.sive acceleration, to even-tually propel it, like a missile in a sling, to speeds ap-proaching that of light, bending time and s.p.a.ce, catching it in the eddies and currents of s.p.a.ce and punching it right through a tunnel, a hole in s.p.a.ce-time created by the series of ma.s.sive 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 s.p.a.ce and time could never fully contain, a being that had spent long eons plan-ning its rule and reign. It would have to meet the Watch-man 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 advan-tage of the position.

A Small Town In Georgia

IT HAD BEEN A SHOCK OPENING THE DOOR TO THE APARTMENTand seeing just how much was missing.

Have I acc.u.mulated so little in my life as this?she won-dered, 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 ev-erything 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.sware 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 s.p.a.ce, there was an emptiness. The dresser and makeup table were just where they always were, but the room looked gro-tesque 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 mat-tress 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 a.s.sistantship 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 be-cause 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 fe-male 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 sci-ence."

But they also, she had to admit, credited experience. Not that she hadn't tried that route, but the big openings for her were in the oil industry, and that meant both swallowing a lot of her principles and old ideals and also facing the probability of going off to Third World countries where women had no rights at all and trying to do a job there.

Finally she gotthis job, one she really loved, thanks to an old professor of hers who had become department head. As an instructor, teaching undergrads basic courses, it hadn't been the fun it should have been, but it allowed her to work as an a.s.sistant on the real research, even if it wasn'ther grant and wouldn't merit more than a "thanks" in the articles that might be published out of it. Still, she'd done more work in the lab than the professors whowould get the credit, trying to show them, prove to them that she was in their league and on their level.

And now she was thirty-six going on thirty-seven, not yet tenured, teaching elementary courses to humanities stu-dents who didn't give a d.a.m.n but needed these few basic science courses so they could get B.S. instead of B.A. de-grees. And she was alone in this mostly stripped apartment, going nowhere as usual and doing it alone.

Not thathe'd droppedher. She had been the one to break it off, the one to give the ultimatum. It was always under-stood that they had an "open" relationship, that they were free to see others and not be tied down. They even laughed at the start about making sure they both had safe s.e.x and got regular tests for any nasties that might be picked up. And she'd meant it at the time. The problem was she'd never fooled around with anybody else after he'd moved in, even though she'd had the chance. She simply didn't need anybody else. But he'd kept doing it and kept doing it and kept doing it until he'd done it with a regularity that finally showed that he was not about to slow down or become mo-nogamous.

She felt guilty, even now, for being jealous. Worse, it wasn't based on morality but on her ego. She'd never ex-pected to be so wounded, and it bothered her.What do they have that I don't? What do they give him that 1 can't? Am I thatbad in bed?

Best not to dwell on it now. Best to pick up the pieces and go on to something else. She was good at that, she thought ruefully. It seemed like all her life she was picking up the pieces and going on to something else.

She slipped out of her clothes, removed her gla.s.ses, grabbed some towels, and went in to take a shower. The mirror on the shower wall reflected her back to herself with no illusions. She stepped very close to the gla.s.s so that she could see it clearly, her vision without the gla.s.ses being perfectly clear for only a foot or so in front of her, then stared at the reflection as if it were someone else, someone she hardly knew.

Her black hair was cut very short, in a boyish cut; it was easy to wash and easy to manage, and it had fewer gray hairs to pluck that way. Her face was a basic oval shape with brown eyes, thin lashes, a somewhat too large nose, and a mouth maybe a bit too wide, but not much. Not an unattractive face, neither cute nor beautiful, but with matu-rity creeping into its features, hardening them a bit-or was that her imagination?

Average. That's what she was: average. Not a bad figure but no bathing beauty type, either. b.r.e.a.s.t.s a little too small, hips too wide. With the right clothes she could be very at-tractive, but this way, unadorned, her body would win no prizes, no envious gazes, no second looks. She looked like a million other women.Generic, that's me, she thought glumly.Iought to have a little black bar code tattooed on my forehead.

That was the trouble, really, in academia as well. Therewere women at the top of most scientific disciplines, in-cluding hers, none of whom would have any problems be-ing wooed from one major chair to another, writing their own tickets their own way, but they were very few in number because the deck was still stacked. Those women were the geniuses, the intellects who could not be denied. As "attractive"

was to "knockout," so "smart" was to "bril-liant." Intellectually, she knew that the vast majority of peo-ple, male or female, could not have attained a doctorate in a field like hers, but it just wasn'tquite enough. Enough to finally teach at a great university, but only as "Instructor in the Physical Sciences"-not just Physics 101, which was bad enough, but, G.o.d help her, "Introduction to the Sci-ences for Humanities Students"-and a lowly a.s.sistant on research projects whose grants and control were held by middle-aged male professors.

The shower helped a little, but not much, since it left time for more brooding. Was it the fates that struck her where she was, or was it rather lapses in herself? Was she demanding too much of a guy and maybe too much of her-self? With people starving around the world and the work-ing poor standing with their families in soup kitchen lines, did she have any right to complain about a dead-end life if it was such a comfortable, yuppified dead end? Was she be-ing just daddy's spoiled little girl, in a situation many would envy, depressed because she couldn't have it all?

A line from one of her undergraduate seminars came to her, fairly or not, and tried to give her some relief from those hard questions. The professor had been a leading feminist and sociologist, and she'd said, "It's not tough enough being a woman in this day and age, we also have to be saddled with some kind of constant guilt trip, too."

She was, she knew, at a crisis point in her own life, no matter how miserable other lives might be. She was at an age when biological clocks ticked loudly, at an age when ease of career change was fading fast with each pa.s.sing page on the calendar, when any move that could be made had to be made or the status quo would become unbreak-able. At some point in nearly everybody's life there came the time when one came to a cliff's edge and saw a mon-strous gap between oneself and the other side, a side that was nearly impossible to make out. She was up for tenure and possible promotion next year, and she'd not heard any-thing to indicate she wouldn't get it, although one could never be sure. It was something she wanted, yet it also meant being here, on this side of the chasm, for the rest of her life.

Or she could break away and take real risks and, like most people who did so, fall into the chasm. But all the people who got what and where they wanted, the satisfied movers and shakers, had taken that same risk and made it to the other side. Not all ofthose people were happier than they'd been before, but many were. The trouble was, she was on the old side for making that leap. She was, after all, in this situation now because she craved stability, not earth-quakes. Taking a risk in her personal life would mean say-ing yes to the first guy who proposed who wasn't a geek or a pervert. And professionally, to take a risk would mean first having someplace to jump to, and the offers weren't exactly pouring in, nor did risky opportunity just fall from the sky.

The vortex was never black; rather, it revealed the under-side, the sinews, the crisscrossing lines of mathematical force that sustained and essentially stabilized the relevant parts of the universe. The Kraang examined those lines, noted the symmetry and precision, and, this time, noted the relay and junction points. Now, after all those millennia, the slight deviation the Kraang had been able to induce in the last reset had paid off; a line was being followed, not avoided as always before. The Watchman's line, the focal point for probability itself, the emergency signal and warn-ing beacon for the physics of the governable portions of the cosmos . . .

The emergence, as always, was like suddenly being cat-apulted 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 crea-tures 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 aberra-tion 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 G.o.d of the universe with no limits and no gover-nor. Automatic maintenance meant automatic response; the experiments were supposed to be controlled, not super-vised.

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 a.s.sorted larger moons were all dead save the experiment it-self! 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 frag-ments that still worked together, trapped into sufficient co-hesion 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 b.u.mp, a wrenching jar-its con-tainer had been struck head on! An asteroid, small yet ef-fective, 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 under-stood. 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, acceler-ate it to tremendous speed, sufficient to generate a s.p.a.ce-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 Watch-man, 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 de-partment 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 cam-pus 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 ques-tions as to the exact angle of entry, how much true ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 wa-gered 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 hemi-spheres 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 organiza-tions as well gearing up to go in, but the Brazilian government is very concerned about possible injuries or deaths and wants n.o.body 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 frustra-tion 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."

She sat for a moment, not quite wanting to believe the implications of the conversation. Finally, worried that shehad misunderstood, she asked, "Are you asking if I would go?"

He nodded. "Very short notice." He looked at his watch. "You'd have to leave for home now. Pack in an hour or so. Your pa.s.sport is current?"

"Yes, but-"

"Don't forget it. They've got the visas. They'll send a helicopter here for you and your stuff. You'll be on a pri-vate charter with their team leaving Hartsfield at seven to-night."

"But-but . . . Why me?"

He looked almost apologetic. "Grad a.s.sistants can cover your courses with no sweat, but Doctor Samms is in a rush to get his research organized for a presentation at the AAS next week, and both Kelly and I are, frankly, too old for this sort of thing, as much as I'd love to see that sucker come down-pardon the expression. n.o.body else is quali-fied to observe the event and free enough to go who also wouldn't be stiff as a board and look like an a.s.s on televi-sion. So it's either you or they call another university. And I'm afraid I have to call them back in less than ten minutes or they're going to do that anyway."

"I-I hardly know what to say. Yes, ofcourse I'll go. I-oh, my G.o.d! I better get packing!" The fact that he was being fairly left-handed about it all, that she'd gotten the job only because she was the only one so unimportant that she could be easily spared, didn't bother her. This was the kind of luck she dreamed about, the one break upon which she might be able to stake out a scientific position that would be so unique that it would ensure her stature and prominence.

"We'll make sure you're covered," Hicks a.s.sured her. "Five o'clock this afternoon they'll land to pick you up at the medical center heliport. Don't forget your pa.s.sport!"

She wanted to kiss the old boy, who now could call her "Lori" any time he wanted, but she was in too much of a hurry. Jeez-she'd have to get the suitcases out of the stor-age locker, haul them up. What to take? She had little clothing or equipment for this kind of trip. And makeup- this was television! And the laptop, of course, and . . . How theh.e.l.l was she going to pack and make it in just three hours?

It was tough, but she managed, knowing she'd forgotten many vital things and hoping that she would have a chance to pick them up in Brazil before going into the wild. The mere hauling of the suitcases and the packing had her gasp-ing for breath, and she began to wonder if she was up to the coming job. She began to feel both her age and the ef-fects of letting the spa membership lapse about a year earlier. She also worried about how much of that clothing, particularly the jeans, would fit. In the months since she'd thrown Harry out, she'd found solace for her dark mood in large quant.i.ties of chocolate and other sugary things and generally letting herself go.

Well, the h.e.l.l with it. If they were going to give her this kind of notice, they could d.a.m.ned well buy her appropriate jungle clothing.

She locked up and hauled the suitcases to the car, discov-ering for the first time that one wheel on the big suitcase was missing. She just wasn'tready for this, not with this kind of deadline-but she knew she needed it, needed it bad.

The helicopter was just about on time. It was, she saw, amused, the one Atlanta's pop radio station used for traffic reports and had that big logo on the side. She wondered how the commuters were going to get home tonight.

The pilot got out, bending slightly under the rotors, and put out his hand. "h.e.l.lo! I'm Jim Syzmanski," he said in a shouted Georgia-accented voice. "You're Doctor Sutton?"

"Yes. I'm sorry for the bulk, but they didn't give me much notice on this."

He looked at the two suitcases. "No sweat. You ought to see what some of 'em take to a mere accident." He picked them up as if they weighed nothing and stored them in back of the seats. "Get in, and we'll get you goin'."

Although not new to helicopters, she'd never been in one of these small, light types with two seats and a bubble, and it was a little unnerving for a while. Still, the pilot knew his business; it was smooth and comfortable, and they were ap-proaching the airport in a mere twenty minutes, about two hours less than it would have taken to drive and park.