Echoes of the Well of Souls

during a trip to the north cascades up lake chelan in
Washington State back in 1976, the Well World was bom. This account has been published elsewhere
(Dance Band on the Titanic,
Del Rey, 1988) and won't be repeated here, but if you missed it, it gives as fully as I can explain it the creative processes which led, later that year, to the writing of
Midnight at the Well of Souls
(Del Rey, 1977 and ever after).

Midnight
became my big hit, all the more so because it did it without any prior successes (my first novel,
A Jungle of Stars,
published the preceding year, sold okay but wasn't exactly a massive hit). Its fate was that it became, through means that no one can explain, a "campus cult classic" of the period—that is, a book everybody just
had
to read. Its sales, not only in the U.S. but in Britain, Germany, Denmark, and many other countries, have continued strong in the sixteen years since it was written, and it essentially made my career as a professional novelist.

It also brought me to a kind of personal fork in the road where I either jumped one way and risked everything or took the other and played my life safe. I was thirty-three years old and teaching history, and I had tenure at a time when history positions were few and far between. The safe road was to keep teaching until retirement and write, perhaps, a book every year or two when I had the time as a kind of profitable hobby. The other route was to go for broke and see if I could make it as a professional writer— even though it would mean giving up all that security, even tenure, at a time and age where I might not be able to get any of it back. I had the insight to realize that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opening and, ultimately, the ego to think I could make it.

To be practical, though, I'd need some real money, and fast. My publishers were paying me more than most beginning writers made, but it certainly wasn't enough to provide any security, and while I had ego and guts, I was practical enough and selfish enough not to want to starve in a garret someplace. Contrary to popular myth, starving in garrets has nothing to do with art; it has to do with your ability to recognize that after you do the art, it's a business. Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, and Melville never starved in garrets, and I'd already gone through a sufficient number of life traumas that I didn't need to wallow in any more.

My publishers wouldn't pay enough to make me feel secure for other projects, but they would if I did a Well World sequel.

Now, understand,
Midnight
was never intended to be the start of a series. If it had been, I would have laid out things a lot differently. And I hadn't intended to write more, because what in the world do you do when you have already established that your hero is, at least in a science-fictional context, a god? The answer had to be to make him a peripheral character while featuring someone else, someone quite different.
Exiles at the Well of Souls
involved some of the same characters and time line but featured someone new and not godlike, the space pilot and high-tech thief Mavra Chang, and a mostly new supporting cast who went much farther afield geographically and otherwise.

I found I
liked
Mavra and the expanded Well, and on the manuscript page when I had ended
Midnight,
a fairly big book, I instead was introducing a new character into
Exiles.
Since the publisher had some length limitations (because of cost—buyer resistance to a much higher price for a gigantic volume meant they couldn't price it profitably), we split the book in two, with the second half published as
Quest for the Well of Souls.

Doing a few independent novels as well during that period with totally different plots, settings, ideas, and objectives kept everything in at least creative perspective for me. Thus, when I finished
Quest,
I discovered I had enough unused notes to actually do another book. I had always wanted, for example, to go to the northern hemisphere of the Well World, and that was enough of a challenge (and had few of the layout problems compared to the south), so I wrote what my publisher titled
The Return of Nathan Brazil,
and then, in a big finish, I destroyed and re-created the entire universe, killed countless trillions of people, destroyed most civilizations, and had an upbeat ending in
Twilight at the Well of Souls.
It was a good ending, and I had no intention of ever writing another fictional word about the Well World.

Twilight
was written in 1979 and published in 1980. The three novels in five volumes created a tight and, I thought, satisfactory epic. In spite of pleas from very large numbers of readers, I resolved that I was done, finished. I started work on
Four Lords of the Diamond.

Now, I
did
have a couple of smart-ass lines I got used to giving at autographings, appearances, speeches, and SF conventions when I would inevitably be asked to do more Well World material, the most common of which was naming a dollar figure so impossibly high compared to what even the best in the field were getting paid at the time and saying that if somebody offered me
that
much,
and
if I had an idea I thought would not cheapen, and might possibly enhance, the existing books, I
might
consider it.

I have found that when you
are
actually offered
that much,
good ideas somehow pop out of the woodwork.

This book, and two more to follow, comprising the single work titled
The Watchers at the Well,
are the result. I have better titles than the ones we use, but the old experience with
The Return of Nathan Brazil
showed that some folks out there don't realize it's a Well World book unless it says Well of Souls in the title. While the story eventually caught up to the huge total of sales made by the other books in the series, it was a much slower starter. Don't blame me— blame yourselves.

And this brings up a last question. If you're too young or new to this literary form of ours or you're reading this because your wife/husband/brother/sister or whatever said you should, and you haven't read even
one,
let alone all five, of the previous books, what should you do?

The
correct
thing to do is to go and buy them. The friendly folks at Del Rey assure me that they will all be readily available at your nearest bookstore when this title comes out. They've never been out of print in any event, so if by chance they
aren't
there, either find a better, more aware bookstore or have them ordered.

But if you're not sure, or maybe cannot afford to invest twenty bucks, and want to just start reading this book, could you?

The answer is yes. This one, with the two that follow, has been constructed in such a way that while it contains two main characters from the earlier books and takes a few elements from them to move the plot along, everything here is explained and opened up as new. It will be quite a while before you actually get
on
the Well World, anyway, and by then the new characters who are partially the focus of this work will have to find out what you must know. Longtime readers will find it something of a refresher course, although I hope the information is what you need and not an encumbrance.

I enjoyed going back after such a long time, although I nearly went crazy trying to keep the Well World straight myself. The original books were done at a time when I was still using a (gasp!)
typewriter,
and so I didn't have my usual computer files to check and had to do it all the hard way. I have tried very hard to do justice to my own concept and my own convictions about my art, and I think I have. I haven't just dashed this off; indeed, this novel has taken the longest period I have ever used to write a book, and it's been among my most difficult to do as well. Over the period, too, I've thought that God or at least a great supernatural power was against me. Everything happened from my computer breaking down to having to undergo not one but two eye operations during this period. Well, the Powers lost. Here it is, and I wouldn't be offering it to you unless I thought it was as good as I could make it.

As I say, there are two more to come. Will I write others beyond that one? Well, I'm not going to say a flat "No," just as I didn't in 1980. And I'm not about to name another dollar figure, either. Maybe I will sometime, though—if this or its companion makes the
Times
bestseller lists . . . Hey—naming a goal worked the
last
time, didn't it?

Jack L. Chalker

Uniontown, Maryland

February 29, 1992

Prologue:

Near an Unnamed Neutron

Star in the Galaxy M-22

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 re-creation 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.