The Return of Nathan Brazil

by Jack L. Chalker

  "And what about you?" Marquoz broke in. "He thought you might drive him crazy, yet he threatened to drive you sane. Did he?"

  Brazil chuckled again. "The mind is a resilient thing, Marquoz. I'm probably saner than any living being has ever been, possibly saner than the Markovians were after their mind-links to their computers, yet I'm still quite mad and slipping more into madness the more I think. When you face the unthinkable you retreat, you shove it away, back into corners of your mind that you can't reach."

  "Unfortunately, I think I understand you," the Chugach responded. "Still, except to you, that bit of metaphysics is of little consequence. The question on the table is, simply, have you changed your attitude on fixing the Well of Souls?"

  Nathan Brazil sighed. "A byproduct of the mind-link is that you remember things you never wanted to remember. The worst part is, the more of those memories you dredge up the more you realize how futile it all is. Rome rose to great heights, yet its own methods caused it to decay from within. I wonder if that isn't true of the Markovian experience as well. Will we just do it all over again, even reach this point once again? Is the whole business of life doomed to repeated failure because there is something wrong with the experimenters? I wonder . . ."

  "But will you fix the Well?" the little dragon persisted.

  Brazil nodded unhappily. "I'll go to the Well, if possible. I'll enter and stand there and analyze the problem. But I won't take the responsibility for murdering so many. I can't accept the responsibility any more." He turned slightly on his side, looking at them, and his eyes fixed on Mavra Chang. He pointed to her.

  "You will take the responsibility," he told her. "When I stand inside the Well so will you. I'll ask you to give me the order. You will tell me to pull the plug on the Universe."

  He sank down and lapsed into unconsciousness, but the instruments informed them that, this time, it was closer to normal sleep.

  Nautilus—Topside,

  Later That Same Day

  Mavra Chang paced back and forth in the large reception chamber, where she had spent most of the afternoon and a good part of the evening, looking grim and somewhat unhappy.

  Marquoz waddled around the corner, stopped, yawned, and stared at her for a few moments. "You know, you really ought to get some rest and eat something, too. You can't eat like a bird anymore. You're a Rhone now and you require a great amount of energy."

  Mavra stopped and looked at him for a second. She was tired and wan; the strain showed on her face. She looked as if she had aged ten years in the past few days. "Perhaps you're right," she said hoarsely. "I don't know—that's all part of this, I guess. Everything has changed. Obie's gone, even as we sit here comfortably on him; the Universe is going—have you really considered that what we're trying to do is destroy all that we know? And me, well, I'm stuck in a reconstruction of my ancestor's old Well body, but I don't feel like a Rhone. Do you know what it's like to want a roast beef or something and realize that you can only digest leaves and grass?"

  "You're just feeling sorry for yourself," the little dragon responded. "I know what that's like—but from what I've heard it's not like you. I heard that on the Well World you were transformed into a handless cripple yet managed to surmount that difficulty and beat Ortega and everyone else at their own game. What's changed you?"

  She thought about it. "Oh, I don't know. Maybe I'm getting old. Maybe I've just grown fat and complacent during my years with Obie."

  Gypsy cleared his throat and they turned. Neither knew how long the strange, dark man had been listening. "You know what's wrong, if you just face it," he said.

  Mavra just looked at him questioningly.

  "You're not the boss this time," Gypsy said. "You're not in charge, not even in control. Being a Rhone didn't bother you one whit on the snatch operation because you were in charge. Not anymore, though. You're not even a full partner; with Obie you were a partner only when and because he allowed you to be. Now it's all in the hands of a little guy you don't even know. Even back on the Well World they left you alone; you were the mistress of your own destiny. Not now. That's what's eating you. You gotta be the general all the time, or at least think you are."

  His speech was galling because she knew, deep down, that what he said was true. Gypsy had the uncanny ability to reach down inside your soul and see truths, and he wasn't at all diplomatic about telling you what they were. For a moment she understood what Brazil seemed to be saying about being inside Obie. There were things you didn't want to face, didn't want to even think about—and you certainly became uncomfortable when they were thrust under your nose.

  "Who are you, Gypsy?" she asked. "Where do you come from?"

  He smiled. "I could give you a long, drawn-out biography, but even then you'd have no way of knowing whether I told the truth. What difference does it make? None of us really knows the others anyway. Take Marquoz, there. Why would a man leave his people, live and work entirely cut off from the environment, and the culture that he was born to? I'm the guy who was around every dingy spaceport milking the marks with any sort of con, never taking a sucker who didn't really want to be taken but taking all those who did. I'm the guy who doesn't fit, the square peg who's found some way to survive and enjoy himself. Freighter captains are like that, too, I think—and thieves, and secret agents, and those kinds of folks. I'm not sure about Marquoz, but he's definitely a square peg, too. So are you. The staff of the Nautilus—all square pegs, more or less. That's why we're here and they're out there." His tone became grim and distant. "That's why we survive—and they don't."

  A long silence ensued. Finally Mavra Chang said, "I guess I'll go out and munch the lawn or something. I think the time's approaching when we have to get to work."

  She didn't have to go as far as the lawn; Obie had prepared for her hunger, as she well knew, with stores of grain pilfered from Brazil's old ship. It didn't taste great but it went down well, and the more she ate the more she wanted to eat. She didn't feel good, but at least she felt better.

  When she returned to the main hall she found Nathan Brazil. The tailor shop had found a black pullover shirt and a pair of shorts that fit him, and a pair of plastine sandals as well. He'd taken time to remove all the rest of his makeup and looked, they guessed, pretty much as he always had. He certainly looked both casual and comfortable. He was a small man, barely 170 centimeters tall, slightly built and very thin despite strong shoulders and strong, sinewy arms. He was dark, almost as dark as Gypsy, and two bright, brown eyes flanked a conspicuous Roman nose that sat atop a mouth very wide, rubbery, and full of teeth. His hair was cropped short, the better to use disguises, and he was clean-shaven, for much the same reason.

  He looked up at her, nodded, and smiled a bit. "So how are you, great-granddaughter?" he greeted lightly.

  "Surviving," she responded coldly. Obie had been right on that score; they were too much alike to feel comfortable in each other's presence.

  "Well, surviving is all we can do," he came back. "I've called a petit council meeting—no reflection, that term—shortly, so the rest will soon be here. I've been seriously hampered by lack of materials. Everything was in Obie. When were you on the Well World?"

  "Over seven hundred years ago," she replied, fascinated by his sudden but easy transformation from world-weary sage to crisp businessman. "We looked in on it occasionally, but they were Obie's checkups, nothing more. It was pretty easy to do—just monitor transmissions, mostly. Ortega and Dr. Zinder both had transmitters capable of reaching us, but Obie never used them. We were supposed to have been destroyed by the Com Police. Obie felt he was better off dead to all parties. I certainly have no love for the place, barely knew Zinder, and never met Ortega—although I have less reason to love him than anyone."

  Brazil smiled. "Still mad at the old bastard? I'd think by now you'd have faced the fact that, under similar circumstances, you'd have done to him exactly what he did to you. I'd never accuse the old boy of having a conscience, though."

 
She looked surprised. "You know Ortega?"

  He nodded. "Oh, yes. Matched wits with him lord knows how long ago on a number of capers in the Com. He's a wily old scoundrel. I've always liked him despite the fact we're usually on opposite sides. He was on the Well World last time I was there—my welcoming committee, in fact, and later on, my adversary. He should have been dead then, but the Olympian record indicates that he's somehow managed to survive."

  She nodded. "Some kind of magic spell, I was told. But he's a prisoner in Zone, even though he practically runs the place."

  "Then he's likely still there and even more in control," Brazil noted. "That can be good or catastrophic, and I have no way of knowing which in advance. Damn! The worst thing about the loss of Obie is that we'll be flying blind in this. I won't know conditions on the Well World until I get there. A real-life kriegspiel. I've never liked the game."

  "Kriegspiel?"

  "Chess. You know the game? Only the opponents sit back to back with their own boards and a referee tells you that your opponent's made a legal move. You have to figure out from the illegal moves where your opponent's pieces are. And we don't have a referee in this one."

  "You make it sound like we'll have to fight another war on the Well World," she said, slightly puzzled. "I'm not sure I'm clear on this yet."

  "We probably will," he responded, then looked up. "Well, here come the other three now, so if everybody will relax I'll explain what this is all about."

  "Let's first set our own situation properly," Brazil began. "First, I have to get from a hex near the south of the Southern Hemisphere to an Avenue, an opening to the Well of Souls at the equator. The best-case distance is over forty-nine hundred."

  "Excuse me," Marquoz interrupted, "but why so far?"

  "Fair question," he replied. "I keep forgetting that you're not up on this sort of thing. In fact, only Mavra and I have ever been there, so I'll return to the basics.

  "The Well World is a construct. It was created a little over ten billion years ago by a race known to you as the Markovians. You know the story—we keep running into the remains of their dead planets as we expand outward. Cities, yes, but no artifacts of any kind. No machines, no ruined food stores, no art or pottery, even. Nothing. The reason is rather simple. The Markovians were the first race to develop out of the big bang that started the Universe. They evolved at the normal rate, or maybe a little faster than normal due to local conditions, and they went through most of the stages our peoples have. By the time the Universe was barely two and a half billion years old—I know that sounds long, but on a cosmic scale it's not—they'd spread out and reached virtually every place in their corner of the Universe. Having reached the limits of expansion, they turned inward, eventually developing a computer linked to each of their minds. They removed the entire crust of each of their planets and replaced it with a poured quasi-organic substance about two kilometers thick—the computer—then programmed it with just about everything they knew. They matched their minds to their local computers and, presto! A civilization without need of anything physical. They replaced the old crust atop the computer, of course, and built cities more to delineate the physical space, the property, of each than to serve any utilitarian purposes. Then they settled back and dreamed up their own houses—and the computer created the things by an energy-to-matter conversion. Hungry? Just think of what you wanted and the computer served it up to order. Art? Create anything you wanted in your mind and the computer realized it for you. No wants, no needs, the perfect materialist utopia."

  "It sounds pretty wonderful to me, if a little like magic," Yua commented.

  Brazil chuckled. "Magic? Magic is doing something the other guy can't do. We haven't learned how to do it yet, so it's magic. When we learn how and understand it, it's science. Obie could do it, of course. That's what his builder, Gilgam Zinder, discovered—the same principles that made the Markovian computers work. Of course, Obie was a tiny, primitive prototype when compared to the Markovian models, but he was able, within his design limits, to do those things. Zinder wasn't the first to stumble onto the Markovian history, only the first to be able to build a machine that could do the conversions."

  "But the Markovians are all dead," Gypsy pointed out.

  Brazil nodded. "Yes, all dead. They got bored, fat, lazy, and stagnant. My latest theory is that they spent too much time connected to their computers and tended to merge minds with parts of their devices, which forced them to face up to the fact that they'd gone as far as they could go, done everything they could do, reached the point all races strive for—and there wasn't anything there. No challenge. Nothing to look forward to. Since the idea seems to have spread and taken root among Markovians all over the Universe within a fairly short period of time, this computer concept becomes the most logical. They spent very little time playing god, it appears. A few generations, no more. And then, as one, they decided to scrap everything and try again."

  "It sounds logical," Mavra agreed. "But why theorize? Weren't you there?"

  Brazil coughed slightly. "Well, ah, yeah. But it—well, it's just so long ago that my memories of that time are pretty well nonexistent now. A lot of this stuff is rediscovery. Bear with me. I've lived an awfully long time."

  They accepted that, although not without some reservations. Mavra, at least, thought that there was something decidedly phoney about Nathan Brazil, something she couldn't put her finger on. A mass of contradictions, Obie had called him. That was putting it mildly.

  "Anyway, the Markovians decided that they'd made a wrong turn somewhere in evolution. They couldn't accept the idea that what they had was the be all and end all, because that made all striving, all progress, a joke in their minds. They couldn't handle that. So, they decided they'd blown it—and they'd have to start again.

  "The means chosen was peculiar," Brazil continued. "They couldn't wipe out the whole Universe without wiping out themselves as well. So they created a monster computer, a computer as big as a planet, and one that had to be manually operated. They were large creatures that would be real monsters to any of us now—like big, throbbing leathery human hearts standing on six long, suckered tentacles. They were, however, our cousins in that they were a carbon-based lifeform whose atmosphere though different from ours, was close enough that we could breathe it. Now, they poured a crust over this planet-sized computer, this master brain, and then divided it into fifteen hundred and sixty hexagonal biospheres. Since you can't cover a sphere with hexagons, they divided large areas at the poles into mini-biospheres around the polar centers. These are North and South Zone, the two areas where the creatures they were going to invent could gather comfortably and talk, trade, or whatever."

  "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 little 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 us
ed 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."