The Return of Nathan Brazil

by Jack L. Chalker

  The place was a mess; used food tins were all over the place, wherever he'd finished with them; piles of papers; books in languages she didn't know, with covers suggesting a decidedly peculiar taste in reading materials.

  "Sorry the place looks like a dump, but I just wasn't in the mood to clean it and I wasn't expecting guests," he said casually, dusting off a padded chair and plopping into it.

  "Aren't you afraid I'll overpower you now that we're alone?" she asked. "After all, I'm a lot bigger and stronger than you are."

  He chuckled. "Go ahead. The pilot's keyed to me, the aft section's in vacuum during unloading, and the ship's inoperable until the stevedores finish the job." To illustrate his unconcern he unbuckled his gun belt and tossed it on the floor.

  She picked up a book and looked at the cover. "I've never seen real books like this in the Com sections of space," she commented, curious. "Tell me—is it really what the cover seems to say it is?"

  He leered at her mockingly. "Of course it is, my dear. Although they're never as juicy inside as they promise." The leer faded. "That was how people got information in the old days—and entertainment, too, for a couple thousand years. All B.C., of course—before computers in every home and office. I still like 'em—and there are enough museums and libraries around to get 'em. Some of the stuff they saved, though! Whew!" He paused again, settled back, and looked at her seriously. "So you're Mavra Chang, huh?"

  She nodded. "You don't seem all that surprised," she noted.

  He smiled. "Oh, hell, I knew you were still around someplace on that cosmic golf ball of a computer."

  She was genuinely amazed. "You knew? How?" Visions of an omnipotent god floated by her briefly.

  He laughed again. "Oh, nothing mysterious. The computer blew your death scene, that's all. He waited three full milliseconds before his vanishing act—well within the detection range of other computers. He could have and should have done it a lot quicker—a nanosecond, maybe, is beyond detection with all that antimatter flashing about. Obie took it slow because though he could stand the stresses of quick acceleration, you might not."

  "Three milliseconds is plenty fast for me," she noted dryly.

  He shrugged. "It's all relative. At any rate, his gamble was good. Nobody subjected those records to the kind of analysis I did. They saw you go, looked at the tape, saw you go again, and that was that."

  That only slightly decreased her awe. "You kept track of it all, then? We thought your memory . . ."

  "My memory's decent," he told her. "There's just so much information the human brain will hold, and after that it starts throwing out some to make room for the new. I got to that point once—fixed it in the redesign last time I was in the Well. And, yes, I knew about it, about Trelig, anyway. Alaina came to me first with the proposition. I did some figuring, decided there was a slight chance everybody'd wind up on the Well World—which they did—and figured that the kind of reception I'd get there wouldn't be parades and brass bands. So I suggested you. I don't know why I didn't think of your being in this before, though. Damn! I must be slipping!"

  "You suggested me for that?" Some anger flared up in her. "So that explains it!"

  He shrugged. "You did the job. You're still here several hundred years after you'd otherwise have been dead. Why not?"

  There wasn't any satisfactory answer to that so she let it pass.

  "Now, then, great-granddaughter, what the hell is all this about?" he asked, settling back.

  "The rip," she told him. "It must be fixed at the source. You know that. Why haven't you done so?"

  He grew serious suddenly. "Because I choose not to," he said simply.

  She was shocked. "Maybe you don't know what's happening! In less than a hundred years—"

  "Humanity's done for," he finished. "And shortly after that the Rhone, the Chugach, and all the other Com races. I know."

  She couldn't believe what she was hearing and tried to think of reasons why he might be taking such a cavalier attitude. She could not. "You mean you can't fix it?"

  He shook his head sadly. "I mean nothing of the sort. The rip will continue to grow and spread and eventually destroy the Universe as we know and understand it. Not everything—the original Markovian Universe will remain, but most of those suns and all those worlds are pretty well spent now. Unless some random dynamic comes along, though, it'll be a dead universe, a cemetery to the Markovians."

  The silence could be cut with a knife. Finally she said, "And you refuse to stop it?"

  He smiled. "I would if the price weren't too high—but it is. I just can't take the responsibility."

  Her mouth dropped. "Responsibility? Price? What the hell are you talking about? What could be worse than a dead Universe?"

  He looked at her thoughtfully. "I don't know what you've been doing of late, but I suspect that if I had something like Zinder's computer world I'd travel, see everyplace that could be seen. Other galaxies, other lifeforms."

  She nodded. "Yes, that's part of it."

  "But you're jaded, you've lost perspective," he told her. "With the Markovian equations, Obie can instantly be anywhere he or you want. Do you really have any concept of interstellar distances, of just how far things are? Remember back when you were a captain and it still took weeks or months to go between stars, even with us cheating on relativity? Stars are, on the average, a hundred or more light-years apart around here. This galaxy is hundreds of thousands of light-years across. Our next nearest galaxy is much farther. It took the Dreel thousands of years to cross it. That thing out there—that tear—is moving barely sixty light-years a year. It'll take a century to engulf the Com, almost twenty thousand years to eat enough of our Milky Way galaxy to destabilize it. It'll be many millions more before it eats a really significant sector of space when you think on that scale. There are countless races out there among the stars, tremendous civilizations now on the rise. How can I deny them their chance at the future, their chance at the Markovian dream? To save a few who can't really be saved anyway?"

  She didn't understand, couldn't. "You aren't being asked to sacrifice them, only fix the thing so it'll save us."

  He looked up at her and smiled sadly. "No, you misunderstand. The Well of Souls is powered by a singularity, a discontinuity from another Universe. It has a massive power source, but only one. In order to fix the Well of Souls Computer, I would have to shut off the power. That would destroy everything the Markovians created with it. Everything. You're asking me to destroy the Universe in order to save it."

  Shocked, she looked at him, then glanced around the room. So there it was—cold, impeccable logic declared that more than a dozen races must die.

  "What will you do then?" she asked him. "You can't stay here."

  He sighed. "I've always had the power to save or alter myself to fit existing conditions. There's just never been any real reason to do so. I've lived in this area longer than any other person; I've been human longer than any other person—I am a human being. What I will do is survive—I always survive. Survive until somebody replaces me with the Markovian or a better ideal. Survive until—if nobody has done so very far in the future—that time when the rip becomes too great. Then I can then turn the power off and fix the problem." He smiled grimly. "At least I'll have some company, huh? You, and Obie, and whoever else you choose to save."

  She looked up at him, suddenly filled with new hope. "Save! Now that's an idea! Obie can manage whole planets! Maybe we can relocate—"

  "No, 1 can't, Mavra." Obie's sad voice came into her mind. She straightened up in surprise, startling Brazil, who couldn't know what was happening.

  "Obie!" she exclaimed aloud. "You son of a bitch! You installed a relay anyway!"

  Brazil sat up, interested. "I suddenly feel like an eavesdropper," he said dryly.

  "I'm sorry, Mavra. It was too important. I had to have the link to keep myself informed. If everything had gone right I wouldn't have told you."

  "I gather," Brazil put in, "that we
are not alone. Damn!" he added a little sarcastically.

  Mavra, angry despite Obie's logic, unleashed a mental tirade. He let it run its course on it, which was a while since she had quite an extensive vocabulary. Finally, when she ran down, the computer said, "Now will you relay what I say?"

  She threw up her arms in frustration. "Okay, go ahead," she told him. To Brazil she added, "He wants to talk to you through me."

  "Fire away," Brazil invited.

  "First of all," Obie began through Mavra, "forget the idea of spiriting whole planets away. I can't do it. Transform them into something else, yes, but to move them requires more energy than anything possible to design or build short of the Well of Souls itself, not to mention a near-infinite storage capacity. I can't save them, Mavra. A few worlds, yes, by transferring just the population, but that's it. And it would do no good anyway."

  "Sounds like it's worth a try," Brazil said. "After all, each of these races started on a single planet. We have millions of years—and a real head start in technology—to redevelop. And you said you could transform a planet. Should make finding perfect sites easy. For the first time I see a ray of hope in all this."

  "It's no good," Obie retorted. "Oh, it would last for a while, yes, but we do not have the time to spare for such a project. You have no late option to make the necessary repairs. What the rip in space-time represents is not a reversion to the passive original state but a two-way energy flow. As it grows it is engulfing massive amounts of conventional matter and energy. The rip is not transforming the energy but transmitting it. The rip is the other end of a short circuit. The more that is sent back, the larger the energy bursts inside the Well of Souls. We don't really have that much time. If the rift transmits enough material, the damage will be beyond compensation by the Well's protective circuitry, and the Well will self-destruct beyond any hope of repair—leaving this a very, very dead Universe indeed."

  Brazil considered that, then shook his head. "It's a pretty strong machine," he replied. "I don't see it reaching that point, not any time soon. No, I have to reject the argument. For a hypothetical danger that might not arise for millions of years I'm expected to wipe out countless trillions of people? The Well World holds only the descendants of the last batch of fifteen hundred and sixty races developed—the actual total is thousands of times that. Races. People who are born, have a right to grow up, to live, to experience. To cut them off forever because of the possibility of imminent danger—and a remote one, at that—no, no, thank you. I don't want that responsibility."

  Mavra—don't relay this! Stand by! I'm going to lock on and bring you both to me!

  But I thought he couldn't go through you without hurting you! she objected.

  1 have to take the chance. Stand by . . . Now!

  The world went black, and there was the sensation of falling.

  Nautilus—Underside

  With fascinated curiosity, Nathan Brazil looked at the small laboratory and original control room.

  Mavra, still a Rhone, was more apprehensive than anything else. It had felt odd, somehow slightly different being transported to the Nautilus this time—and Obie had not returned her form to its original contours. That was bad.

  "Obie?" she called hesitantly. "Obie? Are you all right?"

  "I'm here, Mavra," the computer's familiar voice told her from its usual central position in thin air. "I—I'm hurt. That's the only way I can describe it."

  "What happened?" she asked, genuinely concerned. "Was it? . . ." She glanced at Brazil, who casually stepped down from the pedestal and started to walk around, looking at everything.

  "Only slightly," Obie told her. "I—I had him as a unitary structure and could have transported him without harm, but I tried to get a full breakdown and record. I couldn't, Mavra. It—well, it caused shorts in my circuitry. I couldn't handle it. Ordinarily I'd be able to shut it down, but it's that damned tear, Mavra! I'm not moving or thinking as quickly. As the gash widens I lose a little of myself."

  "If you weren't acting so damned high and mighty I could have warned you about that," Brazil said, showing little sympathy. "Every time you break somebody down to file him on your little electronic slides you're essentially killing him and then reviving him according to the plans. The Well won't permit you to kill me, and the core of being that is me is not a part of the Markovian Universe, as I said. You have no key to handle the difference in the math."

  Mavra was much more concerned. "Obie, how badly are you damaged? Can you still function?"

  "Creakily," he told her. "I think I can contain the damage by just not using those sections—but that means I'm very limited in what I can do. I'm going to have to be very careful now as long as we're this close to the rip."

  "Then why don't we move away? Why torture yourself like this?"

  There was a moment's silence and then Obie said, simply, "Ask him, Mavra."

  She turned and looked at Brazil, eyebrows raised. "Well?"

  Brazil, who was now up on the balcony, touring, stopped and looked over the side at her. "He's got a martyr complex," he said. "After all, he figures he's going to talk me into it or else we're all going to die anyway, him included."

  "I will convince you," Obie promised.

  Brazil smiled and cocked his head at the empty air. "I doubt it." He looked around. "How do you get upstairs or whatever? I'm curious about this place."

  A door behind him slid back, revealing the bridge across the great main shaft. He turned, nodded approval, and strolled through. The door closed behind him.

  "He's not what I expected at all," Mavra Chang remarked.

  "Don't be too hard on him," the computer said. "Inside he's being eaten alive. Don't be fooled. It's driving him mad. How would you like to have the choice of seeing the people you call your own destroyed or destroying every race in the Universe just to make repairs on a machine? I don't envy him—I wouldn't like that decision myself."

  She sighed. "All right, I'll try to be kind—but he doesn't make it very easy. I liked him in the beginning, back on Meouit. He was really slick, a pro. Now, though—now he's so cold, so callous, so insufferably flip. It's as if he wants to put distance between himself and us."

  "He does," Obie told her. "He's very human, you know. He can be hurt physically and emotionally. Can you imagine living since the dawn of time, most of it as a man, watching everything you love wither and die in front of you as you continued on? He's got to be hard, Mavra. It's the only way to contain the hurt. Your ancestor, one of whose forms you now wear, was someone he cared about a great deal. Someone I think he loved. Yet, long as her life was, it was a blink of the eye to Nathan Brazil. And, in the end, when his true nature was revealed—as I showed you—even she was so frightened and so repulsed that she fired on him. Pity him, Mavra. He is in Hell and he has no way out of it."

  She smiled slightly. She'd been hurt pretty badly herself through most of her long life, the kind of wounds that never heal. She wondered whether or not she seemed to others the same way that Brazil seemed to her. It was not a thought to dwell on; it was too close to the truth.

  "Speaking of my ancestor"—she changed subject quickly—"am I to continue to look like her?"

  Obie paused a moment, as if thinking about something, then said, "Yes, for a little while. I think your appearance will be an anchor for him, an emotional crutch. Will you trust me on this one?"

  "All right, I'll go along for a little while," she agreed. "But you better have somebody Topside refit my rooms and redesign me a bathroom."

  Obie laughed. "All right, I will. I'm transmitting orders and specifications now. It won't be for long," he promised.

  She laughed with him, then grew serious. "Obie? What if we can't talk him into it? What then? Will you run him through and force him to do it? Or can't you do that?"

  "I could," the computer admitted. "I could do most things with him I could do with ordinary people. The trouble is that once he steps inside the Well of Souls control complex he will be outs
ide the Markovian equations in which we all operate. He'll revert, as he did before, to his Markovian form—and be free of any compulsions. I can get him there, but, once inside, I can't force him to do anything. No, he'll come around. He has a sense of duty, I think, if I can convince him of the seriousness of the problem."

  She started to walk toward the stairs, then stopped and turned.

  "Obie?"

  "Yes, Mavra?"

  "Suppose he does do it? What happens to us?"

  There was a long pause. Finally the computer said, "Our own people will be on the Well World when that happens—you included. It's going to be tough going and I want no slipups. Since unlike the rest of our Universe, the Well World is not on the main Well of Souls Computer but on its own minisystem, now undamaged, you and anybody else who's gone through the Well will survive."

  Suddenly Brazil's comment on martyrs came back to her. "What about you, Obie? You can't go to the Well World."

  "I was constructed in the Markovian Universe according to a historical pattern developed in Markovian space-time," Oble said carefully. "That means I exist because everything else exists. When it doesn't—well, when he shuts that thing off it won't be that our Universe will cease to exist. Our Universe and everyone in it, everyone who's ever lived, every intention, every event major and minor, every great idea and major villany—they'll be wiped out in all dimensions. They will not only cease to be, they will never have been. Only the Well World and the dying suns and dead planets of the ancient Markovians will remain. "They will be the only reality."

  "You'll die then."

  "I will never even have been. I will not even exist, except in the minds of those who have known me who are on the Well World."

  She felt tears coming unbidden to her eyes and she wiped them, embarrassed at showing emotion yet unable to regain full control.

  "Oh, Obie . . ." she managed.