04. The Return of Nathan Brazil (32 page)

He looked around at them. "All straight? Well, let's get started, then. We've got a lot of groundwork to lay, a whole population to brief, and that'll take time and sweat. Let's move!"

Serachnus

THE SHUTTLE LANDED WITH NO FANFARE. THERE
wasn't anyone present; no marching bands; no good-luck parties; nothing. It was a dead world of barren rock pitted by countless meteor strikes.

It was a ghost world, too; they could see that as the landscape, slowly rolling past their screens now as Nathan Brazil put on the brakes, showed areas blasted eons ago through high mountains and vague traces of roadways. Occasionally they would pass over a dead city, strange-looking places with hexagonal central squares, and strange, twisted buildings and spires. All dead now, all dead for ten billion years or more.

"Once this was a green place," Brazil noted, sounding almost nostalgic. "The air was sweet, the climate warm and comfortable, and several million people lived in those cities."

"Markovians, you mean," Mavra remarked. "Not people."

He nodded vigorously. "People. Shaped like big leathery hearts with six suckered tentacles and all sorts of yucky attributes, yes, but people all the same. Not too different, deep down, from us, I suspect, considering how similar our wildly varying alien civilizations have developed. We're their children, remember. Down there they lived and laughed and played and worked and thought just as people have been doing for ages, and down there they worried and decided and left. They left to go to the Well World, to give up their mortality for our kind of existence."

"You seem pretty certain that we can get there the same way," Marquoz noted. "There is some sort of transportation system, you said?"

Brazil nodded. "A Well Gate. It'll open if you want it to open and it'll take you one place if you really want to go there. The Markovians built their machines too well; the computer that once sustained a civilization in a materialist Utopia is still alive, still waiting for instructions. If somebody orders the Well Gate to open, it will respond and do so—and send you to the Well World. You've been well briefed; you remember the facts."

"Just hard to believe," the Chugach replied. "I mean, all these computers and nobody's ever been able to make 'em do anything—and, heaven knows, enough time, trouble, and money's been spent trying to make them do something. Not even discover the Well Gate, as you call it."

"People
have
discovered the Well Gate," Brazil told him. "People who wanted to find it found it—and it swallowed them, took them to the Well World. Others, well, there are gates all over, even on asteroids where Markovian worlds used to be, that snare the bored, the fantasizers, the would-be suicides—the people who are sick of their own lives and earnestly wish for a new start. The computers see that as a reflection of the Markovian attitudes. That's how people like Ortega got to the Well World. That's how Mavra's grandparents returned not once but twice."

"Do you think either may still be alive?" Mavra asked him.

He shook his head. "I doubt it very strongly. It's been too long. Some Well World lifeforms live an awfully long time, but none lives that long."

"Ortega," she pointed out.

"A special case," he replied. "Still, your name should also be known to a lot of the Well World from your part in the wars; if any of your relatives who got through are still alive, I'm pretty sure you'll have no trouble finding them. They'll find you."

He set the boat down on a barren plain. "Far as I go," he told them. "I can't just fly into it or past it; it'd probably snatch me, too, and I can't go just yet. I can hear it screaming for me now, though. So into your pressure suits and out you go."

They dressed quickly, almost in silence. Tension, already high, was practically visible now. Finally they were all set, all on internal air and power, and Brazil threw the switch that isolated the scout pilot's cabin from the rest of the ship.

He leaned over and flicked his communications switch. "Mavra, use your own judgment with Ortega. The rest of you—you don't even know each other."

"Don't worry," Marquoz grumbled. "And don't keep repeating the obvious so much. If you didn't trust us with this thing then you shouldn't have sent us."

He smiled, knowing what was going on inside all of them. They were saying good-bye to their pasts, their worlds, their Universe. The ones who'd never been on the Well World before were at the biggest disadvantage, but for Mavra, too, it was highly traumatic. He understood that. She loved freedom most of all, and freedom to her was a fast ship crossing the starfields.

Not for the first time did he worry about Obie. Could the computer really influence what they'd become? And had he done the best job in that regard? If they all wound up immobile, or mass-minds, or water-breathers they'd be of precious little help to him when it counted.

He checked his screens. "There. It's open. See it ahead of you on your right?"

They were out of the ship now, four white-suited figures against the dull-gray rock, walking single-file with Mavra's Rhone body leading.

They stopped and looked. It was there, on the plain —a huge hole, it seemed, with infinite blackness filling it. If they had been airborne they would have seen its hexagonal shape.

"Just walk into it," he urged. "And—good luck to all of you. I hope to see you all one midnight at the Well of Souls."

There was no response. He sat back, sighed, switched off the transmitter although he left the receiver on, and lifted off. In the airless void they hadn't heard or noticed his slow departure, but he wanted to remove any possibilities of second thoughts now that they were so close. Alone, with a day's air or less and no food, they had little choice but to walk into the hole no matter what.

They were at the edge now. He knew it even though he was too far up to see them clearly. Just their breathing and their noise—or sudden lack of it— told him.

"Well? Who's first?" he heard Mavra ask, nervousness creeping into her voice. Up until this time the plan had just been theoretical; now this one act was one of irrevocable and possibly fatal commitment.

"I'll go," Gypsy's voice responded. Brazil heard some shuffling, then the strange man's voice say, "Not too bad. It's not a hole at all. Still solid. I guess—"

And that was it for Gypsy. Brazil knew that on the ground he had simply winked out. He could hear from the slight decrease in static that the man was no longer anywhere nearby.

"We've followed each other over fifty worlds," Marquoz said dryly. "Here goes."

"Yua? Shall we go together?" Mavra asked.

The Olympian swallowed hard. "Yes, I—I'd like that," she responded. "I—oh! It sort of tingles, doesn't it?"

"No different from Obie, I don't think," Mavra replied.

"It's—it's so
dark . . ."

They were all gone now.

Brazil sighed, lit a cigarette, and punched in the codes to return to his main ship and from there to the
Nautilus.
It's done, he thought. It's started. Damn! I wish I could know what's going on at the other end!

South Zone

"MAVRA? HELP ME UP, WILL YOU? I FEEL A LITTLE dizzy," Yua muttered.

Mavra knelt down on her forelegs and reached out, helping the Olympian to her feet.

"That was a
decidedly
uncomfortable ride," Marquoz grumbled. He looked a little unsteady himself.

Mavra looked around, suddenly puzzled. "Where's Gypsy?"

The other two suddenly realized that they were only three and peered around. The chamber was huge; they stood on a flat, smooth, glassy black surface of unknown composition. The slab was six-sided, but so large was the hall it was difficult to tell. Illumination was from a massive six-sided panel on the ceiling. A rail concealing what appeared to be a walkway circled the chamber, and steps led to gaps in the rail.

"We might as well get going," Mavra said, making for the nearest steps, which appeared to be made of stone. The walkway was a series of moving belts, they saw—but still now.

"You've been here before. How do we start the walkway?" Marquoz asked Mavra.

She chuckled. "I was never here. Here is where everybody else arrived who wasn't born here. I arrived by ship. I crashed. The only time I was ever in Zone was a brief stay as a prisoner in an embassy. I'm afraid this experience is as new to me as it is to you. Just remember, though I've been on this planet before, I haven't been through the Well. I'm as raw as the rest of you about what to expect."

Suddenly they heard a whirring sound from far off in the chamber and felt a vibration through the rail. "Looks like our welcoming committee is coming," Mavra remarked.

Marquoz looked back out at the glassy floor. "But where is Gypsy? I know he came here. He went first."

Mavra sighed. "I don't know. There's been something eerie about him since the moment I met him. He's
your
friend. I can't think of any reason why he wouldn't be here no matter who or what he was, though."

Marquoz shrugged. "I've known him for years yet I don't really know him at all. Perhaps what we all saw was some sort of disguise. Perhaps he was a noncarbon-based lifeform that fooled us into seeing him as a man and he's in North Zone. Who knows? Obie did, I think. I think it's best not to mention him at all right now, though. There may be more afoot than we know."

Mavra nodded. "I agree—but I don't like it. I don't like puzzles at all."

Suddenly Marquoz pointed.

Approaching them was a huge creature. It had a deep-brown torso shaped like a man's, but plated. Six arms, extended from the sides of the torso four of them rotating on ball joints, yet terminating in fingered hands. All six looked hard and muscular. The head was ovoid and had no ears. Deep, black human eyes flanked a flat nose below which grew a massive white moustache. Below, the torso ended in long, serpentine coils.

The creature approached them without fear—which was natural, since he was obviously master here. He slapped the wall sharply as he drew within a few meters of them and the walkway stopped. Bushy white eyebrows rose.

"A human, sort of, a Dillian and a Ghlmonese? What is this?" He seemed genuinely perplexed. "Do you understand what I am saying?"

Mavra nodded. "Ah—yes, perfectly," she said, only partly feigning nervousness. She had never met such a creature as this before on or off the Well. "We are from the Com."

Amazement spread all over the creature's face. "The Com! And not one of you true human! Oh, my! How things must have changed since I was last there!"

Yua gasped. "
You
were once in the Com?"

He smiled a very human smile beneath his bushy moustache. "Oh, yes. Once I was human like you— well, I didn't have a tail like that, and I was a man, and women sure didn't look as good as you—but you know what I mean." The voice was deep, thick, and rich but had no trace of an accent. Only Mavra understood immediately that a translator, a small surgical implant made by a Northern race, was really doing the talking. She would need one soon; they all would. She'd had one, once.

"The Com has many races now," she told the creature. "All living in peace. That is, with each other. Together we just fought a war with a no-compromise nonhuman race."

The creature was still wondering at it all. "Multiracial cooperation in the Com! Who'd have thought it! You mean the brotherhood boys were right all along about improving the human race?" It was more a question directed at himself than one to them but Marquoz answered anyway.

"If you mean their petty little social philosophies, no," he told the alien. "That's mostly breaking down now. And having spent the last several years in the human worlds I can tell you that I was tolerated more than embraced."

The six-limbed creature shrugged all his limbs. "So? In my day it would have been war and intolerance all around. Death and destruction." He grew a little more serious. "But you said there'd been a war? Is that why you're here?"

Mavra jumped in quickly. "I don't know why we're here—and I'm not sure where 'here' is. No, it wasn't the war, though. We won that. We won it, but tore a hole in space-time to do it. It is eating the Com now. You might say we were refugees, although how we wound up here I don't know. We set down on an old world to take a vote on just where to go and the lights went out. We woke up here."

The creature nodded. The explanation was about what he expected to hear—which is why the cover story had been invented in the first place.

The creature slithered back, allowing room for all of them on his section of belt. "You can take off the spacesuits, by the way. The Well pressurizes before it brings you through so right now it's set to be comfortable for you. Or keep 'em on until we get to my office, as you will."

He slapped the wall with his lower left hand, swiveled without really turning, so he was facing the other way, and the belt whirred to life.

"What are your names?" the creature called back to them as they traveled.

"I am Tourifreet, a Rhone," Mavra told him. "The human is Yua, an Olympian, and the Chugach is Marquoz."

"Pleased to meet you," the creature responded amiably. "It's been a long, long time since anybody from my old stamping grounds has been through here. People fall into those holes all the time, like I did— maybe a hundred a year, give or take. But no humans in the last century or two. Been a while. I, by the way, am Serge Ortega."

Mavra's head snapped up and there was a sudden, odd gleam in her eyes. Ortega, his back to her, saw nothing. "Easy, girl," Marquoz whispered.

Ortega! She thought. After all this time! After all this . . . Ortega, still alive, still in charge. The man who imprisoned her so many years ago, coldly, cruelly, for so very long.

The one man for whom she still felt a smouldering hatred.

And here he was, leading them calmly into the depths of Zone, back to her. How easy to plunge a knife in that broad, leathery back—if only she had a knife. To kill this man who treated people as playthings, and had been doing so for over a thousand years.