The Return of Nathan Brazil wos-4, page 20
part #4 of Well of Souls Series
“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 outside 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,” Obie 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.
He said nothing, letting her feelings run their course, but he was curiously touched in a very human sort of way. Could computers cry, too?
Finally she regained her composure and started to mount the stairs. At the top she turned again. “Obie? What if he does it? Turns everything off, I mean, and fixes it. For what? There’ll be nobody left to appreciate it.”
“You misunderstand the depth of his responsibility,” the computer told her. “The Well World exists as a laboratory, yes, but also as an operational device. Inside its memory is the power to use the Well World to restart the Universe again—no, to create a new one. Brazil is being asked not only to destroy everything we know but to start it all again as well.”
There was something almost overwhelmingly frightening about that. Mavra reached the door, went outside and over the bridge, down the corridor and entered the elevator to Topside, one of the few places Obie didn’t monitor on the Nautilus.
She cried most of the way to the top.
Nautilus—Topside
“Marquoz!”
The sight of the familiar, squat little dragon puffing on his ever-present cigar seemed to reassure her, bring her back to reality. Mavra had never felt so helpless, so alone, not even when she was alone, making her own way from orphaned beggar to streetwalker to space captain and master thief.
She felt like hugging the little monster, but refrained. Instead she just held up a hand in greeting and waited for him to come across the grassy lawn to her. He could move damned fast, she found.
“Well! Mavra, I hope?” the Chugach’s foghorn voice boomed. “Still in harness, so to speak?”
She shrugged. “Obie said it would help if I kept this shape a little longer. He’s running this show.”
And that, of course, was part of the problem. As had happened on the Well World many years before when Mavra was a hopeless cripple, she felt like a pawn, an ornament, in a grand design being woven by others, uncertain of her future, even of whether she had a future, and unable to do a damned thing about it.
Marquoz seemed to understand. “Obie had us bugged, as you know,” he told her. “When the Olympians moved, he dispatched more of the crew to get us. Man, was that Amazon leader mad!”
That was more like it. Real. Down-to-earth. “What have you done with the Olympians?” she asked.
“Ran ’em through Obie, of course,” the little dragon replied. “Tame as kittens now.”
She nodded. “And where’s Brazil?”
“Eating—eating big, too, for such a little man. Says it’s the first nonsynthetic stuff he’s had in ages except grain products. One of the boys is going to take him on the grand tour later.”
That returned her thoughts to reality, and she didn’t want any more of that right at the moment. “Where’s Gypsy?” she asked. “I could use a good card game or something right now. Bet he lorded it all over you that he stayed back here nice and comfortable while we were getting shot up!”
Marquoz’s large head cocked itself slightly to one side. “That’s the odd thing. He isn’t here. Obie said he asked to borrow a ship to fix up some personal things before he got completely tied down and trapped in this business. Rather odd—I didn’t even know he could fly one. Even odder that Obie would give it to him.”
She nodded, a funny feeling in her stomach. “He’s a very strange man,” she said, “with very strange powers. I wonder where he went?”
“Stranger than that,” the little dragon added. “He didn’t go anyplace at all. We were in the Rhone sector, we’re still in the Rhone sector, and his ship’s on standby in deep space just a few light-years from here, or so Obie tells me.”
That was even odder. “Has Obie given you any idea about what’s going on? I mean, is Gypsy doing something for us that we’re just not being told about?”
Marquoz shrugged. “Who knows? What on Earth would anybody use Gypsy for? No, I got the distinct impression that Obie is as bewildered as we are—but, just like with the customs men, security men, and the rest, Gypsy seems to have a power over even Obie.”
She shivered slightly. “I hope he’s on our side.”
“Oh, I have no doubt he’s on his own side and no other,” the Chugach said. “But he’s not against us, I’ll stake my life on that. Have, in fact.”
“I hope you’re right” was all she could manage. “Still, I’d like to ask him a few questions when he gets back. Curious, too, that he should take off like that just when Brazil comes on. I wonder if he will be back? Doesn’t he want to meet Nathan Brazil?”
“Perhaps not,” the dragon admitted. “We’ll see… Well, come on. Let’s go up and relax a bit. I’m not as adept at gaming as Gypsy, but me and the boys would be delighted to have you join us in a little game of chance.”
Olympus, the Chamber of the Holy Mother
The elevator door opened and a man stepped out into the chamber. That was sacrilege—that he was not even an Olympian male was simply impossible.
Nikki Zinder was aware of his presence as soon as he stepped into the chamber; she would have been aware of him earlier but she alone controlled the elevators and they had not been operating. None of them had been. It was as if he had simply appeared in the elevator out of nowhere.
“Who dares enter the chamber of the Holy Mother so?” she thundered.
The man stopped, looked around, and nodded, a thoughtful pout on his face, like a tourist strolling through some dead shrine. He took out a cigarette, lit it, and stood dead center in the chamber looking at the far wall. “Hello, Nikki,” he said casually.
Bells and alarms went off all over the Temple several stories above them and computer monitors struggled to bring her cybernetic juices back under control. The Holy Mother was blowing her top.
“Who are you that you dare to come here so?” she demanded.
“You know who I am, Nikki,” he replied calmly, quietly. “You have only to look at me to know.”
“You are the Evil One Himself!” she screeched through electronic voice centers. “You dare to come here, Evil One, particularly in that guise? How dare you!”
Bolts of lightning shot out from all over the chamber, arcing and aiming directly for the man who stood in the center, still puffing on his cigarette. Though hot enough to fry anything living and to disrupt the flow of even a creature of pure energy, he stood at the center of the furious storm as if protected by an impervious bubble. None of the strikes found their mark.
Realizing this, Nikki turned off the electricity while considering what else might have some effect on him. There was a smell of ozone in the air.
“It’s time to go now, Nikki,” he said, still, quietly, calmly.
“No, Evil One! You shall not take me!” she thundered.
He smiled. “It’s your time, Nikki. It’s past your time. Long past. Your world is ending. Parts of it should never have begun. Parts of it are needed elsewhere now.” There seemed to be tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Nikki. Yours is not the life it should have been—but none of us can fully control our fate. You were born for an unhappy destiny. Perhaps you would have been better unborn. Perhaps, then, none of this would have happened, none of this would have been necessary. But it is, Nikki. It exists. Cheated of life, your time is still past. You must go now.” He said it sadly, the sincerity so deep it almost penetrated her senile brain.
“You are the Enemy!” she persisted, but now she . felt fear.
He smiled. “I am the Friend,” he responded. “Look at me, Nikki. Tell me what I am.”
“You’re dead!” she shrieked. “Dead! Dead! Dead!” There was a rumble and the dim lights in the chamber went out completely except for a glow that emanated not from the machines in the walls but from the man himself. He, too, underwent a transformation. Suddenly he was very tall, caped, and hooded, and inside the black garments his form could be seen, a ghostly, ghastly form.
A skeleton. A skeleton looking at her, peering deep through the walls and the machines with eyeless sockets into the reinforced cell where her brain and nervous system were imbedded in a semiorganic substance that nurtured her.
A skeleton with a cigarette gripped between flesh-less jaws.
“You are death!” she screamed. “Away with you! Away! I am beyond death!”
“I am rest,” he replied. “I have come for you, Nikki.”
“No!” she screamed, panicked to the core of her soul. “No! Away, I say! No!”
Computers struggled to correct the imbalances, restore normalcy, but deep inside the ancient brain something welled up, beyond control, and vessels burst. Dials flickered, reflected the struggle briefly, then zeroed.
Terrified Olympian technicians, summoned by the alarms, knew even then that the Holy Mother was dead. Still they made for the elevators, tried to reach the chambers. Eventually somebody remembered the emergency bypass system and activated it. Elevators rose to the Temple levels and quickly filled with High Priestesses. Back down they rode, nervous, unsure of themselves, and then burst through the doors into the Holy Mother’s chamber.
No one was there. No one. And yet, on the floor in the center of the oval room were the crushed remains of a still-smouldering cigarette.
Nautilus—Underside
Mavra Chang’s suspicions about gypsy’s unwillingness to meet with Nathan Brazil proved unfounded. The strange, dark man returned within half a day after her return from Meouit, though he would say not a word about what he had been doing in space except to note that he “felt a need to be alone for a little while.” Somehow he seemed much different; he still talked like an old con man and was outwardly unchanged, but there was something deep down, something that anyone who’d known him any length of time sensed but couldn’t pin down. Until now there had been a touch of the child in Gypsy; he wasn’t feared for his talents and was generally liked because of this puckish humor. All that seemed gone now; only the mannerisms and act remained.
They were all gathered in the control room waiting, for what they weren’t quite sure. It had been Obie’s show from the start and Obie was still very much in charge. He was telling as little as he could get away with. If he had questioned Gypsy about the strange trip, he hadn’t told anyone his results.
Brazil hadn’t remembered Gypsy but when reminded of a few incidents that had occurred many years earlier—neither could remember just how many—he vaguely recalled the strange man.
And now here they were, at Obie’s bidding. Brazil, Gypsy, Marquoz, centauroid Mavra Chang, and, interestingly, Yua.
“Prepare for drop,” Obie warned. Mavra always wondered why the computer bothered; there wasn’t anything you could do to prepare for it. There was the blackness, the drawn-out sensation of falling, and then back to normal once again.
Obie had asked them to gather in the control room to monitor televisor screens of the big dish, the giant Zinder radiator that was a large part of the lower surface of the planetoid.
They were seeing a world mostly blue-green and white but with patches of red, yellow, and other colors. Yua recognized it at once and gasped. “That’s Olympus!” she exclaimed.
The image of the planet shifted a bit, first this way and then that as Obie oriented the huge antenna so that the planet was in the center of the screen. He matched orbital velocity with the planet’s rotation so that he stayed in the same position relative to it.
