The Return of Nathan Brazil

Kwangsi

Marquoz lit a pipe by breathing on the bowl, then sucked on it for a few moments, blowing billowing clouds of acrid smoke everywhere. Finally he said, “The problem, of course, is keeping the Com out of it. I’m having one hell of a time lying through my prodigious teeth just to get us this access.”

Mavra Chang’s sharp, black eyebrows rose slightly. She was getting to like the little dragon, not only for his cynical, self-confident personality but also for the streak of larceny in him. Obie thought that Mavra liked Marquoz because the Chugach was shorter, not counting tail, than Mavra although, in sheer bulk, he outweighed four of her.

“You think they’re catching on?” she asked.

He nodded. “I think they are aware that there’s more to it than we’ve told them. After all, they are not stupid. Their agents report a great deal of change in the cult and its operations and a businesslike transformation of its Temples. Right now, because of Oiympus’s economic clout, they are humoring an influential interest group at little cost, but they’re getting worried at how suddenly un-nut culty everybody’s acting. They know such a powerful group can be a severe threat.”

Mavra sank back, stuck a cheroot in her mouth, declined the dragon’s offer to light it, and brought things more to the point. “So how close are we? Obie is digesting enormous gulps of data but it’s all secondhand. You know we don’t dare bring him in this close to Suba and the Council itself.”

A speaker barked into life. It was an ordinary intercom, but some modifications had been made. Obie might not be able to risk a direct link with the Com computer complex but he could risk a small private line.

“Hello, Mavra,” the computer’s pleasant and uncannily human voice broke in. “I couldn’t help overhearing. Want an update?”

“Please,” she invited and settled back. Obie could, of course, simply continue the link she’d had with him on Olympus, but she was paranoid about keeping that sort of state up for any length of time. To her Obie was another person, and she valued her privacy even as she knew she enjoyed it only at the computer’s sufferance.

“He’s well hidden, I can tell you that,” Obie told her. “Nobody can be erased totally from the computers, you know that, but if anybody tells you that no individual can do anything without computers knowing and reporting it he is dead wrong.”

“You’ve had problems finding data on Nathan Brazil?”

“Oh, no. Not really, Mavra. Despite a really good coverup it was fairly easy to sort out the facts of his life back a couple thousand years—back to Old Earth. He’s been born in at least three dozen places and died more than that.”

“How’s that?” Marquoz put in.

Obie laughed. It was eerie to hear a machine be so damned human, particularly a machine as powerful and absolute as Obie.

“Oh, yes. After all, records are kept. If you don’t have logical backgrounds, then somebody’s bound to notice. I’ve had to trace a very good mind determined not to be traced, and if it wasn’t for three factors I can tell you it would have been impossible.”

“Three factors?” Mavra was interested.

“Oh, yes. First, he does not seem to be able to alter his appearance, even surgically, and make it stick. He’s tried. Since he’s not a part of the Markovian reality like us but of the pre-Markovian original state of the Universe, the one that created them, he’s apparently impervious to change by anything maintained by the Well of Souls. Once, long ago, on the Well World itself, he actually managed to change bodies when his was badly injured. He can regenerate anything, it appears, and cannot be killed although he can be injured, even very painfully. Yet, even then, when he got out of his old body he later turned up in the Com looking just like his old self. It is very curious—he is a mass of contradictions. One would say that his current form was his original form, which is why he keeps reverting to it, except that all the data indicate he predates humanity’s origin.”

Mavra considered it. “I have often wondered about some things. I don’t see how a god can be hurt, lose his memory, or cling to one form, among other things. He seems awfully ordinary, Obie, to have power such as you’ve described.”

“I agree. He is a mass of questions with no answers. I would love to learn those answers, Mavra.”

“We’re trying.”

Marquoz stepped back into the conversation. “You said three factors. Constancy of form is only one.”

“Oh, yes. Well, the second thing is that he is a sailor. Back on Old Earth he commanded at least one ship that sailed a watery ocean, and he’s commanded such ships, however powered, on a number of worlds. The combination of the shape consistency and the vocation made it easier to hunt him down.”

“And the third?” Mavra asked.

“His religion. It is very curious, you know, that he should have one, let alone observe one. It is an ancient Old-Earth religion that came out of a collection of tribal groups a few thousand years ago. They seem to have started as polytheists of the routine sort and then, very suddenly, became the first monotheistic religion in human history, and codified that religion with a series of laws and customs. A number of other huge religions sprang from it but the followers of the original have remained small in number and have survived the millennia holding to their beliefs. It is called ‘Judaism,’ followers usually called ‘Jews,’ and there are some around even today, still a handful. Very curious.”

“And he follows this faith?” Marquoz put in.

“Yes, he seems to. Although he does not live in one of their communities and seems never to have, he is often in contact with them, particularly on their highest holy days, and has been known to look after them.”

Marquoz was not the only one fascinated, but his thinking followed the same lines as Obie’s while Mavra was acquiring a more romantic if equally enigmatic picture.

“You say he observes this religion and has a special interest in the welfare of its adherents,” the little dragon mused aloud, “yet there is no evidence that he is more than a participant in their rituals? He is not regarded as especially holy or godlike?”

“Absolutely not,” Obie replied strongly. “Their god is universal but not tangible, certainly not an ordinary man. In fact, once, when what appeared to be an ordinary man showed up in their homeland claiming to be their god’s human son, they executed him. A much larger religion grew out of that, though.”

“More and more contradictions,” Marquoz mused. “Why would Nathan Brazil be interested in such a group? If he is god why would he follow it as an adherent? If he’s not, then he’s at least a Markovian holdover who knows damned well where humanity came from—including his little group. It makes no sense at all!”

“Even more,” Obie said. “The religion that sprang from the execution of the man who claimed he was god’s son? It’s called ‘Christianity,’ and it is still very much around and generally rather well organized even though fragmented into subcults. Those people have a legend that there is one immortal man, a Jew, who cursed god’s son on the way to the execution and was in turn cursed to live eternally until the executed one should return to establish the rule of Heaven. It is clear that, no matter what the true origin, Nathan Brazil is this Wandering Jew, the source of the story.”

“Less and less sense,” Marquoz snorted. “I guess we won’t know the answers until we find him. I’m getting interested in that myself, now.”

“Obie?” Mavra called. “Can you give us what you do know—in brief, of course. How far back have you been able to trace him?”

Obie was silent a moment. Then he said, “Well, the dates will mean nothing to you. Let’s just say that the first real record I have was back in the days of Old Earth, when space travel was still in its infancy. He was a freighter captain, of course, sailing from Mediterranean ports to North and South America. Those terms mean nothing to you, I know—sorry. I find a couple of things interesting about the period, though. He called himself Mark Kreisel back then, and he was a citizen of a tiny island country called Malta although the company he worked for was not Maltese but from a much larger country far away called Brazil.”

“Aha!” Marquoz commented. “It is also interesting that Malta is not very far from what was once the country of Israel, the only Jewish state in the industrial age and the birthplace of the religion I mentioned.”

“How far back was this, Obie?”

“Roughly eighteen hundred years, Mavra—the dating systems have changed several times since then and many of the old records are either inexact or unclear on which they used. That would give you a rough idea, though.”

Marquoz was fascinated anew. “As far back as that… And even then he was near those unusual people with the small religion. Even then. I wonder, though. I would think he’d have been a citizen of that group’s country.”

“No, that would have limited him,” Obie said. “The Jewish people have been ill-treated in human history almost from the start. Much of the world did not recognize the country and would have destroyed it had it not had a strong military and a few powerful allies. The Jews were always persecuted for being different from the main culture of the places they lived because they would not fully adopt the majority’s ways.”

“I think I have an idea of being mistrusted because of being a bit different,” Marquoz noted sardonically.

“Malta, on the other hand, was a tiny island country nobody ever heard of, a polyglot of races and cultures, and absolutely no political threat to anybody,” Obie told them. “A perfect vantage point, a perfect base, a nationality that nobody gave a damn about.”

“And then what?” Mavra prompted. “I mean, what happened?”

“It would seem,” Obie responded, “that Captain Mark Kreisel ran into a bad storm and that his ship was abandoned. He remained aboard in the old tradition to secure against salvage—the laws are pretty much the same on that now as then—and, though the ship didn’t sink, when rescue parties went to find him he was gone. No boats or rafts were missing, and on the high seas, hundreds of kilometers from land or safety, the authorities assumed that he’d been washed overboard in heavy seas and drowned. That was the first recorded death of the man we now look for as Nathan Brazil.”

Mavra was fascinated by the story and begged for more. Obie told of the many lives and many identities of Nathan Brazil over the centuries. As an astronaut named David Katz he’d been one of the supervisors on the building of the first permanent orbiting space stations; he’d fought in a number of wars and surfaced in a number of countries. In several guises, he was something of a legend in humanity’s far past. As Warren Kerman he’d been chief astrogator on the first human starship; as a Russian cosmonaut named Ivan Kraviski he’d been the third man to step onto the alien world they would name Gagarin, the first Earthtype world discovered in space. As man had spread, so had Nathan Brazil, not leading the pack but with the leaders all the same.

Mavra was entranced, but Marquoz commented, “Funny. I would have thought he’d have kept a low profile—yet here he is, constantly in the headlines.”

“Not so odd,” Obie replied. “Every man he was was a real person, who was born someplace, grew up someplace, worked his way up and eventually died—never of old age, I might add. He has a penchant for disappearances.”

“You say they were all real people,” Mavra cut in. “But they couldn’t be—could they? I mean, it’s all the same man…”

“It was, I feel sure,” the computer told her. “Yet they were real. I cannot see how he managed it—yet, somehow, he did. It is interesting that all of them came from orphaned families or small families with few living relatives. Also, they were picked for close physical resemblance. At some point Brazil moved in and replaced each individual, usually at a juncture when the man was far from home and fairly young. One thing’s for sure—he knew them well enough that he was never tripped up, never once. Everyone, even the people from the man’s real past, seemed to believe the impersonation.”

“I wonder—did he murder them?” Marquoz asked worriedly. “And, if so, what power did he use to become them literally when he never changed his physical form? It worries me.”

That seemed to upset Mavra. “He would never coldbloodedly murder anyone!” she protested. “Everything we know about him says he wouldn’t. As a small child I have memories—he spirited me out past the Harvich secret police during the takeover—the only strong memories from that period I have. There was kindness in him, a gentleness.”

Marquoz shrugged. “Nevertheless, if he did not do them in, what happened to them?”

“That’s the key,” Obie said over the intercom. “That’s the major thing. If we can learn that we might find him. For, you see, over thirteen hundred years ago he broke his pattern. He became Nathan Brazil, he purchased a freighter, he went into business. And he stayed Nathan Brazil until just over twelve years ago.”

“Interesting,” Marquoz muttered. “I wonder why?”

“Fairly simple,” Obie responded. “First, that coincides with the development of the rejuve process, which, even then, was good for a century. As time passed the process got better, the possible lifespan longer. Of course, as you know, the brain cells eventually die even in rejuve, but by the time this would have happened to Brazil everyone who knew him and was likely to run into him was dead and he had a new batch of friends. Com bureaucracy being what it was, he had only to renew his pilot’s license every four years and that would be that. He became a legend among the spacers—the oldest man still to be flying. He’d drank with them, gambled with them, fought with and beside them, helped them out when they needed it, and they owed him. The spacers thought that he was just the only person lucky enough to be able to take an infinite number of rejuves. With the Com expanding, times between meetings even of old friends was great. The relativity factor complicated matters, and, of course, he’d find little to like in the sameness of the hivelike communal that made up most of the Com.”

“But he finally did give it up, huh?” Mavra queried.

Obie was philosophical about that. “Well, yes, of course. If a cult that said you were God started a campaign to find you—wouldn’t you think it time to change identities? Somehow I think any of us would.”

“You’ve learned this all from the computer files?” Mavra asked, amazed.

“Yes and no. It was there, but only in bits and pieces. It has taken not only the computer files but also the legwork of thousands of Fellowship members on a large number of worlds to correlate,” Obie replied. “We could not have done it without them—but now we are stopped until we can unearth some clue as to where he was reborn.”

“Did he just disappear again?”

“That’s about it, Marquoz. He kept ships an awfully long time—two, three hundred years or more, until they wore out. They were all named the Stehekin, a word whose meaning eludes me. The last one was found, a huge hole blown through its midsection. It had been looted. There was blood on the bridge that matched Brazil’s—quite a lot of it—but no trace of him or his valuable cargo. It was assumed that he’d been lured out of nullspace by a false distress signal, attacked by pirates, and murdered. There’s actually a plaque to his memory in Spacer’s Hall.”

“You don’t believe it, though,” Mavra noted.

“Of course not. That sort of thing is his favorite way out. No, I think he found some real person, reached the point he had to reach with that person in order to assume his identity, and did so. He is somewhere else now, as someone else, waiting a decent amount of time before he can resume a normal life again.”

A new voice said, “Well, I think he should be pretty easy to find.” They whirled, saw that it was Gypsy. Marquoz nodded but Mavra looked at him strangely, an odd thought passing through her mind. It was ridiculous, of course, but… No, he was a little too tall, a little too muscular, a little too dark. She wondered, though. When Obie had picked them all up from the Temple that first time, the computer had not done anything more than simple teleportation. He’d made no detailed analysis; he hadn’t stored the mind and memory of Gypsy and Marquoz. Later, they’d refused to use Obie’s teleportation system. Both Gypsy and Marquoz had insisted on using spaceships. Afterward Mavra and Obie had run a check on Gypsy, just out of curiosity, and found nothing. Absolutely nothing. When even Mavra Chang’s early history could be found in the files and all travel and expenses required records, there was not even a travel document showing that he existed. His thumbprints, retinal and blood patterns had matched nowhere at all.

Finally she couldn’t resist it. “Gypsy? Ever heard of Malta?”

He looked a little surprised but didn’t bat an eyelash as he replied, “Sure. It’s the capital city of Sorgos, I think.”

Marquoz chortled lightly. “I know what you’re thinking. I’ve sometimes thought it myself. But, no, he has the wrong physiology. Brazil has occasionally been able to alter thumbprints but never retinal and blood patterns. Forget it. He’s another mystery.”

Gypsy looked confused. “What’s that all about?”

“The lady was just wondering if you were Nathan Brazil yourself, that’s all.”

He chuckled. “Oh, hell, no. Whoever heard of a Jewish Gypsy?”

They all had to laugh at that. Still, Mavra told herself, there was something extremely odd about the man. His strange powers went beyond empathy. In an age in which everyone showed the proper papers just to go to the bathroom and even Mavra’s had had to be carefully faked, Gypsy, according to Marquoz, had never been asked for them. In a customs line he would simply be ignored; stiff-necked hotel clerks, even when robots, never thought to ask for his documentation. Even on New Pompeii he strolled into high-security areas without a challenge. Why? What strange power did he have? Where did he get it? Could he influence Obie? Was that why the computer had taken no readout?

Seemingly ignorant of this mental speculation, Gypsy plopped down in a chair, yawned, and rubbed his eyes.

Even as Mavra stared, her preoccupation passed; her mind turned to other channels, dismissing the mystery of Gypsy as unimportant to their present work. She turned to the intercom and Obie and never once even questioned why the problem of Gypsy had suddenly become something she shouldn’t concern herself with.