The Return of Nathan Brazil

Aboard the Jerusalem

They’d said little after the initial exchange.The pilot docked quickly and they moved through the set of airlocks into the center of the ship. There was alot of banging and shuddering aft, as the sounds of the ship being dismantled into containers by tugs came to them. He gestured and she walked forward on the catwalks, he following, until they reached the lounge.

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. Allb.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!”

“Yousuggested 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, I 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.

I have to take the chance. Stand by … Now!

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