The Return of Nathan Brazil

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 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.