The Return of Nathan Brazil

Hakazit

Marquoz awoke.

He groaned, stretched, and looked about curiously at his new land. It was not a cheering sight; he was on a high plateau and had a good view of the lay of the land for many kilometers. The land was rugged, almost ringed, it seemed, by towering volcanic peaks some of which were venting smoke. Below stretched a great plain, but a plain strewn with black rocks and boulders and thick layers of volcanic ash broken occasionally by tiny cinder cones that did not look reassuringly old or extinct.

There was grass, yes; a sickly yellow grass that grew tall and wild and waved in the wind that swirled around the volcanic bowl, and off in the distance he could see a huge body of blue-green water that had to be an ocean. Only near this great sea were there splotches of deep green indicating cultivation.

It was an active landscape. There were rivers, many of them, all in perpetual youth thanks to the obviously continuous volcanism. The source of the water was obvious; the prevailing winds blew in from the sea, were captured and forced up against the high volcanoes, many with snowcaps, and cooled, producing rains that flowed down here in the back country.

He marveled at the extent of his eyesight; everything was incredibly sharp and clear, and he could pick out individual trees farther away than he could have seen anything at all in his old body. His hearing seemed normal; he could hear the rush of wind and the sound of dripping water, neither anything he would expect to have heard differently—before.

Before what? he wondered suddenly. There were roads down there, nice-looking ones, but little sign of habitation. Were all the people in hibernation except him, or did they simply all live near the sea? Animal, vegetable, or mineral?

Well, he was one of them himself now, whatever. He knew that, felt strange and massive. He knew, too, that he could get some idea of his new race by simple self-examination, yet he hesitated, a little afraid at what he might find.

Some big, majestic black birds swooped nearby; for a second he was afraid that they were his new form—but, no, he had no wings, of that he was sure.

Slowly, acting as if the mere sight of his own body would turn him to stone, he looked down at himself.

His new body was massive; that was the only word to describe it. No, not huge—although far larger than his old form—but thick, dense. His skin was a metallic blue and seemed thick enough to stop arrow or, perhaps, bullet, and terminated in two very thick legs that rested on large, wide, wickedly clawed feet.

Those claws, he thought idly, look as if they are made of the strongest steel.

His old arms were short and stubby; they now matched the legs, perfectly proportioned to the body and so thick and powerful looking that he would not have been surprised to bend steel bars with them. As he’d seen but four toes he wasn’t surprised to find three long, thick fingers faced by an abnormally long opposable thumb.

He raised his hands to his face. The neck was thick and apparently bone plated, but it was difficult to tell anything about his head except that it was more ovoid and flatter than his had been, more like a human’s—although it felt hard, thick. It’s almost as if I am a huge insect, he thought, with leathery skin over my exoskeleton. He wasn’t sure—maybe his guess was close to the mark.

There was some room to move on the plateau so he took a hesitant step forward and immediately realized that, as before, he still had a thick supporting tail, this one longer than his old one. He looked over his shoulder while bringing the tail around, dislodging rocks in the latter operation, and stared. The tail, too, was thick and plated, but there were bony ridges running in pairs from his back down to the tip, and the tip terminated flatly, not pointed, and out of it rose two incredibly wicked-looking spikes, perhaps a meter each. He tested the tail as he would a weapon, and knew that it was exactly that. His old tail was strictly for sitting and balance; this one could be used like a thick tentacle, and those sharp points would close in on just about anything at great speed. He was certain that those of his new race practiced the wielding of it as some human cultures and his own Chugach practiced with swords.

I’m a creature built like a war machine, he told himself. He looked back again at the bleak and violent landscape. If each hex on the Well World was designed to test a lifeform, then that land down there must be very dangerous indeed.

He studied his hands again, flexing the fingers, and discovered that his first impression was correct—the nails were long, nasty sword-points that were retractable with a flick of internal muscles.

Still, he could see the logic of it. He had been assured by Obie that the computer had in some way influenced what each would become, and this form, for all its nasty toughness and bulk, was not so terribly alien to what he’d been. He was not, after all, to live in this place but to make war from it. This was a form built for war.

He tried to reach back into his throat, to the sacs where internal wastes produced the flammable gases of the Chugach, and tried to blow some fire. There was nothing; that ability was gone, and he would miss it. A pity, though, he reflected. Such an ability would be appropriate here, in a land of volcanoes.

The sun was already behind the mountains; dark shadows closed in on the landscape as he watched. Soon it would be very dark, he knew, and he was in the middle of nowhere with no sign of his new people, no sign of huge settlements or even tiny villages, and no weapon with which to defend himself against whatever might be laying in wait for him out there on that darkening plain. He wished for a club, something with which to arm himself against the hidden foes he knew must be waiting, but there weren’t even trees from which clubs might be improvised.

He considered staying on the little plateau until morning; it was tempting, but he was ravenously hungry and wasn’t even sure what the hell he ate.

He was still pondering this problem in the gathering gloom when the one thing he absolutely least expected occurred.

Down below, in orderly succession, the street lights came on.

It was amazing how the barren landscape was transformed by the tiny lights—thousands, no, tens of thousands of them, stretching out from just below him all the way to where he knew the sea to be. Tremendously variable in color, too; intelligently arranged in geometric patterns of greens, blues, reds, yellows—all the colors. It was beautiful, even if the landscape did now seem to look like a massive aircraft landing field.

Still, the sight puzzled him as much as it fascinated him; there had been roads, yes, but no sign of such an array of electronics that he’d been able to see, nor any sign of where the energy was coming from.

Almost in reply to his thoughts, he felt a slight rumble in the ground, and nearby, dislodged rock fell crashing to the plain below. He knew the answer in an instant—geothermal power. These people had learned to make such a violent land work for them.

There was a pathway down to his right, he saw, but he hesitated before using it. Those lights were electrical; that meant that this was a high-technology hex, a land where machines obeyed the same rules he’d been born and bred to take for granted. That meant communications networks, computers, perhaps, and—guns. He felt confident that he could stop most projectiles, but this skin and bone would be little protection against a laser pistol, for example—particularly one designed by a people to be used on their own kind.

He felt certain there was more danger from his own new race than from any hidden menaces. The civilization had proved out long ago, millions of years perhaps. It had proved itself by conquering whatever horrors his new body was designed to combat, and it had built a technologically sophisticated civilization on that result. There would be no hidden enemies down there, only new ones he would make.

He sighed and started carefully down the path. It wasn’t hard, although he had to remind himself now and then that his tail was longer and thinner and solidly weighted, and had to be watched lest it start a landslide of its own.

Vision wasn’t much of a problem, he noted with interest. The Chugach had terrible night vision, since they lived beneath the sands and used senses other than sight much of the time. This new form saw extremely well in the daylight and even better at night. Though it distinguished virtually no color the night vision was precise where it needed to be. As he had seen the greens and blues and yellows quite clearly earlier, Marquoz surmised that his night vision emphasized contrast and depth perception at the expense of color. It probably got in the way, he thought—but, no, the color sense was still there; he’d seen the differences in the mass of lights.

Tradeoffs, he decided. You had the senses you needed when you needed them. That was convenient.

He hadn’t expected much activity so close to the volcano slopes and he wasn’t disappointed; these giant volcanos were active. Anyone building at the base would be buried in stone and ash, probably. Only a nut would take the risk.

Still, there was some traffic; he heard it as he reached the bottom and started off on the plain. The sounds of trucks and heavy machinery all over. This was a busy place, anyway. He wondered what the hell they did.

It was not long before he reached a road. The lights outlined it in ghostly pale orange; small ball-shaped ones set into the ground, apparently to show the left and right limits of the road.

As he stood alongside the road a vehicle approached. He quickly saw why they needed the limit markers. Not only was the thing gigantic but it was bearing down on him at a tremendously high rate of speed. In only seconds it had approached and roared past him.

He saw the driver, although the maniac never took his eyes off the road markers. The vehicle itself had been a great mechanical shovel built to scoop huge amounts of earth and deposit it elsewhere. It didn’t look that different from those of several other races. The driver, though, had afforded him his first real look at his new people.

Centauroid, yes, but two-legged, his face a bony, demonic mask flanked by sharp horns, his eyes seemed to be seas of deep fiery red without pupils. He resembled the demons of Chugach mythology, the kinds of creature his people had used in their darker legends to scare the hell out of children and gullible adults.

He heard a rustling sound nearby. Startled, he whirled on it, only to discover a tiny lizard staring nervously back at him. At his movement it froze, then saw it was spotted and looked up into his face with a hopeful expression.

“Cherk?” it piped in a high, squeaky voice.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he told it, and it seemed to accept that and suddenly scampered off. Nothing nasty from that native.

He turned back to the road, trying to decide what to do. He would like merely to be noticed and picked up, he decided, but that was no sure thing along here, not at the speeds the natives drove—and that single-minded, straight-ahead stare on the driver didn’t inspire confidence. It would not do, he decided, to get run over by a truck before he’d even said hello.

He started walking alongside the road, choosing the direction leading away from the mountains. That might be a mistake, he knew, as that driver had definitely been going somewhere. Still, there was little sign as to where these people kept themselves in the daytime, or why they were nocturnal despite having keen day vision. There were some interesting puzzles here he’d love to start solving.

A second vehicle roared by him, this time from the opposite direction, not a shovel but an enormous truck filled with gravel or sand or ash or something. The driver didn’t see him, either.

He stopped short. Ash! Of course! These huge volcanos probably popped off pretty regularly but the slow, chunky lava he’d seen indicated that they were probably not dangerous to people on the plains. It would be the ash that would be the problem—layers of it, meters thick, perhaps, at times. Even if the eruptions only occurred every year or two it would mean frequent rebuilding. After a while the natives would have stopped bothering; they’d have built permanent structures underground, in the most solid bedrock they could find. With a high technology that would be easy. Just as his own Chugach had learned to live with the thick desert sand by building and living below it, so must these people have found refuge from the constant threat of eruption by an underground civilization. Only near the sea, farthest from the volcanos and probably with a good, irregular volcanic coastline that made for deep water harbors, would they exist aboveground.

Idly, he wondered how they coped with seismic quakes but decided that they had had an awfully long time to learn to cope with that. There might well have just been an eruption—they would be hauling away the ash, clearing, and rebuilding. It might well be their chief export, as volcanic ash made the best mineral-rich soil known. Mineral-poor and overworked hexes would pay through the nose for a steady supply.

He began to feel better. Even before he had met or talked with one of these people, he felt he knew them.

He was still deep in such thoughts when five small sledlike hovercraft sped up to him. Each bore a single rider, a demon prince of Chugach legend, and each stopped close to him. They nearly surrounded him. He looked up into their faces and felt childhood fears surface. He pushed them back as best he could and summoned up his courage.

All five wore official-looking leather-like jackets, plus holsters. Empty holsters. The pistols were all out, all pointed at him.

Oddly, he felt better at this. He’d been noticed—probably by one of the truck drivers—and he was now face to face with the local constabulary.

Brazil had told him he would automatically be able to speak their language, so he didn’t hesitate. He held up his hands, slowly, palms out, to show that he was carrying no weapons.

“All right, you got me,” he said lightly. “I’m an Entry, I think you call it. The new boy here. Take me to your leader or my leader or something like that.”

They just sat on their funny little sleds for a moment, staring at him with expressionless, demonic faces, pistols drawn. Finally one with some extra buttons on his jacket hissed in a low and nasty voice, “All right. Move. Start walking.”

“Anything you want,” Marquoz responded agreeably and started forward. They followed, pistols still drawn, not saying another word.

They walked for several kilometers. Marquoz was thirsty and hungry, but his captors supplied neither rest nor food nor conversation. He was no longer as sure about this culture as he had been, but he knew he didn’t like these five.

His first guess had been right as to where the people were, though. They came to a junction and he could see cross-shaped plates where the two roads met. As they approached, one of the plates lowered, forming a downward ramp below the other road. He wondered where the controller was. The way these people drove he fervently hoped that it was efficiently automated.

The surface roads were duplicated below, although he had a fair downhill walk before they reached the living levels. Alongside each cavernous route, though, were moving walkways. He took the walk while his escort kept to the road, although he knew that eyes and weapons were upon him. Still, this was easier; he stood and machines did the work, as he was always sure the gods meant it to be.

Suddenly the walls dropped away and he found himself on a bridge overlooking an enormous cavern, one of the largest he’d ever seen. A city was below him, a stunningly beautiful city aglow in colorful lights. Thousands of people rode the intricate network of moving walkways that passed below him. Occasionally Marquoz and his escort would reach a platform and siding where a truck was loading or unloading what looked like great freight elevators. There were no shafts; the great cubes just seemed to float up and down. He guessed it was somehow done with magnetism.

He’d stopped, absently looking over the view, and that irritated his captors. “Keep moving!” the leader hissed at him.

He stepped back onto the walk and let it carry him. “Sorry,” he said, “it was just very beautiful—and very unexpected.” That seemed to mollify and please them; after that they didn’t seem quite so nasty. They weren’t too bright, he reflected. When he’d stepped off the walk to look they’d gone several meters past before they realized he’d stopped. If he had a little more experience being whatever these people were and if he hadn’t wanted to be a captive, he could have escaped them easily or knocked them all off.

There were uniforms and uniforms, though. Loads of uniforms and symbols of what he took to be rank. It was funny, really. The place looked to be a parody of a military state, an almost perfect place for someone of his talents, background, and experience.

They finally reached the place they wanted, a large elevator or whatever with siding, empty now. “You get in,” the leader ordered. “You will be met at the bottom.”

He nodded absently and entered, making sure he cleared his spiked tail before the door rumbled closed. The descent was quick; more, it was fascinating, since the rear of the cube was transparent and afforded him a nice view of the city. He noted absently the little device in one corner of the ceiling that had to be a camera of some kind. He had seen them all over. A dictatorship for sure, he decided. He wondered what the hell they were so scared of.

The view was suddenly masked as the cube settled in its berth and he turned to the door. He felt a bump as the car settled, then the door slid open to reveal a single creature staring at him with those eerie burning eyes. The reception committee’s jacket had slightly more decoration; Marquoz had been passed on to a higher-up, although one not very high, he decided. He saw no squads of nervous guards, no hidden cops or nasties. He was disappointed; he was beginning to like being considered an important enemy of the republic or whatever.

“I am Commander Zhart, two hundred ninety-first District,” the creature told him, his voice a hissing echo of the man above.

Marquoz bowed slightly and walked slowly from the elevator. “I’m Marquoz, formerly of Chugach, a new Entry to this land and this world,” he responded. “Glad to meet someone who’ll at least talk to me,” he added.

“Just come with me,” the commander chided and started off. He followed, noting that the ability to avoid stepping on the spikes of the next person’s tail was an art.

“Just where am I?” he asked casually.

“You are in Hakazit,” Zhart told him. “Specifically, in Harmony City.”

“Hakazit,” he repeated. That was how his mind saw it; actually the sounds they were using to converse would have been impossible for human or Chugach. “Well, this is a most fascinating and beautiful land you have here, Commander. I look forward to a new life here.”

The commander was pleased. “I must say,” he noted, “that you are remarkably calm and relaxed for an Entry. Our last Entry—about thirty years ago—was a frightened wreck.”

“Oh, it comes naturally,” Marquoz responded casually. “I’ve spent a good part of my life in strange cultures among alien people. The new and the strange fascinate more.”

“A commendable, if surprising, attitude,” Zhart approved. “You are a most unusual individual, Marquoz. Tell me, what brought you to such other worlds and creatures? What did you do formerly? A salesman, perhaps?”

Marquoz chuckled. “Oh, my, no! Dear me, no!” He continued chuckling. “I was a spy.”

Commander Zhart stopped short, almost causing Marquoz to step on his tail. He looked back gravely at the new Hakazit and tried to decide if he was being put on.

Marquoz was still chuckling. “A salesman indeed!” he snorted.