The Return of Nathan Brazil

Council. Com expansion was slowed, so that as each frontier world became “ripe,” Trelig’s sponge syndicate could wrest control. Furthermore, the slower the expansion the easier it was to attain a majority on the Council. Then from his luxurious and well-guarded planetoid, New Pompeii, the self-styled Emperor of a new Roman Empire had tried to gain control of literally everything.

Not a word of which, historian Tortoi Kai noted with increasing horror and fascination, could be found in the history books. The wars, the weapons locker, yes—but sponge was discussed only as an amok alien disease whose cure had been discovered about seven hundred and fifty years before, a cheap and easily distributed cure that had sent sponge the way of smallpox, polio, cancer, and other earlier ills.

Kai couldn’t resist something like this. She burrowed further into the records. Trelig, she found, had discovered the researches of an obscure scientist named Gilgram Zinder, who worked for some long-gone science institute. Somehow this Dr. Zinder had made a mammoth discovery, one so powerful that Trelig believed it would give him absolute control of the Com in a matter of months. So he had kidnapped Zinder’s young daughter, Nikki, and blackmailed Zinder into quitting the institute and moving to New Pompeii to continue his researches. Some recalcitrant Councillors had then been invited for a demonstration; a few had gone, the rest sent agents or representatives. Three days later not only they, but Trelig and the entire planetoid of New Pompeii, simply vanished. None ever returned. Ever.

This Tortoi Kai pieced together from thousands of bits of information. Obviously the experiment, the great demonstration, had somehow gone wrong—but how? And why? And what was the demonstration to have been? Trelig was no fool; Zinder had something, all right, somehow, somewhere. What was it?

Zinder was the best clue. His early lab research and theories were all filed, but they were technically beyond her. So she asked the computer for a basic statement of his theories in layman’s terms.

Basically, the computer explained, Zinder didn’t believe in the absolutes of any physical laws. All matter, all energy, he theorized, was an unnatural state whose existence was maintained by a set of mathematical equations. The natural state of the Universe was a thing at rest, a constant and evenly distributed “ether” or single type of energy. The matter and the energy that we know were caused by the transformation of this single, primal energy into the forms obeying the laws we know.

That the Universe had limits was well accepted in physics; it had been born of a massive explosion of a “white hole” that opened from an alternate Universe into ours for no known reason. Zinder believed that the matter and energy gushing through this white hole had somehow transmuted the rest-state primal energy, the ether of our own Universe, creating the seeds for the Universe as we know it. Generally, Zinder’s theory was in agreement with those of most of his colleagues except on the nature of the ether, the primal energy, of which there was no evidence. Powerful telescopes looking beyond the edge of the Universe had registered literally nothing. Besides, the scientists argued, if this Universe was naturally at rest, as Zinder proposed, then now, almost fifteen billion years later, we should observe signs of a return to the rest state. Our Universe had been nothing, a blank, until the white hole had opened.

Oddly, Zinder agreed that there should be signs of a return to the rest state; the fact that there wasn’t any didn’t convince him that he was wrong. He was the one scientist in a thousand who refuses to believe. Once created, Zinder argued, the matter and energy in our Universe were frozen, somehow, by the imposition of physical laws from outside. These laws were imposed and enforced, preventing our Universe from “damping out” the white hole intrusion as it should have. What agency could impose and enforce the posited laws? his critics had asked derisively. Was he suggesting that there was an omnipotent god, who caused the breakthrough and imposed such laws? Metaphysics! they sneered.

In fact, Zinder believed in such a god and believed he might be the one to prove scientifically the existence of such an intelligence. Other white holes must have broken through from time to time; there was physical evidence that some still did. They were damped out. Why wasn’t the big bang of the Creation damped?

Although a brilliant scientist, Zinder was somewhat practical, too. If science would not allow him to proceed, perhaps metaphysicians would. Endowed by a religious foundation he found personally distasteful, he had set up his lab on Makiva, a huge for-hire science complex, and built on entirely new principles he had developed a huge self-aware computer, with the sole aim of locating the primal energy, discovering why it couldn’t be seen or measured, and then, if possible, divining the imposed equations for those things we think of as real—divining them and, ultimately, rewriting them.

Tortoi Kai did not need to be a scientist to understand the implications of all that. Suppose, just suppose, Zinder had been right? If a thing could be analyzed to the nth degree so that the whole of it could be reduced to the mathematics of its existence, and then sufficient force was applied to change that math ever so slightly…

You’d be a god yourself. You’d be able to tailor-make whatever and whoever you needed. With the transmutation of any matter and any energy into anything else, you could have anything you wanted just for the asking. Anything.

Suddenly Kai recalled the Markovians. A galaxy-wide race of beings who had arisen so long ago they must have been the first intelligence to develop after the Creation explosion. They left tantalizing structures on worlds billions of years dead, yet no minor artifacts of any sort. And beneath each of their planets was an artificial layer, up to two kilometers thick, a mysterious quasi-organic computer, purpose unknown.

If Zinder was right, then the Markovians may have had no need for artifacts of any kind—their food, their art, their furnishings, anything they wanted they had only to wish for. Perhaps the computer gave whatever they desired to them.

The records implied that Zinder believed that to be the answer to the Markovian riddle. He had even postulated that our own worlds were generated by a Markovian-created singularity, a singularity of a far different sort than that at the heart of black and white holes. The place where the rules were made—and enforced. A secondary singularity in imitation of the greater one that maintained the Markovians.

But the Markovians were long dead. Zinder believed that they had reached such a point that they were absorbed into the god who created their own Universe. They had become gods themselves, and had risen to join their father.

Right or not, Zinder’s theories accounted for a lot. Even eliminating the metaphysics, Tortoi Kai thought, suppose he’d been right about the basics? Antor Trelig, the would-be emperor of the galaxy, had believed Zinder right, had believed him right enough to have kidnapped his daughter, moved his project to Trelig’s own world, and been confident enough to arrange a show of power.

But something had gone wrong.

The science teams jumped on the problem within hours of Tortoi Kai’s discoveries. Although tremendously skeptical of Zinder’s metaphysical theories, they nonetheless admired his grasp of esoteric science, his evident massive genius, and they recognized, as did Kai, that Trelig had believed it would work and someone high up had been so convinced it had worked that Zinder’s unfortunately incomplete notes—even the fact of his existence—were sealed in the security computers.

The scientists alerted by Tortoi Kai had Zinder’s theories and his math but not his computer—the concept for which he managed, somehow, to hide from everyone—or the results of any of his experiments. Trelig had seen to that, obviously.

What had happened on New Pompeii? Tortoi Kai worked at that problem while the science teams were hurriedly using their seven hundred years of subsequent know-how to learn if Dr. Gilgram Zinder really had something.

But Tortoi Kai wasn’t satisfied. Despite the accolades falling her way, she went to her superior, Warn Billie, with her worries. Her supervisor, a kindly, balding little old man who fit perfectly the stereotype of the stuffy academic historian, listened attentively.

“I don’t like the extent of the burial of this information, Supervisor Billie. It’s far too deliberate, done by someone with a keen knowledge of how to fool even a researcher with a good computer.”

Billie nodded then said, “But a man like Trelig would naturally take such pains.”

“No, not Trelig,” she responded. “From what I can see he had been so fanatic that, if this were his doing, there wouldn’t be a trace of information in the files. Besides, it couldn’t be Trelig since much of the information