The Return of Nathan Brazil

“Obie feigned his own death, of course,” Mavra explained. “The same explosions that freed him from Ben Yulin’s control gave him total self-control. He is independent of anyone. When the others left, I decided to stay.”

“Decided to die, you mean,” Obie’s voice came to them. “She had been deformed by the Well and had no future in the Com except as a freak, so she stayed behind, letting the others think her dead, knowing that the Com would blow me up before it would chance me going amok. I got us out, then we formed a partnership. The others—seventy-one at last count—are from various races that we’ve picked up in our travels. Outcasts with our sense of purpose, you might say.”

“They looked pretty human to me,” Yua put in. Mavra smiled. “Remember that Obie said I was deformed? He fixed it. Made me as I was before—keeps me young and in perfect condition. Any of us can assume any form Obie knows or can imagine, with any powers or abilities we think we need.”

Marquoz let that pass for the moment. “And to what do we owe the pleasure of this visit?” he asked. “And why are we here?”

“Mostly luck, as to why it’s specifically you,” Mavra replied. “Good luck from what I’ve seen of you so far. You see, when Obie felt that disruption in space-time, we first checked on the Well World to see if the master computer was damaged.”

Yua gasped. “You have visited the Holy Well of Souls?”

“Holy or not, I’ve spent entirely too much time on that crazy world.”

“And was the Well damaged?” Marquoz was trying to get her back on the subject. She nodded. “Obie?”

“The Well Computer was damaged by the unrestricted and improperly shielded Nullifiers used,” the computer told them. “It’s not a great or gaping wound now, but the rip in the fabric of space-time is growing. As it grows, the damage becomes more severe, since it’s the hole, not the Well, that is the natural state of things. The Well’s doing a fine job of inhibiting the spread but cannot damp it out.”

“When we traced the problem,” Mavra continued, “we wound up here and quickly were able to establish the reason for it, although we couldn’t get too close. Obie experiences real pain this close to the fault. That’s why we’ve moved a bit farther out for now.”

“But that doesn’t explain us,” Yua pointed out.

Mavra nodded quickly. “I’m coming to that. Well, I put down at a frontier world to get a feel for the place— the Com has really changed since my day—and the first thing that happens is some robed people ask me if I’m Nathan Brazil. Well, before too long I’ve been briefed on the Fellowship of the Well and on its leaders, the Olympians. I had no problem recognizing who the Olympians must be, although I was tremendously surprised. I hadn’t expected them to be able to reproduce, particularly not true to type.”

“Two males were born of the First Mothers,” Yua put in. “From that beginning we have built our race.”

Mavra nodded, then continued. “So, anyway, I figure that I have to know more about this Fellowship and fast because we need them.”

“You see,” Obie’s voice came to them, “the rent in space-time is expanding at a great rate. If unchecked, it will swallow the entire Com in a hundred and fifty years, although it probably will have destroyed all life in about a hundred around here. The tear will continue after that—growing faster and faster. There is no way I can fix it; not only is it beyond my powers, but as it widens it is creating ripples throughout reality as we know it. That is, well, think of all reality, all space-time, as a bedsheet. Put a tear in the middle and start pulling from all sides. Not only does the gap widen, but waves are sent through the blanket. Space, time, reality itself is distorted, becoming less stable. Right now you barely notice the instabilities, but they’ll get worse, much worse, before the end.”

“So, you see, there’s only one thing we can do,” Mavra continued. “We have to find Nathan Brazil. He should have been called to the Well World to repair this damage as soon as it developed, but he has not. Either the mechanism’s been damaged or, for some reason, he refuses to go. As far as we know he’s the only one in the Universe who can fix the Well Computer. Either we find him, or our home ceases to exist. It’s that simple.”

Marquoz thought it over. For his part, he had no reason to believe this newcomer, but with all this advanced science about and at her command he had no reason to doubt her, either. Still, there were questions.

“I return to my original question,” he said suspiciously. “Why is it that we three are here? Why not a Presidium member, or the Council President, or someone equally distinguished?”

Mavra Chang smiled. “It was partly luck, your role, that is. I was after Yua.”

The Priestess grew more interested but remained silent.

“The thing we know the least about,” Mavra explained, “is the history of the group after Obie and I left. That meant finding a real live Olympian, and there are few of those around. We debated going directly to Olympus, but I had no desire to walk in there cold. The rally had been well publicized, and Obie has been monitoring all communications channels. The reports emphasized that an Olympian High Priestess would address the crowd. So we staked out the dressing room where she’d be relaxing after the show—no sense in causing panic—and were prepared”—she smiled sweetly at Yua—“to put the snatch on her. But she came in all huffed up about being stood up by a Com representative, and in listening to her tirade I figured that they were asking you for help in finding Brazil. I decided that we’d wait for you and that was that.”

Marquoz nodded. It made sense. The only reason for their meeting was the fact that so few Olympians ever left their home planet; coincidence was diminished to mere chance.

“I want to know more about you,” he told Mavra, acting as if he were in charge. “I want to know just who you are and what you meant by being Brazil’s great-granddaughter.”

“That interests me, as well,” Yua added. Mavra sat back, relaxed, and looked at them. “I was once a professional, for hire. A freighter captain who did odd jobs on the side. Councillor Alaina hired me to attend Trelig’s meeting. I did, and we all got zapped back to the Well World. I was more than twelve years getting out of there. As to being Brazil’s great-granddaughter, it’s mostly a matter of how you look at it. I was the grandchild of people who Brazil returned to the Com from the Well World; he gave them new lives in new bodies. When my parents’ home world fell to totalitarian forces, Brazil got me out—my grandparents, having grown old, had by then returned to the Well World—and placed me with a freighter captain. Surgery altered me to resemble the captain.” She saw Yua’s eyes open at that, guessed her thoughts, and added, “I was only a small child at the time and that’s the only time I ever saw him.” She turned her gaze back to Marquoz.

“Well, back on the Well World I again met my grandparents, in new forms, and they were among the people who survived our battle with Ben Yulin. He changed the bunch into his dream women—the tails were an afterthought, part of his sense of humor—including my grandparents. They became the founders of Olympus, your First Mothers, I’ll bet.”

Yua was a bit unsettled by the casual way in which her faith and the revered First Mothers were being discussed, but said nothing. Gypsy, for his part, had finished his meal and was now working on parts of Yua’s and Mavra’s with total unconcern.

Marquoz sat silently for a moment, thinking. Her story hung together, of course, and he would be the last to say that the Zinder Nullifiers hadn’t botched everything up. The hole was definitely growing and they were all powerless to stop it.

“Tell me, Yua,” he said carefully, considering his words, “with a minimum of service and religion and all that, just how you know that god is Nathan Brazil.”

The Olympian looked a bit surprised at suddenly being center stage. “Why, two of the First Mothers, blessed be they, said so. They said they had been with Nathan Brazil on the planet of the Well and that He had not only told them He was God but shown them by His works.”

“Ah, my grandparents.” Mavra nodded. “It figures.”

The Chugach turned to the small woman, who seemed with each moment to be less a captor. “What about it?”

She shrugged. “Obie would be better at this than me. He has their memories up to the last leaving and mine better than I can remember. What about it, Obie?”

The computer did not answer, but they heard the whine of the little dish overhead. Marquoz started to shout and to jump from the table and platform, but it was too late. The violet beam caught them all.

They were in a strange place, a place unlike any they had ever seen before. There were walls of obvious controls, switches, levers, buttons, and what looked like a large screen before them. No, not a screen, they saw, but a tunnel long and dark, a great oval stretching back as far as the eye could see or perspective would allow. As they looked closer they could see that the blackness was caused by trillions of tiny jet-black dots, like buttons, so