The Return of Nathan Brazil

hell of a time lying through my prodigious teeth just to get us this access.”

Mavra Chang’s sharp, black eyebrows rose slightly. She was getting to like the little dragon, not only for his cynical, self-confident personality but also for the streak of larceny in him. Obie thought that Mavra liked Marquoz because the Chugach was shorter, not counting tail, than Mavra although, in sheer bulk, he outweighed four of her.

“You think they’re catching on?” she asked.

He nodded. “I think they are aware that there’s more to it than we’ve told them. After all, they are not stupid. Their agents report a great deal of change in the cult and its operations and a businesslike transformation of its Temples. Right now, because of Oiympus’s economic clout, they are humoring an influential interest group at little cost, but they’re getting worried at how suddenly un-nut culty everybody’s acting. They know such a powerful group can be a severe threat.”

Mavra sank back, stuck a cheroot in her mouth, declined the dragon’s offer to light it, and brought things more to the point. “So how close are we? Obie is digesting enormous gulps of data but it’s all secondhand. You know we don’t dare bring him in this close to Suba and the Council itself.”

A speaker barked into life. It was an ordinary intercom, but some modifications had been made. Obie might not be able to risk a direct link with the Com computer complex but he could risk a small private line.

“Hello, Mavra,” the computer’s pleasant and uncannily human voice broke in. “I couldn’t help overhearing. Want an update?”

“Please,” she invited and settled back. Obie could, of course, simply continue the link she’d had with him on Olympus, but she was paranoid about keeping that sort of state up for any length of time. To her Obie was another person, and she valued her privacy even as she knew she enjoyed it only at the computer’s sufferance.

“He’s well hidden, I can tell you that,” Obie told her. “Nobody can be erased totally from the computers, you know that, but if anybody tells you that no individual can do anything without computers knowing and reporting it he is dead wrong.”

“You’ve had problems finding data on Nathan Brazil?”

“Oh, no. Not really, Mavra. Despite a really good coverup it was fairly easy to sort out the facts of his life back a couple thousand years—back to Old Earth. He’s been born in at least three dozen places and died more than that.”

“How’s that?” Marquoz put in.

Obie laughed. It was eerie to hear a machine be so damned human, particularly a machine as powerful and absolute as Obie.

“Oh, yes. After all, records are kept. If you don’t have logical backgrounds, then somebody’s bound to notice. I’ve had to trace a very good mind determined not to be traced, and if it wasn’t for three factors I can tell you it would have been impossible.”

“Three factors?” Mavra was interested.

“Oh, yes. First, he does not seem to be able to alter his appearance, even surgically, and make it stick. He’s tried. Since he’s not a part of the Markovian reality like us but of the pre-Markovian original state of the Universe, the one that created them, he’s apparently impervious to change by anything maintained by the Well of Souls. Once, long ago, on the Well World itself, he actually managed to change bodies when his was badly injured. He can regenerate anything, it appears, and cannot be killed although he can be injured, even very painfully. Yet, even then, when he got out of his old body he later turned up in the Com looking just like his old self. It is very curious —he is a mass of contradictions. One would say that his current form was his original form, which is why he keeps reverting to it, except that all the data indicate he predates humanity’s origin.”

Mavra considered it. “I have often wondered about some things. I don’t see how a god can be hurt, lose his memory, or cling to one form, among other things. He seems awfully ordinary, Obie, to have power such as you’ve described.”

“I agree. He is a mass of questions with no answers. I would love to learn those answers, Mavra.”

“We’re trying.”

Marquoz stepped back into the conversation. “You said three factors. Constancy of form is only one.”

“Oh, yes. Well, the second thing is that he is a sailor. Back on Old Earth he commanded at least one ship that sailed a watery ocean, and he’s commanded such ships, however powered, on a number of worlds. The combination of the shape consistency and the vocation made it easier to hunt him down.”

“And the third?” Mavra asked.

“His religion. It is very curious, you know, that he should have one, let alone observe one. It is an ancient Old-Earth religion that came out of a collection of tribal groups a few thousand years ago. They seem to have started as polytheists of the routine sort and then, very suddenly, became the first monotheistic religion in human history, and codified that religion with a series of laws and customs. A number of other huge religions sprang from it but the followers of the original have remained small in number and have survived the millennia holding to their beliefs. It is called ‘Judaism,’ followers usually called ‘Jews,’ and there are some around even today, still a handful. Very curious.”

“And he follows this faith?” Marquoz put in.

“Yes, he seems to. Although he does not live in one of their communities and seems never to have, he is often in contact with them, particularly on their highest holy days, and has been known to look after them.”

Marquoz was not the only one fascinated, but his thinking followed the same lines as Obie’s while Mavra was acquiring a more romantic if equally enigmatic picture.

“You say he observes this religion and has a special interest in the welfare of its adherents,” the little dragon mused aloud, “yet there is no evidence that he is more than a participant in their rituals? He is not regarded as especially holy or godlike?”

“Absolutely not,” Obie replied strongly. “Their god is universal but not tangible, certainly not an ordinary man. In fact, once, when what appeared to be an ordinary man showed up in their homeland claiming to be their god’s human son, they executed him. A much larger religion grew out of that, though.”

“More and more contradictions,” Marquoz mused. “Why would Nathan Brazil be interested in such a group? If he is god why would he follow it as an adherent? If he’s not, then he’s at least a Markovian holdover who knows damned well where humanity came from—including his little group. It makes no sense at all!”

“Even more,” Obie said. “The religion that sprang from the execution of the man who claimed he was god’s son? It’s called ‘Christianity,’ and it is still very much around and generally rather well organized even though fragmented into subcults. Those people have a legend that there is one immortal man, a Jew, who cursed god’s son on the way to the execution and was in turn cursed to live eternally until the executed one should return to establish the rule of Heaven. It is clear that, no matter what the true origin, Nathan Brazil is this Wandering Jew, the source of the story.”

“Less and less sense,” Marquoz snorted. “I guess we won’t know the answers until we find him. I’m getting interested in that myself, now.”

“Obie?” Mavra called. “Can you give us what you do know—in brief, of course. How far back have you been able to trace him?”

Obie was silent a moment. Then he said, “Well, the dates will mean nothing to you. Let’s just say that the first real record I have was back in the days of Old Earth, when space travel was still in its infancy. He was a freighter captain, of course, sailing from Mediterranean ports to North and South America. Those terms mean nothing to you, I know—sorry. I find a couple of things interesting about the period, though. He called himself Mark Kreisel back then, and he was a citizen of a tiny island country called Malta although the company he worked for was not Maltese but from a much larger country far away called Brazil.”

“Aha!” Marquoz commented. “It is also interesting that Malta is not very far from what was once the country of Israel, the only Jewish state in the industrial age and the birthplace of the religion I mentioned.”

“How far back was this, Obie?”

“Roughly eighteen hundred years, Mavra—the dating systems have changed several times since then and many of the old records are either inexact or unclear on which they used. That would give you a rough idea, though.”

Marquoz was fascinated anew. “As far back as that… And even then he was near those unusual people with the small religion. Even then. I wonder, though. I would think he’d have been a citizen of that group’s