The Return of Nathan Brazil

country.”

“No, that would have limited him,” Obie said. “The Jewish people have been ill-treated in human history almost from the start. Much of the world did not recognize the country and would have destroyed it had it not had a strong military and a few powerful allies. The Jews were always persecuted for being different from the main culture of the places they lived because they would not fully adopt the majority’s ways.”

“I think I have an idea of being mistrusted because of being a bit different,” Marquoz noted sardonically.

“Malta, on the other hand, was a tiny island country nobody ever heard of, a polyglot of races and cultures, and absolutely no political threat to anybody,” Obie told them. “A perfect vantage point, a perfect base, a nationality that nobody gave a damn about.”

“And then what?” Mavra prompted. “I mean, what happened?”

“It would seem,” Obie responded, “that Captain Mark Kreisel ran into a bad storm and that his ship was abandoned. He remained aboard in the old tradition to secure against salvage—the laws are pretty much the same on that now as then—and, though the ship didn’t sink, when rescue parties went to find him he was gone. No boats or rafts were missing, and on the high seas, hundreds of kilometers from land or safety, the authorities assumed that he’d been washed overboard in heavy seas and drowned. That was the first recorded death of the man we now look for as Nathan Brazil.”

Mavra was fascinated by the story and begged for more. Obie told of the many lives and many identities of Nathan Brazil over the centuries. As an astronaut named David Katz he’d been one of the supervisors on the building of the first permanent orbiting space stations; he’d fought in a number of wars and surfaced in a number of countries. In several guises, he was something of a legend in humanity’s far past. As Warren Kerman he’d been chief astrogator on the first human starship; as a Russian cosmonaut named Ivan Kraviski he’d been the third man to step onto the alien world they would name Gagarin, the first Earthtype world discovered in space. As man had spread, so had Nathan Brazil, not leading the pack but with the leaders all the same.

Mavra was entranced, but Marquoz commented, “Funny. I would have thought he’d have kept a low profile—yet here he is, constantly in the headlines.”

“Not so odd,” Obie replied. “Every man he was was a real person, who was born someplace, grew up someplace, worked his way up and eventually died—never of old age, I might add. He has a penchant for disappearances.”

“You say they were all real people,” Mavra cut in. “But they couldn’t be—could they? I mean, it’s all the same man…”

“It was, I feel sure,” the computer told her. “Yet they were real. I cannot see how he managed it—yet, somehow, he did. It is interesting that all of them came from orphaned families or small families with few living relatives. Also, they were picked for close physical resemblance. At some point Brazil moved in and replaced each individual, usually at a juncture when the man was far from home and fairly young. One thing’s for sure—he knew them well enough that he was never tripped up, never once. Everyone, even the people from the man’s real past, seemed to believe the impersonation.”

“I wonder—did he murder them?” Marquoz asked worriedly. “And, if so, what power did he use to become them literally when he never changed his physical form? It worries me.”

That seemed to upset Mavra. “He would never coldbloodedly murder anyone!” she protested. “Everything we know about him says he wouldn’t. As a small child I have memories—he spirited me out past the Harvich secret police during the takeover—the only strong memories from that period I have. There was kindness in him, a gentleness.”

Marquoz shrugged. “Nevertheless, if he did not do them in, what happened to them?”

“That’s the key,” Obie said over the intercom. “That’s the major thing. If we can learn that we might find him. For, you see, over thirteen hundred years ago he broke his pattern. He became Nathan Brazil, he purchased a freighter, he went into business. And he stayed Nathan Brazil until just over twelve years ago.”

“Interesting,” Marquoz muttered. “I wonder why?”

“Fairly simple,” Obie responded. “First, that coincides with the development of the rejuve process, which, even then, was good for a century. As time passed the process got better, the possible lifespan longer. Of course, as you know, the brain cells eventually die even in rejuve, but by the time this would have happened to Brazil everyone who knew him and was likely to run into him was dead and he had a new batch of friends. Com bureaucracy being what it was, he had only to renew his pilot’s license every four years and that would be that. He became a legend among the spacers—the oldest man still to be flying. He’d drank with them, gambled with them, fought with and beside them, helped them out when they needed it, and they owed him. The spacers thought that he was just the only person lucky enough to be able to take an infinite number of rejuves. With the Com expanding, times between meetings even of old friends was great. The relativity factor complicated matters, and, of course, he’d find little to like in the sameness of the hivelike communal that made up most of the Com.”

“But he finally did give it up, huh?” Mavra queried.

Obie was philosophical about that. “Well, yes, of course. If a cult that said you were God started a campaign to find you—wouldn’t you think it time to change identities? Somehow I think any of us would.”

“You’ve learned this all from the computer files?” Mavra asked, amazed.

“Yes and no. It was there, but only in bits and pieces. It has taken not only the computer files but also the legwork of thousands of Fellowship members on a large number of worlds to correlate,” Obie replied. “We could not have done it without them—but now we are stopped until we can unearth some clue as to where he was reborn.”

“Did he just disappear again?”

“That’s about it, Marquoz. He kept ships an awfully long time—two, three hundred years or more, until they wore out. They were all named the Stehekin, a word whose meaning eludes me. The last one was found, a huge hole blown through its midsection. It had been looted. There was blood on the bridge that matched Brazil’s—quite a lot of it—but no trace of him or his valuable cargo. It was assumed that he’d been lured out of nullspace by a false distress signal, attacked by pirates, and murdered. There’s actually a plaque to his memory in Spacer’s Hall.”

“You don’t believe it, though,” Mavra noted.

“Of course not. That sort of thing is his favorite way out. No, I think he found some real person, reached the point he had to reach with that person in order to assume his identity, and did so. He is somewhere else now, as someone else, waiting a decent amount of time before he can resume a normal life again.”

A new voice said, “Well, I think he should be pretty easy to find.” They whirled, saw that it was Gypsy. Marquoz nodded but Mavra looked at him strangely, an odd thought passing through her mind. It was ridiculous, of course, but… No, he was a little too tall, a little too muscular, a little too dark. She wondered, though. When Obie had picked them all up from the Temple that first time, the computer had not done anything more than simple teleportation. He’d made no detailed analysis; he hadn’t stored the mind and memory of Gypsy and Marquoz. Later, they’d refused to use Obie’s teleportation system. Both Gypsy and Marquoz had insisted on using spaceships. Afterward Mavra and Obie had run a check on Gypsy, just out of curiosity, and found nothing. Absolutely nothing. When even Mavra Chang’s early history could be found in the files and all travel and expenses required records, there was not even a travel document showing that he existed. His thumbprints, retinal and blood patterns had matched nowhere at all.

Finally she couldn’t resist it. “Gypsy? Ever heard of Malta?”

He looked a little surprised but didn’t bat an eyelash as he replied, “Sure. It’s the capital city of Sorgos, I think.”

Marquoz chortled lightly. “I know what you’re thinking. I’ve sometimes thought it myself. But, no, he has the wrong physiology. Brazil has occasionally been able to alter thumbprints but never retinal and blood patterns. Forget it. He’s another mystery.”

Gypsy looked confused. “What’s that all about?”

“The lady was just wondering if you were Nathan Brazil yourself, that’s all.”

He chuckled. “Oh, hell, no. Whoever heard of a Jewish Gypsy?”