The Return of Nathan Brazil

Hodukai, a Planet on the Frontier

They filled the temple; it was a good sign, Mother Sukra thought to herself as she looked out from behind the stage curtain. The Acolytes had done a wonderful job of carrying the Word. Most were first-timers, she saw. Hesitating, nervous, unsure, but curious. That, too, was to be expected. The Fellowship of the Holy Well was still new here, and attractive mostly to the young, the most impressionable always, and the poor, the starving, the losers. The Holy Priestess, too, would know this and be pleased by the newcomers and the demonstrated effectiveness of Mother Sukra’s organization after only a few months.

The High Priestess was pleased—and excited, although she betrayed none of this in her classically stoic manner. She had been in this position before, although not with so much of responsibility.

The lights were going down; stirring music, subtle, soothing subsonics, set the mood and soft lights caressed both audience and stage. She looked at Mother Sukra, now checking herself one last time in the mirror, smoothing her long saffron robes and touching up her long brown hair. Her timing was impeccable, though; she stopped at precisely the right moment and turned to walk on stage to the center spot. There was no dais, no podium tonight, no pulpit from on high; that would spoil the effect they wanted from the Holy Priestess.

Mother Sukra looked terribly alone on the barren stage.

Along the sides the robed men and women, the Acolytes, heads shaved and wearing only loose-fitting cloth robes, rose and bowed to her. A number of the audience took the cue and stood, and within a short period most of the hall was standing. Normal crowd reaction; the ones remaining seated were not those to whom they would be speaking. Later, she thought. Later all would come willingly.

“Be at peace!” Mother Sukra proclaimed, and raised her arms to the heavens.

“Peace be unto the creatures of the Universe, no matter what form they be,” the Acolytes—and some in the audience—responded.

“This night we are honored to be graced with the presence of Her Holiness the Priestess Yua of the Mother Church,” Sukra told them needlessly. Curiosity over Yua’s appearance explained the large crowd at a service normally attended only by the few hundred devout. The audience was entirely human, which was to be expected, too. Although the Com now contained no fewer than seven races, only three or four were commonly seen in large cities on the human worlds and none in Temples, which they considered racially xenophobic. While the Temple was open to all races, its doctrine was not one to appeal to nonhuman types.

Unless, of course, you were an Olympian.

Everybody knew about the Olympians, but nobody knew much about them at one and the same time. Few had ever seen one; they were secretive and clannish. Their world was such that no one could live on it without a spacesuit, yet the Olympians could live comfortably on any of the human worlds. They ran their own shipping company and flew their own ships; sales were handled by an Olympian-owned but human-run trading company— no salesmen need apply to Olympus.

Such conditions breed an insatiable curiosity in people, but there was more. The Olympians were said to be stunningly beautiful women; no one had ever seen a male. Beautiful women with tails, like horse’s tails, who all, it was said, looked exactly alike.

There was a full house on this frontier world waiting to see an Olympian for the simple reason that the Fellowship of the Well had arisen on Olympus; the Mother Temple was there; and, while humans were the congregation and humans ran the Temples, the Olympians alone could be the High Priestesses.

Oh, they were there, all right—the local press, the politicos, the just plain curious. They sat and shuffled and suffered through Mother Sukra’s mummery and chants as they waited to see just what an Olympian was really like.

Finally Mother Sukra finished, and her voice assumed an awed tone.

“Tonight, my children, we are honored to present Her Holiness the High Priestess of our Fellowship, Yua of Olympus.”

The audience sat up now, expectant, watching as first Mother Sukra walked off then eyeing the curtains on either side of the stage to catch the first glimpse of the priestess.

Yua paused, leaving the stage vacant for thirty seconds or so to heighten the suspense, then she strode purposefully out to the center. The lights dimmed and a spotlight illuminated an area dead center stage and almost to the extreme front, its stream of light forming a bright aura that seemed to make her even more supernatural.

She heard the whispers of “There she is!” and “So that’s an Olympian”—the last said in many different ways—with satisfaction. She wore a cloak of the finest silk, or some synthetic close to it, embroidered with gold leaf. It concealed her form to the floor, but even those far back in the hall were struck by the classic beauty of her face and the long, auburn hair that swept down past her waist.

“Be at peace, my children,” Yua opened, her voice low, incredibly soft, and sexy. “I am here to bless this Temple and its congregation, and to tell those of you here who came out of curiosity or interest of our beliefs and our way.”

She could sense the mixture of awe at her presence—she knew well how stunning she appeared to the humans—and disappointment that they were seeing no more than this. She did not intend to disappoint the voyeurs, but not before the message was delivered, not until it would mean something.

“I come from a planet we call Olympus,” she began, and that got their attention again. Not only was she erotically charismatic, but this promised to be informative. “Our Founding Mothers discovered the world, which had been passed over by the Com as it was not a place where one could survive without prohibitively expensive modification or sealed domes, like the dead worlds of the Markovians. But we could survive there, build there, grow and prosper there, and we have.”

She had them now; a cough was conspicuous in the big hall. They had come expecting the kind of cultism and mummery Mother Sukra had done. They had not expected to be addressed so practically on matters of common curiosity and therefore interest in such plain terms. They listened.

“We resemble you, and we are from your seed, but we are not like you. We were insensitive to many extremes of heat and cold, able to filter out poisons in alien waters and hostile atmospheres, and we need no special suits or equipment to help us. Listen well and I will tell you the story of our people, yours and mine, and of our beliefs.”

She paused. Perfect. Nobody stirred.

“Yours is a frontier world,” she reminded them. “Still rough, still raw. Most, perhaps all of you, were born of other stars. You are all, then, widely traveled in space. You know of the ruins of the Markovians on dead worlds, a mysterious race that left dead computers deep inside their planets and shells of cities without artifacts. You know that once this race inhabited most of the galaxy, and that it vanished long before humanity was born.”

Some heads nodded. The Markovian puzzle was well known to everybody by now. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of dead worlds, had been found as humanity had spread ever outward. They were old, incredibly old, impossibly old since they appeared to date back almost to the formation of the universe.

“They were the first civilization. They grew and spread and reached godhood itself, their computers giving them everything they could ever desire merely for the wishing. And yet this was not enough; they grew stale, bored, unable to take joy in life. And so they decided to abandon their godhood, begin anew as new races of the Universe. They created a great computer, the Well of Souls, and they placed it at the center of the Universe, and on this computer world they created new races, all of the races of the Universe out of their very selves. Their old world grew silent while their creations, tested on the world of the Well, became the new masters of creation—our own people among them. At last all were gone; they were transformed into our ancestors, and the Markovians were us and we were the Markovians.”

A number of the better educated nodded at this account. It was an old theory, one of thousands advanced to explain the Markovian mystery.

“But even as this is truth, for we all know of it, a puzzle remains, the eternal, ultimate question. The Markovians rose near the beginning of time; they were the first race, the parents of all who came after. And if this be so, then who created the Markovians?”