The Return of Nathan Brazil

unable to regain full control.

“Oh, Obie…” she managed.

He said nothing, letting her feelings run their course, but he was curiously touched in a very human sort of way. Could computers cry, too?

Finally she regained her composure and started to mount the stairs. At the top she turned again. “Obie? What if he does it? Turns everything off, I mean, and fixes it. For what? There’ll be nobody left to appreciate it.”

“You misunderstand the depth of his responsibility,” the computer told her. “The Well World exists as a laboratory, yes, but also as an operational device. Inside its memory is the power to use the Well World to restart the Universe again—no, to create a new one. Brazil is being asked not only to destroy everything we know but to start it all again as well.”

There was something almost overwhelmingly frightening about that. Mavra reached the door, went outside and over the bridge, down the corridor and entered the elevator to Topside, one of the few places Obie didn’t monitor on the Nautilus.

She cried most of the way to the top.

Nautilus—Topside

“Marquoz!”

The sight of the familiar, squat little dragon puffing on his ever-present cigar seemed to reassure her, bring her back to reality. Mavra had never felt so helpless, so alone, not even when she was alone, making her own way from orphaned beggar to streetwalker to space captain and master thief.

She felt like hugging the little monster, but refrained. Instead she just held up a hand in greeting and waited for him to come across the grassy lawn to her. He could move damned fast, she found.

“Well! Mavra, I hope?” the Chugach’s foghorn voice boomed. “Still in harness, so to speak?”

She shrugged. “Obie said it would help if I kept this shape a little longer. He’s running this show.”

And that, of course, was part of the problem. As had happened on the Well World many years before when Mavra was a hopeless cripple, she felt like a pawn, an ornament, in a grand design being woven by others, uncertain of her future, even of whether she had a future, and unable to do a damned thing about it.

Marquoz seemed to understand. “Obie had us bugged, as you know,” he told her. “When the Olympians moved, he dispatched more of the crew to get us. Man, was that Amazon leader mad!”

That was more like it. Real. Down-to-earth. “What have you done with the Olympians?” she asked.

“Ran ’em through Obie, of course,” the little dragon replied. “Tame as kittens now.”

She nodded. “And where’s Brazil?”

“Eating—eating big, too, for such a little man. Says it’s the first nonsynthetic stuff he’s had in ages except grain products. One of the boys is going to take him on the grand tour later.”

That returned her thoughts to reality, and she didn’t want any more of that right at the moment. “Where’s Gypsy?” she asked. “I could use a good card game or something right now. Bet he lorded it all over you that he stayed back here nice and comfortable while we were getting shot up!”

Marquoz’s large head cocked itself slightly to one side. “That’s the odd thing. He isn’t here. Obie said he asked to borrow a ship to fix up some personal things before he got completely tied down and trapped in this business. Rather odd—I didn’t even know he could fly one. Even odder that Obie would give it to him.”

She nodded, a funny feeling in her stomach. “He’s a very strange man,” she said, “with very strange powers. I wonder where he went?”

“Stranger than that,” the little dragon added. “He didn’t go anyplace at all. We were in the Rhone sector, we’re still in the Rhone sector, and his ship’s on standby in deep space just a few light-years from here, or so Obie tells me.”

That was even odder. “Has Obie given you any idea about what’s going on? I mean, is Gypsy doing something for us that we’re just not being told about?”

Marquoz shrugged. “Who knows? What on Earth would anybody use Gypsy for? No, I got the distinct impression that Obie is as bewildered as we are—but, just like with the customs men, security men, and the rest, Gypsy seems to have a power over even Obie.”

She shivered slightly. “I hope he’s on our side.”

“Oh, I have no doubt he’s on his own side and no other,” the Chugach said. “But he’s not against us, I’ll stake my life on that. Have, in fact.”

“I hope you’re right” was all she could manage. “Still, I’d like to ask him a few questions when he gets back. Curious, too, that he should take off like that just when Brazil comes on. I wonder if he will be back? Doesn’t he want to meet Nathan Brazil?”

“Perhaps not,” the dragon admitted. “We’ll see… Well, come on. Let’s go up and relax a bit. I’m not as adept at gaming as Gypsy, but me and the boys would be delighted to have you join us in a little game of chance.”

Olympus, the Chamber of the Holy Mother

The elevator door opened and a man stepped out into the chamber. That was sacrilege—that he was not even an Olympian male was simply impossible.

Nikki Zinder was aware of his presence as soon as he stepped into the chamber; she would have been aware of him earlier but she alone controlled the elevators and they had not been operating. None of them had been. It was as if he had simply appeared in the elevator out of nowhere.

“Who dares enter the chamber of the Holy Mother so?” she thundered.

The man stopped, looked around, and nodded, a thoughtful pout on his face, like a tourist strolling through some dead shrine. He took out a cigarette, lit it, and stood dead center in the chamber looking at the far wall. “Hello, Nikki,” he said casually.

Bells and alarms went off all over the Temple several stories above them and computer monitors struggled to bring her cybernetic juices back under control. The Holy Mother was blowing her top.

“Who are you that you dare to come here so?” she demanded.

“You know who I am, Nikki,” he replied calmly, quietly. “You have only to look at me to know.”

“You are the Evil One Himself!” she screeched through electronic voice centers. “You dare to come here, Evil One, particularly in that guise? How dare you!”

Bolts of lightning shot out from all over the chamber, arcing and aiming directly for the man who stood in the center, still puffing on his cigarette. Though hot enough to fry anything living and to disrupt the flow of even a creature of pure energy, he stood at the center of the furious storm as if protected by an impervious bubble. None of the strikes found their mark.

Realizing this, Nikki turned off the electricity while considering what else might have some effect on him. There was a smell of ozone in the air.

“It’s time to go now, Nikki,” he said, still, quietly, calmly.

“No, Evil One! You shall not take me!” she thundered.

He smiled. “It’s your time, Nikki. It’s past your time. Long past. Your world is ending. Parts of it should never have begun. Parts of it are needed elsewhere now.” There seemed to be tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Nikki. Yours is not the life it should have been—but none of us can fully control our fate. You were born for an unhappy destiny. Perhaps you would have been better unborn. Perhaps, then, none of this would have happened, none of this would have been necessary. But it is, Nikki. It exists. Cheated of life, your time is still past. You must go now.” He said it sadly, the sincerity so deep it almost penetrated her senile brain.