The Return of Nathan Brazil

She sighed. “Let’s get it over with. At least I won’t have to finish life as a Rhone.”

“All right, then. You four will go in first. Obie indicated that he had some way of influencing the Well’s choice, so I can assume that all four of you will somehow be placed to do me and yourselves maximum good. I don’t know whether he’ll be a hundred percent successful in this but I expect you to be rallying your Entry armies around you by the time I get there. After giving you sufficient time to become adapted to your new forms and environments, I’ll start sending in the hordes. The hue and cry will be enormous and immediate. There’ll be a new body in every back yard. You’ll know when. Time your actions properly—don’t move too soon or the locals will be on to you before you have sufficient strength to tell them where to go. Then, and only then, rise up, announce yourself, rally the newcomers around you. Later Entries will carry a more sophisticated timetable. That’s what I’m going to use my nonhuman friends for. More likely even after they’ve begun to shoot all the Amazonian women they see, they’ll let others pass. Rally and move to consolidate your forces as quickly as possible. Move on Ambreza, which is where everybody knows I’ll appear.”

“But Ambreza is the hex of the big beavers,” Mavra objected. “I remember that much.”

“But you forget that they had a war with the humans that the humans lost and they swapped hexes,” Brazil responded. “So as a human I’ll show up in modern-day Ambreza.”

“Sounds a little odd to me,” Gypsy remarked. “Seems to me that as we sweep down we’ll tell everybody when and where you’re coming.”

Brazil grinned. “Seems like it, doesn’t it? But, you see, you won’t have any idea where I am or when I’m coming through. If I need you I’ll contact you, but otherwise you’ll not know. I could arrive early, in the middle, or at the end. All your marching and fighting and all the rest of that will be the big show, the window dressing. In the meantime I’ll be sneaking up toward the Avenue.”

“In other words, we might not even know if you’ve succeeded—at least until the newcomers start vanishing around us?” Mavra said, incredulously.

He chuckled. “Oh, everybody will know before that. I wish it would go that smoothly, but it won’t. I’ll need firepower before the end—I just hope it isn’t until we’re almost there. And I’ll have to let everybody know—it isn’t so simple to reseed a Universe, particularly when you have so few races to work with. I’ll give the Northerners the option of losing half their people or being left out—that may be enough, with some of them. But you’ll know.” He turned and looked straight at Mavra Chang. “You in particular will know. If you’re still alive, if you survive, you’ll be there with me, inside the Well, and you will give me the order to turn off the juice. If you fail, Mavra, then it’ll be one other of you four. And one of you had better survive—because I will not turn the Well off except on somebody else’s orders. The responsibility will not be mine.”

He looked around at them. “All straight? Well, let’s get started, then. We’ve got a lot of groundwork to lay, a whole population to brief, and that’ll take time and sweat. Let’s move!”

Serachnus

The shuttle landed with no fanfare. There wasn’t anyone present; no marching bands; no good-luck parties; nothing. It was a dead world of barren rock pitted by countless meteor strikes.

It was a ghost world, too; they could see that as the landscape, slowly rolling past their screens now as Nathan Brazil put on the brakes, showed areas blasted eons ago through high mountains and vague traces of roadways. Occasionally they would pass over a dead city, strange-looking places with hexagonal central squares, and strange, twisted buildings and spires. All dead now, all dead for ten billion years or more.

“Once this was a green place,” Brazil noted, sounding almost nostalgic. “The air was sweet, the climate warm and comfortable, and several million people lived in those cities.”

“Markovians, you mean,” Mavra remarked. “Not people.”

He nodded vigorously. “People. Shaped like big leathery hearts with six suckered tentacles and all sorts of yucky attributes, yes, but people all the same. Not too different, deep down, from us, I suspect, considering how similar our wildly varying alien civilizations have developed. We’re their children, remember. Down there they lived and laughed and played and worked and thought just as people have been doing for ages, and down there they worried and decided and left. They left to go to the Well World, to give up their mortality for our kind of existence.”

“You seem pretty certain that we can get there the same way,” Marquoz noted. “There is some sort of transportation system, you said?”

Brazil nodded. “A Well Gate. It’ll open if you want it to open and it’ll take you one place if you really want to go there. The Markovians built their machines too well; the computer that once sustained a civilization in a materialist Utopia is still alive, still waiting for instructions. If somebody orders the Well Gate to open, it will respond and do so—and send you to the Well World. You’ve been well briefed; you remember the facts.”

“Just hard to believe,” the Chugach replied. “I mean, all these computers and nobody’s ever been able to make ’em do anything—and, heaven knows, enough time, trouble, and money’s been spent trying to make them do something. Not even discover the Well Gate, as you call it.”

“People have discovered the Well Gate,” Brazil told him. “People who wanted to find it found it—and it swallowed them, took them to the Well World. Others, well, there are gates all over, even on asteroids where Markovian worlds used to be, that snare the bored, the fantasizers, the would-be suicides—the people who are sick of their own lives and earnestly wish for a new start. The computers see that as a reflection of the Markovian attitudes. That’s how people like Ortega got to the Well World. That’s how Mavra’s grandparents returned not once but twice.”

“Do you think either may still be alive?” Mavra asked him.

He shook his head. “I doubt it very strongly. It’s been too long. Some Well World lifeforms live an awfully long time, but none lives that long.”

“Ortega,” she pointed out.

“A special case,” he replied. “Still, your name should also be known to a lot of the Well World from your part in the wars; if any of your relatives who got through are still alive, I’m pretty sure you’ll have no trouble finding them. They’ll find you.”

He set the boat down on a barren plain. “Far as I go,” he told them. “I can’t just fly into it or past it; it’d probably snatch me, too, and I can’t go just yet. I can hear it screaming for me now, though. So into your pressure suits and out you go.”

They dressed quickly, almost in silence. Tension, already high, was practically visible now. Finally they were all set, all on internal air and power, and Brazil threw the switch that isolated the scout pilot’s cabin from the rest of the ship.

He leaned over and flicked his communications switch. “Mavra, use your own judgment with Ortega. The rest of you—you don’t even know each other.”

“Don’t worry,” Marquoz grumbled. “And don’t keep repeating the obvious so much. If you didn’t trust us with this thing then you shouldn’t have sent us.”

He smiled, knowing what was going on inside all of them. They were saying good-bye to their pasts, their worlds, their Universe. The ones who’d never been on the Well World before were at the biggest disadvantage, but for Mavra, too, it was highly traumatic. He understood that. She loved freedom most of all, and freedom to her was a fast ship crossing the starfields.

Not for the first time did he worry about Obie. Could the computer really influence what they’d become? And had he done the best job in that regard? If they all wound up immobile, or mass-minds, or water-breathers they’d be of precious little help to him when it counted.

He checked his screens. “There. It’s open. See it ahead of you on your right?”

They were out of the ship now, four white-suited figures against the dull-gray rock, walking single-file with Mavra’s Rhone body leading.

They stopped and looked. It was there, on the plain—a huge hole, it seemed, with infinite blackness filling it. If they had been airborne they would have seen its hexagonal shape.

“Just walk into it,” he urged. “And—good luck to all of you. I hope to see you all one midnight at the Well of