Jack Chalker - The Return of Nathan Brazil

Suddenly they heard a whirring sound from far off in the chamber and felt a vibration through the rail. “Looks like our welcoming committee is coming,” Mavra remarked.

Marquoz looked back out at the glassy floor. “But where is Gypsy? I know he came here. He went first.”

Mavra sighed. “I don’t know. There’s been something eerie about him since the moment I met him. He’s your friend. I can’t think of any reason why he wouldn’t be here no matter who or what he was, though.”

Marquoz shrugged. “I’ve known him for years yet I don’t really know him at all. Perhaps what we all saw was some sort of disguise. Perhaps he was a noncarbon-based lifeform that fooled us into seeing him as a man and he’s in North Zone. Who knows? Obie did, I think. I think it’s best not to mention him at all right now, though. There may be more afoot than we know.”

Mavra nodded. “I agree—but I don’t like it. I don’t like puzzles at all.”

Suddenly Marquoz pointed.

Approaching them was a huge creature. It had a deep-brown torso shaped like a man’s, but plated. Six arms, extended from the sides of the torso four of them rotating on ball joints, yet terminating in fingered hands. All six looked hard and muscular. The head was ovoid and had no ears. Deep, black human eyes flanked a flat nose below which grew a massive white moustache. Below, the torso ended in long, serpentine coils.

The creature approached them without fear—which was natural, since he was obviously master here. He slapped the wall sharply as he drew within a few meters of them and the walkway stopped. Bushy white eyebrows rose.

“A human, sort of, a Dillian and a Ghlmonese? What is this?” He seemed genuinely perplexed. “Do you understand what I am saying?”

Mavra nodded. “Ah—yes, perfectly,” she said, only partly feigning nervousness. She had never met such a creature as this before on or off the Well. “We are from the Com.”

Amazement spread all over the creature’s face. “The Com! And not one of you true human! Oh, my! How things must have changed since I was last there!”

Yua gasped. ” You were once in the Com?”

He smiled a very human smile beneath his bushy moustache. “Oh, yes. Once I was human like you—well, I didn’t have a tail like that, and I was a man, and women sure didn’t look as good as you—but you know what I mean.” The voice was deep, thick, and rich but had no trace of an accent. Only Mavra understood immediately that a translator, a small surgical implant made by a Northern race, was really doing the talking. She would need one soon; they all would. She’d had one, once.

“The Com has many races now,” she told the creature. “All living in peace. That is, with each other. Together we just fought a war with a no-compromise nonhuman race.”

The creature was still wondering at it all. “Multiracial cooperation in the Com! Who’d have thought it! You mean the brotherhood boys were right all along about improving the human race?” It was more a question directed at himself than one to them but Marquoz answered anyway.

“If you mean their petty little social philosophies, no,” he told the alien. “That’s mostly breaking down now. And having spent the last several years in the human worlds I can tell you that I was tolerated more than embraced.”

The six-limbed creature shrugged all his limbs. “So? In my day it would have been war and intolerance all around. Death and destruction.” He grew a little more serious. “But you said there’d been a war? Is that why you’re here?”

Mavra jumped in quickly. “I don’t know why we’re here—and I’m not sure where ‘here’ is. No, it wasn’t the war, though. We won that. We won it, but tore a hole in space-time to do it. It is eating the Com now. You might say we were refugees, although how we wound up here I don’t know. We set down on an old world to take a vote on just where to go and the lights went out. We woke up here.”

The creature nodded. The explanation was about what he expected to hear—which is why the cover story had been invented in the first place.

The creature slithered back, allowing room for all of them on his section of belt. “You can take off the spacesuits, by the way. The Well pressurizes before it brings you through so right now it’s set to be comfortable for you. Or keep ’em on until we get to my office, as you will.”

He slapped the wall with his lower left hand, swiveled without really turning, so he was facing the other way, and the belt whirred to life.

“What are your names?” the creature called back to them as they traveled.

“I am Tourifreet, a Rhone,” Mavra told him. “The human is Yua, an Olympian, and the Chugach is Marquoz.”

“Pleased to meet you,” the creature responded amiably. “It’s been a long, long time since anybody from my old stamping grounds has been through here. People fall into those holes all the time, like I did—maybe a hundred a year, give or take. But no humans in the last century or two. Been a while. I, by the way, am Serge Ortega.”

Mavra’s head snapped up and there was a sudden, odd gleam in her eyes. Ortega, his back to her, saw nothing. “Easy, girl,” Marquoz whispered.

Ortega! She thought. After all this time! After all this… Ortega, still alive, still in charge. The man who imprisoned her so many years ago, coldly, cruelly, for so very long.

The one man for whom she still felt a smouldering hatred.

And here he was, leading them calmly into the depths of Zone, back to her. How easy to plunge a knife in that broad, leathery back—if only she had a knife. To kill this man who treated people as playthings, and had been doing so for over a thousand years.

They left the big chamber now and headed down an oval tunnel, a large corridor whose junctions were curved and smooth. It seemed to be made of some heavy, grainy stone that had been painted a dull yellow.

They passed chambers as their tunnel twisted and turned; it wasn’t a single corridor but a labyrinth. Each chamber, Ortega told them, contained a mini-biosphere for one of the Well World’s fifteen hundred and sixty races. The ones in this section were the embassies of the seven hundred and eighty Southerners.

When they reached his office and began to relax, Ortega sent for food and drink. He told them what they already knew, about the Well World and its foundings, about the hexes, zones, and gates. They listened as if they had never heard any of it before, asking all the right questions; but it was Ortega’s political map of the Well World that held their interest. Brazil had done a rough one from memory and it had been all they had; now they could see the true complexity of the Well World and the enormity of their task. In particular, they saw, for the first time, the vast oceans of the Well World and the topography of the landscape. Mavra located the areas she’d been in, and spotted Glathriel, which, Ortega explained needlessly, was where the human race now resided in tribal primitivism.

That hex held a different interest for them, for next to it was Ambreza, the original home of humanity and the point at which Nathan Brazil must emerge once he arrived. That was their initial goal.

Mavra knew the place well. Glathriel had been her prison so many years before, and she doubted the Ambreza had let it change much. Her eyes drifted northward, to Lata and Agitar and other exotic names from the Wars of the Well, and to Olborn, where she’d been half-turned into a beast, and to cold, mountainous Gedemondas, whose strange inhabitants had destroyed the rocket engines for which the war had been fought. They had also predicted her future. She wondered what the Gedemondas were predicting now.

Ortega replaced the map, seemingly oblivious to their real interests. “Enough politics,” he told them. “After you arrive at your home hexes you will have opportunities for more relaxed studies.”