Jack Chalker - The Return of Nathan Brazil

Yua could hardly contain her fright at those words, but it only lent verisimilitude to her staged question. “What—what do you mean, our home hexes?”

Ortega smiled. “From here, you will shortly be taken to another gate. It is the Well Gate. It removes you from the Universe you have always known and makes you a part of the Well. Once inside, the Well analyzes you according to criteria we’ve never been able to understand and chooses a form for you. You will wake up, as if from a sleep, as one of the seven hundred and eighty Southern races—just as I did, long ago. The Well helps in that it makes you comfortable with your new form and conditions, so you won’t feel totally alien, but it does not toy with your memories—you will still be you and you’ll remember all that has been. From that point you’re on your own. Don’t fight it. Whatever you wake up as you will be for the rest of your natural lives.”

It was a sobering thought. The rest of their lives as something—else. Something alien. To some it might have had a romantic ring, but to these comrades who were not on the Well World out of desperation but on a mission, the words had a particularly forbidding sound.

But Ortega wasn’t through with them quite yet. He pumped them about conditions in the Com. They were pretty honest about it—they told him of the Dreel, and the Zinder Nullifiers, and the widening hole in space. They did not tell him about Obie or about Nathan Brazil. It was Ortega who brought up the latter’s name.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he consoled them. “The Well will repair it. If it didn’t there’s a surviving Markovian around to make the repairs and he’d have been here by now if it were necessary.”

“How do you know he hasn’t?” Marquoz asked pointedly.

Ortega smiled. “I know him. He’s human—looks like a skinny little runt, goes by the name of Nathan Brazil. If he’d passed through here I’d have heard of it.” He scratched under his chin with his upper right arm and stared at them. “You know, it’s funny. I been looking at you two women and feeling I know you—or should know you. Funny, isn’t it? It isn’t possible, of course.”

Mavra coughed slightly. “No, hardly.”

He shrugged. “I guess in your case,” he decided, looking at Yua, “one or two of your fellow Olympians musta come through a long time ago. There’s been so many and it’s so long…” He seemed to be wandering, then looked back at Mavra, “And you—seems even further back. Damn if I can think why, though. You just look a little like somebody I used to know, way back—ah, well. No matter. Ready for the Well?”

“No,” Marquoz told him. “But what choice do I have other than to move in with you or the—what was it?—Ghlmonese ambassador?”

Ortega laughed. “All right, then. Come along.” The door opened and he slithered out. They followed as close as they dared, trying not to come too close to his lower coils.

They entered a normal room, a rectangle except for the rounded corners, barren of furniture. The door closed behind them.

Walls, floor, ceiling were of the same grainy yellowish material as the corridors except the far wall, which was another dose of total darkness.

“The Well Gate,” he told them. “You have no choice at all now. The door behind me will not open from the inside. The only way out is through the gate—and the Well.”

That was a lie, and Mavra knew it. Still, she could see that it would be useful in his line of work.

They had shed their spacesuits in Ortega’s office and were all naked now. Marquoz had salvaged his cigar case and he and Mavra puffed on the last of them. Both wondered idly if they’d ever do it again.

Mavra looked at Ortega. She still hated the man, but he seemed less an ogre in person than as an untouchable she’d never even seen. He’d been quite pleasant with them, even a little charming, and that in itself was unsettling. Brazil had called him a total scoundrel yet liked him all the same, and they’d had long debates on whether to trust the snake-man with the advance secret. And after all these years, he was still here, still in charge, never leaving Zone, never getting a day older thanks to Well magic and a liberal dose of blackmail—Mavra knew he’d had just about every embassy in Zone—and possibly a lot more places—bugged.

“Who first?” she asked the others, feeling as if it were a replay of the scene back on that dead Markovian world. Then Gypsy had stepped forward and vanished—Gypsy, who had vanished utterly, it seemed.

Whatever you wake up as you will be for the rest of your natural lives.

The sentence haunted them all.

“Oh, the hell with it.” Marquoz mumbled and stepped on the butt of his cigar. “I’m out of cigars, anyway.” He walked up to the black wall and through. It swallowed him utterly.

Yua turned and looked at Mavra, and there was fear in her eyes. Not for the first time Mavra wondered why Obie had chosen this one from those he could have selected for this mission. Only Obie knew, and Obie was far, far away.

“We’ll meet again,” the Olympian said quietly to her, taking and squeezing her hand. Then, unhesitatingly, she turned and walked the route Marquoz had walked, stepping boldly into the engulfing blackness.

“And then there was one,” said Serge Ortega behind her.

She smiled to herself. He was so cocksure, so rock steady. She took a step toward the darkness, then stopped, her mind, unbidding making the choice Brazil had left to her.

“Wait a minute, Ortega,” she said coolly, and turning to face him. “I am going to need your help.”

He was taken aback. “Huh?”

“The other two—they are meaningless to you or to anybody else. Window dressing. I’m not. I’ve been standing around debating this moment since I arrived at the entrance gate and had just about decided not to say anything, but I think I’m taking a reasonable risk.”

He coiled his serpentine body tightly and rocked his torso atop the heap, all six arms folded. “Go on. I’m listening,” he said, curious.

“The Well is broken. It’s shorted out,” she told him. “Slowly by cosmic standards but actually pretty quickly the whole damn Universe is being snuffed out. In a while the rift will grow so big it’ll damage the Well beyond repair. Shortly—very shortly—you’re going to be inundated with refugees, mostly Olympians, from the destruction of the Com.”

“Go on,” he said, not changing position or expression. “I’m listening.”

“They’re to be the seed for new races,” she continued. “They are the ones who’ll provide the souls or whatever once the Well is fixed.”

“But if the Well is fixed all will be as before,” he pointed out.

“No, it has to be turned off first. The whole experiment of the Markovians is over, and it failed. Time to press reset and start again. You must help. Those people must be allowed to do what we are doing, go through the Well, come out as something else. You know better than I the reaction that that many people coming through is going to cause. We need your help.”

Ortega remained impassive, saying nothing, betraying no emotion, for over a minute. Finally he said, “What you’re telling me is that not only is Nathan Brazil coming back but this time he’s going to really do something serious.”

She nodded apprehensively.

“And how do you know all this?”

She considered how to tell him, had thought about this moment a long, long time. “Because this centaur body isn’t the real me. Because it was made by Obie. Because I’m Mavra Chang.”

Serge Ortega almost fell over backward. Then he chuckled, then he laughed, and continued laughing until he couldn’t stop for a bit. Finally he said, “How is such a thing possible? Obie was destroyed. Mavra Chang was still on Obie, so she was destroyed with the computer. We had witnesses to this return.”