Jack Chalker - The Return of Nathan Brazil

It was an active landscape. There were rivers, many of them, all in perpetual youth thanks to the obviously continuous volcanism. The source of the water was obvious; the prevailing winds blew in from the sea, were captured and forced up against the high volcanoes, many with snowcaps, and cooled, producing rains that flowed down here in the back country.

He marveled at the extent of his eyesight; everything was incredibly sharp and clear, and he could pick out individual trees farther away than he could have seen anything at all in his old body. His hearing seemed normal; he could hear the rush of wind and the sound of dripping water, neither anything he would expect to have heard differently—before.

Before what? he wondered suddenly. There were roads down there, nice-looking ones, but little sign of habitation. Were all the people in hibernation except him, or did they simply all live near the sea? Animal, vegetable, or mineral?

Well, he was one of them himself now, whatever. He knew that, felt strange and massive. He knew, too, that he could get some idea of his new race by simple self-examination, yet he hesitated, a little afraid at what he might find.

Some big, majestic black birds swooped nearby; for a second he was afraid that they were his new form—but, no, he had no wings, of that he was sure.

Slowly, acting as if the mere sight of his own body would turn him to stone, he looked down at himself.

His new body was massive; that was the only word to describe it. No, not huge—although far larger than his old form—but thick, dense. His skin was a metallic blue and seemed thick enough to stop arrow or, perhaps, bullet, and terminated in two very thick legs that rested on large, wide, wickedly clawed feet.

Those claws, he thought idly, look as if they are made of the strongest steel.

His old arms were short and stubby; they now matched the legs, perfectly proportioned to the body and so thick and powerful looking that he would not have been surprised to bend steel bars with them. As he’d seen but four toes he wasn’t surprised to find three long, thick fingers faced by an abnormally long opposable thumb.

He raised his hands to his face. The neck was thick and apparently bone plated, but it was difficult to tell anything about his head except that it was more ovoid and flatter than his had been, more like a human’s—although it felt hard, thick. It’s almost as if I am a huge insect, he thought, with leathery skin over my exoskeleton. He wasn’t sure—maybe his guess was close to the mark.

There was some room to move on the plateau so he took a hesitant step forward and immediately realized that, as before, he still had a thick supporting tail, this one longer than his old one. He looked over his shoulder while bringing the tail around, dislodging rocks in the latter operation, and stared. The tail, too, was thick and plated, but there were bony ridges running in pairs from his back down to the tip, and the tip terminated flatly, not pointed, and out of it rose two incredibly wicked-looking spikes, perhaps a meter each. He tested the tail as he would a weapon, and knew that it was exactly that. His old tail was strictly for sitting and balance; this one could be used like a thick tentacle, and those sharp points would close in on just about anything at great speed. He was certain that those of his new race practiced the wielding of it as some human cultures and his own Chugach practiced with swords.

I’m a creature built like a war machine, he told himself. He looked back again at the bleak and violent landscape. If each hex on the Well World was designed to test a lifeform, then that land down there must be very dangerous indeed.

He studied his hands again, flexing the fingers, and discovered that his first impression was correct—the nails were long, nasty sword-points that were retractable with a flick of internal muscles.

Still, he could see the logic of it. He had been assured by Obie that the computer had in some way influenced what each would become, and this form, for all its nasty toughness and bulk, was not so terribly alien to what he’d been. He was not, after all, to live in this place but to make war from it. This was a form built for war.

He tried to reach back into his throat, to the sacs where internal wastes produced the flammable gases of the Chugach, and tried to blow some fire. There was nothing; that ability was gone, and he would miss it. A pity, though, he reflected. Such an ability would be appropriate here, in a land of volcanoes.

The sun was already behind the mountains; dark shadows closed in on the landscape as he watched. Soon it would be very dark, he knew, and he was in the middle of nowhere with no sign of his new people, no sign of huge settlements or even tiny villages, and no weapon with which to defend himself against whatever might be laying in wait for him out there on that darkening plain. He wished for a club, something with which to arm himself against the hidden foes he knew must be waiting, but there weren’t even trees from which clubs might be improvised.

He considered staying on the little plateau until morning; it was tempting, but he was ravenously hungry and wasn’t even sure what the hell he ate.

He was still pondering this problem in the gathering gloom when the one thing he absolutely least expected occurred.

Down below, in orderly succession, the street lights came on.

It was amazing how the barren landscape was transformed by the tiny lights—thousands, no, tens of thousands of them, stretching out from just below him all the way to where he knew the sea to be. Tremendously variable in color, too; intelligently arranged in geometric patterns of greens, blues, reds, yellows—all the colors. It was beautiful, even if the landscape did now seem to look like a massive aircraft landing field.

Still, the sight puzzled him as much as it fascinated him; there had been roads, yes, but no sign of such an array of electronics that he’d been able to see, nor any sign of where the energy was coming from.

Almost in reply to his thoughts, he felt a slight rumble in the ground, and nearby, dislodged rock fell crashing to the plain below. He knew the answer in an instant—geothermal power. These people had learned to make such a violent land work for them.

There was a pathway down to his right, he saw, but he hesitated before using it. Those lights were electrical; that meant that this was a high-technology hex, a land where machines obeyed the same rules he’d been born and bred to take for granted. That meant communications networks, computers, perhaps, and—guns. He felt confident that he could stop most projectiles, but this skin and bone would be little protection against a laser pistol, for example—particularly one designed by a people to be used on their own kind.

He felt certain there was more danger from his own new race than from any hidden menaces. The civilization had proved out long ago, millions of years perhaps. It had proved itself by conquering whatever horrors his new body was designed to combat, and it had built a technologically sophisticated civilization on that result. There would be no hidden enemies down there, only new ones he would make.

He sighed and started carefully down the path. It wasn’t hard, although he had to remind himself now and then that his tail was longer and thinner and solidly weighted, and had to be watched lest it start a landslide of its own.

Vision wasn’t much of a problem, he noted with interest. The Chugach had terrible night vision, since they lived beneath the sands and used senses other than sight much of the time. This new form saw extremely well in the daylight and even better at night. Though it distinguished virtually no color the night vision was precise where it needed to be. As he had seen the greens and blues and yellows quite clearly earlier, Marquoz surmised that his night vision emphasized contrast and depth perception at the expense of color. It probably got in the way, he thought—but, no, the color sense was still there; he’d seen the differences in the mass of lights.