Jack Chalker - The Return of Nathan Brazil

Tradeoffs, he decided. You had the senses you needed when you needed them. That was convenient.

He hadn’t expected much activity so close to the volcano slopes and he wasn’t disappointed; these giant volcanos were active. Anyone building at the base would be buried in stone and ash, probably. Only a nut would take the risk.

Still, there was some traffic; he heard it as he reached the bottom and started off on the plain. The sounds of trucks and heavy machinery all over. This was a busy place, anyway. He wondered what the hell they did.

It was not long before he reached a road. The lights outlined it in ghostly pale orange; small ball-shaped ones set into the ground, apparently to show the left and right limits of the road.

As he stood alongside the road a vehicle approached. He quickly saw why they needed the limit markers. Not only was the thing gigantic but it was bearing down on him at a tremendously high rate of speed. In only seconds it had approached and roared past him.

He saw the driver, although the maniac never took his eyes off the road markers. The vehicle itself had been a great mechanical shovel built to scoop huge amounts of earth and deposit it elsewhere. It didn’t look that different from those of several other races. The driver, though, had afforded him his first real look at his new people.

Centauroid, yes, but two-legged, his face a bony, demonic mask flanked by sharp horns, his eyes seemed to be seas of deep fiery red without pupils. He resembled the demons of Chugach mythology, the kinds of creature his people had used in their darker legends to scare the hell out of children and gullible adults.

He heard a rustling sound nearby. Startled, he whirled on it, only to discover a tiny lizard staring nervously back at him. At his movement it froze, then saw it was spotted and looked up into his face with a hopeful expression.

“Cherk?” it piped in a high, squeaky voice.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he told it, and it seemed to accept that and suddenly scampered off. Nothing nasty from that native.

He turned back to the road, trying to decide what to do. He would like merely to be noticed and picked up, he decided, but that was no sure thing along here, not at the speeds the natives drove—and that single-minded, straight-ahead stare on the driver didn’t inspire confidence. It would not do, he decided, to get run over by a truck before he’d even said hello.

He started walking alongside the road, choosing the direction leading away from the mountains. That might be a mistake, he knew, as that driver had definitely been going somewhere. Still, there was little sign as to where these people kept themselves in the daytime, or why they were nocturnal despite having keen day vision. There were some interesting puzzles here he’d love to start solving.

A second vehicle roared by him, this time from the opposite direction, not a shovel but an enormous truck filled with gravel or sand or ash or something. The driver didn’t see him, either.

He stopped short. Ash! Of course! These huge volcanos probably popped off pretty regularly but the slow, chunky lava he’d seen indicated that they were probably not dangerous to people on the plains. It would be the ash that would be the problem—layers of it, meters thick, perhaps, at times. Even if the eruptions only occurred every year or two it would mean frequent rebuilding. After a while the natives would have stopped bothering; they’d have built permanent structures underground, in the most solid bedrock they could find. With a high technology that would be easy. Just as his own Chugach had learned to live with the thick desert sand by building and living below it, so must these people have found refuge from the constant threat of eruption by an underground civilization. Only near the sea, farthest from the volcanos and probably with a good, irregular volcanic coastline that made for deep water harbors, would they exist aboveground.

Idly, he wondered how they coped with seismic quakes but decided that they had had an awfully long time to learn to cope with that. There might well have just been an eruption—they would be hauling away the ash, clearing, and rebuilding. It might well be their chief export, as volcanic ash made the best mineral-rich soil known. Mineral-poor and overworked hexes would pay through the nose for a steady supply.

He began to feel better. Even before he had met or talked with one of these people, he felt he knew them.

He was still deep in such thoughts when five small sledlike hovercraft sped up to him. Each bore a single rider, a demon prince of Chugach legend, and each stopped close to him. They nearly surrounded him. He looked up into their faces and felt childhood fears surface. He pushed them back as best he could and summoned up his courage.

All five wore official-looking leather-like jackets, plus holsters. Empty holsters. The pistols were all out, all pointed at him.

Oddly, he felt better at this. He’d been noticed—probably by one of the truck drivers—and he was now face to face with the local constabulary.

Brazil had told him he would automatically be able to speak their language, so he didn’t hesitate. He held up his hands, slowly, palms out, to show that he was carrying no weapons.

“All right, you got me,” he said lightly. “I’m an Entry, I think you call it. The new boy here. Take me to your leader or my leader or something like that.”

They just sat on their funny little sleds for a moment, staring at him with expressionless, demonic faces, pistols drawn. Finally one with some extra buttons on his jacket hissed in a low and nasty voice, “All right. Move. Start walking.”

“Anything you want,” Marquoz responded agreeably and started forward. They followed, pistols still drawn, not saying another word.

They walked for several kilometers. Marquoz was thirsty and hungry, but his captors supplied neither rest nor food nor conversation. He was no longer as sure about this culture as he had been, but he knew he didn’t like these five.

His first guess had been right as to where the people were, though. They came to a junction and he could see cross-shaped plates where the two roads met. As they approached, one of the plates lowered, forming a downward ramp below the other road. He wondered where the controller was. The way these people drove he fervently hoped that it was efficiently automated.

The surface roads were duplicated below, although he had a fair downhill walk before they reached the living levels. Alongside each cavernous route, though, were moving walkways. He took the walk while his escort kept to the road, although he knew that eyes and weapons were upon him. Still, this was easier; he stood and machines did the work, as he was always sure the gods meant it to be.

Suddenly the walls dropped away and he found himself on a bridge overlooking an enormous cavern, one of the largest he’d ever seen. A city was below him, a stunningly beautiful city aglow in colorful lights. Thousands of people rode the intricate network of moving walkways that passed below him. Occasionally Marquoz and his escort would reach a platform and siding where a truck was loading or unloading what looked like great freight elevators. There were no shafts; the great cubes just seemed to float up and down. He guessed it was somehow done with magnetism.

He’d stopped, absently looking over the view, and that irritated his captors. “Keep moving!” the leader hissed at him.

He stepped back onto the walk and let it carry him. “Sorry,” he said, “it was just very beautiful—and very unexpected.” That seemed to mollify and please them; after that they didn’t seem quite so nasty. They weren’t too bright, he reflected. When he’d stepped off the walk to look they’d gone several meters past before they realized he’d stopped. If he had a little more experience being whatever these people were and if he hadn’t wanted to be a captive, he could have escaped them easily or knocked them all off.