04. The Return of Nathan Brazil (24 page)

Ahead he saw the opening into the small square with a monument of some kind in the center—a huge Rhone of age-greened bronze pulling some sort of wagon, the god of commerce or somesuch. The statue was the only impediment, but it would provide cover for somebody, he thought. No, Paddy's men would have seen anyone.

Or would they? He stopped just short of the square, just out of sight, and peered hard at the statue. How many Olympians could use it as a backdrop to fade into? he wondered idly. He put his hands through his pockets to the pistols. Well, superwomen or no super-women they'd have to be unarmed. He swallowed hard, inhaled then exhaled, and stepped into the square.

At that moment Paddy and his men fired. The Olympian women on the rooftops quietly stiffened and rolled over. Nothing was heard or seen in the square, but Brazil knew that his ambush had been successful; if not, there'd have been yells, screams—even possibly explosions, knowing Paddy.

He glanced over the warehouses washed in the bright sunlight, spotted the Durkh Shipping Corporation sign on one, and headed toward it carefully, keeping half an eye on the statue. With the snow the green centaur looked like it had white mange.

Inside the warehouse Mavra was the first to rise groggily to her feet and recover her wits.

They'd been double-crossed by the Olympians, there was no doubt in her mind. That meant the women were laying for Brazil in the square! She reached the door, slid it open, and saw him approaching diagonally across from her. Quickly she reached for the transceiver and flipped it to all-call.

"Talgur! Galgan! Muklo!" she called. There was no answer. She tossed the thing aside in frustration. She had to warn him, she knew, had to get him out of there— But how to do it without getting shot?

It was cold, yes, but to hell with cold! She removed coat and long sweater so she was now unclothed. That would show him she had no weapons concealed or otherwise. Without thinking further of the risk she kicked off on her powerful equine hind legs and bounded full-speed into the square right toward the tiny black-clad bearded figure approaching casually.

"Go back!" she screamed at him, all the time charging. "It's a trap!"

He stopped dead, seemingly amazed by it all and taken slightly aback by her rush toward him.

The Olympian leader, cursing, broke from her place by the statue and started running for Brazil, screaming, "Shoot her, sisters! Shoot!" As she did so, her shrill plea echoed eerily off the buildings on the square.

Brazil saw the Olympian amazon rushing him to his left and the specter of Wuju charging across and was completely stumped. "Holy shit!" he managed.

Paddy was quicker. As soon as he saw the Olympian break from the statue he drew a bead and prepared to fire. The Olympian leader beat Mavra to Brazil and screamed, "Lord, are you Nathan Brazil?" At that moment Paddy fired and she was knocked to the ground and lay unmoving, an amazed expression on her face.

Mavra was taken by surprise by the shot but assumed that at least one of her people had managed to retain control of a rifle. Two Rhone crewmembers, Brazil's shadows, suddenly galloped into the square, guns drawn, from two different street openings. Mavra briefly felt reassured. She tried to stop but her momentum was carrying her past Brazil.

More pulse-rifles fired from the rooftops, felling the Rhone. Again caught off-guard, Mavra swerved to avoid Brazil but he'd already shed his coat to reveal a large double-bolstered gunbelt. One of the machine pistols was in his left hand. He didn't try to avoid her; instead, as she swerved and slowed, he jumped on her back!

She almost buckled from the unexpected extra weight, but as she stopped and reared in an attempt to throw him, she felt the cold of a pistol in the small of her humanoid back.

"Just don't try anything," he warned sharply. She knew his voice well from Obie's files. She stopped dead.

"Head up the street toward the port authority building," he ordered. She calmed herself and started slowly in the indicated direction, completely confused about what had happened.

"Who's up there?" she managed, pointing at the rooftops.

Brazil laughed, enjoying his full control. "My people, of course! You should've covered the back alley and the window last night!"

She was sweating now, and felt the cold very bitterly all of a sudden. She shivered.

"Mind telling me where we're going? I'm freezing to death!"

He laughed again. "Tit for tat. I damn near froze going down that brick wall in the snowstorm last night. You won't die. Just get to the port authority."

She bent around a little and glanced at him. He was a ridiculous sight, a man in leather high-heeled boots, skin-tight smooth brown pants, a crazy thick gunbelt with two holsters. He wore a thin cotton shirt of red and white checks, a gigantic white beard, flowing white hair, and the porkpie hat.

"Okay. Stop here," he ordered, just short of the heavily trafficked main street across from the port authority. "Now I'm going to dismount, but don't you think I can't shoot you where you stand. The locals take offense at seeing a human ride a Rhone, but this little pistol has a mind and will of its own."

She'd caught a glimpse of the pistol and knew it to be true.

He slipped off and she felt as if she'd shed a ton of weight. The sensation felt so good it hurt, and she stiffened up slightly.

"Now, the boys in the port authority have been paid pretty good not to notice us," he told her, "but since you're a native and I'm not, racial loyalty might yet overcome greed—although I wouldn't count on it. So what I'm going to do is holster this thing and we're both going to walk over there, into the authority waiting room where we met yesterday, and out Gate Four to the shuttle boat. Since they haven't finished unloading my ship yet they'll probably see no evil. I can't break orbit now, anyway."

She nodded, knowing that he'd never be this confident unless his own people had them covered the whole way and everything was already set up. It didn't matter; all she wanted was a talk, anyway.

She wished, though, that she'd allowed Obie to do an implant in her the way he'd done on Olympus. But she was still so angry with him for that trick with the Temple of Birth that she had adamantly refused this time. Now she missed his presence. She knew Obie could deal with Nathan Brazil better than she.

They entered the building and, as he'd said, nobody paid the slightest attention, not even to her—and she thought she was reasonably attractive for a Rhone —bare as the day she would have been born if really a Rhone. And in the middle of winter!

The pilot boat was automated and took no time at all to lift. She was thankful for the warmth and the chance to catch her breath. Brazil sat back and regarded her with a mixture of amusement and fascination.

"So tell me, Tourifreet or whatever your real name is," he began, "are you the head of this conspiracy or just a hired hand? Who knew enough to make you look like that?"

She managed a smile although still slightly winded. "Not Tourifreet, no," she wheezed. "Mavra. Mavra Chang. I'm your great-granddaughter, Mr. Brazil."

He took out a cigar, lit it, and settled back against the bulkhead. "Well, well, well . . . Do tell. Anybody ever tell you you favor your great-grandfather?"

Aboard the Jerusalem

THEY'D SAID LITTLE AFTER THE INITIAL EXCHANGE. The pilot docked quickly and they moved through the set of airlocks into the center of the ship. There was a
lot of banging and shuddering aft, as the sounds of the ship being dismantled into containers by tugs came to them. He gestured and she walked forward on the catwalks, he following, until they reached the lounge.

The place was a mess; used food tins were all over the place, wherever he'd finished with them; piles of papers; books in languages she didn't know, with covers suggesting a decidedly peculiar taste in reading materials.

"Sorry the place looks like a dump, but I just wasn't in the mood to clean it and I wasn't expecting guests," he said casually, dusting off a padded chair and plopping into it.

"Aren't you afraid I'll overpower you now that we're alone?" she asked. "After all, I'm a lot bigger and stronger than you are."

He chuckled. "Go ahead. The pilot's keyed to me, the aft section's in vacuum during unloading, and the ship's inoperable until the stevedores finish the job." To illustrate his unconcern he unbuckled his gun belt and tossed it on the floor.

She picked up a book and looked at the cover. "I've never seen real books like this in the Com sections of space," she commented, curious. "Tell me—is it really what the cover seems to say it is?"

He leered at her mockingly. "Of course it is, my dear. Although they're never as juicy inside as they promise." The leer faded. "That was how people got information in the old days—and entertainment, too, for a couple thousand years. All B.C., of course—before computers in every home and office. I still like 'em—and there are enough museums and libraries around to get 'em. Some of the stuff they saved, though!
Whew!"
He paused again, settled back, and looked at her seriously. "So you're Mavra Chang, huh?"

She nodded. "You don't seem all that surprised," she noted.

He smiled. "Oh, hell, I knew you were still around someplace on that cosmic golf ball of a computer."

She was genuinely amazed. "You
knew?
How?" Visions of an omnipotent god floated by her briefly.

He laughed again. "Oh, nothing mysterious. The computer blew your death scene, that's all. He waited three full milliseconds before his vanishing act—well within the detection range of other computers. He could have and should have done it a lot quicker—a nanosecond, maybe, is beyond detection with all that antimatter flashing about. Obie took it slow because though he could stand the stresses of quick acceleration, you might not."

"Three milliseconds is plenty fast for me," she noted dryly.

He shrugged. "It's all relative. At any rate, his gamble was good. Nobody subjected those records to the kind of analysis
I
did. They saw you go, looked at the tape, saw you go again, and that was that."

That only slightly decreased her awe. "You kept track of it all, then? We thought your memory . . ."

"My memory's decent," he told her. "There's just so much information the human brain will hold, and after that it starts throwing out some to make room for the new. I got to that point once—fixed it in the redesign last time I was in the Well. And, yes, I knew about it, about Trelig, anyway. Alaina came to me first with the proposition. I did some figuring, decided there was a slight chance everybody'd wind up on the Well World—which they did—and figured that the kind of reception I'd get there wouldn't be parades and brass bands. So I suggested you. I don't know why I didn't think of your being in
this
before, though. Damn! I must be slipping!"

"You
suggested
me
for that?" Some anger flared up in her. "So that explains it!"

He shrugged. "You did the job. You're still here several hundred years after you'd otherwise have been dead. Why not?"

There wasn't any satisfactory answer to that so she let it pass.

"Now, then, great-granddaughter, what the hell is all this about?" he asked, settling back.

"The rip," she told him. "It must be fixed at the source. You know that. Why haven't you done so?"

He grew serious suddenly. "Because I choose not to," he said simply.

She was shocked. "Maybe you don't know what's happening! In less than a hundred years—"

"Humanity's done for," he finished. "And shortly after that the Rhone, the Chugach, and all the other Com races. I know."

She couldn't believe what she was hearing and tried to think of reasons why he might be taking such a cavalier attitude. She could not. "You mean you can't fix it?"

He shook his head sadly. "I mean nothing of the sort. The rip will continue to grow and spread and eventually destroy the Universe as we know and understand it. Not everything—the original Markovian Universe will remain, but most of those suns and all those worlds are pretty well spent now. Unless some random dynamic comes along, though, it'll be a dead Universe, a cemetery to the Markovians."

The silence could be cut with a knife. Finally she said, "And you refuse to stop it?"

He smiled. "I would if the price weren't too high —but it is. I just can't take the responsibility."

Her mouth dropped. "Responsibility? Price? What the hell are you talking about? What could be worse than a dead Universe?"

He looked at her thoughtfully. "I don't know what you've been doing of late, but I suspect that if I had something like Zinder's computer world I'd travel, see everyplace that could be seen. Other galaxies, other lifeforms."

She nodded. "Yes, that's part of it."

"But you're jaded, you've lost perspective," he told her. "With the Markovian equations, Obie can instantly be anywhere he or you want. Do you really have any concept of interstellar distances, of just how far things are? Remember back when you were a captain and it still took weeks or months to go between stars, even with us cheating on relativity? Stars are, on the average, a hundred or more light-years apart around here. This galaxy is hundreds of thousands of light-years across. Our next nearest galaxy is much farther. It took the Dreel thousands of years to cross it. That thing out there—that tear—is moving barely sixty light-years a year. It'll take a century to engulf the Com, almost twenty thousand years to eat enough of our Milky Way galaxy to destabilize it. It'll be many millions more before it eats a really significant sector of space when you think on that scale. There are countless races out there among the stars, tremendous civilizations now on the rise. How can I deny them
their
chance at the future,
their
chance at the Markovian dream? To save a few who can't really be saved anyway?"

She didn't understand, couldn't. "You aren't being asked to sacrifice them, only fix the thing so it'll save us."