04. The Return of Nathan Brazil (4 page)

"We are married," the young woman assured him. "Just got a small farm outside Tabak."

"You wish to enter the Fellowship, freely and of your own will?" the Acolyte continued. Standard procedure. It was really a tough job, since the questions could easily break a mood if asked in the wrong tone.

The young couple looked at each other, then back to the Acolyte. "We do," they assured him as one.

The Acolyte was familiar with the type. Small farmers, probably given the land at marriage, both children of farmers who had looked forward to a certain but dull destiny. Now they saw a quick way out.

"Will we . . . travel?" the young man asked.

The Acolyte nodded. "You will see many places and experience many things."

"Will . . . will we see
her
again?" The woman almost sighed.

Again, the Acolyte nodded. "She, or her sisters, are with us as our teachers and our guides."

The couple was quickly accepted and passed on to the more formal processor, whose primary responsibility was to get their zeal on a piece of recorder paper along with their thumbprints in case of later legal challenge. Many times the Com Police and other religions had sent ringers to make sure that the laws were observed. They would be. Cops quickly tired and dropped out of the regimen; the ringers were often the best converts of all, since they were already involved in one faith.

The contract was not a simple one; almost nobody read it, including the ones who weren't for real —those who could read, that is—and none of the Acolytes could remember anyone taking advantage of the offer to have it completely read to them. Such procedures were recorded, of course, also for defense of later legal challenge.

And the contracts
would
be challenged, most of them, by family and friends outside the cult. In effect, they signed over everything they owned to the Mother Church, forever. Under Com law such a contract could be canceled even if not signed under fraud or duress within even days of signing; after that it was "sealed" and even if you later resigned, the Church kept all.

During the next seven days it was the job of expert indoctrinators to see that nobody canceled. It was a measure of effectiveness that few did.

There would be singing and dancing, hugging and kissing, praying and rejoicing in total communal fellowship, as individuality was worn down and the newcomers were kept in an emotionally high state. Recalcitrants during the mass period would see the Holy Priestess herself before they left. They usually didn't leave after that.

It was an easy cult to accept, too. Your bad habits, dietary and otherwise, were discouraged, and peer pressure usually got you into the mold, but they were not prohibited either. Nor, except for the indoctrination period, were they celibate.

They did good works, too. For every proselytizer stalking the streets and spaceports of the thousand human Com Worlds, there were five working in the poorest communities, feeding, clothing, sheltering those in need with no questions asked and displaying no prejudices of any sort. These good works were the more common, although slower, ways of gaining converts.

On the eighth day the young couple would undergo a sacred and solemn ceremony; their clothing and old possessions would be burned in a sacred fire said to have been carried from Olympus, and they would have their heads and bodies shaved and don the robes of the Acolyte. Then would come the full religious study, aided by hypnotics and all other means at the cult's command, until they were so immersed in the dogma and so dependent on the Mother Church for even the most basic things that they thought no other way. Then they would be ready to take to the streets, to ask every stranger if in fact he—or even she—was Nathan Brazil, and to carry out the good works of the Church.

It was spreading, yes, but discouragingly slowly from world to world, so slowly that none of the Olympians believed they would see it as a truly dominant force in their very long lifetimes. The nonhuman races paid no attention whatever; the concept that the one true God would choose to go around as a human was pretty insulting.

And through it all, government and press found nothing wrong in its behavior and didn't worry overmuch as it built because of its slow growth rate. Although they wondered about Olympus, about whether those strange superwomen whose world was off-limits to all were sincere in their religion or practicing a new and slow but effective form of conquest. If so, nobody would be alive to really see such a thing happen. It would be somebody else's problem unless something happened to cause a massive growth in church membership. Even the Olympians admitted that.

None of them had yet heard of the Dreel, let alone guessed their implications. Not yet, not yet.

Com Police Headquarters, Suba

THEY STARED WHEN MARQUOZ PLODDED DOWN A hallway. They always stared at a creature that looked mostly like a meter-high Tyrannosaurus rex wearing a vest and smoking a large cigar. He was used to it and ignored them.

The Com had expanded enormously in the past few centuries; it had also become far less totalitarian since the huge criminal-political drug syndicate had been broken centuries earlier. The old syndicate had carefully limited expansion so that frontier worlds were developed only at a pace which it could easily control and eventually take over. The discovery of a cure for their main hold on the leadership of those worlds—and the even greater shock at just how many worlds had been run by the power-mad hidden monarchs from their private little worlds of luxurious depravity—had caused a total reevaluation of the Com and the directions in which humanity had been going.

Hundreds of Com Worlds were seen to be totally stagnant; many were truly dying, their genetic breeding programs and mass mind-programming having bred populations resembling insect societies more than any past human ones, the billions toiling for the benefit of the ruling class and they for the syndicate. When the syndicate was broken so were most of the ruling classes, discovered simply because the drugs they needed were no longer available and they had to come to the Com or die.

Now there were new structures and new societies, some as bad or worse than those they replaced, but most at least slightly better and the attention of the Com spread outward toward more rapid expansion and the infusion of a new frontier spirit.

Over a thousand human worlds now spread over more than a tenth of the Milky Way galaxy. It was inevitable that they should finally meet others, and they had. The Com had by then encountered fourteen races, some so alien and incomprehensible that there could be little contact and no common ground; others, such as the centaurlike Rhone, with expanding cultures of their own. There had been some conflicts, a lot of misunderstanding, but growth had been positive, overall, and humanity had learned a lot about dealing with alien races. The Council of the Community of Worlds, or Com, had seven nonhuman members.

Of them all, however, the Chugach of Marquoz's own origin were probably the least well known. They had been found on the outer fringes of the Rhone empire by the Rhone, not humans. Their huge, hot desert world was at first thought to be uninhabited, a swirling, harsh sea of desert sands.

The Chugach lived far beneath those sands, where it was cool, near the bedrock and even in its cavities, where the water was, with great cities and grand castles lay. The Chugach swam in the sand like fish in water, and, since their lungs were not that different from those of humans and Rhone, it was still a mystery how they kept from suffocating. A non-spacefaring race that bred slowly would be virtually lost to most of the people of all races in the Com.

It had taken the semifeudal Chugach a while to get over the shock that they were not alone, nor even the lords of creation, but they'd made do. A collection of thousands of autonomous regions, that translated roughly as dukedoms yet seemed to have an almost Athenian democracy, they'd had no central government, no countries, nothing with which to deal.

But they had knowledge, talent, and skills the Com did not have. They produced intricate glass sculptures that were beautiful beyond belief; they had an almost supernatural way of transmuting substances without complex machinery, taking worthless sand and rock and providing pretty much what you wanted or needed. They had something to trade, and the Com had technology they lacked. Once a single dukedom had entered into a trade agreement with the Rhone, its neighbors had to follow or be left behind. The chain reaction permanently altered Marquoz's home world.

He didn't seem to care. He said he was a deposed duke, but it was well known that every Chugacb who wasn't a duke claimed to be a deposed one. Nobody much understood him or his motives, and least of all
was his almost total lack of concern for his home world. He'd roamed the Rhone empire as agent for a hundred small concerns, always seemed to have money and a knowledge of alien surroundings, and he got results. He seemed to have a sixth sense when something was wrong; he was drawn to trouble like a magnet, and he proved himself capable of handling what trouble he found.

So he was a natural for the Com Police, who recruited him to keep from being embarrassed by him. Marquoz was neither understood nor trusted by his human and nonhuman counterparts as the only Chugach in the Com Police. But he got results every time— and superiors up to the Council itself did not share prejudice against one so productive. He might not be understood, but there was no question that he was a capable friend.

He strode into the lab section with that air of confident authority he always wore, his cigar leaving a trail of blue-white puff-balls in the air behind him. He spotted a technician instantly as the boss of the section, and strode over to him.

The man was standing in front of a wall of transparent material more then twelve centimeters thick. Behind it were cells, cages really, in which sat, thoroughly bound, a middle-aged man, an elderly woman who looked like everybody's grandmother, and two fairly attractive young women, neither of whom looked to be much older than sixteen. All were naked; although securely bound, the cells contained nothing except the chairs to which they were bound—and even the chair was fashioned out of the material of the cell itself when it was molded.

Dr. Van Chu saw the dragon's reflection in the glass but didn't turn from observing the four people in the cells.

"Hello, Marquoz," he mumbled. "I figured you'd still be in debriefing."

"Oh, I took a break. You know how much respect I have for all that nonsense. I filed a report. I fail to see what repeating the story a few hundred times will add."

Van Chu chuckled. "Every little bit helps. You've dropped a nasty one in our laps this time. Worse than the last time. Can I persuade you to return home and have a mess of kids or whatever it is you people do and let us get some rest?"

Marquoz took the cigar in his long, thin fingers and snorted. The snort produced a small puff of smoke from his own mouth. Chugach did not need to carry cigar lighters.

"That'll be the day," the little dragon responded. "No, you're stuck with me, I'm afraid, as long as I'm having this much fun."

Now the lab man looked over and down at him, curiosity all over his face. "What makes you tick, Marquoz? How is shooting and getting shot at on alien worlds for alien races fun? Why not Chugach?"

That question had been asked many times, and he always gave the same answer. "You know that every race has its oddballs, Doc. The ones that don't fit, don't like the rules or things as they are. I'm the chief oddball Chugach. I'm a nut, I
know
I'm a nut, but I'm having fun and I'm useful so I stay a nut."

Van Chu let the matter drop. Suddenly dead serious, "You sure you got them all?" he asked, motioning toward the prisoners with his head.

Marquoz nodded. "Oh, yeah. On Parkatin, anyway. Who knows how many in other places? Our pigeon, Har Bateen, was dropped on a farm about twenty kilometers from town only the day before. We traced back his movements pretty easily. Apparently he just walked up to the nearest farmhouse—man, wife, one young kid—and pretended to be on his way from here to there. They were hospitable—and the first three he took over. We got none of them. Man, we did a drop on 'em and had that farmhouse surrounded in minutes, but they just wouldn't give up. We just about had to level it.

"He took their little roadster and drove into town the next day, checked into a small hotel in the sleazy section, near the spaceport. A busy lad: we found eight he'd gotten there including Grandma over there." He pointed with the cigar to the little old lady in the cell. "Then he went to the bar, took the madam there, then wandered out and over to us. These characters vary in their desire to live—Bateen himself was pretty meek and after we stunned him and put a vacuum suit on him he behaved real nice. The roomers tried to shoot it out; grandma just wasn't fleet of foot— tripped and knocked herself cold. The others we had to burn. Likewise the madam, although she'd infected the two girls, there, and they were still unsteady enough that we had 'em wrapped and ready to ship before they could do much."

"How'd you know they weren't what they appeared?" Van Chu pressed. "I mean, I'd never guess they were anything but what they seemed."

Marquoz chuckled. "They stink. Oh, not to you. Apparently not to anybody but a Chugach. Not an ordinary kind of stink; a really alien kind of thing, an odor like nobody's ever experienced before. I can't describe it to you—but I'm hoping you folks can figure it out and synthesize it so we can get detectors. This crap kind of gives you the creeps—you can't know who's who."

The lab chief shivered slightly and nodded agreement. "At least you can smell them. We can't even do that. The whole lab's paranoid now."

"Find out anything yet?"

Van Chu shrugged. "A great deal. A little. Nothing at all. When you are dealing with the previously unknown it all amounts to the same thing."

"I'm not one for philosophy, Doc. What do you know?" the dragon shot back impatiently.

Van Chu sighed. "Well, they are an entirely new form of intelligent life. You might call them an intelligent virus. They're rather amazing under the microscope. Come on over here."