04. The Return of Nathan Brazil (8 page)

To Gypsy, an operator was one of the movers and shakers, one of the men and women behind the government who
really
controlled things. Among other attributes, Gypsy was extremely paranoid.

Marquoz just nodded. "Anybody able to get a Com block on his entire past history would be able to hide real good, wouldn't he?"

"Why're you so interested in him, anyway?" the man pressed. "I don't know anybody who ever had a really bad word to say about him. Operator or not, these Olympians have him in a real bind. I feel sorry for the little guy."

The diminutive dragon shrugged. "I just wonder. The more I hear about him, the more I wonder. God or not, the man seems to have a lot to hide and a lot of clout to help the hiding. Such men interest me."

Gypsy was about to say something when the ship's intercom came to life.

"Attention! Attention!" The throaty soprano of the captain came through. "The Dreel are making forays into the sector just ahead of us and we have been ordered to heave to and stand by. Since it appears the wait may be a long one, I am preparing to put us in orbit around Cadabah, and for safety I must insist that all passengers debark there. When the danger is over we will reload and continue our journey. This decision is in the best interests of all concerned. Please be ready in the docking chamber in twenty minutes with enough luggage for an overnight stay. We apologize for the inconvenience."

That was all, but it was enough—standard procedure in a combat zone, of course. The passengers would be safer and more comfortable in a spaceport, customs and immigration aside, and the captain could make ready for a fast getaway.

Gypsy sighed and got up. "I didn't realize we were that close to the fighting." His voice was tinged with concern.

"We weren't," Marquoz responded. "This is bad. The war news wasn't that wondeful when we left, but if the front's shifting this far in we're in worse trouble than I thought."

The war was not going well. Shorn of their ability to take over worlds by stealth, the Dreel had closed on the weakest and most vulnerable systems with what looked like its whole fleet. The fleets and weapons-locker teams had gone to counter them and been drawn in. This time the Dreel were on the defensive; no longer could they be surprised by the Com weapons. The Dreel's were faster by far and more maneuverable than anything the Com had—and the weapons locker was as fully stuffed with terror weapons as legend had made it. That was the problem. The weapons-locker weaponry was built to destroy suns and reduce planets to cinders, but not for ship-to-ship fighting or wading into an enemy fleet. It was meeting the deadly fly with nothing less than an atomic bomb.

In ship-to-ship combat, the Dreel were far superior. They had the middle ground of weaponry and the fast ships for it, and much better generalship. They were winning, since their main fleet and combat control ships could not be touched. Only their lack of numbers had kept them from totally overrunning the Com in weeks. Now it had been years, of course, many years —but the Com was losing. The Dreel were overrunning more worlds than the Com could vaporize—and if you blew the worlds up, you didn't hurt the Dreel very much anyway.

As Gypsy and Marquoz made their way aft, the Chugach asked his companion, "What do you know about this Cadabah? Anything interesting there?"

"Cruddy kind of place," Gypsy almost spat. "One of the old Com Worlds when Com was a corruption of Conformist, not Community. A bunch of farmers, mostly, all looking alike, thinking alike, acting alike. One of those human insect hives."

Marquoz sighed. "Deadly dull, then. Well, there's no helping it."

The docking chamber was already filling with the other passengers.

The Olympian was there; she stood out, like true royalty in a pigsty, clad only in a great cloak.

"She looks pissed," Marquoz noted with some amusement.

"Ah, boy! She'll be a pain in the neck for us before long," Gypsy predicted. "Once she gets bored she'll start trying to convert the lot of us."

He was right. Even before the shuttle touched down at Cadabah spaceport she was at it with a fanatic's fervor. One thing Marquoz gave her, no matter how crazy her religion,
she
believed it utterly. The more of her total zeal and commitment he observed, the more he agreed with Gypsy. If Nathan Brazil was indeed a real person, he was to be pitied.

He wondered how long the most sacred of seals on Council and Com information would hold as the Dreel advanced.

Kwangsi

AS IT TURNED OUT, MARQUOZ WAS BEHIND THE TIMES.

The Council was composed of politicians, true, but neither great people nor fools. As the Dreel advanced, the Council members read the handwriting on the wall and their judgments were reinforced by their computers and military leaders.

The Com would lose. Worse, as the Dreel accelerated their advance they would build up a sizable reservoir of captive worlds whose resources would be theirs to use. With human populations under control —even immunized ones, the Dreel had a major advantage: they could breed whatever characteristics were required to render immunization worthless. If the Dreel continued at their present rate and were not countered within a year, they would not be withstood. They would be too many, wearing the bodies of their enemy and not only building the additional ships and armament the Dreel needed but using captured industries as modified by advanced Dreel technology. Humans would be flying those ships against the Com, too.

War may be the most efficient stimulus of innovation and technological advance, but there wasn't time for that sort of thing. It didn't matter if the ultimate weapon was developed if it could not be manufactured and deployed before the Dreel won. And so the only hope lay in past research, forbidden research, research and information classified by past generations as too dangerous to allow. Everybody knew that such things existed, somewhere, in the files—but no one knew what or why or how.

By a near unanimous vote of the Council the seals came off. Eager researchers pored over the files, often discovering that even the tools needed to understand such interdicted projects were hidden behind yet another set of seals. Much of it was, therefore, useless —and much more was useless because it didn't bear even slightly on the problem. Some of the material was truly shocking. Ways had been developed to remake humanity, its society and culture, into something alien, and every kind of insanity was represented there. It was this "Mad Scientist Catalog" that most interested the weapons researchers, though; they strengthened their stomachs and kept at it, looking for a quick and easy way to beat the Dreel.

Tortoi Kai was not a scientist but a historian looking in the records for clues to events carefully culled from the open references and filed away to be forgotten. She was chilled to learn how much of the past had been doctored by the historical boards appointed by past Councils. The farther back one went, the worse it got—wholesale attempts to change history by simply rewriting it or editing it to suit one's purpose—but even as she worked, restoring the past, entire staffs were distorting the present.

Kai was a typical historian; though her world was collapsing around her, she followed minor threads, becoming fascinated by the major and minor people and events that, when suddenly revealed, changed what she had been taught. It started in a thread, a name, encountered from a past 762 years dead; it was during the days of the sponge merchants, a dark time for the Com, long before the discovery of the first nonhuman race. The farther back she looked in the "window" encompassing that period, the more times the name appeared.

Everyone knew that humanity had originally evolved on a beautiful blue-white world called Earth, third planet from a yellow G-type sun. It was a world of conflicting ideologies, a world of rapidly rising population and rapidly diminishing resources, one that pushed out, almost at the last minute, into space. The ancient name of Einstein had decreed that none could surpass the speed of light; his physics held even today, refined and honed to the ultimate degree. But there were ways to circumvent Einstein's physics by removing oneself from the four-dimensional universe in which they operated. Tell scientists something's impossible and show them the math and nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand accept the declaration. The other one will devote his entire life to figuring out how to beat it. Add to this Earth's total acceptance of the necessity for outward expansion and you give that one man the funds and personnel and equipment to let him do it.

Human beings love to break laws, even natural ones.

And break Einstein's law they did—bent it, anyway —so objects could travel slower than light yet effectively progress at a rate thousands of times light-speed. Expansion was rapid. There were no Earth-type planets anywhere nearby, but within five years scouting expeditions located several toward the core that could be made habitable with some creative planetary engineering. Debris and space junk would provide the resources.

People carried their ideologies with them; Utopians and dystopians all attempted to display their superior system on worlds where corrupting competition did not exist. Cloning, genetic engineering on a planetary scale, social engineering on scales even greater, all created a series of worlds—soon numbering in the hundreds—with the Utopians dominating. Each was sure it had the perfect system; each was determined to bring perfection to the whole race.

Earth could not maintain control. Depleted, dependent on the colonies for her survival, she held power only through military dominance. But the new colonies developed their own industries using their own resources, then, in secret, created their own military machines and trained personnel. It was ultimately easy. Most of the colonies buried their ideological hatchets in a quest for colonial freedom and joined up first to attack Earth's forces and later Earth itself. The extent of the damage—whole worlds burned away—shocked even the toughest party leaders. But it appeared that in victory they were condemned to wage war against each other.

When fanatics moved to do just that, though, wiser heads prevailed and the Com—the Council of the Community of Worlds—was created. The great weapons were placed in the weapons locker; the Council alone controlled and guarded it—and any technology that might break that control was automatically broadcast to the automated factories of the weapons locker of every Com World's patent registration computer complex, or destroyed. Research applying to such stored weaponry was placed under an interdict so absolute that near unanimity of the Council was required to get at it. Each planet was free to develop its own social system; the Council had no power there. But a planet could not spread its ways by force to other worlds. There the Council, through its weapons locker and through the Com Police, prevailed. The only ideological battles possible were on the developing worlds of the frontier; the only individuality, the only free souls, left were those who plied the space-ways to maintain the trade between worlds, those who served them, and those on the frontiers.

In the course of interstellar exploration, a microorganism was encountered that interacted with some otherwise harmless synthetic foods to produce a horrible mutation within the brain; a person's ability to think would slowly be diminished, until he was reduced to a mindless vegetable unable even to feed himself. The only known antidote was a spongelike lifeform native to the home of the microorganism. It contained an arresting agent that the best computers and best medical minds had not been able to duplicate.

The world was interdicted, of course, guarded by automated sentinels so none could reach it. All cultures of the microorganism were destroyed, and it was thought the problem had been solved. However, some of the organism and the sponge from the early researches fell into the hands of the underworld elite on a number of the Com Worlds and quickly was adopted as a means of furthering the aims of their interplanetary organization. By introducing the disease to a planet's leadership, by letting some examples of deterioration be made and by possessing the only means of arresting that decay—the sponge they now grew in their own secret labs—the syndicate came to control more and more of the Com Worlds.

On the communal, genetically engineered world of New Harmony had lived the syndicate leader, a man not just born but engineered to rule. His name was Antor Trelig. Trelig was the perfect conqueror—a human being with a great intellect and in perfect physical condition, but one totally without morals, scruples, or other inconvenient inhibitions. As the Councillor for New Harmony, he knew who ran what everywhere. Gradually, he and his criminal syndicate had assumed control of world after world, their aim the eventual control of a majority of the Council. Com expansion was slowed, so that as each frontier world became "ripe," Trelig's sponge syndicate could wrest control. Furthermore, the slower the expansion the easier it was to attain a majority on the Council. Then from his luxurious and well-guarded planetoid, New Pompeii, the self-styled Emperor of a new Roman Empire had tried to gain control of literally everything.

Not a word of which, historian Tortoi Kai noted with increasing horror and fascination, could be found in the history books. The wars, the weapons locker, yes—but sponge was discussed only as an amok alien disease whose cure had been discovered about seven hundred and fifty years before, a cheap and easily distributed cure that had sent sponge the way of smallpox, polio, cancer, and other earlier ills.

Kai couldn't resist something like this. She burrowed further into the records. Trelig, she found, had discovered the researches of an obscure scientist named Gilgram Zinder, who worked for some long-gone science institute. Somehow this Dr. Zinder had made a mammoth discovery, one so powerful that Trelig believed it would give him absolute control of the Com in a matter of months. So he had kidnapped Zinder's young daughter, Nikki, and blackmailed Zinder into quitting the institute and moving to New Pompeii to continue his researches. Some recalcitrant Councillors had then been invited for a demonstration; a few had gone, the rest sent agents or representatives. Three days later not only they, but Trelig and the entire planetoid of New Pompeii, simply vanished. None ever returned. Ever.