“How will you manage two Brazils?” Yua wanted to know.
“Watch closely,” Gypsy said with a grin, and closed his eyes. For a moment nothing happened; then, suddenly his body seemed to shimmer and blur, and to shrink slightly. Slowly, ever so slowly, Gypsy became the physical image of Nathan Brazil.
“You never told me you could do that,” Marquoz grumbled. “Hell, it would have saved me a lot of shit.”
The image of Nathan Brazil, now very solid and very real on the floor, gave him a Gypsy grin. “There’s a lot of things I didn’t tell you, old friend.” He looked at each of them. “Well? Think it’ll work?”
Except for Asam, who had never seen Brazil, they all gaped at the figure. It was Brazil, perfectly, exactly, to a hair. Even the voice and inflection were correct.
“It’ll work,” Mavra told him. “You could convince me, and I saw it.” But, deep down, it disturbed her a great deal. Obie hadn’t given him the ability to do this, despite Gypsy’s claims. Obie may have known Gypsy had the ability and planned accordingly, but giving Gypsy the talent would be beyond even Obie. To become somebody else, to appear and disappear at will, one had to go through the dish. There was only one possible explanation.
“Hypnosis will fool a living observer,” she noted, “But never a camera.”
“It’s not hypnosis,” said the Brazil who was not Brazil. “It’s for real. It’ll photograph, even—pleasant thought!—stand an autopsy. I am, cell for cell, the spitting image of Brazil. And as long as you all treat me as if I were Brazil, and as long as I can remember to act Brazil-ish at all times, it’ll work. They’ll come after us like bees after honey.”
Yua stared at him a moment. “You are more powerful than Brazil,” she said flatly. “How is that possible?”
Gypsy chuckled uneasily. “I wish that were true. In a sense, I am more powerful. But only as regards me. I couldn’t change any of you into anything at all, couldn’t hypnotize you, force you to do anything you didn’t want except by nagging or talking you to death, anything like that. And, no, Yua, I have abilities Brazil does not have in his present form. So do you all, if you think about it. But that’s all it is. A con, really. Just another scam. Just remember this: I can be killed just as easily as any of you. I expect to die in this. Maybe we all will. But not Brazil. He can’t die. The Well won’t let him.” He paused for a moment, considering his words, almost as if trying to decide whether or not to say anything at all. Finally, he said, “Look, this is just guesswork, but I think Brazil wants to die. I think he’s planning on it.”
“You just said he couldn’t,” Marquoz pointed out.
“Not here. Not now. But in there, inside the Well itself, he can die. He’s a guardian. He’s had a rough job, too. He’s had to stick around for maybe billions of years, watching everybody else grow old and die, experiencing all that can be experienced, and I bet he’s bored to death. The records said that the last time he was on the Well World he didn’t know he had ever been here before. He didn’t remember. He’d blocked it out of his mind completely, mostly as a compensation, I guess the psychmen would say. He wanted to forget and he forgot. It took the Well World to completely unblock him, and I think he’s been trying to forget again ever since.”
“I’m not sure I couldn’t take that,” Mavra murmured aloud. “After all, I’m not bored after a thousand years.”
“You may get the chance,” Gypsy warned her. “Or one of the others of you. I think he intends, once he goes in there and does what has to be done, to pick somebody else, train them to do it, then die. I’d almost bet on it.”
Breaking the long silence following that statement, Yua said, “I don’t believe it. He couldn’t. He is the Lord God.”
Gypsy shrugged. “Don’t believe it, then. But I think you know there’s a grain of truth in it, even from an amateur psych like me. You’ve all researched him, met him, talked to him. I’ve also got a pretty good idea who he’s Chosen as his replacement.”
Mavra caught his eye and nodded almost imperceptibly. She remembered that Brazil refused to take the responsiblity for turning off the machine for repairs and thereby condemning all those trillions to oblivion. He had insisted that she give the order to him, and, therefore, take that responsiblility. She was seeing it, more and more, as the passing of a torch. But did she really want it?
She saw she was going to have a lot of sleepless nights over that one—if, that is, she lived to get that far.
Embassy of Ulik, South Zone
Serge Ortega was furious and frustrated at one and the same time, and that made him something like a fearsome madman.
“First,” he screamed at the intercom, “first this idiotic attempt on Mavra Chang. Fools! Worse than fools! Sloppy! You turned a hex that was inclined to stay entirely out of this into one of theirs, and in the process managed to injure and get mad at us the closest thing to a national hero they’ve got! And now— this! A summit meeting of the enemy commanders right here, not a thousand meters from me, right here in South Zone. And by all that’s holy, we don’t know a thing! And why? Because they hire some from our own side to blank out communications! Our own side! Free enterprise… bullshit!”
No reply was allowed, nor did they expect the opportunity. In fact, most of the embassies hooked in had turned their own intercoms down to a very tiny roar until he was spent, and it took a long time for him to be spent. In the back of his mind, Ortega knew this, too. But it made him feel better, and that was all it was ever intended to do.
Finally he said in a normal tone, “You can all come back now. We have to do some serious work.”
It took another twenty minutes for all of them to be notified that they could dare turn up the volume and turn back to business once again.
For longer than any Well Worlder could remember Serge Ortega had been its imprisoned tyrant. Not that he actually ruled; none could do that. But he had been an old man, near death from natural causes, when he discovered the arcane fact that there was at least one race, and a southern one at that, with the power to extend his life. It wasn’t any great scientific leap, or unique minerals; nothing like that.
It was magic.
There was magic on the Well World. Not a lot, and it was pretty scattered around, but it was there in some races. The entire world was a laboratory, a set of experiments used by ancient Markovians to prove out their races before establishing them out there, in the universe. But when your largest social lab is 614.4 kilometers at its widest point near the equator, compensations must be allowed for. Not merely the technological handicaps, either, but often more. Magic. The ability to do something no other race could do, apparently out of nothingness. Of course, what was magic to the other races was magic only because they didn’t know how to do it or simply couldn’t. All it meant was that these races could draw those powers from the great machine that kept everything working, the Well itself. The mumbo-jumbo, if it existed, came later.
And one race had a spell that could sustain him indefinitely, keep him from aging. It was relatively easy to get them to do it; he had spies all over the Well World and he had all the embassies thoroughly bugged. He knew where everybody’s bodies were buried, and if they had no skeletons in their closets, he was perfectly capable of creating them to order and to need. But there were limits to magic, too.
This magic worked only in the home hex of the spell-caster. Not all magic was like this—some worked anywhere. Not this, though. And since the hex was, not only a water hex but a deepwater hex, he could hardly move there even as alien-in-residence. The spell was against aging, not drowning.