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 alot 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. Allb.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!”
“Yousuggested 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?”