“Like what?” Brazil chuckled. “This I got to hear.”
“Well, the place is pretty damned dull, frankly, just like home. Nothin’ much happens, and what little that does isn’t important but it becomes the biggest thing around ’cause it’s something. Everybody’s into everybody else’s business ’cause they don’t have much else to do, the life’s routine, and the pleasure for them is simple. On top of it all it’s dominated by a straitlaced church that’s gonna make sure you behave and go to heaven, or wherever they think Dahirs go. No imagination, no curiosity. Even the weather’s borin’. And I mean, think about this kinda invisibility thing. Even that’s a drag there. I mean, so you decide to rough it and hunt your own food down ’cause it’s fun, right? Only nothin’ can see you comin’, so where’s the sport? Even back home the deer could see you and make a break for it or hide out, and even the fish had a little bit of a chance. Nothing’s even really wild in Dahir. It’s all carefully managed. I couldn’t stand it no longer than I did.”
“Urn, I see what you mean. You couldn’t just find an attractive female and go off and buy your own swamp or something?”
“Not likely. Hell, it’s the women who run the damn place. They’re the bigger ones, they got the muscles, and they’re all kinda muddy brown. It’s us guys who have all the color and are supposed to attract a female. They lay the eggs, but the guys hatch ’em. I know I’m supposed to have been made comfortable with bein’ a Dahir and all that, but that’s just the physical part. I mean, the swimmin’, the eatin’ the way I eat and what I eat, stuff like that, no problem, but in my head I’m still the same guy. I been him too long to be somebody else. And that arrangement just don’t seem natural to me.”
“I know some women who’d like that arrangement just fine.” Brazil laughed. “It’s not as uncommon among either animals or sentient species as you think, but I can see your point. Some people handle the cultural differences fine, but others find things just too topsy-turvy to adjust in that department. Tell me, what would you do if you had your pick? You’ve seen a bit of this world and its denizens. Would you be something else? Or would you go back if you could?”
Gus thought about it. “I dunno. I guess I ain’t seen enough of this place to really decide if there’s somethin’ neat to be. I sure wouldn’t be no Earth-human type, not if it meant havin’ done to me what was done to Terry. Go back? Yeah, maybe. I loved the job, no question. That’s what I miss most. But I also had started thinkin’ that I was gettin’ older too fast and slowin’ down and the odds were gonna catch up to me sooner or later. You know the worst thing, though? The one thing I dreaded, really hated? And it wasn’t bein’ shot at or bombed or nothin’ like that.”
“I couldn’t guess.”
“Comin’ home. Thing was, I didn’t really have one. My folks are dead; the rest of my family’s as happy not to see me as I am not to see them. Got one sister who married a career navy guy and she’s got a couple of neat kids, but I always felt like a stranger when I visited, like I didn’t really belong there no matter how much she said she liked me visitin’ her. I dunno. You get to a point in life, you don’t want to stop what you love doin’, but you also want something else, something more . . . permanent, I guess. And I just wouldn’t feel right keepin’ on doin’ what I’m doin’ if I had a wife and kids, particularly kids. Be worse than bein’ a navy wife. Sort of like bein’ a cop’s wife, wonderin’ if I was gettin’ my ass blown off someplace and only coming home between revolutions and massacres. There’s some that do it, but I couldn’t, and takin’ a job runnin’ around to the latest drug bust or bank heist or whatever isn’t the same thing.”
“Permanence but with a lot of action and variety—that’s a pretty tall order,” Brazil commented.
“Yeah, I know. I guess I’ll never find what I’m lookin’ for. Kinda like the sign I once saw in a shop. ‘Quality! Service! Price!’ it read. Then underneath it added, ‘Pick any two.’ Still, I’d love to go back if I could keep this invisibility or whatever it is. You could still get caught by a random bullet and nobody’d notice you sinkin’ in the quicksand, but you could walk right into the rebel camp and film away. Speaking of which, how come you ain’t been spooked once since I got back? I really didn’t think about it until just now, but you’ve had no problems seem’ me, have you?”
“No,” Brazil admitted. He hadn’t told Gus about all that had transpired, and he wanted to keep most of it that way. What Gus didn’t know he couldn’t reveal if he really got captured later on. Besides, who knew how he’d feel about Brazil having that kind of bond with Terry? But a few things had to be addressed.
“I picked up her second sight, sort of,” he told the Dahir. “I don’t know how, but somehow she gave it to me. At least, when I woke up, I had no more problems seeing you or her just like I’d expect to.”
“Yeah? You also got the power to blank out other folks?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Brazil replied honestly. “Unfortunately, at some point in this trip I’m almost sure to find out. I wouldn’t be surprised, though. After all this time I tend not to be surprised at very amazing things happening when I need them.”
“You sure got the luck, all right,” Gus noted. “I mean, bad as it is for Terry, she’s been a real plus for you this trip, right? Then I’m here as a Dahir with this crazy, built-in disappearin’ act, and she figures it out and then gives it to you when they got your picture splattered all over creation. What are the odds of that?”
“Very low, Gus, but that’s my point. It’s not luck. It’s the Well—the master computer. I’m just a glorified serviceman, like I said, but I have to be able to be there at the very infrequent times it needs me. So it kind of watches over me, like a guardian angel. It can manipulate probability, make a chain of events happen that serve its interests, although it doesn’t do that for much of anything or anybody except me—and Mavra Chang. That doesn’t mean that bad things don’t happen to me. Sometimes nasty things happen in spades. I got sloppy this time around, didn’t remember everything, and wound up spending a year and a half in Auschwitz for my trouble during World War II. It just means that nothing permanent happens. I suffered, I starved, I was treated lower than an animal there, but I survived. Barely, but I survived. That’s what it does, Gus. It makes sure I survive.”
“Jeez! I keep forgettin’ you don’t age. But what did you mean by gettin’ sloppy ‘this time around’? You talk like you lived through the Nazis before.”
“I did—but in Ireland last time, I think. That’s the scary part of it all, Gus. Inside there, inside the Well, among other routine things, is something I can’t really explain but which is, for all intents and purposes, a reset button. It’s a last gasp thing, something only I, not the Well, can decide to push. What it does is—complicated. Now there’s an understatement for you! But anyway, it resets. Not completely, of course. The universe still continues to expand, the basics don’t change, but all life out there is essentially canceled out. All people, all history, everything pretty much. Time and space become objects of manipulation. In some cases it can use the same planet and solar system again; in other times it has to find material from somewhere else that pretty well matches what existed before and re-create from scratch. Each of the worlds goes through the whole process of development, of evolution, you name it. From the vantage point of the Well World, it happens in the wink of an eye, but it can be a few billion years or more out there. Don’t ask me how that’s possible. I’m just the guy who has to push the button sometimes, not the ones who built or designed it or the computer capable of such godlike things.”
“Jesus! And you’ve actually done this?”
“Twice. The memory of doing that is something that’s always stored somewhere inside me. I might forget it for a while, but when I get here, I remember. Hitler, Stalin, all the mass murderers of Earth history are pikers compared to me, Gus. I’ve killed trillions with one decision, and worse, I erased all signs of their existence. All their history, culture, everything. Gone. But then I brought them back, in real time. The Well is a master of matching probabilities. Everything repeats as closely as possible. Maybe not an absolute one hundred percent, but it repeats so eerily that you wind up seeing the same people, the same empires, the same dreams, the same wars, the same nations and ideologies.”
“Jeez! You mean you killed me at some time in the past? Or another me? And another Terry, and all the rest?”
“Well, no. You two were long dead by the time I did it the last time. The time before—I only remember that I did it, that’s all. But I was still a captain both times, I’m pretty sure of that. Not of some ship like this, though, or even the big supertanker I was skippering back on Earth. Spaceships, Gus. Mavra, too. She had her own ship. She wasn’t even born on Earth and might not even have heard of it until she fell in with me here. We moved a lot of cargo and occasional passengers between stars over a third of the Milky Way galaxy. God! How I loved that job! That’s my equivalent of your photojournalism, Gus.”
“Spaceships. Wow, that’s neat!”
“Yeah, only the Well never inserts me at a point where I can do my job. This last time it inserted us, oh, I think maybe 50,000 b.c. or so. Since that time Mavra and I have both been, well, surviving, waiting until Earth once again headed for the stars. This time we didn’t make it.”
“Holy smoke! You mean you got to reset that thing again? That’s what this is all about?”
“Maybe. I hope not. I don’t know if I can do it again. I can’t imagine why I’m here, but I’ve been here in between for other things. Somebody once was actually smart enough to figure out the mechanics of the Well and some Markovian mathematics. The Well was alarmed, not because he could do anything major but because he had the potential to do some damage right here. Events got manipulated so I fell through a Well Gate shortly after, and it was up to me to solve the problem. No damage done in the end, and I just went back to doing what I’d been doing. The Well doesn’t let you stick around to get the universe into real trouble when it doesn’t need you anymore. I can tell you that something’s off kilter and may need adjustment. Something happened, maybe recently, maybe back as far as the last reset, but the tiny differences have accumulated to the point where, over thousands of years, they made a big change or a series of big changes. I noticed that when the Soviet Union collapsed so suddenly. I knew the consequences were terrible for later history that it did, but I kind of hoped it was just the result of a local aberration, just Earth, in other words. There’re a lot more worlds and races than that out there.”
“Hey! Hold it! That was great news, not bad news!”
“Was it? Yeah, I suppose, from your local point of view. From my point of view it was awful. Without the tension, the pressure, the competition, discoveries that would eventually spread humanity to the stars were set back by centuries at the very least, maybe even forever unless another such power arose.”
“Huh? What? We was sendin’ up space shuttles all the time!”
Nathan Brazil sighed. “Gus, you come from the most bizarre nation on Earth. It looks and feels like a European culture or cultures, but its root culture is more alien to the rest of the world than the Chinese or anybody else Westerners think are inscrutable. You invented violent anticolonial-ist revolution and sponsored it for decades, then you turned around and acted like an imperial power and couldn’t figure out why everybody else didn’t do the same. A bunch of your people, half of them devoted slaveholders and at least half virulent racists, wrote the world’s greatest statement on individual liberty and protecting minority rights. You continue to create and dream up most of the vital inventions and scientific principles of the industrial revolution, and then you let everybody else put them into practice better than you do, so that the only thing you wind up being absolute masters of is varying ways to destroy all life on Earth. One of your people invented the principles of rocketry and couldn’t give it away, so the Germans copied his patents and used it to bomb London. Then you import the same Germans to make rockets for you, but you don’t care even about them until the Russians use their captured Germans and create the first satellite. Then you decide you got to go to the moon before them to show them up, and you do. But they don’t go, and you lose interest, and thirty years later, nobody’s close to going back.”
“Jeez! You’re sure not givin’ us credit for much, are you?”
“Well, I credit you with an awful lot, Gus, but you Americans were only masters of one specialty, and that was war. The rest you let go, and when you let the rest go, like space, you become a hollow nation without ideals, a bunch of folks doing research and development for other nations, and you lose that restless creativity that made all those advancements possible. You were rotting, Gus. Drugs, crime, poverty, and an economy mostly based on exporting raw materials and importing finished goods—right back where you started from before the revolution. A service economy isn’t an energetic, growing one, it’s a nation doing each other’s cooking and dry cleaning.”
“And the Russians stayin’ whole would have changed that?”
“Well, it did the last time. Your people need an enemy they think is an equal, Gus. They see the world as a sports contest. Not much fun playing soccer when you’re the only team on the field. The Soviets were going to assemble a big, grand space station, Gus. One hell of a platform up there, under the control of the Red Army. You know what would happen in your country if that became real. And then they were going to the moon and eventually Mars. Things would turn around. The game would be on again. Instead, their totalitarian regime collapsed, they fragmented, discovered the rest of us weren’t so bad and that they really lived at a Third World level, and all the grandiose dreams fell apart as the money and resources got diverted to doing things like producing toilet paper and decent indoor plumbing. Fine for them, but it keeps humanity pretty much stuck on its ball with the only question being whether it’ll run out of resources, choke to death on pollution, destroy its atmosphere, or just fall apart in food riots and general anarchy. Don’t blame me. It was your people who couldn’t do a thing without an archenemy. And don’t look so downcast. We came from a great era for bang-bang on-the-spot news, didn’t we?”
“If you think I’m gonna argue about how shitty the situation on Earth is, you’re nuts,” Gus responded. “You said it—you remember what I did for a livin’. But you know, I bet you saw worse, experienced worse, during all that time. Kids dyin’ of no reason but ignorance or maybe sacrificed to some sun god someplace. You said you was in that concentration camp, saw the worst people can do to each other. Did you ever look up the survivors? Did you ever cry for the ones that went into the ovens? Or did you just sit there, like you was in purgatory, endurin’ the hunger and the punishment and the pain and maybe feelin’ sorry and disgusted that you got yourself into that fix, but unlike all them other people, them millions, you knew you was gonna walk out. You knew the Nazis would lose. Hell, you knew that even if they whipped you, even if they pulled out your toenails, cut your fingers off, tore out your tongue, you’d not only pull through, somehow, but all that would grow back. In the end it’d be just one more bad experience and the nightmares would stop and you’d do okay. Not like all them others. You like to pretend that you care, and maybe you do for one person or another right here and now, but you don’t really. Not deep down. And the only thing you’re really pissed off about is the wrong people got a good break and even though it might be better for everybody else, it slowed down what you wanted. Slowed it down! What the hell’s a hundred years to you, anyway? Don’t lecture me about my people and my world, good, bad, or whatever. You push a button and we all go away, but while we’re here, we’re alive. You didn’t need to see a Dahir’s invisible tricks. You ain’t noticed the whole course of human civilization except when one comes up and shouts in your face!”
Brazil didn’t respond immediately. He felt bad about what he’d said about Gus’s native country and history; really, in the long course of things, it was far better than most. But Gus’s accusations had hit a bit too close to him at his drifting best to remain totally unchallenged.
“You’re right, Gus,” he said at last. “About some of it, anyway. The cause, though, is one you should understand as well as anybody. How many people have you seen die? How many corpses have you counted on bloody streets and in killing fields? How many starving kids in some revolution or drought-stricken land have you walked past? A lot, I’d guess, in your short life.”
“Yeah? So?”
“What was your reaction the first time you saw kids you liked getting blown away or lying in agony? The first time you saw a whole village die of starvation, a living death? I think you cried, Gus. If not outside, then inside. I think after you saw a village of kids who looked like walking skeletons and could barely raise their heads, you got so upset, so sick to your stomach, you puked your guts out someplace and maybe cried again. But you had a job to do. Without your pictures, nobody else would know. Nobody who could help would know where to help. A few news-reels of Auschwitz and it would have ceased to exist. The whole rest of the world would have fought like demons. Nobody made it into those camps and back out with those pictures then. That’s your job, Gus, and that’s part of why you do it. Part of it is a thrill ride, living on the edge, but nobody walks through the starvation in east Africa, say, because they want to see the world.”
“I still don’t see your point.”
“The point’s simple. After a while you still believe in the job, but you don’t puke anymore. The ten-thousandth kid dying before your eyes of starvation isn’t like the first one or even the first ten. The hundredth soldier you capture on film falling in battle isn’t like the first one, either. Ask any soldier. Ask any survivor of those camps. You never like it, but you get hardened, you get immunized to a degree, because you have to survive and live with yourself. Pretty soon you don’t have nightmares about it, either. You just get—detached. Not only to save your sanity but also because you accept that you can’t feed those starving people yourself, you can’t save the kid looking up at you, you can’t call back that bullet to that young soldier’s heart. You know it happened to you; otherwise you couldn’t still do it. Some people can’t. They go nuts or they quit and do something else. You can and you did. I think they call that being ‘tough,’ or maybe just being a ‘professional.’ Terry was a tough professional. You admired that a lot in her.”
“Well . . .”
“So why condemn me for being the same way? When the ice sheets came down and killed off the crops and moved the people in great migrations southward, I was there. When the first temples were built to long-forgotten gods, I was in the crowd that watched the sacrifice of the children to them. When the Persians and Medes and Babylonians and Greeks marched and leveled whole cities and sowed their enemies’ lands with salt, I was there. When Roman emperors threw people to the lions to the cheers of the crowd in the coliseums of the world, I was selling tickets and souvenirs or picking the spectators’ purses. When they crucified thousands every few meters of the Appian Way as examples, I ran the dice game for their effects. When the Vandals vandalized and the Goths and Visigoths crushed the Romans, I sold them street maps. Then the Celts, then the Germans, then the Slavs, then the Moslem hordes, as they were called by the Christians. The Children’s Crusade—that was a good one! All those kids, some not even in their teens, slaughtered as they made their way to the Holy Land singing hymns only to be finished off facing a professional army also convinced that God was on their side. The Inquisition—they actually felt horrible after they tortured you to death in the name of God. Wept for your lost soul. Want me to go on?”
“I get your point. But you knew better. Couldn’t you have done something more than be an audience?”
“What? One guy? You can’t buck the worst in humanity because sometimes you throw out the best, too. See, you have an advantage I don’t have. I could at least hide out from the worst of that, I suppose, but I can’t quit, I can’t go home. I can’t even go permanently nuts. I can’t even die with them. After a while you just get too frustrated. After a while you just stop fighting the tide of history and just survive as best you can.”
“Yeah, I guess I see, sorta. I still ain’t sure how we got on this track. Maybe boredom or tiredness or somethin’. Can you answer me one thing, though?”
“If I can.”
“What were you in the last go-round? I mean, maybe this machine god won’t let you play really funny stuff, but you got some choice over you, don’t you?”