02. Shadows of the Well of Souls (36 page)

"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?"

The question actually surprised him. "I—well, yeah, I do. I have a good deal of
local
power over what happens here, on the Well World, while I'm in there, even if I can't mess with the Earth's program. I never really did much with myself, though. Every time I'm in there, I say at least I'm gonna make myself 185 centimeters tall with a face and body to die for, and I never do. It's not a Well prohibition, it's just, well, I'm generally so preoccupied with other folks and other things when I'm there, I never really think of myself. Maybe I'm just so used to being me now, I can't think of myself any other way."

"Jeez! So you're kinda the master of this world of all these races and forms and stuff and you
never
wind up anything or anybody else? You got all them other planets out there and you stick with relivin' Earth history over and over? You're right about not bein' able to go nuts. You
are
nuts!"

This new point struck him even harder than the earlier argument had because there really
was
no defense. He'd always been Nathan Brazil since—well, since this job had begun, anyway. At least he hadn't the slightest, vaguest memory of
not
being just this way. He alone knew why he'd stuck with Earth, or at least Earth humans, but even there he didn't really
have
to. It made no difference in the end to damned near anything.

Sure, he'd been—memory somewhere vaguely said a deer at one time in the past and a Pegasus for a brief time—but those had been
here
and for emergency purposes. He'd become himself again as quickly as he could.

He'd always loved the Dillians, also for good reason, but he'd never considered becoming one of them, living as one of them through
their
history, which was something of a mystery to him. They were fighters, too, and even with far more limited resources they'd managed, as he knew, to attain space consistently ahead of Earth. There were others, too, equally attractive and advanced, yet he'd ignored them all. It seemed stupid on the face of it. No rerun of history and events, new experiences, new people and capabilities . . . Even Mavra, with her own personal traveling version of the Markovian computer, had gone to many other worlds and become many other creatures, he remembered now.

"I've got no answer or explanation, Gus," he told the Dahir. "The only thing I can think of, and I'm not at all sure if it's the real reason or not, is that maybe I needed something that was absolutely fixed, unchanging, always comfortable and familiar, that couldn't be taken away from me."

Gus stared back out at the colorful scenes in the darkness and tried to imagine what it would be like to be Nathan Brazil. Maybe he'd be just as loopy after all this time, he thought, but he wouldn't mind giving it a try.

They were passing another area of active volcanic activity in the distance, and it was a sight he found impossible to tire of. Suddenly his two huge eyes focused on a single spot in the distance, off to the left of the lava flow. At first he thought they were just reflections of some of the lights from under the sea or perhaps lights or markers on the islands, but now, as he stared fixedly at the spot, he saw what had drawn his attention to the spot.

"Cap! Off here, just left of the lava. Those lights
moved
!"

"Could be just an illusion with all the heat and distance," Brazil responded, not terribly concerned. "Or it might well be another ship. There's a lot out here, you know."