Day of Truth

by Brian Stableford

  Rayshade experienced a few moments of bewilderment at the other’s apparent lack of concern. We’ve taken too much punishment, he thought. It’s all the same to him, no matter what. Or perhaps he thinks that we’ll never get back into spacedrive, never even have a chance to try and land. He may be right.

  He flexed his fingers, wondering if he could hold the ship if and when it went down. It was one thing to crash-land a small ship. It was quite another to set this monster down.

  “Another gun out,” cut in the blond man, and Rayshade’s eyes jerked back to the screen. The toys were swarming around the battleship again. He had rested long enough. They were no longer scared of him. They were coining in for the kill.

  He searched the screen, trying to see whether Hawkangel’s ships were still in the Saraca system. If they were, he could not identify them.

  He grabbed the microphone again, but he never got a chance to give the orders he had delayed so long. The Aurita rolled over, the gravity adjustors failed, and a suddenly hysterical voice yelled, “The shield’s going.”

  For a sickening two seconds, he knew what it was like to be dying. With the shield down, the ship was finished. But gravity bit again and pulled him back into the soft, slick plastic of his seat.

  It took it! he exulted. How many times can it be hit and still survive? How long can luck hold out?

  “Communications out,” snapped the voice of the blond man, still icy cold. “No power on either omega-drive or high-omega. We’re drifting. Were holed in the tail. One more shot will kill us.”

  “Can I get power?” demanded Rayshade.

  “No.”

  He looked at the screen. The silver dots were still there, like a swarm of flies. But they were no larger. His sudden cut in power had taken him further away from them. But they would come back. They’re still afraid, he thought. But they won’t hang back for long. We’re a sitting target now—all it takes is one more shot.

  “Where are we?” he asked the navigator. “What speed?”

  “Just sub-c,” came the reply. “In space and going more or less toward the sun. We cross Saraca’s orbit in a matter of minutes.”

  Without power, thought Rayshade, we’ll never make a solar orbit. “Can we make Saraca?” he asked.

  It was the blond man who answered. “If we had the time, we could make any of the inner planets. But we’ll never get there. It’ll take more than a minute.”

  Rayshade knew that. He sat tense and still, waiting for the final blow. He willed himself to keep talking, to show no fear of death, no sign of defeat.

  “We’ll go for Saraca on spacedrive. Work out a curve.”

  Why don’t they shoot us?

  “There’s no chance,” wailed the navigator.

  “Do it!”

  They looked almost still, thought Rayshade. As though they were on spacedrive as well. Why don’t they shoot? The Aurita plunged on through space, robbed of power but not of momentum. The silver dots just hung there.

  They are on spacedrive! he thought. They’re stopped!

  He watched, fascinated and unbelieving, as the pale dots—so few now—swept back into the battle. Someone, Sky-wolf probably, was urging them on.

  “They’re going to carve them up,” said Rayshade. “We’ll annihilate them.”

  “They stopped,” whispered the frightened navigator.

  “Get that curve!” the order came from another crewman. Rayshade still gazed in stark amazement at the frozen toy fleet, watching the pale dots running rings around them. The silver flies were dying.

  “Seventy—ten—ten,” recited the navigator.

  “When?”

  “Nearly…now!”

  Rayshade brushed the relevant keys and switched on the spacedrive motors. In the middle of the screen, the bright red dot that was Saraca was growing.

  There was a slight shearing sound.

  “We’re drifting,” said the voice of the blond man.

  “Zero—seven—zero,” said the navigator.

  “All right,” said Rayshade. “I can take her in by feel.”

  He pressed keys slowly and carefully, his mind taut and fearful, listening for some small noise which would tell him that the girdle was giving way and that the ship would not even reach the planet on which he intended to crash it.

  “It’s holding,” he said, to reassure himself.

  “Wait till we hit atmosphere,” said the navigator pessimistically.

  “Once we hit atmosphere,” countered Rayshade dryly, “at least there isn’t far to fall.”

  The red circle in the middle of the screen grew and developed features which delineated cloud and continent. Minutes crept by while Rayshade altered key settings carefully, beginning to edge away from the dead center of the planet. In the borders of the screen, the toy fleet hung all but motionless, while Skywolf and the fleet were systematically destroying them.

  There was a faint but ominously frightening creak. The red circle filled half the screen and began to warp as it encountered the distorting effect of the planar projection. Rayshade’s fingers stirred nervously as they lay on the edge of the keyboard.

  The red patch was drifting slightly, and Rayshade adjusted the trajectory, edging the gigantic ship into a long curve which would send them into atmosphere as obliquely as possible, with a slowly decaying orbit. The creaking of the broken tier was renewed as the ship moved. It became a groan, and Rayshade knew that it would not hold.

  It’ll break within minutes, he thought. The supports will snap and we’ll lose some of the shells. I only pray that we’re still balanced.

  There was an audible snap coinciding with a yelp from one of the crewmen. The ship jerked sideways and began to wobble.

  “We’re in atmosphere,” supplied the blond-haired man.

  Rayshade’s fingers rattled the keyboard, and he felt the ship respond. We’ve got the power, he thought, if only I can straighten it.

  “We lost two shells,” he said.

  “We’ll lose more,” predicted the navigator.

  “The power will hold us up if the unbalanced shells don’t tip us over.”

  Rayshade’s fingers plucked delicately at the keys. He felt as though he was carrying the ship like a gargantuan puppet. Slowly the ship began to roll. He steadied it and brought the nose gradually upward. If only I can hold her steady now, he prayed.

  The Aurita was going down too fast, he knew, and if the ship were to tilt while he turned the body, he would go down like a rock. He was waiting every second to hear more of the supporting structure break, spilling more of the the girdle motors.

  He eased his fingers away from the controls with a sigh of relief, but he dare not relax. The ship was going down right end first, but it was still too fast. He had to crash the battleship as expertly as possible. All he could see on the screen was cloud. It was as though he was descending into a vast saucer full of fog. He could not see any of what was underneath it. He prayed for a shallow lake or a forest.

  The Aurita began to shake, and he could practically feel the shells coming away from the superstructure. He flicked keys furiously, but the rocking continued. The cushion of power was fast breaking up. Desperately, he slewed the ship and sent it into the cloud in a fast, slanting dive.

  “Now!” he yelled to the man behind. He rolled himself into a tight ball, head between his knees, arms wrapped round his shins, waiting for the impact.

  When it came, he was sure for a dreadful second that his frenzied efforts had been insufficient. But the noise was far worse than the shock. He was hurled across the control room when the gravity adjustors cut and the floor became a wall. But nothing broke except the Aurita.

  The battleship would never fly again, but its captain would.

  Out in space, Skywolf and the Beasts ruthlessly converted the toy fleet into debris. They did not understand what had happened, but they took full and glorious advantage of it.

  The battle of Saraca was over, and the toys had lost.

 
They were, of course, only following orders when they switched their ships into space and ceased fire. They did not understand, but the command was clear enough, and they had been built with no option except to obey Heljanita’s every command.

  They were not to know, of course, that when the orders were sent from the citadel on Aetema, Heljanita had run away in a desperate attempt to reach the lever in the control room. The voice which had assured them that Heljanita held the pistol once again had sounded like Heljanita’s, but it had belonged to Darkscar of Despair.

  CHAOS’S STORY CONTINUED

  There was solid ground beneath my feet and there had been all the time, except that I had not noticed. I stood on the surface of Planet Despair, on the bank of the River of Tears. The purple sun hung low in the patterned sky, illuminating the dark, sluggish waters of the great river.

  Corpses floated in the river—the corpses of Darkscar’s frog people who had tried to fight the toys and failed. There were silver corpses, too, and for a moment I thought that I saw the bodies of men as well, but those images faded and were gone.

  I still balanced the galactic lens in my shattered left hand, still steadied the stars with the tips of my fingers. In my other body, which I also shared with the alien entity who was Planet Despair, I still surrounded the universe and lived within it as a whole. And yet my boots rested in the mud of the River of Tears.

  I looked into the face—my face—to follow the thoughts which were in the mind of the alien. But once again my mind twisted and writhed as I tried to absorb and interpret the entire contents and convolutions of the face. I did not draw away, and I was not hurt. I was a part of that face, and it was my face. I could’ read and understand, But it took time. It did not all come at once. There were still questions and answers, and things which escaped my notice.

  There was strain in the face. Had it been a man’s face, the muscles would have been pulled taut, the lips stretched, eyes closed and sweat pouring. But there was no need for such symptomatic indication. The strain itself was there and could be read directly. Planet Despair was pouring out powers to me; to hold the stars; and into the galaxy and the dimensions of time.

  There was fear in the face as well. Planet Despair was fighting for its very existence.

  I. felt my face reaching and my mind reaching with it.

  I had thought that all the universe was stretched before us already, but I did not know anything about the dimensions of time. I felt them now. We reached into caverns in time. We were inside the Time Wave, identifying with it and reaching along it for more help.

  We needed more minds, specific minds, with the depths of perception and the strength which we needed. We needed minds that we could reach without destroying; minds which could be absorbed into our composite entity.

  I read new fear in the face; fear that even with my help we might not be able to find those minds and bring them The fear grew, and I knew that we were failing. We drew one mind, but there were two more that we still needed.

  The mind that we found was the mind of a girl. Her body, which stood beside me on the bank of the great river, was that of a small, slim girl with golden hair and pale, frightened eyes. I saw her recognize me—and I knew her for Dawnstar of Home. She had been there in the palace when I murdered her sister and her mother and her brother’s child. But I think she was unconscious at the time. I could feel the fear which she flooded into the face, but it was all fear and no hate. I could feel the pain too; the pain of dreams and nightmares, of knowing the future before it became the present; and the pain of seeing other people fighting against her dreams, doomed by what she saw and knew. And there was a third pain—the pain of a dagger in her belly, with blood spilling over soft silken sheets, and a life ebbing up the hilt of the dagger and draining her body of its soul. We had taken Dawnstar from the very moment of her death.

  But we could not find the other two minds. They were too far away. Planet Despair could not understand. But all of a sudden, I did.

  “Not back in time,” I said. “In the present. In Darkscar’s collection!”

  We found them then, quickly and thankfully.

  The second of the three was an old man with snow white hair and sensitive violet eyes. I had seen him before as a metal plate and as an image on a screen. But I think anyone who had never seen him would have known him. He was Moonglow of Amia, the first of the great Beasts, philosopher and prophet. He added nothing to the face except peace. He had no violent memories of death, no visions of terror and destiny.

  I knew why he was here. Because of his judgment. He was a thinker and a guide. He had the control about which Planet Despair had spoken. He had once taken the fractions of an idea and the bones of a civilization, and built them into a system which worked for ten thousand years. Adam December had created the Beasts and their society, but Moonglow of Amia had been the synthesist—the builder.

  I guessed then why Dawnstar was here. It was because of her visions, because she had a unique empathy with the Time Wave. Like her brother, Christopher Rainstar, she felt the rhythm of the Time Wave, but unlike him she also felt the tremor which was going to distort it and throw the whole universe into chaos. She was the perception that we needed.

  I began to see the pattern. We needed a creator: a man who could provide the bones for Moonglow to flesh and Dawnstar to fit into the Time Wave. There was only one logical choice—Adam December, the man who made the Beasts and gave mankind the stars.

  He was a small, uncomfortable man, seething with fury and loneliness. I had spoken to him before, as one of Dark-scar’s collection, and he had nothing for me then but hate and blame. Only the vestiges of these emotions were there now. They had only been superficial, things of the moment. I was much closer now to the actual nature of the man, and he to mine.

  The face was complete now, and I stared into it to see what a maker of universes was like. It was a face with five identities and everything which five identities could put into it—two Humans, two Beasts and one alien. We were power, vision, wisdom, creation—and one other.

  “Why me?” I asked the face. “What am I here for?”

  And the answer came back: “To choose.”

  I was there to choose the future. I was to tell Adam December what to create.

  The face laughed. Mark Chaos—the man who had hardly ever made a decision in his life—was here to decide. For all my life I had drifted. I had always been more ready to take commands than give them, and even more ready to recognize no command at all. I had watched, learned and understood, but I had never interfered. I had never believed, never asked myself to believe in anything. I had never trusted myself, never depended upon myself. I had always waited instead of acting, remained aloof rather than commit myself, done nothing rather than decide between two courses of action. I had always run away from decision.

  Less than an hour before—if time could still be said to have any meaning—I had stood before Heljanita the toymaker and Darkscar the collector with a gun in my hand, which made me almost master of the galaxy, or at least the war. And I had delayed and delayed, wavered in nowhere, afraid of the nature of my dilemma, until finally, we all lost. I had been forced to shoot Darkscar and still had not prevented Heljanita from throwing the time machine into the sun—and us with it. It was Heljanita who finally tipped the balance of time and drove the universe mad, but I had had the power to stop him and I had failed. If Planet Despair had not snatched me from the heart of the star, I would have died for my lack of decision.

  And here I was, adopted by Planet Despair to choose the course of history.

  “Why?” I asked, feeling the discomfort of the irony which filled the situation, and watching the face laugh with a subtle, sarcastic humor.

  “Because you are the only man in the galaxy with enough information to be able to make such a choice. Dawnstar is a child and lived as a sheltered child. She has no capacity to make such a decision. Adam December and Moonglow of Amia are ten thousand years beyond their time. They ha
ve not lived in the world of today. And their ideas are solidly entrenched in the ethos of a world ten thousand years out of date. The only man who can choose is the man who knows the truth, and there is no man who knows no more of the truth than you.

  “You are a synthetic man; a man bom without preconception and without the prejudices of childhood. You are a cold, dispassionate man. You are an empty man. You are the only man who has been able to see the truth for what it is, without the distortion of an identity shaped by personal history. You were always the only man who could choose when the time came.

  “During the Beast war, you were Heljanita’s weapon. You understand the Beast war better than anyone because you are the only man who knows everything that happened and understands why.

  “After the Beast war you drifted, learning both about yourself and about those who would be important later. You did not drift wholly by accident. You were guided by me. I took your ship into the Time Gap. I took you to Heljanita’s world. I made sure that you encountered Dark-scar of Despair. I made certain that you reached Aquila in order to learn the last part of the truth about yourself.

  “I did it because I knew this moment would come. I forced you to look at hyperspace, and I made sure that I could contact you again when the moment came. I needed you because I did not understand the problem. I could see it, and I could interpret it. But I am primarily an inhabitant of cosmic time. I did not have the fineness of control, the subtlety of perception to understand the motives of men, their reasons and their ambitions.

  “But I could see that when the time came to rebuild, to snatch safety from the calming of the Time Wave, that I could not trust my chosen creator to design as well as create. Adam December is a man of talent, but he is a tortured man. He is a self-involved man. This much I could see. I did not understand, but I dared not trust him. It was too important. The Time Wave had to be reorganized, and it must never be distorted again. I could take no risks.

  “Do you understand?”

  I think I did understand. But I felt a terrible dread in case the alien should be wrong. I knew now that however vast and complicated that multidimensional web might be and however miraculous that face, the entity called Planet Despair was fallible and uncertain. Like myself, like the other three, it was groping in the dark. It did not know what was required. It was risking its existence on the four of us and our supposed abilities. Equally, we depended upon the power and cosmic perception of the alien to save ourselves.