Cave of Stars (Macrolife Book 2)

by George Zebrowski

  The looming face was goading him with lies to shake his faith.

  “Die in mortal sin, then, without a confessor…” the lips whispered, and the face withdrew behind the falling curtain of whiteness. Josephus closed his eyes, and the cool, miraculous flakes refreshed his face.

  “The snow! The snow!” he cried out in joy, remembering what Paul had told him about how the visitors reversed old age. Small repair machines were injected into the body, to rebuild everything. He had wondered then if they were little angels or devils, but now he knew. They were devils! And the day would come when they would exact their price. “The snow, the snow!” he cried out again, realizing that these were the smallest angels of all, sent to help him in his hour of death.

  God’s grace melted into him, giving direct proof that the enigmas and paradoxes of his novice days were all real, and had always been real, redeeming each moment of time, however it had been misspent, binding together each infinitesimal of spirit. He would not decay into death, but would live again through this nourishing invasion of angels into his body…until such time when God chose to take him by the hand and say, “Your work is done. Now come with me.”

  40

  “Nine hours and fifty minutes remaining,” the Link reminded Voss suddenly as the tube car pulled into the station at the rearward docks. The Link’s intermittent presence in himself and in others offered some hope, but he could not trust its information completely.

  He drifted up from the vehicle and pushed off toward the exit, followed by the young men who had come with him from the control center.

  Doors slid open and he floated into a crowd of about a hundred people waiting in the large receiving bay, one of a dozen such areas clustered around this end of the habitat’s long axis.

  “Tell them!” he ordered the Link out loud, noting how few people were here, and fearful that the contact would fade again. “Tell everyone you can to get here quickly, in any way they can. It may be the only way out.”

  “It is being done,” the Link replied, “but thousands cannot move, even if they hear.”

  As Voss looked around at the anxious faces, he knew that even if all receiving areas were filled up, and all possible vessels used, the sum would be only a small fraction of those who still lived. Many of the faces that looked at him now seemed puzzled, and he knew that their Link was gone. Many seemed to be in shock as they clung to the zero-g handholds. The moment might come, Voss realized, when there would be nothing left to do except abandon the habitat, and these bays would still be filled with people unable to leave for lack of ships and time.

  He scanned the crowd, hoping to glimpse Josepha, or a Cetian who might know where she was, but without success. He pushed to one side and found a manual information terminal.

  She’s dead, he thought as he brought up a list of the vessels that were docked. They’re all dead. We saved them from the planetary storm so they could die here with us. Fears pushed into him, coming from places within him that he could not shut down.

  People drifted up to him and watched him inventory the means of salvation. Solid visualizations presented the vessels from all possible angles. He counted twenty craft, each one listed as available in its cradle; but all of them together would ferry off a thousand people at best, he realized. There were only two large ships with interstellar capability. There was no log as to when they had last been used or their state of maintenance.

  He turned to the people around him and shouted: “Listen to me! Fill up the available ships. Program them into stable orbits around Ceti IV. You may be able to return once we have altered the habitat’s course. Clear this area as soon as possible, so that arriving survivors can be more comfortable. Some of them may be injured badly. Note this well: You may have to put people on the planet’s surface, then come back as often as possible for people who will be filling up these receiving areas.”

  He wondered as he looked at the faces around him how long each such rescue trip would take, how it counted against remaining time to impact, and how many round trips would be needed to carry away all the living and injured.

  “Tell me,” he said silently to the Link. Normally it would have already done the calculation for him. “Tell me,” he repeated, hoping that it had merely mistaken his privacy command.

  The lights flickered.

  “Hurry!” he shouted at the crowd. “We may not have power enough to launch these ships later.” He was suddenly grateful to be certain that at least this group would be able to leave.

  People pushed away from him and pulled themselves along the guide rails, intent on reaching the cradles. Unfamiliar feelings of despair passed through him as he realized how few might actually survive, and what it would mean when the habitat was gone.

  “Wolt?” he asked.

  Blackfriar answered, faintly. “I hear you, Voss. My tube car is stopped some twenty kilometers from the docks. People are moving ahead on muscle power. I can do so, but it will take hours we don’t have.”

  “Can you move laterally, to the outer engineering level? I could come and get you through an outside lock.”

  “Those elevators are dead,” Blackfriar said with what seemed a growl.

  “Then we’ll use a maintenance vehicle,” Voss said. “How many people are with you now?”

  “About fifty.”

  “Which tunnel?”

  “The main transport on level one, in direct line to the docks.”

  “Have people go forward as best they can,” Voss said. “I’ll be there soon.”

  Voss looked around and was relieved to see that the receiving area was thinning out as people flowed into the passages leading to the cradles. He pulled himself down to what would have been the floor and followed a rail to the nearest exit, which took him down a short passage and out into a utility bay.

  He clambered onto one of the maintenance scooters and strapped himself in. The forward lights went on as he touched the power plate, and he heard the whisper of the self-contained floater engine.

  He shot the scooter into the exit, punching in the destination coordinates Blackfriar had given him, and the scooter did its job. It slipped forward into the maintenance tunnel, found the exit to A-B-l, and rushed down the main passage of the engineering level that wrapped around the asteroid core.

  Emergency lights rushed toward him. His eyes tried to see beyond his beams as he sought to link with Black-friar, but there was no answer, and for the first time in his life he felt utterly alone. Distances that had been nothing were becoming gulfs. Twenty kilometers was now a matter of life or death.

  Much of his world was dead. More than half, by an incomplete but still increasing count. For a moment he expected the exact number to be given to him, but the Link was silent.

  He tried not to think of Josepha. Little had passed between them, and there might never again be a chance for him to say more. He might never know whether she had lingered somewhere, trapped, or been killed quickly.

  She might be somewhere ahead, burned beyond recognition, or simply unconscious and dying, and he could not take the time to search for her. If she had been forward of the core, then she’d had no chance at all.

  “Wolt—can you hear me?” he asked. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Suddenly the emergency lights winked out, leaving only the scooter’s beams. It may be all over, he told himself. Some of us will survive. So few. He held on to the hope.

  His display panel glowed, counting the kilometers. He touched the slow plate and peered ahead.

  “Wolt!” he shouted.

  His lights flashed across heads floating in the darkness.

  Then he saw with relief that they were attached to the living bodies of people trying to make their way ahead, and his beams caught Blackfriar sitting in his stalled vehicle, arms crossed on his chest. People crowded the tunnel around the vehicle, grasping every possible handhold. There was a terrible odor of bodily excretions.

  Voss slowed, then came up and bumped the scooter a
gainst the car. Automatic clamps locked to the frame. He dimmed his lights.

  “All of you!” he shouted. “Hold on to the car any way you can. Pull out the utility lines. I’m going to haul the car through to the terminal.”

  As shapes assembled into a train behind the car, Voss saw that Blackfriar seemed to be lost within himself.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Blackfriar looked at him grimly. His shadowed face seemed angry. “You know what waits for us.”

  Voss nodded. “We’re not defeated yet.”

  Blackfriar grimaced. “Can you restart the drive in time?”

  The people behind the car shouted their readiness.

  “Here we go!” Voss shouted back—and for an instant the lack of gravity made him see the tunnel below him as a deep dark hole in which people hung on a long line behind the suspended vehicle. At any moment the entire assembly would fall away into the pit.

  He pressed the scooter into reverse, and as it began to pull back through the tunnel, his horizontal orientation reasserted itself.

  “Make sure we pick up the stragglers ahead!” he shouted.

  41

  Blackfriar sat with eyes closed against the bright lights, with Voss facing him on the scooter as it retreated and pulled the car forward. Behind him, Blackfriar knew, shapes floated in the darkness, hanging onto the back of the vehicle and the trailing lines. These individuals would survive, he told himself, as a sickness of implications crept through him.

  He was old enough to know patterns of history: the rich feared poverty, the powerful dreaded weakness, the living averted their eyes from the dead and dying. His world had known these things only rarely, and many of its citizens had never known them at all. Without the habitat’s heritage of wealth, knowledge, and technology, longlife would end; without enough life, living would revert to the old evolutionary default settings, and on a damaged planet. Horror sat at the center of Blackfriar’s thoughts, and he knew that Josephus Bely had put it there—as did our own ignorance, he reminded himself, our own inability “to understand that which we no longer believe in,” as a great thinker once said. It was our mere example, thoughtlessly presented, that tempted Bely to cling to life, setting up an intolerable conflict in an old man’s beliefs.

  “Voss, can you hear me?” Blackfriar asked within himself.

  “Yes.”

  “I think Bely acted alone.”

  “I agree,” Voss said, “because it took special access to set the explosives in the old starship.”

  “Should we have feared these people, or been more cautious?” Blackfriar asked.

  Voss said, “They appeared too backward to pose any threat. How could we have guessed that their leader would have the means?”

  “We gave him the means by being curious about the old hulk,” Blackfriar said.

  “He gave us no time to discover the danger,” Voss said.

  “Cunning,” Blackfriar said, thinking it strange to imagine anyone wanting to do such harm.

  “We have to go faster,” Voss said out loud. “Hang on, everybody!”

  Blackfriar felt a moment of outrage. An impossible danger had all but destroyed his world. He kept his eyes closed and turned his face away from the bright lights, and for the first time in his experience he trembled. It was nature, that great other that still lived in his body, beyond the control of conscious mind, facing danger in its own way…

  Random noises played in his head—musical tones, bursts of static, distant cries for help. He did not know how to set aside his feelings for the lost and those about to be lost.

  “Silence,” he said to the Link.

  “Don’t let go of the lines!” Voss shouted.

  Blackfriar’s vision flashed white, and pain pulsed through his head.

  Voss stopped the scooter.

  Blackfriar turned and saw that people had let go and were drifting, grasping their heads from the pain.

  “Get ahold and hang on!” Voss shouted again, his voice echoing down the tunnel.

  In the moments when his own pain lessened, Blackfriar realized what was happening. Dead and dying brains were still linked with the living, and there was not enough control left to filter out spurious signals from the injured and dying. Noise was being given auditory and visual form.

  “Stop!” Blackfriar ordered within himself, hoping that the common demand for privacy would be enough to stop a damaged Link intelligence from harming its human partners as it drifted into disorder.

  Light exploded behind his eyes. He felt anxious and fearful, and began to shake uncontrollably. The walls of the tunnel dissolved around him. The air became unbreathable, burning his lungs, and he was certain that the habitat had been hit again. He kept his eyes closed, resigned to a swift end.

  But now other images played in the gray theater of his brain.

  —burned bodies floated inside ruined structures—

  —eyes gazed at each other and went dark—

  —lungs gasped—

  —skin melted away—

  And he knew that images of the disaster in the forwards were fleeing from mind to mind, a second wave front of neutrino-carried information passing across the habitat, lingering orphans of experience still being thrown from mind to mind by a patchwork link field.

  “Why?” asked the dead.

  Curiosity persisted in fevered brains as their fear drained away into death…

  Blackfriar’s vision returned. He glanced around and saw that the people behind him were silently returning to the tow lines.

  Voss restarted the scooter and began to pull the train along.

  Blackfriar decided to risk the Link’s pain with a question.

  “How much time is left?” he demanded, but the Link was again silent, and he wondered if this had been its end.

  42

  Story and ritual domesticated life’s terrors, Paul thought as he waited for Cardinal Breivis de Claves. Even the moment of death, the long-awaited passage to elsewhere, was not a departure into darkness, but a routine entrance into the fellowship of a god who waited for the tiring of mortal bodies, judged souls, and gathered the worthy to himself. Terror waited only for the unworthy, for the doubting who resisted instruction in the ways of faith or who sought strength in unbelief itself.

  Twisted in upon itself, Josephus Bely’s comatose brain was seeing whatever his upbringing and education permitted as he waited at the exit gate of life. Paul wished that he might be spared the delusions fueled by a lifetime of hopes that must now be gripping his brain.

  Cardinal de Claves came into the chamber and motioned for Paul to remain seated at the conference table.

  “Minister,” he said in a raspy voice as he sat down in the chair at Paul’s right, “we have decided not to assemble the Sacred College for its electoral duty while His Holiness still lives.”

  Paul nodded. It had been too much to expect. “But he may never reawaken,” he said softly, thinking how easily he might have held his hand over the old man’s mouth and no one would have been the wiser. It would not have been easy, but perhaps it would have been wise.

  The cardinal’s long, bony ringers emerged from his frayed red robes and seemed to hover for a moment; then he placed his palms down on the polished wooden table, looked directly at Paul, and said, “We realize that it may be some time before His Holiness passes from us, but as long as he breathes, you are asked to be his minister. No one wishes otherwise. You know him and his aims better than anyone.”

  The cardinal smiled slightly, and the wrinkles of his predator’s face cut deeply around his eyes. You understand perfectly well, the eyes said, don’t you? The peace of your declining years depends on your answer.

  “Yes, of course,” Paul replied, knowing that de Claves’s clique needed more time to consolidate his position in the hierarchy, to ensure that the next election would be a foregone conclusion. “I assume that you have conveyed my report to the College?”

  The cardinal nodded. Paul knew that the
y would also need a transition period in which to ascertain what records to seize, what prote’ge’s to watch—in effect, how to get the best possible use out of Bely’s final departure. But perhaps he was giving them too much credit; maybe they were simply afraid.

  “And what was their reaction?” Paul asked.

  The cardinal withdrew his hands into his robes, pressed his lips together as he sat back, then said, “You claim that his Holiness destroyed the visitor. But he cannot speak for himself, so there the matter rests.”

  “Do you doubt my report?”

  “Not at all, Minister. But until His Holiness speaks of the matter, the report will remain incomplete.”

  “You yourself saw the flash in the sky,” Paul said with a sigh. “And you and I know full well that his daughter was on that world.”

  The cardinal did not answer. There could be no reply, Paul thought. His Holiness could not have had a daughter, had never acknowledged his daughter, and her death now ended the matter. The problem of her existence would never come up again.

  “I am certain,” de Claves said, “that His Holiness acted in our best interest.”

  Paul hesitated, then said, “Great injury may have been done. The habitat is home to twenty million people.”

  “So many—in that star?” de Claves asked. “It’s a devil’s lie.”

  Paul had no desire to argue plane and solid geometry with the cardinal.

  “All these matters are closed,” de Claves said. “The Senior Tribunal will not convene the College for any reason until His Holiness speaks, or passes from us.”

  “I do see the wisdom of your procedures,” Paul replied.

  Cardinal de Claves ignored his faint mockery, or had failed to notice. He looked at Paul intently for a few moments.

  “His Holiness may in fact be medically dead,” Paul said.

  The cardinal shook his head in denial. “He breathes…and that is all we need to know,” he said, stumbling over his words, and Paul was now sure that his group was in desperate need of delay. “As for the flash in the sky,” de Claves continued, “you may be mistaken. The night sky is full of flashes. And you have had no radio communication with the visitor, either by sending or receiving?”