Cave of Stars (Macrolife Book 2)

by George Zebrowski

He let go of the handhold and drifted over the board. What did it matter now? What choices remained? He might ride his world down to death without regard for his own survival as he continued to try the drive; or he might leave and not think of all the living and injured he would leave behind. Voss felt his face flush. Moisture ran into his eyes, and he saw ahead to the emptiness that would inhabit him when his world was gone. How could he live with that, he asked himself as beads of sweat drifted near his face, sparkling as they caught the light from the board.

  He looked around the drum-shaped chamber and felt weak. The air was going bad, he realized as his eyes lost focus and the chamber seemed to fill with a reddish fog.

  He lost consciousness for what seemed only a few moments, then came to. Sluggishly, he grabbed whatever handholds he could reach and pulled himself toward the exit. A wash of cooler air revived him outside the chamber, and he remembered that he had to hurry to the pod. There was no way to tell how long he had been out.

  One more restart, a distant voice whispered, one more try might do it.

  He ignored the voice, insisting to himself that he would not remain conscious long enough in that chamber to carry out the procedure again.

  Slowly, he crossed the engineering tunnel and found the locks that would get him back to the cradle where he had left his pod.

  As he came up to the lock controls, he saw that all the touchplates glowed red, indicating that the bank of bays was empty. All the pods had been used.

  He closed his eyes and drifted, trying to think whether he should go back to the drive control chamber and cycle the board until the very end, to make his life count to the last instant…

  He opened his eyes and looked around, listening to the whisper of air as he wondered how long he had been unconscious this time. The Link’s silence inside him made him feel as if he had forgotten something.

  He reached out to the panel and touched the controls to confirm their indications. The red lights blinked one by one, but the last one flickered green and stayed on.

  That still might not mean anything, he told himself; red was no more to be trusted than green in a malfunction.

  But he forced himself to touch the lock plate. The door slid open and he pulled himself down to the next lock. Here the indicator was also green. He pressed and waited for the lock to cycle.

  He pushed forward as the door opened, and saw that his pod was still there. He pulled himself forward and up through the open bottom. It hissed shut as he touched the control.

  Fresh air flooded into his lungs, clearing his brain. He strapped in and hit the eject plate, wondering how much time was left.

  The pod shot out from the mobile, and the dark planet confronted him at his right. For an instant, it seemed to be attached to the ruined forwards of the habitat; but as the pod gained distance, Voss saw that planet and mobile were still separate.

  He peered to his left and saw the transport shuttles—motes scattered in their orbit, glittering in the sunlight.

  “Can anyone hear me?” he asked, and it seemed to him suddenly that in the deep silence within himself the Link would speak.

  He turned the pod, and through its faceplate he saw his world against the planet’s night. Atmosphere would soon howl into the wound of the open forwards and incinerate the dying flesh of his kind.

  He closed his eyes to the sight, unable to accept what was about to happen.

  47

  In the large hold of the transport hauler that had taken in Voss’s fleeing pod, people sat on the deck in groups of twos and threes, watching the overhead holo image.

  Voss sat alone and tried to touch the Link. The foreshortening of the holo’s high magnification made it seem that the ghostly habitat was pasted against the dark planet. He could not see the open forwards that faced the planet’s onrushing atmosphere.

  “Save us!” someone shouted in his brain.

  “What is happening…”

  “It’s so cold…”

  “I’m burning!”

  Screams shot through him. Pain stabbed from behind his eyes, as if trying to escape, and Voss knew that the Link was struggling to deliver the last pleas of its dying human host, with no knowledge that its effort might damage those who had been spared.

  “Be silent!” he commanded within himself, even though he had longed to hear the Link again.

  “Help us!”

  “We cannot see…”

  People were holding their heads in pain. Some were lying down on the deck and moaning; others curled into fetal positions; many were already unconscious.

  “Blackfriar!” Voss called out over the inner tumult, determined to make use of the Link while it lasted.

  But he received no answer over the cries. He felt dizzy and leaned forward, then sat up again.

  In the wispy field of the holo it seemed that the mobile was scraping across a large black stone. He closed his eyes and saw explosions. Glass ripped through his muscles. A hand closed around his heart, but he knew that the pain would end when the habitat struck the planet, silencing the Link.

  He lay down on his side and waited as vermin crept through the tissues of his body, and tore at nerve endings.

  “Help us!” cried the unsynchronous chorus within him.

  Through teary eyes he saw the sharing of pain as people writhed around him on the deck.

  “Be still,” he pleaded with the Link, “convey no more….”

  But it was without control and did what chance permitted. Human voices flowed through its labyrinth, praying for help that it could no longer give while Voss waited patiently for the end. Nothing else would now free the linked survivors from the mind mass of injured and dying inside the habitat or prevent damage to those who were still whole.

  He opened his eyes and watched the holo. The mobile was smaller, sinking forward end first into the planet’s ocean of air.

  Suddenly he feared that the strike would not break the Link cleanly, that there might be a jolt of nervous energy as the mobile hit, enough to cripple all of the survivors in the shuttles.

  As the pain in his body swelled, he knew that the Link was still struggling. It did not feel as he felt, but it knew that its end was near, yet still it continued to feed whatever systems were open, causing unintended harm. The child of human minds, the dream of past visionaries, babbled, unable to help its people as it faced destruction.

  One more restart, a distant voice whispered to him, just one more…

  He lay on his side, head on the deck, watching the silent, stately inevitability with which the mobile struck the planet.

  For a fraction of a second, its one-hundred-kilometer length stood up out of the shallow atmosphere.

  There was no time, in the first two seconds of its fifty-kilometers-per-second rush, to fragment.

  In the third second it was smashed all the way into the ground.

  He sat up, suddenly relieved of pain, as the subnuclear flash shot out in all directions, ionizing the air and vaporizing everything for hundreds of kilometers around the impact with skyshine alone.

  Slower Shockwaves of heat went out, setting fires, and then putting them out with blasts of wind.

  A big boom, he knew, was starting through the planet, rippling through its solidity, starting a dance that would wake up old volcanoes, birth new ones, and shake the ocean floors.

  Antipodal vulcanism, he knew, would open huge volcanic seeps on the other continent, and the quaking would be as violent as at the impact site.

  The shaking of sea bottoms would send out tidal waves more than a kilometer high to sweep the planet….

  All in a day…

  There would be little life left to starve when gas and dust shut out the sun and shrouded the planet in winter.

  48

  “It struck the unsettled continent,” Blackfriar said to the gathering in the hold of the largest surviving spacecraft. “We should send down a reconnaissance team.”

  Voss had come over in the pod as soon as he had learned Blackfri
ar’s location. In every vessel, a few survivors had suffered brain damage from the Link’s random feedback. Many were comatose. Most appeared unaffected, but only time would reveal if they had suffered any less obvious damage. He wondered about himself as he looked around at the group. All the Link’s routine functions were gone, which meant that medical diagnosis would lose all subtlety. Informationally, the individual was now reduced to his own memory.

  “What could we find down there?” a woman said sadly. “A grave. I’ve never seen a grave…”

  Voss looked at a thin, long-boned woman with short brown hair and gray eyes. He did not know her. He did not know any of the people here, except for Wolt Black-friar, and realized that all the people he had known and loved best—Loran, his best friend in childhood, Tarla Ojemi, who had first taught him mathematics, Calida…who had been his first physical love—might all be dead. He knew that it was likely, with so few survivors, that Wolt might be the only personal friend he had left.

  “Nothing of use to us would have survived, even in the core,” Blackfriar said. “But we should examine and record the site.”

  Voss stood up and said, “We should give detailed warning of the coming winter.”

  The woman who had spoken so bitterly looked up at him with uncaring eyes. Voss had never seen such a look in the face of a fellow citizen.

  She asked, “Which of us will tell them? Which of us will go to see…what’s left?”

  The look of rage and dismay in her eyes meant she knew the number of the dead. Nearly twenty million individuals were gone—all the youngest and nearly all the longlived. The helpful intelligence that had been more than the habitat’s nervous system was gone. The Link had grown with the mobile, becoming its shared soul and history, and it had died in every survivor—an entire living culture ripped from human minds and scattered.

  “Why tell them anything,” the woman said. “They’ll know soon enough, when they start dying.” She spoke with a restrained satisfaction.

  Voss held back, trying to find an answer.

  “What about us?” she asked. “What are we going to do?”

  Blackfriar looked around at the saved and said, “We’ve already given them some warning. There’s nothing anyone can do to save them from what’s coming now.”

  Voss thought of Josepha, and wondered what the survivors from Ceti would be able to say to the survivors of his mobile.

  “We are partly to blame,” Blackfriar said, “but it was difficult to foresee that our very presence here would provoke an unstable leader to strike at us. The weapons were old and well hidden.”

  “We did not have to come here!” a young man shouted, and Voss now recognized him as one of the four he had found in the auxiliary drive chamber. Earlier, the youth had shouted the same comment, when Blackfriar had first summarized, to shocked staring faces, what had happened. Not everyone had heard all of the details through the failing Link.

  Blackfriar held up his hands and said, “Ceti IV was…an island of humankind from Earth. It was only natural for us to have taken an interest while we constructed the new habitat. A group of us wanted to live on a planet, and this was a chance to let them go.”

  We should have kept our distance, Voss thought, until we understood them better. We should not have come so close. Better to have sent in smaller vessels than to have come so close. A million years of human skill, saved from a dying Earth, were now crushed and cooking in a cauldron of melting soil and rock.

  He thought of the six hundred thousand lives lost in the virtuals when their inputs of energy had stopped. Inner suns and stars had ceased to be as minds had faded. He imagined what it had been like in the matrix tanks, as they continued to function, oblivious to events in the primary world, as the mobile struck the planet. No creative command given in the forgetful wish-worlds could have prevented the crushing intrusion from outside.

  “I’m as responsible as any of the council,” Blackfriar said.

  We were so unsuspecting, so innocent, Voss thought, struggling with his regrets. He had known small ones in the past, never imagining that regrets might ever loom so large.

  “So what now?” a man’s breaking voice demanded.

  49

  Voss intended to inspect the strike area alone, but Josepha followed him to the flyer.

  ‘Take me with you,” she said urgently.

  He looked at her with surprise, unable to understand why she would want a closer look.

  “I have to see it,” she said. “This is my world. My father did this. Paul admitted it to me and to Wolt Blackfriar. He planned the death of your world.” She twisted her hands together and stared at him with tormented eyes.

  “Your father?” Voss asked, confused. He had been assuming that Paul Anselle was her father, or at least a relation.

  “The Pope,” she said bitterly. “Josephus Bely, His Holiness Pope Peter III. He’s my father.”

  Voss did not know what to say. The fact was significant, but no blame could be attached to Josepha unless she had participated in Josephus Bely’s plan. Voss was suddenly afraid of learning something that would forever change his view of the Cetian woman.

  “I haven’t known that I was his daughter for very long,” she continued. “Paul confirmed the truth to me not long after I had learned it from Bely himself, just before the arrival of your world.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and said, “Take me with you, Voss. I deserve to see more of my father’s handiwork.”

  By the broken look in her eyes, Voss felt that she was already at the disaster, her guilty imagination raising terrifying images. He wanted to refuse her request, but was suddenly alarmed at what she might do if left alone. The Link might have advised him to speak consolingly to her now, or to place her in the hands of someone wiser about the strong emotions of guilt and despair. Was she raging? Her mental universe was foreign to him, but he felt its edges expanding toward him.

  “Take me with you,” she insisted.

  The sun was just coming up when their flyer approached the site. The great column of gas and dust stood visible for thousands of kilometers. It went straight into the sky, a roiling mountain of black and white and red, standing on a base of several thousand square kilometers of molten crust.

  “It’s monstrous!” Josepha cried out when they were still fifty kilometers away. “Do we have to go closer?”

  “No,” Voss said. “There won’t be much else to see.”

  Twenty million people, he lamented, thinking that their loss was so much greater than what the Cetians would suffer in the next day or two. He was unable to feel otherwise as he looked at the titanic pyre, because he could not bring himself to place an equal value on the backward world that now waited to die—even though his reason insisted that only a few people were responsible for the destruction of his world. In the silence where the Link had been, he now felt a strange numbness.

  As Josepha looked at him, he wondered what it was that he felt for her, and tried to set aside that she was Josephus Bely’s daughter, born of the very backwardness that had reached out to take his world from him.

  “Voss?” she asked. “What is it?”

  Old human feelings, he realized, flowed through him now like a black river. They belonged to the ways of hatred and revenge, which had written so much of human history; and here they were within him, still under control but threatening to run wild without the Link’s subtle counsels. He would soon know for himself the states that Josepha had been familiar with all her life.

  “You hate us,” Josepha said. “You hate me. I don’t blame you.”

  He felt apprehensive as he thought of what might now happen to his fellow survivors. Linkless, would they learn to hate?

  He touched her hand as the flyer made a wide circle before the pillar and tried to say what his mentors and Link would have urged him to say.

  “No, I don’t hate you, Josepha.”

  What he would not say to her was that at this moment he felt very little for her. Th
e longings that had begun to grow for her had been cut short in him. They were lost somewhere in the same emptiness carved out of him by the Link’s death, and he did not know whether he would ever be able to find his feelings for her again.

  She looked at him uneasily.

  “We must wait,” he said, and saw that his words seemed to stir some hope in her eyes.

  “Thank you for that,” she said softly, “but I won’t expect anything.”

  “Maybe sometime soon,” he said, “I will explain to you.”

  His words surprised him, as if someone else had spoken them; and he realized that his thoughts were not in order, that he did not know what they would be when he brought them to order.

  “I will explain,” he said, “when I know better myself.”

  50

  Dark clouds marbled the planet’s atmosphere as the continent burned and shook. Fifty thousand kilometers above the planet’s fiery nightside, the mobile’s survivors, working through repair robots, assembled a makeshift starship from their smaller craft.

  The vessel’s core was a sluglike hull one half kilometer long. Small craft were being fitted to form chambers within the whale shape. A massive dumbbell assembly at the bow was a deflector field generator, placed to protect the living areas from hard radiation created by high-speed collisions with interstellar particles. A dual drive was being improvised: a field-effect pusher for relativistic velocities, and a jump unit.

  As the devastated continent rode toward daylight, a red Cyclops’s eye seemed to open as the clouds cleared over the area where the mobile had melted the crust.

  In the forward control room, Blackfriar looked away from the sight in the holo tank and said, “Fortunately, this patchwork ship of ours will not have to work for very long.”

  Voss changed the view from the planet’s cancerous conflagration to one of stars. His way of life was out there, he reminded himself, growing, reproducing, diverging. Macrvlife moves like new, swift thoughts through the Galaxy, he told himself, even if we fail to return to it.