A lone figure got out and walked toward him. Kurbi shivered as he recognized Nico’s stocky frame. He stumbled a few steps forward to meet him.
“Kurbi,” Nicolai Rensch said as he grasped Kurbi around the wet blanket. “I knew you would be alive.”
Kurbi embraced him and the other steadied him on his feet with a strong grip.
“What has happened, Nico?” he managed to ask.
“Something hit the ocean off the coast. When the storm and tidal-wave warnings came, I had only a few minutes to leave.” He shook his head and looked at the ground. “I was not able to save anyone — if I had tried, they would have mobbed the flyer. I decided to look for you and help where I could do so safely and effectively. Is anyone else alive here?”
“A father and two daughters. The mother died of exposure last night.…”
“The flyer has a good cabin, food and medical supplies — let’s take them inside and warm up.”
Kurbi dropped the wet blanket from his shoulders and led the way back into the ruin of the house. There he pried the sobbing Fane away from the body of his wife and led him out toward the open lock of the flyer. Nico roused the twin girls out of their states of semishock and led them away.
Halfway to the black egg-shape of the flyer, Fane stopped and stared at the light coming out from the lock. Turning, he grabbed Kurbi’s arm and looked at him with hollow eyes. “Where are we going — what is this fearful thing you have brought me to, offworlder?” Fane’s face and body trembled.
“There’s food and warmth inside,” Kurbi said, “we’ll be safe, don’t worry. My friend Nicolai came from the port and found us.”
“Friend?” Fane’s eyes were wide circles of darkness. “What do you know of this devil? From the city? We should not accept help after God has punished us so much.…”
Fane collapsed into his arms and Kurbi dragged him into the flyer.
“We can wander the planet,” Nicolai said, “picking up survivors until the freighter from Earth arrives.”
They sat in the control room of the flyer. On the screen the rain was coming down again and the landscape was almost completely dark. Fane and his daughters were in the midsection cabin. All three had recovered somewhat after drying out and eating some food.
“There’s no link with Federation on the planet?” Kurbi asked.
“There was in New Marsport — but that’s … gone, under water.”
“Are the electrical storms affecting communications badly?”
“Pretty badly,” Nico said.
“Then we’ll have to get the flyer up into orbit,” Kurbi said. “From there we can talk to the subspace beacon station — it’ll relay a message to the nearest Federation base.”
“Can you get us into orbit?” Nico asked.
“I think I can, if I study the flyer. It’s the only way to get help here quickly. If we have to, we’ll dock with the beacon station — there’s a small installation inside, with provisions and first-aid supplies, but I don’t think we’ll have to try that.”
“Let me show you something,” Nico said. He reached over and pressed a few control areas under the screen.
A picture appeared. “I recorded this before heading west,” Nico said. A column of blue air stood in the ocean. At its base the waves were turning into steam. “It was huge,” Nico said. “It went up through the whole atmosphere. Something came in from space and hit us hard, Raf.”
“How far away were you when you recorded this?”
“It sat on my horizon — I didn’t want to get closer.”
|Go to Contents |
XIV. Swimmer in Shadows
caught within ourselves
feeding inner hounds
in too tight a wood
we await the dawn
— Tymoteusz Karpowicz
IN THE POLAR MOUNTAINS of Myraa’s World, Gorgias waited on a glacier. Cold white light filled the cabin through the screen. There was no sign of pursuit vessels appearing near the planet. The ship was safe; he was safe.
As he waited, Gorgias made a vow of vengeance against the Earthborn; he swore it to his father, to the twenty war stars of home and their dead worlds. The oldest Herculean had not died by his own hand; the Federation had killed him, as it had murdered his mother and brother.
He thought of his father lying cold in the aft quarters, waiting for his funeral.…
“We’re safe,” he said to the ship, “take us to Myraa.” For a moment he felt brother to the ship, though it never spoke to him except through the screen readouts. He could order it to speak in a voice, now that he would be alone.It will be strange to live now that my parents are dead, when all that was in them is in me, and nowhere else . Whatever intelligence was buried in the vessel was also Herculean; it would die if he died; it would live as long as he lived.
The ship rose from the tilted ice-field, revealing the setting sun at one end of the glacier, creating the illusion of sunrise.
Running east, the ship reached the glacier’s edge and rushed out low over the ocean, whipping up whitecaps in its wake.
“He cannot be saved,” Myraa said.
As the sun set, the trees and grass in front of the house seemed to become drenched with blood; then slowly the darkness turned the red to black.
“Why not?” Gorgias asked as he turned from the windows to face her.
“He cannot enter our circle because he has already become nothing. He died too far away, Gorgias, in distance as well as in belief. He got what he expected — eternal nothingness.” She paused. “I have saved many of our dead, but I can do nothing for him.” She paused again. “I warn you, Gorgias, die near me — it will be the only way I can save you.”
“My father was right, this is all nonsense — you can’t frighten me.”
“I know how he died, Gorgias.”
“Stay out of my mind!”
He turned from her to the window. Herculean women might have been telepathic, his father once told him, or simply observant.
Outside, the dark countryside of hills and grass was blazing now with a million fireflies, as if invisible mourners carrying candles had gathered for a funeral. The mass of lights was concentrated in the meadow below the house, but a snaking S shape ran up the nearby hill.
Gorgias stepped closer to the window and looked out at the procession of lights. A sprinkling of stars had fallen on the darkening land, and he felt the edges of pity pushing in at him, threatening to break his self-control; beyond pity stood sorrow and guilt, avengers of the dead.
“Gorgias!”
He whirled to face her again, ready now to answer her reproaches.
“Ships are coming,” she said. “I warn you to show that I am not your enemy, and that I can examine the content of minds, even at a distance.”
He had expected her to blame him further for his father’s death, to question again the manner of his death. Something in him had hoped that she would; instead she spoke idle prophecies.
“You will die one day, Gorgias — but remember to die here, remember.…”
Contempt surfaced in him, contempt for his own weakness, blotting out pity, sorrow and guilt. He stepped up to Myraa’s naked form and hit her across the face. “Get away from me!” he shouted. “Little animals, that’s what you are here, animals, fools and cowards.”
She only looked at him and said, “I did not have to tell you that ships are coming.”
“Why did you, then? You want me to die. You said so. How would you know anyway?”
But he almost knew her answer. “I can feel them hating you as they come in their ships,” she said. “How many did you kill for them to hate you that much? That many? It makes their hatred almost rational.”
“It’s war,” he said.
“What war?”
“They killed my — our world, and my father.”
“Your father killed himself.”
“Stop!”
“It’s true —”
“They drove him into cowardi
ce, they took his great strength — they killed him!”
“Who’s the liar, Gorgias?”
He lunged at her, grabbing her by the throat; it was soft and yielding as he squeezed. Her eyes held him in a vise. Suddenly he let her go.
“You’re not worth killing,” he said, hating himself for his weakness. She was too close to him, too much a part of his past to let die.
“The ships are nearer,” she said. “You’d better go.”
He went past her and out the back entrance. The grass was wet on the dark hillside. Fireflies exploded around him like miniature suns; he slipped a few times before he reached the bottom of the hill. He jumped into the open side lock and rushed forward as the inner door closed behind him.
“The base,” he said and sat down at the screen station.
HUNTERS APPEARING IN ORBIT.
“Get us out of here,” he shouted.
The ship lifted straight up through the atmosphere. Cruiser positions registered on the screen, coming fast from dayside.
The Whisper Ship slipped into otherspace.
Gorgias saw signs of pursuit. Black dashes appeared in the grayness behind him, but he would lose them; he would lose them because he had to, because any other outcome would be unthinkable.
Ten days after Kurbi and Nicolai made orbit in the flyer, Julian Poincaré arrived with a cruiser and a dozen freighters loaded with emergency supplies. Nicolai led the freighters’ lifeboats down to the tortured planet, where storms, earthquakes and tidal waves continued to rage, and where the coming fimbul winter would soon make life all but impossible for the survivors. Nico was going to try to convince as many people as possible to leave New Mars and settle elsewhere.
“It was the Whisper Ship,” Julian told Kurbi in the cruiser’s stateroom.
“How do you know?”
“He announced it himself — hundreds of worlds picked up the details on their relays. Most of the Snake knows by now. It was a large rock he threw at us, Raf.”
“I should have guessed — my luck.”
“Are you going to help me now?”
“I’d like to help Nicolai for a while — though I can see myself waking up one morning, picking up a weapon and going out to kill that monster, except —”
“What?”
“I want to see him alive — what kind of living being can destroy a planet and still live with itself?”
“He’d probably say you were taking it much too personally, since you lived through it. We did that to his world — once. Old injustices drive his life, or lives, whoever they are, and he dispenses new injustice. Who is to blame? Is there a good answer, or only answers that no one will like?”
“I would say there is no hope for them,” Kurbi said, “ — too much past, as you say.”
Kurbi was silent for a moment. He looked around the stateroom, at the starmaps covering the walls, at the green carpeting under his dirty feet, at Poincaré sitting behind the polished ebony desk. Kurbi sat down in one of the chairs in front of the desk and said, “Julian, after what I saw down there, I think I will want to try and stop Gorgias.”
“Go home first, get some rest. We’ve got ships looking already — they may save you the trouble. You may not have the stomach to kill. For the terrorist, civilized behavior is a screen. He counts on the enemy’s inability to behave as he does.”
“You still think he’s a good thing for us, Julian?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time good came out of horror. Gorgias will keep us alert, interested; if we ignore him, he or his descendants will topple us one day.”
Suddenly Kurbi felt very tired. Home, he thought, but all he could visualize was his small room in New Marsport, and the various houses he had slept in during his travels.
“Where do you think the Whisper Ship has gone?” he asked, trying to concentrate.
“I think he’s at Myraa’s World — much of his audience for his deeds is there. A harmless bunch, really. But we won’t find him there. He has a base somewhere, remember? He’ll be there by then.”
Gorgias fled into the southern regions of the galaxy, reentering normal space and slipping back into bridgespace dozens of times; but still the hunters followed, making every turn, imitating every jump.
After a week of fleeing there was no sign of the cruisers on the gray screen, but that was only because the Whisper Ship’s slightly superior speed was finally giving him a lead. At any moment the black dashes would appear on the screen.
Gorgias waited. The ship was on its own — following any evasive maneuver that became practical. He closed his eyes and tried to get some rest.
The ship switched to normal space. There was still no sign of the hunters, but directly ahead a white-hot star was streaming a tail of material into space.
BLACK-HOLE BINARY.
MATERIAL DISAPPEARING FROM NORMAL
SPACE-TIME.
The ship rushed toward the empty point in space where the whirlpool of stolen star material ended. Gorgias noted the halo of debris circling the dead spot in space.
In a few minutes the ship passed the ring of captured matter and seemed to be heading directly toward the black hole.
“Explain,” Gorgias shouted, wondering if something had finally gone wrong with the ship.
EVASIVE MANEUVER:
PASSAGE THROUGH BLACK HOLE ERGOSPHERE
WILL SIMULATE DISAPPEARANCE.
ONE HOUR IN ERGOSPHERE, SHIP TIME,
EQUALS ONE STANDARD GALACTIC MONTH.
HUNTER SHIPS LACK POWER FOR SKIRTING
BLACK-HOLE EVENT HORIZON.
The ship circled the dead spot in space for one hour while Gorgias waited. Half the sky was a black lake trying to pull him in, while in the bright universe of stars, time was rushing forward at a furious pace. If the ship stayed here too long, all the history of the universe would flee by him; stars would grow old and die, all nature would become a ruin rushing together.…
He got up and went to the aft cabin. His father’s body hung motionless in the cold. He imagined a conversation between himself and the old Herculean: “Get them for me son, never rest — promise!”
I will.
“You must hate them as much as I do.”
I do.
“If you are caught you must die.”
I will.
He knelt before the bloated body and shivered. A new peace came over him; he had made his vow; his father had asked him at last, and the vow was real.
In jumpspace view, the Hercules Cluster was a mass of black stars exploding from a black center.
Gorgias turned off the screen and dozed as the ship came home. There had been no sign of hunters after the black-hole maneuver, and it was now too late for pursuers to discover the direction he had taken; they might guess that his base was in the Cluster, but it would take centuries to check each star.
When he woke up, the ship was sitting in its berth. He got up, went to the aft quarters and carried his father’s body out to the scooter. Securing the corpse in the backseat, he took the forward position and floated out through the open lock.
The base lights were steady as he whisked down the passageway toward the stasis chambers. His father leaned forward against him, cold and stiff, as the tunnel dipped into the deepest parts of the base. Gaining speed, Gorgias rushed into the underworld, emerging at last into a large circular chamber lit by one large globe of orange light.
Here the empty stasis shells waited in a circle around the room.
Gorgias stopped the scooter in front of one, took his father off the rear seat and pushed him into the shell. The field flickered as it received the body, surrounding it with a deep gloom. The shell would do as well as a tomb, he thought. He could barely make out his father’s face as the darkness took him, deepening his eyes into caves that stared out into the room. The old Herculean would remain as he was for as long as the base renewed itself, for as long as power fed the accumulators, for as long as his son’s hatred lived; from here the old Herculean would co
mmand all that was to come.
When he stepped into the shell at his father’s right hand, Gorgias knew that two decades would pass; he could set the return for much later, if he wished, but two decades would be enough to confuse the hunters further; he would disappear from their experience for a while, enough time for them to lose interest or let down their guard. In any case, when he emerged the search would be going slower and he would have the element of surprise.
To step into the stasis field and step out at any time in the future would always be a matter of a moment. He hesitated, thinking, I never had a chance to grow up in my world, with millions like myself around me. I never had a chance to take what was mine.…
He stepped into a profound darkness, which became bright red.
Yellow leaves grew on trees nourished not by water but by blood; the soaked roots drank greedily, until the leaves curled scarlet and dropped to earth, each veined structure a world dying on the parched ground.
A bright sun turned the landscape white-hot, until his eyes stared into white space. A raging wind whipped him, enveloped his body with icy fingers and hurled him against invisible obstacles. Hatred froze inside him, petrifying his bones and organs; a hot wind came and coursed fire through his heart and stomach.
He opened his mouth to protest, but only curses escaped — words like wars hurled through the doors of speech.…
He swam in the shadows, waiting for the iron game to resume.
|Go to Contents |
Book Two
The Omega Point
I. Immortal Enemy
“What would we do without our enemies?”
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“In his own unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.”
— Freud
GORGIAS RAN.
Three black smudges swam in the scanner — ships creeping through his wake across the vast unreality of jumpspace. He watched, dreaming of how to lead the Earthborn to their deaths. The trackers would not overtake him for at least a week; more than enough time to lay a trap, or escape.
George Zebrowski Page 10
