“The problem had its own merits also. Besides, you pressured me into the search.”
“That’s true.”
“It would have been better to have saved him, regardless.”
“Possibly.”
“There will be other things for me now.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that.”
The ship touched down on the darkened battlefield. The lights of the house looked almost friendly.
“I’ll take a few men and investigate,” Poincaré said.
Kurbi was pacing back and forth when the screen came on.
“The ship is still here,” Poincaré said from the house. “So is the woman Myraa.”
Kurbi nodded. Julian was sitting in the main room, alone.
“One strange thing, though.”
“What?” Kurbi asked.
“It’s probably nothing. Our cyberneticist is questioning the artificial intelligence in the Whisper Ship, to see if there is any hidden delay in its destruct sequence. The destruct has not been tripped. The ship is behaving as if Gorgias were still alive.”
“So their technology was not infallible.”
“That or it was not Gorgias who died.”
It’s not over. The words repeated in Kurbi’s head. He felt a sudden surge of hope — and with it came the realization that Julian’s view of him was correct, or as nearly correct as words could be made to express reality.
“… The ship doesn’t give any sign of malfunctioning,” Poincaré was saying. “It’s as if it’s waiting …”
“The ship is very old,” Kurbi said softly.
“So, you think he’s dead?”
“Yes — but send out search parties. He would have to be on foot.…”
“What about the ship?”
“We’ll stow it in our hold and take it with us,” Kurbi said.
“What about the woman?”
“Leave her. She obviously had no part in any of this. We’d violate our agreement with the Herculeans on this world by taking prisoners. Has she told you anything?”
“They’ll cheer us back home,” Poincaré said.
“But I know I’ve failed.”
“I’ll let you know if we learn anything more. We’ll leave the screen open.”
Kurbi turned away and went to the door. It slid open and a watch officer came in to take his place. Kurbi walked into the open elevator and rode it down to the locks.
He came out into a chilly morning. A warming sun crept up from behind the mountains. Long glowing clouds streaked the sky. He wondered about the Herculean army. Maybe Myraa’s people had collaborated with Gorgias to bring the force here? But from where? Myraa seemed to be at the center of something.
He took a deep breath and went back inside.
Poincaré came into the control room with a tripod on his shoulder. He opened it and set it down on the floor.
“What is it?” Kurbi asked as he stood up.
“The troops were stored in this cylinder casing, in the crystalline structure of the material inside.”
Kurbi took the casing and examined it.
“We knew they were working on various things toward the end of the war,” Poincaré said, “ — but this!”
“So it was all Gorgias’s doing,” Kurbi said.
“We’ve examined the entire assembly,” Julian said. “What’s really interesting about it is that with a slight modification it might have thrown up the same army again and again, using the patterns to create an indefinite number of doubles, as long as there was energy to feed in. Gorgias did not know this at all.”
“What else did Myraa tell you?”
“Crusus helped us figure out the tripod. He knows a few things about it. He’s a sad person, Raf, filled with doubts now.”
“What else?”
“There is a base. We think the ship can take us to it. Myraa also showed me what she says is a teleport link with the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, but it’s dead now, she says.”
“Will the ship listen to our commands?”
“In time, she says, it might.”
Kurbi found himself only half-listening as Poincaré finished his report. Despite Julian’s explanation of his preoccupation with Gorgias, the future seemed empty without the hope of getting through to the Herculean.
“… and then, Raf, her face became strange and drawn, and she looked old, as if she were staring into another universe. Raf?”
Kurbi rubbed his eyes. “That’s it?”
“No — you need sleep.”
“Finish what you were saying,” Kurbi said.
“She wouldn’t say another word to me. Well — it’s not a total loss. We have the ship. We may have the base in time. Think of what we may find there — think of the archives it might contain!”
Kurbi was silent. Even if Julian was right about his tangled motives, it would still be a long time before he could weave another web half as meaningful. There was nothing left but empty possibility, unconnected to him in any personal way. He was going to become someone else, for whom none of this would have any interest.
“You can’t go on like this,” Julian said.
“Hurry things along,” Kurbi said. “I’m weary of this place.”
Poincaré sighed.
Kurbi looked at the tripod. He stepped closer and inserted the cylinder carefully. With these things, he thought, Gorgias called up the past to help him, but the past came forward with all its defects. The patterns of men long dead were rebuilt into flesh and blood, then burned into ashes. When he had first come to hunt Gorgias, the Herculean’s life was already a mere echo, a life which had started somewhere with groping motions, had reached several stages of twisted development and had settled into a wayward spiral, winding from a ruined past into an empty future. He thought of the Federation’s snaking corridor of worlds — turning, twisting as it grew, until it had reached the Hercules Cluster, there to light the spark that gave birth to Gorgias’s people. The Herculean terrorist had been the puppet of a greater will, growing more desperate with each failure.
Julian was speaking, but Kurbi could not listen. A cold pain grew in his stomach. He was marching with Gorgias across a barren waste, toward a dawn that could never come. He hated himself.
I might have saved him, he told himself, and each word was a star being born in a terrifying darkness.
|Go to Contents |
XVI. Galaxy of Minds
“Each consciousness seeks to be itself and to be all other consciousnesses without ceasing to be itself: it seeks to be God.”
— Miguel de Unamuno
“The ego persists only by becoming ever more itself, in the measure in which it makes everything else itself … by slowly elaborating from age to age the essence and the totality of a universe deposited within …
“The only universe capable of containing … the person is an irreversibly ‘personalizing’ universe …
“ … however large the radius traced within time and space, does the circle ever embrace anything but the perishable?
“To satisfy the ultimate requirements of our action, Omega must be independent of the collapse of the forces with which evolution is woven.
“Thus something in the cosmos escapes from entropy, and does so more and more. It escapes by turning back to Omega …”
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,The Phenomenon of Man
“Under those low large lids of hers
She hath the histories of all time;
The old seasons with their heavy chime
That leaves its rhyme in the world’s ears.”
— Swinburne,Cleopatra
GORGIAS STRUGGLED to open his eyes.
“You must try to understand.” Myraa’s voice was all around him, soft and caressing.
“Where are you?”
“Here, near you. You’re safe. They cannot hurt you now. You’ll know everything soon.”
He tried to move his arms.
It felt … as if he did not have any.
The ship. Myraa and he were safe in the ship, fleeing back to the base. Maybe the ship was still on the planet, waiting for the moment when the canopy would lift. The pain would come when the drugs wore off. He imagined that he was lying in a gel bath, waiting for the protective mass to heal his burns.
No, Myraa said. She seemed to speak from inside him.
Myraa was blocking the pain in his mind.
“Myraa! What has happened?” Suddenly he realized that he was not speaking; there was no feeling of movement in his jaw. “You promised never to enter my mind!”
“There is no other way now.”
“What do you mean? Tell me!”
He tried to look around in the darkness, but his eye sockets were empty. Shadows rushed into them.
Suddenly he could see.…
He was in the bedroom, in what seemed to be the house. He felt himself get up against his will and walk to the window. Then he saw that it was not the same house. Below him was the white beach. Foamy waves drifted in from the warm green ocean; long-legged birds chased each other across the wet sand.
Something black pushed into the corner of his eye. His head jerked to the left, and there on the floor, in the bright afternoon light, lay a charred, unrecognizable body. He walked over and reached down to touch it, but his hand passed through to the cold floor.
“I show you an image,” she said from within. “They took the corpse with them.”
“Myraa, what are you saying?”
He looked at his right hand.
It was Myraa’s.
“I could not let you die like your father.” Her voice was agonizingly near. Her fingers were touching his heart, holding it, brushing it with words and warm breath. “I could not let you dissolve …”
He thought of the ship.
“They took the ship, which could not destroy itself while your mind was still whole.”
He looked around the room through her eyes. The ghost of his body had disappeared. The space seemed very bright. He looked upward through the skylight at the blue sky. Everything was vivid and clear, as if he were seeing it for the first time.
I’m dead, he thought,and she carries me inside .
He tried to scream, to force the sound out of her throat, but it was only a thought. Her will was not his own.
“You let them take my body, to be exhibited as a trophy!”
He slipped into darkness. Myraa’s thoughts were everywhere, ministering to his fears, whispering like flies. “I could not stop them, and it was not important.”
“Traitor!” He was suddenly sickened by the idea of being imprisoned in another’s body. He thought of his own arms, legs and belly, the center of his own will coiled in his loins. What was left of him?
“The old dreams are dead,” she said. “I know how they died on that world in the Magellanic Cloud. For a long time after the plague hit them, I heard their voices crying out of that dark place, out of that terrible cold, as they fought with each other. They tore at their vessels and at themselves until they died. Only a few had the strength to reach out. I saved them, but they are still not whole.”
“Iam no longer whole!” He hurled the words, wishing that he could die. He wanted to bloody her from within, tear out the words that she was depositing within him. If only he could wrap himself in his own flesh again. Her soothing wounded him, and he hated her for it. How would he be able to endure an eternity of her domination? He would never be able to love her now, or have sons.
How could he kill her? He was only a thought within her, a memory. What if she chose to forget him? The chaos would take what was left of him, and he would die a second time. Could she forget him for a time, then summon him back? He would drift at the edges of her awareness, a mystery to himself, a spark struggling to grow brighter.
Somehow she was in his arms. He held her firmly as she thrust up at him.
“Liar!” he shouted.
“You lived a lie. I am still with you.”
“I don’t want you — I don’t need you! Release me!”
“There is much more than this.”
“No!”
The darkness pressed in around him, an infinite solidity that would hold him immobile forever.
“When you accept us,” she said, “you will have everything.”
Ages passed and she did not speak to him. The black, sunless solidity was a constant humiliation; at any moment it would close in and crush him into nothing.
The fact of his body’s destruction tormented him.
He felt anger and sadness, but the feelings seemed strange, echoes of their former intensity; his cries would not cry out, his rage would not swell, and a part of him held his hatred in contempt. The substructures of his body, he realized, were not there to underscore his thoughts; his feelings were beginning to fade. Perhaps he could shake off this inversion of reality, will his eyes to open in his corpse, wherever it might be, recreate his body in a sudden act.…
A glow enveloped his awareness … almost as if he had limbs again. The warmth increased and he felt his charred skin, and he knew that his nerves were signaling horror to his brain. He felt his body dying, stared through the blindness of his eyes, felt its insides beginning to decay. A distant sorrow called to him, but he could not make it his own. His body died; he could no longer feel its extremities. His self contracted to a point drifting in limbo. Anyone could pass through him now and read his most private thoughts like a roadsign.
Alien minds watched him with a cold curiosity. How could Myraa have joined with these? They had been there, he realized, when he had made love to her; still, he felt grateful for the attention they gave him in the darkness.
They were ancient, older than the Empire, older than the Earth; they had survived in this way, and would continue until all the suns of space died and the universe collapsed to start the entropic decline all over again. These minds were part of a greater community, one that would not die in the final singularity; it would burst from the continuum like some great moth, newborn into the skies of some greater realm; and as it had survived from mind to mind in the universe he knew, so this being would continue to pass from realm to realm, an eternal voyager on an upward path from the infinitesimal to the infinite.…
The intruding vision held him, and he wondered at it. What was there to find in the upper realities?
“Who rules this mind?” he found the strength to ask. Where was Myraa? She was still someone he trusted. He would not be played with by strangers for unknown ends. Maybe Myraa was also a prisoner here, wandering in search of him, waiting for him in the darkness.
“Who rules here?” He shouted into the void, giving the words all the force that he could imagine, but again there was no answer.
The darkness became a fluid mass, carrying him along; he felt its indeterminacy at his own center. Painful sensations stabbed into him out of this chaos, emotions unattached to any specific memory.
The face of a young boy appeared. It was his brother’s face. Gorgias found himself standing by the sea, and the boy had just come out of the emerald-green water. His body glistened with clear droplets. The air was fresh with spray.
“Hello, Gorgias,” the boy said and hugged him around the middle with slippery arms. “You look so tired,” he said looking up at him. “Tell me where you’ve been. You’ll stay now, won’t you? Come and sit with me.”
The boy smiled and led him away from the water. Gorgias sat down next to him on the white sand.How real he seems , he thought as he looked into his brother’s radiant face.Ihad almost forgotten what he looked like .
Then only the boy’s face was left in the darkness, smiling at him as if their conversation had already taken place. “You’ll be happy with us, Gorgias. There is such a long journey ahead of us and we’ll need you. You should have come sooner. I’m sorry that Father can
’t be here.…”
“So am I,” Gorgias said. “I killed him.”
“Oriona will see you later.”
The darkness returned, and again he felt the watchful presence of alien entities. His interest quickened, growing into a curiosity equal to his fear. What was it that had so changed Myraa and his brother?
Gorgias remembered the second time his father had brought him to Myraa’s World. She had run to him across the grass and they had made love under the warm orange sun. Later, his father had spoken to them in the house on the hill. He had told them that they were fated for each other, and that the Empire’s rebirth would take place only if they, and others like them, willed it. Before Herkon’s death, Myraa had been a playful girl, always complaining about his father’s seriousness. What was she now, he wondered? How had it happened?
He heard laughter in the dark and turned to see her coming toward him across the grassy field, her naked body bright in the sunlight. The field was dotted with thousands of yellow flowers; the cool breeze was full of fragrance. She came up to him and put her arms around his waist. “In my world,” she whispered into his ear, “nothing is ever lost.” Her warm breath sent a chill down his back. “You still wear your father’s serious face. Don’t you love me any more?” He put his arms out to hold her, but she laughed and disappeared, leaving him to embrace the void.
Another age passed before she spoke to him again. He found himself looking through blinking eyelids at Myraa’s reflection in the dark window — his reflection. The room was quiet. He missed the sound of the sea washing the shore, the feel of night wind on skin which had known the sun all day, the freshness of rain.
“Hello, Gorgias,” his-her reflection said to him from the window. The house seemed poised at the edge of a dark abyss.
“How long has it been?” he asked, wondering at her cruelty.
“A year since Kurbi left.” She sat unmoving in the glass. “He was hurt badly by what happened here.”
“No others have risen to oppose the Federation?”
George Zebrowski Page 21
