The ships drew nearer.
He swept toward them as the field blossomed around him.
“Each life,” Myraa whispered to him, “is a universe of possibility denied.”
“Why else would there be satisfaction in their destruction?” he asked. “Would I waste my time on nothing? It’s my future or theirs!”
The swarm of warships winked out as he passed through it. He had given them only a moment to emerge from jumpspace.
Myraa was silent.
“They’re paying!” Gorgias shouted. “For my wasted centuries.”
A steady breeze blew in from the ocean. Poincaré stood up and gazed into the distance for a while. Kurbi heard invisible voices around the Security Chief’s image.
“They’re gone, Raf,” he said at last. “Now we have only the ships in Earthspace.”
We created him, Kurbi thought.
“Just a moment,” Poincaré said. “I’ll be right back.”
He disappeared.
The gap in the ring grew larger as more worlds ran for the freedom of jumpspace.
Poincaré reappeared. His image walked around and stood before Kurbi. “He’s bypassing worlds now, Raf, so he’ll be here very soon. You’ll have to leave.”
“No.”
“We can leave together. It’s not certain that he would find us, not certain at all.”
“Tell me what we would live for and I’ll go.”
Poincaré’s ghost approached with outstretched hands. “Why should we live for anything, Raf? Forget all your intricacies and live life as it comes. We’ll flee with a small group and lose ourselves well away from the Snake, and forget all this. Raf, listen to me!”
“You could live that way. I can’t. Get out and don’t look back.”
“Raf, I can’t.…”
“Forget me.”
|Go to Contents |
XI. The Stillness of the Will
“Now let us consider attentively and observe the powerful, irresistible impulse with which masses of water rush downwards, the persistence and determination with which the magnet always turns back to the North Pole, and the keen desire with which iron flies to the magnet, the vehemence with which the poles of the electric current strive for reunion, and which, like the vehemence of human desires, is increased by obstacles. Let us look at the crystal being rapidly and suddenly formed with such regularity of configuration; it is obvious that this is only a perfectly definite and precisely determined striving in different directions constrained and held firm by coagulation. Let us observe the choice with which bodies repel and attract one another, unite and separate, when set free in the fluid state and released from the bonds of rigidity … If we observe all this, it will not cost us a great effort of the imagination to recognize once more our own inner nature, even at so great a distance. It is that which in us pursues its ends by the light of knowledge, but here, in the feeblest of its phenomena, only strives blindly in a dull, one-sided, and unalterable manner. Yet, because it is everywhere one and the same — just as the first morning dawn shares the name of sunlight with the rays of the full midday sun — it must in either case bear the name ofwill . For this word indicates that which is the being-in-itself of everything in the world, and is the sole kernel of every phenomenon.”
— Schopenhauer,The World As Will and Idea
MYRAA KNEW that she could stop Gorgias by dying.
But her death would endanger those within her who were not yet ready to voyage on their own.
And there was no one nearby to receive her; it would be death, the loss of personality to chaos. If it came to a choice, she realized, the death of Earth was not as important as the host of minds waiting on the inward shore, struggling to understand and unfold into the new realm. Centuries of exploration and knowledge would be lost. Let the empires of the outer world destroy themselves.
Gorgias was adept at drawing strength from the force-center. He identified with it; perhaps one day, when his hatred was spent, he would have something to teach. No one had imagined that the force-center’s undisguised power might be directed back into the world of origins. All efforts had been concentrated on inquiry, with the aim of breaking the final bonds with outwardness; when all the Herculeans had been gathered, the final adept would have had to find a way to follow, or be left to die. It was thought by some that this single adept might have to live forever in the realm of galaxies, to insure the welfare of those who would voyage out into infinity, where the outward universes were only infinitesimal nodes circling the vast force-center, each nexus contributing new minds, new perspectives, in the climb toward Omega.
In reality, she could not choose to die because she was helpless within the ship. Gorgias had made sure of that.
Kurbi struggled inside Gorgias.
Earth’s solar system floated defenseless over the black abyss. What had it ever been worth? he asked, whispering the Herculean’s thoughts. Nothing here but a worn-out species worshiping its own identity, blind to possibility and growth. He would put it out of its misery.…
Kurbi opened his eyes, got up and went out on the terrace. The sky was bright with stars, but lonelier. Large sections of the ring were dark. He felt a great stillness, as if it no longer mattered whether the fleeing worlds would escape or find happiness. Oblivion seemed the perfect state; nothing would be obliged to crawl from lesser to greater to gain a sense of achievement; there would be no torment in striving and feeling empty at fulfillment; the container would not have to ache to be filled, then empty itself so it could have the pleasure of aching again; and knowledge gained through the admission of ignorance and the suspense of curiosity would not repeatedly arrive at boredom for lack of new unknowns. Perfect knowledge would be static, satisfying for only a few moments, he had always thought; but now he wondered if it might not provide an unending, secure bliss in the contemplation of final mysteries. There was no way to know.
We dwell partly in the thoughts of others, he thought, recalling his dream of being inside Gorgias. For a moment it had seemed that he would turn the Herculean away from Earth, but their thoughts had converged into a shared contempt.
He would not be able to sleep tonight.
Sleep. A vestigial fall into unconsciousness. All evolution and history struck him as the crazed effort of intellect struggling to wake up.
He went down from the terrace and wandered on the dewy hillside, as he had done countless times before when he had feared sleep. Lost, unrenewable, unable to embrace oblivion’s subtleties, he preferred the strained shore of self-awareness to sleep’s worrisome drift.
He stopped at the cliff’s edge finally, and listened to the breakers pounding the rocks below. The white foam seemed to roll in from the ocean of stars beyond the planet’s edge. There were many gaps in the arch of the ring now, yet still it seemed to stand on the horizon.
His shadow appeared on the foam below.
Kurbi turned around and saw the giant figure of Poincaré standing over the house. The grassy hillside was black from his harsh glow.
“Raf, where are you?” the figure boomed. “The Whisper Ship is at Centauri!” The image stared blindly into the darkness, then shrank toward normal size. Kurbi hurried up the hill.
Poincaré’s image waited as Kurbi stepped onto the terrace. He noticed the ghostly images of flickering tank screens behind the motionless figure. “The whole sky is afire out there,” the Security Chief said as Kurbi came into his field of view. “He’s large enough to destroy a whole system.”
“How soon?”
“A day or two, at most. You’ll come with me, Raf.”
“Did you think this would frighten me into fleeing? I’m staying.”
“But your demise won’t accomplish a thing! Do you think he’ll hesitate with you here?”
“I have no illusions left,” Kurbi said softly, feeling almost at peace. “Save yourself, Julian.”
“Are you planning to talk to him?”
Kurbi looked up at the sea of evening. Stars t
winkled silently, oblivious to the vast disturbance only four light-years away.
“It’ll be a clean sweep, Raf. We have nothing to put into the field against him. The planet will be deserted within hours now.”
“Everyone?”
“We can’t be sure. There may be some primitives in out-of-the-way places.”
“When he’s finished here,” Kurbi said, “he’ll work his way through the remaining Snake worlds. Then he’ll wait for the Herculeans to increase their numbers, in preparation for the return to the Cluster.”
“And what will he be?” Julian asked. “A retired ghost. He doesn’t belong in our universe.…”
“He’ll work to fit in through Myraa, to become her as much as possible. Maybe he’ll succeed.”
“I hope it wears on him. Raf, you’ve got to come with me.”
“No.”
“I’ll come and take you away by force.”
“Don’t waste your time. It will be too late for you to get to safety by the time you find me.”
“I’ll take that chance. I’m leaving now.”
His image winked out.
Kurbi looked around. The house seemed desolate under the stars. He had taken great pride in it once, enjoying the way it fit into the hillside. He had loved the house when Grazia had loved it. The image of the broken glider came back to him. He saw Grazia being pulled by the downdraft which forced the craft against the cliff face despite all her efforts. He saw her body battered against the rocks by the breakers. He had not been there to witness the whole accident, but he seemed to remember it all.
Maybe he should have cloned her; by now her sister would have been a grown woman and he might have fallen in love with her. Grazia would have approved. The new person would have won his loyalty and affection, and he would now be living a different life. He would not have hunted the Herculean. Gorgias might not have followed so successful a course. He would still be a nuisance, struggling to reshape the ashes of the past.
Kurbi listened to the gathering silence within himself. The stars had not satisfied the hungers of humankind; as long as it held to its ancient identity, the inner hounds could not be satisfied. Social systems would only imprison these faithful guardians of adaptive evolution. The Herculeans had been the old nature’s way of reasserting itself, by willing a wolf to match the growing power of intellect. Humanity had released, not its better part, but the raging beast rearmed; and the beast would live now, as surely as it cowered in the Old Ones of Earth. The past would be silenced and the future would belong to the Herculeans. They would swarm among the stars, angry at finitude and everything which was not them, transforming the stuff of worlds into more of their own kind; all that had been humanity would live in them. Hatred stirred deeply within him, and he knew that his humanity was not so different from Gorgias.…
A flyer appeared in the morning sky.
The oval shape landed in the open area at his right, halfway to the cliffs. A dozen men got out and marched up toward the house.
Kurbi got up from his chair and slipped away to his left. He left the terrace and ran toward the cliffs.
“Raf, wait!” Julian shouted.
Kurbi ignored him, resenting the stir which the physical effort was making within him. The ship was far to his right by the time the group started after him, and he saw that he would reach the edge well ahead of them.
There would be just enough time to cheat Gorgias and release Julian from a fatal friendship.
|Go to Contents |
XII. Flower and Sword
“Only knowledge remains; the will has vanished. We then look with deep and painful yearning at that state, beside which the miserable and desperate nature of our own appears in the clearest light by contrast. Yet this consideration is the only one that can permanently console us, when, on the one hand, we have recognized incurable suffering and endless misery as essential to the phenomenon of the will, to the world, and on the other see the world melt away with the abolished will, and retain before us only empty nothingness. In this way, therefore, by contemplating the life and conduct of saints, to meet with whom is of course rarely granted to us in our own experience, but who are brought to our notice by their recorded history, and, vouched for with the stamp of truth by art, we have to banish the dark impression of that nothingness, which as the final goal hovers behind all virtue and holiness, and which we fear as children fear the darkness. We must not even evade it, as the Indians do, by myths and meaningless words, such as reabsorption inBrahman , or theNirvana of the Buddhists. On the contrary, we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is — nothing.”
— Schopenhauer,The World As Will and Idea
THE FIELD CONTRACTED and the Whisper Ship was alone in normal space. Behind the vessel, Centauri’s three suns were missing a planet.
Earth lay ahead.
Four jumpspace units would put him at the edge of its sunspace. Gorgias felt the ship’s surge of power as it slipped into the ashes.
Earth’s sun grew from a black dot to a globe.
The ship resurfaced and the sun blazed. The stars looked on without interest, blind to the possibility that one of their vast number might be put out.
Mars was nearby, its red surface bright with cities. Gorgias listened, but the planet was silent, despite the lights. Then he noticed that its orbital space was nearly devoid of habitats. He clenched his will at the thought that they might have escaped him; there would be time to hunt them later.
The field blossomed around him. He stabilized it at one hundred thousand kilometers in diameter, and nudged Mars with the outer edge.
The red planet buckled. Its rotation wobbled. He brought the globe within the field. The planet broke up into pieces. These became white-hot and exploded.
Gorgias considered whether to engulf the sun and all its planets, or destroy only the inhabited inner worlds.
The bright morning sky, looking toward Mars, burned as if a hole had been opened in space, letting in the white light of eternity. Slowly, the hole grew, blotting out the stars.
“Raf, come with us!” Julian called.
Kurbi looked down at the breakers. The sliver of beach was visible in the lurid light of the sky. The air was cold in his lungs.
He turned around and saw mists rising from the black slope. “Go away!” he called to the dark figures.
They moved toward him.
“Back, or I’ll jump!”
The figures halted.
“You’ll die anyway,” Julian said, walking forward.
Kurbi laughed. “You’d better go, or you’ll cause my death directly. I’ll jump anyway, just to cheat him!”
Poincaré stopped.
The sphere of force flickered and grew larger. It was already twice the size of the full moon.
“Go, Julian, while you have the chance!”
Poincaré raised his hand. The five figures behind him turned away and started back to their flyer.
“I’ll stay with you,” Poincaré said.
“Julian, I warn you!”
“Nothing else to do.” The Security Chief walked toward him.
A cold wind struck from the ocean. Kurbi balanced himself on the edge. He had not expected Julian to call his bluff.
Kurbi looked up. A quarter of the sky was white.
“It would be nice,” Julian said as he came up to him, “to believe that we are being destroyed by fresh, young barbarians who will carry out their own vision of a new future. But this is … another dead end throwing itself at us. It’s difficult to accept that there isn’t a thing we can do to stop it.”
“Myraa’s group is too new at this.”
“Weren’t there others before?”
Kurbi nodded, feeling empty. “What use would they have for the likes of Gorgias? He intr
udes with brute force into the world of his birth. It probably requires many special conditions to grow out of our realm, much effort of learning and experience. There’s nothing to gain by looking back.…”
Poincaré seemed to be breathing with difficulty. “Don’t they care that he’s doing harm here? I can’t believe they’re not trying to stop him!” His voice quavered.
“I don’t know,” Kurbi said. “Without Myraa we can’t know anything.…”
The ocean was black in the white glare of Gorgias’s expanding will.
“Reality is not what we thought it to be,” Julian said, glancing up. Kurbi knew that he was desperate to keep the conversation going long enough to get him away from the edge. “We’ve lived blindly, building our understanding on the basis of operational theories, unaware —”
“How could we know?” Kurbi said. “But it’s all nature still, all real, material and lawful, even the chaos which intrudes at the extremes.”
Poincaré was silent. “We have no one to lead us past our deaths,” he said finally.
Myraa was too far away, powerless aboard the Whisper Ship. Kurbi put his arm around his friend. Together they stepped away from the cliff’s edge. “There is nothing we should concern ourselves with now, Julian, nothing.”
“Just as well, if this is all we can ever be. It’s not enough. Hasn’t been for either of us. A long time now.”
They looked up in time to see the moon blaze and disappear.
Gorgias kept his position at the orbit of Mars and expanded his will. He would take all the inner planets and the sun as well.
His will grew toward the Earth, aiming to stop at a point beyond the sun. Never again would this star’s warmth drive evolution to create life.
He pushed outward. Small bits of rock and dust flared as they came into the field. He pushed easily against the solar wind, singing as he grew larger than he had ever been. There could be no limit to his size. He would be able to destroy the whole arm of this galaxy, even whole galaxies!
George Zebrowski Page 29
