Forever Free (24 page)

I didn't really feel like eating, though I should have been famished. I picked up one that said chili in bright red letters, with a picture of Donald Duck holding his throat, fire issuing from his beak. I pulled the top back and it worked, the chili sizzling and filling the room with an agreeable odor.

"Not spoiled," I said, and blew on a forkful. It was bland, meatless. "Seems okay."

The others popped boxes, and soon the place smelled like a cafeteria. Cat and Po came down, followed by Max. We ate the small meals in stunned silence, except for mumbled greetings. Po said grace before he opened his box.

I left mine unfinished. "See what the sunset looks like," I said, and got up from the table. Marygay and Cat came along.

Outside, Antres 906 and the Omni, still looking like a priest, were conversing in croaks and squeaks, standing where Anita had died.

"Discussing who the next will be?" Cat said, glaring at the priest.

He looked up, startled. "What?"

"What caused that," she said, "if it wasn't you?"

"Not me. I could do that to myself, if I wanted to die, but I couldn't do it to someone else."

"Couldn't, or wouldn't?" I said.

"Couldn't. 'Physically impossible,' to put it in words of four syllables. To use your belief system."

"So what happened? People don't just explode!"

He sat down on the edge of the porch and crossed his long legs, lacing his fingers over his knee, looking toward the sunset. "There you go again. People do explode, obviously. One just did."

"And it could have been any of us." Marygay's voice shook. "We could all go like that, one by one."

"We could," the priest said, "including me. But I hope it was just an experiment. A test."

"Someone's testing us?" I was feeling dizzy and trying to control nausea. I sat down carefully on the porch floor.

"Always," the priest said quietly. "You've never felt that?"

"Metaphor," I said.

He made a slow sweeping gesture. "The way all this is metaphor. Taurans understand that better than you do."

"Not this," Antres 906 said. "This is something I cannot contain."

"The nameless." The priest said a Tauran word I didn't know.

Antres touched his throat. "Of course. But the … you say 'nameless'? They are not literally real. They are a convenience, a symbol, talking about … I do not know how to say it. Truth underneath appearance, fate?"

The priest touched his cross and it became a circle with two legs, a Tauran religious icon. "Symbol, metaphor. The nameless, I think, are more real than we are."

"But you've never seen or touched one," I said. "Just guessing."

"No one ever has. You've never seen a neutrino, but you don't doubt their existence. In spite of 'impossible' characteristics."

"All right. But you can prove neutrinos are there, or something is there, because otherwise particle physics wouldn't work out. The universe couldn't exist."

"I could just say, 'I rest my case.' You don't like the idea of the nameless because it smacks of the supernatural."

Fair enough. "Okay. But for the first fifty—or fifteen hundred—years of my life, and for thousands of years preceding me, the universe could be explained without resorting to your mysterious nameless." I turned to Antres. "That's also true of Taurans, isn't it?"

"Very much so, yes. The nameless are real, but only as intellectual constructs."

"Let me ask you an old question," the priest said. "How likely is it that humans and Taurans, evolving independently on planets forty light-years apart, would meet at the same level of technology, and be similar enough psychologically to fight a war?"

"A lot of people have asked that question," I nodded toward Antres, "and a lot of Taurans, I suppose. Some of the people from my future, under my command, belonged to a religious sect that had it all explained. Something like your nameless."

"But you have a better explanation?"

"Sorting. If they had been pre-technological, we wouldn't have interacted. If they'd been thousands of years ahead of us, there would have been no war. Extermination, maybe." Antres made a sound of agreement. "So it's partly coincidence, but not completely."

"It was not at all coincidence. We Omni have been on both planets since before humans and Taurans had language, which we gave you. Or technology, which we controlled.

"We were Archimedes, Galileo, and Newton. In your parents' time, we took control of NASA, to retard human development in space."

"And you masterminded the Forever War."

"I don't think so. I think we just set up the initial conditions. You could have cooperated with one another, if it had been in your natures."

"But first you made sure our natures were warlike," Marygay said.

"That I don't know. That would be far before my time." He shook his head. "Let me explain. We're not born the way you are; nor you, Antres 906. I think there are a fixed number of us, around a hundred, and when one of us dies, a new one comes to be.

"You've seen how I can split into two or several pieces. When it's time for a new Omni—when one of us dies somewhere—I or someone else will split, and half will stay separate, and go off to become a new individual."

"With all the parent's memories and skills?" Rii said.

"I wish. You start out a duplicate of your parent, but as the months and years go by, that fades away, replaced by your own experience. I would love to have a hundred fifty thousand years of ancestral memory. But all I have is hearsay, passed on by others of my kind."

"Including this 'nameless' stuff," I said.

"That's true. And at various times in my life, I've wondered whether it might not be a delusion—some sort of fiction that we share. Like a religion: there's no way you or I could prove that the nameless don't exist. And if they do, their existence can explain the otherwise inexplicable. Like the coincidence of parallel evolution, Taurans and humans coming together at just the right time. Like random people exploding."

"Which happens all the time," Cat said.

"All sorts of inexplicable things happen. Most of them do get explained. I think sometimes the explainers are wrong. If, in the normal course of things, you came upon the remains of someone who had died the way your friend did, you would have assumed foul play; some kind of bomb or something. Not a whim of the nameless."

The sheriff gave words to my thoughts: "I still haven't ruled out foul play. We've watched you do all sorts of things we would call impossible. It is much easier for me to assume you did this, somehow, than to posit the existence of invisible malevolent gods."

"Then why did I do it to her, rather than you? Why didn't I do it to Mandella when he came within an inch of killing me?"

"Maybe you crave excitement," I said. "I've met people like that. You want the two of us to live, to make your world more interesting."

"It's interesting enough, thank you." He cocked his head. "And about to become more so."

I heard it then, the faint warbling sound of two floaters converging from different directions. In a few seconds they were visible; in a few more, they floated over us and settled down in the park.

They were sport floaters, bright orange and cherry, streamlined like the combat helicopters of my youth—"Cobras," and they did look like cobras.

The cockpit canopies slid back and a man and a woman climbed out. They were both a little too large, like our pal, and the floaters rocked in gratitude, relieved of their weight.

Both the man and the woman shrank when they saw us. But they left deep footprints in the grass. I wondered why they hadn't just come as floaters. Maybe that took too much material.

The woman was black and stocky, and the man was white and so plain it would be hard to describe his face.

Protective coloration, I supposed; a kind of default configuration. They were both wearing togas of natural unbleached cloth.

There was no greeting. The three Omni looked at each other, conversing silently, for less than a minute.

The woman spoke. "There will be more of us here soon. We are dying too, in violence, the way your friend died."

"The nameless?" I asked.

"What can you say about the nameless?" the man said. "I think it is them, because things are happening contrary to physical law."

"They're in control of physics?"

"Apparently," our priest said. "People exploding, antimatter evaporating. Ten billion creatures going off to, as you say, some cosmic nudist colony. Or mass grave."

"I'm afraid it is a grave," the woman said. "And we're about to join them."

All three of them looked at me. The faceless man spoke. "You did it. You tried to leave the Galaxy. Escape the preserve the nameless established for us."

"That's ridiculous," I said. "I've left the Galaxy before. The Sade-138 campaign was in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Other campaigns were in the Lesser Cloud and the Sagittarius Dwarf."

"Collapsar travel is not the same," the woman said. "Wormholes. It's like exchanging one quantum state for another, and then going back."

"Like a bungee jump," our fan of the twentieth century added.

"With your starship," she continued, "you were actually leaving. You were going into the territory of the nameless."

"They told you this?" Marygay asked. "You talk to the nameless?"

"No," the man said. "It's just inference."

"You would call it Occam's Razor," the woman said. "It's the least complicated explanation."

"So we've provoked the wrath of God," I said.

"If you want to put it that way," the plain one said. "What we're trying to figure out is how to get God's attention."

I wanted to scream, but Sara expressed it more calmly. "If they're omnipotent and everywhere … we have their attention. Too much of it."

The priest shook his head. "No. It's sporadic. The nameless leave us alone for weeks, for years. Then they introduce a variable, like a scientist or a curious child would, and watch how we react."

"Getting rid of everybody?" Marygay said. "That's a variable?"

"No," the black woman said. "I think it means the experiment is over. The nameless are cleaning up."

"And what we have to do," the plain man said, and paused. "Now me." He exploded, but not into blood and guts and fragments of bone. It was a shower of white particles, a small blizzard. The particles settled to the ground and disappeared.

"Hell," the priest said. "I liked him."

"What we have to do," the woman continued for him, "is get the attention of the nameless and convince them to leave us alone."

"And you two," the priest said to me and Marygay, "are the obvious key. You provoked them."

Max had disappeared. He came back inside the fighting suit. "Max," I said, "be real. We can't fight them that way."

"We don't know," he said softly. "We don't know anything."

"We still don't know if you're telling the truth," Sara said. "The nameless stuff might be so much sand. You did it—you killed everybody off and now you're playing with us. You can't prove otherwise, can you?"

"One of us just died," the priest said.

"No, he changed state and disappeared," I said.

The priest smiled. "Exactly. Isn't that what you do when you die?"

"Drop it," Marygay said. "If it is the Omni, and an elaborate ghastly joke, we're doomed no matter what we do. So we might as well take them at face value." Sara opened her mouth to say something and closed it.

"Oh, shit," Max said, and the fighting suit rocked and stood rigid.

"Again," the priest said.

"Max!" I shouted. "Are you there?" Nothing.

Marygay moved behind the suit, where the emergency release was. "Should I do this?"

"Have to, sooner or later," I said. "Sara … "

"I can take it. I saw Anita," she said, her pale face going to chalk.

Marygay popped the suit, and it was about as bad as I had imagined. There was nothing you could identify as Max. Gallons of blood and other fluids sloshed out on the ground. Chunks of muscle and organs and bone filled the lower part of the suit.

Sara crouched and vomited. I almost did the same, but an old combat reflex made me clench my teeth and swallow, hard, three times.

Max was the kind of guy you liked in spite of what he did; in spite of who he was. And they just took him out like removing a piece from a game.

"Can we be part of this?" I yelled. "Is there any way we can make a case for ourselves?"

Cat exploded like a bomb. Not even organs and bones, this time; just a fine mist blowing away from where she had been standing. Marygay moaned and fainted. Sara, I think, didn't even notice. She was on her knees, sobbing, her arms wrapped around herself while her body spasmed, trying to empty an empty stomach.

There were two explosions inside Molly Malone's, and hysterical screaming.

Antres 906 looked at me. "I am ready," he said in slow English. "I do not want to be here anymore. Let the nameless take me."

I nodded numbly and went to Marygay. Kneeled and lifted her head and tried with a tissue to wipe her face clean, clean of what remained of the woman she loved. She half woke, her eyes still closed, and put an arm around my waist. She rocked silently, breathing hard.

It was a closeness not many people could have, the way we'd felt sometimes in battle, or just before: We're going to die now, but we're going to die together.

"Forget the nameless," I said. "We've been on borrowed time since the day we were drafted … and we've—"

"Stolen time," she said, her eyes still closed. "And we made a good life out of it."

"I love you," we said at the same time.

There was a loud thump; the fighting suit had fallen over. The breeze reversed itself and became a wind, blowing toward the suit. Something stung the back of my neck—a bone or a piece of one, again—and it tumbled on into the suit.

With a sound like dry sticks rattling, an incomplete skeleton heaved itself upright from the open casket of the suit. A forearm, ulna and radius, attached itself to the right elbow; metacarpals grew out of the wrist, and finger bones grew out of the metacarpals.