Galactic Empires (25 page)

"With a reasonable tone, she asked, 'Can we kill you?'

" 'If I was foolish and a little blind, perhaps. But I am not, and I am not.'

"She nodded, accepting that verdict.

"And then she tensed through the shoulders and along her back, and with a voice that was small and furious, she asked, 'But why shouldn't we try to kill you? When your work is finished, you intend to murder all of us. Isn't that so?'

"I didn't respond immediately.

" 'You told me as much,' she claimed. 'When you sang about your secret Union and your need for nameless places… you practically confessed that when you were finished with this place, you wouldn't leave any witnesses behind.'

" 'You don't understand,' I warned her.

"Then I dropped my hand, the fingers and broad palm stroking her body down to the point where her legs joined together. 'You are a special, special soul,' I told her. 'My work would have been finished in another few years, and my plan was to take you with me. Out to the stars, out into the rich cold darkness.'

"The shock rolled across her features.

"Quietly, almost angrily, she said, 'No, you're lying.'

"But I was speaking the truth.

"With a fond, slightly paternal voice, I asked, 'How do you think I was brought into the Union? No one is born into this noble service. The rank and responsibilities are earned only on exceptionally rare occasions. In my case, another servant visited my home world and built several marvels before retreating back into the darkness with his treasures, including the man lying beneath you now.'

" 'No,' she whispered.

"And then, in pain, she said, 'Maybe. But this changes nothing. I wouldn't abandon my world, and I certainly won't let you to blow up this volcano and make it as though this place never was.'

" 'Is that what you think will happen?' I asked. 'That I would slaughter you and yours for no reason but my convenience?'

"She hesitated. Then with a figurative acid on her tongue, she asked, 'What do you mean?'

" 'Unless provoked, I will not murder.'

"By the light of the moon, my lover looked into my face. And then the beginnings of an explanation occurred to her. 'You won't murder, but you might take back all of your gifts. Our minds. The genetic manipulations. Wipe clean the ideas and concepts you brought down here to serve your damned Union.'

"I interrupted her by throwing my palm across her mouth.

"Then I yanked her close, and said, 'Yes. That was my kind, responsible plan. You would come with me, and my magical device would come with us, and the other grandchildren would wake that following morning to discover… nothing. Nothing but a shared dream of a magical civilization… a public memory that would turn to legend in another day, and, in another ten generations, vanish into a muddled, impossible story.'

"She lay against me, her heart beating against what passed for my ribs.

" 'I am sorry,' she told me.

"Into my ear, she said, 'Really, we haven't done anything wrong. Not yet. I can give commands, and every weapon will be put away, and you won't have to worry about any of us lifting so much as a lard knife against you.'

" 'That is not enough,' I replied.

" 'And you can kill me,' she promised. Then she repeated her offer, sounding as if she was begging. 'Kill me, and maybe the other adults. But leave our children. They don't know anything.'

" 'Like the boy I spoke to? The child waiting between the plaza and the palace?'

"She hesitated.

" 'At this moment,' I said, 'that tiny fellow is sitting beside the water, bare toes in the surf. And do you know what he is watching with all of his interest, every shred of passion? He watches the sky.'

"She did not move.

" 'The sky,' I repeated. 'And in particular, this night's very bright stars.'

"The woman could not breathe.

" 'You are a crafty soul, my dear. My darling.' I told her, 'I am extremely impressed by the thoroughness and audacity of your plan. Threatening the machine as well as my own immortal self… well, those are the tactics that anyone would expect. But you also dispatched a team of technicians to the mainland. You convinced the worshipful souls living there that they should help you. Since then, our people and theirs have been living in a distant valley, secretly fabricating an amazing machine of their own.

" 'A radio beacon, as it happens.

" 'To the best of your ability, you have been marking my passage across the heavens. You guessed that I was subverting a set of prying eyes, and you were correct. Your hope was to broadcast a huge, important signal. You wanted to be noticed. By the probe, perhaps. Or if you missed that mark, then at least there would exist a loud intelligent scream that would race its way through the heart of our galaxy.

" 'Your secret hope was to accomplish what I would never allow.

" 'You wanted to name your world, and to name it in exactly the way that would make the universe take note of your presence.

" 'You were right, my sweet darling. That would have been your only genuine hope of salvation.

" 'But just this morning, I visited that far valley and your secret beacon, and I destroyed the dishes and power plant, and I have slaughtered everyone in my reach, but left the local communication system intact. During these last hours, every time you spoke to your fellow rebels, you were actually speaking to me.' "

Finally, the voice paused.

In the perfect darkness, a deep useless breath was taken.

Then the entity was speaking again, quietly admitting, "I gave my lover one last freedom. She could be the last to die, or first. She chose to be first, and she did that herself, releasing the acids inside her body. But I was already standing at a safe distance from our bed, my back to the carnage. Hearing the screams and smelling the blistered flesh, I kept my eyes averted, reminding myself that the worst of this awful night was finally finished."

XII

The two humans clung to each other.

In the same moment, in a rough chorus, they asked, "What happened? What did you do? What about the other people? What?"

A tight slow creak was audible, old leather or old bones moving.

From a point markedly closer than before, a mouth opened and breathed and then breathed again.

"I did exactly what I promised." The voice seemed to be within arm's reach. "However imperfectly, I have always strived to serve my cause, and that includes punishing those who dare rise up against me. I had no choice but to gather the worst of the offenders on the Sunset Plaza, and, with the rest of the grandchildren watching, I removed them from the living world. Then I ordered the low animals to clean the bricks of blood and pink tissues, and the dead bones were ground up and piled high on the nearest beach. And within five years, those who had survived my justice had managed to make up for lost time. Within ten years, my work was finished, and I carved away the gray summit of the volcano and pulled from the hot workroom a single machine encased in the finest hyperfiber-a wonder of genius and competence that made my stay on that world worth any cost."

The voice drifted even closer and, feeling the intrusion, Quee Lee instinctively leaned away.

Perri held her and spoke past her, asking, "When did the mountain erupt?"

Nothing.

"After you abandoned the world, did the island explode?"

A sound of amusement, weary and cool, ended with the simple pronouncement, "Never, no."

They waited.

"Your assumption has been that this was Earth. And that is a reasonable, wrong assumption. But I let you believe what you wanted. As a rule, every species, no matter how open to odd notions and alien fancies, will find its own stories to be the most compelling.

"No, this wasn't your cradle world. And its people were perhaps not quite as human as I might have let on."

"What happened to them?" Quee Lee pressed.

"As I promised my lover, I undid my fancy tinkering. I made her citizens simple again, just as I pulled back the engineering of the other species. The population scattered. The palace was abandoned. Without trained hands to make repairs, the city fell into ruins. Within a few years of my departure, the island was a mystery already famous across half of that world. But its mountain would never erupt. My work had stolen away too much heat, and the magma lake below had cooled and turned to stone."

The voice paused.

Then, with a matter-of-fact tone, it explained, "Earth is blessed in many ways. It has a mature, very stable sun. Comets are rare beauties in the sky, not constant hazards. And it possesses a relatively thin crust, easily pierced and quick to bleed. But this world that I speak of was notably different. Its skin is much thicker than Earth's, and much more resilient. As its core generates heat, oceans of magma build up slowly, millions of years required to reach that critical point when a thousand eruptions come at once.

"That harum-scarum probe surely recognized the inevitable—a world perched on the margins of a grand, yet thoroughly natural, disaster.

"I left that world and placed my magical machine in a secret place. A new mission called to me from the sky, and I was en route when that nameless world suddenly and violently attacked itself.

"The sulfurous gases and blistering lava flows achieved everything that I had counted upon. Every convincing trace of my visit was erased. The continents were wracked by quakes. Ten thousand volcanoes spat ash and fire, and then they exploded, flinging their poisons into the stratosphere. Every forest burned. Every breath brought blisters and misery. The ocean floors were wrenched upward, forcing salt water over the coast-lands. My little island was washed clean beneath a quick succession of tsunamis, erasing even the palace. The humanlike creatures were reduced to a few scattered populations, ignorant and desperate. And after another thousand years of geologic horror—when the skies finally cleared and the lava cooled to glass—not a single example of that very promising species could be found in Creation."

Those deadly words were absorbed in silence.

Then Quee Lee said, "How awful."

Softly, the voice asked, "In what way is this awful?"

"You allowed that to happen," she began.

"But the people were doomed long before I knew of their existence. And despite my considerable powers, there was little I could have done, except delaying the story's end by one day, or maybe two."

The humans said nothing.

"If you need righteous anger," it continued, "direct your emotions toward the harum-scarums. Their probe saw the same future that I saw. Three of their colonies were near enough and powerful enough to launch rescue missions. Better than I, they could have saved a worthy sampling of those people before they passed out of existence. But no missions were launched. The costs and the benefits were too much and too little, respectively. The battered world remained nameless until a starship eased its way into orbit. That particular ship was bringing colonists, I should mention-people who didn't care about the bones under their feet, people who wanted nothing but to start new lives on this rich empty place."

Quietly, Perri asked, "Is it another harum-scarum world?"

"No," the voice replied, "it is not."

"Then who?"

"Who else would be a likely suspect, my friend? Remembering all that we have discussed by now…"

Humans had claimed the empty world. The colonists might even be humans that had come from the Great Ship… people whom Quee Lee and Perri had met and even known well at one time or another.

Quee Lee was desperate to talk about anything else.

And Perri was, too. With a scornful, demanding tone, he said, "I still don't believe in your Union."

"No? In what ways do you doubt it?"

"When you describe this organization, it sounds like an exclusive club or somebody's secret society. Not the imperial underpinnings of a powerful political machine."

There was a long pause, and then the voice said, "Power," four times, each utterance employing a different emotion. Amusement was followed by disgust, and then came contempt, and finally, a different species of amusement. A joyful, almost giddy rendering of the word "Power." After that, there was a laugh that lingered until the voice decided to speak again.

"As you must have guessed by now," it told them, "I am embroiled in a new task in the service of my Union. A mission full of facets and difficult challenges, yes."

The humans held their breath.

And now the voice pushed even closer, less than an arm's length away, and from a mouth that they could only imagine came the reminder, "I did once visit your cradle world. Your Earth. Yes, I did."

Quee Lee nodded.

"Before it was named," Perri recalled.

"Moments before," the voice added. And then the bulk of an invisible body drifted even closer, hovering within a tongue's length of Quee Lee's ear, and an intimate whisper offered her a single date. A specific time. Then a place inside a city that she would never see again.

Quee Lee shivered.

Perri reached out with one arm, aiming for the face that had to be lurking in the blackness… but his hand closed on nothing, and nothing else came from the voice, and, after a few moments more of clinging comfort, their camp lights returned-a scorching white glare of photons that left them blinking, blinded in a new way altogether.

XIII

They didn't sleep that night, and they didn't start missing sleep until the middle of the following morning. By then, Perri and Quee Lee had thoroughly explored the enormous room and most of the little tunnels leading out from it. But they didn't find any traces of visitors other than themselves. Their sniffers tasted surgically clean surfaces and cold air uncluttered by even a single flake of lost skin, and, just as puzzling, none of their machines could explain why they had failed last night. Whatever the voice was, it had been careful. With its absence, it proved its great powers… at least when it came to fooling a couple of peasants who were ignorant of the real powers of a galaxy that they had barely begun to know.