George Zebrowski (13 page)

“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 cowardice, 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 command 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.

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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.

Suddenly the three centuries of his life shrank into an impossible instant, and there was no time to fulfill his father’s vow of vengeance. A billion souls cried out from the black hole of the past, lamenting the home world’s destruction. Ghosts crowded into him, wearying him with shrill pleas, and he yearned for the yellow-orange sun of Myraa’s World, for the peace of the grassy plain around the hilltop house, for the warm colors of a living world to replace the sterile innards of the Whisper Ship and the ashes of jumpspace.

A hundred hours had passed since his raid on Eisen IV. He got up from the command station and went aft, where he lay down in the small quarters and drifted through his bloodied memory, seeking oblivion. But the impossible instant of his life spun itself out into a strand of thirty decades, and he felt the tension of each long year. He wandered in the vast belly of the void, struggling to silence the reproaches of waste and loneliness.

He relived the decades of stasis in the bowels of his father’s base, enduring again the torments of time-marking dreams. He cried into the shadowy echoes, demanding respite from the endless scarring —

—
starlight cut coldly into his eyes, and he saw the giant shapes of Earthborn blacking out the starfields. The figures hunched over their instruments, tracking and hating him without rest.…

The black sun glowed, then blazed suddenly as the Whisper Ship winked into normal space. He had intended to emerge in the shadow of Wolfe IV, but the hunters were too far behind him for that to matter. The masses of ship and planet would merge on conventional sensors when he landed, and only the most systematic scanning of the surface would have any chance of revealing his position. Otherwise there would be no certainty that he was even on the planet. The hunters would take up orbital stations and hope to trap him when he left the surface, but he would be finished with his task long before a careful search could even begin.

The ship dropped down on the nightside, stabbed through a partial overcast and raced low over a dark ocean. Whitecaps sprang up as the glow of New Bosporus appeared on the horizon.

The port city sheltered ten million Earth Federation citizens; the planet supported sixty million humanoids, both native and recently created hybrids. Water washed half the planet, and most of the land was still frontier. Most inhabitants lived in the coastal areas of the two major continents.

The ship slowed to a hover and settled into the water. One hundred meters below the waves, the craft moved forward to within a quarter-klick of the beach and came to rest on the sandy bottom.

Gorgias thumbed a pressure point on the control board. A voice spoke on the screen audio. It was a documentary which he had recorded, the prologue to an interview with Marko Ruggerio, Earth’s popular composer. The commentator’s self-important tones were amusing.

“… The Herculean Empire endured for twelve hundred Earth years —
A.D.
5000-6200 — in the globular cluster M-13, which contains more than fifty thousand suns, at a distance of thirty-four thousand light-years from the Federation capital, Earth. The greatest concentration of stars is in the core, which is thirty light-years across.…”

The distortions had come later in the year-old program. Gorgias ran the recording forward.

“… The hybrid inhabitants of the Empire were the offspring of genetically engineered crosses between Earth colonials, freed from their sunspace by the early stardrives, and the original humanoids of the Cluster. The resulting physiology was hardy and long-lived. Average height was five and a half feet, small-boned but muscular, usually dark-haired. Individuals needed, on the average, about one third the normal sleep required by Earthmen.…”

The commentator had slipped over the transition years, during which hordes of invading Earthpeoples had butchered the native populations.

“… But many of the females displayed psionic powers, while the males were high-strung and emotional, giving evidence of some empathic gifts, but seldom equaling the consistent telepathic reach of the females.…”