George Zebrowski (18 page)

From far out in space, New Anatolia’s face was black. Sparks kindled and died.…

“No more,” Gorgias said, seized by a sudden weary despair. The attack on New Anatolia had drawn Herculean forces home, into the final trap.

The vault filled with light as the library shut down.

Gorgias listened to the subliminal hum of the base around him. He looked at the glare of lights in the surface of the table; he looked at his fingertips touching their twins in the mirror. He wondered about the troop cylinder, imagining the small, crystal-filled casing which contained the matrix for a fully armed division of Herculean soldiers.

His father came awake inside him. “
Are you still dreaming of that?
”

“
There was such a thing — I’ll find it
,” Gorgias answered silently.

“
A hundred cylinders would do no good — at best you could expect a division or two of hastily trained personnel, and you could not be sure of reviving them successfully. There might be side effects — they might all appear dead or damaged. I never saw any evidence for such a device
.…”

Gorgias remembered the hurt in his head when his father had dreamed of the home world’s death.…

The street.

Metal flowing down as the upper levels of the city melted.

The pain of people dying from the sudden heat in their lungs … exploding as the water in their bodies turned to steam.

Level after level collapsing, crushing …

Crowds fleeing downward into the drain tunnels …

A sky of red dust. Columns of energy pushing down from the armada in orbit, one column for each city, one for each unit of land. The atmosphere was blue around the frozen bolts as they pumped power into the screaming planet — energy drawn from the Cluster itself, from the very suns of home.

“Stop it!”

“The dream?” his father asked, half asleep.

“It hurts in my head — it’s so terrible.”

“I’ll wake up,” his father said, “and we’ll take a walk down the hill.”

He remembered the walks in the tall grass on Myraa’s World, the planet of exile that he had mistaken for home as a child. Time rushed forward to the present as he confronted his father:

“But I have the tripod that uses the cylinder!”

“So maybe there was one. If you find it, don’t use those lives for combat.…”

I have the tripod, Gorgias thought, and when I plug the cylinder into the panel …

“… use them to help our peoples to increase their numbers.”

… all the power of the ship will go into reconstituting a division of Herculean fighting men.

He saw the army appearing out of nowhere, sweeping the field of battle clean of all the Earthborn, and he knew that he had to find the cylinder; it would free him from the endless cycle of striking and running; he would be able to challenge the enemy openly.

It’s not here, he thought. In all the years of searching the base, he should have found the cylinder. Perhaps it had never existed. Myraa knows where it is, he thought, unable to rid himself of the long-held suspicion, but she won’t tell me where to look.…

There were other things he had to do while he was here. The ship’s cyber-intelligence could always use more memory units, to extend its knowledge and surrogate experience. He would also have to adopt a few more weapons from the arsenal, so that he could teach their use when the time came.

He got up, went out through the automatic door and turned right into a lighted passage. It sloped gently into the depths of the base, leveling off after a quarter kilometer.

He walked into a large circular chamber. The orange globe of light was bright overhead, burning without even the smallest flicker. The mosaic of the floor was still unbroken, each stone shiny and free of dust.

He looked around at the circle of doors; each led into a weapons room, and each room led into still other rooms. The regress continued outward for many square kilometers. He had never been in all the storage chambers; it would take many years to complete the search of all the closets and corners.

He chose a door at random and went through as it slid open. The walls of the room were covered with shelves, each wall rising ten meters from the floor to form a hexagon drum fifty meters across.

He scanned the shelves, hoping to glimpse a protective case about ten centimeters square; the orange star of the Empire would probably be in one corner of the cover.

The shelves contained hundreds of hand weapons, all of the same type, each strapped to its packing board with a generous supply of power slugs laid out on both sides of the barrel. He would never have enough hands to use them, unless he found the cylinder, or contacted the army in the Magellanic Clouds. If Myraa knew where the cylinder was located, he thought, then what else did she know?

He searched room after room, stooping and climbing the shelf walls. Some chambers were filled with nothing but personal screen units, others with field-ration packs; still others contained only uniforms. Everything seemed to be duplicated into infinity. Hopeless as it seemed, he knew that the cylinder might well be here, despite his suspicions.

“
You want it handed to you
,” his father said, “
the search is too hard
.”

“Shut up!” Gorgias shouted into himself. He knew what his father would say about anything lately; the dead man’s echo was growing tiresome.

Gorgias stopped looking and came out from the maze of rooms, picking up two boxes of memory cubes on the way.

The side lock was open when he reached the ship. He went through to the control room and started plugging in the additional memories. He did not know in advance what they contained, but they might prove useful in the solution of operational problems.

The prospect of not finding the cylinder wore away at him as he worked. It could very well turn out to be a sentence of death, he thought, knowing that without a large force he could not possibly win against the Federation.

The thought startled him; he had never before considered defeat or death.

Obviously, the weapon had not come into use during the war; time had run out. If it had been manufactured on a large scale, then even a small fleet of scout ships would have been able to invade one world after another, landing secretly and deploying overwhelming forces for swift takeovers. The idea quickened his pulse, flowering into hatred. He left the ship and started to search again with a renewed will; but again without success.

They would not have hidden such an important weapon, he thought; clearly, it was somewhere else.

At last he went to the stasis chamber. The march down the inclined tunnel helped relieve some of his tension.

The lonely orange light still shone in the chamber; the empty stasis shells still stood in a circle against the wall, tilted like strange sun pods to receive the orange illumination.

He walked up to the shell that held his father’s body and peered in. The shadowed face was unchanged, its cave-eyes still staring into a mindless eternity.…

Gorgias saw himself emerging again and again from the time-contracting sleep.

He turned and left the chamber.

Back inside the ship he sealed all the locks, and slept.

Myraa listened, touching his sleeping thoughts, reaching out to him across the island universe which swam in the fragile bubble of space-time, which in turn floated in a greater sea of chaos, and once every eighty billion years collapsed under the press of darkness, only to rekindle and throw back the night.

“No!” his swarming thoughts cried, afraid of the black minutes at the end.

She pitied his fortress self and tried to caress his spark of awareness, but it was useless; he would have to come by himself; he could not be drawn sooner. She withdrew, leaving him to his ghosts.…

Treason and fear.

He saw the girl who had glanced up at him in the auditorium on Wolfe IV.

Her face became Myraa’s, and she was singing a beautiful song; at any moment she would stop and cry out to expose him.

He longed for her embrace.

She whispered in his ear as he held her, but the words were unclear, windlike and fearful.…

She became small and soft in his arms, completely open, shaking slightly as he broke her in two.…

Her eyes were black cavities.…

Five Whisper Ships sat in the previously empty berths, each vessel fully manned and equipped with troop cylinders.…

He woke up in a sweat, got up and went out to stand on the concrete.

He listened, trying to forget the snakelike hiss of Myraa’s voice. The ancient lights in the bay chamber continued without a flicker. Invisible beings moved through the vast honeycomb of the base. The air was damp.

He imagined a din-filled base in the midst of war. Furious shouting from the war room. Weapons being brought up from the stores as ships came in and out of the bays …

How he wished that he might have lived then, when each moment of life had been charged with meaning and resolve, and the future lay open to courageous choices.

“
But we lost
,” his father whispered. “
How do you explain that
?”

Suddenly the inertia of the deserted base threatened to quiet his will. Somewhere below, he knew, were luxury quarters, where he might live out a lifetime in comfort, the slave of a waking dream.

He turned, walked back into the ship and went forward into the control room. The screen came on as the ship readied itself for his command.

“Myraa’s World,” he said.

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“WE’VE GOT TO CATCH HIM,” Poincaré said from the screen. “They’ll replace me if this goes on much longer. Some of the oldest groups have taken this up personally — the Herculean has touched their pride.” He lowered his voice. “Submit a new report. Make it optimistic. I like my life as it is, Raf.”

“We’re doing quite a bit,” Kurbi said.

“It doesn’t show.”

“We’re ready to leave for Myraa’s World. I’ll beam a report in a day or two while we’re in passage.”

“Fine. Have the officials on Wolfe IV given you any more trouble?”

“The mayor of New Bosporus called me up and gave me a lecture on how Wolfe is entitled to protection from renegades. He made it clear that he didn’t care about some two-bit composer imported by enthusiasts, but that he would not tolerate the ruin of his career. Then he went on to read me a list of his accomplishments until I cut him off.”

“That’s not like you.”

“I’m tired, and I’ve been getting the feeling that all this won’t mean much to me after a while. Maybe I can get it over with before that happens.”

“What?”

“Oh, don’t worry.” Suddenly he regretted voicing his feelings to Julian. “I’ll do the job as long as you’re part of the Herculean Commission.”

Poincaré smiled. “I know what you mean.” He paused. “Maybe Gorgias will follow those Herculeans who were supposed to have escaped into the Magellanic Clouds. I personally don’t care if they start another empire out there, and I don’t believe we could ever find it, even if it grew to cover a thousand systems. Good luck to them — they deserve to be left alone.”

“Herculeans are still human,” Kurbi said, “and human beings have always had a wretched curiosity about their own kind, as well as a tendency to treat old conflicts as if they had happened yesterday. They’ll come looking for us one day, unless we find them first. You’ve seen this kind of account-keeping in the pride of the old immortals on Earth.”

“I can think of a few of them I’d never like to see again,” Poincaré said. “They cling to life, Raf, and they’re no wiser for their centuries of life. They’re amazed that the Herculean can risk so much at his age.”

“We’ve failed to open up the human mind as much as we’ve extended life,” Kurbi said. “You can’t have indefinite life without increasing the mind’s potential for knowledge and creativity …”

“You think the Herculeans might have done something along these lines? It certainly doesn’t show in Gorgias.”

“Maybe there’s something in the cult on Myraa’s World.”

“Don’t let that take you in — it’s just another form of stoicism, retreat from a bad war.”

“You’re probably right,” Kurbi said. “It’s just that I look at humankind’s last twenty-five centuries and I see no genuine advances beyond an increase in living space — no integration of the sciences, only small technical advances, mostly a refinement of devices we’ve had for a millennium. No commanding art forms to mention. We’ve got an awesome syncretism of styles — the greatest war ever waged is our greatest originality. We’re a museum display of every period from Earth’s history, existing on one Federation world or another. How I wish we’d run into another starflung species as powerful as we are, so that they would take us down a few pegs, make us see ourselves from outside.”

“But we had the Herculeans.”

“An accident resulting from the opening up of the galaxy to our stardrives, and they were no better than us, Carthage to our Rome.”

“But you’re not sure that something in their culture might have been … different?”

“Yes. I’m sorry, Julian — you’ve had it with me, haven’t you?”

“You make it all sound very interesting,” Poincaré said. He was silent for a few moments. “You know, I think I do know how to make all this look better. Stay where you are — don’t leave Wolfe’s sunspace. I’m coming out there to join you.”

“You’ll be delaying me.”

“What’s a few days, a few weeks, after all the time you’ve put into this? I’ll bring another ship, a big one, and that will get everyone here excited. Naturally, I won’t say what it’s for. Besides, Myraa’s World is supposed to be lovely.”

“It won’t be any vacation if we run into Gorgias.”

“Do you really think we might?”

“Maybe — we’ve been around a long time, waiting for a mistake on his part. He’s due for one. There’s something that brings him to Myraa’s World, despite the danger. The surest way is to get there ahead of him, settle down and wait for as long as it takes. We’ve never tried it.”