George Zebrowski (20 page)

Gorgias sat back and waited, feeling peaceful, as if the past had suddenly died within him, taking with it the weariness that had plagued him.

As he looked across the grassy hills, the house came into view, a lonely structure dominating its hill, attended by six elegant trees. The familiar circular design seemed different. The trees, he realized, were taller and thicker, the branches heavier with curving green needles; the red cones were now a deeper red and the grass came up closer to the panoramic windows.

The ship circled once; he looked for signs of danger and for human figures. The sun flashed in the windows. The ship circled again and set down on the bottom of the hill in back of the house.

He came out through the side lock and climbed the hill. The sun was over the house when he looked up, but the house soon eclipsed it as he neared the hilltop.

He paused before the back entrance. A familiar southern breeze cooled his face. Would Myraa greet him as before? What had it been like for her during these last decades? Were the other Herculeans still with her? He was a stranger who had stolen across time, from past to future; he would be the same, but those at home would be changed.
Home
? He struggled with the idea. Home was any place in the galaxy where others of his kind still lived.

He stepped forward and the automatic door slid open to let him in.

“You were talking in your sleep last night,” Myraa said.

“What about?” He wondered if she had dared to listen to his thoughts.

“Something about the edge of time.…”

He turned over. The orange sun was a ball of hot iron rising in the east window. The sky was a deeper blue than he had ever seen here. He turned his head and looked at her. The morning light reddened her tanned skin. He looked into her eyes and smiled.

“What else did I say?”

She closed her eyes and her body shuddered for a moment. “They’re coming here again,” she said.

“They’re not sure I’m here,” he answered. “You can’t frighten me into leaving. They’ve come before, and failed.”

He turned on his side to face her, and ran his hand on her hip. Her brown hair was all over the bed, longer than it had ever been. “I have loved you, Myraa.”

She was silent, looking up through the skylight.

“They want the ship,” he said.

“If you perish too far away from me,” she said, “I will not be able to save you. All that is you will disperse. You would risk that for the ship?” She moved away from him, like a snake rearing to strike. “Gorgias, think!”

He looked at her carefully, trying to imagine the truth of her claims — that she contained within herself many personalities, among them his grandmother, his brother and his mother, as well as alien minds once native to this world. He searched her face, trying to recover the young girl he had known long ago. He still loved her, he realized, because there were few others of his kind left to love; but he could not bring himself to accept her illusions and way of life.

Myraa continued to believe that there were two kinds of survivors from the war — those with multiple-fused personalities, like herself, and those solitaries who had failed to turn inward. His brother had made the transfer moments before his death at the hands of a hunting party. They had crushed his head with a rock and left him to rot in the tall, dew-covered grass near the house. Gorgias had never known his grandmother. She had been a medical officer on one of the larger warships. The alien, Myraa claimed, had been the last of his kind. He had brought the knowledge of symbiosis to the surviving Herculeans when they had arrived on this planet; in exchange, they would always keep him with them, Myraa said.

Gorgias lay back and closed his eyes, trying to imagine what it had been like to arrive here four hundred years ago. The war was lost as hundreds of half-wrecked, poorly shielded ships burned the land with their last bursts of power, leaving a yellow desert where they now decayed. The survivors of that grim landfall had marched away to find shelter from their pursuers. Most of the Herculeans died from lingering injuries; others quarreled and fought each other; the rest were hunted down for sport by bounty hunters from various colonial worlds. These raids continued for many years after the war’s end, for as long as the prey struggled and fought back, until the survivors grew tired and refused to run and hide.

In those days, Myraa claimed, she had been a rescuer, a collector of souls. She sounded very believable when describing the numbers she had saved. He imagined a vast prison within her mind, where illusory personalities cried out to each other.

There could be nothing for him in her grand delusion; even the Earthborn knew that she was harmless, and left her small group alone.

She got up and stood looking out the window, her naked body obscuring the sun. Her hair appeared lighter now, her skin smoother. She stretched and turned, bathing herself in the warming glow.

“Even if personality fusion were real,” he said, “I would not want it.”

She turned and looked at him. “You would have to accept of your own free will.”

“But it would be a turning away from the world, from everything.”

“This world that you see, with all its suns and galaxies, is only the surface of a deeper ocean. You would still be able to come to the surface, but it would not be everything.”

Clouds moved into view behind her. Her face was suddenly a mask, hiding a madwoman. “I cannot always judge distance,” she said, “but I can feel the hunters coming!” He saw her hesitate, as if hiding something. “You … could stand and fight.”

She wants me to die
, he thought.

“I will,” he said softly, horrified by the extent of her delusion, “when I find the weapon I came for. You know where it is — tell me!” If she really wanted him to die, she would tell him with the hope that it would put him in danger. He would live on as a memory in her mind, while she imagined that she had saved him.

“We hid it in the flagship after the Earthborn stripped the fleet.”

He sat up. “Where?”

“First deck, third hold.”

He got up from the bed and slipped into his uniform.

“Hurry!”

Her insanity saddened him; he wanted to hold her, protect her. The impulse surprised him, making him feel weak, as if his father’s failure was seeping into him, sapping his will.

He went out from the bedroom to the back door; it slid open and he stepped out. The ship lay at the bottom of the hill. As he looked at the polished hull, he felt a renewed admiration for the ancient builders. He still knew very little about how the ship worked, except that its power source was not contained inside, and that nothing he had ever encountered could cut off its flow. The ship was faster than even the newest Federation vessels, and carried enough weaponry to equip a small force; its food synthesizers could turn almost any kind of raw material into edibles. Even if it were captured, opening it would be impossible. If he died, the ship would destroy itself with enough force to vaporize a planet; he would, however, have to be close enough for the ship’s intelligences to pick up any violent interruption of his personality imprint. He would never be separated from the Whisper Ship; if he died, it would die with him.

Myraa came through the door and stood next to him.

“They’re very near — can’t you feel them?”

He stood perfectly still, listening. There was a rushing in his head, incoherent whispers mocking him. Somewhere, he knew, the hunters were hunched over their instruments, hating him. He had a sudden vision of them standing around his body, burning it into ashes with their weapons; the wind seized the ashes and blew them away.…

“You’re not immortal,” she said, “only long-lived. You hate them, but one day you might need their services to renew your body.”

“What I need I’ll take,” he said, puzzled by her comment. He looked at her for a moment, then turned away and went down the hill to the ship.

Myraa went back inside and lay down on the bed. The ship appeared in the skylight and disappeared. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. Turning her head, she saw a cloud obscure the rising sun; light drained from the land as the cloud’s shadow swept toward the house.…

The hunters were closer.

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“Their blood runs round the roots of time like rain;

She casts them forth and gathers them again;

With nerve and bone she weaves and multiplies

Exceeding pleasure out of pain.”

— Swinburne,
Laus Veneris

AS THE WHISPER SHIP flashed westward toward the mountains, Gorgias watched the screen for signs of hunters. His scanners could penetrate a planet to reveal approaching vessels in normal space, but there was no way to predict a sudden appearance from bridgespace. If Myraa was right, he might only have time to retrieve the cylinder and run; he could not be sure of returning here safely in the near future.

He pictured the pursuit. A large ship would come up behind him in jumpspace, open its field-effect basket and swallow the Whisper Ship. Of course, the hunters would need an even start to have a chance of catching him, but that could happen if they surprised him.

His facial muscles tightened; fear constricted his stomach. He stared into the screen, trying to decide whether to leave the system at once or go after the cylinder. There was no visible sign of danger yet. He was so close this time. Myraa was only trying to frighten him. Once he had the cylinder, it would not matter if he ever came back here again.

He saw the snow-covered peaks that divided the continent. The ship went over, up into thunderheads, out into blue sky; he saw grassland again as the vessel dropped lower.

The ship sped forward, pulling the horizon into the screen. At any moment, it seemed, a sudden surge would carry him over the planet’s edge.

He saw the first of the spires — tall starships still pointing starward. Chained to the planet, they seemed stoic in defeat.

The ship slowed and came in low as it crossed into the desert. Four hundred years later, the land was still dead here, a sickly yellow splashed across the green plain. Only near the edges was there any sign of typical desert life. Those last intermittent bursts of lift from the emergency landfall engines of dying warships had assured that nothing would grow here for a long time to come.

The Whisper Ship eased forward between the huge vessels, hovering only a few meters above the sand. “Discarded toys,” his father would have said.

An army had died here, its will broken by the sight of enemy energies tearing at the home planet, bodies slowly sickening from a lack of provisions and medical supplies.

The great ships were slipping into the sand. Drifts had accumulated in the open locks, a dry sea lapping slowly at the sinking vessels on its surface.

The enemy had sent no help to the dying, only killers not yet full of killing. When their interest had died, the survivors had been left to perish.

Twenty square klicks of desert, wind blown into sterile dunes, exposing here and there the rocky bones of the planet. The greatest concentration of ships was toward the center, around the flagship. The illness had worked its way outward from there, until the life of the planet had stopped it.

In one of these two hundred hulks, the troop cylinder held a spark of life, of power, an army from home, waiting to be summoned.

The Whisper Ship drifted through the maze, searching for the center. Finally, he saw the two largest vessels. The ship came in between them and settled on the sand.

The sun was blindingly bright when Gorgias came out through the side lock. The air was hot in his lungs. The ships towered for two hundred meters on each side of the silvery insect on the sand. So large, he thought, yet not as powerful as the Whisper Ship.

The sand was gritty under his boots. He looked around and saw chunks of carbon and fused glass. The sand-glass was multicolored, ranging from deep green and purple to crystal-clear, imprisoning small images of Myraa’s sun.

He could not see between the ships to the desert; between any two hulks he saw only another, between two others still another.

He looked up. The tops of the ships were lost in the glare of approaching noon. He began to walk, hoping that the taller of the two ships would be the flagship. His feet sank in the sand, and he had to step high to keep going. He began to sweat. The air smelled of ozone. He stopped and squinted. His boot touched a piece of fused glass. He bent down and picked it up. Blue tint, clear: trapped inside was a large, centipedelike creature with a small beetle still in its pincers. He let the long-dead scene drop from his hand and continued toward the ship.

He stopped and looked up at the brown-red spire, noting that it was almost perfectly erect. For a moment he felt that it might fly again. Its engines would roar suddenly and hurl it into the clear blue sky.

He walked up to the ladder and began to climb. It was a long way up to the first lock; the rungs were hot and the hull radiated a withering heat. Sweat ran into his eyes, and he stopped to wipe his face with his sleeve.

These ships were nothing more than giant lifeboats with a few armaments, he thought as he resumed the climb. A jumpspace drive attached to a hull; no gravitics, only atomic-reaction engines for landfall. The ships had been built in desperation.

He reached the open lock and climbed inside. It was cooler in the darkness. His eyes adjusted and he peered through the open inner lock. Winding stairs led upward to what were probably troop quarters in the midsection.

He looked back to the oval of the outer lock, where light spilled in from the furnace of the desert. He turned away, went inside and climbed the stairs, his footsteps echoing, disturbing the dust.

He looked up and saw daylight. When he reached the deck, he saw the massive hole in the hull.

The large doors to the hold compartments were open. He entered the first hold. It was empty, except for torn boxes and a few old crates.

The second hold was filled with bones, human and animal. He came out quickly and entered the third hold.