George Zebrowski (21 page)

It was empty.

Gorgias paused, wondering if Myraa had lied to him. He crossed to the far wall and started a careful circuit of the hold, running his hands across the metal surface.

Suddenly his hand pushed into an open area in the wall and he slipped, hitting his forehead.

Perhaps Myraa had not lied. Someone had opened this compartment and left it open. It’s not here, he thought; someone found it a long time ago, when the ships were being stripped. It would have been a meaningless object to anyone not familiar with it. A crystalline rod with a metal casing, an ornament in a small box.

He felt around inside with both hands. Maybe the scavengers had missed it. It was possible that the box had been hidden long after the vessel had been stripped. His hands felt nothing but dust and bits of debris.

Leaning forward, Gorgias strained to reach the back wall of the compartment. He stopped and pulled his hand out, realizing that he would have to crawl inside to make sure that there was nothing in the back.

He lifted himself in and crawled forward. Something scurried across his right hand. He looked down, looking for an insect of some kind. Then he felt a feeble pinprick in his left hand. The insect was biting him. There was no way to tell if the creature was poisonous. Gorgias pulled his hand back and brushed the thing away with his right hand. The insect seemed large suddenly. He heard a sound as it fled.

His thumb ached as he reached the end of the dusty chamber and felt around with both hands. He peered around in the gloom. A flat shape of some kind lay at his left. Reaching out, he grasped one corner of the box and pulled. The container seemed light as he picked it up. It might be empty.

Slowly, he backed out of the storage space, pulling the flat container after him. He felt something crawl across the backs of his legs. He kicked and scrambled over the edge, landing on his feet.

He looked at his thumb. There was a red mark on the skin, nothing more.

He reached again into the compartment and pulled out the box, holding it by the bottom with his left hand. He pulled at the top, but it would not open.

Holding the box with both hands, he went to the stairs and started down. The metal creaked. Something in the structure was loose. He hurried. The spiral groaned when he reached bottom.

He went to the open lock, climbed out on the rungs with the box in his left hand and started to descend with his free hand sliding down the righthand side of the ladder, supporting his weight.

The descent was slow and painful; the metal chafed and burned his palm. He grew dizzy from the heat. Sweat ran into his eyes, but he could not wipe it away. His uniform felt as if it were floating on a thin layer of perspiration. He jumped the last two rungs and the box fell from his hand.

He lay in the sand, watching it. A depression formed around it. The sand was running away into a space somewhere below.

Gorgias lunged for the box and seized it with both hands. Crawling back, he watched the vortex deepen and stop.

The sun’s position shifted, giving him a patch of shade from one of the ships. Gorgias sat up and examined the box. It was entirely black, except for the faded orange star of the Empire in the top righthand corner; a thin white line marked the lid. He pulled at it from two sides. It came up, and he saw the cylinder.

As he looked at the bright metal casing, he realized that at last he had the means to fight the hunters directly.

He looked closer; the casing was black near the top, and the orange star was bright on it. Taking the cylinder in his hand, he examined the terminals at the bottom, where it would plug into the tripod’s power feed.

He took a deep breath. The cylinder had waited, safe all these years, until the time when he would need it most. He was the Empire now, armed with its greatest weapon. All surviving Herculeans would have to recognize him as their leader. He looked up at the ships around him, dreaming of a time when better vessels than these would move to his command. He looked at the Whisper Ship, imagining a hundred like it emerging from hidden bases in the Cluster.

He felt the hot sands through his uniform, and remembered Myraa’s warning about the hunters. He put the cylinder carefully into its box, closed the lid and got up. The orange sun was just past noon. He hurried back to the Whisper Ship.

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THE SHIP CIRCLED the planet. Gorgias watched the screen, but there was still no sign of hunters.

“Back to the house,” he ordered.

The Whisper Ship dropped into the planet’s ocean of air.

Clouds enveloped the vessel as it neared the surface, breaking suddenly to reveal the house below. Myraa stood between the trees. Her magnified image seemed to be looking directly at him. Gorgias felt her presence near the edges of his mind, circling but not daring to probe.

The ship came in low and drifted to a landing behind the house. Gorgias came out and made his way up the hill. The door opened and he went through the hallway into the main room.

Myraa stood in the center, her unclad body aglow in the afternoon sunlight.

He came up close and looked into her eyes.

“They’re much nearer,” she said.

“When?” he demanded.

“I can’t judge distance. Soon.”

“It won’t do them any good.” He looked up through the skylight at the clear blue sky, then out through the west window. Wind waved the tall grass.
What is she planning
? he asked himself.

“Consider that you may be putting me in danger,” she said.

“You’ve taken good care of yourself so far,” he answered without looking at her.

There was an awkward silence.

“I found the cylinder,” he said as he turned to look at her again.

Her face seemed strange. “It’s only a tactical weapon,” she said. “If you don’t win immediately, you’ll have to supply and cover your force as it retreats. Where will you retreat to? You’ve never commanded a force.”

It might have been his father speaking.

“What can they use against me here? They have no reason to suspect …”

She looked at him with icy attention. Her gaze was impenetrable, immune to intimidation.

“Come with me,” she said calmly.

She turned away from him. He looked at the curve of her back, the strong muscles in her stocky thighs.

A portion of the floor slid open in front of her, revealing a stairway.

Myraa disappeared into the hill. The lights came on below. He followed. She was already a distant figure, far below.

Gorgias reached bottom and saw a long, dimly lit hallway. Myraa was a silhouette standing in the archway at the end, waiting for him.

She slipped from sight as he started toward her.

He came out into a large circular room and looked around. Parts of the granite wall and ceiling were stained where moisture had seeped in from the hill.

There was a silver plate on the floor. The polished surface rested on a platform of concrete. Gorgias stepped forward and looked into the mirrored surface.

Myraa’s image joined him as she came up behind him. He took a deep breath of the damp air and turned to face her.

“It can take you,” she said, “to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and back, but only once. They left this link on their way out. Go and see what’s left of them.”

The survivors
! It was the only thing in his mind as he stepped onto the plate. They were a reality, not just a legend.

“Have you been there?” he asked.

“I have no need.”

“Then you don’t know anything! They might be alive.”

“You must return quickly, before all the power is gone.”

He heard her warning, but she was far away, unimportant. Who was she to give him orders? He thought of the distance that he would traverse: a quarter of a million light-years. This too was accomplished by his people. What else might there be for him to find?

Myraa backed away from him. He saw the control panel on the wall. She reached back and pressed her palm against a small green square —

— darkness pushed in around him, a solid blackness threatening to crush him —

— the silence was a long shrill note, the sound of something great dying between the stars —

— Myraa had cast him into an oblivion from which he could never return —

— the starry lens of the Milky Way was rising, cut in half by a mountainous horizon.

He stood in a rocky grotto. Below him lay a barren plain, strewn with rocks. The dry, alien night was still.

He searched the sky. The planet was probably near the edge of the cloud. He might see the Magellanic stars toward morning, if there was any rotation.

He looked down into the plate and saw his faintly lit face floating in an abyss of stars.

He stepped off the receiver, wondering how long it had taken to establish it here by travel through conventional jumpspace.

He walked down the rough hillside to the plain, where he stopped and looked back. The mountain was a dark mass against the intergalactic sky, its lower regions shrouded in shadow, hiding the mirror-eye whose nerve ends reached across space to the edge of the galaxy in the sky. Where else did the link lead?

He turned away and searched the horizon. There was something directly ahead, a structure of some kind. He started walking toward it.

After a few minutes he saw that it was a ship, a huge wreck lying on its side like the carcass of some huge sea creature that had been stranded at the bottom of a dry sea.

As he came closer, the derelict seemed to rise out of the darkness toward the bright stars of the galaxy behind it. Natural conditions had not disfigured the vessel, he realized; it had been stripped. Dozens of holes had been torn in the hull, a few so large that he could see through them and across the stony plain.

He saw the first skeletons lying near the nose of the ship, jaws open in a frozen grimace.

He circled the leviathan and came upon a bone-strewn area — thousands of skeletons reclining on the bare rock — as if one day they had all lain down to rest and rotted away. The bones were very white in the starlight, protruding through the torn elbows and knees of dusty uniforms, hands and skulls a white sprinkle on the dark rock.

All have gone but me
, he thought, realizing why Myraa had sent him here.
There is no one left
.

He pictured the sick soldiers lying before him, some still alive and calling out to one another, others crawling away into the darkness to take their own lives. Falling stars had whispered across the sky while the flesh of Herculeans had rotted away and the cold wind had blown through their bones.…

To die so far from the suns of home
. He looked up at the distant galaxy, hoping to glimpse the Cluster, even though he knew that the angle was wrong for him to see it. He wanted to rip himself open and let his anger flow out to fill the universe, but there was nothing in him now except pity. He was the last flailing arm of an empire that would not let him free. He craved rest, but it would not be his until the blood of Earthmen flowed around his feet.

An ancient will to power stirred within him again, dispelling his pity and sense of weakness. A wind came up from the mountains, but he imagined that it was blowing in from beyond, from the dark belly of space-time, where it whirled the snowflake galaxies. He stood like a rock before a tide, feeling its currents pass around him, threatening to carry him off if he weakened.

A faint dawn showed itself behind the mountains, a fire kindling below the world. He saw dark clouds breaking up before the growing heat. The wind became urgent as it whipped his face.

He turned to go, knowing that in the night the skeletons possessed a kind of dignity; the harsh morning light would make them squalid and pitiable.

He walked back toward the mountain, up the stony foothill to the grotto and the mirror. There he paused and looked back at the corpse of the behemoth that had crossed the void to die here. Its dark shape lay on the plain in the gray light of morning. He heard the wind in its wounds.

This vessel had established the receiver plate, through which the soldiers arriving on Myraa’s World had escaped. They were all here; there were no others. Only the cylinder remained. It might not work, he realized, or it might be empty.

He looked up at the Lesser Magellanic Cloud as it rose before the sun, a million morning stars fading in the dawn.

He turned and stepped onto the plate —

— into the room in the hill, one island universe away.

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“Is not his incense bitterness, his meat Murder?

And our hands labor and thine hand scattereth …”

— Swinburne

MYRAA WAS NOT in the underground chamber. The air was damp in his lungs as he looked around. Something was wrong.

He jumped from the plate, ran down the dark passage and climbed the stairs into the house.

A gloomy light filled the main room. Myraa was standing by the east window. The view was gone. He looked up through the skylight. The sky was a gray bowl over the house.

“There are three ships outside,” Myraa said. “They’ve put a restraining field around the hill. There’s no way out.”

He rushed to the back door. It slid open and he stepped outside. The Whisper Ship was well within the field. Myraa came up behind him.

“It’s still there,” he said. The light from the side lock was a bright yellow in the gloom. “We won’t starve.”

He felt a quickening of his whole being. The sudden stress tightened his nerves and sharpened his perceptions.

“You sent me to the Lesser Magellanic to demoralize me,” he said, “but it won’t work.”

“They’ll set up a power plant outside and leave it to sustain this prison forever,” Myraa said.

Gorgias gazed at the gray wall of the field. It let in only a feeble light, just enough to dilute the murkiness.

“They’ll never get the ship if they do that. They’ll have to drop the field, and I’ll be ready.”