George Zebrowski (30 page)

Myraa raised walls around Gorgias, but he crumbled them. “
I won’t hurt him, but let me see
.”

Kurbi’s face had not changed. It was still set in that patronizing stare, that look of pitying blindness.

“Tell him you’ll go.”

She resisted.

“Tell him!”

“All that you would have to do,” the Earthman said, “is go before a group of people and repeat what you have told me — that your people wish to be left alone. I’ll bring you back myself.”

Gorgias wanted to leap at his throat, but he held back; there would be a better time.

Myraa felt her hands clench and unclench.

“Tell him!”

“If you don’t come,” Kurbi continued, “their suspicions will be increased and I will lose what influence I have. Their policies could endanger this planet.” He paused. “I’m sorry to have to say this to you. Please agree to come back with me.” He looked down at his feet.

“Very well,” Myraa said of her own free will.

Kurbi got to his feet. “Come down to the ship when you’re ready.” He turned and walked to the door.

The darkness solidified around Gorgias, pushing inward to crush his awareness. Myraa had summoned help, he realized too late.

A cold morning light began to push the night away. He recognized the battlefield on Myraa’s World. Herculean soldiers came out of the gloom and stood around him. He saw bodies everywhere, black from the burning.

The soldiers moved in. Their faces were burned inside their helmets, but there was no hatred in their eyes, only reproach.

“We came across time,” one said, “giving up the defense of our homes to hold ourselves in readiness, when the need would be greater, and you wasted us.”

“Better if you had destroyed the cylinder,” another added. “We would not have suffered.”

Gorgias stared back at them, realizing that he was free of caring. They belonged to Myraa now, and should have nothing to complain about; they were alive, after all. If it had not been for him, they would have remained as bits of information inside a crystal forever.

They drew their weapons.

Beams flashed.

Gorgias felt his flesh burn and saw his right arm fall away. He sensed pain distantly, but no blood flowed.

His legs were cut off at the knees. Pain flooded into his brain. He had expected it this time, so it was more intense. He fell to the ground. They were turning him against himself, he realized as his left arm melted away.

The soldiers stood over him. They knew that he could not be killed, but they raised long metal spikes over his body.

One spike drove through his head, and he imagined its cold pass through the gray colloid of his brain. Another slid through his heart and pinned him to the black ground; blood spilled into his chest from the ruptured pump. The third shot through his guts, splintering his spine; and the last two spiked through the cartilage of his shoulders.

Myraa’s World held him as he struggled to shatter the vivid impressions, but the soldiers held their spikes as he strained to lift himself.

“We are here,” they said, “nothing can change that.”

The sky flashed and thunder growled. Rain muddied the ground. He turned his head and saw charred bodies rising from the battlefield.

The storms were quiet inside her as she walked down to the ship. The surface of the universe was everything; sunny, grass-green, her planet wore no mask; the Earthship was a curious toy, waiting under a blue sky. The breeze blew through her long hair. She felt warm in the Herculean jump suit.

She came to the bottom of the hill and marched toward the ship. Kurbi looked out from the lock as she came into the ship’s shadow and climbed the ramp.

“Your cabin is ready,” he said as she stepped inside.

An abyss opened within her; she fell in and drifted over a muddy flatland. Puddles became mirrors as a white sun came out. Faces crowded to look out at her.

“This way,” Kurbi said, leading her down a curving passage.

She tensed and followed as the quiet crept back into her. The faces in the puddles fell into shadow and faded, and she knew that Gorgias was still under control.

“Here we are.” The Earthman turned and looked at her. “Are you well?”

She nodded and stepped to the door. “Thank you,” she said as it opened and she went inside.

“We’ll be leaving in a few minutes,” he said as the door closed behind her and the lights came on.

The curved wall of the cabin was a depth mural of the Earth-Moon system with its ring of habitats. A small zero-g bed stood under the view. The bath was a small closet off to the right. A square locker stood at the foot of the bed.

She wondered if Gorgias could see through her eyes without her knowing it.

“Come in, General Crusus,” Kurbi said.

The Herculean took a few steps into the center of the stateroom. “Do sit down,” Kurbi added, shifting in his chair.

The stocky Herculean sat down and looked at him with black eyes.

“I would like to ask your impressions, if any,” Kurbi began, “of the situation on this world.”

Crusus shrugged. “What do you hope to find out?”

“Why haven’t you decided to settle here, after your release?”

Crusus took a deep breath. “I’ve been asked all this before, but I’ll tell you again. I have no religious feelings. I’m done with the Herculean past. There’s nothing else to say.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“What would you have me say? That my past threw me away? There is no past — only a few misguided individuals.”

“I understand. But I have to ask these things. Do you believe there is any chance of some kind of new uprising here?”

Crusus almost smiled. “By whom? There is no force to speak of, no weapons.”

“What about troop cylinders?”

“I understand there were very few of those, perhaps only one. I knew of no others when I was stored.”

“But you do understand that it would take only one to start materializing the same weapons and fighting personnel over and over again? You yourself would be called up again, and each time you would be ignorant of what you know now.”

“I tell you it was a fluke. You have the only cylinder. If there are others, no living Herculean has the means to find them!”

Kurbi was silent for a few moments. “I tend to agree. But, well … there is a feeling on Earth.”

“I know. To settle the matter once and for all by destroying Myraa’s World. The idea has a mind-settling elegance, doesn’t it? We had it ourselves once, so I should know.”

“You see the position I’m in.”

He sighed. “Of course. You have to prove that it can’t ever happen, that we Herculeans will never rise again, and you can’t prove that. No one can. Not to the satisfaction of the suspicious.” He laughed. “You’re wasting your time, Kurbi.”

“But I do care what happens.”

“Do you? How can you, when I don’t?”

Kurbi waited again. “What about the other survivors?”

“They’ve taken to Myraa’s cult, even more so than the others. Just imagine yourself taken out of storage and thrown into a slaughter. And then to find out the war has been over for centuries! What do you expect? Did you have to kill nearly all of them?”

“We’ve spoken before, General, so you know that with me you have the most sympathetic listener possible. Better that I should find out what’s going on than someone else.”

Crusus raised an eyebrow. “Blackmail?”

“I have no such intention.”

“Of course. Circumstances are blackmailing us both.”

Kurbi took a deep breath. “What would you do in my place?”

“But there’s nothing to uncover.”

“It’s an undercurrent. I felt it on Earth, and I feel it here.”

“Isn’t that to be expected?”

“Then you feel it too? What do you make of it? Please — be as explicit as you wish. No one will hold your views against you.”

Crusus smiled sadly and sat back. “It means nothing, and there can be no support for any of my suspicions, nothing at all. We’re talking about bad feelings, which tend to persist.”

“I’d like to hear your suspicions, however unfounded.”

“It’s nothing specific, just something in the back of my mind insisting that it’s not finished, all this, that it can’t be over. Not a bit of evidence. As I said, it’s just the residue left by the war. You feel the same thing. Suspicion, vague fears. It will disappear in time. Fear of the future, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“That should be clear to you. If the numbers of Herculeans increase, it’s inevitable that some of them will continue to resent what happened to them in the past. It seems unbelievable even now. How does a group live down such a destructive conflict, especially when people who lived through it persist? The offending generations died in past wars of this kind. The future could shrug off the past as something done by others.”

“Evil didn’t seem quite so bad when it could grow old and die.”

Crusus was silent for a few moments. “Gorgias — what was he like, Kurbi?”

“He hated me. I stood for everything he hated. I feel that enmity even now. For a while I believed that I could reach an agreement with him. But the war had never ended for him. He believed with such force. And when he had his successes, they were terrifyingly effective. They haven’t forgotten that on Earth.”

“I find that hard to credit, given the erratic leadership I witnessed.”

“Even great generals lose wars,” Kurbi said, standing up. “Well, thank you anyway, General. What will you do after we reach Earth?”

Crusus rose. “Ship out to some obscure world and make a simpler life for myself, as far away from the past as possible.”

“I wish you luck.” Kurbi remembered his own wanderings among the frontier worlds of the Snake. “Will you remove any of your memories?”

Crusus looked at him. “I don’t think so … I don’t know. Thank you for the lift to Earth.”

It’s not finished
, Kurbi thought as Crusus turned to leave.

The General stopped and faced him again. “Do you think I’ll be detained on Earth for any reason?”

“I don’t think so, but I can’t promise. Myraa will reassure them. They’ll be suspicious, but the matter may end with that. You’re free to talk with her during the trip.”

“Thank you. I’m not sure I want to. I’ve already heard what she has to offer. Do you wish me to question her? I can’t find out anything that you couldn’t for yourself, assuming that there is anything to learn.”

“It’s up to you, General.”

Clearly, it was not over for Crusus, Kurbi thought as the Herculean left. It meant something to him to keep his memories, even if he wouldn’t admit it to himself.

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“… On every side,

spaces, the bat-wing of insanity!

Above, below me, only depths and shoal,

the silence! And the Lord’s right arm

traces his nightmare, truceless, multiform.

I cuddle the insensible blank air,

and fear to sleep as one fears a great hole.

My spirit, haunted by its vertigo,

sees the infinite at every window …”

— Baudelaire,
The Abyss

HE ROCKED THE DARKNESS back and forth, slowly trying to open a space for himself within the rigidity of Myraa’s will; but his struggles created only a painful vibration.

He reached inward, stabbing more deeply into the infinitesimal, probing the quantum realm of softening determinisms, collapsing lengths and fluid energies.

Again the heart of fire seemed unimaginably distant, but he knew that he was kin to its burning assertiveness — an individual pulse shaped by the categories of space-time. If the way out through Myraa’s body was closed, then he would voyage inward.

He moved in closer, diminishing before the unattainable force-center of the will.

“Can you answer me?” he asked. “Do you know me?”

There was no answer, and he realized that it was blind, unknowing, the source of all motive, but without the power of decision.

The fools!

They worshipped it, drew their life from its outpouring, its waste.

But he would learn to use its infinite strength. Its transcendent heart would become his own.

If Myraa would not let him out, he would penetrate all that lay within and master it. Then he would shatter Myraa’s control and reach out through her into the universe of decision, where everything was a facade, the masked will striving to persist, giving the world permanence.

He spiraled toward the force-center, circling endlessly, exerting all his will to draw nearer. He felt its repulsion; it pushed him back by minute degrees, slowly stealing his forward gains.

He threw himself inward, reaching out with all his longing from the endless night. He imagined that the Whisper Ship was around him, carrying him toward the fire. He shrank into a point, concentrating his strength into the tip of a spear, yearning to join his spark with the great conflagration at the heart of all things.

Suddenly a pulse stabbed into him, filling his will to the core. He was hurled away, upward, growing large swiftly, racing outward at the edge of an expanding universe.

He filled Myraa instantly, giving her no chance to resist.

Her eyes opened and he looked around the cabin.

“May I come in?” General Crusus asked over the com.

“Come in,” Myraa said.

The door slid open and Crusus stepped inside.

Myraa leaped at him. She wrapped her legs around his waist and her hands locked around his throat.

“Traitor!” Gorgias shouted, digging into the windpipe.

Crusus gulped air. His arms clawed at Myraa’s back, but there was nothing to grab.

Gorgias felt the windpipe collapse. Crusus fell backward onto the floor. A gurgling sound came from his throat. His eyes stared. The body twitched once, then lay still under Myraa.

Gorgias stared into the man’s face as Myraa’s trembling hands drew away.

“What have you done?” her voice asked faintly.

“He deserved to die,” Gorgias said through the same mouth. He looked toward the bath. “He’ll fit in the disposal when I’m through with him.”

“Wait —”