George Zebrowski (32 page)

“It will be safer,” Aren said. “The consequences of letting the Omega cult develop may be too dangerous to take any chances. Weighing doubts may be fatal.”

Gorgias listened.

The whispers had to penetrate light-years of lead, but they reached him, and their meaning gave him new strength. The last stronghold of Herculean life would be destroyed unless he acted.

Bypassing the armor of Myraa’s conscious effort, he filled her musculature and looked out into the oval chamber. She struggled against him, but he held her rigid.

“We stand to lose everything,” Aren was saying.

Gorgias turned and struck Kurbi across the heart. The Earthman grunted and fell to his knees.

“Yes!” Gorgias hissed through Myraa’s throat. “But it’s too late!”

He reached into the underwill and drew what he needed.

Aren rose, pale.

Contorting space-time, Gorgias picked her up with invisible fingers and crushed her against the floor in front of the half-moon table.

The other commissioners were getting to their feet. Gorgias glanced over at Kurbi. The Earthman was still on his knees, staring at the broken body of Aren.

Gorgias whirled around. Armed guards were taking a fix on him. He reached out to crush them, but Kurbi grabbed him around the legs. The restraining field caught them as Myraa’s body hit the floor.

“Too late!” Gorgias shouted in the grayness of the inverted bell. The guards had not acted quickly enough to save the Prime Commissioner.

Kurbi wrestled with Myraa’s body, trying to pin her to the floor. Gorgias looked into his eyes, then hurled the Earthman upward, pressing him against the field.

“I’ve waited for this,” Gorgias said as he stood up. “You know what I’m going to do? Strip off your arms, legs and genitals. And then your eyes!”

Kurbi hung silently above him.

Gorgias concentrated on his right arm and wrenched it into a breaking position.

“Myraa!” Kurbi cried out.

The field winked out and Kurbi fell on him. Stunned, Gorgias concentrated his will, but the Earthman was lifted from him and the bell reappeared. He took a deep breath and got up. No matter, he would kill them all next time.

He looked around the small area of gloom, wondering if he could strike through the canopy.

“Are you hurt?” Julian asked.

Kurbi was unsteady on his feet as he looked around. “Yes,” he said, struggling to control his fear.

The guards were still adjusting the shield’s field strength from the portable projector. Eliade Aren was being wheeled out to the nearest freezer.

“This does it, Raf. Nothing can save Myraa’s World now.” He looked at the four other commissioners. They were talking together near the main exit. “My one vote won’t mean a thing.” Kurbi caught Ona Aren’s eye, but she looked away. “I suppose you have an explanation?”

Kurbi stared at him, unable to speak. Everything Myraa had said was true.

“I know what happened,” Kurbi managed to say.

Poincaré turned to the guards. “Is it secure?”

The senior officer nodded.

“Get the commissioners out of here.”

When they were alone, Julian said, “We won’t be able to contain this. Too many saw it.” He looked at the bloody spot on the floor. “What do you know, Raf?”

“I wasn’t sure until now.” Kurbi told him what he had learned from Myraa.

Poincaré was silent for a few moments after Kurbi finished. “It was criminal of you not to tell me,” he said, “even though I see why you were skeptical. I wouldn’t have believed it. Still, we might have saved Aren from this, monster though she was.” He shook his head. “As my friend you should have told me, no matter what.”

Kurbi began to pace, thinking wildly. Gorgias should have killed the entire Commission. Then no one would have known what had happened and Myraa’s World might be safe. “I can’t think any more about this, Julian. Worse, I don’t even want to care. Why did you drag me back into all this?”

“You still know more than anyone.”

“A lot of good it does. So, what do we do now?”

“Talk to whatever is inside.” He stepped over to the controls and made an adjustment.

The bell of force shimmered, as if about to dissolve. Myraa’s shape became visible, but it appeared deformed, huge in head and torso, small in the legs. Her mouth opened and closed like that of a huge fish gasping for air.

“Myraa?” Kurbi asked, stepping close and peering in.

“Yes,” she said, her mouth a cave, “I’m here.”

“We can’t be sure,” Julian said.

“You must not release me,” she warned. “I’ve hurled him back, but I’m too weak to do it again.”

“It must be her,” Kurbi said.

“Why should he tip his hand?”

“The destruction of my world,” she continued, “will do nothing to stop Gorgias.”

“We may have to kill her,” Poincaré said.

“It may be too late,” Myraa whispered weakly. “He may be able to survive without me now.”

“What should we do?” Kurbi asked.

“I can no longer advise. You should probably kill me, in the hope that he won’t be experienced enough to keep himself together. He may misjudge his powers. I don’t know.…”

“We’ll keep her in the field,” Julian said, “but in a cell, where we can pipe in life-support. We can’t risk giving him a way out.”

Kurbi nodded.

“I understand,” Myraa said.

“Are you in pain?” Julian asked.

“I’m not in danger.”

Kurbi looked around the chamber. He’s here, he thought, slipping through the substructures of reality, rebuilding his strength, struggling toward me with a terrible hatred, an unshakable resolve.

“Leave my world to live,” Myraa pleaded.

“If we could only trap him somehow,” Julian said, “then we might stop the destruction of her world. But what is there to catch? A quantum ghost, more elusive than neutrinos. And we can’t be sure that her death would stop him. His own certainly didn’t. If all this is true.”

“All that is left of him is his hatred,” Myraa said.

For the first time since he had met her, Kurbi saw Myraa weep. Giant, distorted tears burst from her eyes and flowed down to the cave of her mouth.

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“Mischiefs feed

Like beasts, till they be fat, and then they bleed.”

— Ben Jonson,
Volpone

GORGIAS REACHED OUT, searching for the Whisper Ship.

He visualized it, imagining that he was near the vessel.

The true nature of space-time was not the continuum of forward-flowing, relative times; he was learning an underlying unity; only adapted mental structures made distinctions, allowing for the experience of separate spaces and durations; but these seemingly external settings were mere aspects, observer-defined islands afloat on a quantum sea.

Passages in space-time were journeys across mental realms, nothing more, if the will were brave enough to break from its given categories.

He probed the Whisper Ship at its dock in the Centauri system. Energies flowed as the vessel’s intelligence came to full alert.

Gorgias poised himself for the quantum transfer, leaped —— but the ship failed to integrate him into its structure.

He dropped back into Myraa’s prison.

He gathered his strength and tried again —

— and fell back, exhausted.

Myraa’s mazes would hold him forever, he realized, unless he learned the patience necessary to concentrate the intensity of his conscious will enough to pass from one energy state to a higher one.

“I am in danger,” he whispered as he waited, “come to me.”

The ship shifted.

Far away, but also deep within him.

For an instant, the universe pulsed at his center, and he knew the possibility of engulfing galaxies, breathing at the heart of every sun, drinking the radiation of collapsing suns, feasting on the cores of imploding galaxies.

There was a direct way of doing things in the realm of unity. Myraa had tried to confine him in a maze, but she needed his cooperation to succeed. He had to force himself to think differently.

“Then forget the past,” she said. “Don’t let it drag you back.”

“You should have let me die!” he answered. “Here I can’t die, and I will rule!”

She was silent, but he felt her fear within himself.

And he felt the ship wrench itself from its dock and regain the freedom of space. The vessel came swiftly, swallowing the four light-years between Centauri and Earth; it came across the infinite inner gray of mental substance called jumpspace, which had elsewhere flowered into the facade of an external universe.

Kurbi peered into the field. Myraa had been motionless for three hours now.

Her eyes opened suddenly. “The ship has broken free. It’s coming here!”

“It’s beginning,” Kurbi said.

“We can probably repel it,” Julian said from the control unit.

“I’m not so sure. It’s coming for her, and to destroy the Earth.”

“Then we’ll have to leave for Myraa’s World at once,” Julian said, “if only to draw the ship away.”

Kurbi nodded, knowing that it was going to happen. “How many ships are within striking distance of Myraa’s World?”

“Enough to sterilize the planet. We were right, as it turns out. We can’t kill her now. We need her to draw the Whisper Ship away from Earth.”

“But she
is
the ship. Gorgias is within her, controlling the vessel.”

“We can’t be sure, Raf. She told us herself. We can’t be certain that by killing her we’ll destroy the ship’s command. It might already have enough new directives to operate on its own. We can’t kill our only hostage at this point.” He turned away from the control unit, walked over to Kurbi and stared into the bell. “At any moment,” he continued, “I will receive orders to destroy Myraa’s World, especially if the medics find that Aren’s brain is hopelessly damaged and can’t be recovered.”

Soldiers came into the oval chamber. Kurbi and Poincaré stood back as the bell was levitated out into the corridor.

“We have to board in the next few minutes, Raf. Are you coming?”

Kurbi hesitated. “What choice do I have?”

Myraa’s World was a ball of ocean wrapped in a clear membrane of atmosphere. The yellow-orange sun stood guard nearby, blindly blazing away its vast store of energy. Stars are the engines of life, Kurbi thought, collapsing inward so they can radiate outward as they drive the evolution of their worlds across time, unfolding possibility and choice, finally destroying the worthy and worthless alike. Suns are insane parents.

What should have been was too hard
, he told himself as he waited.
It was much easier to destroy the Herculeans then
,
and it is still easier now. Gorgias, where are you?
Kurbi called within himself.
Come save your world!

One hundred ships waited for him in polar orbit.

“We’ve got him on sensors,” Julian said next to Kurbi on the bridge. The screen turned gray. The Whisper Ship was a black smudge in the vast unreality of otherspace.

“Any moment now,” Julian said.

The screen switched to a normal view. The distant stars seemed to be waiting. Kurbi felt the old curiosity and surprise at being himself and not someone else, of being contained in his own skull. Something oceanic, general, became specific and self-conscious when confined to the self’s point in space.

The Whisper Ship caught the yellow-orange sunlight and seemed to burst into a small nova.

Beams lashed out from the fleet and tracked.

The vessel winked out.

“What’s he doing?” Kurbi asked as the screen scanned jumpspace.

The black smudge came toward them and seemed to explode as it rushed into the screen and disappeared.

“I didn’t think …” Poincaré said softly, stunned.

“What is it?”

“I didn’t think it possible …”

“What’s wrong?” Kurbi tensed as he watched the black stars on the gray screen.

“His ship’s inside ours! Look at the readings! And there’s nothing we can do.”

The brig outside the force bell flickered. Distortions appeared, throwing shadows into Myraa’s prison. Fearful, she pressed her face against the clouded lens of the bell and peered out. The walls of the rectangular brig were flickering very fast now.

She saw the door slide open. A guard came in, threw up his hands and disintegrated.

The flicker became imperceptible as the chamber outside the barrier exploded with white light.

The brightness faded. Myraa recognized the control room of the Whisper Ship. The Herculean vessel had passed through the Earth ship, materializing for the instant needed to snatch her and the bell from the brig.

“Too late!” Poincaré cried.

The screen blinked to normal view. Beams cut across space after the ship.

“He’s thumbing his nose at us,” Poincaré said. “No other reason to come out of jumpspace.”

The ship winked out. The screen switched, but the smudge was already invisible against the black disk of the sun.

“Track!” Poincaré shouted.

“He’ll scatter his wake through the sun,” Kurbi said, “and get just far enough ahead of us so we can’t catch him.”

“Doesn’t matter. We know where he’s going.”

Don’t come back
, Kurbi thought.
Disappear forever
.
There’s enough galaxy out there for you to find a safe home
.
Leave us alone
.

Gorgias switched the ship through the star and continued on a random course through bridgespace.

He knew why the ship had accepted him completely into its own systems: Myraa’s presence was now identical to his own, thus making it possible for him to flow through the artificial intelligence without abandoning her body. By rescuing Myraa, the ship had also solved the problem of integrating him into itself.

Gorgias looked into the control room. Myraa seemed unconscious inside the force bell. He reached out to the control unit and turned off the shield. Her eyelids fluttered as she struggled to remain standing. He seized her body before she could fall, walked her over to the command station and sat her down.

The ship would run its random course for a few hours, then return to the Snake.