George Zebrowski (7 page)

“They’ve dropped it in my lap,” Poincaré said. “What do you think we should do?”

“Ask our military antiquarians.”

“I’m one of them — so are you, to a degree.”

“Well?”

“I say go after the ship with a small force, hunt him down, keep a larger force on call to come running when we’ve found him.”

“What’s your problem then?” Kurbi asked.

“I want you with me. I thought that much was obvious. Raf, you have a feel for Herculean civilization. I don’t want this to be a completion of genocide. I think you can help me save whatever may be worth saving.”

“I’d say that was a charitable way of thinking about it, considering all the carnage the Herculean has caused. Do I have a choice?”

“If possible,” Poincaré said, “I want the Whisper Ship and its occupants captured alive. Everyone I know feels the same. They’re not altruists or historians or bleeding-heart Chards — they’re curious, somewhat greedy men, who want the ship and its base, just to see what’s there. I wouldn’t mind playing with a few Herculean war toys myself.” Poincaré took a deep breath. “Besides, it’s great entertainment to think of capturing these rogues. We’ll exhibit them, question them, try them, inter them for life.”

“The enemy’s face is fascinating,” Kurbi said, “especially when he is in short supply. You want me to go out and find Gorgias?”

“You still want to, don’t you?”

“There’s Grazia to consider — it would be dangerous. I would be giving up a life of travel and reflection.”

“There’d be travel, and you can test what you’ve been reflecting about. You would also be helping to save lives.”

Kurbi shrugged. “Does that mean so much, Julian, with so many dying by choice?”

“The ones who died out there made no choice.”

“Life seems to be most precious when threatened. Take danger away, and a whole starry civilization goes to sleep.”

“Exactly,” Poincaré said. “You and I know that we need all the waking up we can get. This terrorist might be doing us a favor.”

“I don’t think he would appreciate your view of him.”

“Now you’re sounding like Grazia.”

“I sometimes wonder if I know what I want,” Kurbi said. “Life seems to possess a fundamental flaw, especially if you know it can be prolonged indefinitely.”

“What flaw is that?”

“An inability to provide lasting satisfaction.” He looked out across the bright morning and saw Grazia’s glider come sweeping in from the ocean. In a minute or two she would pass over the house. Suddenly the craft dropped below the seaside cliffs and he could not see it. The updraft would hurl it skyward again, and she would hurtle in over the house as she had done so many times before.

Kurbi picked up the half-finished glass of grape juice and finished it. “Won’t you have something with me, since you’re here in the flesh?”

“No thanks. Well, what do you say?”

“I don’t know right now, Julian. Let me think about it.”

“I won’t try and sugarcoat it — we may both get killed.”

“I’m well aware of that,” Kurbi said. He got up. The glider was not coming up into view.

“What’s wrong?”

“The glider hasn’t come up over the cliffs.”

Poincaré got up also and they went to the terrace steps that led down to the path. In a moment Kurbi was running across the grass to the cliff’s edge a quarter of a kilometer away. Poincaré caught up with him just in time to steady him at the edge.

“There,” Julian said, pointing.

The glider was in the water, one wing broken.

“She took this updraft so many times.…”

“Let’s get down there,” Julian said. “Better still, I’ll go down and you call the medics.”

Kurbi turned and walked quickly up to the house, feeling that his body was not his own.

“Hurry!” Julian called after him.

She had fallen to the rocks after hitting the cliff; the sea had battered her body until she was beyond repair. There was no possibility of freezing the remains or of restarting the body’s regenerative systems; only cloning remained, and he had rejected the idea. The person who would have come to him bearing Grazia’s appearance and genetic structure would not have been Grazia, only her twin sister. For many others that would have been enough, but for him it would have been a mockery of his love for her.

He sat alone in the darkened living room and tried to choke his grief, compress it to a point and squeeze that point out of reality. Outside, the sky blazed, hurling spears of starlight through the clear wall between the living room and terrace. The glider sank in his mind and he reached out with invisible hands to stop it from hitting the cliff. She had been falling as he had talked with Julian, and he had known it; she might even have been conscious after hitting the sea rocks.

It would have been better, he thought, if she had been on the interstellar liner. That would have made more sense; better the explosive decompression of the void than the bloodying rocks; better murder than mindless chance. Anything was preferable to being reminded of frailty and the indifference of physical reality; the intended act was always superior to the unintended event.

Stupid thoughts, he told himself. Maybe he should go and help Poincaré trap his gadfly; maybe it would help him forget. It would be almost … as if he were searching for Grazia again.

He got up and went out on the terrace. The sky made him feel small. For a moment he felt that he understood the feelings of the outworlders, for whom life was joined to strenuous effort; out there living was valuable and dying meaningful. There they would laugh at the manner of Grazia’s death; there life was stretched between demanding limits and did not try to be more; there life spent itself so completely that little regret was possible at its end.

He thought of his son Rik, who had not come to Grazia’s funeral service, and who had refused to talk with him or share his sorrow. It would do no good to search for him among the diverse worlds of the ring; he would not recognize his son if he saw him.

Rik had never reconciled himself to the fact that he had been born of natural parents and in a fairly ancient way, while all his peers in the sun settlements were creative composites drawn from genetic-bank materials. Kurbi blamed himself for letting the boy leave Earth at an early age; in the ring he had come under the overwhelming influence of a myriad of styles. Earth could never be the same for him again.

In a way Rik was right; only a small portion of humanity lived on Earth; an even smaller portion lived the older life, which accepted leisure but little biological alteration. Perhaps, as Rik believed, the acceptance of the unmodified human form limited one’s range of experiences and exercise of creative powers; while the newer, variegated humanity, Rik claimed, had overcome the old discontents.

Suddenly Kurbi was sure that he would join Poincaré, but the feeling passed; what he really wanted to do, he admitted, was to wander away from the solar system and explore the worlds of the Federation Snake. He wanted to see how people lived, and if they were happier. Julian could do without him for a time.

Grazia
, he said silently. The ring of worlds in the sky blurred into a band of light as tears filled his eyes, while another part of him cursed the fact of human dependency and the insufficiency of all things.

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“As to what happened next … when men are desperate no one can stand up to them.”

— Xenophon

THE STILLNESS in the control cabin was oppressive. The ship’s motion through the gray vastness seemed to be an imprisonment within a static medium. That the ship was moving was something he
knew
; but his body felt only confinement.

His father came in and stood behind him. “Where are we going now?” he asked.

“I think we’ve lost the pursuers, but I don’t want to lead them back to the base if I’m wrong. We’re going back to Myraa — later we’ll go to the base to pick up some equipment I want.”

“What do you have in mind?” His father’s tone was almost friendly, as if he were another person.

“What do you care?”

“I’m sorry I can’t feel the way you do. Can you feel how sorry I am?”

“How can you bring yourself to care about the deaths of our enemies?”

“I can’t help it — it’s been so long. What can those alive now know of the old struggle?”

“I’m going to leave you at the base — unless you still want to help.”

“If something happens to you, I will never be able to leave the base. Leave me with Myraa instead.” His father’s voice was almost a whisper.
He’s inside me
, Gorgias thought,
I’ll never get rid of him
. “I think I might like living with Myraa and the others.”
Punish him
,
don’t give him what he wants
.

“I’ve changed my mind — we’ll go back to the base first. I’ll need you to help me load and handle two or three gravitic units. You do know something about them, don’t you?”

“Yes, very well,” his father said, “but later you must leave me on Myraa. It’s what I want now.”

Gorgias turned around in his station chair.

“Must — there is little that I must do. I’ll see.” The old Herculean was trying to manipulate him now.

“I’ll stay in the aft cabin,” his father said and left the control area.

As he watched the bulkhead door slide shut, a sudden fear gripped Gorgias, as if he had been cut off from everything real. The past was shrinking away from him, leaving him alone and naked before a stone wall of infinite height and thickness, a structure that he would never be able to penetrate. He could not imagine what lay on the other side, but he knew that he desired it above everything else. He turned back to the screen and closed his eyes to shut out the timelessness of jumpspace; visualizing the wall before him, he made an effort to pierce its substance. His eyes came up against a fine texture of sandy pits and scars, where a nameless weathering had worked to breach the stone.…

He opened his eyes, suddenly aware that he had been dozing. The screen was filled with the gray-white light of the continuum, casting its pallor into the cabin. He looked at his hands. The skin seemed dead and dry, as if the flesh were about to fall away from the bones.
Everything in jumpspace is dead; everything that passes through dies a little
. He rubbed his hands together and they fell away from his arms.…

He sat up and realized that he had been dreaming about being awake. The screen was a normal gray with black stars; passage home was a quarter over and there was no sign of hunters.

He got up and paced the cabin, dreaming of the new sortie.

As the universe reappeared on the screen, the Hercules Cluster took up half the field of view ahead, a globe of fireflies exploding out from a center of concentrated light. Within a half hour the Cluster became the entire universe as the ship penetrated toward the base star inside.

Within another hour the concealing cloud was behind the ship and the dead world of the base floated on the screen. The ship brought itself in low over the scarred surface and drifted into the receiving tunnel through the sequence of locks, sliding finally into its familiar berth.

Home
, young Gorgias thought bitterly,
all there is of it
.

Once, the core of the Empire had consisted of twenty worlds, all dead now. He still remembered the roll taught to him by his father: New Anatolia, Capital of the Empire; Gorgias, home of the Empire’s creators; Vis and Sivat, worlds of the mental arts; Lash and Bram, planets for soldiers; Indra, the water world; Avat and Rishna, where armorers built the instrumentalities of war; Rud and Panis, shipbuilding planets, where a few inspired designers, together with a team of fleeing armorers, had built the two known Whisper Ships; Nahus and Ush, places for the arts and architecture; Ganesa, a world for poets and songsingers; Manus, a world for historians and computer libraries; Yama, the wilderness where young soldiers went to test themselves; Jas, Ulys and Mizon, outer worlds for astronomers, physicists and scientific researchers of every kind. All this within a space of fifty light-years. The Cluster’s diameter of a hundred light-years contained ten thousand times as many stars as any equal volume of space. Here was room to grow, to concentrate creative energies, to create the greatest civilization in the galaxy; no wonder the Cluster had earned the Federation’s envy. Here the Herculean Empire would come to be again.

He got up from the station and went aft to the side lock, which was already open. He stepped out into the stillness and looked around. The lights were still on around the stony berth. The metal door leading out from the chamber of six berths was still open. Suddenly he felt love for the base; it was strong and constant; self-maintaining, it would last forever.

His father came out and stood beside him. “What will you need me for?” he asked.

“I’ll need you to help me load two gravitic units and a tug-scooter.”

“Right now?”

“Yes — that’s all I came for.”

Gorgias led the way from the berth, through the metal door and down the long corridor into the war room, around the table to another door. Pulling it open, they went through and followed a downward-sloping passage which led into a supply warehouse composed of a hundred interlocking chambers. There were a dozen levels below this area; the lowest floor housed the life-support devices, which were powered by the thermal energy of the planet’s core. As long as this world remained warm inside and the homeostatic slave intelligences continued to channel energy to the various systems, the base would live, its synthesizers producing air and foodstuffs, more than he would ever need. The berth would stock the ship with sufficient synthesizer mass and make subtle adjustments and repairs in the sealed submolar systems that received the energy to run the drive.

At times it disturbed him to know that he understood so little of the ship or the base’s workings, but the great builders and armorers were gone and there was no one to teach him. Where, for example, was the power source for the Whisper Ship? Somewhere in the Cluster, but where? Where was the other ship, if there was one? Given enough time, he might come to understand more of what the base contained; but only the growth of a new population of Herculeans would be capable of retrieving the legacy of the past, bringing all the skills and knowledge out of the records and technical examples back into the container of living individuals, who could then shape new developments.