George Zebrowski (16 page)

Few in the outworlds would weep over Marko Ruggerio. Gorgias had misjudged the level of pride on Wolfe IV. Petty officials would be nervous for a while, but the killing would be forgotten as soon as responsibility was dissipated.

The Herculean’s target had been Earth, where the creatures of conscience still fed deeply, and would not be so easily overcome. Earth would chew on the insult, fearful that one day Gorgias would be able to do more than wound its pride.

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“Because God put His adamantine fate

Between my sullen heart and its desire,

I swore that I would burst the Iron Gate,

Rise up, and curse Him on His throne of fire.”

— Rupert Brooke

THE WHISPER SHIP slipped from the dark ocean and floated slowly in the high winds, held steady in the grip of its drive field. Gorgias peered ahead. The vessel entered the sunny stillness of the storm’s eye and switched into jumpspace.

The hunters would be looking for a ship that would move away from the planet before entering jumpspace. Coordinate changeover was usually a dangerous procedure, given the quantum indeterminacy of distances within otherspace, but it was well within the ship’s design limits.

Smudges appeared on the scanner. It had not taken the hunters long to guess what he had done.

“Switch back,” he said.

The ship drifted in normal space. He counted to five.

“Back again — minimum speed.”

The ship switched and he looked ahead. The hunters had gone past him in their eagerness. It would be a moment before they noticed.

“Run at the star,” he ordered, expecting the ship to protest, but it obeyed.

The trick was fairly complex, and he doubted that the hunters would have the courage to follow him; even if they decided to do so, they would be too late. They would learn what he had done, but they would fail to fix his direction after he came out on the other side.

There was some danger in it; he would be playing with the star’s various fields, which continued as forces even in hyperspace, but his trail would end in the heart of a furnace.

A three-dimensional chart appeared on the screen as he approached the star. Animated lines of color marked the gravito-spatial and magnetic forces belonging to the star in normal space-time, dancing to mirror the reality of the star’s equilibrium between the gravitational force of collapse and that of thermonuclear expansion. In one moment the representation was a series of circles, in the next cubes within cubes with superimposed triangles. The chart was an adequate quantitative model, an example of flow geometry, necessary to the ship’s navigational programs, capturing the star’s essential reality.

The lines of the schematic turned red, signaling that the ship had entered the star. Gorgias gripped the armrests and tensed; he was, after all, penetrating a major stress point of reality, where even a Whisper Ship might be torn apart if something went wrong.

He watched the screen, searching for signs of instability in the transit path. The model pulsed, heartlike in its red abstraction, bloodless compared to the awesome heart of fire existing in the familiar continuum.…

The primary colors of the model reappeared as the pulsations slowed. The ship emerged on the other side. Gorgias relaxed, knowing that he could do it again.

“Home,” he said to the ship.

All there is of it
, he thought bitterly. Home was still his father’s base, even after his death. It had been another universe then, yesterday and twenty-five years ago; another person had performed the burial; another person had made the vow of vengeance before stepping into the tortured sleep of the stasis field. Silently, Gorgias renewed his allegiance to the fury imprisoned within his chest; one day its full energy would be unleashed and his ancient enemies would flee before him.

The screen cleared as he looked for the marks of his pursuers; the gray screen was empty, revealing only the cavernous unreality of jumpspace, with its black suns and shifting perspectives. As he watched, the continuum turned ash-white, throwing a glare into the control room; passing through this space of skeletal reality was still a slow dying.

Gorgias tried to look forward to his arrival at the base. There he would add more memory units to the ship’s intelligences; he would continue his exploration of the arsenal; perhaps this time he would find the weapon that would give him superiority over the Earthborn. The arsenal contained thousands of weapons which he had not yet mastered; one day he would be called upon to teach others their use; he would have to be ready.

He thought again of the Herculean army, wondering what life was like for it in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Someday he would go in search of that army, and it would become part of his offensive strategy.…

“
If it still exists
,” his father’s voice said within him.

The army was probably in stasis, waiting, battle-ready; with all of its equipment and twenty divisions of fighting men, it had probably settled an entire planet.…

Gorgias got up and went aft to his quarters, where he ate a meal from the mess dispenser and went to bed, setting the controls for zero-g.

For a time his sleep was unbroken, but later troublesome images appeared. He was poised above a great abyss, with a large weight on his back, crushing him, pushing him into the black space below; he was frozen in his dream, unable to wake up.…

An age passed. He was looking across the plane of the galaxy to the glowing hub. Huge fireflies clustered around it, the globular clusters in their orbits; one of those jeweled groupings contained the cinder which had once been his home.…

Thoughts crossed the void and struggled to enter him; he reached out, but failed to embody them completely.…

Myraa’s eyes opened and he looked out from within her, sensing her presence around him, distinct from his mental space. Suddenly he was thrown back from her eyes, to fall endlessly toward a floor of ice.…

Julian Poincaré, now Earth’s highest-ranking intelligence officer, appeared on Kurbi’s screen. The subspace link blinked and remained steady.

“Well — has he escaped again?” he asked in a voice lower than usual. There was no hint of the stocky man’s unsettling sense of humor.

Kurbi told him about Gorgias’s new maneuver. “There’s almost no chance of there being a recognizable trail. He might have gone off in any direction.”

The subspace image wavered again, as if Poincaré’s impatience had suddenly disturbed the link with Earth.

“He’ll turn up again,” Kurbi said, knowing that it would mean more loss of life. “We were lucky to have confirmed his presence at all.”

“Where next?”

“Myraa’s World — I don’t know when, but I’m certain we can catch him there sooner or later.”

Julian shook his head. “You’ve been saying that for decades.”

“We have pursued the Whisper Ship from there.”

“Only once — unsuccessfully. I may believe you, but I have trouble communicating my faith to the big thumbs around me.…”

The sense of urgency quickened again in Kurbi. He had to find the Herculean, talk to him face-to-face, make him understand the sense of retrieving what was still valuable in his civilization. If Gorgias died, a key to the past would perish with him. It would be difficult to understand Federation history fully without absorbing the evidence in his control; and with him would also die all the stimulating differences of culture which all civilizations needed to renew their vitality. Three centuries ago, the Federation had destroyed a proud enemy, and had turned its back on the survivors. It was this loss of Carthage that haunted Kurbi, making him feel personally cheated. The conflict had revealed only one side of Herculean culture. What about the philosophers, scientists, musicians and poets? Where was the record of their work? Gorgias might not be aware of what had survived into his keeping.

“Couldn’t you have followed him through the star?” Julian asked.

“Perhaps — but by the time we would have passed through, the Whisper Ship would have been out and gone, leaving us no direction to follow. The star will have erased any of the usual signs of his passing. There might be a trace farther out, but he will be far away and covering his tracks by the time we find it.”

“He’s certainly put a lot of space between his tricks in the past,” Julian said.

“You want to see him dead. Admit it.”

“Yes — if he goes on killing. You think that yourself. There won’t be any choice.”

Kurbi thought of the Herculean survivors on Myraa’s World. Gorgias was the kind of vigorous and intelligent leader who might pull them out of their stoicism of defeat.

“Maybe you need a rest,” Julian said. “When was the last time I saw you bodily?”

“I’ve got to see this through to the end.”

“Yours or his?”

“I’m going to Myraa’s World.”

“I won’t stand in your way, up to a point — but if you lose a ship, or if he strikes and there is a greater loss of life, someone will have me for breakfast.”

“They’ll spit you out,” Kurbi answered. “You’d taste too bitter.”

Poincaré snorted, threw up his hands and broke the link.

Kurbi stared at his own face in the shiny gray surface of the screen. The lines were just beginning to come into his face at the age of seventy-five, but his hair was still black; his appearance would not change significantly until he was well past two hundred, if he did nothing; with rejuvenation he would stay as he was indefinitely.

He tried to imagine his life as it might be after the hunting of young Gorgias was over — the Herculean was young only by Herculean standards, yet Kurbi always thought of him as younger than himself. He thought of Grazia, dead these three long decades … frail, transparently skinned Grazia with her long black hair and large sad eyes, an exotic flower torn suddenly from the garden of Earth. He pictured her swimming gently in the pool, climbing out to lie naked on the grass; and he remembered the distant fear that had crossed his mind then, the future casting its shadow backward into a happier past —

—
The glider sank suddenly toward the cliff face.

He was grateful that he had been unable to see its shape crumple up against the rock. Looking back, the chain of events leading to her death seemed inevitable, bound with an iron determinacy because there was nothing he could ever do, even in an infinity of time, to change them.

He recalled his time of wandering as he had searched for peace in the worlds of Earth’s ring, moving from one habitat to another; he might have removed the terrible memory, but that would have meant losing too much else, becoming another person.

The hunting of Gorgias had given him something useful to do, enlisting his intellect and feelings in the solving of a problem that might have no solution. The sense of urgency was always there — Gorgias was killing Federation citizens, and it was possible, though unlikely, that he might in time persuade enough outworlds to revolt against Federation authority.

The best solution would be for Gorgias to surrender, hand over his ship and base and retire to Myraa’s World, where he would help revive his people’s will to increase their numbers, so that one day they could return to the Hercules Cluster and rebuild their civilization along peaceful lines.

Suddenly Kurbi realized that the future he wanted for Gorgias was the sort of thing a man might want for his children, but the reality threatened to be different; Gorgias seemed as unreachable as Grazia.

Kurbi could not abandon the hunt. It would have to end in a constructive way, or with Gorgias’s imprisonment, or death. That final alternative filled Kurbi with dread and sorrow. The Herculean’s hatred was a natural force, self-reliant, moving by sudden inspiration, by impulses surer than intellect — admirable in its own way; but Kurbi knew that he would not shrink from killing the Herculean if it became necessary; he would kill him for what he had done to New Mars; he would kill him because he could not change him.

They would hail the act on Earth, and lament the loss of the Herculean base; the collective shoulders of the Federation would shrug at the death of a rival.
It will be my failure if we kill him
, Kurbi thought. Surely Gorgias could not forever resist capture by a starflung civilization?
He might commit suicide
. The only chance to save him would come as the result of a long personal confrontation.…

The screen lit up. “Still no trail,” Milut said. “It’s a dead end.…”

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THE WOODED HILLS were a green blur; rain-covered leaves reflected yellow sunlight in a chain of sunbursts running before the Whisper Ship.

Three thousand light-years along the winding corridor from Earth, Izar’s only navigational link with the Federation was an old-fashioned beacon — a lighthouse radiating into otherspace, guiding infrequent jumpships to what was clearly a fledgling settlement. Gorgias had noticed the signals while still in whisper drive — three concentrated beams penetrating toward the galactic perimeter; they were stationary, unlike the sweeping beams usually used for otherspace navigation; and they came from a planet, rather than from a relay in space.

Izar’s possible vulnerability had caught his interest, giving him an excuse to linger. The deserted levels of his father’s base could wait. Izar was inhabited by enemies — more than enough reason to scout and strike; no one would expect him here, especially if he had not planned it himself.

He felt the burden of isolation lift as the ship landed near the edge of a large clearing. He sat back and dreamed of people coming across the grass to welcome him, involving him with their looks, words and feelings.

Warm air circulated through the ship. He got up and went aft to the open side lock.

He stepped out and looked at the huge waxy leaves on the trees. The air was filled with the smell of growing things; sunlight was a veil on the greenery; wind stirred the trees with a soft rustling sound.