George Zebrowski (3 page)

Gorgias lay down and tried to sleep, struggling to reach a deep calm, but rest charged a toll of memory before releasing him into its quietest realm. He was on Myraa’s World for the first time. “Is this home?” he asked his father. No, it was another place, far from their enemies. Here the surviving Herculeans might live in peace. A green field showed a pit, a wound cut in the grass. Bodies lay in the pit, the corpses of Herculean animals, those that had been unable to adjust to the new planet. Later, fleeing warships had arrived, burning the grass into desert with their makeshift jets; only the crudest planetfall was left to them after their strained gravitics had failed.

Spring light was streaming through Myraa’s window. Beams walked ghostly on the floor. Whole ships had been gutted to build the house on the hill. Sickness, suicide and lack of provisions had decimated the survivors, soldier and specialist alike; no hand or brain remained now that could repair, operate, or even understand the dead fleet. Only the Whisper Ship ran itself, demanding little direct understanding of its systems for effective operation.

Beams of steel passed through his body, pinning him in a place beyond sleep. There was no pain and no possibility of movement; in a few moments there would be … nothing.

He awoke and listened to the perfect silence of the cabin, imagining that the wintriness of hyperspace was increasing, pressing in on the ship, and would soon freeze it into immobility within the gray continuum. The cabin smelled of cold metal. He closed his eyes again and thought of entering stasis for … a thousand … two thousand years. Would the Federation still exist after ten thousand years? Would the machines maintain the stasis field for that long? What kind of universe would he find after a million years? No revenge would be possible for him in that universe. To step into it would require no more than a subjective moment of sleep, and all his purpose would be left behind. The idea filled him with a sense of loss. He saw himself going alone across time, the past a black pit behind him, drawing him backward, pulling him closer each time he fell asleep; one day he would not wake in time to save himself.

Then all thoughts and dreams left him, as he knew they would, as they always had; but again he wondered if he had won, or if a tide had simply gone out.

During his second watch he saw the ship’s ghost on the screen, running ahead at a fixed distance. He wondered if an insubstantial copy of himself was sitting before the screen in that phantom vessel, watching a still more distant illusion, and if his father was resting in the aft quarters there also.

When he slept after his watch, the ship turned to glass, letting in the ghastly gray-white light from beyond, the glow of an overcast creation or the underside of a universe forever turned away from the living.

Opening his eyes, he longed for starlight, for sight of worlds, for living things. He looked at his hands. His skin was growing pale here, as if the few days had really been years. What was time in jumpspace? Perhaps time was lost in transit, then regained at the moment of exit, leaving in the traveler only the memory of long imprisonment.

He closed his eyes again. Memory was bare and clean, as stony as the halls and chambers of the base. He felt pity for himself, for his father, for Oriona imprisoned on Myraa’s World, for his brother who had died there. Only revenge was left; nothing else would fill him up completely and quiet his hunger, nothing else would lead to renewal for his people. The only way to redeem the past was to bring it into the present and use it to control the future; he had to make memory a material thing, a force that would lash out at the Earthborn, making it impossible for them to ignore his demands. Revenge was the only way to kindle recognition in those who had taken everything from him, leaving this gray present, an old man and a black future.

If I do not reach out to hurt, he thought, I will not want to live.

A shadowed face looked down at him, and he knew that he would cease to be if it turned its gaze away. Again the pit of things past pulled him in, closer this time; he reached for a handhold to keep himself from falling in, but he woke up before he could grasp it.

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THE ASHES of jumpspace faded; the black coals caught fire and became bright stars again. Nearby, the sun of Myraa’s World burned with a yellow-orange life, its shouting light filling the screen, humbling the observer who had just emerged from limbo.

I have reached the complexity of hating myself, the older Gorgias thought. My son will begin to hate me and I will not want to live. I am not sure that his plans will be ineffective, I have simply lost … my taste for war. Reproaches rose in his brain, the dark shapes of Herculean soldiers going into battle, each one crying out for him to remember his training, his loyalty, the meaning of cowardice and treason.
I am not guilty
, he said to the shapes. Too much had changed.

Myraa’s World grew large on the screen until it took up the whole view. The ship cut into the atmosphere and circled halfway around the planet before dropping to a few kilometers above the ocean.

His son came in and stood behind him as the screen showed the land ahead. The water grew shallow, revealing sunlit bottom. In a few moments the ship was past the rocky beach and rushing low over the land.

Oriona. He wondered how she would greet him this time. How would she greet her son? Would she continue to judge in her silent way? If she spoke to him, what would he say to her, what could he say to her after thirty years? She had lived those years while he had stolen them — stolen them from her and from himself. He would not see those years in her face; few Herculeans below the age of five hundred showed signs of age.

The ship turned north, running over worn mountains and grassy valleys. The yellow afternoon sunlight stained the greenery, making it look blue in patches.

“We’re almost there,” his son said quietly, almost as if he were afraid.

We’re almost home, Gorgias thought. It always surprised him to think of Myraa’s World as home; in a way it was home, the gathering place of almost all remaining Herculeans; it was home because Oriona was here, and because he was here with his son, however brief the visit; it was home because his son had once asked him if it was home, and he had lied.

The hill and house came into view. A circular design of panoramic windows drank in the western sunlight, though some shade was provided by six elegant trees standing in a carpet of tall grass. He saw that the trees were taller, their trunks larger. The branches were thicker with curving needles, and the red cones were as bright as the gem sands of New Anatolia’s beaches.

The ship circled once and landed in a hover at the bottom of the hill in back of the house, where the evening shadow would cloak it.

He turned and looked at his son, but there was no sign of shared feelings in the younger man’s face. For a moment Gorgias was afraid that his son would guess his state of mind and see it as yet another sign of weakness, but the other was already turning away to leave the ship.

He got up and followed his son out of the control room to the side lock. The mechanism had already cycled and they stepped out into a warm south wind which greeted them with the scent of living things. The effect was almost a shock after the sterility of the base and jumpspace.

The hill was a thirty-degree climb on a dirt footpath. His son reached the door first and waited. They stood together for a minute until the door opened. Inside, they walked to the front room through a narrow corridor.

“There’s no one here,” his son said as they passed by the open bedroom door.

The black floor was dustless, as if someone had just cleaned it. The chairs sat alone, facing the massive bowed windows, waiting for visitors who would come out of time to seat themselves; the silence seemed eternal.

“Welcome.”

They both turned and saw Myraa standing in front of the entrance to the corridor. She wore a simple blue robe which matched her eyes. A hood hid her long brown hair.

“Welcome,” she repeated, “I knew you were coming.”

She could not have known, he thought, but it gives her a sense of power to say so.

“Where’s Oriona?” his son asked.

Myraa took a few steps into the room and said, “Oriona is no longer living —”

The sentence stopped for an eternity, preventing him from hearing the rest.

“ — as you know it. It was her wish.”

His son went up to her. “Wish? What are you talking about? How did it happen — an accident? Was she murdered?”

“It was her wish,” Myraa said. “She left nothing for you, and she does not want to speak with you now.”

“What are you saying?” his son asked. “Tell me where she is — is she dead or not?”

“She exists elsewhere, whether you accept it or not. I am telling you this so that you will calm yourself.”

His son turned to him. “What is she saying?”

“Their belief is that, well — people are absorbed into others, like herself, becoming multiple personalities. I’ve never paid the idea much attention. Oriona is dead — Myraa is trying to … excuse me.” He closed his eyes and felt a warmth spread through his body. He felt his head bow and a freezing weakness entered his muscles. He recovered and opened his eyes. Turning, he sat down in the nearest chair and looked out the window.

Behind him, he heard his son strike Myraa across the face.

“Liar! What has happened?”

“I’ve told you,” Myraa said, and there was no anger in her voice.

“Suicide?”

“No, but it was her wish.”

“Do you hear yourself — which was it?”

“You’ve heard the truth.”

“Explain it to me.”

“She who was your mother lives … in a different way.”

Oriona
, Gorgias said to himself as he looked out the curving window,
now only your name is left to me
. A gust of wind shook the tree near the house, hurling a few red cones against the window in front of him.

“You’ll tell me,” his son was saying, “you’ll tell me what you mean.”

Stillness returned to the room, as if time had run backward to the moment when they had come in.

Then he heard a rush of air and a thud. He turned and saw that his son had kicked Myraa in the stomach. She lay on the floor, clutching her belly without a sound. He gave her a disgusted nudge with his boot, turned and sat down in the other chair facing the window.

“Oriona’s death has affected her. Did you think before you hit her?”

“You didn’t try to stop me.”

He closed his eyes and turned his head away to keep his son from seeing the tears threatening to well out of his eyes.
Oriona
, he said to himself, almost singing the name.
So few, so few Herculeans left
.

“What is it?” his son asked.

Oriona, Oriona, I’ll never see you again. All that might have changed between us is now impossible. How could that have been taken from us?

He opened his eyes and turned to his son. “Go pick her up.”

The younger man laughed, and a look of contempt came into his eyes. “You’ve lost your mind. She lives here and does nothing but invent lies! We have only her word that Oriona is dead.”

Alive — maybe she was somewhere outside walking, nothing more. In a moment he would get up and go find her
. Then he realized how long it would be before he accepted her death; the slightest hope was a shock, pushing him into wish fulfillment.

“I pity you both,” Myraa said from the floor. She sounded like Oriona.

“Dear father, we should be preparing for war!”

“At least her lies keep alive the few of us who are left.”

“You and I live without her.”

“She keeps the Federation from killing those who stay with her.”

“How — by being meek and cowardly? They could all be killed in a few minutes.”

“Then why haven’t they done it?”

“The Earthborn are fools,” his son said, “nothing more.”

“Then being humble is a way to survive.”

Myraa got up and came to stand between them. “Look,” she said as she gazed out the window.

Wearily, the older man got up and stepped to the window; his son joined him.

At the bottom of the hill, a procession was starting to make its way up to the house, thirty people marching single file with hands linked. Each wore the black body garment of the Herculean military, but with no insignia. A body without a head, the older Gorgias thought, but they live while their leaders rot.

“What are they doing?” his son asked.

“They are your brothers and sisters,” Myraa said. “All that your mother was is mirrored within them. She is more alive than ever.”

“Idiotic nonsense,” his son said.

Escape
, the old Herculean thought. To leave all known worlds behind, to go outside the narrow Snake of worlds strung between Earth and the Cluster …

“It’s true,” Myraa said.

He thought of the worlds nearest Earth, where power for work was plentiful, where the only problem of life was what to do with one’s time. There the problems of longevity were directing a different form of natural selection, one in which only the most ingenious and creative individuals would survive into advanced ages, beyond the one-thousand-year mark, while the rest died of accident and ennui. He remembered his raids against a number of those worlds just after the war’s end, when his infant son and Oriona were hiding on the planet which later came to be called Myraa’s World. He remembered the contempt he had felt for the long-lived, useless Earthpeople he had seen. He had disliked killing these temporal drifters. A pair of eyes, a face, an expression of vacant worry — images of various individuals still lived inside him. Too many had seemed content to die. He wondered if long life gave powerful individuals a proprietary view of reality.

Vaguely he noticed that his son was about to strike Myraa again. She retreated from him and his son followed until they were behind him. He heard the blow, followed by two dull sounds. Myraa and his son were struggling on the floor. Children playing, he thought.