George Zebrowski (34 page)

“I have not finished!” he shouted. “Dead worlds still cry out!” Earth had to pay for its crimes. Centuries of failure had to be redeemed.

“You will only destroy yourself,” Myraa said as the void contracted around him.

“That is no longer possible.”

“I have never lied to you.”

“Release me!” He struggled to draw strength.

“Come together in me!” commanded Myraa.

The whispers formed a net around him, but he broke through and fled from their deafening hisses.

Light slashed across the darkness, creating a horizon.

He flowed toward it, filled with dread at the renewed possibility of defeat. Fresh air swelled his lungs; wind combed his hair; a chill drizzle began to wash his face. He looked back and saw solid shadows dancing after him, drawing closer across the frozen waste. They were bringing him pain, elastic agonies capable of endless increase.

A shriek shot out from his throat as he strained to reach the burning horizon, where he could gaze again into the sea of fire and renew his strength.

The shadows encircled him as he ran, cutting him off from the dawn but keeping their distance. The heart of fire beckoned, but the blanket of night was too large and he would not run out from under it in time.

The circle of shapes pulled in closer around him. Long, thin blades caught the light, flashing as they struck, piercing him to make a wheel with his heart as the hub.

“Something must be wrong,” Poincaré said. “The ship is drifting.”

“It may be a trap,” Kurbi said. “When we get closer, he’ll back up and destroy a few more ships.”

“Or this may be our chance! Myraa may be diverting his attention.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Kurbi said. “What world is ahead of him now?”

The gray-white plenum flickered as Poincaré called up the charts. “He entered the Snake at this point, so the next system must be Izar. A rural planet, religious settlers like New Mars.”

Kurbi turned his head away and closed his eyes.

Gorgias strained to break the wheel.

The blades burned in his heart. The wind howled across the wastes, and the horizon seemed unattainable.

Somewhere, he knew, the ship was adrift, vulnerable to a well-timed attack.

The wheel was rigid before his will. Pain flowed through the blades.

He set the pain aside and seized the wheel. It rolled toward the horizon and flew over the edge.

The blades withdrew as the force-center surged through him, erasing his fear and renewing his strength. The orderly mindscape of the ship’s intelligence reappeared around him.

He scanned nearby jumpspace and saw that the Earth vessels were keeping their distance.

He slipped the ship into normal space and flared his will. The bubble of force appeared and expanded, glowing white hot. He made it larger, just to see how big it could get. It rushed outward with no drop in intensity.

He stopped the field at one hundred thousand kilometers. The ship still rode at its center. He felt the lethal bubble as if it were his own skin.

He glanced into the control room. Myraa was unconscious, slumped forward in the command station, exhausted from effort.

Izar was just ahead. He nudged the planet, stripping away its atmosphere, boiling the oceans, burning the land and buckling the continents. He increased the field’s intensity and vaporized the planet.

It was much too simple. He longed to see the faces of the Old Ones on Earth when they learned that their future was coming to an end, that the time would come when there would be no Earthborn in the Federation Snake. Earth’s history would come to a sudden halt, reduced to microdust drifting in the void; but they had to know what was happening to them. He would have to measure his actions to make sure of that.

His own future had been taken from him before he was even born. He was the only one among the survivors who had said no to Earth, who continued to say no, and would soon say the final no; that meant more than anything. His one small self was now unique, the greatest military force in all history; not even his physical destruction had stopped him from achieving this new state.

He would sweep triumphantly into Earth’s sunspace; every planet would burn; he might even destroy the sun. He would deny eternity to the old immortals of Earth; they had lived too long with the conviction that all time belonged to them.

“And then what?” Myraa asked.

He laughed. “Even your wisest did not suspect that I could do what I have done.”

“You may destroy us all.”

“I will not worship and cower as you do!”

“He’ll grow impatient,” Kurbi said. “It will take a long time to destroy all the worlds in the Snake one by one, so he’ll go on to Earth.”

Poincaré sighed. “He’ll have plenty of time later.” The Security Chief stood up and gazed at the main screen. “My impulse is to throw what we’ve got at him, no matter what it costs, just to do something. He’ll be in range of another world soon.”

“I know how you feel.”

“We’ll bypass him and run for Earth. Defenses have to be built up there. Maybe we can send heavier ships against him. Let’s hope he doesn’t tire of his butchery too soon.” He sat down and stared at the gray deck.

I must be there when Earth dies
, Kurbi thought, feeling a monstrous urgency stir within him.

“Suicide ships might stop him,” a voice said behind him.

Kurbi turned and looked at Birkut. The navigator shrugged. “If there were enough of them.”

“It might have been different,” his father’s voice said, “if he had been a rebel with a people behind him, to modify his aims, bring him closer to a reasonable center. Alone, frustrated, he is driven to attempt the impossible before an unforgiving enemy.”

The words had lingered in the Whisper Ship’s memory, waiting to strike at him like a snake from a dark cave.

Gorgias laughed. “Impossible? I’ve already done what the greatest Herculean generals failed to do!”

His father’s words were only bits of information. There was no way to reach into the random scatter of true death to tell him what he had accomplished. He almost wished that Myraa had been able to claim him, so he could see what his son was doing.

“Did I ask to hear this?” Gorgias asked.

YES, the ship answered.

Something in him had reached out to find the words; a part of him was a betrayer.

“Ignore such requests in future.”

NOTED.

Gorgias reached across the gray sea of jumpspace and examined the inhabited world of the system ahead. He caressed the planet with long bursts of exploring particles, sensing the twitching shapes of life on the obsidian surface. The harsh analogue of the world in normal space already suggested the bone-dryness of death. Passage through jumpspace had been for him a slow dying once, but now the sterile desert of jumpspace reminded him of his victory over death. Nothing could kill him now, not even if he wished it.

He recalled the pleasure of killing Commissioner Aren. The physical universe had obeyed his will. True, he needed Myraa, and the ship, but these were mere outcroppings of his will in the universe of his origin; he would not need them in time, when he learned to invade any living thing, control any thinking entity.

The planet’s cities twinkled as the ship emerged from jumpspace. The ice caps were bright; the oceans caught the yellow light of the double suns on the dayside.

Gorgias threw the blister of force outward. It expanded and touched the planet. Again the atmosphere was heated and torn away; the oceans boiled, the continents baked and buckled, releasing inner fires.…

He pulled back.

This one he would leave to break apart by itself; too quick an end cut short agony.

He watched the burning planet. Pockets of life struggled to survive; deep places sheltered the maimed and dying. Such little sparks of will, he thought, hanging on to life as they fell into the abyss. And for them it was death, true dying, with nothing on the other side. Millions burned and fell into death as he watched. The universe was too generous with life. But what could be expected of a mindless force-center?

This was nothing compared to the coming death of Earth, he told himself, looking forward to that feast of vengeance. Kurbi and the remnants of his pitiable fleet would be there, watching in despair, awaiting their turn.

Myraa gathered the dead.

She plucked individual sparks, passing them through herself into the cradle of inwardness. Unseen to Gorgias, the trickle again became a torrent.

But she could not save them all; for that she would have needed thousands of adepts. The blood of worlds was flowing too quickly, and she had to hurry; if Gorgias were to notice, he would destroy her shape and deny her the position needed for gathering, such as it was; other adepts were too far away to be of use.

The passing dead cried out as they fell into the pull of her rescuing stream. Some were insane by the time they were picked up; all were full of fear and lamentations. A long time would pass before they emerged from the darkness within themselves.

She felt Gorgias’s laughing hatred as he watched the world break into pieces, but she tried to ignore him as she worked; there was no time to oppose him now.

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ALL THESE MILLENNIA of humanity, Kurbi thought as he looked out over the ocean from his terrace. So few inner changes. Progress in government and living environments, vast potential for biological alterations, yet the human form retains its inertia, clinging to its identity, refusing to give up its evolution-imposed form and become something better. Expanded life spans, but the mind is the same, slowly filling with information which must be regularly wiped away. Forgetfulness was as real a death as any in times past, and rebirth as real a way of seizing the future as reproduction.

The Herculeans are our shame, he thought, staring up at the stars. The Cluster People were our children, our attempt at something better, but we destroyed them. Now they have sent back a single individual to topple our empire. He felt like a thief, returning to Earth to steal its last moments for himself. All those people who had left the Earth for the worlds of the Snake, about to die after centuries of living and building. We have failed to secure the future.

A dozen systems had died by the time he and Poincaré had returned to Earth. Others were dying as he stood here. He thought of his old room on New Mars, of Rensch, as if they still existed. Again, the terrible realization swept through him that Gorgias, or whatever he was now, did not crave conquest; he wished the destruction of all worlds settled by Earthpeoples; nothing else would satisfy him. And it was no longer only the wish of blind rage; he was doing it because he could do it.

And I helped him, Kurbi thought, shrinking into himself. My wishes, my feelings, my curiosities helped bring him to his greatest strength. Myraa’s explorations, at first a reaction against the Herculean Empire’s ambitions, had played into the hands of that past, infusing it with new strength. How stupid, Kurbi thought, to have seen her group as a mere religious cult.

Something stirred in the corner of his eye. He turned his head with a jolt, as if waking from a dream.

Dark figures waited around him. Images of the old immortals. He counted six.

“Can you do anything?” a low-pitched voice pleaded, almost growling.

“You know more than anyone,” another said, quavering. “All this,” he added, gesturing at the ring of sunspace settlements rising out of the dark ocean, “will perish!”

The growling voice rumbled in agreement.

Kurbi shook his head. “Nothing. The knowledge behind this weapon is beyond us. Even their Empire ignored it. Now it’s in the hands of one who knows how to use it.”

The dark shapes seemed to tremble.

“We cannot end!” a high voice cried out. “It cannot happen. Think! Why are you waiting? Why are you not out there?”

“Would you have us throw all our remaining forces into the fire?” Kurbi said, knowing that they did not care about the colony worlds. They would sacrifice the whole Snake to save Earth. What was life to them? A protracted endurance with pain edited out, memories rearranged, a persistence which could not imagine its own end. Where was the enlarged creativity of humankind’s native longings and intelligence, where was wisdom, where happiness and satisfaction? Long life might have brought all these things, he told himself, drowning out the whisper which insisted that nothing else had ever been possible, that this was all.

One of the figures came close. The starlight showed a thin human face with chocolate skin and large eyes. Long-fingered hands reached out and passed through Kurbi’s arm.

They’re children, he thought as the eyes searched his face, children afraid of evil.

“Rafael,” the thin lips said, “save us. You are the only one who can.…”

“I don’t know how.”

“You do, but you haven’t put your attention to it. Some part of you is holding back.”

“If you can suggest …”

The other shapes glided forward and crowded around him.

“Yes,” the growler said, “direct your attention and discover what must be done.”

“Wishes won’t work to help us,” Kurbi answered, reminding himself that Gorgias had made his power fantasies a real threat. He’s out there, Kurbi thought, slowed up only by his wish to be thorough.

“Discover!” the high-voiced Old One shrieked. “You must!”

We don’t deserve to survive, Kurbi thought, looking into their wide, staring eyes. Their hands shook at their sides like snakes.

“Leave me alone, there’s nothing I can do. Flee in your ships. Thousands of worlds wait outside the Snake.”

The dark faces considered. “Yes,” the high-voiced said at last, “that would be possible. Will you lead us?”