George Zebrowski (35 page)

“But our Earth,” the growler objected. “Our Earth will perish.”

“Go settle somewhere and wipe your memory,” Kurbi said impatiently.

“Wipe … Earth?” the growler asked.

Kurbi shrugged. “Might as well wipe it from your minds before it happens in reality. It will save you the pain.” Then he realized that Gorgias would track those who fled. He would hunt their thoughts and probe through their amnesia. Their frightened whispers would echo in the great bell of space-time; it would be easier to hide the quasars.

The Old Ones began to wail in a sick, wrenching moan, released by a final despair; it emanated from within them, where pride born of persistence was being broken.

The six uninvited shapes faded away.

Julian appeared.

“Where are you?” Kurbi asked.

“South Pole Security. I’m going out to Ring 24. Coming?”

“I suppose we should be there in person.”

“A flyer is on the way for you. What did they say?”

“They can’t cope, Julian.”

“I’ve had similar conversations. It’s become clear to them that they don’t control everything, or even run the world. We consult them, persuade them to agree to what must be done, but the creative impetus does not come from them. They’re grateful for the continuity.”

“All they have is self-consciousness and a long, selective memory. We should have been something else by now, Julian. Ours is a petrified species.”

Ring 24 was a dumbbell shape made from two pyramids joined at their apexes.

Kurbi listened to the transmissions from the Snake.

“What information do you have?” one face asked.

“What kind of danger?” asked another.

“Izar is gone, ships are missing. Is this a new Herculean invasion? Please advise, can we depend on Federation forces to defend us?”

“Please confirm.…”

“… twelve freighters missing …”

“Nothing remains in the New Mars System.…”

“Precept is gone!”

“… advise what preparations to make.…”

“Sagan IV does not answer.…”

The jumpspace chatter was endless. Screens flickered, one portrait replacing another. Deep-set eyes; heavy lips; pale skins; bald heads; silent faces, animated faces — jeering, shouting, pleading; skulls containing minds unable to cope with an overwhelming fact.

“Relays are sweeping the message through the Snake,” Julian said next to him, “so he’s bound to pick it up.”

“Why should he bother?” Kurbi said.

“He’ll talk to you, I’m hoping.”

What can I say? Kurbi asked himself. Shall I plead with him?

“I’m here, Kurbi,” a metallic voice said over the chatter of the screens.

Poincaré raised a hand. All other receptions were blacked out.

Myraa appeared on the main screen. Her eyes were open, but she was looking inward.

Gorgias’s voice came from the cabin, not from her mouth. “You’ve come to beg. Spare yourself the humiliation. I will destroy you along with your world and its sun.”

“Would you prefer to take me prisoner?” Kurbi asked.

Gorgias laughed. It sounded like a slow drumbeat on metal.

“What would change your mind?” Kurbi asked.

“Nothing. You know that.”

“There must be something we could give you. Name it.”

Gorgias laughed again. “But you’re about to give me everything!”

“What will you gain?” Poincaré asked.

“The satisfaction of existing in a universe without you and your kind.”

“We should have destroyed Myraa’s World,” Julian whispered.

Gorgias heard him. “But you didn’t, and now it’s too late to threaten me. You hesitated because you weigh gains and losses. You can never understand the beautiful simplicity of absolute power, of not having to measure advantages.”

“It takes no brains to be a glutton,” Poincaré said.

Myraa’s eyes blinked and closed.

Gorgias laughed faintly. “What do you hope to gain by provoking me? I am stronger than a black hole, or a quasar. A thousand of each could not stop me. Let me remind you that I have not yet destroyed as many of your worlds as you did of mine. You who took everything from me will pay everything! Have the dignity to die bravely.”

He broke the link.

The cries of the Snake flooded in again.

Gorgias listened.

Someone was walking around in his mind. He pulled away from the ship’s mindscape and looked into himself. Two figures came toward him from a great distance; his mother, Oriona, and his brother, Herkon.

“Go away!” he shouted.

But they drew nearer.

“You have nothing to say to me!”

Oriona shot toward him, invading his center, examining painful memories.

“You were cruel to your father,” she announced, “to Myraa. You burned the homes of innocent people, and now you are destroying whole worlds. You no longer care about justice, you only wish revenge, which has no end beyond selfish satisfaction.” She wrapped herself around his twinges of conscience and squeezed, seeking to give him pain.

“I don’t care,” he said, “pain is an old friend.”

Minds of all shapes appeared within him, as numerous as stars. He felt their scrutiny, their disdain.

“You are all fools!” he shouted. “So grateful for your existence! You worship a seething blindness, and you make no difference in the world from which you came. I have learned to do more than warm myself before the force-center. Go away, or I will find a way to destroy you all!”

“Gorgias,” Herkon called, “what do you have?”

“The strength of my hatred, the knowledge that it has always been justified, and now I will have the satisfaction of destroying those who murdered our kind.”

“But no happiness, Gorgias.”

“Happiness is vague and general. Satisfaction is specific. I will have what I have worked for!”

“And then?” Oriona asked tenderly.

“I will remake worlds, repopulate cities. I will be the heart of the reborn Cluster.”

“In a perishing universe?” she asked. “It was not made for endless life, or for knowing. It is a toy for young minds, which grow into greater realms.”

“I was not given what I should have had,” Gorgias insisted. “I am not finished here yet. But why should you care? If what you say is true, then leave me to do as I wish.”

“Turn away, son, turn away!”

“You’re so certain! Then make me see what you’re talking about!”

But the galaxy of minds was silent, convincing him that they had nothing to offer; they also lived in a predicament of some kind. Perhaps they needed him for a purpose?

Myraa appeared next to Oriona.

“Turn away, Gorgias,” she said, “follow us.”

“Go away,” he repeated.

Minds crowded around him suddenly, squeezing him toward nothingness.

The force-center flowed into him, helping him resist collapse. He held his space, counterbalancing the pressure, but unable to throw it back.

Suddenly he was in a line of soldiers on a battlefield, advancing toward a house on a hill. Orders barked inside his suit helmet. Dark ships floated in the sky, cutting across the troops with massive beams. Cries burst in his ears as he was pushed into a vise of bodies.

The house on the hill was hidden by a restraining field. He was there, he realized, watching his army die; and he was here, watching a beam sizzle across the ground. It reached him and he smelled burning in his helmet. The fire cut through his armor and plunged into his body, melting his heart, penetrating deeper, pumping pain for the eternity that it would take him to die.…

“But I did not die,” he whispered, listening to the screams of his soldiers.

“I am here,” Crusus said into his ear.

So Myraa had saved him after all.

Crusus entered him with knives of revenge, twisting, plunging, cutting. “Feel what I felt, my General! I gave you everything. How did you serve me? We waited centuries to be butchered!”

Oriona hovered nearby. “He is like you,” she said. “How do you like him?”

Crusus severed his head. Gorgias felt his body twitch. His mother picked up his head as he opened its eyes. Crusus was still raging over the body with his knives.

“You cannot hurt me!” Gorgias shouted, hanging by his hair from Oriona’s hand.

“Gorgias, stop,” Herkon pleaded.

Crusus changed into a hideous alien form. Jaws opened and crushed the headless corpse. Blood ran into the darkness.

“I am past fear,” Gorgias said as Oriona lifted him high and gazed into his eyes. “The rest of you have come into this realm like beggars, but I will become its master.”

She gave him a long questioning look, and for an instant her doubt became his own; then she hurled his head into the void.

He tumbled, laughing in triumph, knowing that his will was joined to the blind absolute. The force-center rose from behind the night. He fell into a close orbit around it and drew nourishment. His eyes burned, his hair flamed; the flesh flowed from his skull, but he felt no pain.

The meek could not imagine what he would dare.

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THE RING WAS THINNING.

Kurbi saw a group of worlds break formation and wink out into jumpspace. Others, he knew, were installing pushers and warpers. The rush for mobility would save lives in the short run, but sooner or later Gorgias would hunt down the fugitives.

So the empire of Earth was staggering to its end, dying of a war it had won centuries ago, he thought as he reclined on his terrace. The death blow would come from a god without a body, enforcing his will from beyond the grave.

No invading hordes battering at the gates of civilization. No complex economic struggle
. His historian’s brain insisted that Earth would fall to satisfy simple hatred, paying a thousand times the price it had exacted from the Herculeans.

What remained of the fleet was going out into the Snake, to take the Whisper Ship by surprise, if possible. The officers and crews were all volunteers, convinced that a successful defense was still possible, one way or another.

Rik was out there somewhere, fleeing with the worlds. His son had erased much of his memory by the time of Grazia’s death, becoming too much of a different person to be affected by the news.
I should have sought him out sooner
, Kurbi thought,
when he would still have known me
. Rik had no past inside him; that would not save him when Gorgias caught up with the fugitive worlds.
My past will come looking for you, but you will not know it
.

“You’re still determined to stay,” Julian said.

Kurbi saw the image out of the corner of his eye, but did not turn his head. “I belong here.”

“We’ll leave together, Raf.”

“And have him hunt us?”

Poincaré clenched his fists. “I can’t believe that you’ve given up like this!”

“There’s not much to live for anyway. Let him make a clean sweep.”

“You’ve never been free of that way of thinking,” Poincaré said, his voice tense and trembling. “Always ready to kick over the game board and make a quick exit.”

“Game is right. Why shouldn’t I rid myself of it? It throws us up against our limits as human beings too much. Is this all there is? We’re appalled as we ask the question.”

Julian shook his head. “I don’t know.…”

“Don’t you see?” Kurbi asked, sitting upright. “Gorgias has broken his limits more than once now. He’s almost fulfilled. By some quirk his desire has found all it needs to satisfy itself, and maybe more.…”

“What? He’s a strained, tormented rag of a personality, if you can still call him a person.”

“He’s shown us that there is more to the universe,” Kurbi continued, “than the shackles we’ve known. The myth of our history has us breaking one chain after another, but we’ve only moved away from genuine possibilities. Gorgias has entered a realm which has grown from roots deep in reality. Those roots probably spring from regions deeper than we can imagine. But the important fact is that they flower
elsewhere
, beyond the sorry range of our abilities. The Herculeans found the way, and we dismissed their discovery as some kind of cult.”

Julian looked exasperated. The pale light of the room from which his image was being cast emphasized the anxiety in his face.

“Don’t you see?” Kurbi insisted. “It’s important for our peace of mind to
understand
what is happening, even if there is nothing we can do.”

“You must be joking.”

“It’s the way I’ve lived my life,” Kurbi added.

Julian seemed to sit down in the air. “Fine! And you want to be consistent to the end. I’m sorry, but it’s just a way of quieting yourself before the death blow. That’s all I see.”

“Understanding is the only victory left to me,” Kurbi said, sitting back again.

Poincaré took a deep breath. “Okay, Raf. I want to hear how clear you can make all this. Not very, I suspect.”

“You’re not really interested.”

“Go ahead,” Poincaré said softly.

“The universe of matter is only an aspect of youthful consciousness,” Kurbi answered, “but, under certain conditions, consciousness can go on developing. Our cosmos is probably only one of many which organizes conscious intelligence out of the geometries of smaller, infinitesimal realms, and is abandoned when that intelligence matures, leaving behind an empty shell of run-down energies. Sometimes intelligence fails to make the climb and dies within the rotting fruit.”

“And we’re a failed universe.”

“We may become one if Gorgias isn’t stopped.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He’s directing his interest back into the cradle, instead of developing … outward. He’s using directly the power which underlies all things.”