George Zebrowski (6 page)

“You’re the expert on the Herculeans,” Poincaré said.

“The corps will have something to do.”

“And you too.”

“What are your thoughts about this?” Kurbi asked.

“I’m worried about where the ship will turn up next. It may be soon.”

“I think so too,” Kurbi said. He felt wide-awake suddenly.

“As ranking intelligence officer, I’m issuing warnings — we can expect more violence.”

“As long as it’s out in the colonies, I don’t think anyone in Chambers will care,” Kurbi said.

“I’ll try to throw a scare into them. I want ships and resources, and I want you. If they think the ship will pose a threat to close-in worlds, they’ll give me what I want.”

“Me?” Kurbi asked. He had never thought of his interest in Herculeans as resulting in any practical action. The mystery of Herculean psychology had fascinated him. He had even dreamed of time travel back into the war, just to soak up the atmosphere of those times, feel the pressure of purpose and necessity; now here was a chance to confront a living Herculean from those times.

“Julian!” Grazia said as she came out of the house. The shade screen came on over the terrace, darkening the sky and rising sun. She sat down on the deck cot.

“How are you, Grazia?”

“Fine — now tell me what you want Raf for.”

“It’s up to him.” Poincaré shrugged, and Kurbi saw another tame wolf, like himself, among the sheep of Earth.

“Is there any doubt that it was a Whisper Ship?” he asked.

“Even Precept’s simple computer slaves identified it. There’s no doubt, Raf.”

Grazia was looking at him, her eyes saying,
Why bother, what can it matter, my love
?

“You want to go,” she said, “you want to stir up your sense of mission, destroy your equilibrium. Over what? An old war and a madman or two. Go ahead. I couldn’t care less.”

“Many people have died, Grazia,” Kurbi said.

“You wouldn’t go for that alone.”

“I haven’t decided yet; we’re just talking.”

“What if our homes were threatened,” Poincaré said, “— this house; what if that ship appeared in that beautiful morning sky? What if that ocean were being beamed into steam right now?”

“I’d rather not live in such a world,” Grazia said. “The sooner they killed me the better.”

“You don’t mean that,” Kurbi said. He took a step toward her, intending to sit down and hold her hand.

“Stop right there,” she said. “Look at the two of you. You’re both hoping that terrible things will happen. You may be bored with your lives, but I find ennui and changelessness quite pleasant.”

“Look at it this way,” Kurbi said. “All we know about the Hercules-Federation War is that we fought an implacable enemy. It’s just one big enigma — no records or witnesses left, at least nothing that makes for good evidence. Here’s a chance to confront an individual or individuals who still have the war mentality. They remember things and they may have records.”

“We have people from then also.”

“They’ve mostly erased their experiences, you know that.”

“Well, there are Herculeans living on various worlds.”

“Those survivors will never open up — they’ve changed.”

“The simple fact of the matter,” Poincaré said, “is quite clear and needs no justification — a Whisper Ship is a good-sized nuisance. It could kill more Federation citizens, it could destroy a planet under certain conditions — Earth, for example. Whatever Raf’s interest, he would be useful in the hunt.”

“You’re just trying to scare me, Julian,” Grazia said.

“I’m certainly not.”

“Well, it is frightening, no matter what your motive.”

“Raf, she’s picking on me. Grazia, it could happen, what I say.”

Grazia laughed and lay back on the cot.

The war left us a legacy
, Kurbi thought,
one which must be taken up, examined, understood; to do so is a form of loyalty to the past, and truthfulness to the future.

“Good day,” Julian said and disappeared.

Kurbi looked through the space where the man’s image had stood. The ocean beyond was alive with sunlight and small sailboats. He wondered what they were thinking inside the Herculean ship countless parsecs away.

“I’m going for a swim,” Grazia said behind him.

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“The savage mind deepens its knowledge with the help of
imagines mundi.
”

— Claude Lévi-Strauss

“Who is the man walking in the Way?

An eye glaring in the skull.”

— Seccho

HIS SON was shaking him awake.

“We’re not coming out — the ship won’t come out of jumpspace!”

He opened his eyes.

“I can’t tell what’s wrong,” his son was saying, “I’ve tried everything.”

“It’s not the ship,” the Herculean said, “this sometimes happens.…” He got up and followed his son forward through the ship.

The screen was blinking when they entered the control room, as if a storm were raging outside.

“Look,” his son said, “the star analogs — they look solid now!” In normal passage, the black places marking the positions of stars in normal space were not solid objects in relation to the ship; directly ahead of them now was a giant black sphere, its surface shiny and reflective. The ship was rushing toward it at an unknown velocity.

“I’ve tried to alter our course half a dozen times,” his son said, “but the ship fixes on another sphere and runs toward it.”

“We’re not in the usual otherspace, but in a nearby parallel space. A quantum uncertainty within the ship’s vibrancy matrix generator causes this sort of thing. I was warned against it. It doesn’t happen very often, but it can’t be helped. The old builders didn’t have time to iron out the problem, and they were not sure it could even be solved without altering the fundamental laws of nature.”

“But you know how to get us out?”

“I’ll try.”

The object ahead was now twice as large. In a few moments it covered the viewscreen. A reflection of the ship appeared in the black surface, a silver image rushing up to meet them head-on. Frozen energy, the old Herculean thought, everything that a living sun is not. The continuum flickered again, leaving a slow fading flash in the black below. Suddenly the ship’s image seemed to pass into them and the vessel was flitting across a Stygian plain. A mock sunrise flashed on the horizon as the continuum flickered again.
Maybe we’ll die
, the older Gorgias thought. He would not have to face his son, or watch him carry out his plans.

The ghastly flickering became more frequent. The Herculean passed his hand over the glowing program plate.

The ship switched. For a moment it seemed that a more familiar jumpspace was coming into view on the screen; then the alien space flickered again and he knew that the ship had only changed position within it.

“Tell me the truth — we may never come out.”

“You may be right.”

“Try again.”

“Here we go.”

The ship switched, straining to surface into the known universe, again without success. The ship was running at another black sphere.

“What now?” his son asked. There was a trace of anger in his tone.

“Wait — try again, as often as it takes to bring us out. The uncertainty in the generator fields can’t last forever by their very nature.”

“Regular watches?”

“Try three times during each watch.”

“I’ll wait until you try once more,” his son said. “Then I’ll get some rest and leave you to it.”

“Here we go.”

The ship switched for the third time.

The screen went black.

“Now what?” his son asked.

“I don’t know.…”

The ship’s lights flickered.

“It’s as if we’re not getting enough power,” his son said. “Can we check anything in here?”

“No, the receiving accumulators are a sealed mechanism.”

“You mean we get power from somewhere else?” his son asked.

“We’ve never taken on fuel, if you’ve noticed. For what this ship can do, it could never carry enough power or generate its own. I think we get it from the Cluster, but I don’t know how. Engineering and armoring was not my strong suit. I was just an attack-force captain.”

“But if the ship works, then the power source was never destroyed!” his son said.

“We’re far out of our spaces — that’s probably interfering with power reception.”

All signs of movement were absent from the black screen; reality had solidified, freezing all motion.

The screen lightened, growing brighter, as if some titanic explosion were taking place outside. The ship was suddenly in a white space, and the stars, if they were stars, appeared as small black points.

The Herculean passed his hand over the panel for the fourth time.

The known universe recreated itself on the screen.

“We don’t seem to be far from where we started,” his son said, “maybe a dozen light-years from Precept.”

Where hundreds lay dead in the dust. What had they known of the war? What had they ever done to my son? I should have tried to stop it.

But his doubts and tender feelings of mercy would not restore the Empire’s power. His son would never accept the Empire’s demise; restoration was for him the one supremely valued end, overriding all others; the effort to revive Hercules was the only way of life for him, even if in the end it might mean the death of all surviving Herculeans, including himself.

The interstellar liner drifted slowly on the screen; only minutes out of Sagan IV, it was readying to switch over into jumpspace. The Whisper Ship’s beam reached out to the cylindrical hull and began pumping energy into the forward drive mass. A hole opened like a blooming flower. Gas began to spill out. The beam shifted to the midsection and another wound opened; red light and human shapes spilled out into space.

It’s the only way.

His father had left the cabin a few moments before the attack.
The whole point is to do cruel and terrible things
. Silently the beam shifted and cut its third hole.

A million miles behind the rupturing vessel, the disk of Sagan IV swam in half phase. In a few minutes port tugs would be rushing out to the dying liner. He could expect a military ship or two, but they would be too late to threaten him.

There would be little for the rescuers to save. The ship would explode at any moment, as the beam’s torrent of energy penetrated into vital areas. Was it true, he wondered, that power from the stars of home was finding its way into the Whisper Ship? He felt pride in the idea; Hercules was still a cluster of war stars, despite his father’s weakness, despite Myraa’s indifference.

The liner blossomed in space. Its hull flew apart as if driven by the magma of an exploding planet. The debris expanded, a small universe of mangled life, molten metal and hot plasma; bits and pieces would continue in all directions — into the local sun, into deep space, moving until all time ran out.

Suddenly, the magnification on his screen went up, revealing military vessels coming out from the orbital docks around Sagan IV, two near-planet defense cruisers summoned by the dying liner. Gorgias wondered if there was fear aboard the Federation ships as they examined the Herculean design on their screens. What were they thinking as they stared at the Whisper Ship, a legendary shape far out of its time?

They were coming fast now, growing in size until the screen switched to normal and they were plainly visible as bright stars no more than a few hundred kilometers away.

Automatically, the Whisper Ship began to pull away, shrinking Sagan IV to a blue point. The ship switched, blackening the stars and affixing them to a backdrop of desolate gray. The pursuers were gone.

Gorgias waited for two black dots to appear in the warp. A minute went by, two minutes; after five minutes there was still no pursuit.

“Are we running?”

He turned around and saw his father standing in the center of the cabin. Fear and sadness crowded into the older man’s face, constricting his muscles as if he had been crying. The old Herculean was a disgrace to his traditions.

“The liner is destroyed, and we’ve lost the hunters.”

His father closed his eyes. “Where are we going now?”

“I want Myraa and the others to know before we return to base.”

“It will impress them, you think.”

“It will inspire the others, perhaps, and she can’t help being affected.”

“Don’t you see — it’s your way of stealing courage.”

“I don’t see that at all.”

His father walked up to him and struck him across the face with the back of his hand.

“You have no right!”

The old Herculean struck him again. The blow threw him back in the chair. “I’m going to beat you until you can’t walk, until I can lock you up like a beast and not care.”

“Coward,” Gorgias said as he rubbed his face.

His father lunged at him and seized his throat. Gorgias felt powerful hands close on his windpipe and squeeze.

With great effort, Gorgias lifted his father by the waist and they both fell to the floor, older man on the bottom. The angry hands relaxed their hold on his throat and Gorgias struggled onto his feet.

He turned and looked at the screen. Two black dots had appeared.

“Look — hunters! I can’t bother with you now. Go back to your cabin.”

He sat down at the station, passed his hand over the program plate and rekindled the known universe for a few seconds, quenched it again, then searched for the sign of the pursuers.

The continuum was clear, but he knew that they would reappear in a few moments; the ship was leaving a clear trail. He would have to do something to hide it quickly.

He turned around to face his father again, but the Herculean was gone.

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“THE FRONTIER SETTLEMENT on Precept,” Poincaré was saying, “then the liner on the Sagan IV run. That’s more than twenty thousand dead, Raf.”

They sat on the sun-filled terrace, breakfast before them. Grazia was sailplaning over the ocean, a small white bird in a perfectly clear blue sky.