George Zebrowski (15 page)

White light caught Marko Ruggerio about to conduct a female soloist. She began a weary song in high soprano, childlike but powerful in its grasp of feeling; no strain showed in her face on the close-up.

The drums surged menacingly.

Gorgias felt anger at the intrusion, even as he understood. From the first, it would be a war of beauty against ugliness, good and evil; the theme was present in the black and white dress of the performers.

Despite his determination not to be swayed, Gorgias found himself surrendering to the song’s charm; its endless ache glowed around his consciousness, echoing deeply within unexamined regions. He dreamed of Myraa, the loveliness of her world; he longed to caress her long brown hair. Forgetfulness sang to him.

The song was cut short by the drums. The giant mallets struck their wooden blocks with an innocence-shattering thud.

The anvils chattered like metallic teeth.

Drums unleashed their thunder.

The celesta, xylophones and triangles hurled waves of breaking glass.

Bony pianos clattered.

Strong trees splintered.

Clickers shot through the chaos of sound.

The din spent itself with a clash of cymbals. A heroic melody slipped up from below and asserted itself. It was a well-formed theme, steadfast, the massed electric strings achieving a titanic sound as the xylophones joined in—

— There was a sudden silence, as if the universe had ceased to exist —

— An inversion of the heroic theme climbed out of the silence, grew monstrous, and perished.

Heroic themes, mirror images, one for each side of the war. Gorgias smiled inwardly, contemptuous of the composer’s effort at reconciliation. Who was he trying to convince? There was only one Herculean in the audience, and no one was aware of the fact. It seemed incredible that Ruggerio could mean this sort of thing seriously. And yet the naive man had been right — a Herculean had come to the concert, for whatever reason.…

Now the first theme returned and lumbered forward, becoming distorted and ugly; its mirror image followed suit. Gorgias strained after elements of order as they dropped away.

But the spell seized him again, and he wandered after the music, drawn to its central concerns. He closed his eyes and thought of the countless Herculeans who had been murdered at the end of the war, dying in vaporizers because the Federation had defined them as biological mistakes. He visualized massive beams scorching entire worlds. And he remembered the vow he had made before his father more than twenty-five years ago.…

Listless snake drums brought the end of the bleak work by a composer of poster music, whose fame would be assured not by talent but by the manner of his death.

The last drum rolled away. A distant chorus sighed. Silence spoke in the darkness.

The lights crept up halfway. Gorgias leaned forward and pressed the release on his wrist-timer. Marko Ruggerio turned on the podium while holding the hand of the soprano. The applause was enthusiastic. Gorgias watched the composer’s face on the monitor as the cameras scanned the platform with their unconscious gaze.

The applause grew louder, then faltered as Ruggerio crumpled to the floor. The soloist bent over him.

The audience screamed the Federation’s outrage.

The arena lights exploded into brightness. Gorgias got up. Other performers were falling as they neared the stricken maestro; the soloist collapsed over his body. Gorgias stepped into the aisle and walked up toward the exit. The weapon had not shut down, he realized, but was still stabbing with its lethal pulses as the audience watched in horror.

He hurried through the exit. The panic was just beginning; soon the exitways would be choked with people. The short downhill passage led directly to the shuttle platform. An empty car was waiting.

He stepped inside. The doors closed and the car pulled away. A minute later it rushed into the oceanfront station. The doors opened and Gorgias stepped out. The smell of brine and sewage was strong as he climbed the stairs to the surface.

The sky was overcast now. He climbed the old wooden fence and dropped to the beach. Spray cooled his face as he crossed the darkness to the breakers.

He stopped short of the foam and looked back. The only light in the dock arena came from the entrance to the underground line. The dome of the distant arena was a behemoth rising over lesser structures, spilling its brightness into the low-hanging clouds.

He dropped his cape and took off his boots. Together with the exhausted pulse weapon, there would be more than enough evidence that he had been here.

Walking into the heavy breakers, he threw himself forward and broke through, counting a hundred strokes as he swam for the ship’s position.

He dived. The vessel’s light lay thirty meters below him. He pulled down toward it for what seemed a long time. The lock opened when he touched it; he swam inside. It cycled and he drew a deep breath.

The inner door opened. He rushed to the control room. The ship was already sweeping through the planet’s communications.

One commentator was bemoaning the tragic interruption of a great musical career; another voice accused a political faction of murder; still another was demanding an investigation of lax security. The police channels were awash with special orders.

“Into deeper waters,” Gorgias ordered, feeling elation as the ship slipped away. Only another Whisper Ship could follow him into extreme depths; the hull could resist all weapons except those of the ancient Herculean masters, or the very recent planet-based Federation batteries.

The hunters waiting in orbit would soon know that he was here; his humiliation of them would make it obvious.

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THE PLANET SCREAMED.

Rafael Kurbi watched the screen. A million-headed organism pressed in around the stage. Ruggerio’s body was being placed on a stretcher. The screaming mob parted and the composer was whisked away.

There was no doubt in his mind that Gorgias had assassinated Ruggerio, even though conclusive proof might never be found. Police were searching for the weapon; known criminals and firebrands were being picked up; but Kurbi knew that it would do no good.

He leaned forward in his command station. “All officers, attention! I suspect that the Herculean will try to leave Wolfe IV at any time now. Watch the nightside. Captain Milut, inform the authorities at New Bosporus of our suspicions, so they don’t charge some innocent wretch with the killing. Ruggerio is dead, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” Milut said.

“This was planned some time ago.”

The screen view changed to show the planet in full phase. Kurbi leaned back and tried to relax. Gorgias might attempt to leave the planet, but it was just as likely that he would try their patience by waiting.

After twenty-five years, Kurbi had learned not to be certain about anything involving Gorgias. Scores of hunters had given up in frustration and shame; others had simply accepted the quest as busywork, and had retired without caring. Kurbi was sure that he would not capture the Herculean in the Wolfe IV system; it looked too easy. Somehow, Gorgias would extricate himself; later they would understand what had happened.

Kurbi was tired. Ten years of service in relocating the survivors of the New Mars disaster, and five studying medicine at Centauri, had led to command of the hunt for the Herculean, the institutionalized stalking of an enemy who could never mount a decisive blow against the Federation, but who could still terrify a starflung civilization.

He dimmed the lights in the control room, leaving only the glow of Wolfe IV. The darkness conjured up the past as he closed his eyes; it always asserted itself when he tried to rest or sleep, and he had long ago given up trying to banish it; the dead years were an old friend who had become irritating, very much like his superior, Julian Poincaré.

He remembered how his feelings about Gorgias had changed after the ruining of New Mars. He had resolved to hunt the Herculean, even kill him if necessary; but curiosity and a deeper concern had remained part of his motives.

“I can see getting up one morning and going out to kill him,” he had told Julian. “Except —”

“What?”

“I want to see him alive,” he had answered. “What kind of being can destroy a planet and still tolerate itself?”

“He’d probably say you were taking it much too personally. Understandable, since you lived through it. But we destroyed his world, more than one world. Old injustices feed his life, and he dispenses new ones. Who is to blame? Is there a just answer, or only answers that no one will like?”

Fifteen years later, in a series of debates on Earth, he had finally convinced them to let him offer terms to Gorgias. The grudging decision had come during a quiet spell, when it was suspected that the Whisper Ship had met with disaster and would never be heard from again.

Gorgias remembers too much
, Kurbi thought,
while we remember too little
. The Herculean’s acts of the last five years had made it unlikely that a sensible peace would be concluded with him, except as a ploy to lure him into the open.

“We are not dealing with a real force,” Caddas, the old historian, had said, “but with a relatively weak individual, last of his kind, however strong he seems. We will forever see the past falsely if we do not make peace with him, and hear his testimony.”

The Commission, recalled to service on an
ad hoc
basis, had directed that the Herculean be taken alive; but the decision had been the result of pressures from several interests. The historians were eager to question a survivor from the great war; he might give them caches of Herculean records and artifacts. The military gamers wanted the Whisper Ship, more valuable in their minds than the Herculean’s life, or the lives of any outworlders he might kill; a peace with Gorgias might give them control of his base and all the fabled war toys that it might contain. Negotiate if possible, Kurbi had been ordered, but destroy the renegade if necessary. The commissioners had covered themselves perfectly.

Their arrogance had once made Kurbi angry; now it was simply annoying. He would do what he believed was right; whatever the outcome, no one on Earth would be able to undo it; with Gorgias a prisoner, there would be little that anyone could say.

But every new action by the Herculean made it more unlikely that a sensible peace would be concluded with him. Each side was striving to overcome a past which could not be redeemed, only silenced. The commissioners did not want a living prisoner; and Gorgias wanted a Federation reduced to ashes.

The hunters had picked up the trail from Eisen IV, where it seemed Gorgias had destroyed the jumpspace exit beacon. Kurbi had joined the trackers just before entry into Wolfe’s sunspace. He might have guessed the Herculean’s purpose if he had known about the composer’s deluded ambitions; but it was not possible to keep up with every aspect of cultural life in a corridor of one hundred thousand worlds.

New Bosporus sparkled on the screen. Clouds floated toward the lights, heralds of the hurricane that was pinwheeling westward.

A hunter gets to know his quarry
. But Kurbi wondered whether Gorgias would be as he imagined him. Would it be possible to talk face-to-face? Or would the Herculean present a twisted, unreachable otherness? Kurbi hoped for an island of sanity within the Herculean, a place unclouded by the fears and hatreds of a terrible history whose bloody tide had washed Gorgias onto the strange shore of the present. If I could reach into him, Kurbi thought, the behavior set by the past might fall away like an ancient mask of brittle clay. Would the remaining personality be a broken individual? Would it be more merciful to kill him rather than tear apart the fabric of his reality? Who could rebuild the Herculean, give him another existence as meaningful?

In an unjust universe, facts and things mingled with a small amount of free will. Justice had to be made; it was an artifact which flickered like a feeble fire, and had to be made anew constantly.…

Was Gorgias free to change? Was it reasonable to expect that he would give up exercising the will and power he had grown up with? He had never known anything except the vision of himself as a rogue who would topple an evil civilization.

Captain Milut’s face appeared as an inset in the lefthand bottom corner of the screen. “Nothing so far,” he said.

“Keep the watch,” Kurbi replied. The inset faded. Milut was a good officer, but he never communicated anything of himself.

Gazing at the blue-green globe, Kurbi wondered why intelligent species could not simply turn their backs on the stars and embrace the environments of these beautiful islands swimming in the deep. The view from space, like the mood of night on a planet, invited transcendent musings, stirring one’s hunger for what lay beyond the horizon of the senses. The starry everblack quickened one’s interest in the abyss of death, in the rush of peril, in the urgent call that came, always ambiguously, from the other side of whatever reality chanced to be. He recalled the lines of two forgotten poets, lines which he always thought of together: “I came out of the ninth-month midnight, and one day death will be a quiet step into a sweet, clean darkness.…” But in this age there was a great delay between birth and death, a barrier of longevity which prevented growth beyond the known life, if such existed.…

There was comfort in speculating, in reaching out beyond the finitude of one’s ancient, inherited self.…

Outworlders judged the agelessness of the Earthborn as blasphemous, an obstacle to the endless flow of newness from the process of natural reproduction. Earthborn sought to become their own posterity. Countless jokes were told about their virility, their odd medical practices and long-term outlooks; yet the outworlds were still eager to acquire Earth’s skills. Outworld leaders sought political power as a means by which to escape their own natural deaths, through the importing of Earth’s biotechnics. One day the entire length of the Federation Snake would live by the skills and luxuries which Earth had developed and was slowly sending out to her greedy, opinionated children.