George Zebrowski (2 page)

“Under good leadership we can grow — the lives in the cylinder are not just for combat.”

“You’re talking of committing unborn generations to vengeance. It’s over, let it die.” Oriona, you are right, he thought, we must come to the end of our wars; if we do not, we will not see what lies beyond. What do you see, my love, what is there for you on that green world?

“… In your weakness,” his son was saying, “you fail to see that if we’re terrible enough, often enough, we can blackmail a universe.”

Perhaps he was right; what else was there beyond the old war? Inwardly he looked back into the past and saw a black pit.

“Only if we remain at large,” he said to his son, “only if they don’t catch us.” The black pit was drawing him down; or was it rushing up to meet him?

“To remain at large is a matter of skill in avoiding a real test of strength,” his son answered. “But consider — if we could destroy large populated centers, how long could they deny our demands?”

“You have demands? What could we ask for that they might not take back when we were made harmless?”

“The first demand is recognition of the need to rebuild our home world.…”

“Sometimes I think you’re a complete idiot — what can their promises mean after the toll you plan to inflict? Don’t you see — any guarantee would be observed by them at
their
pleasure, not ours.” He looked at his son carefully. Was this the descendant of Gorgias the First, Uniter of Worlds, creator of the Herculean Empire? Perhaps there was more to his plan, some shrewdness he had missed.

“We would keep a hidden strike force. At the first violation we make them pay! If we can remain at large, you and I, then so could such a force.”

Gorgias felt his head shake in denial, as if it had become independent of his body; his right hand trembled and for a moment he was unable to speak. His son’s will had entered him and taken possession, half-convincing him, reminding him of his own earlier self, with its resolve and hatred. All that would be required to make his son’s terrible vision work was an iron terror, a will that would be ready to do anything against the enemy, a resolve that would not crumble when confronted by pity. This would be the game Oriona feared, the iron game that would set father and son in the service of an old hatred, turning them into devices to serve the dead. Father and son had skirted the edge of this game; now, finally, they would be drawn into its merciless logic and cruel satisfactions.…

“One day,” his son continued, “our worlds will be repopulated, our power rebuilt. We will have little need of threats then. But until then, you and I must be guardians of that future. Have you forgotten? Have you become a coward? Won’t you even try — or will you abandon me as you abandoned Oriona?”

Gorgias looked into his son’s eyes.
I won’t need you
, they seemed to say,
I’ll become my own father
,
I’ll deny you if you refuse me and you’ll be left alone
.
Without Oriona and me you are nothing
. A shuddering fear, like breaking metal, passed through him. He tasted its cold in his mouth. His stomach knotted in rage, and he knew for the first time that he would be able to kill his own son — if for no other reason than to abolish this monstrous resurgence of his own youth, this fortress self which had come out of him, out of the past, to stand alone in this way.

Oriona’s eyes looked at him from beneath black eyebrows and black hair. “Well?” his son asked. “Will you plan with me?” The questions were now shouts, strong and insistent and convinced, assuming agreement. For a moment his son’s shouting shape became a torso rising from the frozen lake of the polished table, an awesome creature imprisoned here by the sheer weight of its own hatred. His son was a creature of loveless power, making him doubt again, forcing him to feel once more the uncoiling insanity of the failed past.

“All right,” Gorgias said softly, “but first —”

“Good!”

“— but first we’ll visit Oriona.” Perhaps she may be able to quiet her son, he thought, even though the life she lives is a delusion.

“We’ll take her away,” his son said.

“Let’s see how she feels.” A lie might save his son’s life. Any delay might change the future; once his son started on this new course, there would be no turning back; his life would become a hunted thing, and one day he would die. Any delay might save him. There were worlds aplenty outside the Federation, where a life might be started anew; a small community … simply existing … perhaps Oriona was living that life right now.

“I’ll prepare the ship,” his son said.

Gorgias nodded and tried to quiet himself.

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A SHADOWED FACE floated in the stone ceiling, and faded; in another moment it would have spoken to him.

Cave eyes stared at a barrier of ice in a timeless place.

Outside the black walls, floor and ceiling of the doorless room, lay an infinite solidity; the cell was the only open space, cut miraculously out of a universe of rigid substance. The lonely lamp in the corner would go out if he looked away; the darkness would flow in around him and solidify, freezing his movement until his flesh also turned stony.…

The home world lay before him. He had never seen it after the holocaust, yet suddenly he was there. The land was an endless plain of ashes, the remains of cities and towns, the very mountains. The planet was a heated dust bowl, wind-whipped and sterile. Grief held back all his tender reactions, all regret and tears. He felt the hell wind on his face, tasted the baked ash in his mouth as the gray sea drifted around his feet.

He walked forward across the meadow of ashes. The horizon was a wavy line of heat distortions. He came abruptly to a large circular pit in the waste; stars burned below the world, glowing gravel floating in a subterranean universe.…

The dream was always the same.

A titanic fist pounded on the wall behind his bed, making the stone echo like metal; the black surfaces of the room became glassy and shattered, flowing away like water.…

He sat up suddenly and saw his father standing in the open doorway.

“Are you awake?”

“I’m ready,” he said, feeling distrustful of the silhouette. His father’s dark shape turned and went out into the corridor.

He looked at the dark lamp in the corner, remembering that in the dream he had believed that his life was somehow dependent on its continued shining; a curious absurdity.

He got up and prepared to follow his father to the ship.

The ramp tunnel exit loomed ahead suddenly and the Whisper Ship shot out over the barren surface of the planet. A glowing cloud of interstellar gas blazed from horizon to horizon as the vessel raced over jagged mountains, stone-filled valleys and dusty plains; airless, beaten by solar wind and heat, the lifeless world orbited faithfully, forever dead in the angry glare of its small, white-hot primary. Located near the center of the cluster, the entire system was wrapped in a cloud of gas and dust half a light-year across.

The ship lifted into the shining sky. Variations in cloud density let in the light of cluster stars, the glow fading as the ship shifted position.

With his father now asleep in the aft quarters, the younger Gorgias began his first watch. Without warning the ship slipped into otherspace, revealing the stars of the cluster as perfectly round black coals set at an indefinite distance. For the next one hundred and fifty hours the ship would push through this ashen sea, fifty thousand light-years across the top of the galaxy, halfway across the spiral, past where Earth swam deep in the spiral disk’s outer arms, upward to the sparsely starred region where Myraa’s World looked out on the dark between the galaxies.

All through his first watch, the younger Gorgias was irritated by the shroud of hyperspace covering the known universe, hiding the diamond-hard stars, abolishing the black void’s comfort, leaving only the ash-white continuum dotted with the obsidian analogs of objects in normal space-time. The bones of reality, he thought, dry and lifeless; passing through this region was always a slow dying.

Did he really care about the Herculean dead? He searched himself, trying to feel the death of millions. The killing of ten would have been intolerable. Each of those hundreds of millions would have lived a thousand Earth years or more, each life an entire world of experience, now cut off. To remember their passing was to deny oneself all normal day-to-day living, all simplicity, all love; to remember their passing was to act in ways that would change him irrevocably, making him an instrument, a sacrifice to the fires of outrage. He did not, and never would, belong to himself, or to anyone else.

If he could hurt even ten Earthborn, the news would humiliate millions; the dead deserved that much. Each blow, however small, would be a reminder that the Federation’s victory had not been complete. The dead were alive within him, sparks ready to flare up into an inner fire; his strength was the needed fuel; his strength was their will preparing to live again. Rest would come for him only when all the hatred he bore was spent.

The thought of his father’s growing weakness made him angry again. He felt it as a coldness camped at his center, a promise of failure. He would have left the older man in stasis at their last waking and gone out by himself, but the ship was still tuned to the other’s personality and would obey no one else. The ship could only be his by deliberate transfer of command; his father’s death would not give him the ship. He needed his father’s good will.

If only a second Whisper Ship could be found. Perhaps there was one somewhere on Myraa’s World. He had always suspected that Myraa knew more than she was willing to tell. Maybe he could learn something from Oriona. Myraa or one of the other survivors might have revealed something to her, a piece of information that would not appear to be useful, but which might be crucial to one who could fit it into a large context. The visit might turn out to be useful after all.

He found himself thinking about Myraa — her nakedness, her long hair, her smile, the freshness of her skin. Thoughts of her always brought out his weakest feelings. The universe of time and space had cheated him (what was this effort of time passing?) of the simplest pleasures enjoyed by the humblest creatures on a million worlds. He was a thinking, self-conscious object living in a plenum where distance lay between objects that were made up of infinitesimally spaced small objects lying below gross perception. What was justice, or vengeance, in such a universe? Why did he crave closeness with Myraa, and why was he compelled to believe that distance from her way of life was necessary for him? In his way he loved her, but he would not give himself up to her; the cry of the past was stronger than her love; for him to ignore the past would be to die.

He would have to recreate the history from which he sprang; it would have to be a certain kind of living object, a network of conscious beings again holding the Hercules Cluster together. To this community he would give himself; there love might not be a fault; there he would shine as he had been meant to shine, a king from a line of kings; there he would know the past and future as they should be, unshattered and filled with the meaning of time; there the past would be pride, the future a distant glowing goal that would consume all things in its crucible of satisfaction and joy.

On the screen, the desolation of otherspace promised nothing as the ship rushed through its oblivion.

When his father came in to stand his first watch period, Gorgias rose and let the older man take the station chair.

“I’ve found a likely target for us,” Gorgias said.

His father swung the seat around and glared at him. The face was pale, the blue eyes sunken from worry and doubt; the hands sought each other from fear, then pushed apart to hide the fact. “What are you talking about? We were not to plan anything until after the visit.”

“Thirty light-years south of Myraa there is a frontier world, mostly small towns, not more than half a million people, an easy target.”

His father gripped the armrests. “Later, we don’t have time to discuss it now, get some rest.”

“You said you would fight —”

“A world that size is unimportant, settled by rejects. Federation won’t be impressed.”

“We could destroy a town in a single run.”

“They’d look for us on Myraa’s World immediately, hold Oriona and others hostage …”

“We could do it after we take Oriona with us. Besides, what makes you so sure they are capable of holding hostages?”

His father was shaking his head. “There’s too little thought and preparation. Don’t be so impatient. Do you think that Federation military operatives are stupid? They’ll pick up on every mistake. They won the war that way.”

“But they never came up against a Whisper Ship.”

“True, the ship is unassailable, but you might imprison yourself forever inside. Even the life-support systems require mass to synthesize food.…”

“I could recycle indefinitely.”

“But you would starve if something went wrong. Son, there are ways to trap or disrupt the ship. In time it would be possible to bring enough power to bear on it to tear it open.”

“Things would never get that far,” Gorgias said. He turned and started aft.

“Rest well,” his father called after him just as the bulkhead door slid shut. There was no point in angering the old man now. Later, he thought, when the ship is mine, I can do as I wish, but I need him now to control the ship’s programs. Suddenly, he feared that his father would never relinquish control of the ship.

At the end of the short corridor, another door slid open to let him into the aft quarters, containing a large bunk with gravity controls, bath cubicle and a small kitchen dispenser.