George Zebrowski (5 page)

“Is that safe?” she asked.

“It’ll switch to jumpspace in the atmosphere, and it’s faster than Federation craft.” He touched the plate and fed in the numbers given to him by the General. Images of the streets above them persisted in his mind — metal flowing down from melting upper levels; people dying from sudden heat, exploding as steam formed from the water of their bodies; level after level collapsing as crowds fled downward. In less than a day the heat would sink the city, and dozens of others, into the planet.

The Earthgiant had come well prepared, with a large fleet escorting hundreds of brute-power units. The approach of this armada had drawn all Herculean forces back to defend the Cluster. It was clear now that those forces would not be enough to save New Anatolia or any of the Cluster worlds.

The Whisper Ship rushed out of the drain tunnel — into a sky of red dust. Columns of energy pushed down from the sky, one for each city and town of the hemisphere. The atmosphere was blue around the frozen bolts as they pumped power into the screaming planet.…

“Stop it!”

A hand struck him across the face. He opened his eyes to see his ten-year-old son bending over him.

“Stop it!”

“The dream?”

“It hurts — it’s so terrible.”

His son was receiving his nightmares. The effect was not as violent as it was for Oriona, but it was bad enough.

“I’ll wake up and it will be better,” he said, “we’ll take a walk down the hill …”

Then he opened his eyes again and found himself floating in the aft quarters of the ship. Time had rushed by; the boy of ten was a man; Oriona was dead; and when the ship came out of jumpspace, his son would be in command.

Thirty light-years south of Myraa’s World, the Whisper Ship stabbed into the atmosphere of Precept, a frontier world near the end of the Federation’s other corridor, a volume of space that was slowly being settled in the direction of the galactic rim.

The younger Gorgias knew that the thickening atmosphere outside the hull was beginning to howl from the vessel’s intrusion, and there would be thunderclaps and vortices when the ship leveled off near the surface.

The screen showed swirling clouds and fleeting glimpses of brown and green surface. His father came into the cabin and stood silently behind him. Abruptly the clouds cleared and the ship was running level with the country below.

“How is it going?” his father asked.

“Very well — the ship pretty much guesses what I want it to do. The program plate is enough.”

“You can override it with your voice, or add instructions.”

“I’m well aware of that.”

The first settlement became visible far ahead, a scattering of domes and primitive wooden dwellings on an open plain. There were few signs of vegetation inside the town. As the ship approached, groups of people looked up, toy figures on a dirt tabletop. A few were waving.

Automatically, the forward beam cannon lashed out with its tongue, flitting from one structure to the next; one by one, buildings began to blaze. In a few moments the ship was circling for a repeat run.

The cannon widened its beam and caught all remaining structures. The tabletop town was slowly being cloaked in black smoke. The ship shot past and circled again.

“What do you think?” Gorgias asked without turning around.

His father did not reply.

“You think this is too easy, and you’re right. But the object is to hurt them, give them something to talk about, not fight a textbook battle.”

As the ship continued to circle, Gorgias turned around in his station and glared at his father. “How many dead do you think?”

“This is not warfare.”

“You wouldn’t have said that once. Why do you care so much about being fair now?”

“But you can’t win unless you can escalate terrorism into conventional conflict — destruction of Federation industry, and then invasion. You can’t win …”

“I’m not planning to win. How many times do I have to say it? I want to hurt them, make them know that we live and remember.”

“And you want to continue with that indefinitely?”

“Who’s to say that we won’t find wider support later,” Gorgias said.

“I don’t want to argue — I’m here, that should be enough for you.”

The older man turned and left the cabin.

Gorgias shrugged and turned back to the screen. On the plain below, the smoke was a billowing, churning darkness pushing up toward the sky. Suddenly he wanted to hear the screaming rush of the ship through atmosphere, feel the kick of its shock wave pass over the dead town. He was just beginning on the road that would lead to the return of the Herculean Empire. He felt the will of his people surge through him as the ship shot through the curtain of smoke and out into a deep blue sky, which grew purple as he climbed, blackening into a void of bright stars. The nearby sun pulsed with anger, but could do nothing against him.

Gorgias touched the controls and the ship began to run at the sun, accelerating to a few percent of light speed. Slowly the star grew in size, seething with the same energy he felt within himself; the star was his enemy, a watchdog that had failed to protect its planet.

When he had absorbed his fill of the star’s intensity, he turned it off by switching the ship into jumpspace, abandoning again the universe of violent colors for the dead space of black suns.

For a long time he sat before the screen, thinking about his father’s ambivalence. The gray-white jumpspace seemed a bit different this time, suggesting strong light trying to break in from a space beyond; maybe somewhere a waterfall of light marked the frontier between the two kinds of space. He imagined the light of a universe spilling over into an abyss, a cosmos dying in one place and being born again elsewhere.

There was only one thing to do now — strike somewhere else as soon as possible, just in case there was no one left alive on Precept to report the raid.

He would need an invasion force, his father had said. Gorgias made a mental note to question Myraa again about the story of the Herculean army which had fled into the Lesser Magellanic Cloud toward the end of the war. He would have to find out if this was true or just a legend; if true, he would make an effort to contact the force, or its descendants. They might have ships and weapons that would be of use to his campaign.

Passing his hand over the panel, he summoned the star charts onto the screen and began searching for a new target.

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EARTH’S SUN SETTLEMENTS sparkled across the New Zealand night, a ring of habitats encircling the planet, creating the illusion of an arch standing in the ocean. Rafael Kurbi sat with Grazia on the terrace of their seaside house. The waters were swallowing the ring as the night wore on, but there was always more coming up from the other horizon as the Earth turned.

Tightening his arm around Grazia, he thought,
I could drift off into death now and not mind
. Immediately the thought startled him, as once the idea of his own existence had surprised him. He relaxed.
I can live as long as I wish, but my life is precarious and could just as easily have not existed
.

“What is it, Raf?”

“Oh, nothing. Just bored, I suppose.”

“With me?”

He looked into her dark eyes, enjoying the paleness of her skin in starlight, and wondered how long peace and satisfaction could be endured.
Strange thought, since satisfaction must by its very nature be enough, always,
he told himself unconvincingly. Perhaps there was too much order, too much tolerance and not enough conflict.

There was plenty of disorder in the planetary colonies, increasing through the Federation Snake until one reached the dark age inside the Hercules Cluster, where almost four centuries after the war the twenty worlds of the Empire were still cut off from Earth and each other.

“Well?” Grazia asked again.

“It’s not you.…”

Three times between 2000
A.D.
and 5000
A.D.
the Earth had destroyed itself in war, only to be rebuilt by its nearer colonies. That kind of help might never be available again. After the great war with Hercules, the colonies began to think of themselves first, while Earth, untouched within its own solar system, was turning away from planet-based societies. Earth was becoming a garden, slowly being enclosed by the worlds of the ring, its people slowly drifting away into the skyworlds. One day the mass of the Earth and the other planets would be gone, having been used to construct the component communities of the great shell that would one day finally surround the sun, to draw the sun’s energy until it was exhausted in the far future. For a time, at least, the planet would continue to belong to a humankind whose biology was relatively unchanged, to people like himself and Grazia.

I have to get back to being interested in something
, he told himself,
in something other than comfort
. His friends in the surrounding communities would laugh at him when he mentioned this need for demanding work. After all, he had studied the unities of art and science, experienced the pleasures and madnesses appropriate to his five decades of life. What else did he want?

“I just feel that I should be risking something, adding to something,” he said.

“That’s an old-time idea; you can have it subdued.”

“But I don’t want it suppressed,” he said.

She looked at him and smiled. “That’s a strange thing to say — you wouldn’t know afterward.”

“Haven’t you ever wondered,” he said, “why we haven’t found any cultures different from our own, I mean really different from the humanoid patterns we know?”

“Not really.”

“Haven’t you wondered why they have been only as advanced as we are, give or take a little?”

“That’s just the way it is. Nothing much depends on our finding out more about it.”

“Maybe there is a superior culture out there in the galaxy — or maybe it exists only in the main group of galaxies and ours is a backwater. We haven’t gone out to look for them because we’re afraid. Maybe the war has made us distrust our curiosity? Maybe curiosity and ambition lead to violent conflict. I don’t know. It seems wrong …”

“What nonsense,” Grazia said, “it’s enough that we’re kind and gentle and civilized.”

“Look — we don’t even use our subspace communications system to search for advanced cultures, not even in our galaxy, much less beyond. We use the system to talk to our own worlds in the Snake. Doesn’t that strike you as narrow and unenterprising?”

“We mind our own business, Raf.”

“But look — we don’t even know much about ourselves, what we are, what life is beyond the textbook litanies.”

“We’re the form of living matter that asks foolish questions about itself,” she said. “There are scientific people for these problems.”

“But there aren’t, Grazia. You don’t know how few there are.”

“Enough, I would say.”

“A few hundred. Oh, there are many technical priests who know how to run things by looking up the answers which they don’t really understand. Too many areas of knowledge exist only in the computer intelligences and in old books. Very little of that lives in new human minds.”

“It’s there, though.”

“But what about new work, new questions?”

“I think the artificial minds can do better,” she said.

“They only care about knowing, not doing — they have no drive, no instincts to use what they have learned. Once they know, that’s enough.”

“I’m glad they know — it would be such a burden. We’re made for the senses, Raf, to appreciate and experience things, not for understanding, which is an illusion anyway.”

“Then maybe those who are redesigning populations in the ring are right.”

“But they’re not doing what you would want, just more so toward what I say we are. What you want was tried in Hercules, and we got warlike, unbalanced conquerors, not knowers, or appreciators.”

“How are we to evolve further?” he asked. “We must do it by our own hand, because natural selection is over.”
Maybe it’s not over
, he thought,
maybe after a million years of immortality, only the most ambitious and innovative will remain.

“I’m glad there’s a place for unchanged people like ourselves,” Grazia said.

Slowly, he knew, she was going to get the better of him. But nothing she could say would rid him of the feeling that he was beginning to die, that he would continue to die no matter how often he was renewed physically, no matter how long he lived.

Julian Poincaré visited the next morning, dropping his image in from South Pole City just as Kurbi was beginning to resent the rising sun’s penetration of his closed eyelids. He opened his eyes and saw the stocky man standing near the railing, looking out over the ocean.

“Julian?”

Poincaré turned around. “Ah, you’re awake.”

“Are you here?” Kurbi asked, sitting up on the deck cot.

“Appearance only, dear friend — no substance, no reality, at least not as much as usual. You’re talking to yourself.”

Kurbi looked around for Grazia, vaguely remembering that she had gotten up before dawn.

“You’ll be surprised to learn,” Poincaré said, “that our intelligence at the Pole has just had news that a Herculean Whisper Ship has wiped out the rim colony on Precept.”

“It must be Gorgias again,” Kurbi said. He stretched his long legs and stood up. “Precept? That’s in the open end of the Snake, north?”

“That’s right — but why should it be Gorgias? He may be dead — we haven’t heard anything for more than a century. Why can’t it be someone else?”

“I think he’s been in stasis. There’s some evidence of previous appearances and disappearances, with decades in between. If I’m right, then they have stasis capability and that means I’m right about there being a base; there would have to be to support the technology and the ship.”

“And you still think he’s not alone?”

“I think,” Kurbi said, “that Gorgias may have a son, daughter, even brothers or relations with him.” He started to pace back and forth on the terrace. “A base could support quite a few people.”