Codrus had died. Aristotle had died...
And Sappho...
Now it was his turn.
"Fight!” screamed Gillian, wanting to throw something at his unmoving monarch. But Empedocles refused to get up from the floor.
Gillian turned away and limped toward the rear of the chalet, desperately searching the rubble for a weapon.
Slasher was on his feet again, blood dripping down the side of his face, flash daggers extended to their full lengths, the cartoon blades carving the air with wicked strokes. The tway met Susan's eye, sneered. Howling like an animal, Slasher bounded forward—
—while Calvin picked up the downed skystick, hopped onto its saddle, and aimed it out into the swirling blizzard.
Gillian, weaponless, his leg crippled, body almost numbed by the incredible pain, steeled Susan's body to meet Slasher's charge.
Empedocles looked on, feeling as if the events that were occurring here no longer mattered. It was all over. Ash Ock monarchy was about to pass forever beyond his reach. There was no reason for him to continue fighting.
But curiously, at the moment that last thought entered awareness, its diametrical opposite also took shape.
There was no reason to pursue the struggle. But there also was no reason to give up.
Empedocles roared to his feet, threw his Cohe wand to Susan, and then leaped onto the back of Calvin's skystick just as the Ash Nar rammed the accelerator.
The saddled propulsion tube lunged forward, sailed out through the shattered wall, its tiny rocket motor protesting at the sudden doubling of cargo. The skystick was not powerful enough to lift both riders. Calvin and Empedocles made it just past the boundary of the wall—into the fury of the storm—before the overworked skystick sputtered, died. Like a sinking ship, its bow turned skyward, pointed straight up into the blizzard. Both tways dropped from the saddle; Calvin, Empedocles, and the skystick fell from sight.
Gillian caught the Cohe in Susan's right hand. He pivoted sharply and squeezed the egg.
The black beam sliced through Slasher's raised daggers, shearing both barrels. Twin cartoon images—their sources destroyed—hung in the air for an extended moment before deenergizing into harmless streaks of multicolored vapor.
Enraged, Slasher dropped the weapons, squatted low, and rammed his arms through the side portal of Susan's web, grabbing for the injured knee. Gillian screamed with new agony as Slasher plunged a finger straight into the cauterized wound.
He managed to hang onto his Cohe, but the pain coming from his leg was now so intense that he could barely focus Susan's eyes, let alone perform the subtle hand pressures necessary to control the wand.
Gillian felt his borrowed body being lifted into the air, held over Slasher's head, and then the tway was bounding toward the jagged hole in the rear wall of the day room. Slasher hurled him through the opening and onto the balcony overlooking the gym. For an instant, Gillian felt ethereal—a shape without form, uprooted from the world, cast into space. And then his rear crescent slammed against the railing, and he flipped half over it, dangling precariously.
Slasher careened into him, intending to send Gillian plunging over the edge. But the balusters gave way. The entire railing snapped from its supports, sending both of them tumbling down onto the gym.
And beneath them, waiting with his spray thruster, stood the Ash Nar's third tway, Shooter.
* * *
Empedocles fell through the storm, hearing the shriek of cold winds, feeling the smudge of ice crystals adhering to his bare face and hands, seeing the blurred forms of Calvin and the riderless skystick dropping with him.
His rear crescent struck something solid, and then he was rolling out of control down the steep slope in front of the chalet, red sparks leaping from his web as his tumbling body gouged great chunks of ice and snow from the virgin hillside. Nearby, Calvin and the skystick somersaulted with similar abandon.
The hill tapered. Empedocles slowed, came out of one final flip to land on his back and slide to a grinding halt against something warm and metallic.
Quickly, he struggled to his feet. All around him, figures were moving through the thick curtain of snow. E-Tech Security troops. Dozens of them.
The warm metallic object he had butted against was the lower side panel of a small assault jet.
Calvin slammed into him.
Empedocles was knocked back to the ground. He caught one quick glimpse of Calvin's face, raging in triumph, and then the assassin's Cohe was slipping through Empedocles's side portal, skimming across the top of the monarch's shoulder, sliding up toward his neck.
Empedocles felt the sharp needle penetrate a fold of flesh beneath his chin.
He felt Calvin squeezing the wand.
Darkness exploded.
The black pain rose from his neck, filling his head, filling every cavity of his being, and Empedocles was hurled from the Gillian/tway's body, instantly reconstituted back into the abstract essence of an amalgam.
The living tissue of Gillian's body—the very form that enabled Empedocles to exist—began a rapid descent into death. When that body expired, the monarch would be without habitation. There would be no place left for him to go.
His last decision was an easy one. He would end life as it had begun, within the realm of the corporeal.
Empedocles plunged back into the turmoil of Gillian's body, back into the maelstrom of cellular disincorporation, back into the sanctifying purity of mortal pain.
And in those final moments of existence, the monarch looked out through Gillian's eyes, and he saw Calvin roar to his feet, firing his thruster at anything that moved, lashing his Cohe into the blistering sheets of white, seeking any and all targets.
But no one closed in on the tway. Instead, the assault troops scampered desperately toward Calvin's left and right flanks, clearing a wide path directly in front of the assassin. And Empedocles knew that it was not cowardice that drove the troopers back.
Calvin realized his peril. The tway whirled, came face-to-face with the huge misshapen figure marching out of the storm directly behind him.
It was Vilakoz, wielding the massive geo cannon.
There was a crack of thunder.
For one spliced fragment of time, nothing seemed to happen. And then Calvin's front crescent exploded as the blast ripped through his web, pulverizing flesh and bone, lifting him off the ground...
And he was gone, his shattered body hurtled out into the storm between the flanks of E-Tech troopers. All that remained to mark the spot where the tway had stood was a fading spiral of red snow.
Empedocles closed his eyes.
Inner vision gazed upon the image of a five-point circle. It was the Sphere of the Royal Caste, the icon that had served to bind the Ash Ock into a symbolic whole. But even as the monarch watched, the sphere started to decompose, crumbling into motes of dust, being swept downward, into an encroaching void.
Empedocles's final thoughts were of Theophrastus.
Now there is only one of us left.
* * *
Gillian hit the gym floor at a sharp angle, his crescent-protected shoulder slamming against the padded deck. He tucked Susan's body into a forward somersault and used her momentum to vault himself up onto her one usable leg.
Shooter instantly targeted Gillian with his spray thruster. But Slasher landed directly between them, blocking Shooter's line of fire.
The pain coursing through Gillian—arising from Susan's pierced leg—was now almost unbearable. It took all of his power just to raise the Cohe, squeeze out a spiraling shaft of black light. He tried to aim the beam, but a wave of dizziness nearly overwhelmed him. The wand deenergized. His hand fell to his side.
Concentrate! he commanded himself.
And then a strange feeling entered consciousness, and he felt as if something were being drawn out of him, extracted from the core of his being, pulled free from his very essence. It hung there beside him for a moment, like a ghostly apparition, before desolidifying
, falling away, becoming a rainfall of dust, streaming into a yawning pit far below.
And Gillian knew that Empedocles was gone. And that could only mean that his own physical body had perished.
Slasher leaped sideways, giving Shooter a clean shot at Gillian. But the tway did not fire his weapon.
Hideous screeching echoed across the gym as the Ash Nar went into a rage, four arms thrashing wildly at the air, two bodies spinning madly across the padded floor.
And Gillian knew that Empedocles had not been the only casualty.
Gillian's awareness of his own loss—the death of his actual body—should have felt devastating. Yet instead, a wonderful sensation coursed through Susan's physique, leaping from her head to her toes. It was a feeling of corporeal freedom—a freedom Gillian had never known before, not within the entire breadth of his life.
He was no longer a tway.
This is what it feels like to be a true individual. This is what it feels like to be human.
The binary interlace—a quintessential element of his being, a part of him since birth—was gone.
He was free.
But he no longer had a body. Even if he could have overcome those protective mnemonic cursors, there was no place left for him to go back to.
From the depths of the heretofore silent creature whose body he currently occupied, whose limbs he commanded, whose superimposed essence rode beneath him, shadowing his every move; from those depths, came the echoes of renewed turmoil.
I'm afraid, projected Susan.
Gillian allowed soothing feelings to cascade through her. You have nothing to fear. I would never take away what is truly yours.
His words did not calm her. And he realized that this time, he had misinterpreted the nature of her dread. Another feeling rose up from within her.
Sadness washed through Gillian, immaculate in its totality. He understood. She was not afraid that he would stay.
She was afraid that he would leave.
Slasher and Shooter suddenly froze in the middle of their mad gyrations. Two sets of eyes, crazed with the pain of tway/death, locked on Gillian. Two mourns, leaking spittle and blood, emitted low guttural noises.
Gillian raised Susan's arm high over her head, held the Cohe wand aloft, aimed its tiny needle up at the ceiling. This time, his hand remained steady. This time, that wondrous feeling of autonomy—that singularity of spirit—enabled him to hold Susan's turmoil in abeyance, momentarily overriding all tangents of her pain.
He flicked his wrist, created a rapidly oscillating coil of black light. The spiral rose upward until it nearly touched the ceiling. His skill with the wand condensed into one ephemeral flash of physical perfection.
His arm came down.
The black light leaped forward, punctured Shooter's upper neck, emerged out the other side, leaped twenty feet across the gym to burn through Slasher's head, directly above the right ear.
For one taut moment, the beam appeared to arc between the tways—a bolt of dark lightning, grounding itself on twin staffs. And then Gillian released pressure on the egg and the energy stream disappeared. He lowered his arm.
The tways did not fall. They just stood there, rock solid, blood streaming from their wounds, as if their monarchial consciousness refused to acknowledge that it was all over, that life had ended. And even though Gillian knew that the assassin had passed beyond the point where sounds could be heard, where thoughts could be interpreted, there were still words that needed to be said.
"That was for Martha,” he whispered, “and for Buff."
The tways fell together, collapsing like ruptured airbags, two shapeless masses landing in heaps on the padded floor.
Gillian deenergized Susan's web. He sat her body down, leaned against a pommel horse. Noise erupted in the outer hallway as troopers poured into the chalet.
It was time to go.
From deep inside, he felt Susan protesting his decision.
It has to be this way, said Gillian, shaping her cheeks into a fresh countenance, leaving her with a smile.
He detached himself from her consciousness, slipped away. And then he was falling into a deep chasm, falling toward a place where nothing existed but a pure golden light, swaddled in darkness.
O}o{O
It was truly a contrast of the light and the dark.
The Lion gazed out at the brilliant yellow crescent curving upward from the lower horizon of the shuttle's midcompartment window, dominating the bottom half of the vista. Above the glowing rim, the blackness began—a spacescape devoid of all other stellar objects, the distant stars etched from the scene, their minor lights unable to overcome the radiant effusion emanating from that glorious golden sphere.
With a little imagination, the Lion could almost believe that he was looking at the sun instead of the Earth.
"It's actually beautiful,” murmured Huromonus.
Nick, standing between them, nodded. “Yeah, in a weird sort of way."
Speakers came to life. “Sir, we'll be entering primary orbit in five minutes."
The Lion depressed the intercom switch. “Is the storage bay prepped?"
"Yes, sir. Cargo is ready for launch."
He released the switch and turned to the fourth figure in the weightless midcompartment. Meridian's friction boots were planted on the window wall itself; he hung perpendicular to everyone else. The Jeek was gazing downward, at the spacescape beneath his feet.
"You've not said much since we left Irrya,” offered the Lion.
Meridian shrugged. “I was thinking of the future."
Nick, with distinct rancor underlying his tone, said, “You're lucky to have a future."
A smile touched the assassin's face. “Then let us praise luck."
On the wall directly in front of Meridian—from the Lion's perspective, the ceiling—lay his dog Lancelot, hanging in a zero-G net. The poodle and borzoi, sleeping back to back, convulsed in tandem, as if caught in the turbulence of some violent dream.
Huromonus cast an ironic eye at the Jeek. “Perhaps we should also praise your merciful masters?"
"Merciful, my ass,” grunted Nick.
Meridian continued to gaze at the Earth, resplendent in its cloak of vivid gold. Physicists suspected that a temporary self-sustaining reaction—temporary at least until Van Ostrand's fleet of Ribonix destroyers arrived with their fresh payloads—accounted for the planet's fierce new tint. According to the latest theories, the thermonuclear bombing was believed to have ignited vast strands of biological toxins, which had also been introduced by the E-Tech/Costeau shuttle armada. Those upper-atmospheric strands, blasted by heavy radiation from above and below, had somehow achieved a photoluminescent state. The overall effect made it appear as if the very air was on fire.
"Mercy was not a consideration,” agreed the Jeek. “The Os/Ka/Loq spared the human race because it was the logical thing to do."
True enough, thought the Lion, although Meridian still refuses to admit openly the real reason why the Os/Ka/Loq didn't massacre us, why their actions—on the surface—seem to denote a benign acceptance of defeat.
Nick had figured it out. And from the Os/Ka/Loq perspective, allowing the Colonies to survive did indeed fit a logical paradigm.
Nevertheless, despite the invaders’ final machinations, there was no arguing with the simple fact that the Irryan Colonies would—for the foreseeable future—endure.
The Biodyysey's decision had come two days ago, less than sixteen hours after the battle at the chalet. Meridian had disclosed the actual details to Council, including the Os/Ka/Loq's surprise announcement regarding the human and human-type Paratwa who lived aboard their massive vessel. Meridian had recited the Os/Ka/Loq's official statement with a diplomatic flair worthy of the most outrageous of pre-Apocalyptic politicians.
We, the Os/Ka/Loq, have chosen to cancel our plans leading toward the colonization of the Earth. The strident efforts on the part of the Irryan Colonies and their defensive units have convinced us that pe
aceful coexistence is not possible between our species.
Therefore, in the interest of preventing further loss of life, we have decided to nullify our viral threat and provide you with the locations of all skygene suitcases hidden within your cylinders.
Our vessel is currently reformulating navigational parameters—we will be leaving your solar system within a very short time. However, in light of our decision to abandon your planet as a viable place for colonization, we request in return that you accept into your colonies the majority of our vessel's human and human/Paratwa population.
We essentially ask that you provide living space—in whatever capacity you judge appropriate—for approximately four thousand singular humans and nine hundred and fifty binary humans.
That had concluded the official statement, although Meridian had not been shy in adding what he thought would happen to those humans and human-type Paratwa should the Council reject that particular portion of the peace proposal: “Complete extermination of the Biodyysey's human and human-Paratwa populations would be a possibility."
Nick had immediately complained. “This is an old guerilla warfare tactic. If you're forced to retreat, you saddle your enemy with refugees."
Despite the midget's objections, the fate of the so-called refugees had been decided quickly. Later, when the Council's acceptance of the Biodyysey's initiative was made public, fiery opposition had arisen. Although most of the intercolonial rioting had ended, many citizens were understandably outraged by the idea of having their former enemies welcomed into the cylinders.
But the Council had been unequivocal—and unanimous—in agreeing to accept the refugees from the Biodyysey. Ostensibly, the Council's reasoning was based on humanitarian principles. But they all knew that altruism was just a smokescreen to disguise a less noble incentive.
Even Van Ostrand, who the Lion thought would offer at least some token resistance to the plan, had quickly agreed, rationalizing his decision by suggesting that the refugees might provide a rich source of intelligence data on the inner workings of the Biodyysey.
The Paratwa (#3 in the Parawta Saga) Page 42