Cave of Stars (Macrolife Book 2)

by George Zebrowski

  Voss was silent.

  “They can’t return to the mainland,” she continued, still afraid that an earlier storm had taken their lives. “They have been condemned, but the authorities won’t kill them. They want to believe that God will carry out their death sentence. I’ve seen enough of your world to guess that you would never put people to death.”

  Voss still did not respond. Maybe she was wrong about that, maybe these people hid their failures. No, she told herself. Even in her brief glimpses of this world, she had seen no police or civil authority waiting to restrain and imprison evildoers. Were there any evildoers? It seemed that there had to be other ways to deal with people who went wrong, perhaps through the Link. But as she watched the dispassionate way in which Voss considered her plea, she felt that this world simply grew better people from the start, people who had not seen much evil in a long time, but who would not stand idly by and watch evil do its work.

  “Can we bring them here?” she asked nervously.

  Voss said, “Those islands cover a vast area of ocean.”

  “Paul will tell us where to go,” she said, hoping as she searched Voss’s face for a clue to his feelings.

  “The danger is real,” he said. “How many are there?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “A thousand, I think. Can you rescue that many?”

  22

  The wind straining at the roof of the hut awakened Ondro the next morning. He crawled to the entrance and saw that several trees had been uprooted in the night. The sound of giant breakers roared in from the beach as the ocean readied to wash over the islands.

  “Ondro!”

  Jason’s shape came out of the rain and staggered inside the hut.

  “Come—we’ve got to get to the high point!” he shouted over the howl.

  “What’s the use? We can’t survive a big wave.”

  “It might not come to that!”

  The roof suddenly ripped away and the rain beat in as Ondro struggled to his feet.

  “Come on!”

  Ondro glanced at the dark sky as Jason’s hands grabbed his shoulders and pulled him outside. Someone had spilled ink into the clouds.

  Ondro worked to keep his balance against the wind as they went downhill toward the center of the island, but his feet kept slipping on the muddy path. He fell as they reached the low point. Jason picked him up and they started up the path that led to the top of the largest hill.

  Ondro looked up occasionally. It wasn’t much of a hill, but it was higher than the rest of the island and flat at the top—as good a place as any to wait for the island to be washed away from under one’s feet.

  The rain became heavier as they reached the top. Ondro sat down in the sandy mud and put his arms around his knees. He could see nothing of the island in the downpour. The shapes of other men sat around him. It seemed to him that fewer than fifty were here—the ones who had cared enough to seek higher ground. The rest of those still alive, fewer than half the two hundred who were supposed to be on this island, were still in their huts, he realized, waiting for the end. He doubted that more than half of the purported thousand or more were still alive on the islands.

  A chill went through him as the wind quickened. He opened his mouth and drank the rain. It felt warm and strange in his stomach, making him want to urinate. A tree branch struck him across the face. He fell on his back, feeling dizzy.

  He saw how it would happen. The loose, sandy soil would not hold together. The hill would come apart. The ocean would finish the job begun by the rain.

  He relaxed his bowels and relieved himself. It would be the last time. We take in, and we give back, until there is no more to give. He turned his head left and saw his brother staring into obscurity. Some of the men were cursing; others were weeping. He did not see his fellow students among them. These were the others, the criminals who did not care about changing the society, only about taking what they wanted from it. Death would come salty wet into their lungs after a forced night swim in the sea.

  Ondro turned his head right, and saw a man who had just cut his wrists. Blood ran in the mud around him as the man’s face whitened. A hand reached out of the rain and picked up the dying man’s knife. Ondro recognized Lemuel Annan, who seemed grateful for the knife. Ondro turned away, his heart beating quickly in his chest, surprising him with its show of useless vitality.

  “There’s something!” Jason shouted.

  Ondro looked up and saw a strange shape descending toward them. Long, black, it seemed to be repelling the rain.

  It stopped in the air, about two meters over the far end of the hill. It was a vehicle of some kind. The hull opened, and a warming light spilled out into the rainy gloom. Men began to move toward the light.

  “Ondy!” Jason shouted, helping him to his feet. Ondro found his footing, and together they stumbled toward the vessel. Jason pushed him forward, and they stepped into the craft, bunched together with a dozen men in the brightness of the wide opening.

  Pressed forward by the men behind them, Ondro and Jason entered a small orange chamber, and then a much larger one, where the light was a soft yellow. They turned around and saw that most of the men from the hill were crowding in behind them. After a few moments, there were no others.

  Ondro felt his ragged clothing drying on his body as he looked around the bay. He was in a fever dream, still dying on the hill, his life stolen from him by a man who held the keys to heaven and was determined to keep him out….

  “Jason,” he whispered to his brother, “don’t let me die mad…”

  An opening appeared in the wall behind Jason. Three human figures stepped through. Ondro recognized Josepha—and felt fear when he saw Paul Anselle. The third figure was a tall, brown-haired, athletic-looking man. His clothes were strange—close-fitting, as if they were his skin.

  “Ondro!” Josepha shouted, looking around but failing to see him. “Are you here?”

  She pushed her way toward him. The men made way for her, staring in silence.

  It was not a delusion, he realized. He raised his hand. “I’m here,” he tried to say, but it was a whisper.

  She came to him with horror in her eyes at what he had become. He clenched his teeth to keep from weeping, partly from shame and partly from the joy of seeing her.

  She looked into his eyes, then said, “It’s all right. We’re going to a safe place.”

  Ondro looked at Paul and tensed.

  “It’s over,” Bely’s minister said, looking at him and Jason. “I’ll explain after you’ve washed, eaten, and slept. You’ll feel much better after our friends help you.”

  “The other islands…” Ondro started to say in a breaking voice.

  Paul nodded. “They’re being evacuated now.”

  “Bely?”

  “He knows nothing of this,” Paul said with satisfaction, with no effort to banish his look of shame.

  Ondro knew, as Josepha looked at him, that she was searching for the man she had known. Unable to bear her gaze, he looked around at the other men. They seemed confused and slow to show relief.

  He looked back at Josepha. “What kept you?” he whispered bitterly, fearing that she had come too late.

  She stepped closer to him. “All this,” she started to say softly. “Paul and I did not know we would have this help. Without it, there would not have been a way.” She came close and pressed her forehead to his shoulder, but he knew that she was repelled by his condition. “I didn’t know where you were,” she added, “until a little while ago.”

  As she drew back, he started to say that Paul had always known, but the effort paralyzed his voice and he felt that he would pass out. Figures in white were coming through the opening. They came among the rescued and began to lead them out of the bay. He shivered—and blackness drowned his eyes.

  23

  Ondro woke up in a clean bed. He was naked and there were no covers, but he was not cold. There was light behind him, and the smell of grass and growing things. He seem
ed to be in a room somewhere. Anxious and confused, he got up and went to the open window.

  The world outside was green; but as he came fully awake he noticed that the land rose upward in the distance and covered the sky. He closed his eyes and reached out to steady himself.

  “Ondro!” Josepha shouted from somewhere behind him.

  Her arm slipped around his waist before he could open his eyes and turn around, and she was leading him back to bed.

  “Where am I?” he asked as he lay down and she sat down beside him.

  She explained that they had brought him to another world. He struggled with the idea for a moment, then asked, “How many were saved?”

  “Nearly six hundred,” she said, “and they are being cared for.” She smiled. “And no one back home knows about it.”

  He thought of the dead.

  Then she was looking at him strangely, and he tried to recall the woman he had known. Her dark hair was shorter and pulled back. Her skin seemed fairer, her green eyes a bit more tilted, but her nose was not as delicate as memory insisted. Her lips were still full and sensual, but there was a rakish tilt to her mouth. What he saw now was a look of determination.

  “Ondro,” she said, “we don’t have to go back. If we live here, we will not die.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “People here live as long as they wish—centuries.”

  He tried to make sense of what she was saying, but the thought of never going home, of not settling old wrongs, confused him.

  He touched her hand. “Can we turn our backs on everything we’ve known?” he asked, realizing that he had been wrong about her. She had acted, and with overwhelming means, at the first opportunity. But how had this all happened? Why had these visitors chosen to help her?

  “Wait until you see what is here,” she said. “You’ll think that you’ve never lived before!”

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “In a mobile habitat, one hundred kilometers long, in a sun orbit.”

  She leaned down and kissed him, and he felt his body tingle in the way that he had all but forgotten; but images of male unions blocked his way to her as he remembered the cold, futile effort of his refusals on the island, to men and the occasional woman. She had been his first love, his only love, as he had been for her. They had promised to be faithful to each other during their first night together.

  He pulled back from her warmth, from the taste of her, from the refuge that he had longed for and been certain would never be his again.

  She smiled and said, “Of course, you’re still worn out. Rest, my dear Ondro.”

  He turned his head away. “I hated you, thinking you had forgotten me.”

  “I didn’t know where you were,” she said.

  He waited, struggling with his feelings, unable to speak.

  ‘Try to rest,” she answered. “I’ll be here when you wake up.” Her voice seemed distant, as if she were disappointed in him.

  He tried to relax, but he was still on the island, waiting to drown.

  24

  Josephus Bely was in turmoil as he waited for Paul to bring Voss Rhazes into the audience chamber. His minister’s report after his visit to the mobile had made it obvious that there was very little of value that could be offered to the visitors. Theirs was a self-sufficient culture wielding vast powers. The material world, with all its evils, was their plaything.

  But he was Peter III, in whose school of life worthy souls were forged and led into the fellowship of God. Of course, he would also have to get in line at the end of his days, but he had never been afraid, dedicated as he was to the guidance of so many. In this he knew himself to be selfless, so he had not expected the crushing fear that came into him when he saw his own death approaching. It was not possible that he should still be so afraid, even now, as he waited for the visitor.

  He prayed—and felt the grace of God’s strength flow through him as the door to the audience chamber opened.

  “I will speak with the envoy alone,” Bely said as his minister and Voss Rhazes came in and stopped before the dais.

  Paul nodded calmly and left the chamber, making Bely feel even more uncertain. He had expected resistance, a question, a look; but his minister’s reaction seemed uncaring.

  Bely felt lost as he looked now to Voss Rhazes, and saw that there was nothing in the man’s expression. He simply stood waiting, looking at him and not looking at him. Bely felt irritated, realizing that without any obvious effort this visitor held the initiative, all control of what might be said. It’s my fault, Bely told himself, my fear is doing his work for him.

  Bely said, “You may settle your group on the other continent, if you wish. In return I ask for your medical help, so that I might live to finish my work.”

  He had said it well, without hesitation, without demanding, and without fear.

  But the moment before the visitor replied became an eternity. Bely heard a rushing in his ears, and knew that he would beg for his life. Only a fool would risk the passage through death to learn the truth of dying, when it would be too late; there would be nothing to learn if the end was oblivion, not even that it was oblivion. Only faith offered the certainty of successful passage.

  Terror constricted his bowels. What if the Divinity let the doubters fade away at death, damning them with the very darkness that they so feared, while the saved emerged into the Divine presence? The fool hath said in his heart: There is no God. His brain repeated the ancient bit of wisdom from his school days, which now spoke to him like a stranger. But what if the fool had not been a fool? The prideful question from his youth was still there, along with a hundred answers drilled into him by his teachers. Why had there been so many answers to plague one question?

  Voss Rhazes said, “I am communicating your offer to First Councilman Blackfriar.”

  Bely’s thoughts raced with his pulse as he understood again that the offworlders’ minds were somehow linked. “May I have an answer now?”

  “A day or two, at most,” Rhazes said.

  Bely felt his hands tremble beneath his robes. Darkness blinked in his eyes. “I may not live a week,” he said. “Why not an answer now?”

  Rhazes nodded. “I’ll go at once.”

  Bely breathed deeply, struggling to conceal his humiliation as the visitor turned and left the chamber. Voss Rhazes had brought evil into his heart, poisoning his spirit with a vision of his people ascending to the false heaven in their sky, lured by an immortality of the flesh.

  I am unworthy of God’s love, he told himself as he looked around the empty chamber. He had not confessed for months now. Each time it was a matter of finding a priest from a distant township and confessing in elaborate generalities, never speaking of his despair over death, or about his lapses of faith. It would not do for de Claves, or any of his past confessors, to know his weaknesses and pass them on to the other bishops. At any moment he might die in a state of mortal sin, unconfessed, lying to himself that God knew what was in his heart and would not punish him for his passing moments of unbelief.

  Then he wondered whether his request for help might anger the visitor in the sky and bring the wrath of devils upon his world. He prayed again to believe that death would send him back to God, but the doubt sown long ago in his imagination had waited a long time to blossom, and now took strength from Paul’s report and Voss Rhazes’ visit, stifling his plea.

  “Oh Lord…forgive my unbelief…and grant me eternal life,” he said out loud, stumbling over his words, and wept.

  25

  “He asked you for his life,” Paul said as he stood with Rhazes at his flyer. A chill came into the air on the terrace as the sun was setting.

  “You knew he would?” Voss asked.

  Paul nodded. “Will you grant it?”

  “He is very ill,” said Rhazes, “and in ways I have never seen.”

  Paul looked directly at him and said, “If you do save him, then nothing will change.”

  There, he had said i
t, and was now a conspirator. All his life he had compromised. Now here was his coup, set in motion with soft words to a stranger from beyond the sky, a few words to kill a man….

  “But you are the pope’s right hand,” Rhazes said.

  Paul nodded. “I have not opposed him because there was never any chance. The rescue of the prisoners from the islands has shown me that we may have a chance to change.” Paul sighed and said, “Let him die. It was only chance that brought you here.”

  “But who will replace him?” asked Rhazes.

  “Anyone would be better.”

  Rhazes said, “Even with his illness, he might still last five years.”

  “That long?”

  “Perhaps two. I can only guess, based on what I see. I don’t know enough about his specific ailments. Or he might die today.”

  Paul looked out over the darkening city and wondered whether he could take decisive action rather than follow the rules of succession. There were at least a dozen individuals he might take into his confidence—but after that there would be no guarantees.

  “Would you like to come with us when we leave?” Rhazes asked.

  Paul smiled. “I had not intended to ask you for my life.”

  “But you would come?”

  “I don’t know,” Paul said.

  Rhazes said, “Blackfriar and the Council will have to meet to consider all these matters. I’ll return as soon as possible.”

  Paul watched him enter his craft. The ovoid rose after a few moments, and Paul again took pleasure from its graceful motion as it disappeared into the sea of evening.

  26

  Josephus Bely sat gripping his armrests, eyes gazing inward.

  “Are you well, Your Holiness?” Paul asked, knowing that there could be no solution to the pontiff’s dilemma, no escape from the humiliation of asking for his life while professing belief in the life to come. For him to seek a material salvation was the rebellion of the angels. Pride danced with fear; hope seduced despair; personal authority warred with the leadership of faith.