In a way Rik was right; only a small portion of humanity lived on Earth; an even smaller portion lived the older life, which accepted leisure but little biological alteration. Perhaps, as Rik believed, the acceptance of the unmodified human form limited one’s range of experiences and exercise of creative powers; while the newer, variegated humanity, Rik claimed, had overcome the old discontents.
Suddenly Kurbi was sure that he would join Poincaré, but the feeling passed; what he really wanted to do, he admitted, was to wander away from the solar system and explore the worlds of the Federation Snake. He wanted to see how people lived, and if they were happier. Julian could do without him for a time.
Grazia, he said silently. The ring of worlds in the sky blurred into a band of light as tears filled his eyes, while another part of him cursed the fact of human dependency and the insufficiency of all things.
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VIII. Home
“As to what happened next … when men are desperate no one can stand up to them.”
— Xenophon
THE STILLNESS in the control cabin was oppressive. The ship’s motion through the gray vastness seemed to be an imprisonment within a static medium. That the ship was moving was something heknew ; but his body felt only confinement.
His father came in and stood behind him. “Where are we going now?” he asked.
“I think we’ve lost the pursuers, but I don’t want to lead them back to the base if I’m wrong. We’re going back to Myraa — later we’ll go to the base to pick up some equipment I want.”
“What do you have in mind?” His father’s tone was almost friendly, as if he were another person.
“What do you care?”
“I’m sorry I can’t feel the way you do. Can you feel how sorry I am?”
“How can you bring yourself to care about the deaths of our enemies?”
“I can’t help it — it’s been so long. What can those alive now know of the old struggle?”
“I’m going to leave you at the base — unless you still want to help.”
“If something happens to you, I will never be able to leave the base. Leave me with Myraa instead.” His father’s voice was almost a whisper.He’s inside me , Gorgias thought,I’ll never get rid of him . “I think I might like living with Myraa and the others.”Punish him ,don’t give him what he wants .
“I’ve changed my mind — we’ll go back to the base first. I’ll need you to help me load and handle two or three gravitic units. You do know something about them, don’t you?”
“Yes, very well,” his father said, “but later you must leave me on Myraa. It’s what I want now.”
Gorgias turned around in his station chair.
“Must — there is little that I must do. I’ll see.” The old Herculean was trying to manipulate him now.
“I’ll stay in the aft cabin,” his father said and left the control area.
As he watched the bulkhead door slide shut, a sudden fear gripped Gorgias, as if he had been cut off from everything real. The past was shrinking away from him, leaving him alone and naked before a stone wall of infinite height and thickness, a structure that he would never be able to penetrate. He could not imagine what lay on the other side, but he knew that he desired it above everything else. He turned back to the screen and closed his eyes to shut out the timelessness of jumpspace; visualizing the wall before him, he made an effort to pierce its substance. His eyes came up against a fine texture of sandy pits and scars, where a nameless weathering had worked to breach the stone.…
He opened his eyes, suddenly aware that he had been dozing. The screen was filled with the gray-white light of the continuum, casting its pallor into the cabin. He looked at his hands. The skin seemed dead and dry, as if the flesh were about to fall away from the bones.Everything in jumpspace is dead; everything that passes through dies a little . He rubbed his hands together and they fell away from his arms.…
He sat up and realized that he had been dreaming about being awake. The screen was a normal gray with black stars; passage home was a quarter over and there was no sign of hunters.
He got up and paced the cabin, dreaming of the new sortie.
As the universe reappeared on the screen, the Hercules Cluster took up half the field of view ahead, a globe of fireflies exploding out from a center of concentrated light. Within a half hour the Cluster became the entire universe as the ship penetrated toward the base star inside.
Within another hour the concealing cloud was behind the ship and the dead world of the base floated on the screen. The ship brought itself in low over the scarred surface and drifted into the receiving tunnel through the sequence of locks, sliding finally into its familiar berth.
Home, young Gorgias thought bitterly,all there is of it .
Once, the core of the Empire had consisted of twenty worlds, all dead now. He still remembered the roll taught to him by his father: New Anatolia, Capital of the Empire; Gorgias, home of the Empire’s creators; Vis and Sivat, worlds of the mental arts; Lash and Bram, planets for soldiers; Indra, the water world; Avat and Rishna, where armorers built the instrumentalities of war; Rud and Panis, shipbuilding planets, where a few inspired designers, together with a team of fleeing armorers, had built the two known Whisper Ships; Nahus and Ush, places for the arts and architecture; Ganesa, a world for poets and songsingers; Manus, a world for historians and computer libraries; Yama, the wilderness where young soldiers went to test themselves; Jas, Ulys and Mizon, outer worlds for astronomers, physicists and scientific researchers of every kind. All this within a space of fifty light-years. The Cluster’s diameter of a hundred light-years contained ten thousand times as many stars as any equal volume of space. Here was room to grow, to concentrate creative energies, to create the greatest civilization in the galaxy; no wonder the Cluster had earned the Federation’s envy. Here the Herculean Empire would come to be again.
He got up from the station and went aft to the side lock, which was already open. He stepped out into the stillness and looked around. The lights were still on around the stony berth. The metal door leading out from the chamber of six berths was still open. Suddenly he felt love for the base; it was strong and constant; self-maintaining, it would last forever.
His father came out and stood beside him. “What will you need me for?” he asked.
“I’ll need you to help me load two gravitic units and a tug-scooter.”
“Right now?”
“Yes — that’s all I came for.”
Gorgias led the way from the berth, through the metal door and down the long corridor into the war room, around the table to another door. Pulling it open, they went through and followed a downward-sloping passage which led into a supply warehouse composed of a hundred interlocking chambers. There were a dozen levels below this area; the lowest floor housed the life-support devices, which were powered by the thermal energy of the planet’s core. As long as this world remained warm inside and the homeostatic slave intelligences continued to channel energy to the various systems, the base would live, its synthesizers producing air and foodstuffs, more than he would ever need. The berth would stock the ship with sufficient synthesizer mass and make subtle adjustments and repairs in the sealed submolar systems that received the energy to run the drive.
At times it disturbed him to know that he understood so little of the ship or the base’s workings, but the great builders and armorers were gone and there was no one to teach him. Where, for example, was the power source for the Whisper Ship? Somewhere in the Cluster, but where? Where was the other ship, if there was one? Given enough time, he might come to understand more of what the base contained; but only the growth of a new population of Herculeans would be capable of retrieving the legacy of the past, bringing all the skills and knowledge out of the records and technical examples back into the container of living individuals, who could then shape new developments.
“Where would the grav units be?” Gorgias asked.
“
In the wall closets,” his father said. “Most were never unpacked.”
The lights in the room were dim. The greenish walls rose to a height of ten feet and met a gray ceiling. The air was cool and odorless. “I was here when the base was opened,” the old Herculean said, “when they were bringing in all the supplies still stored here.” He went ahead to the far wall and slid open a large closet door, revealing case after case of work scooters and gravitic workhorses, each packed in a clear plastic block.
Gorgias went up to the open closet and peered in at the tools. The scooter had seats for two, hover and propulsive controls that seemed obvious and a small rack in the back; the gravitic units were featureless solid rectangles about a meter long and half a meter tall, with attachment fingers located at each right angle. On-off pressure plates were yellow and stood out from the dark green of the unit; whether the device would be used to push, pull or lift depended on the position in which it would be attached.
“How much can these handle?” Gorgias asked.
“I don’t know the practical limit,” his father said, “though I suspect that they could not push a planet. Anything substantially smaller, depending on where it is, on a planetary surface or in free-fall, would be fair game, I suppose.”
His father seemed calmer, as if their violent confrontation had purged him of his fears and doubts. Maybe he would become his old self again and be of use after all.
“Can we use the scooter to ferry the units to the ship?”
“I think so,” his father said.
“Let’s unpack, then.”
Together they pulled the scooter from its niche onto the floor. The plastic block was soft and gelatinous to the touch and came off easily. Gorgias peeled off the covering on the grav units and stacked them on the back of the scooter. He sat in the front saddle and his father got on in back.
“Here we go.”
Gorgias pressed down on the hover-control plate gently and the scooter lifted from the floor; he pressed on the propulsion plate and the scooter moved forward. Grasping the stick, he steered the machine toward one of the marked service doors, which slid open to reveal a direct tunnel connecting to the berth area.
As the scooter carried them through the passageway, he thought of all the weapons stored in the warehouse, rooms and rooms of shelves, closets and cubbyholes turned away from the stars of home, filled with more military hardware than he could name; enough armaments to equip ten divisions.
Another door slid open and let them out into the berth chamber. Gorgias steered the scooter alongside the ship and into the open lock, stopping just past the inner door.
“We can leave it here, near the bulkhead,” he said, and got off.
“What will you use the units for?” his father asked as he dismounted.
A suspicion grew in Gorgias’s mind, the result of the question as well as of the older man’s change in approach. Was he planning to act against him? The only way to find out was to tell him what he wanted to know and watch his reaction.
“Come with me and find out.”
“Then you don’t want to leave me here?”
“Tell me, why did you give me the ship if you were so worried about how I would use it?”
The Herculean did not answer immediately. At last he said, “It must be because a part of me still thinks as you do. Once all of me felt the way you do — I taught you to do so. There seemed to be no other way to live and act in the periods between stasis, especially when we thought one of our armies had escaped and might return. So much was promised by the armorers toward the end of the war — we all thought those weapons could make a difference.”
“They would have if there had been time to build them.”
“I think,” his father said, “that I would like to live on Myraa’s World. Leave me there, forget me and do as you wish, but don’t leave me here.…”
“Very well.” It would be better to agree with him now, and see what happened later. He suspected that the older man was physically ill in some way, and his mind might be affected. But what doctor from the Federation knew enough to treat a Herculean? Completely homeostatic, requiring no medical care except in serious accident cases, the race had been designed for endurance; in terms of the need for rest, recovery from infection and general vitality, a Herculean could outperform a traditional Earthborn by a factor of three to five.
Historically, Earth citizens had been shy of biological engineering, fearing the loss of versatility to specialization if the practice grew out of hand; but as the Federation grew, pockets of humankind diverged from one another, culturally and biologically, until the first settlements in the Hercules Cluster reached out for a truly improved human type, creating the long-lived Herculeans. Few were left now, he thought sadly, himself and his father and the handful on Myraa’s World. He had not heard of any others. Genocide had been all but complete; but in failing to be complete, the Earthborn had made a fatal error, one which he would live to see them regret.
“Let’s get going,” he said to his father.
Turning from the open lock, he led the way into the control room. He sat down in the station chair and waited for the lock to close. His father came and stood at his right.
“Well, what are your plans?” There was an almost light-hearted tone in the older man’s voice.
Gorgias touched the map retrieval plate and the screen lit up, revealing a solar system of twelve planets. “Here, six hundred light-years from Earth, lies New Mars, fourth planet from the twin suns. The various settlements have more than twenty million people. The planet has no heavy defenses, and no reason to expect us.…”
“What’s your idea?”
“I’m going to destroy most of the life on the planet,” Gorgias said.
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IX. The Ring
“One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.”
— G. K. Chesterton
“… the love of a man for a woman is like an attempt at transmigration, at going beyond ourselves, it inspires migratory tendencies in us.”
— Ortega y Gasset
HE WAS ALONE, going where he wished, and the fact made him feel guilty.
As he stood looking out the window of his resort room, Rafael Kurbi realized that he did not know where he was going. The green mountainside was peaceful outside his window. Here in the sun settlements of Earth’s ring, a quarter of a million worlds, each a different environment and subculture, beckoned with the promise of novelty and human contact; he could change worlds as he would clothing.
From inside, the ring was a cloud of glittering insects, rivaling the stars in brightness, a milky way of human living spaces cutting across the galactic background; at the center was Earth, oasis of origins, a place to be looked at, admired, even worshipped, but not lived on. People found it strange that he had cared to dwell there so long; even though a large population shared his preference, it was a tiny minority compared to the population of the ring.
The North American mountain landscape outside his window — peaks and fir trees, outcroppings and boulders — was all perfectly safe and accurate. The weather could be varied to taste, streams stocked with perfect fish, woods filled with replaceable game, the air filled with birds. If only he could order a glider with Grazia in it.
He was standing with his head toward the center of the small world; across a space of air he could see houses and roadways attached to the opposite surface fifty kilometers away. Sunlight shafted down the center of the egg-shaped air space, reflected in by a large mirror at one end of the environment; sunpower also ran the recycling plant located on the outside at the other end of the worldlet.
Less than twenty kilometers away in space hung another world, one filled with water, where visitors’ hotels provided a view of aquatic human life; there one could swim to a sun window and look out at the stars.
Pulling aside the slide window, Kurbi stepped out on the terra
ce and took a deep breath. The air was cool and clean and stimulating. Standing there, he felt little of the stress and anguish that he knew were inside him, readying to take over.
“How are you feeling?” a familiar voice asked from behind.
He turned and said, “Hello, Julian — are you here?”
The image shook its head. “Waste of time — just dropped in to see if you’d changed your mind.”
“No. Any more news of the Herculean ship?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Maybe that’s the end of it.”
“I don’t think so. I’ve been doing some checking — this ship has appeared before. From the scattered Herculeans still alive on more than a dozen star systems, besides those on Myraa’s World, I’ve learned that the Whisper Ship is probably manned by an officer named Gorgias and his son of the same name. He’s more than four centuries old, his son at least half that age — but much of that time may have been spent in stasis somewhere.…”
Like an old disease virus, Kurbi thought,or a spore .
“There must be an undiscovered base,” Julian said. “If there is not, then the ship may very well disappear for lack of supplies and repair facilities. We were never able to capture a Whisper Ship — the only record is of one destroying itself rather than surrendering. Some of the Herculean legends reported to me say that the ship is tied to the personality of its commanding officer in some way, and destroys itself when the officer dies. In any case, this vessel has appeared in centuries past, each time taking action against some locale in the Snake, always disappearing for long stretches of time.”
“What’s the point, then?”
“Revenge, from what I’ve managed to guess. A few of the Herculeans questioned by our operatives have shown admiration for what has happened. A thing like this could grow.”
“Into what?”
“Insurrection — takeover of a world here and there.”
George Zebrowski Page 6