She was an absurd image in his mind, laughing at him.
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VI. A Bitter Native Land
“There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he looked upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.”
— Walt Whitman
THE WHISPER SHIP flickered out of bridgespace — a broken line suddenly becoming continuous as the stars of Hercules kindled around it, throwing their light into the gas and dust of the Cluster, wrapping the myriad huddling suns in a shimmering field. These were hot suns, these fifty thousand ornaments, intense even in the lenses of faraway worlds.
The core of the Cluster, thirty light-years across, contained the greatest concentration of stars, giving the appearance of a solid mass of light, as if some cosmic craftsman were planning to create a titanic star from the compression of suns.
It had taken almost two hundred hours at full drive to get here; the ship had followed a twisting path through the plane of the galaxy, turning, winking in and out of jumpspace, doubling back to check for pursuers, finally setting a direct course for the base.
He could live out his life among these stars and not be found. As he looked at the Cluster, something like reverence came into him, as if he were looking at the beginning of all things. These stars were silent beings, ruling the galaxy from this place above the hub. The stars below circled the black hole at the galactic core; but the Cluster seemed to ride free in the night.
The screen flickered briefly as the ship passed in and out of non-space, stitching across the remaining distance to the base.
The Cluster swallowed the ship, blotting out the galaxy.
Slowly, the ship penetrated toward the center, until the cloud that hid his destination filled the screen. Here and there the cloud was suddenly pierced with light, the lances of the ruling gods outside, sentries protecting the spark inside.
The screen brightened as he neared the small, white-hot sun. Gorgias leaned forward, anticipating the sudden vista; even as a child it had never failed to move him.
The ship passed out of obscurity and the white-hot star lay before him in a pocket of space, a small desert of darkness and light. Home was here, all there was of it, the warren of war which had never been found by the Federation.
The ship slipped through the sunspace and sought the airless world.
Soon the barren, craggy surface took up half the screen; and a little later the polar mountains sprawled beneath a painted sky of star-pierced gas. The tunnel entrance gaped at Gorgias like the barrel of some huge gun set in the mountainside.
The ship floated inside; locks opened and closed as it passed through to the berth chamber far below.
Gorgias was still as the ship settled into its familiar concrete notch. Homecoming was always a time of mixed feelings. Elation would be followed by a sense of safety; later, he knew, a feeling of entombment would find him. He worried at times that the lock mechanisms might fail, trapping him here forever.
He got up and climbed the ladder to the vertical air lock. The hatches opened and he climbed out onto the ship’s hull, stepping from there to the concrete block which enclosed the ship’s ovoid shape on three sides.
Six berths and only one Whisper Ship. Where were the others? Somehow the question was not as insistent as it had been during past homecomings.
He turned and his footfalls echoed; he walked through the huge open door set in the cavern wall, and marched down the long dark passage until he came to the war room; the heavy door slid open and he stepped into the brightly lit chamber.
He sat down at the table of polished metal and took a deep breath. The room still held the antiseptic odor of the tireless air system.
Centuries had tumbled away and the table had not lost its mirrored luster. He looked around at the empty chairs, imagining the Herculean strategists whose faces had been reflected in the polished metal as they planned and shouted at each other across the frozen, lakelike surface.…
Home. All there was of it.
The base had never been found; even now it would be able to defend itself if attacked — but that would never happen; home was a place beyond reach, beyond all danger, where all hopes were stored, as impregnable as the center of his will.
He reached over and touched the terminal next to his chair, selecting from the historical records.
The long-dead, encyclopedic voice, familiar to him throughout his life, uttered words in the dark region above the table. A misty pillar of light went up from the mirrored surface.
Gorgias had always avoided the visuals of New Anatolia’s destruction; his father had described the event to him, but had always been reluctant to show him what had happened; now it was time to see, Gorgias thought, to renew his weakening will.
“These records were made with great difficulty,” the voice said from the vault. “Where they are deficient, simulations have been substituted, so that the past will stand against the inevitable lies that will be told.…”
A green world appeared, the plaything of a double star.
“A hundred ships from Earth,” the voice continued, “built for one purpose: to strike directly at New Anatolia, to break the will of the Empire. They came out of jumpspace with their heavy lasers and sun mirrors. The entire surface of the planet had been divided up in advance, one sector for each group of ships.…”
They came as if to cut grass and destroy pests, Gorgias said to himself.
Snippets of battle sequences appeared. Mobile fortresses as large as planetoids lanced energy into New Anatolia, incinerating cities, precipitating whirlwinds and earthquakes, melting the ice caps.…
Floodwaters crossed continents, filling valleys as if they were ditches.…
“The ground was carbonized to a depth of fifty meters, the oceans began to steam; the clouds spread across the blackened land. A billion people died. The corpses did not have time to bleed; firestorms swept the urban areas, disintegrating bone and tissue as if they were paper. Here and there a few survived, coming to the surface to breathe the fine dust and alien air, shriveling up into dry sacks filled with brittle bones.…”
From far out in space, New Anatolia’s face was black. Sparks kindled and died.…
“No more,” Gorgias said, seized by a sudden weary despair. The attack on New Anatolia had drawn Herculean forces home, into the final trap.
The vault filled with light as the library shut down.
Gorgias listened to the subliminal hum of the base around him. He looked at the glare of lights in the surface of the table; he looked at his fingertips touching their twins in the mirror. He wondered about the troop cylinder, imagining the small, crystal-filled casing which contained the matrix for a fully armed division of Herculean soldiers.
His father came awake inside him. “Are you still dreaming of that?”
“There was such a thing — I’ll find it,” Gorgias answered silently.
“A hundred cylinders would do no good — at best you could expect a division or two of hastily trained personnel, and you could not be sure of reviving them successfully. There might be side effects — they might all appear dead or damaged. I never saw any evidence for such a device.…”
Gorgias remembered the hurt in his head when his father had dreamed of the home world’s death.…
The street.
Metal flowing down as the upper levels of the city melted.
The pain of people dying from the sudden heat in their lungs … exploding as the water in their bodies turned to steam.
Level after level collapsing, crushing …
Crowds fleeing downward into the drain tunnels …
A sky of red dust. Columns of energy pushing down from the armada in orbit, one column for each city, one for each unit of land. The atmosphere was blue around the frozen bolts as they pumped power into the screaming planet
— energy drawn from the Cluster itself, from the very suns of home.
“Stop it!”
“The dream?” his father asked, half asleep.
“It hurts in my head — it’s so terrible.”
“I’ll wake up,” his father said, “and we’ll take a walk down the hill.”
He remembered the walks in the tall grass on Myraa’s World, the planet of exile that he had mistaken for home as a child. Time rushed forward to the present as he confronted his father:
“But I have the tripod that uses the cylinder!”
“So maybe there was one. If you find it, don’t use those lives for combat.…”
I have the tripod, Gorgias thought, and when I plug the cylinder into the panel …
“… use them to help our peoples to increase their numbers.”
… all the power of the ship will go into reconstituting a division of Herculean fighting men.
He saw the army appearing out of nowhere, sweeping the field of battle clean of all the Earthborn, and he knew that he had to find the cylinder; it would free him from the endless cycle of striking and running; he would be able to challenge the enemy openly.
It’s not here, he thought. In all the years of searching the base, he should have found the cylinder. Perhaps it had never existed. Myraa knows where it is, he thought, unable to rid himself of the long-held suspicion, but she won’t tell me where to look.…
There were other things he had to do while he was here. The ship’s cyber-intelligence could always use more memory units, to extend its knowledge and surrogate experience. He would also have to adopt a few more weapons from the arsenal, so that he could teach their use when the time came.
He got up, went out through the automatic door and turned right into a lighted passage. It sloped gently into the depths of the base, leveling off after a quarter kilometer.
He walked into a large circular chamber. The orange globe of light was bright overhead, burning without even the smallest flicker. The mosaic of the floor was still unbroken, each stone shiny and free of dust.
He looked around at the circle of doors; each led into a weapons room, and each room led into still other rooms. The regress continued outward for many square kilometers. He had never been in all the storage chambers; it would take many years to complete the search of all the closets and corners.
He chose a door at random and went through as it slid open. The walls of the room were covered with shelves, each wall rising ten meters from the floor to form a hexagon drum fifty meters across.
He scanned the shelves, hoping to glimpse a protective case about ten centimeters square; the orange star of the Empire would probably be in one corner of the cover.
The shelves contained hundreds of hand weapons, all of the same type, each strapped to its packing board with a generous supply of power slugs laid out on both sides of the barrel. He would never have enough hands to use them, unless he found the cylinder, or contacted the army in the Magellanic Clouds. If Myraa knew where the cylinder was located, he thought, then what else did she know?
He searched room after room, stooping and climbing the shelf walls. Some chambers were filled with nothing but personal screen units, others with field-ration packs; still others contained only uniforms. Everything seemed to be duplicated into infinity. Hopeless as it seemed, he knew that the cylinder might well be here, despite his suspicions.
“You want it handed to you,” his father said, “the search is too hard.”
“Shut up!” Gorgias shouted into himself. He knew what his father would say about anything lately; the dead man’s echo was growing tiresome.
Gorgias stopped looking and came out from the maze of rooms, picking up two boxes of memory cubes on the way.
The side lock was open when he reached the ship. He went through to the control room and started plugging in the additional memories. He did not know in advance what they contained, but they might prove useful in the solution of operational problems.
The prospect of not finding the cylinder wore away at him as he worked. It could very well turn out to be a sentence of death, he thought, knowing that without a large force he could not possibly win against the Federation.
The thought startled him; he had never before considered defeat or death.
Obviously, the weapon had not come into use during the war; time had run out. If it had been manufactured on a large scale, then even a small fleet of scout ships would have been able to invade one world after another, landing secretly and deploying overwhelming forces for swift takeovers. The idea quickened his pulse, flowering into hatred. He left the ship and started to search again with a renewed will; but again without success.
They would not have hidden such an important weapon, he thought; clearly, it was somewhere else.
At last he went to the stasis chamber. The march down the inclined tunnel helped relieve some of his tension.
The lonely orange light still shone in the chamber; the empty stasis shells still stood in a circle against the wall, tilted like strange sun pods to receive the orange illumination.
He walked up to the shell that held his father’s body and peered in. The shadowed face was unchanged, its cave-eyes still staring into a mindless eternity.…
Gorgias saw himself emerging again and again from the time-contracting sleep.
He turned and left the chamber.
Back inside the ship he sealed all the locks, and slept.
Myraa listened, touching his sleeping thoughts, reaching out to him across the island universe which swam in the fragile bubble of space-time, which in turn floated in a greater sea of chaos, and once every eighty billion years collapsed under the press of darkness, only to rekindle and throw back the night.
“No!” his swarming thoughts cried, afraid of the black minutes at the end.
She pitied his fortress self and tried to caress his spark of awareness, but it was useless; he would have to come by himself; he could not be drawn sooner. She withdrew, leaving him to his ghosts.…
Treason and fear.
He saw the girl who had glanced up at him in the auditorium on Wolfe IV.
Her face became Myraa’s, and she was singing a beautiful song; at any moment she would stop and cry out to expose him.
He longed for her embrace.
She whispered in his ear as he held her, but the words were unclear, windlike and fearful.…
She became small and soft in his arms, completely open, shaking slightly as he broke her in two.…
Her eyes were black cavities.…
Five Whisper Ships sat in the previously empty berths, each vessel fully manned and equipped with troop cylinders.…
He woke up in a sweat, got up and went out to stand on the concrete.
He listened, trying to forget the snakelike hiss of Myraa’s voice. The ancient lights in the bay chamber continued without a flicker. Invisible beings moved through the vast honeycomb of the base. The air was damp.
He imagined a din-filled base in the midst of war. Furious shouting from the war room. Weapons being brought up from the stores as ships came in and out of the bays …
How he wished that he might have lived then, when each moment of life had been charged with meaning and resolve, and the future lay open to courageous choices.
“But we lost,” his father whispered. “How do you explain that?”
Suddenly the inertia of the deserted base threatened to quiet his will. Somewhere below, he knew, were luxury quarters, where he might live out a lifetime in comfort, the slave of a waking dream.
He turned, walked back into the ship and went forward into the control room. The screen came on as the ship readied itself for his command.
“Myraa’s World,” he said.
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VII. Ends and Means
“ ‘What can I do to save them!’ Danko thundered. Suddenly he tore open his breast, took out his heart and held it high over his head.”
— Gorky
�
�WE’VE GOT TO CATCH HIM,” Poincaré said from the screen. “They’ll replace me if this goes on much longer. Some of the oldest groups have taken this up personally — the Herculean has touched their pride.” He lowered his voice. “Submit a new report. Make it optimistic. I like my life as it is, Raf.”
“We’re doing quite a bit,” Kurbi said.
“It doesn’t show.”
“We’re ready to leave for Myraa’s World. I’ll beam a report in a day or two while we’re in passage.”
“Fine. Have the officials on Wolfe IV given you any more trouble?”
“The mayor of New Bosporus called me up and gave me a lecture on how Wolfe is entitled to protection from renegades. He made it clear that he didn’t care about some two-bit composer imported by enthusiasts, but that he would not tolerate the ruin of his career. Then he went on to read me a list of his accomplishments until I cut him off.”
“That’s not like you.”
“I’m tired, and I’ve been getting the feeling that all this won’t mean much to me after a while. Maybe I can get it over with before that happens.”
“What?”
“Oh, don’t worry.” Suddenly he regretted voicing his feelings to Julian. “I’ll do the job as long as you’re part of the Herculean Commission.”
Poincaré smiled. “I know what you mean.” He paused. “Maybe Gorgias will follow those Herculeans who were supposed to have escaped into the Magellanic Clouds. I personally don’t care if they start another empire out there, and I don’t believe we could ever find it, even if it grew to cover a thousand systems. Good luck to them — they deserve to be left alone.”
“Herculeans are still human,” Kurbi said, “and human beings have always had a wretched curiosity about their own kind, as well as a tendency to treat old conflicts as if they had happened yesterday. They’ll come looking for us one day, unless we find them first. You’ve seen this kind of account-keeping in the pride of the old immortals on Earth.”
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