“I can think of a few of them I’d never like to see again,” Poincaré said. “They cling to life, Raf, and they’re no wiser for their centuries of life. They’re amazed that the Herculean can risk so much at his age.”
“We’ve failed to open up the human mind as much as we’ve extended life,” Kurbi said. “You can’t have indefinite life without increasing the mind’s potential for knowledge and creativity …”
“You think the Herculeans might have done something along these lines? It certainly doesn’t show in Gorgias.”
“Maybe there’s something in the cult on Myraa’s World.”
“Don’t let that take you in — it’s just another form of stoicism, retreat from a bad war.”
“You’re probably right,” Kurbi said. “It’s just that I look at humankind’s last twenty-five centuries and I see no genuine advances beyond an increase in living space — no integration of the sciences, only small technical advances, mostly a refinement of devices we’ve had for a millennium. No commanding art forms to mention. We’ve got an awesome syncretism of styles — the greatest war ever waged is our greatest originality. We’re a museum display of every period from Earth’s history, existing on one Federation world or another. How I wish we’d run into another starflung species as powerful as we are, so that they would take us down a few pegs, make us see ourselves from outside.”
“But we had the Herculeans.”
“An accident resulting from the opening up of the galaxy to our stardrives, and they were no better than us, Carthage to our Rome.”
“But you’re not sure that something in their culture might have been … different?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, Julian — you’ve had it with me, haven’t you?”
“You make it all sound very interesting,” Poincaré said. He was silent for a few moments. “You know, I think I do know how to make all this look better. Stay where you are — don’t leave Wolfe’s sunspace. I’m coming out there to join you.”
“You’ll be delaying me.”
“What’s a few days, a few weeks, after all the time you’ve put into this? I’ll bring another ship, a big one, and that will get everyone here excited. Naturally, I won’t say what it’s for. Besides, Myraa’s World is supposed to be lovely.”
“It won’t be any vacation if we run into Gorgias.”
“Do you really think we might?”
“Maybe — we’ve been around a long time, waiting for a mistake on his part. He’s due for one. There’s something that brings him to Myraa’s World, despite the danger. The surest way is to get there ahead of him, settle down and wait for as long as it takes. We’ve never tried it.”
“Wait for me, Raf,” Julian said and broke the connection.
If the war had ruined us, Kurbi thought, to the point where the Federation and the Herculean Empire had fallen apart into isolated worlds, then each world would have had a chance to go its own way, to grow and diverge for as long as the interstellar quarantine lasted. Some would view such a time as a dark age, but in fact it would have been a rebarbarization of history, a time of renewal, giving the antagonists time to digest each other’s influences, undisturbed.
The Federation was still in need of such a fertilizing fragmentation.
Enemies need each other, he thought, exasperated by the idea’s perverse necessity. A darkness without hope of dawn pressed in around him. The war seemed to be still raging nearby; the gestures of hate were still being made somewhere near the edge of his vision; if he turned his head fast enough, he would glimpse titanic forms locked in combat, huge limbs embracing above burning worlds, dying throats gasping for air in countless infernos.…
Captain Milut came into the control room and sat down.
“We’re waiting here until Poincaré arrives with another ship,” Kurbi said.
Milut nodded. A very reclusive officer, Kurbi thought, very careful about what was coming to him from the Service.
“Where are you from, Captain?”
“New Mars. I left long before the disaster, but …”
“But what?” Kurbi asked in surprise.
“It did not deserve what he did to it, even though I hated the place.…”
“What about your family?”
“The Federation gave me a way out.”
“All your relatives were on New Mars when it happened?”
“They all died by drowning.”
“Did you ask to be assigned to my command?”
Milut shrugged. “Luck of the draw.”
“Are there any others here from New Mars?”
“A few, I think.” He turned and looked at Kurbi with pale blue eyes. “Count me out of your suspicions, Commander. I can’t speak for others, but I live in the present. My retirement and rejuvenation is coming up soon, at which time I’ll change my identity and live as I please.”
“What do you plan on doing?”
“I don’t think it would interest you. Personally, I don’t care what happens to the Herculean.” Milut turned and faced the screen. “I would appreciate it, sir, if we kept things on an official basis.”
“As you wish, Captain.”
“One thing, Commander. I don’t think that your crew’s animosity toward the Herculean will help you much. It might be a handicap.”
“I’m aware of that.”
Suddenly Kurbi wondered whether Julian had been entirely honest with him. Was he coming out because he was afraid that his friend might fall apart under pressure? Or had Poincaré sensed success and wanted to be around for a share of the glory?
“You may go, Captain,” Kurbi said, “I’ll take this watch myself.” Milut nodded and left the room.
Julian’s trivial wit would be a welcome change.
Kurbi closed his eyes and tried to sleep.I’m a fool , he thought,to have chased Grazia when she didn’t want me .I wouldn’t be here if she had not died .It would have been different if I had let life come to me,instead of chasing it .…
But then, things might always have been different.
He got up and paced the control room. He stopped and turned on the screen to find Earth among the stars. A map grid appeared, pinpointing the star at a distance of fifteen light-years. Why did Julian need a week to get here? What kind of ship was he requisitioning, anyway?
Kurbi sat down, and this time he slept.
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VIII. Myraa’s World
“I will do such things —
What they are yet I know not — but they shall be
The terror of the earth.”
— King Lear
“… the souls that were
Slain in the old time, having found her fair;
Who, sleeping with her lips upon their eyes,
Heard sudden serpents hiss across her hair.”
— Swinburne,Laus Veneris
HE SAW MYRAA and himself suspended in a clear liquid, she floating on her back below him, limbs open and long hair flowing, he a perfectly muscled body, sinewy fibers wrapped around his skeleton.
He pushed down to her, grasped her head with both hands and kissed her as she embraced him. Rings of water moved away from the intertwined bodies; the liquid plenum filled with light.
The outsider’s view persisted. He held a water-filled globe in his hand, examining it against a sky of white light, watching the figures turning slowly inside. He opened his hand, watched the globe roll, fall and shatter at his feet.…
The laser cut through the bodies on the ground. Hands thrust forward from a dozen torsos. His own mouth was in the dirt; he felt the beam touch his insides and pass through to warm the ground under his belly.
Blink.
Drown, sink down, lance out as light into the sea mud, surface into a vise of pain.…
His eyes refused to roll down from inside his head.
He groped with a hundred hands into the white space, straining to glimpse something dark. His eyes were made of polished marble; nerves brushed gently against their sto
ne surfaces, ivory wires trying to pick up something to send backstage.
Blink.
Inability became a fearful mass in his stomach. He closed his eyelids, covering the white space with red capillaries. Fear became a messenger, linking the strands of his consciousness, preserving the matrix of his individuality, the lightning pattern of his nervous system, entombed within his flesh.…
The Whisper Ship blinked into normal space and rushed into the Earth like a toy dart, blossoming into a flash — leaving him without flesh, a pattern of naked energy.…
He sank, passing through soil and granite into Earth’s magma-warmth, where the heat nourished his new form. He shrugged, shifting the Earth’s crust around him, and he knew that he had filled the planet with himself. There was a thin whisper of atmosphere at his outer edge; he felt the tidal bulge moving, passing.…
Pulse.
He tried to wake up.
Blink.
The cold came as he drained the planet of energy and was left with the light of sun and stars to feed his hunger.…
Blink.
He knew vaguely that his body was thrashing around in the cubicle, unable to break out of deep sleep; the attack would have to run its course. The waking state seemed an undesirable lesser state.…
He pulsed the field of Earth with a whisper of his will, moving the planet, wrinkling its skin —
— and rolled it into the sun’s gravity well. Earth boiled and vaporized on the way. He shed it completely as he was borne into the star’s center.
He filled it, but the star’s power did not drain.
He remembered existing in a ship, living only half-awake, hating the Earth.…
Spinningspinningspinning …
Stop.
The enemy Earth turningturningturning …
Dead stop.
Billions hurled into the sky, across continents; structures knocked flat; the atmosphere seething with storms; and the sun had received the shards.…
He breathed in gales of hot plasma.
The sun flickered, interrupting eons of streaming. In a moment the star would not be enough.
Angrily he drew himself into a concentrated mass, shaping it —
— into a leaping shout of energy, a spark bridging the everblack to another star, abandoning the sun of his father’s enemies as it collapsed into a dark, pitiable thing glowing on the edge of red and black, dying.…
Sirius.
Time of passage had been zero. He would be able to reach any point in the universe instantly, without experiencing the pressure of time. He bathed in the star’s energy, assimilating the rhythms of its structure.…
He reached out and probed its orbital material.
There was no one like him here.…
He passed through the floor of his dream into a deadening sleep. Far away, the quiet, rational centers of his brain were grateful that the tide of megalomania had ebbed; the swirling power fantasy was frozen for a moment.
A double-pronged, misshapen finger of lightning joined the ground to the livid green sky. The sky darkened; a giant moon cast its indifferent white light through a break in the clouds and was swiftly hidden by the woolly masses, the roiling shoulders of protean night travelers moving toward the dawn. The sun crouched below the world, a fiery demon ready to lash out with a scorching tongue, but held back by the storm. The rain started as a whisper in the silence and fell in a rush of crystalline droplets which still held starlight in their structures. The thick, rich earth, loosened by the thunder, inhaled the flood; worms came to the surface and were washed pink.…
The starship lay like a rotting peach on the muddy plain. Rusty water ran from the hull, flowing into a deep gully cut in the red mud. The lights were bright in the open air lock; the night sky was overcast.
Gorgias watched himself walk up the gully and into the ship. Inside, in the main muster room, his father sat in a one-foot deep reptile tank. He wore a huge horned mask and large gloves. The creatures in the tank with him were in a panic. They writhed and leaped, leechlike worms, lizards, snakes and things with a hundred legs. His father grasped a snake by its head with his huge gloved hand, held it until its fangs dripped venom, then brought it up to the back of the man next in line to the tank, and forced the creature to bite him. When it was his turn, Gorgias stepped forward.…
A hammer blow struck stone, waking him back into the upper space of his dream.
Sirius dimmed, faltered.
He reached out to another star. There he drew a binary companion into the larger furnace, feeding on the massed energy. The star flared, gobbling up its children.
The center, the galactic hearth, drew him now. He went whispering between the stars, strong enough now to feed on the interstellar medium, breathing the galaxy’s atmosphere. He went like a beggar toward the locus of endless power, knocking over garbage cans, devouring meager scraps and the smallest sparks of life on the way.
He hurried, absorbing bright stars, making them into himself. He was rushing upward through the floors of a huge iron building, past rusty girders and rotting wood, trap doors opening before him.…
He grasped a hundred stars in his net, a thousand, a million, as his frontier flashed outward to the edge of the galaxy. The wheel of suns became his skin as he filled it up.
The galaxy breathed with his will.
Were there others like him?
Fears crept into him as he looked out into the intergalactic dark, to the small lights beyond, and felt the hopeless cold pressing in around him.
He tried to expand into the infinite emptiness and fell back.
He began to throb, quickening the pulses as he pulled all available material into his center, flaring the globular clusters as they spiraled inward.
Pulse, breathe, pulse, breathe …
The starstorm spun faster and began to move, streaming suns in its wake.
In a moment of eternity he was fleeing in a monstrous red-shifted rush toward his new prey.…
He thrust his fist into the sky, and his grasping fingers broke through the cardboard into a white room with white walls and perfect corners.…
The universe collapsed into a throbbing mass inside his head.
He opened his eyes and listened to the pulse in his head. The gray of sleep quarters was a disappointment after the colors of his dream. He closed his eyes and saw the dream-mass, the glow of a collapsed universe readying to expand; his consciousness was a thin film on the edge.
He opened his eyes; the vision was gone. In a moment he was half asleep, afloat in a darkness teeming with run-on thoughts giving birth to dreams; images turned back on themselves, furious fears forced him to remember.…
Ratlike creatures scurried out of the drains as the rain came down and the water started to run in the huge pipes. Mists passed across the thousand-foot towers of the ancient city; wind rushed whistling through a million breaches, whooshing and shrieking until it became a howl. The raindrops became swollen as the storm reached its full force; wind and water became hammer blows, echoing in the canyons of stone, metal and plastic. Ancient girders creaked but did not fall, as if waiting for an appointed time. The drains gushed a wet foamy mass, washing out dirt and the corpses of creatures not swift enough to have escaped.
Gorgias stood next to his father in the damp maintenance storeroom beneath the first level of the city. The planet had never recovered from the war, and the Federation had abandoned it. The forests had come back to embrace the burnt-out cities, and the moist earth was beginning to cover everything in its corrosive grip.
The derelict planet made a good temporary hiding place for the Whisper Ship. The Federation’s frontier was dotted with such worlds. In the mornings he would go out from the bowels of the city to the countryside, where the tall trees were thick with vines and the grassy clearings were carpeted with yellow flowers.…
One morning his father had shot three human scavengers in the street near the old center of government.…
The flapping sound of a
sharp-taloned bird came up from somewhere behind him; claws dug into his neck and a ragged beak drank blood from his throat, leaving him to sink into a merciful darkness.…
The black and gray enigmas of jumpspace faded, revealing an orange-yellow star. Here, at the Galactic Rim, the suns were sparse; only the Magellanic Clouds stood out against the intergalactic black.
The water planet sparkled as the ship entered the atmosphere. Halfway around the northern hemisphere, the vessel found the single landmass and dropped in over the eastern continental shelf. The rocky coast came up and fell behind; Gorgias saw rolling green country ahead. The ship turned north, following a course for Myraa’s house.
Gorgias sat back and waited, feeling peaceful, as if the past had suddenly died within him, taking with it the weariness that had plagued him.
As he looked across the grassy hills, the house came into view, a lonely structure dominating its hill, attended by six elegant trees. The familiar circular design seemed different. The trees, he realized, were taller and thicker, the branches heavier with curving green needles; the red cones were now a deeper red and the grass came up closer to the panoramic windows.
The ship circled once; he looked for signs of danger and for human figures. The sun flashed in the windows. The ship circled again and set down on the bottom of the hill in back of the house.
He came out through the side lock and climbed the hill. The sun was over the house when he looked up, but the house soon eclipsed it as he neared the hilltop.
He paused before the back entrance. A familiar southern breeze cooled his face. Would Myraa greet him as before? What had it been like for her during these last decades? Were the other Herculeans still with her? He was a stranger who had stolen across time, from past to future; he would be the same, but those at home would be changed.Home ? He struggled with the idea. Home was any place in the galaxy where others of his kind still lived.
He stepped forward and the automatic door slid open to let him in.
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