The Final Nightmare

by Jack McKinney

  It was contained in a clear canister only a little larger than and the same shape as an earthly hurricane lantern, with flat metal discs of systemry at either end. The container and the globe around it rested on a stem of metal that was grown around with leaved creepers of a Flower of Life stem.

  Ranged around the compartment were other such vessels, the Flowers within them now blooming-the masses useless, their remaining power shunted into the single remaining viable one.

  Its power, too, would soon show signs of atrophy, but it would serve. The three looked on if silently, thinking greedy thoughts of the vast energies waiting for them on Earth, exulting in the contemplation of the absolute tyranny they could establish.

  "Our victory is within reach," Shaizan said aloud, and the words had a death-knell echo in the chamber.

  "I shall never allow that victory!" a new voice cried, a ringing challenge.

  The Masters whirled, shocked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Lazlo, my dear friend,

  Comes now a parting of the ways; you know our quandary. Max and Miriya Sterling will not consent to bringing their child, Dana, along on the SDF-3 expedition for fear that the Shaping endangers her, and for mistrust of me, I suspect. It may even be that Jean and Vince Grant leave their little boy behind for kindred reasons.

  Of course, you will be monitoring Dana's progress and seeing to her welfare and education; that is a given. But I warn you to do nothing, nothing, to harm her. The scales of the Protoculture, we know, often take a long time to come back into balance, but ill is always paid for ill, and good for good, despite your ponderings.

  Parents are a fearsome breed anyway; how much more so, Earth's greatest Robotech ace and the battle queen of the Zentraedi?

  While we may look to the Shaping for certain protection, do not make the mistake of forgetting that there are Powers far and above anything we see in the Protoculture.

  Your colleague,

  Emil Lang

  "So, Zor Prime, you have finally come," Shaizan managed to say. "We have been expecting you, and you have not disappointed us."

  And they had expected him, but not quite like this. How had he survived the Triumviroids? He was armored, though unhelmeted, and had a Southern Cross assault rifle leveled at them. Dana was backing him up, the stock of her tanker's carbine clamped against her hip, muzzle swinging a bit to keep them all covered.

  Still, the Masters were little dismayed. In the final analysis wasn't Zor one of them? The Protoculture's intoxicating effect on them, the rush of its

  sheer power, made them sure that if they offered to share it with the clone, he would be theirs. The halfbreed enemy female was of no real importance.

  "So-you know why I'm here?" Zor asked, eyes narrowed.

  Shaizan nodded serenely. "But of course. Your purpose has always remained the same-through every incarnation."

  "You are the embodiment of the original Zor," Bowkaz added, "creator of the first Protoculture Matrix, the Master responsible for our race's ascendancy."

  The words had Dana reeling; she had good reason to know some of the Masters' works. "You mean...Zor also developed the Zentraedi people?"

  Dag studied her. "Zor was the prime force behind all the advancements of our race." He sensed that Zor Prince hadn't yet recalled all the things the Masters and their Elders had done to the original Zor. If he had, Dag thought, the clone would have entered firing.

  Dana studied Zor Prime, reincarnation of the man who had created her mother's race-he who was therefore, at least in part, her own creator as well. She looked back to the Protoculture mass, and wondered if it was the key to everything: the war, peace, and her own origins and destiny.

  "But his most important discovery-the one from which our lifeblood flows-is the Protoculture that makes possible eternal life," Shaizan was saying.

  Zor, though, was shaking his head angrily, eyes squeezed to mere slits, breathing hard. "No! I was never a Master, never one of you! And the Protoculture hasn't brought life; it has brought only death!"

  He brought the assault rifle level with his waist and fired, the weapon burping brief meteoric bursts that blew open a half dozen of the canisters of degraded Protoculture mass along the wall. It showered the deck with nutrient fluids and the raveled, dripping Flowers of Life, their soaked petals and spores, their intertangled roots and blossoms.

  "I will end this here and now!" he screamed, turning the barrel on his onetime Masters.

  In spite of their calm greeting, the Masters hadn't thought to confront

  Zor at this moment, in this situation. It was suddenly clear that he was too overwrought to listen to reason or blandishment. The accursed Human emotions had thrown the Masters' calculations awry yet again.

  Shaizan stepped from the Protoculture cap to stand protectively near the resplendent globe that held the remaining mass. Zor must be kept at bay, until the help that had already been silently summoned could arrive. "Surely you are not prepared to destroy your most precious creation, the embodiment of all your hopes and dreams. Without it, your own species and the civilization you founded will die."

  Shaizan himself felt a strange ripple coursing through him. He felt as if he needed biostabilization and longed for contact with the Protoculture cap, but there was no time for that in this crisis. He could see that both Dag and Bowkaz were experiencing the weird perturbations, too.

  "My civilization is already dead!" Zor hissed, and opened fire again, bolts chopping at the spilled, saturated Flowers, sending up steam and burning blossoms and bits of glowing deckplate.

  Zor felt as if he were made of pure rage. Strange, that beings as emotionless as the Masters should find it so easy to use emotions to their own ends-to torment him and manipulate him so with guilt and sorrow-to batter down his resolve. They made it so hard to think clearly, and unclear thought could only work to their benefit.

  Then, all at once, the scent of the Flowers came to him. The aroma summoned up a memory as clear and substantial as diamond, though it was a memory inherited from a Zor who had died long ago. He recalled how he had plumbed the mysteries of Protoculture, and why, and the tragedies of that great undertaking. He recalled, too, that he had never intended his discoveries to be used for the ends to which the Masters had put them. He saw that the civilization-if that was the word for it-around him was their perversion, their responsibility, not his.

  And he saw, in an almost preternatural calmness, that it didn't lie within his power to change the Masters' civilization, only to stop it.

  Zor brought his weapon around and blasted the base of the sphere. The

  glassy material shattered, in big fragments and infinitesimal ones, like the end of some Cosmic Egg. Shaizan bent aside, shielding himself with his hands.

  A secondary explosion in the systemry under the Masters' last protoculture mass shot the hurricane-lantern canister into the air, as if a child had launched a tin can with a firecracker.

  Trailing wires and dendrites, it turned slowly end for end. Unused to physical action, Bowkaz still sprang from his standing place at the ca tog catch it before it shattered against the deck.

  But Zor was pivoting, livid with anger. Perhaps he would have fired at anybody who came into his sights then-even Dana. Certainly, he shot Bowkaz, the impact of the blasts sending the Master back, setting his monkish robes on fire, his Flower of Life-shaped collar flopping, to fall to the deck.

  But while Zor was distracted, firing at the Master, Dana was in motion, slinging her carbine over her shoulder and leaping high. It wasn't so different from football or volleyball, but it was the best save she had ever made. She had always been athletic, but a desperation to save what might be her own personal salvation and the key to the war made her faster and stronger than she had ever been before.

  And yet, even while she hurled herself up for the catch, gauntleted hands closing in, she could hear the one called Dag actually screeching, "Do not touch the terminals!"

  She had no choice; Dana c
aught it as best she could, and as her hands closed over the discs of systemry at either end of the canister, there was a bright discharge. She wailed, a long, sustained sound, as an absolute-zero shock of energy pulsed through her, and time seemed to slow.

  She could see every detail of the vegetable mass in the canister. It was really very beautiful. Unhurriedly-though she could sense, somehow, that it was happening very quickly-the little twisted buds that reminded her of the mother ships' cannon began to open.

  Sheets of crackling energy raged and swept through the compartment,

  throwing out harsh shadows one moment, then making her and Zor and the Masters all transparent as X rays the next. Bowkaz had barely begun to fall, but his fall was stopping, making him seem to her to hang in midair, contorted with pain from Zor Prime's shot.

  The canister and its Protoculture mass glowed like a star. Shaizan, watching, registered Impossible! The Masters, in concert with their Protoculture cap, might have been able to work something like that effect, but no unaided entity-not Elder, Master, clone, Zentraedi, or Human-could so evoke the power of the Universe's most potent force.

  But Dana heard. Somehow, as if from far away, she heard Shaizan's thought-speech, The Flowers have blossomed!

  Far below, Flowers began opening faster and faster, as the three enigmatic entities set to guard and watch over the matrix by Zor sensed what had happened in the mother ship. The three wraiths began to gather themselves, depleted as they were, for their final task.

  Zor felt himself engulfed in a quicksand of time dilation; he began to mouth a cry that echoed Dana's, a cry that seemed to stretch to Forever. And still the canister poured its full energies into Dana Sterling, who hung in a split-instant's graceful pose, high in the air with the Masters' last Protoculture mass radiant between her hands...

  With no sense of transition, she found herself awakening on a green field lush with the pink Flowers of Life. She still wore her armor; she looked around at hills and vales, not sure that they were of Earth, though she saw wind-blasted crags and what seemed to be rusting Zentraedi wrecks in the distance. She had barely begun to wonder how she had come to be there when she realized she wasn't alone.

  "Huh?"

  There were dark, cloaked figures standing back at a slight remove-female, she thought, feeling a bit drifty, though she couldn't quite be certain. Each of the dark figures held one of the three-stemmed Flowers

  of Life, the three-that-were-one.

  But there was someone else, kneeling right before her, a compact, blond young woman in gauzy pink robes, clutching a bouquet of the Flowers, wearing a necklace something like Musica's. The woman had a roundish hairdo and an upturned, freckled nose; she was calm, and yet there was a sense of life and gusto to her that made her very winsome.

  Dana gave her head a slight shake and realized that she was looking at herself. And she realized that she, like this image of her, held a Flower of Life.

  She levered herself up and saw that there were more of the dark figures, standing silently-making no move as yet-clutching their Flowers, forming a

  ring around Dana and her doppelg 鋘 ger. Dana realized that she wasn't

  armed, but somehow the fact didn't bother her, and she felt only peace and a yearning to have her questions answered.

  Then the kneeling image of herself suddenly shifted, separating out to either side so that there were three, smiling their mysterious smiles at her.

  The triumvirate! She sat-bolt upright, recalling what had happened-grasping the canister-and looking at the Flower in her hand.

  The discharges released the Zentraedi side of my mind! I'm seeing those other sides of me that would have come to life if I were part of a triad!

  She suddenly felt terribly alone. She had never known hen family, never known much about her mother's race, had grown up cut off from most of the knowledge of serf that people around her so took for granted.

  And here was not just one other Dana, but three. A chance for a closeness and unity, a companionship, beyond anything Humans knew. No surprise, it occurred to her, that it was the first thing her expanded powers of mind had summoned up from the vast reservoir of the Protoculture.

  But even as she was about to embrace her sibling-clones, something held her back. The image came to mind of Musica, and of the sad scenes in the mother ships of the Masters. She remembered the antiseptic cruelty of triumvirate life and the obscene murder of the clone Latell.

  She still couldn't understand or see clearly who those shrouded entities

  were, gathered around her, but perceived that they were listening closely, were attentive to her response. Dana felt that some crucial judgment was hanging in the air.

  But it didn't take a lot of soul-searching. She had seen all the sorrows of the submerged personalities of the triumvirates. She looked to her potential otherselves again. Their stares were somehow malign now, and hungry-as if they wanted to devour her, to subsume her in themselves and bury forever the personality that had grown up, for good or ill, as Dana Sterling.

  Dana hurled the Flower to the ground; it shattered and disappeared like a de-rezzing computer image. "I am not a part of your triumvirate! I am an individual Human being!"

  The triplicate visions moaned in concert-hollow sounds like the faraway wails of tortured children. They seemed to turn to smoke, becoming vacant-eyed ghosts that were rent in the wind like spindrift, their Flowers dissolving as well.

  The dark listeners evaporated, too, with thin, pipe-organ howls like mourning specters, resigned to their eternal fate. They faded, now part of a reality that would never come to be.

  Dana was on her feet. The green had vanished, and she ground herself in a bleak and blasted setting, lifeless as any lunar crater but still recognizably an Earthscape.

  She threw the words out angrily. "I reject the horrors of your civilization!" She wasn't sure if she was talking to the Masters, or the Protoculture, or her own Zentraedi heritage. "I reject your values and your beliefs!"

  Who is there to hear? she wondered, and yet she knew she wasn't going unheard. "I'm an individual, a free Human being of the planet Earth!"

  It came to her that she was standing in a place of scattered Human bones, a skull nearly beneath her feet. There was no stirring of air, no hint of life, anywhere across a limitless plain covered with ash and roofed over by low clouds that might have come from some planetary cremation.

  Is this it? Is this the future of both civilizations? Suddenly she was

  running, calling for help in a bleak landscape that even denied her echoes.

  Her foot turned on a shattered skeleton, and she fell headlong. But as she fell, the ash smothering her, clogging her throat and nostrils, she heard somebody calling her name.

  She shook her head to clear it, but when she looked up, she was in some strange, kinder place. There was the blue and green of growing things, but not any that she could identify. The smell of life and the clarity of the air made her gasp, though.

  "Dana, wait for me! I'm coming!"

  There were low crystal domes of the Flowers of Life before her, and a starlit sky with no constellation she could recognize. Somewhere there was ethereal music that reminded her of the Cosmic Harp's, and a little girl was dashing toward her.

  "I-I'm not going anywhere," Dana said dazedly.

  She was ten or so, Dana guessed, a black-haired, spritelike thing with huge dark eyes, wearing a short, flowing garment of gold and white. Her tiny waist was encircled by a broad belt, her wrists and throat banded by the same redbrown leathery stuff. She wore a garland of woven Flowers of Life in her hair, and carried another.

  "Who are you?" Dana got out.

  The child stopped before her. "Your sister, Dana! The other daughter of Max and Miriya Sterling! I was born a long, long way from Earth, and I've come to warn you. Oh, Mother and Father will be so glad to know I've finally made contact with you!"

  "I'm glad, too," Dana said haltingly, praying it wasn't just some hallucination. "But
what are you supposed to warn me about?"

  "The spores, Dana."

  This, even while the little girl pressed the Flower of Life into Dana's armor-clad hands. "I've come to bring you these Flowers and to warn you about the spores."

  "Please" Dana couldn't bear it, was afraid the thought of the Flowers and the Protoculture and the rest of it would shake her loose from this

  Vision or contact or whatever it was. "Let's not talk about that. Tell me about you! What's your name?"

  The little girl was giggling. But then she turned and raced away in the direction from which she had come. Dana was left to yell, "Hey! Please come back! I want to know more!"

  Two more shadow-figures had appeared, a man and a woman, graceful beings whose figures were indistinct in the way of this strange half world. A cape billowed around the woman, and there was something familiar about the way the man had his arm around her, two presences Dana had felt before.

  The child went running toward them, and they opened their arms to her. As the three apparitions looked to her, Dana heard voices she knew, speaking without speech.

  The spores, Dana! Beware the spores, and the Invid!

  "The-the what?" She felt dizzy. Her own memories and old tapes of Max and Miriya Sterling told her that she was truly hearing her parents' voices-or rather, their thoughts.

  Beware the Invid! They will come in search of the spores!

  She had a million things to ask them and to tell them, but the contact seemed to be growing weaker, for when the mind-message came again, it was faint.

  Time grows short. So much has happened since our last contact with Earth, so many astounding things! Your powers are awake now, and they are growing! Use them cautiously; we of the Sentinels are only beginning to understand the true nature of Protoculture.

  The Sentinels? Dana wondered at the sound of the words.

  And then she heard was her sister's voice. We love you, Dana! We love you very much!