by Barry Lyga
“Twenty seconds,” Thanos said.
“How’s this for acknowledging kindness?” Ro said. “I’ll actually let you get to zero before I blow you out of space.”
“Ten seconds,” Thanos said, and at the same time signaled Cha to attack.
In anticipation of the day when some foolish world or desperate system or ignorant space pirate would attempt to blast him out of existence, Thanos had taken the precaution of having ten Leviathans trail the rest of his fleet at a distance of roughly one light-minute. They were spread out far enough that to normal sensors they simply appeared to be asteroidal space debris.
During his conversation with Daakon Ro, those ten living ships had closed the light-minute distance to the Nova Corps Star Blasters. With ten seconds left on Thanos’s countdown, they attacked.
On-screen, Daakon Ro’s hologram gasped and turned. Over the audio of the comms channel, Thanos heard panicked cries and shouts of alarm.
“What the hell!” Ro exclaimed, looking around. “Thanos! What the hell!”
The Leviathans did not so much assail the ships as they swarmed on them. They insinuated themselves into the Nova Corps’s attack formation so swiftly that the ships couldn’t fire without potentially hitting their own vessels. Lightning blasts sizzled from the Leviathans’ blast ports, and the great beasts twitched their muscled lengths as they coursed through the ships’ assault pattern. The vacuum-hardened outer carapaces of the Leviathans plowed through the alloy hulls of the ships, ripping them open to the empty death of space.
Daakon Ro’s hologram fuzzed, sparked, then collapsed into dead static.
The assault took only a few minutes. When it was over, one Leviathan was dead, two were wounded, and all fifteen Star Blasters were obliterated. Debris, bodies, and globules of blood drifted in the zero-gravity tomb of deep space.
“I rarely lie,” Thanos said to the empty screen. “But rarely does not mean never.”
Thanos leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers before him. “As I was saying, Cha: I will not surrender. I will not give up. Life needs me on its side.”
Cha clucked his tongue and gestured outside the main pulsoglass portal. An exploded Xandarian corpse drifted by, caught by the microgravity generated by Sanctuary’s mass. The body would orbit the ship like a broken, bloody moon until they increased speed to the point that friction would burn it to ash.
“Yes. Life needs you,” Cha said without a trace of sarcasm.
“Your point is taken.” Thanos heaved himself out of his chair. “Perhaps there is another way. Only a fool or a zealot clings to his original plan and does not seek new methods of attaining his goal.”
“I’m pleased you distinguish between fools and zealots,” Cha said happily.
“A mistake I won’t make again,” Thanos said as he left the bridge.
Retreating to his quarters, Thanos spent days in deep study. With Cha distracting his daughters, he allowed himself to sink deep into the data at his disposal. His chambers came to resemble the silencurium of his memory—there was no sound save for the occasional whisper of his own breath or the infrequent hard thump of his heart when he realized something anew.
He downloaded statistics and data from satellites orbiting distant worlds in far-off solar systems. He pored over information gleaned from obscure tracts and hidden caches of knowledge. He calculated and he massaged his intelligence and he applied his considerable brain to the question of how many worlds needed to be saved. And how best to save them?
The results were chilling. They made him so despondent that he did not leave his quarters for another week, simply lay in his bed and stared straight ahead at nothing. At absolutely nothing.
It was no longer a matter of saving individual planets, he realized. He’d been too nearsighted and too shortsighted to comprehend the sheer enormity of the problem ahead of him. The planets were in danger, yes, but the planets existed as parts of the universe.
And the universe itself was in danger of succumbing to the same fate as Titan.
The universe was vast, but not infinite. There was a finite number of habitable worlds and thus a finite supply of resources to support life. The number was enormous, yes—almost unimaginably so.
But it was a number. It was finite and limited, and therefore…
According to his new calculations, and based on his models—now tried on the ashes of hundreds of worlds—within the next one hundred billion years, the universe would run out of the resources to support life.
When he’d first calculated that number, he had laughed with relief. One hundred billion years was an unimaginably ridiculous length of time. It was almost an obscenity.
And yet…
And yet time was inexorable. One year or one hundred billion of them: The day would come. And did not the people of one hundred billion years hence deserve their lives as much as those living in the present? Who was he—who was anyone—to claim that a life lived right now was more valuable or worthy or deserving than one lived one hundred million millennia from now?
By that time in the future, there would be multiples of sextillions of living sentients in the universe. A staggeringly large number.
And every single one of them would be doomed.
Why should a child in the future suffer, starve, and die in horror just so a child today could live in comfort?
He could continue to travel the cosmos and try to fix planets and civilizations one by one, but…
“It’s a big damned universe out there,” he whispered to himself.
And that night, the dream came to him again, for the first time in years.
Remember what I have told you, Gwinth said. She was almost completely bare of flesh at this point, her body a loose-jointed skeleton hanging with gobbets of leftover skin and scraps of muscle that did not know how to let go. Her jaw clicked as she spoke.
And he remembered when he awoke. He always remembered now. Ever since he’d lied to Cha.
She said, Save everyone. That’s what he’d told Cha all those years ago on the Golden Berth, when he lived under the yoke of His Lordship.
But that was not all. That was only half of what she’d told him. Quite literally.
You cannot save everyone, she’d said.
It made so much sense now. His algorithm, applied not to a planet but to the universe as a whole. To save the universe for the people of the future, he needed to kill half of it. He needed to kill half the universe.
He laughed at the thought. Laughed for a long, long time.
“Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you, Gwinth, for leading me down the right path once again.”
He summoned Cha, his warrior-daughters, and the Other to the bridge. They were the only beings in his army capable of independent planning, and while his intellect outweighed theirs—combined—in every possible measure, he did feel that there was value in other perspectives, no matter how wrong.
Cha sat at the navigation pod, his chair twisted around to face Thanos in the commander’s chair. The Other stood ramrod straight nearby, and his daughters…
The girls were girls no longer, verging on womanhood. Insolent and filled with hate and anger, they were so focused on their loathing for him that they did not realize how he’d made them his perfect weapons. Soon would be the time to unleash them with his armies, to watch them kill in his name as they deluded themselves into thinking that they were just biding their time, looking for his weakness.
He had no weakness. They would kill for him again and again, hating him, and do his loving work.
Nebula lounged in the weapons pod, her back against one chair arm, her legs draped over the other. Gamora perched atop a console nearby. They sparred and they bickered, but they also stayed close to each other, as though subject to some unspoken but understood détente that they enforced so long as it was to their mutual advantage.
“You’ve heard the problem,” Thanos told them. “We’ve been taking the plodding course of going from planet to plan
et, identifying those with environmental issues like Titan’s. But the universe as a whole is endangered. The problem before was merely staggering in its scope. Now it is nearly impossible to conceive. I welcome your suggestions for a solution.”
“Gee, Dad,” said Nebula, “why don’t we just build a bomb big enough to kill half the universe? Do it in one shot.”
“That’s stupid,” Gamora grumbled.
“At least I’m contributing,” Nebula said, her remaining organic eye flashing with anger.
“Contributing something stupid is worse than just keeping your mouth shut in the first place.”
Nebula spun in her chair, a blur of motion so fast that even Thanos had trouble keeping up with her movement. But before she could do anything else, Gamora was at Nebula’s throat with a blade.
“Not now,” Thanos said reprovingly.
Gamora snarled and jerked the blade away. Nebula sidled away, a hand to her throat. Her cybernetic eye spasmed open and closed, a sign that she was losing control. Thanos gave her his sternest glare and she settled down.
“A bomb big enough to kill half the universe,” Thanos said once the room had calmed, “is an attractive notion, but imprecise and impractical. It’s not as though I can snap my fingers and make it so. But something must be done. Inevitable death is a sad enough fate for an individual or a world; for an entire reality? Unforgivable.”
Cha folded his arms over his chest and hmmphed. “You cannot expect to understand the machinations of fate.”
“How convenient for fate,” Thanos remarked.
“It was always a crazy idea,” Nebula said sulkily. “Now it’s just a bigger crazy idea. Running around the universe, killing off people in order to save them… Insane.”
“Sanity is a matter of perspective, determined by social norms,” Thanos told her. As he spoke, he watched Gamora, not Nebula. Gamora’s expression, as always, revealed nothing of what she was thinking. He found her stoicism impressive and unnerving. “I am not bound by social norms. My sanity is not at issue.”
“Says you,” Nebula snarked.
“Indeed.” Thanos opened his hands wide. “I am still amenable to suggestions.”
No one spoke.
“Have we come this far only to meet a terminal pause?” he asked the room.
“Come this far?” Gamora said with the slightest hint of a smile at the corners of her lips. In their teen years, both his daughters had developed a mild rebellious streak. Gamora spoke less often, but with more bite. “How far have we come? A billion inhabited worlds in the universe, with billions of souls on each one. And you’ve killed less than a trillion in total so far.” She clapped slowly, mockingly. “Well done, mighty Thanos, Warlord Thanos. Truly, the stars do quake at your footsteps.”
“Say the word,” Nebula urged, “and I’ll cut her tongue out.”
“And give me a robotic one, like yours?” Gamora asked sweetly. Nebula leaped up from her chair and launched herself at her sister, who sidestepped at the last possible instant and rabbit-punched Nebula in the side. Nebula gasped in pain and flew over the control console, crashing into the bulkhead. Gamora smoothly vaulted over the console, her knife already drawn.
“Gamora! Nebula!” Thanos barked, his voice cut off somewhat by the sound of Nebula’s strangled gasp for breath as Gamora landed on her solar plexus. “We do not have time for this!”
Shielded from Thanos’s view by the console, they scuffled there for a few moments, grunting and cursing. Finally, Thanos rose from his seat, leaned over the console, and hauled them to their feet, where, despite his massive hands on their shoulders, they continued to swing and swipe at each other.
“You vex me,” he informed them, squeezing so tightly that bones in Gamora’s shoulder ground together painfully. Nebula’s new artificial shoulder complex whined electronically. “Vex me no further.”
He shoved them to the floor.
“Sure, Dad,” Nebula said darkly.
“As you say,” Gamora said with an indifferent toss of her hair.
He waited until they had taken seats again—once again damnably close together; these two could not stand to be together, could not abide being apart—and then returned to his own seat.
“A problem of enormous size does not always require a solution of equal size,” he said. “Sometimes finesse, critical thinking, and planning may suffice where brute force cannot.”
“Like the way we overcame the three Asgardian warriors near Alfheim,” Cha offered.
The mention of the Asgardians made Thanos think, surprisingly, of Kebbi. He’d not thought about her in years, and he was stunned to find that the memory of her was both clear and painful, as though its clarity sharpened its edges, making it difficult to turn the remembrance over in his mind. She had been the first sacrificed in the name of his mission, the first to have the trust she’d put in him repaid with her own blood.
He did not mourn her passing. But he mourned the loss of her presence. They were not the same, though the distinction was probably too fine, too nuanced for others.
“The Asgardians…” he murmured. “Their artifact.”
Cha shook his head. “Thanos. That was years ago. I’m sure the Asgardians have redoubled security on their… what was it called? Their bespoke gate technology?”
“Bifrost,” Thanos said absently.
“Right.” Cha stared at Thanos, tilting his head this way, then that. “Thanos? Are you actually considering this? Again? Do you remember what happened last time?”
Thanos closed his eyes and—for a moment—was back on board the Blood Edda. Smoke purled from control panels. Kebbi was dying in his arms even as his own blood fled his body with fierce rapidity.
In his life, he had conquered many worlds, brought many species to extinction. In the past several years, he had gone from one war to another. Yet those moments with Cha and Kebbi on the Blood Edda were the closest he had ever come to death.
“I remember exquisitely,” he told Cha, opening his eyes. Across the bridge, his daughters scrutinized him, as though they’d finally found the weakness they’d sought all these years. He filed it away for later. “I remember coming very, very close to victory, at a time when we were younger, less puissant, and without resources.”
“You want to mount an assault on Asgard?” Cha asked, his voice high-pitched and terrified. “Are you serious? All to seek out something that may not even exist? His Lordship was not exactly…”
“Sane?”
“I was going to say a reliable source of information. But yours works just as well.”
“The Asgardian we first encountered,” Thanos mused aloud. “Vathlauss.”
“The one you tortured,” Cha said, managing to keep a tone of judgment out of his voice.
“Yes, him. He certainly seemed to believe that Odin was hiding something. Something monumentally powerful.”
Cha threw his hands up in the air. “This is madness. I’ve gone along with much since we met, Thanos, but invading the home of Odin himself? In pursuit of something that may or may not even exist?”
“Aether,” Thanos murmured. “He called it Aether. The Infinity Stone.”
Cha had opened his mouth to argue further, but at the words Infinity Stone, he froze. After a moment, he managed to say, “Is that what he told you? He said Odin had an Infinity Stone? You never told me that before.”
Thanos shrugged. “It no longer seemed to matter. We had no way to return to Asgard. But…” Something occurred to him. “An Infinity Stone? There’s more than one?”
“I don’t…” Cha scratched at his head in bemusement. “I don’t know. You hear things. Rumors. Space lore. Especially out on the Rim, where I was doing my work before His Lordship abducted me and pressed me into service. People tell all kinds of stories. But, still—it would be crazy to try to take an army to Asgard on the mere word of a dying man.”
“I agree. That would be madness. We first need to ascertain whether the artifact exists. And then what it is
and what it does. And then, if it is worthwhile, we will raze Asgard to find it.”
Cha shook his head. “How exactly do you propose to learn all of this? Are we going to find and torture more Asgardians and hope this time it works out?”
“Lorespeaker.”
It was the first time the Other had spoken since the meeting had been convened.
“Excuse me?” Thanos said.
At the same moment, Cha groaned loudly and said, “Oh no!”
“Lorespeaker,” the Other said again, very precisely. “Lorespeaker will know. He knows everything.”
“Don’t be an idiot!” Cha howled, pointing at the Other.
Thanos nodded minutely to Gamora, who came up behind Cha and put a strong hand on Cha’s shoulder. The Sirian calmed down almost immediately.
“What is a Lorespeaker?” Thanos asked.
“Not what. Who,” the Other explained. “The Lorespeaker knows everything worth knowing. All the stories. The Lorespeaker hears all and knows all. Every legend. Every myth. Every tale.”
“Why have I never heard of this Lorespeaker before?”
Cha fumed in his seat, arms folded over his chest. “Because it’s a fairy tale, Thanos.”
When the Chitauri shrugged—which wasn’t often—their carapaces clacked against their cybernetic implants. It was an oddly hollow sound, and the Other made it now. “It is a big universe, Lord Thanos. No one knows all of it. Except the Lorespeaker.”
Thanos held up a hand to forestall Cha’s indignant interruption.
Cha spoke through clenched teeth, eager to leap up from his chair but mindful of Gamora standing behind him. “The Lorespeaker is a charlatan. He knows as much fiction as fact and spews them in equal quantities.” He turned his attention to Thanos. “Don’t listen to this… bug. The Lorespeaker will lead you down a path that ends in a black hole, then push you in.”
Thanos considered this. “What harm can there be in at least consulting with this Lorespeaker? If he speaks truth, so be it. If not, we are no worse off than before.”