George Zebrowski Read online

  The home world lay before him. He had never seen it after the holocaust, yet suddenly he was there. The land was an endless plain of ashes, the remains of cities and towns, the very mountains. The planet was a heated dust bowl, wind-whipped and sterile. Grief held back all his tender reactions, all regret and tears. He felt the hell wind on his face, tasted the baked ash in his mouth as the gray sea drifted around his feet.

  He walked forward across the meadow of ashes. The horizon was a wavy line of heat distortions. He came abruptly to a large circular pit in the waste; stars burned below the world, glowing gravel floating in a subterranean universe.…

  The dream was always the same.

  A titanic fist pounded on the wall behind his bed, making the stone echo like metal; the black surfaces of the room became glassy and shattered, flowing away like water.…

  He sat up suddenly and saw his father standing in the open doorway.

  “Are you awake?”

  “I’m ready,” he said, feeling distrustful of the silhouette. His father’s dark shape turned and went out into the corridor.

  He looked at the dark lamp in the corner, remembering that in the dream he had believed that his life was somehow dependent on its continued shining; a curious absurdity.

  He got up and prepared to follow his father to the ship.

  The ramp tunnel exit loomed ahead suddenly and the Whisper Ship shot out over the barren surface of the planet. A glowing cloud of interstellar gas blazed from horizon to horizon as the vessel raced over jagged mountains, stone-filled valleys and dusty plains; airless, beaten by solar wind and heat, the lifeless world orbited faithfully, forever dead in the angry glare of its small, white-hot primary. Located near the center of the cluster, the entire system was wrapped in a cloud of gas and dust half a light-year across.

  The ship lifted into the shining sky. Variations in cloud density let in the light of cluster stars, the glow fading as the ship shifted position.

  With his father now asleep in the aft quarters, the younger Gorgias began his first watch. Without warning the ship slipped into otherspace, revealing the stars of the cluster as perfectly round black coals set at an indefinite distance. For the next one hundred and fifty hours the ship would push through this ashen sea, fifty thousand light-years across the top of the galaxy, halfway across the spiral, past where Earth swam deep in the spiral disk’s outer arms, upward to the sparsely starred region where Myraa’s World looked out on the dark between the galaxies.

  All through his first watch, the younger Gorgias was irritated by the shroud of hyperspace covering the known universe, hiding the diamond-hard stars, abolishing the black void’s comfort, leaving only the ash-white continuum dotted with the obsidian analogs of objects in normal space-time. The bones of reality, he thought, dry and lifeless; passing through this region was always a slow dying.

  Did he really care about the Herculean dead? He searched himself, trying to feel the death of millions. The killing of ten would have been intolerable. Each of those hundreds of millions would have lived a thousand Earth years or more, each life an entire world of experience, now cut off. To remember their passing was to deny oneself all normal day-to-day living, all simplicity, all love; to remember their passing was to act in ways that would change him irrevocably, making him an instrument, a sacrifice to the fires of outrage. He did not, and never would, belong to himself, or to anyone else.

  If he could hurt even ten Earthborn, the news would humiliate millions; the dead deserved that much. Each blow, however small, would be a reminder that the Federation’s victory had not been complete. The dead were alive within him, sparks ready to flare up into an inner fire; his strength was the needed fuel; his strength was their will preparing to live again. Rest would come for him only when all the hatred he bore was spent.

  The thought of his father’s growing weakness made him angry again. He felt it as a coldness camped at his center, a promise of failure. He would have left the older man in stasis at their last waking and gone out by himself, but the ship was still tuned to the other’s personality and would obey no one else. The ship could only be his by deliberate transfer of command; his father’s death would not give him the ship. He needed his father’s good will.

  If only a second Whisper Ship could be found. Perhaps there was one somewhere on Myraa’s World. He had always suspected that Myraa knew more than she was willing to tell. Maybe he could learn something from Oriona. Myraa or one of the other survivors might have revealed something to her, a piece of information that would not appear to be useful, but which might be crucial to one who could fit it into a large context. The visit might turn out to be useful after all.

  He found himself thinking about Myraa — her nakedness, her long hair, her smile, the freshness of her skin. Thoughts of her always brought out his weakest feelings. The universe of time and space had cheated him (what was this effort of time passing?) of the simplest pleasures enjoyed by the humblest creatures on a million worlds. He was a thinking, self-conscious object living in a plenum where distance lay between objects that were made up of infinitesimally spaced small objects lying below gross perception. What was justice, or vengeance, in such a universe? Why did he crave closeness with Myraa, and why was he compelled to believe that distance from her way of life was necessary for him? In his way he loved her, but he would not give himself up to her; the cry of the past was stronger than her love; for him to ignore the past would be to die.

  He would have to recreate the history from which he sprang; it would have to be a certain kind of living object, a network of conscious beings again holding the Hercules Cluster together. To this community he would give himself; there love might not be a fault; there he would shine as he had been meant to shine, a king from a line of kings; there he would know the past and future as they should be, unshattered and filled with the meaning of time; there the past would be pride, the future a distant glowing goal that would consume all things in its crucible of satisfaction and joy.

  On the screen, the desolation of otherspace promised nothing as the ship rushed through its oblivion.

  When his father came in to stand his first watch period, Gorgias rose and let the older man take the station chair.

  “I’ve found a likely target for us,” Gorgias said.

  His father swung the seat around and glared at him. The face was pale, the blue eyes sunken from worry and doubt; the hands sought each other from fear, then pushed apart to hide the fact. “What are you talking about? We were not to plan anything until after the visit.”

  “Thirty light-years south of Myraa there is a frontier world, mostly small towns, not more than half a million people, an easy target.”

  His father gripped the armrests. “Later, we don’t have time to discuss it now, get some rest.”

  “You said you would fight —”

  “A world that size is unimportant, settled by rejects. Federation won’t be impressed.”

  “We could destroy a town in a single run.”

  “They’d look for us on Myraa’s World immediately, hold Oriona and others hostage …”

  “We could do it after we take Oriona with us. Besides, what makes you so sure they are capable of holding hostages?”

  His father was shaking his head. “There’s too little thought and preparation. Don’t be so impatient. Do you think that Federation military operatives are stupid? They’ll pick up on every mistake. They won the war that way.”

  “But they never came up against a Whisper Ship.”

  “True, the ship is unassailable, but you might imprison yourself forever inside. Even the life-support systems require mass to synthesize food.…”

  “I could recycle indefinitely.”

  “But you would starve if something went wrong. Son, there are ways to trap or disrupt the ship. In time it would be possible to bring enough power to bear on it to tear it open.”

  “Things would never get that far,” Gorgias said. He turned and started aft.

&nbs
p; “Rest well,” his father called after him just as the bulkhead door slid shut. There was no point in angering the old man now. Later, he thought, when the ship is mine, I can do as I wish, but I need him now to control the ship’s programs. Suddenly, he feared that his father would never relinquish control of the ship.

  At the end of the short corridor, another door slid open to let him into the aft quarters, containing a large bunk with gravity controls, bath cubicle and a small kitchen dispenser.

  Gorgias lay down and tried to sleep, struggling to reach a deep calm, but rest charged a toll of memory before releasing him into its quietest realm. He was on Myraa’s World for the first time. “Is this home?” he asked his father. No, it was another place, far from their enemies. Here the surviving Herculeans might live in peace. A green field showed a pit, a wound cut in the grass. Bodies lay in the pit, the corpses of Herculean animals, those that had been unable to adjust to the new planet. Later, fleeing warships had arrived, burning the grass into desert with their makeshift jets; only the crudest planetfall was left to them after their strained gravitics had failed.

  Spring light was streaming through Myraa’s window. Beams walked ghostly on the floor. Whole ships had been gutted to build the house on the hill. Sickness, suicide and lack of provisions had decimated the survivors, soldier and specialist alike; no hand or brain remained now that could repair, operate, or even understand the dead fleet. Only the Whisper Ship ran itself, demanding little direct understanding of its systems for effective operation.

  Beams of steel passed through his body, pinning him in a place beyond sleep. There was no pain and no possibility of movement; in a few moments there would be … nothing.

  He awoke and listened to the perfect silence of the cabin, imagining that the wintriness of hyperspace was increasing, pressing in on the ship, and would soon freeze it into immobility within the gray continuum. The cabin smelled of cold metal. He closed his eyes again and thought of entering stasis for … a thousand … two thousand years. Would the Federation still exist after ten thousand years? Would the machines maintain the stasis field for that long? What kind of universe would he find after a million years? No revenge would be possible for him in that universe. To step into it would require no more than a subjective moment of sleep, and all his purpose would be left behind. The idea filled him with a sense of loss. He saw himself going alone across time, the past a black pit behind him, drawing him backward, pulling him closer each time he fell asleep; one day he would not wake in time to save himself.

  Then all thoughts and dreams left him, as he knew they would, as they always had; but again he wondered if he had won, or if a tide had simply gone out.

  During his second watch he saw the ship’s ghost on the screen, running ahead at a fixed distance. He wondered if an insubstantial copy of himself was sitting before the screen in that phantom vessel, watching a still more distant illusion, and if his father was resting in the aft quarters there also.

  When he slept after his watch, the ship turned to glass, letting in the ghastly gray-white light from beyond, the glow of an overcast creation or the underside of a universe forever turned away from the living.

  Opening his eyes, he longed for starlight, for sight of worlds, for living things. He looked at his hands. His skin was growing pale here, as if the few days had really been years. What was time in jumpspace? Perhaps time was lost in transit, then regained at the moment of exit, leaving in the traveler only the memory of long imprisonment.

  He closed his eyes again. Memory was bare and clean, as stony as the halls and chambers of the base. He felt pity for himself, for his father, for Oriona imprisoned on Myraa’s World, for his brother who had died there. Only revenge was left; nothing else would fill him up completely and quiet his hunger, nothing else would lead to renewal for his people. The only way to redeem the past was to bring it into the present and use it to control the future; he had to make memory a material thing, a force that would lash out at the Earthborn, making it impossible for them to ignore his demands. Revenge was the only way to kindle recognition in those who had taken everything from him, leaving this gray present, an old man and a black future.

  If I do not reach out to hurt, he thought, I will not want to live.

  A shadowed face looked down at him, and he knew that he would cease to be if it turned its gaze away. Again the pit of things past pulled him in, closer this time; he reached for a handhold to keep himself from falling in, but he woke up before he could grasp it.

  |Go to Contents |

  III. Exiles

  “The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization.”

  — Freud

  “There is nothing worse for mortal men than wandering.”

  — Homer,The Odyssey

  THE ASHES of jumpspace faded; the black coals caught fire and became bright stars again. Nearby, the sun of Myraa’s World burned with a yellow-orange life, its shouting light filling the screen, humbling the observer who had just emerged from limbo.

  I have reached the complexity of hating myself, the older Gorgias thought. My son will begin to hate me and I will not want to live. I am not sure that his plans will be ineffective, I have simply lost … my taste for war. Reproaches rose in his brain, the dark shapes of Herculean soldiers going into battle, each one crying out for him to remember his training, his loyalty, the meaning of cowardice and treason.I am not guilty , he said to the shapes. Too much had changed.

  Myraa’s World grew large on the screen until it took up the whole view. The ship cut into the atmosphere and circled halfway around the planet before dropping to a few kilometers above the ocean.

  His son came in and stood behind him as the screen showed the land ahead. The water grew shallow, revealing sunlit bottom. In a few moments the ship was past the rocky beach and rushing low over the land.

  Oriona. He wondered how she would greet him this time. How would she greet her son? Would she continue to judge in her silent way? If she spoke to him, what would he say to her, what could he say to her after thirty years? She had lived those years while he had stolen them — stolen them from her and from himself. He would not see those years in her face; few Herculeans below the age of five hundred showed signs of age.

  The ship turned north, running over worn mountains and grassy valleys. The yellow afternoon sunlight stained the greenery, making it look blue in patches.

  “We’re almost there,” his son said quietly, almost as if he were afraid.

  We’re almost home, Gorgias thought. It always surprised him to think of Myraa’s World as home; in a way it was home, the gathering place of almost all remaining Herculeans; it was home because Oriona was here, and because he was here with his son, however brief the visit; it was home because his son had once asked him if it was home, and he had lied.

  The hill and house came into view. A circular design of panoramic windows drank in the western sunlight, though some shade was provided by six elegant trees standing in a carpet of tall grass. He saw that the trees were taller, their trunks larger. The branches were thicker with curving needles, and the red cones were as bright as the gem sands of New Anatolia’s beaches.

  The ship circled once and landed in a hover at the bottom of the hill in back of the house, where the evening shadow would cloak it.

  He turned and looked at his son, but there was no sign of shared feelings in the younger man’s face. For a moment Gorgias was afraid that his son would guess his state of mind and see it as yet another sign of weakness, but the other was already turning away to leave the ship.

  He got up and followed his son out of the control room to the side lock. The mechanism had already cycled and they stepped out into a warm south wind which greeted them with the scent of living things. The effect was almost a shock after the sterility of the base and jumpspace.

  The hill was a thirty-degree climb on a dirt footpath. His son reached the door first and waited. They stood together for a minute until the door opened. Inside, they walked
to the front room through a narrow corridor.

  “There’s no one here,” his son said as they passed by the open bedroom door.

  The black floor was dustless, as if someone had just cleaned it. The chairs sat alone, facing the massive bowed windows, waiting for visitors who would come out of time to seat themselves; the silence seemed eternal.

  “Welcome.”

  They both turned and saw Myraa standing in front of the entrance to the corridor. She wore a simple blue robe which matched her eyes. A hood hid her long brown hair.

  “Welcome,” she repeated, “I knew you were coming.”

  She could not have known, he thought, but it gives her a sense of power to say so.

  “Where’s Oriona?” his son asked.

  Myraa took a few steps into the room and said, “Oriona is no longer living —”

  The sentence stopped for an eternity, preventing him from hearing the rest.

  “ — as you know it. It was her wish.”

  His son went up to her. “Wish? What are you talking about? How did it happen — an accident? Was she murdered?”

  “It was her wish,” Myraa said. “She left nothing for you, and she does not want to speak with you now.”

  “What are you saying?” his son asked. “Tell me where she is — is she dead or not?”

  “She exists elsewhere, whether you accept it or not. I am telling you this so that you will calm yourself.”

  His son turned to him. “What is she saying?”

  “Their belief is that, well — people are absorbed into others, like herself, becoming multiple personalities. I’ve never paid the idea much attention. Oriona is dead — Myraa is trying to … excuse me.” He closed his eyes and felt a warmth spread through his body. He felt his head bow and a freezing weakness entered his muscles. He recovered and opened his eyes. Turning, he sat down in the nearest chair and looked out the window.