George Zebrowski (12 page)

Miraculously, the rucksack lay in the ruined fireplace, pinned down by a few stones that had fallen in from the chimney. Slowly he crawled over to the rucksack and dragged it backward.

Pulling out a few pieces of dried food, he handed them to the women under the table.

“Eat it — it’s wet but we don’t have much else.” The stores in the basement were under water now; this was all the food that was left. Hands reached out and took what he offered.

“Pass some to Fane,” he shouted.

He bit into the last piece himself, savoring the texture of synthetic protein and fruit flavor.

The light grew darker, until he could no longer see his own hands in front of his face.

I am a soldier
, he thought,
my son is a terrorist
.

Everything was perfectly clear now.
If this is what it takes to survive and regain power
,
then I want no part of it
. A planet was dying nearby, and he had done nothing to prevent it. He would not be able to live with that knowledge.

He remembered Gorgias and Myraa playing as small children, with Oriona and himself looking on. The General would have been happy to know that his daughter, Myraa, had survived.…

The old Herculean closed his eyes and lay still, overcome by the past. It was a sweet breeze of memory, enveloping him with longing and regret; he did not have the strength to struggle against it.…

Gorgias, his brother Herkon and Myraa ran through the tall grass, shouting and laughing. Oriona was smiling.…

He should never have brought his son to the base, or taken him on sorties; he should never have let him use the ship’s library, or taught him the roll of destroyed worlds; he should never have believed the stories of a Herculean army still at large somewhere, regardless of the evidence that such an army had escaped through the ruined gate on Myraa’s World. He had failed; his whole civilization had failed. If it were to grow back, it would have to do so slowly, peacefully, out of sight of its enemies who now lived inside it in the form of hatred and the thirst for revenge. Perhaps there were irreversible things, and the Herculean Empire would never return, except maybe as something else.…

Myraa, Gorgias and Herkon ran naked into his open arms, shapes out of time.…

“Herkon is dead,” Oriona said one day, “the others have taken him.”

“How?” he heard himself ask very long ago.

His father was not in the aft cabin.

Gorgias turned and went forward again to the control room.

“Am I alone?” he asked the ship.

YES.

“When was the lock opened?”

ONE HALF HOUR AGO.

“Scan nearby space.”

SCANNING. LIFEFORM AT SIX KILOMETERS.

“Overtake,” Gorgias said.

The disfigured face of New Mars disappeared, to be replaced by the sight of his father and scooter directly ahead. Gorgias went aft, put on his suit and stepped into the lock. It cycled and opened just as the ship came alongside the scooter.

Gorgias reached out and pulled the scooter inside.

As the lock closed and cycled, the figure toppled from the seat, pulled down by the ship’s artificial gravity. The inner door opened, and Gorgias pulled his father inside.

When he took off the helmet, he saw that the face was disfigured by lack of air pressure, eyes bulging wide open. Gorgias looked into the eyes as if he were looking across light-years, hoping that far away, at a greater distance than he had ever known, something of his father might still be alive to be recalled by a sheer act of will.

Slowly, mechanically, he stood up and took off his own suit, then his father’s, and hung them up in their places on the bulkhead.

Turning back to the body, he stared at it for a long time.

“You were waiting to do this,” he said, “to take what remained of the past from me.” He knelt down and punched the discolored face with his fist. “Coward!” For a moment the mouth seemed to turn up into the semblance of a smile, but the flesh would not stay and it turned into a sneer. “You’re nothing now — you’ve always been nothing. Why else would you have come to this, old man?”

A wild thought came into his mind. Myraa could drag his father back, make him face what he had done, if what she said was true. He picked up the body, carried it into the aft cabin, and turned the temperature down to its lowest setting, insuring that the body would not begin to decompose for a while.

He rushed forward into the control cabin, sat down at the station and screamed an order.

“Switchover — evasive route to Myraa’s World — we’re being pursued by Federation cruisers.”

YOU ARE MISTAKEN,

NOTHING IS VISIBLE.

He would tell Myraa that the patrol ships had appeared just after he and his father had finished attaching the gravitic units to the rock. His father had been hit by laser fire, but he had managed to get him back into the ship before he died.

“Follow orders — Myraa’s World,” he repeated.

When the ship was in jumpspace, Gorgias went aft and looked at his father’s corpse floating in the zero-g field.

“I’ll lose them,” he said. “I’ll get us home.”

He went forward again and sat down at the screen station.

The gray continuum was clear; he was safe.

Closing his eyes, he tried to push away the nagging fear that came into him. His father was dead … honorably, he told himself, rehearsing the lie that would have to be told.

Myraa will know the truth
, another part of him said.

Myraa will know what to do
, his hopes whispered.

On the third day the rain slowed to a drizzle and some light came into the sky, a pitiably feeble glow that was put to shame by the more distant lightning flashes. Kurbi opened his eyes and found himself staring at the lighter sky for a long time.

“Slifa is dead,” Fane said, his voice seeming loud now in contrast to the steady rush of the endless rain. “The cold was too much for her.” Azura and Apona were crying softly.

As Kurbi watched the sky, he saw a black shape appear on the horizon. He stood up, pulling the wet blanket around him, and peered through the large hole in the east wall of the house.

“There,” he said pointing, but Fane and the twins paid him no attention.

The flyer came closer. “Nico,” Kurbi whispered, and started toward the open doorway. He could not remember when the door had been blown away.

Kurbi leaned against the doorjamb and watched as the flyer came in low over the rails, casting a strong beam of light onto the track bed below it. In a moment it veered from the railroad and approached the house, floating to a gentle landing a hundred meters away on the rainswept prairie.

A lone figure got out and walked toward him. Kurbi shivered as he recognized Nico’s stocky frame. He stumbled a few steps forward to meet him.

“Kurbi,” Nicolai Rensch said as he grasped Kurbi around the wet blanket. “I knew you would be alive.”

Kurbi embraced him and the other steadied him on his feet with a strong grip.

“What has happened, Nico?” he managed to ask.

“Something hit the ocean off the coast. When the storm and tidal-wave warnings came, I had only a few minutes to leave.” He shook his head and looked at the ground. “I was not able to save anyone — if I had tried, they would have mobbed the flyer. I decided to look for you and help where I could do so safely and effectively. Is anyone else alive here?”

“A father and two daughters. The mother died of exposure last night.…”

“The flyer has a good cabin, food and medical supplies — let’s take them inside and warm up.”

Kurbi dropped the wet blanket from his shoulders and led the way back into the ruin of the house. There he pried the sobbing Fane away from the body of his wife and led him out toward the open lock of the flyer. Nico roused the twin girls out of their states of semishock and led them away.

Halfway to the black egg-shape of the flyer, Fane stopped and stared at the light coming out from the lock. Turning, he grabbed Kurbi’s arm and looked at him with hollow eyes. “Where are we going — what is this fearful thing you have brought me to, offworlder?” Fane’s face and body trembled.

“There’s food and warmth inside,” Kurbi said, “we’ll be safe, don’t worry. My friend Nicolai came from the port and found us.”

“Friend?” Fane’s eyes were wide circles of darkness. “What do you know of this devil? From the city? We should not accept help after God has punished us so much.…”

Fane collapsed into his arms and Kurbi dragged him into the flyer.

“We can wander the planet,” Nicolai said, “picking up survivors until the freighter from Earth arrives.”

They sat in the control room of the flyer. On the screen the rain was coming down again and the landscape was almost completely dark. Fane and his daughters were in the midsection cabin. All three had recovered somewhat after drying out and eating some food.

“There’s no link with Federation on the planet?” Kurbi asked.

“There was in New Marsport — but that’s … gone, under water.”

“Are the electrical storms affecting communications badly?”

“Pretty badly,” Nico said.

“Then we’ll have to get the flyer up into orbit,” Kurbi said. “From there we can talk to the subspace beacon station — it’ll relay a message to the nearest Federation base.”

“Can you get us into orbit?” Nico asked.

“I think I can, if I study the flyer. It’s the only way to get help here quickly. If we have to, we’ll dock with the beacon station — there’s a small installation inside, with provisions and first-aid supplies, but I don’t think we’ll have to try that.”

“Let me show you something,” Nico said. He reached over and pressed a few control areas under the screen.

A picture appeared. “I recorded this before heading west,” Nico said. A column of blue air stood in the ocean. At its base the waves were turning into steam. “It was huge,” Nico said. “It went up through the whole atmosphere. Something came in from space and hit us hard, Raf.”

“How far away were you when you recorded this?”

“It sat on my horizon — I didn’t want to get closer.”

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IN THE POLAR MOUNTAINS of Myraa’s World, Gorgias waited on a glacier. Cold white light filled the cabin through the screen. There was no sign of pursuit vessels appearing near the planet. The ship was safe; he was safe.

As he waited, Gorgias made a vow of vengeance against the Earthborn; he swore it to his father, to the twenty war stars of home and their dead worlds. The oldest Herculean had not died by his own hand; the Federation had killed him, as it had murdered his mother and brother.

He thought of his father lying cold in the aft quarters, waiting for his funeral.…

“We’re safe,” he said to the ship, “take us to Myraa.” For a moment he felt brother to the ship, though it never spoke to him except through the screen readouts. He could order it to speak in a voice, now that he would be alone.
It will be strange to live now that my parents are dead, when all that was in them is in me, and nowhere else
. Whatever intelligence was buried in the vessel was also Herculean; it would die if he died; it would live as long as he lived.

The ship rose from the tilted ice-field, revealing the setting sun at one end of the glacier, creating the illusion of sunrise.

Running east, the ship reached the glacier’s edge and rushed out low over the ocean, whipping up whitecaps in its wake.

“He cannot be saved,” Myraa said.

As the sun set, the trees and grass in front of the house seemed to become drenched with blood; then slowly the darkness turned the red to black.

“Why not?” Gorgias asked as he turned from the windows to face her.

“He cannot enter our circle because he has already become nothing. He died too far away, Gorgias, in distance as well as in belief. He got what he expected — eternal nothingness.” She paused. “I have saved many of our dead, but I can do nothing for him.” She paused again. “I warn you, Gorgias, die near me — it will be the only way I can save you.”

“My father was right, this is all nonsense — you can’t frighten me.”

“I know how he died, Gorgias.”

“Stay out of my mind!”

He turned from her to the window. Herculean women might have been telepathic, his father once told him, or simply observant.

Outside, the dark countryside of hills and grass was blazing now with a million fireflies, as if invisible mourners carrying candles had gathered for a funeral. The mass of lights was concentrated in the meadow below the house, but a snaking S shape ran up the nearby hill.

Gorgias stepped closer to the window and looked out at the procession of lights. A sprinkling of stars had fallen on the darkening land, and he felt the edges of pity pushing in at him, threatening to break his self-control; beyond pity stood sorrow and guilt, avengers of the dead.

“Gorgias!”

He whirled to face her again, ready now to answer her reproaches.

“Ships are coming,” she said. “I warn you to show that I am not your enemy, and that I can examine the content of minds, even at a distance.”

He had expected her to blame him further for his father’s death, to question again the manner of his death. Something in him had hoped that she would; instead she spoke idle prophecies.

“You will die one day, Gorgias — but remember to die here, remember.…”

Contempt surfaced in him, contempt for his own weakness, blotting out pity, sorrow and guilt. He stepped up to Myraa’s naked form and hit her across the face. “Get away from me!” he shouted. “Little animals, that’s what you are here, animals, fools and cowards.”

She only looked at him and said, “I did not have to tell you that ships are coming.”

“Why did you, then? You want me to die. You said so. How would you know anyway?”

But he almost knew her answer. “I can feel them hating you as they come in their ships,” she said. “How many did you kill for them to hate you that much? That many? It makes their hatred almost rational.”