George Zebrowski (27 page)

Myraa was blocking the pain in his mind.

“Myraa! What has happened?” Suddenly he realized that he was not speaking; there was no feeling of movement in his jaw. “You promised never to enter my mind!”

“There is no other way now.”

“What do you mean? Tell me!”

He tried to look around in the darkness, but his eye sockets were empty. Shadows rushed into them.

Suddenly he could see.…

He was in the bedroom, in what seemed to be the house. He felt himself get up against his will and walk to the window. Then he saw that it was not the same house. Below him was the white beach. Foamy waves drifted in from the warm green ocean; long-legged birds chased each other across the wet sand.

Something black pushed into the corner of his eye. His head jerked to the left, and there on the floor, in the bright afternoon light, lay a charred, unrecognizable body. He walked over and reached down to touch it, but his hand passed through to the cold floor.

“
I show you an image
,” she said from within. “
They took the corpse with them
.”

“Myraa, what are you saying?”

He looked at his right hand.

It was Myraa’s.

“
I could not let you die like your father
.” Her voice was agonizingly near. Her fingers were touching his heart, holding it, brushing it with words and warm breath. “
I could not let you dissolve
…”

He thought of the ship.

“
They took the ship, which could not destroy itself while your mind was still whole
.”

He looked around the room through her eyes. The ghost of his body had disappeared. The space seemed very bright. He looked upward through the skylight at the blue sky. Everything was vivid and clear, as if he were seeing it for the first time.

I’m dead
, he thought,
and she carries me inside
.

He tried to scream, to force the sound out of her throat, but it was only a thought. Her will was not his own.

“You let them take my body, to be exhibited as a trophy!”

He slipped into darkness. Myraa’s thoughts were everywhere, ministering to his fears, whispering like flies. “
I could not stop them, and it was not important
.”

“Traitor!” He was suddenly sickened by the idea of being imprisoned in another’s body. He thought of his own arms, legs and belly, the center of his own will coiled in his loins. What was left of him?

“
The old dreams are dead
,” she said. “
I know how they died on that world in the Magellanic Cloud. For a long time after the plague hit them, I heard their voices crying out of that dark place, out of that terrible cold, as they fought with each other. They tore at their vessels and at themselves until they died. Only a few had the strength to reach out. I saved them, but they are still not whole
.”

“
I
am no longer whole!” He hurled the words, wishing that he could die. He wanted to bloody her from within, tear out the words that she was depositing within him. If only he could wrap himself in his own flesh again. Her soothing wounded him, and he hated her for it. How would he be able to endure an eternity of her domination? He would never be able to love her now, or have sons.

How could he kill her? He was only a thought within her, a memory. What if she chose to forget him? The chaos would take what was left of him, and he would die a second time. Could she forget him for a time, then summon him back? He would drift at the edges of her awareness, a mystery to himself, a spark struggling to grow brighter.

Somehow she was in his arms. He held her firmly as she thrust up at him.

“Liar!” he shouted.

“You lived a lie. I am still with you.”

“I don’t want you — I don’t need you! Release me!”

“There is much more than this.”

“No!”

The darkness pressed in around him, an infinite solidity that would hold him immobile forever.

“
When you accept us
,” she said, “
you will have everything
.”

Ages passed and she did not speak to him. The black, sunless solidity was a constant humiliation; at any moment it would close in and crush him into nothing.

The fact of his body’s destruction tormented him.

He felt anger and sadness, but the feelings seemed strange, echoes of their former intensity; his cries would not cry out, his rage would not swell, and a part of him held his hatred in contempt. The substructures of his body, he realized, were not there to underscore his thoughts; his feelings were beginning to fade. Perhaps he could shake off this inversion of reality, will his eyes to open in his corpse, wherever it might be, recreate his body in a sudden act.…

A glow enveloped his awareness … almost as if he had limbs again. The warmth increased and he felt his charred skin, and he knew that his nerves were signaling horror to his brain. He felt his body dying, stared through the blindness of his eyes, felt its insides beginning to decay. A distant sorrow called to him, but he could not make it his own. His body died; he could no longer feel its extremities. His self contracted to a point drifting in limbo. Anyone could pass through him now and read his most private thoughts like a roadsign.

Alien minds watched him with a cold curiosity. How could Myraa have joined with these? They had been there, he realized, when he had made love to her; still, he felt grateful for the attention they gave him in the darkness.

They were ancient, older than the Empire, older than the Earth; they had survived in this way, and would continue until all the suns of space died and the universe collapsed to start the entropic decline all over again. These minds were part of a greater community, one that would not die in the final singularity; it would burst from the continuum like some great moth, newborn into the skies of some greater realm; and as it had survived from mind to mind in the universe he knew, so this being would continue to pass from realm to realm, an eternal voyager on an upward path from the infinitesimal to the infinite.…

The intruding vision held him, and he wondered at it. What was there to find in the upper realities?

“Who rules this mind?” he found the strength to ask. Where was Myraa? She was still someone he trusted. He would not be played with by strangers for unknown ends. Maybe Myraa was also a prisoner here, wandering in search of him, waiting for him in the darkness.

“Who rules here?” He shouted into the void, giving the words all the force that he could imagine, but again there was no answer.

The darkness became a fluid mass, carrying him along; he felt its indeterminacy at his own center. Painful sensations stabbed into him out of this chaos, emotions unattached to any specific memory.

The face of a young boy appeared. It was his brother’s face. Gorgias found himself standing by the sea, and the boy had just come out of the emerald-green water. His body glistened with clear droplets. The air was fresh with spray.

“Hello, Gorgias,” the boy said and hugged him around the middle with slippery arms. “You look so tired,” he said looking up at him. “Tell me where you’ve been. You’ll stay now, won’t you? Come and sit with me.”

The boy smiled and led him away from the water. Gorgias sat down next to him on the white sand.
How real he seems
, he thought as he looked into his brother’s radiant face.
I
had almost forgotten what he looked like
.

Then only the boy’s face was left in the darkness, smiling at him as if their conversation had already taken place. “You’ll be happy with us, Gorgias. There is such a long journey ahead of us and we’ll need you. You should have come sooner. I’m sorry that Father can’t be here.…”

“So am I,” Gorgias said. “I killed him.”

“Oriona will see you later.”

The darkness returned, and again he felt the watchful presence of alien entities. His interest quickened, growing into a curiosity equal to his fear. What was it that had so changed Myraa and his brother?

Gorgias remembered the second time his father had brought him to Myraa’s World. She had run to him across the grass and they had made love under the warm orange sun. Later, his father had spoken to them in the house on the hill. He had told them that they were fated for each other, and that the Empire’s rebirth would take place only if they, and others like them, willed it. Before Herkon’s death, Myraa had been a playful girl, always complaining about his father’s seriousness. What was she now, he wondered? How had it happened?

He heard laughter in the dark and turned to see her coming toward him across the grassy field, her naked body bright in the sunlight. The field was dotted with thousands of yellow flowers; the cool breeze was full of fragrance. She came up to him and put her arms around his waist. “In my world,” she whispered into his ear, “nothing is ever lost.” Her warm breath sent a chill down his back. “You still wear your father’s serious face. Don’t you love me any more?” He put his arms out to hold her, but she laughed and disappeared, leaving him to embrace the void.

Another age passed before she spoke to him again. He found himself looking through blinking eyelids at Myraa’s reflection in the dark window — his reflection. The room was quiet. He missed the sound of the sea washing the shore, the feel of night wind on skin which had known the sun all day, the freshness of rain.

“Hello, Gorgias,” his-her reflection said to him from the window. The house seemed poised at the edge of a dark abyss.

“How long has it been?” he asked, wondering at her cruelty.

“A year since Kurbi left.” She sat unmoving in the glass. “He was hurt badly by what happened here.”

“No others have risen to oppose the Federation?”

“You were the last.”

Her skin was milky in the black window, her breasts pointed; her long hair was invisible, blending with the night. She was sitting on the bed, her hands folded in her lap.

“How can you expect me to accept this?” he asked.

“You live — there was no other way. Now you must come to understand that you came from a lesser way of life.”

“Lesser?”

“Can a child understand what it will become?”

“I am not a child.”

“You are not ready to know.”

“Tell me now!” he cried within her.

“Think of all the living things that die and there is nothing for them — little things with small intelligences that struggle and scream in all the corners of all the forests in the galaxy, and die so that those who come after them may do the same. Think of those living things who only dimly understand what is happening. In them intelligence flickers and fails to grow, and dies as they are dragged into death. All the good that they will ever know must be expressed in dreary effort, against the backdrop of final defeat. Think of all life, billions of sparks that fly up from a fire. The source is as generous with them as it is uncaring.”

“But what has this to do with me?” he asked.

“This circle of anxious striving and repetition can be broken. You can put aside the isolation and disorder that you have known.”

He felt a sudden, luxurious repose. “You will acquire the power to look outward and through all things,” she said, “to fall through the bottom of mysteries, to swim in a vastness of warmth and knowing. I can help break the bonds that hold you.”

He was lying on white sand; a peaceful, warm sun shone down on him and he stretched wearily. He sat up and looked toward the ocean. Myraa, her long brown hair wet on her back, splashed in the water. A young boy splashed back at her. Gorgias lay back and let the warmth of the sand creep into him. This was his universe, his world; he held it deeply within himself, a tamed chaos which expressed its order only to him.

He was a child again, standing on a hill overlooking a clearing. The tall grass was brilliant in the yellow light of late afternoon. The forest shadows were growing darker, sharper. The crystal clarity of the landscape made him feel that he knew the complexity of every blade of grass, every scrap of bark, every stone and clump of dirt; every insect was a world in itself, yet related to every other world. Everything was passing into everything else. The infinity of layers of organization seemed to glow around him, catching fire from within, yet nothing was ever consumed. The transparency of reality invited knowing. The universe trembled on the verge of revealing itself to him.…

He held the moment.

Something took him upward suddenly, with the power of an infinite force. He was thrust into a great lighted space, as vast as the starry void he had known. He whirled, trying to find the dark world he had left behind, anything to give him a sense of distance.…

There was no sense of space or time, and he knew that he might exist and perceive in a new way. He thought of his wanderings, his hatred of his enemies. The memories threatened to drag him back.

He felt a sense of expectation.

“You are not ready,” Myraa said. Her words meant nothing.

He gazed into himself and saw the darkness between the suns; he drew the stars together into a dense superstar, rekindling his hatred and sense of loss.

Myraa tried to calm him, stroking him with her thoughts. “The expansion of humanity from Earth,” she said, “led to dissipation, as intelligence sought to inhabit world after world, spreading itself thinly, becoming a stranger to itself. Only by turning inward can a species and an individual concentrate power, through the growing complexity of involution.”

“What kind of power?”

“To continue, to be in different ways — we do not know everything,” she said.

He felt suspicious, fearing her power over him. What would she do if he refused her way? He was lodged inside her. She could show him anything, and present it as some kind of reality; he would not be able to tell the difference.

“I don’t want your delusions,” he said.

Again she showed him the sun in a clear sky, trees and grass, the endless summer that she carried within herself. He felt her promise of renewal, drawing him into a whole underside universe of illusions, of mindscapes created by wishes. Or was it more?

“See what I see,” she said.