George Zebrowski (28 page)

He heard the life of the universe, felt its will uncoiling, reaching, grasping, squeezing, exploding. Voices cried in a chorus of chance. Countless living things struggled toward a fulfillment which no individual would ever know. Form after form lifted itself out of the unconscious substratum of time, demanding immortality. A myriad of suns burst into brightness and died. Empires struggled and expired, throwing off spores to start anew. Outworlds flowered, becoming flesh as populations increased.…

Myraa drew him further into herself.

“Illusions!” he shouted, powerless to prevent his sinking. He felt the presence of
others
in her folds. His doubts were silenced as the great mass of minds pressed in around him. Myraa held them all, it seemed, and they held other minds — an infinity of interlocking mentalities within minds, within Myraa.…

There were Herculeans, his brother and mother, and grandmother; ancient minds dating from the beginning of time, aliens who had survived from the collapse of countless previous universes, entities who sang strange, joyous songs.…

Myraa’s thoughts were radiant within his own; she seemed to be herself again, more desirable than ever.

“We are the universe,” she said. “The interlocking matrix of minds is coextensive with all of nature, which is our outward face, in every stone, in every blade of grass and grain of sand. We accumulate those who return to us through death. Soul-minds are returned to our matrix, into the monadic inner structure of visible reality. The material cosmos is the outward manifestation of an infinitely complex inwardness, a sentient, divine machine composed of minds within minds extending below the infinitesimal and beyond the macroscopic. All physical universes are emanations from these minds, which are also one mind, dreaming all that is beautiful and good, evil and grotesque in the eyes of lesser beings. Its creations push up like rocks from the ocean to form the world of objects. Our radiant energy is permanent, the inward power of all nature, supporting the tangential energy of entropy, which is transient, useful only for the outward workings of a fluid reality. That reality is a nursery, a place for the testing of new minds.”

“I must doubt,” Gorgias said halfheartedly. “I am your prisoner. You can make me see and feel anything.”

“We can see anywhere,” she said.

In a small lighted space he saw Kurbi, and heard his thoughts across the light-years … feelings of despair … judgments of failure … reproaches. Was this the man who had hunted him?

“His hunger may bring him back here,” Myraa said.

A new suspicion formed in Gorgias’s mind. Myraa did not fully understand this new realm. Her grouping might be only a local configuration.

Suddenly he was moving. Something was drawing him away from Myraa, along what seemed a straight line. The Myraan complex of mentalities became the hub of a wheel and he was rushing away from it along one of the spokes.

He peered ahead. The spoke seemed to be leading toward a greater center. He sensed the presence of other lines at his left and right, multiple continua converging toward some power ahead.

He slowed, humiliated by the sense of immense energy. He stopped. Churning clouds hid the place ahead. Spears of light escaped occasionally. He felt a deep sound, a rumbling bass; it passed through him, making him afraid. He might be able to master the spoke that led out from Myraa’s locus, but the convergent mass, the center of centers ahead, would blind him, drive him insane.

He crept forward. Something was focusing him, opening his awareness beyond the confines that he had known. He felt suddenly that he would forget himself as he drew closer, dissolve into something larger.…

He began to struggle, denying the titanic will as it labored to possess him. Slowly, with great effort, he backed away from the vibrant force-center. As he retreated he felt a sense of kinship with the vast center. It was blind, but it gave consciousness all its impetus.

Long ago, he thought, intelligent beings had believed that the world was not enough, later that it was enough. If the material universe was all of reality, with nothing beyond, then intelligence was a stranger, a complexity which had coalesced by chance, a shadowed face looking into a cold, dark mirror. The loss of life within such a reality was at once irreversible and senseless; but if what he had seen so far was not an illusion, then intelligence could pass through a mirrored interface, into a vast sea inside the cosmos, below the grasping life of galaxies, into a realm of will and mind coextensive with the universe.

Gorgias turned and saw something small hanging nearby, as if it were an ornament suspended in a dark room. He came up close to it and saw it resolve into spiral galaxies composed of individual stars. The whole cosmos was wrapped in a shimmering field of force, glowing from within, ethereal and alive.

He felt it pulse with its cycle of birth and death; he felt it expand and collapse because he was part of it.

I am everywhere
, he thought.
Myraa was not lying
.

He felt his will expand with the force of an explosion, radiating outward into all things, riding the spherical wave that was the power of birth and all striving, passing into quantum spaces and deep abysses, into the large and small. He looked out from a billion eyes, felt the weight of stones, leaves and trees; a galaxy lay upon his shoulders, its center swallowing itself. His consciousness flickered through the space-time he had known —

Skies,

Stormy, blue and red.

Starfields and a coiled snake.

Silence and a blood-red sun.

A vein of metal in rock,

Worn away by a hurrying stream,

Cracked by a pulling moon.

A winged thing falling

Toward its shadow.

An insect trapped in amber.

Rafael Kurbi.

I might have killed him.

I should have killed him.

There must still be a way.

— the underside of reality was filled with mirrors opening out into every place and moment.…

Gorgias fell back into a peaceful darkness. The effort would destroy him now, but he would grow stronger. He would be able to strike out again from this vast cave of the dead. Myraa and the others did not care for the other side of the world; for them it was only a preparation, a chancy source of new minds.

“We are free of the wheel of will,” she said. “We are at peace, outside its blind tyranny.” She seemed far away from him.

“You would be better off dead,” he said. “You do nothing with the power that is here. This will is blind, but we might be able to direct it.”

“We are not wise enough.”

“You would imprison me with your ways. What wisdom do you have? None at all! What is there here for you?”

“We wait.”

“For what?”

“For what is coming.”

“What is that?”

“We do not know, except that it is coming.”

“Fools! Circling a blind will like insects. Do you think it will speak?”

She did not answer.

Myraa sat on the bed and looked at her reflection in the night-mirror of the crystal window. She put her hands up to her breasts and held them. Soon, she hoped, Gorgias would be ready to nurture new minds, as they fled from the evolutionary cauldron of creation.…

Gorgias saw two pools of blue. He recognized Myraa’s eyes, but he did not go up to them to look out into the room. He knew that she felt his growing strength inside her. Slowly he stretched, summoning his powers. An influx of energy twisted and turned inside him like a snake trying to swallow its own tail, and he knew that he was learning to control a will that would never die.

“Myraa!” he shouted as he stood up inside her and looked out through her creature’s eyes at her reflection in the dark window. “You won’t be able to fight me for long.”

Her image smiled at him.

The force of her rebuff hurled him back from her eyes.

“I won’t need you in time,” he called to her. “How can I love you now?”

Her answer seemed warm and welcoming. “I have always loved you, Gorgias. I am stronger than you.”

Her words passed into him; for a moment he began to feel that they were his own thoughts; but then he felt his strength returning as he drew himself together, coiling to strike at her self-control.

“I will go back,” he shouted.

“Never,” she said.

“Some things are never finished!”

He began the struggle for her body.

His will invaded her limbs, pushing into her muscles, making them his own. She froze his impulses and tightened to expel him.
The evil that returns
, she thought.
We have defeated it before and will do so again
.

He swam through her blood and lurked in the shadows of her heart, listening to its slow, ageless beat while the rest of him wound itself around her bones and waited for her to weaken.

… Her heart burst into a sun, hurling him out into the darkness.…

Suddenly his strength was gone.

“I am all my ancestors,” he whispered, tumbling, “… and all my descendants.… I am the Empire.…”

“You will forget what you were,” Myraa said.

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GORGIAS DRIFTED.

Suddenly, the flow of a muddy universe pressed cold darkness into his eyes. Pliant masses slipped into all his openings — probes tapping his will, scattering his strength as they collected his thoughts.

He gulped the damp blackness, longing for a dry clearing in the infinite substance, a warm breeze to convince him that he still had a skin. He dreamed of a fiery explosion that would break the vise of Myraa’s dungeon.

Fleeting images cut through his visual field. The mind-maze was everywhere around him, falling away into pits and opening into passages; space twisted and folded in upon itself. Moments of pain and pleasure wandered through him like hungry vermin, keeping his will in check.

He dreamed again of pushing himself into her limbs. Her eyes would be his eyes, her breath his own, joining him once more to the universe of his birth; but there seemed to be no way out of the prison within her.

He ached to be pulled from the darkness, as once his father had drawn him through the knothole of his mother’s womb; but Myraa would never allow him to be reborn.

He dreamed of light.

He stood on a dark mirror. Shapes rose through the surface, as if they were sea creatures coming up for air. Faces, curious about him as they drew near and whisked away.

The black surface softened and gave way. He slid toward some central abyss. The softness closed around him, wrapping him in forgetfulness.…

He kicked, waited and kicked again.…

He peered around, shivering in a cathedral of ice.

Pale beams shot through clouded windows, illuminating a barren area on the floor far below him.

His life had been a dream; he was only a nightmare, thinking that it had been real, that it had once had a body, a purpose; the illusion of self and past, of lost power, would soon fade away with the hope of new things.

“Why was I given this?” he asked, forming the thought, thrusting it outward.

It rushed away from him, echoing back from a great distance. Then it became a grotesque, birdlike thing which cried out and flew at his eyes; in a moment it had passed into his mind and was tearing at his insides.

His throat struggled to hurl storms, but his thoughts were impotent, forming only silent words; his hatred huddled, fearful of showing itself, lest Myraa punish him.

“Myraa!” he cried as talons tore at his brain.

The silence waited within him.

“Answer me!”

Her thoughts watched him like beasts of prey, hungry but holding back. He was afraid that she would dissolve what was left of him, let it slip into nothing.

“See what you are,” a pitiless thought whispered, passing through him. He was completely vulnerable. Minds rushed through him like wind through trees, exposing secret fears and shames on the way, tearing apart hopes, mocking his personal boundaries.

“Let me die.” He pushed the thought outward.

There was no answer.

“Let me go! What can there be for me, like this?”

Space trembled around him. The infrastructure of reality was vibrant with minds. They nestled in folds and byways, distending the darkness, forming galaxies of consciousness.

Slowly, he became aware of a vast center, a pulsing enigma from which all nourishment flowed. He reached out, probing this heart of fire, sensing that even Myraa had no control over it.

He coiled his will and struck inward, spiraling inward into dimensionless points, held steady by his hatred. No one moved to stop him.

But his determination faltered when, after an age, he was no closer to the center.

The muddy universe closed in again, flowing into him as he struggled to throw up defenses.

“Why?” he asked, coiling tighter within himself. There had to be a way to regain control of Myraa’s nervous system.

The darkness pressed in harder around him. He cried out and pushed back, but the effort filled him with pain and trembling. He coiled his will even more tightly. What he needed from the central fire was enough strength to strike out from his fortress self. Unfinished things wore away at him, insisting that if he dared enough, willed intensely enough, then he would be given the power he needed to prevail.

The darkness loosened its grip. Morning glowed around him, promising the rise of a million suns. The gathered dead within Myraa looked forward to a vague life beyond life, but he would do what no mind in nature had ever attempted. He would rend worlds, darken suns, shatter the minds of those who had taken everything from him.