George Zebrowski (36 page)

“To settle old scores. Maybe there is nothing else for him out there.”

“He can’t see what there may be for him for some reason,” Kurbi insisted. “He won’t surrender his old attachments.” He looked at Poincaré. The Security Chief bit his lower lip and turned away. “Perhaps it was the manner of his death,” Kurbi continued. “In any case, the persistence of his hatred has blinded him. He has so much strength now that he doesn’t have to be particularly crafty; it would be hard to make a mistake when you can afford to use unlimited means to kill flies. He can indulge himself.”

“I’m not so sure he can’t make a mistake. What about Myraa’s group? Can’t they do anything?”

“They haven’t been able to restrain him, or convince him of their way. Maybe they don’t have much to offer him. But I’m sure they’ve been learning for some time.”

Julian gestured with his hand. “Why should you care? What’s in it for you?”

“It angers me that we won’t have a chance to grow, to see what they have glimpsed before he destroys us. There will be no survival, only death.”

“You might not like what they’ve seen.”

Kurbi sighed. “That’s possible. I’ve liked to think that something in the fabric of eternity finds the destruction of conscious beings abhorrent, so it conserves and nurtures unique things, drawing them upward through the scale of things into … fellowship with itself.”

Poincaré was silent. “Well,” he said finally, “that lets out any chance of happiness in physical immortality.” He was sounding more irritated. “What
can
there be in that resurrection realm which Gorgias fails to see? Maybe he’s right and everyone else, including you, is being sentimental.”

Kurbi smiled to himself. If only it were true, and he could forget all this as some kind of delusion. “There is a blind force-center,” he continued. “It exists necessarily, is self-sustaining, and cannot be dissipated.”

“Gorgias powers his weapon with that.”

“Yes.”

“What is Myraa’s group doing with this force-center?”

“Her configuration is made up of many old, surviving intelligences, in addition to the Herculeans. Some derive from nonhuman sources. The whole group is forming an event horizon of mind around the heart of fire. The blindness will acquire awareness, they hope, much as unconscious matter evolved into intelligent life in our plenum. A god will arise at the end of history and be a product of it, not its creator.”

“No Omega-god until the end? But you think this may fail.”

Kurbi nodded. “I feel it within myself as a weakness, a lack of resolve.”

“Well, you have given a lot of thought to this tearful and tragic stuff, but —”

“Myraa provided most of it, and it’s true. The force-center underlies everything we see and feel. Future and past are one above our level of perception.”

“Raf, what are we talking about?”

“The danger that a particular species may fail to join the flowering of Omega. That’s what I fear is happening to us and Myraa’s group. Her physical form holds the candidate configuration together, but the mind net may dissipate if her body is destroyed. The complex may not be able to hold its developing shape if it is not weaned gradually. Gorgias himself may not be able to persist without her, despite his partial invasion of the Whisper Ship. Her mind-body focuses and concentrates. Who would collect her if she died? Are there others with her skills?”

“On Myraa’s World,” Julian said.

“They’re too far away.”

“If all this is right,” Poincaré said angrily, “then we should have killed her when we had the chance. Would you let all of humanity perish to insure the survival of Omega?”

“It’s not a logic I invented,” Kurbi answered. “The universe is not as we would like it. I don’t know. Maybe oblivion is to be preferred. But when I think of all the generations of living things which have gone into death.…”

“I would kill her if I could,” Poincaré said. “Maybe we still can. It’s our only chance. All these eschatological issues weigh on me only because you’re involved, Raf, and there may be practical difficulties —”

“But you should understand. More than anything —”

“These may be realities. You talk as if they were truths long known.”

“You wear blinders, Julian. Worse, you want to.”

He shrugged. “Countless microcreatures make up my body. They don’t interest me as long as they do their job. We can’t help but be blind. All life is lived between extremes of large and small. Dig below small, or climb into large, and all experience becomes distorted as far as we’re concerned.”

“So you feel that we can never be more than we are?”

“We’ve tried to be more, Raf, and it’s never worked!”

“Nothing gave us our limits except blind environment, and we haven’t lived in the given environment for millennia. You blur distinctions and won’t deal with the merits of what I’m saying.”

“Merits!” Poincaré laughed nervously. “You’re sitting here waiting to die, and you want me to agree with you! Our ships will try to destroy the Whisper Ship one more time. If it means killing Myraa and closing some way to a distant yonder, then so be it! If it’s there, we’ll find it again some day. We live long enough to have the time to search.”

Kurbi ignored him and looked up at the stars. There was a clear gap in the ring now, and it seemed that the arch of worlds standing in the ocean would collapse at any moment.

Gorgias reached out.

Fifty ships moved toward him through jumpspace.

So, the fools would try again. He felt their desperation, but it would be no challenge; pity that he could not rob them of the satisfaction of trying.

He looked into the cabin. Myraa stared at him from the command station. Sooner or later, he knew, she would attempt to move against him again, but he could not simply destroy her; the ship could not be all the embodiment that he would ever need. Through her, he would have to live the life which the loss of his body had denied him. By manipulating her reproductive system, he would in time be able to give birth to a copy of his previous form and occupy it.

The ships drew nearer.

He swept toward them as the field blossomed around him.

“Each life,” Myraa whispered to him, “is a universe of possibility denied.”

“Why else would there be satisfaction in their destruction?” he asked. “Would I waste my time on nothing? It’s my future or theirs!”

The swarm of warships winked out as he passed through it. He had given them only a moment to emerge from jumpspace.

Myraa was silent.

“They’re paying!” Gorgias shouted. “For my wasted centuries.”

A steady breeze blew in from the ocean. Poincaré stood up and gazed into the distance for a while. Kurbi heard invisible voices around the Security Chief’s image.

“They’re gone, Raf,” he said at last. “Now we have only the ships in Earthspace.”

We created him
, Kurbi thought.

“Just a moment,” Poincaré said. “I’ll be right back.”

He disappeared.

The gap in the ring grew larger as more worlds ran for the freedom of jumpspace.

Poincaré reappeared. His image walked around and stood before Kurbi. “He’s bypassing worlds now, Raf, so he’ll be here very soon. You’ll have to leave.”

“No.”

“We can leave together. It’s not certain that he would find us, not certain at all.”

“Tell me what we would live for and I’ll go.”

Poincaré’s ghost approached with outstretched hands. “Why should we live for anything, Raf? Forget all your intricacies and live life as it comes. We’ll flee with a small group and lose ourselves well away from the Snake, and forget all this. Raf, listen to me!”

“You could live that way. I can’t. Get out and don’t look back.”

“Raf, I can’t.…”

“Forget me.”

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MYRAA KNEW that she could stop Gorgias by dying.

But her death would endanger those within her who were not yet ready to voyage on their own.

And there was no one nearby to receive her; it would be death, the loss of personality to chaos. If it came to a choice, she realized, the death of Earth was not as important as the host of minds waiting on the inward shore, struggling to understand and unfold into the new realm. Centuries of exploration and knowledge would be lost. Let the empires of the outer world destroy themselves.

Gorgias was adept at drawing strength from the force-center. He identified with it; perhaps one day, when his hatred was spent, he would have something to teach. No one had imagined that the force-center’s undisguised power might be directed back into the world of origins. All efforts had been concentrated on inquiry, with the aim of breaking the final bonds with outwardness; when all the Herculeans had been gathered, the final adept would have had to find a way to follow, or be left to die. It was thought by some that this single adept might have to live forever in the realm of galaxies, to insure the welfare of those who would voyage out into infinity, where the outward universes were only infinitesimal nodes circling the vast force-center, each nexus contributing new minds, new perspectives, in the climb toward Omega.

In reality, she could not choose to die because she was helpless within the ship. Gorgias had made sure of that.

Kurbi struggled inside Gorgias.

Earth’s solar system floated defenseless over the black abyss. What had it ever been worth? he asked, whispering the Herculean’s thoughts. Nothing here but a worn-out species worshiping its own identity, blind to possibility and growth. He would put it out of its misery.…

Kurbi opened his eyes, got up and went out on the terrace. The sky was bright with stars, but lonelier. Large sections of the ring were dark. He felt a great stillness, as if it no longer mattered whether the fleeing worlds would escape or find happiness. Oblivion seemed the perfect state; nothing would be obliged to crawl from lesser to greater to gain a sense of achievement; there would be no torment in striving and feeling empty at fulfillment; the container would not have to ache to be filled, then empty itself so it could have the pleasure of aching again; and knowledge gained through the admission of ignorance and the suspense of curiosity would not repeatedly arrive at boredom for lack of new unknowns. Perfect knowledge would be static, satisfying for only a few moments, he had always thought; but now he wondered if it might not provide an unending, secure bliss in the contemplation of final mysteries. There was no way to know.

We dwell partly in the thoughts of others, he thought, recalling his dream of being inside Gorgias. For a moment it had seemed that he would turn the Herculean away from Earth, but their thoughts had converged into a shared contempt.

He would not be able to sleep tonight.

Sleep. A vestigial fall into unconsciousness. All evolution and history struck him as the crazed effort of intellect struggling to wake up.

He went down from the terrace and wandered on the dewy hillside, as he had done countless times before when he had feared sleep. Lost, unrenewable, unable to embrace oblivion’s subtleties, he preferred the strained shore of self-awareness to sleep’s worrisome drift.

He stopped at the cliff’s edge finally, and listened to the breakers pounding the rocks below. The white foam seemed to roll in from the ocean of stars beyond the planet’s edge. There were many gaps in the arch of the ring now, yet still it seemed to stand on the horizon.

His shadow appeared on the foam below.

Kurbi turned around and saw the giant figure of Poincaré standing over the house. The grassy hillside was black from his harsh glow.

“Raf, where are you?” the figure boomed. “The Whisper Ship is at Centauri!” The image stared blindly into the darkness, then shrank toward normal size. Kurbi hurried up the hill.

Poincaré’s image waited as Kurbi stepped onto the terrace. He noticed the ghostly images of flickering tank screens behind the motionless figure. “The whole sky is afire out there,” the Security Chief said as Kurbi came into his field of view. “He’s large enough to destroy a whole system.”

“How soon?”

“A day or two, at most. You’ll come with me, Raf.”

“Did you think this would frighten me into fleeing? I’m staying.”

“But your demise won’t accomplish a thing! Do you think he’ll hesitate with you here?”

“I have no illusions left,” Kurbi said softly, feeling almost at peace. “Save yourself, Julian.”

“Are you planning to talk to him?”

Kurbi looked up at the sea of evening. Stars twinkled silently, oblivious to the vast disturbance only four light-years away.

“It’ll be a clean sweep, Raf. We have nothing to put into the field against him. The planet will be deserted within hours now.”