George Zebrowski (37 page)

“Everyone?”

“We can’t be sure. There may be some primitives in out-of-the-way places.”

“When he’s finished here,” Kurbi said, “he’ll work his way through the remaining Snake worlds. Then he’ll wait for the Herculeans to increase their numbers, in preparation for the return to the Cluster.”

“And what will he be?” Julian asked. “A retired ghost. He doesn’t belong in our universe.…”

“He’ll work to fit in through Myraa, to become her as much as possible. Maybe he’ll succeed.”

“I hope it wears on him. Raf, you’ve got to come with me.”

“No.”

“I’ll come and take you away by force.”

“Don’t waste your time. It will be too late for you to get to safety by the time you find me.”

“I’ll take that chance. I’m leaving now.”

His image winked out.

Kurbi looked around. The house seemed desolate under the stars. He had taken great pride in it once, enjoying the way it fit into the hillside. He had loved the house when Grazia had loved it. The image of the broken glider came back to him. He saw Grazia being pulled by the downdraft which forced the craft against the cliff face despite all her efforts. He saw her body battered against the rocks by the breakers. He had not been there to witness the whole accident, but he seemed to remember it all.

Maybe he should have cloned her; by now her sister would have been a grown woman and he might have fallen in love with her. Grazia would have approved. The new person would have won his loyalty and affection, and he would now be living a different life. He would not have hunted the Herculean. Gorgias might not have followed so successful a course. He would still be a nuisance, struggling to reshape the ashes of the past.

Kurbi listened to the gathering silence within himself. The stars had not satisfied the hungers of humankind; as long as it held to its ancient identity, the inner hounds could not be satisfied. Social systems would only imprison these faithful guardians of adaptive evolution. The Herculeans had been the old nature’s way of reasserting itself, by willing a wolf to match the growing power of intellect. Humanity had released, not its better part, but the raging beast rearmed; and the beast would live now, as surely as it cowered in the Old Ones of Earth. The past would be silenced and the future would belong to the Herculeans. They would swarm among the stars, angry at finitude and everything which was not them, transforming the stuff of worlds into more of their own kind; all that had been humanity would live in them. Hatred stirred deeply within him, and he knew that his humanity was not so different from Gorgias.…

A flyer appeared in the morning sky.

The oval shape landed in the open area at his right, halfway to the cliffs. A dozen men got out and marched up toward the house.

Kurbi got up from his chair and slipped away to his left. He left the terrace and ran toward the cliffs.

“Raf, wait!” Julian shouted.

Kurbi ignored him, resenting the stir which the physical effort was making within him. The ship was far to his right by the time the group started after him, and he saw that he would reach the edge well ahead of them.

There would be just enough time to cheat Gorgias and release Julian from a fatal friendship.

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THE FIELD CONTRACTED and the Whisper Ship was alone in normal space. Behind the vessel, Centauri’s three suns were missing a planet.

Earth lay ahead.

Four jumpspace units would put him at the edge of its sunspace. Gorgias felt the ship’s surge of power as it slipped into the ashes.

Earth’s sun grew from a black dot to a globe.

The ship resurfaced and the sun blazed. The stars looked on without interest, blind to the possibility that one of their vast number might be put out.

Mars was nearby, its red surface bright with cities. Gorgias listened, but the planet was silent, despite the lights. Then he noticed that its orbital space was nearly devoid of habitats. He clenched his will at the thought that they might have escaped him; there would be time to hunt them later.

The field blossomed around him. He stabilized it at one hundred thousand kilometers in diameter, and nudged Mars with the outer edge.

The red planet buckled. Its rotation wobbled. He brought the globe within the field. The planet broke up into pieces. These became white-hot and exploded.

Gorgias considered whether to engulf the sun and all its planets, or destroy only the inhabited inner worlds.

The bright morning sky, looking toward Mars, burned as if a hole had been opened in space, letting in the white light of eternity. Slowly, the hole grew, blotting out the stars.

“Raf, come with us!” Julian called.

Kurbi looked down at the breakers. The sliver of beach was visible in the lurid light of the sky. The air was cold in his lungs.

He turned around and saw mists rising from the black slope. “Go away!” he called to the dark figures.

They moved toward him.

“Back, or I’ll jump!”

The figures halted.

“You’ll die anyway,” Julian said, walking forward.

Kurbi laughed. “You’d better go, or you’ll cause my death directly. I’ll jump anyway, just to cheat him!”

Poincaré stopped.

The sphere of force flickered and grew larger. It was already twice the size of the full moon.

“Go, Julian, while you have the chance!”

Poincaré raised his hand. The five figures behind him turned away and started back to their flyer.

“I’ll stay with you,” Poincaré said.

“Julian, I warn you!”

“Nothing else to do.” The Security Chief walked toward him.

A cold wind struck from the ocean. Kurbi balanced himself on the edge. He had not expected Julian to call his bluff.

Kurbi looked up. A quarter of the sky was white.

“It would be nice,” Julian said as he came up to him, “to believe that we are being destroyed by fresh, young barbarians who will carry out their own vision of a new future. But this is … another dead end throwing itself at us. It’s difficult to accept that there isn’t a thing we can do to stop it.”

“Myraa’s group is too new at this.”

“Weren’t there others before?”

Kurbi nodded, feeling empty. “What use would they have for the likes of Gorgias? He intrudes with brute force into the world of his birth. It probably requires many special conditions to grow out of our realm, much effort of learning and experience. There’s nothing to gain by looking back.…”

Poincaré seemed to be breathing with difficulty. “Don’t they care that he’s doing harm here? I can’t believe they’re not trying to stop him!” His voice quavered.

“I don’t know,” Kurbi said. “Without Myraa we can’t know anything.…”

The ocean was black in the white glare of Gorgias’s expanding will.

“Reality is not what we thought it to be,” Julian said, glancing up. Kurbi knew that he was desperate to keep the conversation going long enough to get him away from the edge. “We’ve lived blindly, building our understanding on the basis of operational theories, unaware —”

“How could we know?” Kurbi said. “But it’s all nature still, all real, material and lawful, even the chaos which intrudes at the extremes.”

Poincaré was silent. “We have no one to lead us past our deaths,” he said finally.

Myraa was too far away, powerless aboard the Whisper Ship. Kurbi put his arm around his friend. Together they stepped away from the cliff’s edge. “There is nothing we should concern ourselves with now, Julian, nothing.”

“Just as well, if this is all we can ever be. It’s not enough. Hasn’t been for either of us. A long time now.”

They looked up in time to see the moon blaze and disappear.

Gorgias kept his position at the orbit of Mars and expanded his will. He would take all the inner planets and the sun as well.

His will grew toward the Earth, aiming to stop at a point beyond the sun. Never again would this star’s warmth drive evolution to create life.

He pushed outward. Small bits of rock and dust flared as they came into the field. He pushed easily against the solar wind, singing as he grew larger than he had ever been. There could be no limit to his size. He would be able to destroy the whole arm of this galaxy, even whole galaxies!

Earth’s moon flickered and was gone.

The Earth was naked before him.

The sky flashed.

Black-white, black-white.

Something screamed inside Kurbi’s head, as if it were trapped there.

Black.

The scream died, falling away into an inner abyss.

White.

Hideous monstrosities appeared in the sky, performing bestial acts. Titanic animals, like great bears, reptilian faces set in gelatinous masses, suggesting bloody afterbirths.…

Kurbi heard the scream again. It was a pitiable, frightening cry, turned in on itself as if determined to throw all of space-time into agony.

“The fools,” he heard Julian say. “My flyer is coming back for us.”

The sky became black, starless, as the scream died within Kurbi.

Gorgias fell in on himself.

He struggled to halt the collapse. Weakened by his expansion from the orbit of Mars, he could not channel enough energy to maintain his shape, much less engulf the Earth.

The force-center drew him inward, down into the infinitesimal centrality of all will.

He tried to pull back, but his resistance was gone. He managed to hover over the force-center, but the collapse into himself continued; soon he would be too small to resist the heart of fire. It had repelled and nourished him when he had been strong, but he had exceeded his capacity to control its infinite strength.

And he knew what was about to happen.

To draw on the force-center was life, but to merge with it was death, a return to the great flame of all being.

“You have made your last mistake,” Myraa whispered near him.

Morning stars blazed in the sky.

“Look there,” Poincaré said. “It’s the Whisper Ship.”

It drifted in slowly over the ocean, passed over them, and settled to the grass just below the terrace of the house. The side lock opened and Myraa rushed out.

“Myraa!” Kurbi shouted, waving at her. He started up the hillside.

“Raf, wait!”

Kurbi ignored him.

“You will be nothing!” Oriona shouted.

“Good-bye, Gorgias,” his brother whispered.

The force-center bathed him with warmth as he grew smaller. He felt no pain as he spiraled in, but he cursed and began to scream. This blindly striving mass did not deserve to have him. Kurbi had earned the right to kill him, as he had earned the right to destroy all the Earthborn; but to be defeated by a mindless enemy, who had used no skill to win, was the final humiliation.

“You defeated yourself,” Myraa said. “You did not trouble yourself to learn, you simply took what you desired, and one day you received more than you could handle.”

“Myraa! Save me! You can save me!”

“I can, but I won’t.”

He cried out to her once more. She did not reply.

Myraa felt a sudden silence within herself. Gorgias was gone.

Myraa spoke quickly when Kurbi reached her.

“We must leave! The ship will now destroy itself.”

“This way,” Julian said, pointing to his flyer.

They ran across the hillside. “How long?” Kurbi asked, pulling next to Myraa.

“There is no way to tell. Not long.”

The distance to the flyer seemed to expand. Kurbi stole a glance back at the Whisper Ship. The scream inside his head was completely gone, but he heard its echo in his memory. Gorgias was finally dead, he told himself, but the ship still served him.

They reached the flyer. Hands reached out and pulled them inside. Kurbi watched the screen as the vessel lifted. The Whisper Ship waited by the house, catching the sunrise on its silver hull.

The flyer’s drive pulled hard, shrinking the house, the island, and the whole South Pacific region. The curve of the Earth appeared, and in a moment the whole planet was afloat in the night.

A point of light appeared on the island. The point grew into a circle of light, as if a second sun were rising from the depths of the planet.

The Earth shifted as the flyer pulled back, and the explosion swallowed the globe. Kurbi stared into the silent fire. Slowly, it began to fade, revealing large fragments in the sun orbit. The debris was already spreading out along the orbit, forming an asteroid belt around the sun. Now, he thought, Earth is only a coordinate in space. Gorgias had gotten what he had wanted.

“Perhaps some of the larger pieces might be useful,” Julian said softly. “The habitats will be able to come back, and we still have many worlds in the Snake.”