George Zebrowski (8 page)

“Where would the grav units be?” Gorgias asked.

“In the wall closets,” his father said. “Most were never unpacked.”

The lights in the room were dim. The greenish walls rose to a height of ten feet and met a gray ceiling. The air was cool and odorless. “I was here when the base was opened,” the old Herculean said, “when they were bringing in all the supplies still stored here.” He went ahead to the far wall and slid open a large closet door, revealing case after case of work scooters and gravitic workhorses, each packed in a clear plastic block.

Gorgias went up to the open closet and peered in at the tools. The scooter had seats for two, hover and propulsive controls that seemed obvious and a small rack in the back; the gravitic units were featureless solid rectangles about a meter long and half a meter tall, with attachment fingers located at each right angle. On-off pressure plates were yellow and stood out from the dark green of the unit; whether the device would be used to push, pull or lift depended on the position in which it would be attached.

“How much can these handle?” Gorgias asked.

“I don’t know the practical limit,” his father said, “though I suspect that they could not push a planet. Anything substantially smaller, depending on where it is, on a planetary surface or in free-fall, would be fair game, I suppose.”

His father seemed calmer, as if their violent confrontation had purged him of his fears and doubts. Maybe he would become his old self again and be of use after all.

“Can we use the scooter to ferry the units to the ship?”

“I think so,” his father said.

“Let’s unpack, then.”

Together they pulled the scooter from its niche onto the floor. The plastic block was soft and gelatinous to the touch and came off easily. Gorgias peeled off the covering on the grav units and stacked them on the back of the scooter. He sat in the front saddle and his father got on in back.

“Here we go.”

Gorgias pressed down on the hover-control plate gently and the scooter lifted from the floor; he pressed on the propulsion plate and the scooter moved forward. Grasping the stick, he steered the machine toward one of the marked service doors, which slid open to reveal a direct tunnel connecting to the berth area.

As the scooter carried them through the passageway, he thought of all the weapons stored in the warehouse, rooms and rooms of shelves, closets and cubbyholes turned away from the stars of home, filled with more military hardware than he could name; enough armaments to equip ten divisions.

Another door slid open and let them out into the berth chamber. Gorgias steered the scooter alongside the ship and into the open lock, stopping just past the inner door.

“We can leave it here, near the bulkhead,” he said, and got off.

“What will you use the units for?” his father asked as he dismounted.

A suspicion grew in Gorgias’s mind, the result of the question as well as of the older man’s change in approach. Was he planning to act against him? The only way to find out was to tell him what he wanted to know and watch his reaction.

“Come with me and find out.”

“Then you don’t want to leave me here?”

“Tell me, why did you give me the ship if you were so worried about how I would use it?”

The Herculean did not answer immediately. At last he said, “It must be because a part of me still thinks as you do. Once all of me felt the way you do — I taught you to do so. There seemed to be no other way to live and act in the periods between stasis, especially when we thought one of our armies had escaped and might return. So much was promised by the armorers toward the end of the war — we all thought those weapons could make a difference.”

“They would have if there had been time to build them.”

“I think,” his father said, “that I would like to live on Myraa’s World. Leave me there, forget me and do as you wish, but don’t leave me here.…”

“Very well.” It would be better to agree with him now, and see what happened later. He suspected that the older man was physically ill in some way, and his mind might be affected. But what doctor from the Federation knew enough to treat a Herculean? Completely homeostatic, requiring no medical care except in serious accident cases, the race had been designed for endurance; in terms of the need for rest, recovery from infection and general vitality, a Herculean could outperform a traditional Earthborn by a factor of three to five.

Historically, Earth citizens had been shy of biological engineering, fearing the loss of versatility to specialization if the practice grew out of hand; but as the Federation grew, pockets of humankind diverged from one another, culturally and biologically, until the first settlements in the Hercules Cluster reached out for a truly improved human type, creating the long-lived Herculeans. Few were left now, he thought sadly, himself and his father and the handful on Myraa’s World. He had not heard of any others. Genocide had been all but complete; but in failing to be complete, the Earthborn had made a fatal error, one which he would live to see them regret.

“Let’s get going,” he said to his father.

Turning from the open lock, he led the way into the control room. He sat down in the station chair and waited for the lock to close. His father came and stood at his right.

“Well, what are your plans?” There was an almost light-hearted tone in the older man’s voice.

Gorgias touched the map retrieval plate and the screen lit up, revealing a solar system of twelve planets. “Here, six hundred light-years from Earth, lies New Mars, fourth planet from the twin suns. The various settlements have more than twenty million people. The planet has no heavy defenses, and no reason to expect us.…”

“What’s your idea?”

“I’m going to destroy most of the life on the planet,” Gorgias said.

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HE WAS ALONE, going where he wished, and the fact made him feel guilty.

As he stood looking out the window of his resort room, Rafael Kurbi realized that he did not know where he was going. The green mountainside was peaceful outside his window. Here in the sun settlements of Earth’s ring, a quarter of a million worlds, each a different environment and subculture, beckoned with the promise of novelty and human contact; he could change worlds as he would clothing.

From inside, the ring was a cloud of glittering insects, rivaling the stars in brightness, a milky way of human living spaces cutting across the galactic background; at the center was Earth, oasis of origins, a place to be looked at, admired, even worshipped, but not lived on. People found it strange that he had cared to dwell there so long; even though a large population shared his preference, it was a tiny minority compared to the population of the ring.

The North American mountain landscape outside his window — peaks and fir trees, outcroppings and boulders — was all perfectly safe and accurate. The weather could be varied to taste, streams stocked with perfect fish, woods filled with replaceable game, the air filled with birds. If only he could order a glider with Grazia in it.

He was standing with his head toward the center of the small world; across a space of air he could see houses and roadways attached to the opposite surface fifty kilometers away. Sunlight shafted down the center of the egg-shaped air space, reflected in by a large mirror at one end of the environment; sunpower also ran the recycling plant located on the outside at the other end of the worldlet.

Less than twenty kilometers away in space hung another world, one filled with water, where visitors’ hotels provided a view of aquatic human life; there one could swim to a sun window and look out at the stars.

Pulling aside the slide window, Kurbi stepped out on the terrace and took a deep breath. The air was cool and clean and stimulating. Standing there, he felt little of the stress and anguish that he knew were inside him, readying to take over.

“How are you feeling?” a familiar voice asked from behind.

He turned and said, “Hello, Julian — are you here?”

The image shook its head. “Waste of time — just dropped in to see if you’d changed your mind.”

“No. Any more news of the Herculean ship?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Maybe that’s the end of it.”

“I don’t think so. I’ve been doing some checking — this ship has appeared before. From the scattered Herculeans still alive on more than a dozen star systems, besides those on Myraa’s World, I’ve learned that the Whisper Ship is probably manned by an officer named Gorgias and his son of the same name. He’s more than four centuries old, his son at least half that age — but much of that time may have been spent in stasis somewhere.…”

Like an old disease virus
, Kurbi thought,
or a spore
.

“There must be an undiscovered base,” Julian said. “If there is not, then the ship may very well disappear for lack of supplies and repair facilities. We were never able to capture a Whisper Ship — the only record is of one destroying itself rather than surrendering. Some of the Herculean legends reported to me say that the ship is tied to the personality of its commanding officer in some way, and destroys itself when the officer dies. In any case, this vessel has appeared in centuries past, each time taking action against some locale in the Snake, always disappearing for long stretches of time.”

“What’s the point, then?”

“Revenge, from what I’ve managed to guess. A few of the Herculeans questioned by our operatives have shown admiration for what has happened. A thing like this could grow.”

“Into what?”

“Insurrection — takeover of a world here and there.”

“What do we care?”

“There is civil order to preserve — and some of the Chamber members won’t stand for a Herculean survivor causing trouble. They’ll do anything to quash it, out of pride.”

“Let the locals do it — they do almost everything else for themselves.”

“Raf, what it comes down to is this — we want the ship and we want the base. It’s a combination of curiosity and completing unfinished business. There may be more attacks on transports, and many worlds have no protection against attack from space — they have no need of it, since it’s not the kind of thing that happens very often.”

“You can do well without me, Julian. Look at the worlds around Earth — what do they care about anything that happens to old-style human types like you and me and the frontier worlds? Reality is a menu they write each morning; their bodies are clay to be molded from one generation to the next. The acts of this terrorist are part of an unpleasant game for them, one they don’t care for much, so they give it to you or me. You know, Julian, these Herculeans are probably a lot like you and me, relics from another time; and they’re out there kicking and screaming, getting in their licks before they’re blown away.”

“That’s very nice, Raf, but they could destroy the Earth, the ring, most of the life in the solar system, if they can get followers. They’re probably not aware of that yet but they’ll catch on. It’s up to those of us who have an idea of the potential danger to stop them.”

Kurbi did not reply.

“It’s that serious, Raf.”

“You think they may have the equipment to do that?”

“If they have a base, maybe worse. They may not be aware of what they have. We don’t have much will to fight back. The Whisper Ship could do quite a bit of damage if it came into our sunspace. How do you protect the ring? It wasn’t made to be defensible.”

“You’re assuming a lot of motivation, a lot of hatred on their part.”

“Raf, you know more than I do how we destroyed their entire culture — twenty worlds razed to the ground!” He paused for a moment. “It’s possible none of this may happen, we may never hear of the ship again — its range is not limited and Gorgias may simply go off somewhere into the galaxy and live quietly. I don’t know — but I do have a job to do as intelligence officer, and I do have some pride in how well I do it. You’re a Herculean expert. It’s my duty to recruit you.”

“I wouldn’t be much good to you now, Julian. The answer is still no.”

Abruptly, Poincaré was gone. Kurbi was alone again with the perfect view, a cool breeze and the weight of a loss that could never be made good.
What in all eternity do I want
, he asked himself, knowing full well that it was involvement, a context in which he was needed. Poincaré was offering that, but it was not enough, because Kurbi would not let it be enough out of stubbornness.

Maybe there comes a time when having lived for a time is enough, and further life is useless unless one becomes a different person. The person I am must die
, he told himself, but he was not sure there would ever be a successor.

On the world devoted to physical pleasure he paid to fall in love. The fee was his permission to record his memory and the time limit was three weeks; but the completeness of the illusion convinced him that more than a year had passed.

She was beautiful, brown-haired and brown-eyed, buxom and heavy-hipped — an old-style human type from before the changes; of course, she was tailor-made, to be mindwiped after his term of involvement, but he knew that only later. When she was with him, he forgot the past and believed completely. She spoke perfectly, smiled appealingly — perhaps she even understood what he said to her during those long nights when the moon never set. She was a professional, who somewhere had her own life and would return to it. In the end she helped destroy his sense of the unique, which he had gained so painfully, so completely with Grazia.

I need something constructive to do
, he told himself. Julian’s offer intrigued him, but he felt that he would be of no use in his present state. He wondered if he were afraid of the danger, of dying. What would it be like to confront a Herculean who had only one desire — to kill those who had destroyed his world.
My past is as dead as theirs
. Again he found himself sympathizing with the Herculeans.