Transcendence (47 page)

And now change, irreversible and omnipotent, loomed over them like a new world ready to crash down and consume them.

He had created an empire for them. He had made it his priority to give America’s—and soon after, EarthCo’s—children a world of safe education and freedom from the dominion of adults. He no longer fooled himself: His charitable goals didn’t mean he cared for humans, no indeed. It meant only that he pitied the naïve, abused youths.

“
Behind heroism lurks revenge,” he told the deaf city. By creating elemental change, he had destroyed the world which had shoved all he loved into a shell containing nothing but emotional scar tissue.

“
Oh, I don’t like children much,” Mrs. Pehr Jackson had told him as they flew in his limo to Feedcontrol Central. “Yes, I know,” he had replied. In his mind, she became no more than an example of how his people hadn’t changed. He was so pleased she had said that.

Herrschaft gazed out at the city. From this height, he couldn’t tell if anyone were reacting to the news of the interplanetary war just now getting underway.

“
I gave you an empire, and you spat on it,” he said. “Because you are human, you found a way to despoil the noble vision, as you spoil all you touch.”

In a million-kilometer-wide sphere around Earth and Moon, their lesson was in motion, punishment, change. Soon, everyone left alive would look to him as a child looks to a loving, protective parent. He would offer wisdom, and they would love him for it. He would complete the empire, but first he had to crush the aborted attempt in his fist like so much dry clay. Only blood could rewet it, and this time he would mold it properly.

But first, they needed to learn their lesson.

“
Only pain truly teaches,” he told them.

Luke Herrschaft, Director of Feedcontrol and Destroyer of Worlds, broke uncontrollably into fits of weeping. He didn’t know where this emotion came from, nor could he resist it. A small corner of his mind decided to stop coming to this room, this place where he had told a younger Lucilla the story of his life and she had accepted him as friend. This place would need to be buried, like the rest of his past. Pain was only for his subjects, not him.

Trembling with power, yet confused, angry, and deadly sad, Herrschaft wept—and curiously watched himself weep from a wall mounted pov—as the solar system swept itself into a frenzy of war. Only now were the things he had set in motion spinning out of his direct control.

EConautics Fleet Boss H.C. stared through an ultraglas porthole of the fleet’s flagship, Locust. His naked, crooked body floated in fetal position, left foot drawn up beside his cheek. He absently picked at the disproportionately large big toe.

Outside, ten thousand ships glinted like knives against the black of infinity. Inside, the knives were hollow; they were tiny islands, most uninhabited except by AIs, the most efficient long term space warriors. But about half of the vessels contained a single pilot, a redundancy backup. A few of the larger craft—torpedo platforms, really—held larger crews. These would be first to heave their contents during battle, first to breathe vacuum.

H.C. had been kept in a plastic grain cylinder until he was eight, so he never developed a taste for virtuality. In fact, never in the following 35 years did he subscribe to a single show. An employee of his father’s at the grain elevator found H.C. one day while searching for the source of a bad smell.

H.C. lived the next ten years in a government orphan facility, where he received his basic citizen’s card. The doctors also performed extensive surgery to remove painful growths and correct severe deformities. There, he learned how to please those in authority. He learned how to survive among gangs, but, mostly, his grotesqueness kept dangerous people at a distance.

In the long run, the cylinder gave H.C. the advantage of small size, so he required less lifesupport to sustain his body onboard spacecraft, making his craft lighter, more maneuverable, and capable of carrying greater arms. The vivid 3D imagination he had developed to entertain his sensory-deprived brain made him unbeatable in fighter-pilot training, so he rocketed up the ranks. He even defeated the suit camp AI combatant. Familiar with enclosed spaces, he never suffered the kind of claustrophobia that often disabled other one-man-craft pilots; however, that did not mean he was not terrified both of closeness and of the immensities stretching in every direction just beyond the thin hull.

Defeating those fears was his greatest challenge. When he succeeded—through self-induced desensitization—he felt invulnerable. At 39, he became the youngest Fleet Boss in EConautics history. No one challenged his ascendancy, for reasons he never quite grasped. One possible reason, he thought, was that he recognized Luke Herrschaft as the true Boss of EarthCo, and treated the man as such; in fact, when H.C. decided to issue the ultimate challenge to the former Fleet Boss, Herrschaft was the first person he approached. Two hours later, H.C. destroyed the Regency Optima vessel and claimed the title of Fleet Boss. The Director himself endorsed the promotion.

H.C. was yanked out of reverie by a word echoing in his head:

“
Begun,” said the voice of Luke Herrschaft, as if thinking of the man had summoned him.

H.C. finished the phrase: It has begun.

He savored the moment briefly.

No rush. Time for savoring. Ten thousand warships quivered at his command. Each was armed enough to destroy a city, pop a thousand tin cans NKK called spacecraft, kill and destroy. H.C. drank the moment, grew ecstatic. This is all he had ever managed to feel: ecstasy, fear, victory, satisfaction of a job well done.

At last, at last, at last, I have a real mission.

“
Come Toe, come Toe,” he said to his one friend. He scratched the tiny man hidden in his left foot. “Time to get to work.”

A pulse flashed out from the Locust to every other EarthCo craft under his control. Each entered Stage GO, unleashing the program Herrschaft had installed months prior.

And then his craft lurched. H.C. grabbed hold of the cabin’s netting and fastened himself in place. All around him, the largest machine ever created by Man set itself in motion, a collection of vast gears whose teeth could each smash a city, a machine powerful enough to crush worlds, a machine that, once set into motion, bore an irresistible momentum.

Half the stars in the sky began to move, a swarm of battleships about to swoop down upon NKK’s planets.

Toe chuckled, the mischievous little man attached to the Fleet Boss’ foot. H.C. caught his enthusiasm.

“
It has begun.”

Pehr Jackson led the way down the cauldron of the crater, picking his way carefully among the footholds; he didn’t feel a need to use his hands, which would have been difficult at this angle, anyway. He worried only for a moment about radiation. A spacesuit is designed to withstand the direct rays of the sun: the standard rating is for three hours’ exposure.

The old memories—good memories—of his 3VRD bouldering experience took over. It was as if his few weeks in the virtual mountains were only yesterday. His body instinctively knew where to place the next step. Still, he kept an auto-piton handy in case they began to slip. The ion bonder would snap into place immediately, and only the breaking-point of the ice itself would determine their safety. Even if this kind of ice was fragile, at least the eye would skid along, slowing their slide as it broke up the surface. Hopefully they would come to a stop before reaching the lake.

The effort was good. He needed it. They were making a journey across a crater they had made, on an alien world—an enemy’s alien world. Their ship was destroyed, stranding them on this strange place. Eyes had nearly sabotaged their escape from the sinking escape pod. He had screwed with reality. Janus had killed the man, right in front of Pehr. That brought up really uncomfortable memories. All this was hard to manage. Pehr concentrated on foot placement.

After about half an hour, they had descended as far as they could; the fuming lake now stood in their way. A film of ice was already spreading across the surface, but only a madman would try to cross. Anyway, the surface was nearly flat here. Pehr triggered the first piton, strung the cord through, and tossed it up and ahead. It bounced once and held. He tested the bond; the ice didn’t crack as he tugged.

Slowly, they made their way around the shore. The spacesuit boots weren’t designed for this kind of terrain, but their soles marginally gripped the slick footing. Ice crystals had formed where the liquid met the crater floor, tiny, intricate sculptures made of geometrically perfect shapes. Here, a man stood with octagon feet, his legs cones formed from triangles, his head an even more complicated shape made of smaller shapes. Some looked like magnified snowflakes; some looked like knives or sawblades. All the new things to see, combined with the need to concentrate on staying upright, kept Pehr from slipping back into the weak self. He felt strong and capable.

They reached the far side and the stair-like cracks leading upward. Up they climbed, in silence, the only sound his own labored breathing. Time and again, Pehr wished he had exercised as diligently as Janus had aboard ship. But he reached the destination without too many aches. The tower rose only ten meters away.

Now he tossed the piton again, since they would have to cross smooth ice to reach the tower’s base. They had taken perhaps ten steps when Pehr heard the rumble.

He stopped and looked around. Janus watched a certain spot in the sky. She pointed.

“
Another ship,” she said.

Now Pehr saw it, just beyond the crater’s rim. As the seconds passed, a star grew into a long flare. The flare soon showed its source, an oval ship riding fire down toward them.

Moments later, Pehr heard words and static on his comm line:

“
. . .EarthCo mamamatay-tao!” More static, then, “. . .pagbabaka! War!” And then laughter, whooping and loud and numerous. Another channel, perhaps several more, soon overlapped the first.

The ship grew larger. As it passed over the crater, beams of energy poured down onto where the pod was now immersed in ice. A great cloud boiled up at the end of the trench just as the ship thundered overhead.

Another, and then another ship followed suit. The third fired a missile into the cloud of vaporous ammonia and methane, its exhaust like a searchlight. When it impacted, the whole crater shook and rumbled. Pehr felt the sound more through his bones than in his ears. After the fifth ship passed, no more followed. Finally, something bright flashed in space, far overhead. Pehr assumed that would be the derelict
Bounty
.

She was all gone now. He recognized at last the complete severing from his past. That’s it. No more ship, no more show, no more Captain Pehr Jackson. He had become a nobody again, a nobody in a distant, enemy land, with no means to return home. What do I do now, little boy? he asked of the bandanna in his hip pocket.

Then he saw Janus, and knew he still had a purpose and a responsibility.

She didn’t return his look; instead, she was watching something down by the lake.

“
The little sonofabitch,” she said.

“
What?”

“
The cyborg. He’s following us.”

“
Impossible,” Pehr said. “I watched you
. . .
kill him.”

“
He fooled us again. Blotted out his image. I suppose he was drawing power from the pod, somehow. When they destroyed the pod, he lost his powersource.” Janus turned to face Pehr; her eyes were burning, rimmed with red and furious with tears.

“
I shot a 3VRD,” Janus said.

“
But how—”

“
He’s a master of his card, Jack. You wouldn’t know. The sonofabitch is still alive, and I left my weapon aboard the pod. I didn’t want to appear threatening to the people here.”

“
Don’t worry about Eyes,” Pehr said. “His card is powerless now, right? Physically, we can easily overcome any attack from him.

“
All this assumes that he’s stupid enough to follow us. And that he doesn’t fall into the lake. Look at the fool.” Pehr pointed. “He’s walking freehand. Leave him be; it’s better to let a man kill himself. Have you ever killed anyone?”

“
I wish I had.”

Pehr turned away from the struggling, distant figure and looked into Janus’ eyes. “You don’t know what it’s like. You don’t want to know. He’ll haunt you all your life.”

Pehr paused, seeing a boy lying on a heap of junk in a Minneapolis alley. He then saw an old man, blue in the face, motionless on a Persian rug. Suddenly, all the men and women who had died in cinematic combat with him seemed real, clothed in blood and flesh and skin, and loved or hated by someone in their lives; he saw a great ocean of effect, waves crashing through the network of human existence. Perhaps the pilot of a particular white AMRCO fighter—the one with the brown bear painted on the side—had a best friend, and perhaps that best friend grew so filled with hate that he started his own Crusades down on Earth, killing and maiming in search of the perpetrator, unsatisfied until the blood debt had been paid with interest. That’s the way with all wars, with all violence, Pehr thought. It never really ends, not until the whole world is dead, not until all the hate has been satiated with murder and suicide. Not until the last drops of venom and grief have bled out of the last victim and perpetrator, ending the cycle forever with the death of the human race.