George Zebrowski Read Free

raced over jagged mountains, stone-filled valleys and dusty plains; airless, beaten by solar wind and heat, the lifeless world orbited faithfully, forever dead in the angry glare of its small, white-hot primary. Located near the center of the cluster, the entire system was wrapped in a cloud of gas and dust half a light-year across.
    The ship lifted into the shining sky. Variations in cloud density let in the light of cluster stars, the glow fading as the ship shifted position.
    With his father now asleep in the aft quarters, the younger Gorgias began his first watch. Without warning the ship slipped into otherspace, revealing the stars of the cluster as perfectly round black coals set at an indefinite distance. For the next one hundred and fifty hours the ship would push through this ashen sea, fifty thousand light-years across the top of the galaxy, halfway across the spiral, past where Earth swam deep in the spiral disk’s outer arms, upward to the sparsely starred region where Myraa’s World looked out on the dark between the galaxies.
    All through his first watch, the younger Gorgias was irritated by the shroud of hyperspace covering the known universe, hiding the diamond-hard stars, abolishing the black void’s comfort, leaving only the ash-white continuum dotted with the obsidian analogs of objects in normal space-time. The bones of reality, he thought, dry and lifeless; passing through this region was always a slow dying.
    Did he really care about the Herculean dead? He searched himself, trying to feel the death of millions. The killing of ten would have been intolerable. Each of those hundreds of millions would have lived a thousand Earth years or more, each life an entire world of experience, now cut off. To remember their passing was to deny oneself all normal day-to-day living, all simplicity, all love; to remember their passing was to act in ways that would change him irrevocably, making him an instrument, a sacrifice to the fires of outrage. He did not, and never would, belong to himself, or to anyone else.
    If he could hurt even ten Earthborn, the news would humiliate millions; the dead deserved that much. Each blow, however small, would be a reminder that the Federation’s victory had not been complete. The dead were alive within him, sparks ready to flare up into an inner fire; his strength was the needed fuel; his strength was their will preparing to live again. Rest would come for him only when all the hatred he bore was spent.
    The thought of his father’s growing weakness made him angry again. He felt it as a coldness camped at his center, a promise of failure. He would have left the older man in stasis at their last waking and gone out by himself, but the ship was still tuned to the other’s personality and would obey no one else. The ship could only be his by deliberate transfer of command; his father’s death would not give him the ship. He needed his father’s good will.
    If only a second Whisper Ship could be found. Perhaps there was one somewhere on Myraa’s World. He had always suspected that Myraa knew more than she was willing to tell. Maybe he could learn something from Oriona. Myraa or one of the other survivors might have revealed something to her, a piece of information that would not appear to be useful, but which might be crucial to one who could fit it into a large context. The visit might turn out to be useful after all.
    He found himself thinking about Myraa — her nakedness, her long hair, her smile, the freshness of her skin. Thoughts of her always brought out his weakest feelings. The universe of time and space had cheated him (what was this effort of time passing?) of the simplest pleasures enjoyed by the humblest creatures on a million worlds. He was a thinking, self-conscious object living in a plenum where distance lay between objects that were made up of infinitesimally spaced small objects lying below gross perception. What was justice, or vengeance, in such a universe?