George Zebrowski Read Free Page B

had failed.
    Spring light was streaming through Myraa’s window. Beams walked ghostly on the floor. Whole ships had been gutted to build the house on the hill. Sickness, suicide and lack of provisions had decimated the survivors, soldier and specialist alike; no hand or brain remained now that could repair, operate, or even understand the dead fleet. Only the Whisper Ship ran itself, demanding little direct understanding of its systems for effective operation.
    Beams of steel passed through his body, pinning him in a place beyond sleep. There was no pain and no possibility of movement; in a few moments there would be … nothing.
    He awoke and listened to the perfect silence of the cabin, imagining that the wintriness of hyperspace was increasing, pressing in on the ship, and would soon freeze it into immobility within the gray continuum. The cabin smelled of cold metal. He closed his eyes again and thought of entering stasis for … a thousand … two thousand years. Would the Federation still exist after ten thousand years? Would the machines maintain the stasis field for that long? What kind of universe would he find after a million years? No revenge would be possible for him in that universe. To step into it would require no more than a subjective moment of sleep, and all his purpose would be left behind. The idea filled him with a sense of loss. He saw himself going alone across time, the past a black pit behind him, drawing him backward, pulling him closer each time he fell asleep; one day he would not wake in time to save himself.
    Then all thoughts and dreams left him, as he knew they would, as they always had; but again he wondered if he had won, or if a tide had simply gone out.
    During his second watch he saw the ship’s ghost on the screen, running ahead at a fixed distance. He wondered if an insubstantial copy of himself was sitting before the screen in that phantom vessel, watching a still more distant illusion, and if his father was resting in the aft quarters there also.
    When he slept after his watch, the ship turned to glass, letting in the ghastly gray-white light from beyond, the glow of an overcast creation or the underside of a universe forever turned away from the living.
    Opening his eyes, he longed for starlight, for sight of worlds, for living things. He looked at his hands. His skin was growing pale here, as if the few days had really been years. What was time in jumpspace? Perhaps time was lost in transit, then regained at the moment of exit, leaving in the traveler only the memory of long imprisonment.
    He closed his eyes again. Memory was bare and clean, as stony as the halls and chambers of the base. He felt pity for himself, for his father, for Oriona imprisoned on Myraa’s World, for his brother who had died there. Only revenge was left; nothing else would fill him up completely and quiet his hunger, nothing else would lead to renewal for his people. The only way to redeem the past was to bring it into the present and use it to control the future; he had to make memory a material thing, a force that would lash out at the Earthborn, making it impossible for them to ignore his demands. Revenge was the only way to kindle recognition in those who had taken everything from him, leaving this gray present, an old man and a black future.
    If I do not reach out to hurt, he thought, I will not want to live.
    A shadowed face looked down at him, and he knew that he would cease to be if it turned its gaze away. Again the pit of things past pulled him in, closer this time; he reached for a handhold to keep himself from falling in, but he woke up before he could grasp it.
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III. Exiles
    “The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization.”
    — Freud
    “There is nothing worse for mortal men than wandering.”
    — Homer, The Odyssey
    THE ASHES of jumpspace faded; the black coals caught fire and became bright stars again. Nearby, the sun of Myraa’s World burned with a