Complete Short Fiction, page 44
“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.”
Kurbi turned to Myraa. She explained. “Only his ignorance could stop him, and only if he made a mistake. We had to wait for him to overextend himself. There was no other way after he had grown strong.”
“You deliberately waited?” Poincaré asked.
“Our other assaults had all failed.” She was silent for a moment. “Now he is part of all willing, all natural striving. But he is free of the pain of knowing. The burden of his past has been taken from him.”
“He’s dead, then, and can’t be recovered?” Julian asked.
She nodded. “As with his father, the individual will-pattern has been scattered. Look for him in the strength of suns, in the sighs of magnetic storms, or in the swirl of galaxies. Search for him in your own wills. He is there, freed from the prison of self-awareness, riding the mindless music.”
“That’s the same as dead,” Poincaré said.
“Akin to sleep. He deserved better, once.”
Could Myraa be lying? Kurbi wondered. Perhaps Gorgias had grown beyond his hatred after Earth’s destruction and had reconciled himself with her. She would hide him in return. But as he gazed into Myraa’s eyes, Kurbi rejected the idea.
“But he’ll never reawake,” Poincaré insisted, seeking reassurance.
“Others will, in these rudimentary realms,” Myraa replied, “and they will always be him.”
XIII. Mirror of the Will
“. . . with the birth of human consciousness there was born, like a twin, the impulse to transcend it.”
—Alan McGlashan
“Sometimes the best teacher teaches only once to a single child or to a grown-up past hope.”
—Anonymous
“Nothingcannot exist; it is a psychological as well as a logical absurdity; therefore something exists necessarily—the uncreated self-sufficiency which cannot be destroyed, only transformed and shaped to wear an infinity of masks. It is, of necessity, a blind idiot god, mindless but capable of becoming all things . . .”
—A Common Heresy
RAFAEL KURBI MARCHED up the hill to Myraa’s house. His strides became longer as he neared the top, and he stopped when he reached the front walkway. The sun was warm on his face as he turned and looked out over the countryside.
Groups of Herculeans moved like grazing beasts in the tall grass around his small shuttle. The unclad figures seemed to be performing a strange dance, as if seeking a configuration which would free them of the need for any further motion.
A year had passed since he had returned Myraa to her home. For a month now he had come up to the house once a day, but she still took no notice of him and he was beginning to lose hope.
Poincaré had obtained permission for him to visit, even though the planet was under permanent quarantine. One ship stood guard in orbit while Kurbi lived out of his shuttle and waited for Myraa to receive him.
Many of the habitats had returned to pick up and reshape the pieces of Earth left in sun orbit. Poincaré was part of the project to rebuild the old continents, or at least large sections of them, within large habitats. Again, the outworlds would help Earth recover from a war.
The Old Ones had accepted Myraa’s story. Poincaré and he had supported her account of what had happened, but the most convincing evidence had been the destruction of the Whisper Ship.
It seemed to Kurbi that the Old Ones still feared the very idea of Herculeans, but had decided to leave well enough alone. True, there was still the matter of the lost base and the possibility of other Whisper Ships; but there were no functioning spacecraft on Myraa’s World with which to break the natural quarantine, and only Gorgias’s ship had known the way to the base. Myraa’s World was helpless and could always be destroyed. So, one way or another, the planet was safe and the Earth-Herculean War was finally over.
Kurbi felt Myraa’s presence behind him and turned to face her. She gazed at him for a long time, draining away his doubts, preparing his mind.
“Gorgias was right,” she said at last, “to hold the force-center in contempt. Its blind, striving will-to-be is hideous, but we concluded that a long time ago. Minds-within-minds, surviving from countless creations thrown up throughout eternity by the force-center’s pulsations, had sought immortality and a way of loving the universe without becoming its slave—through the gathering of knowledge, the survival of offspring, through physical persistence and renewal; and finally through the conservation of minds, by which patterns of will and intellect may continue beyond the ruin of the body.”
“But an immortal adept is required to serve as gatherer,” Kurbi said.
“Yes, that is the weakest condition of our discovery, but it will be overcome, when our conscious will becomes strong enough to stand alone. I am the focus of the response to a universe which destroys the common and unique alike. Though we exist in the swirl of material galaxies, our minds extend into the geometrical substratum of reality, where we are free of the illusions of space-time. The time will come when our unified will shall become as strong as the force-center.”
“Why not stronger?” Kurbi asked.
“Not possible, since everything is an expression of its will-to-be, but as-strong will be enough.”
“Has this always been the goal?”
“No. Once there were those among us who believed that the gathering of all the minds in this universe into our net would represent the highest achievement, and there would be nothing left to do except destroy the force-center, thus annihilating the entire fabric of being and returning all to stillness.”
“But this changed?”
Myraa nodded. “We will transform rather than destroy the force-center, and gain its power. We will give it a conscious intelligence as we permeate its blind striving. Then it will remain for us to abolish the universe and create something better.”
“A new reality?” Kurbi asked. “New laws, different constants. . . .”
“We can’t be specific now,” she said, “and we may have to experiment, but one thing is certain. It will not be a blind creation. It will not waste life, as this one does, simply to bring forth narrow adaptations, nor will it instill in its conscious life the suspicion that existence is some kind of terrible mistake.” She paused and continued to gaze at him, as if wondering whether she had told him too much.
“I have never been your enemy,” he said.
She took a step closer to him. “But you must understand that the existence beyond death, such as we have achieved, is no salvation; it too requires questioning and exploration. Even though the center of life’s great storm is blind, it can still destroy all our hopes; but if we succeed, there will be new explorations, accomplishment and knowledge. We will continue to unfold what is in us without end.”
“Do you think that’s possible?” Kurbi asked. “I feel so small and limited.”
“We know that infinities are real, within us and outside. We will remake our nature. Perhaps we will create a universe of laughter, love and sudden discovery. . . .”
“No tragedy, sorrow?” he asked, filling with doubt. She was describing states of being which would leave all his humanity behind, discarded like a butterfly’s cocoon. But wasn’t that what he had come to in his own thinking? He had stood too long at the edge of his humanity with no place to go.
“Elsewhere,” she continued, “creations swim in the infinite apeiron. Those who wish tragedy may seek to voyage across the ocean of nonbeing and enter into the countless universes which have not glimpsed the possibility of Omega. There will be enough for them there to feed on, in the dismay of entropies, in the tyranny of despairing lives thrown up like sparks by the laws of the blind will which breathes at the center of every creation.”
“Then it’s possible,” Kurbi said, “that the individual universes of the apeiron are not everything. Perhaps they are the expression of some even greater impulse?” The universe of galaxies into which he had been born, Kurbi realized, might be a minor, coarse creation drifting in some outer circle of quantum possibility.
“We do not know,” Myraa replied, “but if there is a greater center, and if it too is blind, then we may have to unite with other universes in order to transform it also.”
“Tell me,” Kurbi said, “has our universe ever shown signs of having been entered . . . from outside?”
“We can’t be sure. Certain Old Earth religions claim that it has happened at least once, but the evidence no longer exists. We will know when we see it.”
Taking her hand, he asked, “Will you teach me to prepare?”
She nodded. “Send your ship away.”
He looked up at the blue sky, knowing that all this universe now lay under a judgment, that it was already nothing in the minds of its best; and he accepted the knowledge that he would grow into the fullness of creations to come.
1984
The City of Thought and Steel
This story marks the author’s third solo appearance in these pages (a collaboration with Pamela Sargent, “The Falling,” appeared in our March 1983 issue as well). As for whether or not it’s “science fiction,” all we can say is, we hope it is.
They were talking about him again in the hall. He pressed his ear to the metal door and listened to the distant thunder of the words.
“But did he do it?” the new voice asked again.
“I told you, you’ll find out,” the fat man replied.
“But what do you mean?”
“Well, he confessed, and a lot of people think he’s one of them.”
“A hundred others confessed also.”
“There’s proof, but it’s subjective.”
“What do you mean? Come on, tell me.”
“You’re new here. Wait and see.”
What do they know, he thought behind the door. They couldn’t know anything; they had no insides.
“I admit one thing’s likely,” the new voice said.
“What? Give me a light.”
A match snapped and hissed.
“He must have had something to do with it, the way he caved in.”
“He was more sensitive than his pals. This cigarette stinks.”
“There are people who’ll confess to anything.”
“Sure,” the fat man said. “Never was any outside proof.” Coughing. Labored breathing.
“Just think, all those financial records, vaporized instantly. But I guess there were duplicates in other cities. Come on, tell me what you know.”
“You’ll see when you understand what he does in there all the time.”
“You mean his hobby? What can that prove? You sound like you feel sorry for him.”
A long drag. Exhalation.
“There’s nothing else.” The fat man said. “That’s why he’s here and not dead.”
Silence.
“You’ll see. He can’t control it. That’s proof of some kind. Good enough for me.”
“I don’t know; that’s really reaching. . . .”
A long silence.
“Why do you think he did it, if he did?”
“Who knows?” the fat man thundered. “Maybe he needed the excitement.”
“You’ve said that before.”
Laughs and coughs. Echoes.
A longer silence.
“Maybe he didn’t really know what it would be like?” the new voice asked insistently. “Didn’t believe it myself when I heard. Never thought it could be that bad.” A pause. “I heard he was studying to be an architect.”
“Look—forget it. You’re not gonna figure him out. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Sorry. I think about it when I take the detour around the ruined part of the city.”
“Take another way.”
“There isn’t one.”
“I wish to God I could get a fresh pack of cigarettes for once.”
“Maybe the machine’s reloaded by now.”
Footsteps.
He turned away from the door and went to the window. His eye moved ahead, leaving his body behind. The city began to appear, block by block.
Gathering all distance and perspective to itself, his eye glided hungrily along the shafts of light, passed through the bars and hovered over his city, which lay below him as if on a tabletop.
