Free Omega Point Trilogy by George Zebrowski Page B

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.
    I want to live after all , he concluded.
    On the dream world he found, and lost, Grazia three times.
    One hundred kilometers long, the asteroid had been motorized and brought in from the outer solar system more than a thousand years ago. It had been bored, hollowed and honeycombed in thousands of places, creating chambers of safety for the dreamers, who lived an endless succession of dream sequences. This subculture believed in the biological history of the body and old brain — letting that history of layered impulses, instincts and images bubble to the surface of their dream lives in violent, often cruel fantasies —
    — Grazia came to him in his tomb, opened the sleep crypt and asked him why he was fleeing from all that was alive. She took his hand and together they were borne up through a long tunnel, emerging at last in a sunny landscape of trees and gentle hills.
    The earth smelled of flowers and dirt. Here a stiff-winged blackbird swooped toward them, seized Grazia by the torso and nearly cut her in two, carrying the remains off into the blue, cloudless sky —
    TRY AGAIN.
    — They waited in a garden, she looking up at the sky where the hot sun rode. Slowly its light increased, suffusing the entire sky, until the nova’s heat blew away the planet’s atmosphere, melting the flesh from their bodies, leaving for an instant two skeletons embracing —
    AND AGAIN.
    — He had come back in time to run toward the cliff edge. High over the sea, Grazia’s glider was dropping toward the wall face, gaining speed as it approached the air