Free Watson, Ian - Novel 06 by God's World (v1.1)

something to attain —not to overcome.
                 “We purged ourselves when you fired all
the missiles,” I try to explain to him. (We did promise to help him, after
all.) “We couldn’t go on to God’s World with all that freight of pointless
human animosity on board. Pointless, yes! Paltry. It was just plucked out of
our grasp, like a nasty toy.”
                 I
reach to take the catapult, to toss it over the parapet of the bridge into the
misty water of the Vltava ; but he clutches it tightly to his heart,
almost like a crucifix. As though Christ had been slain by a catapult.
                 “Pointless?
Little sister, it was all our knowledge of death, and what death might be to
us! We need death as our ally.”
                 “I
can’t imagine why! ”
                 “Because
it leads beyond. I shall lead all
living creatures beyond! It’s necessary .”
He brightens. “Kiss me, little sister? We belong. You’re my other self. I shall
search for you forever.”
                 “The
hell you will!”
                 “When
a particle meets an antiparticle, they annihilate in a flash of light. Let there be this light between
us, amie. Let us meet in that flash
of light. Love meets Death. And they become . . . the pure Light. The God.
Through Death. I love . . . but you don’t know the language of my love. Kiss
me. Annihilate me. Let me be your antiparticle. The tank treads crushed you,
buried you alive, but here I have you back again. Let my fingers crush you,
instead! I will do the job they cheated me of. Lovingly . . . I’ll fight that
politbureau of the Dead, if there is one. And I can smell one. It stole my
weapons, so that you shouldn’t know what a blessing death may be.”
                 Some
kind of nasty dream. Just as well I don’t remember anything, apart from the
nastiness. I don’t want to. Something— some healing, soothing element in
me—advises that this is best. Something blessed. Something larger—a wise whale
in the sea of general mind—has sieved out the nasty little things that nibbled
at me.
                 Ah
yes, I must have dreamt about the phantom battle. But now we’re safe. We’re
purged.
                 Oh
no, we’re not. There’s still that damned lunatic.
                 Jacobik
is dead, hanged naked in his cabin.
                 How
does a man hang himself in High Space, where gravity is null? By sheer venomous
hatred of the ship, and of himself, does he generate surges of quasi-gravity
fierce enough to throttle himself in the loops of plastic cable which had
formerly secured him to his bunk, his wrists and ankles bound? That cable now
tethers his neck to a ceiling brace. His clothes, tom off him, float like rag
banners in the air...
                 How
acrobatically he must have twisted and turned, to untie the tethers with his
teeth! How much in love with death he must have been, for he died ejaculating!
Death was his orgasm, and his orgasm was death: a perfect equation which
annulled him, adding up to final zero.
                 “Not
so,” says Captain K, after we have frozen his body. “I regret to say that he
was undoubtedly murdered. The door seal was quite cleverly tampered with ...”
Neil Kendrick nods sourly. “Judging by the manner of his death, I’m led to
believe that it must have been a female crew member—unless . . He leaves the
alternative implication afloat, like Jacobik’s corpse, to haunt us. He stares
in turn into my face, Natalya’s, Sachiko’s, Zoe’s, Li’s, even Wu’s; then gazes
at the men, too, for good measure. “Somebody let themselves into his cabin.
Someone loosed him, though not his wrists or ankles—not till afterwards. I
noted the bruises on those.”
                 “He
might have bruised them, struggling to free himself,” says Natalya
dismissively.