Thokk uttered a sound like a dry hiccough that served her for a chuckle. “I would have cleaned a burial cloth for her, for Rania, but she will never have a grave to fill.”
Montrose clutched his head. “I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it! That could have been—something else. Anything else. A meteor with the same ratio of iron and other elements, traveling the same speed—a fragment of the planet Thrymheim—she would not give up so easily. She would keep going even in a pinnace boat.”
The old woman laughed again, and chanted. “The world rolls round for ever like a mill; it grinds out death and life and good and ill; it has no purpose, heart or mind or will. While air of Space and Time’s full river flow the mill must blindly whirl unresting so: It may be wearing out, but who can know?”
“Who are you, really? Some puppet of Blackie’s?”
“Man might know one thing were his sight less dim; That it whirls not to suit his petty whim, that it is quite indifferent to him. Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith? It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath, then grinds him back into eternal death.”
“You are trying to get me to take down the phantasm barrier, aren’t you?”
The old lady stared at him, her one eye like a dull stone in the shadows of her cloak hood. She said nothing, and Montrose realized that Blackie would at all costs keep from him any hint, any evidence, that might suggest Rania was dead, because this was the only thing making Montrose pliant to Blackie’s plans. If Montrose knew Rania were no more, he would shoot Blackie without even the formality of a duel: just walk up and blow the head off the man who cheated him of the chance of dying on her voyage with her, the man who provoked the alien invasion which forced Rania to her quest.
Thokk said, “I am soon to die: the doings of men in a year mean nothing to me, much less their doings in times so remote none can see.
“But all the great ones who sent the world to weep on your knees, they are as I am, except that they endure a longer time. To them, the period when they will be slaves to Jupiter are all they see. They do not see what lies in the aeon after this, any more than I see next year. What do they care if the Children of Men go extinct?
“And greatest Jupiter, he is also as I am, but merely enduring longer and looking longer. He sees his maker’s vision of a galactic empire, or some such nonsense.
“And the monsters in the Hyades, what of them? Longer still. And their masters beyond the galaxy, where your lady flew in vain, what of them? Longer and longer still, and still they are as I am, looking to themselves, concerned with this life, nothing beyond. For what is beyond? Death, nakedness, dust, emptiness, nothingness. Entropy wins all.”
Montrose was feeling less pity for this crooked figure. The bitterness, the helpless hatred in her words, disgusted him. “If everything is futile, old woman, why talk to me? There is the river. Drown yourself and be done with it.”
“Why? Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles to show the bitter old and wrinkled truth stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles; false dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth!”
“Are you quoting someone?”
She held up her cold and crooked hands. “Look at me. If Tellus could see me, I would be saved and cured. If Jupiter could see us all, he could set things to right, and save us all.”
“Every tyrant promises that. They lie.”
“Oh? If we are all to die in any case, what does it matter if we die in a short time, free as birds, free as uncaught criminals! Or die in a long time, enjoying eons of greatness after long eons of servitude? It is a rite of passage, a payment the young always make to join their elders, a payment of worth. You want to be a starfarer, do you? To sail the endless dark, and see all the mysteries! Well, pay the fare. Pay the fare.”
“And if the fare is the freedom of mankind? Won’t you shed a tear for that?”
She spat. “I will not weep, save with those dry tears shed by skulls who do not live. What has man and his vaunted freedom ever done for me? To me what joy does it give?”
And she turned her back on him, and began to slap her washing against the stones.
His mind was a whirl of thoughts. Rania dead? He decided not to believe it, not for an instant. It would be too much like treason. If he believed it, he was certain that she would return, alive after all, and upbraid him for his lack of faith. You did not trust me to outsmart a simple starship disaster?
But the image in his mind which the old woman’s words had placed there: a man who thinks about a few decades, and does not care about the centuries, or of a machine that cares about centuries, but ignores the millennia; or of posthumans who care about millennia, or Potentates who care about tens of millennia, or Powers who care about hundreds, and yet above them like a black sky were Virtues big as solar systems, Principalities large as stars, and Dominations filling whole star clusters … and to them, the concerns of the gas giants and the living planets were like the tantrums of children, the tempest of an hour, or the lives of mayflies.
The sheer immensity appalled him. He had always somehow thought that a wise man, a moral man, looked to the long term, and sacrificed, when need be, his short-term desires. But what did that become when inflated to a planetary scale, to an interstellar scale, to a cosmic scale?
Live free or die was always the motto he lived by. And now the whole world, all save one desolate and penniless crone, wept for their lost freedom, and were willing to die—
Again, he felt the cold sensation in his spine. No, they were not willing to die. Not to die their own deaths. They were willing that mankind, in some remote eon many millennia from now, should go extinct, or people on far planets condemned to starve amid the cratered salt flats or by shores of seas of boiling ink beneath strange and moonless skies.
7. Verdict
By the time he hiked back over field and flood, forest and plain to the riverside where all the representatives of man had gathered, they were ready to receive him. As before, figures looked down from columns and stepped pyramids, and the fields were filled with Swans and Men, and many races and sub-races of Man. Music played from the whole environment, bird and insect, leaves and lapping waters joining in the refrain to welcome him. Stately thin-faced Swans folded their wings, and bowed, and in the river the whales and lesser cetaceans of the Melusine order sported and wallowed in his honor.
And here also was Blackie, dressed in new clothing, who had a hat with a feather in it. He was spinning the hat on his finger, tossing it in the air and catching it, over and over. He stood near the stairs that led down to a launching vessel.
Montrose did not wait for all the music to cease and the ceremonial bows to be ended.
“Bugger you all,” said Menelaus Montrose in a harsh voice. “You’ve had your fun. I mean to see my wife again. That’s all.”
And he slunk down the stairs to the launching vessel waiting to carry him back to exile in the outer Solar System, and Del Azarchel, whistling and skylarking, skipped after.
8. A Small Moon Burns
A.D. 11322
Within the arms of the mighty crescent of the planet Jupiter, on the night side, among the flashes of eternal lightning, a bright dot appeared sliding across the cloud belts. The countless square miles of sails were focusing the weak sunlight of the outer system like a parabolic magnifying glass into a pinpoint of hell.
At the moment, all three tugs were aft of the great ship, connected by monocrystalline carbon tethers to numerous stanchions dotting the nonrotating segment of the hull, and Del Azarchel could see on high frequency wavelengths both the powerful magnetic fields surrounding the engines, and the blazing star of their exhaust. The tugs were forming a drag against the sail pressure.