Calm was unshaken. “Think why you are hostile.”
“Aren’t you our enemies?”
“We are enemies to none. We seek, we shape.”
“Let me talk to Aycharaych. I’m certain he’s somewhere on Chereion. He’d have left the Zorian System after word got beamed to him, or he learned from broadcasts, his scheme had failed. Where else would he go?”
Liannathan curved feathery brows upward. “Best you explain yourself, Captain, to yourself if not us.”
Abruptly Flandry snapped off the switch of his mind-screen. “Read the answers,” he challenged.
Liannathan spread graceful hands in gracious signal. “I told you, knowing what darkness you must dwell in, for mercy’s sake we will leave your thoughts alone unless you compel us. Speak.”
Conviction congealed in Flandry, iceberg huge. “No, you speak. What are you on Chereion? What do you tell the Merseians? I already know, or think I know, but tell me.”
The response rang grave: “We are not wholly the last of an ancient race; the others have gone before us. We are those who have not yet reached the Goal; the bitter need of the universe for help still binds us. Our numbers are few, we have no need of numbers. Very near we are to those desires that lie beyond desire, those powers that lie beyond power.” Compassion softened Liannathan’s words. “Terran, we mourn the torment of you and yours. We mourn that you can never feel the final reality, the spirit born out of pain. We have no wish to return you to nothingness. Go in love, before too late.”
Almost, Flandry believed. His sense did not rescue him; his memories did. “Yah!” he shouted. “You phantom, stop haunting!”
He lunged. Liannathan wasn’t there. He crashed a blaster bolt among the mystics. They were gone. He leaped in among the red-tinged shadows of the arcade and peered after light and sound projectors to smash. Everywhere else, enormous, brooded the stillness of the long afternoon. The image of a single Chereionite flashed into sight, in brief white tunic, bearing though not brandishing a sidearm, palm uplifted—care-worn, as if the bones would break out from the skin, yet with life in flesh and great garnet eyes such as had never burned in those apparitions which were passed away. Flandry halted. “Aycharaych!”
He snatched for the switch to turn his mindscreen back on. Aycharaych smiled. “You need not bother, Dominic,” he said in Anglic. “This too is only a hologram.”
“Lieutenant,” Flandry snapped over his shoulder, “dispose your squad against attack.”
“Why?” said Aycharaych. The armored men gave him scant notice. His form glimmered miragelike in the gloom under that vaulted roof, where sullen sunlight barely reached. “You have discovered we have nothing to resist you.”
You’re bound to have something, Flandry did not reply. A few missiles or whatever. You’re just unwilling to use them in these environs. Where are you yourself, and what were you doing while your specters held us quiet?
As if out of a stranger’s throat, he heard: “Those weren’t straightforward audiovisuals like yours that we met, were they? No reason for them to put on a show of being present, of being real, except that none of them ever were. Right? They’re computer-generated simulacrums, will-o’-the-wisps for leading allies and enemies alike from the truth. Well, life’s made me an unbeliever.
“Aycharaych, you are in fact the last Chereionite alive. The very last. Aren’t you?”
Abruptly such anguish contorted the face before him that he looked away. “What did they die of?” he was asking. “How long ago?” He got no answer.
Instead: “Dominic, we share a soul, you and I. We have both always been alone.”
For a while I wasn’t; and now she is; she is down in the aloneness which is eternal. Rage ripped Flandry. He swung back to see a measure of self-command masking the gaunt countenance. “You must have played your game for centuries,” he grated. “Why? And … whatever your reason to hide that your people are extinct … why prey on the living? You, you could let them in and show them what’d make your Chereionites the … Greeks of the galaxy—but you sit in a tomb or travel like a vampire—Are you crazy, Aycharaych? Is that what drives you?”
“No!”
Flandry had once before heard the lyric voice in sorrow. He had not heard a scream: “I am not! Look around you. Who could go mad among these? And arts, music, books, dreams—yes, more, the loftiest spirits of a million years—they lent themselves to the scanners, the recorders—If you could have the likenesses to meet whenever you would … of Gautama Buddha, Kung Fu-Tse, Rabbi Hillel, Jesus the Christ, Rumi … Socrates, Newton, Hokusai, Jefferson, Gauss, Beethoven, Einstein, Ulfgeir, Manuel the Great, Manuel the Wise—would you let your war lords turn these instruments to their own vile ends? No!”
And Flandry understood.
Did Aycharaych, half blinded by his dead, see what he had given away? “Dominic,” he whispered hastily, shakily, “I’ve used you ill, as I’ve used many. It was from no will of mine. Oh, true, an art, a sport—yours too—but we had our services, you to a civilization you know is dying, I to a heritage I know can abide while this sun does. Who has the better right?” He held forth unsubstantial hands.
“Dominic, stay. We’ll think how to keep your ships off and save Chereion—”
Almost as if he were again the machine that condemned his son, Flandry said, “I’d have to lure my company into some kind of trap. Merseia would take the planet back, and the help it gives. Your shadow show would go on. Right?”
“Yes. What are a few more lives to you? What is Terra? In ten thousand years, who will remember the empires? They can remember you, though, who saved Chereion for them.”
Candle flames stood around a coffin. Flandry shook his head. “There’ve been too many betrayals in too many causes.” He wheeled. “Men, we’re returning.”
“Aye, sir.” The replies shuddered with relief.
Aycharaych’s eidolon brought fingers together as if he prayed. Flandry touched his main grav switch. Thrust pushed harness against breast. He rose from the radiant city, into the waning murky day. Chill flowed around him. Behind floated his robot-encased men.
“Brigate!” bawled Vymezal. “Beware!”
Around the topmost tower flashed a score of javelin shapes. Firebeams leaped out of their nozzles. Remote-controlled flyer guns, Flandry knew. Does Aycharaych still hope, or does he only want revenge? “Chives,” he called into his sender, “come get us!”
Sparks showered off Vymezal’s plate. He slipped aside in midair, more fast and nimble than it seemed he could be in armor. His energy weapon, nearly as heavy as the assailants, flared back. Thunders followed brilliances. Bitterness tinged air. A mobile blast cannon reeled in midflight, spun downward, crashed in a street, exploded. Fragments ravaged a fragile facade.
“Shield the captain,” Vymezal boomed.
Flandry’s men ringed him in. Shots tore at them. The noise stamped in his skull, the stray heat whipped over his skin. Held to his protection, the marines could not dodge about. The guns converged.
A shadow fell, a lean hull blocked off the sun. Flames reaped. Echoes toned at last to silence around smoking ruin down below. Vymezal shouted triumph. He waved his warriors aside, that Flandry might lead them through the open lock, into the Hooligan.
Wounded, dwindled, victorious, the Dennitzan fleet took orbits around Chereion. Within the command bridge, Bodin Miyatovich and his chieftains stood for a long while gazing into the viewscreens. The planet before them glowed among the stars, softly, secretly, like a sign of peace. But it was the pictures they had seen earlier, the tale they had heard, which made those hard men waver.