and grander history on a million worlds, far from here. That's where you'll find God, I suspect, not in some rusty artifact on a forgotten world."
"God is everywhere, from the very large to the very small. You can't possibly know how it all fits together."
"And you do? Or are you just kidding yourself?"
"I must have known, or how would I have resisted you for so long?"
"That's what I want to find out. Was it luck or because some secret Fort helped you?"
"Why can't the answer be God?"
"Because I don't believe." He is angry now, angry in a way I've never seen before. "God is either a crutch for the weak or a tool for the strong. It's nothing else. Whatever's going on with you, there has to be another explanation. If you looked as long and hard at yourself as I have, you'd know what it was. Or perhaps you do know, and you simply won't tell me."
A fleeting fear, that I might be thrown bodily from the aircraft, tossed out like garbage, races through me.
"Something happened here," growls Bergamasc. "Something important, just before the Forts died, something involving all the frags. An experiment, perhaps, and whatever killed the Forts also stopped that experiment in its tracks. I think that you're the result of that experiment—incomplete and self-deluded, but here all the same. At least partly finished."
"God isn't made in a test-tube."
"No. Exactly. So what are you, Jasper? What are you?"
I cannot give him an answer that he hasn't already dismissed.
We land and I am imprisoned behind the bars of a cell they have constructed in Vulcan's sandstone plinth. I don't know if Bergamasc ever made good on his promise to destroy the statue, but my daily ritual continues unchecked.
Outside I hear the sound of trees being felled to make way for Bergamasc's camp. I do not mourn them as I mourn the frags who have died in my service, but I do feel a pang of regret with each mighty, slow-motion collapse. If my enemy truly does fell whole worlds as easily as he levels this ancient forest, am I only delaying the axe-blow by standing in his path?
I know how the war progresses and that at some point I am captured; but how that capture comes about is still unknown to me. What if it's true that I have been betrayed without knowing it? Bergamasc may be mistaken and misguided, but I have rarely known him to lie.
If I had executed him while he was in my hands, as Alice-Angeles suggested, I might have spared myself this dilemma. A general of lesser charisma and inferior brilliance could actually have been easier to deal with, in the long run. Helwise's instincts would have been to crush our resistance at any cost to the Earth itself, and that would have resulted in outright war with the Round. The galaxy would never have stood for that. Instead I am entangled in this complex game whose rules change as quickly as they come into focus.
Because I didn't kill him...
We had little to say to each other in Lop Nur, and not just because I had the safety of Alice-Angeles and the others on my mind. I decided while on the journey to Malan that I would leave Bergamasc there with the nuke that I had promised to abandon. His own jamming would prevent him calling for help, and thus alerting his underlings that we could be safely targeted. That head start, I hoped, would give us the edge we needed to get to safety.
We did talk some, though, in Malan, sheltered for the night in a self-repairing nuclear waste complex, circa the twenty-second century, when he commented on our out-of-date provisions.
I responded that humanity has existed in an anachronistic state ever since it invented history. For almost a million years, the layers of knowledge we have created have been pressing against each other like geological strata. Faults and folds create strange juxtapositions and resonances between facts that are otherwise entirely unconnected, giving present society a richness unimaginable in earlier times.
He agreed, noting his own use of anachronistic
"God is everywhere, from the very large to the very small. You can't possibly know how it all fits together."
"And you do? Or are you just kidding yourself?"
"I must have known, or how would I have resisted you for so long?"
"That's what I want to find out. Was it luck or because some secret Fort helped you?"
"Why can't the answer be God?"
"Because I don't believe." He is angry now, angry in a way I've never seen before. "God is either a crutch for the weak or a tool for the strong. It's nothing else. Whatever's going on with you, there has to be another explanation. If you looked as long and hard at yourself as I have, you'd know what it was. Or perhaps you do know, and you simply won't tell me."
A fleeting fear, that I might be thrown bodily from the aircraft, tossed out like garbage, races through me.
"Something happened here," growls Bergamasc. "Something important, just before the Forts died, something involving all the frags. An experiment, perhaps, and whatever killed the Forts also stopped that experiment in its tracks. I think that you're the result of that experiment—incomplete and self-deluded, but here all the same. At least partly finished."
"God isn't made in a test-tube."
"No. Exactly. So what are you, Jasper? What are you?"
I cannot give him an answer that he hasn't already dismissed.
We land and I am imprisoned behind the bars of a cell they have constructed in Vulcan's sandstone plinth. I don't know if Bergamasc ever made good on his promise to destroy the statue, but my daily ritual continues unchecked.
Outside I hear the sound of trees being felled to make way for Bergamasc's camp. I do not mourn them as I mourn the frags who have died in my service, but I do feel a pang of regret with each mighty, slow-motion collapse. If my enemy truly does fell whole worlds as easily as he levels this ancient forest, am I only delaying the axe-blow by standing in his path?
I know how the war progresses and that at some point I am captured; but how that capture comes about is still unknown to me. What if it's true that I have been betrayed without knowing it? Bergamasc may be mistaken and misguided, but I have rarely known him to lie.
If I had executed him while he was in my hands, as Alice-Angeles suggested, I might have spared myself this dilemma. A general of lesser charisma and inferior brilliance could actually have been easier to deal with, in the long run. Helwise's instincts would have been to crush our resistance at any cost to the Earth itself, and that would have resulted in outright war with the Round. The galaxy would never have stood for that. Instead I am entangled in this complex game whose rules change as quickly as they come into focus.
Because I didn't kill him...
We had little to say to each other in Lop Nur, and not just because I had the safety of Alice-Angeles and the others on my mind. I decided while on the journey to Malan that I would leave Bergamasc there with the nuke that I had promised to abandon. His own jamming would prevent him calling for help, and thus alerting his underlings that we could be safely targeted. That head start, I hoped, would give us the edge we needed to get to safety.
We did talk some, though, in Malan, sheltered for the night in a self-repairing nuclear waste complex, circa the twenty-second century, when he commented on our out-of-date provisions.
I responded that humanity has existed in an anachronistic state ever since it invented history. For almost a million years, the layers of knowledge we have created have been pressing against each other like geological strata. Faults and folds create strange juxtapositions and resonances between facts that are otherwise entirely unconnected, giving present society a richness unimaginable in earlier times.
He agreed, noting his own use of anachronistic
Similar Books
