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is now attacking the planets of Ahnalik Thirteen."
Quamodian caught a sudden, rasping breath.
"CallCygnus!" he demanded.
"Sacred Almalik, spokesman star of Cygnus, is calling here," the robot's high
whine interrupted him. "Your transflex travel priority has been approved. You
and your party may depart from the
Wisdom Creek transflex station at once."
25
Light-millennia away, the rogue's consciousness grew and sharpened in the heat
of a cosmic fury.
The huge sentience of stripped electrons and plasma soliloquized to itself
like a stellar Hamlet:
My seas boil dry . . . my magma bleeds from glowing wounds . . . my core
itself is shattered by those savage plasma spears . , . still I hurl myself
toward the great white sun ahead . ..
The inner planets of the sun spread wider in their orbits as it approached.
They began flashing backward past it; it was hours only now until they, and
all the space about, would be dissolved in the blazing debris of the sun the
rogue was about to destroy. And still the sun did not resist.
Swelling vast ahead of the rogue, it lay serenely white, beautiful and quiet,
undisturbed by the rogue's attack.
By now the rogue was ancient and mature in its own terms at least; it had
existed and learned through billions of cycles of its picosecond reflexes. It
had learned a full complement of
"emotions," or at any rate of those polarizing tropisms which did for it what
the glandular byproducts called emotions did for human beings. It had
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learned anger, and the calm pride of the target sun called forth anger in the
rogue:
// it would only recognize me! If it would only admit causing the sun of Earth
to strike at me! If it would offer some apology for deceiving me, for its
contempt of me then perhaps I could yet stop my blow ...
But it ignored him.
The rogue was not entirely ignored. Though the great white star blazed on
passionlessly, benevolently, still the rogue found itself the target for great
forces from elsewhere. Another sun of Almalik had joined the attack upon it
The blue companion of the golden giant stabbed at it with a twisting shaft of
plasma, a monstrous snake of glowing ions and transcience energy, which
pierced to the rogue's heart, withdrew and jabbed again.
An agony of meta-pain jolted the rogue to its innermost plasma swirl; but it
was not destroyed. It gathered its forces and sought for a weapon to hurl back
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the thrust of the blue star.
And it found one. Passing by the great fifth planet of the unresisting white
sun, the rogue reached out with its plasma arms to snatch a string of moons.
It gathered them to itself, fused their shattered mass into its own body,
linked their electrons into its transcience patterns. With its new mass it
strengthened its defenses.
And secure in its new strength, it drew more strength from the attacking stars
themselves. It
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file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E-books/LoPL%20full%20...child%20(3
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transcience energies, through the blue bolts and the golden ones, tightened
its transflection fields and hurled its new mass always faster toward the
maddening white star that glowed on, contemptuous of all the rogue could do.
And that phase of the battle ended.
Though the rogue had never struck back at the twin attacking giants, they were
beaten.
Their plasma coils had exhausted even their giant strength. The coils
withdrew, collapsed, disintegrated. The blue giant shrank and dimmed; its
golden companion swelled and reddened.
And then they were both dead. Their fusion fires still blazed on but
mindlessly now; the intellects that had animated them were drained empty.
Sentience had fled from them. Anger and fear and purpose had gone. The blue
star swelled again, the golden companion shrank back to normal size; they had
become
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merely globes of reacting nuclear gas, normal atomic engines no longer
controlled by any transcieace intellect.
It was a clear victory tor the rogue but its major enemy, the bright white
star in its path, was still the same.
It was not defeated. If it was even threatened, it gave no sign.
The rogue felt its vast quiet mind watching, alert but strangely unafraid. It
was anomalous, the rogue considered, that the target star did not request
mercy, or a discussion of terms.
Anomalous and somehow disturbing.
But the rogue would not be deterred from its purpose. It plunged on to smash
the white star and its haughty pride. It sought and found new fuel for its
vengeance. Passing a cloud of asteroids, it swept them up and added them to
its mass. It reached ahead to gather in the barren satellite of the fourth
planet, and crushed and fused the new mass into its own as it sought to crush
and fuse all the suns of Almalik.
Already in anticipation, it tasted the acrid joy of victory and destruction.
Thirteen suns would die or be driven to mindless bum-ing. A hundred planets,
and a thousand inhabited world-lets would be destroyed. A million billion
living things would go up in white-hot plasma as the stars died , . .
And among them, thought the rogue with a bleak stab of pain, would be the
trivial living blob of organized matter called Molly Zaldivar. .
I do not wish Molly Zaldivar to die. She must die. I will not save her. But I
do not wish her to die, because I love her.
In its deadly plunge toward the white star it sent thin threads of plasma [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]