Day of Truth Read online

  Where are their ships? he wondered—and then he realized. They can hardly tell us apart. They don’t trust themselves to hit the right one. It’s all ours—a duel. Straight fight between the giants. But they cheated. They claimed the first shot. They took us by surprise.

  The pale dot wavered in the screen. For a moment, he thought that the Aurita had been hit yet again. But there was no cry from behind.

  A shield down? he thought, with vicious exultation. We’re getting through. How many has he left? Two? Or one, just like us? It might be even yet.

  His hands played the keyboard with savage determination. He felt blood running down his chin from the cut on his lower lip which his teeth had widened and kept open. His eyes were hot and angry.

  But there was a growing coldness in his belly. He was beginning to realize that the battle could no longer be won. Even if, by some miracle, the Aurita could beat its sister ship, he had only one shield left and little firepower. His omega-drive was limping, and half his hull must be scarred and dented by now. He could not hope to stand up to the renewed attack of the silver horde.

  The Aurita was all but finished. It was time to run. But could he even run with the other battleship so close?

  The gray dot was growing again. It was on his tail now, right at the edge of the planar screen. It was growing fast. He pulled keys in rapid patterns, trying to swing away.

  The Aurita shook and there was an audible explosion. The omega-drive groaned and the gravity adjusters cut out for a second, lifting Rayshade’s guts into his throat.

  “We’re dead!” yelled the voice behind him.

  “Not yeti Is the screen still up?” howled Rayshade. It was a futile question. Obviously, the shield was holding for the moment. Damaged as it undoubtedly was, the Aurita could not possibly be flying unshielded.

  “All stern guns out!” called the man in the headphones. “We can’t hit him. Turn the ship. Turn the ship!”

  Rayshade’s fingernails were splitting and breaking as he clawed at the keys. Blood splashed the gray plastic as one of his fingers tore. The pain shocked him, but the pattern which his fingers scratched was never interrupted.

  The Aurita turned, and her pain was obvious from the screaming of the power banks. The gray mass of the Falcor began to drift toward the center of the screen.

  The omega-drive moaned and the ship shook.

  “They aren’t hitting us,” called the blond man. “It’s us.”

  The Falcorian battleship began to move back again, swinging out of the range of the Aurita’s remaining guns.

  It’s no good, thought Rayshade. They want to stay behind us. They know they have us pinned. His fingers worked fast, but one hand left the keyboard to grip the speed control, ready but hesitant.

  The keyboard was doing nothing. Rayshade could feel the sluggishness in the column beneath his fingertips. The Falcor could sit on his tail forever unless he tried something different.

  Rayshade jerked the speed control and wheeled the ship as sharply as he could. The power column screamed like a dying man, and there was a crack like the sound of breaking bones.

  “You’ve broken us in two!” yelled the man in the headphones, coming forward as he said it.

  The Aurita turned.

  “Kill him!" screeched Rayshade. “NOW!”

  “It’s no good,” sobbed the blond man, right by his side. “We can’t do it.”

  Helplessly, Rayshade watched the pale scar swing slowly back across the screen. His fingers plied the controls, but there was little effect. He had tried all he could and failed.

  “He’s got us,” whispered Rayshade. “We’re a sitting duck.”

  “You broke us in two,” said the man beside him, for the second time. The blond man’s hand reached out to grip Rayshade’s arm.

  Rayshade shook him off. “We aren’t broken. The shield’s still up. I’m still getting power. It can’t have been the hull that broke. The column’s still there. Find out what it was.”

  The other man was silent. Someone else helped him up.

  Every pair of eyes in the control room was following the slow progress of the gray dot into the safety of the comer of the screen. It was no longer a matter of combat but of waiting for the coup de grace.

  Rayshade almost wished that he was in one of the bow gun pods with a tiny round screen, unable to see the unkind destiny which was staring him in the face.

  CHAOS’S STORY CONTINUED

  For some reason, I had the impression that I hadn’t much time. My mind was racing in an attempt to come to a quick decision.

  Was I supposed to kill Heljanita and hand the galaxy over to Darkscar? I’d already said on several occasions that there was little to choose between them. Kill them both? I certainly didn’t want to kill Darkscar—I owed him at least that much. Kill neither? And let the whole sorry mess go on and on with no end. I was almost regretting that I had picked up the gun at all. I was sure that there was something I could do, something I had to do if I could only think of it.

  “A moment ago,” said Darkscar, making it easier for me by taking me away from my thoughts, “you were with me. What happened to change your mind?” I knew that I couldn’t kill Darkscar. But I couldn’t give him the gun, either. I had to make sure that I didn’t commit myself simply because Darkscar had saved my life. Must I make a choice? I wondered. Are there only the two ways and no middle course? Does my side really exist, and what does it want? That was the difficulty: what did I want?

  Darkscar was my friend, but he was also my enemy. I didn’t believe in his doctrine of total order, of discipline and planning. I didn’t believe even that happiness did lay in harmony, that the one goal of the Human and Beast races was peace.

  “What does he offer you?” asked Heljanita. “A life without challenge, without innovation. A torpid existence, living in delicate daydreams and drug-filled sleep. Why live at all if you have to live like that? His world would be full of listlessness and apathy, completely stagnant and inanimate. Darkscar is the advocate of death. His order is nothing more than another word for extinction. It would reduce you to the level of animals. The Beasts are men like the Humans. Do you want to go back to the level of your ancestors?”

  I could see a stupid, futile argument blossoming before me, but the only way to stop it was by using the gun to decide it. I felt far more powerless now than I had when Heljanita had been holding the gun on me.

  “And you stand for progress?” Darkscar began, unable to keep out of the philosophical syndrome. “For war, hatred, dissonance. I agree with progress. I agree in motion. But I want a goal at the end of it all. I don’t want to plunge on forever and ever, running for the sake of running, enduring agony because I’m running with nowhere to go, living in turmoil with misery and hunger and pain, heading for a promised land that you would never let me reach.

  “When we have found what we want; when we have reached our goal of happiness and peace of mind; when every man can live with every other without fear; when we can derive mutual benefit from our civilization; when we can all enrich each other’s lives instead of fighting and hating—then I want to stop. Then I want to be able to say: “This is where we were going. The promised land is here. It is time to be content.’”

  Between them, they were beginning to make me sick. Was it even remotely possible that one of these .two madmen might be right? I fought frantically for some sort of decision.

  “There is no promised land,” said Heljanita scornfully. “We’re men, not animals. There is no limit to what we can do. There is always somewhere to go on to. What you want isn’t progress, it’s escape. You’re afraid of yourself. There is always more initiative, more achievement. All we need is to follow the dictates of our intelligence instead of denying them and soothing them into sweet oblivion. We can keep the race of man healthy and vigorous instead of forcing it into a coma. Disorder and disunity promote imagination. External struggle places a reward on internal victory. It is the spur of achievement. There is no
where we cannot go and nothing we cannot do provided that we allow ourselves to be free.”

  “Do you really have to conquer the galaxy to do that?” I asked. “Did it require you to slaughter the Humans?”

  “I had to kill Adam December,” insisted Heljanita. “I had to destroy the House of Stars, which promoted and maintained the degeneracy of his ideas.”

  “And the conquest? Wasn’t there enough chaos after the end of the Beast war? Did I fail you?”

  Heljanita shook his head in exasperation. “You don’t understand. The Beast war was only a beginning. Destroying the symbols and rituals wasn’t nearly enough. Things still hung together. Life hardly changed. Sheer force of habit held the old ways. I had to change the people to change the entire way of life.”

  “He’s mad,” said Darkscar. “Can’t you see that? He’s a maniac—a conqueror. He has to be killed. He wants to rule the universe. His madness is just a mask to conceal his ambition.”

  Heljanita was angry, but I waved the gun at him, and when his answer came it was only more meaningless words.

  I stopped him and turned my attention to Darkscar. There was something I wanted to contribute to this fantastic argument.

  “And you?” I asked him. “Don’t you want to conquer the galaxy as well? A benign conquest, of course. Your rule will be one of love and happiness. You’d be a mentor, a guiding hand to stop little children getting into trouble. You’d show us the right way to do things. You like people to be metal plates, all the same size, so that they can be stacked neatly and hidden away in filing cabinets. You have a passion for neatness and perfection. But your idea of perfection is all in symmetry and exactitude. You don’t believe that people are different. You won’t admit, although it’s the most obvious thing in the universe, that people want different things. Everyone is happy in Darkscar’s universe—everybody is the same in Darkscar’s universe. No one is allowed to be different. No one is allowed to be unhappy.

  They either want the same things as everyone else, or else they will be made to want the same things as everyone else. They’ll be happy if it kills them. Doesn’t that sound like a maniac to you, Darkscar?”

  “You don’t understand,” he replied. “I have ten thousand years of history on my side. My world actually existed, somewhere. It existed, and it worked. If you could have seen it, you would have understood. We were happy. Everything that I claim for my world is backed up by evidence. Heljanita cannot deny that my world was real, whereas his never was. His world is just the delirium of an insane mind.”

  ’Tour world existed,” agreed Heljanita. “But it can no longer exist. It is gone from the record of time, completely. And it was erased because it did not work. It did not live up to your claims. There were unhappy men. There were men without peace. Heljanita the toymaker was a product of your society and your society alone. Twenty thousand years of Adam December’s civilization still allowed me to be bom. I can call you a liar and a fool, because I am my own evidence.”

  “You are one man,” replied Darkscar. “One man against a galaxy. One insane man. Whose word can you take, Lord Chaos? The word of one man or the word of three hundred billion?”

  “Can your three hundred billion speak for themselves?” retorted the toymaker. “Or can they only repeat the words which are hammered into their minds by your perfect discipline? Are they ever permitted to think for themselves, let alone speak? I claim that we are one against one, and your three hundred billion have only one voice.”

  I felt compelled to interrupt again. “In this world and in this time, you are one and one against two hundred billion. What gives either of you the right to speak for the galaxy? This is our world—the Kingdom of the Beasts. Before that it was the Empire of the House of Stars. Why should you determine what happens to it? Either of you?”

  “Ten thousand years of history,” said Darkscar. “That gives me the right. Someone has to guide. Someone has to lead. Why should it be you? Or Cain Rayshade? I stand only for what is right.”

  “What is right and what is wrong are not matters for you to decide.”

  “No,” he agreed, with a trace of bitterness. “They are for you to decide. You hold the gun.”

  “What is right and what is wrong are matters for everyone to decide, whether they hold guns or not,” I replied. “Guns only determine what is expedient, not what is right. Any man who imposes his ideas of right and wrong on another is behaving like a fool. The best he can hope for is that expediency will force others to conform to his actions. They will never agree with his ideas.”

  Darkscar’s lip curled. “You, Lord Chaos, moralizing? Behind those words are the same kind of anarchy and lawlessness that Heljanita was crying. Won’t you see that men can’t live on that sort of a basis? No man is alone, and no man can live alone. We are all together, all in the same galaxy, mere minutes away from one another. We must live together as one race, as one people. We are all one kind of being. We share the identity of being men. AU of us—every last one—must live together simply because that is the way the universe is arranged. It is a fact, not a philosophy. We must all add to each other instead of taking from each other. No one can set himself up in a universe complete within himself. No one can say “This is my world. Keep out and I’ll keep out of yours.’ There is only one galaxy, one world, one life. A society which refuses to acknowledge that the Human species is a single entity, no matter what the origin of its people, is a society which denies facts; it denies its own identity; it denies its own heritage; it denies its own humanity. To live as Heljanita wants you to live, or as you have just said that we do live is to make life motiveless. Each life, each place, each year and each hour becomes a thing separate from everything else. There is no continuity, no heritage. We deny the gift of intelligence if we think like that. We are people, Lord Chaos, all of us. No one of us can deny his own humanity, whether he bears the mark of the Beast or not. To make life aimless and motiveless, a matter of personal interest only, is desecration and degradation. You are denying everything that history has given to you, everything that evolution has led you to.

  “If you are a man, Lord Chaos, if you are a Beast, you cannot say that all your decisions are yours to make and yours alone. Nor can you totally deny responsibility for the decisions of all other men. It seems so simple to deny it all, to retreat and hide within your uncertainty and fear. But you cannot cut yourself off. You cannot be alone. You cannot be responsible to no one. It is only cowardice which makes you think you can and must. It is inhuman. You are a naan and must have the dignity of a man, the pride of a man. You must not deny your own identity.

  “Think, Lord Chaos. What is love for? Why are there things we feel which bind us together? Why sympathy? Why friendship? These things exist, Lord Chaos. They cannot be ignored. They speak for the fact that no man is alone, no man can ever be self-contained because he is a part of the race of man.

  “Only hours ago, the Mother of the Underworld gave you two of her children and asked you if you understood what that meant. And you said that you did. Do you understand? Do you understand why the girl lost her life helping you, fighting for you?”

  My eyes moved involuntarily toward Pia’s body to stare for a long moment at her’ closed eyes and blood-soaked hair.

  Heljanita went for the gun. There was a moment when I might have been able to kill him, but I didn’t pull the trigger. I can’t say that I chose not to kill him, because things happened so fast. But there was an instant where he was coming and I saw him and I didn’t fire. On pure reflex, I snatched the gun out of his reach, and his body cannoned into mine. I’d tried to stave him off with my left hand, and the open wound hurt badly. I lost my balance, but he ran on. He was the heavier man, and less affected by the collision. I fell to my knees, and made a grab for his ankle.

  But again I tried to grab him with the hand which had no palm, no muscles to flex the fingers. I couldn’t take hold. He dived through the door and was gone.

  Darkscar pulled me to my
feet and shoved me after him. I paused, but it was clear that for the moment, it was Heljanita who was the enemy. I went after him, leaving Dark-scar behind. I don’t know why he stayed, or what he did after I left.

  Heljanita was disappearing in the direction of the big room where we had fought the toys. I followed at a limping, painful run.

  He never gained much distance on me despite my slowness. But even so, when he reached the corpse-strewn control room there was time for him to have grabbed one of the rifles that lay on the floor. But he didn’t even try. He ran straight past them to a big power distributor in the middle of the room, and he gripped a big lever. I had an impulse to shoot him then, but I didn’t. The situation hadn’t materially changed—or so I thought.

  The toymaker was fiddling with a small button on top of the lever. He saw me standing in the doorway and moved round the lever so that the thin strip of metal was between us. I moved forward, and he watched me calmly. I stopped twenty or thirty feet away, not knowing what to do next

  There was a long pause, and Darkscar reappeared behind me. He stood beside me, and I kept half an eye on him, remembering that I hadn’t made any decisions yet But the center of attention was now Heljanita.

  “It’s the master switch,” said Darkscar in a low voice. “It controls the power flow. If he pulls it all the way over, it will flood the banks. The tower will blow apart.”

  “Now we both have a weapon,” said Heljanita confidently.

  I shook my head. “You’d kill us all. There’s no point in that.”

  He smiled. “I’ll win whatever you do, Lord Chaos. Kill me or don’t, kill Darkscar or don’t. But with one hard pull I can bring chaos to the galaxy. I will win.”

  “All you’ll do is kill us all. You can’t do anything else. What do you hope to achieve by blowing the fortress apart?”

  “I’m not going to blow up the citadel.”

  I glanced sideways at Darkscar. He shrugged.