12 Antagonist by Gordon R Dickson

Author:Gordon R Dickson [Dickson, Gordon R]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812521689
Publisher: Tor Science Fiction
Published: 2008-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 23

Bleys keyed off the circuit over which he had been talking with the Others’ personnel office, six stories below him; and leaned back in his chair, looking down the length of the lounge at the great map he used to keep track of his nemesis. Years of self-control kept him from grimacing.

Dahno would not have hesitated to express his scorn, if he were here and Bleys had mentioned that word, nemesis. There was little concrete evidence to speak for Mayne’s dangerousness.

Yet Bleys remained convinced Hal Mayne was the biggest single danger to his plans.

In a way, Mayne was irrelevant—no single human being, including Bleys himself, carried sufficient historical mass to control the direction of those threads of historical forces Bleys had pictured for Toni, that night on Ceta.

But those forces were closely balanced; just a small weight, added to one side or subtracted from the other, could alter their direction— alter it enough to change the course of the human race, as a puff of wind could alter the flight of a bullet.

The historical forces, that he pictured as a many-threaded tapestry flowing through time, were made up of all the decisions ever made by human beings, across the entire span of the race’s history; and so they had a weight, an inertia, no single person could turn aside.

So his task was not to shift the forces himself, but to move members of the human race—convince them that his was the correct path. If enough people went along with him, their combined weight could dominate the direction of the forces … within himself he felt a feeling of familiarity, as if what he had just thought echoed something he had heard, or thought, or seen—somewhere before … he could not pin it down.

On the other hand, if Hal Mayne convinced enough people not to go in the direction Bleys knew was needed to save the human race, the forces might tend to the other direction.

It saddened Bleys to think that the entire future of the race depended on unknowing decisions made by the totally ignorant, but he could not tell them—not yet—that the very future of humankind was at stake in this conflict. They would not believe it. They would find it unlikely, ludicrous—too far from their own personal lives to be accorded either credibility or interest.

It was yet another sad fact about the human race, he thought: most did not think ahead far enough to imagine a future beyond the lives of their grandchildren—more accurately: to care about such a future time.

It had taken him years to learn that fact about his fellow humans. When he was much younger he had occasionally tried to bring conversations around to considerations of the far future and the destiny of the race; but most of those around him seemed to lack interest in such concepts.

Eventually, he had theorized that those reactions resulted from a strange kind of fear—that most people were very uncomfortable dealing with the concept of a world in which they, or something they had created, no longer existed.

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