Far Voyager- Postscripts 32-33 by Nick Gevers (ed)

Author:Nick Gevers (ed) [Gevers, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Anthologies, Fiction, Science Fiction, Short Stories
ISBN: 9781848638563
Publisher: PS Publishing
Published: 2015-11-22T07:00:00+00:00

He had not attempted to take me in my own environment, and fortunate for him—for I would have undone him. He knew too well my credo of peace, and still had been willing to take part in a meeting that he knew from the start was never going to bear fruit. So why had he come? To taunt? Maybe. To get a feel for his enemy? More likely. Whatever feel he’d gotten, though, was nothing compared to what he was going to get now that I was involved. Once my attention is turned, I don’t suffer obstructions.

In the first few weeks of it, of jamming systems, preventing holocausts, saving worlds, he spoke to me occasionally. Later, nothing, as he decided to shift focus to the slaughter he felt would bring the answer he and his kind, and all the rest of the galaxy, sought. Though treasured for their secret, humans were not loved for their own bloody bid to survive at all costs. The ‘adversity’ they were being put through was easily justified. Alas for the warmongers. Now that the human me was engaged, I’d no hesitation in taking out whole poisoned military systems when Zi-Azi wasn’t looking. When he was, I was patient, waiting for the opportunity to take him. Jared would come and go as the ambassador to me. I paid him no mind. Like all humans, he was selfish. Their curse. The intangible was the prize; humans themselves were expendable.

Such was the message from my counterpart when he finally called a ceasefire and came to me.

‘Nine worlds,’ he said, ‘have suffered for our impasse. Do you want this to continue?’

‘No,’ I replied. Meaning it.

‘Then renounce your association with them. Let us get what we came for and be done with them.’

‘I cannot do.’

‘Why?’

‘Because without them, brother, there is no intrinsic something. As you well know.’

‘I know merely that we observe their behavior in our search for that something. If you come to us, that behavior will only be intensified.’

‘So our union will unify them, is that the plan?’

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘You are a fool to think so. They are unified already. It will only make them angrier.’

‘And? Is it not in the reaction that we hope to find the intangible?’

I looked at my brother and finally understood what he had never begun to understand. ‘Act. React. They are the same creature. We don’t draw them out through adversity. We merely draw them. Offer them what they have no hope of resisting, and then, maybe then, you can isolate that something.’

He thought about that a long time. ‘Yes, war may not be the answer, after all. God. That’s the answer. Is Mirilus God to them now?’

‘Mirilus is God to them now, whether they pray to Mirilus or not.’

‘Then we will target Mirilus.’

‘You may lose there as well. Mirilus is mankind’s protector.’

‘As evidenced by all the bloodshed that has gone on recently? What does this make you, to whom mankind came for help?’

‘Human. It makes me human. I cannot answer for Mirilus, but if you’ve a target, Mirilus is it, not the cosmos at large.

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