Infinity One Read Online Free PDF Page A

somber phalanxes over his fallen body. Citizens lined up to jeer him. ENEMY OF THE STATE. ENEMY OF THE STATE. ENEMY OF THE STATE. They brought Juan to him in his dreams. COWARD. COWARD. COWARD. Juan’s lean bony body was ridged and gouged; he had been put through the tortures, the wires in the skull, the lights in the eyes, the truncheons in the ribs. I STAYED. YOU FLED. I STAYED. YOU FLED. I STAYED. YOU FLED. They showed him his own face in a mirror, a jackal’s face, with long yellow teeth and little twitching eyes. ARE YOU PROUD OF YOURSELF? ARE YOU PLEASED? ARE YOU HAPPY TO BE ALIVE?
    He asked the ship for help. The ship wrapped him in a cradle of silvery fibers and slid snouts against his skin that filled his veins with cold droplets of unknown drugs. He slipped into a deeper sleep, and underneath the sleep, burrowing upward, came dragons and gorgons and serpents and basilisks, whispering mockery as he slept. TRAITOR. TRAITOR. TRAITOR. HOW CAN YOU HOPE TO SLEEP SOUNDLY, HAVING DONE WHAT YOU HAVE DONE?
    “Look,” he said to Lydia, “they would have killed me within the hour. There wasn’t any possible way of finding you, Mark, Juan, anybody. What sense was there in waiting longer?”
    “No sense at all, Tom. You did the smartest thing.” “But was it the right thing, Lydia?”
    Lynx said, “Father, you had no choice. It was run or die.”
    He wandered through the ship, making an unending circuit. How soft the walls were, how beautifully upholstered! The lighting was gentle. Restful images flowed and coalesced and transformed themselves on the sloping ceilings. The little garden was a vale of beauty. He had music, fine food, books, cubes. What was it like in the sewers of the underground now?
    “We didn’t need more martyrs,” he told Plato. “The junta was making enough martyrs as it was. We needed leaders. What good is a dead leader?”
    “Very wise, my friend. You have made yourself a symbol of heroism, distant, idealized, untouchable, while your colleagues carry on the struggle in your name,” Plato said silkily. "And yet you are able to return and serve your people in the future. The service a martyr gives is limited, finite, locked to a single point in time. Eh?”
    “I have to disagree,” said Ovid. “If a man wants to be a hero, he ought to hold his ground and take what comes. Of course, what sane man wants to be a hero? You did well, friend Voigtland! Give yourself over to feasting and love, and live longer and more happily.”
    “You’re mocking me,” he said to Ovid,
    “I do not mock. I console. I amuse. I do not mock.”
    In the night came tinkling sounds, faint bells, crystalline laughter. Figures capered through his brain, demons, jesters, witches, ghouls. He tumbled down into mustiness and decay, into a realm of spiders, where empty husks hung on vast arching webs. THIS IS WHERE THE HEROES GO. Hags embraced him. WELCOME TO VALHALLA. Gnarled midgets offered him horns of mead, and the mead was bitter, leaving a coating of ash on his lips. ALL HAIL. ALL HAIL. ALL HAIL.
    “Help me,” he said hoarsely to the cubes. “What did I bring you along for, if not to help me?”
    “We’re trying to help,” Hemingway said. “We agree that you did the sensible thing.”
    “You’re saying it to make me happy. You aren’t sincere.”
    “You bastard! Call me a liar again and I’ll step out of this screen and—”
    “Maybe I can put it another way,” Juan said craftily. “Tom, you had an obligation to save yourself. Saving yourself was the most valuable thing you could have done for the cause. Listen, for all you knew the rest of us had already been wiped out, right?”
    “Yes. Yes!”
    “Then what would you accomplish by staying and being wiped out too? Outside of some phony heroics, what?” Juan shook his head. “A leader in exile is better than a leader in the grave. You can direct the resistance from Rigel, if the rest of us are gone. Do you see the dynamics of it, Tom?”
    “I