Omega Point Trilogy Read Online Free PDF Page A

interest his son? There had to be a way to change his plans, even if it was with the false hope of making his son think those same plans possible.
    “How nice, Father,” he imagined his son saying, “ — you want me to become an explorer. For whom shall we explore, to what end shall we contact other civilizations? Behind me stands the ghost of a dead civilization. Shall we do it for them?”
    Then, after a long silence, his son would continue, half-believing. “Will they give us the power to revive our civilization, Father?”
    “Perhaps,” he would answer.
    “Why should they, whoever they are? And did you consider that we may be alone, that there are no greater civilizations in the galaxy? Even if they exist, they might not wish to be found.…”
    Outside, the procession had reached the house and was now standing in front of the windows, peaceful faces looking in. He did not know any of them, and they gave no sign of knowing him.
    There was dirt on their hands. He wondered if they had come from burying Oriona somewhere out there in the tall grass of the hilly countryside. They were too polite to come into the house, knowing that he was here with his son. He thought of them living in their monastic cells inside the hill beneath the house; there each occupant turned away from the universe of light and color and substance, in the name of seeing past life and death to some fabulous yonder. They might just as easily see through their cell walls, he thought bitterly. Reality lay not in their self-generated ecstasies, but in the cold ground of worms and decomposition outside their cells; in the life-giving ruin of nature which never gave the same thing twice, settling instead for a repetition of types and approximations, none exactly like the other; in the endless processes of star formation and universe construction, not in the wishes of creatures caught between the infinitesimally small and the infinitely large.…
    Oriona . The thought of her pulsed inside him like a beating heart. His returning grief threatened to swell up inside him and tear his body apart. Ignoring the faces outside, he leaned forward in the chair and put his face in his hands, rubbing his eyes until they exploded into a storm of colors. At any moment he would fall back into the past; his eyes would fail to open when he took his hands away and he would be a stranger to his body while his mind drifted amongst the bloody images of war, in a limbo of sharp pains and shabby sights.…
    Suddenly Oriona stood in his blind sight, as if thrown up to him by a merciful field of creation. Naked and beautiful, she stood with her legs together, hands folded across her breasts, eyes looking directly at him, long black hair flowing in a mysterious wind.…
    He cried out and opened his eyes; the afterimage faded on the window before him and he was looking again at the mourners outside.
    Oriona , he said to her memory, your son will go out to kill now, and I am powerless to stop him; he is as I was . Then a distant thought whispered itself to him: If you died he would change . And an even closer whisper hissed inside him: You could kill him.
    As if something had spoken to them, the mourners outside turned and made their way down the hill.
    | Go to Contents |

IV. Sortie
    “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.”
    — Bakunin
    “Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked … [in war] Death will no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in it. People really die; and no longer one by one … thousands in a single day. Life … has recovered its full content.”
    — Freud
    AFTER THEIR BODIES were quiet, Gorgias opened his eyes and watched Myraa as she slept next to him. There was no other woman for him among the survivors; she would know him as the son of leaders, to whom the future belonged even if that future were lost.
    For a moment he considered what it would be