'I am in position,' she said.
It was Rei’s voice. 'The old man is ill.'
'God,' breathed Miaree silently.
'Wait,' Rei said. 'I will hold the communicator to his mouth.'
'Tell them,' she heard in Artonuee. 'Tell them.' There were shuffling sounds, Bertt’s voice, weak, quavering, speaking Delanian now, 'Hold me to the console.'
'He is standing,' Rei said.
'Expanding,' Bertt mumbled. 'Read, daughter.'
With tears in her eyes, knowing his terrible pain, she read the field of the fleet, her eyes opening to see. She reported.
'Jump... one-tenth unit.' He was speaking Artonuee.
She heard Argun’s harsh voice. 'Now wait a minute,' he said.
She jumped. She turned the flyer. The fleet was now distant, tiny in the viewer.
'Time.' she heard the weak, tired voice say. 'Tell—'
'He has fainted.' Rei said. 'What else did he want, Miaree?'
'I don’t know.' she said. Was it, then, to end like this?
'He speaks.' Rei said. 'Wait.'
'I cannot.' Bertt said, his voice weak. 'I fail, Mother.'
'You cannot fail,' she said, Her voice musical, sweet, in the native language. 'Bertt, hear me. There is one thing to do. You alone know. Speak. Move, Bertt. Stand for one last time.'
'I cannot, Lady. But the power is also yours. On the expander controls you will see. a switch.'
'Bertt.'
Silence.
'He is dead, Miaree.'
'God rest,' she said.
She was an old flyer hand. She had noted the switch. And the tiny symbol engraved on it, the ancient, religious symbol denoting God’s Fires. Hidden under an overhanging bank of controls, it would have defied a casual glance from any but Artonuee. And she had guessed.
She, too, had the power.
Before her, the fleet stretched, its squadrons ordered. Six billion beings
breathed and felt fears and knew hopes and enjoyed the love which was now denied her.
'Miaree, you may return. He is dead.'
Rei’s voice.
Rei’s living voice, living after him.
The lag of long seconds as his voice came at light speed brought his last words to her just ahead of the birth of a thousand new stars in the velvet blackness of intergalactic space. Rei himself was gone before his words came to her, was nothing more than scattered particles before the fires blossomed.
The old male, knowing well the forces trapped within his cold plastic holes which led into a space not known to the universe, knowing the destructive forces of unopposed electrons in the millions of cubes of soft metal which were a vital part of all the fleet’s expanders, knowing all this, and knowing, too, his long, logical hatred, the old male had planned well. Unchanneled, the incredible forces of unopposed electrons had, with the touch of her finger on a tiny switch, returned sanity to a universe gone mad.
The vast explosions had imparted motion before total disintegration. The vectors were random, scattering the electrons of the fleet in a flaring pattern which moved away from the home galaxies in the direction of the expansion of the universe.
The released energies rushed out toward her distant flyer at sub-light speeds, giving her moments to watch in awe as the final construction of Bertt, the builder, avenged the Artonuee.
Yes, she would tell them. She would tell her people that they did not face doom in vain. She would tell them that their betrayal by those who had used love against them was avenged. She would say that the God of the Artonuee, although vengeful, was still God, allowing this one last gesture by Her doomed people. She would return to the ravaged planets and await, with her people, the Fires, knowing that the Delanians had howled themselves into oblivion before her.
Proud, straight in the control seat of the flyer, she watched the growing
bloom of fire. She allowed herself only one moment of sadness. In that moment she saw his face, as he had looked that first night on Outworld.
Rei.
But nothing had changed. God had promised Fire. The coming of the Delanians had not changed, had only seemed to alter the inevitable. The Artonuee had seen the coming of an alien race, had loved with its members, had hoped; and there were still the Fires.
Miaree, proud Artonuee female, sat with exposed wings, with straight back.
God was God and was triumphant.
But there remained one final moment before she went home, there to muse, to repent, to communicate with that silent, all-powerful God.
In the early days, an ancient sister Artonuee had flown in space, using the wings of a sun, committing the original sin and exulting in it.
In the moments of the last days, a large-eyed, beautiful, prideful Artonuee female once again defied God. There were no tears as she watched the spread of the paroxysm which, in the wink of an eye, destroyed a race. There was a selfish, very Artonueeistic glow of exuberant joy as the debris of a fleet and of six billion Delanians and one old, tired, dead male Artonuee swept out toward the Bertt flyer, sails set, waiting to ride the whirlwind of the most titanic storm since the birth of the universe.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ahxender has prepared some figures for us, my young friends. Perhaps they will be of interest even to those among you who, according to my informants, are having difficulty in electronic theory. Although I, being merely a literature teacher, have difficulty comprehending the theory of electricity—for the life of me I don't understand how something can move without anything moving—Alaxender sports the highest marks in his classes and he assures me that there is small chance of error in his figures.
The young man of Trojan has also written something regarding a new dimension, pertaining to what is called, in the text, Bertt's cold plastic hole in space; but such theories befuddle me even more than the proven ones, so we will confine ourselves to this. According to Alaxender, the soft metal used by Bertt could be nothing other than common copper. And much is known about that metal. For example, it is a fundamental law that an electron at rest, in copper, exerts a certain force on every other electron at rest, repelling its fellows in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them. This force is measurable; it is 8.038 x 10 to the -26 pounds.
When I first read young Alaxender's explanation of Bertt's Engine, I asked him, 'If there is such immense force there, why isn't every piece of copper blasted apart by it?' He assures me—and I am pleased to learn it, having an aversion to being penetrated by frying particles of copper—that there is a counter force, represented by a proton. A proton exactly balances an electron, very exactly indeed. If the repulsion of the protons were not exactly balanced against that of the electrons, then we could have a release of some rather impressive forces.
More figures, my young friends: We have read, in translation, the value of the force generated by the mutual repulsion of electrons in two one-tenth-of-an-inch cubes of copper placed one inch from each other. That force was six hundred billion tons. I hesitate to attempt the simple multiplication of the force if the cubes of copper had been, say, one inch to a side, much less six inches or a foot.
Alaxender assures me that, given the correctness of the translation, the force used by Bertt to drive his star ships and to destroy the Delanians could have been none other than that of the electrons in copper, somehow released by neutralizing the balancing force of the protons.
