Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Chapter 16

“By a knight of ghosts and shadows, I summoned am to tourney.”

There are worse things in the world than pain.

Pain can be channeled and concentrated, marshaled and molded, directed to draw some element of the world into bright particular focus. Harsher pain can force a tighter focus.

But panic, heart-stilling, gut-twisting panic, has no redeeming value. It dissipates instead of distilling. When blind panic roars and surges, all concentration is lost.

Drake awoke to that knowledge. Terror and horror howled at him from every direction. He had no idea of the cause. Worse, he did not know how to find out. He was blind to everything, deaf to all but the screaming of frightened minds. He tried to order the chaos around him and structure the questions that he wanted answered:

Where am I? When am I? How long was I dormant? How far in the future have I traveled this time? What progress has there been in restoring Ana ?

It was hopeless. He could form the questions, but a hundred billion replies came raging in at once. They said everything and nothing, individual vectors combining to give a null resultant.

He tried different questions: Why are you so afraid? What is the source of fear?

A hundred billion answers came in unison. The force of the signal was too much to handle. Drake made a supreme effort. He ignored the torrent of inputs from those countless billions of accessible minds, and looked inward to create his own working environment.

A sunny room, windowed and comfortable. The familiar prospect beyond it of a windswept Bay of Naples.

And in the seat opposite, ready to answer his questions -

Drake recoiled. Instinctively he had thought of Ana, and she sat waiting. It was the worst possible choice. In Ana’s presence, even with an Ana that he had himself created, he would not seek answers. Like the lotus-eaters, he would dream away the time.

Who?

People flickered into the armchair. Par Leon, Ariel, Melissa Bierly, Trismon Sorel, Milton, Cass Leemu…

None would hold. They appeared, and were as quickly gone.

Who?

Tom Lambert. Yes, yes, yes. Don’t go!

The outline of the doctor had been faint and wavering. Now his figure stayed and steadied. He shook his head reprovingly. “Dumb, very dumb. I don’t mean you, Drake. Us. Not your fault, but ours — the composite’s. We should have known better.”

“Better than what?” Drake saw that it was Tom at thirty, leaner than the paunchy and balding version of their last meeting.

“Than to expose you all at once to our situation.” The man in the other chair was so real, so tangible, that it was impossible to think of him as some ghostly and evanescent swirl of electrons. “Heaven knows, we’ve talked enough about temporal shock. We have plenty of experience with it. You’d think we would have learned to believe in it.”

“I’m not feeling temporal shock.”

“You will. Do you insist on this form of interaction, by the way? It will severely limit the rate of information transfer.”

“I can handle this. I couldn’t take it the other way.”

“Then I suppose we’ll have to live with it. That is temporal shock, even if you don’t want to use the term. You’ll get used to the new reality after a while. I’d suggest we take this slowly, maybe have little practice sessions until you learn how to structure and sort inputs.”

“I’m ready to sort some inputs now, Tom, without any practice at all. Tell me three things. Can Ana be brought back to me? When am I? And where am I? And don’t tell me that I’ll have trouble understanding or accepting whatever the truth is. I’ve heard that line of talk every time I’ve been resurrected, and every time I managed.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Tom leaned back, pipe and lighted match in hand. He was still in his tobacco-addiction days, shortly before acute sinus problems and the anomaly of a physician practicing the opposite of what he preached had forced him to give up smoking. “You know, Drake, some of the questions that you asked are pretty damned hard to

answer.”

“I thought they seemed very basic.”

“Well, you asked about time again. I know what you mean: How many years has it been since your upload into the data banks? But you must understand that with people buzzing all over the Galaxy, or operating in electronic form, or sitting in strong gravitational fields, everyone’s clock runs at a different rate. We use a completely different technique for describing time now. If I told you how it worked, it wouldn’t mean a thing to you. I’ll give you an answer, I promise. I’ll find a way of showing you. But for the moment, why don’t we just agree that however you measure it, it’s been a very long time compared with your previous dormancies.”

A very long time — compared with fourteen million years? Drake suspected he would not like Tom’s answer, when it was stated in his old-fashioned terms.

“What about Ana?”

“Sorry. No real change since last time. We have confirmed the closed nature of the universe, so there is a possibility of ultimate resurrection close to the Omega Point, in the far, far future. Today, we can’t do a thing for her.”

“So why am I awake, instead of dormant in electronic storage? Have you forgotten what I requested?”

“Not at all. We have honored your wishes for a long time… perhaps too long. But we have our worries, too. Our own needs have finally reached a point of urgency that cannot be denied. More to the point, if we do not solve our problem, your own needs and requests will become academic. We have to save ourselves if we are to save you.”

Tom Lambert was adding to Drake’s perplexity. He could imagine that the composite might have problems; but the composite must also possess overwhelming capabilities and resources. Drake could not see how his own resurrection and involvement would change anything. If he had been a living fossil long ago, he was far more of one now.

“I don’t understand what your problem has to do with me, Tom. And I don’t see what I have to do with it. But I think you’d better tell me about it.”

“I intend to. And believe me, it is a problem, the very devil of a problem, nothing to do with you or Ana. We have gone beyond desperation. I’ll be honest, you are our last hope, and a long shot it is. A damned long shot. We need a new thought. Or maybe an old thought.” Tom’s mouth trembled, and the fingers holding his pipe writhed. On the fringes of Drake’s mind he heard again the cry and yammer of countless terrified souls. He suppressed them ruthlessly, building a gate in his own consciousness that admitted only the calmest components.

“Thanks. That’s a lot better.” Tom took the pipe from his mouth and laid it down on the broad window-sill. He rummaged in his pocket for his tobacco pouch. Drake noted, with no surprise, that it was a black leather one given to him by Ana.

“Might be a good thing if I show you directly,” Tom continued, as he filled and tamped his pipe. “Let you see for yourself, eh? You know the old advice that Professor Bonvissuto drilled into your head: Don’t tell, show.”

“Do it any way you like. I’ll let you know soon enough if I can’t take it.”

“Fine. I’m going to begin with the solar system. It is relevant, even though you may think at first that it isn’t. Hold on to your hat, Drake. And hey, presto.” Tom clapped his hands. The inside lights turned off. The scene beyond the picture window changed. The Bay of Naples had gone. Suddenly it was dark outside, with no hint of sea or sky. The room hovered on the edge of a bleak and endless void, lit only by glittering stars.

As Drake stared, the scene began to move smoothly to the right, as though the whole room was turning in space. A huge globe came into view. It was bloated and orange red, its glowing surface mottled with darker spots.

“The Sun,” Tom Lambert said simply.

Drake stared at the dull and gigantic orb. “You mean, the Sun as it is today?”

“That’s right. Real time presentation. Of course, we’re not as close as it looks. That’s as seen through an imaging system. But you’re looking at Sol, the genuine article, with realistic colors and surface features.”

Sol transformed — by nature, or human activities?

“Did you make it that way?”

“Not at all.” Tom was lighting his pipe again, and his presence was revealed only by a dull red glow that waxed and waned. “We could have done it, but we didn’t. Natural stellar evolution made the change.”

Sol had been transformed by time, from the warm star that Drake had known into a brooding stranger. He had learned enough over the millennia to understand some of the implications. Tom Lambert had answered one of Drake’s questions without saying a word. The change of the Sun from the G-2 dwarf star of their own day to a red giant required five billion years or more of stellar evolution. Sol had now depleted most of its store of hydrogen, and was relying for energy on the fusion of helium and heavier elements.

“What happened to the planets? I don’t see them at all.”

“Not enough natural reflected light. But I can highlight them for you.” The field of view changed as Tom spoke, backing off from the Sun. Brighter flashes of light appeared on each side of the glowing ball of orange. “That’s Jupiter.” One light began to blink more urgently. “And that’s Saturn, and Uranus, and Neptune.”

“Uranus used to have its own fusion reaction. Jupiter, too.”

The glowing pipe bowl moved in the darkness, as Tom shook his head. “Long gone. Those couldn’t be more than short-term fixes, given the limited fusion materials.”

“What about the inner planets? What about Earth? Can you show me them?”

“No. Sol’s red giant phase is a hundred times its old radius, two thousand times the old luminosity. If Earth had remained in its original orbit it would have been incinerated, just like Venus. Mercury was swallowed up completely. Don’t worry about Earth, though, it still exists. The singularity sphere has been removed, and it is more like the Earth that you knew of old. But it was moved far away, along with Mars. There’s no point in looking for it” — Drake had unconsciously been turning his head to scan the sky — “you’ll never see it from our present location. If you like I can show you the Moon. We left that behind.”

Far away. How far away? What would a human (if there were still such a thing as a living, flesh-and-blood human) see today, looking upward from the surface of that distant Earth?

“ ‘I had a dream which was not all a dream.’ ” Drake muttered the words as they welled up in his mind. ” ‘The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space, rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.’ ”

“Sorry?” Tom’s voice was puzzled. “I don’t quite grasp what you’re getting at.”

“Not my thoughts. Those of a writer dead before we were born. Don’t worry about me, Tom, I’m not losing it. Let’s keep going.”

“Axe you sure? I don’t want to overload you again. Remember, this is only our first session.”

“I can take it. Go ahead.”

“If you say so. I wanted to start close to home, give you the local perspective, so to speak, then move us out bit by bit. So here we go again.”

Sol began to shrink. The room that Drake was sitting in backed away into space and lifted high above the ecliptic. Sol became a tiny disk. The highlighted flicker of the outer planets moved in to merge with it and become a single point.

The apparent distance to Sol was increasing. In another half minute the inner region of the diffuse globe of the Oort Cloud was visible. Billions of separate and faint points of light were smeared by distance to a glowing haze. “Every one has been highlighted for the display,” Tom said casually. “Have to do it that way, or you wouldn’t see a thing. Not much sunlight so far out. And of course we’ve been showing just the inhabited bodies. What you might call the ‘old’ solar system colonies, before the spread outward really began. Wanted you to see that, but now if you don’t mind, I’m going to pick up the pace a bit. Don’t want to take all day.”

The outward movement accelerated, accompanied by Tom Lambert’s apparently offhand commentary (Drake realized that the composite speaking through Tom was actually anything but casual; it was his own needs, structuring the form of the input). The whole Oort Cloud was seen briefly, then in turn it shrank rapidly with distance from huge globe to small disk to tiny point of light. Other stars with inhabited planets, or planet-sized free space habitats, appeared as fiery sparks of blue-white and magenta.

At last the whole galactic spiral arm came into view. It was filled with the flashing lights of occupied worlds. The

interarm gaps showed no more than a sparse scattering of points, but across those gulfs the Sagittarius and Perseus arms were as densely populated as the local Orion arm. Finally the whole disk of the Galaxy was visible. The colored flecks of light were everywhere, from the dense galactic center to its wispy outer fringes. Humans and their creations spanned the Galaxy.

The display froze at last.

“In all our forms,” Tom said, “we endured. More than endured: prospered. That’s the way things stood, just one-tenth of a galactic revolution ago — twenty-five million years, in the old terms of time. Development, by organic, inorganic, and composite forms, had been steady and peaceful through thirty full revolutions of the Sun about the galactic center. Pretty impressive, eh?”

Very impressive. Drake recalled that one galactic revolution took about two hundred million years. Humans had survived and prospered for more than six billion years.

“But it’s not like that anymore,” Tom added. “I’m going to show you a recent time evolution — in terms familiar to you, I will display what has been happening in the past few tens of millions of Earth years.”

Again there was a tremor in his voice, a hint of uncounted minds quivering beyond the gate and walls imposed by Drake. The static view outside the picture window began to change.

At first it was no more than a hint of asymmetry in the great pattern of spirals, one side of the Galaxy showing a shade less full than the other. After a few moments the differences became more pronounced and more specific. A dark sector was appearing on one side of the disk. On the outermost spiral arm, far across the Galaxy from Sol, the bright points of light were snuffed out one by one. Drake thought at first of an eclipse, as though some unimaginably big and dark sphere was occulting the whole galactic plane. Then he realized that the analogy was no good. The blackness at the edge of the Galaxy was not of constant diameter. It was increasing in size. Some outside influence was moving in to invade the galactic disk, and growing constantly as it did so.

“And now you see it as it is today,” Tom said quietly. The lights had come on again within the room, dimming the display outside. Drake did not know if that was under his control or Tom’s, as Tom continued, “Except, of course, that it has not ended. The change continues, faster than ever.”

A crescent wedge had been carved from the Galaxy, cutting out a substantial fraction of the whole disk.

“Colonies vanish. Without a signal, without a sign.” Tom sounded bewildered. “If we assume that all the composites in the vanished zone have been destroyed, as the silence would suggest, then billions of sentient beings are dying from moment to moment even while we are speaking.”

It was a tragedy beyond all tragedies. Drake had become used to the tours of a changing solar system, provided on each resurrection until overstimulation led to numbness; but death was different.

He had been touched by death just five times in his own life: his parents, Ana’s parents, and the death of Ana herself. Those single incidents loomed enormous, but they sat within a century of larger disasters — of war and famine and disease. Thirty million had been killed in two world wars, twenty million dead of influenza in a single year, twenty million starved to death by the deliberate act of one powerful man.

Those were huge, unthinkable numbers, but still they were millions, not billions. They were nothing, compared with what he was facing now.

Tom said softly, “Our galaxy is being invaded by something from outside. We are being destroyed, faster than we can escape.”

Drake knew that. He also knew he did not want to face it. “Your problem is terrible, but it has nothing to do with me. More than that, there is nothing that I can do about it.”

“You do not know, unless you try.”

“Try what? You are being ridiculous.”

“If we knew what to try, we would long since have tried it. Drake, we did not rouse you from dormancy on a whim, or without prior thought. You are from an earlier age, more familiar with aggression. If anyone can suggest a way to protect us, you can do so.”

“Why me? There were fifty thousand others in the cryotanks, all from my era. They were resurrected, every one of

them. I assume that some at least are still conscious entities.”

“Most are. But they no longer exist as isolated intelligences. All, except you, form part of composites. The result lacks — please do not misunderstand me — your primitive drive and aggression.”

“You need me because I’m a barbarian!”

“Exactly.”

“To try and do what you refuse to do.”

“No. What we are unable to do. As I said, you are our last hope, and it is a desperate hope indeed. Drake, let me suggest that you have no choice. If you want Ana to return to you, ever, you must help us.”

“Blackmail.”

“Not at all. Consider. If you fail to help, and if human civilization falls, so too do the electronic data banks. You will then cease to exist, and so will any possibility of resurrecting Ana. This is not, in the language of game theory, a two-person zero-sum game between you and the rest of humanity. Only if humanity wins can you possibly win. In order for that maximum benefit to be reached, by you and by humanity, it is necessary for you yourself to suffer a period of great effort, with no guarantee of return on that effort. No guarantee, indeed, that your effort is even needed. It is conceivable that, without you, we might come up with an answer to our problem tomorrow. But I do not think so. We have tried everything that we know. Well, Drake?”

Drake shook his head and stared out at the mutilated disk of the Galaxy. “You sure don’t sound much like Tom Lambert. Tom couldn’t have talked about zero-sum games to save his own life.”

“This was your chosen medium of interaction, not ours. The composite that is addressing you is purely electronic. And talk of zero-sum games may be needed to save all our lives.”

The scene beyond the window changed. Again it was the seacoast villa, looking across a bay tossed now by whitecaps beneath racing storm clouds.

“You see,” Tom said. “You make my point. That is your vision, not ours. But we do not dispute its accuracy, as a possible harbinger of things to come.”

Drake turned moodily to face the south, where a single sailboat was running for shelter. A squall struck as he watched, catching the little vessel and leaning its pink sails far over to starboard.

“I think we ought to start over,” he said at last. “Tell me and show me everything, right from the beginning. Then I have a thousand questions.”

Chapter 17 Star Wars

“I know more than Apollo,

For oft when he lies sleeping

I see the stars at bloody wars

In the wounded welkin weeping.”

Drake could have anticipated the problem. Composites came in all sizes and types, remote and nearby, wise and foolish, planetary and free-space, organic and inorganic. Their constant interactions blurred the lines of identity, until it was not clear which elements were speaking or which were in control. Since he saw that problem in others, he had to assume that the same thing might happen to him when he worked with them. Yet he must, at all costs, maintain his individual character and agenda.

He decided that he had to create a private record of his own thoughts and actions. It seemed not a luxury or a personal indulgence, but a necessity.

The irony of the whole situation was not lost on him. He had been a lifelong and dedicated pacifist, hating all things military — so much so that until Ana went into the cryowomb and he was desperate for money, he would not consider military music commissions, no matter how much they offered. Now, so far in the future that he did not like to think about it, he was an aggression consultant to the whole Galaxy.

His private thought: the incompetent and the ignorant are now leading the innocent; but he did not offer that comment to anyone else.

“What have you tried?” Drake was in working session with Tom Lambert. He was sure that he couldn’t really help, but he was also sure that the composites wouldn’t accept a negative answer. More than that, for Ana’s sake he could not accept it. He had to pretend, to himself more than anyone, that he knew what he was doing.

“Drake, we have tried many things. We sent S-wave signals to that sector of the Galaxy. There was never any reply—”

“Back up, Tom. S-wave signals?”

“Fast signals. Superluminal signals, that employ an S-wave carrier to advance at high multiples of light speed.”

“You can travel faster than light? I thought that was impossible.”

“It is, for material objects. We have superluminal capability for signals only. Just as well that we do, because we really need it. How else could a composite with widespread components operate as a unit? Anyway, we sent fast signals to the silent region, but no reply was ever received. We wondered if the problem might be that the other entities could not detect superluminal messages. So we sent subluminal signals and inorganic probes. We waited for millions of years, knowing that all the time more of our stellar systems were becoming mute. Nothing returned. We sent ships bearing organic units, and ships carrying full composites. Nothing has ever come back.”

“Were your ships… armed?” Drake had to hunt the data banks for that final word, but apparently it gave Tom even more trouble. There was a long silence.

“Armed?” Tom said at last. He sounded perplexed.

“Equipped with weapons.” Drake wondered. Had aggressive impulses been stamped out completely, as an impediment to steady progress and the colonization of the Galaxy? When Tom didn’t answer, he added, “Weapons are things able to inflict damage. Weapons would permit a ship to defend itself if it were to be attacked.”

Tom Lambert didn’t like that, either. His image flickered and wavered, as though whatever was communicating had suffered a temporary breakdown. Confusion bled in from the clamoring host of minds in the background.

“They had no ‘weapons.’ ” Tom was steadying again. “There are no ‘weapons.’ The details of the concept have been relegated to remote third-level storage, and it is poorly defined even there. What are you suggesting?”

“Something very simple. This galaxy is being—” Now Drake had to pause. He wanted to say ‘invaded,’ but that word had apparently vanished from the language.

“Something outside the Galaxy is moving into it,” he said at last. “Do you agree?”

“So it would appear.”

“And that something is displacing human civilization.”

“Yes. That is our fear, although we have no direct proof. But what could be doing this?”

“I have no idea. That’s something we’re going to find out. You’ve been making too many assumptions, Tom. One is that you are seeing something intelligent at work; something with a developed technology.”

“We made no such assumptions.”

“Of course you did. Not explicitly, but you did it. You say you sent signals and you received no reply — but even to expect a reply presumes that something out there is able to detect a signal, comprehend a signal, and reply to a signal. Suppose that the entity moving into our Galaxy has no intelligence at all?”

“Then we will never be able to communicate with it. We are doomed.”

“Why?” Drake, in spite of his own reservations about his ability to help, was becoming annoyed with the composites. They were such a spineless lot, ready to lie down and die before they were even touched. “Why are you doomed? You don’t need to communicate, you know. You just need to stop the— the—” Again, the need for a word that did not exist. The composites had not named the problem. “The blight,” he said at last. “The marauder, the Shiva, the destroyer, the whatever. we choose to call it. I don’t know if it’s intelligent or nonintelligent, but it’s changing the Galaxy in a way that’s deadly to humans. Even if the Shiva don’t mean to kill, they are silencing stellar systems by the billion. Never mind understanding what’s happening. That would be nice, but the main thing is, we have to defend ourselves against the effects.”

“But we have no idea how to do that.”

“I’m going to tell you how.” The amazing thing was that he was starting to believe his own words. It was a chilling reflection on the humans of earlier times. No one, no matter how much the pacifist, could in his own era go from child to adult without becoming steeped in the vocabulary, ideas, and procedures of war. Even games were a form of combat, using the language of conflict. Drake knew more than he realized about the theory and practice of warfare.

“We have to do a few things for ourselves,” he went on, “before we can consider external action. First, we have to create and become familiar with a new language. You must learn to speak War.” Drake said the last word in English. “You need to be able to think war, and before you can think it you have to be able to speak it. I will provide the concepts, you will deal with the mechanics of language creation. All right?”

Silence from Tom. Drake took it as reluctant assent, and went on. “Second, we must form something called a chain of command. You were right when you told me that this form of communication between us limits the rate of information transfer. We have to change the system. I’m sure I can’t deal directly with billions of composites, so we need a new structure. I will deal with no more than — how many? Let’s say six — I’ll work with half a dozen composites like you. Then each of you will work with six more, and so on to successive tiers. How many levels will be necessary to fit every composite into such a framework?”

“Nineteen levels will be enough.”

Tom’s reply was instantaneous. Drake tried to do the inverse calculation, and failed. Six to the nineteenth. How many billions, how many trillions? Let’s just say, a mind-boggling number.

And he was supposed to direct the actions of every one of them. How? He had no idea. Composers were not expected to run things. Had any musician in history ever managed a group bigger than an orchestra? The only one he could think of was the pianist Paderewski, who early in the twentieth century interrupted his performing career to become prime minister of Poland. Great pianist, average politician.

He pressed on, before worries and irrelevant thoughts like that could take over.

“Third, I must learn your science and technology. I don’t mean I have to understand it, because I’m quite sure I can’t. But I have to know what the technology can do. In return, I’ll tell you what weapons are, and you must learn what weapons do, and how to make them. I’ll warn you, you won’t like what you hear — any more than I’ll enjoy telling you.”

“We’ll learn.” Tom was calm now. He even shrugged his shoulders and ran his hands through his mop of red hair. “When we asked for help, you know, we didn’t assume that we’d be sitting around doing nothing. And we didn’t assume we’d enjoy our part of it.”

“I’ll go further. You won’t. Let’s begin by defining the first level of the chain of command. As I said, I can’t interface with you all the time, and I certainly can’t interface directly with umpteen billion composites.”

“Six hundred trillion.”

“Thanks.” Six hundred trillion. It was worse than Drake had thought. “So we set up the chain of command, then we’ll talk about self-defense. You ought to send that information immediately to the section of the Galaxy likely to be the next one threatened. It might help, and it can’t hurt.”

He would prove disastrously wrong on that last point, but he didn’t know it.

“Self-defense?” Tom said.

“Don’t worry about it. You won’t have to harm anything that doesn’t try to harm you. You’ll find self-defense easy. But

after that it may start to get nasty.”

Just how could a planet or a space colony defend itself from outside attack? How could humans counterattack or make a preemptive defensive strike? How did one fight something unknown? Drake rummaged for long-buried ideas, things he had read when he was young and never expected to use or need. His mind was disturbingly well-stocked with them. So much for his pacifist self-image.

Until Ana went to the cryowomb and he was scrambling for money, he had resisted the idea of producing any form of professional description. He had been pretty snooty about it. What could words possibly say, he said to himself and to anyone else who would listen, about the ability to write interesting music?

Times changed. Now he could produce an intriguing resume: Drake Merlin; composer; performer; would-be pacifist; and Supreme Commander of Combined Galactic Forces. •

•

• The easiest part seemed to be the creation of a chain of command. He needed to worry about just the first level. Even so, he learned within minutes that he could only interface with a composite if it simulated an individual with whom he was familiar and comfortable. That narrowed the options enormously; especially since any kind of Ana simulation was out of the question.

First, though, he had to select a command headquarters. That wasn’t hard; he had returned to consciousness so often through the ages in the little villa overlooking the Bay of Naples and Tyrrhenian Sea, it was starting to feel like home. He fixed it in his mind, furnished for his own comfort.

Then it was time to define his principal assistants. Tom Lambert assured him that all he had to do was think of the person, and the composites would handle the rest. Tom didn’t say how, and Drake didn’t ask. He just set to work.

Tom, of course. And Milton. The Servitor had abandoned the original wheeled sphere and whisk broom of many billions of years ago, but it was the form most familiar to Drake. Milton might as well stay in that shape. Cass Leemu, who had tried to teach him science so long ago — and failed — would be his chief scientific adviser. And Melissa Bierly. He wondered about that choice, until she appeared at the table. She was not the woman he had last met, sane and contented and the lover and companion of the cloned Ana, but the mercurial and mad Melissa as she had been at her first creation. War was a form of insanity. Drake needed an element of madness. He could see it now, in those brilliant sapphire eyes.

Trismon Sorel and Ariel appeared briefly, but they would not hold their shapes. It was Drake’s own mind, rejecting them for its own reasons: either he did not know them well enough, or they did not fit his present needs.

He was not happy with the two who completed the half dozen. Par Leon had appeared first, as unwarlike as a human could be. Maybe that meant he was close in temperament to Drake, who needed him for that reason. But then there had to be a balance.

Drake called on someone he hated. Mel Bradley had been the scourge of his childhood; short, hyperactive, hotheaded, ready to fight over nothing. He had sneered at Drake, calling him a girl and a soft-head sissy who liked stupid poetry. In their one confrontation as eleven-year-olds, he had given Drake a black eye. After that Drake went out of his way to avoid him, without ever quite admitting that he was scared. Now Mel, adult and wary, glowered at Drake from the other end of the room.

Six assistants. He looked along the polished table and considered the result of his efforts. How much reality was there in any of this? The others had been created out of his own stored consciousness, plus the combined contents of the data banks. All of them (including Drake himself!) consisted of nothing more than a random movement of electrons. But hadn’t that always been true of thoughts in every brain, whether organic or inorganic, wetware or hardware?

And if Drake was not fully satisfied with his chosen assistants, hadn’t that always been true of all leaders? He remembered what the Duke of Wellington said, after he reviewed his own poorly trained and ill-equipped troops and before they went into battle: “I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but by God they terrify me.”

Drake never expected to see the rest of his own “troops.” All instructions would go out, and all reports come in, through the chosen six. That might be a problem. Old wars had been plagued by officers who restricted access to their generals and told them only what they wanted to hear: “The fort is impregnable…” “The morale of the men remains excellent…” “Strategic bombing will weaken the enemy to the point where their resistance is impossible…” “The adversary’s losses far exceed our own…” “One more increase in troop strength will turn the tide in our favor.”

And the slaughter had rolled on.

Well, with luck, the composites would have forgotten how to lie. They should have no interest in telling Drake only what they thought might please him.

But in fact, none of this could ever please him. He told himself, over and over, why he was doing this: only in order that, someday, he and Ana could be together again.

The next task was to divide up the workload among his chosen helpers.

“You, Cass.” Drake wondered how long it would be before giving orders came easily to him. At the moment he hated it. “I want you to produce the science and technology summary for me. I have to know what’s available now, because that’s going to be the basis for our weapons development. Milton, you will be the expert on alien life-forms, anywhere in the Galaxy. Par Leon, I want you to learn exactly which stars have been affected by the Shiva, and tell me which ones are now in most danger. Mel, you are in charge of offense. That means you’ll be planning counterattacks. You ought to love that. Melissa, you’ll be my expert on the Shiva themselves — everything that humans know, I want to know. Tom, as my general support, you are to remain flexible, ready to tackle anything that comes up.

“Any questions?”

“Yes.” It was Melissa. Her reply stopped Drake cold. It seemed to him he had been perfectly clear and he wasn’t expecting questions. He frowned at her. “What’s the problem?”

“I’m confused. It seems to me that my task is already finished.”

“You have a report on the Shiva?” Even with the uncanny computing speed of the composites, that seemed impossible.

“In a manner of speaking. And so do you. We know all there is to be known.”

She didn’t sound confused. She sounded sure of herself, the confident, competent, all-seeing Melissa that Drake had known of old. He groaned inwardly. They had hardly begun, and already he sensed trouble.

Melissa was right. Her briefing took many minutes, but the main conclusion could be summarized in seconds.

One stellar system, far out beyond the main galactic rim, had ceased to communicate with all other humans thirty-three million years earlier. That was the first. The change had been noted, but it drew no attention. Composites and civilizations often chose to go their own ways, even as Earth had gone its own way and withdrawn from the solar system back in what was now considered the dawn of history.

Over the next several thousand years, half a dozen more systems fell silent. They were in the same remote galactic region as the first one. Still, no one was worried. They were presumed to be part of the same social experiment.

A hundred, a thousand, ten thousand; not until a hundred thousand colonies were silent did humanity sit up and take notice. Before any action was taken, the number had grown to over a million.

Even then, the superluminal S-wave queries suggested more curiosity than worry. They were polite requests for a reply: “Are you all right? Is there anything that we can do for you?”

To that question, and to every other direct and indirect form of approach, the colonies sent the same reply: nothing. Humans, composites, ships, sub- and superluminal signals: whatever was sent did not return. A multimillion-year silence had begun its spread across the Galaxy.

Melissa was detailing that spread, system by system, millennium by millennium, when Drake interrupted her.

“All right, I agree with you. The role that I assigned you makes no sense. So let’s change it to this: Since we don’t know anything about the Shiva, you and I will make it our job to find out.”

He knew that he was on the right track. By some means or other, by skill or subterfuge or treachery or outright murder, they had to collect information about the Shiva. He was glad that Melissa spared him the obvious question: How?

Drake no longer had organic components. His consciousness had no need for food or rest. There was no reason he could not work around the clock, every second of every day. So was it only his own stubbornness that imposed a circadian rhythm on his actions, including “day,” “night,” “sleep,” and “meals”?

He thought not. He had a logic for his behavior: since this era had failed to solve the problem of the Shiva, his own value, if any, must lie in the fact that he was a savage throwback to the earliest human times; the more that he could retain of those archaic traits, the more likely he was to offer something new (or old) and different.

He set up his own working regime. He held “breakfast briefings,” “working lunches,” “strategic planning sessions” each “afternoon,” and “end-of the-day wrap-ups.” His preference was for small groups, not more than two or three present at a time. He insisted on

taking breaks from everyone, when he could be alone to think things over.

The huge mass of composites, nineteen layers deep, did not like that approach. He could feel their impatience as an invisible pressure transmitted through his chosen six. He sent back his own message: / do things my way, or not at all.

It took nerve to stick to that, after his first meeting with Par Leon and Cass Leemu.

“It’s thirty-three million years since we had the first evidence of the Shiva,” Leon said. “The current total of known colonies that have become silent is between ninety-seven and ninety-eight billion. I do not include in this the colonies in parts of the Galaxy far from the troubled region, which have withdrawn from interaction presumably for other reasons. If you would like the numbers exactly…” And, at Drake’s impatient shake of the head, he continued, “They suggest the extinction, or at least the silencing, of almost three thousand colonies a year. But that number is highly misleading. The process began slowly and has been growing exponentially. In the past year, as you like to measure time, contact has been lost with almost seventy-five thousand colonies. Two hundred a day, one every seven minutes…

“Here are their locations.” The great spiral of the Galaxy glowed in the air before them. A curved bite had been taken from it. On the edge of that dark sector, thousands of dots flashed orange. They highlighted a thin boundary between light and dark.

“And now look here.” The orange dots vanished, to be replaced by another set a tiny step closer to the galactic center. “These, according to our best estimates, are the colonies where the Shiva may be expected to appear next.”

It seemed a minute change. Measured against the whole Galaxy, it was; but Drake was not misled. Seventy-five hundred stellar systems or free-space colonies, lost from all human contact.

“What are the composites doing about it?”

He didn’t expect a useful reply, and he didn’t get one.

Par Leon just rubbed his chin and looked unhappy. “Doing? What can we do?”

“Well, at the very least, you can warn the colonies.”

“But they already know. They have known for hundreds or even thousands of years.”

“And they’re just sitting there, doing nothing?”

“Not at all. Many have moved, closer to the galactic center.”

“Fine. So you keep moving — until a few million years from now, when the Shiva occupy the whole Galaxy. Where will you go then?”

Drake turned to Cass Leemu. “I know it’s going to take a while to inventory all of human technology, but we can’t wait. We have to do something now. Take the list you have so far and pick out the ten devices with the highest energy density. I’ll want to look at the whole list, but don’t wait for me. Get with Mel Bradley and send superluminal S-wave messages to the colonies that are next on Leon’s list. Tell them to make sure those top ten devices get built as soon as possible and are ready for use. Tell them we’ll be sending another S-wave message very soon, showing how to make the devices operate as defensive weapons against an invasion from space.”

Cass didn’t hesitate. “The list is on the table in front of you.” It was suddenly there. “It’s ready for your review, in interactive nested form. You can ask for more detail about any part of it.”

She and Par Leon vanished. Had Drake ordered them to do that? It didn’t matter. When dealing with the composites he was never sure who was doing what.

He turned to Cass’s first cut at a list of useful technology. He had given her a few ground rules that might sort devices

into an order of probable value: anything that involved huge amounts of energy, of any form; anything that performed a large-scale manipulation of time and space; anything that could be used to act as a shield to divert objects or radiation; anything able to perform planetary or stellar modification. Finally — he realized that his own ignorance might make him miss the most important defenses of all — he had asked Cass to include anything that she thought would be totally incomprehensible to Drake.

There seemed to be more of that last category than of any other. Humans, in composite form and working with or without their inorganic helpers, had become superhuman by the measures of earlier times. There seemed nothing that they could not do. They had ways to turn off and on the light of stars. They could create black holes in open space, or use existing ones for energy sources. They could build free-space colonies the size of the whole solar system. They could send message-bearing accelerated wave fronts a hundred thousand light-years, clear from one side of the Galaxy to the other, in hours. They could shield an object against any attack, from fusion bombs to neutrino beams.

Any attack. Why couldn’t they shield against the attack of the Shiva? Surely, in all those millions of years since the arrival of the Shiva in the Galaxy, some colony of the endless billions that had fallen silent would have tried the shield as a natural protective move. And it must have failed. Drake worried again about the nature of his unseen adversary.

Most mysterious technology of all, humans had found a way to create a type of space-time singularity never found in nature. There was no word for them that Drake recognized, but they were translated to him as caesuras. They were described as cuts in a Riemann sheet of order four, but that told him very little. He visualized them as slits, mailboxes in smooth space-time, capable of admitting material objects. In fact, they had been developed in an attempt to bypass the light-speed limit for solid matter. From that point of view they were a “failed” technology. They did not achieve their objective in a controlled way. One time in a million (once in 969,119 attempts, to be precise) they would send an object instantaneously to the desired destination, even if it was in the most remote regions of the Galaxy. There was another theoretical possibility, even less likely, that the object would be hurled to some unknown destination much farther off in space and time; in all other cases the caesura would throw the object out of the universe completely.

“Do you mean out of the Galaxy?” Drake wondered if he was misunderstanding what he was seeing and hearing.

“No. Out of the universe.” The interactive list replied in Drake’s own voice.

“Throw them out of the universe to where?”

“That remains unresolved. Most probably, to a universe like our own, perhaps to one with different constants of nature. These conjectures are based on theoretical analyses only. Many probes have been sent through a caesura, but none has ever returned.”

“Is it possible that the Shiva are sending our colonies through a caesura?”

“It is quite impossible. We know from numerous observations that the suns and planets in the silent zone remain exactly where they were before. They merely refuse to respond to us in any way. When we send a probe to them, it remains active and returns signals all the way. After its arrival at the planet, it falls silent.”

Drake fell silent, too. He was persuaded; the Shiva were not making use of the caesuras. But as for the caesuras themselves…

He did not understand them, but he could not get them out of his mind. He called for Mel Bradley. In the short term, the colonies would have to be protected with whatever was to hand. He was not optimistic about that, when the shields had not worked. What could penetrate a total shield?

He would ponder that question. And in the meantime — which might be a very long time — he and Mel would work on another option.

Chapter 18

“Lord of our far-flung battle line”

Waiting.

Drake considered himself an expert on waiting. What else had he been doing for the past six billion years but waiting and hoping?

This time, though, it was different. This time he could not drift dormant through the ages; this time he must remain conscious, day after day, waiting and watching and wondering.

Cass Leemu and Mel Bradley, with Drake’s guidance and close direction, had taken existing technology and adapted it to provide planetary defenses. Superluminal signals had been sent out to the colonies; not only to the ones that according to Par Leon were in the most immediate danger, but to the next line back.

The main focus was going to be on that second line. Drake had made the decision and kept it to himself, knowing that he dare not discuss it with the others. His action was going to doom billions of thinking beings to extinction. The composites would not be able to handle such an idea. Drake, however, had no choice. If he were right, this was going to be a war of long duration. Before he could produce a long-term strategy, he needed to see exactly what happened when the Shiva became active in a region; then he needed time to build a wall of defense, observation posts, and lines of communication. Except as information sources, he had to write off planets that would probably fall in the next year or two.

The outgoing messages to the colonies gave precise instructions on fabricating and installing the defense systems. Within a few months, the superluminal S-wave messages came flowing back. Defenses had been built and tested on thousands of worlds. Shields were in place. Fusion, fission, cavitation, and particle beams sat prepared for instant use. The colonies were nervous, but they claimed to be ready for anything.

That worried Drake more than it heartened him. In every resurrection he had believed himself ready for anything; each time, he had been astonished by events.

What else could he do while he was waiting? The little villa had become a headquarters for galactic action. He prowled it, night and day. The living room was now a War Room for the whole Galaxy, where reports from a billion suns were sifted, analyzed, and summarized by the multiple working layers of composites. The placid view of the Bay of Naples had long since gone. In its place was an ever-changing display of the “battle front.” Drake thought of it that way, although there was still no sign of conflict; only reports from the colonies and regular messages from the probes that were observing them from a safe distance. A copy of Par Leon was on each of those probes, transmitted as S-wave signals and downloaded to permanent storage as part of the resident composite.

Everything was ready. Ready for anything? Drake watched and wondered.

And then the silence began. One of the front line planets stopped transmitting.

It was almost too much for that copy of Par Leon. The returning messages from the probe took on a hysterical overtone. “We can see the planet, it looks just the same as it always has. There’s no sign of damage or change. But they don’t reply! We keep sending, and they won’t reply!”

Underneath Par Leon’s words, like a carrier wave, was the suppressed terror of a billion more voices. Drake itched to be part of the probe composite, to see things at firsthand. But that would break one of his prime rules: he had to remain separate and aloof, a primitive throwback to earlier times uncontaminated by the gentler present. Otherwise he would be no more useful than a hundred trillion others.

“It’s all right, Leon. Keep calm. How far from the planet are you?”

“Two and a half light-hours.”

Drake called for a conversion to a measure more familiar to him: nearly three billion kilometers. “You’re probably safe. Is that the best image you can send us?” The War Room display showed a grainy and fluctuating picture of a gray-green blob.

“The best we can do from this distance. We’re observing at our highest magnification.”

“It’s not good enough. I can’t see any detail at all. You have to take the probe closer. But don’t take risks. Turn around and run if you sense any kind of trouble.”

“Trouble? Do you think it’s safe to go closer? We sent hundreds of messages to them, and they don’t reply anymore.”

“You said yourself, the planet looks just the way it did before it went quiet.”

It sounded like an answer to Par Leon’s question, but it wasn’t. If Drake had to guess, he would say that any probe approaching a silent planet was not safe at all. It was in terrible danger. But he could not mention

that to anyone. If he was to save trillions, he might have to sacrifice billions. He had to have information.

He told himself that he was not sending anyone to a real death. The composite represented by Par Leon would still exist here, even if every probe copy was annihilated. And yet he recognized that as a bogus logic. The death of a clone was a real death — to the clone.

Drake asked to be informed when the probe came within ten light-minutes of its planetary goal, and turned his attention elsewhere. Other messages were streaming in from other places. It was more of the same bad news: planets and their colonies, unaffected in appearance, were vanishing from the universe of communication. They were becoming part of a great and spreading silence.

He measured the total time for fifty more cases of signal loss: a little less than six hours. Allowing for statistical error, Par Leon’s estimate of two hundred lost worlds a day was spot on.

Drake did not try to examine each situation in detail. Melissa and Tom would be doing that, and they would provide their analyses later. He turned his attention back to the first world. The probe was within ten light-minutes. While it flew closer, Drake called for backup planetary data.

This was one world in a triple dwarf-star system of over a hundred. And it was the only one that was even remotely habitable, with native life-forms and an oxygen atmosphere. That gave it a certain distinction: planetary orbits in multiple systems were normally too variable for life to develop, sometimes sweeping in searingly close to one of the stars, then wandering off for cold years in the outer darkness. This world had been lucky — its name translated to Drake as “Felicity.” It had hovered in the middle region, not too close and not too far, for the billion years that life needed.

That’s where its claim to distinction ended. The native life had not progressed beyond cyanobacteria, a coating of blue, green, and sickly yellow that covered the surface of the single ocean and most of the land. For humans interested in planetary transformation, though, Felicity with its surface water and thin oxygen atmosphere was 99 percent of the way there. All that had to be done was a stabilization of the orbit, a boost to the gravitational field, a buildup of the atmosphere, and the introduction of multiple-celled organisms. Trivial. The work had been completed half a billion years ago. Felicity had become a typical member of the teeming galactic family of inhabited worlds.

And now?

The image from the probe was providing better definition as the distance decreased. Drake half expected to see a yellow-streaked globe of sullen red, like Earth when it collapsed to one-tenth of its old size and isolated itself from the rest of the solar system. But he could see surface detail on Felicity. The outline of a single ocean, shaped like a blunt horse’s head and low lit by the glancing light of the triple suns, matched the shape shown in the data bank. He saw the softening of texture that indicated the presence of an atmosphere, and occasional high clouds that confirmed it.

“It looks exactly the same.” That was Par Leon, muttering his surprise. “Nothing at all seems to have happened to it. This was one of the worlds that installed our defense systems. Just a month ago, it told us that they were completed and working. So why doesn’t it reply to us now?”

Drake could suggest a fistful of answers:

• A shield around the planet was inhibiting all outgoing signals or materials; but that clearly could not be the case. Visible wavelength radiation was being reflected from the surface, since the probe could see it. If necessary, anyone down on the surface could use the same wavelengths to send an outgoing signal.

• A shield was stopping all ingoing signals or materials; but that was even worse. The world below the shield would be in total darkness. Clearly it was not, because sunlight was getting through. In any case, other worlds and colonies affected long ago by such a shield would soon have noticed that they were not receiving messages, and either come or call to ask what was going on.

• Something, a deadly ray or a toxic cloud of gas, had wiped out all life on Felicity. The planet would not at once change its appearance if that happened.

• Something had wiped out all intelligent life. It did not have to be fatal; if humans and their inorganic complements had been reduced to the thinking level of a smart dog, no piece of communications equipment — or any other technology — would mean anything.

(Ana, after leaving the home of a couple who swore that their pet was as smart as any human, had said: “No dog, no matter how well bred or well intentioned, can tell you that it came from poor but honest parents. ”

He missed her in a thousand ways, but most of all he missed her humor and her refusal to substitute sentiment for sense.)

Drake jerked his thoughts back to the task at hand:

• The population, for its own reasons, had chosen a policy of total isolationism. If just one world had been affected, that would be wholly plausible. It must have happened a million times. When thousands of neighboring worlds went the same way, though, plausibility became impossibility.

Unless the policy was contagious, an isolationist meme that spread from world to world as a message of irresistible power? But then why hadn’t it traveled at superluminal speed and long ago converted the whole Galaxy? And why had the first world affected been far out on the galactic rim? That suggested an influence borne into humanity’s domain from far, far away.

Well, they would know soon enough. Felicity was looming right ahead.

“Still no response.” Par Leon was losing his nervousness. Drake couldn’t understand why. Didn’t Leon realize that this scenario must have been played out a million or a billion times, when a ship by an accident of timing had approached a world that had just become silent?

“We propose to land,” Leon said. “Do you have any objection?” The probe was swinging into a descent orbit around Felicity’s equator. The nightside view showed a scattering of lights. Cities, and a working power system. The planet still showed the signs of an intact civilization.

“None. Carry on with your landing.” And good luck, Leon.

Something had to happen, and soon. No ship had ever returned a signal from one of the silent worlds. Either it had never reached the surface, or after it did so it could no longer send a message.

On the other hand, no world had ever to Drake’s knowledge possessed its own powerful defenses. Was it as simple as that? Had the defense system done the trick? Was the battle for the Galaxy won already?

He didn’t believe it. Too easy, and it would leave a huge mystery. Who and what were the aggressors?

“We still have no descent problems,” Leon said. “But there is no navigation signal from the surface. We are going into the final entry phase.”

Drake stared at the scene from the probe’s imager. No vanished planet. No mysterious shields. Everything as normal as could be.

While that thought was still forming, a bright spark of violet appeared ahead on the line of the equator. It grew rapidly, blossoming from a point to a soft-edged plume of white and blue.

In the final moment before the fire reached up to envelop the probe, and the S-wave message stream to headquarters ceased, Drake understood several things at once.

First, he was going to learn nothing more about present conditions on the surface of Felicity; because the probe, along with Par Leon and the onboard composite, was doomed. They were about to be destroyed by a flame as hot as the center of a star.

Worse than that, humanity was going to learn nothing about the reason why billions of worlds had been silenced. Whatever had happened to them, it was different from what was happening now on Felicity.

Because the agent for this probe’s destruction was not some alien and unknown force. It was part of a human defensive system; a system that had been designed and defined and described to the inhabitants of Felicity by Cass Leemu, Mel Bradley, and Drake Merlin.

This was no time for meeting in ones and twos. Drake could feel the pressure again, the countless terrified minds clamoring at the gates of the villa. They had been calm when the defenses were going into place, blindly hoping that the problem was solved. Was he the only one who had expected the next sector of the Galaxy to fall? — although even he had been shocked when the observing probes were destroyed by the defenses that he had installed.

All of his team were assembled in the War Room. They were stunned to silence. The scene that Drake had followed in detail for one probe had been repeated over and over, in a thousand variations. The planets remained apparently untouched and unchanged; but no probe had been able to land.

Par Leon was in the worst shape. It confirmed Drake’s idea, that the death of a clone was perfectly real — and not only to the clone. Leon was shattered.

He had seen himself annihilated, time after time. Not one of his copies had tried to do anything about it. Each had gone fatalistically to his doom. It had been a mistake to send Leon, and Drake would not do it again.

He deliberately changed the War Room wall from its overview of newly silenced worlds to the old, white-capped seascape.

“We learned a lot from that experience.” He was brisk and businesslike. “Of course, we’ll do a full analysis of every case, but I only want Tom involved in that. The rest of you will have other assignments. Milton, we’ve been treating this as a problem just for humanity. It isn’t. Every life-form on a silenced world must be affected. I want to meet with you and review every alien life-form in the Galaxy. We may learn something about the Shiva.”

“But it was our understanding that the Shiva originated outside the Galaxy.”

The Servitor was as deferential as ever — and as steadfast. Drake realized that Milton would be a better choice than Par Leon to send on future probes. But even Milton would not be ideal. What was needed was someone who would play a long shot, someone to take a wild risk when it was justified.

Who?

Drake postponed the question.

“I think the Shiva did originate from outside the Galaxy,” he said. “But even if we don’t find out anything about the Shiva from alien life-forms, the forms themselves may prove useful. Leon, I want you to work with Milton on this.

“Melissa, we know that what we tried last time didn’t work. If we’re going to stop the Shiva spread, we have to know more about how they do it. Can their influence move through open space, or does it need planets to do it efficiently? You are going to help us answer that question. You will have the job of creating a. firebreak.” Drake was forced to use the English word. “Do you know what that is? It’s an empty region across the whole Galaxy, surrounding the segment affected by the Shiva. If they need planets, a void should slow and hinder their spread.”

Melissa’s eyes opened wide, and she shook her head dubiously. “I’ll do my best. But do you realize how big a job that will be?”

“It will be enormous. I want a quarantine zone, at least twenty light-years wide, between the edge of the affected sector and the nearest colonized world.”

“You mean you want the colonies moved.”

“I want more than that. I want the colonies moved to a safer location. But then I want space completely empty in that region. No planets, no stars. Not even dust clouds, if we can do it. I want hard vacuum and nothing else.”

“That’s impossible.”

“I don’t think so.” Drake turned to Mel Bradley. “You and Cass have been evaluating the caesuras as possible attack weapons. Do you have an idea how big an object they can handle?”

“In principle, there is no limit.” Mel had been the last addition to the team, but he was a great choice. While the others cringed at the very idea of violence, he reveled in it. “The caesuras seem to feed on their own activity,” he went on. “The more you put into them, the bigger they get.”

“Could you put a whole planet into one?”

“No!” But the hot, angry eyes were gleaming with curiosity. “Not yet, at any rate. We’re orders of magnitude away from that. Right now I can put a small asteroid into a caesura. Do you want to put a planet in? Maybe, if we keep going …”

“Work on it.”

“And you said stars, too?”

“One step at a time. When you get to the point where a caesura can handle a planet, I want to see a demonstration.”

“Mobility is going to be the other problem. We either have to create a caesura where we need it or move one around. That’s not going to be easy.”

“Nothing is going to be easy. Get Cass to help you.” Drake looked around the table. “All right, I think we’ve covered everything. Everyone has plenty to do. Let’s go do it.”

Except, of course, that they had not covered everything. Drake knew it, even if no one else did. He had ducked the most important question of all: Who was going to replace Par Leon as the on-site observer and principal actor in the next interaction with the Shiva?

He knew there would be another interaction. More than that, he expected a countless number of them, over many millennia and even many aeons, before the problem was resolved (one way or another; it might end with the Shiva taking over every world in the Galaxy. That was a resolution of sorts).

Par Leon would not do. He might learn someday to observe dispassionately, but in an emergency he would never know how to take action without direction.

The trouble was, Drake already knew the answer to his own question. It was obvious, as soon as he stated the issues clearly: Who would be willing to use weapons? Who could take a wild risk when it was justified? Who had the most to lose? Who had a motivation to survive, stronger than any of the composites?

The others were terrified when a planet became silent, but any planetary consciousness was likely to form part of a larger composite, with multiple components elsewhere. The disappearance of a planet from the communications web, or even its total annihilation, was not a total death for them. It was more like an amputation, the loss of fingers and toes — highly unpleasant and traumatic, but not fatal.

So. It had to be Drake himself. He would have to agree to something that he had so far resisted, and allow multiple copies of himself to be downloaded, shipped off anywhere that they were needed, and used in either organic or inorganic form. And he had to remain an individual, not joined to form part of a composite. He had to be aware of and afraid of death, focused on his own survival, willing to use any weapon that would allow him to live. Multiple duplication sounded like a guarantee of immortality; he recognized it as a promise of multiple deaths.

He would probably die, over and over, in many places across the Galaxy. Was there any other alternative? If there was, he was not smart enough to see it.

So it had to be Drake. He didn’t want to do it, but he would.

He would do it for the sake of Ana, and for their future together.

Chapter 19 Snark Hunt

Drake had never felt better; fit, strong, and confident. He narrowed his nostrils against the dusty wind and nodded to Milton. “Ready when you are.”

The Servitor was standing by his side. It wore the familiar shape of the wheeled sphere, topped by a whisk broom of motile wires. The wires wriggled and twisted as Milton said, “Are you sure? Do you not need more time to adapt?”

“I am adapted. Perfectly.”

“You see, it was easy for me to take on my original form. But in your case …”

Drake knew what the Servitor was getting at. If he thought hard about it, he could recognize that the Sun was a peculiar and brilliant green, two sizes too small in the sky. The landscape of the planet, Graybill, glittered in prismatic silvers and blues. At the limit of vision, the land curved upward to a hazy horizon. He seemed to be standing in a giant bowl that quaked and shivered beneath his feet, like a tough skin stretched tight over viscous jelly.

No problem. Graybill orbited far from a K-type star whose photosphere was peculiarly high in metals. The bowl effect was a result of vastly higher atmospheric pressure. In fact, if he thought about it, he could explain all the things he saw and felt — just as he knew that he inhabited a thick-legged, shorter body, and that other versions of him, thousands or millions of them, existed far, far away.

None of these things mattered. So far as he was concerned, he was the Drake Merlin, the one and only. He suited this body and this world exactly.

“In your case,” Milton continued. “I could not employ an exact clone. Your body would not have survived here without modification. It was necessary to download your somatic DNA, perform certain changes to it, then download your acquired database only after body growth was complete. So, even though I suspect that you would have preferred your own original body, as it was on Earth—”

“You can stop apologizing.” Drake felt euphoric — dangerously so. Was it possible that Milton had slightly misjudged his body’s required gaseous balance? He scratched at his scaly side. “Let’s get down to business. Where’s the alien?”

“Aliens. Many of them. Far from here. We landed in the equatorial region, and they reside on an isolated continent near the south pole. I wanted to be sure that you were fully operational and adjusted before you were exposed to danger.”

“That bad?”

“Or good. It is a matter of definition. Let me say this: I have examined more than fourteen thousand other alien life-forms that fulfill some or all of the qualifications for sentience. Never, however, have I encountered one so feral and vicious.”

“And intelligent?”

“Not in technological terms. The Snarks use no tools. They have not mastered fire. They modify their environment only in the simplest ways. They seem to possess no language.”

“But you still say they are dangerous?”

“I know that they are.” Milton led the way from the main ship to a smaller, wingless vehicle that rested on the glittering and shaking surface. “This is your third embodiment on this planet.”

“What happened to the other two?”

It was a stupid question, and one that Milton was not supposed to answer. It was a rule that Drake himself had set up: each of his encounters with an alien would be judged on its own merits. Milton would be fully aware of the prior failed experiences, but Drake would not. It had been the same with the fourteen thousand cases. Drake — or one of his embodiments — must have met each of them, but apart from generalities all he knew was that none was useful against the Shiva.

Now the Servitor said only, “This time we are taking special precautions. They included landing far from the polar continent and all Snarks, until I was sure that you were totally at home with your embodiment.”

No more information; except that a knowledge of two prior failures was itself information. On the twenty-minute suborbital flight toward Graybill’s pole, Drake sat and wondered. What had he done the previous times to get himself killed? Would he be killed again? If so, it would be no less painful, merely because it had happened before.

The ship landed on a coastline that crawled with warm-blooded and active plants. Drake could feel a sharp drop in temperature, but his body remained quite comfortable. He merely felt a tightening in his outer layers as improved thermal insulation went into action. He walked to the waterline, knowing that it was not actually water. Any water was in solid form, lying on the bottom. This was some mix of alcohols and hydrocarbons, heptane and ether and propanol, all lighter than water ice.

He bent and scooped up a handful to his tendril-fringed mouth. It tasted fine.

“That way.” Milton was pointing as Drake straightened up. “About seven kilometers inland you will find the first

Snark nests. Do you wish me to accompany you?”

Milton’s voice was hopeful. Drake shook his scaled , and snouted head. The Servitor was smart, but some things it would never learn. There was no way that Milton could remain quiet if Drake was moving into danger. Not only that, no matter how much Drake discouraged it, the Servitor could not help giving hints designed to keep Drake out of danger. It was not Milton’s fault. The Servitor was designed to protect and safeguard Drake Merlin. Its present role of bystander was more than it could stand.

Drake reinforced his gesture with words. “You stay right here until I come back. Don’t leave the flier.”

The wiry whisk broom contorted and turned uneasily. “That is what you said on the last occasion we were here.”

More information that Drake was not supposed to have. “So I’m saying it again. If I am not back by dark, you can come looking for me.”

“That will be a very long time. We are in the polar regions, and this is summer.”

“One quarter of a planetary revolution period, then. If I’m not back in that time, come and pick up the pieces. But not before. I don’t want you around when I’m at the nests. Remember, they also serve who only stand and wait.” Drake headed inland. Milton was tireless and careful and conscientious, but sometimes the Servitor could be a real pain.

Seven kilometers: it sounded like a reasonable safety margin; except that he had no idea what senses were available to the Snarks. Vision by short wavelength light was the most commonly used sense in the Galaxy, evidence of the fact that the average main sequence star emits peak energy at a wavelength between one-half and one micron. However, a dozen other senses were in general use wherever there was an atmosphere: hearing, thermal infrared detection, direct monitoring of magnetic and electric fields, echo location, smell — the Snarks might use any or all of these. Back on ancient Earth, a polar bear could sniff a dead whale thirty kilometers away. A mating moth could identify its distant partner from a single molecule of pheromone. The Snarks might already be aware of Drake.

The ground was becoming increasingly rock strewn and broken, large boulders separated by stretches of flat gravel covered with slow-moving blue ferns. Drake reduced his pace at the two-kilometer mark and again as he caught his first glimpse of what must be the nests. They were well separated, each one long and thin and hollow, like a section of wide clay pipe laid on its side. He could see no sign of life there, but he stopped, crouched down onto his thick haunches, and waited. As soon as he was stationary, the warm-blooded vegetation crawled doggedly to his feet and around them. Tendrils like gentle blue fingers reached up, touched his legs, and apparently decided that he had no potential as a nutrient source. The warm fingers dropped back. The plants crept away.

At last, Drake could see something moving near the clay pipes. Would he have been so patient, without Milton’s warning of earlier problems? Surely not. He would have kept going, because the things that he could see ahead moved not much faster than the plants.

There were scores of them. The Snarks were fat white segmented cylinders, supported by scores of slender white pseudopods. The bodies were about five feet long and a foot and a half wide. The head end, as judged from the direction that they moved, lacked all distinguishing marks. A curving tail of darker creamy-white arched up over the back to direct its sharp tip forward. The pointed end moved slowly from side to side. Did it, rather than the “head,” house the sense organs? Perhaps that was the head, and a Snark walked backward.

The Snarks seemed to take no notice of each other or of their surroundings, but as he watched, four of them reared up slowly from their horizontal positions. Each blind head curved back until it met the tail and formed a complete loop. The tail stopped its slow oscillation. They held this position like statues for several minutes, then unwound to lie once more on the soggy ground. After that they did not move at all. The brief effort to defy gravity seemed to have exhausted them.

Drake drifted closer. He could see that each of the long brown cylinders of the nests curved down at one end to become a tunnel into the spongy surface. Tall stacks of uprooted plants stood next to each pipe. The top plants of the heap were still wriggling feebly, trying to find their way back to ground level.

Nesting materials or food? If the Snarks were herbivores, the source of possible danger to Drake became harder to explain. One of the Snarks had just ripped a plant out of the gritty surface with a pair of its front pseudopods. It was facing right toward Drake, and at last he could see a narrow horizontal slit like a dark gash across the whole lower edge of the face.

Drake moved closer yet. He itched to see just what the Snark was doing with that wriggling fern. It was not eating it. The pseudopods seemed to be peeling off an outer layer, but they were not moving it to the face slit. They were

passing it backward, to other pairs of stubby feet. Again he wondered, Had he confused front and back? The curved tail was slowly swinging back and forth, like a lazy radar antenna.

He had been concentrating hard on the one Snark, ignoring the plants at his feet. His attention was brought back to them only when warm fingers reached up his legs.

It was because he had not been moving, He glanced down and scuffled his feet, encouraging the tendrils to fall away.

“Shoo!” he hissed under his breath. The plants were warm-blooded, regulating their own temperature. They were mobile. Was there a chance that they would someday achieve sentience? Spaceflight? He shook his foot. “Go on, there’s nothing for you. Get out of here!”

When they finally gave up and dropped away, he looked up again at the nests. Everything was the same as before. The Snark was still fiddling lethargically with its fern.

Then he realized that no other Snark was visible. While he had been watching one, all the rest had quietly vanished.

They must have crept into the nests, to the pipes and then maybe underground. He could go closer, or move around so that he could look into the open end of one of the pipes.

As other versions of Drake had done twice before? And never made it back to where Milton was waiting.

Drake decided that he had seen enough for one day. He could always return tomorrow. He turned and started back across the boulder-strewn landscape. The bright green sun was just as high in the sky, but he felt a colder breeze at his back. It encouraged him to hurry. By the time that he was halfway to the shore, he was loping along as fast as his stocky legs would carry him.

It seemed like gross overreaction — until he came to a place where a rock-free stretch of graveled surface made it safe to quickly turn his head.

The rocky surface behind him was clear. But to each side, converging on his path, he saw a dozen pale shapes. They were arranged in a fan-shaped pattern with him as its center. The closest Snarks were at the edge of the fan. They must have been setting up a wide circle, all the time that he was observing the nests. He had been lucky enough to leave when the encircling operation was only half-done.

He had time for no more than a quick look, then he had to turn his attention back to the boulder-strewn ground across which he was running. That one glance was enough to force him to seek more speed. The Snarks, slow as snails when he had first encountered them, were transformed. The pseudopods moved too fast to be seen, except as a pale blur beneath the segmented bodies. The Snarks themselves had become longer and thinner. The curved tail no longer swung from side to side but was flattened along the back.

The worst news was that they were gaining. He was sure of it, even though he dared not look around again. He took more risks, hurdling midsized boulders instead of going around them. He cursed his stumpy and heavyset body. He was low to the ground. That made it harder to see what lay on the other side. If he landed on a rock and fell over, or broke a leg…

The flier was visible ahead. Less than a kilometer. Where were the Snarks? He had to know.

Don’t do it. Remember the runner who loses a race because he turns his head to see how big a lead he has.

It didn’t matter. He had to know. He turned and saw two Snarks no more than twenty steps behind him.

He looked straight ahead and made a desperate final effort. He knew he wasn’t going to make it. Only another couple of hundred meters, but he would need at least a second when he reached the flier. It would take time to jump in and slam the door closed. That’s when the Snarks would get him. They would catch him and bring him down in the moment when he stopped to open the flier door.

“Milton!” He screamed the name, expecting nothing. He had told the Servitor to stay with the flier. Even if Milton heard him, the response would come too late.

But the little wheeled sphere was suddenly where it was not supposed to be — right in front of him. It made a quick sideways zigzag out of Drake’s path, then veered in behind him. He heard the thump of a solid collision.

The flier was a dozen steps away, door open and waiting. Drake jumped and in the same movement grabbed the handle, swung inside, and dropped the latch into position. There was a loud splat as something large and rubbery and

moving at high speed hit the outside of the door.

The sound came again, and then again. Drake looked out of the flier window. A dozen Snarks were hurling themselves in mad succession against the closed door. The car was rocking with their impacts.

Beyond them, twenty meters away, another Snark reared high on its hindmost pseudopods. It had gone through a dramatic change of size and shape. It was about seven feet tall, swollen at the lower end like a giant pear. The white skin was stretched tight. As Drake watched, the skin undulated and bulged and squirmed. There was no sign of Milton.

Drake knew now what his own fate would have been. If the Servitor had not intercepted the Snarks and drawn their attention, he would be that great bulge. He might be wriggling, but not for long.

After another thirty seconds the bloated Snark toppled from its upright position. The slit on the blind face remained closed, but that dark gash stretched longer and longer. The Snark was changing shape again. Its broadest section was moving from one end to the other, traveling like a wave of obesity from tail to head.

The white skin dimpled and swelled and thrust out every few seconds at isolated points, randomly and erratically. The other Snarks one by one abandoned their attack on the flier and eased forward to form a circle around their bloated nestmate.

The featureless face could show no expression, but the squirming and wriggling suggested that the Snark was not enjoying itself. More waves of muscular contraction were running from front to back. Finally, slowly, reluctantly, the slit of a mouth began to alter in shape. It went from a single line to a narrow ellipse, then steadily expanded until it was a round hole three feet across. There was one final heave of peristalsis. Milton suddenly popped out, whisk broom first.

The Servitor was coated with dark-green slime. Milton started to roll upright, but before the move was complete another Snark had dived in. Pseudopods gripped the whisk-broom head and drew it toward a mouth that leered wider and wider.

Milton offered no resistance. Within a minute the Servitor was ingested, while the body of the Snark stretched to accommodate something wider than its usual dimension.

This time Drake was able to watch the whole process. It took about four minutes, from Milton’s disappearance to his rebirth. The Snarks did not give up easily. Five more of them had a go at Milton. Five more times the Servitor was swallowed and regurgitated, before finally rolling unimpeded out of the waiting circle.

The little wheeled form moved to the aircar, and the wired head stared up at Drake. Let me in. The message did not need words. But Drake in the past half hour had acquired lots of respect for the Snarks.

“Just a minute.”

He extended a cargo flap from the base of the car and waited as Milton rolled onto it. Once the Servitor was in position, Drake raised them a hundred feet into the air. That should be more than enough to foil the Snarks, leaping alone or working in concert. Even so, he moved the car sideways, out over the brooding blue sea, before he finally opened the door and allowed Milton to climb inside.

The Servitor was covered thicker than ever with slime. Milton looked disgusting and smelled worse. Drake didn’t wait to learn what the Snarks were doing now but told the flier to return them at once to the main ship.

“I assume that we are done with the Snarks,” Milton said. It was the closest that the Servitor would ever come to asking, “Can we go home now?”

Drake was inclined to say yes. Humans needed all the help they could get in combating the Shiva, but blind ferocity was not enough. It must be matched with intelligence. The Snarks had cunning and murderous intent, but having seen them throwing themselves one after another against the flier, Drake felt sure that they operated mainly at the level of instinct. They knew how to hunt in packs, even to set impressive traps for their prey. But a hundred Earth species had done that, and never been credited with intelligence.

On the other hand, if that huge Snark aggressiveness had been coupled with high intelligence…

Drake sat in the flier and stared down at his own heavily built body. “I want to try one more thing.”

“Very well.” Milton did not sigh. Servitors did not sigh.

“You took my somatic DNA and incorporated changes to give me a body suited to this planet. Where did you get those changes from?”

“From the genetic codes of certain life-forms native to this world — not, of course, from the Snarks.”

“So it ought to be easy to perform a small variation to the procedure. Use my genetic material. We have a complete record of that. In particular, use the elements in me that code for intelligence. Merge them with Snark genetic material — and produce a smart Snark.”

Milton received that suggestion with all the enthusiasm of a being who has been swallowed and disgorged half a dozen times in the past half hour. After a few seconds, the Servitor said, “I do not think that is possible.”

“Why not? The technology sounds quite routine. No harder than what you did to put me in this body.”

“The technology, perhaps. But we do not know the Snark genetic code.”

“Not yet. But we’ll find out all about it.”

“How?”

“That’s the easiest part,” Drake snapped the fingers of his scaly paw. “Tomorrow we’ll come back to the nests and kidnap one.”

Chapter 20

“When half-gods go, the gods arrive.”

The syncarpal synthesis was a surprise to Drake. A merger of human and Snark genetic materials suggested many possible outcomes: a four-limbed sting-tailed caterpillar that stood upright; a faceless segmented cylinder with hair and hands; or maybe a bright-eyed human worm, using dozens of scaly protolimbs to grasp, to lift, and to walk.

The creature in the imager resembled none of these. The syncarpal synthesis — shortened to the carp, or usually just Carp, by Drake and Milton, could have walked among a crowd of humans and passed unnoticed. Drake, looking hard, could observe a few minor differences. The temples bulged too much, only partly concealed by long brown hair. There was something odd about the hips, as though the socket for the upper end of the thigh bone lay outside the pelvis. The bare skin was coarse and rough, protected by a dense layer of gray bristles (but Drake had seen hairier humans). Suitable clothing would hide all this, just as it would cover the unusual genitals. Those were hidden, withdrawn into the pelvic cavity, making sex determination impossible by observation. Drake thought of the carp as “him,” but that probably reflected his own sense of identification with the naked being on the surface.

“And you, of course, are looking for differences,” Milton said. Drake was seeing Carp in action for the first time, and the Servitor sounded defensive. Most of this was Milton’s work, and no one else’s. “In any case, outward appearance is of less importance than the modified inner features. And those are invisible to you.”

The Servitor was not present in person. Drake, embodied in the scaled form designed for use on Graybill, had insisted on three levels of separation. He knew what he had asked for: extreme aggression combined with great intelligence; but neither he nor anyone else yet knew what they had.

So Drake and the only ship that could carry them to orbit sat in one location, close to the Graybill equator. Milton and an aircar were in another, on a long peninsula of the south polar continent; and Carp had been set free and remotely animated in a third place, on the shore close to the nests where Drake himself had narrowly escaped the Snarks.

Carp was independently monitored by both Drake and Milton. Drake zoomed in for a close-up of the face as Carp walked steadily toward the nests. The heavy features wore a placid and relaxed expression. The broad mouth was humming softly and tunelessly, and the eyes glanced from side to side, like a walker on a pleasant summer stroll.

Maybe that was the way Carp felt. Graybill’s polar summer was ending in a lingering twilight, and already the

temperature on the island of the Snarks was falling fast. The dusting of snow on the boulders and gravel was made of solid carbon dioxide. Carp’s physical structure, however, had been optimized to its local conditions. In spite of his naked skin he probably felt right at home.

If only Drake could read the dark eyes hidden beneath bony and prominent brow ridges! What did Carp know? What did he feel? In many ways, Carp was Drake himself; all the human genetic material had come from him. In biological terms, this was his child.

His only child, in so many billion years. Yet how far from their dreams, when they bought the old brick Colonial with its four bedrooms and shady fenced yard, and made their happy plans. One moment in annihilation’s waste. One moment of the well of life to taste. But one moment together. Now he walked through eternity alone. Oh, Ana…

Carp was heading confidently inland, toward the location of the Snark nests. Going home. The Snark from which Milton extracted the nonhuman part of Carp’s genetic material had been taken from this very set of nests. When that Snark had been released and returned, unharmed and apparently unchanged, the others had torn it to pieces. Maybe, like a migrating bird, Carp carried the homing instinct in every cell of his body; maybe that would prove fatal when he arrived home.

They would know soon enough. Carp was walking steadily across blue-green vegetation that soaked up a last dribble of sunlight before digging down below-ground and hibernating until spring. The nest was in view, with its broad pipes. As before, dozens of Snarks were creeping around them, stacking piles of plant life against their sides.

Carp walked right into their midst. They did not turn or attack or crawl away. They went on exactly as before, taking no more notice of him than they did of each other. He squatted down by one of the heaps of dead plants, and did not move for many minutes.

“There is no sign that the others are stalking him,” Milton said at last. “In your own case, they by this time had you close to surrounded. And had you approached the nests themselves, as you did in one previous embodiment, you would have been attacked. It seems that in spite of his appearance, they accept Carp as one of their own. What now?”

It was a good question. Drake was seeking evidence that Carp was a prototype for the fighting machine that humanity needed so desperately. Everything that he had tried against the Shiva had led to failure; every day the Silent Zone grew like a cancer, eating its way in a growing arc across the Galaxy.

The Snarks themselves had seemed like a good first test. The action would take place in a remote location, far from interference or assistance from Milton. If Carp so much as survived, he would be doing a lot better than Drake. In fact, he had already done better.

Drake zoomed in closer, studying Carp’s face. It was thoughtful, as thoughtful as Drake himself. And quite unreadable.

“Milton, do you know how the Snarks decide what they’ll attack, and what they’ll leave alone?”

“Not from observation. However, if they are like most animals who form nesting colonies, the principal sense and signal is olfactory. It seems probable that Carp smells right to them.”

Just as Drake had smelled wrong. He still had no answer to his old question: From what distance could a Snark detect a strange animal from its scent? But even if Carp smelled right to the Snarks, he certainly looked wrong. And Milton, who presumably smelled nothing at all like anything organic, had been attacked and swallowed mindlessly. Why hadn’t the Snarks given Carp at least a test swallow?

For the same reason that they were not constantly swallowing each other. Maybe the test hadn’t failed after all. Maybe Carp had taken it — and passed, by changing his smell to one acceptable to the Snarks.

And what was he doing now? He was still squatting by the heap of leaves, apparently lost in thought.

Drake noticed that the Snarks had begun a common activity. They were removing plants from the piles and dragging them across to make a master heap. In the first sign of peaceful cooperation that he had seen, four of them were using their many pseudopods to shape the heap. The sickle-shaped tails patted and smoothed the edges to round them off and provide a compact, flat-topped structure.

It only became obvious what they were doing when they were finished, and Carp moved across to lie down on the heap.

“Milton! They’ve made him a damned bed. ”

“So it would appear.”

“But how did he tell them what to do? You said that the Snarks have no language.”

“Apparently I was wrong. Do you wish me to — abandon the experiment?”

The Servitor, like other composites, could not handle certain notions. What Milton meant was, Do you wish me to destroy Carp?

“Of course not. He found an answer that’s a lot more effective than aggression: he has the Snarks working for him. I want you to go ahead with the next test. Pick him up — as soon as he’s had some sleep.”

If Carp was indeed proposing to sleep. He was stretched out comfortably on his back on the bed of plants, arms raised to cushion his head on his open hands. The dark, expressionless eyes were open, gazing up into a gentle downward drift of CO₂ snow.

He was awake, Drake realized. And thinking… what?

The Snarks were Graybill’s most feral and dangerous species, but they were not the planet’s only predator. The soundbugs were big gray invertebrates with formidable exoskeletons. They ruled the “tropics,” where

Graybill’s sun could, at zenith, sometimes melt mercury.

The soundbugs were solitary hunters. “They do not resemble the Snarks in appearance, form, or habits,” Milton assured Drake. “Also, they hunt at night, and they use primarily sound and echo-location, like the bats of your own home world. It seems unlikely that smell will play any part in Carp’s survival.”

“If he survives.” Drake had seen a close-up of a soundbug, and he shriveled inside at the idea of fighting one. The animal was like a hard-shelled scorpion, about two meters long and supported by a dozen strong and leathery legs. It weighed three or four hundred pounds, most of that the thick shield of dense armor on its back and belly. Like the Snarks, it swallowed its food whole; unlike them, it could not expand its body and mouth because the massive exoskeleton was of fixed width. Instead, two constriction rings at the front of the maw crushed the prey, living or dead, to a size where it could be engulfed.

“It is my opinion that our Carp will do more than survive. He will triumph.” Milton had initially been dubious about the prospects of any combination of Snark and human. The idea that such a creature might be of value in the battle with the Shiva had seemed preposterous. Now the Servitor’s position was changing. Milton had become a supporter, rooting for their creation and ready to believe that it could do anything.

The Servitor was ready to order Carp’s release. At Drake’s insistence, all activities would still be carried out using remote handling equipment. As an extra precaution, the pilotless flier that had taken Carp from the Snark colony to the equator contained no sentient components. Milton and Drake were directing operations from a station several hundreds of kilometers away and monitoring everything with ground-based, airborne, and spaceborne observing systems.

Graybill’s long twilight was beginning when the door of the aircar automatically opened, and Carp was free to step out onto the crumbling, orange-gray surface.

The planet’s atmosphere was too thick for most stars to shine brightly through. Night observations had to rely on thermal and microwave signatures, and those pictures tended to be grainy and monochrome. Milton was already complaining of their poor quality and augmenting the results with sonic imaging. Drake worried that those high-frequency sound beams might interfere with the soundbug’s own sonic pulses.

Milton reassured him. “It is a different frequency regime. The worst that can happen is occasional signal aliasing, and the soundbug’s interpretation system has enough redundancy to compensate for that. Do not worry. The soundbug will be able to see Carp.”

There was a problem with Milton’s assessment. Unless Carp came out, no one would see him at all; and at the moment, nothing moved in the clearing where the flier stood.

“What’s he doing in there?” Drake asked at last.

“I am sorry, but I am unable to answer your question. The flier’s imaging systems are directed toward observation outside the car. Maybe we should change that in the future. But it is all right. Here he comes.”

A shadowy figure was emerging from the flier’s open door. Carp paused just a few feet from the flier, turning his head slowly from side to side.

“He won’t see clearly for much longer. And when it is fully dark, he will lack our night sensors.” Milton increased the image intensity. The scene became brighter, but no less grainy. “What can he be doing?”

The figure on the screen was bending low, touching the ground.

“He’s digging,” Drake said. “I have no idea why, but I’m sure that he does. Don’t forget that his memories are derived from experiences on the surface of Graybill. He also has instincts, things going for him that we know nothing about. He recognizes a dangerous environment without being told. He knows about soundbugs and maybe he has a way to deal with them.”

But a big part of Carp also derived from Drake Merlin. What would Drake do, himself, if he were outside and alone in the darkness?

Drake had information that Carp lacked. He knew that a soundbug, as big as any on Graybill, had its den a couple of kilometers to the west, across a narrow but deep hydrocarbon stream that ran to within thirty meters of the clearing. Worse than that, the soundbug’s nightly hunting path took it across the stream and through the clearing. They had picked this particular site to make sure that there would be an encounter.

Drake decided he could answer his own question: If he were outside as dark approached, he would climb back into the flier, lock the door, and wait through the long fourteen hours until dawn. Strangely, that seemed to be what Carp was doing. He had raised from his stooped position and moved back inside the aircar. But the door of the car remained open.

Now Drake could see the result of Carp’s digging with his hands. The soil of the clearing was soft and crumbling for only the first few inches, then it turned to a hard tangle of roots and rocks.

“He’s coming out again,” Milton said softly.

Drake could see that for himself. Carp had emerged from the car. He ignored his digging and headed west, toward the stream. He seemed to be following faint marks on the ground. When he reached the stream he stood on its bank for a few seconds, looking first up and then downstream. Graybill’s plant life had never developed woody trunks, and it was limited in height to a couple of feet. Carp had a clear view of both directions. Upstream, to the north, the ground sloped rapidly higher, and at its narrowest point the stream became a series of fast-moving rapids. Downstream the flood slowed and widened to a series of pools and shallows.

Carp stepped into midstream and waded north. The turbulent flow pushed against him, rising past his knees. At one point the stream became narrower and deeper, and he was in almost to his waist. After standing at that deepest point for a few moments, he turned and allowed the liquid flow to push him back downstream. He waded past his point of entry, on to where the flow was slower. There were calm, deep pools here, and the whole stream was much wider.

“But what is he doing?” Milton said.

Drake did not reply. Although the actions were mysterious, the Snark-human synthesis carried a sense of definite purpose in every movement.

Carp emerged from the stream and headed back to the flier. Once more he entered, and once more there was a long and frustrating wait. When he came out he carried a big bundle of soft material.

“He has been stripping the front cabin,” Drake said quietly. “Those are seat materials and seat covers from the control chair. Are you sure there is no way that he can control the flier itself?”

“Quite sure.” Milton displayed a confidence that Drake did not share. “He would need to change microchip settings from remote to manual, and that requires microtools and a knowledge of circuit designs. He has neither. But he has made sure that we cannot do anything with the flier, either. The cables he is carrying are the ones that control attitude and power levels. Do you think he merely seeks to hold the car as a place where he can hide?”

“No. He could do that without stripping the seats.”

But Drake did not have a better suggestion. He watched as Carp, in near darkness now, retraced his steps toward the stream. The synthesis chose his site carefully, and on the stream bank formed a rough cylinder from the material that he was carrying. A long loop of cable went around it and back to his hands. Carp ran another noose on the soft

ground, a full meter away from the cylinder in each direction, and held on to the free end of that line also. In the last glimmer of light he paid out both wire cables and stepped down into the water. Heading upstream, he came to the deepest point of the fast-running rapids. There he crouched down until only his head was visible.

“I think I get it,” Drake said. “He saw the soundbug tracks, and he must have an idea what made them. He tried digging as a way to become invisible, but only the first few inches of ground are soft. So instead he’s trying to use water to hide him.”

“Water?”

“Sorry. I mean liquid hydrocarbons.” Yet to Drake, in his present body, they seemed like water. What else should you call a clear, cold liquid that ran in pure streams, that evaporated from surface pools, that you could drink whenever you felt thirsty? He and Carp had a lot in common, even if Drake could not follow the other’s thought processes. But it was the difference in thought patterns that provided the whole reason for Carp’s existence.

That existence was now threatened. Milton grunted, and drew Drake’s attention to another display. It was dark enough for the soundbug to waken from its daytime torpor, and it was on the move. It had emerged from its den and was making its way downhill. No sound signal accompanied the display, but the easy liquid movement across the uneven surface gave an impression of silent, ghostly progress.

That was confirmed when the soundbug came on its first prey of the night. The animal was a short, fat version of a polar Snark. It was scrabbling busily in the dirt, tail high in the air. The soundbug seized it before it realized it was in danger. The soundbug’s leathery legs moved the victim to the front constricting rings and compression began. Blood spurted from the blind head end into the waiting maw of the soundbug, but the fat Snark did not die at once. It went on struggling, until the last wriggling tip of the tail was swallowed.

Drake did not look at Milton. He had no trouble imagining the Servitor’s reaction, because he shared it. The original idea had sounded clean and simple: combine Snark ferocity with human cunning, to produce an organism more effective than either in combatting the Shiva. What had been left unmentioned was the question of testing the result.

In retrospect it was obvious: he and Milton would have to expose Carp to more and more dangerous situations, until one of them proved fatal. It was a particularly vicious form of torture, with no escape but death.

Drake made his decision. He might be willing to sacrifice himself to save the Galaxy from the Shiva, but he could not bear to create thinking beings merely in order to kill them. If Carp somehow survived through the night, that would be the end of the experiment. The Snark-human synthesis would live out his days in peace on Graybill. That sounded like a cruel enough punishment, forcing a sentient being to exist without others of its kind, but Drake could change that. It would be easy to develop a dozen copies of Carp in the off-world lab and transport them down for release on the surface of the planet.

More than likely, however, that would not be necessary. Every action of the soundbug seemed to emphasize its invulnerability. Nothing in the flier could penetrate that massive armor. Nothing could sever those tough limbs. Unless Drake flew to the distant site at once and rescued Carp, the chance of the synthesis being alive at dawn seemed close to zero.

Drake glanced from one screen to the other. The fat Snark had apparently been no more than an appetizer for the soundbug’s main meal. It was on the move again, quartering the ground. Long antennas had unfurled above the armored back, to receive returning sound signals and interpret them as images.

The soundbug was closing on the stream. Very soon the pictures on the two display screens would merge and show the same scene. To Drake, who knew exactly where to look, Carp’s head was easy to pick out. It was a lighter gray against the darker turbulent flow. The question was, would the soundbug recognize that feature of the stream as new and different, when natural rocks both upstream and downstream rose above the surface to interrupt the flow?

Very soon, they would know. Thirty meters more, and the soundbug was at the far bank. It had come to the narrowest point of the stream, and it hesitated there. The flier was over in the middle of the clearing. That would be new to the soundbug; but also new, and much closer, a fat cylinder lay on the other bank. As the soundbug paused, the cylinder twitched and jerked a couple of feet along the ground.

The soundbug crossed the stream and pounced in a single movement. As it grabbed the stuffed roll of seat covers, Carp stood upright in the middle of the stream. He pulled hard on the second wire, drawing a noose around the soundbug’s legs and carapace.

The predator felt the pressure at once and reached its head down to grip the cable. The maw snapped shut on the

closed loop.

The wire had an outer insulating layer, but its core had been designed to resist both shear and stretching. It would not break, nor could it be cut through. While the soundbug had all its attention on the confining cable, Carp hauled backward and dragged the struggling creature over the edge of the bank into the fast-flowing stream. Weighed down by its dense carapace, the soundbug plunged to the streambed, where it stood with the current swirling about its broad back.

Drake expected that Carp would now try to pull the soundbug upstream, and would fail. The drag of the current in the other direction was too great. But instead, the Snark-human synthesis began to wade forward and allowed the cable to slacken. With the noose still tight around its legs and hindering its movements, the soundbug scrabbled and splashed and was swept farther downstream.

Carp followed. Still holding the wire, he came dangerously close to the predator. Except that it was no longer quite so dangerous. The antennas, thoroughly soaked, lay flat along the back. When Carp pushed at the edge of the carapace, adding his weight for a moment to the force of the current, and then rapidly jumped away, Drake realized that the soundbug was blind. Its sound-emitting equipment was below the surface, and its wet receiving equipment had no signal to receive.

But the animal could still kill anything within reach. The multiple legs were grasping madly in all directions, while the constricting rings in a reflex of violence were dilating and snapping tight every couple of seconds.

Then the upper part of the leathery legs was no longer visible. The dome of the carapace showed less high above the surface. The current had carried the soundbug downstream to one of the deep pools.

Once the thick shield of the exoskeleton had vanished completely beneath the surface, Carp tightened the cable to prevent the sunken body from moving to shallower parts. Then he stood and waited.

Waves on the surface revealed the desperate activity beneath. Four times the soundbug reared up, and the edge of the carapace became visible. Before the head could appear, Carp pulled the body off-balance. The fourth time, the soundbug flipped over onto its back before it disappeared again. There was one last burst of furious splashing, which gradually subsided. Finally not a ripple showed on the surface of the pool.

Carp waited for another minute or two, before finally wading to the bank and hauling himself out. He sat for a while, hunched over and with his legs in the stream. He was still holding the cable that had trapped the soundbug in its noose.

He looked exhausted. It was not surprising. He had fought a creature that Drake had judged invulnerable; he had fought in a place that was not of his own choosing; and he had fought without weapons.

That was when Drake realized the most astonishing thing of all. He and Milton had watched the fight with the aid of microwave and high-frequency imaging sensors. They could see everything. The soundbug, until the stream drowned its sense organs, had also seen perfectly; but Carp could have seen nothing. It was too dark.

He had fought the soundbug totally blind. And still he had won. It was tempting to ask, what were the limits of Carp’s abilities as a fighter? How far could he be pushed, before he lost?

That was an immoral question. Drake had made his decision earlier, before the fight began. He would not change it now.

“It’s over.” He spoke to Milton, who was staring at the display where Carp had at last roused himself and was hauling the dead body of the soundbug onto the bank of the stream. “We wait for dawn. Then first thing in the morning, we go and get the flier.”

“And Carp?”

“He goes free. Don’t you think he’s earned it?”

“More than earned it. But what about the Shiva?”

“We’ll have to find another way.” Drake took a last look at Carp, who now had the soundbug on its back and was prying open the lower shell casing. There was every sign that the soundbug’s final meal would be as a course and not as a diner. What senses was Carp using to guide him? It could only be touch and smell. If it was anything else, some sense undreamed of by humans, Drake would never find out what it was. Just as he would never know what thoughts

were carried inside that long-haired skull.

“First thing in the morning,” he repeated. “Then it’s good-bye to Carp. Some means can never be justified, no matter what the ends.”

It seemed natural that Drake would feel a form of bond with Carp, given the latter’s genetic roots. What was more surprising was that Milton had similar feelings.

And yet, why not? Milton had done the genetic design work, plus the tricky splicing of human and Snark nucleotide coding. Milton had also grown Carp’s body and downloaded into his brain a body of data that went beyond basic survival instincts. If Drake was the father and one of the Snarks was Carp’s mother, then the Servitor could certainly claim to be the midwife.

Milton discussed none of this with Drake. The Servitor merely, and uncharacteristically, volunteered to go back to the clearing and collect the flier. Milton had confirmed that the car would no longer work by remote control, and suggested that it might be informative to learn what had been done to it.

“You can go, with two conditions.” Drake was busy with his own work. He had vowed that Carp would have a group of his own kind as companions, as soon as possible. With Carp’s template to work from, the task would be short and routine. The seed of the necessary lab had been dropped from orbit, the lab itself had been grown, and the lab’s manufacturing line was already up and running.

“First,” Drake continued, “you must handle everything with a heavy lift vehicle that stays continuously airborne. You hoist the flier with that, and you don’t land anything at all on the surface — including you. Second, you make sure that Carp is nowhere around when you do it. Scan the flier, inside and out. If you see a sign of Carp, abandon the pickup operation at once and return to base.”

“Which is precisely what I would have done, without instructions.” The Servitor was touchy on only a few subjects, but reliability and sound judgment were two of them. Milton rolled away, leaving Drake to continue the development of the Carp duplicates. The original cells were in a continuous-flow nutrient bath and had a constant doubling time of 820 seconds. Growth from primal cell to full-sized organism, ready to step out onto the surface of Graybill, was a twelve-hour operation. There were fewer than four hours to go.

Drake divided his attention three ways while the growth process proceeded. His main focus was on the development of the Carp clones, but at the same time he was making plans to wrap up operations on Graybill. The orbiting mother craft had already received instructions. It was prepared to send Drake and Milton back to headquarters by S-wave link, as soon as they were uploaded to it.

Every few minutes Drake made a spot check of Milton’s progress. Like the downed flier, the heavy-lift air vehicle had been grown on Graybill. Both craft would be left behind on the planet after Drake and Milton were uploaded to orbit. The vehicles would not last long. With a planned decay time of less than a month, they would crumble to dust as intermolecular forces weakened.

The vehicles had also been built with an eye to rugged simplicity, rather than the ultimate in performance. That became clear during operations. The heavy-lift cargo car could hover, but it had a slight tendency to drift forward. Drake watched until, on the second sweep, the lifter’s magnetic grapples secured the flier and hoisted it clear of the surface; then Drake returned to his other tasks. He had seen no signs of Carp on the ground, and he confirmed that Milton’s observations had discovered no trace of him. The body of the soundbug had been opened and partly eaten. Without landing for a close inspection, it was hard to say how much of a hand Carp had had in that operation. Plenty of other native life-forms had probably been willing to enjoy breakfast at the soundbug’s expense.

Drake checked the status of each biotank. By design, each copy of Carp had been given a slightly different development plan, and the results would all be a little different from each other. Drake spent the next hour monitoring and approving the progress of each variation.

Finally, he looked up and wondered what was delaying the heavy lifter. The vehicle had not been designed for speed, but the three-hundred-kilometer return trip should take no more than an hour. It must be slowed by the presence of the flier beneath it, and by the resistance of Graybill’s dense atmosphere. There could be no major problem, otherwise the lifter’s emergency beacon would have gone into operation.

Drake turned back to the biotank displays. Almost immediately he was interrupted. The heavy lift vehicle had finally arrived. It lowered the crippled aircar and released it onto the station pad, then made its own landing. Drake, watching at the window, saw the door of the heavy lifter open. Milton rolled out and headed for the aircar. The whisk-broom head turned toward the station. Drake waved and was answered by a nod of tangled wires.

Drake confirmed that the orbiting ship had registered the arrival of the lifter and was ready to upload him and Milton. He made a final check of the biotanks. Everything was proceeding on schedule. In another couple of hours, the biological growth operations within the tanks would be complete. Before the tanks opened, Drake and Milton would leave the planet. Each- copy of Carp would awaken in a biotank that was already dissolving around it. Each copy contained genetic information that would guide it to Carp’s location, together with general data about Graybill. After Drake and Merlin had been transferred to headquarters, the mother vessel would remain high above the surface to monitor activity on the planet below for the indefinite future.

Drake heard a sound at the open door of the station. If Milton were finished already, there was no reason they should not leave at once. He knew that his own wish, to stay long enough to make sure that the copies were delivered safely from the tanks, was unnecessary and even dangerous. As soon as they could go, they must leave.

He stood up. As he did so, Carp entered. Drake had no sense of rapid movement, but suddenly he was back in his chair and Carp was leaning over him. A bristly forearm across his throat held him in position, barely allowing him to breathe.

Dark eyes stared into his. They were all pupil, round and black and infinitely deep. Drake saw in them his own folly and stupidity, level after level of it. He had been crazy to think he could play God, devising a superior warrior that would help to battle the Shiva. If he failed, he failed, and the attempt was simply futile. But success was far worse. Why would such a being wait to fight the Shiva, when humans were so close to hand? What madness had led Drake to believe that such a creature, once brought into existence, could be controlled and confined?

A hundred stories, as old as history, told what happened when a man summoned forces he could not master.

And, the final folly. Why had he allowed Milton to go alone to retrieve the flier? If anyone went alone, it should have been Drake himself. He did not know what Carp had done to persuade or trick Milton, or even if Milton still existed. It did not matter.

“I’m sorry.” The pressure on his throat was great, and he could barely utter the words. Carp’s hands changed their position on his neck and began to twist.

Drake knew that he was going to die, and it would not be of strangulation.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered again, as the turning force increased. Sorry that I did this to you, bringing you into such a life, with such a purpose.

There was a different look in Carp’s eyes. Surprise, that a being who was about to be killed did not resist? Surprise at Drake’s words, which surely Carp did not understand? Or a puzzled wonderment, as Carp, like Drake, stared into another’s eyes and recognized part of himself?

But another presence lay within Carp; a cold, remorseless agent that could admit neither reason nor mercy. Like the Snarks, Carp killed because he had no choice. He killed because he had to kill.

Sorry. No words could come from Drake’s throat. His neck was wrenched around to a point where the cervical vertebrae were ready to splinter and snap. Sorry for what I did to you. And for what I must now do to you.

Drake had been foolish, but he had not been finally and terminally foolish. The orbiting spacecraft was monitoring everything that happened to him. Certain safeguards were still in position.

Drake felt the bones of his neck breaking. His last moment of darkened vision showed Carp’s face, puzzled and alert. Carp was aware that something new was happening, something beyond his control. Drake’s final sensation was the onset of dissolution. The hands that gripped his throat, like Drake himself, seemed to weaken and crumble.

Drake’s death provided the signal. Within him, within Carp’s body, within the station, within all the biotanks, within the fliers, within every human presence or artifact on Graybill, the changes began. Molecular bonds lost their hold.

In the final moments, Carp released Drake’s broken body and dropped it to the ground. He stood upright and motionless, feeling within himself the chaos of death. His final howl, the first sound that he had ever uttered, was a cry of anger. As he fell, he raged at the injustice of a universe that created a perfect fighting machine, then destroyed it before it had a chance to fulfill its destiny.

Chapter 21

“Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death.”

Drake hung in open space, six light-hours from the nearest star. Mel Bradley was at his side. While Drake would have been quite willing to receive a report and a display in the War Room, Mel insisted that he see this at firsthand.

Drake knew exactly where he was: out on the far side of the Galaxy, a safe distance from the spreading Silent Zone controlled (or destroyed) by the Shiva. The nearest star of the Zone was about sixty light-years away.

He was less sure of what he was. He had been transmitted here at superluminal speed, but not to any recognizable form of embodiment. He could maneuver in space and look in any direction, but he was unaware of the nature of his body.

“You’d have to ask Cass Leemu about that,” Mel said. He seemed unconcerned, his attention elsewhere. “It’s something she dreamed up.”

“Are we made of plasma?” Drake turned his own attention inward and saw nothing.

“Not the usual sort. We’re an assembly of Bose-Einstein Condensates. Cass says a BEC assembly has two great advantages. When we’re done we’ll be transmitted back without modification.”

“What’s the second advantage?”

Mel had no way to grin, but he radiated a wolfish sense of glee. “If something goes wrong, Cass assured me that dissolution from a BEC form is painless. Of course, she’s never tried it. Makes you think of the old preachers, talking about the delights of heaven or the torments of hell after you die. I always wanted to ask them, Did you die? How do you know what happens if you haven’t tried it for yourself?”

Drake was listening, but with only half an ear. He was looking outward again. Mel had said that something was ready to begin. Drake had very little idea as to what would happen next.

Partly that was Mel’s doing. He was perfect as the person to develop new offensive weapons, but he was also as awkward and cross-minded and independent as ever, wanting to do things in his own way. And partly it was Drake’s doing. He had been learning over the millennia that either you learned to delegate or you drowned in details. Worse than that, if you were involved in the process, you lost the power to be objective about the outcome. It was Drake’s job to review what Mel had done, then either approve or veto the next step.

But it was hard. The urge to meddle was deep-rooted in humans.

The nearby star was a white FO type, like the blazing giant Canopus that had troubled Drake so many aeons ago. From this distance it showed a definite disk, slightly smaller and whiter than the Sun as seen from Earth. Drake could see a slight asymmetry. A straight line had been ruled across the left-hand limb. Beyond that line, but within the star’s imagined circle, he could detect faint and scattered points of light. They were other stars.

“The caesura?”

Mel said, “You’re looking at it. It’s started.” Even he seemed subdued. The star they were watching might seem small from this distance, but it was thirty million miles across.

And it was being eaten. The dividing line was moving steadily to the right. Drake stared hard at the remaining portion of the star. It seemed unaffected, untouched.

“Are you sure it’s really happening, Mel? If the caesura is sending part of the star to another universe, why isn’t the rest of it in turmoil? Unless somehow the gravitational effect is left behind…”

“According to Cass, it’s not. The whole thing goes — mass, matter, gravitational and magnetic fields, everything. We verified that on the small tests of asteroids and planets. I see no reason to think she’s wrong this time.”

“So why isn’t there total chaos around the star?”

“Cheshire Cat effect. Cass doesn’t call it that — she uses a string of Science gibberish. But there’s a time lag before the field stresses disappear from our universe. It’s long enough to keep the star intact as it moves into the caesura. If there were colonies on the planets around the star — there aren’t, of course, they were moved long ago — and if the caesura hadn’t swallowed them, the colonies would see the star vanish but measure its residual gravitational field. That fades smoothly away over an eight-hour period.”

“Suppose the caesura moves slowly, and takes more than eight hours?”

“Then the part of the star that hasn’t been absorbed will collapse. If half of it is left behind, you’ll get an explosion with as much energy as a supernova. The nice thing is that this can be done with any type of star, and you can do it when you choose. And by picking the right caesura geometry you can beam the emitted energy in a particular direction. You can keep the beam collimated, so it doesn’t spread much over interstellar distances. Intergalactic, either, if you take extra care. And there’s your weapon.”

A weapon, indeed. The ultimate weapon. Drake stared at the doomed star, reduced now to a mere sliver of brilliance. Only a thin sector of the right-hand side remained. Then he turned to look outward, toward the galactic edge. The stars blazed there, undiminished, but they were silent. Uncommunicating, controlled by the Shiva.

He knew now the power that lay within his hands. His own idea had been to use the caesuras to create a no-man’s-land, an empty zone on the edge of Shiva territory. Even if the Shiva could cross that firebreak, the time it took would tell humans something more about the manner and speed of Shiva movement.

Now Mel was pointing out that they could do much more.

Pick a target star in the Silent Zone. Choose any planetless and expendable star in this region, or any other convenient place in the Galaxy. Create a caesura of the right dimensions and geometry.

Now if you moved the caesura to engulf your chosen star at the right speed, a tongue of energy from the stellar collapse would be thrown out into space. It would travel at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. When it reached the target star, any planets orbiting that star would become burned and lifeless cinders. The star’s outer layers on one side would be stripped off. There was a chance that the star itself would explode.

There were more than enough available stars in the human sector of the Galaxy for a one-on-one matching with stars in the Silent Zone. The Shiva, whatever they were, could be destroyed.

Whatever they were. That was the trouble. It was easy to examine the pattern by which the Shiva had entered and spread through the Galaxy from outside, and conclude from the long silence of the old human colonies that the Shiva were ruthless destroyers, inimical to anything other than their own kind.

And hence to propose the old human solution, stated by Rome but surely far older: Shiva delenda est; “the Shiva must be destroyed.”

Conclusion was not the same as proof. Suppose that the colonies throughout the Silent Zone still survived? Suppose there was some other reason for their failure to speak? The existence of the Shiva and the silence of the colonies were not the elements of a syllogism. They did not add up to a proof that the colonies no longer existed.

Drake wondered just what it would take to persuade him of that. Was he proving that the composites were wrong, when they called him back to consciousness? Maybe he was like them, lacking the resolve to do what had to be done.

He looked again at the sky, which now showed nothing at all where star and caesura had been. He turned to Mel Bradley.

“What happens to the caesura when it has done its work?”

“It just sits there, a permanent feature of space-time with zero associated mass-energy. It will never decay or go away. Don’t worry, though. I asked Cass Leemu the same question. Unless it’s activated in the right way it won’t absorb anything else. There’s no danger that the caesuras will keep going and swallow up the universe.”

“That wasn’t what I was thinking. I was wondering if a caesura could go on and eat up another star.”

“Any number. So far as we can tell there’s no limit to how much matter or energy you can put into a caesura and kick right out of the universe. But rather than move one caesura all over the place, it’s easier to make another one. Cass and I have the technique down cold.

We can make one for each star in the Galaxy — if you want us to.”

There was an implied suggestion behind Mel’s words. Which means we could make one for each star in the Silent Zone, if you wanted us to, and have plenty of the Galaxy left afterward.

It was a solution, but one that Drake could not use. Not yet. Someday, maybe, when he had exhausted every other hope, or when absolute proof was produced to show that the Shiva were the destroyers that they seemed to be. But for the moment…

“Stay here. Make as many of the caesuras as you need for the firebreak. As soon as all the colonies are relocated to a safe region, remove the stars and get the break in position.”

“Very good.” Mel sounded disappointed. “And how should I use the caesuras, fast or slow?”

“Fast enough to avoid the problem of stellar collapse.”

“If you say so. And the Silent Zone?”

“Stays silent, and untouched.” Drake looked one last time toward the outer edge of the Galaxy, knowing that colonies were disappearing from the human community as he watched. He felt Mel Bradley’s disapproval, weighted by the thoughts of hundreds of trillions of other composites across space.

“I intend to do something else about the Silent Zone,” Drake continued. “You can start the return transmission any time. As soon as I’m back at headquarters I’m going to try a new approach.”

It was one of the rare occasions when the thought of his own dissolution was preferable to the idea of what he had to do next. Dying once was not so bad. Everybody did it eventually, and it was part of your personal future even if you didn’t know how or when.

Dying a billion times was less appealing.

The location of every lost world was well known. Drake had chosen one of the most recently silenced, vanished from the human community since the time of his own involvement.

He and Tom Lambert were on board a probe ship, downloaded to an inorganic form that shared the ship’s eyes, ears, and communications unit.

Tom had taken charge of the ship’s drive. “According to the records for other similar places,” he said, “we’re approaching the danger zone. That’s the planet ahead.”

They stared in silence at the image of a peaceful world. It was a look-alike for another planet about three hundred light-years away: same K-type primary; mass, size, orbital parameters and axial tilt within a few percent; atmosphere modified very slightly, if at all, to an Earth analog. Both worlds had been colonized by a human association of organic and inorganic forms within two million years of each other. Here were sister planets, celestial twins with one difference: this world, Argentil, after billions of years of active presence in the human community, had dropped all contact and refused to respond to any signals.

Tom finally broke the silence. “Do you want to hold our distance?”

“Everything we see is being sent back to headquarters?”

“Everything.”

“Let’s hold our position for one full Argentil day, and make sure we’ve seen everything that’s down there. Then we’ll go closer.”

Drake suspected they had already seen all they were going to. Whatever the Shiva had done to this planet, they had not destroyed it or made it uninhabitable for humans. Changes had taken place in Argentil, particularly an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapor, but those could be the result of natural long-term climatic changes. They could just as well be the work of humans. Either way, the planet was still comfortably habitable.

They were hovering far off on the sunward side. As the world turned slowly beneath the ship, Drake suddenly imagined himself with Ana, restored to human body form, strolling unsuited and bareheaded among the dark-green forest lands of Argentil.

The thought came as a shock. Ana had been absent from his mind for a long time. Once he would have sworn that could not happen, that no hour could pass in which he did not think about her.

“All right, Tom.” Drake had to act. His mind felt oddly unbalanced. Maybe he had watched Argentil for too long. “Let’s go. Take us closer. Take us all the way down to a landing.”

How could he not be thinking constantly about Ana, when she was the whole reason that he was wandering here on the outer rim of the Galaxy?

He heard Tom screaming, but his own mind was far away. He was not seeing Argentil as the ship closed in for its final approach pattern. When the fusion fires rose from the surface to vaporize the descending ship, he saw only Ana. She was standing before him, telling him not to worry: they would still enjoy the future together, when all these events were nothing but a remote blip on the distant horizon of time.

The ship’s communications unit was not controlled by Drake’s wandering consciousness. A brief final message, triggered by the attack, went as an S-wave signal back to headquarters: it said that this ship, like so many others, was being destroyed — by a system sent to Argentil to defend the planet from the Shiva.

One more attempt. After how many?

Drake had lost count.

He studied the screens. It was information of a sort, even though it only confirmed what he already knew.

Where a giant artificial colony had once floated in free space, the sensors now showed nothing at all. However, the outer layers of the nearest star, only four light-minutes away, revealed subtle changes in its spectrum. There were more metal absorption lines than had been shown in the old records. And a nearby planet, which had once supported a human colony, was silent but apparently untouched.

It seemed as though the Shiva destroyed free-space colonies, while leaving the planets that they conquered able to support life. Drake pondered that fact as his lead ship turned cautiously toward the planet. Instead of Tom Lambert accompanying him, Drake had been downloaded to both ships. His two electronic versions had decided on a strategy on the way out from headquarters. Ship combinations had been sent out before, without success. After a million failed attempts he no longer hoped for definitive answers. He would settle for some small additional scrap of information.

When the first ship was within a few light-seconds of the planet, the second one released a tiny pod. It lacked a propulsion system, but it contained miniature sensors, an uploaded copy of Drake, and a low-data-rate transmitter.

The pod hung silent and motionless in space, while Drake on board it watched the approach of the two main ships to the planet. The first one vanished in a haze of high-energy particles and radiation. The second turned to flee, but a rolling torus of fire arrowed to it from the place where the other ship had been destroyed.

Drake reached a conclusion: the transmission link was an Achilles’ heel. The second ship should have been at a safe distance, but after the Shiva had killed the first ship they had been able to follow the tiny pulses of communication between the two.

It was another crumb of information about the Shiva. It told him that he had to be ultracautious in his own transmission. He began to send data out, warily and slowly, varying the strength and direction of the signal. Thousands of receiving stations, all over the Galaxy, would each receive a disconnected nugget of information. When he was finished, headquarters would face the task of time-ordering the sequence of weak signals, allowing for travel times, and collating everything to a single message.

Drake sent the pulses out a thousand times, varying the order of the signal destinations. By the time that he was finished, twelve thousand years had passed and he had drifted far from the star where the ships had died.

He had no propulsion system. Even now, he dared not risk a rescue signal.

They also serve who only stand and wait.

He waited. For another one hundred and forty thousand interminable years, he waited. The pod contained minimal computing facilities and no other distractions. There was nothing for him to do.

At last he gave the internal command to turn off all systems within the pod.

“All systems?” The pod’s intelligence was limited, but sufficient to follow the implications of the command.

“That is my instruction.”

“I am sorry, but I am unable to perform that command.”

“I see. Very well. Give me override.”

“That is permitted.”

Final authority for pod operations was turned over to Drake.

He switched off all systems; was erased; became nothing.

Chapter 22

“Her lips were red, her looks were free,

Her locks were yellow as gold;

Her skin was white as leprosy,

The nightmare Life-in-Death was she,

Who thicks man’s blood with cold.”

It wasn’t working. Drake decided that a smarter man than he would have realized the truth long ago. With all their efforts, they had learned very little.

The most tangible piece of information had been provided by Mel Bradley: the rate of spread of the Shiva zone of influence was between one-half and three kilometers a second. In other words, the Shiva domain expanded across one light-year of space in between one hundred thousand and six hundred thousand Earth years. That had its own implications. The firebreak that Mel had made with the help of the caesuras was forty light-years thick. It had taken four million years before a world was lost on the “safe” side of it; twenty-five million years later, every world along the whole great arc of the firebreak was gone.

The other thing, pointed out by Cass Leemu, was more peculiar: the Shiva apparently spread faster through regions where humans had colonies. Logic said it ought to be the other way round, that the resistance of a colony ought to slow the Shiva. Instead, it speeded them up. A policy of flight, leaving a world before the Shiva were predicted to arrive, had proved the best defense for other colonies.

And that was it; the sum total of what they had learned, in fifty million years of effort and millions of star systems lost. The good news, if that was the word for it, was that it would take a few billion more years before the entire galaxy became part of the Silent Zone.

Drake wondered what to suggest next to the composites. That humanity, in all its forms, should flee to another galaxy?

Universal flight didn’t seem feasible, even if it was psychologically acceptable.

He turned his total attention to a single question: Was there anything, anything at all, that they had not tried? He could think of just one thing. They had sent specially trained colonies to worlds that in the next centuries or millennia were candidates to fall to the Shiva. It had been done with single organic entities, with inorganics, and with composites, and always with the same results: the colonies reported that everything was all right, that they were doing fine, no problems. Then one day they fell silent.

But here was the oddity: distant worlds were not affected. The Shiva influence was a local effect. If there was a way to be close enough to observe a world as it was lost, yet somehow far enough away that the observer would not be swallowed up in silence, then humanity might learn something new.

That prompted another thought: Could it be that they were not going early enough to the endangered worlds? Suppose there were long-term changes, subtle warnings of the coming of the Shiva, that Drake’s observers did not

catch because they had not lived long enough on the planet.

What sort of indicators were plausible? He couldn’t say. Ice ages, variation in length of seasons, movement of polar caps, polarity reversal of magnetic fields, earthquakes, modified physiology of individuals at the cell level, homeostatic shift — it could be any or all of them. Despite all his studies, he was not, and would never be, a scientist.

But he could think of a way to test his idea. Embody someone in a long-lived form. Make thousands of copies of him, organic or inorganic. Send a copy to each world, long before the Shiva were expected there. Ask each one to wait, observe, and prepare. Tell him to be patient. Tell him to report back any anomaly, no matter how small.

Drake reached one more conclusion. He had been thinking “him,” and it was not hard to see why. How could he ask anyone else to endure an interminable wait, especially one likely to end with final extinction?

It was not some indefinite “him.” It was Drake.

It could be Drake and only Drake. He had to be the one. He would prepare, and he would send copies of himself. He would also be at headquarters and monitor every incoming message. And one day, before the whole galaxy was silenced, perhaps the Drake-that-goes and the Drake-that-stays would learn something useful.

And one other thing must be done. A certain crucial piece of information must be withheld from any copy of Drake who descended to each planet.

He would consult Cass to find out just how to do that.

Drake splayed his feet on the marshy surface and stared up for a last sight of the spacecraft. It was difficult, not only because the ship was dwindling in apparent size, but because as it rose higher the rate of motion across the sky decreased. Drake was embodied in a native form known as a mander. Its eyes were like a frog’s eyes, good at seeing rapidly moving objects, less effective on anything that stayed in one position.

One final glimpse, and then the ship was gone. Human vision might follow it still, but Drake could not. It did not matter. He knew where it was and where it would remain, far beyond the atmosphere in a polar observation orbit.

He looked around. This planet, Lukoris, was his new home. He had better get used to it, because he was going to be here for a long time. Half a million years did not sound like much — if you said it fast. From three to five hundred thousand years were likely to elapse before the Shiva arrived. Half a million years of waiting, before this world became part of the expanding Silent Zone.

The first thing was to understand and feel at home in his own body. He had been animated less than ten minutes ago, as the ship was preparing to leave. Drake examined the mander’s physiology with a fair amount of curiosity. He was supposed to live like this, awake or dormant, for a thousand human lifetimes. According to the composites this body would never age or wear out. Even if he were to remain continuously conscious, which was not his plan, the mander would be as healthy and limber in a million years as it was that day.

How could that be? But perhaps a better question was, why not? Why did organisms age at all?

The answer had been discovered, long, long ago, and soon followed by the longevity protocols. Death by aging was a far-off anachronism. But none of that explained, in a way that Drake could understand, why a being aged, or how current science could hold off old age indefinitely.

It was like much of science: important, useful, and totally mysterious.

Drake returned to the inspection of his body. This was, according to alien specialist Milton, the closest form to human on the whole planet. It was hard to believe.

Drake examined the mander’s feet. They were large and webbed. The legs above them were long and powerfully muscled, ideal for long balanced leaps. If it swims like a frog, and jumps like a frog, and sees like a frog…

He stuck out one of his two tongues. It was short and not sticky or club ended. He had already known that, intellectually, but he wanted reassurance.

In other respects the mander body was not at all froglike. His skin was dry and soft to the touch, covered with material like feathery mole fur. His two mouths were not in his head, where the sense organs were clustered, but one on each side of the torso beneath the breathing apertures. His brain was centered between them, deep in the interior of his chest and protected by rings of bony plates. Nothing could reach it that would not kill him first.

His embodiment was not, according to Milton, the most intelligent life-form on the planet Lukoris. That position was claimed by a monstrous flying predator known as a sphexbat, a creature that bordered on self-awareness and rode the permanent thermals around Lukoris’s crags and vertical precipices, landing neither to feed nor breed. The sphexbat’s young developed within the body cavity of the parent until one day they were ejected, to fly or to fall to their deaths. Lukoris’s mutation rate was high. The survival odds for infant sphexbats were no better than 30 percent.

Drake was interested in the animals mainly because they were interested in him — manders formed one of the sphexbat’s preferred forms of food. An immortal body was immortal only against aging. It could still be killed. He, of course, could be reembodied, but death by sphexbat sounded unusually unpleasant. The sphexbats did not swoop down on their prey and carry it off, like the Earth raptors. First they made a low-level run across the surface, blowing a fine cloud of neurotoxic vapor from glands at the base of their wings. Vegetation cover was not enough protection. Any mander inhaling the fog did not die, but it felt the urge to crawl into the open and there became paralyzed. The sphexbat returning at the end of the day for its second run found the prey alive and conscious but unable to move. The victim was scooped up from the surface and consumed at leisure. The sphexbats maintained live larders on high rock ledges, and a mander — or Drake — might wait there awake and immobilized for many days.

Danger from sphexbat attack was a potential problem on the surface, but that’s not where Drake intended to spend most of his time. No one could live alone and conscious for a million years, in his own body or any other, and remain sane. Drake would mostly be at the bottom of the swamp with the other manders, ten meters down, dormant and safe from attack. His species estivated regularly.

Events on the surface would not be ignored. A network of instruments would record data until Drake’s return to the surface. That information supplemented the observations of the orbiting ship.

Drake expected to return to the surface for Lukoris’s winter, but not every time. Once every hundred or thousand years he would be above ground for a few months, to check the instruments and to conduct a planetary survey. Changes that occurred too slowly to be noticed in real time might jump out at him if he saw the planet as a series of snapshots, glimpses caught at widely separated intervals.

First, though, he needed a baseline from which to measure change. He must understand Lukoris in all its parts. He would travel around the world and observe as he had never observed before.

Drake sighed, and said to himself, Why bother? Why am I doing this?

But he knew the answer to that. He set to work.

Prior to Drake’s arrival, Lukoris had been the home of a thriving colony for hundreds of millions of Earth years. When the great amalgam of panic-stricken humans, computers, composites, and all their trappings fled the path of the Shiva, they did not take everything. Drake was the inheritor of a whole planet and of the former colony’s technology.

That technology was useful in Drake’s own survey of Lukoris. The planetwide data net showed a divided world of extreme horizontals and verticals, of sluggish seas and swamps encircling near-vertical mountain ranges. The mander body could not survive the rarefied air of the highest peaks without equipment, but Drake had to know what was going on there. Who could say where and in what form the Shiva might choose to appear?

He spent the first long winter roaming the planet. In person and vicariously with the help of miniature remote sensing units, he traveled the three-thousand mile ice river in the south, visited the tropics where summer water boiled to steam and only sulfur-loving bacteria could survive, and surveyed the northern badlands where the sphexbats were evolving their first primitive art, drawing stylized animals in blood on sheer rock faces. The sphexbats circled about his equipment. They were cautious and they did not attack at once, but they called to each other constantly in what was clearly a developing language.

Drake stored every image and sound and smell in his body’s augmented memory. He omitted nothing, and he did not hurry. There was plenty of time. If he missed something this winter, there would be a thousand more chances to pick it up.

Finally it was time for the first estivation.

His body started the process automatically, exuding a transparent liquid that hardened into a tough semi-permeable membrane. Small amounts of oxygen and water could be imported, and waste products expelled. As the shell solidified, Drake’s body began to dig. Beyond his conscious control it dived and tunneled its way through a thick green ooze that thickened steadily with depth.

The process was natural to the mander, but not to the consciousness trapped within it. Drake felt that he was

drowning in total darkness, surrounded by viscous fluid that thwarted any effort to save himself.

When it finally became clear that he was not drowning, that the body he inhabited could take prolonged immersion in its stride, he was not much comforted. This was not the way he had imagined his future: trapped in a swamp, in an alien body, the single human intelligence within many light-years with nothing to look forward to but solitude. And he must go through this many thousands of times.

His body was beginning to turn off, powering down for the long night. Drake fought against it, trying to dictate the course of his dreams. He didn’t want to be here. He wanted to fight his way back to the surface, to signal the watching ship to pick him up. He wanted to go home to Earth. He wanted time turned back, to the happy days of youth and love and music.

He wanted Ana…

But that, of course, was why he was here. That was why it was right for him to be here. He was on Lukoris so that he could, someday, be with Ana again.

Someday I will be with Ana again.

As his body cut back the oxygen supply to the brain, Drake clung to that thought. He curled into a ball and went contentedly to sleep.

The pulse of Lukoris’s seasons was slower than Earth’s. With little tilt to the axis of rotation, summer and winter were dictated only by the planet’s movement along its twenty-year eccentric elliptic orbit.

Drake’s modified body had been programmed to sleep through fifty of those long cycles. Awakening at last one early winter, he crawled from the depths and waited for his shell to crack. When it had crumbled enough to give him freedom of movement, he tried to begin his inspection. His mander body would not let him do it. It insisted that he eat and drink, ravenously, breaking an eight-hundred-year fast. Only after that was he allowed to turn his attention to Lukoris.

At once he thought that he saw changes. The instruments assured him that it was illusion. The variations he seemed to observe were purely psychological. He was adapting to the mander body, and as he did so Lukoris’s bottle-green swamps and flame-colored precipices became beautiful to him.

It confirmed the wisdom of coming here long before any Shiva influence might be expected. The adaptation was a transient effect, something that would settle down after the first few estivations.

He continued his careful monitoring and recording of plant and animal populations, diurnal temperature variations, surface and subsurface geology, solar radiation levels, and ten thousand other variables. All measurements went up to the orbiting ship. From there they were transmitted by S-wave data link to headquarters, half a galaxy away.

What was important? Drake did not know. Maybe everything, maybe nothing.

There was one unplanned and unpleasant incident, when he became too interested in a threadlike plant that wove great mats on the swampy surface and lured big animals there. When the threads broke, apparently by intention and all at once, the animal sank into the ooze to die and provided nutrients. Drake was not heavy enough to be at risk; but he was far from any cover when the sphexbat came sweeping on its first run of the day.

It saw him and changed course. A cloud of white vapor came drifting toward him as it passed overhead. The only possible escape route was downward. Drake plunged headfirst into the ooze with his mouths and eyes tightly closed, wondering if this was merely a different way of dying. It was still midwinter, much too early in the year for the mander to estivate.

The slime of the swamp was cool on his skin. After a few minutes Drake realized that he was not suffocating. His body could absorb enough oxygen through its epidermis to keep him alive, provided that he did not move much.

He waited for seven hours, almost half a Lukoris day. The neurotoxin cloud must be given enough time to be absorbed into the swamp, or to dissociate chemically in the presence of sunlight.

When he wriggled back to the surface through the sucking ooze, the sphexbat was right in the middle of its collection run and only a couple of kilometers away. It swooped noiselessly toward Drake on twenty-meter pinions, the capture scoop already open for pickup. It was within thirty meters when it saw that Drake was upright and moving, rather than lying immobile on the mat of the swamp. Twin maws hooted a two-tone call of surprise and rage. The sphexbat banked and veered away.

Ten seconds later, at a higher altitude, it returned to pass immediately overhead. A pair of black eyes ahead of the scoop stared right down at Drake.

What would it tell its fellows on its return to the high cliffs? That some variant mander had arisen, with a new technique for self-defense?

Maybe, in Lukoris’s far future, oral history around a sphexbat tribal fire would tell of a time when a strange creature had appeared on the surface, invulnerable to the paralyzing neurotoxin on which all hunting depended.

Drake told himself that he was fantasizing. Lukoris did not have a far future that was continuous with the past and the present. The arrival of the Shiva would be a singular point on the time line, a moment when future and past were discontinuously connected.

He returned to his careful survey of Lukoris in all its aspects.

On and on.

Winters continued, one after another after another, until Drake no longer saw them in his mind as unique events but as a long continuum of insignificant change. If summers seemed more memorable, it was only because he remained awake more rarely. They formed unpleasant data points, when most of Lukoris experienced conditions of heat and dryness that the mander body could scarcely tolerate. Drake felt that he had to supplement the recording instruments on the surface and in orbit by ground surveys in summer as well as winter, but it was not easy. The changes made to the mander body could keep it awake, but at some level it knew a deeper truth. As temperatures rose, every cell of his body longed to be ten meters belowground, at rest in the cool and quiet dark.

On and on.

Year after long year, winter after winter, summer after summer. The possible arrival of the Shiva took on the overtones of ancient myth. In his mind the final confrontation became Armageddon, Ragnarok, Dies Irae, the Fimbulwinter, the Last Trumpet. It would never happen. They would never come.

Until, suddenly, they did.

Drake rose from his dark hiding place one morning, as he had emerged five hundred or a thousand times before. The rains had ended and the air was pleasantly cool. Even before his protective shell was gone, he knew there was a difference.

Not just a single, minor change, but changes everywhere.

He looked up. The late-summer sky of Lukoris was usually a smudged yellow. Today it was pristine blue, barred with a delicate herring-bone pattern of pink and white clouds. The air was clear, and in the near distance Drake could see hills. They were not vertiginous heights that rose sheer from the encircling plain, but gentle slopes dappled with light green vegetation and small copses of rough-barked trees.

There had never been trees on Lukoris. Only low-growing plants covered the endless swamp and formed dense mats on dark watery flats.

Swamp.

Then where was the feel of cool ooze?

Drake looked down. He should be seeing algal cover and swamp pads, not the short, springy grass and clumps of blue wildflowers that stretched in front of his feet. And those feet should be wide and gray and webbed, not pink and five toed.

Drake breathed deep. He smelled lavender and thyme and roses.

He looked up and saw someone walking to him across the springy carpet of grass. Her hair shone gold in the sunlight, and she moved with the old familiar grace of perfect health. She did not speak, but her red lips smiled a greeting. When she moved to embrace him he knew just where he was.

His long search was over. He was in Paradise, and the only person that he had ever needed or wanted was here with him to share it.

The mander body had been modified in ways deliberately withheld from Drake. During all his days and years on

Lukoris, a continuous report of his condition and actions had been beamed without his knowledge from the augmented memory module of his mander brain, up to the orbiting ship and thence to far-off headquarters.

When the anomalous behavior began on the surface, the copy of Drake that existed in electronic form on the ship did not pause for analysis or explanations. He did not try to send out a superluminal signal, which had failed so often with the Shiva in the past. Instead, he activated the caesura.

It had stood near the ship, prepared and waiting for this moment, for more than half a million years. Into the caesura, one after another, went ten million separate copies of every observation ever made of Lukoris, right up to the final second.

The whole ship and its copy of Drake would go into the caesura also. It was almost unbearably tempting to wait and try to learn what had happened — Drake seemed to be down there on the surface of Lukoris with Ana, miraculously returned to him.

But waiting was too dangerous. Drake in orbit had to assume that the Shiva would soon know about and be able to use anything that was left behind, just as they had used other planetary defenses against humanity. He and the ship must follow the data packets. Immediately after that the caesura itself would close.

In the milliseconds before the ship entered the caesura, Drake had an idea as to what the Shiva might be and do. There was no time to attempt another message. All he could hope was that Drake Merlin back at headquarters would draw the same conclusion.

Ten million packets of data had left the ship — moving not into space, where they might be intercepted, but out of space completely. Not even the Shiva should be able to track something through a caesura or prevent its passage.

Drake knew the odds. They had been calculated by the composites billions of years ago. There was one chance in 969,119 that any single data packet would reach its destination at headquarters. There was the same small chance that the ship and Drake himself would arrive there. In all other cases, close to certainty, Drake would vanish completely from the universe and experience death in some unpredictable way.

But ten million independent packages of information about events on Lukoris had been sent into the caesura. That changed the overall odds completely. The chance that one or more of them would reach headquarters was good: in fact, there was only a chance of one in thirty thousand that no data packet at all would make it home.

Those were acceptable odds. Certainty would have been nicer; but certainties in the universe were rare.

Drake waited, calm and surprisingly content, for the caesura to swallow up the ship and send him with it into oblivion.

Chapter 23

“There’s trouble in the wind, my boys,

There’s trouble in the wind.

Oh, it’s please to walk in front, sir,

When there’s trouble in the wind.”

At last.

After hundreds of millions of years and a hundred billion tries, Drake and his team had something to work with.

Of course, the something made little sense. The group in the War Room was puzzling over eight copies of data records, all identical, that had been delivered through the caesura.

“It’s perfectly consistent with the statistics,” Cass Leemu pointed out. “There was a ten percent chance that we’d get

exactly eight copies, but anywhere between six and fourteen is high probability. I’m afraid there’s no sign of the ship that was orbiting Lukoris.”

She did not need to say “the ship with Drake on board.”

“The statistics may make sense.” Tom Lambert was studying one of the displays. “But nothing else does. Look at this.”

The record of the final minutes on Lukoris existed in two forms. One of them showed events as seen by the sensors scattered around the surface. The other was Drake’s own perception as received through the mander embodiment.

According to the surface sensors, Lukoris was much the same as it had been in the previous year; or, for that matter, the past half million. Swamps, broken by clumps of scrubby plant life, stretched away flat and dull to the horizon, where mile-high scarps of rock loomed skyward. The sky above them was the unchanging sulfurous yellow of late summer.

But Drake’s view…

“What is he seeing!” Milton said. “And what does he think he’s doing}”

They were looking through the mander’s eyes as it walked forward across a sward of healthy turf and spring flowers. Milton, who had never seen old Earth, was justifiably puzzled. But Drake, seated in the headquarters’ War Room, knew where he was. He was having trouble answering Milton, because he also guessed what was coming next.

The mander embodiment had become human in form. It was walking barefoot on the Sussex Downs, one of Drake and Ana’s favorite vacation spots. She had been standing by a hedgerow, admiring a thrush’s nest. Now she turned at Drake’s approach and smiled a greeting. Spontaneously, without a word, they embraced.

In that first ecstatic moment, Drake in the War Room forced himself to look across to the other display. The sensors showed the mander, unchanged in form, standing motionless before a foot-high bulbous plant with spiky silver leaves.

“Freeze!” Drake said urgently. And then, to the others, “You know the earlier records. Is that” — he indicated the little plant — “new to Lukoris, or to this region? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.”

“It appears to be new.” The others, using the power of their composites, could answer almost at once and simultaneously.

“But what is the significance?” Par Leon asked. “It is nothing but a plant.”

“I’m not sure. Look for more of them.”

That analysis was also finished almost before the command was given. All of the Galaxy’s computing power was available when Drake asked for it. With such resources the problem was trivial. Using the spiky-leaved plant as a template for a matching algorithm, the global database of Lukoris was scanned and analyzed, every day of every year since observations first began.

“They’re all over the place,” Cass said. “This size or smaller. But ten years ago there were none. They’ve all sprung up in the past few years. Do you think they are real?”

“I’m sure they are. It’s the other scene that’s a false reality.” Drake hated to say that. He wanted what he had seen to be true, and he found it almost impossible to keep his eyes away from the image of Ana. “I think the plant is able to create an illusion in the mind of an intelligent being.”

“Why intelligent?” Par Leon asked.

“Imagination needs intelligence.” Drake gestured again to the first display. The mander stood motionless before the plant, while other animals wandering the swampy surface apparently took no notice. “There must be a certain minimum awareness, a level of intelligence before a mind can be made to imagine something other than what it receives through its senses.”

“Like hypnotism,” Melissa said. “The subject sees what she is told is there.”

Mel Bradley scowled. “Hypnotized by a plant ?”

“Do you have a better explanation?” Drake zoomed in on the mander. “Look at me. Cass can probably suggest a

thousand ways in which an electromagnetic signal, or a scent containing the right chemicals, could affect the functioning of the brain. Remember, the plant doesn’t change Lukoris. It just persuades the subject to see an alternate reality.”

“But what reality?” Milton sounded confused. “It surely can’t impose its own reality on someone.”

“No.” It did not surprise Drake that he knew what was happening when the others did not. His understanding was exactly proportional to his pain.

“Not its reality,” he went on. ” Your reality. It allows you to see, and to imagine that you live in, the reality that you desire beyond any other.”

He, more than anyone else in the universe, understood the seductive power of that vision. He would give anything to be that other Drake, kissing Ana in the quiet countryside. It was the siren call of the Shiva: Stay with me, and receive your heart’s desire.

Drake tried to explain that to the others, but after a while he realized it was not working. They could not know the mind of the other Drake, and it was impossible for any of them to feel what he was feeling. They were merely asking more questions.

“How does it reach the planet in the first place?” Tom Lambert said.

“I don’t know.”

“Is that it, the whole thing?” said Mel Bradley. “You think the Shiva are nothing but little plants?”

“I don’t know.”

“And the planetary defense systems failing …”

“And their spreading between the stars, between the galaxies… How?”

“And moving more slowly where we didn’t have colonies…”

“And the failure of the lost colonies to send any sort of message…”

“I don’t know.” Drake was longing to terminate this meeting, so that he could enjoy the vicarious pleasure of Ana embracing his other self — even if it was nothing but illusion, he wanted it.

“You’re missing the point,” he, continued. “This doesn’t prove that some spiky little silver plant is all there is to the Shiva. It doesn’t tell us how the Shiva spread, or why. It doesn’t say what happens to a world after they reach it. It tells us little about the Shiva themselves. But we still have a reason to celebrate. We’ve had a breakthrough. For the first time ever, we’ve been present on a planet when the Shiva took over. We’ve sent back information about what happened.

“We don’t have an end. We barely have a beginning. Here’s what we must do next. We must install organic copies of me on every planet along the front of the Shiva’s spread.”

Drake paused, realizing what he had just said. Those copies were going to disappear, every one of them. He was going to vanish, a million times over. But now there was a hope that some of the embodiments would not die. He might be transported to a personal Paradise — a dream life, but a perfect dream from which the copies might never waken.

“We also,” he went on at last, “have to put arrays of independent sensors on every planet. We must install caesuras on or near each planet, ready to operate whenever a reality shift signals that the Shiva have appeared. We must install on a ship near the caesura the equipment to produce millions of identical copies of all data, with the equipment to feed those copies into the caesura at the first sign of trouble.”

Equipment. That was one way to describe it. But the equipment would include copies of himself — and these copies, unlike the ones down on the planetary surface, were surely doomed.

“And when we’ve done all that” — Drake’s gaze, beyond his control, was drawn back to the display; it showed his other self, still holding Ana in his arms — “when we’ve done all that, and we have recorded the information from a thousand or a million or ten million worlds, maybe we’ll get what we need. Maybe we’ll find a way to fight back.”

Breakthrough.

Drake had called it that, but it was the wrong word. No torrent of information flooded in from other worlds on the path of the Shiva expansion. No sudden insight explained everything.

What came was a slow dribble of isolated bits and pieces, an image here, a paradox there; confirmation of a hypothesis, a measurement of sizes and rates and masses, calculations of galactic geometry, the cross-correlation of events from a million worlds as they were absorbed into the Silent Zone.

Drake could not perform that analysis. It was far beyond him, calling for the combined analytical power of a trillion composites. All he could do was sit at headquarters and record the disappearance of each copy of his own self. There was always the possibility that a caesura would deliver a copy of Drake back to headquarters, along with the packets of acquired data; but it never happened.

Data collection and analysis continued; the arc of the Silent Zone spread its darkness farther across the face of the Galaxy; nothing seemed to change. But one day, a day that Drake saw as no different from any of the billion that preceded it, his assistants appeared un-summoned in the villa headquarters.

“Drake, we must talk.” Milton had been appointed as the spokesman. The Servitor’s physical form was the usual one, but now Drake detected a weariness and a discomfort, a gray translucency to the presence. The tangle of wires on the whisk broom were in constant agitation.

“I’m listening.” Drake looked them over, Cass and Milton and Tom, Melissa and Par Leon and Mel Bradley. They all displayed that same uneasiness. “Bad news?”

“Yes,” Milton said. “But not what you might be thinking. Every composite in the Galaxy has been in full superluminal connection for the past few days. We finally have an integrated picture of Shiva activities. It is an inference derived from many trillions of pieces of data, but we are convinced that it is a correct one.”

“That doesn’t sound like bad news. Quite the opposite.”

“In many ways you are right; but it introduces… complications. First, let me summarize for you our understanding of the nature and actions of the Shiva. Much of this you may already know or have guessed. Some of your original conclusions were, if I may suggest it, wrong.”

Milton paused, and Drake laughed.

“Don’t worry about hurting my feelings. I’ve been wrong more often than you can imagine.”

“But right more often than any other being in the Galaxy. Let me continue. The Shiva are living organisms, unlike any encountered before. They have four distinct phases to their life cycle. Two of those phases are capable of two different forms of reproduction. The first phase, which we will call the adult Shiva, is immobile and enormous — one full-grown specimen can measure two hundred kilometers across its base, and stretches high enough for its top to extend beyond the atmosphere of most planets. The adult is invulnerable to normal predator attack, because of its size, and also because it is protected by a second form. We will call this second form the warrior, although it acts aggressively only in defense of the adult. The warriors are one form of offspring of the adults.

“It is important to note that the adult, in spite of its size, can survive only in certain environments. Atmospheric oxygen and water vapor must lie within tight limits. Most worlds of the Galaxy do not come close to satisfying that requirement. We will come back to this question later.

“And one other point, perhaps an obvious one: an adult, because of its size, grows, lives, and dies on a single planet. No Shiva adult can ever travel to another world.

“But when they achieve full size, the adults can send another form of offspring out into space. There is a mystery here — the propagation mechanism is not something as simple as dehiscence, an explosive projection of seeds. However, let us use the analogy and call this phase a Shiva seed. The seed is tiny and light, nothing like the warrior, and once in space its movement is assisted by two factors: radiation pressure, pushing it away from the planet’s primary, and the galactic magnetic field. Originally, the seeds may have propagated only to other parts of the home world; but billions of years ago they became an interplanetary and an interstellar traveler; eventually, an intergalactic one. We do not know where the Shiva originated, but it was not in our galaxy.

“The Shiva seed is enormously tough and durable, able to survive extreme environments and a multimillion-year passage through space. There is another mystery which still waits an explanation: the seed motion is not mere random drift. Movement is preferentially toward other stellar systems. In the final stages, that implies movement against radiation pressure.

“Most Shiva seeds must end their lives on barren planets, or burn up as they fall into stars; but there are enormous numbers of them. Some small fraction will meet a world and drift down through the atmosphere to a surface on which they can transform to the next stage of the life cycle.

“This stage we will call the worker, though analogy with Earth’s social insects must not be carried too far. It would be just as good to call it a changer or a preparer. The worker, like the adult, is a sessile form incapable of movement. It is the plantlike entity that we saw long ago on Lukoris. Like the seeds, it is tough and robust. Workers thrive on worlds that would quickly kill an adult. They also propagate like plants, and they do so very fast.

“We have debated whether the worker or the adult should be considered the mature form of the Shiva, and decided that the question is meaningless. As in cryptogams, the ferns of Earth, two forms are alternating mature phases of a complex life cycle.

“Much more important, from the human point of view, is the worker’s other function. It is able, through a combination of generated fields and chemical diffusion, to affect the behavior of native animals on a planet. You have argued that only intelligent beings could be affected by the Shiva, since they alone are able to consider an alternate reality. It was then natural to conclude that the worker form of the Shiva must be intelligent.

“We now believe that those deductions are false. In our own galaxy, before the spread of humans, life developed on a billion worlds. Only five of that great multitude of forms achieved self-awareness. A life-form that relied on the presence of intelligence on every planet that it reached would surely fail. Moreover, the worker is not itself intelligent, and thus can have no concept of intelligence. Unable to move, it must somehow achieve its objective while remaining in one place. The objective is simple: the planet must be changed from its initial state to one in which an adult Shiva can thrive. Then, and only then, will the worker advance to its second form of breeding and produce not more workers, but new adults. Those will in turn grow, mature, and allow the Shiva to reach new worlds.

“The workers employ the native life-forms on a world as the unwitting agents for planetary change. Their breeding, their numbers, and their patterns of behavior alter under the workers’ control, to make the world suitable for adult Shiva habitation. Some native species will become extinct. Some will thrive, some will evolve to other forms. When the planet is ready, the adults begin their growth. The workers disappear. The life cycle begins again.”

Milton fell silent. The wiry head began to writhe more furiously than ever.

“That’s wonderful.” Drake wondered what was not being said. “Once you understand something, it’s much easier to stop it. The Shiva are vulnerable. We can destroy their seeds as they reach a planet, or kill the workers as soon as the plants appear. If I hear you right, humans don’t suffer their changed perception of reality until the workers begin to operate.”

“That is correct.”

“So let’s get going. There’s plenty of work to do.”

Milton sat silent, and at last Tom Lambert said, “A ton of work. But there are a few more things that we have to talk about. First, we’ve been thinking all the time of the Shiva as evil — as deliberate, calculating destroyers. That just isn’t true. There was no malice involved, no plan to achieve destruction. Changing human perceptions, even making the colonies use the defenses that we installed against us, was an accident. We believe that the adult, form of the Shiva possesses some kind of intelligence and self-awareness, but the workers do not. They were simply doing what all life-forms do, trying to ensure their own survival and propagation. In the case of humans, Shiva propagation required the acceptance of a false reality that justified human actions.”

“And, sooner or later, led to the human’s death.”

“True. But now that we know what’s going on, we may find many ways to stop the Shiva. Peaceful ways. There will be no more wholesale destruction of our planets or theirs; no more firebreaks, devastating whole arcs of the Galaxy; no more use of the caesuras, casting ships and intelligences and worlds beyond the bounds of space and time. And there will be no need for certain other things.”

And Drake, at last, saw what they were unwilling to tell him directly. “You mean, there will be no more need for me.”

“Yes. The service that you have performed for us is too great ever to be measured. We are eternally in your debt. When we thought that the Shiva were malicious and deliberately trying to destroy us, your presence and courage and mode of thinking were absolutely essential. Now, they are not. Of course, we would not suggest that you, or we, do anything at once. Many, many unknowns and potential difficulties remain. We hope that you will assist in their solution. But ultimately we see you as a hindrance to peaceful answers. You are too steeped in war, too much in favor

of the crudities of combat.” Tom Lambert ducked his head. “I’m sorry, Drake.”

“That’s all right.” There was no point in explaining that he was not aggressive, that his instincts had always been toward peace. They would not understand. He had operated as commander in chief for many hundreds of millions of years. So far as the composites were concerned, a militant Drake had been summoned from electronic darkness to fight a battle, to rid the universe of the threat of the Shiva. And when that threat passed, Drake would be useless. Worse than useless — he would be an embarrassment, a source of violence, a reminder of the ancient and cruel ancestry of humanity.

“You don’t need me now that the problem is solved and the war is ending, right? I understand, Tom. It’s all happened before.”

“It has?” Tom looked and sounded bewildered. “You have encountered a similar situation in the past?”

“Not me personally. But it’s as old as human history. Remember the Pied Piper, and Tommy Atkins?”

They did not, and he didn’t expect them to. There were blank looks on every face. Drake could imagine countless invisible composites, delving into fourth- and fifth-level storage, trying to make sense of his reference. Maybe they would find it; or maybe he alone held that particle of early human folklore. Either way, it didn’t matter. His own next step was clear.

“You say that you’re in my debt. I agree. So do something for me. Return me to electronic storage and let me remain dormant. Keep looking for new ways in which Ana might be restored to me. And wake me again only when you make progress.”

Drake anticipated no problem with his request. But again, he saw hesitation and embarrassment in the other’s eyes.

“What’s wrong this time? Come on, Tom, spit it out.”

“There is one more difficulty. You have always refused to become part of any composite.”

“I still do. You know why. I didn’t survive for eight billion years, just to lose focus now. I can’t afford to become part of a shared consciousness. I want to stay me. Think what shape you would be in if I’d chosen differently.”

“We appreciate that. We know that we cannot change your obsession. But what you ask is impossible. You already exist in multiple forms. As the spread of the Shiva is halted, many of those forms will survive. Someday, they will return.”

And of course, Tom was right. Drake had become accustomed to the idea that billion after billion copies of his personality had been created and sent as S-wave signals across the Galaxy. He knew that they had been embodied in native forms on a hundred million planets, and set to watch and listen on a billion ships along the Shiva frontier. Those innumerable versions of himself would be changing, absorbing new experiences, becoming quite different from the Drake Merlin who remained at headquarters.

He had learned to live with the idea that he was dying, daily, in endless different ways. What he had never considered was the time when an understanding of the Shiva was reached, and all the scattered copies were no longer doomed. As ways were discovered to deal with the Shiva, they would survive in increasing numbers.

“I get it. You can’t handle one of me. How do you hope to deal with a billion?”

“We fear that we cannot. We want to ask your help — again. Many of the returning minds will be changed, many will be seriously damaged. You are the only being in the whole universe who can understand and help them. We will promise you unlimited resources from us, anything that we have, in performing your task. We ask only that you should avoid contact with our composites.”

“You mean you want to lock me up, me and every version of me?”

“No. There would be no restriction of your freedom. You would travel as you choose, and act as you choose. The only condition that we ask is that there be a separation between us and you. You may find this ridiculous, but we fear your intensity — what is, quite literally, your single-mindedness in our universe of composites. If you agree, we promise in return continued research on the subject that most interests you: the return of Ana.”

“Has there been progress?” Drake had hardly thought to ask that question in a hundred million years.

“Nothing of immediate value. It should be possible to re-create Ana at the eschaton, when the universe approaches

final convergence. But that is far off. We promise to continue working on other possibilities, if you in turn will help us. What is your answer? Will you deal with the copies of Drake Merlin, returning in their broken billions from the Shiva frontier?”

What option was there? How could a man turn his back on his own self — especially on a damaged and troubled self?

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tos’t to me.”

He spoke more to himself than to the others, and their baffled faces showed that again they didn’t understand. Drake turned away. The composites were digging into the historical data banks, seeking a reference, wondering what he had just said.

He knew, even if they did not. He had agreed to do what they asked. The war with the Shiva might soon be ending, but his own most difficult task lay ahead.

Chapter 24 E pluribus unum

Trillions of bits, billions of pages; now it was all unnecessary. Drake surveyed the mass of storage that represented his private journal and reflected on a curious irony: The prospect of victory rendered his work irrelevant, as danger and defeat could not.

He had no cause to complain. He had known what was coming, the moment he said yes to Tom and the others in the War Room.

For all the years since first resurrection, he had kept strictly to himself. Originally it was because no one else understood his need or shared his quest for Ana. His solitude had seemed even more crucial when the Shiva appeared on the scene. His was the only consciousness in the Galaxy left over from humanity’s early days, and he dared not become close to any composite — certainly, he could not consider a merger with the webs. He had even refused to share the contents of their data banks.

His obstinacy had caused trouble, a billion times over, but he had felt that he had no choice. Inefficient as it was to rely on others for most of his information, he must do it that way. He had to remain aloof. Someone must make the hard decisions. Someone had to be willing to sacrifice humans and composites and whole planets. No one but Drake would do that, and he dared not risk any dilution of his own will.

Drake glanced again over the long record of events. The composites must think that he had no heart and no soul; certainly, they believed he had no imagination. They could not see how else he was able to send out countless versions of himself, to face an uncertain end on the dark borders of the Galaxy.

They knew nothing of the effort that it had taken. And why should they? He had not said anything to them. He had done it, and that was the important thing.

When the Shiva were ascendant, it had been a oneway process. Copies of him had gone out and never come back. But no longer. One week ago, the first copy had returned. He had returned.

The composites urged him to study that copy well before he attempted contact with it. They were worried because his returning self had been through what they felt was a “traumatic experience.” There were also, they warned, a hundred billion more like it on the way.

A traumatic experience? You might say so.

Drake had checked the background, and this case was probably typical. Downloaded and shipped out eight hundred thousand years ago, as a superluminal signal to a ship in permanent orbit about a planet of a faint star on the other side of the Galaxy. Taken down to the surface of that world and embodied in an enhanced alien life-form of increased

life expectancy. Left there to survive, endure, observe, and await the arrival of the Shiva.

Except that this one had been retrieved, without warning. The Shiva seeds were to land soon on its world. The composites were making special preparations there, as on a hundred million other planets, and they did not want an uncontrolled element disturbing their plans. They feared that this being, like the others that would be retrieved, might have “major instabilities.”

“Traumatic experience,” “study it well,” “major instabilities.” Bland, aseptic words.

Didn’t they understand that anyone left alone for a million years must have instabilities? Didn’t they realize that Drake had no need to study the returning copy, that he understood it perfectly already? That whatever came back from the other side of the Galaxy was not it. What came back was him, Drake Merlin.

A different him, certainly. That must be so, because the revenant had unique experiences. But it was Drake, nonetheless. And the composites were right about one thing: the returning Drake needed help.

He had stood apart from all others for so long, it was an ingrained habit. But how could he hold apart from himself?

He could not.

So, at last, Drake Merlin would become part of a composite. This, however, was going to be a unique composite — every element of it would also be Drake.

He had no idea how it would work out. The returning selves had been scattered far off through space and time. He had long ago lost count of their number. Some would be maimed or incomplete versions of a whole Drake Merlin; some would surely be totally deranged. Perhaps they would unbalance the whole.

No matter what happened in the long run, at first it was going to be total chaos. Each one of him, without exception, was going to be different. Time and events produce changes in form, in perspective, even in self-image.

It would be his job to understand, to assimilate, and ultimately — if he could — to integrate every part to a single being.

How? He had no idea.

He called on Ana to give him strength.

Chapter 25

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments.”

The first one is the most difficult.

As Drake repeated this to himself he tried to believe it. His revenant self had been dormant when it was retrieved from eight-hundred-thousand-year isolation. It still wore the snakelike organic form considered best for the surface of the planet Greenmantle.

Drake faced his first decision: Should he transfer the mind of his other self to electronic storage, before the interaction began? The technique to do it was routine, and information transfer would surely be easier and faster if they were both electronic. But would the change offer an additional shock that made the revenant’s awakening harder to bear?

It was better to do it the other way around, at least for the first meeting. Electronic downloading and merger could come later. Drake arranged for his own transfer to the same snaky form. When he awoke he occupied the body of a legless animal with vestigial wings on its sides and a triplet of prehensile tentacles on the blunt head.

He gave the signal to awaken the other, and wondered: What am I going to call him, whenever in my own mind I must distinguish us ?

Again, the answer was obvious. If he is to suffer minimal shock, he has to be Drake Merlin. If anyone changes his name, I must do it.

Slitted green eyes opened and stared at him.

“Hello.” His own greeting came out as a complex waving of the three flexible proboscises.

The other Drake regarded him warily but said nothing. He felt sure he knew why. Drake Two was thinking, Has the planet fallen to the Shiva? Is this some manifestation of them, designed to trick me and destroy me?

“Drake, don’t go by appearances. You are among humans again. You were retrieved before the Shiva reached your planet.”

There was a long, thoughtful pause. The response, when it came, was not quite what he would have provided. The revenant’s isolation had produced changes.

“Who are you?”

“I am you. Another version of you.”

“Prove it. Tell me something that no one else in the universe knows. Something about me that no one but me could possibly know.”

That no one else could possibly know. It took a few seconds, then he had it.

“Our teacher was Professor Bonvissuto.”

“Known to me, and also to all the data banks.”

“Surely. In our second year with him, he entered us in a statewide contest. We won, mainly because a big part of the competition was to improvise on a given theme.”

“Also recorded, I suspect, in the same data banks.” Drake Two must suspect where this was heading, but the snaky tentacles gave nothing away.

“But we weren’t really improvising at all. When we had breakfast in a hotel near the concert hall the morning before the competition, we were given a table that hadn’t yet been cleared. The previous diner had scribbled a series of notes on a napkin, then crossed them out. We noticed the last one, because it had the same three ascending G-minor notes that start the third movement of Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony, and also the third movement of Schubert’s Fifth Symphony. We started to wonder what you could do with the theme, and we doodled around with it off and on for the rest of the day.

“When the judge offered the theme on which we were to improvise, we realized who had been sitting at the table before us. Naturally, we did a spectacular job and astonished everyone. We felt like cheats, but we didn’t say anything to anybody — not even to Ana.”

Drake Two was gesturing agreement. “I am persuaded. So what now? Why was I returned?” And then, with a wave of comical puzzlement that Drake understood exactly, “I am Drake — but what do I call you?”

“Call me Walter, if you have to. You know how much we hated our given name. I must give you an update on events. There have been great changes; mostly for the good, but we have bad news too.”

He outlined the progress in understanding the Shiva, and the effect that would have on society’s need for Drake Merlin. At the end of the explanation, his other self gave the gesture of grim assent.

“If you are no longer needed, I am in the same position. So are all the other versions of us. We are dangerous atavisms — until the next time that the galaxy needs us.”

“Which may be never.” He regarded his companion self. Given his experiences, he was comfortingly normal. He had known that already, since the responses were close to his own responses. Which suggested another step. “There will be countless billions like us, returning from service beyond the stars. They will not all be as balanced as you. Even so, they must be welcomed, provided with explanations, and restored so far as possible to normal function. Will you help?”

If Drake was truly Drake, the answer could not be in doubt.

“Tell me what I must do.”

“Some of our returning selves are likely to be hugely unstable. I am not sure if I — or you — could suffer such an interaction alone and retain our own sanity. We need to reinforce each other. We need to combine our strength. We need—”

“—to merge. I understand.”

“But not in this form. I am not sure that is even possible. It must be accomplished when we are in electronic storage.”

“Of course. Proceed.”

No need to explain, no need to persuade. Of course not. Not unless a man had to persuade himself.

Already his vision had begun to blur. Uploading and merger became simpler when the mind was fully quiescent. As his consciousness began to fade, he wondered.

What would he be like — they be like — when the merger was complete? Was he a caterpillar, ready to change to a chrysalis before transforming to a butterfly? It would not be like that. In the caterpillar’s metamorphosis there was no combining of materials. Two gametes, then, joining to form a single zygote in the fertilized egg? That was closer, except that his parts were — or had once been — absolutely identical.

As he drifted off into limbo, he hit another simile: he was like identical twins; born together, parted for a long, long time, and at last reunited.

Drake awoke and recognized at once that his groping comparisons were worthless. He had no sense of a merger. He would never believe that he had once been two separate individuals, except that his memories beyond a certain point in the past were duplicates. He had been eeling his way through the swamps of Green-mantle and at the same time directing operations in the War Room. In his mind’s eye he looked to the heavens and recalled two starscapes of vastly different skies.

But he had also been right. His mental strength, stability, and resilience had never been so great. For the first time, he understood why humanity chose to exist as elements of a composite. If the merger of two felt like this, what would a multitude be like? Omnipotent and omniscient?

He was about to find out. A thousand returned copies were waiting for his attention. Millions more were on the way.

But even when those were all merged to a single Drake Merlin, it would be no more than a beginning.

The first one is the most difficult.

Drake recalled that optimistic assessment and wished that it were true. This was not the first, nor even the hundred and first. But he was fighting for his sanity and his own existence.

There had been no warning. An organic revenant, seemingly no different from ten thousand others, had agreed to merge into shared consciousness. The upload to electronic form had been routine. The merger began. And Drake felt within him the white-hot flame of insanity.

Alone, he would have had no chance. It was his extended self, protected by the finite transmission times of even S-wave communication, that provided an opportunity for defense.

An opportunity, but not a guarantee. The force of madness was strong beyond belief. A single command was repeated over and over. It ordered every part of Drake to forget the external world, to sink with it into an autism that knew nothing beyond self.

But one part of Drake, farthest off in space, was able to resist. It offered its urgent warning: If we move inward upon ourselves, we will never return. Remember doomed Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection. Look outward. Turn outward.

The struggle continued. Drake became oblivious to external time and place. That was exactly what the insane component wanted. Only a continuing, intrusive, distant voice — look outward, turn outward — provided the lifeline that returned Drake to external reality.

At one point he thought he saw an opportunity to destroy the component, erasing it completely from all stored memory forms. At the last moment he realized that was a trap. He was the copy, and the copy was Drake. By accepting

its annihilation, he would be endorsing the idea of self-annihilation, and ultimately he would guarantee his own dissolution.

Look outward, turn outward. He continued the fight. At last, little by little, his dispersed self found a purchase on the lost mind. He turned it, screaming and struggling, to face the united force of ten thousand components, each delivering the same message.

It was hopeless. The revenant was obdurate, irrational, impenetrable. And at the moment when he came to that conclusion, a critical stage was reached. Without warning, the phase change took place. All resistance ended and the madness dissolved. The mad mind, broken and bewildered by past insanity, could not explain what had happened.

Drake soothed it and welcomed another self to the expanding society of the composite. At the same time, he made a solemn vow: Never, no matter how many components were added to his composite self, would he again assume that adding the next one would be easier. •

•

• It ought to be a moment for rejoicing. Drake had kept strict accounting, and this was the millionth component to return for rehabilitation. He was getting there, slowly but surely.

It was a pity that the millionth had to be such a case, one that made any idea of celebration impossible. Perhaps it was the gods of ancient times, punishing hubris in their own way. Drake had felt his power growing as the number of his components grew, and he had exulted in it. He spanned a million stars, and there was nothing he could not do.

Except this.

He examined the profile of the new revenant. This Drake had suffered a unique and terrible fate. A hundred million years ago, he had assumed a local organic form and been landed on a world where the Shiva were expected. He had remained there for half a million years, and at last been rescued and returned for possible rehabilitation.

Sometime during that half-million years, a parasite had entered Drake’s body without his knowledge. For native life-forms, the organism was actually a symbiote that improved its host’s chances of survival. No native life-form was intelligent, so it was not important that as an accidental by-product, brain tissue atrophied in the presence of the parasite. The infected animal was still able to breed. Its life expectancy and reproductive capacity were somewhat improved.

Drake’s intelligence had been housed in the brain of the native animal, with a slight organic memory augment. The decline had been too slow to notice, and at some point there was no intellect — or anything else — left to worry about.

The mind and memory of the returned copy had been downloaded to electronic storage, so that Drake’s composite could examine it bit by bit. There was still something, the vaguest feeble glimmer of self-awareness. By no rational standard could it be called intelligent. And by no emotional standard could it be destroyed.

Drake initiated the merger with himself. The poor, damaged relic of the revenant had done its duty. It deserved the best that the composite could offer. Even if nothing at all was contributed to the intellectual power of the extended group mind, perhaps the millionth merger would add its iota of emotion and compassion.

And maybe the million and first revenant, or the billionth one, would experience the benefit.

Brooding over the abyss, Drake contemplated his growing self. He stretched across a million galaxies, adding to his numbers every day and every year. The threat of the Shiva to humanity was ancient history. Nowhere was there danger, nowhere was there conflict. The potential for his own growth was endless. He might one day occupy the whole universe.

And yet …

Yet there was a feeling that something was missing.

How could that be? His task was complete. Every one of the components that he had sent out, on every planet once threatened by the Shiva, was fully accounted for. Every one that had not been destroyed in the battle had returned. Over long aeons they had added to his extended composite. There was no way that he could have missed one.

So it was an illusion. Nothing was going wrong. Nothing was lost or forgotten, nothing could be.

Drake felt himself, for the first time that he could remember, at peace. At last he could relax.